The Blood: A Denouement

That first night at Long Lees, Jim dreamed in full. The last time he had known vivid dreams was almost twenty years ago, and he’d spent some time in a psychiatrist’s chair about those. He had seen the portrait by Frida Kahlo of the suicide of Dorothy Hale and for months in his grown up life, dreamt of his mother tumbling and tumbling to her death in a dark dress through pale clouds and lying dead on the ground in a spatter of blood.

What Kris did not know or Marabeth or even Peter and Myron was the heavy amount of drug and sometimes sex induced sleep that had blacked out Jim’s ability to remember anything that happened to him after he closed his eyes. That had been in his mid twenties, and in the last few years he had naturally gained the power of virtually dreamless sleep.

But since Seth Moore had come into his life, little visions began to creep back in, mostly pleasant, but the dreams were becoming clearer and clearer. When he began to read the Book of Pamela Strauss, he began to dream of the woman with piercing eyes and golden hair in classic fingerwaves who had been, in his time, an old and wrinkled shadow of her once glamourous self. Friederich, old and ruggedly handsome occasionally drifted through Jim’s slumber, but mostly it was Hagano. Then, the night when he and his cousins had been in Marabeth’s apartment reading the stories of Red Riding Hood, suddenly he began to dream of misty woods with tall black trees and girls with red cloaks riding on wolves. Riding on wolves! There was the thing. That night he and Ryan had exhausted themselves in the kind of love only two men who need each other could make, and he had waken up beside his old companion, exhilarated by the wolf dreams, but knowing he could only share them with Seth. Tonight he was not surprised to find himself in the woods again.

There was a sword on his back, and he did not trouble to see what he was wearing, but it wasn’t his usual suit or his jeans and turtlenecks. He had seen his reflection, his thick curly hair was more golden than ever. He was a handsome deep blue eyed hero and he was surprised to see Seth at his side. The gentle faced man with equally curly, copper hair and the fringe of dark beard along his jaw said nothing, but Jim was glad of his presence and now said, “Look, a river. Why don’t we stop for a drink?”

But as they rode toward the shimmering river, the sun shining golden on its ripples, Jim paused, for in the way it moved, he realized what Seth now said:

“This is no proper river.”

They approached it slowly, even as its course changed, even as it buckled and smoothed a little, and now Jim saw it, moving back through hills. He saw it curling through the trees as long and broad as a true river would be, and yet it glowed and shimmered in this golden misty light.

“Wyrm,” Jim pronounced.

He knew the word, but would have never used it in waking. He would have never thought it while waking. He put his hand to the sword at his back.

“No,” Seth said. “It is the dragon of Creation. The first Father of Change.”

“Should we ride to it?”

Seth shook his head.

“Can’t you see? It’s coming to us.”

He remembers the dragon. Fafnir. He had heard the name before, but remembered it from the Volsungasaga. Even as it approached him, several things came to light. That he could not fully grasp it, that the eyes were lightning over the clouds, the breath thunder and forest fires on the hills. His breath was the roar.of the storm. His twisting back was indeed many rivers, most water, but some the underground currents of lava. Every sight of him was an element and there was no contained sight.

“We are inside the dragon,” Jim began.

The dragon is inside the world a voice finished.

It was not his voice, and it was not Seth’s, and the voice only said, “Watch.”

But before Jim could watch or know where to watch, he realized that though he and Seth had been riding, they were riding wolves, great as horses, black, fire eyed, tongues lolling.

And hanging from Seth’s back was a great red cloak.

Why don’t these wolves kill us? Jim wondered. Why don’t they throw us from their backs?

Because you are wolf of wolf.

Look, Golden Prince, and understand.

And Jim looked, but he didn’t know where he was looking. The vision of dragons cleared, and he was in an old house. It was large and well made, but this was in the past, certainly. There were brass lamps and there was a man in the garb of a soldier, a Roman soldier, and he was, when Jim looked… Hagano?

“The gift was ours long ago,” Hagano was saying in Latin, and Jim was no great Latin scholar. He’d taken it in high school, but somehow he understood.

“It is yours now,” the man said to him. “I perceive this. Only you have failed to unlock it.”

When Hagano said nothing, the man said, “Tell me what happened.”

Seth observed that the figure speaking was cloaked and hooded in white, and the sleeves of his gown fell over his hands so that Seth could gather no true details of him.

Hagano said, “I am the last of my family. Before I went to the foederati, we were taken by a king… a chieftain. He raped my sister, made her his wife. He killed our father. He tied us to trees and left us for the wolves.”

Seth shuddered, but Jim frowned because the story was familiar.

“There was a she wolf. She came by every night and killed all of my brothers.”

But the last night, Jim remembered, the sister, Signy, came out and filled her brother’s mouth with honey, and so he bit out that wolf’s tongue and Sigmund lived. Jim remembered this.

“But the last night the wolf came,” Hagano said, “and she shook herself. Her pelt fell away, and she became my sister. She said that I was the only one worthy of our family to live.”

“And what did you do?” the man asked, unshaken.

“Sorcerer,” Hagano said, “she told me to lay with her so that we might have family. At the time I thought I’d never leave that place, and all that had happened to me was so strange, and so I lay with her, and then I left.”

“But,” and the sorcerer’s voice was familiar, though Seth could not see him, “I still am not sure what you want me to do for you.”

“I want the wolf gift! The tribe wants the wolf gift!”

“It is in you,” the wizard sounded unfazed. “Clearly. If it was in your sister.”

“But I cannot feel it. I cannot get to it.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“How should I know?”

“I don’t know how you should know,” the wizard, crossed one leg over the other through his robe. “But you should.”

Hagano looked desperate, as Jim had never seen him. His hands made claws.

“It’s in her cloak. It’s in the wolfskin.”

“Yes,” the sorcerer allowed in a tone that meant there was still more to be discovered.

“But then, simply putting on a wolf skin won’t make you into a wolf.”

“No.”

“Would that alone do it for me?”

“We are on the banks of great Fafnir, the man who entered the dragon and then became one. His brother was Ottar. The children of Hreidmaro shifted their shape, because they gave their lives. Or gave another’s.”

“Life is the price. The blood is the price!”

“The blood is always the price,” the sorcerer said.

“I have to kill her,” Hagano said.

“She killed your brothers,” the magician said. “If you would kill your sister and consume her heart, then with the blood and with the liver, or some part of her, I can open the Gift to you. Surely you must know by now that she must have won the gift herself by killing.”

“Our father…” Hagano murmured. “Our brothers. But… her husband…. It was Steddes who… But…”

Hagano was silent a moment. The darkness of the room seemed especially dark, and the lamp that burned on the table by the wizard had an especially bright point of light.

“I…. cannot… kill my sister.”

With little compassion, the sorcerer said. “I am here for only a short time. “What you can or cannot do I do not know, but you have asked how to do this thing, and I have told you.”