He decided not to walk any further; it was really no decision. Pain was spreading through his shoulder, so intense he imagined it must be glowing inside. Carefully, carefully, he lowered himself and lay propped on an elbow, hanging on to the cane. Good, magical wood. Cut from a hawthorn atop Griaule’s haunch. A man had once offered him a small fortune for it. Who would claim it now? Probably old Henry Sichi would snatch it for his museum, stick it in a glass case next to his boots. What a joke! He decided to lie flat on his stomach, resting his chin on an arm—the stony coolness beneath acted to muffle the pain. Amusing, how the range of one’s decision dwindled. You decided to paint a dragon, to send hundreds of men searching for malachite and cochineal beetles, to love a woman, to heighten an undertone here and there, and finally to position your body a certain way. He seemed to have reached the end of the process. What next? He tried to regulate his breathing, to ease the pressure on his chest. Then, as something rustled out near the wing joint, he turned on his side. He thought he detected movement, a gleaming blackness flowing towards him… or else it was only the haphazard firing of his nerves playing tricks with his vision. More surprised than afraid, wanting to see, he peered into the darkness and felt his heart beating erratically against the dragon’s scale.
…It’s foolish to draw simple conclusions from complex events, but I suppose there must be both moral and truth to this life, these events. I’ll leave that to the gadflies. The historians, the social scientists, the expert apologists for reality. All I know is that he had a fight with his girlfriend over money and walked out. He sent her a letter saying he had gone south and would be back in a few months with more money than she could ever spend. I had no idea what he’d done. The whole thing about Griaule had just been a bunch of us sitting around the Red Bear, drinking up my pay—I’d sold an article—and somebody said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Dardano didn’t have to write articles, if we didn’t have to paint pictures that color-co-ordinated with people’s furniture or slave at getting the gooey smiles of little nieces and nephews just right?” All sorts of improbable moneymaking schemes were put forward. Robberies, kidnappings. Then the idea of swindling the city fathers of Teocinte came up, and the entire plan was fleshed out in minutes. Scribbled on napkins, scrawled on sketchpads. A group effort. I keep trying to remember if anyone got a glassy look in their eye, if I felt a cold tendril of Griaule’s thought stirring my brains. But I can’t. It was a half-hour’s sensation, nothing more. A drunken whimsy, an art-school metaphor. Shortly thereafter, we ran out of money and staggered into the streets. It was snowing—big wet flakes that melted down our collars. God, we were drunk! Laughing, balancing on the icy railing of the University Bridge. Making faces at the bundled-up burghers and their fat ladies who huffed and puffed past, spouting steam and never giving us a glance, and none of us—not even the burghers—knowing that we were living our happy ending in advance…”
—from The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule by Louis Dardano
Copyright Acknowledgments
Introduction and story notes copyright 2010 by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon.
“Stable of Dragons” by Peter S. Beagle © 1960 by Peter S. Beagle. Originally published in The Texas Quarterly, Autumn, 1960. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Avicenna Development Corporation.
“Orm the Beautiful” by Elizabeth Bear. © 2007 Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in Clarkesworld, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Sobek” copyright © 2010 by Holly Black.
“Paper Dragons” by James P. Blaylock. © 1985 James P. Blaylock. Originally published in Imaginary Lands, 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Bully and the Beast” by Orson Scott Card. © 1979 Orson Scott Card. Originally published in Other Worlds #1, Roy Torgeson ed. 1979. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Gwydion and the Dragon” by C. J. Cherryh. © 1991 C. J. Cherryh. Originally published in Once Upon a Time, 1991. Reprinted by permission of C. J. Cherryh.
“Berlin” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Fourth Avenue Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Charles de Lint. Grateful acknowledgments are made to Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, creators of the Borderland series, and to Bellamy Bach and Midori Snyder, for the use of their copyrighted material in this work. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“St. Dragon and the George” by Gordon R. Dickson. © 1957 Gordon R. Dickson. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1957. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Gordon R. Dickson.
“The Dragon on the Bookshelf” by Harlan Ellison® and Robert Silverberg. © 1995 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation and Agberg, Ltd. Originally published in The Ultimate Dragon, 1995. Harlan Ellison is a registered trademark of the Killimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
“The Laily Worm” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. © 2004 Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy, August 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Miracle Aquilina” copyright © 2010 by Margo Lanagan.
“The Rule of Names” © 1964, 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fantastic Magazine; from the author’s own collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
“Draco, Draco” by Tanith Lee. © 1984 Tanith Lee. Originally published in Beyond Lands of Never, Unicorn 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Silver Dragon” by Elizabeth A. Lynn. © 2004 Elizabeth A. Lynn. Originally published in Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, Roc 2004. Reprinted in a slightly different version in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, St. Martin’s, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Concerto Accademico” by Barry N. Malzberg. © 1992 Barry N. Malzberg. Originally published in Dragon Fantastic, DAW 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Ice Dragon” by George R. R. Martin. © 1980 George R. R. Martin. Originally published in Dragons of Light, 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey. © 1967, 1995 Anne McCaffrey. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 1967. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” by Patricia A. McKillip. © 1982 Patricia A. McKillip. Originally published in Elsewhere II, Ace 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Howard Morhaim.
“Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy. © 2003 Pat Murphy. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2003. Reprinted by permission of Pat Murphy.
“In Autumn, a White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River” by Naomi Novik. © 2009 by Temeraire LLC. Originally published in In His Majesty’s Service, Del Rey 2009.
“The Dragons of Summer Gulch” by Robert Reed. © 2004 Robert Reed. Originally published in SciFiction, December 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” by Lucius Shepard. © 1984 Lucius Shepard. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1984. Reprinted by permission of Lucius Shepard.
“Dragon’s Fin Soup” by S.P. Somtow. © 1995 S.P. Somtow. Originally published in The Ultimate Dragon, Byron Preiss & John Betancourt eds. 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“King Dragon” by Michael Swanwick. © 2003 Michael Swanwick. Originally published in The Dragon Quintet, The SF Book Club, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Dragon’s Boy” by Jane Yolen. © 1985 Jane Yolen. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The George Business” by Roger Zelazny. © 1980 Roger Zelazny. Originally published in Dragons of Light, 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Jonathan Strahan, Wings of Fire
Wings of Fire Page 74
