The Dragon Charmer Read online

  “You had the television on?” Fern queried sharply. She picked up the remote and pressed On: the screen flicked to a vista of a fire in an industrial plant in Leeds. Behind the commentator, ash flakes swirled under an ugly sky.

  “That was it,” said Gaynor with real relief. “It must have been that.” And: “I can’t think why I’m so tired…”

  “It’s the Yorkshire air,” said Will. “Bracing.”

  “You don’t want to go watching t’news,” opined Mrs. Wicklow. “It’s all murders and disasters—when it isn’t sex. Enough to give anyone nightmares.”

  Will grinned half a grin for Gaynor’s exclusive benefit. Fern switched off the television again, still not quite satisfied.

  “Have you had any other strange dreams here?” she asked abruptly when Mrs. Wicklow had left.

  “Oh no,” said Gaynor. “Well … only the bagpipes. I thought I heard them last night, but that must have been a dream, too.”

  “Of course.”

  Fern and Will followed the housekeeper, leaving Gaynor to dress, but as the door closed behind them she was sure she caught Fern’s whisper: “If you don’t get that little monster to shut up, I’m going to winkle him out and stuff his bloody pipes down his throat…”

  At supper, thought Gaynor, at supper I’m going to ask her what she’s talking about.

  But at supper the argument began. It was an argument that had been in preparation, Gaynor suspected, since they arrived, simmering on a low heat until a chance word—a half-joking allusion to premarital nerves—made it boil over. Without the subject ever having been discussed between them, she sensed that Will, like her, was unenthusiastic about his sister’s marriage and doubted her motives. Yet he had said nothing and seemed reluctant to criticize; it was Fern, uncharacteristically belligerent, who pushed him into caustic comment, almost compelling him toward an open quarrel. On the journey up she had listened without resentment to her friend’s light-worded protest, but with Will she was white faced and bitter with rage. Maybe she wanted to clear the air, Gaynor speculated; but she did not really believe it. What Fern wanted was a fight, the kind of dirty, no-holds-barred fight, full of below-the-belt jabs and incomprehensible allusions, that can occur only between siblings or people who have known each other too long and too well. It struck Gaynor later that what Fern had sought was not to hurt but to be hurt, as if to blot out some other feeling with that easy pain. She herself had tried to avoid taking sides.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Fern said afterward, on their way up to bed. “I shouldn’t have let Will provoke me. I must be more strung up than I thought.”

  “He didn’t provoke you,” Gaynor said uncertainly. “You provoked him.”

  Fern shut her bedroom door with something of a snap.

  III

  The spellfire burns anew, the smoke blurs. Among the shifting images I see the tower again, nearer this time: I can make out the rhythms of the liturgy, and the silver tinkling of the chimes has grown to a clamor. I sense this is a place where the wind is never still. The air is too thin to impede its progress. Later, the castle by the lake. A scene from long ago. I see shaggily bearded men dressed in fur and leather and blood with strange spiked weapons, short swords, long knives. There is fighting on the battlements and in the uncarpeted passageways and in the Great Hall. The goblin moves to and fro among the intruders, slashing at hamstrings with an unseen dagger. Those thus injured stumble and are swiftly killed. Surprise alerts me: it is rare for a goblin to be so bold. On the hearth a whole pine tree is burning: a giant of a man, red of face and hair, lifts it by the base of the trunk and incredibly, impossibly, swings it around like a huge club, mowing down his foes in an arc of fire. A couple of warriors from his own band are also laid low, but this is a detail he ignores. His surviving supporters give vent to a cry of triumph so loud that the castle walls burst asunder, and the picture is lost.

  It re-forms into the shape of a house. A dour, gray-faced house with the moorland rising steeply behind it. The goblin is descending a footpath toward the garden gate. He is tall for his kind, over three feet, and unusually hirsute, with tufted eyebrows and ear tips and a fleecelike growth matting his head. His body is covered in fragments of worn pelts, patches of cloth and hide, and his own fur: it is difficult to distinguish the native hair from that which has been attached. His feet are bare, prehensile, with a dozen or more toes apiece that grasp the earth as he walks. His skin is very brown and his eyes are very bright, the eyes of the werefolk, which are brighter than those of humankind. They show no whites, only long slits of hazel luster. He pauses, skimming hillside, house, and garden with a gaze that misses nothing, sniffing the air with nostrils that flare individually. Then he continues on down the slope.

  “Why do we see him so clearly?” Sysselore is easily irritated: she takes umbrage where she can find it. “He’s a goblin. A house-goblin. He cannot possibly be important.”

  “Something is important,” I retort.

  More people follow, a succession of faces, overlapping, intermingling, many too dim to make out. Some are familiar, some not. There is a man in a cloak and a pointed hood, trading a potion in an unlabeled bottle for a bag whose contents are muffled so they will not chink. And the same man, older, poorer, though he retains his distinctive garb, striding across an empty landscape under the sweeping wings of clouds. Once he was called Gabbandolfo, in the country of his origin, meaning Elvincape, though he had other names. But he lost his power and his titles and now he roams the world on a mission that can never be achieved, going nowhere. Nonetheless, when his image intrudes I am wary: it is a strange paradox that since his impotence his presence has become more ominous, grim as an indefinite warning. He stalks the smoke scenes like a carrion crow, watching the field for a battle of which only he has foreknowledge. “I don’t like it,” I assert. “We should be the sole watchers. What has he seen that we missed? What does he know?”

  Outside, night lies beneath the Tree. I hear the whistling calls of nocturnal birds, the death squeal of a tiny rodent. In the smoke, a new face emerges, growing into darkness. It belongs to no known race of men, yet it is mortal—sculpted in ebony, its bone structure refined to a point somewhere on the other side of beauty, emphasized with little hollowings and sudden lines, its hair of a black so deep it is green, its eyes like blue diamonds. For all its delicacy, it is obviously, ruthlessly masculine. It stares straight at me out of the picture, almost as if the observer has somehow become the observed, and he watches us in our turn. For the first time that I can remember I speak the word to obliterate it, though normally I leave the pictures to fade and alter of their own accord. The face dwindles until only a smile remains, dimming into vapor.

  “He saw us,” says my coven sister.

  “Illusion. A trick of the smoke. You sound afraid. Are you afraid of smoke, of a picture?”

  As our concentration wavers, the billows thin and spread. I spit at the fire with a curse word, a power word to recall the magic, sucking the fumes back into the core of the cloud. The nucleus darkens: for a moment the same image seems to hover there, the face or its shadow, but it is gone before it can come into focus. A succession of tableaux follow, unclear or unfinished, nothing distinguishable. At the last we return to the gray house, and the goblin climbing in through an open window. In the room beyond a boy somewhere in his teens is reading a book, one leg hooked over the arm of his chair. His hair shows more fair than dark; there are sun freckles on his nose. When he looks up his gaze is clear and much too candid—the candor of the naturally devious who know how to exploit their own youth. He stares directly at the intruder, interested and undisturbed. He can see the goblin. He has no Gift, no aura of power. But he can see it.

  He says: “I suppose you’ve come about the vacancy.”

  The goblin halts abruptly, halfway over the sill. Unnerved.

  “The vacancy,” the boy reiterates. “For a house-goblin. You are a house-goblin, aren’t you?”

  “Ye see me, the
n.” The goblin has an accent too ancient to identify, perhaps a forgotten brogue spoken by tribes long extinct. His voice sounds rusty, as if it has not been used for many centuries.

  “I was looking,” the boy says matter-of-factly. “When you look, you see. Incidentally, you really shouldn’t come in uninvited. It isn’t allowed.”

  “The hoose wants a boggan, or so I hairrd. I came.”

  “Where from?”

  “Ye ask a wheen o’ questions.”

  “It’s my hoose,” says the boy. “I’m entitled.”

  “It was another put out the word.”

  “He’s a friend of mine: he was helping me out. I’m the one who has to invite you in.”

  “Folks hae changed since I was last in the worrld,” says the goblin, his tufted brows twitching restlessly from shock to frown. “In the auld days, e’en the lairrd couldna see me unless I wisht it. The castle was a guid place then. But the lairrds are all gone and the last o’ his kin is a spineless vratch who sauld his hame for a handful o’ siller. And now they are putting in baths—baths!—and the pipes are a-hissing and a-gurgling all the time, and there’s heat without fires, and fires without heat, and clacking picture boxes, and invisible bells skirling, and things that gae bleep in the nicht. It’s nae place for a goblin anymore.”

  “We have only the one bathroom,” says the boy, by way of encouragement.

  “Guid. It isna healthy, all these baths. Dirt keeps ye warm.”

  “Seals the pores,” nods the boy. “I’m afraid we do have a telephone, and two television sets, but one’s broken, and the microwave goes bleep in the night if we need to heat something up, but that’s all.”

  The goblin grunts, though what the grunt imports is unclear. “Are ye alone here?”

  “Of course not. There’s my father and my sister and Abby Dad’s girlfriend. We live in London but we use this place for weekends and holidays. And Mrs. Wicklow the housekeeper who comes in most days and Lucy from the village doing the actual housework and Gus the vicar who keeps an eye on things when we’re not here. Oh, and there’s a dog a sort of dog—who’s around now and then. She won’t bother you—if she likes you.”

  “What sort o’ dog wid that be?” asks the goblin. “One o’ thae small pet dogs that canna barrk above a yap or chase a rabbit but sits on a lady’s knee all day waiting tae be fed?”

  “Oh, no,” says the boy. “She’s not a lapdog or a pet. She’s her own mistress. You’ll see.”

  “I hairrd,” says the goblin, after a pause, “ye’d had Trouble here, not sae long ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And mayhap it was the kind o’ Trouble that might open your eyes tae things ordinary folk are nae meant to see?”

  “Mayhap.” The boy’s candor has glazed over; his expression is effortlessly blank.

  “Sae what came tae the hoose-boggan was here afore me?”

  “How did you know there was one?” Genuine surprise breaks through his impassivity.

  “Ye can smell it. What came tae yon?”

  “Trouble,” says the boy. “He was the timid sort, too frightened to fight back. In a way, his fear killed him.”

  “Aye, weel,” says the goblin, “fear is deadlier than knife wound or spear wound, and I hae taken both. It’s been long awhile since I kent Trouble. Do ye expect more?”

  “It’s possible,” the boy replies. “Nothing is ever really over, is it?”

  “True worrds. I wouldnae be averse to meeting Trouble again. Belike I’ve been missing him. Are ye going tae invite me in?”

  The boy allows a pause, for concentration or effect. “All right. You may come in.”

  The goblin springs down from the windowsill, hefting his antique spear with the bundle tied to the shaft.

  “By the way,” says the boy, “what’s your name?”

  “Bradachin.”

  “Bradachin.” He struggles to imitate the pronunciation. “Mine’s Will. Oh, and… one more thing.”

  “What thing is that?”

  “A warning. My sister. She’s at university now and she doesn’t come here very much, but when she does, stay out of her way. She’s being a little difficult at the moment.”

  “Will she see me?” the goblin enquires.

  “I expect so,” says the boy.

  The goblin moves toward the door with his uneven stride, vanishing as he reaches the panels. The boy stares after him for a few minutes, his young face, with no betraying lines, no well-trodden imprint of habitual expressions, as inscrutable as an unwritten page. Then he and the room recede, and there is only the smoke.

  The owl woke Gaynor, calling in its half-human voice right outside her window. She had started up and pulled back the curtains before she really knew what she was doing and there it was, its ghost face very close to her own, apparently magnified by the glass so that its enormous eyes filled her vision. Its talons scrabbled on the sill; its wings were beating against the panes. Then somehow the window was open and she was straddling the sill, presumably still in her pajamas, and then she was astride the owl, her hands buried in its neck ruff, and it was huge, huger than a great eagle, and silent as the phantom it resembled. They were flying over the moors, and she glimpsed the loop of a road below, and the twin shafts of headlights, and the roofs of houses folded as if in sleep, and a single window gleaming like a watchful eye. But most of the landscape was dark, lit only by the moon that kept pace with their flight, speeding between the clouds. Above the gray drift of cirrus the sky was a black vault; the few stars looked remote and cold. They crossed a cliff and she saw the sea wheeling beneath her, flecked with moon glitter, and then all detail was lost in the boom of wings and the roar of the wind, and Time rolled over her like waves, maybe months, maybe years, and she did not know if she woke or slept, if she lived or dreamed. At one point another face rushed toward her, a pale expanse of a face with a wide hungry mouth and eyes black as the Pit. There was a hint of smoke in the air and a smell of something rotting. “This is not the one,” said a voice. “Not the one …” The unpleasant smell was gone and she felt the plumage of the owl once more, and the wind and the cloud wisps and the dying moon flowed over her, and sleep came after, closing the window against the night.

  She woke fully just before moonset, when its last ray stole across the bed and slipped under her eyelids. She got up to shut the curtains, and was back between the sheets when it occurred to her she had done so already before she went to bed.

  Fern, too, was dreaming. Not the dreams she longed for and dreaded—fragments of the past, intimations of an alternative future dreams from which she would wrench herself back to a painful awakening. This dream appeared random, unconnected with her. Curious, she dreamed on. She was gazing down on a village, a village of long ago, with thatched roofs and dung heaps. There were chickens bobbing in farmyard and backyard, goats wandering the single street. People in peasant clothing were going about their business. A quickfire sunset sent the shadows stretching across the valley until it was all shadow. One red star shone low over the horizon. It seemed to be pulsing, expanding—now it was a fireball rushing toward them—a comet whose tail scorched the tree-tops into a blaze. Then, as it drew nearer, she saw. Bony pinions that cut up the sky, pitted scales aglow from the furnace within, blood-dark eyes where ancient thoughts writhed like slow vapor. A dragon.

  Not the dragon of fantasy and storyland, a creature with whom you might bandy words or hitch a ride. This was a real dragon, and it was terrible It stank like a volcanic swamp. Its breath was a pyroclastic cloud. She could sense its personality, enormous, overwhelming, a force all hunger and rage. Children, goats, people ran, but not fast enough; against the onset of the dragon they might almost have been running backward. Houses exploded from the heat. Flesh shriveled like paper. Fern jerked into waking to find she was soaked in sweat and trembling with a mixture of excitement and horror. Special effects, she told herself: nothing more. She took a drink of water from the glass by her bed and lay down again. Her th
oughts meandered into a familiar litany. There are no dragons, no demons … no countries in wardrobes, no kingdoms behind the North Wind. And Atlantis, first and fairest of cities, Atlantis where such things might have been, was buried under the passing millennia, drowned in a billion tides, leaving not a fossilized footprint or a solitary shard of pottery to baffle the archaeologists.

  But she would not think of Atlantis…

  Drifting into sleep again she dreamed of wedding presents, and a white dress that walked up the aisle all by itself.

  The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallizing into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapor. Sometimes it seems as if it is the cave that drifts, its hollows and shadows vacillating in the penumbra of existence, while at its heart the smoke visions focus all the available reality, like a bright eye on the world. We, too, are as shadows, Sysselore and I, watching the light, hungering for it. But I have more substance than any shadow—I wrap myself in darkness as in a cocoon, preserving my strength while my power slumbers. This bloated body is a larval stage in which my future Self is nourished and grows, ready to hatch when the hour is ripe—a new Morgus, radiant with youth revived, potent with ancientry. It is a nature spell, old as evolution: I learned it from a maggot. You can learn much from those who batten on decay. It is their kind who will inherit the earth.

  Pictures deceive. The smoke screen opens like a crack in the wall of Being, and through it you may see immeasurable horizons and unnavigable seas, you may breathe the perfume of forgotten gardens, taste the rains on their passage to the thirsty plain—but the true power is here in the dark. With me. I am the dark, I am the heartbeat of the night. The spellfire may show you things far away, but I am here, and for now, Here is all there is.