The Dragon Charmer (2 page)

You may think this is all mere fancy, the delusions of a mind warped with age and power. Come walk with me then, under the Tree, and you will see the uneaten heads rotting on the ground, and the white grubs that crawl into each open ear and lay their eggs in the shelter of the skull, and the mouths that twitch and gape until the last of the brain has been nibbled away. I saw my sister once, hanging on a low branch. Oh, not my sister Sysselore—my sister in power, my sister in kind—I mean my blood-sister, my rival, my twin. Morgun. She ripened into beauty like a pale fruit, milky skinned, raven haired, but when her eyes opened they were cold, and bitterness dragged at her features. “You will hang here, too,” she said to me, “one day.” The heads often talk to you, whether they know you or not. I suppose talk is all they can manage. I saw another that I recognized, not so long ago. We had had great hopes of her once, but she would not listen. A famine devoured her from within. I remember she had bewitched her hair so that it grew unnaturally long, and it brushed against my brow like some clinging creeper. It was wet not with sap but with water, though we had had no rain, and her budding face, still only half-formed, had a waxy gleam like the faces of the drowned. I meant to pass by again when her eyes had opened, but I was watching the smoke to see what went on in the world, and it slipped my mind.

Time is not, where we are. I may have spent centuries staring into the spellfire, seeing the tide of life sweeping by, but there are no years to measure here: only the slow unrelenting heartbeat of the Tree. Sysselore and I grate one another with words, recycling old arguments, great debates that have long degenerated into pettiness, sharp exchanges whose edges are blunted with use. We know the pattern of every dispute. She has grown thin with wear, a skeleton scantily clad in flesh; the skin that was formerly peach-golden is pallid and threaded with visible veins, a blue webbing over her arms and throat. When she sulks, as she often does, you can see the grinning lines of her skull mocking her tight mouth. She has come a long way from that enchanted island set in the sapphire seas of her youth. Syrcé they named her then, Seersay the Wise,
since Wise is an epithet more courteous than others they might have chosen, and it is always prudent to flatter the Gifted. She used to turn men into pigs, by way of amusement.

“Why pigs?” I asked her, listening to the wild hog grunting and snorting around the bole of the Tree.

“Laziness,” she said. “That was their true nature, so it took very little effort.”

She is worn thin while I have swollen with my stored-up powers like the queen of a termite mound. I save my Gift, hoarding it like misers’ gold, watching in the smoke for my time to come round again. We are two who must be three, the magic number, the coven number. Someday she will be there, the
she
for whom we wait, and we will steal her soul away and bind her to us, versing her in our ways, casting her in our mold, and then we will return, over the borderland into reality, and the long-lost kingdom of Logrèz will be mine at last.

   She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know
how
she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. “Fern” her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word “—Fern, are you listening to me?”

“Yes. Sorry. What did you say?”

“If you’d been listening, you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.”

“I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The
countryside is scenic—if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.”

“I know. So
why
—?”

“Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you
do
invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a drafty pub and drink champagne in the rain.”

“Sounds like a song,” said Gaynor Mobberley. “Champagne in the rain.” And: “Why do you always do what Marcus wants?”

“I’m going to marry him,” Fern retorted. “I want to please him. Naturally.”

“If you were in love with him,” said Gaynor, “you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“Maybe. Best friends have a special license to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.”

“I like him,” Fern said after a long pause. “That’s much more important than love.”

“I like him, too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.”

“Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passed the danger point so you know the worst already.”

“Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.”

Fern gave a shivery laugh. “That’s like… oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.”

“Cynic.”

“No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.”

“Do you remember that time in Wales?” said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. “Morwenna Rhys gave
that party at her parents’ house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.”

“Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again—you put on yourself—and then you know who you are.”

Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. “Who’ll be there?” Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. “When we arrive, I mean.”

“Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.”

“What’s he doing now? I haven’t seen him for years.”

“Postgrad at York. Some aspect of art history. He spends a lot of time at the house, painting weird surreal pictures and collecting even weirder friends. He loves it there. He grows marijuana in the garden and litters the place with beer cans and plays pop music full blast; our dour Yorkshire housekeeper pretends to disapprove but actually she dotes on him and cossets him to death. We still call her Mrs. Wicklow although her Christian name is Dorothy. She’s really too old to housekeep but she refuses to retire so we pay a succession of helpers for her to find fault with.”

“The old family retainer,” suggested Gaynor.

“Well… in a way.”

“What’s the house like?”

“Sort of gray and off-putting. Victorian architecture at its most unattractively solid. We’ve added a few mod cons but there’s only one bathroom and no central heating. We’ve always meant to sell it but somehow we never got around to it. It’s not at all comfortable.”

“Is it haunted?”

There was an appreciable pause before Fern answered. “Not exactly,” she said.

   The battle was over, and now Nature was moving in to clean up. The early evening air was not cold enough to deter the flies that gathered around the hummocks of the dead; tiny crawling things invaded the chinks between jerkin and hauberk; rats, foxes, and wolves skirted the open ground, scenting a free feast. The smaller scavengers were bolder, the larger ones stayed under cover, where the fighting had spilled into the wood and bodies sprawled on the residue of last year’s autumn. Overhead, the birds arrived in force: red kites, ravens, carrion crows, wheeling and swooping in to settle thickly on the huddled mounds. And here and there a living human scuttled from corpse to corpse, more furtive than bird or beast, plucking rings from fingers, daggers from wounds, groping among rent clothing for hidden purse or love locket.

But one figure was not furtive. She came down from the crag where she had stood to view the battle, black cloaked, head covered, long snakes of hair, raven dark, escaping from the confines of her hood. Swiftly she moved across the killing ground, pausing occasionally to peer more closely at the dead, seeking a familiar face or faces among the silent horde. Her own face remained unseen but her height, her rapid stride, her evident indifference to any lurking threat told their own tale. The looters shrank from her, skulking out of sight until she passed; a carrion crow raised its head and gave a single harsh cry, as if in greeting. The setting sun, falling beneath the cloud canopy of the afternoon, flung long shadows across the land, touching pallid brow and empty eye with reflected fire, like an illusion of life returning. And so she found one that she sought, under the first of the trees, his helmet knocked awry to leave his black curls tumbling free, his beautiful features limned with the day’s last gold. A deep thrust, probably from a broadsword, had pierced his armor and opened his belly, a side swipe had half severed his neck. She brushed his cheek with the white smooth fingertips of one who has never spun, nor cooked, nor washed her clothes. “You were impatient, as always,” she said, and if there was regret in her voice, it was without tears. “You acted too soon.
Folly. Folly and waste! If you had waited, all Britain would be under my hand.” There was no one nearby to hear her, yet the birds ceased their gorging at her words, and the very buzzing of the flies was stilled.

Then she straightened up, and moved away into the wood. The lake lay ahead of her, gleaming between the trees. The rocky slopes beyond and the molten chasm of sunset between cloud and hill were reflected without a quiver in its unwrinkled surface. She paced the shore, searching. Presently she found a cushion of moss darkly stained, as if something had lain and bled there; a torn cloak was abandoned nearby, a dented shield, a crowned helm. The woman picked up the crown, twisting and turning it in her hands. Then she went to the lake’s edge and peered down, muttering secret words in an ancient tongue. A shape appeared in the water mirror, inverted, a reflection where there was nothing to reflect. A boat, moving slowly, whose doleful burden she could not see, though she could guess, and sitting in the bow a woman with hair as dark as her own. The woman smiled at her from the depths of the illusion, a sweet, triumphant smile. “He is mine now,” she said. “Dead or dying, he is mine forever.” The words were not spoken aloud, but simply arrived in the Watcher’s mind, clearer than any sound. She made a brusque gesture as if brushing something away, and the chimera vanished, leaving the lake as before.

“What of the sword?” she asked of the air and the trees; but no one answered. “Was it returned whence it came?” She gave a mirthless laugh, hollow within the hood, and lifting the crown, flung it far out across the water. It broke the smooth surface into widening ripples, and was gone.

She walked off through the wood, searching no longer, driven by some other purpose. Now the standing hills had swallowed the sunset, and dusk was snared in the branches of the trees. The shadows ran together, becoming one shadow, a darkness through which the woman strode without trip or stumble, unhesitating and unafraid. She came to a place where three trees met, tangling overhead, twig locked with twig in a wrestling match as long and slow as growth. It was a place at the heart of all wildness, deep in the wood, black with more than the nightfall. She stopped there, seeing a
thickening in the darkness, the gleam of eyes without a face. “Morgus,” whispered a voice that might have been the wind in the leaves, yet the night was windless, and “Morgus” hollow as the earth’s groaning.

“What do
you
want of me?” she said, and even then, her tone was without fear.

“You have lost,” said the voice at the heart of the wood. “Ships are coming on the wings of storm, and the north-men with their ice-gray eyes and their snow-blond hair will sweep like winter over this island that you love. The king might have resisted them, but through your machinations he is overthrown, and the kingdom for which you schemed and murdered is broken. Your time is over. You must pass the Gate or linger in vain, clinging to old revenges, until your body withers and only your spirit remains, a thin gray ghost wailing in loneliness. I did not even have to lift my hand: you have given Britain to me.”

“I have lost a battle,” she said, “in a long war. I am not yet ready to die.”

“Then live.” The voice was gentle, a murmur that seemed to come from every corner of the wood, and the night was like velvet. “Am I not Oldest and mightiest? Am I not a god in the dark? Give me your destiny and I will remold it to your heart’s desire. You will be numbered among the Serafain, the Fellangels who shadow the world with their black wings. Only submit yourself to me, and all that you dream of shall be yours.”

“He who offers to treat with the loser has won no victory,” she retorted. “I will have no truck with demon or god. Begone from this place, Old One, or try your strength against the Gift of Men.
Vardé!
Go back to the abyss where you were spawned!
Néhaman! Envarré!”