Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [57]
But no dragons.
Not a single little tiny dragon even, not a sign, not a footprint on any of those wild sweeps of sand, not a glimpse of a something through the thick clusters of vegetation. No weird, unearthly calling in the night.
We all spoke as if the thing didn’t exist. But before I slept, sometimes I’d think about the beast and wonder why it was that I could not get it out of my mind, how it had come to hover over me with scaly wings that grew ever more devilish with every passing day. And suddenly, that night, the night before, I was very afraid. Those Malays, they knew something. They took a boat yesterday morning, and poked about on the shore and in the fringes of the forest for no more than an hour, and when they came back they were changed.
All of us feel it, but no one says it. This is the island. Neither big nor small, rocky green, high mountains of harsh brush jutting the sky above jungle and weeping bays. Its seas are fast and rough, as if it doesn’t want to be reached, and it terrifies me. The gongs of Sumba play in my head as I lie thinking in the night; they’ve been playing in my head ever since we left that place, their low, droning somnolence sending out into the darkness long sound ribbons that scarcely vibrate but change constantly in some shimmering way, simple as silk. The music is like a snake swallowing its tail, a lullaby that repeats and repeats, softening and sharpening your senses at the same time, like a drug. My mouth is dry with fear and my throat clenches when I swallow, and I fall into a gloom so profound it’s like a sudden nausea.
I kept thinking about that poor dog getting eaten by a snake while it was still alive and knew what was happening. I kept seeing its silently crying mouth as it was crushed and ingested, and I thought about the god that could conceive of such an entrance into death, and felt cold and hurt and scared more than I had ever been. And when at last I fell asleep, it was into a terrible nightmare, the kind that wakes you in a pounding-heart sweat and leaves you shaken out and horrified by the contents of your head. There was a big tank full of blood in a dark attic room, parts of bodies moving about in it, swimming around each other like eels; and there, right in the middle of it was a man’s face, full of horror—oh, the horror, it’s what woke me—a real, whole man desperately trying to swim out but with no chance at all. An arm came up out of the gore and a spread hand, coated in thick clots, pushed his face down under, and I woke in the creaking fo’c’s’le and wasn’t sure if I’d screamed or not. But no, it seemed I hadn’t.
I was hot. This filthy heat going on and on. God, I was shaking. Nothing had scared me this much since I got stuck in the dark in Jamrach’s shop when Tim locked me in. There he lay across from me, breathing the sweet sleep of unconcern. Bastard, doing that to me. A two-edged blade, our Tim. You should have seen him since he’d been going off all cocky with Dan and the Malays, coming back with feathers stuck behind his ears and a band round his head. Beautiful, he was. Brown as a native with his eyes bright baby blue and clear, and his hair all goldy-white, stalking back from the jungle like a dirty, sweaty Apollo, buffalo blood under his nails, a head taller now than Dan, sage old simian by whose side he walked. Doesn’t say much.
Why should he be sleeping so sweetly there and me awake? He needed his sleep of course, with what he had to do.
“Tim,” I whispered.
“What?” he replied at once. He wasn’t asleep.
“Are you awake?”
“No.