The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  “Only a dragon charmer can charm a dragon,” repeats Morgus.

  “Find one,” mocks Sysselore.

  She sees him in the spellfire, the man with the gray face. He looks younger here, but she knows him at once, by his ashen complexion, by the high prow of his nose. He is sitting in a room of books—a room not merely lined but apparently constructed of books. Chinks of bare wall show here and there, but the books are the building blocks: fat books, thin books, ancient calf-bound volumes, gaudy modern hardbacks, their spines crushed together so they can hardly draw breath, jostling and leaning, vertical and horizontal, like bricks stacked at random by a drunken bricklayer. And in the midst of the books the man sits on an upright wooden chair upholstered in studded leather, the light from a desk lamp falling sidelong on his face. The shadow of his own profile stretches across his left cheek, the nose elongated, the thin, pointed lips outthrust in speech, casting a mobile darkness in the hollow above the jaw. As his head moves the beam blinks briefly into his eyes, showing them pale, pale and cold, filled with a desire that is part avarice and part desperation. He might be a caricature of the dragon charmer, aged and flawed, the black purity of his skin dulled, the fine temper of his spirit blunted. Ruvindra Laiï was fearless, reckless, remorseless, a predator without morality or pity, but in this man those strengths appear shriveled, reduced to the littleness of mere evil.

  He is talking to a chairback on the other side of the desk. The chair may or may not have an occupant: the spell-watcher cannot see. The back is unusually high, spreading out into a wide oval, the arms curving around to encircle the sitter. There might be a shadowy elbow resting there; it is difficult to be sure. Lower down, the vision blurs into smoke. Sound arrives slowly: the thin mouth tenses into stillness, and she hears the voice of the chairback—a voice from the abyss, deep and cold and familiar. She has heard that voice grating from a throat of stone, dripping like honey from stolen vocal cords; she has heard it harsh with power, cracked with death. But the essence is always the same. “You would not be an ambulant,” it is saying. “With an ambulant, the spirit is expelled from the body, to wait in Limbo until that body dies. You would remain in possession: I would lodge in your mind merely as a guest. A visitor. I would be yours to summon whenever you have need of power. Yours to summon, and to dismiss. I would be a djinn at your command.” She knows he lies. It is there in the softened tone, in the gentle slither of seductive phrases. She knows it and his auditor knows it: loathing and longing vie for prominence in his gray face. She sees him push knowledge away, sliding toward a willing submission. “Together,” says Azmordis, “we can master the last of the dragons, and in so doing we will have mastery of the air, mastery of fire and magic. Forget the crude weapons of the modern age. With a dragon, we have a firebomb that thinks, the ultimate symbol of power. You have dreamed of it, I know you have. I have seen your dreams: the memories of your ancestors passed on in your sleeping thought. The skill is in your blood, too long irrelevant; you have it still, the Gift of the dragon charmers. But your body ages: you need vitality and strength. These things only I can give you. Invite me in!”

  Invite me in. The ancient laws forbid anyone to cross a threshold uninvited: the threshold of a house, the threshold of a mind. The door must be opened from within, the words of invitation uttered freely. Who made the laws no one knows: Morgus in all her teaching has not revealed it. Doubtless she is reluctant to admit that there are powers beyond her reach, rules that even she cannot break. The enforcers may be unknown and unseen but they never fail: the Ultimate Laws cannot be gainsaid. Even the weakest individual has this last protection against the invasion of the dark. Your soul is your own: it cannot be stolen from you. But it can be eroded, or sold, or given away.

  “Invite me in!” says Azmordis, and in the other man’s face there is the dread of creeping age and death, the yearning of dreams unsated. Fern wonders what he sees, when she can distinguish nothing beyond the chairback save the impression of an elbow. He wavers, debating within himself—a superfluous exercise: his battle is already lost. “Invite me in!” The voice is a dark whisper, less persuasive than hypnotic.

  “Very well!” She hears the man speak at last, his tone almost a croak, riven between eagerness and doubt. “With your aid I shall have power beyond imagining. I shall tame the dragon, I shall take what I want from this world and live long enough to enjoy it. We have a bargain.” He holds out his hand, but it is not taken.

  “Say the words. Invite me into your mind, into your body, into your soul. Say the words!”

  There is a hunger behind his insistence, a hunger born of greed. He feeds on swift, perishable lives to swell his one undying life, draining and discarding his human playthings, seeking to refill his immortal emptiness with the brief glimmer of their souls, losing them in the end to the mystery of the Gate. Fern cannot see his face—if there is a face to see—but it is not necessary. All expression is in the voice, in the looming presence of the chairback, grown now to dominate the room, becoming a throne of darkness before which the other cringes like a supplicant. Yet she sees a similar hunger in his gray visage, shrunken to mortal dimensions, an object of pathos and contempt, a deadly weakness. He hesitates at the last, unwilling to utter the fearful invocation, but the hunger is too strong for him. They are drawn together in a terrible bond, the greater monster and the less. The man speaks with awful deliberation.

  “Come into my mind. Share my body. Infuse my spirit with yours.”

  “Aaaah!”

  The huge sigh of satisfaction changes to a hoarse shriek, like the cry of some long-extinct bird. She has heard such a call once before, in the heart of a tempest long ago: a summons from the world before speech, when the beasts and the elements and the gorge of Earth itself made the only voices to be heard. The impression of an elbow is gone from the arm of the chair. In front, the man stiffens. His eyes widen until the lids all but vanish, staring orbs on which the veins leap to prominence like cracks threading an eggshell. His cheeks are sucked into caverns, his mouth becomes a hole. Ripples tug at his skin. Then with a vast shudder the tension collapses and his features slip back into place. He appears unconscious, breathing through a slackened mouth. His eyes are turned upward in his head and suffused with blood, slits of red wetness in the gray waste of his face. Fern closes her eyes, feeling sick, not only at the physical manifestation of possession but the deeper horror beyond—someone else buried in your brain, sifting through your thoughts, sinking into your subconscious. The nausea drains her: she has known no bodily sensation like it in all her measureless hours beneath the Tree.

  When she opens her eyes again she notices for the first time that she is alone. Sysselore sleeps in her bower of roots; Morgus must be outside the cave, watching the slow ripening of the heads. (Fern knows there is an exit, though she has never found it.) The spellfire shows its visions only to her. There is the man again, talking with a smooth visible fluency though she hears no sound. He is aged now, perhaps by his tenant, yet he appears imbued with some hidden unnatural strength. The image recedes until he is framed in a black square like a picture, still talking, and his finger comes out of the frame toward her, beckoning, and in the foreground she sees very briefly a back view of a girl with a dark mass of hair. Then the vision is gone, vanishing into smoke. Memories from the world of Time rush into her head. Gaynor—Gaynor and Alison’s television set—and the man she had named as Dr. Laye. (Dr. Laye … Ruvindra Laï?) Gaynor her friend—afraid—in danger…

  Fern reaches into the smoke with mind and will, sensing the power rise in her, feeling it flow through every channel of her body, through the marrow of her bones, through the blood in her veins. She touches the core of the magic, willing it to respond. You cannot force the spellfire, Morgus has said, but Fern is in the grip of a fierce urgency; prudence is overruled; Gift and certainty are strong in her. “Show me Dr. Laye,” she demands, her voice suppressed to a hissing whisper in order not to wake Sysselore. “I need to know what he plans. S
how me the fate of Ruvindra Laï. Show me the dragon!” But the fire is no spirit or sibyl whom you can question. The smoke thickens at the pressure, billowing out, swirling around her. Her eyes water. She has a fleeting glimpse of another picture, neither man nor monster, a picture that seems to belong somewhere in her story. A pale figure in a pale bed. White sheets, white pillows, and the still face death-white, cheeks and lips devoid of color. Transparent tubes stream like ribbons from various portions of her anatomy, artificial intestines fueling the machine of the sleeping body. There is something familiar about her, a sense of wrongness … But the scene crumples, sucked into a vortex of smoke, and the magic spins out of control, and the cave is filled with a whirlwind of black vapor. Fern crouches down, covering her face. With a sound like a suffocated bomb, the spellfire implodes.

  When the air clears the flames are extinguished, the crystals scattered. Fern’s legs, face, torso are blackened. Sysselore rushes over, shrill with fury, scolding like a fishwife. “I wanted to control the spellfire,” Fern explains. “I pushed too hard. Sorry.”

  “What did you see?” And Morgus is behind her, moving silently for all her bulk. “What did you try to see?”

  “The dragon,” Fern answers. “Ruvindra Laiï. The man with the gray face.” The truth is always safer, as long as it is doled out sparingly.

  “And what did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  But she knows now what she saw, and why it felt so wrong. The figure in the bed was her.

  Fern lies on her pallet in the darkness, thinking. Nearby Morgus snores with the sound of an earthquake stirring, Sysselore hisses and whistles like an inefficient kettle. They exist here physically, in the flesh; their bodies need sleep. But her body is sleeping somewhere else. The person she saw was not the past or the future but the present: a still white figure in a white hospital bed, fed and watered and purged mechanically, a thing, just a thing, tangled in an octopus of tubes, alive on sufferance. She touches her flesh, and knows it for an illusion. Her bodily functions are a mere habit of mind, like the shape she fills. Perhaps that was why she would not bleed when Morgus cut her; she bled elsewhere, in the real world. Yet Morgus knows the truth—of course she does—and she expected blood. What did Sysselore say? “She is protected…” There may have been others at her bedside: friends, family, people who care. (Friends like Gaynor, who is in danger.) She knows she must trust them, though they are too distant to picture, memories beyond the reach of thought. If they take care of her body, she must take care of her Self.

  She must find the way back.

  At least there is no other occupant in her domain. We saved you, said Morgus, meaning from Azmordis, and Fern seems to hear herself in another dimension, calling him, mocking him: Azmordis! Azmordis! Let him come. Folly. But if she saved me, Fern concludes, it was for her own purposes, not mine. I will take the ember of my hatred and nurse it carefully, carefully. I need hate, in the dark beneath the Tree where all other emotions are far away. Courage, hope, love are like rainbow-colored ghosts, bright phantoms from the world of warmth and life. Here, only hate is left to me. Hate makes you strong. Hate will find a way.

  Now she knows she does not need it she sleeps no longer. She can move about the cave without noise: her spirit-self may appear to have weight and substance but that is an illusion. Her feet touch the earth, but they do not press it. Morgus still does not realize Fern has discovered the true nature of this state of being. She sees Fern always as her pupil, her disciple, too absorbed by her teaching to think for herself, too naïve and too spellmazed to question or speculate. Fern is supposed to soak up her words, follow in her swath. Fern plays her part. In the dark before dawn Morgus wakes alone and moves about the cave, strangely light on her feet for all her size, as if her body floats on a cushion of air, gliding just above the ground. The spellfire is unlit and the erratic worm-shine makes her shadow dance in her wake, breaking up over the uneven floor and walls into separate shadow flecks that seem to caper with a brief life of their own. The whispers as she talks to herself trail after her, hissing echoes finding their way between the crannied roots, where they are trapped a moment or two, stifling. Fern hears her name, suddenly clear among the shapeless murmurs, uttered with a kind of deadly lust. Morgus moves away into one of the cave’s many corners, where the tubers form a twisted arch filled with darkness. Another word emerges, a command: “Inyé!” Her hand describes a gesture and a light appears, a candleflame without a candle, hovering at her side. Under the arch, the darkness withdraws, receding into a tunnel that appears to slope upward. Morgus must surely be too large to enter such a narrow space, but the fluid mass of her flesh ripples and changes, pouring through the gap, and in a moment she is gone. Fern follows her, without light, touching earth and root for guidance in the gloom. And then she is outside.

  The tunnel issues through a slot beneath a huge roo limb, buckled and sinewy, like the outflung arm of a felled giant scrunching at the ground. Here the darkness is several shades paler, suggesting the imminence of dawn, or what passes for dawn in this place. All around Fern can see similar limbs, the smallest thread-fine, the largest many feet in diameter, crushing the land into a bizarre rootscape of humps and hollows, ridges and clefts. Somewhere above looms the bole, half-veiled in mist, like a curving gray wall, many-ribbed, crusted with flaking slabs of bark, immense and ghostly in the dusklight. For the first time she begins to appreciate the true vastness of the Tree. Sysselore has told her that beyond there are shadow forests that you cannot pass, where the stray wanderer will become lost or sicken: offshoots of the Tree’s imagining, manifestations of its dreams. Only the great birds may come and go. But such boundaries are not necessary: the Tree fills the world, it is the world. It stands outside reality, between the dimensions; its roots drink from the depths of being, its upper branches out-top the stars. The cave itself is a mere niche scooped out among the labyrinth of its lesser tubers. She feels as insignificant as an aphid crawling over its feet.

  Morgus is visible some way off, a dark blot against the grayness. The outline of her many-robed figure waxes and wanes like a monstrous amoeba as she moves swiftly over the uneven ground. Fern sets off after her, halting abruptly on a sudden terrible realization—looking back to impress on her mind the exact pattern of the roots around the exit, so she can find it again. It would be too easy to become lost in such a place. Then she hurries in pursuit of Morgus, clambering, sometimes on all fours, over the hunches and hummocks of the Tree’s nether limbs, ascending gradually on an oblique route toward the bole. The witch is well ahead of her now, often concealed by a dip in the terrain. When she vanishes from sight Fern finds herself hastening instinctively, afraid Morgus will elude her altogether; on one occasion, Morgus emerges much too close, and her pursuer drops down into a hollow, melting herself into the gloaming. Morgus has evidently slowed her pace, stopping frequently to examine the lower branches, which hang down here within easy reach. Fern can distinguish the leaves, shaped like those of an oak only far larger, gathered into dim masses that rustle softly together although there is no wind. There are globes depending below the foliage, apple-sized, each at some distance from its neighbor: it is these that interest Morgus. And suddenly Fern realizes what they are. The fruit of the Tree, which will swell and ripen into form and feature, character and speech. The heads of the dead.

  She peers closer at some of them, although she does not touch, whatever horror she may feel mitigated by a kind of detached curiosity. Horror is out of place here: the Tree cannot comprehend it. The fruit are still small and hard, a slight irregularity of shape being the only indication of eye sockets and developing nose. On the more advanced, petal-fine lines show where lids and lips will open, shallow depressions mark the nostrils, sprouting protuberances the beginnings of ears. The hair will come last. Morgus has told her that many may grow the preliminary stages of a neck, but it will always peter out, dangling like a starved shoot beneath the jaw. It is as if the Tree tries to generate a whole body
but lacks the will or the sap, losing momentum after the head. The light is still too poor to define color, but the fruit appear mostly pale, with darker veins spreading out from the stalk. Some have a faint blush that might be brown or bronze, rose or gold. Gradually Fern intimates that Morgus is looking for one in particular, one she will recognize, even this early on, by some stigma that will mark it out from the rest; but if so, she does not find it. Intrigued by the strange seeds, Fern is inattentive: the witch is almost on her before it becomes clear she is returning on her tracks. Slipping out of sight behind a double-jointed root twist, Fern finds herself sliding backward into a dip. Morgus passes by, and as Fern goes to scramble out she sees it. A thin branch swooping so low that it is screened by root and ridge, a solitary fruit ripening in secrecy, hidden from casual search. And the fruit is black.

  Initially, she suspects some disease, but there is no scent of rottenness, the skin is hard and glossy. And then she knows what it must be. After a long hesitation she departs reluctantly on the witch’s trail, impressing the place on her memory so she can find it again.

  The light is growing now, not with the sparkle and freshness of a true dawn but with a slow paling of the world, a gradual transition from the gray twilight to the normal hues of day. After the gloom of the cave the colors appear over-bright even without the dazzle of sunshine, stinging her eyes. Different browns shade earth and bark; the leaves are the deep green of late summer, threaded with crimson veins, for the sap of the Tree is red. Bronze drifts lie in many hollows, the leaf fall of countless seasons, harboring tiny clusters of cloche-hatted toadstools, one among the many fungi whose use Morgus teaches. Grasses cushion every bank, mosses pad every root. Flowers are few and furtive. The air is filled with the morning small talk of birds, though Fern can see none. She feels very exposed, caught in the daylight, no longer a shadow among shadows but a displaced being, standing out against the groundscape like an alien. She follows in the direction Morgus has gone, but cautiously, taking care to remain well behind. When Morgus finally disappears from view altogether Fern has a moment’s panic before she identifies the giant’s arm tree root and the entrance to the tunnel. Color changes everything. She plunges into the narrow darkness, debouching with a strange sense of relief into the retreat of the cave.