The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  The money and gems he had stolen from the harbormaster enabled Hota to live as comfortably as the rough consolations of Teocinte permitted. He occupied a third-floor room at the rear of Dragonwood House, a weathered, boxlike building with a tin roof and a tavern downstairs and a newer, less ruinous single-story wing attached, where prostitutes were housed. Its ashen gray facade was dressed with a garishly painted sign that depicted a dragon soaring through a fiery heaven. The inn was situated near the edge of town and serviced the steady stream of visitors that came to look at Griaule, offering views of the dragon’s side from its front windows. Its owner, Benno Grustark, claimed that the boards employed in its construction were manufactured from trees that had grown atop Griaule’s back, but his patrons, knowing that few dared to set foot upon the dragon, let alone cut timber, referred to the inn as Liar’s House.

  Having no need to work, Hota passed many of his days at woodcarving, a hobby of his childhood that still pleased him, though he displayed no talent for the work. Since there was little in the town to attract his eye, he took to carving likenesses of Griaule. Dozens of such pieces were crowded together on his shelves, atop the bureau and chairs, and scattered across the floor of his room. On occasion he would give one to a child or to a prostitute who shared his bed, but this made no appreciable dent in the clutter. To avoid further clutter, he began working on a grander scale, walking out into the hills, felling trees, chiseling dragons from the trunks, and leaving the completed figures to the depredations of the rain and the insects. He set no great store by the work, caring only that it distracted him, but was nonetheless pleased that the woods were becoming littered with his sculptures, crude figures weathering into objects that – like their model – appeared to be natural formations that bore a striking resemblance to dragons.

  In the early spring, eleven years after his arrival in Teocinte, Hota hired a carter to haul the trunk of a white oak to the crest of a hill from which he had a profile view of Griaule with the valley spreading beyond, an undulant reach of palms and palmettos, figs and aguacates, threaded by red dirt paths. There he set about his most ambitious project. Previously he had carved the dragon as he might have appeared during more vital days – flying, crouched, or rampant; now he intended to create a sculpture that would depict Griaule as he was: the oddly delicate, birdlike head, jaws half open, tongue and fangs embroidered with lichen, vines depending in loops and snarls from the roof of the mouth; the bluish green folds and struts of the sagittal crest, that same color edging the golden scales; his sinuous body, the haunches, flanks, and back mapped by a forest whose dark green conformation was so similar to the shapes of the hills that lifted higher behind him, it caused Hota to wonder if they, too, might not conceal gigantic dragons. He spent a week in laying out the design and then several days more gathering the details of Griaule’s shape in his mind and letting that knowledge flow into his hands.

  Toward noon one morning, as Hota was busy carving, he noticed something flying in loops above Griaule’s snout, difficult to make out against the strong sun, as tiny in relation to the dragon as a swallow fluttering about a bull’s nose. To his astonishment, for Hota had thought Griaule to be the sole survivor of his species, he realized it was another dragon. Thirty to forty feet long, by his estimate. With bronze scales. Enthralled, he watched the creature swoop and soar, maintaining a predictable circuit, as if she (because of her daintiness by contrast to Griaule, Hota thought of the second dragon as she) were tracing the same character over and over, enacting a ritual of some kind. Her wings seemed to ripple rather than to beat against the air, and her long neck glided through its attitudes with the suppleness of a reed borne on a stream, and her tail lashed about with what struck him as a lascivious ferocity. She might be, he surmised, attempting to communicate with Griaule. Or perhaps he was communicating with her; perhaps the patterns of her flight gave visual form to the eddies of his thoughts. At length she broke off her circling and settled onto Griaule’s broad back, passing out of sight behind his sagittal crest.

  Dropping his chisel, Hota hurried down the hill, following a track that merged with one of the red dirt paths crisscrossing the valley, and approached Griaule from the side, heading for the bulge of his foreleg. As the dragon came to loom above him, he felt a surge of terror. The tightly nested scales of the jaw; the gray teeth with their traceries of lichen, like the broken wall of a fortress city; the bulge of an orbital ridge: seen close to hand, the monumental aspect of these things dismayed him, and when he moved into the dragon’s shadow, something colder and thicker than air seemed to glove him, as if he were moving in invisible mud. But fascination overbore his fright. The prospect of observing a dragon who was capable of motion excited him. There was nothing of the academic or the artistic in his interest. He simply wanted to see it.

  He scrambled up the slope afforded by the brush-covered foreleg, then ascended to the dragon’s thicketed shoulder, catching at shrubs to pull himself higher. His breath labored, sweat poured off him. On several occasions he nearly fell. When at last he stood atop Griaule’s back, clinging for support to a pine branch, looking down at the valley hundreds of feet below, Teocinte showing as an ugly grayish patch amid the greenery, he understood the foolishness of what he had done. He felt unarmored against the arrows of fate, as if he had violated a taboo and been stripped of all his immunities. And adding to his anxiety was the fact that nearby was a dragon who, upon sensing him, would seek to tear him to pieces . . . unless she had flown away while he was climbing, and he doubted this to be the case. Fear mounted in him once again, but he did not place so much value on his life as once he had – indeed, he often wondered why he had bothered to save himself from the hangman’s rope that night in Port Chantay – and his desire to see her remained strong. Planting his feet with care, easing branches aside, he pressed on into the brush and headed for the spot where he supposed the second dragon had landed.

  The heat of the day came full and Hota continued to sweat profusely. The needle sprays of stunted pine and the yellowed round leaves of the shrubs that dominated the thicket limited his view to a few yards ahead and stuck to his damp neck and cheeks and arms. After wandering blindly about for a quarter of an hour, he began to speculate that the second dragon had made no landing at all, but merely swooped down behind the sagittal crest and then leveled off and flew away over the hills. He found a bare patch of ground and sat, deliberating whether or not to give up the search. Scutterings issued from the brush and this alarmed him. Rumor had it that many of the animals living in and on Griaule were poisonous. Deciding that he had been foolish enough for one day, Hota stood and headed back the way he had come. After half an hour, when he had not reached the edge of the thicket, he realized with annoyance that he must have gotten turned around and was walking along the spine. He stood on tiptoes, caught sight of the dragon’s crest, and, thus oriented, started off parallel to it. Another half hour passed and his annoyance blossomed into panic. Someone – doubtless Griaule himself – was playing a trick on him. Clouding his thoughts, causing him to go in circles. Again he sighted the sagittal crest and beat his way through the brush; but the ground beneath his feet did not slope away as it should have done and when he checked the crest once more, he saw that he had made no progress whatsoever.

  After two hours, Hota’s panic lapsed into resignation. This, then, was the fate to which his violence had led him. Trapped in a magical circumstance that he could not hope to fathom, he would wander Griaule’s back until he grew too weak to walk and died of thirst and exposure. He would, he thought, have preferred to be hung. Yet he could not deny that he was deserving of worse and there was no defiance in him. He kicked broken branches aside, cleaning a spot where he could sit and wait for death; but upon reflection, he kept on walking, deciding it would be best to wear himself out and so hasten the inevitable. He hurried through the thicket, no longer trying to hide his presence, for he assumed that the second dragon had been an illusion, bait in the trap Griaule had set. He sw
atted boughs aside and shouldered through entangled places, forcing himself whenever possible into a lumbering trot. As he went, he began to feel exhilarated and it occurred to him that this might be because he finally had something meaningful to do. All his years of drinking and inept woodcarving, and all the years prior, the numbing labor, silent evenings staring glumly at his wife, and shabby, juiceless days . . . It was right they should end here and now. They had profited no one, least of all himself.

  The longer he contemplated the prospect of dying, the more eager to have done with life he became. What did he have to look forward to? A few uneventful years followed by the loss of his physical powers? Assaults by younger, stronger men who would rob him and leave him destitute? And that would not be the worst of it. Exhilaration turned to something approaching glee and he increased his pace. Twigs stabbed at him, abrading his skin, but he ignored the pain. He remembered another occasion on which he had felt a similar measure of . . . what? Enthusiasm? Vitality?

  Delirium.

  That was the word, he thought.

  It was a feeling very like the one he had experienced at the harbormaster’s house in Port Chantay.

  Sobered by an awareness of this possible connection, he slowed to a walk, mulling it over, wondering if what he felt, then and now, might be an indication of mental infirmity or some physical ailment. He was still considering this notion when he slapped aside a pine bough and stepped into a clearing where stood a slender woman with bronze skin, long black hair falling to the small of her back, and wearing not a stitch of clothing.

  The woman was so startling a sight, Hota’s initial reaction was one of disbelief. He imagined her to be part of his delirium . . . or perhaps a further trick of Griaule’s. She was half-turned away, a hand to her cheek, as if she had been struck by a remembrance. A pattern of dark irregular lines covered her body. Like, he thought, a sketch of reptilian scales. He first believed the lines to be a tattoo, but then noticed them growing fainter every second, and he recalled that the scales of the female dragon had been the exact shade of bronze as the woman’s skin. On hearing his choked outcry, she glanced back at him over her shoulder, displaying no indication of fear such as might be expected of a naked woman alone on being surprised by a man of his threatening appearance. She remained motionless, calmly regarding, and Hota, unable to accept what he was tempted to believe – that here stood the dragon he had sought, transformed somehow – was torn between the desire to flee and the need to know more about her. In a matter of seconds, the lines on her skin faded utterly and, as if this signaled the completion of a process that had restrained her, she turned to face him and said in a dry, dusty voice, ‘Hota.’

  The sound of his name on her lips, freighted with a touch of menace, or so he heard it, spurred him to flight. Unwilling to look away from her, he took a backward step, tried to run, but stumbled, and went sprawling onto his belly. He scrambled to one knee and found her standing above him.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ she asked, tipping her head to the side.

  Her eyes were dark, the irises large, leaving room for scarcely any white and her face, with its sharp cheekbones and full lips and delicate nose, was too perfect, lifeless, as might be an uninspired artist’s rendering. She repeated her question and, like her face, her voice was empty of human temper. The question seemed pragmatic, as if she were unfamiliar with fear and was hoping to identify its symptoms. Though she looked to be a mature woman, not a girl, her breasts and hips and belly betrayed no marks of age or usage.

  Hota sank back into a sitting position, dumbstruck.

  ‘There’s no reason to fear. We have a road to travel, you and I.’ A cloud passed across the sun; the woman glanced up sharply, scanning the sky, and then said, ‘I’ll need some clothing.’

  Somewhat reassured, Hota edged away from her and got to his feet. He gave thought again to running, but remembered getting lost among the thickets and decided that running would probably do him no good.

  ‘Did you hear?’ she asked, and again her words conveyed no sense of impatience or anger. ‘I need clothing.’

  Hota framed a question of his own, but was too daunted to speak.

  ‘Your name is Hota, isn’t it?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He licked his lips, tried to dredge up the courage to ask his question, failed, and succeeded only in making a confused noise.

  ‘Magali,’ said the woman, and touched the slope of a breast. ‘My name is Magali.’

  He could detect nothing of her mood. It was as if she were hidden inside a beautiful shell, her true self muffled. She waited for him to speak and finally, when he kept silent she said, ‘You know me. Is that what’s troubling you?’

  ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ Hota said.

  ‘But you know who I am. You saw me fly. You saw me while I was yet changing.’

  This, though it was the answer to his unasked question, only confounded him further and, in response, he merely shook his head.

  ‘How can you not believe it?’ she said. ‘You saw what you saw. But you have nothing to fear from me. I’m a woman now. My flesh is as yours.’ She reached out and took his hand. Her palm was warm. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘No . . . I . . .’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘No.’

  ‘You will in time.’ She released his hand. ‘Now can you bring me some clothing?’

  ‘There are no shops that sell women’s clothes in Teocinte.’

  ‘Borrow some . . . or bring me some of your own. I’ll make do.’

  By agreeing to do her bidding, Hota thought he would be able to make his escape. ‘All right. I’ll go now,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll come back. Don’t think you won’t.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  She laughed at this – it was, he thought, the first purely human thing she had done. ‘That’s not what is in your mind.’

  ‘How can you know what’s in my mind?’

  ‘It’s written on your face,’ she said. ‘You can’t wait to be gone. Once out of sight, you’ll run. That’s what you’re thinking, anyway. But you’ll tell yourself that if you don’t return, I’ll come after you. And it’s true – I would. But you have deeper reasons for returning.’

  ‘How can that be?’ he asked. ‘We have no history together, nothing that would furnish a depth of reason.’

  She moved away a few paces, turning toward the sun, and a pattern of leaf shadow fell across her hip, reminding him of the pattern that had faded from her skin. She arranged her hair so that it trailed across her breasts, dressing herself in the black skeins.

  ‘You’ll come back because there’s no other direction for you,’ she said. ‘Your life until this moment has been empty and you hope I’ll offer fulfillment of a kind. You’ll come back because you want to. Because the road you and I must travel, we have already set foot upon it.’

  When Hota and Magali, clad in an unflattering ankle-length dress he had borrowed from a prostitute, arrived at Liar’s House that evening, Benno Grustark, portly and short-legged, his round, dark-complected face set in grouchy lines and framed by oily black ringlets, hurried out of his office and admonished Hota that if the woman were to spend the night, he would have to pay extra. After getting a closer look at Magali, however, and after she turned her flat stare upon him, his delivery sputtered. When they passed up the stairs, leaving Benno looking up from the dusty lobby, silent, not offering, as was his habit, further admonitions, Hota suspected that the innkeeper was unaccustomed to having so beautiful a woman frequent his establishment.

  On ushering her into his room, Hota apologized for its sorry condition, but Magali paid no attention to the disarray and walked over to the wall beside his bed and began to inspect the weathered gray boards, running her forefinger along the black complexities of their grain, appearing to admire them as though they were made of the finest marble. Still daunted to a degree, Hota busied himself by straightening the room, picking up wooden dragons and stowing them into drawers, dusting his
rude furniture with a shirt. Glancing up from these chores, he saw that Magali had taken a seat on the bed and was picking at the folds of her skirt.

  ‘I’d like a green dress,’ she said. ‘Dark green. Do you have a seamstress in the town?’

  Hota wadded up the dust-covered shirt and tossed it onto a chair. ‘I think so . . . Yes.’

  She nodded solemnly as if he had imparted a great wisdom and then swung her legs up and lay back on the bed. ‘I want to sleep for a while. Perhaps we can have something to eat afterward.’

  ‘The tavern downstairs . . . they have food. It’s not so good.’

  She closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and after a minute or two Hota assumed that she had drifted off; but then, with a sudden violent twisting of her body, she turned onto her side and said, her words partially muffled by the pillow, ‘Just so long as there’s meat.’