The Tower at Stony Wood

Twelve

Thayne Ysse saw himself reflected in the dragon’s eye. The eye itself was enormous, a pool of liquid gold circled by dry, rough ridges of scale and skin. A very thin, pointed oval of dark slit the gold from top to bottom; paler streaks of gold rayed away from it. Thayne was a splinter of something human within the dark.

He did not dare move. His horse had thrown him and bolted, halfway across the plain, when the dragon had opened its maw and a tongue of fire uncoiled out of it, licking the ground into a frozen shimmer of glass. Thayne, desperately picking himself up as the dust and scorched air roiled over him, stood in the full glare of the dragon’s eyes when the fire died away. It had not reached him, though he felt scoured and drained in the aftermath. The sun, a second watching eye, wended a leisurely path down a slope and paused, forever it seemed, wedged in the cleft between two hills. Thayne, motionless and sweating, waited for night.

The sun shifted slightly, after what seemed hours, and loosed a scarlet ray across the wasteland. On the plain, long shadows stretched away from odd things littering the ground. Some of them he recognized. A horned skull. A dead horse, its skin dried to parchment and sagging between its ribs. The wheel of a cart. A shield stripped of its emblem. What looked like a wooden rake, which seemed wildly improbable in that wasteland. A complex mingling of bones, human and horse, pieces of armor, swords, shields, shredded silk, and jewels, lying on earth too parched to give them any kind of burial. A human skull, which had somehow rolled itself away from the confusion, gazed, upside down, at Thayne. The sun slid another fraction of an inch. The dragon, with Thayne trapped in its eye, did not move. Neither did Thayne.

Finally, the cracked, barren ground grew less raw. The shadows faded. A little smoke trickled out of the dragon’s nostrils, which were as broad and black as cauldrons. A translucent eyelid rolled down over its staring eye. Thayne stayed still. A moment later, the eyelid slid back up; the dark slit of its pupil widened so abruptly that Thayne nearly jumped. He swallowed, his body rigid, his throat so dry that he might have kindled his own flame out of it. The dragon sighed languidly, blowing dust all over Thayne. It swung its head, coiled its neck more securely about itself. Its baleful eye closed. Thayne, gritting his teeth, his hands and face clenched, imploded with a sneeze.

He took a step sometime later, then another. Above him, a beast with a million eyes opened them one by one, stared down at him. He tried to walk on air. The dragon rumbled, and he melted breathlessly into the motionless night. But it only shifted a little, turning its head more tightly into itself. Thayne waited, watching the humps and hillocks of dragon around the tower. The stars and the risen moon, hanging like a scythe blade above the hills, gave the ground a faint, silvery sheen. Thayne, moving silently around the tower, away from the dragon’s eyes, could see no door anywhere.

There had been none in the drawing, either, unless it was hidden behind the dragon. It seemed to be sleeping deeply now, its rumbling soft and regular, as if it were snoring. The tower, with its thick red rings of stones glowing faintly in the moonlight, looked formidable, forbidding and impregnable. It seemed to have no opening anywhere; he could not find even a single window. Baffled, he wondered if the dragon dropped its gold down the open top of the tower like rain dropping down a chimney.

He felt a sudden, intense impatience with himself and this mysterious tower. He had journeyed so far, found the plain that seemed to exist only on a page in a book; he had outfaced the dragon. Here in front of him was treasure to save the North Islands. And he could not claw his way into the tower, nor climb its steep walls, nor burrow under it: the foundation stones, visible under an arch of dragon’s tail, looked as if they ran down into the center of the earth. Weary, at last, of ringing the tower with footprints for the knight to find, he slipped recklessly under the dragon’s tail to reach the tower wall. If the massive loop of tail shifted, he could be crushed between stone and dragon; he was too frayed with tension and exasperation to care. He slumped a moment against the wall, rested. The stones were still warm from the merciless light of day, or maybe from the dragon’s seething inner fires. He felt a heartbeat of utter astonishment as the stones closed about him like water and drew him in.

He found himself in the dragon’s heart.

So it seemed, to his stunned eyes. The inner stones of the tower glowed a rich, warm gold, as if the heaps and scatterings of coin, the jeweled cups and patterned bowls, the plates, the scabbards of beaten gold, all kindled their own light. Here was the treasure promised in his father’s book, that would fall across the North Islanders like rain, feed them and their animals, mend their broken walls and leaky roofs, arm them, bring back the power they once possessed, and set a ruler’s throne again in the House of Ysse. There were crowns in that crazed mass of wealth, one or two still attached to skulls; gold-hilted swords in their bright scabbards clung to thighbones. Dazed, he waded ankle-deep through coin stamped with faces he did not recognize. The dragon had carried away even princes from distant places, dressed in cloth-of-gold, crowned and ringed with gold. One tried to grasp at Thayne’s foot, it seemed; he tripped in its hold. Fingerbones and rings went flying everywhere. Looking at the severed wrist, the neckbone snapped where it had fallen, Thayne felt his stomach lurch, his skin grow suddenly cold. The place was oddly full of ghosts.

He looked around for something to fill with gold, for he did not want to leave with nothing. Thoughts, confused and unfinished, collided in his head. He had to find his horse. He either had to slay the dragon or figure out how to speak its language of fire and gold. He had to watch for the knight of Gloinmere, who would try to kill the dragon, being ignorant of magic, and believing that gold had more value. He found a golden helm and dragged it like a cup through a pile of coin, filling it to its neckpiece. Perhaps, in Skye, he could find someone to teach him… Stumbling a little on the slippery piles, hugging his unwieldy burden, he searched for the place in the wall where he had entered. He found it, exactly opposite a crowned skeleton sitting on top of a gold breastplate. He stopped, before he left, to cast an incredulous glance back at the riches that turned the air itself gold. He stepped into the wall.

Stone stopped him.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And then he felt the horror still trapped in the bones scattered around him on the floor.

The tower was the door leading into itself. The drawing in his father’s book had told him plainly: there was no way out.

Sitting on a pile of gold, he waited.

For what, he was not exactly sure. It came stealing mouselike out of a crowned skull; he glimpsed it in the corner of his eye as it slipped into the hollow of a gold cup and turned to shadow. Something small, ignominious, and silent kept intruding into his thoughts, teasing his vision, as maybe time passed, and maybe it didn’t in that changeless, soundless place. If he listened, he heard his heartbeat; if he moved, he heard coins shift. Beyond that nothing, not even a spider moved. In that silence he could have heard the sound of one thread dropping onto another as it built its web.

He had spent some time trying to shift every stone he could reach, more time moving mountains of gold across the floor to find some hidden passageway beneath them. He wore his hands bloody trying to pry through stone. The stones bent gold, snapped blades, even broke a gold-handled mace. Later, he began beating on the walls with swords, flinging shields and plates across the room, shouting until his voice was raw, trying to get the dragon’s attention. If he annoyed it, he thought, it might push its head through the stones to silence him. Perhaps he could follow it out, if it didn’t eat him first. He felt it shift once. Coins jumped and rang on the floor; shields clanged; bones knocked hollowly against the stones. He reached for a sword and waited. But it went back to sleep, apparently, as if all his raging among the gold made no more noise than the whirl of seed off a dandelion stem.

Finally, spent, he slumped onto the gold as if it were a pile of straw. Craiche, he thought numbly. He will never know what happened to me. That was his last coherent thought for a long time. He simply watched the little, skulking, ignoble idea of death skitter soundlessly through a row of collapsed ribs, duck beneath the outflung bones of a hand. He slept finally, or at least he dreamed. The tower grew so dark that the air seemed to take on density and weight; he felt the blackness that he breathed.

He heard harping.

He walked up the steps in the tower on Ysse, where his father waited for him. The harping surprised him; he thought the harper had gone. But her playing lingered, lovely and ancient as something spun out of sea and wind. When he opened the door at the top of the stairs, he found a room full of gold and the bones of lost princes. His father was not in this tower, only an old woman sitting on a hillock of coins, playing a harp made of bone.

She smiled at him above her harp, her sunken eyes as black as the shadow beyond the glow of gold.

“Thayne Ysse.”

“Yes,” he answered, wondering, in his dream, why he was not surprised to find her there.

“You have something I want.”

He laughed sharply, to hide his sudden fear. “I have all the gold in the world and nothing.”

“You have something I want.” She released a final, deliberate note with her thumbnail, and put the harp aside. She looked at him out of eyes as dark as the new moon within the ring of the old. “If you give it to me, I will show you the way out of here.”

He found the cloying dark suddenly heavy to breathe. He remembered the old crone he had dreamed about, trying to fish the horned moon out of water. He had spoken the word for dragon and she had turned into fire. He said again, “I have nothing to give you.”

She plucked another string with a fingernail, a high nick of sound, watching him. “I will show you how to become the words for dragon and gold.”

He whispered, “What do you want?”

“Give me Craiche.”

“No!” he shouted with such horror and fury that she seemed to blur in the force of it. Her hair streamed into the dark; a string on the harp hummed an overtone. “I will never give you Craiche!”

“Never is a long time.”

“I will die here first.”

“Yes. It is getting warm, isn’t it?”

“What do you want with Craiche?”

“I have my eye on him.” She rose then, a little taller than he had remembered. She smiled, her face like the cracked, dry waste outside. “I could take him anyway, while you are dying in here. You will go mad from boredom before you starve. A mercy, I think. The dragon sees you through those stones. He knows you are here. You brought him nothing but your golden hair; even that will not outlast your bones. If you do not return to Ysse, Craiche will rouse the North Islands against Yves again, and no one will be left on the islands but the birds.”

“He couldn’t—No one would listen—”

“I listen.” She smiled again, a skull’s smile, he thought, at everything and nothing. “He has already called my name.”

“No,” he shouted again, and woke himself.

The air had grown stifling; the noon sun, he guessed, was scorching the plain. He wiped sweat from his face, his mouth as dry as the hot metal mouths of the cups on the stones. He contemplated his dream, and thought dispassionately: she was wrong. I will go mad from thirst before boredom. He lay back on the coins. From that angle he could see, very far away, an oblong of blue where the tower opened to the sky. In the dream, he realized, there was a way out. What had the old crone said? I will show you the way out of here… “If,” he whispered. “If.” What would she do with Craiche, anyway? he wondered. It didn’t matter; he would never bargain with Craiche’s life, for anyone or anything. He would drink this molten fiery air and die first.

It took an exhaustingly long time. He counted coins, picking them out of the pile he lay on and tossing them against the wall, while he watched the oblong of blue narrow into a slit. Later, watching a sapphire mine itself out of the matrix of the night, he thought about the harper. She led him here, he remembered. She had told his father that the dragon existed somewhere in Skye. “Well,” he murmured, feverish with thirst, “all I have left to do is pick a crown and call myself King of the North Islands. She is ridding Regis Aurum of the gadfly family that challenged his rule… I didn’t bend my head low enough for his taste when we surrendered in that dreary rain…” His mind seized on the rain, the endless water falling as freely as words for anyone to drink. Rain changed to gold in the merciless crucible of the tower… He tasted a coin, searching it for the memory of water, and choked on dry metal. He closed his eyes, felt tears run down the side of his face, and tasted them. They were as bitter as the gold.

Craiche stood in his thoughts, smiled his wild, sweet smile that was afraid of nothing. Thayne, soothed by it, told him: I tried. That’d all. I tried. Then Craiche was crawling on his belly out of the dark rain into firelight, one leg pushing him, the other useless, bleeding from a sword slash that severed the tendon behind his knee. He wept silently when Thayne picked him up, his body shaking as he stifled the noise, so that his enemy would not hear him cry. “I carried you,” Thayne whispered to him, “nearly the whole way back to Ysse.”

He fell silent, dreamed a little, of cups of gold that turned to gold dust as he swallowed them. He dragged his eyes open after a while, thinking: There is a way out. She said there is a way. His thoughts slid to Craiche again, sitting on the tower steps with a book, trying to persuade Thayne that there was magic in what lay between his hands.

“Maybe,” Thayne whispered, “there is a way with words…”

He pulled himself upright, off the pile of coins, stood shaking, dizzy, wondering which portion of the dragon he might be addressing through the wall. He said finally, his voice worn so ragged he scarcely recognized it, “I don’t know how to talk to dragons. I came here to steal your gold and take you away with me to the North Islands, where it’s cold and wet and noisy with the sea. I wanted you to burn a path for the army of Ysse and the North Islands to march south down Yves to Gloinmere, to strike at Regis Aurum where he rules. I wanted your gold to buy bread and arms for the North Islands. I wanted you to fight with us for our freedom. I don’t know what you are, or what you want besides gold. I don’t have gold to give you. I don’t have much of anything. Maybe there is something I can do for you.”

He waited. The night beyond the tower seemed so still it might have been stone itself. The stars had vanished from the top of the tower; he could barely see the faintest line where dark separated itself from the deeper black of stone. Then a handful of coins slid down the pile where he had been lying. A cup overturned with a sudden clink. Thayne felt the vibration under his feet, the massive movement of dragon as it shifted a boulder’s weight of bone and let it settle.

He swallowed, or tried to. He said, “Is there anything? I’m an ignorant northerner in a land full of magic. All I know is war and work. And a little of love. No magic words. I don’t know what language dragons speak. I can say the words I see here in this tower. Wealth. Beauty. Power. Death. They’re what I want to take back with me to Ysse. I don’t know what the price for them might be.”

The dragon stirred again. A sword angled against the wall slid and struck the stones; a jewel spun out of its hilt. A crown shivered away from a skull and rolled across the floor. Beyond the thick tower walls, Thayne heard the faint sigh of dragon breath blowing up dust storms, sending whirlwinds spinning across the waste. For an instant his head filled with gold, as if the sun had poured itself into his eyes and turned his thoughts to light. He found himself on the floor, arms pushed against his eyes. When he opened them finally, the world was drenched with gold; he wondered if he had been blinded by light.

Then he saw the vast eye staring at him through the tower wall. He got to his feet unsteadily. The words he had spoken seemed to echo through him. He had not spoken fear; he had no place left for it under that gold, unwinking scrutiny. In the stillness, he heard the dragon’s heartbeat.

“Thayne Ysse.” Its voice was a hollow hiss, like wind in a cavern.

He heard his own heartbeat then, slowing to match the dragon’s; his blood seemed to run in small rivers, secret chasms, burning like fire and the color of gold. He could fly, he felt suddenly; he could suck stars out of the sky with the powerful drag of his wings; he could spit fire at the sun.

He answered, aware of himself only as a reflection of the dragon’s eye, a thought in the dragon’s fiery brain. “Yes.”

“I will give you everything in this tower. Wealth. Beauty. Power. Death.”

“Yes.”

“I will burn the towers of Gloinmere for you.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Give me one thing.”

He said one letter, then stopped, letting the word fade into breath. He heard his own heart again, faster now, a small, secret thing outracing the dragon’s heart. He answered finally, “What one thing?”

“Give me Craiche.”

He moved finally, after time had shaped his heart again, his trembling, parched body, his mortal thoughts. He turned his back to the dragon’s eye, slumped down on the floor against a pile of gold, and waited.