Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

Time is not, where we are. I may have spent centuries staring into the spellfire, seeing the tide of life sweeping by, but there are no years to measure here: only the slow unrelenting heartbeat of the Tree. Sysselore and I grate one another with words, recycling old arguments, great debates which have long degenerated into pettiness, sharp exchanges whose edges are blunted with use. We know the pattern of every dispute. She has grown thin with wear, a skeleton scantily clad in flesh; the skin that was formerly peach-golden is pallid and threaded with visible veins, a blue webbing over her arms and throat. When she sulks, as she often does, you can see the grinning lines of her skull mocking her tight mouth. She has come a long way from that enchanted island set in the sapphire seas of her youth. Syrcé they named her then, Seersay the Wise, since Wise is an epithet more courteous than others they might have chosen, and it is always prudent to flatter the Gifted. She used to turn men into pigs, by way of amusement.

‘Why pigs?’ I asked her, listening to the wild hog grunting and snorting around the bole of the Tree.

‘Laziness,’ she said. ‘That was their true nature, so it took very little effort.’

She is worn thin while I have swollen with my stored-up powers like the queen of a termite mound. I save my Gift, hoarding it like miser’s gold, watching in the smoke for my time to come round again. We are two who must be three, the magic number, the coven number. Someday she will be there, the she for whom we wait, and we will steal her soul away and bind her to us, versing her in our ways, casting her in our mould, and then we will return, over the borderland into reality, and the long-lost kingdom of Logrèz will be mine at last.

The smoke thickens, pouring upwards into a cloud which hangs above the fire. The cloud expands in erratic spurts and billows, stretching its wings to right and left, arching against the cave-roof as it seeks a way of escape. But the flue is closed and it can only hover beneath the vaulted roots, trapped here until we choose to release it. More and more vapour is drawn into its heart till the heaviness of it seems to crush any remaining air from the chamber. I see flecks of light shifting in its depths, whorls of darkness spinning into a maelstrom, throwing out brief sparks of noise: a rapid chittering, an unfinished snarl, a bass growl that shrills into a cackle. Then both sound and light are sucked inward and swallowed, and the smoke opens out into a picture.

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.