The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  ‘Soon enough,’ she said. ‘But that’s not your worry. Just bring me food. Meat. And make sure no one disturbs me. The rest I’ll take care of.’

  She needed an herb, she told him, that grew on the far side of the dragon’s tail. It was most efficacious when picked at the height of the rains and she asked him to go that day and gather all he could find. She described the plant and urged him to hurry – she wanted to begin taking it as quickly as possible. Then she brushed her lips against his cheek, the closest she had ever come to giving him a kiss, and tried to send him on his way. But this diffident affection, so out of character for her, provoked Hota to ask what she felt for him.

  She gave an impatient snort. ‘I told you – my emotions aren’t like yours.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot. You could try to explain.’

  She sat on the edge of the bed, gazed at him consideringly. ‘What do you feel for me?’

  ‘Devoted, I suppose,’ he said after a pause. ‘But my devotion changes. I remain dutiful, but there are times when I resent you . . . I fear you. Other times, when I desire you.’

  She appeared to be studying the floor, the boards figured by dragons, blackly emerging from the grain of the wood. ‘Love and desire,’ she said at last, imbuing the words with a wistful emphasis. ‘For me . . .’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Try!’ he insisted.

  ‘This is so important to you?’

  ‘It is.’

  She firmed her lips. ‘Inevitability and freedom. That’s what I feel. For you, for the situation we’re in . . .’ She spread her hands, a gesture of helplessness. ‘That’s as near as I can get.’

  At a loss, Hota asked her to explain further.

  ‘None of this was our idea, yet it was inevitable,’ she said. ‘Its inevitability was thrust upon us by Griaule. But that’s irrelevant. We have a road to travel and must make the best of it. And so we . . . we’ve formed an attachment.’

  ‘And freedom? What of that?’

  ‘To find your way to freedom in what is inevitable, within the bonds of your fate . . . that, for me, is love. Only when you accept a limitation can you escape it.’

  Hota nodded as if he understood her, and to a degree he did; but he was unable to apply what he understood to the things he felt or the things he wanted her to feel.

  Perhaps she read this in his face, for she said then, ‘Often I feel other emotions. Strains . . . whispers of them. I think they’re akin to those you feel. They trouble me, but I’ve come to accept them.’ She beckoned him to come stand beside her and then took his hand. ‘We’ll always be bound together. When you accept that, then you’ll find your freedom.’ She lay back and turned onto her side. ‘Now, please. Bring me the herb. This is the day it should be picked.’

  There was no shortcut to the spot where the herb grew, unless you were to climb over Griaule’s back. Hota was loath to run that course again and so he went up into the hills behind the town and walked through pine forest along the ridges for an hour until he reached a pass choked by a grassy mound that wound between hills: the dragon’s tail. Once across the tail, he walked for half an hour more through scrub palmetto before he came to an undulant stretch of meadow close to the dragon’s hind leg, where weeds bearing blue florets sprouted among tall grasses. He worked doggedly, plucking the weeds, cramming them into his sack and tamping them down. When the sack was two-thirds full, he sat beneath a palmetto whose fronds still dripped with rain, facing the massive green slope of the dragon, and unwrapped his lunch of bread and cheese and beer.

  The trappings of his life seemed to arrange themselves in orderly ranks as he ate, and he realized that for the first time he had a significant purpose. Aside from momentary impulses, he had never truly wanted anything before Magali appeared atop Griaule’s back. Nor, until the day of his wife’s death, had he ever acted of his own volition. He had done everything by rote, copying the lives of his father and his uncles, compelled by the circumstance of birth to obey the laws of his class. Of course, it was conceivable . . . No, it was certain that he had always been the subject of manipulation, that what he had done in Port Chantay and since was not of his own choosing, and he was merely a minor figure in Griaule’s design. It was immaterial, he supposed, whether the manipulative force were the arcane directives of a dragon or the compulsions of a society. The main distinction, as he saw it, was that his purpose now – that of surrogate father, caretaker, protector of a woman once a dragon – was a duty for which he had been singled out, for which he was best suited of all available candidates, and that bred in him an emotion he had felt so rarely, he scarcely knew it well enough to name: Pride. It pervaded him now, alleviating both his anxieties and his aversion toward being used in such a bizarre fashion.

  An armada of clouds with dark bellies and silvered edges swept up from the south, grazing the sharp crests of the distant hills and thundering, as if their hulls were being ruptured. White lightnings pranced and stabbed. The rain began to pelt down in scatters, big drops that hit like cold shrapnel, and Hota, leaving the remnants of his food for the ants, returned to his task, tearing up fistfuls of weeds and stuffing them into the sack. Soon the thunder was all around, deafening, one peal rolling into the next. Then he heard a low rumble that came from somewhere closer than the sky, an immense, grating voice that seemed to articulate a gloating satiety, a brute pleasure, and lasted far too long to be an ordinary peal. Hota dropped the sack and stared at Griaule, expecting the hill to shake off its cloak of soil and trees, and walk. Expecting also that the head would lift and pin him with a golden eye. Rain matted his hair, poured down his face, and still he stood there, waiting to hear that voice again. When he did not, he became uncertain he had heard it the first time, and yet it resounded in memory, guttural and profound, a voice such as might have risen from the earth, from the throat of a demon pleased by the taste of a freshly digested mortal soul. If he had heard it, if it had been Griaule’s voice, Griaule who never spoke, Hota could think of only one thing that would have summoned so unique a response. The child. He set about stuffing the sack with renewed vigor, ripping up weeds, unmindful of the rain, and when the sack was full, its girth that of a wagon wheel, he shouldered it and headed back into the hills and along the ridge toward Teocinte.

  By the time he began descending through the pine forest, angling for the center of town, Hota was shivering, his clothes soaked through, but his thoughts were of Magali’s well-being and not his own. She might have needed the herb in preparation for the birth and suffered greatly for lack of it. The idea that he had failed her plagued him more than the cold. He increased his pace, hustling down the slope with a choppy, sideways step, the sack bumping and rolling against his back. On reaching the lower slope, where the pines thinned out into stands of banana trees and shrubs, he heard voices and caught a glimpse of several men sprinting up the hill. He was too worried about Magali to make a presumption concerning the reason for their haste. Forcing his way through the last of the brush, he burst out onto a dirt street, repositioned the sack, which had slipped from his shoulder. Then he glanced to his left, toward Liar’s House.

  What he saw rooted him to the spot. Off along the bumpy, muddy street, many-puddled, strafed by slashing rain and lined with shanties that in their crookedness and decrepitude looked like desiccated wooden skulls with tin hats, lay the wreckage of the inn. There appeared to have been an explosion inside the place, the walls and roof blown outward . . . though not blown far. Just far enough so as to form, of shattered gray boards, crushed furniture, ripped mattresses, and scraps of tin, the semblance of an enormous nest . . . though one corner post with a shard of flooring attached had been left standing, distracting from the effect. Resting at the center of the ruin, her head high and her body curled about a grayish white egg twice the size of Hota’s sack, was a dragon with bronze scales. Perhaps forty feet in length, tip to tail. Twists of black smoke fumed from the boards around her and were dispersed by the rain. Smoke also
rose from the wreckage of a shack opposite the hotel. She had breathed fire, Hota told himself. He felt a twinge of regret that he had not been present to see it.

  No one else was about and Hota could feel the emptiness of the town. Everyone had fled. All the thieves and murderers. Except for him. The men whom he had passed on the outskirts must have been stragglers. His sack grew heavy. He lowered it to the ground, with no thought of running in his mind, and drank in the scene with the greediness of a connoisseur of desolation, savoring every detail, every variation in tint, every fractured angle. Liar’s House had been constructed from exactly the right amount of timber to make a nest, enough to provide protection, yet not so much as to interfere with Magali’s field of vision as she lay beside the egg. Griaule’s design at work, Hota imagined. The boards had fallen perfectly. Those that had been part of the interior rooms had collapsed outward and thus created a wall around the inner nest; those that had been part of the exterior had fallen inward, creating a field of debris that would be hard for anyone to cross.

  Hota was still marveling over the rectitude and precision of Griaule’s plan, when Magali’s neck flexed, her head turned toward him, and she gave a cry that, though absent the chthonic power of the grumbling he had earlier heard, nonetheless owned power sufficient to terrify him. It started as a guttural cawing and narrowed to a violent whistling scream that seemed to skewer his brain with an icy wire. He wanted to run now, but the sight held him. How beautiful and strange she looked at the heart of her ruinous nest, with her child in his glossy shell, smoke rising about them like black incense burnt to celebrate an idol. Her sagittal crest was a darker bronze, a corroded color – some of her scales shaded toward this same hue at the edges. The shape of her head was different from Griaule’s. Not birdlike . . . serpentine. Her eyes, also dark, set in deep orbits, were flecked with many-colored brightnesses; her folded wings were of an obsidian blackness, the struts wickedly sharp. All in all, like a relic treasure of the orient in her armored gaud. She screamed again and he thought he understood the urgency her voice conveyed.

  The herb.

  She needed the herb.

  He hoisted the sack onto his shoulder. Got his feet moving. Shuffled toward her, resolute yet weak with fear, his scrotum cold and tightened. He paused at the point where the front steps of the hotel had stood, now smashed to kindling, and imagined the change, the floor giving way beneath her suddenly acquired weight, the walls sundered by lashings of her tail and blows from her head. Even with the heavy odor of the rain and smoke, he could smell her scent of bitter ozone. He opened the sack, preparing to dump the contents on the ground, and she screamed a third time, a blast that nearly deafened him.

  Closer.

  She wanted him closer.

  He knew she could extend her neck and snap him up at this distance – there was no reason for him to be more afraid and yet he was. He reshouldered the sack and picked his way across the outer wreckage, scrambling over broken-backed couches, rain-heavied folds of carpet, barricades of splintered wood, and a litter of items belonging to guests: undergarments, shoes, spectacles, books, tin boxes, satchels, hip flasks, a trove of human accessories, all crushed and rent. As he crawled over the last of these obstacles, he saw a taloned foot ahead. The talons gleaming black, the neat scales into which they merged no larger than his hand. And the boards beneath him – those that had fallen so they formed a circular wall about the inner nest – they were alive with the images of dragons. Tiny perfect dragons flowing up from the grain of the wood, changing moment to moment, clearer than they had previously been and counterfeiting movement by their flow, as if they were pictographs emanating from Griaule’s mind and he was telling a story in that language to his son, the story of a single dragon and how he flew and hunted and ruled. Like, Hota thought, a nursery decoration. Magical in character, yet serving a function similar to that of the fish he had painted on the ceiling of his own back room in Port Chantay when his wife had informed him she was pregnant. He had painted them over after learning it was a lie told to prevent him from straying.

  Standing beneath the arch of Magali’s scaled chest and throat, Hota found he could not look up at her. He dumped the weeds from the sack and remained with his head down, appalled by the chuffing engine of her breath, the terrible dimension of her vitality. He shut his eyes and waited to be bitten, chewed, and swallowed. Then a nudge that knocked him sideways. He fetched up against the wall of the nest and fell onto his back. She peered at him with one opaline eye, the great sleek wedge of her head hanging six feet above the ground, snorting gently through ridged nostrils. Her belly rumbled and her head swung in a short arc to face him and he was enveloped in steamy breath. The implausibility of it all bore in upon him. That his seed had been transformed into the stuff of dragons; that he was father to an egg; that the beautiful woman to whom he had made love now loomed above him, dressed in fangs and scales, an icon of fear. His eyes went to the egg, glistening grayly with the rain. Lying just beyond it was a sight that harrowed him. The lower portion of a leg, footless, the calf shredded bloodily. Tatters of brown moleskin adhering to the flesh. Benno. It seemed he had paid for his dutiful trespass by becoming Magali’s first postpartum meal.

  Magali’s neck twisted, her head flipping up into the cloudy sky, and she vented a third scream. Once again, Hota understood her needs.

  Bring me food, she was saying.

  Meat.

  *

  How the days passed for them thereafter was very like the passage of all their days. Hota sat, usually on the steps of a shanty across the way, and watched over Magali. Intermittently, she would scream and he would walk to the livery where a number of horses were stabled, left behind by the panic-stricken citizens of Teocinte. He would lead one into the street (he could never manage to get them closer to the inn) and cut its throat; then he would butcher the animal and carry it to her in bloody sections. From time to time he spotted townspeople skulking on the outskirts, returned to reclaim personal possessions or perhaps to gauge when they might expect to reclaim their homes. They cursed at him and threw stones, but fled whenever he attempted to approach. He himself considered fleeing, but he seemed constrained by a mental regulation that enforced inaction and was as steady in its influence as the rain. He assumed that Griaule was its source, but that was of no real consequence. Everywhere you went, everything you did, some regulation turned you to its use. His thoughts ran in tedious circuits. He wondered if Magali had known she would change back into her original form. He believed she had, and he further believed that everything she had said to him was both lie and truth. She had wanted the herb, but she had also sent him to collect it in order to keep him away from the inn, to prevent him from being injured or killed during her transformation. That was the way of life. His life, at any rate. Even the truest of things eventually resolved into their lie. Every shining surface was tarred with blackness. Every light went dark. He speculated absently on what he would do after she left, as he knew she must, and devised infant plans for travel, for work. A job, he decided, might be in order. He had been idle far too long. But he realized this to be a lie he was telling himself – he doubted he would survive her and, though this might also have been a deception, he did not think he cared to survive her.

  His habits became desultory. He fell to drinking, rummaging through the wreckage of the tavern for unbroken bottles and then downing them in a sitting. He slept wherever he was when sleep found him. Out in the street; in a shanty; amid the ruins of Liar’s House. Not even the hatching of his golden-scaled child could spark his interest. The cracking of the shell started him from a drunken stupor, but he derived no joy from the event. He stared dumbly at the little monster mewling and stumbling at its mother’s side, asking its first demanding questions, learning to feed on fresh horsemeat. At one point he attempted to name it, an exercise in self-derision inspired by his mock-paternity. The names that he conjured were insults, the type of names given to goblins in fairy tales. Tadwallow. Gruntswipe. S
tinkpizzle. When he brought the food, Magali would nudge him with her snout, gestures he took for shows of affection; but he understood that her real concerns lay elsewhere. They always had.

  That time was, in essence, an endless gray day striped with sodden nights, a solitude of almost unvarying despondency. Weeks of drinking, slaughtering horses, staring at the sleeping dragon and their reptilian issue. On rare occasions he would rouse himself to a clinical detachment and give thought to the nature of the child. Dragons, so the tradition held, bore litters, and that Magali had borne a single child caused him to suspect that embedded in the little dragon’s flesh was a human heart or a human soul or some important human quality that would enable it to cross more easily between shapes and sensibilities than had its mother. And then he would look to Griaule, the mighty green hill with its protruding, lowered head, and to Magali in her nest, and he would have a sense of the mystery of their triangular liaison, the complex skein that had been woven and its imponderable potentials, and then he would briefly regain a perspective from which he was able to perceive the dual nature of her beauty, that of the woman and that of the sleek, sculptural beast with lacquered scales, monster and temptress in one.

  The rainy season drew toward its close and often he woke to bright sunlight, but his thoughts remained gray and his routine stayed essentially the same. The child had grown half as big as an ox, ever beating its wings in an effort to fly. It required more food. After killing all the horses, Hota found it necessary to go into the hills and hunt wild boar, jumping from branches onto their backs, stabbing them or, failing that, breaking their necks. He felt debased by the brutality of these death struggles. The animal stench; the squeals; the hot blood gushing onto his hands – these things turned something inside him and he began to see himself as a primitive, an apelike creature inhabiting a ruin and pretending to be a man. At night he stumbled through the town carrying an open bottle, singing in an off-key baritone, howling at the night and serenading the tin-hatted wooden skulls, addressing himself by name, offering himself advice or just generally chatting himself up. He refused to believe this was a sign of deterioration. He knew what he was about. It was an indulgence, a means of passing the hours, nothing more. And yet it might be, he thought, the prelude to deterioration. He was not, however, prepared to give up the practice. The sound of his voice distracted him from thinking and frightened off the townspeople, whose incursions had become more frequent, though none would come near Liar’s House. Day and night they shouted threats from the hills, where many had taken refuge, and he would respond by singing to them and telling them what he had recently learned – that a man’s goals and preoccupations, perhaps his every thought, were the manufacture of a higher power. Whatever they threatened had been promised him since birth.