Chapter 16. The Sea of Words

[THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK OF BOOKWORM CAN BE FOUND HERE: http://stihi.ru/avtor/yanastihiru&book=4#4]

The half-light of the dragon lair faded out of view. The utter darkness of the tunnel was illuminated only by the dim red glow of Bookworm’s nostrils. From time to time he sent forward a small jet of flame to allow them to see the passage ahead.

It was impossible to imagine who or what had made the tunnel. Perhaps it was merely a natural fissure in the rock. It was wide enough for Bookworm to pass through easily in most places, although Rendtalon would have had a hard time squeezing through the narrower spots. It ran fairly straight in one direction and slanting down. Occasionally it jagged to one side and then back to the original direction. The floor and the walls were rough and the ceiling was so high heads, that Magda could not glimpse it in the brief light of Bookworm’s jet.

At first, Magda was afraid that they might encounter some dangerous underground creatures, see ghostly sights or be haunted by blood-curdling sounds in the darkness. None of that happened. They walked on and on without encountering anyone or anything.  But this utter blankness itself became an oppressive, terrifying presence. The silence did not seem broken by the clicking of Bookworm’s talons on the rock, by Magda’s footsteps, by the soft “paff” of the dragon’s exhalation as he sent forth flame. The stillness instantly absorbed and obliterated each sound without a trace. The darkness was not pierced by the glow of Bookworm’s fiery breath, but merely pushed aside a tiny bit. It sprang back around them like a solid, resilient substance.  Magda became aware of the unimaginable weight of raw rock that separated them from the outside world. They were buried alive and worming their way ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, away from sunlight and moving air. A wave of panic rose from Magda’s stomach to her throat. She stumbled several times, fell down to her knees and struggled to make a sound. Bookworm heard her fall. He stopped and backed up to her, looking over his shoulder (the tunnel was too narrow in this spot for him to turn around).
“What is it, Magda? Are you all right?” The sound of his voice reassured her enough, so that she could speak.
“I’m scared,” Magda gasped. “We are so deep… so deep under ground, deeper than a grave. I cannot go on. It feels like I cannot breathe,” she whispered.
“Let us go back,” Bookworm replied without hesitation. 
“But, what about Salt Spring? We will never find it if we do not follow the tunnel.”
“Then I will do without. Magda, it is simple. I reckon we have gone less than one-tenth of the way. We cannot risk it. Let us go back. I can go backwards until that wide place a quarter-mile back: there, I can turn around.”
“No, wait!” Magda struggled to get a hold of herself, to gather her wits. “I don’t want to go back. We have come all this way. I want you to get to the Salt Spring. I can go forward,” she added more firmly. Magda got up. “It’s not so bad when I hear you talk. I don’t want to go back. Just keep talking to me. Recite poems or tell me stories.”

So, Bookworm began to recite the Iliad. The darkness and the terrible stillness of the air still enveloped them, but the silence no longer pressed on Magda’s eardrums. Bookworm’s rumbling voice rose and fell with the rhythm of the ancient poetry, carrying Magda's imagination to the vast openness of the rising and falling sea. They resumed walking.

They walked, and they walked, and they walked. From time to time they stopped for food and a brief rest. Magda could not bear the thought of lying down and sleeping in this dark crevice in the rock, so deep under the ground. She only rested long enough to allow her leaden, shaking legs to regain strength to start walking again. She lost all sense of time, but knew that they had walked for many hours because Bookworm got through the Iliad and was more than half way through the Odyssey. Eventually, she was so overcome with tiredness that she could no longer understand the words of the poetry. All she knew was that the voice reciting it was there, rising and falling, filling her hearing with the rhythm of sea tide, keeping weight of silence from crushing her spirit. Her legs were giving out, so she had to walk holding on to a piece of rope, tied around Bookworm. The pull of the rope held her up and propelled her forward; she merely moved her legs just enough to prevent herself from falling.

“Magda! Magda!”
The girl stopped and slowly raised her lolling head. Ahead of her, the dragon had also stopped. “Paff,” the orange jet of fire drilled through the darkness. She saw what the dragon was illuminating: a heap of loose rock blocking their path. Magda looked at it dully, then sat down. “Trapped. We are trapped. We will not make it back.”  The thoughts in her head seemed dull too. Not panicky, just tired.

But the dragon was not ready to give up. He moved Magda further back in the tunnel, to keep her out of the way of the debris, and began to dig. Magda closed her eyes, drifting into a mixture of inchoate nightmares and unconsciousness. She heard someone calling her, as if from a great distance, shaking her, picking her up and carrying her. And then, she felt it – the cool wind on her face, the smell of pine resin. Slowly, she raised her eyelids. Stars! Above her was not the blank darkness of the rock fissure, but the breathing, velvet blackness of the night sky, blazing with a myriad of stars. She heard water trickling somewhere close by, and the wind soughing in the branches. The dragon lowered her gently on the springy carpet of pine needles and she lay there, amazed and overwhelmed by the sky, and the wind, and the fragrance of the forest. Then Magda slept.

When she woke up, the dawn was just starting to color the sky. Magda climbed out from under the tarp that Bookworm had wrapped around her as she slept. Her legs still ached, but she felt refreshed and more famished than she had ever been in her life. The bag with the remaining provisions lay nearby. She lunged for it and for a long time alternated between gulping water from the bottle and cramming bannocks and dried fruit into her mouth, almost choking in her haste.

At last, she lifted her head and looked around. She was in a small clearing in a pine forest. Bookworm lay nearby, his shiny black back dappled by the morning sun, his head resting on his forepaws. He was fast asleep. Getting up to her feet, she explored the clearing. They have traversed many miles underground, and this place looked nothing like the leafy woods around Rendtalon’s lair. Even the rocks here were different from the granite boulders that abounded on the old dragon’s territory. In this clearing, outcroppings of blue-gray slate protruded here and there from the stiff forest grass and the carpet of pine needles. Among the trees, Magda saw the mouth of the tunnel surrounded by the slate rubble that Bookworm pushed out when he dug out the cave-in.

The girl’s ears picked up the steady drip of water. She went towards it. She saw a stack of flat slate stones.  This cairn was old — there was moss growing in the crevices between the stone slabs. Looking closer Magda saw that the top stone had symbols carved on it: sun, moon, stars, people, animals, fishes. In the center there was a shallow bowl in the shape of cupped human hands. Water welled up in slow pulses, filling the hands and pooling over the entire surface of the stone.  It dripped down the layered stones, the sounds of many drops mingling together in moist whispers. Magda kneeled and stretched her hand to catch the drops. They were warm. She raised the hand to her lips and drank. The water was salty. She felt as if she were tasting her own blood or. Magda leapt up, her whole being humming with pain and exultation. Then, in a trance, she sank back to her knees and, stretching her hand, filled it again, and again, and again.

She stood up, swaying. The terror of being buried alive deep underground and the joy of the senses drinking in the freely moving air, the stars, the pine trees were all surging inside her — a gale of spirit wind, demanding to be put into words. The words came, shaped and moved by some irresistible rhythm, like waves driven by the great heartbeat of the sea. She felt as if she were at the helm of a ship, propelled by that wind, sailing upon that sea. At times the words and the feelings surged in a shared direction, producing a sense of power and exultation. More often they clashed discordantly, making Magda strain to the breaking point with the effort of steering the ship. The girl was oblivious to all else, stumbling around the clearing, waving her arms wildly, mumbling.

Suddenly Magda stopped, her eyes slowly focusing upon the black shape in front of her. She had almost walked straight into Bookworm. The dragon was sitting up. She had no idea how long he had been awake, watching her. She sighed deeply, as if floating up from a deep dream. “Bookworm!” she smiled up at him. “We found it. The Salt Spring! It is over there. It is tiny, but it has great magic. I drank from it! You know, I feel that if I do not find the right words for what I need to say, I will burst. I…” She halted, struck by the odd stillness of the dragon, by the unfamiliarly soft expression of wistfulness and sadness in his golden eyes. “Bookworm, what is the matter? Aren’t you glad we found your spring? Aren’t you going to drink from it?”
“Magda, I am glad we finally found the spring. But it is not mine. And I cannot drink from it.”
“What do you mean, you cannot?”
“Watch.” He took Magda’s porridge pot and put it under the lip of the stone, catching the drops. Then, when the pot was half full, the dragon picked it up and tilted it over his open jaws. The liquid hissed and spattered, boiling away into a small puff of steam before any of it reached his tongue.
The girl watched in astonishment. “But maybe there just was not enough in the pot!” she protested. “What if we fill one of the water bottles – it holds a lot more than the pot!” Bookworm shook his head. “I tried a lot of things in the last two days.”
“Two days?”
“Yes, that’s how long you slept. I tried many things, but it always turned out the same way.”
"Why? Why?" Magda cried, greatly upset. “You drank from the Bird Spring and sang, you drank from the Ice Spring and invented. Why can't you drink from this one and compose poetry, like you wanted?"
"I have thought and thought about it, and I am starting to understand,” Bookworm replied pensively. “I am a dragon, and a dragon's nature is fire. Fire has its own song, and fire can be used to make things, but fire does not compose words; it can only illuminate or consume them."
"So, this whole journey was for nothing?" Magda whispered.
"It was not for nothing!" the dragon answered. "I wanted to write a book of poetry because a poet, while composing a poem, is fed by great power. It is true that this power is not accessible to me. But this journey made me realize that I am sustained by a far greater kind of power."
Magda stared at Bookworm, as if checking if he had sprouted an extra set of wings. "Really? What kind of power?"
"Friendship, loyalty, belonging. I always thought of Seven Hills as ‘my city’ — something that I owned. And I considered you to be ‘my dragon maiden.’ But now I know that I am also the dragon of Seven Hills, that I belong to the place where I was born. I am your friend — I belong to you, too. And this is a far greater source of strength than gold, or bookish knowledge, or even inspiration. "
Magda's eyes flooded with tears and she hid her wet face against the hot, scaly flank. Suddenly, she looked up at the dragon: "And this will be enough? You will not lose your fire when we get back home?"
"I promise," he answered gravely.


THE BOOK OF BOOKWORM WILL BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT CHAPTER