Dragonfield (3 page)

Lancot smiled to himself and threw his shoulders back. He looked straight ahead. He knew he was no god. He was not even, the gods help him, a hero. Despite his posture and his muscles, he was a fraud. Heroes and gods were never afraid and he was deadly afraid every day of his life. It was so absurd that he found himself laughing most of the time for, by holding himself upright and smiling his hero smile, by making others party to his monstrous fraud, could he keep most of the fears at bay.

And so they arrived home, the fisherman’s son, the beekeeper’s son, and the three other boys alternately trailing the golden-haired hero and leading him.

They were greeted by a sobbing crowd.

The dragon, it seems, had carried off the church bell ten days before. The sexton, who had been in the act of ringing matins, had clung to the rope and had been carried away as well. Great Tom had dropped upside-down with a final dolorous knell into the bay, where it could still be seen. Little fish swam round its clapper. The sexton had not been found.

With all the sobbing and sighing, no one had noticed that the hero Lancot had turned the color of scum on an ocean wave. No one, that is, except Tansy, who noticed everything, and her sister Sage, who thought that gray-white was a wonderful tone for a hero’s skin. “Like ice,” she whispered to herself, “like the surface of a lake in winter, though his eyes are the color of a summer sky.” And Rosemary, who thought he looked big enough and strong enough to train to the farm, much as a draft horse is measured for the plow.

As there was no inn and May-Ma had first claim on heroes, her husband having been the great worm’s earliest meal, Lancot was put up at the healer’s cottage. He eyed the three daughters with delight.

Their first dinner was a dismal affair. The healer’s wife spoke of raw vengeance, Rosemary of working, Sage of romance, and Tansy of herbs. Lancot spoke not at all. In this place of dragons he knew he dared not tell his tales.

But finally Tansy took pity on his silence and asked him what, besides being a hero, he liked to do.

It being a direct question, Lancot had to answer. He thought a bit. Playing a hero had taken up all his adult time. At last he spoke. “When I was a boy …”

Sage sighed prettily, as if being a boy were the noblest occupation in the world.

“When I was a boy,” Lancot said again, “I liked to fly kites.”

“A useless waste of sticks and string,” said Rosemary.

Sage sighed.

But as May-Ma cleared the table, Tansy nodded. “A link with earth and sky,” she said. “As if you, too, were flying.”

“If we were meant to fly,” reminded Rosemary, “we would have been born with a beak …”

Sage laughed, a tinkling sound.

“And a longing for worms. Yes, I know,” interrupted Tansy. “But little worms are useful creatures for turning the soil. It is only the great worms who are our enemies.”

Rosemary’s mouth thinned down.

Lancot said uneasily, “Kites …” then stopped. Dinner was over and the need for conversation was at an end.

In the morning the boys, backed up by their fathers, came to call. Morning being a hero’s time, they came quite early. Lancot was still asleep.

“I will wake him,” volunteered Sage. Her voice was so eager the fisherman’s son bit his lip, for he had long loved her from afar.

Sage went into the back room and touched the sleeping hero on the shoulder. Lancot turned on the straw mattress but did not open his eyes.

“Never mind,” said Rosemary urgently when Sage returned without him. “I shall do it.”

She strode into the room and clapped her hands loudly right behind his left ear. Lancot sat up at once.

“Your followers are here,” she snapped. “Tramping in mud and knocking the furniture about.” She began to fluff up the pillow before the print of Lancot’s head even had time to fade.

Reluctantly he rose, splashed drops of cold water on his cheeks, and went to face the boys.

“Do we go today?” asked the fisherman’s son, quick to show his eagerness to Sage.

“Is it swords or spears?” asked the innkeeper’s son.

“Or the poisoned arrows?”

“Or rocks?”

“Or …”

“Let me think,” said Lancot, waving them into silence. “A dragon needs a plan.”

“A plan,” said all the boys and their fathers at once.

“Come back tomorrow and I will have a plan,” said Lancot. “Or better yet, the day
after
tomorrow.”

The boys nodded, but the beekeeper spoke timidly. “The day after tomorrow will be too late. The great worm is due to return to feed. The sexton was …” he swallowed noisily, “… a puny man.” Unconsciously his hand strayed to his own ample waist.

Lancot closed his eyes and nodded as if he were considering a plan, but what he was really thinking about was escape. When he opened his eyes again, the boys and their fathers were gone. But Rosemary was holding the broom in a significant manner, and so Lancot put his head down as if in thought and strode from the house without even worrying about breaking his fast.

He turned down the first wooded path he came to, which was the path that wound down towards the river. He scarcely had time for surprise when the wood opened into the broad, meandering waterway, dotted with little isles, that at the edge of sight opened into the sea. Between him and the river was a gentle marsh of reeds and rice. Clustered white florets sat like tiny clouds upon green stems. There was no boat.

“There you are,” said Tansy, coming out of the woods behind him. “I have found some perfect sticks for a kite and borrowed paper from the priest. The paper has a recipe for mulberry wine on it, but he says he has much improved the ingredients and so could let me have it. And I have torn up Da’s old smock for ribbons and plaited vines for a rope.”

“A kite?” Lancot said wonderingly. He stared at the girl, at her river-blue eyes set in a face that seemed the color of planed wood. Yesterday she had seemed no great beauty, yet here in the wood, where she reflected the colors of earth, water, sky, she was beautiful, indeed. “A kite?” he asked again, his thoughts on her.

“Heroes move in mysterious ways,” Tansy said, smiling. “And since you mentioned kites, I thought perhaps kites were teasing into your mind as part of your plan.”

“My plan,” Lancot repeated vaguely, letting his eyes grow misty as if in great thought. He was having trouble keeping his mind on heroics.

Suddenly he felt a touch on his hand, focussed his eyes, and saw that Tansy had placed her green-stained fingers on his.
Her hands are like a wood sprite’s,
he thought suddenly.

“Being a hero,” Tansy said, “does not mean you need to be without fear. Only fools lack fear and I believe you to be no fool.”

He dared to look at her and whispered, “No hero either.” And having admitted it, he sank down on his heels as if suddenly free of shackles that had long held him upright.

Tansy squatted next to him. “I am no hero either,” she said. “To run away is by far the most sensible thing that either of us could do. But that will not stop this great worm from devouring my village and, ultimately, our world. The very least the two of us poor, frightened un-heroes can do is to construct a plan.”

They sat for a long moment in silence, looking at one another. The woods stilled around them. Then Lancot smiled and, as if on a signal, the birds burst into full throat again. Little lizards resumed their scurrying. And over the water, sailing in lazy circles, a family of cormorants began their descent.

“A kite,” said Lancot. His eyes closed with sudden memory. “I met a mage once, with strange high cheekbones and straw-colored hair. He spoke in a language that jangled the ear, and he told me that in his tongue the word for kite is
drache,
dragon.”

Tansy nodded slowly. “Correspondences,” she said. “It is the first rule of herbalry. Like calls to like. Like draws out like.” She clapped her hands together. “I
knew
there was a reason that you spoke of kites.”

“Do you mean that a kite could kill a dragon?
The
dragon?” Lancot asked. “Such a small, flimsy toy?”

Tansy laced her fingers together and put her chin down on top of her hands. “Not all by itself,” she said. “But perhaps there is some way that we could manipulate the kite …”

“
I
could do that!” said Lancot.

“And use it to deliver a killing blow,” Tansy finished.

“But there is no way a kite could carry a spear or bend a bow or wield a sword.” Lancot paused. “You do not mean to fly
me
up on the kite to do that battle.” He forgot to toss his hair or dance his muscles across his shoulders, so great was his fear.

Tansy laughed and put her hands on his knee. “Lancot, I have not forgotten that you are no hero. And I am no kite handler.”

He furrowed his brow.
“You
will not go up the kite string. I forbid it.”

“I am not yours to forbid,” Tansy said quietly. “But I am no hero either. What I had in mind was something else.”

He stood then and paced while Tansy told him of her plan. The river rilled over rocks to the sea, and terns scripted warnings in the sky. Lancot listened only to the sound of Tansy’s voice, and watched her fingers spell out her thoughts. When she finished, he knelt by her side.

“I will make us a great kite,” he said. “A
drache.
I will need paint besides, red as blood and black as hope.”

“I thought hope a lighter color,” exclaimed Tansy.

“Not when one is dealing with dragons,” he said.

The cooper supplied the paint. Two precious books of church receipts were torn apart for the paper because Lancot insisted that the kite be dragon-size. The extra nappies belonging to the missing babe, the petticoats of six maidens, and the fisherman’s son’s favorite shirt were torn up for binding. And then the building began.

Lancot sent the boys into the woods for spruce saplings after refusing to make his muscles dance. They left sullenly with his
caveat
in their ears: “As the dragon is mighty, yet can sail without falling through the air, so must the wood of our kite likewise be strong yet light.”

Tansy, overhearing this, nodded and muttered, “Correspondences,” under her breath.

And then the hero, on his knees, under the canopy of trees, showed them how to bend the wood, soaking it in water to make it flex, binding it with the rags. He ignored the girls who stood behind him to watch his shoulders ripple as he worked.

The fisherman’s son soon got the hang of it, as did the cooper’s eldest daughter. Rosemary was best, grumbling at the waste of good cloth, but also proud that her fingers could so nimbly wrap the wood.

They made rounded links, the first twice as large as a man, then descending in size to the middle whose circumference was that of Great Tom’s bow. From there the links became smaller till the last was a match for the priest’s dinner plate.

“We could play at rings,” suggested Sage brightly. Only the fisherman’s son laughed.

All the while Tansy sat, crosslegged, plaiting a rope. She used the trailing vines that snaked down from the trees and added horse hair that she culled from the local herd. She borrowed hemp and line from the fisherman’s wife, but she did the braiding herself, all the while whispering a charm against the unknitting of bones.

It took a full day, but at last the links were made and stacked and Lancot called the villagers to him. “Well done,” he said, patting the smallest boy on the head. Then he sent the lot of them home.

Only Tansy remained behind. “That was indeed well done,” she said.

“It was
easy
done,” he said. “There is nothing to fear in the making of a kite. But once
it
is finished, I will be gone.”

“A hero does what a hero can,” answered Tansy. “We ask no more than that.” But she did not stop smiling, and Lancot took up her smile as his own.

They walked along the path together towards the house but, strange to say, they were both quite careful not to let their hands meet or to let the least little bit of their clothing touch. They only listened to the nightjar calling and the erratic beating of their own timid hearts.

The next morning, before the sun had picked out a path through the interlacing of trees, the villagers had assembled the links into the likeness of a great worm. Lancot painted a dragon’s face on the largest round and colored in the rest like the long, sinewy body and tail.

The boys placed the poisoned arrowheads along the top arch of the links like the ridge of a dragon’s neck. The girls tied sharpened sticks beneath, like a hundred unsheathed claws.

Then the priest blessed the stick-and-paper beast, saying:

Tansy made a hole in the
drache’s
mouth, which she hemmed with a white ribbon from her own hope chest. Through that hole she strung a single long red rope. To one end of the rope she knotted a reed basket, to the other she looped a handle.

“What is the basket for?” asked May-Ma. “Why do we do this? Where will it get us? And will it bring dear Da back home?”

Rosemary and Sage comforted her, but only Tansy answered her. “It is the hero’s plan,” she said.

And with that May-Ma and all the villagers, whose own questions had rested in hers, had to be content.

Then with all the children holding the links, they marched down to the farthest shore. There, on the strand, where the breezes shifted back and forth between one island and the next, they stretched out the great kite, link after link, along the sand.

Lancot tested the strings, straightening and untwisting the line. Then he wound up the guy string on Rosemary’s shuttle. Looking up into the sky, one hand over his eyes, he saw that for miles there were no clouds. Even the birds were down. It was an elegant slate on which to script their challenge to the great worm.

“Links up!” he cried. And at that signal, the boys each grabbed a large link, the girls the smaller ones, and held them over their heads.