Century #4: Dragon of Seas

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  The water is a few centimeters below the level in the passageway they just stepped out of.

  “Man,” Ermete whispers. “Now how do we get out of here?”

  “I’m not so sure we need to get out,” Sheng replies, looking around. He studies the ducts’ wide openings, the numbers, the crumbling gray cement, the strange iron rings, the manholes in the ceiling and finally the metal rungs of a ladder leading up on the opposite side of the reservoir.

  “We need to go there!” he says, pointing at the wall.

  “Up that ladder?”

  “No.” Sheng points at a rather large opening next to it, half a meter above the surface of the water. It’s marked with a two-digit number. “We need to go through that duct.”

  “Why that one?”

  “Because it’s duct number eighty-nine,” Sheng answers, as if it was obvious.

  “On my three!” Ermete shouts from the underground reservoir. Cupping Sheng’s right foot in his hands, he starts counting slowly. “One … two … three!”

  He boosts his friend up, grunting from the effort. Sheng springs up, grabs hold of the lower rim of duct number 89 and hangs there.

  Meanwhile, Ermete sinks down under the whirling water in the reservoir and quickly tries to resurface. By the time he does, Sheng has already hoisted himself into the duct and has turned around to reach out his hand.

  Ermete grabs it.

  “On three! One … two … three!”

  Ermete jumps as high as he can and, at the same time, feels himself being pulled up. He grabs hold of the edge of the duct with his free hand and drags himself up.

  Sheng turns around and leads the way.

  Duct number 89 is around half a meter tall, just enough to crawl through. It slopes upward and is relatively dry. More than damp, it’s cold. Freezing cold.

  After a few minutes of this slow advance, when the light from the manholes disappears, the two can finally stand up and start walking through the darkness again.

  “It ends here,” Sheng says after a dozen or so meters.

  Ermete bumps into him. “What do you mean, it ends here?” he asks.

  “There’s a grate.”

  “Open it.”

  Clunk! Clunk! Clunk!

  “It won’t open.”

  “Let’s try it together. Make room.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Hand me the backpack.”

  Sheng presses his back against the wall and tries to let Ermete through. In seconds, they’re stuck, the tips of their noses touching.

  “Oh, would you—look at—this mess …,” the engineer grunts into Sheng’s face. Then he grabs the grate with both hands and shoves on it.

  Beside him, Sheng does the same.

  Clunk! Clunk! Clank!

  “We’re doing it,” the engineer cheers when he hears the last noise. “C’mon!”

  A few more shoves and the grate gives way, tumbling down on the other side with a deafening clatter.

  Ermete is the first one to roll out. He ends up in a strange underground hall lit by a row of fluorescent lights high overhead. Sheng follows him in.

  They’re sopping wet, dirty and grimy.

  “First possibility,” Ermete observes, trying to make out their surroundings. “We’re in a giant’s freezer.”

  “The second?”

  “We’ve wandered onto a movie set at a studio that makes catastrophe movies. You know, Pompeii, the Trojan War.…”

  They wander through the strange place, feeling like they’re in the middle of an archeological excavation site. Slowly but surely as they proceed, they see metal walkways arranged at different heights over an old stone pavement, the remains of small walls and more massive walls that section the underground hall into smaller rooms, some crumbling pillars, and, in the back, a larger wall covered with thousands of blue mosaic tiles.

  In front of it, the remains of two giant statues facing each other. Both of them appear human. The one on the left, which is better preserved, is a woman whose arm is stretched out in the act of giving a blessing. The other one, destroyed from the knees up, seems to have been a man. Between the two statues is a third carved figure, its strange, dark, hunched, spiral shape covered with scales.

  The backpack slung over his shoulder, Sheng walks up to the strange collection of artifacts. Ermete follows him. On the surviving walls around them are the remains of large, strange masks that are similar to the gargoyles on Gothic churches but look far more ancient. Claws, beaks and monster faces leer down from a ceiling that has only partially withstood the test of time. In the uneven paving stones is a series of circular holes that look like little wells. Now that they’re closer, Sheng notices that the statue on the left really is a woman, her face covered by a veil.

  “It can’t be …,” he whispers, holding back a wave of shivers.

  The woman wears a long gown, a tunic covered with stylized depictions of all the world’s animals. What remains of her arm is raised in front of her.

  “Isis …,” Ermete whispers beside him, dripping. “The goddess of Nature.”

  The twin statue facing her has only one foot and a male leg carved into the rock.

  “And my bet is that this one’s Mithra, who was born from stone.”

  But both of them are left speechless when they look at the third statue, the one between the other two: seen from behind, it looks like a monster crouched over, ready to pounce.

  “And this one?” Ermete asks.

  “I think it’s … the Sea Dragon,” Sheng says, his eyes completely flooded with gold.

  TUNGUSKA IS THE NAME OF A SCARCELY INHABITED VALLEY. THE little village that Vladimir takes Linda Melodia to is a group of low houses clustered together as if huddled up against the cold. They have conical wooden rooftops.

  All around the village are slopes that grow wilder and more savage in the distance, dotted with sparse patches of evergreens and bogs.

  “This way,” Vladimir says, leading Linda Melodia up the town’s only road: a winding dirt path that passes by the doors of the various houses.

  Under the almost-white sky, the village’s only colors are the gray of the stone and the dark brown of the tree trunks in the roofs.

  The elderly antiques dealer from New York stops in front of a whitewashed house, the last one in the village. Drawn in red and black around the door are pictures of stylized animals. Vladimir waits for Linda to catch up with him, knocks and goes in, his long back hunched over.

  Indoors, the house looks like the inside of a tent: the walls are very thick—almost forty centimeters—and they lead into a single, round room with furniture pushed up against its sides. A bed, an old military stove, a credenza, a dilapidated sink hidden behind some curtains. Containers in all shapes and sizes, vases, tins, wineskins, woven baskets, rucksacks lie on the ground. The floor is covered with overlapping rugs. The stuffy, musty air smells like burnt cardamom and incense.

  “Come … come in …,” says the elderly woman who sits cross-legged in a pool of amber light in the center of the room.

  Vladimir motions for Linda to take off her shoes and leave them in a niche in the wall before stepping onto the carpeted floor. As she does so, she sniffs the air and peers around, horrified. Nevertheless, she follows the man onto the rugs.

  She stares in awe at the drapes in colorful fabrics hung from the conical ceiling, swaying like strands of multicolored seaweed. And for a long moment she has the sensation she’s swimming through the air, which is thick and brims with memories.

  With her every step across the soft rugs, the objects scattered around her seem to take on a meaning, almost as if it was possible to glimpse a precise pattern, an idea, a story in all that disorder.

  There are strange wooden masks that peer out from the shadows, metal jewelry hand-wrought on long-forgotten anvils. There are silver trinkets hung from strands of silk, ritual footwear in bright, showy colors. There are pages of herbariums that contain flowers unseen for centuries and crude
malachite crystals that glow like silent embers. There’s a gold nugget that looks like a forbidden fruit, lace fringe that looks like embroidered frost. And in the center of that circle of enchantments sits a small, frail woman with a wizened face, her skin withered in a thousand wrinkles, enough to cover two faces just like hers. Hidden within its folds are two amber-colored eyes, one of which points all the way to the side. Far from beautiful, the woman’s face is oddly reassuring. And when Linda looks at her for the first time, her only sensation is one of absolute peace.

  “Welcome, Linda,” the Seer says, holding out her hand, her fingers bent and gnarled by time.

  Linda shakes it gently.

  “Do sit down,” the old woman continues. “You too, Vladimir. You can stay here with us.”

  As Linda sits down beside her, she feels like she’s in the center of the world. She feels as if everything of any importance is right here in their presence, or will come to pass at any moment.

  And it’s a strange sensation to have in this remote village in Siberia, which isn’t even on the map.

  “I know you’ve had a long journey, Linda,” the Seer says, folding her hands in her lap.

  Elettra’s aunt nods. “Yes, actually. It was weeks before I decided to come here. First I had to find the courage. This is the first time I’ve ever traveled alone.”

  She smiles, as if she finds it completely natural to open up like this to a stranger.

  Linda looks for the right words to describe how it feels. After a lifetime spent organizing other people’s lives—looking after her two sisters; her nephew, Fernando, especially after first his mother, then his wife, passed away—the hotel, her train journey across half of Europe and just as much of Asia is an experience that is both terrifying and wonderful. It makes her feel alive. More alive than she’s felt for many years now.

  “And it’s very nice,” she tells the Seer, relieved.

  Then she looks around, bewildered. She raises her hand to her mouth, realizing only now that she’s been speaking in Italian.

  “But … you understand me! And I understand you!”

  Vladimir exchanges glances with the Seer, who makes a vague gesture with her hands, leaving Linda in doubt one instant longer.

  Then the old woman begins to explain. “They call me the Seer because of my eye, this one … and because I’m very, very old. I’m two hundred and twelve years old now. But I’ve never been particularly good at seeing things. Others are far better at that than me. My power is with words. I’ve always been able to speak to anyone and make myself understood. It doesn’t matter if we’re perfect strangers or what part of the world we’re in. All we need to do is talk.”

  Linda stiffens, but only for a second.

  “My master was the one who helped me discover this power of mine. Before I met him, I’d never left my village and I couldn’t even imagine there were languages other than our dialect. But when my master arrived, he taught me many things. He was already very old then. He came from the City of Wind, a place beyond the steppes and the mountains and the desolate fields of grain. His name was Nicholas. But everyone called him the Alchemist. It was he who brought me the tops. And he spoke to me of a long line of Sages that had been around since ancient times and had powers like mine. It was 1802 when I met him, and soon afterward I used the tops to answer the questions he left unanswered.”

  Linda would like to ask something, but she decides to wait.

  “Naturally, I didn’t find the answers I wanted. However, I discovered there was another gift that Nature had decided to grant me: while the other women aged visibly, I stayed young far longer than they did. And because my appearance didn’t change, the others began to believe I was some sort of enchantress. Or witch. And to some extent, that’s what I was.” The Seer pauses before going on. “In 1906, a hundred years after I met my master and was given the tops, I left the village to do what the Alchemist had asked me to do: find my successors. I had only vague instructions on how to go about it, and no knowledge of the world. Just like you. One of the people I needed to find was a little girl in Messina, Sicily. Her name was Irene.”

  The Seer holds up her palms, as if to keep Linda from interrupting.

  And so, Linda listens to the woman’s calm, measured voice as she tells of how, in 1907, the Pact was handed down to four children, who as of that moment stopped aging.

  “A few months later, everything here changed. A valley not far away from where you are now was devastated by a powerful explosion that destroyed everything, flattened the trees and scorched the earth. They thought the world had come to an end. But the world, fortunately, continued to exist. I returned home, believing that the catastrophe had somehow been my fault. Years later, the four children I had found in just as many cities around the world came to visit me. They came here, just like now,” the Seer says, pointing at Vladimir, “to ask questions I didn’t have the answers to.”

  “What I’d like to know,” Linda speaks up, “and the reason why I’ve come all the way here—”

  “I realize what you want to know,” the Seer says, “and if you don’t have time to listen to the whole story, I’ll tell you right away: you and your sister are my grandchildren. My daughter’s daughters.”

  The simplicity and straightforwardness of her statement strikes Linda like a whiplash, but she limits herself to raising a hand and saying, “You’re … my grandmother?”

  “When Irene returned the second time, after World War II, the village had been devastated. Every province in Siberia had been reduced to starvation. Soldiers were everywhere. And along with the soldiers were foolish statesmen, Bolshevik visionaries who believed they could structure everything following the ideals of their strange, distant centralized state. I don’t mean to tell you the history of the Soviet Union after the war. What I mean to tell you is that in those years, my daughter had two wonderful baby girls. One of them, older by a year, was named Linda.”

  Linda Melodia brushes the back of her hand over her eyes and finds they’re soaked with tears. “What … what was my mother’s name?”

  “Olga,” the Seer replies. “When Irene came here, together with Vladimir and Alfred—Zoe hadn’t obtained the visas she needed for the journey and remained in Europe—your mother begged her to take care of her daughters. She thought they wouldn’t have a future here in the village. Particularly the younger one, who had a persistent cough.”

  Through her tears, Linda nods. “She always did have weak lungs.”

  “We all felt that if we sent them away to live in Italy, they would be better off than they would if they stayed here. And that’s what we did.”

  Linda is sobbing uncontrollably now. Vladimir would like to offer her a handkerchief, but the Seer stops him. “Give her time to let it out, now that she has nothing else to discover.”

  “And now?” Linda asks when she’s done crying. “What should I do now?”

  The Seer smiles, taking her hand. “What all of us here need to do …” She reaches out to Vladimir and rests both their hands on her knees. “We have a dragon to reawaken.”

  THE SEA DRAGON IS AT LEAST FIVE METERS LONG AND TWO METERS high.

  It’s a mighty serpent carved in wood and is as dark as night. Its bristly body is covered with shell-like scales. It rests on its back paws and its front ones are pulled back, like a feline ready to lash out with its claws. Its boxy head has massive teeth and round eyes, with bulging eyebrows and long, coiled whiskers. One of its two eye sockets is empty, while the other one still holds a radiant sapphire. A second precious gem rests on its back, between its shoulder blades at the base of its neck. It’s a large, gray pearl.

  The creature is depicted as if it’s about to pounce toward the back wall, the one covered with blue mosaic tiles.

  Ermete and Sheng walk around it, examining it from every angle. And they uselessly try to figure out the meaning behind the arrangement of the extraordinary room’s various features: the path on the floor with round holes in it, the two
statues, the wooden dragon in the middle, the blue wall, like ones found in ancient Babylonian temples.

  Overwhelmed, Sheng sits down on the ground, his eyes glued to the dragon’s lazy eye. Golden specks fill his pupils like minuscule nuggets.

  “The gold letters …,” he suddenly murmurs.

  Still soaked to the skin, Ermete feels cold shivers run down him from head to toe. “What’s that, Sheng?”

  “Mistral told us there were strange gold letters in the Veil of Isis.”

  “Something like that, yeah. Her mom said that in X-rays, they look like Chinese characters or cuneiform letters. Whatever they are, we didn’t have time to read them.” Pulling his clothes around his body more snugly in the useless attempt to warm himself, he exclaims, “It’s like the North Pole in here! Somebody’s pumping ice-cold air into the place. Don’t you hear that noise?”

  Sitting on the ground beside him, Sheng bursts out laughing.

  “What’s so f-funny?” Ermete stammers. “Don’t you think it’s cold in here?”

  But Sheng doesn’t answer. He laughs. And he keeps laughing, raising his hand apologetically. “Hao! Ermete, I’m not laughing at you! Sorry! But yeah, it’s freezing!”

  “Then what’s so funny?”

  “I figured it out,” Sheng says, standing up. “It’s like those shows my dad used to put on for me when I was little.”

  Ermete sneezes. “What is it you figured out?” he asks, sniffling.