The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  His dreams acquired a fanciful quality that went contrary to the grain of his waking life, and he came to have a recurring dream that seemed the crystallization of all the rest. He imagined himself running across fields, through woods, tireless and unafraid, in a state of exaltation, running for the joy of it, and when he approached the crest of a hill overlooking a steep drop, instead of halting, he ran faster and faster, leaping from the crest and being borne aloft on a sweep of wind, flying in the zones of the sun, and then seeing Magali, joining her in flight, swooping and curving, together weaving an endless pattern above a mighty green hill, the one from which he had leapt, and the child, too, was flying, albeit lower and less elegantly, testing itself against the air. It must be Griaule’s dream, he thought. Though liberating, there was about it the cold touch of a sending. He recalled what Magali had said – that one day he would know how it felt to fly – and he wondered if the recurring dream was a reminder of that promise, or else the keeping of it. Set against all he had endured, it did not weigh out as a suitable reward. But suitable or not, he enjoyed the dream and sleep became the sole thing in his routine to which he looked forward.

  One morning he woke lying in the street down from the inn. His joints stiff, eyelids crusted and stuck together, a fetid taste in his mouth. The brightness of the day pained him. Heat was beginning to cook from the abandoned town, a reek compounded of rotting flesh and vegetable spoilage. His vision blurry, he looked toward the inn. Magali, crouched in her nest, emitted a scream. In reflex, Hota took a step toward the hills, thinking that she was demanding food. Then she screamed a second time. He stopped and rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on her. Clinging atop her back, between her wings, its diminutive talons hooked into her crest, was the child. Before Hota could put reason to work and understand what he was seeing, Magali unfurled her obsidian wings – each longer than her body – and beat them once, producing a violent cracking sound and a buffet of wind that knocked Hota off-balance and caused him to fall. She leaped to the edge of the nest and, using her grip on the shattered boards as a boost, vaulted into the air, paper debris from the street whirling up in her wake. Within seconds she was soaring high above and Hota, stupefied by the abruptness of her departure, felt as empty and abandoned as the town.

  Magali disappeared behind Griaule’s back and Hota regained his feet. He stood a while with his hands at his sides, unable to summon a thought; then he walked over to the inn and clambered across the rubble to the inner nest. What he expected to find, he could not have said. Some token, perhaps. An accidental gift. A scale that had worked loose; a scrap from a green dress. But there were only wastes and bloody bones. The images on the boards had receded into the grain. No dragons were visible upon their surfaces, agitated or otherwise. The silence oppressed him. Irrational though it was, he missed Magali’s rumblings, her newborn’s trebly growls. Fool, he thought, and struck himself on the chest. To be mooning over a monstrosity, a twisted union that had been arranged by a still greater monstrosity. He picked up a fragment of board and slung it toward the looming green hill, as if his strength, inflamed by anger, could drive it like a missile through scale and flesh and guts to pierce the enormous heart. The plank splashed down into a puddle and he felt even more the fool. He crawled up out of the nest and went into the street and sat beneath the remaining corner post of the inn. If he stayed much longer, he thought, people would drift back into town and there would be trouble. It would be best to leave now. Forgo searching for his money, his gems, and walk away. He would find work somewhere. The notion tugged at him, but it refused to take hold. He clasped his hands, hung his head, and waited for another impulse to strike.

  And then, as suddenly as she had departed, Magali returned, swooping low above Liar’s House, the rush of her passage shattering the silence. She arrowed off over the hills behind the town, but returned again, swooping lower yet. Restored by the sight, Hota sprang to his feet. Watching her dive and loop, he soon recognized that she was repeating a pattern, that her flight was a signal, a ritual thing like the pattern she had flown above Griaule so many months ago. An acknowledgment. Or a farewell. Each time after passing above the street, a streaking of bronze scales, a shadowing of wings, she loosed a scream as she ascended. The guttural quality of her voice was inaudible at that distance, and her call had the sound of an eerie whistling music, three plaintive notes that might have been excerpted from a longer song whose melody played out closer to the sun. For an hour and more she flew above him. Like a scarf drawn through the sky. Entranced, he began to understand the meaning of the design her flight wove in the air. It was a knot, eloquent in its graceful twists, a sketch of the circumstance that had bound them. They had met, entwined into a minor theme that served the purpose of a larger music, one whose structure neither could discern, and now they would part. But only for a while. They would always be bound by that knot. All its loops led inward toward Liar’s House. He understood what she had told him on the day he went to gather the herb. He understood the congruence of inevitability and love, fate and desire, and, having accepted this, he was able to take joy in her freedom, to be confident that a like freedom would soon be his.

  Even after she had gone, flown beyond the hills, he watched the sky, hoping she would reappear. Yet there was no bitterness or regret in his heart. Though he did not know how it would happen, he believed she would always return to him. They would never be as he might have hoped them to be, but the connection between them was unbreakable. He would go inland, toward Point Horizon, and somewhere he would find a suitable home, a sinecure, and he would await the day of her return. No, he would do more than wait. For the first time in memory, he felt the sap of ambition rising in him. He would soar in his own way. He would not allow himself to settle for mere survival and drudgery.

  His mind afire with half-formed plans, with possibility of every sort, Hota turned from the inn, preparing to take a first step along his new road, and saw a group of men approaching along the street. Several dozen men. Filthy and bearded from their exile in the hills. Clad in rags and carrying clubs and knives. A second group, equally proportioned, was approaching from the opposite end of the street. He ducked around the corner of the inn, onto a side street, only to be confronted by a third group. And a fourth group moved toward him from the other end of that street.

  They had him boxed.

  Hota was frightened, yet fear was not preeminent in him. He still brimmed with confidence, with the certainty that the best of life lay ahead, and refused to surrender to panic. The third group, he judged, was the smallest of the four. He drew his boar-killing knife and ran directly at them, hoping to unnerve them with this tactic. The center of the group, toward which he aimed, fell back a step, and, seeing this, Hota let out a hoarse cry and ran harder, slashing the air with his knife. Seconds later, he was among them. Their bearded, hollow-cheeked faces aghast, they clutched at him, tried to stab him, but his momentum was so great, he burst through their ranks without injury, and ran past the last shanties into the palms and bananas and palmettos that fringed the outskirts. Jubilant in the exercise of strength, he zigzagged through the trees, knocking fronds aside, stumbling now and again over a depression or a bump, yet keeping a good pace, liking the feel of his sweat, his exertions. His muscles felt tireless, as in his recurring dream, and he wondered if the dream had foreshadowed this moment and he would climb the green hill of Griaule’s back – he was, he realized, heading in that very direction – and leap from it and fly. But though strong, Hota was not fleet. Soon he heard men running beside and ahead of him. Heard their shouts. And as he passed a large banana tree with tattered yellow fronds, someone lying hidden in the grass reached out a hand and snagged his ankle, sending him sprawling. His knife flew from his hand. He scrambled to his knees, searching for it. Spotted it in the grass a dozen feet away. Before he could retrieve it, someone jumped onto his back, driving him face first into the ground. And before he could deal with whoever it was, other men piled onto him, pressing the
air from his lungs, beating him with fists and sticks. A blow to his temple stunned him. They smelled like beasts, grunted like beasts, like the spirits of the boars he had killed come for their vengeance.

  There seemed no dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, or perhaps Hota never completely blacked out and, instead, sank only a few inches beneath the surface of the waking world, and was, as with someone partially submerged in a stream, still able to hear muted voices and to glimpse distorted shapes. It seemed he was borne aloft, jostled and otherwise roughly handled, but he did not fully return to his senses until he stood beneath the remnant corner post of Liar’s House, something tight about his neck, surrounded by a crowd of men and women and children, all of whom were shouting at once, cursing, screaming for his blood. He wanted to pluck the tight thing away from his neck and discovered his hands were lashed behind his back. Dazedly, he glanced up and saw that a rope had been slung over the wedge of flooring still attached to the corner post, and that one end of the rope was about his neck. Terrified now, he surged forward, trying to break free, but whoever held the rope pulled it tight, constricting his throat and forcing him to stand quietly. He breathed shallowly, staring at the faces ranged about him. He recognized none of them, yet they were all familiar. It was as if he were looking at cats or dogs or horses, incapable of registering the distinctions among them that they themselves noticed. A woman, her thin face contorted with anger, spat at him. The rest appeared to think this a brilliant idea and those closest to him all began spitting. Their saliva coated his face. It disturbed him to think that he would die with their slime dripping from him. He lifted a shoulder, rubbed some of it off his cheek. Then the blond man whom he had beaten in the tavern stepped forth from the crowd. Hota recognized him not by his pink complexion or pudgy features, but by his mangled right hand, which he held up to Hota’s eyes, letting him see the damage he had caused. The man waved the crowd to silence and said to Hota, ‘Speak now, if ever you wish to speak again.’

  Still groggy, Hota said, ‘None of this is my doing.’

  Shouts and derisive laughter.

  Once more, the man waved them to silence. ‘Who then should we blame?’

  ‘Griaule,’ Hota said, and was forced to shout the rest of his statement over the renewed laughter of the crowd. ‘How could I have brought a dragon here? I’m only a man!’

  ‘Are you?’ The blond man caught the front of Hota’s shirt with his good hand and brought his face close. ‘We’ve been wondering about that.’

  ‘Of course I am! I was manipulated! Used! Griaule used me!’

  The blond man seemed to give the idea due consideration. ‘It’s possible,’ he said at length. ‘In fact, I imagine it’s probable.’

  The crowd at his back muttered unhappily.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ said the blond man, and smiled. ‘We can’t hang Griaule, can we? You’ll just have to stand in for him.’

  Hooting and howling their laughter, the crowd shook their fists in the air. Some snatched at Hota, others clawed and slapped at his head. The blond man moved them back. ‘You’ve killed our horses, you’ve stolen from us. You’re responsible for that bitch tearing Benno Grustark to pieces. Any of these crimes would merit hanging.’

  ‘What could I have done!’ Hota cried.

  ‘You could have talked to us. Helped us. Brought us food.’ The blond man waved his damaged hand toward the hills. ‘Do you know how many of us died for want of food and shelter?’

  ‘I didn’t know! If you’d told me, if you hadn’t threatened me . . . But I wasn’t thinking about you! I couldn’t! I had no choice!’

  ‘Lack of choice. A common failing. But not, I think, a legal remedy.’ The blond man moved the crowd farther back, warning that Hota might kick them as he was being hauled up. He turned to Hota and asked blithely, ‘Anything else?’

  A hundred things occurred to Hota. Pleas and arguments, statements, things about his life, things he had learned that he thought might be worth announcing. But he could muster the will to speak none of them. The rope made his neck itch. His balls were tightened and cold. His knees trembled. His eyes went out along the street, past the drying mud and the crooked shanties and their rust-patched roofs, and he felt a shape inside his head that seemed to have some correspondence with the green mountainous shape that lay beyond, as if Griaule were telling him a secret or offering an assurance or having a laugh at his expense. Impossible to guess which. A desire swelled in him, a great ache for life that grew and grew until he thought he might be able to burst his bonds and escape this old fate he had avoided for so long.

  ‘Hang him,’ said the blond man. ‘But not too high. I want to watch his face.’

  As Hota was yanked off his feet, the crowd’s roar ascended with him, and blended into another roar that issued from within his skull. The roar of his life, of his constricted blood. It was if he had been made buoyant by the sound. His face was forced downward by the rope and his vision reddened. He saw the upturned faces of the crowd, their gaping black mouths and widened eyes, and he also saw his legs spasming. He had kicked off a shoe. The inside of his head grew hot, but slowly, as if death’s flame were burning low. Fighting for breath, he flexed the roped muscles of his neck and found that he could breathe. The heat lessened.

  They had set the knot in the noose incorrectly.

  Air was coming through.

  Barely . . . but enough to sustain him.

  That became a problem, then. To breathe, to hold out against fate, or to relax his muscles and let go. Soon the decision would be made for him, but he wanted it to be his.

  A terrible new pressure cinched the rope tighter.

  Two children had shinnied up his lower legs and were humping themselves up and down. Trying to break his neck, he realized. The little shits were giggling. He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing all his energy and will on maintaining breath.

  Fiery pains jolted along his spine. White lights exploded behind his lids. One such flash swelled into a blinding radiance that opened before him, vast and shimmering and deep, a country all its own. He felt a shifting inside him, a strange powerful movement that bloomed outward . . . and then he could see himself! Not just his legs, but his entire bulky figure. The children jiggling up and down, and the crowd; the exhausted town leached of every color but the redness of his dying sight.

  Then he lost interest in this phenomenon and in the world, borne outward on that curious expansion. He recalled Magali and he thought that this – here and now – must be the fulfillment of her promise, the beginning of fulfillment, and that his soul was growing large, coming to enclose the material in the way of a dragon’s soul . . .

  And then a violent crack, like that of a severing lightning stroke or an immense displacement, and a thought came to mind that stilled his fears, or else it was the last of him and there was no fear left . . . the thought that it was all a dream, his dream, how he had run and felt joy, how he had leaped – sprawled, really, but that was close enough – and been borne aloft and now he was soaring, and the crack he had heard was the crack of his wings as they caught the air, and the roaring was the rush of first flight, and the light was the high holy sun, and soon he would see Magali and they would fly together along the pattern of their curving fate, with the child flying below them, above the green hill of their religion, and this was his reward, this transformation, this was the fulfillment of every promise, or else it was the lie of it.

  THE

  TABORIN

  SCALE

  Chapter One

  If a man can be measured by the size of his obsessions, George Taborin might have been said to be a very small man, smaller even than the quarter-men rumored to inhabit the forests of Tasmania. He was a numismatist by trade, by avocation a lover of rare and ancient coins, and he spent his days cataloguing, cleaning, and in contemplation of such coins, picturing as he did the societies whose lifeblood they had emblematized. Rubbing the face of Ptolemy, for instance, on a silver drachma found i
n Alexandria, struck at the approximate time of the invasion of Cyprus by Demetrios Poliokortes (probably in Salamis, the last city to fall to the Besieger), would conjure not merely the historical context of the Roman empire and Ptolemaic Egypt, but brought visions so vivid that he imagined he felt the weight of an armored breastplate on his chest or caught the scent of naphtha from an arrow dipped in Greek fire smoldering in its victim’s flesh. It was as if the ball of his thumb stirred the energies of the coin, releasing some essence of the moments through which it had passed, and it had been thus ever since his sixth birthday when his uncle gave him a Phoenician copper as a present.

  From this you might suppose George, in his fortieth year, to have been a fastidious, obsessive little man given to wool-gathering, with spectacles and a potbelly and few close friends, his minimal life partitioned into orderly sections like the trays whereon he displayed the best of his collection. You would have been correct in this assessment save for one thing: George Taborin was not little. He stood a hand’s breadth over six feet, more if you measured from the peak of his coarse black hair, which tended to arrange itself into spiky growths when left unwashed, causing it to be said that if George ran into you while walking with his head down (as was his habit), you would be fortunate to survive the encounter without a puncture or two. Thanks to his parents, a farm couple who had viewed him less as a beloved addition to the family than as child labor, he was powerfully built; his sedentary occupation had eroded his strengths and softened his mid-section, but not so much that he was often challenged – he had earned a schoolyard reputation for toughness and durability in a fight and that reputation clung to him yet. He had a slightly undershot chin, a straight nose whose only notable quality was that it was too big for his face, and a mouth through which he was prone to breathe due to a persistent sinus condition (for all that, his was a face that missed being handsome by an ounce here, a centimeter there, and might have passed muster had there been more self-confidence underlying it). These features conspired with his bulk to lend him a doltish aspect, like a gangling idiot boy thickened into a man. When gazing into a mirror, something he did as infrequently as possible, he would have the notion that his soul had not thickened commensurately and was rattling around inside its house, a poor fit for the flesh it animated, stunted and too small by half.