Czytaj książkę: «The Dragon-Charmer»

I

The battle was over, and now Nature was moving in to clean up. The early evening air was not cold enough to deter the flies which gathered around the hummocks of the dead; tiny crawling things invaded the chinks between jerkin and hauberk; rats, foxes, and wolves skirted the open ground, scenting a free feast. The smaller scavengers were bolder, the larger ones stayed under cover, where the fighting had spilled into the wood and bodies sprawled on the residue of last year’s autumn. Overhead, the birds arrived in force: red kites, ravens, carrion-crows, wheeling and swooping in to settle thickly on the huddled mounds. And here and there a living human scuttled from corpse to corpse, more furtive than bird or beast, plucking rings from fingers, daggers from wounds, groping among rent clothing for hidden purse or love-locket.

But one figure was not furtive. She came down from the crag where she had stood to view the battle, black-cloaked, head covered, long snakes of hair, raven-dark, escaping from the confines of her hood. Swiftly she moved across the killing ground, pausing occasionally to peer more closely at the dead, seeking a familiar face or faces among the silent horde. Her own remained unseen but her height, her rapid stride, her evident indifference to any lurking threat told their own tale. The looters shrank from her, skulking out of sight until she passed; a carrion-crow raised its head and gave a single harsh cry, as if in greeting. The setting sun, falling beneath the cloud-canopy of the afternoon, flung long shadows across the land, touching pallid brow and empty eye with reflected fire, like an illusion of life returning. And so she found one that she sought, under the first of the trees, his helmet knocked awry to leave his black curls tumbling free, his beautiful features limned with the day’s last gold. A deep thrust, probably from a broadsword, had pierced his armour and opened his belly, a side-swipe had half-severed his neck. She brushed his cheek with the white smooth fingertips of one who has never spun, nor cooked, nor washed her clothes. ‘You were impatient, as always,’ she said, and if there was regret in her voice, it was without tears. ‘You acted too soon. Folly. Folly and waste! If you had waited, all Britain would be under my hand.’ There was no one nearby to hear her, yet the birds ceased their gorging at her words, and the very buzzing of the flies was stilled.

Then she straightened up, and moved away into the wood. The lake lay ahead of her, gleaming between the trees. The rocky slopes beyond and the molten chasm of sunset between cloud and hill were reflected without a quiver in its unwrinkled surface. She paced the shore, searching. Presently she found a cushion of moss darkly stained, as if something had lain and bled there; a torn cloak was abandoned nearby, a dented shield, a crowned helm. The woman picked up the crown, twisting and turning it in her hands. Then she went to the lake’s edge and peered down, muttering secret words in an ancient tongue. A shape appeared in the water-mirror, inverted, a reflection where there was nothing to reflect. A boat, moving slowly, whose doleful burden she could not see, though she could guess, and sitting in the bows a woman with hair as dark as her own. The woman smiled at her from the depths of the illusion, a sweet, triumphant smile. ‘He is mine now,’ she said. ‘Dead or dying, he is mine forever.’ The words were not spoken aloud, but simply arrived in the watcher’s mind, clearer than any sound. She made a brusque gesture as if brushing something away, and the chimera vanished, leaving the lake as before.

‘What of the sword?’ she asked of the air and the trees; but no one answered. ‘Was it returned whence it came?’ She gave a mirthless laugh, hollow within the hood, and lifting the crown, flung it far out across the water. It broke the smooth surface into widening ripples, and was gone.

She walked off through the wood, searching no longer, driven by some other purpose. Now, the standing hills had swallowed the sunset, and dusk was snared in the branches of the trees. The shadows ran together, becoming one shadow, a darkness through which the woman strode without trip or stumble, unhesitating and unafraid. She came to a place where three trees met, tangling overhead, twig locked with twig in a wrestling match as long and slow as growth. It was a place at the heart of all wildness, deep in the wood, black with more than the nightfall. She stopped there, seeing a thickening in the darkness, the gleam of eyes without a face. ‘Morgus,’ whispered a voice which might have been the wind in the leaves, yet the night was windless, and ‘Morgus’ hollow as the earth’s groaning.

‘What do you want of me?’ she said, and even then, her tone was without fear.

‘You have lost,’ said the voice at the heart of the wood. ‘Ships are coming on the wings of storm, and the northmen with their ice-grey eyes and their snow-blond hair will sweep like winter over this island that you love. The king might have resisted them, but through your machinations he is overthrown, and the kingdom for which you schemed and murdered is broken. Your time is over. You must pass the Gate or linger in vain, clinging to old revenges, until your body withers and only your spirit remains, a thin grey ghost wailing in loneliness. I did not even have to lift my hand: you have given Britain to me.’

‘I have lost a battle,’ she said, ‘in a long war. I am not yet ready to die.’

‘Then live.’ The voice was gentled, a murmur that seemed to come from every corner of the wood, and the night was like velvet. ‘Am I not Oldest and mightiest? Am I not a god in the dark? Give me your destiny and I will remould it to your heart’s desire. You will be numbered among the Serafain, the Fellangels who shadow the world with their black wings. Only submit yourself to me, and all that you dream of shall be yours.’

‘He who offers to treat with the loser has won no victory,’ she retorted. ‘I will have no truck with demon or god. Begone from this place, Old One, or try your strength against the Gift of Men. Vardé! Go back to the abyss where you were spawned! Néhaman! Envarré!’

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 gravediggers had gone, postponing their sombre task till morning. A couple of torches had been left behind, thrust into the loose soil piled up by their labours; the quavering flames cast a red light which hovered uncertainly over the neighbouring corpses, some shrouded in cloaks too tattered for re-use, others exposed. These were ordinary soldiers, serfs and peasants: what little armour 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 Grey 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.

I have known many battles, many defeats. I have been a fugitive, hiding in the hollow hills, spinning the blood-magic only in the dark. The children of the north ruled my kingdom, and the Oldest Spirit hunted me with the hounds of Arawn, and I fled from them riding on a giant owl, over the edge of being, out of the world, out of Time, to this place which was in the very beginning. Only the great birds come here, and a few other strays who crossed the boundary in the days when the barrier between worlds was thinner, and have never returned. But the witchkind may find the way, in desperation or need, and then there is no going back, and no going forward. So I dwell here, in the cave beneath the Tree, I and another who eluded persecution or senility, beyond the reach of the past, awaiting a new future. This is the Ancient of Trees, older than history, older than memory – the Tree of Life, whose branches uphold Middle-Earth and whose roots reach down into the deeps of the underworld. And maybe once it grew in an orchard behind a high wall, and the apples of Good and Evil hung from its bough. No apples hang there now, but in due season it bears other fruit. The heads of the dead, which swell and ripen on their stems until the eyes open and the lips writhe, and sap drips from each truncated gorge. We can hear them muttering sometimes, louder than the wind. And then a storm will come and shake the Tree until they fall, pounding the earth like hail, and the wild hog will follow, rooting in the heaps with its tusks, glutting itself on windfalls, and the sound of its crunching carries even to the cave below. Perhaps apples fell there, once upon a time, but the wild hog does not notice the difference, or care. All who have done evil in their lives must hang a season on that Tree, or so they say; yet who amongst us has not done evil, some time or other? Tell me that!

You may think this is all mere fancy, the delusions of a mind warped with age and power. Come walk with me then, under the Tree, and you will see the uneaten heads rotting on the ground, and the white grubs that crawl into each open ear and lay their eggs in the shelter of the skull, and the mouths that twitch and gape until the last of the brain has been nibbled away. I saw my sister once, hanging on a low branch. Oh, not my sister Sysselore – my sister in power, my sister in kind – I mean my blood-sister, my rival, my twin. Morgun. She ripened into beauty like a pale fruit, milky-skinned, raven-haired, but when her eyes opened they were cold, and bitterness dragged at her features. ‘You will hang here too,’ she said to me, ‘one day.’ The heads often talk to you, whether they know you or not. I suppose talk is all they can manage. I saw another that I recognised, not so long ago. We had had great hopes of her once, but she would not listen. A famine devoured her from within. I remember she had bewitched her hair so that it grew unnaturally long, and it brushed against my brow like some clinging creeper. It was wet not with sap but with water, though we had had no rain, and her budding face, still only half-formed, had a waxy gleam like the faces of the drowned. I meant to pass by again when her eyes had opened, but I was watching the smoke to see what went on in the world, and it slipped my mind.

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.