The Dragon Charmer Read online

  “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!”

  The darkness heaved and shrank; the eye gleams slid away from her, will-o’-the-wisps that separated and flickered among the trees. She sensed an anger that flared and faded, heard an echo of cold laughter. “I do not need to destroy you, Morgus. I will leave you to destroy yourself.” And then the wood was empty, and she went on alone.

  Emerging from the trees, she came to an open space where the few survivors of the conflict had begun to gather the bodies for burial, and dug a pit to accommodate them. But the grave diggers had gone, postponing their somber task till morning. A couple of torches had been left behind, thrust into the loose soil piled up by their labors; the quavering flames cast a red light that hovered uncertainly over the neighboring corpses, some shrouded in cloaks too tattered for reuse, others exposed. These were ordinary soldiers, serfs and peasants: what little armor they might have worn had been taken, even their boots were gone. Their bare feet showed the blotches of posthumous bruising. The pit itself was filled with a trembling shadow as black as ink.

  Just beyond the range of the torches a figure waited, still as an animal crouched to spring. I
t might have been monstrous or simply grotesque; in the dark, little could be distinguished. The glancing flamelight caught a curled horn, a clawed foot, a human arm. The woman halted, staring at it, and her sudden fury was palpable.

  “Are you looking for your brother? He lies elsewhere. Go sniff him out; you may get there before the ravens and the wolves have done with him. Perhaps there will be a bone or two left for you to gnaw, if it pleases you. Or do you merely wish to gloat?”

  “Both,” the creature snarled. “Why not? He and his friends hunted me—when it amused them. Now he hunts with the pack of Arawn in the Gray Plains. I only hope it is his turn to play the quarry.”

  “Your nature matches your face,” said she.

  “As yours does not. I am as you made me, as you named me. You wanted a weapon, not a son.”

  “I named you when you were unborn, when the power was great in me.” Her bitterness rasped the air like a jagged knife. “I wanted to shape your spirit into something fierce and shining, deadly as Caliburn. A vain intent. I did not get a weapon, only a burden; no warrior, but a beast. Do not tempt me with your insolence! I made you, and I may destroy you, if I choose.”

  “I am flesh of your flesh,” the creature said, and the menace transformed his voice into a growl.

  “You are my failure,” she snapped, “and I obliterate failure.” She raised her hand, crying a word of Command, and a lash of darkness uncoiled from her grasp and licked about the monster’s flank like a whip. He gave a howl of rage and pain, and vanished into the night.

  The torches flinched and guttered. For an instant the red light danced over the cloaked shape and plunged within the cavern of the hood, and the face that sprang to life there was the face of the woman in the boat, but without the smile. Pale skinned, dark browed, with lips bitten into blood from the tension of the battle and eyes black as the Pit. For a few seconds the face hung there, glimmering in the torchlight. Then the flames died, and face and woman were gone.

  They had been friends since their days at college, but Gay-nor sometimes felt that for all their closeness she knew little of her companion. Outwardly Fern Capel was smart, successful, self-assured, with a poise that more than compensated for her lack of inches, a sort of compact neatness that implied I am the right height; it is everyone else who is too tall She had style without flamboyance, generosity without extravagance, an undramatic beauty, a demure sense of humor. A colleague had once said she “excelled at moderation”; yet Gaynor had witnessed Fern, on rare occasions, behaving in a way that was immoderate, even rash, her slight piquancy of feature sharpened into a disturbing wildness, an alien glitter in her eyes. At twenty-eight, she had already risen close to the top in the PR consultancy where she worked. Her fiancé, Marcus Greig, was a well-known figure of academe who had published several books and regularly aired both his knowledge and his wit in the newspapers and on television. “I plan my life,” she had told her friend, and to date everything seemed to be proceeding accordingly, smooth-running and efficient as a computer program. Or had it been “I planned my life”? Gaynor wondered, chilling at the thought, as if, in a moment of unimaginable panic and rejection, Fern had turned her back on natural disorder, on haphazard emotions, stray adventure, and had dispassionately laid down the terms for her future. Gaynor’s very soul shrank from such an idea. But on the road to Yorkshire, with the top of the car down, the citified sophisticate had blown away, leaving a girl who looked younger than her years and potentially vulnerable, and whose mood was almost fey. She doesn’t want to marry him, Gaynor concluded, seeking a simple explanation for a complex problem, but she hasn’t the courage to back out. Yet Fern had never lacked courage.

  The house was a disappointment: solidly, stolidly Victorian, watching them from shadowed windows and under frowning lintels, its stoic façade apparently braced to withstand both storm and siege. “This is a house that thinks it’s a castle,” Fern said. “One of these days, I’ll have to change its mind.”

  Gaynor, who assumed she was referring to some kind of designer face-lift, tried to visualize hessian curtains and terracotta urns, and failed.

  Inside, there were notes of untidiness, a through draft from too many open windows, the incongruous blare of a radio, the clatter of approaching feet. She was introduced to Mrs. Wicklow, who appeared as grim as the house she kept, and her latest assistant, Trisha, a dumpy teenager in magenta leggings wielding a dismembered portion of a Hoover. Will appeared last, lounging out of the drawing room that he had converted into a studio. The radio had evidently been turned down in his wake and the closing door suppressed its beat to a rumor. Gaynor had remembered him tall and whiplash thin but she decided his shoulders had squared, his face matured. Once he had resembled an angel with the spirit of an urchin; now she saw choirboy innocence and carnal knowledge, an imp of charm, the morality of a thief. There was a smudge of paint on his cheek that she almost fancied might have been deliberate, the conscious stigma of an artist. His summer tan turned gray eyes to blue; there were sun streaks in his hair. He greeted her as if they knew each other much better than was in fact the case, gave his sister an idle peck, and offered to help with the luggage.

  “We’ve put you on the top floor,” he told Gaynor. “I hope you won’t mind. The first floor’s rather full up. If you’re lonely I’ll come and keep you company.”

  “Not Alison’s room?” Fern’s voice was unexpectedly sharp.

  “Of course not.”

  “Who’s Alison?” Gaynor asked, but in the confusion of arrival no one found time to answer.

  Her bedroom bore the unmistakable stamp of a room that had not been used in a couple of generations. It was shabbily carpeted, ruthlessly aired, the bed linen crackling with cleanliness, the ancient brocades of curtain and upholstery worn to the consistency of lichen. There was a basin and ewer on the dresser and an ugly slipware vase containing a hand-picked bunch of flowers both garden and wild. A huge mirror, bleared with recent scouring, reflected her face among the spots, and on a low table beside the bed was a large and gleaming television set. Fern surveyed it as if it were a monstrosity. “For God’s sake remove that thing,” she said to her brother. “You know it’s broken.”

  “Got it fixed.” Will flashed Gaynor a grin. “This is five-star accommodation. Every modern convenience.”

  “I can see that.”

  But Fern still seemed inexplicably dissatisfied. As they left her to unpack, Gaynor heard her say: “You’ve put Alison’s mirror in there.”

  “It’s not Alison’s mirror: it’s ours. It was just in her room.”

  “She tampered with it…”

  Gaynor left her bags on the bed and went to examine it more closely. It was the kind of mirror that makes everything look slightly gray. In it, her skin lost its color, her brown eyes were dulled, the long dark hair that was her principal glory was drained of sheen and splendor. And behind her in the depths of the glass the room appeared dim and remote, almost as if she were looking back into the past, a past beyond warmth and daylight, dingy as an unopened attic. Turning away, her attention was drawn to a charcoal sketch hanging on the wall: a woman with an Edwardian hairstyle, gazing soulfully at the flower she held in her hand. On an impulse Gaynor unhooked it, peering at the scrawl of writing across the bottom of the picture. There was an illegible signature and a name of which all she could decipher was the initial E. Not Alison, then. She put the picture back in its place and resumed her unpacking. In a miniature cabinet at her bedside she came across a pair of handkerchiefs, also embroidered with that tantalizing E. “Who was E?” she asked at dinner later on.

  “Must have been one of Great-Cousin Ned’s sisters,” said Will, attacking Mrs. Wicklow’s cooking with an appetite that belied his thinness.

  “Great-Cousin—?”

  “He left us this house,” Fern explained. “His relationship to Daddy was so obscure we christened him Great-Cousin. It seemed logical at the time. Anyway, he had several sisters who preceded him into this world and out
of it: I’m sure the youngest was an E. Esme … no. No. Eithne.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a romantic mystery attached to her?” Gaynor said, half-ironic, half-wistful. “Since I’ve got her room, you know.”

  “No,” Fern said baldly. “There isn’t. As far as we know, she was a fluttery young girl who became a fluttery old woman, with nothing much in between. The only definite information we have is that she made seedcake that tasted of sand.”

  “She must have had a lover,” Will speculated. “The family wouldn’t permit it, because he was too low class. They used to meet on the moor, like Heathcliff and Cathy only rather more restrained. He wrote bad poems for her—you’ll probably find one in your room and she pressed the wildflower he gave her in her prayer book. That’ll be around somewhere, too. One day they were separated in a mist, she called and called to him but he did not come—he strayed too far, went over a cliff, and was lost.”

  “Taken by boggarts,” Fern suggested.

  “So she never married,” Will concluded, “but spent the next eighty years gradually pining away. Her sad specter still haunts the upper story, searching for whichever book it was in which she pressed that bloody flower.”

  Gaynor laughed. She had been meaning to ask about Alison again, but Will’s fancy diverted her, and it slipped her mind.

  It was gone midnight when they went up to bed. Gaynor slept unevenly, troubled by the country quiet, listening in her waking moments to the rumor of the wind on its way to the sea and the hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The owl cry invaded her dreams, filling them with the noiseless flight of pale wings and the glimpse of a sad ghost face looming briefly out of the dark. She awoke before dawn, hearing the gentleness of rain on roof and windowpane. Perhaps she was still half dreaming, but it seemed to her that her window stood high in a castle wall, and outside the rain was falling softly into the dim waters of a loch, and faint and far away someone was playing the bagpipes.