The Dragon Charmer (29 page)

“What I do with my black plum,” says Fern, “is my own affair.”

“And if l tell Morgus?”

“She will be pleased. She has been looking for it.”

“So if I leave you to your spells, what will you do for we?”

“Nothing.” She will ask no favors from him. Instinct tells her he will batten onto weakness like a vampire onto an open vein.

“I thought we might make a bargain.”

“No. Tell Morgus, and she will pat your head, and call you her good dog. This is a bone she has been seeking for a little while. Also, she will be angry with me, she may punish me. Tell her, or don’t tell her. It’s your choice. I do not bargain.”

“You are a proud little witch, aren’t you?” he says sourly. “So it’s to be my choice. How do you think I will choose?”

“I won’t play that game,” Fern says, “so don’t try it.”

“What games
do
you play?”

“None that you know.”

There is a red glint in the darkness of his eyes, but he laughs unexpectedly, this time with genuine amusement, and it fades. He moves away suddenly and swiftly on clawed feet, padded like the paws of a lion: a fantastic conglomerate of beasts, like the mythical monsters of old, parts of this animal or that tacked together to create an improbable whole. Lion’s feet and ram’s horns, human skin and matted pelt. Briefly he pauses to look back, dropping to a crouch on a shoulder of root, balancing with his tail. “I go to Morgus,” he taunts, “like a good dog. I will see you there.”

“What should I call you?” she asks.

“Kal.”

And on the name he is gone, vanishing into the environs of the Tree as if it was his native habitat. Fern follows more slowly, picking her way by the marks she has trained herself to recognize. She hopes or hazards that he will tell Morgus nothing, but nonetheless she reenters the cave of roots with a certain trepidation. But for once Morgus pays her no attention. “What are
you
doing here?” she is saying, and the scorn in her tone is blatant. In front of her Kal stands at a little distance: he is so much the shorter he appears to be cowering. “Filial duty? Affection? I hardly think so. We know each other too well for that. Your loathing for me can only begin to match mine for you. The first of my sons, for all his failings and failures, had beauty if not charm; the second—”

“Mordraid was a monster under the skin; I show it. I am as you made me, mother dear. The fruit of your womb.”

“The heads are the fruit of the Tree, but it lets them fall and the wild hog eats their brains. Don’t dabble in sentiment: it doesn’t become you. Stick to your jeers and gibes: they are pinpricks I cannot feel, and as long as I ignore you, you are safe from me. What brings you here?”

“I met someone who was asking after you. It inspired me with a curious urge to pay a visit.”

“It inspired you with curiosity, no doubt. Who was it? I am not one to be casually spoken of.
Who was it?”

“An ancient spider—a negligible creature—setting his nets for a fly too big for him.” He speaks in riddles, or so it seems to Fern. “But there was another in the background, one far more skilled, a tarantula who has lost his venom but not his bite.
He
was telling the first little spinner how to weave his silken traps. I wondered who—or what—he was hoping to catch. So I came here, to consult the Greek oracle.”

“Syrcé!
” The’s sounds hiss like snakes.

“I told him only what he could learn for himself,” says Sysselore defensively.

“You have a pretty new toy, Mother.
Such
a pretty thing. May I play with it?”

Still Fern says nothing, and Morgus does not spare her a look, though she must sense the girl’s presence.

“Don’t touch her,” Morgus says, bored, “or you may live to regret it”—but whether the threat is personal or an expression of her confidence in her apprentice is unclear. “Who was this tarantula who impressed you so much?”

“I didn’t say he impressed me.”

“You didn’t need to. Who was he?”

“You knew him of old. I thought you would remember.”

“Him.”
Derision warps her face, tugging her thick mouth off center. “He’s no tarantula. A legless crawler who champs his hollow fangs because he can no longer dance. What does
he
want in all this?”

As she speaks, Fern has a sudden mind picture of a weather-brown face, creviced and cragged, lurking in the shadow of a pointed hood, of green-gold eyes bright as sunlight on spring leaves. She sees him in the fire circle, shaking the sparks of wereglow like water drops from his coat. And she sees him beside a clean white bed, watching over the sleeper who lies there. Caracandal. Ragginbone. Once her ally, if sometimes unreliable, always her friend, though it is long since they have exchanged a word. The awareness that he might be searching for her, shielding her unoccupied body, is like a hand reaching out when she had believed herself entirely alone. But she keeps her face immobile: even in the uncertain wormshine Morgus can read the slightest change of expression, and the thought behind the change. Fern moves toward them, letting her gaze fall coldly on Kal. Morgus’s luminous black stare flickers over her—flickers and passes on.

“Maybe,” Kal is saying, “he too is driven by… curiosity.”

“He is driven by the urge to spy and pry. He is the sort who minds other people’s business, and calls it
responsibility
. He does nothing, neither evil nor good, and makes a virtue of it. He will spend ten years watching a pebble, waiting for it to hatch. He was a charlatan, a poison peddler who tried to turn himself into a magus and sickened of his own failure. And now he is a snooper who, without reason or power, lays claim to some kind of mandate from an unknown Authority. Senile delusions. His mind is as calcified as his body.”

“All the same,” Sysselore interjects, perhaps for provocation, “he lives in the world beyond—the world of Time.
He moves around. He meets people. He knows things. His presence—his interest—always means something. You have said so yourself.”

No one likes having their own words used against them. Morgus rounds on her, spitting vituperation. As her attention shifts Kal looks sidelong at Fern, a sly sardonic smile on his misshapen face. “It is good to know that the coven sisters still exude so much sisterly love,” he remarks. Morgus turns back with a word, a gesture, so swift that there is barely a break in her tirade. The sudden whiplash of power knocks him down like a blow: he sprawls on the ground, helpless and ungainly, before snapping his body into a huddle from which he glowers, red eyed, rubbing a mark like a burn on his chest. Fern has never seen Morgus use her strength in such a way before and the ease, the carelessness of it is terrifying. She recalls lashing out herself once, at the house-goblin—a reflex of anger without thought—but she made no contact, caused no pain. She finds herself clutching right hand in left as if to keep it under control.

Sysselore cowers under the diatribe with the resentful cringing of a subordinate who feigns submission while plotting a petty revenge. The long habit of sisterhood has engendered certain rules between them: conflict is only ever verbal. Morgus stops as abruptly as she began; her black gaze veers, finding the girl. “Are you enjoying the spectacle, Fernanda?” she asks.

Fern shrugs. “A family squabble.”

Morgus laughs—her mouth splits and widens, the soft flesh shifts and re-forms itself around the red hole of her mirth. “Do you see this?” she says at last, indicating the hunched figure on the ground. “This was a mistake. Learn from it. I had a son once, when I was young: his father was a king whose legend they still remember.”

“He was your half brother,” mutters Sysselore.

“Irrelevant. My son was handsome and proud, though with little Gift, but he was also impatient and greedy. Ambition and rancor destroyed him. When I saw he was flawed I set out to make myself a better child. I took the seed of a god and warmed it into mortal life, I infused it with a phantom drawn from the ether. It was a magic like no other—”

“Galataea,” murmurs Sysselore. “The flower bride of Llew LlawGyffes.”

“Galataea was a statue, a receptor put to a different use. Blodeuwedd was a doll made of forget-me-nots and love-in-idleness. My experiment was with flesh and blood—my flesh, my blood. I nursed it like a fragile plant and it grew in my belly like a tumor. When it emerged I saw—this. Neither Man nor Spirit, a monster from infancy, crawling in his own dirt. I gave him to a peasant half-wit and he drank in stupidity with her breast milk. When he was older, he used what little power he had to sneak and steal, growing only in vice—the crude vices that spring from a mean imagination, from brute sensuality and bile. I had named him after Caliburn, the sword of fame and fable. Now he is Kaliban, a byword for a beast. I let him live as a reminder. The Ultimate Laws can be bent but not broken. Look at him and learn.”

You let him live to torment him, Fern says, but only to herself. You take vengeance on him for your own aberration.

“Did you ever try to love him?” she asks, as if in a spirit of scientific enquiry.

“Love!” Morgus laughs again, but without sound. “What do you know of such things, beyond poetic sentiment and story? Listen: I will tell you of love. Love is a phantom of the mind, a famine in a hungry heart. To love is to go forever yearning and empty. It is a gift that cannot be given, a stone that weighs you down, incapacitating instead of conferring power. It was spawned as part of the machinery of nature, a wayward link in the reproductive chain; but we live outside the natural world, we do not need such bonds. Had this creature here fulfilled my hopes I would have used him and gloried in him, but never loved him. Why should I waste emotion on him now?”

Kal gets to his feet, looking at Fern, addressing his mother. “I know many secrets,” he says. “Secrets you would give much to share.”

“Droppings from a feast table where you will never have a seat,” retorts Morgus. “Keep them to yourself. I do not pick over other men’s crumbs.”

He moves away from her crabwise, vanishing into the
shadows around the exit, but for a long while Fern seems to feel his eyes, watching her from the dark.

   Fern does not sleep anymore, but sometimes she dreams. The same dream as before: a gray church, full of turning heads. From somewhere, there comes the boom of solemn music. This time she is watching, not taking part. There is a long white dress moving slowly up the aisle. It seems to have no occupant. The man is waiting for it beside a fountain of flowers: he is dark, stocky, slightly balding, with a clever, not-quite-handsome face, amusing and amused. She sees him vividly, and he is vividly familiar, spearing her with a strange kind of pain. She even knows his name: Marcus Greig. The dress places an invisible hand in his. “I’m not there!” Fern screams in a sudden panic. “Can’t you see I’m not there?” But the ceremony proceeds, and she wrenches herself back to consciousness, sweating as if from a fever, forgetful that her body’s trembling and the perspiration that soaks her are mere illusion. As she grows calmer, memories trickle back, details she has not thought of before, insignificant beside the greater priorities that burden her. She is supposed to marry Marcus; he may even be waiting at her bedside. Dimly she recalls that this was something she wanted, though her reasons for so doing have evaporated like raindrops in the sun. She knows now that she can take no such empty vows, that even to have considered it was a kind of madness that had nothing to do with either Morcadis or Fernanda. She reaches for another, older memory, a memory that has lain untouched at the back of her thought for what seems like aeons—a beach in Atlantis, golden with sunset, and waves breaking, and a man rising up out of the water to meet her like a sea god. But even as the image surfaces, it has changed. He is dark against the sea’s glitter, too dark, and as he comes toward her she sees his face is the face of Ruvindra Laiï.

   The fruit is ripening.

Fern wanders beneath the laden branches with Sysselore observing the swelling globes, seeing the strands of hair dripping with moisture, the burgeoning of new colors beneath the
skin. Already some of the faces begin to look faintly recognizable, as if she has seen them in the other world, on a square screen or a printed page. Once in a rare while there will be one that does reappear, season after season, fading a little with every fruiting. “Whatever the reason,” Sysselore says, “they cannot pass the Gate. Their soul may be eroded, or their will. They may be trapped by vain emotion, residue of a lost life—caught in a rut until their flame withers and vanishes utterly. Here is one.” The head hangs low, within easy reach. The cheeks have an unhealthy pallor, blotched here and there with red; greasy threads of hair slip forward across the brow; more hair sprouts over the upper lip. Eyes and forehead are scrunched together in a blind scowl, savage and meaningless. As they watch, the eyelids split, bursting open, the mouth begins to jabber. But the light-blue stare is unfocused, the voice curiously remote, like a radio with the volume turned down. The words pour out in an unceasing stream, vehement, passionate, raucous, with now and then the echo of an identifiable language, but for the most part incomprehensible, all gibberish. “In the first couple of seasons he was much louder,” says Sysselore. “He used to harangue us—Morgus understood him; she speaks many tongues. He doesn’t see us now. In a day or two his eyes will become bloodshot and he’ll start to rot from within.” It is a face Fern knows, though she cannot recall the name; names are unimportant here, except in conjuration. Yet somehow she remembers the face as fuller, stronger, more solid, whereas the fruit, though barely mature, seems already shriveled, decayed before its time. It has become a weak, pathetic, shrunken object, where the last flicker of a soul is imprisoned, gleaming fitfully ere it expires. The eyes shine with a dreadful ferocity of spirit, but they are the eyes of a madman, expending his enmity on monsters that only he can see.

Most of the heads appear young, though they may have died old. “The sap of the Tree is strong,” says Sysselore. “Morgus believes it was a Spirit once, old as the Oldest: immortal ichor runs in every bough. At the very least it is—an entity, something with a power all its own. Many of the fruit will wither into age before they fall.”