The Dragon Charmer (3 page)

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. It 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.

   In her room on the floor below, Fern, too, had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deeply to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust, and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. “I must go back!” she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly luster of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to weigh her down, the spirit that breathes in every creation and at the nucleus of all being. An emotion flowed into her that was as vivid as excitement and as deep as peace. She wanted to hold on to that moment forever, but there was a voice calling, calling her without words, dragging her back into her body and her bed, until at last she knew she was lying in the dark, and the owl’s hoot was a cry of loneliness and pain for all that she had lost.

An hour or so later she got up, took two aspirin (she would
not use sleeping pills), tried to read for a while. It was a long, long time before exhaustion mastered her, and she slipped into oblivion.

   Will slumbered undisturbed, accustomed to the nocturnal small talk of his nonhuman neighbors. When the bagpipes began, he merely rolled over, smiling in his sleep.

II