The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’ George looked down at the scale.

  ‘You rubbed it! I saw you!’ She wrested the scale from him and rubbed it furiously; when nothing came of her efforts she handed it back and said, ‘You try.’

  It had not escaped George that there might be a correspondence between the apparition of the plain and the visions that arose when he rubbed his thumb across the face of a coin; but none of those visions had supplied the sensory detail of this last and no one else had ever seen them. He experienced some trepidation at the thought of trying it again and dropped the scale into his shirt pocket.

  ‘Finish dressing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down to breakfast.’

  A flash of anger ruled her face. He folded his penknife and packed up his cleaning kit and pocketed them as well.

  ‘Won’t you give it one more rub?’ she asked.

  He ignored her.

  Wrapping the towel around her upper body, she gave him a scornful look and flounced into the bedroom.

  George sipped his coffee and discovered it was tepid. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, the scale felt unnaturally cold against his chest and he set it on the desk. It might be more valuable than he had presumed. He nudged it with the tip of a finger – the room remained stable.

  Sylvia re-entered, still wearing the towel and still angry, though she tried to mask her anger behind a cajoling air. ‘Please! Give it one little rub.’ She kissed the nape of his neck. ‘For me?’

  ‘It frightened you the first time. Why are you so eager to repeat the experience?’

  ‘I wasn’t frightened! I was startled. You’re the one who was frightened! You should have seen your face.’

  ‘That begs the question: Why so eager?’

  ‘When Griaule makes himself known, you’d do well to pay heed or misfortune will follow.’

  He leaned back, amused. ‘So you believe this nonsense about Griaule being a god.’

  ‘It ain’t nonsense. You’d know it for true if you lived here.’ Hands on hips, she proceeded to deliver what was obviously a quoted passage: ‘He was once mortal, long-lived yet born to die, but Griaule has increased not only in size, but in scope. Demiurge may be too great a word to describe an overgrown lizard, yet surely he is akin to such a being. His flesh has become one with the earth. He knows its every tremor and convulsion. His thoughts roam the plenum, his mind is a cloud that encompasses our world. His blood is the marrow of time. Centuries flow through him, leaving behind a residue that he incorporates into his being. Is it any wonder he controls our lives and knows our fates?’8

  ‘That sounds grand, but it proves nothing. What’s it from?’

  ‘A book someone left at Ali’s.’

  ‘You don’t recall its name?’

  ‘Not so I could say.’

  ‘And yet you memorized the passage.’

  ‘Sometimes there’s not much to do except sit around. I get bored and I read. Sometimes I write things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Little stories about the other girls, like. All sorts of things.’ She caressed his cheek. ‘Try again! Please!’

  With a show of patience tried that was only partly a show, expecting that nothing (or next to nothing) would occur, he picked up the scale and ran his thumb along the lustrous blue streak, pressing down hard. This time the ripping sound was louder and the transition from hotel room to sun-drenched plain instantaneous. He fell thuddingly among the tall grasses, the chair beneath him having vanished, and lay grasping the scale, squinting up at the diamond glare of the sun and a sky empty of clouds, like a sheet of blue enamel. Sylvia made a frightened noise and clutched his shoulder as he scrambled to his knees. She said something that – his mind dominated by an evolving sense of dismay – he failed to register. The smells that had earlier seemed generic, a vague effluvia of grass and dirt, now were particularized and pungent, and the sun’s heat was no longer a gentle warmth, but an ox-roasting presence. A droplet of sweat trickled down his side from his armpit. Insects whirred past their heads and a hawk circled high above. This was no vision, he told himself. The scale had transported them somewhere, perhaps to another section of the valley. In the distance stood a ring of rolling, forested hills enclosing the lumpish shapes of lesser, nearby hills – his coach had traversed similar hills as it ascended from the coastal plain toward Teocinte, though those had been denuded of vegetation. Panic inspired him to rub at the scale, hoping to be transported back to the room; but his actions proved fruitless.

  Sylvia sank to the ground and lowered her head, and this display of helplessness served to stiffen George’s spine, engaging his protective instincts. He scanned the valley for signs of life.

  ‘We should find shelter,’ he said dazedly. ‘And water.’

  She made an indefinite noise and half-turned her head away.

  ‘Perhaps there’s water there.’ He pointed to the far-off hills. ‘And a village.’

  ‘I doubt we’ll find a village.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t you recognize where we are?’ She waved dejectedly at the closest hill, which lay behind them on the right. ‘There’s Haver’s Roost, where the Weathers stood. And the rise over yonder is where Griaule’s head rested. The sunken area to the left, with all the shrimp plants and cabbage palms – that’s where Morningshade used to lie. There’s Yulin Grove. It’s all there except the houses and the people.’

  She continued her cataloging of notable landmarks and he was forced to admit that she was correct. He would have expected her to be upset by this development, fearful and verging on hysteria; but she was outwardly calm (calmer than he), albeit dejected. He asked why she was so unruffled.

  ‘We’re accustomed to such doings around here,’ she replied. ‘It’s Griaule’s work. The scale . . . he must have shed it when he was young and it wound up in that jar. For some reason he set you to find it. So you could clean it and rub on it, I imagine.’

  In reflex he said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  With a loose-armed gesture toward Haver’s Roost, she said, ‘Teocinte is gone. How else do you think it happened?’

  Aside from grass swaying, palmetto fronds lifting in the wind, birds scattering about the sky, the land was empty. Odd, he thought, that birds would act so carefree with a hawk in the vicinity. Shielding his eyes against the glare, he tried to spot the hawk, but it had vanished against the sun field. His uneasiness increased.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

  Sylvia arranged her towel into a makeshift blouse and appeared to be awaiting instruction.

  A bug zinged past George’s ear – he swatted at it half-heartedly. ‘Which way should we go?’

  She tugged at a loose curl, a gesture that conveyed a listless air – it had become apparent that she had surrendered herself to Griaule or to some other implausible agency. George grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him.

  ‘If this is where Teocinte stood, you know where we can find water,’ he said

  Sullenly she said, ‘There should be a creek over that way somewhere.’ She pointed toward the depression in which Morningshade had once sprawled. ‘It was filthy last I saw it, but now, with nobody around, the water ought to be all right.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and when she showed no sign of complying, he shoved her forward. She swung her fist, striking him in the forehead, an impact that caused her to cry out in pain and cradle her hand.

  ‘Are you angry?’ he asked. ‘Good.’

  ‘Don’t go pushing me!’ she said tearfully. ‘I won’t have it!’

  ‘If you’re going to act like your spine’s been sucked out, I’ll push you whenever I choose,’ he said. ‘You can mope about and wait to die on your own time.’

  5 The process by which Griaule purportedly had been killed took more than 30 years to complete and was achieved by the utilization of arsenic- and lead-based paints in a mural painted on his side. The manufacture of these paints had destroyed the lush forests of the C
arbonales (a steady supply of timber was necessary to heat the vats in which the paint was distilled) and placed such a stress on the economy that a number of wars had been fought with neighboring city-states in order to replenish Teocinte’s exchequer.

  6 Cele Van Alstyne of Port Chantay, who had secured the rights to Griaule’s heart, estimated to weigh nine million pounds, was desperate to revive her failing pharmaceutical company and initiated legal action. She was joined in this by a group of speculators who had bought the approximately one hundred and sixty million pounds of bones (except for the skull, sold to the King of neighboring Temalagua) and planned to export them to foreign countries for use as sexual remedies, charms, souvenirs, etc.; and by a second consortium who had bought the skin, all two hundred and twenty million pounds of it (not counting the mural, destined to be housed in the Cattanay Museum). Lawyers for the council fought a delaying action, claiming that since the dragon’s death could not be proven absolutely, the lawsuits were invalid.

  7 She had adopted this nom d’amour after George expressed dissatisfaction with the first name she gave, Ursula, and a selection process that winnowed the choices down to three: Otile, Amaryllis, and Sylvia. He had settled on the latter because it reminded him of a grocer’s wife he had admired in Port Chantay, a woman from the extreme south of the country, a region ‘Sylvia’ also claimed as home.

  8 The excerpt is from the preface to Richard Rossacher’s Griaule Incarnate. Rossacher, a young medical doctor, while studying Griaule’s blood derived from it a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the population of the Temalaguan littoral. After experiencing an epiphany of sorts, he became evangelic as regarded the dragon and spent his last years writing and proselytizing about Griaule’s divinity.

  Chapter Three

  By the time they had hiked a third of the distance to the creek, George’s practical side had re-established dominance and he had developed a scheme for survival in case their situation, whatever it might be,9 failed to reverse itself. But as he prepared for a solitary life with Sylvia (of whatever duration), planning a shelter that could be added to over the months and years, and devising ways in which they could usefully occupy their time, the hawk reappeared above, swelling to such a size as it dropped toward them that George could no longer believe it was a hawk or any familiar predator. He scooped up Sylvia by the waist, lifting her off the ground, and began to run, ignoring her shrieks, just as a dragon swooped low overhead, coming so near that they felt the wind of its passage. Its scales glinting bright green and gold, the dragon banked in a high turn and arrowed toward them again, and then, with a furious beating of its jointed wings, landed facing them in the tall grasses no more than fifty feet away. It dipped its snout and roared, a complicated noise like half-a-dozen lions roaring not quite in unison. George glimpsed a drop of orange brilliance hanging like a jewel in the darkness of its gullet and threw Sylvia to the ground, covering her with his body, expecting flames to wash over them. When no flames manifested, he lifted his head. The dragon maintained its distance, breath chuffing like an over-strained engine – it seemed to be waiting for them to act. Sylvia complained and George eased from atop her. When she saw the dragon she moaned and put her face down in the grass.

  Taking care to avoid sudden movements, George climbed to his feet. He was so afraid, so weak in the knees, he thought he might have to sit down, but he maintained a shaky half-crouch. The dragon’s lowered head was almost on a level with his, but its back and crest rose much higher. He estimated it to be twenty-five feet long, perhaps a touch more, from the tip of the tail to its snout. The green-and-gold scales fit cunningly to its musculature, a tight overlay like the scales of a pangolin. It emitted a rumbling, its mouth opening to display fangs longer than his arms. A dry, gamey scent seemed to coil about him like a tendril, causing a fresh tightness in his throat. Yet for all its wicked design and innate enmity, there was something of the canine in the way it cocked its head and scrutinized them, like a puppy (one the size of a cottage) confounded by a curious pair of bugs.

  ‘Sylvia.’ He reached down, groping for her, his fingers brushing her towel.

  In response he received a weak, ‘No.’

  ‘If it wanted to kill us, it would have done so by now,’ he said without the least confidence.

  Not taking his eyes from the dragon, he groped again, caught her wrist and yanked her up. She buried her face in his shoulder, refusing to look at the dragon. Putting an arm about her waist, he steered her back in the direction from which they had come, experiencing a new increment of dread with each step. They had gone no more than thirty feet when, with a percussive rattling of its wings, the dragon scuttled ahead of them, cutting them off. It settled on its haunches and gave forth with a grumbling noise and tossed its head to the side. Sylvia squeaked and George was too frightened to think. Again the dragon tossed its head and loosed a full-throated roar that bent the nearby grasses. Sylvia and George clung together, their eyes closed. The dragon lifted its snout to the sky and screamed – the trebly pitch and intensity of the cry seemed to express frustration. It tossed its head a third and a fourth time, all to the same side, gestures that struck George as exaggerated and deliberate. Taking a cue from them, he went a couple of halting steps in the direction they indicated, dragging Sylvia along. The dragon displayed neither approval nor disapproval, so George continued on this path, heading toward the rise where Griaule’s massive head once had rested.

  So began a faltering march, the two of them stumbling over broken ground, harried along by the dragon’s rumbles, herded from the former site of Teocinte, past the rise and out onto a vast plain of yellowish green thickets and sugarloaf hills, crisscrossed by animal tracks. On occasion the dragon bulled ahead of them to divert their course, flattening wide swaths of vegetation. The heat grew almost unbearable and George’s grip on reality frayed to the point that once, when they stopped to rest and the dragon urged them on with a roar, he sprang to his feet and shouted at the beast. After what must have been several hours of sweat and torment, they reached a spot where a stream widened into a clear pool some eighty or ninety feet across at the widest, flowing into other, smaller ponds and fringed by towering sabal palms, hedged by lesser trees and bushes, a cool green complexity amid the desert of thorny bushes and prickly weeds. There the dragon abandoned them, belching out a final cautionary (thus George characterized it) roar and soaring up into the sky until it once again appeared no bigger than a hawk and vanished into a cloud, leaving them exhausted and stunned, relieved yet despairing. They bathed in the largest pool and felt somewhat refreshed. As night fell, George picked shriveled oranges from a tree beside the pool and they made a meal of nuts and fruit. Shortly thereafter, too fatigued to talk, they fell asleep.

  In the morning they had a discussion about returning to the spot to which they had been transported, but the sight of the dragon circling overhead ended that conversation and George began constructing a lean-to from bamboo and vines and palmetto fronds, while Sylvia set herself to catch fish, a task for which she claimed an aptitude. After watching her for half an hour, bent over and motionless in the pool, waiting for the fish to forget her presence and attempting to scoop them up when they swam between her legs, he held out little hope for a fish dinner; but to his amazement, when next he checked in on her he saw that she had caught two medium-sized perch.

  That night, with enough of a breeze to keep off the mosquitoes, the two of them reclining on a bed of fronds and banana leaves inside the shelter, gazing at the lacquered reflection of a purple sky so thickly adorned with stars, it might have been a theatrical backdrop, a silk cloth embroidered with sequins . . . that night their predicament was reduced to a shadow in George’s mind by these comforts and a full belly; but it became apparent that Sylvia did not feel so at ease with things, for when he tried to draw her into an embrace, she resisted him vigorously and said, ‘We’re at death’s door and that’s all you can think about?’

  ‘We’re not at
death’s door,’ said George. ‘The dragon was rather solicitous of our welfare. He could have conveyed us to a far more inhospitable spot.’

  ‘Be that as it may, we’re not exactly sitting pretty.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. One of us is.’ George gave a broad wink, attempting to jolly her with this compliment.

  Sylvia returned a withering look.

  ‘We might as well make the best of things,’ said George.

  She sniffed. ‘To my mind, making the best of it would include figuring a way out of this mess.’

  ‘We had a bargain,’ George said weakly.

  ‘Back in Teocinte we had a bargain. Here all bets are off.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’

  ‘Well, I do . . . and I’m in charge of the sweet shop. I don’t have my medicines with me and I won’t risk getting pregnant out here. When we return to Teocinte, I’ll do right by you. Until then you’ll have to take care of your own needs. And I’ll thank you to not do so in my presence.’

  A pour of wind rustled the thatched roof of the shelter, carrying a spicy scent. Despite understanding that Sylvia’s reaction was to be expected, George’s feelings were hurt.

  ‘This is your fault,’ he said glumly.

  She sat up, her face pale and simplified by the starlight. ‘What?’

  He sketched out Peri Haukkola’s theory concerning the effects of stress on consensus reality.

  ‘You say I’m ridiculous to blame this on Griaule,’ she said. ‘Then you put forward this Haukkerman as if . . .’

  ‘Haukkola.’

  ‘. . . as if it were proof of something. As if because he wrote some stupid theory down, it must be true. And I’m the ridiculous one?’ She gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘You saw the dragon, I assume?’

  ‘Of course! That’s just more evidence in support of Haukkola. You’re obsessed with Griaule, so you incorporated one of his little friends into your fantasy.’