The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  As she spoke he seemed to understand her, but when she fell silent the echoes of the words lost energy and died, transformed into generalities. He tried to explore them, to recapture some sense of the feeling her voice had communicated, but failed.

  The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant’s petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule’s head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.

  ‘You keep telling me I can’t understand things,’ he said. ‘It’s frustrating. I want to understand something and I don’t understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this . . . as a woman?’

  She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.

  ‘Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens,’ she said. ‘We control our shapes in ways you cannot.’

  ‘You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Only a dragon or a woman . . . I think. I’m not sure.’

  He pondered this. ‘Why can’t Griaule change himself into a man?’

  ‘What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate – a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It’s something done only out of great necessity.’

  ‘You didn’t appear to be in pain . . . when I found you.’

  ‘It had ebbed by the time you reached me.’

  There were too many questions flocking Hota’s thoughts for him to single any one out; but, before long, one soared higher than the rest: What great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, ‘Soon you’ll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient.’

  Moonglow fanned up above the hills to the west and in that faint light she looked calm, emotionless. Yet as he considered her, it struck him that a new element was embodied in her face. Serenity . . . or perhaps it was an absence he perceived, some small increment of anxiety erased.

  ‘Griaule,’ she said in a half-whisper.

  ‘What of him?’ he asked, perplexed by her worshipful tone. She only shook her head in response.

  Something scurried through the grass behind the boulder. A dull gleam emerged from the shadow of Griaule’s head, the tip of a fang holding the light. The wind picked up, bringing the still palms alive, swaying their fronds, breeding a sigh that seemed to voice a hushed anticipation. Magali folded her arms across her breasts.

  ‘I’m ready now,’ she said.

  Hota assumed that by those last words, she meant she was ready to return to Liar’s House, for after saying them, she hopped down from the boulder and led him back toward the town; but once they closed the door of his room behind them, it became clear she had intended something more. She undressed quickly and stood before him in a silent yet unmistakable invitation, her skin agleam in the unsteady lamplight. Skeins of hair fell across her breasts, like black tributaries on the map of a voluptuous bronze country. Her eyes were cored with orange reflection. She looked to be a magical feminine treasure whose own light devalued that of the lamp. All his flimsy moral proscriptions against intimacy melted away. He took a step toward her and let her bring him down onto the bed.

  During the first thirty-one years of his life, Hota had made love to but one woman: his wife. Since then, he had made love to many more and thought himself reasonably knowledgeable as to their ways. Magali’s ways, however, enlarged his views on the subject. For the most part she lay quiescent, her eyes half-closed, as if her mind were elsewhere and she were merely allowing herself to be penetrated; but every so often, abruptly, she would begin to thrash and heave, pushing and clawing at him, breath shrieking out of her, throwing herself about with such apparent desperation, he was nearly unseated. Initially, he took this behavior for rejection and flung himself off her; but she pulled him back down between her legs and, once he had entered her, she lay quiet again. This alternation of corpselike stillness and frenzied motion distressed him and he was unable to lose himself in the act, half-listening to the sounds of more commercial passions emanating from adjoining rooms. When he had finished and was lying beside her, sweaty and breathing hard, she demanded that he repeat the performance. And so it went, the second encounter like the first, equally as awkward and emotionally unsatisfying. In her frenzied phase, she seemed even less a complicitor in pleasure than she did when she was still. She took to snapping at his arm, his shoulder, making cawing noises deep in her throat. But their third encounter, one into which Hota had to be vigorously coerced, was different. She drew up her knees and met his thrusts with sinuous abandon and kept her arms locked about his neck, her eyes upon his face, until at long last she offered up a shivery cry and clamped her knees to his sides, refusing to let him move.

  After he withdrew, pleased, feeling that they had managed actual intimacy, he tried to be tender with her, but she shrank from his touch and would not speak. More confused than ever, he decided that her behavior must be due to a lack of familiarity with her body, and he counseled himself to remain patient. They had come this far and whatever road lay ahead, there would be time to smooth over these problems. Fatigued, his eyes went to the lamp-lit ceiling. It looked as if all the dragons imprinted in the grain were quivering, shifting agitatedly, as if preparing to take flight. He watched them, imagining that if he watched long enough he would see one fly, the tiny black sketch of a dragon flap up off the boards and make a circuit of the room. Eventually he slept.

  The following morning, gray and drizzly, with a touch of chill, he woke to find Magali at the window, which stood half-open. She had on her green dress and was looking out onto the street. He sat up, groggy, rubbing his eyes. The bedsprings squeaked loudly, but she gave no sign of having heard.

  ‘Magali?’ he said.

  She ignored him. The rain quickened, drumming on the tin roof. Feeling the bite of the cold, Hota swung his legs onto the floor, grabbed his shirt from among the rumpled bedclothes, and began to pull it over his head.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

  Without turning, she said glumly, ‘You’ve given me a child.’

  He paused, the shirt tangled about his neck, and started to ask how she could know such a thing, then remembered that she had knowledge inaccessible to him.

  ‘A son,’ she said dully. ‘I’m going to have a son.’

  The idea of fathering children no longer figured into Hota’s plans and his immediate reaction was uneasiness over having to shoulder such a responsibility. He tugged the shirt down to cover his belly. ‘You don’t seem happy. Is it you don’t want a child?’

  ‘It isn’t what I want that’s of moment.’ She paused and then said, ‘The birth will be painful.’

  Her attitude, so contrary to what he would have expected, provoked an odd reaction in him – he wondered how it would feel to be a father. ‘It might not be so bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve known women to have easy childbirths. At the end we’ll have our son and perhaps that’ll give . . .’

  ‘He’s not your son,’ she said. ‘You fathered him, but he will be Griaule’s son.’

  The rain came harder yet and, amplified by the tin, filled the room with a kind of roaring, a din that made it difficult for Hota to think, to hear his own voice. ‘That’s impossible.’

  Magali turned from the window. ‘Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve told you?’

  ‘What have you told me that would explain this?’

  She stared at him without expression. ‘Griaule is the eldest of all who live. Over the centuries,
his soul has expanded with the growth of his body. How far it extends, I can’t say. Far beyond the valley, though. I know that much. I was flying above the sea when he drew me to him.’ She dropped heavily into the chair beside the window and rested her hands on her knees. ‘His soul encloses him like a bubble. For all I know that bubble has grown to enclose the entire world. But I’m certain you live inside its reach. You’ve lived inside it your whole life. And now he’s drawn you to him as well. It’s possible he caused the events that drove you from Port Chantay. That would be in keeping with what I understand of his character. With the deviousness and complexity of his mind.’

  Hota felt the need to offer a denial, but could find no logical framework to support one.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she went on. ‘Griaule desired to father a son. Since he couldn’t participate in the act of conception, he contrived a means by which he could father the child of his will. And for this purpose he sought out a man who embodied certain of his own qualities. Someone with a stolid temperament. With great strength and endurance. And great anger. A human equivalent of his nature who fit the shape of his design. Then he chose me to endure the birth.’

  Rain slanted in through the window. Hota crossed the room and closed it. As he returned to the bed, he said, ‘You must have known this all along? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘I didn’t know all of it. I still don’t know it all. And it’s as I’ve said – these things that have happened to us, they weren’t my wish. Even if they were, I’m not like you. My thoughts are not like yours. My motives are not yours. You asked why I wasn’t happy? I’m never happy. My emotions . . . You couldn’t grasp them.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘It would have only upset you. There’s nothing you could have done.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you lied to me. I don’t deserve to be kept in the dark about what’s going on.’

  ‘I haven’t lied!’ she said. ‘Have I withheld things from you? Yes. I did what I was compelled to do. But all the things I know, the things I don’t know, they may or may not be good for you. And that’s what you truly want to know, isn’t it? What’s going to happen to you? In the end all your questions will be answered and you’ll be pleased with that. That’s what I think. But I can’t be certain. That’s the problem, you see? Any answer I can give you is essentially a lie, except for “I don’t know.”’

  Her response had the same disorienting effect as the rain – he believed her, but it was like believing in nothing, knowing nothing. He sat with his head down, dull and listless, looking at his fingers, wiggling them for a distraction. ‘You and me . . . What about you and me?’

  ‘We’ll travel the road together and learn what fate has in store. That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What don’t you believe?’

  ‘About your feelings,’ he said. ‘I know you were happy last night. For a time, at least.’

  She leaned toward him and spoke slowly, with exaggerated emphasis, as if to a child. ‘I lived in the side of a cliff. A sea cave. I was alone, yet I wanted for nothing. I was content with the world I knew.’ She resettled in her chair. ‘Last night, that was . . . strange. Now it’s done. We’re past that turn of the road.’

  She appeared to lose interest in the conversation, her eyes traveling across the boards. In the rainy light, her beauty was subdued, diminished. ‘Are you happy?’ she asked after a minute.

  ‘Maybe I was, a little. I’m never happy much.’ He spotted his pants lying on the floor and stepped into them. ‘Why would Griaule do this? For what reason does he want a son?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps it’s just a game he’s playing. You can’t know Griaule’s intent. Some of his schemes play out over thousands of years. He’s unique, as unlike me as I am unlike you. No one can understand what he intends.’

  Of a sudden the rain let up and a weak sun broke through the overcast; the wind gusted and a distorted shadow of the window, pale panes and darker divisions, canted out of true, trembled on the floor.

  ‘I need food,’ Magali said.

  Though Hota held out hope that their night together would be the beginning of intimacy, he soon recognized it to have been their peak. Thereafter the relationship settled back into one of functional disengagement. He brought her food, whatever she needed, and kept watch over her with devotional intensity. Their conversations grew less frequent, less far-ranging, as her belly swelled . . . and it swelled much more rapidly than would a typical pregnancy. Four weeks and she had the shape of a woman in late-term. She stayed in bed most of the day. Never again did they visit the tavern or walk out together in the town. Hota sat in a chair, brooding, or stood at the window and did the same. He became familiar with the window much in the way he had become familiar with Magali, noting all its detail: patches of greenish mold on the sill; a splintery centerpiece; areas of wood especially stained and swollen by dampness; rotted inches eaten away by infestation. Its gray dilapidation was, he thought, emblematic not only of the room, but of his life, which was itself a gray, dilapidated region, a space that contained and limited his spirit, stunting its growth.

  He recognized, too, that his position in the town had changed. Whereas formerly he had been someone whom people avoided, few had spoken against him, but now, when they passed him in the streets, no one offered a greeting or a salute: instead, men and women would stand closer together, whisper and dart wicked glances in his direction. The reasons for this change remained unclear until one afternoon, as he entered the inn, Benno Grustark accosted him at the door and demanded twice the usual rent.

  ‘I’m losing business, having you here,’ Benno told him. ‘You need to compensate me.’

  Hota pointed out that his was the only place in town where visitors could stay and thus he doubted Benno’s claim.

  ‘When people hear about you, some will sleep outside rather than rent my rooms,’ Benno said.

  ‘When they hear about me?’ Hota said, bewildered. ‘What do they hear?’

  Benno, who was that day dressed in his customary brown moleskin trousers and a red tunic that clung to his ample belly, a costume that lent him an inappropriately jolly look, shifted his feet and cut his eyes to the side as if fearing he would be overheard. ‘Your woman . . . people say she’s a witch.’

  Hota grunted a laugh.

  ‘It’s not a joke for me,’ Benno said. ‘What do you expect them to think? She’s about to give birth and yet she’s only been with you a few months!’

  ‘She was pregnant before I brought her here.’

  ‘Oh, I see! And where was she before that? Did you keep her in your pocket? Did you make her pregnant at a distance?’

  ‘It’s not my child,’ Hota said, and realized that this, unlike his previous statement, was only partially a lie.

  An expression of incredulity on his face, Benno said, ‘I saw her when she came. She wasn’t showing at all. And I’ve seen her since, in the hallway, no more than a month ago. She wasn’t showing then, either.’

  ‘All pregnant women show differently. You know that.’ Benno started to raise a further point, but Hota cut him off. ‘Since you’re so observant, I have to assume you’re the one who’s been spreading rumors about her.’

  Benno popped his eyes and waggled his hands at chest-level in thespian display of denial. ‘Plenty of people have seen her. Other guests. Some of my girls. Her condition’s hardly a secret.’

  Hota dug coins from his pocket and pressed them into Benno’s hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Now leave us alone.’

  With a plodding tread, he started up the stairs.

  Benno followed to the first step and called out, ‘As soon as she’s able to travel, I want the both of you gone! Do you hear me? Not one day longer than necessary!’

  ‘It’ll be our pleasure.’ Hota paused midway up the stairs and gazed down at him. ‘But take this to heart. Until that day, you would do
well to suppress the rumors about her, rather than foster them.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘What possessed you to cut the boards of the inn from Griaule’s back?’

  Benno’s defensive manner was swept away by a confounded look, one similar – Hota thought – to the looks he often wore these days. ‘I just did it,’ Benno said. ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘Is that another one of your lies?’ Hota asked. ‘Or don’t you know?’

  Over the course of the next two weeks, Magali became increasingly irritable, not asking things of Hota so much as giving orders and expressing her displeasure when he was slow to obey. She otherwise maintained a brittle silence. Thrown back onto his own resources, Hota fretted about the child and speculated that it might be some mutant thing, awful in aspect and nature. Burdened with such a monster, where could he take her that people would tolerate them? It was not in him to abandon her. Whether that was a function of his character or of Griaule’s, he could not have said and was a question he did not seek to answer. He had accepted that this, for the time being, was his station in life. That being the case, he tried to steel himself against doubt and depression, but doubt and depression circled him like vultures above a wounded dog, and the rain, incessant now, drummed and drummed on the tin roof, echoing in his dreams and filling his waking hours with its muted roar. Out the window, he watched the street turn into a quagmire, people sending up splashes with every step, thatched roofs melting into brownish green decay, drenched pariah dogs curled in misery beneath eaves and stairs. The smell of mildew rose from the wood, from clothing. The world was drowning in gray rain and Hota felt he was drowning in the rain of his existence.

  Then came a morning when the rain all but stopped and Magali’s spirits lifted. She seemed calm, not irritable in the least, and she offered apology for her moodiness, then discussed with him what she would require after the child was born. He asked if she thought the birth would be soon.