"Patricia A. McKillip - The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbrea" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

THE HARROWING OF THE DRAGON OF HOARSBREATH
Patricia A. McKillip

[07 feb 2002тАФscanned, proofed and released for #bookz]


Winner of the first World Fantasy Award for best novel (1975), for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld,
Patricia McKillip went on to write the popular "Riddle-Master of tied" trilogy, as well as a number of
books for younger readers. She rarely writes short stories. This one, however, is an interesting science
fantasy about dragon-killing on another planet (a tradition that goes back to E. R. Eddison 's fantasies set
on the planet Mercury, especially The Worm Ouroboros). Beware of sincere young men who offer
salvation: The solution they have may well be worse than the problem.

Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named Hoarsbreath, made out of gold
and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briney, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months
out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world's cap, the snow melted
from the peak of Hoarsbreath. The hardly trees shrugged the snow off their boughs, and sucked in light
and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners'
village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mineshaft sagged to the
ground; the dead-white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move
again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the
deep mountain, and took it downriver, across the sea to the mainland, to trade for food and furs, tools and
a liquid fire called worm-spoor, because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three
swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs,
kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they
weren't buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to Hoarsbreath. But the gold
waiting in the dark, secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.
For two hundred years after the naming of Hoarsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived
rich isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept
lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised children who were sent to the mainland when they
were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children
found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of
gold in the dark.
Then, two miners' children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.
They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years
on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to Hoarsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she
was good-natured and sturdy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of Hoarsbreath,
even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone
to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny: she seemed to sense it through her fingertips
touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the
few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it
aged into a rich, smokey gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles, and inspired marvellous
tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.
She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross-section of tunnel between her mother's house
and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in
the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn't handle with a
soft word or her own right arm. Even when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-
light, she wasn't afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with
something that puzzled its senses.
His hair was dead-white, with strands bright as wormspoor running through it; his eyes were the