Lichen

Legend has it… every dragon hatches whole — fully awake, fully loved, and connected to everything alive. Some are hatched seeing colors the world around them has forgotten. On a clean stone in clean air, lichen grows — gold, and green, and orange, a crust of color that takes a hundred years. Where the air is dirty, it waits.

1

Lichen grew up in Kilnport, where the brick kilns burn all day and everything — walls, coats, sky — comes out the same shade of gray. The river runs orange past gray docks, stained by the old mine above town. The pigeons match the roofs. Not one stone in Kilnport has lichen on it. On the corner, two dragons pass each other in the ash-light. "Another one," says the first. "Another one," says the second.

3

His parents work the kilns' long shifts. They come home ash-gray and coughing, but every payday his mother stops in the doorway, opens her claw, and there — one small berry. Not to eat. To paint with. Lichen eats the flesh for the color and keeps the seeds. He plants them in a cracked pot on the windowsill in the gray dirt from the yard, and nothing comes up, and he keeps planting. "They're not dead," he tells his mother. "They're waiting." Blackberry, rowan, one impossible summer's strawberry. Forty-three seeds.

4

Lichen paints with anything: berry juice, crushed brick, the orange crust off the river stones, the yellow off a broken lantern glass. His schoolbook margins turn into meadows. His teacher takes the book, looks at a poppy running down the edge of page forty — and slides it into her desk drawer without a word. On the walk home, he stops at a blank gray wall and stands in front of it a long time. "Every gray wall," he says, "is waiting."

5

Behind the kilns, in a bin of broken lamps, Lichen finds an old painter's box. Inside: a wide brush with its bristles worn to a slant, a stone mortar, and a notebook of color recipes in faded ink — kiln ash and linseed, river rust and chalk, a red made from something called madder root. Scratched into the lid, nearly worn away: paint the waiting. Every recipe is signed: Old Madder of Kilnport. Lichen doesn't mix a single one. He carries the box up and down the street until the baker says Madder was her grandmother. "She'd have wanted them used," the baker says. "Just say whose they are."

6

So Lichen mixes his first color by claw — kiln ash nobody wants, a pinch of chalk, the oil from his mother's lamp — following Madder's recipe exactly. He touches the old brush to the kiln fence, low down, and draws one small line: the green of the single weed that grows by the loading dock. He steps back. The line dries soft and true in the gray afternoon, and it doesn't smoke or stink like the paint the kilns buy. Lichen looks up and down the empty lot, and laughs out loud, alone.

7

Whatever Lichen imagines, the old brush can paint, if he's patient enough to mix it. He paints sample patches the size of a claw on the back of his own shed: a waterfall blue, a fox-at-dusk orange, his mother's berry red. And the river: he scoops the orange muck off its stones, washes it, dries it, grinds it in Madder's mortar. And it's ochre, the oldest paint there is, the color of the first cave paintings, made of the very rust that's poisoning the river. Every bucket he takes out leaves the river a little cleaner.

8

His first wall is the baker's gray shop front. Before he opens a single tin, he stands in front of it and says three things out loud, the way his mother says grace before the one berry: Is it good for me? Is it good for them? Is it good for the world? Then he writes the price on a scrap of card: ONE WALL, TWO COATS, SIX SILVER: THE PAINT PAID FIRST, THE REST WHEN IT'S DRY. He paints a sample patch by the door in three colors for the baker to choose from. She chooses Madder's red. The morning shift rounds the corner and stops. A big dragon with soot in his frills stands in front of the red shop a long time, then wipes his eyes with the back of his claw, and looks around, and everyone saw, and nobody says anything.

9

After that, wall after wall. Lichen prices every one by the wall and the coat, asks only for the paint before he starts and the rest when it's dry, and never paints a whole wall before the owner has chosen from a sample patch. On every tin he mixes, he paints a small label: MADDER'S RED. MADDER'S GREEN. "Gray is cheaper to keep," says the kiln foreman, to the ground. But all afternoon, workers passing the red bakery slow down. That night at supper, the big dragon with soot in his frills asks his wife what color poppies are, exactly, and she tells him, and he nods for a long time.

10

So Lichen opens the Ochre Works in an empty shed by the river, with what the walls have paid. Young dragons scoop the rust out of the water, grind it into paint that doesn't smoke, and learn to paint a wall that lasts. On a ladder, a friend always foots it, and every pot is stirred where the wind can carry the fumes away. Every silver goes into three pots on the shed shelf: wages, the town's coin, and winter. He scratches the two rules on every brush: paint the waiting, and say whose color it is. Somebody's grandmother brings a chair. And Swatch comes to stay: an old paint-speckled humanoid robot from the kilns, with a fan of color cards in one hand, which holds up the right card before anyone asks.

11

Soon Kilnport has color that stays: a meadow on the water tower, whales down Main Street, a sunrise on the kilns themselves. On the corner, two dragons pass each other in the last light. "Good evening," says the first. The second stops. "Good evening." A gold-scaled dragon with a burn scar down one wing buys a tin of Madder's red, and on her way out she tells Lichen quietly, "Gold makes a fire roar overnight. Only good fuel keeps it burning." Then the kiln owners come to town in a black coach, with a chest of venture capital on the seat beside them.

12

The kiln owners want every wall in three cities painted by summer — under their name, with the ochre thinned to go further, and Madder's name scraped off the tins. Lichen takes the gold. A hundred and twelve walls in a month. No sample patches, no second coat, paint too thin to hold. In the rush he knocks the cracked pot of seeds off his own windowsill, and hasn't time to pick it up. Then the first spring rain comes. Down a hundred and twelve walls the color runs in orange streaks, back into the river it came out of. Three cities send back the walls and want their silver. And Madder's granddaughter, the baker, finds her grandmother's red on a kiln owner's tin with someone else's name, and closes the shop door without a word. Lichen stands alone at sundown at the ruined wall, and nobody comes. Only Swatch, which stands beside him with its fan of cards closed, and says nothing. That night, in the Ochre Works shed, the old grinding mill — a stone wheel that only ever turns when someone feeds it — turns by itself in the dark, grinding the last good ochre into one small bucket. In the morning it is sitting by the door: enough for one wall, two coats.

13

He goes out into the canyon country to be somewhere the rain isn't. Out there the old flood-lines run in bands of ochre, rust and rose — the same colors he's been scraping off the river, laid down by water over a million years. Not one of them has run — and where the bands meet, the rock itself spells a line in pure morning-lit color: When you are afraid, breathe like me. Seeds on the floor at home. A hundred walls running. A shop door closed. Does Lichen bank the fire and breathe with the canyon — or blaze off to the three cities tonight and repaint every wall himself?

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