The Fledgling

The clearing, ringed with spruce and birch and tussocked underfoot with coarse grasses, was tinged a murky yellow under the grey blanketing sky. A slow drizzle laced the air, the moisture neither falling nor rising, but coalescing on the little girl’s lashes, beading into bright gems around the darkness of each iris, one, deepest brown, the other unfathomable blue. She stood alone and quiet, in the centre of the clearing, the gaze of those wide, cloud-rimed eyes passing from shadow to shadow as she sought comprehension between the encircling trunks. She should have been cold, standing there, naked and wet in the cool air, but the water lay on her skin like it was obsidian, and the only movement in her small body were those probing eyes. She did not shiver or pimple, not from cold, and not from fear, as the gloom thickened above her and the wind whipped her black hair about her face. But in the valley, an ululation spread through the village setting cats and dogs alike to their crying, as the wise women watched the distant hillside and held their talismans tight to their breasts.

The day Nathera was born, no one expected her mother to survive. The birthing had been brief. Brief, brutal, and awash with blood. The women made Elspet ready for her passing, filling the chamber with firelight and the smell of burning lavender, painting her brow and forearms with a paste of parsley and peat and blessing her passage in all the many ways they knew how to. They took the baby from amongst the gore, and left her wrapped in a thin cloth outside the door while they tended the mother, but Elspet did not die straight away, and when she heard the child crying, she fussed and moaned until she was brought back in to her and laid at her breast. Elspet did not die that night, though the blood saturated the woven rug beneath her and her legs lay limp and dead under the coverings. She did not die in the morning, though the midwives assured her it would not be long. Elspet did not die that day, nor the next, nor the next, though she should have, and it frightened the women that she had not. The babe lay at her mother’s breast, suckling fiercely, urging the milk to come, tiny hands clawing at the flaccid flesh until it began, on the third day, to thicken and swell, and the child took her fill again and again. When the women plucked her from the nipple to clean her, Elspet became agitated, as if in a fever, but miraculously, there was no fever. On day five, they cleaned the stinking crust from her skin and laid fresh bedding underneath her and began to feed her cheese melted with mare’s blood, one drop at a time. On day six, Elspet awoke, and named the child Nathera.

Nathera was another matter, and no less perplexing to the midwives and wise women who made up most of the village. The pregnancy itself had been a surprise, as no man had visited the village in over half a year when Elspet fell pregnant. Though they exchanged looks between themselves, no questions were asked, as the women did not ask such questions of each other. Assumptions were made, but the truth was Elspet’s to share or to keep, and she kept it, knowing the others would take her for a liar if she did not lie. When the baby burst into the birthing chamber like the eruption of a blood filled boil, more looks were exchanged, but not before a measure of horror had cast its shadow on their faces. The baby was beautiful, with smooth, dark skin, perfect, delicate fingers and a face foretelling her mother’s elegant looks, but behind, her spine stood proud from her back in a serrated ridge, the skin stretched so thin over the vertebrae in places that grey bone could be seen underneath. Her scapular flared wide, forcing her arms forward, and her weak neck, overlong for a newborn, left her head lolling on the floor where she bawled. It was kindest, some thought, to let nature take its course.

But the course of nature only leads to death one day in every lifetime, which the women well knew, and they watched Nathera grow strong on Elspet’s milk, and as Elspet’s milk flowed, her life returned to her. For months they washed her, and fed her, and massaged her limp legs. She would never bear more children, but slowly she began to regain some movement. After a while, she could pull herself into a chair, and be pushed into the winter evening sunshine, where she would sit facing the forested hillside, watching the day fade, smoke rising from the wood and mud huts of the village, and far in the distance, the ascent of the great dragon leaving her home to hunt, and she would sing to Nathera while the cold numbed her nose. The women watched how Elspet loved Nathera, and they looked away from one another.

When Nathera turned one, The Mathair came to see them. The previous Mathair, though she had been both old and wise, had been neither the eldest, nor the wisest of the women. She had never the less been uncontested as the head of the village. She had won her position over many years of occupying it well, and the women had thrived under her guardianship, and so not only went on accepting her leadership, but had deified her such that her word had become law in a village where laws did not apply. The old Mathair had been gifted with the ability to see both far and wide, and had steered the women into comfortable prosperity. The alliances between the village and those in the surrounding valleys had kept the people largely happy and industrious, with enough of all things, but never too much of any, to live well, and her truce with the dragon had preserved safety in the valley for long enough that the youngest of the women knew nothing else. Her shortcoming, if she had one, had been to die.

In the year before Nathera was born, the village had undergone something of a transition. The new Mathair assumed the position with a confidence that no one questioned, a vicious streak masquerading as strength, and ambition as wisdom. That she was daughter to the old Mathair lent her a legitimacy that discouraged argument and the people celebrated a funeral and an investiture befitting the divine status they had leant to the position, ceremonies which only cemented the unassailable rule of the Mathairs past and present.

The new Mathair was greedy. She recognised the value of the skills the village specialised in, and she raised the levies made for birthing a baby or tending a fever, even for preparing the dead. Trade had fallen away as the services the midwives and wise women offered were taken up by mothers, wives and daughters who could no longer afford what was asked and still feed their families. The women of the village, who grew more herbs than vegetables and knew more about fixing broken heads that broken carts, became dispirited and what work they took, they did with heavy hearts and, in time, empty stomachs. Sensing vulnerability, one night a few weeks after Nathera was born, a handful of men from the village over the mountain descended the steep wooded hillside, invisible beneath the trees, and attempted to seize the good growing land the women squandered on things that wouldn’t fill your belly. The women had fought them off by sheer force of numbers, but three had been killed, and the following day, they had trekked the long way around, following the tributaries that converged from the valleys to the great lake, to return the bodies of two murdered men to their own soil to rot. The Mathair had praised their valour and storied the skirmish to render it a battle victory, but it had left them shaken, waiting for another attack, and when The Mathair announced a tax to be paid on everything traded in the village in order to fund an army, hungrier than ever.

On the morning the new Mathair came to see them, the sun was warm and the trees still green, and Elspet was sat in front of the open doorway of the hut she had occupied since the day Nathera was born. The little girl was standing before her, small hands clasped in Elspet’s larger ones, holding her steady on short, bent legs. In a few days, Nathera would take her first steps, and Elspet, too, would find that with a stick in each hand, she could take her weight on first one foot, then the other. The Mathair sat on a padded chair one of the women who always attended Elspet brought out for her. She had first been to see Nathera when she was one day old, and often since. The child had captured her imagination, her long, bent back, and striking eyes. Rumours of her providence entwined themselves with myths her mother had told her, and her hunger had been ignited. She had bided her time, but now she had come to a recognition of what must be.

“You know”, she began, her eyes on the child “Nathera is a beautiful child. But she is not one of us”.

“I know no such thing.” Answered Elspet.

“Yes, you do” said The Mathair, gently. Elspet was silent. “She is not one of us and everyone has known it since the day she was born. Maybe before. No one will say it to you, but everyone sees it”.

“Nathera is one of us,” said Elspet. “Look, she stands. She crawls, she eats, she cries, she sleeps. She is not broken. She’s fine, of course she is one of us”.

“Broken? No. She’s not broken. But she is different. I think she is special Elspet. I think she is the key to our survival here. And I think it will be a great sacrifice, but without it, we are all doomed.”

The Mathair explained her plan to Elspet while the Nathera, still now, curled into in her mother’s lap, fixed her with one deepest brown and one unfathomable blue eye. But The Mathair didn’t blink.

“No”. Said Elspet.

“I’m sorry Elspet. I have decreed it.”

Elspet fought it, but she had known what would come to pass since the day Nathera was born. Blind with pain and near death from blood loss, a vision had come to Elspet. It was not the first time, the visions had been coming for five years by then. In each, she saw herself holding a serpent, cradling it to her breast while it grew longer and longer. Even as its tail thumped onto the floor, it lay placid in her arms, but when its eyes opened, it stretched itself wide, piercing her heart with a long spindly finger. This time, as her lacerated womb pumped life onto the soaked matt, behind closed eyes she saw the finger break off as the creature wriggled from her grasp. The wound healed over before her eyes, but she felt the pain from her heart suffuse her body. Six days later, when she woke up, the pain was still there and even after her body healed, it had stayed with her ever since. Now it grew daily as she pleaded for more time. She got another year. Shortly before her second birthday, Nathera refused her milk. Without fuss, she turned he face away from the nipple, and the die was cast.

It was dawn when they came to the hut and took her from her mother’s arms. There had been no warning, but Elspet had known it was a matter of time before someone noticed that the child no longer fed from her. Elspet could not stop them, her weak legs gave out beneath her and though she dragged herself across the floor, there was nothing she could do but call out to her daughter not to be afraid, even as her heart filled with dread. She knew the place, the clearing in the forest where they said that their great great great great grandmothers sacrificed innocents to the gods, and everyone believed it because even the trees seemed to recoil there. The gods alone knew how she found the strength, but Elspet took her two walking sticks and gave hopeless chase into the trees, while the village woke to the reverberating alarm of her sobs.

Holly and hawthorn tore at Elspet’s cloak and bloodied her hands and face as she plunged through the wood, her heart beat deafening in her ears and her breath ragged and gasping, but she kept going, a straight line, or near enough, which brought her to the clearing just in time. She had sensed the scurrying retreat of the others where the path’s zigzag passed close by her, and she had heard, ten minutes later, the wind from the great grey-green wings bending the tree tops above her, and she had pushed on, fast enough, just, to emerge from between two silvery trunks as the dragon descended, black eyes fixed on the little girl below. Just in time for her daughter’s searching eyes to lock onto her own, and for her to see, for the last time, that small smile of recognition tilt the corners of her child’s rosebud lips, before the dragon swallowed Nathera whole.

Elspet sat against the trunk of a tree, wet through and shivering, until dusk darkened the dark of the forest, and the clearing dimmed to the dullest grey. She sat, weak, exhausted, and impatient. Beside her lay the dragon. She had watched as the great beast had taken her daughter into her mouth, rising into the sky without missing a beat. The dragon’s neck, reaching skywards, had convulsed, throwing the massive head forward, and then snapping back again. Disorientated, the dragon tried again to rise away from the clearing, and again, hear head plunged forward as the searing pain in her neck took hold. Elspet retreated back one step, into the shadow. She knew that pain. She knew how the spines of Nathera’s back were right now ripping through the muscle and fat and blood vessels of the animal’s throat, splitting her in two. The dragon was large, and she watched her writhe in the air, screaming in pain as Nathera’s body made its progression towards her stomach. There was a long way to travel, and by the time Nathera was piercing the stomach wall, the creature lay unconscious, blood spilling from its mouth onto the grass of the clearning. But the pain was only the beginning. On day one, Elspet kept watch, but could do nothing. On day two, she stroked the beast’s head listening to its gurgling breath, willing it to live. On day three, she lay against the black scaled spine, supported underneath by the grey spikes, which ran from the back of its skull to the end of its tale. There she felt the bones within, shifting, making room, locking again. She felt the rushing of blood filling a new circuit of veins and arteries, she felt the quickening of the giant heart, falling into a new fast beating rhythm. The wise women began to arrive on day four, bringing food, water and incenses, and on the fifth day, she fed it blood and milk, one drop at a time. Her own blood, and her own milk. On the sixth day, the dragon opened its eyes, one deepest brown, the other, unfathomable blue. She named her Nathera.

When Elspet and Nathera returned to the village, every woman was present. Those who had helped Elspet stood at the front of the group, the rest cowering behind. The Mathair stepped forward, and fire rumbled in Nathera’s throat. The Mathair turned her back on the dragon and raised her arms to the crowd.

“This is a great day for us!” She spoke loudly, forcefully, so no one had to strain to hear, but she never gave the appearance of shouting. “With this dragon, Nathera the Dragon Child is reborn in her true form! Behold, our tame Dragon!” The crowd shifted uneasily. The elders remembered the fear they had felt as children, hiding each dawn and dusk in their homes, or if not, in any barn or pigsty that was near. No one turned anyone from their door when the dragon took flight. Elspet remembered holding the small body of her daughter, in their bed, in the darkness, and placed a hand on the dragon’s smooth scales, just beneath that ridge of spines. From inside, she felt a small pressure, and pressed back.

“Today” continued The Mathair “our bowls are empty, our hearths are cold and our land is under threat! Tomorrow, we shall eat richly, we will light the fires and we shall dance on the fields that our mother’s mother’s cleared for us! Tomorrow morning, Nathera will fly South, and she will show them what we have. We are not a greedy people, we will not take what is not ours, but we will offer a fair price, and tomorrow, we will have food on every table!”

But the following day, food did not come. Nathera lolled on her belly, stretched across the mud floor of the village, her head the only part which fit inside Elspet’s hut. She picked up a pig, inspected it, and put it back, trotters in the air, in someone elses home. She chased her tail, trampling the poppy crop in her exuberance. And when The Mathair berated her for her reticence to leave the village, she cried until Elspet took the great skull into her lap and sang to her in the sunshine. The Mathair grew impatient. She shouted, prodded, cajoled and bribed the dragon to fly to the southern villages to deliver a message, but Nathera was indifferent. Instead, she followed Eslpet around, and watched as she gathered herbs and mushrooms from the forest.

Over time, the women lost faith that the dragon would change their fortunes. Yet word got out and old debts started to be repaid, with interest, while generous trade offers arrived with envoys bearing gifts. The village held a feast, and planted vegetables alongside herbs and flowers. The raids stopped, and the villagers no longer asked when the dragon would fly south. Then, after three years, with no more fanfare than she might break her fast, the dragon took flight. The whole village came out to see, and Nathera basked in their admiration. The Mathair cheered the loudest of all, and ordered a party, with music and fire magic, in Nathera's honour. Like a fledgling bird, a few laps of the valley evolved quickly, and as the leaves began to turn the woods from green to a patch work of glowing golds, Nathera flew south.

The first day, she came back empty handed, but The Mathair sent her out again, each day a new destination, each village stricken by fear and willing to trade all they had for safety. Nathera meant them no harm, and did not understand their fear, but she began to recognise her power, too. The first time Nathera took the offering, it had been through desire as much as an effort to be polite. In a village which sat on stilts on the edge of the great lake, the people offered Nathera a model of a dragon, carved from sheep horn and set with glittering stones. Elspet was cross, and Nathera felt ashamed, but only the following day she was offered a blanket, sewn from cloth of the brightest pink. She brought it home, and hid it in a cave in the north facing slope of the hill. The offerings grew as it became known that the dragon favoured beautiful things.

The Mathair was finally delighted. The wealth of her people grew, and the trades between goods and services the villagers used to make were supplanted by payment in gold coins which a person could exchange for whatever they wanted, but also, which could be kept, an insurance against hard times, a guarantee of a place of importance at any table. The Mathair began to collect these coins, building a pile which graduated from a purse, to a sack, to a room. And with each coin she added, she felt an intoxicating surge of potency spurring her to send Nathera out again. Meanwhile, Nathera’s blanket was forgotten under the growing mound of ornaments, coins, and trinkets she hid in the cave out of view of even the sun.

Elspet saw the greed growing in Nathera’s eyes, and she did not like it, but The Mathair nurtured it, sent her on trade mission after trade mission, watched the pile of gold grow. Soon Nathera ceased to hide her own treasure trove, and Elspet’s angry words dripped off her gleaming scales without penetrating to her skin beneath. She tired of taking what was offered and started to take what was not. If she wanted it, she took it. The Mathair did not ask questions, for the women did not ask those questions of each other, but as long as her own wealth grew, she had no need of answers. Elspet however, was not to be pacified with gold, and when reasoning with Nathera proved fruitless, she was first angry, then disappointed, swapping rage for a quiet sadness. Nathera sulked. She began to refuse to fly, spending some days asleep in her cave, and others flying aimless miles. She came home less often, and rarely followed Elspet into the forest any more, though Elspet’s legs grew stiffer and her back more bent.

Another decade passed and the village rebuilt itself from its new wealth, one or two houses at a time, in stone and tile, while the villages nearby floundered, their residents gaunt and sickly, even if they had the money, finding themselves both afraid to send for a wise woman, and afraid not to. Only Eslpet went to them, when they had nothing to give, and paid the tax from her own pocket. Nathera watched her go, her two walking sticks gently thudding down the path as her back bent under her bag of remedies. She began to wonder what Elspet knew. One evening, as Elspet left the village on the river path, Nathera stepped forward, and bowing her to the ground, allowed the older woman to climb the ladder of her spines and ride on her shoulder as they walked the path together. For the first time in many years, Nathera felt strong. But when they arrived at the house of the ailing child they had come to help, the people screamed and ran from them, and the shame burned Nathera to her human core.

Desperate, the people of the valleys began to send raiding parties into the village of women, seeking food, medicines, gold. The Mathair, scared now to lose so much of what she had gained, retaliated, and dressed for battle, ordered the dragon go forth and burn the villages to the ground. Nathera recoiled, confused. The Mathair was asking her, for the first time, not to intimidate, not to bully, not to steal, but to destroy and to kill. For the first time since she had begun to build her bed of stolen trinkets, Nathera looked to her mother. For a moment, Elspet met her eyes, the one deepest brown, the other unfathomable blue, and then Nathera took to the sky, the spread of her green tinged wings blocking the light as her sinuous tail snaked over the village and on down the valley, a winged serpent undulating out of sight. Elspet stood for a moment, watching her go, her hand on the burning pain in her heart. She had not tried to stop her leaving, not this time. Though she had lost her a thousand times, she had found her again at last.

Night fell, and Nathera had not returned. The Mathair sat by the fire, awaiting news, but none arrived. No one travels faster than a dragon, and Nathera would bring her own news when she came. But she did not. By morning, she was still not home. Nor by sundown the following day. Elspet gathered rosemary from the meadow, and mixed it with dandelion in a paste, letting it dry near the fire. It took her two days to reach the cave on the north face of the hill, the weight on one stick, then the other. There, she stood on the ledge, backed by the hoard of silver and gold, the faded pink of an old blanket torn to shreds amongst the tarnished treasures. With her eyes to the sky, she burned the rosemary and dandelion, and she wished her daughter luck.