The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  “Now.” Kal reappears beside her. “Come on.” He jumps down, assisting her to follow. They scramble out of the dell and progress as fast as they can over the twisted network of roots. Behind them, the screaming of the head and the pig’s raging gradually die away. Beyond the narrow range of the werelight the dark encircles them, impenetrable as a wall. Kal is surefooted but Fern stumbles frequently. As they circumnavigate the bole she is increasingly aware of the Tree’s dimensions; occasional glimpses show the bastion of the trunk to her left, like the foundations of a giant fortress whose higher towers are swagged in shadow. Kal has told her they are aiming for a point on the far side, but the route seems interminable, the trunk boundless, a pillar mighty enough to uphold the cosmos.

  Then Kal turns aside into a deep cleft; the earth closes in and they are in a passage between matted webs of root. The walls shoulder inward, forcing Kal to move crabwise. For a while Fern proceeds more easily, being smaller, but the were-glow dims, its light greening to sallow, shrinking into a spark and vanishing, slowly. “Don’t make another,” says Kal, taking her hand again. “Save your strength. We may need it.” The passage plunges steeply downhill. Underfoot, soil and plant sinew give way to rock. Fern’s free hand skims the wall, touching the chill hardness of stone, ribbed and sculpted by runnels of moisture long dried up. The atmosphere grows colder, but she knows rather than senses the change; a warmth flows into her from Kal’s grip that staves off trembling—Kal the half-breed, the botched man-beast whom she trusts only because of his hatred for his mother. There are some things that are beyond explaining. To her eyes, the dark is absolute, but Kal’s guidance does not falter, and the susurration of his breath, the very rankness of his odor have become her one link with existence and vitality in the dead blackness. She clutches his unseen fingers like a talisman.

  The tunnel widens slightly, descending ever deeper, but beneath what earth, or where, Fern cannot guess. The presence of the Tree is lost; she is in a realm where nothing lives, even to stagnate. She seems to be in suspension, trapped indefinitely in the moment between one frozen hour and the next. She finds herself imagining that the ridges on the walls were made by the melting seconds, trickling down from some loophole in reality far above. Her head is filled with the silent drip-drip of the ages …

  The change is so subtle that at first she distrusts it. The diminution in the dark might be only in her mind; but no, she can make out the shaggy mound of Kal’s mane, the hump of a shoulder, the coil of a horn. She sees veins of faint glitter rippling through the rock, and rough encrustations of quartz or crystal touched with a ghost sparkle that disappears even as she looks at it. Below, the light increases, still little more than a dimness, a gray shade softer and blander than the dusk of the outer world, but dazzling to the dark-adapted eye. The tunnel opens abruptly into a cavern.

  It is immense. Behind them, the walls soar beyond sight, the roof is lost; ahead is only distance. This is no subterranean hollow but a whole new region, a different layer of being. It is filled with a twilight that comes from nowhere, diffuse and shadowless, muting the hard edges of things, softening perspective. The space is dizzying after the narrow confines of the passage, but the sensation fades quickly. Immediately in front of them is the lip of a chasm that stretches away to right and left, spanned by a solitary bridge. It seems to be made of natural rock, irregular in shape, cracked and eroded so that in places it is less than a yard wide, less than a foot. Evidently there was once a rail, but the remaining posts lean drunkenly, and whatever joined them is gone. “This is the ancient Underworld,” says Kal. “When we have crossed the bridge, we will be within its borders. Remember, whatever happens, you must not look back. Long ago, so they say, when the Tree bore apples and not heads, it was here that the spirits of the dead waited, ere they could pass the Gate. That was in the days when men still worshiped the immortals, before they started to look for their gods higher than heaven or closer to earth. There are old memories clinging on here phantoms poor weak things for the most part, but you are mortal and vulnerable, and they will yearn for you.”

  “And you?” she asks. “Can you pass with impunity?”

  “It is your soul that draws them, little witch,” he says, and his grin is ugly. “I have none. Does your nerve fail?”

  “I have no nerves,” Fern retorts.

  She lies. The phantoms do not trouble her—not yet—but she shrinks from the bridge. A great cold emanates from the chasm, the chill she sensed in the passage; but here nothing can warm it, and it eats into her bones. In the depths there is a flow of white vapor, like the ghost of a river long gone. Air currents move over it in waves, ruffling it into peaks and hollowing out troughs that collapse slowly, one into the other. “Yes, there was a river,” says Kal. “One of the great rivers of legend. There were many others, with many names, but they are dry and nameless now. All save one.” He steps lightly onto the bridge, pausing a moment to mock her, waiting for her to reach for the assistance of his hand. But she knows she must cross alone, unaided, showing no fear. Morgus is in him, and the legacy of spirits old and wild: his instinct is to prey on weakness. She spreads her arms for balance, steadying her gaze on his face. He moves backward, indifferent to the drop, and she follows, step by careful step, not looking down. Never looking down. Her features are expressionless, still as a mask. It is only when she reaches the other side, and begins to relax, that she realizes her breath was pent and her jaw muscles clamped with the effort of self-control.

  And now they are in the Underworld. A path winds ahead of them across what seems to be a vast plain, a gray impression of meadow whose dim grasses are stirred by winds they cannot feel. At times a flicker of white snatches at the tail of Fern’s eye, tempting her to turn, a trick of the light perhaps, if light is wily, and knows such tricks. Then she sees one more clearly, close by the path, a pale star shape like a flower … and another, and another. The petals are ephemeral as mist, holding only loosely to the calyx; the long stems toss and bend. Now there is a whole cluster approaching, five or six of them, but a zephyr plucks the blossoms from their tenuous anchorage and spins them away, scattering them over the waste like spectral butterflies. At the same instant she catches on the perimeter of hearing a faint surge of sound, music without a tune, singing without words, a faerie summons from somewhere far behind her. “There are no flowers here,” says Kal. “Like me, flowers have no souls.”

  “Did you hear something?” she asks.

  “No. Shut your ears. There is nothing for you to listen to.”

  She sees no more flowers. There is only the rolling emptiness of shivering grass and flaccid air. Once or twice she glimpses lone trees in the distance, but they are half-formed and shadowy, phantom growths that have forgotten how they ought to appear, and they are blown away into nothingness more swiftly than the blossoms. The music does not recur, but sometimes she hears a few silvery notes, like the tinkle of wind chimes or tiny bells, always behind her.

  The horn comes later. She hears it winding across the plains, the sound traveling from somewhere very far away, more echo than horn call. It is audible even to Kal; his face is blank, frozen on a memory—he who once was hunted, hunted like a beast, reacting instinctively to the message in that swelling peal. Other sounds come after, faint as a rumor: the belling of hounds, and the hoofbeats of horses, and the eager cries of many riders. Then Fern sees the stag, white as virgin snow, swift as a forest fire, racing over the meadow. A clot of darkness streams in its wake, many-limbed, studded with pale eyes and red tongues, breaking into separate shadow flecks that spread out to surround their prey. She knows them of old, the hounds of Arawn, and she does not want to encounter them again. But as the chase draws nearer she sees the stag is transparent, a drawing in mist that fades even as it passes by, and the hounds are mere shades, bodiless and flimsy; the grass shows through their eyes. Behind them come ethereal horses, unfinished shapes wayward as smoke, their riders still more insubstantial. Fern sees blowing hair leaf-crowned
, the shimmer of a diadem, phantom spears glittering like frost. They sweep by with a rushing noise like the wind in the trees, and the hounds’ braying and the horn calls carry far behind her; yet the air that touches her cheek is still.

  “Illusion,” says Kal, and a shiver crawls over his skin. “The Wild Hunt has not been seen for many centuries, and never on the Gray Plains. What would they have found to chase, in the Land of the Dead? The hounds may have kenneled here, but they preferred to pursue living quarry.”

  “I know,” Fern murmurs. “I’ve seen them.”

  “Have you run from them?” demands Kal, and there is no mistaking the bitter edge in his tone. “Have you run and run—until your mouth is dry and your muscles scream and the breath gripes in your lungs?” Fern says nothing, only taking his hand, and his fingers crush hers till she winces, but she does not draw them away “Those who dwell here are playing out memories,” he resumes eventually, “clutching at the tag ends of forgotten tales. They cannot even complete the images they call up; their minds are withered like winter leaves, but their famine is evergreen. Beware, little witch. They lust after you: your youth, and your life, and your soul. No mortal has come this way for ages beyond count.”

  “They must be lonely,” she says.

  “You are too easy with your pity.” His grip releases her. “They will twist it into a thread to bind you here. If you are going to waste your heart on pity, I may as well leave you now.”

  “Pity is never wasted,” says Fern.

  They go on. The meads seem limitless, stretching into vacancy on every hand, but at last they come to an end of them. Fern has forgotten that they are underground, until she sees the cavern walls drawing in once more. Another river curves to meet them, cutting a great swath across the plain; no mist flows in its arid bed, but at intervals the depths gleam into pools, and reflections flicker there of scenes long past. The grasses cease, ebbing from the rock like a tide. Ahead, the wall is riven with many openings through which the light flows like vapor, penetrating subterranean cathedrals pillared with slow-growing stone, sacrificial altars whose blood has hardened to porphyry. Beyond, there are shadows that must have lain undisturbed since before the advent of Man. “Who made this place?” Fern asks, but Kal does not know.

  “Maybe it was the first Spirits,” he says, “in the days when they were gods. Maybe the men who worshiped them. There are many such realms, though most are deserted now. Once people needed heaven and hell, Elysium and Faerie. They believed. Belief is the great creative force, the faith that moves mountains. If Someone had not believed in us, so they say, we would never have been born. I have spent my darkest hours wondering what kind of a Creator would have believed in me.”

  “I believe in you,” says Fern. “I have to, or I would be lost here.”

  “So it’s your fault,” Kal retorts. “Go carefully, little witch, lest I take you at your word. I have often dreamed of strangling my Creator.”

  She laughs at him, not to hurt but to shake his mood, to send her laughter into his darkness. And for a moment, she feels the Underworld itself shaken, as if that little quiver of sound has pierced its deepest foundations. None other has ever laughed here, since the halls were made. Perhaps none ever will. And so she laughs again, lighthearted with her own sacrilege, and the ghosts watch her from their holes, starving and afraid, stabbed by the echo of something whose meaning they have long mislaid.

  “You are one alone,” says Kal, “even among witches.”

  He moves on, following the river cleft through the widest of the apertures. The path shrinks to a ledge; above, the overhang is fringed with stalactites forming a frozen curtain that screens the space beyond from view. The ravine below them becomes narrow and deep. Formerly the river here must have been a torrent, seething and foaming between constricting cliffs, making the caves resonate to the roar of its waters; now the crevasse yawns like a parched mouth and a great hush lies over all. The noise of their footsteps is deadened; not an echo follows on their heels. The ledge hugs ever closer to the wall and is cloven in several places from rockfalls; Fern is grateful for the proximity of the stalactites that provide her with much-needed handholds. The path clings on by its teeth. On one occasion, circumventing a particularly awkward gap, her foot slips and she starts to fall. She hears them again close behind, reduced to a shapeless whispering without music or tone: the threadlike remnant of voices probing the silence. But Kal is ready, seizing her arms, pulling her up again, and the whispers sink reluctantly out of sound.

  At last they enter a large grotto where the river cleft broadens to form what must have been a pool. Fountains of petrified carbonate spill over the rim; the walls are ribbed with cascades of thick pale stone. Above the center of the pool, the roof swoops downward into a single massive stalactite, many-tiered and gleaming like a huge natural chandelier. And there is sound—real sound, not the subsilent mutterings of voices long stilled. Soft but very clear, filling the endless quiet of the Underworld. The sound of water.

  On the farther side of the pool a small spring bubbles out of the rock, spilling into a basin hollowed out over the ages from which it must formerly have overflowed into pool and river. Now there must be a fissure in the basin through which it drains away, for little collects there although the flow appears constant. Its few pellucid notes seem to Fern, in that place where Death himself has moved out, to be the most beautiful sound she has ever heard.

  They skirt the pool, drawing nearer. The water is unclouded, pure and clear as liquid light. “May we drink?” she asks Kal.

  His dark ugliness softens briefly with a kind of saturnine amusement. “No! Have you forgotten all you ever knew? You should neither drink nor eat here, if you would leave. Next you will be demanding a pomegranate to nibble. But in any case, this is no ordinary spring. It is the Well of Lethe, the waters of Oblivion. One drink, and your spirit will be cleansed of care and sorrow, love and hatred and pain. A second, and all memory will be drained; a third, and your soul is suspended in nirvana. Long ago, many drank deep from the spring and bathed in the pool, washing away the burdens of the past, and their vacant minds were filled with the gentleness of death. Only so could they pass the Gate, and hope for rebirth, or so I was told.”

  “Is there rebirth?”

  His face twists into a scowl. “Who knows? Ask of the Ultimate Powers, not of me. If they exist. Mortals have hope. I—do not.” He pauses beside the spring, turns toward her with a sudden change of mood. “One drink to erase all griefs, to ease heartache, and loneliness, and loss. Does it tempt you, Fernanda? Has grief ever marked that cold little face? Do you indeed have no heart to ache?”

  “Grief is easy to recall,” she answers. “Is there a drink to blot out the memory of happiness? The human heart is strong to bear all things, save only that.”

  Kal stares at her, baffled, but says no more. They enter a crooked passage leading out of the cave, and the music of Lethe fades behind them.

  The passage descends in an erratic series of inclines, awkward and hazardous. The light has been squeezed out and only its dregs remain, insufficient to show the fluctuations in the slope. Fern misses her footing often, blundering against the walls. She may be spirit, not substance; yet she still seems to feel the bruises. Beyond the tunnel there is another cavern, another ravine. Already she is disorientated by the vastness of the place—by the sourceless light that blurs outlines and confounds distance, by the quiet, more a lull than a silence, pregnant with the unheard voices of the dead. She peers into the ravine, expecting another dry riverbed, but instead there is a black torrent of rock, its surface swollen with misshapen waves, seamed with the cracks of long cooling. Rags of vapor issue from these cracks, white foggy wisps that hang motionless on the air or are tugged hither and thither by intangible drafts. Some begin to assume forms that are blown away before they come to completion, not horses or trees but other things less pleasant. The chasm is bridged by a single arch, apparently man-made, its stonework inset with carvings tha
t echo the unfinished shapes in the mist, grasping hands and half-formed faces whose lineaments are twisted with pain. The bridge is broad and easily crossed, though there are gaps among the stones where fragments of masonry have broken away. On the far side two tall pillars stand sentinel, black and ominous against the paler gloom beyond. They resemble the trunkless limbs of some vanished colossus. The ruins of what might have been a wall extend along the border of the ravine; between the pillars, the remnants of great gates sag from their hinges, shrunken to calcined panels, warped in fires now withered to ash. Strands of mist vacillate toward the columns and spiral around them.

  “This was the River of Fire,” says Kal. “It has been cold now for many ages, though somewhere far below, maybe, you might still feel the heat of the ancient world. The bridge leads to the Region of Hel, by some called Tartarus, the Dungeons of Death. The wall is fallen now, the gates rusted. Only the ghosts remain. Be wary, little witch. They are strongest here, strong with remembered pain. Most of the spirits have departed from the Gray Plains, but few of those who were bound in the pits of Hel could ever leave. Their souls are rotted with evil: the phantoms that endure are empty of all but hunger and the memory of torment. Close your ears and your heart against them; this is no place for pity.”