The Dragon-Charmer. Jan Siegel

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       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?’ СКАЧАТЬ