A million stones, a million bones, a million holes within the chinking

[sovay]

I have not been sleeping well. I dreamed last night for the first time in weeks that I can remember. I had found used hardcovers of Gillian Bradshaw's The Dragon and the Thief and The Land of Gold, which in waking life I have never seen outside of a library; in a college town by the sea, I discovered a corpse in a bed of seaweed, slippery and unrotted, like a bog body. It was sewn within a second shroud of skin, pale and wet as sacking. A friend told me this was standard funerary practice in his denomination of Christianity, so I could stop carrying the head around in a fold of nori for the authorities to investigate. We reburied it in the black salt mud under the bridge where the tide had gone out. I guess my brain is basically all right.

Comments

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

I guess my brain is basically all right.

Glad to hear it!
Yes, cool dream. Are the books worth reading?

[sovay]

Are the books worth reading?

I remember them so. I haven't read either one since eighth or ninth grade, which is presumably why they still surface in my dreams; I wonder periodically how they would hold up. What I remember is a luckless tomb robber who discovers the last dragon in Egypt, Hathor; when they venture into Kush where there are still said to be dragons, they encounter a princess of Meroë and some creatures that are certainly not dragons, but still pretty mythological. There is probably a romance and definitely some politics. Mostly I remember the names of the dragons.