Dumfounded, Sylvia stared at him. ‘The dragon is Griaule! Didn’t you notice he’s got the same coloring, the same head shape? True, he’s not all nicked up and scarred, and he’s quite a bit smaller. But it’s him, all right.’
‘You can distinguish between lizards?’ He chuckled.
‘I’ve been looking at Griaule most of my life and I can distinguish him.’ She turned onto her side, showing him her back. ‘You and Haukkola! You’re both idiots! If it helps you to blame me, fine. I’m going to sleep.’
9 Though a rift in time or dimensionality would seem to be indicated, George subscribed to the theory espoused by Peri Haukkola, holder of the Carbajal Chair of Philosophy at the University of Helvetia. Haukkola believed that people under extreme stress could alter the physical universe even to the point of creating pocket realities, and George assumed that a reality formed by Sylvia’s self-avowed identity crisis comprised the relatively empty landscape they currently inhabited.
Chapter Four
The wind died shortly before dawn and mosquitoes swarmed the interior of the shelter, waking Sylvia and George, driving them into the water for cover. The sun climbed higher and they sat beside the pool, miserable, baking in the heat. Having nothing better to do, George shored up the walls of the shelter and elevated the ceiling, making it less of a lean-to, and then went off foraging. To avoid the thickets, the thorn bushes and the gnats, he followed the meanders of the stream through stands of bamboo and clusters of palmettos with parched brownish fronds. Once he sighted the dragon circling above the plain and lay flat until it passed from view. From that point on, for the better part of an hour, his thoughts became a grim drone accompanying his exertions. At length he happened upon a patch of dirt and grass enclosed by dense brush, an oval of relative coolness and shade cast by a solitary mango tree with ripening fruit hanging from its boughs in chandelier-like clusters. He fashioned his shirt into a sling and had begun loading it with mangos when he saw two figures slipping through the brush. Alarmed by their furtive manner, he knotted the shirt to keep the mangos safe and turned to leave. Two men blocked his path. A scrawny, balding, pinch-faced fellow dressed in a skirt woven of vines and leaves, his tanned body speckled with inflamed mosquito bites, shook a fist at George and said, ‘Them’s our mangos!’ Grime deepened the lines on his face, adding a sinister emphasis to his scowl.
His companion was a plump young man with unkempt, shoulder-length hair and a brow as broad and unwritten on as a newly cut tombstone – his head was rather large and his features small and unremarkable, imbuing his face with a weak, unfinished quality. He wore the remnants of corduroy trousers and carried a stick stout enough to be used as a club, but hid it behind his leg and refused to meet George’s stare, the very image of a reluctant warrior. George decided the men posed no threat, yet he kept an eye on the figures hiding in the brush.
‘I’ve only taken a dozen or so,’ he said. ‘Surely there’s enough for everyone.’
The balding man adopted an expression that might have been an attempt at ferocity, but instead gave the impression that he suffered from a sour stomach. The plump man whispered to him and he made a disagreeable noise.
‘We’re camped a long way from here – I hate to return empty-handed,’ said George. ‘Let me pass. I won’t bother you again.’
The plump man looked to his friend and after brief consideration the balding man said, ‘We can spare a few, I reckon. I apologize for treating you rude, but we’ve had problems with our neighbors poaching our supplies.’
‘Neighbors? Is there a village nearby?’
‘Naw, just people like us. And you. People what Griaule chased onto the plain. Maybe fifty or sixty of ’em. It’s hard to say exactly because most keep to themselves and they’re scattered all over. Might be more.’
George hefted his mangos, slung them over his shoulder. ‘Griaule, you say? You’re talking about that smallish dragon?’
‘Same as chased you out here,’ said the man. ‘Quite different from the Griaule we’re used to, he is. But you can see it’s him if you looks close.’
‘How long have you been out here?’ George asked.
‘Three months, a piece more. At least that’s how long me and the family’s been here.’ He gestured at the plump man. ‘Edgar joined us a week or so later.’
Edgar grinned at George and nodded.
‘Is that your family?’ George pointed to the figures in the brush. ‘Please assure them I mean no harm.’
‘I’m sure they know that, sir. It’s obvious you’re a gentleman.’ The balding man toed the dirt, as if embarrassed. ‘My daughter took a terrible fright, what with all Griaule’s bellowing. She’s never been right in the head. Now she ain’t comfortable around people . . . except for Edgar here.’ Resentment, or something akin, seeped into his voice. ‘She fair dotes on him.’
‘How many people are with you, Mister?’ asked Edgar, startling George, who had begun to think he was a mute.
‘Just a friend and I.’
He introduced himself and learned that the balding man was Peter Snelling, his wife was named Sandra and his daughter Peony. These formalities concluded, he asked what use they thought the dragon had for them.
‘Might as well ask how much the moon weighs,’ said Edgar, and Snelling chimed in, ‘You’ll get nowhere attempting to divine his purposes.’
‘You must have had some thoughts on the subject,’ said George.
‘Don’t reckon he wants to eat us,’ Snelling said. ‘He wouldn’t go to all this trouble . . . yet he did eat that one fellow.’
‘Didn’t really eat him.’ Edgar scratched a jowl. ‘Chewed on him and spit him out is all.’
‘That was because he tried to run off,’ said Snelling. ‘It were Griaule’s way of telling the rest of us to stay put.’
The idea that anyone could undergo this trial and not expend a great deal of energy in trying to comprehend it was alien to George. In his opinion, it did not speak highly of the two men’s intellect. He asked how they had wound up in this desolate place to begin with. Had they, like him, been transported by a magical agency?
‘You’d have to talk to Peony,’ Snelling said. ‘She were fooling around with something, but she wouldn’t show me what it was. Then the walls of our house vanished and there we were, with nothing but nature around us. Peony let out a screech and flung the thing in her hand away. I suppose I should have searched for it.’ He hunched his shoulders and made a rueful face. ‘It was hard to swallow, you know, that she were the one responsible. But I’m sure now it was her doing.’
‘Even if you had found it, it wouldn’t have done you much good,’ said George.
Edgar’s eyes darted to the side and George followed his gaze. An immensely fat woman with gray tangles of hair framing a lumpish, sunburned face and wearing a tent-sized piece of canvas for a dress, rushed at him, swinging a tree branch. The branch struck him on the neck and shoulder. Twigs scratched his face; sprays of leaves impaired his vision – a confusing blow yet not that concussive. He staggered to the side, but did not fall. Snelling threw himself on him, riding him piggyback, and as husband and wife sought to wrestle him to the ground, Edgar poked him with his stick, more annoyance than threat, his moony face bobbing now and then into sight. George managed to shove the woman away and, when she came at him again, he planted a foot in the pit of her stomach, sending her waddling backwards across the clearing, her arms making circular motions as if attempting to fly out of danger. She made a cawing noise and toppled into a bush – her dress rode up around her hips, leaving the raddled flesh of her legs protruding from the leaves. Snelling clung to him, biting and clawing, until George grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the mouth. Edgar dropped his stick, retreated to the edge of the clearing, and stood wringing his hands, his expression shifting from pained to vacant, and finally lapsing into the feckless grin that George took to be the natural resolution of his features.
He wiped blood from his chin, where a twig had
nicked him. Snelling lay on his side, breathing through his mouth, blood crimsoning his teeth. His wife struggled to sit up, teetered for a moment, flirting with the perpendicular before falling back again.
‘Sandra!’ Snelling’s cry sounded forlorn, almost wistful, not like a shout of warning, or even one of sympathy.
‘Are you mad?’ George kicked dirt on him and scooped up his shirt, along with the mangos it held. ‘Risking your lives for a few mangos! Fucking idiots!’
A noise behind him – he spun about, ready to defend himself. Standing at the margin of the clearing was a gangly young girl in deplorable condition, twelve or thirteen years old. Ginger hair hung across her face in thick snarls and her faded blue rag of a dress did little to hide her immature breasts. In addition to a freckling of inflamed insect bites, the skin of her torso and legs was striped with welts, some of them fresh, evidence of harsh usage. Her lips trembled and she tottered forward. ‘Help me,’ she said in a frail voice. She stumbled and might have fallen had George not caught her. She was so slight, when he put an arm about her, he inadvertently lifted her off the ground.
Snelling collapsed onto his back, breath shuddering, but his wife, displaying renewed vigor, shrilled, ‘Take your hands off my daughter!’
Edgar, displaying unexpected ferocity, charged George with arms outstretched and fingers hooked, as if intending to scratch out his eyes. George stepped to the side and, using the mangos knotted in his shirt, clubbed him in the face. Edgar dropped like a stone, blood spurting from his nose, and began to sob. Between the sobs, George heard Peony speaking almost inaudibly, saying, ‘She’s not my mother . . . she’s not my mother.’
‘Liar!’ Mrs Snelling shrieked. ‘Ingrate!’
‘She may be your daughter, but you most certainly are not her mother,’ George said. ‘No real mother would allow her child to endure such abuse.’
‘Bastard! If we were in Morningshade, I’d have you beaten.’
‘Lucky for me we’re not in Morningshade. And lucky for you I’m less concerned with justice than I am with caring for your daughter’s injuries.’ George’s outrage crested. ‘My God! What sort of people are you to treat a child so? Wild animals would show more humanity! I’m taking her with me. If you attempt to interfere in any way, I’ll finish what I’ve begun. I’ll kill you all!’
To illustrate this message, George kicked Edgar in the thigh. He backed from the clearing and, once he could no longer see them, he picked up Peony and ran.
He had gone no more than twenty-five yards when a blast of sound assailed him, seeming to come from on high, followed by a windy rush. Glancing up, he glimpsed a pale swollen belly and a twitching serpentine tail passing overhead. Moments later, the bushes crunched under an enormous weight and a low grumbling signaled that Griaule had landed nearby and was crashing through the thickets. George flung himself down, burrowed under the dead fronds scattered beneath a palmetto tree, and gathered Peony to him, clamping a hand to her mouth to prevent an outcry. More crunching, dry twigs snapping like strings of firecrackers; then the great glutinous huff of the dragon breathing. Through a gap in the leaves George saw a thick scaly leg that terminated in a foot as broad as a sofa cushion, with a spike protruding from its heel and four yellowish talons, much discolored. Peony, who had been squirming about, went limp in his arms, and a cold sensation settled over his brain. Cold and seething, like the margins of a tide. He had the impression of an ego gone wormy with age and anger, a malefic, indulgent potency whose whims dwarfed his deepest desires, an entity to which he was intrinsically subservient. A message resolved from the coldness, clear as the reverberations of a gong, silencing every other mental voice, and he knew, as surely as he might know the worn portrait of an empress on a Roman sestercius, that his place was beside the pools, that he should never return to the mango tree. Such behavior would not be tolerated a second time. He shut his eyes, terror-struck by this brush with Griaule’s mind (it had been too alien and powerful to write off as imagination born of fear), and he refused to open them again until he heard leathery wings battering the air and a scream issuing from above the plain.
As they made their way toward home, he rejected all interior conversation concerning the possibility that the dragon had spoken to him (though he was certain it had), and he stuffed any material relating to the encounter into his mental attic and locked it away. Denial was the only rational course in the face of such power. To distract himself further, he poked around in the fume and bubble of his thoughts, hoping to learn what had provoked him to such a rage against the Snellings. Not since his schoolboy days had he lifted a hand in anger and, while he had acted in self-defense, the murderous character of the emotions that had attended his actions astonished him. He could not unearth any inciting event from his past that would have predisposed him to such a vicious reaction, yet he realized he had tapped into a reservoir of ferocity that must have been simmering inside him for years, waiting a proper outlet. His threats had not been empty bluster. He meant every word.
Chapter Five
Peony was too weak to manage a hike and George had to carry her much of the way. When he questioned her about the Snellings, she put her head down on his shoulder and slept, her heart beating against his chest, frail and rapid as a bird’s. With every step, her vulnerability impressed itself on him and his commitment to her deepened. He stopped now and then, hiding in the thickets, waiting until certain no one was trailing them before moving on, and before they reached camp in early afternoon he had reversed the basic situation in his mind and thought about Peony in terms such as might befit a protective parent.
Sylvia was fishing, crouched half-naked in the pool, wearing only her rolled-up trousers. She pretended not to hear his approach. He called out to her and she turned on him a look of exasperation that changed to one of displeasure when she caught sight of Peony.
‘Adding to your stable?’ she said nastily. ‘One woman’s not enough for a man of your dimensions?’
‘Use your eyes,’ he replied. ‘She’s hardly a woman.’
He explained what had occurred and she had him carry Peony inside the shelter, then shooed him away, saying she would tend to the girl.
Five good-sized fish lay on flat stones by the edge of the pool, their glistening sides pulsing with last breaths. One had silvery tiger-stripes on its olive green back – George couldn’t identify it. He sliced off their heads, gutted and filleted them, and wrapped their flesh in banana leaves. That done, he took a stroll into the thickets, located a banderilla tree growing beside a cluster of hibiscus bushes, and began removing the barbs from the tips of the twigs, placing them on banana leaves and carrying the leaves to the perimeter of the camp. He was loading his ninth leaf when Sylvia pushed through the bushes to his side and asked what he was doing.
‘I’m going to rig some booby traps along the trails,’ he said. ‘They won’t do serious damage, but we’ll hear when someone trips them.’
She said nothing, watching him work.
‘Is Peony sleeping?’ he asked.
She nodded and knelt beside him. ‘She’s going to require a lot of care. I’ll do what I can, but . . . I don’t know.’
‘What’s wrong?’
Sylvia shook her head.
‘Tell me,’ George insisted.
‘It’s what happens to beautiful young girls when there’s no one to care for them.’
Recalling the way Peony had looked, it was difficult to think of her as beautiful. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Men. As best I can tell, they’ve been at her since she was eight.’
Sylvia’s voice quavered with emotion and George suspected that her empathy for the girl might be due to a similarity of experience.
‘Men did most of the damage,’ she said. ‘But her mother used her as well.’
George had the impulse to suggest that being sexually abused by one’s mother would have a momentous effect. A centipede crawled onto his ankle – he flicked it off. ‘Did she say whether the Sne
llings were her parents?’
‘I asked, but she’s not clear about it. She’s hazy about most things. It’s good you brought her here.’ She uprooted a weed. ‘I’m sorry for earlier . . . what I said about you.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I had no business saying it. You’ve treated me better than most.’ She paused. ‘She saw Griaule’s scale in your kit. I let her keep it, if that suits you.’
‘That’s up to you. It’s yours, after all.’
After a pause she said, ‘Could you sleep somewhere else for a while? Peony’s grateful for what you did, but it would do her a world of good not to sleep at close quarters with a man.’
George mulled this over. ‘I should build a larger shelter, anyway. We could be here for a while. There’s a nice spot by one of the smaller ponds. If I put it there, that should give her enough privacy.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Once I finish with the booby traps, I’ll get started.’
She made as if to stand, but held in a crouch with one hand flat to the ground, and then settled back onto her knees. ‘One more thing. Can I have your shirt? I want to cut it up and make her a halter.’
‘There’s no need to cut it up. It’ll be too big for her, but it’ll do the job.’
‘I thought I might make something for myself to wear, too. I know you like watching my titties, but they’re an encumbrance for me.’
He heard resentment in her tone, but her face remained neutral.
‘You were using it as a carry-all,’ she said. ‘I don’t figure you’ll miss it so much.’
He shrugged out of the shirt and handed it to her. ‘I’d give it a wash first.’
She stood, holding the shirt in both hands. Again he thought she might speak and when she did not he lowered his head and went to twisting banderilla barbs from the twigs.
‘Save me a fish,’ he said.
The Dragon Griaule Page 30
