Here Be Dragons

I wrote this story 20 years ago, when I was young and the memories were fresh. Shiv has spoken of magic-realism. There is some truth in this; the supernal is everywhere, and all things possess a surreal nature which transcends the mundane. This is a very long post, and if I apologise for it, it is because it might not be good enough. But it's mine. I wrote it in 1987 and it was first published in Tesseract, the Science Fiction Association (Singapore) magazine, 1st Quarter 1991. This version is almost completely free of edits. Almost.

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I:

Al, as usual, was a bronze dragon: intelligent, romantic but a little cynical, satisfied with the quality of his life. We sat in a pizza restaurant somewhere along Bukit Timah Road with wine and pasta before us, and journeys behind us. We spoke of futures, as mythical figures often do. I was trying my hardest to be a sorcerer: mysterious but unsure, skilled but unwise. I looked sidelong at him, trying to read his careful expression.

"When you're out of national service, what will you do?"

"Become a geologist," he replied. "I've been reading this book on the tropical rain-forest.

"What's that got to do with geology?"

"Nothing, really. Why?"

I sighed. A dragon should know better, was what I thought; although, of course, you shouldn't say such things to them. This one was a friend, though. I waited for the explanation.

He continued, as if unveiling a surprise, "Really, I'm interested in plate tectonics." He paused for a while, looked at me expectantly. I remained, inscrutably, a sorcerer.

"Continental drift, earthquakes, that sort of thing." Musingly, he said, mostly to himself, "The rain-forest book had some very good photographs in it; I would have bought it, but it was rather expensive."

Dragons are like that - they window-shop a lot. What they do buy, they hoard. Bronze dragons have an entertaining little quirk: unlike most other dragons, they don't believe so much in possessing things. Intellectual property is more their sort of stuff. When looking at grimoires or enchiridia, if the price asked is too great, they'll haunt the book, but not buy it unless they must. They'd rather visit it respectfully from time to time, memorizing it in little bits. The reason dragons keep the company of sorcerers is that they find it convenient to borrow books from them. And why do sorcerers keep the company of dragons? Ah, because they make marvellously entertaining companions, of course.

The conversation faded into the background. It went on while the rain came outside, borne by the thin wind and the storm. Amber light glinted through the sharp and rainy night on the windowpanes. I was thinking of dragons. Maybe, dragons were thinking of me. I'd known lots of them. It's always useful for a magician to be able to understand and speak to dragons.

Mentally, a review.

My friend Shen, a silver dragon: without certain purpose though of great rational intelligence, a good friend but subject to temperamental instability, lethal when roused. Like most of his kind, he excelled at games of skill and reason. He'd been one of our best chess-players until he'd gone seeking wisdom elsewhere: the arts of healing, in the English midlands. Shen still writes with great conviction mixed with many questions on the nature of things.

Sean, on the other hand, is a red dragon, one of a bright and savage race. He's got typical red traits: a tendency towards violent solutions and fiery resolutions, gracefully aesthetic artistic abilities, extraordinary strength and endurance. The red dragon is a beast of a thousand contradictions. This fellow plays the piano, behaves impeccably in unfamiliar company. He's also been known to run after people, knife in hand.

Al's saying something about Sean.

"... so I gave him a lift to this girl's house. He said she had reddish hair, which he thought was rather exotic. I misheard him: I thought he'd said 'erotic'."

Indeed, Sean's a red, even down to his colour sensitivity.

The bronze dragon looks curiously at me. "Did you say something?"

I speak almost by reflex. "Two days ago, I met a female unicorn. I asked her to marry me, and she told me to wait five years, and she'd consider it then. It's hard to snare a unicorn, even if you are a virgin."

Al snorts. He's definitely got a streak of the horse dragon in him: a passive, almost docile, disregard for authority. He's not the rapacious sort of dragon, stocking up on bright gems and fair maidens. Several pretty girls have caught his eye, but only one has caught his heart. He's the sort who will wait, regardless of how many graduate and remain unmarried.

Likewise, Shen. The heart of the silver dragon is a noble one; once lit by a spark of idealism, its flame will not die. They mate for life, and so, the other must be perfect in the dragon's eyes. The friendship of a silver is legendary: a flood would not quench it. And I, a sorcerer, only wonder that I have known such a one.

The wine dwindles in the candlelight, as if it fuels those distant flames. We let it flow away untapped, although it was within our talents to have taken that magic for our use. I smile reflectively. Perhaps I should've been a dragon too, forever chasing after a precious pearl and never knowing its true beauty for my own. A sea-dragon, then, glinting copper-gold on deep armour forged of greenness and of light? She'd not have cared, no, not for dragon, not for the sorcerer within, not for the man in sorcerer's guise. She'd have wanted to know it all, mercilessly all, exceedingly well. There's a formula to these things, and most sorcerers know it: when a sorcerer is no longer inscrutable, he is no more a magician.

"What shall we do after this?" he asks, as dinner draws to a close. (Time has passed. The mind hides between times; it hides in the bones of things, iron in tall buildings, granite in my country's spine, our own bones. The underlying reality is mightier than the obvious. It is a larger, more complete world.)

Time kept passing by for a while. We were passengers waiting for an altogether different train, and it was a sluggish river full of fish and winter ice. As the wine disappeared, along with the pasta, I cast a line into the water. "Whatever. The vehicle is yours; let it carry what it will, to wherever it will go."

The river rolled on, serene. It was too lazy to care.

I found myself outside, on the main road with Al. The rain had tapered off to a thin, whispering drizzle. The old white chariot, a driving-instructor's oldest vehicle it seemed, was waiting as always, and it sighed with chill and impatience. A mellow knocking rose about us as Al ignited the flame within, and as its sweet breath caught fire, we fell away into the outer ring. The world receded, a pebble in the pond.

The night was cold, and dry despite the rain. It was as if the world were a vast eternal sponge, absorbing softly all the waters of the upper air. Al said to me, not really questioning, "You've been thinking about dragons again?"

"Yes," I answered, "And I've decided you're a bronze."

He kept his hands on the wheel, mulling it over. Then, "Let's go visit Pat," he said, chuckling. "She won't mind entertaining a dragon, although his wizardly friend may be a matter for doubt."

I remained inscrutable. My profession would serve me well for a while yet, I knew. In the darkness, under deep shadow, the sorcerer's heart sang like an iron bell, and stopped.


II:

Pat. A fire rises, yellow, normal, friendly, an enemy, a tree, a diamond. As Amergin, bard of bards, said, I have been many things. Yet, Pat has been nothing save whatever she has wanted to be, and occasionally, I look for her, hoping to find my place.

Tonight, the night melts in parts. Like a womb, a shaft of light, a chariot of flame, Al's old nag carries the darkness before her. Darkness looming, blooming. Darkness. Amber light growing, glowing. Amber fading. Darkness comes again. Every few moments, each time the cycles come and go, the same cycles. How many revolutions per minute, of death and rebirth? The chariot lunges on, forever chasing its lost horses, the golden destriers of the sun.

We talk to Pat because it is convenient, and if not, we don't.

I am the Magician, I told myself once, juggler of the metaphysical, he who reassures others of their innocence. I might have been wrong. I might be the Sun, triumphant always, yet ever constrained to repeat the cycle of his life over the endless circles of the world.

In the library of the heart, I strain the metaphor, and nothing much is left behind. Pat is a Wheel of Fortune, Chance, the smallest of God's fingers. There too, I was nearly wrong: I thought of her as Temperance once. But Temperance, her dreams are less troubled, and her blessings more comfortable.

Looking out of the left window, the National Junior College sits easily, like a colony of petrified monks after vespers, more befuddled than sinister. Al says, "Have you read anything interesting recently?"

The sorcerer looks at the inquisitive dragon. Indeed he has, he thinks. He has read The White Goddess, by that flawed but brilliant master, Robert Graves. The sorcerer parts his lips; I speak.

" 'I was with my Lord in the highest sphere / On the fall of Lucifer into the depths of Hell, / I have borne a banner before Alexander; / I know the names of the stars from North to South...' and it goes on, Al; Graves works a new tapestry from Taliesin the bard, and you might be interested. I'll lend the book to you some day."

Gentle smoke curls from the bronze nostrils. The dragon is appeased. Absent-mindedly, he sweeps past Watten Estate, leaving cold grey smoke scudding like baby fog behind him. "Graves, hmm? He wrote some interesting poetry, but I preferred Frost."

A creature of refinement and culture, though hard as nails. I smile. Hard as frost, perhaps. Idly, my thoughts uncurl, stand up, and wander. They too have miles to go before they sleep, and I, I have promises to keep.

Yesterday, as always, I was in the Army. Today, as always, I am a sorcerer, a power of music and of verse. It is hard, and it gets worse. The Army, by the nature of the creature, is cautious about creativity. Everything must be tested, evaluated, weighed and metered before tentative acceptance, careful adoption, before the gods who rule in Tanglin (now, no more even there!) smile and give their blessings. Thirty months, it has been, my life like a fish in a closed pond.

Now? 'They shall seek me, but they shall not find me. They shall call for me, but I shall not answer them.' For (almost) a thousand nights and one night, we dream of the Army, we dream of the jolly green giant, the titanic defender, the career commanding respect. Some others dream of Spartans at a pass. The Army watered us, and in the darkest night, like mandrakes, we grew. Another cycle thus unfolds.

This night was a dark night not too long ago. In it, Al was saying, "How many more days do you have?" and I was replying, as if by conditioned reflex, "Four hundred and thirteen." I had been a defender of men for five hundred days. Although we had counted our days with such care, our dreams were still intact, the dreams of a sorcerer and his friend, the dragon.

Dreaming is a human thing. Along with it comes Myth, the tenuous condensation of Dream, like a cloud of hypnotic vapours. The first among the myths is Creation. The libraries of Man are filled with remnants of failed and partially-succeeding creation myths: Ginnungagap and the Ice-Cow, Ouranos and Gaia, the Five Universes, the World as Illusion, the First Principle, Ea, Nun, Varuna, and all their successors.

The Road was never this long! The night is endless, with lamps lighting our way a short while before and after, but never all the way to the end or back to the beginning. Indeed, some lights have been disconnected, and most travellers don't even miss them when they're gone. If each light were a deity, a pantheon, an idea, or a philosophy, it's almost as if many of them have been lost through their own inadequacy, and no-one wants them back because no-one needs them. How sad! How... necessary.

The bronze dragon mutters. Al says, "There's been an accident ahead. We'll have to turn around and enter the Court from the other side. I hope you know the way."

This is simple. I nod, assenting - wizards are used to the other side, the hidden ways. Al brakes, breaks the golden river, creates a tributary. White in the golden light, we turn towards the distance and are gone, pale in the many shadows under the wide trees.

The Dream takes worldly responsibility away from the Dreamer. A true Dreamer has only the responsibilities given by the Dream. The Dream is all-inspiring, all-devouring, all-powerful, like an emanation of the Most High, although not all are such. It inhabits, indwells the Dreamer utterly, and the Dreamer becomes priest, warlock, champion of his Dream, the Dream, the only Dreamt. There are many types of dream, but for each of us, normally only one Dream. Each Dream is light to its Dreamer, but most of us are trapped in the lighting.

Al laughs to himself, the dragon like a kingfisher flashing over a green lake. I look questioningly at him. He sees this, and replies to the unspoken, "You know, you were once so spellbound by that girl that everyone knew it. One night, I was speaking with Sean, and he said you spent an entire Applied Maths lecture drawing hearts with her name in each of them. Were you really so much in love with Pat?"

The Dream gets most of us at one time or another; in my case, while idling my way through Numeromancy 102 classes. The magician's only foe is the Dream of Woman, his only failing the Dream of Power; yet, his only goal should be the True Dream, and that is, while hard for all men, harder for him.

"I suppose I was. She is such a nice person to be with, even now. There were others, you know, who were just as enamoured."
The bronze dragon risks an equine snicker, to which the sorcerer can only raise a mildly embarrassed eyebrow. The night falls away, and three years ago, it falls into day, a lazy Wednesday, in the leaf-light dappled heaven-haven of the College of Wyverns.


III:

The college is a grey lichen-white, resembles a rectangular eggshell, made into a dwelling from wood and glass and stone and people. There are many people. All of them have been hatched, it seems, from the same egg, for their plumage is mostly identical. There is also a breeze.

Bronze-green and ash-brown, undernourished tenacious trees stand apart from the building. A girl, one among many others, walks from the foyer. My friend Burn says, "That's a classmate."

I turn to look. History, now, has poured its ocean over the facts, and some have dissolved. Of them all, very few, stubborn rocks in the lashing salt-spray, have retained their shape. She was Pat. There was something pleasant about her, which I liked. I don't know what it was. I don't know where she is. The pages have turned, the trapdoor has closed.

Even the college has changed now, or will have once been changed, or twice. We must avoid being perfectly tense. Things change, and the tense is seldom immutable.

Al and I are in his old vehicle. Burn and I are out on the bleachers, and Burn tells me about his class, three years ago. Al and I walk purposefully up the brick path, a deep purple night wheeling above us, hunter-starred. Burn and I walk leisurely across the asphalt, on a warm and dusty day; the sky is a pale half-electrified blue.

The lift arrives, we enter, and it rises. The trapdoor falls away. Three years ago, Burn says, "This is Pat." Three years ago: "Hello, I'm Alex." She is a strange mixture of embarrassed and pragmatic. I open the door, look into the house, and find no-one really at home, although signs of habitation are evident.

Three years later, I have been lifted up, and the bronze dragon with me. We stand on level ground, overlooking the city of a million souls, the amber stars, the grim greening of the night. I am a very young man, but feel a very old sorcerer. The bluish-grey smoke-scented wind twists into a zero and cancels out, while its careworn rain renews the shadow of the heart. The entrance is inviting, a simple metal grille outside an unornamented wood door. The plain figures of the apartment number remind me of her. I grasp Al's shoulder, hear a dragon's exhalation of surprise.

As we leave, nothing has seemingly changed, but I am different. By rejecting one thing forever, I have become more than I was before, but less than a magician. I will become a wanderer. Al is silent all the way to the waiting car.

In my several years of exploration, I made many friends. Literally, you understand; I made them from words and craft and poetry - their sinews were prose and their flesh was story. None of them had 'real' names - after all, these days, which of all the people have real names anymore ?

Well, there are a few. Soldiers whose names are 'known only to God', they rest as reminders of war, as our guilt-price. These are the Unknown Soldiers of a score of nations, the only ones with true names; and those, hidden by gunshots and smoke, poison gas and blood-smears.

My unknown soldiers were the crystals of my saturated imagination. As the heat of my age diminished, they were forced out, through the filtering paper of my writing, through the careful tubing of my pens. They had names (oh, all so false, and yet so true to me) like Tom Aquine and Maradaine Chase. They lived the lives I could not lead, the lives I dreamt.

Al asks, "Where to, now?"

He turns a restless eye on me, sees I am on the edge of nothing once again, asks carefully, "And what are you thinking about, then? You still thinking about Pat?"

"No, not Pat; she's out tonight, I've only just remembered. I was thinking of those who 'saved the sum of things for pay'. Do you remember all those characters we wrote about in the bad old days? I think they're all dead now; wouldn't write about them these days at all, now that so much time has passed. Except to make a bit of money, perhaps."

The bronze dragon chuckles, like the sucking of a summer river past winding banks. "You, at least have an art you can prostitute. I shall be content with photography, taking private photographs of the last hidden places of the world."

And that's the way of memories. We cultivate them until the fateful day in which they take on lives of their own and colour the processes of our reason (writers who can only write about one set of characters, actors who will always be known for only one role...). Then, we have no more need of them and must destroy them utterly.

Somewhere in time, we move out into the roaring river of light which is the Road at night. The track of each hurtling headlight-bearer burns an image on the retina of each eye. 'I knew a girl, and she went away / And the rain came down the face of my day.' Memories inhabit us, inhibit us. They are lessons we have learnt, whether for good or for ill. They burn their tracks into the screens of our minds. To learn some things properly, we must forget everything else, which looks like a waste.

Down in the dark brightness of this autumnal day, Al's heading home. I go with him, for the security of his home is a minor, but very marvellous thing. It's a very short trip from the Court to the Garden. The time-and-space bending properties of an old flame which still carries much weight must still be in effect, for the journey is short, and the warm house far nearer than it really is.

Why dragons? Why should I, failed magician, keep the dream of a lost race forever? It's like this: once upon a time, there was a dragon coiled on the hill near Al's house. It was another time, a summer day, and the predominant scents were dry grass and haze. I walked up the hill, wondering, and came upon him. The poor old thing, he was ancient but powerless, huge but decrepit, the sorry ruin of a mighty hunter.

I spoke to it; it winked sightless eyes at me and said, "Soon, the Village will be all commerce, and no one will dream the dragon-dream anymore. I will be less and less, your people more and more. One day, a little boy will weep for loss, and not know why, because there will be no more dragons, and no memory of them."

It went back to sleep - perhaps, forever. The sun set behind its apartment-crowned ears, and its placid breath was dilute in the fires of the burning leaves. There I stood, and there promised: always, dragons. No little boys crying. No worlds lost.
I seal the portal, but it will not hold for me, no longer magician. My hands find edges, but are blind, will not grasp the whole, too late. Somewhere, we have come home, to love and family comforts. Here, the trapdoor opens on infinity.


IV:

We sit in the patio, with carefully-distilled coffee and the hospitality of shortest notice. Out there, the wind giggles, pirouetting through palm and vast canopy. Inside, Al and I sit, muse, caffeinate and reminisce. We talk rubbish. We, together, dream. And the product is the old world, lost forever except by the seldom and infrequent windowing of this world through to that.

High school days, another summer, the season of Clavell's Shogun. Al sees, retrospectively, says, "Remember Sean's act, his famous mock suicide in courtly Japanese tradition? A broom for a sword, and fake poetry!"

How could we forget? Sean looked funny, there on his knees atop the teacher's table. A broken broomstick, ancient chairs in formidable array, and apart from them but in the same time, an old piano, a dusty laboratory full of apprentice glassblowers, a broken window. They stick in the corners of the mind, like cobwebs.

Let them stay. They do not hurt or hinder anyone. They were never harbingers of doom, but the slow sedimentation of the wind, the tide, the flow of years. They are a benign past, made desolate by ceaseless passages.

In that background, a desk slams shut, and a German submarine from the Second World War sneaks through the trapdoor. At its helm, five of us, captain and crew. We order the torpedoing of an enemy ship, we are sonar, hull, and tired submariners all at once. There are many other times within that time, and the spaces are infinite as well. There are no horizons, and our imaginations swim wide.

Then, we have grown, and the walls of the cup appear, leaving us like coffee-sodden ants within. Confinees of a new confine, most of us will drown somewhere here. In the present, as I reply to Al over coffee and cookies, many of that company have already gone, swept aside and down, into the abyss or the wasteland, and the roses have all died.

"What was it between Pat and you, back in college?" Al asks. He is genuinely curious, although not very much so.

There is a book of old roses, locked up in old rooms. In it, you may find almost every variety of beauty, any hue, any form, any texture. All around, the smell of antique wood, books, leather; everywhere, the rich and heavy aura of age upon age piled deep, like a carpet. I come here once in a while to visit old roses, to live apart from stainless steel and white cement.

Looking back, it is hard to decide whether I ever really loved them; harder still to know if ever they loved me. Of all things, one thing is sure: when a rose blooms in the watching hand, the heart might burst with joy.

In the cool darkness of the memory's mausoleum, my heart grows large, my body too small for its happiness. Here in the dusk, scribbled in the dust, are some haiku. One reads: 'One slim girl smiles here / Bright eyes burn and walk away / I am happy now'.

These lines are the potent image made into words, life and beauty molten in the forge, shaped in the cylinder of the heart. Even on the greyest of days, the cadences are not robbed of their power; each wise bright thought - though made less wise, less bright by mortal pen and vision - is still a fragment of the song.

I have learnt, I tell Al, that one love can foster many other friendships. The dragon nods, waits for me to continue.

"Love is the excelling way, the only one through the wilderness of the human heart," I say aloud. The coffee's aroma is still in the back of my nose.

Al looks at me with half-amusement. "You should know."

Once again, conversation fades into a buzz as the lower air unfolds around me. I feel tomorrow in my hand, an unknown weapon. It's time to get up. Ahead of me, the half-minute which is the wall of sleep looms. Struggling, I climb over it, land on the floor. I am awake. No. I am awake! No! I place feet carefully on their way to the bathroom. Noooooo... oh, very well then, have it your way. I am awake.

Thinking these thoughts in one year, in love with the last (and best) of all my roses, is hard. Three years ago, another year, and in love elsewise with an older rose, I hurt in my innermost parts. The only thing which firms the fastnesses of my life is the awareness I feel of God. In my mind, ideas of God unfurl, flutter like defiant banners. Bright love, word of creation made flesh, whose Spirit roars like a mighty wind among the towers of my thought - may this day be Yours, I say, brushing my teeth, washing my face.

In the corner of the mind's eye, December will be coming soon. We can expect showers in several areas in the mornings and in the late afternoons (are they always late?), and perhaps at night... and back in time, Al says, "Go on; what exactly did Pat say to you?"

Long ago, in the first quarter of 1984, we spoke for the third time. Her voice was soft. Her eyes were big, intelligent, careful and shy. She was gently dark, slim, and walked without care.

There was something I had to tell her. My heart beat in tympanic reverberation. It was grey and cool and quiet, for the rains had come and gone. I said all I had to say to her, quietly, distantly. My voice returned to me like the singing of a lone whale in the ocean. Of what had happened that day, I told no one.

Somewhere, in the deeps, my botanical brother whispers, "Old roses are the best." I agree. Before Pat, there were others; after her, others again. One thing differences them, makes their stories different, though: after Pat, my poetry would not be the same again.

The bronze dragon snorts, crunches chocolate chips. He chews, swallows, drinks, asks, "And that was how it all began? I would've thought something more dramatic might have happened, seeing your subsequent behaviour. I'm sure you're not telling me everything, O necromantic one!"

I'm sure I have most definitely not told him everything. I am also entirely sure of not being a necromancer at all. I continue. I tell him of the days which came after. He makes few interruptions, and I come eventually to December, and the painful wisdom of the dying year.

The coffee has gone, and the story ends, its last notes trailing away into despair, and a heart as heavy as the sea. Softly, the dragon's voice whispers, "We thought it was a pity too, you know. Nevertheless, it's better for you this way. Your life is different from hers. You are too... unalike. Now that all that is over, you're friends again, and what could be better?"

Indeed, not much could be better. I am happy, I am still in love, which is 'a great way to be', as Pik the brass dragon says.

Someday, I shall end my wanderings, join my princess, and be free... and old roses will bloom.

Ω