Dragons in the Earth Page 7

  I swept the floor there, but the floor belonged to a temple. The gods in it were as squat and curly-haired as I was, with enormous round eyes. If they were male they had long braided beards; the females, the goddesses, were round-breasted and wide-hipped, and they didn’t bow to anything, even the gods who shared their temple.

  The waking part of me had to wax academic and start attaching names to things. Mesopotamia. Sumer? Akkad? It didn’t feel exactly right for what I’d ever read or seen, but what did we really know? All we had were bits and pieces dug up out of the dirt.

  It must be ancient, but it was a present I was living in, a series of moments that added up to now. I took care of the gods because someone had to. I kept their temple clean and their offerings fresh, and I sang the rites of morning and evening and the hours in between.

  There were other priests in the temple. The city was full of people. If I stopped to listen, I could hear oxen lowing and donkeys braying and humans arguing.

  At the same time, I was all alone in a singing quiet. The gods came and went, tasting their offerings and listening to the hymns. The sound fed them as much as the food did, and the smoke of a sacrifice made them drunk for days.

  They couldn’t see me unless I let them. I watched them in their dance. There were so many and they looked so much alike that it took me a while to tell them apart.

  In my dream I knew the names of a hundred gods. I knew their lives and their histories, their powers and vulnerabilities. I knew what made them dangerous, and I knew how to keep them from being a danger to the people in my city.

  Not all the gods meant well. Some could be persuaded to give us things we needed, or help us when plague blew through or a famine threatened. Most didn’t care, or were actively determined to blast us, either because we’d done something to offend them, or because it entertained them to watch us suffer.

  One of my predecessors had come to an arrangement with one of the circles of goddesses. They were sisters, or close enough: relatives, in the way gods could be related. We kept them fed with rituals and offerings, and they kept the rest from doing serious damage.

  The Sisters had a brother, or maybe a husband, or a sort of bodyguard; but there was also the sense that they guarded him. It was complicated. While they tended to stay around the city, protecting it, he came and went.

  They were like stars, my dream said, and he was the moon. Sometimes they orbited him, and sometimes he circled around them. It wasn’t exactly a scientific cosmology, but since it was all a metaphor, it didn’t really matter.

  He’d been away for a while when the dream started. The city was peaceful; the Sisters blessed it, and the people, being human, were becoming complacent. They were shorting some of the offerings, not much, a loaf here or a garland there, but it added up. The priests were mumbling through the short prayers and skipping the longer ones. It didn’t matter, they said. The gods would take whatever we gave; they wouldn’t notice the finer details.

  Maybe they wouldn’t, and maybe they didn’t, but the rites were designed to concentrate the mind, and when they were done properly, they made the Sisters stronger. Slacking off, feeding too little and neglecting the proper forms, made them weak.

  If there’s anything that tempts a god, it’s weakness. Divinity, like entropy, goes for the gaps in the defenses, and does its best to eat them away.

  She came out of the dark behind the stars. The gods mostly took human form, maybe out of courtesy, maybe because it amused them. She wouldn’t stoop to it.

  The snake-lion dragon was a sweet little kitten next to this one. She was onyx and lapis lazuli and flashes of gold. Her wings spanned the sky.

  She was hungry. She’d been wandering far, far, where the fields had all gone barren, and the stars were dim and far apart. When she left, the earth was still a half-molten rock spinning around a young sun. This blue-white ball, rich with water and life, made her keen with eagerness.

  The gods fluttered like moths around a destroying flame. Only the oldest remembered her at all, and the younger ones had their first sight of a power that was greater than they were. They scattered in terror.

  All but a few. The Sisters foremost, and the one they’d been protecting, streaking like a meteor past the moon.

  He was tiny beside the Dragon, a short and sturdy man with curly black hair and an exuberant beard, and wings of lapis and silver. He looked up at her and laughed. “Sister! You’ve grown.”

  Well, I thought, so had he, or the earth had shrunk. It tucked itself under one of his wings.

  He nudged it ever so gently inside the circle of the Sisters. They closed tight around it.

  The Dragon reared back. I thought she might flame them all, but she spoke instead. “Little brother, you’ve grown small. I could swallow you in a bite, and this morsel with it.”

  “If we’re that tiny,” he said, “why do you even trouble? Aren’t there stars enough to feed on?”

  “Stars are as common as sand,” she said, “and taste like it, too. And this smells so sweet.”

  “It’s not for you,” he said.

  She opened her jaws wide enough to swallow the sun. Her brother planted his fists on his hips and tilted his head and showed her his strong white teeth. “Go away. Find something else to gnaw on.”

  “But,” she said, “I want this.”

  “You can’t have it,” he said.

  Without any warning at all, she lunged.

  He wasn’t there.

  The stars blurred. He loomed against them. He was as big as she was, and he was laughing, but I could feel his anger like a long, deep burn under my skin.

  She spawned monsters. He killed them all. She attacked him herself, and he killed her, too, with a poisoned arrow that brought her down in ruin.

  In between one breath and the next, I was awake. It was dark. The house was cold and still. The cats had abandoned me.

  The dream was as clear in my head as if I’d lived it. I was still living it, even though I knew I was no longer asleep.

  I saw the winged god tear the Dragon limb from limb and scatter her across the heavens. I saw how the Sisters warded the earth, and their brother built walls of star-stuff around it. And I saw the Dragon regenerate herself, gather her parts together one by one in secret, and then when she had them all, crawl away to finish healing. When her wings would carry her again, she flew as far as she could, to the very end of things, and brooded in the absolute darkness.

  The old priests hadn’t expected her to come back, I thought while I lay in my warm bed, knowing I had to get up in the dark cold morning and feed horses. They thought she was destroyed. I knew, all the way down to the rivers of water and energy that ran under the earth, that they were wrong.

  Bel screamed down in the barn, and Ricky banged on his stall bars, radiating hunger so strong it made my stomach growl.

  I staggered up and pulled my clothes on and went to do my job.

  12

  In the bright winter daylight, logic tried to take over. Dragons are real—I knew that; they were everywhere, sleeping in the earth, swimming in the oceans, dancing in the air. That Dragon, the mother of monsters, was long and forever gone, if she had ever existed at all. The gods I’d seen in the dream hadn’t lasted much longer. They’d fallen off the cultural radar, died or been assimilated into newer divinities.

  It was all symbolic anyway, wasn’t it? Ancient male power subdued primordial female power. Patriarchy ensued.

  It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever is. I turned six mares of unknown lineage out in the pasture that morning, and if I slanted my eyes just right, I could almost see which mare corresponded to which goddess.

  As for the stallion . . .

  He was a horse. An exceptionally handsome one, with exceptional presence, but I couldn’t find anything in or around him that said he’d been a Mesopotamian deity. It was all metaphorical. Someone or some entity—government, corporation, whatever—wanted him and his mares. Rare breed, after all. Probably worth a great
deal of money. My brain being what it was, I’d turned it into a variorum version of the Enuma Elish.

  But I couldn’t believe it was that simple, either. The thing that had been hunting, the protections we’d felt compelled to put up—those weren’t normal or ordinary.

  We had Thanksgiving at the Women’s Side, a tradition that had been going on since before I moved to Tucson. Caro could have simply catered it, but we all loved potluck: the crazy variety and the pleasant surprises. I brought my famous cheesecake, and squeezed it in among the rest on the communal dessert table.

  All the regulars were there this year with their partners and kids and assorted friends and relations, plus a few new recruits. This was as close to a tribe as I had. They were horse people and woo people and people from the university, most of whom were two or more of the above.

  I retreated to the patio, well along in the proceedings, with a fresh latte and a plate with a bite of everything on the dessert table. A few of the academics had pulled a cluster of tables together and sat drinking jug wine and talking shop.

  The bitching and moaning hadn’t changed since I was actively in the game. Tenure was as impossible as ever to get, and you published and you perished whether you were tenure track—which almost nobody was, any more—or an adjunct slave.

  I knew a few of them slightly. I’d have joined in the laments, a year ago or three or six. Tonight I felt like an anthropologist studying a culture she recognizes vaguely, but from a long time ago and a long way away.

  I hadn’t worked on an article since the horses came. I hadn’t even thought about it. There was so much else to do and understand and dream.

  When I wandered back into the Women’s Side, the crowds had thinned. Caro and Emma sat in the corner booth where Caro liked to read the cards, and some of the circle were closing in on them. I saw a drum or two, and the glint of a crystal. They’d be raising the Powers tonight after everyone else had gone.

  Caro tried to catch my eye. I ducked and slid out into the night.

  13

  The full moon hung in front of me on the drive home. The desert glowed faintly; the mountains were flat black against the sky.

  Nobody else was out on the road. The Thanksgiving travelers had gone home hours ago. I had the world to myself.

  The press and pull of the city slid away. I angled the vents to blow cold air on my face, and clicked on the radio to keep from falling asleep. The local station that played constant rotations of mariachi and Calexico was on a native flute kick tonight: sweet eerie notes that had the same shape as the landscape around me.

  The turn off the main road matched a swoop of the music, before the road and the flute both steadied, leading me down past the pastures.

  It was warm enough this week to leave the herd out at night. I saw their dark shapes in a huddle toward the far side of the pasture.

  The truck slowed down while I took a count—instinctively; anyone who manages a horse barn is constantly making sure they’re all present and accounted for. I could see well enough by moonlight to get a sense of how many backs and necks there were.

  Six.

  Five dark ones. One pale: Matina. It was definitely Matina. I could feel her as distinctly as I felt my foot on the brake.

  He must have been in the shadow of the shelter. I’d hardly miss him out in the open: he was if anything whiter than Matina.

  The truck rolled to a stop. The mares’ heads were up, their ears alert. They weren’t milling and screaming the way a herd does when someone is missing. In fact they were perfectly calm.

  The flute ended its run with a last, drawn-out note. I flicked the radio off before the DJ’s voice could shatter the mood.

  It was quite a bit colder out here than it had been in town. The air had a sharpness to it that felt almost like frost. But it was a long way up from freezing.

  I pulled my old barn hoodie out of my bag and put it on over my company clothes. My shoes weren’t exactly barn shoes, but they’d have to do. Trust me to remember the jacket but not the feet.

  Matina whickered as I slipped through the gate. I was careful to latch it behind me. With the headlights off, my eyes had adapted; I could see clearly across the pasture.

  Six mares. Nothing inside the shelter. Fences all solid: none of them down.

  He could have jumped out. Five and a half feet isn’t that high, if you’re a horse—even a small horse like Bel. You’d be amazed how high a pony can jump, if he’s in the mood.

  I wouldn’t have thought he’d leave his mares. They didn’t miss him, either, from anything I could see. But they weren’t telling me where he was. My question, both spoken and not, met a blank and expressionless wall.

  I picked my way across the pasture in my little black pumps, dodging manure piles and trying not to fall down a rabbit hole. None of the mares came to see what I was doing, which was strange. Usually they’d have been in my face.

  The moon was almost directly overhead, so bright I cast a shadow. The coyote serenade rose to a fever pitch and abruptly cut off.

  I stiffened and almost fell on my face. But there was nothing hunting the sky tonight. The moon was too strong.

  The only sound in the silence was my breath, coming a little fast, and the rattle of a rock when my foot struck it. I’d reached the back fence, where there was a gate, safely and correctly latched, with a clip and chain for backup: Houdini-horse insurance. Nothing without thumbs could open that.

  That side of the pasture ran along the bank of the wash, set back about a hundred feet in case of floods. The space in between held a few stragglers from the mesquite bosque upstream, and the remains of an old cattle pen from when the ranch was a working operation.

  Someone was sitting on the ancient and weathered rails. Moonlight shone through branches, but it didn’t cast much light on the human figure: dark hair, dark clothes. Its head was bent, dozing or contemplating something between its feet.

  City reflexes would have sent me flying out of there. Anything that looks male, if you’re a female out alone at night, is just about guaranteed to be dangerous. But I hadn’t lived in that kind of city in years, and my name might not be on the deed to this land, but it still belonged to me in ways too deep to easily explain.

  I marched as sturdily as I could in those impractical shoes, around the cattle pen and straight toward the trespasser. “Hello!” I said, terribly brightly. “May I help you?”

  He didn’t move. I had a moment’s thought that maybe he wasn’t actually human. Spirits do walk this land, after all.

  Then he sighed. Breath is not restricted to the living, but it’s a reasonable indication.

  I don’t usually use the flashlight app on my phone, because it can strike you blind at ninety paces, but the much less overwhelming one was back in the truck, and he’d be long gone before I could hike back to get it. I squeezed my eyes all but shut, pulled the phone out of my pocket, and tapped it on.

  He didn’t bolt, which surprised me. He blinked and squinted, throwing up an arm to shade his face.

  I knew that face.

  I shouldn’t have. It shouldn’t have existed. Curly black hair. Big dark eyes. Exuberant beard. The arch of his nose reminded me of—no. I wasn’t going there. Not quite yet.

  He was short but sturdy: wide shoulders, deep chest. At first I thought the overly bright light was playing tricks with my eyes, but he seemed to be dressed in the night sky with stars.

  It resolved, with some peering, into a knee-length shirt or tunic, short-sleeved, tight but with room to move. I knew that as well as I knew his face.

  I knew his name, too, from the research I’d been doing instead of writing articles on medieval iconography. Bel-Marduk. Marduk of the dragons, Dragonslayer, lord of horses.

  He wasn’t wearing the crown. Or the four wings. He looked perfectly human, if he’d been in my dream instead of sitting on the top rail in front of me.

  That rail shouldn’t have held him up. Somehow that made it easier to believe he was who
he had to be. It explained an amazing number of things, and raised a whole new set of questions.

  I started with the shortest one. “Why?”

  “Turn off the light,” he said. Then, after a noticeable pause, “Please.”

  I’d seen as much as I needed to. I thumbed it off and shoved the phone in my pocket.

  My eyes took a while to readjust. I half expected him to melt into the moonlight before I could see, but when the world fell back into focus, he was still there.

  The stars were brighter on his tunic. I could swear I saw the Milky Way and a constellation or two.

  I tried my question again. “Why?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  I’m not sure he said it aloud. I heard it in English, in a warm burr of a voice, but it resonated in the place where animals talked to me.

  In that place, he was a short and sturdy grey stallion with an elegantly arched nose and big dark eyes.

  “The moon called me out,” he said. He stretched out his arms and peered at his hands, flexing the fingers, wiggling the thumbs. “I forgot I had these.”

  “So it’s not a monthly thing?” I asked.

  Because that’s what you do when you’re in a totally impossible situation. You ask logistical questions.

  Or I do.

  “Monthly?” I could see well enough now, even with how dark his skin was against the black hair, to catch the frown. “I’m not sure . . . it’s been a long time. Long.”

  The sense he gave me was of a stretch of years so long it vanished into light. I knew what was on the other side of that. A temple, a floor I swept most nights. A constellation of gods.

  “So what?” I asked. “Geas? Curse? Thaumaturgical miscalculation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was too numb to be frustrated, yet. There was still so much of the horse there, that long slow roll of the now; the calm, and the acceptance of whatever comes. But a horse’s memory is so strong, every moment so clear and exact, that for him to have forgotten was like a hole in the fabric of existence.