was hearing not only the words but the voice of the bard
my father had killed a generation back.
I decided it did not matter. All that mattered was the
truth of the words and the truth of the telling. Arion’s song
had marked my grandfather as a traitor, but it had preserved
the land, for what bandit or goblin would care to invade a
fire-blasted country? Orestes’s song had rescued Alecto’s
name, at the price of flame and ruin and his own life. So
when Arion’s song returned again, I was ready to hear it, to
commit it to memory, to wander these caves until I
recovered the light, the fresh air, the vellum or hide on
which to write the lines that would save my father’s line,
my line.
It did return, and I remembered each word, with a
memory half trained in the listening, half inherited from a
father with bardic gifts. For the first time in a long while,
perhaps the first time ever, I was thankful for who he was,
and I praised the gifts Orestes had passed on to me.
And then, with a whisper that drowned out all other
voices, at once the beast spoke. It was a dragon!
So HE HAS SENT ANOTHER FROM UP IN THE
LIGHT… O MOST WELCOME . . . THE STRUGGLE IS
OVER IS OVER . . . REST THERE REST… NO
CONTINUING … NO … NO …
Oh. And it seemed not at all strange now to fall to the
monster without struggle or issue, to rid myself of the
shifting past and the curse of these scars and their burning,
and to rid all above me of the land’s torture . . .
So I stood there, ridiculously clutching pen and ink,
and though it was already darker than I could imagine
darkness to be, I closed my eyes, and the alien heat
engulfed me, and with it the evil smell of rust and offal and old
blood. The jaws closed quickly around me as I heard a man’s voice,
saying, I HAVE KILLED ARION, AND THE BURNING
WILL NEVER STOP. THE LAND IS CURSED. I AM
CURSED. MY LINE IS CURSED. I DIE.
And then, like a last sudden gift, a woman’s whisper:
THERE IS POWER IN ALL WORDS, AND IN YOURS ESPECIALLY.
*****
It was the hot fetor that awakened me. I gasped and
coughed and closed my eyes immediately to the fierce and
caustic fumes.
I was sitting upright in very confined quarters.
Slowly I tested my surroundings, my eyes clasped
tightly against the foul biting mist. I stretched my arms, and
to each side I felt slippery leather walls.
It came to me slowly what had happened.
I sat in the dragon’s stomach, like a hapless sailor at the
end of an ancient tale.
I cried out in panic and kicked against the pulsing walls,
flailing frantically, but it seemed that the great beast had
settled and fallen asleep, assured by long experience that the
dark corrosives of his stomach would do the rest.
I felt my scars hiss and bubble. The tissue was old and
thick as hide, and it would take hours for the acid to eat
through. There was a fair amount of air, though it was foul
and painful to breathe. What was left to me was the waiting.
For a while, for the space, perhaps, of a dozen
heartbeats, the absurdity of my quest rushed over me like a
harsh, seething wave. Four years of wandering across two
continents, hiding away in castles and marshes, under the
abutments of bridges and in filthy, narrowing alleys,
enduring searing pain in silence . . .
Only to come ignobly to the filthiest, narrowest end of
all, and with me the line of Pyrrhus Alecto, dissolved and
digested miles beneath our beloved peninsula. I had gone
down to the depths of the mountains, and the earth with her
bars was about me forever.
I cried out again, certain no one would hear me.
Then it seemed almost foolishly simple. For after the
weeping, the vain recollection of my hundred adventures, I
recalled the last thing I had heard:
“There is power in all words, and in yours especially.”