Wings of Fire Part 1

Wings of Fire.

Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon.

Dedication.

On the afternoon of August 2, 2008 over too much drink and too many laughs, this book.

and several others were inspired by Jeremy La.s.sen and the late Charles N. Brown.

This book is dedicated to those two friends and to the memory of that long, fine afternoon.

Acknowledgments.

This book grew out of a conversation with the late Charles N. Brown and Jeremy La.s.sen of Night Shade Books, and we would like to thank them both for their involvement in the genesis this book. We'd also like to acknowledge the efforts of Howard Morhaim and Katie Menick of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency; Jason Williams, Ross E. Lockhart and everyone at Night Shade Books (the best posse ever!); Todd Lockwood, who provided an incredible piece of cover art; Robert Silverberg, who went well above and beyond the call of duty; and Peter S. Beagle, Kathleen Bellamy, Holly Black, Ginjer Buchanan, Connor Cochran, Vaughne Hansen, David G. Hartwell, John Helfers, Margo Lanagan, Todd McCaffrey, Kay McCauley, Garth Nix, Diana Tyler, Anna J. Webman, and Dave Wix, each of whom went above and beyond the call of duty in some way while we were compiling this book. Our sincere thanks to you all.

We would also like to thank the following people who made story recommendations for the book through the Wings of Fire database: John Joseph Adams, Richard J. Arndt, Ron Brinkmann, David Cake, John Harmon, Nik Hawkins, Rich Horton, David Barr Kirtley, Susan Loyal, Simon Petrie, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Paul Strain, Charles A. Tan, Jason Tyler, Jason M. Waltz, Desmond Warzel, Tehani Wessely, and the members of the Fictionmags mailing list.

Introduction.

Quick. What does a dragon look like? Think about it for a moment. Picture it in your mind. Imagine it as a real three-dimensional creature. We suspect that if you asked almost any reader, and certainly any reader of fantastic or speculative fiction, they would come up with something. It might be large and scaly, fiercesome and fiery, wispy and windswept, or even, oddly, small and cute, but that reader would know the answer to the question you were asking. He or she would know what a dragon is, what it is supposed to look like, and what it is supposed to be able to do. Depending on whether that reader came from a European background or an Oriental one, the dragon would be either large, bat-winged, with a four legs and a snake-like body cover in scales, or it would be more lizard-like, possibly wouldn't fly at all, and would be strongly a.s.sociated with water.

And yet, there is no such thing as a dragon, is there? How did a creature that is no more substantial than a pixie or a pouka become more familiar to us than a platypus or a potoroo? There are reports of "dragons" in as diverse texts as The Iliad and the King James Bible, Marco Polo mentioned encountering them on his visits to China, and dragons appear in differing forms in myth, legends and historical reports throughout Europe and Asia.

Often these reports were because witnesses misunderstood the evidence they encountered. There's at least one report, for example, that the bones of a dragon had been discovered in Wucheng, Sichuan, China in 300 BC. Later a.n.a.lysis found them to be dinosaur remains. In fact, although the notion has been discredited, it has even been suggested that the widespread depiction of dragons is connected to some kind of unconscious inherited memory of dinosaurs.

The late Avram Davidson in his fine "Adventure in Unhistory" article "An Abundance of Dragons" suggests many more rational, and some simply more attractive, explanations for why dragons are so ubiquitous. Personally we're greatly attracted to his idea that the airborne Oriental dragons a.s.sociated with rain and storms are simply based on lightning seen during storms. It seems elegant and appropriate, which is almost as important as the truth, where dragons are concerned.

Modern dragons, the dragons which appear in Wings of Fire, are sometimes elegant, sometimes fierce, but always captivating. The first dragon Jonathan recalls encountering was in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Smaug, fierce and terrible, was the archetypal Western dragon, using his strength to protect his enormous h.o.a.rd, the one weakness that would ultimately lead to his destruction. He was followed soon after--Jonathan was a precocious reader--by Anne McCaffrey's intelligent, telepathic firebreathers from Pern and Ursula K. Le Guin's beautiful and wise dragons from Earthsea. There have been many, many others. Wise dragons, cruel dragons, funny dragons, cozy dragons, enormous dragons, and tiny dragons. Dragons as a metaphor for the devil and temptation, and dragons as faithful friends and true allies.

There's no end, it seems to what a dragon can be, and we had that on our collective editorial mind when we sat down to collect the stories that make up Wings of Fire. We had a fairly simple brief from our publisher. Collect dragon stories and make them the best dragon stories we could find. We expanded that slightly, deciding that we wouldn't attempt to define what a dragon was beyond that it should be real within the confines of the story (at least most of the time) and that it should be described as a dragon. We knew we wanted to focus on modern fantasy, but wanted to be open to stories from any era and any genre. We also considered whether we should focus on lesser known tales, and avoid those that had been widely collected in previous volumes. After much discussion we decided that it was more important to compile a book filled with the best and most widely loved stories that we could find, even if there was a risk that they might be happily familiar to some of our readers. By way of compensation for that, we also invited two writers to contribute original stories for the book. In the end Holly Black and Margo Lanagan both delivered fine stories that stand with the best dragon tales that we could find.

In the end we have the twenty-seven stories collected here. There are famous dragons from Earthsea and Pern, wise dragons, wicked dragons, dragons as large as mountain ranges and dragons that can fit on a bookshelf. They all have one thing in common, though. They're magical. One dictionary defines as dragon as being "a fabulous monster variously represented as a huge, winged reptile, often spouting fire." The late Ogden Nash famously said that "When there are monsters there are miracles." We think that's what you'll find in the pages to follow: monsters and miracles.

Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon.

Perth, Western Australia.

March 2010.

Stable of Dragons.

Peter S. Beagle.

Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 in New York City. A poem he wrote in his senior year of high school won him a scholars.h.i.+p to the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a creative writing degree and made his first professional sale. His first novel, A Fine and Private Place, was published when he was nineteen. It was followed by non-fiction travelogue I See By My Outfit in 1965 and by his best known work, modern fantasy cla.s.sic The Last Unicorn, in 1968. Beagle's other books include novels The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song and Tamsin, and a number of story collections, non-fiction books, screenplays and teleplays. His two most recent story collections are We Never Talk about My Brother and Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle. His writing career spans fifty years, the last few of which have seen a great number of remarkable short stories, including "Two Hearts," winner of the both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He has also received two Mythopoeic awards as well as Locus, WSFA Small Press and Grand Prixe de l'Imaginaire awards for his work.

I keep nine dragons in an old cow barn, And sometimes I go down to look at them.

I didn't build the barn--I bought it From a little old lady from Pasadena, Who was arrested, the last I heard, For selling the North Star.

To a blind man.

I bred the dragons.

I fed them on sorrowful meat and marmalade And lighter fluid and an occasional postadolescent Chicken. And then I built a house Far away from the stable, because things burn down Where dragons are.

Outside the barn.

Are fallen birds, their wings scorched To fluff. The earth is livid, broken veined and rashed, Pimpled with crimson ash--and dragon droppings, Big enough to fertilize the whole frigid world.

Within are dragons.

The roof beams are low.

They are crowded and it makes them short-tempered.

They smell of marshes and the lowland sea, Starfish and seaweed and smashed clams dying in the sun.

They have small ears and their eyes are octagonal; Their teeth are urine-yellow as contempt, and the hairs of their manes Are like chains.

The barn is lanced.

With the raucous fire of their laughter, for they do Breathe fire. Or perhaps the fire breathes them.

Dragon-scented fire it is, and it casts their shadows On the mud-plastered walls.

The males are coin scaled and sluggish.

Their wings are short and weak, useless As an idea to a general. They cannot fly.

They will not walk. Therefore they lie amid applauding ashes And breathe irrelevant d.a.m.nation.

But the females!

They are the purple of outdoor claustrophobia, And they move like dusk. They have winter-colored wings, As wide as cathedral doors. They pace the floors Of their stalls, and their claws make an impatient sound, As if they were scratching at the earth To be let in.

It is a waking sound.

I hear it in my high bed at night, and I cannot sleep Until they do. And they never sleep Unless they are satisfied. And they are never all satisfied At once. There is always someone awake.

When I come in, their heads turn on their crested necks, And they look at me out of their stained-gla.s.s eyes.

They know my name.

I have mated with them.

I'm not the first. I never was an innovator. Knights used to do it.

They killed them later, when the angled eyes were dark with sleep, And the knights were ashamed. So they killed them And some were made saints for it. But I think They were a little lonely in bed with their wives For a while.

I have embraced dragons in my time.

I have held my mouth on white-toothed fire, and been drawn Down the whirlpool gullet that seared me to wakefulness.

I have felt claws sunk in my back, Straining me against silver-dollar scales, and heard a strange heart Exploding in my ears like a drunken grandfather clock.

And I have left my seed to care for itself In a new and bitter cave.

Then I have crawled away And lain in the fields, my flaking skin crackling like wrapping paper, reddening the well-meaning air With my blood. And from the stable Through the scarred, shut door, there comes no sound Of querulous claws.

A dragon is sleeping.

I think that I shall have a son someday.

He will be handsome, with sharp teeth.

The Rule of Names.

Ursula K. Le Guin.

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most important and respected writers in the history of science fiction. Born in 1929, she graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and married historian Alfred L. Kroeber in 1953. Her first work appeared in the early 1960s and was followed by numerous novels, short story collections, poetry collections, books for children, essays, books in translation, and anthologies. She is the author of the cla.s.sic Earthsea series of fantasy novels and stories, and the Hainish series of science fiction novels and stories, including landmark novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation have been recognised with the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, Tiptree, Locus, Ditmar, Endeavour, Prometheus, Rhysling, Gandalf, Jupiter and SFRA Pilgrim Awards. Le Guin is an SF Hall of Fame Living Inductee, a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Seemingly unaware that she's supposed to be entering the later stages of her career and an appropriately respectable dotage, Le Guin has published a remarkable series of novels and stories in the past five years, most recently including the YA Western Sh.o.r.e trilogy and historical novel, Lavinia.

Mr. Underhill came out from under his hill, smiling and breathing hard. Each breath shot out of his nostrils as a double puff of steam, snow-white in the morning suns.h.i.+ne. Mr. Underhill looked up at the bright December sky and smiled wider than ever, showing snow-white teeth. Then he went down to the village.

"Morning, Mr. Underhill," said the villagers as he pa.s.sed them in the narrow street between houses with conical, overhanging roofs like the fat red caps of toadstools. "Morning, morning!" he replied to each. (It was of course bad luck to wish anyone a good morning; a simple statement of the time of day was quite enough, in a place so permeated with Influences as Sattins Island, where a careless adjective might change the weather for a week.) All of them spoke to him, some with affection, some with affectionate disdain. He was all the little island had in the way of a wizard, and so deserved respect--but how could you respect a little fat man of fifty who waddled along with his toes turned in, breathing steam and smiling? He was no great shakes as a workman either. His fireworks were fairly elaborate but his elixirs were weak. Warts he charmed off frequently reappeared after three days; tomatoes he enchanted grew no bigger than cantaloupes; and those rare times when a strange s.h.i.+p stopped at Sattins Harbor, Mr. Underhill always stayed under his hill--for fear, he explained, of the evil eye. He was, in other words, a wizard the way wall-eyed Gan was a carpenter: by default. The villagers made do with badly hung doors and inefficient spells, for this generation, and relieved their annoyance by treating Mr. Underhill quite familiarly, as a mere fellow-villager. They even asked him to dinner. Once he asked some of them to dinner, and served a splendid repast, with silver, crystal, damask, roast goose, sparkling Andrades '639, and plum pudding with hard sauce; but he was so nervous all through the meal that it took the joy out of it, and besides, everybody was hungry again half an hour afterwards. He did not like anyone to visit his cave, not even the anteroom, beyond which in fact n.o.body had ever got. When he saw people approaching the hill he always came trotting to meet them. "Let's sit out here under the pine trees!" he would say, smiling and waving towards the fir-grove, or if it was raining, "Let's go and have a drink at the inn, eh?" though everybody knew he drank nothing stronger than well-water.

Some of the village children, teased by that locked cave, poked and pried and made raids while Mr. Underhill was away; but the small door that led into the inner chamber was spell-shut, and it seemed for once to be an effective spell. Once a couple of boys, thinking the wizard was over on the West Sh.o.r.e curing Mrs. Ruuna's sick donkey, brought a crowbar and a hatchet up there, but at the first whack of the hatchet on the door there came a roar of wrath from inside, and a cloud of purple steam. Mr. Underhill had got home early. The boys fled. He did not come out, and the boys came to no harm, though they said you couldn't believe what a huge hooting howling hissing horrible bellow that little fat man could make unless you'd heard it.

His business in town this day was three dozen fresh eggs and a pound of liver; also a stop at Seacaptain Fogeno's cottage to renew the seeing-charm on the old man's eyes (quite useless when applied to a case of detached retina, but Mr. Underhill kept trying), and finally a chat with old Goody Guld the concertina-maker's widow. Mr. Underhill's friends were mostly old people. He was timid with the strong young men of the village, and the girls were shy of him. "He makes me nervous, he smiles so much," they all said, pouting, twisting silky ringlets round a finger. "Nervous" was a newfangled word, and their mothers all replied grimly, "Nervous my foot, silliness is the word for it. Mr. Underhill is a very respectable wizard!"

After leaving Goody Guld, Mr. Underhill pa.s.sed by the school, which was being held this day out on the common. Since no one on Sattins Island was literate, there were no books to learn to read from and no desks to carve initials on and no blackboards to erase, and in fact no schoolhouse. On rainy days the children met in the loft of the Communal Barn, and got hay in their pants; on sunny days the schoolteacher, Palani, took them anywhere she felt like. Today, surrounded by thirty interested children under twelve and forty uninterested sheep under five, she was teaching an important item on the curriculum: the Rules of Names. Mr. Underhill, smiling shyly, paused to listen and watch. Palani, a plump, pretty girl of twenty, made a charming picture there in the wintry sunlight, sheep and children around her, a leafless oak above her, and behind her the dunes and sea and clear, pale sky. She spoke earnestly, her face flushed pink by wind and words. "Now you know the Rules of Names already, children. There are two, and they're the same on every island in the world. What's one of them?"

"It ain't polite to ask anybody what his name is," shouted a fat, quick boy, interrupted by a little girl shrieking, "You can't never tell your own name to n.o.body my ma says!"

"Yes, Suba. Yes, Popi dear, don't screech. That's right. You never ask anybody his name. You never tell your own. Now think about that a minute and then tell me why we call our wizard Mr. Underhill." She smiled across the curly heads and the woolly backs at Mr. Underhill, who beamed, and nervously clutched his sack of eggs.

"'Cause he lives under a hill!" said half the children.

"But is it his truename?"

"No!" said the fat boy, echoed by little Popi shrieking, "No!"

"How do you know it's not?"

"'Cause he came here all alone and so there wasn't anybody knew his truename so they could not tell us, and he couldn't--"

"Very good, Suba. Popi, don't shout. That's right. Even a wizard can't tell his truename. When you children are through school and go through the Pa.s.sage, you'll leave your child-names behind and keep only your truenames, which you must never ask for and never give away. Why is that the rule?"

The children were silent. The sheep bleated gently. Mr. Underhill answered the question: "Because the name is the thing," he said in his shy, soft, husky voice, "and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing. Am I right, Schoolmistress?"

She smiled and curtseyed, evidently a little embarra.s.sed by his partic.i.p.ation. And he trotted off towards his hill, clutching the eggs to his bosom. Somehow the minute spent watching Palani and the children had made him very hungry. He locked his inner door behind him with a hasty incantation, but there must have been a leak or two in the spell, for soon the bare anteroom of the cave was rich with the smell of frying eggs and sizzling liver.

The wind that day was light and fresh out of the west, and on it at noon a little boat came skimming the bright waves into Sattins harbour. Even as it rounded the point a sharp-eyed boy spotted it, and knowing, like every child on the island, every sail and spar of the forty boats of the fis.h.i.+ng fleet, he ran down the street calling out, "A foreign boat, a foreign boat!" Very seldom was the lonely isle visited by a boat from some equally lonely isle of the East Reach, or an adventurous trader from the Archipelago. By the time the boat was at the pier half the village was there to greet it, and fishermen were following it homewards, and cowherds and clamdiggers and herb-hunters were puffing up and down all the rocky hills, heading towards the harbour.

But Mr. Underhill's door stayed shut.

There was only one man aboard the boat. Old Seacaptain Fogeno, when they told him that, drew down a bristle of white brows over his unseeing eyes. "There's only one kind of man," he said, "that sails the Outer Reach alone. A wizard, or a warlock, or a Mage..."

So the villagers were breathless hoping to see for once in their lives a Mage, one of the mighty White Magicians of the rich, towered, crowded inner islands of the Archipelago. They were disappointed, for the voyager was quite young, a handsome black-bearded fellow who hailed them cheerfully from his boat, and leaped ash.o.r.e like any sailor glad to have made port. He introduced himself at once as a sea-pedlar. But when they told Seacaptain Fogeno that he carried an oaken walking-stick around with him, the old man nodded. "Two wizards in one town," he said. "Bad!" And his mouth snapped shut like an old carp's.

As the stranger could not give them his name, they gave him one right away: Blackbeard. And they gave him plenty of attention. He had a small mixed cargo of cloth and sandals and piswi feathers for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g cloaks and cheap incense and levity stones and fine herbs and great gla.s.s beads from Venway--the usual pedlar's lot. Everyone on Sattins Island came to look, to chat with the voyager, and perhaps to buy something--"Just to remember him by!" cackled Goody Guld, who like all the women and girls of the village was smitten with Blackbeard's bold good looks. All the boys hung round him too, to hear him tell of his voyages to far, strange islands of the Reach or describe the great rich islands of the Archipelago, the Inner Lanes, the roadsteads white with s.h.i.+ps, and the golden roofs of Havnor. The men willingly listened to his tales; but some of them wondered why a trader should sail alone, and kept their eyes thoughtfully upon his oaken staff.

But all this time Mr. Underhill stayed under his hill.

"This is the first island I've ever seen that had no wizard," said Blackbeard one evening to Goody Guld, who had invited him and her nephew and Palani in for a cup of rushwash tea. "What do you do when you get a toothache, or the cow goes dry?"

"Why, we've got Mr. Underhill!" said the old woman.

"For what's that's worth," muttered her nephew Birt, and then blushed purple and spilled his tea. Birt was a fisherman, a large, brave, wordless young man. He loved the schoolmistress, but the nearest he had come to telling her of his love was to give baskets of fresh mackerel to her father's cook.

"Oh, you do have a wizard?" Blackbeard asked. "Is he invisible?"

"No, he's just very shy," said Palani. "You've only been here a week, you know, and we see so few strangers here..." She also blushed a little, but did not spill her tea.

Blackbeard smiled at her. "He's a good Sattinsman, then, eh?"

"No," said Goody Guld, "no more than you are. Another cup, nevvy? Keep it in the cup this time. No, my dear, he came in a little bit of a boat, four years ago was it? just a day after the end of the shad run, I recall, for they was taking up the nets over in East Creek, and Pondi Cowherd broke his leg that very morning--five years ago it must be. No, four. No, five it is, 'twas the year the garlic didn't sprout. So he sails in on a bit of a sloop loaded full up with great chests and boxes and says to Seacaptain Fogeno, who wasn't blind then, though old enough goodness knows to be blind twice over, "I hear tell," he says, "you've got no wizard nor warlock at all, might you be wanting one?"--"Indeed, if the magic's white!" says the Captain, and before you could say cuttlefish Mr. Underhill had settled down in the cave under the hill and was charming the mange off Goody Beltow's cat. Though the fur grew in grey, and 'twas an orange cat. Queer-looking thing it was after that. It died last winter in the cold spell. Goody Beltow took on so at that cat's death, poor thing, worse than when her man was drowned on the Long Banks, the year of the long herring-runs, when nevvy Birt here was but a babe in petticoats." Here Birt spilled his tea again, and Blackbeard grinned, but Goody Guld proceeded undismayed, and talked on till nightfall.

Next day Blackbeard was down at the pier, seeing after the sprung board in his boat which he seemed to take a long time fixing, and as usual drawing the taciturn Sattinsmen into talk. "Now which of these is your wizard's craft?" he asked. "Or has he got one of those the Mages fold up into a walnut sh.e.l.l when they're not using it?"

"Nay," said a stolid fisherman. "She's oop in his cave, under hill."