The Eye of the Snake

Thank you for allowing me to see Professor McGonagall after curfew. I've been thinking about what you said, and I need to clarify a bit. I've been reading some of your books on mental magic, and it seems like a really useful area of skills to develop. You implied that Legilimency is a Dark Art, but in these books it doesn't seem to necessarily use Dark Magic as long as the appropriate rules are followed. I'm particularly interested to know why students are not taught Occlumency. It seems like it might be an important field of study, especially nowadays.

You looked really tired tonight. I hope you are okay. Have you really had to do those awful things you told me about? I know all your responsibilities must be very difficult. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

If I don't see you before, Happy Christmas!

Regards,

Ahead of me the country improved. From my present hillside elevation, the land descended through a sunny plain, a quilt of stubbled fields and woodlands whose oaks still retained autumn leaves, to a seaside promontory. At the tip stood a great gleaming city, filled with Muggle skyscrapers surrounded by populous, prosperous sprawl. The cobbled road led straight through its gates, hid for awhile between the tall buildings, then emerged and wound round the coastline into the distance. The sea beyond marked the edge of this unnamed land through which I must travel.

I began to walk and soon reached the city walls. A motley herd of travellers, merchants, and city denizens had fallen in along the way, so that by the time I entered the city proper, a crowded line had formed along the main road. I marched amidst anonymous others, myriad wizards and Muggles and magical creatures of various societal strata, a curious mixture of the two worlds that has no place in waking life, at least not in any part of the world that follows the Statutes of Secrecy. Muggles shuffled through, clutching their instruments, crude mechanical substitutes for magic; automobiles sputtered and telephones warbled. More civilized wizards, for all that they were quieter, smelled just as bad, though any human was better at least than the giants and goblins who also lumbered along. Abraxans and Thestrals drew wizarding carriages past bicycles and rusty Peugeots.

I wished nothing to do with any of them. They in turn seemed to have no consciousness of me; I was to them but another stranger. Each kept to himself, eyes fixed upon his feet, turned inward to unknown purposes, looking up only to snarl or move away from those classes of creatures most different from him. Where this rabble were headed, I had not a clue, but squealing and squeezing against one another, they swept me through the city's narrow central artery.

Flanking both sides of the road stood glass-windowed houses of commerce and trade; they towered like walls of a canyon, their shadows obscuring the side streets. Other layers, now dwarfed, still peeked from beneath and between the skyscrapers: shingles and brownstones, cathedrals with spires and shining stained glass, those of history's creations that had not been demolished by war or by progress. Statues of bygone heroes, conquerors or lords of such and such, sporting moustaches, metal weaponry, and other barbarous relics, stood arrested in motion. Over the indifferent masses they gazed self-importantly, stonily reigning in pomp, still striving to assert their immortal relevance.

From the choked, reeking passageway, the teeming current of creatures disgorged into a square filled with shops. Here chaos reigned: gold and Galleons changed hands; wheels spun and screeched; deals sealed by barter and handshake; moneyed gentlemen strolled and turned up their noses; wild-eyed prophets, buskers, and whores hawked their wares on corners; self-proclaimed 'Potions masters' sold Quintessence of Quince and Unagian Unguent to alleviate pains or desires; tramps stumbled about; briny fishmongers squawked and stank of herring; net-weavers drew up their skeins; and in the hum and buzz of the crowd, there also marched beasts yoked to wagons, greengrocers, watchmakers, carpet sellers, fortune tellers, and a thousand other utterly forgettable faces. The frenzy fed on itself.

In the shadows lurked scavengers; daws pecked at heaps of wet rubbish; bluebottles buzzed. Though the skies were clear above, plumes of smoke curdled on the horizon, rising from factories and mills on the city's margins – the sort of forgotten, swept-aside boroughs with sewage-filled rivers and filthy writing on walls, where heroes are scarce, where men go to labour or loaf by day and off to forgetful oblivion by night at the pubs, and women tend bruises alone, where children enter a world with slim chances while mothers count pennies and sit up late at night after work to sew patches by hand on their children's old Muggle rags.

I left it behind, exited the city across a bridge suspended over an estuary; skimmers and terns wheeled below me. On the purlieus of town, past neat ordered rows of cottages, the countryside opened before me. I passed settlements and farms filled with haycocks and lambs. From time to time, I came upon this or that trodden crossing or little threads of paths breaking off to the side, but I ignored them and wondered not at the houses or to where led the insignificant trails. I remained steady to my purpose, for I well knew my captain's order: I must keep to the afferent road, bound for the centre of the kingdom. Only there, in the unknown interior, would there be hope of finding the answers I sought.

The road led atop sea cliffs that clung to the land's edge. Below and ahead of me into the distance, the chalky rock faces slowly eroded, exposing their stratified layers, the new atop old through the ages. Along the high-water mark clung dead layers of flotsam and driftwood, salvages tossed by Fate's fury long ago. On the ocean beyond, the tides rose and fell in a rhythmic chantey, pulsed over dark depths below. A light wind swept the sea's surface; frothy caps emerged and dissolved. Upon the horizon, a war fleet sailed in formation; great ships flew banners and spinnakers; smaller vessels drew their seines by the shore.

Time trotted on. As I marched, it seemed that although the day lengthened, the sun round and full in the sky's bright centre, the season turned backwards, for the autumn air became a warm summer haze. I passed through a succession of small hamlets, each presided over by a little church and its yard. In clusters stood nameless marble tombs, their faces dissolved by hundreds of rainy seasons. The surrounding land was divided into parcels and patches of green and gold, clover and sun-ripened wheat fields. The road worsened, wound umbilically across wilder heathed cliffs, through abandoned fields littered with rusted scythes and ploughs. The hamlets grew sparser. I passed a series of long-dead remains: great stone foundations of abbeys, crumbled in on themselves, cast shadows across the now-deserted footpath; a circle of cromlechs, each engraved with rings and coils and four-legged creatures, stood stoically, left in the wake of mysterious architects whose secrets had long since drifted beyond death's veil, while summer veronicas crept and crawled over them like veins; a grassy site lay scattered with burial mounds, swollen like full earthen bellies; along the path beyond, the odd shard of clayware poked up from the ground.

By and by, the sun sank through the sky; the heather lining the path condensed, turned to hedges that thickened and grew. Their thorns hemmed and shuttered the lane on either side and overhead until violet dusk was nought but a sliver above me, and the kingdom lay hidden save the footpath before me that ran like a seam through its midst. No trace of Muggle or wizard-made material remained. Dense shadowy leaves of beeches and oaks waved above; beasts bellowed from beyond; hedge-roots crawled up through the dust. I walked in near-blindness. Now and then, I made out the whistle and wing-beats of a bat or a moth overhead.

I pressed on in this darkness for an unknown quantity of time with only a vague sense of time passing, the sort of dreamtime existence where years pass in moments. Aloft, the stars in their heavenly motions were a jumble of seasons: Ophiucus wheeled through the sky; Capricornus merged briefly with Virgo, then Leo; Aries hovered over all. Farther beyond, more distant dark suns dwelt unseen in their places. Mars and Jupiter wandered their courses as well, and even swift Mercury and old Saturn were unusually bright to the naked eye. How many times they turned in their restless revolutions, I could not say; but over and over, the celestial bodies fixedly danced their elliptical rounds in endless, timeless procession.

Or it may have been in the mere twitch of an eye that night passed into morning. Dawn's rosy fingers reached out through the sky; the stars retreated before the sun's mighty advance. Presently I came to a fork in the path. Both directions were obscured from my view. In one gathered a thick formless mist, grey and impenetrable to the eye. In the other stood a gateway, closed but unlatched, embowered in a tangle of vine-thorns that clawed their way out from the hedge. They twined round the gate's bars in helical fashion, inside and outside each other. The metal beneath was wrought of an unalloyed, silvery element; in the new eastern light it shone like Goblin-wrought silver, but with a watery translucence that I could not identify, some singular magic. I stood on the threshold. To advance or to retreat? I could not see beyond; was my mission to enter? Was my answer within?

At the garden's green centre, not fifty paces away, a copse of small trees in various stages of flower and fruit studded the earth. Beneath the largest, I spied a figure, a maiden, who sat in its shade, her face partially obscured by a largish book she held up to her nose.

"Lily?" I called and hastened towards her, as I had done in many a dream.

She looked up and I paused. To my consternation, she was not Lily at all, but some warped incarnation thereof, an impostress of vague, unclear features. She nevertheless seemed somehow familiar. I saw indistinctly, squinted to make out her features. What was this creature? Where was Lily? I looked cautiously round, then progressed, step by step.

As you no doubt have guessed, the girl was Miss Granger, a fact that I registered soon enough. As she came into focus, I cursed my luckless fate – she followed me even in dreams now! She was bent over a book and frowning in thought, but she must have seen me enter the garden, for as I reached her location, she looked up to me, smiled, and twittered a greeting, as if she had expected me here all along.

She may not have belonged in my dream, but she seemed to belong to this garden as one of its myriad creatures. And speaking of creatures, she was not entirely alone by the tree, for none other than a serpent curled lazily about her feet, tangled around her such that I could not discern which end was which or even where girl's tresses ended and reptile began. (Reason intruded here slightly, a sleep-tinged awareness: This dream was all wrong; Miss Granger was no Slytherin. Or was she? I could not quite remember reality's details.) The serpent appeared to be sleeping. The girl ignored it, as if it were simply a natural part of existence.

I looked to the ample tree behind her. Its limbs leaned protectively over her, casting shade in a patchwork of light and dark against the lawn. New buds shot forth from its boughs; young leaflets emerged and stretched out to the sun. In every direction spread irregular branches, long dendritic fingers, vaulting intersections, crossings, offshoots at acute angles, diverging pathways dividing and subdividing as they arced overhead. All anchored to the axis of the trunk, which stood straight and strong like a bridge from the sky to the earth, beneath which its roots and the roots of the roots, the invisible underground network, twisted and turned in dense tunnels, and emerged now and then as hard knobs in the unshorn high grass.

It was clear that this tree was the heart of the garden. I could not determine whether it grew there by design or by chance. Though reason insisted it must be an ordinary tree, a known species and cultivar of certain circumference, area, and width, a mere assemblage of atoms and energy, conquerable by chemist's microscope or carpenter's nail, its majesty nonetheless held me in thrall. It seemed to my world-weary eyes immeasurable, boundless, its trunk the beginning of innumerable paths, its ramifications endless, its possibilities infinite.

But what drew my curious eye most of all were its unusual fruits, some rare sort of apple or pome. Softly rounded, whole, gentle in form, they caught the sun's light this way and that, now fiery, now golden in hue. Into the salt-air they exhaled their sweet breath. Dispersed throughout the canopy, they hung heavy, so many and fair, as numerous as a vast kingdom's subjects. Like jewels arrayed within a crown or clues laid out in a puzzling pattern, I sensed in their placement an order embedded, a pattern I could nearly distinguish; at some crucial moment, an eloquent solution might resolve before my eyes. Their mystery so struck me that I quite wished to linger a while before returning to my solitary march. I had grown weary of travelling alone, after all. Perhaps I ought to speak to the girl, discover what she knew of this place, so obviously steeped in ancient and powerful magic.

Not knowing quite how to begin, I lectured to her in the customary schoolmaster's monologue, enumerating the properties of something or other; she took notes, much the same as in real life. At first, she was merely a silent observer. But as always, she could not keep her mouth shut and presently embarked upon a series of questions, which I answered accordingly. Her queries (on Occlumency, on Defence, on everything under the sun), though deceptively simple at first, became increasingly complex in nature. I answered her accurately, of course, but I had the feeling that she was hearing more than the sum of my words, parsing their subtext for some meaning entirely other, known only to her. She seemed to have some unspoken purpose that I could not quite discern. It dawned on me then, in the midst of this strange interaction, that her questions were no longer so childish, her actions not the sub-rational instincts of an insentient creature, but those of an independent agent with a mind of her own. Might she herself be wondering why I was here? Might she be able to guide me to the knowledge I needed? Perhaps – an unbidden gleam of hope took root in my mind – perhaps we unknowingly sought the same intelligence. If I could discover her motives, I thought, perhaps she could help me. I might not have to go on alone. Or was she trying to trick me? Either way, I aimed to find out.

Presently she frowned, as if working out a question in her head; then she set her face in decision. She rummaged around in the basket beside her, plucked out an apple, much like the ones from the tree, and studied the thing contemplatively. I stood above her, keeping my distance, but strained my eye to examine it further: such a strange sort of fruit, not at all like an ordinary apple, but a most uncommonly inviting treasure. I determined that the mysterious tree must be the source. She did not lift it to eat, but cradled it patiently in her lap, as if it were a precious wonder all her own, a secret, forbidden to any intruder.

Slightly dazed, I resumed my attempt at a lecture, but my words seemed more and more futile and feeble. Unspoken questions crowded my mind: Could it be that she knew something? What was she thinking? As I lectured, my eye came to rest, time and again, upon her small hands, the cup of her palm, and nested within her gentle embrace in innocent, clandestine repose, the fair apple's blush. I beheld it, transfixed. What was this intimate promise it silently held? What yearning was this that came over me? The war seemed so far away from here, the girl and her apple so near to my grasp. If I could only see to its interior! I imagined a wisdom more priceless than rubies or pearls from the sea; I saw from beneath its fresh skin a hint of long-concealed secrets awaiting me, ripe for discovery, as though I (or we?) were on the brink of solving a riddle. (And did I only imagine that she turned it towards me in a tentative offering?) Was it so wrong to envy the secrets that surely passed through it, this living bond between her and the garden? I did not understand it, but I felt ever stronger this new and strange longing to share its possession, as if my life had been purposed not for war but for this unforeseen moment, as if my fate itself rested in her hands. All things seemed possible. Surely if only I were granted one taste of this fairest of fruits, the secrets of this place – of the girl – perhaps even those of this kingdom – might lay bare before me.

She leapt up; we stood eye to eye. The serpent sank gently to the ground, twitched slightly. She was practically twitching as well, swotty hand in the air stretching skyward; in the other, the apple-fruit beckoned. I advanced towards her stepwise, half expecting her to run. But she stood her ground firmly before me.

She was struggling to speak. "I know the answer! I know what the lesson means!" she cried, but I hushed her. I would have none of her tricks or her uncertain words, for words were deceitful, polluted with falseness. I would have only the fruit and its unfiltered truth. I, a mere soldier, had so long been denied understanding, but now – how close I was to finally attaining the unattainable! Here was my chance to know fully, completely, to at last master the mystery of things.

I recklessly reached out my hand. Plucking it from her fingers (she must have resisted, but I do not recall), I brought it to my lips, tasted sweet flesh –

There was a moment in which everything stood still. I knew that a horrible sense of wrongness and dread descended upon me. Beyond that, I knew nothing for certain, for all that had seemed on the verge of clarity seemed to have tipped, upon one act of transgression, to a state of unutterable confusion. I now recall only impressions, emotions, as the order of things fell apart piece by piece. Events moved not in the linear progression that this narrative must follow, but unevenly, sporadically, without logic or reason. I shall attempt to relate in some fashion:

Like a beast newly exposed to the light, I blinked. I closed my eyes, opened them. At once I became conscious of my flesh, for to my horror I was now entirely naked. (You know this sort of dream, where one moment you are sure you are clothed, and the next, your companion – in this case, my student, dear God! – is staring at you first with incomprehension, then with wonder, and finally with fear.) In only my indecent skin, I was shaking with mortal chill and unease, my protective layers vanished, my dignity stripped. Still worse, I was suddenly, miserably aware that Miss Granger stood naked as well (though incarnadine features were mercifully abstracted, I swear it). The sweet taste in my mouth turned bitter with shame even as the words left my mouth: "What have you done, stupid girl?" But on her face there was anger and pain, and I was plainly the cause.

I stepped backwards, away from her. And at this sudden, instinctive motion of mine, the serpent, whose presence I had completely forgotten, stirred, unwound from her feet, and splayed between her and myself. It began to writhe in erratic, unpredictable waves, like a fault spread across the divided earth, a rupture. It lifted its head, swung its dead eye first to her, then to me. From its throat came a discordant, hollow hiss, a foetid stink of decay.

I started and moved to retreat. I looked in desperation to the vast tree above. The sun seemed to blind from behind it. I saw only unreachable branches, the dizzy multitude of fruits that hid, not revealed, the fragments, insensate gross matter unmoored from all meaning. They swam before me in a crude mixture of disparate elements. Each yet retained a transient, frail beauty, cruel reminder of its coming demise, the destruction carried within each mortal seed: From the moment of harvest, each fruit would slowly lose its scent and beauty; each would shrivel to dust. I could see no design in their placement now; there was only an endless, permuted procession of secrets and lies, truths and falsehoods inextricably jumbled together. The mystery of the garden remained. Only irresolvable chaos reigned.

Then real fear came upon me, a paralysing, nameless terror. I had failed; I had gained nothing; worse still, I had broken the implicit vow of a teacher to do no harm to a student. The unfortunate Miss Granger no longer seemed a deceitful trickster; now struggling to cross the serpentine barrier, she seemed small and fragile and so very distant. I felt shame, as if I were a child just as she was a child. It was I who could not be trusted; had I not proved this, time and again? I felt despair at the thought that she loathed me, and I knew then that I was alone.

"Wait, you've got it all wrong! Trust me!" she cried. "This isn't the end; you can choose!" But it was she who was wrong. I had no choice but to leave; this place was not mine, never had been, and could never be. I said nothing but turned from her silently and made to depart.