The Song of Andiene

CHAPTER 8



Wide and deep is the water that lies between the Nine Kingdoms and Dragonsland. Andiene stood on the foggy plateau and knew she had crossed the channel that no ships may sail. She was not in the world of men.

Still, she stood silent. She had heard many tales of dragons. She had been carried through the square that marked the heart of the city, where a chain, massively forged, fettered white dragon’s bones. She stared at the great gray dragon again. One foreleg was gnarled like a tree stump, heavy claws digging rootlike into the ground. The other … tattered and unfinished …

“Yvaressinest,” she said.

“How are you so learned, daughter of mine enemies, that you know my name?”

“The songsters have sung of you for a hundred summers and a hundred winters,” she said.

The dragon’s voice, dry and inhuman though it was, seemed tinged with human pleasure. “So they still sing of the revenge of Yvaressinest?”

She was spurred to pride in her own people. She remembered the stories she had heard. “They sing of the madness of Karstir—how he vowed to his love, Cresine, that he would bring her a dragon meek, tamed, and chained. They sing of how that dragon was the marvel of the Rejiseja, of all the Nine Kingdoms, till he escaped, forced to gnaw off his leg and escape like some animal in a trap.”

White flames licked out from the dragon’s half-opened mouth, flickered and died like the motion of a serpent’s tongue. “And what of the city that died in flames that day?”

She smiled. “In all the songs, they sang much of dragon’s indifference, but little of dragon’s curiosity. They might have told more and been more truthful. In the songs I heard, the city lived unharmed.”

A mutter, deep down in the dragon’s throat, that could almost have been a growl. Andiene met his eyes fearlessly. In the huge slit pupils, she saw herself, a tiny figurine, a shadow in the darkness. She was dizzy, as though she stood on the edge of the sea cliffs. She swayed, took a step nearer, another step. Great circles of green surrounded those doll-like images of herself, but they had no meaning—it was important only to come closer … closer … to that gray-barked tree-trunk lying in the flowerless meadow. Moving was like wading upstream. She lifted her foot, moved it forward. The water swept it back again. Moving was like walking in deep sand. She floundered and sank.

Black shadows of herself, black, green, gray—she looked outward from the center, and stopped, and laughed. “Lord Dragon, I will not walk into your jaws so easily. I did not come to your call. I came of my own free will to strike a bargain with you.”

“What do you have that you could offer me?” Yvaressinest asked. He raised his heavy head, wedge-shaped like that of a poisonous snake. His mouth opened. She saw the teeth like curved yellow swords, venom dripping from each fang.

The white flames sprang out and engulfed her; they burned deep but did not consume. In summertime the air is so dry and hot that it seems to sear the skin. Though the air is still, the weight of it lies on men like a heavy garment. The flames lay on her like that.

She tried to beat them out with her hands. She fell to the ground and rolled to smother them. They clung and burned like executioner’s fire. Under the cliffs, the waves crashed against the rocks. Water will quench the flames, she thought in her madness.

No! The cliffs were high; the rocks were cruel. The answer came like a door opening on a familiar land. Fight flames with flames! She called fire of her own, from her body, from her mind. It pressed outward, warding off the dragonbreath. White fire warred with white fire. Then both were gone.

Andiene laughed arrogantly. “You see, Lord Dragon, I am not for you.”

His eyes regarded her, jewel-green as the depths of the green sea. “In the days that I knew your kind, they would have leaped over the cliff into the sea to escape that burning.”

“But not I.” Andiene looked down at her hands. No pain, no burns; the fire had left no marks. There had been greater joy and excitement in that struggle than in anything she had done in her short life. Already, though, she felt the weariness, the paralyzing weakness. In all wisdom, she knew that she should flee while she was able. Instead, she asked, “Why did you call me here?”

“I wished to see what manner of royalty they bred on the other shore. I know what you saw, what wakened your powers. I was with you when you fled from that courtyard. Nahil reigns now by conquest and birthright, with no one to oppose him. The city will not speak to him, but he has no need of that. He has no one to fear.”

“Does he not?” she asked.

The dragon’s voice went on, harsh and dry. “There is much I can teach you. If you stay with me, you will gain the power to return to that other shore and destroy them. Destroy your uncle and all his kin, to the very least one. Set yourself over the people and trample them into the dirt, the filthy people, the fickle people, ready to cheer for anyone.”

Andiene looked deliberately at the dragon. “So you will help me gain my revenge, and in doing so, you will win your own vengeance?”

If dragon’s voice could have smiled, then the voice of Yvaressinest did. “Indeed you are right, child of the Rejiseja. You need what I have to offer. Down on the beach, you lit a fire to bake your fish, and it left you as weak and sick as a woman who has given birth to a brat. You will need greater power than that to conquer your kingdom.”

It is true, Andiene thought. I need what he has to offer. But once I gain power, I do not need to use it to work his will. Once on that other shore, I can choose my own way. Wide and deep is the water that lies between the Nine Kingdoms and Dragonsland. He will have no power to bind me to his will.



She looked around the meadow where she stood. Though it must have been very late in the day, the twilight was no dimmer, the air no colder, than when the fog first closed in around her.

“I want to learn all that you can teach me.”

“Then listen while you learn of yourself,” said Yvaressinest. “You know the laws of the land, that those gray-cloaked fools taught your kind. There was a race once that kept to a straiter law. They vowed that they would gather in one day only the food they needed for that day, that they would raise no animals for slaughter, that they would not shelter in the earth in summer. So they thought that the land would not corrupt them.

“That first summer they died, and that winter they starved, and the ones who remained broke their oath that they might live. And because they broke it, it crushed them more certainly than if they had never tried to abide by it. They are mine now.”

His cruel voice continued. “And so, think of the law that your kind holds to. They break it also, and scarcely know that they have done so. You are the result. You are what they have been guarding against for these thousand years.”

The dragon’s flames licked out almost casually toward Andiene. With her new-learned skills, she warded them off the way that a man brushes away a fly.

His voice was full of mockery and rage. “They are weak, fools and weak. ‘We live in the houses that other men have built,’ they say, and think that will save them. When they need metal to forge a sword, they fear to dig in the earth to find it; they do not even dare to turn over a stone in search of it, but go scrambling over the hills, looking for where the rain has washed the rocks bare. They crawl on the surface of the earth like maggots, too weak to burrow deeper into the rotten flesh they devour.

“And for all their care, their petty laws, they have failed, like all before them. ‘Let our children not be born as strangers,’ they say. You are the stranger they fear. Did you see the fear in your father’s eyes when he saw you for what you are?”

The dragon’s words lashed against Andiene, crueler than the flames of his breath. “Even before you were born, they failed. Do you think your ancestors looked like you, with white hair and bleached eyes and mud-colored skin? I saw them when they first came, singing prayers of thanksgiving for a land they feared to understand. Dark hair and pale skin like the people of the south that they hate. Their own fear has changed your people, though they do not realize it. The ones that they once were would have run from your kind in terror.

“Look, and I will show you what they are.”

His contempt overwhelmed Andiene. So weak, so silly, so futile, the people that lived their little lives. She saw them through his eyes, as he relived his imprisonment.

Dragonsquare was the heart of the city. Yvaressinest had lain a captive there for two hundred years, watching his enemies to learn their ways. All the great betrayals lay before her eyes. She saw her ancestors, bloody-handed, as son killed father, and brother killed brother, an endless round of hate and retribution.

And the lesser betrayals lay plain before her also, the thievery, the cruelty, the words of love, lightly spoken and lightly forgotten. She heard the foolish words, the endless foolish jabber from men who thought that they were wise. Generation after generation the same, wearying, sickening.

Yvaressinest showed her all that had passed before his eyes. She saw the empty-eyed gawkers; she felt the maiming pain of escape. He meant for her to see her people in all their littleness.

She saw that clearly enough, but she saw other things that he did not intend, even though she saw them through the haze of his contempt and fury. She searched the faces of the crowd for what she needed, and found parents leading their children, teaching them with love. Then time passed, and those same children guarded their parents, and took good care of them.

Andiene listened, and heard words of wisdom and gentleness, half-unnoticed among the clamor. She saw lovers talking joyful foolishness, blind to the grimness of the place they were in, and fifty years later, she recognized those same people, walking hand in hand and still looking at each other with love.

Andiene let the folly and cruelty slip by her, and clung to those images of love and life, letting them hold her up and save her from drowning in his hate. But she said nothing, and listened meekly to his fierce teaching.

“Now you have seen more of your land than you ever saw before,” he said at last. “You know what your kind are.”

“How will that teach me to use what is within me?”

“Be patient,” Yvaressinest said, and he showed her all the forms of fire, and movements of the air. “If you knew how, you could kindle a fire that would burn this world to ashes.”

She stood and listened, in the endless fog and twilight, the flowerless meadow, the land where there is no land. And as she listened to dragon-thoughts and dragon-voice, the use of power became evident and easy.

Fierce thoughts brought flames, subtle thoughts moved the air. She learned thoughts of callings, thoughts of shapings, thoughts to hold and warp men’s minds. They came to her easily. Words were unnecessary, gestures only toys.

She questioned him only once. “And what of healing?” she asked.

A sound that could have been a laugh came from the dragon’s throat. “You have no gift for that in you. No seed nor root of it, nor could seed grow in that barren soil.”

So she turned away, and did not ask again. She wove shapes of mist and fire on the high sea-cliffs, and gave no thought to the passing of time.