Wings of Fire Read online

  Wings of Fire

  Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1 – 4

  Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  Engineering Infinity (forthcoming)

  Life on Mars: Tales of New Tomorrows (forthcoming)

  Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron (forthcoming)

  Godlike Machines (forthcoming)

  With Lou Anders

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (forthcoming)

  With Charles N. Brown

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories

  With Jeremy G. Byrne

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  With Terry Dowling

  The Jack Vance Treasury

  The Jack Vance Reader

  Wild Thyme, Green Magic

  Hard Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance

  With Gardner Dozois

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  With Karen Haber

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  Wings of Fire © 2010 Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon

  This edition of Wings of Fire

  © 2010 by Night Shade Books

  Cover illustration © 2010 by Todd Lockwood

  Cover design by Evan Chung

  Interior layout and design by Michael Lee

  All rights reserved

  An extension of this copyright page appears on pages 497–499

  First Edition

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-187-4

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  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 Lassen 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 Lassen 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 associated 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 analysis 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 associated 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 hoard, 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 M
argo 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 scholarship 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 classic 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 damnation.

  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-glass 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 classic 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 Shore 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 sunshine. 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 passed 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 deserve
d 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 ship 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 nobody 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 Shore 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.