The Horse Dreamer

by Marc Secchia

  Would she have noticed, save that it reminded her of something she may have seen in the dream-swamp?

  Zaranna trembled as her mother’s thumb caressed her cheekbone, softly tracing the slight indentation of her left temple before tucking a stray strand of platinum hair behind her ear, as if committing a favourite sculpture to memory. Other mothers spoke love. Susan emoted it, as if every fibre of her being worked together to make her feelings known.

  “Milk’s good for you. Drink up, Zars,” she said, blandly.

  And then that – utterly gormless. Dropping her gaze, Zaranna delivered herself an infuriated inward kicking. Honestly, could she be any ruder about the mother who so clearly loved her to distraction? Another contrast. Lively intelligence coupled with moments when Susan’s mind seemed fogged, lost in another world. Fogged … by someone or something?

  Right. From today, Susan Inglewood could consider herself her obstinate daughter’s project. If someone had hurt her, Zaranna vowed, they would pay in blood. And that hooded fiend of her dream? Her horse would kick him so hard between the legs, his family jewels would hit the moon!

  Yet when she peeked past her lashes, it was to spy lips incoming. Shutters, quick! Susan kissed each of her closed eyelids. “Precious, chrysoprase eyes,” she whispered.

  “Ah …”

  “It’s our colour. Chrysoprase. It’s a kind of chalcedony gemstone.” Suddenly, her mother tugged at the duvet. “Shift up.” She slipped beneath the covers, saying, “When you were a little girl, Zingle, you had the craziest dreams. I often had to sleep next to you; I’d hear you scream or chuckle or gasp with wonder, even in your sleep. I’m so glad your eyes didn’t shutter forever, that day. I would’ve died in your place, so joyfully stepped into death for you. Do you see? Your breath is mine. My soul’s life. And without you …”

  Suicidal. Zaranna’s heart suddenly seemed too swollen for her chest. Clasping her fragile mother close, she let Susan pillow her head upon her shoulder. “It’s alright, Mom.”

  “Tell me it will be alright.”

  Zara said, “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Ever.”

  Susan laughed quietly. “You always had the courage of ten, my baby girl. Always.”

  * * * *

  The sounds of lethargic breathing slowly merged into the tuneful twittering of a parakeet. A single spot of colour against the swamp, iridescent lavender except for a yellow back and breast, the bird perched upon her knee – a knobbly horse-knee, as her leg was stretched out in front of her. It peered at her as if amused, while chirruping lustily.

  “Good morning, o feathered alarm clock.”

  The bird replied, “Thus awakens the dawn, o filly of magnificent cleanliness.”

  Zaranna made a harrumph of annoyance. The bird voiced a bright, chuckling trill and, with a clip of its wings, shot off into the mists.

  “Some creatures need to learn how to have the morning grumps.”

  If she woke in the swamp again, Zaranna had been determined to be as feisty as a riled porcupine. Instead, the parakeet’s song had infected her with a mysterious jauntiness that was as annoying as it was irresistible. She chuckled with insane gladness. Glancing back over her pristine flanks and withers, merriment burbled from her lips. Why not? She was beautiful, a rich white-golden colour she did not believe she had ever quite seen on a horse, with a long mane and tail of dark, honeyed gold. Her hooves had darker ‘socks’ above them. Just the fact of having legs made her giggle like a nervous teen. Wow. She could run! Gallop!

  Uh … clean?

  A mystery. Never mind. Today she would seize this foetid, benighted slough by the scruff of the whatnot and make her escape.

  She had slept atop a small knoll about ten feet above black waters bitter with the taste of decay, her nose almost pressing against a much larger, mossy hillock that stretched up into the thick fog. Goodness. Worse weather than the usual genuflection to a soggy autumn morning, damper than a badly overused tissue – she could see no more than fifteen or twenty feet in any given direction. Only, how had she scaled this boulder?

  Zaranna sniffed the sweet air appreciatively. For once, not the smell of rot perfected over hundreds of years, but a pervading scent of jasmine. So fresh. Invigorating. So … oh no!

  “Dragon!”

  She had barely begun to scramble to her hooves in horror when the ground lifted. “Holy …” she neighed stridently, hurling herself off her perch. Freezing water slapped her belly. Washed over her head. Zaranna did not care. Her legs thrashed wildly, taking her further from the great mound which had suddenly begun to shift upon its foundations. She spat out a rank mouthful. Powerful movement churned the waters. Bubbles exploded from her muzzle as a great heave of water resolved into a clutch of thick grey-blue talons that jolted her hooves, sweeping her into the damp, cool air; she leaped desperately, but the beast was faster by far. Its paw snaffled her up with the ease of a boy playing catch with a ball.

  She kicked, bit and struggled, but the Dragon would not be moved. Steely talons closed over her back. Her head stuck out between his digits. Yet the beast did not harm her. Instead, it swung her toward the mossy bank, which was no hillock, Zaranna realised. Beneath the mosses and lichens lay a beast as large as a hill, half-submerged in the water. It stretched lazily as though waking from an aeons-long sleep. With reptilian menace, its eyelid cracked open.

  Mercy! That eye was half the size of her body!

  What had she expected of a Dragon’s gaze? Fire? This was different. An orb blacker than the darkest night regarded her, filled with swirling motes of light which changed colour so rapidly, she could barely follow the patterns as they formed and changed. She stared through a portal into the Universe’s deepest mysteries, nebulae and galaxies forming and reforming at hypersonic speeds. The effect was vertiginous, stealing her away from herself until she sensed that if she peered into that depthless blackness for one more second, her eternal soul would be forfeit to the beast.

  Zaranna squeezed her eyes shut. “No …”

  “No? Did you not call me?” a querulous growl made her shudder. “ ‘Dragon,’ you said, clear as a sparkling dawn somewhere beyond the borders of this infernal quagmire. Honestly, the fickleness of today’s youth is beyond belief. Make up your mind, little foal, if you have one.”

  With shuttered eyes, she might have imagined a grandfather ticking off an errant youngster. Ignoring a blast of heat and billows of choking sulphurous gas, perhaps, and a voice like a mountain’s groaning. Minor details. Less than a minute back in the dream-world and her courage had shrivelled to raisin-like proportions.

  Enough. Dragons were not real. This lizard was nothing but an overgrown firelighter.

  She cracked open an eye.

  “Not real? Overgrown firelighter? Earthen Fires, you’re cheekier than a Pegasus with four wings,” complained the Dragon. “I’m as real as you are, young Plains filly, so don’t you spout your grass-withering nonsense and River Horse run-off at me.”

  “You’re a dream.”

  She eyed the apparition with her best Victorian schoolmistress expression cemented in place. Dragons were supposed to have scales. This creature had lichens, rocks and whole trees apparently growing out of its flank. What she could see was a lidded eye and a horizontal crack of disturbing length filled with an unnervingly practical-looking plethora of fangs. Seeing all this from within the jail bars formed by its fisted paw gave the scene an even more demoralising quality, if that were possible.

  Fine morning to be interrogated by a ravenous Dragon. Perfect, Zaranna. One little squeeze would mince her horse brains between its knuckles.

  “Huh. Evidently, your cranium is so stuffed with swamp-muck it’s leaking out your ears.”

  “And I’m not a Plains filly, or whatever you said.”

  “Oh no, you are merely a querulous quadruped with a clump of straw for brains who thinks it politic to insult a gigantic, starving Dragon.” With that, the paw uncurled and the Dragon huffed a vast breath ove
r her, snarling her mane about her muzzle while making every inch of her hide tingle. “There. See? I’d rather clean you than eat you, little filly.”

  Zaranna glanced at her body in surprise. Pristine. She blurted out, “Oh, so you’re a herbivore?”

  Swamp muck exploded away to her left in a deafening roar. Fire sizzled. Boulders shook off the Dragon’s sides, while the talons clenched convulsively before uncurling again. Suddenly, the Dragon lay still. Only the soughing of what Zaranna realised was inner Dragon-fires rising and falling with each breath broke the swamp’s stillness. Orange flame leaked between the creature’s fangs, curling upward in streamers of bubbling, curiously liquid-seeming fire. Steam rose from its flanks, while bubbles burst from beneath its body, as if the swamp were slowly being boiled for soup.

  Maybe she should just shut her yapping trap. Permanently.

  “Before I suck the marrow from your bones for insolence,” he gritted out, “you should allow one truth to pierce that nut-case you wear upon your shoulders. I am not a herbivore. Clear?”

  Zaranna gulped. “Carnivorously so.”

  “Now. What are you doing in the middle of the Swamp of S’tyrax, she who says she is not what she plainly is?”

  “Well, Rhenduror dropped –”

  “Silence!” With the thunderclap-power which Zaranna realised had struck her before, the Dragon muzzled her, and their environment, she realised. It felt as if her ears had been stuffed with cotton wool. “Know you not that names convey power, nursling?”

  His alien gaze held her so forcefully, she could not look away. No pretence, now. No jollity. Quietly commanding, the ancient Dragon snarled, “I could rip the truth from you. Strip you bare. Leave you to wander these stinking waters the mindless fool I mistook you for. Yet I was the fool. For you are not what you seem, are you, little filly? Are you?”

  She shook her head convulsively, just once.

  “Now, it is safe to converse. Speak! What fate caused thee to penetrate my lair, which no other has done these decades past?”

  “Well, sir – mighty Dragon, I mean – I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she babbled, inwardly ashamed at her reaction. “But I was lost and lonely, and wounded … far from home. So very far, it seems. Where am I? I ask, because I know I dream … yet all this seems incredibly real. I’m so confused.”

  One talon curled toward her, touching her forehead delicately. “Are you a Dreamer?”

  “A-A Dreamer? I don’t know. But you healed me. Thank –”

  The great beast vented a laugh, shivering the swamp waters beneath her. When he spoke, his voice had reduced to an awed murmur. “And here I thought you merely a wounded wanderer. After all these years, I came within seconds of missing my calling, what with you arriving disguised as an ordinary Plains filly. No, not Pegasus Clan. Of course not. The Dreamer appears as she wishes. Still your prattling tongue, little filly, for if you are the Dreamer – if the Dreamer truly has returned – then you are miracle, a wonder, and the bearer of a great and terrible fate.”

  Zaranna could only stare at the black eye, rich with firefly-like lights. She could not shake the impression that those motes were dancing for her. “I’m sorry, Dragon, but I really don’t have the first inkling of what you’re talking about.”

  “She walks in the beauty of her dreams,” he breathed. “Know this, Dreamer. I would lay down my life for thee.”

  Chapter 8: Pony o’ the Wisp

  ZARANNA SHOOK HER muzzle at once. No. This madness had to stop. Not only had she invented an alter-ego for herself, now she was imagining a Dragon laying down its life for a horse, and apparently a rather ordinary one at that.

  She said, “What happens if I stop dreaming?”

  “I will not cease to exist,” the Dragon replied, as if he had anticipated this very question. “My existence is no function of your agitated imagination, nor is this world and its environs a shared mental construct unless you hold to an esoteric brand of philosophy which greatly amuses some of my Dragon-kin. Prove you exist. Prove you don’t. Prove that nothing exists. Reduce nothing itself to nothingness. Infinite worlds, parallel universes – they’re all terribly busy constructing a whole reeking trash-heap of nothing. You and I, we’ll agree to keep our paws and hooves firmly on the ground – which is a dreadfully droll thing to say in the middle of a squidgy swamp, wouldn’t you say?”

  Despite her fug of confusion, Zaranna found herself chuckling at the Dragon’s testy manner. His eye-stars sparkled in concert with her mirth. What swamp? What misery? Her injuries? They had vanished like the mists – well, unlike the sticky, never-moving mists, but as in a dream.

  The Dragon said, “Tell me this, little Dreamer. Have you come from Beyond? Are you of our world?”

  “Because this one is …”

  “Well it is yet is not, our scaly philosophers would argue,” snorted the Dragon, apparently losing track of his thoughts. Another paw appeared beneath his chin to scratch loose several anaemic bushes rooted near his eye, with grey-blue digits that appeared to have one extra knuckle, the artist in her noted carefully. “Don’t transfer your addled wits to me, you diminutive guttersnipe. What was the question? Spit it out.”

  “Where am I?”

  The great jaw cracked open in an unmistakable reptilian smirk. His fangs were as long as her horse’s legs, and they came in seven serried rows, like the teeth of a small Great White shark she had once discovered washed up on Noordhoek beach. “Slap in the middle of a quagmire, my fine equine, muddled and muddied in equal measure, standing pretty as you please upon the paw of a magnificent draconian elder of the Bluewing Clan. Supposedly extinct. But not, evidently, unless we retreat to philosophy once more. Which we shall not.”

  Zaranna stomped a hoof tetchily.

  Sulphurous smoke laced with that ubiquitous jasmine boiled thickly toward her on the wings of his laughter, but the Dragon politely raised his captive above the worst of the choking fumes. “Impatient imp, I was answering every detail of your question in the manner of the mighty masters of air and fire. Fine, let us hasten for the sake of your miniscule attention span. Equinox is the word you seek. A world of equinoctial storm, Equinox is named for the mighty, conflicting forces of magic which sweep across its surface, flinging all manner of detritus about – like you.”

  She blinked as a grey, metallic talon abruptly centred on her chest. “Hey! No horse kebabs. Listen here, Dragon whatever-your-name-is, I am not –”

  “Of course you are. Or did I imagine the Storm-Pegasi thundering across our land? A sign it was, a sign and a portent.”

  “Equinoctial storms don’t have anything to do with the time of Equinox,” Zaranna argued, trying to recall an article she had read on climatology.

  Equinox? Another world? It made some sort of mad sense, deep in her addled brain, which was more and more coming to resemble a deeply cracked, leaking jugful of lunacy.

  “Ignoramus,” snorted the Dragon. “Of course not. Shut the braying trap whilst I attempt to raise you out of your mire of disastrous ignorance. Equinoctial storms are undeniably equine in origin, as may be discerned from the name – equinoctial. Most things are. Equine species are the dominant life-form on the world of Equinox. Closely followed by us Dragons.”

  “I’m a Human,” she put in.

  “Human? How mind-numbingly disappointing,” said the Dragon.

  “Well, we Humans dominate our world, which is called Earth.”

  “Inconceivable.”

  Irritation ambushed Zaranna before she could think of a neutral reply. “We even domesticate horses. And ride them.”

  “Ride horses? Domesticate?” spluttered her host, spitting a large glob of what appeared to be molten lava away into the swamp. “Heresy! Blasphemy! Go wash your mouth out with lye this instant – filthy language. To imagine I was actually starting to like you. Unthinkable. Should’ve followed my first notion and enjoyed a nice snack. Would’ve saved us all a great deal of bother.”

  Well, how to answer that?
She settled for a flat glare. No, she was not dinner. No, she would not be cowed by his threats.

  The Dragon appeared to find her bravery rather humorous.

  He said, “Now you listen to me, you feeble-minded fillet. I mean, filly.” The claw tapped her chest firmly, backed up by that thicket of pristine white fangs which could have furnished a maximum security jail’s bars without shame. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay a Plains Horse and forget all about this disgusting Human drivel. Humans are the bottom of the heap. The dung beneath the hoof, the bolus of indigestible remnants spat onto a garbage pile. Humans are pongy, mud-grubbing parasites that suck all life and goodness out of our great Vales. They’re insects. Bugs. Less than bugs, they’re muck-raking flatworms!”

  “On Earth, Dragons are mythological creatures.”

  The Dragon said, “Mythological? Can’t you hear how stupid you sound? Ludicrous. That’s exactly what we want you to think.”

  “Honestly, I’m a Human!”

  “Look at yourself,” he snapped, with withering condescension. “Four hooves, mane, plumy tail, undeniably equine features. Actually, you’re reasonably attractive for a creature with no wings and a tail useful only for prettifying yourself.” The paw waved precipitously, making Zaranna stagger and fight to keep her balance. “Human indeed. Utter claptrap! Now you’ve ruined the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. Shattered. Poof!”

  His closing exclamation blasted swamp muck hundreds of feet away from his nostrils, at least, what Zaranna could see before the mists swirled in behind the Dragon’s heated blast. Truly heated? A dozen insults and irate responses crammed into her throat all at once, but she was more preoccupied with the nuances of the Dragon’s delivery than the content. ‘Hot air’ certainly described him. Irascible, biting humour, yet what underlay it all? More. Much more.