The dragon spat in blinding fury. Lassan-din shut his eyes, felt the ground shudder and roll beneath him. (You dare to command me to leave my chosen lands? You dare?)
“I claim my right!” He shouted it, his voice breaking. “Leave these lands alone—take your grief elsewhere and be done with them, and me!”
(As you wish, then—) The Storm King swelled above them until it filled the cave-space, its eyes a garish hellshine fading into the night-blackness of storm. Lightning sheeted the closing walls, thunder rumbled through the rock, a screaming whirlwind battered them down against the cavern floor. Rain poured over them until there was no breathing space, and the Storm King roared its agony inside their skulls as it suffered retribution for its vengeance. Lassan-din felt his senses leave him; thinking the storm’s revenge would be the last thing he ever knew, the end of the world. . . .
But he woke again, to silence. He stirred sluggishly on the wet stone floor, filling his lungs again and again with clear air, filling his empty mind with the awareness that all was quiet now, that no storm raged for his destruction. He heard a moan, not his own, and coughing echoed hollowly in the silence. He raised his head, reached out in the darkness, groping, until he found her arm. “Fallatha—?”
“Alive . . . praise the Earth.”
He felt her move, sitting up, dragging herself toward him. The Earth, the cave in which they lay, had endured the storm’s rage with sublime indifference. They helped each other up, stumbled along the wall to the entrance tunnel, made their way out through the blackness onto the mountainside.
They stood together, clinging to each other for support and reassurance, blinking painfully in the glaring light of early evening. It took him long moments to realize that there was more light than he remembered, not less.
“Look!” Fallatha raised her arm, pointing. Water dripped in a silver line from the sleeve of her robe. “The sky! The sky—” She laughed, a sound that was almost a sob.
He looked up into the aching glare, saw patches that he took at first for blackness, until his eyes knew them finally for blue. It was still raining lightly, but the clouds were parting; the tyranny of gray was broken at last. For a moment he felt her joy as his own, a fleeting, wild triumph—until, looking down, he saw his hands again, and his shimmering body still scaled, monstrous, untransformed…“Oh, gods—!” His fists clenched at the sound of his own curse, a useless plea to useless deities.
Fallatha turned to him, her arm still around his shoulder, her face sharing his despair. “Lassan-din, remember that my people will love you for your sacrifice. In time, even your own people may come to love you for it. . . .” She touched his scaled cheek hesitantly, a promise.
“But all they’ll ever see is how I look! And no matter what I do from now on, when they see the mark of damnation on me, they’ll only remember why they hated me.” He caught her arms in a bruising grip. “Fallatha, help me, please—I’ll give you anything you ask!”
She shook her head, biting her lips. “I can’t, Lassan-din. No more than the dragon could. You must help yourself, change yourself—I can’t do that for you.”
“How? How can I change this if all the magic of Earth and Sky can’t do it?” He sank to his knees, feeling the rain strike the opalescent scales and trickle down—feeling it dimly, barely, as though the rain fell on someone else. . . . Through all of his life, the rain had never fallen unless it fell on him: the wind had never stirred the trees, a child had never cried in hunger, unless it was his hunger. And yet he had never truly felt any of those things—never even been aware of his own loss. . . . Until now, looking up at the mother of his only child, whose strength of feeling had forced him to drive out the dragon, the one unselfish thing he had ever done. Remorse and resolution filled the emptiness in him, as rage had filled him on this spot once before. Tears welled in his eyes and spilled over, in answer to the calling-spell of grief; ran down his face, mingling with the rain. He put up his hands, sobbing uncontrollably, unselfconsciously, as though he were the last man alive in the world, and alone forever.
And as he wept he felt a change begin in the flesh that met there, face against hands. A tingling and burning, the feel of skin sleep-deadened coming alive again. He lowered his hands wonderingly, saw the scales that covered them dissolving, the skin beneath them his own olive-brown, supple and smooth. He shouted in amazement, and wept harder, pain and joy intermingled, like the tears and rain that melted the cursed scales from his body and washed them away.
He went on weeping until he had cleansed himself in body and spirit; set himself free from the prison of his own making. And then, exhausted and uncertain, he climbed to his feet again, meeting the calm, gray gaze of the Earth’s gratitude in Fallatha’s eyes. He smiled and she smiled; the unexpectedness of the expression, and the sight of it, resonated in him. Sunlight was spreading across the patchwork land far below, dressing the mountain slope in royal greens, although the rain still fell around them. He looked up almost unthinkingly, searching—found what he had not realized he sought. Fallatha followed his glance and found it with him. Her smile widened at the arching band of colors, the rainbow; not a curse any longer, or a mark of pain, but once again a promise of better days to come.
AFTERWORD—
THE STORM KING
“The Storm King” is one of two stories I’ve written that I consider to be pure fantasies in the classic sense. A lot of people seem to want to call most or all of my work fantasy (including a fair number of men who apparently don’t want to believe women can write anything else), but despite the intentional use of certain mythological references and symbols in some of my stones, I consider myself primarily a science fiction writer. My imagination stubbornly insists that mass ratios should be equal and rocket drives at least theoretically functional; it gets nervous if a man turns into a bird, simply because they don’t weigh the same. Nevertheless, I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy just as much as I enjoy reading science fiction and have always wanted to try my hand at writing it.
In “The Storm King” I wanted to create something with the feel of a classic fairy tale. Most of the fairy tales we think of as children’s stories are more correctly folk tales—tales passed down like folk songs, by word of mouth, through generations, in basically the same ecological niche as mythology. They are rooted in the cultures and superstitions of our ancestors, but they continue to be told, and to exert power over us, because they are about the universal aspects of human relationships. Because their roots are so ancient, some of the fairy tales we know sometimes seem grotesque or almost dreamlike now, but we still recognize the basic morality tale that lies at their heart. “The Storm King” is that sort of morality tale, told with a more modern viewpoint, but drawing on my background in anthropology to give it an archaic feel.
At the time I was working on this novelette, my life was going through another of its recent highly unsettled periods, and I had a great deal of trouble finishing the story. My alienation was so severe that the two protagonists actually had no names through the entire first draft; they were merely sets of parentheses. A trip to England helped me get a fresh start on it—the feel of being in a country with such deep layers of history, and actually seeing the beauty of the land and its ruins of ancient places (where ancestors of mine might even have lived) was literally inspiring to my muse. And I found the perfect image of the dragon in my story in a museum there. I came home and finished the story at last.