Weaveworld

There were countless characters to choose from, wandering in the Wild Woods; sooner or later every story had a scene played here. This was the place orphaned children were left to find either their deaths or their destinies: where virgins went in fear of wolves, and lovers in fear of their hearts. Here birds talked, and frogs aspired to the throne, and every grove had its pool and well, and every tree a door to the Netherworld.

What, amongst these, was she? The Maiden, of course. Since childhood she’d been the Maiden. She felt the Wild Woods grow more luminous at this thought, as though she’d ignited the air with it.

I’m the Maiden …

she murmured,

… and he’s the Dragon.

Oh yes. That was it; of course that was it.

The speed of her flight increased; the pages flipped over and over. And now ahead she saw a metallic brightness between the trees, and there the Great Worm was, its gleaming coils wrapped around the roots of a Noahic tree, its vast, flat-snouted head laid on a bed of blood-red poppies as it bided its terrible time.

Yet, perfect as it was, in every scaly detail, she saw Hobart there too. He was woven with the pattern of light and shade, and so – most oddly – was the word DRAGON. All three occupied the same space in her head: a living text of man, word and monster.

The Great Worm Hobart opened its one good eye. A broken arrow protruded from its twin, the work of some hero or other no doubt, who’d gone his tasselled and shining way in the belief that he’d dispatched the beast. It was not so easily destroyed. It lived still, its coils no less tremendous for the scars they bore, its glamour untarnished. And the living eye? It held enough malice for a tribe of dragons.

It saw her, and raised its head a little. Molten stone seethed between its lips, and murdered the poppies.

Her flight towards it faltered. She felt its glance pierce her. Her body began to tremble in response. She tumbled towards the dark earth like a swatted moth. The ground beneath her was strewn with words; or were they bones? Whichever, she fell amongst them, shards of nonsense thrown up in all directions by her flailing arms.

She got to her feet, and looked about her. The colonnades were empty in every direction: there was no hero to call upon, nor mother to take comfort with. She was alone with the Worm.

It raised its head a few feet higher, this minor motion causing a slow avalanche of coils.

It was a beautiful worm, there was no denying that, its iridescent scales glittering, the elegance of its malice enchanting. She felt, looking at it, that same combination of yearning and anxiety which she remembered so well from childhood. Its presence aroused her, there was no other word for it. As if in response to that confession, the Dragon roared. The sound it made was hot and low, seeming to begin in its bowels and winding down its length to break from between the countless needles of its teeth, a promise of greater heat to come.

All light had gone from between the trees. No birds sang or spoke, no animal, if any lived so close to the Dragon, dared move a whisker in the undergrowth. Even the bone-words and the poppies had disappeared, leaving these two elements, Maiden and Monster, to play out their legend.

‘It finishes here,’ Hobart said, with the Dragon’s laval tongue. Each syllable he shaped was a little fire, which cremated the specks of dust around her head. She was not afraid of all this; rather, exhilarated. She had only ever been an observer of these rites; at last she was a performer.

‘Have you nothing more to tell me?’ the Dragon demanded, spitting the words from between its serried teeth. ‘No blessings? No explanations?’

‘Nothing,’ she said defiantly. What was the purpose of talk, when they were so perfectly transparent to each other? They knew who they were, didn’t they?; knew what they meant to one another. In the final confrontation of any great tale dialogue was redundant. With nothing left to say, only action remained: a murder or a marriage.

‘Very well,’ said the Dragon, and it moved towards her, drawing its length over the wasteland between them with vestigial forelegs.

He means to kill me, she thought; I have to act quickly. What did the Maiden do to protect herself in such circumstances as this? Did she flee, or try to sing the beast to sleep?

The Dragon was towering over her now. But it didn’t attack. Instead it threw back its head, exposing the pale, tender flesh of its throat.

‘Please be quick,’ it growled.

She was bewildered by this.

‘Be quick?’ she said.

‘Kill me and be done,’ it instructed her.

Though her mind didn’t fully comprehend this volte face, the body she occupied did. She felt it changing in response to the invitation; felt a new ripeness in it. She’d thought to live in this world as an innocent; but that she couldn’t be. She was a grown woman; a woman who’d changed in the last several months, sloughed off years of dead assumptions; found magic inside herself; suffered loss. The role of Maiden - all milk and soft sighs - didn’t fit.

Hobart knew that better than she. He hadn’t come into these pages as a child, but as the man he was, and he’d found a role here that suited his most secret and forbidden dreams. This was no place for pretence. She was not the virgin, he was not the devouring worm. He, in his private imaginings, was power besieged, and seduced, and finally – painfully – martyred. That was why the Dragon before her raised its milky throat.

Kill me and be done, he said, lowering his head a little to look at her. In his surviving eye she saw for the first time how wounded he was by his obsession with her; how he’d come to be in thrall to her, sniffing after her like a lost dog, hating her more with every day that passed for the power she had over him.

In the other reality - in the room from which they’d stepped, which was in turn hidden in a larger Kingdom (worlds within worlds) he would be brutal with her. Given the chance he’d kill her for fear of the truth he could only admit in the sacred grove of his dreams. But here there was no story to tell except the true one. That was why he raised his palpitating throat, and fluttered his heavily lidded eye. He was the virgin, frightened and alone, ready to die rather than sacrifice his tattered virtue.

And what did that make her? The beast, of course. She was the beast.

No sooner thought than felt.

She sensed her body growing larger, and larger, and larger still. Her blood-stream ran colder than a shark’s. A furnace flared up in her belly.

In front of her Hobart was shrinking. The dragon-skin fell away from him in silky folds, and he was revealed, naked and white: a human male, covered in wounds. A chaste knight at the end of a weary road, bereft of strength or certitude.

She had claimed the skin he’d lost; she felt it solidify around her, its armour glittering. The size of her body was a joy to her. She exulted in the way it felt to be so dangerous and so impossible. This was how she truly dreamt of herself; this was the real Suzanna. She was a Dragon.

With that lesson learned, what was she to do? Finish the story as the man before her wished? Burn him? Swallow him?

Looking down at his insipidity from her rearing height, smelling the dirt off him, the sweat off him – she could easily find it in her heart to do her Dragon’s duty, and devour. It would be easy.

She moved towards him, her shadow engulfing him. He was weeping, and smiling up at her with gratitude. She opened her vast jaws. Her breath singed his hair. She would cook him and swallow him in one swift motion. But she was not quick enough. As she was about to devour him she was distracted by a voice nearby. Was there somebody else in the grove? The sounds certainly belonged in these pages. They were far from human, though there were words attempting to surface through the barking and grunting. Pig; dog; man: a combination of all three, and all panicking.

The Knight Hobart opened his eyes, and there was something new in them, something besides tears and fatigue. He too had heard the voices; and hearing them, he was reminded of the place that lay beyond these Wild Woods.