Jan Siegel - The Dragon Charmer

That night, she dreamed she was back in the city. It was not the first such dream: she had had many in the weeks since she left, some blurred, beyond the reach of memory, some clearer; but this was the most painfully vivid. She was standing on the mountainside wrapped in the warm southern dusk, in a blue garden musky with the ghosts of daytime flower scents. Here were the villas and palaces of the aristocracy, set among their terraced lawns and well-watered shrubberies. There was a house nearby: she could see the golden arch of door or window floating somewhere behind a filigree of netted stems. Its light drew her; and then she was close by, staring inside.

There were three people in the room: a woman, a young man, and a girl. They were sitting close together, deep in talk. She knew them allshe knew them well, so well that it hurt to look at themthe youth with his averted profile, just as he had appeared the first time she saw him properly, and the woman with silver glints in her long hair, though she was not very old, and the girl with her back to the window. Herself. She wore the veil she had been given on the last day, hiding her cropped head, but the colors and patterns that had always seemed so dim and elusive poured down her back like some inscrutable liquid script, tinted in rainbows. It had the power of protection, she had been told. Her unspecified anguish crystallized into the horror of imminent doom; she saw herself marked out by the veil, designated for a future in which the others had no part. She tried to enter through the glassless window, but an invisible barrier held her back; she cried outTake it off! Take off the veil!but her voice made no sound. The whorls and sigils of the design detached themselves from the material and drifted toward her, swirling together into a maelstrom, and she was rushing into it, sucked down and down into deep water.

And now the blue that engulfed her was the ultramarine of an undersea world. Great weeds arose in front of her, billowing like curtains in the currents of the wide ocean. They divided, and she passed through into a coral kingdom. But beyond the branching fans of white and scarlet and the groping tentacles of hungry flowerets she saw isolated pillars, roofless walls, broken towers. She floated over gaping rooms where tiny fish played at hide-and-seek with larger predators, and the spotted eel and giant octopus laired in cellar and well shaft. And ahead, in the shallows, the sun turned the water all to golden green, and she made out the gleaming spire of a minaret, the curve of a fractured dome. Then at last she found what she knew she had been seeking. He lay in a dim hollow beyond the reach of the sun, and stones weighted the rags of his clothing, and his dark hair moved like filmy weed in the current, and white shells covered his eyes. She lifted the stones that pinned him down, and removed the white shells, and kissed his cold, cold lipsa witchs kiss, to break the spelland his eyes opened, and gazed at her. The water receded like waves from a beach, and he was lying on an apricot shore under a sky of bronze, and his arms were reaching for her

The dream faded toward awakening, and, as always, there was a moment in between, a moment of unknowing, when the past lingered and the present was void, a waking to hope and the brightness of a new day. Then realization returned, and all that she had gained, and all that she had lost, rushed over her in a flood of suffering reborn, so she thought her spirit was too frail a thing to endure so much pain. And it was the same every day, every waking. She remembered that it was her birthday, her seventeenth. Tomorrow she would return to London, to school, to study, to the slow inexorable unrolling of her predictable life. She was a diligent student: she would take exams and go to university and succeed in a suitable career. And one day perhaps she would marry, because that was what you did, and have children, and live to be forty, fifty, ninety, until, unimaginable though it seemed, she was old and tired, and the dream came from which there was no awakening. A life sentence. Maybe eventually the acuteness of her loss would dull to an ache, and the routine of her daily existence would numb her feelings and deaden her heart; but in the morning of her youth she knew that this moment, this emptiness was relentless and forever. She had been told she had the Gift, setting her apart from other mortals that if she willed it she might live ageless and longbut that fantasy had gone with the city, if indeed it had ever been real. And why should she wish to lengthen the time of her suffering?