The Dragon-Charmer

The moon, thin and curved as a bull’s horn, caught on a hook of cloud. It is suspended in a splinter of midnight sky between mountain ranges higher than any mountains of earth, and its dead-white glow streams down into a valley so deep and narrow that neither moon nor sun should penetrate there. The valley is dry, so dry that I can taste its aridity, shrivelling my tongue. Everything is in monochrome. I see lakes of some opaque liquid that is not water, shrunken in their stony depressions; luminous steams shimmer on the air above them. At the bottom of the valley there is a garden of petrified vegetation: brittle knots of stems, the black filigree of leaf-skeletons, writhen stumps of tree and shrub. A breath of wind would blow it all to powder, but no wind comes there. Beyond looms the temple: the moon reaches in through the broken roof with probing rays, touching the face of an idol whose nose has long eroded and whose lip crumbles. The hearth at its feet is empty even of ash.

‘He has gone,’ says Sysselore, and her voice croaks on a whisper. ‘He has gone at last.’

‘He will be back.’ I know him too well, the god in the dark. ‘The others may fade or fall into slumber, but he is always persistent. He believes that even Time is on his side. He will be back.’

For a moment the moonlight falters, then the shadow of the mountains sweeps across the valley, and in that shadow the shapes of things are changed, and there is a rustle among the vanished leaves, and a stirring like an infinitesimal breeze in that place where no breeze ever blew.

He will be back.

And then the darkness turns to smoke, and the picture is lost.

There are changing landscapes, cities and villages, hovels, temples, castles. Ruins sprout new walls, which crumble and fall in their turn. Weeds grow over all. Mountains melt into plains, hills heave upward like waves. The picture falters, pausing on a lonely needle of rock jutting into a flawless sky. For a moment I hear music, a silvery tinkling without a tune, as if the wind is thrumming on forgotten harp strings. I inhale a whiff of air that is both cold and thin: we must be very high up. There are voices chanting, though I see no one. And then I realise that the needle of rock is a tower, a tower that seems to have grown from the jawbone of the mountain like a tooth, and below it grey walls interface with the cliff, and window-slots open as chinks in the stone, and the rumour of the liturgy carries from within. The chant grows louder, but the wind takes it and bears it away, and the scene shivers into other peaks, other skies. Rain sweeps over a grim northern castle and pock-marks the lake below. The shell of the building is old but inside everything is new: carpets lap the floors, flames dance around logs that are never consumed, heat glazes the window-panes. Briefly I glimpse a small figure slipping through a postern, too small to be human. It moves with a swift limping gait, like a spider with a leg too few. There is a bundle on its back and something which might be a spear over one shoulder. The spear is far too long in the shaft and too heavy for its carrier, yet the pygmy manages without difficulty. It hurries down the path by the lake and vanishes into the rain. A man walking his dog along the shore passes by without seeing it.

‘A goblin!’ Sysselore is contemptuous. ‘What do we want with such dross? The spell is wandering; we do not need this trivia.’ She moves to extinguish the fire, hesitating, awaiting my word. She knows my temper too well to act alone.

I nod. ‘It is enough. For now.’

We open the flue and the smoke streams out, seeking to coil around the Tree and make its way up to the clouds, but the wind cheats it and it disperses and is gone. This is not the season of the heads, this is the season of nesting birds. The smallest build their nests in the lower branches: the insect-pickers, the nibblers of worms and stealers of crumbs. Higher up there are the lesser predators who prey on mice and lizards and their weaker neighbours. Close to the great trunk woodpeckers drill, tree-creepers creep, tiny throats, insatiable as the abyss, gape in every hollow. But in the topmost boughs, so they say, live the giant raptors, eagles larger than a man, featherless fliers from the dawn of history, and other creatures, botched misfits of the avian kingdom, which are not birds at all. So they say. Yet who has ever climbed up to look? The Tree is unassailable, immeasurable. It keeps its secrets. It may be taller than a whole mountain-range, piercing the cloud-canopy, puncturing the very roof of the cosmos: I do not wish to find out. There are ideas too large for the mind to accept, spaces too wide to contemplate. I know when to leave alone. I found an egg on the ground once, dislodged from somewhere far above: the half-shell that remained intact was as big as a skull. The thing that lay beside it was naked, with claw-like wings and taloned feet and the head of a human foetus. I did not touch it. That night, I heard the pig rooting there, and when I looked again it was gone.

The birds make a lot of noise when they are nesting: they scold, and squabble, and screech. I prefer the murmuring of the heads. It is a gentler sound.

* * *

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 clamour. 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 round 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, grey-faced house with the moorland rising steeply behind it. The goblin is descending a footpath towards the garden gate. He is tall for his kind, over three feet, and unusually hirsute, with tufted eyebrows and ear-tips and a fleece-like 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 which 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 lustre. 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 unlabelled 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 the other side of beauty, emphasised 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 vapour.

‘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 grey 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 candour 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, half way over the sill. Unnerved.

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

‘Ye see me, then.’ 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 of 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 any more.’

‘We have only the one bathroom,’ says the boy, by way of encouragement.

‘Guid. It isna healthy, all these baths. Dirt keeps you warrm.’

‘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 of 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 of Trouble that might open your eyes to things ordinary folk are nae meant to see?’

‘Mayhap.’ The boy’s candour has glazed over; his expression is effortlessly blank.

‘Sae what came to 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 window-sill, 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 towards 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 recedes, and there is only the smoke.

* * *

The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallising into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapour. 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.

The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.

The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw-fragments from the wrong puzzle.

‘Why there?’ asks Sysselore, forever scathing. ‘A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible – but almost is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?’

‘Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought for it there.’

Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumour of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seemed to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky-gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek for concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless threadlines which glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager …

The egg hatches.

‘What now?’ whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. ‘Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and … it won’t stay hidden. Not long.’

‘We shall see.’

The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently, the house-goblin materialises, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded Laird who swatted his foes with a tree-trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.

In a bedroom on the first floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing-table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair which it may not merit and shades the moulding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see something in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.

The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She is still staring at her reflection but now the direction of her gaze switches to a point beyond her shoulder. Her eyes widen; shock or fury expels the hint of colour from her cheek. To us, the glass is empty, but she sees the intruder. She sees him in the mirror. ‘Get out!’ She rounds on him, screaming like a virago. ‘Toad! Contemptible little sneak! Creeping in here, spying on me – how dare you! How dare you! Get out, do you hear? If I see even your shadow again, I’ll – I’ll squeeze you to pulp – I’ll blast you into Limbo – I’ll blow your atoms to the four winds! Don’t you ever – ever! – come near me again!’ The unleashing of power is sudden and terrifying: her hair crackles with it, the air thickens around her outstretched fingers. The goblin vanishes in a flash of startled horror. She is on her feet now but her rage ebbs as rapidly as it came, and she casts herself face down on the bed, clutching the pillow, sobbing briefly and violently. When the storm is over she lifts her head; she is red-eyed and tearless, as if tears were a rain that would not come. Her expression reverts to a wary stillness: her gaze roves round the room. ‘It’s gone,’ she murmurs, ‘I know it’s gone, but … there’s someone … somewhere … Watching me.’

‘She feels us,’ says Sysselore. ‘The power. Did you see the power in her…?’

‘Hush.’

The picture revolves cautiously as I lean forward, close to the smoke; the fire-draught burns my face. I am peering out of the mirror, into the room, absorbing every detail, filling my mind with the girl. This girl. The one I have waited for.

Slowly she turns, drawn back to the mirror, staring beyond the reflections. Our eyes meet. For the second time, the watcher becomes the watched. But this is no threat, only reconnaissance. A greeting. In the mirror, she sees me smile.

She snatches something – a hairbrush? – and hurls it at the glass, which shatters. The smoke turns all to silver splinters, spinning, falling, fading. In the gloom after the fire dies, Sysselore and I nurse our exultation.

She is the one. At last.