The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page B

story.
    ‘Tell me one thing,’ said the eldest Princess to the Old Woman, when they had all applauded her story. The moon shone in an emerald sky, and all the creatures drowsed and rustled. ‘Tell me one thing. Was that you, ahead of me in the road, in such a hurry?’
    ‘There is always an old woman ahead of you on a journey, and there is always an old woman behind you too, and they are not always the same, and may be fearful or kindly, dangerous or delightful, as the road shifts, and you speed along it. Certainly I was ahead of you, and behind you too, but not only I, and not only as I am now.’
    ‘I am happy to be here with you as you are now.’
    ‘Then that is a good place to go to sleep, and stop telling stories until the morning, which will bring its own changes.’
    So they went to bed, and slept until the sun streaked the apple-green horizon with grassy-golden light.

Dragons’ Breath
     

     

     
    Dragon
, from
Die Bilder zur Bibel
, Matthäus Merian, 1593–1650
     
    O nce upon a time, in a village in a valley surrounded by high mountains, lived a family with two sons and a daughter, whose names were Harry, Jack and Eva. The village was on the lower slopes of the mountains, and in the deep bowl of the valley was a lake, clear as crystal on its shores, and black as ink in its unplumbed centre. Thick pine forests grew in the shadow of the mountain ridges, but the village stood amongst flowery meadows and orchards, and cornfields, not luscious, but sufficient for the needs of the villagers. The peaks of the mountains were inaccessible, with blue ice-shadows and glittering snow-fields. The sides of the mountain were scored with long descending channels, like the furrows of some monstrous plough. In England the circular impressions around certain hills are ascribed to the coiling grip of ancient dragons, and in that country there was a tale that in some primeval time the channels had been cut by the descent of giant worms from the peaks. In the night, by the fire, parents frightened children pleasurably with tales of the flaming, cavorting descent of the dragons.
    Harry, Jack and Eva were not afraid of dragons, but they were, in their different ways, afraid of boredom. Life in that village repeated itself, generation after generation. They were born, they became lovers, they became parents and grandparents, they died. They were somewhat inbred, to tell the truth, for the outside world was far away, and hard to reach, and only a few traders came and went, in the summer months, irregularly. The villagers made a certain traditional kind of rug, on handlooms, with a certain limited range of colours from vegetable dyes they made themselves-a blood-red, a dark blue with a hint of green, a sandy yellow, a charcoal black. There were a few traditional designs, which hardly varied: a branching tree, with fruit like pomegranates, and roosting birds, somewhat like pheasants, or a more abstract geometrical design, with discs of one colour threaded on a crisscrossing web of another on the ground of a third. The rugs were on the whole made by the women, who also cooked and washed. The men looked after the livestock, worked the fields and made music. They had their own musical instrument, a wailing pipe, not found anywhere else, though most of them had not travelled far enough to know that.
    Harry was a swineherd and Jack dug in the fields, sowed and harvested. Harry had a particular friend amongst the pigs, a young boar called Boris, a sagacious creature who made cunning escapes and dug up unexpected truffles. But Boris’s playfulness was not enough to mitigate Harry’s prevailing boredom. He dreamed of great cities beyond the mountains, with streaming crowds of urgent people, all different, all busy. Jack liked to see the corn come up, green spikes in the black earth, and he knew where to find ceps and wild honey, but these treats did little to mitigate his prevailing boredom. He dreamed of ornamental gardens inside high