The Red Mother Page 4
“With two mouths I kiss hard
“The hot and pliant maidens.”
I blushed, because I hadn’t been expecting racy double-meanings from a dragon. But I knew the answer to this one, when I thought about it a little. “Hammer,” I said. And then, “Smith’s hammer. The road and the maidens are the metal to be forged. The mouths are the two ends of the hammer.”
The dragon snorted another curl of fire, slightly larger than the last one. How good was the word of a dragon, anyway? Especially when exposed to a little frustration?
Perhaps I should have been surprised that the dragon knew about hammers—but the dragon knew about treasures, and steel for swords and gold for gauds alike must be refined, then hammered pure.
I hoped there were other human things the dragon knew less about. I said,
“I am the black horse.
“On eight legs I bear my rider.
“He holds no rein.
“At the end of the journey it is he who is left in the stall.”
I am not sure dragons frown. Their scaled foreheads are not designed for furrowing. But I could not shake the sense that the dragon was frowning at me.
After a little while, she responded calmly, “A coffin and its bearers.”
I sighed. “You can’t blame me for trying.”
The tongue flickered. “Can I not? Here is my next one.
“We are the old women
“Who walk on the beach
“We braid the shells and seaweed
“In our white hair.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Do you forfeit?” The dragon leaned forward eagerly. Its talons tensed as if already imagining raking through treasure.
“Not so fast!” I held up a hand and tried to ignore the warmth of the dragon’s breath ruffling my hair. Unless that was just the wind off the volcano. What walks on a beach…? Crabs. Birds.
“Waves!” I said suddenly, as it came to me. The word burst from my lips before I could second-guess myself. “It’s waves!”
“It’s waves,” the dragon agreed, sounding slightly disappointed.
“My next.” Of course, because I was looking at a dragon, I could only think of one riddle.
Hoping she wouldn’t be offended, I said,
“I am a dragon with only one wing.
“But of limbs I have a score.
“I fly to battle.
“I grow more fearful when I shed my scales.”
“Really?” the dragon said.
I spread my hands. The rock was making my backside ache. I tried not to fidget. It would only make me seem nervous.
Of course, I was nervous.
“A long-boat,” the dragon said. She yawned before she continued. “The limbs are oars. The scales are the shields hung over the gunwales and retrieved when the men go to fight.”
“You’ve seen that?”
“I’ve destroyed a few. Sometimes they’re full of livestock. Or treasure.”
If dragons didn’t frown, did they smile? Or had she always been as toothy as she seemed now.
“What do we do if it’s a draw?” I asked.
She chuckled. “A sudden-death round? By which I mean, then I eat you.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking and I didn’t want to ask. It might be better to let myself lose. I could always find more treasure, after all. Never mind that it would take a desperate Viking indeed to give a berth to a man as old as me, and those were the sorts of raiders who did not come home with their ships wallowing with gold.
“Last one,” the dragon said cheerfully. Did they play with their pray, like cats?
“A stone on the road.
“I saw water become bone.”
How on earth did that happen? It was a metaphor, of course—riddles always were—but what was water a metaphor for? Blood that clots? A stone was hard, and so was a sword … brigands? Something that could stop a journey?
No. No, of course not. The water wasn’t the metaphor. The road was the metaphor. The whale-road, the ship-road. The sea. What was a stone on the sea?
“An iceberg,” I said.
“Brave little witch,” the dragon remarked. She lifted one talon and waved idly. Her opalescent eyes seemed to enlarge until I felt as if I were falling upward into them.
I’m not sure how long I gaped at her, but I was startled abruptly back into my skin when she said, “Hurry up, then. Let’s see this done.”
My mind went blank.
My wit ran dry.
I could think of not a single riddle.
No, not true. I could think of a riddle. But it was a children’s riddle, and not one worthy of a dragon. I needed something better. Something clever. Something I stood a chance of stumping her with.
She sighed a slow trickle of flame.
Dammit.
I said,
“Fat and full-bellied
“Welcome and warm
“I rise with joy
“Though my bed is hard.”
A loaf, of course. A loaf, puffing up and baking on a flat hearth-stone before the fire.
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I thought of half a dozen better ones. The onion riddle with all the dick jokes in it … anything. Anything at all would have been better…
There was the end of my chance to save my kinfolk. There was the end of my chance to put this obligation to rest—
I was so engaged in flyting myself that I thought I must have missed the dragon’s answer. And indeed, when I lifted my eyes again, she was staring at me quizzically.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”
She snorted rather a lot of fire this time. “I said, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer.”
“What?” I said, foolishly.
“Little witch, tell me the answer.”
“Bread,” I said. “A loaf of bread. It rises when you cook it on a hot stone.”
“Fascinating.” The tip of her tail twitched like a hunting cat’s. “Fascinating. Is that where bread comes from?”
She sounded genuinely excited.
Dragons, it seemed, knew about death and war. But not so much about baking.
Her wings folded more tightly against her sides. “Well, you’ve won. That’s the end of the riddles, then.”
“I have another one for you,” I cried, struck by inspiration now when it was too late. “As a gift. No wager.”
The dragon definitely had facial expressions, and this one was definitely suspicion. “No wager?”
“None.”
“What do you want if you win?”
“Just the joy of winning,” I said. “Here.
“Alone I dwell
“In a stone cell
“With a gray roof.
“Though kept captive
“None holds the key.
“I am not soaring above the halls of dawn.
“I do not see the sun rise.
“What creature am I?”
She stared, tongue flickering. Moments passed, and I worried I had misunderstood her—or worse, offended her.
When she burst out, “Me!” she nearly incinerated me with the spray of her venom. “It’s me! Oh, sorry…”
“I’m fine. It’s fine.” I remained standing, so I could dodge faster if there were more outbursts. And to get away from the eyewatering, sinus-stinging smoke curling from the cinders where the eitr had fallen. “Unscathed.” I held out my hands to demonstrate.
“Good,” she said. “How odd it is that a small, frail, temporary person like yourself should make me feel so clearly seen.”
Well, from her point of view, I supposed I was all of those things.
She had been lying along the edge of the vent, just her head and forequarters poking over. Now, with a motion that was half slither and half chinning herself, she crawled up to the rim and stretched out. “Did you bring vessels?”
“Jars,” I said, lifting the pack.
“Cheeky,” she said.
“What’s
worse?” I asked. “Preparing too much and not using everything, or needing a thing and not having it to hand?”
“You swore to grant me a boon.”
She had me there. “I did.”
“I’ll give you the eitr. You won the wager honorably. And I will leave this place and take with me my two children. We shall make our nest further from human habitations, though I must complain that there are more and more of you with every passing season. If you cover the whole damn landscape and keep breeding even when you encroach on other people’s nesting grounds, I don’t see how you can complain about a little volcano.” She sighed. “And here I am helping resurrect your whelps, who will probably just make more of you.”
They weren’t my whelps, but I was more concerned with something else she’d said. I snuck a sideways glance over the rim of the vent. Yes, three eggs. “Wait. You and your two children?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the boon. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you plenty of eitr for feeding the whelp on. And I will come back every season or so to be certain the whelp is well-taken-care-of and replenish your supplies.”
That sounded less like reassurance, and more like a threat.
“You want to raise a brood of your own.”
“Not I,” I said. “A friend.”
“Well, if I save his children, let him care for one of mine. But you, little witch—you must see that the care is good. Yourself.”
“Why me?”
“Because,” she said. “Because I have tested your word and your mettle. And because I’m giving you the foster of my whelp. I have seen what you will do for the bonds of kinship. And because you understood me and gave me a gift, so I know you understand how bound to this boring rock I am.”
“But I … I don’t want to stay here either.”
“Once a turning should suffice,” she said, relentless. “As I said, it’s only another hundred seasons or so. The egg will hatch in … twelve more seasons. Make sure your folk know that if they don’t take care of my little one, though, I will come back and eat them.”
I imagined the little whelp—perhaps only as large as the horse—looking up at the giant creature before me with wide, adorable eyes and begging, “Mama, can I eat him?”
“What about the volcano?” I asked. “My people cannot survive it. Doesn’t the egg need its heat to incubate?”
“Oh, a lone egg will do well enough if they bury it in dry ground near a hot spring,” she said.
“Like baking a loaf of bread,” I mused.
“You,” she said, “and your baking.”
* * *
The dragon said she would give me time to return to Ragnar’s farmstead before she flew the egg down and delivered it. My backpack sloshed with jars of eitr as I walked, the downhill steep and full of rocks that stubbed my toes through my boot leather. I’d be lucky not to lose a nail or two.
I was lucky that was all I seemed to be in danger of losing. Unless I tripped and fell and broke the jars, in which case the venom within would saturate my clothes, melt my flesh, and then probably catch on fire for good measure.
I walked very carefully and kept my eyes where my feet should be going.
It was a good thing, too, because the glamour I had cast on the little horse was strong enough that it even fooled me until I tripped over one of the spell-spun traces.
I had been singing to myself as I walked, songs more fitting for a warrior this time, and I had not been fingering my spindle. My hands, being free of my pockets, flung out and smacked into the horse’s warm flank.
The glamour fell away in the face of concrete evidence, and I could see that the boulder he was dragging had gotten jammed into a crevice and was stuck there.
I slipped off my extremely caustic load and set the pack down carefully before going to unwind the string from around the boulder. Then I had some extra string and a horse that was already wearing a conjure-ish harness, so it only seemed fair that the horse carry the pack. That was what horses were for, after all, among other things.
I lashed it on over his withers. He was a convenient size, not so tall I had to reach up to tie things across his back. While I worked, I thought about getting back to town and explaining to Ragnar that he could have his children back, and all it would cost him was to spend his dotage babysitting a dragon.
I would get out of town before my brother and his wife woke up, I decided. It would be preferable to watching their teary reunion. Or having to endure either their thanks, or their lack thereof.
I finished my harnessing and patted the horse on the shoulder. He nickered at me under his breath, friendly. Or hoping for carrots.
I draped an arm over his withers. He was a good height for leaning on. I made up my mind that I was taking him with me when I went, in addition to Magni. I would have to find someplace easy for him to recuperate, assuming the leg could—and would—get better. That would mean a winter off the road, which was probably wise for a man my age anyway, even if it griped me.
Anyway, if I left him here, Ragnar would probably eat him. I felt after using him to bait a dragon, I owed him better.
I scratched under his mane. He leaned into me, lip twitching in pleasure.
“Good lad,” I said. “I think I’ll call you Ormr.”
About the Author
Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border.
She’s a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Transylvanian, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it. Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.
Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is the author of the acclaimed Eternal Sky series, the Edda of Burdens series, and coauthor (with Sarah Monette) of the Iskryne series. Bear lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Bear
Art copyright © 2021 by Greg Manchess