The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  Pursuant to his family’s wishes (the thought being that if George didn’t marry young he would never find a woman), at the age of fifteen he wed Rosemary LeMaster, a chubby, sullen, unprepossessing girl who, over the course of a quarter-century, had matured into a flirtatious, Raphael-esque matron. They had not been blessed with children and, because George deeply desired a family, as did Rosemary (so she claimed, though he suspected her of taking steps to ensure her infertility), they still shared the marriage bed once a week, regular as clockwork; but now that George’s business (Taborin Coins & Antiquities) had prospered, providing them the wherewithal to hire servants, Rosemary, freed from domestic duties, wasted no time in making up for the period of youthful experimentation she’d never had, aligning herself with a clutch of upper-middle-class wives in Port Chantay who called their group the Whitestone Rangers (named for the district in which many of them lived) and considered themselves prettier, more sophisticated and fashionable than they in fact were. She veered into a social orbit of parties and trivial causes (the placing of planter boxes along the harbor, for one) that served as opportunities to meet the men with whom she and her sisters would share dalliances and affairs. Although troubled by his wife’s infidelities (he had no proof positive, yet he was aware of the Rangers’ liberal attitude toward the matrimonial bond), George did not complain. He and Rosemary led essentially separate lives and this latest separation had not created any disruption in the routines of the marriage. Then, too, he had no grounds for complaint since he was regularly unfaithful to Rosemary.

  In the spring of each year, George would travel to Teocinte and pass the next three weeks sporting in the brothels of Morning shade, a district that never received the morning sun, tucked so close beneath the dragon Griaule’s1 monstrous shadow, his ribcage bulged out over a portion of the area like a green-and-gold sky.2 Apart from its brothels, Morningshade was known for its junk shops and stalls where you could find antiquities and relics of Griaule (mostly fakes) among the dragon-shaped pipes and pendants, his image adorning a variety of merchandise including plates, pennants, toys (wooden swords were a big seller), tablecloths, teaspoons, mugs, and maps purporting to divulge the location of his hoard.3 George would spend his afternoons combing through these shops, searching for old coins. One evening in May, after such an expedition, he took himself to Ali’s Eternal Reward (the crudely-lettered word ‘Hellish’ had been added and marked for insertion between Ali’s and Eternal), a brothel on the sunnier edge of Morningshade, there to examine his day’s treasures over a pint of bitters.

  The common room of the tavern, lit by kerosene lamps and almost empty at that early hour, was shaped like a capital I and smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and several decades of grease. Pitch-covered beams quartered the ceiling, beneath which lay benches and boards, and whitewashed walls gone a splotchy gray from kitchen smoke and innumerable grimy touches, and a counter behind which a corpulent barman wearing a fez (not Ali, who was a purely fictive personage) stood lordly and watchful, punctuating the quiet with the occasional thwack of a flyswatter. Three young women in loosely belted dressing gowns sat at the center of the room, talking softly. Carts rattled by outside, and a vendor shrilled the virtues of her coconut sweets. To George, sitting at a window in a rear corner of the I, the conversations of passersby came as bursts of unintelligible words peppered with curses.

  While inspecting the contents of a glass jar containing coins and buttons and tin badges that he had purchased as a lot, he unearthed a dark leathern chip stiff with age and grime, shaped like a thumbnail, though three times the size and much thicker. He opened his cleaning kit and dabbed at the chip with a cotton ball dipped in solvent, after some exercise clearing a speck of bluish green at the center. His interest enlisted, he put on the spectacles he used for close work, bent to the chip and rubbed at it vigorously with the cotton ball, widening the speck. The blue-green color held a gem-like luster. He fitted a jeweler’s loupe to his spectacles and held the chip to his eye.

  ‘What you got there?’

  A prostitute clad in a robe of peach silk, a thin brunette in her early twenties with curly hair, a dusky complexion, and a face that, though pretty, was too sharp-featured for his tastes, slid onto the bench beside him and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’

  Startled not only by her, but by the fact that the tavern had, without his notice, filled with a noisy crowd, he dropped the chip into her hand, an action he instantly regretted, worried that she might abscond with it.

  ‘I haven’t seen one of these since I was a bare-ass kid,’ the woman said, pushing her hair back from her eyes. ‘My granny wore one like this around her neck. She promised she’d leave it to me, but they buried the old hag with it.’

  ‘You know what it is, then?’

  ‘A dragon scale . . . not off a monster like Griaule. The babies have this blue color when they’re born, or so I hear.4 I suppose it could be Griaule’s from when he was little. There ain’t been any baby dragons around these parts for centuries. The scale my granny wore was passed down from her great-great-great.’

  George reached for the scale, but the woman closed her hand.

  ‘I’ll give you a ride for it.’ She opened her robe, exposing her breasts, and shimmied her shoulders.

  ‘Let me have it,’ said George, snapping his fingers.

  ‘Don’t act so stern!’ She jiggled the scale in her palm, as if assessing its weight, and then passed it to him. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you liberties for a week. When you go back to Port Chantay, you’ll have more than a guided tour of Griaule to remember, I promise.’

  ‘How can you tell I’m from Port Chantay?’

  With a disdainful sniff, she said, ‘I have a gift.’

  Her breasts were fuller than he had thought, quite shapely, with large cinnamon areolae. Ever a pragmatic sort when it came to business affairs, he reckoned the scale to be a curiosity piece, not worth that much to the run of his customers; but he pressed his seller’s advantage.

  ‘I’m here two more weeks,’ he said. ‘Put yourself at my disposal for that time and the scale is yours.’

  ‘At your disposal? You’ll have to speak plainer than that. I ain’t letting you tie me up, if that’s how you’re bent.’

  ‘I’m staying at the Weathers. I’d want you there with me.’

  ‘The Weathers,’ she said, and made an appreciative face. ‘What else would you want?’

  George spelled out his needs in clinical detail; the woman nodded and said, ‘Done.’

  She extended a hand and, as if imitating George, snapped her fingers. ‘Give it here.’

  ‘When the two weeks are up. One of us will have to trust the other to fulfill their end of the bargain. I’d prefer it be you.’

  1 The mile-long dragon, paralyzed by a wizard’s spell, in whose lee Teocinte had grown.

  2 Portions of this sky, scales shed by the dragon, would occaisionally fall on the rooftops below, crushing the houses beneath, causing the plots of land upon which they had stood to appreciate in value because they would be unlikely to experience another such disaster.

  3 As the tale was told, over the centuries people came from the ends of the earth to lay offerings before him, and these offerings had been transported by a succession of creatures and men controlled by the dragon to a hiding place known only to him (its location having been subsequently erased from the minds of his minions). The treasure was said by some to be fabulous beyond belief, and by others to be a complete fabrication.

  4 This was true only as so far as dragons native to the region went. Dragons bred in other climes displayed a variety of coloration, ranging from ivory-scaled snow dragons of the Antarctic to the reddish-gold hue of those dragons that once inhabited the wastes north of Lake Baikul, a shade that deepened to a rich bronze at maturity.

  Chapter Two

  With the death of the dragon Griaule, the city council of Teocinte were forced to confront a question they had failed to anticipate: When dealing with a c
reature whose heart beat once every thousand years, how does one determine whether he is actually dead? Since the sole perceptible sign of death was the closing of his eyes, it was suggested that he had merely lapsed into a coma induced by the countless gallons of poisoned paint slapped onto his side during the creation of Meric Cattanay’s mural.5 The parasites that lived on and inside him had not fled the body and there was no evidence of corruption (nor would there be for many years if the rate of decay were as glacially slow as the rest of his metabolic processes). Indeed, it had been ventured that since Griaule was a magical being, the possibility existed that his corpse would prove to be uncorrupting.

  Decades before, when the council accepted Cattanay’s plan, they had acted in confidence and contracted with various entrepreneurs for the disposal of Griaule’s corpse, selling it piecemeal in advance of his death, thus adding millions to the town coffers; but the current council regretted their predecessors’ decision and refused to honor the contracts.6 Due to their uncertainty about his mortal condition, they still feared Griaule. If he were alive, they could only imagine his reaction to an attempted dissection. Then there was the matter of aesthetics. Thanks to the discovery of mineral springs south of town and, in no small part, to Griaule himself, Teocinte had become a tourist destination. Turning a portion of the town into an abattoir, with several hundred thousand tons of dragon meat and guts and bones lying about, would be an inappropriate advertisement for fun and relaxation. The council was hesitant to act, yet the citizenry of Teocinte, who for generations had lived under Griaule’s ineffable dominion, clamored for an official judgment. It was a touchy situation, one that demanded a delicate resolution, and therefore the council tried – as do all accomplished politicians – to make doing next to nothing seem like a compromise. They tore down the scaffolding Cattanay had erected in order to create his mural, scoured the moss from the teeth, cut away the vegetation from his body, leaving in place only the thickets surrounding the ruin of Hangtown on his back (now uninhabited except for a caretaker), which they designated a historical site. They constructed rope walkways leading to every quarter of the dragon and offered tours, inducing tourists to go where most of the townspeople feared to tread. This, they thought, would promote the idea that they believed Griaule to be dead, yet would provide no evidentiary proof and put off a final determination. If Griaule were still alive and a few tourists died as a result of this experiment in the social dynamic, well, so be it. They further built several luxury hotels, among them the Seven Weathers, on the slopes of Haver’s Roost, each offering excellent views of the dragon. And so, on the day after he found the scale, George stood at a window in his suite at the Weathers, sipping coffee and having a morning cigar, gazing at Griaule: an enormous green-and-gold lizard looming like a hill with an evil head over the smoking slum in his shadow, his tail winding off between lesser hills, light glinting from the tip of a fang and coursing along the ribbing of the sagittal crest rising from his neck, the mural on its side glazed with sun, making it indecipherable at that angle. The huge paint vats that had occupied the flat portion of his skull had been dismantled so as not to distract from the dramatic view.

  The woman, Sylvia,7 stirred in the bedroom and George sat down at a writing desk and took up cleaning the scale once again, thinking he might as well make it nice for her. The dirt on the scale was peculiarly resistant and he had managed to clear only a small central patch, about a quarter of its surface, when Sylvia entered, toweling her hair, wearing only sandals and a pair of beige lounging trousers. She dropped heavily into the armchair beside the desk and sighed. He acknowledged her with a nod and bent to his task. She made an impatient noise, which he ignored; she flung her legs over the arm of the chair, the towel slipping down onto her thighs, and said blithely, ‘Well, you don’t fuck like a shopkeeper, I’ll say that much for you.’

  Amused, he said, ‘I assume that’s intended as an endearment.’

  ‘A what-ment?’

  ‘Praise of a kind.’

  She shrugged. ‘If that’s how you want to take it.’

  ‘So . . .’ He scraped at a fleck of stubborn grime with a fingernail. ‘How do shopkeepers fuck?’

  ‘With most of them, it’s like they’re embarrassed to be between my legs. They want to get it over quick and be gone. They turn their backs when they button their trousers. And they don’t want me saying nothing while they’re riding.’ She shook out her wet hair. ‘Not that they don’t want me making noises. They like that well enough.’

  ‘Then that raises the question: How do I fuck?’

  ‘Like a desperate man.’

  ‘Desperate?’ He kept on rubbing at the scale. ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Maybe desperate’s not the right word.’ She lazily scratched her hip. ‘It’s like you truly needed what I had to offer, and not just my tra-la-la. I could tell you wanted me to be myself and not some Sylvia.’

  ‘I expect I did.’ He was making good progress – the blue portion of the scale had come to resemble an aerial view of a river bordered by banks of mud and black earth. ‘From now on I’ll call you Ursula.’

  ‘That’s not my proper name, either.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘You don’t want to hear – it’s horrible.’ She stretched like a cat on its back in the sun; her face, turned to the window, blurred with brightness. ‘Truth be told, I don’t mind being Sylvia. Suits me, don’t you think?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm.’

  She lapsed into silence, watching him work, attentive to the occasional squeak his cloth made on the scale, and then she said, ‘Do you fancy me? I mean, the way I’m talking with you now?’

  He cocked an eye toward her.

  ‘I’m curious is all,’ she said.

  ‘I have to admit you’re growing on me.’

  ‘I was thinking I might try being myself more often. Always having to be someone else is an awful pressure.’ She scrambled to her knees in the chair, the towel falling away completely, and leaned over the desk, peering at the scale. ‘Oh, that blue’s lovely! How long you reckon ’til it’s done?’

  ‘I’ll give it a polish once it’s clean. A week or so.’

  She bent closer, her breasts grazing the desktop, holding her hair back from her eyes, fixed on the streak of blue dividing the scale. How different she seemed from the brittle businesswoman he had met at Ali’s! She had tried to sustain that pose, but she let it drop more and more frequently, revealing the country girl beneath. He suspected he knew the basics of her story – a farm family with too many children; sold to a brothel keeper; earning her way by the time she was twelve – and thought knowing the specifics might uncover a deeper compatibility. But that, he reminded himself, was what she would want him to think in hopes of getting a bigger tip. Such was the beauty of whores: No matter how devious, how subtle their pretense, you always knew where you stood with them. He studied her face, prettied by concentration, and absently stroked the scale with his thumb.

  A sound came to him, barely audible, part hiss, part ripping noise, as of some fundamental tissue, something huge and far away, cleaved by a cosmic sword (or else it was something near at hand, a rotten piece of cloth parting from the simple strain of being worn, giving way under a sudden stress). This sound was accompanied by a vision unlike any he had heretofore known: It was as if the objects that composed the room, the heavy mahogany furniture, the cream-colored wallpaper with its pattern of sailing vessels, the entire surround, were in fact a sea of color and form, and this sea was now rapidly withdrawing, rolling back, much as the ocean withdraws from shore prior to a tidal wave. As it receded, it revealed neither the floors and walls of adjoining rooms nor the white buildings of Teocinte, but a sun-drenched plain with tall lion-colored grasses and stands of palmetto, bordered on all sides by hills forested with pines. They were marooned in the midst of that landscape, smelling its vegetable scents, hearing the chirr and buzz of insects, touched by the soft intricacy of its breezes . . . and then it was gone, trees and pl
ain and hills so quickly erased, they might have been a painted cloth whisked away, and the room was restored to view. George was left gaping at a portmanteau against the far wall. Sylvia, arms crossed so as to shield her breasts, squatted in the easy chair, her eyes shifting from one point to another.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asked in a shaky voice. She repeated the question accusingly, shrilly, as if growing certain of his complicity in the event.