The Dragon Charmer Read online

  When the witch has gone Fern clambers down into the hollow.

  The head is waiting, watching her with its hawk’s stare, dark lips slightly parted to show the glint of teeth, a trace of sap dripping redly from its neck stump. It greets her with a challenge, and the sharp edge of a smile. “What now, sorceress? What witch games have you been playing up there?”

  “I was saving your rind,” says Fern, choosing the noun with deliberation. “Morgus was close by: she knows she has missed something near here. I called up a swarm of wasps to distract her.”

  “I heard them,” says the head. “Also her curses. You are skilled for your years.”

  “Not skilled enough. She didn’t curse: that was a Command. My champions burned in midflight. It was a temporary measure only; she will return, and shortly. I must leave when it is dark, with or without you. The choice is yours.”

  “Can you give me a choice?” sneers Ruvindra. “I am an apple ripe for plucking, by you or by her. I am a dainty for your delectation. Would you offer me a real choice? Would you destroy me with your witch-fire, even as Morgus destroyed those wasps? Would you set me free—free of this shape, this punishment, free to pass the Gate into eternity?”

  Fern hesitates, trembling suddenly, though she does not know why. “You are bigger than a wasp,” she says. “I am not sure I am not sure if the heat would be enough. A strong fire needs more fuel than a little spell. I could steal some fire crystals, I suppose… Yes, I would do it. If that is what you wish.”

  “Won’t you set conditions? That is the way of witchkind. Nothing for nothing.”

  “No,” says Fern, with a touch of pride. “That is not my way. I offered you a choice. Choose freely.”

  “Very well,” says the head. “I will hold you to your promise. I choose the completion of my death a swift passage through the Gate instead of a slow lingering in between. Do not forget. But first I will go with you as you asked, back to the world of Life, to forestall the Oldest of liars, the Stealer of Souls if we can.”

  Fern smiles—a great warmth rushes through her, so her spirit-body becomes suddenly radiant, though she does not know it. She stretches out one bright finger, stroking the black hair. The dark face seems to soften. “It will be hard,” he says, “returning to a dimension of strength and vitality, in this form. When I lived, I lived as dragons do, with every fiber of my being, every nerve. Now I am a stunted misshapen thing—a gargoyle emasculated—helpless. A fruit without seed—a head without body or limbs.”

  “I will be your limbs,” says Fern.

  Her tone is very serious, as in a vow, and quiet falls between them.

  “Do you seek to touch my heart?” mocks Ruvindra at last. “I have no heart. The Tree does not provide such inessentials.”

  “I will be your heart,” says Fern.

  XII

  On the day Ragginbone returned to Yorkshire, Will and Gaynor had left Dale House shortly after breakfast. They took the aging Ford Fiesta in which Will paid his occasional visits to the university or went on exploratory drives in search of scenery to distort in his pictures. There were sketch pads and canvases in the back, the seats were daubed with random smears of paint, and the external bodywork had been enlivened with representations of holes from which various insect and animal heads peeked out. “Fern won’t go in this car,” Will remarked. “She says it’s embarrassing. I hope you don’t mind too much?”

  “I don’t mind at all.” Privately Gaynor wondered if Fern’s objections were actually founded on the stuttering condition of the engine and the delayed reaction time of the brakes, but she did not say so. “Do we know how to find this museum?” she asked.

  “Not offhand,” said Will, “but I know York pretty well. Anyway, we can always ask.”

  They asked several times before they happened on the museum, more or less by chance. Gaynor found her confidence restored in the familiar ambience of unlived-in rooms, of bleared glass display cases, of the carefully conserved scribblings of history. This was her normal work environment, a haunt little frequented by visitors, where fragments of the past were studied, restored, illuminated, giving brief glimpses of light in the darkness of lost ages. There was a smell of dust hovering, awaiting only the departure of a wandering vacuum cleaner before settling comfortably back into place. The rooms must once have been heavy with late-Victorian gloom, over-furnished, somberly curtained, but now naked windows let in the gray daylight, and neutral paintwork reduced everything to a background. The exhibits had taken over. In her own workplace Gaynor often felt the books had both presence and personality: the aloof superiority of priceless tomes, the secrets reaching out to her from half-obliterated pages, the arcane wisdom groping for new expression. They were awakened by her touch, alive and curious. Here, however, the books seemed crippled with age and intellectual neglect, collector’s items, preserved, imprisoned, unread. She could almost hear the creaking of arthritic spines, the crackle of desiccated paper. Occasional patches of color stood out, vivid as if new-painted, a stylized illustration or elaborately decorated capital; but they were few and far between. It was the gleam of gold leaf that drew her to the dragons.

  The book was the centerpiece of one of the smaller showcases, open at the section Gaynor had seen fleetingly on the television. “A grate dragon, grater than anye other lyving beaste, ravaged the kyngdom, devouring anye who stood in yts way. Onlie one Knyghte was found brave enough to stande against yt…”

  “It does sound like your dream,” Gaynor said.

  “Described by someone who wasn’t there. Still, frontline journalism was in its infancy in the Middle Ages and anyone who was there wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. How about asking for the curator, and seeing if we can get a proper look at this?”

  The curator the elderly young man Gaynor remembered from the television program was stirred almost to enthusiasm by Gaynor’s interest and her credentials. “We have so few visitors,” he explained. “I had thought, after the TV publicity … but no. People don’t want books, you see. They don’t want knowledge. They want to gawp at the assassin’s knife, the courtesan’s jewelry, the collar of the royal lapdog. We get the odd American, of course, researching a thesis, or someone writing a book, but they tend to be more crank than scholar. Chasing the Grail legend, or one of those conspiracy theories, Freemasons and stuff. Not genuine study, just some hypothesis they’ve got hold of, and they think they can attach the evidence to it afterward, like hanging bells on a Christmas tree. Usually they want to spend more time talking about how clever they are than actually looking at the exhibits.”

  “We’re interested in dragons,” Gaynor said a little nervously, aware that this, too, might be labeled cranky.

  The curator, however, seemed pleasantly surprised. “Dragons,” he murmured. “Well, that’s different. No one’s interested in dragons. They believe in secret societies and magical artifacts, but a dragon is just a crocodile story that got out of hand. Still, I’ve always thought the symbolism might reward analysis. Is that what you’re studying?”

  “More or less,” said Will.

  “I’m his supervisor,” Gaynor explained, giving Will a minatory look. “He’s doing a doctorate, but he’s quite sensible about it. He doesn’t have any weird ideas, honestly.” With his connections, she amended privately, he doesn’t need them. “He’s working on the ‘Origins of the Dragon in British Mythology’”

  “Strictly speaking,” the curator pointed out with what might have been suspicion, “there’s no such concept as British mythology.”

  “Celtic, Norse, Greco-Roman…”

  “Oh, all right…”

  The curator removed the book from the display case and carried it to an upstairs room where an untidy desk was cramped between filing cabinets under the slope of the roof. “You’ll be careful, of course,” he adjured. “It’s from Dr. Laye’s collection; we have a number of his things on loan at the moment. You may know of him: he’s on the board here.”

  “I saw him on
the television,” said Gaynor, trying to sound natural.

  “An extraordinary man,” the curator said, with a nuance in his manner that Will could not quite clarify. It might have been merely the resentment of a weaker character outweighed by one more forceful, or it might have been something else. Apprehension, uncertainty, fear… “Curiously enough, he, too, has an interest—almost an obsession with dragons. Perhaps you ought to … speak to him.”

  Gaynor missed the hesitation, but Will didn’t. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, we won’t trouble him. He isn’t here, is he?”

  “Not today.”

  “Do you know of any other documents we ought to be studying?”

  “I’ll have a look for you.”

  With the departure of the curator she turned to the book, her nervousness vanishing in professional absorption. “It’s vellum,” she informed Will. “The condition is almost perfect. I’ve never seen one more beautiful. It really should be in a major museum, not an obscure place like this. Don’t touch it! I’ll turn the pages.” It began with an account of how Shaitan, presumably the Devil, made the first dragons out of stone and fire, inhabiting their bodies with hungry spirits from below the nethermost regions of Hell. “And those elementáis, being born of the grate heate of the Inferno, took fire even in lyfe, and breathed flames of Hell, and poysonous fumes; but their spirits were tempered with the cunnynge of Shaitan, and they spoke with tongues, and there was sorcerie in the glaunce of their eyes. And he sente them forthe into the world, to be a plague on beastes and menne.” Various accounts followed, some familiar, some new or strangely altered, of dragons and their activities. The story of St. George was set in Egypt; another tale featured the Leviathan sleeping beneath the ocean’s floor until the end of the world, when it would awake to swallow the sun. (“Not a dragon, a serpent,” said Will. “The Sea Serpent, Jiormungund, the Nenheedra. Fern saw it once”) There were few details, however, to flesh out the substance of Will’s dream. The dragon who had swallowed “a thyng of grate power and magicke” was described as growing to enormous size and finally being consumed in its own fires, while the warrior who had confronted it joined the ranks of other heroes, lost in the realm of mystery and myth. In due course the curator returned with a stack of manuscripts and a couple of more recent books bound in calf and printed on paper. A plunge into the filing cabinets offered the opportunity to trace related material.

  “This is going to take ages,” said Will. “I hadn’t realized.”

  “It’s called work,” Gaynor said with a rueful smile.

  “Somehow, I don’t really believe we’ll find anything of use.”

  “We won’t know till we’ve finished.”

  Around three o’clock Will departed to take Lougarry for a walk, though they had left the car window open and she was quite capable of taking herself. Gaynor remained at the desk, immersed in a welter of arcana, turning from manuscript to file and back again, scrawling notes on a piece of scrap. The habit of study cocooned her, shutting out darkness and danger, numbing anxiety. She found herself hoping against hope that this would all prove useful, searching for something that constantly eluded her something hiding between the words, behind the tales. But whatever it was, she could not find it. One manuscript in particular held her attention: the story of “a Tamer of dragons, who could speke with them, and they would answere, and their fire did not burn him, for he had the countenaunce of his House. His ancestor was blackened in the flames of Taebor Infernes, father of dragons, and lyved, and no other flame could burn him, nor anye of his kyn.” But later pages were missing, and what the Tamer did was unrevealed. Gaynor sensed the story was important, but she did not know why, and wondered if the pricking of instinct was merely unsatisfied curiosity. She pushed both manuscript and file away, assailed by the recurring image of Fern’s still face, feeling ineffectual and frustrated.

  And then it happened. The room around her—the sloping planes of ceiling and skylight, the narrow rhomboids of wall, the many corners of cabinet and desk—seemed to shift very slightly, as if adjusting to another dimension. One moment she felt secure, unthinking, fretting only at her problem; the next she was being crowded, crushed, folded away between hard, flat surfaces, boxed into a tiny cube of existence where no one would ever find her. She tried to scream, but the constricted air squeezed the voice from her throat. She struggled to get up, and the chair tumbled, and the desk seemed to tilt, spilling its clutter on the floor. And from the crack between the dimensions—the splinter of nothing between time and Time, somewhere and elsewhere—eyes watched her, flickering and vanishing as the door opened and the room jolted abruptly back into place.

  “Are you all right?” asked the curator. “What has happened here?”

  “I I’m sorry,” stammered Gaynor. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  The curator may have believed her, but she knew better now than to believe herself.

  “Well?” she said to Will, over a beer in a dim corner of a student pub. “What do we do next?”

  “You know the answer to that one,” he retorted. “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. I don’t like it, but we’ve no alternative. It’s been obvious all along. You needn’t come if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m coming,” Gaynor whispered.

  “Fine,” said Will. “I’ll go and call a mate, fix up a sofa for the night—or a sofa and a floor, since I expect that’s what you’ll prefer. Then we’ll go out for a really good meal French, I think, with Italian undertones—and you can tell me the story of your life. Afterward—some time afterward I’ll kiss you. Things may even go further, though not too far. You’re not the sort of girl to be hurried, and this is the wrong moment for hurrying.”

  Gaynor gaped at him. “You’re not serious,” she said, pulling herself together. “We’re supposed to be helping Fern—”

  “And tomorrow,” Will persisted, “we’ll pay a call on Dr. Jerrold Laye.”

  Gaynor’s indignation stopped in midflow. “I see,” she said.

  “Do you?” he responded. Her face showed sudden doubt. “I remember the first time I saw you. I was sixteen, so you must have been about twenty. You’d come to the house with Fern on your way to a Christmas party. It was somewhere outside London, and you were driving. Fern looked immaculate the way she always does, sort of perfectly finished, red spangly dress, high-heeled shoes. You wore black, which doesn’t suit you, something with lots of tatty lace, and you’d tied your hair back but it had burst the elastic, and you had flat squashy boots for driving. You didn’t look pretty, or glamorous, but I thought you so bloody sexy. A sweet disorder in the dress… I said to myself: ‘One day, I’m going to have that girl.’ I don’t know that I meant it seriously, not then. But I could have picked your face out in a crowd any time after that night. Any time.”

  “It wasn’t tatty lace,” Gaynor muttered. “It was antique.”

  “Same difference.”

  “And Fern’s dress was burgundy, not red. I’ve never seen her wear red. It’s a bit flamboyant for her.”

  “Anything else you’d like to correct? I must point out it’s my memory. If I want to remember a red dress and tatty lace, I bloody well will. I suppose all you noticed of me was a grubby schoolboy who leered at you from the stairs?”

  “Actually,” said Gaynor, carefully noncommittal, “I told Fern I thought you’d be causing a lot of trouble in a few years’ time.”

  Will gave her an impish grin. “I already was.”

  “That’s what Fern said.”

  He went to telephone, and she sat finishing her drink. All my life, she thought, I’m going to remember this. Not just the horror and the magic—the phantom in the snow, the gray beckoning finger of Dr. Jerrold Laye—but this moment, this dark, crowded, beery interior, and waiting for Will to come back from the telephone. All my life … A wave of feeling washed over her, so violent that she shook from the impact of it, a mixture of shock and revelation, of wonder and happiness and terror. S
he thought of her previous encounters with that feeling, of the giddying highs and lows of her six-year relationship with a married man who had ultimately left his wife, but not for her. It would be so easy to tell herself, in hope, in fear: This is different. She mustn’t dare to think such thoughts, not of Will, who was her best friend’s brother, who had more than his fair share of charm, who took nothing seriously, not even the Dark. Fern’s spirit was lost, and a shadow lay beyond the next dawn, and all she had was this one evening, to live in it with all her senses, saving it for memory, expecting no more. But treacherous longing and inevitable doubt would not be so lightly thrust aside, and when Will returned he found her pale and quiet, her drink undrunk, her responses monosyllabic.

  “Come on,” he said, and they went. Afterward—long afterward—Gaynor realized she had never even noticed what that forever-to-be-remembered pub was called.

  The restaurant, as Will had promised, offered a Mediterranean menu, a French wine list, Italian waiters. It was cramped, busy, and noisy, but they did not notice, too absorbed in each other to be distracted by extraneous details. For an hour or two they set aside their current preoccupations to explore each other’s lives, exchange ideas and hopes, to luxuriate in the enchantment of mutual understanding. It’s just a game, Gaynor told herself, it’s always just a game, but she had never really grasped the rules, so she always staked too much, lost too much, and was left in the end impoverished and alone. But for this time—this little time she would pretend the game was for real, and abandon herself to the illusion of a perfect companionship. Will’s smile teased her but his eyes were serious, or so she fancied, and in their steady gaze she felt her heart shiver. “Fern once told me you’re the sort of exceptionally nice girl who always falls for a bad lot,” he said as she concluded the saga of her past affair.

  “Did she?” Gaynor’s flicker of indignation died swiftly, giving way to a resigned weariness. “Anyway, I thought I was supposed to be falling for you. Isn’t that supposed to be the idea?”