The wind must have changed, because the temperature dropped and the light from the burning plain dimmed, occulted by a mixture of smoke and fog – still the dragon herded them along. They emerged from the thickets onto a grassy slope and, after no more than thirty yards, the slope grew steeper, rockier. Visibility was poor and George had to feel his way – it was as if they were ascending a crag whose lower reaches had the semblance of a crude stair, each step a couple of feet high. He couldn’t hear the fire anymore and, though perplexed by this development, he was too enervated to worry. Soon what sounded like muted voices came to his ear. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he realized that the steps of the stair were very wide and scattered about on them were small groups of people. He steered clear of these and found an unoccupied space where they could sit. The dragon rumbled below, but it was a ruminative sound, or so George chose to interpret it. He was done with running, unable to go another foot.
‘Where are we?’ Sylvia asked, pressing close for warmth – it had gotten cold and she and Peony sheltered under his arms.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I thought we were heading back toward Teocinte . . . where it used to stand. But there’s no place like this near the city.’
‘We’ll puzzle it out in the morning,’ he said. ‘Get some rest.’
George made a manful effort to keep watch, but the gentle breathing of the women seduced him and he fell into a dreamless sleep, waking to discover that the sky had grayed and a dense fog sealed them in against tiers of stone, a kind of amphitheater, perhaps a natural formation.10 The morning wind picked up, causing eddies and rifts in the fog, revealing sections of the plain – it disquieted him to see that the thickets showed yellowish green, not a trace of the previous night’s fire, and there was no smell of burning. Every part of his body ached and he would have liked to shake out the kinks and have a look around, as people on the tiers beneath were doing (from what he could tell, there were fewer than fifty altogether, though he could not be certain, what with the fog); but he wanted to let Peony and Sylvia sleep as long as they could and contented himself with passive observation.
The people clustered on the steps, as sooty and ragged as George, kept an eye on the other groups around them, displaying no inclination to socialize, perhaps focused on the hope that their ordeal might be over, thus having no interest in anything apart from their own preoccupations. That hope, however, did not long persist, for an immense shape began to materialize from the fog directly in front of the amphitheater and, while he had no reason to despair (on the contrary, the vista that opened before him should by its familiarity have relieved his every concern), the sight of Griaule, not his lesser incarnation but the great paralyzed, recumbent beast with his evil snout, his fangs festooned with vines and epiphytes, and scales embroidered with lichen and bird droppings, his greens and golds muted by an overcast, ghost-dressed in streamers of mist, the cavern of his mouth enclosing enough darkness to fill the naves of four or five cathedrals, the hill of his body looming above the tin roofs, the shanty districts and factory precincts of Morningshade from which now arose a clangor of bells . . . that sight had such a grim, iconic value, like a gigantic conceit enclosing the gates of some abyssal domain, George’s strength failed him and the other witnesses appeared similarly afflicted. Their murmurous voices grew silent and they stopped milling about and stood frozen in a dozen separate tableaus. Waking, Peony screamed and buried her face in George’s shoulder, and Sylvia drew in a breath sharply and pricked his arm with her fingernails. A chthonic rumbling was heard, so all-encompassing a sound it seemed to issue from the earth, the sky, from the core of all things, as if the basic stuff of matter had gained a voice and were offering complaint, and from Griaule’s mouth, in a trickle at first, and then a tide darkening the grass, came the creatures that dwelled within his enormous bulk, slithering, crawling, creeping, flying, hopping, running on four legs and two (for among the snakes and spiders and skizzers and flakes11 were a number of derelict men and women who, for whatever reason, had sought to shelter inside the dragon, in the hollows and caves and canyons formed by his organs and bones and cartilage). As they fled, dispersing across the plain, the witnesses made out a distant clamor composed of the affrighted cries of the citizens of Morningshade and various alarms being sounded. Griaule’s eyes blinked open, wheels of gold flecked with mineral hues, each divided by a horizontal slit pupil, lending a vile animus to his face. In the depths of his throat bloomed an orange radiance that whitened and shone more fiercely until it resembled a star lodged in his gullet. Seeing this, between ten or fifteen of the witnesses broke from the tiers of the amphitheater and raced toward the town below. Among them was Peony. She shrugged off George’s arm, eluded his lunging attempt to snatch her back, and scampered down the tiers.
Somewhat reluctantly, Sylvia made to stand, and George said, ‘It’ll be less of a risk if I go alone. Wait for us on the plain. We’ll find you.’
Relief and shame mixed in her face. ‘I don’t think she knows where she used to live,’ she said. ‘Look for her at Griaule’s temple. She thought it was pretty inside.’
‘Where else?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ And then, as he started off, she called, ‘The brothel! Maybe there! Because of my stories!’
They had been seated near the top tier and George had descended about two-thirds of its height when Griaule, with a coughing grunt that signaled a mighty effort, turned his head and twisted his body in the direction of Haver’s Roost, his snout projecting out across the tin roofs – in the same motion, with a tremendous creaking and popping of calcified joints, noises that might have been created by tree trunks snapping, he pushed himself erect, moving with a ponderous, rickety deliberation bred by thousands of years of muscular disuse. It was an unreal sight, a mountainous transformation, the coming-to-life of a colossus. Griaule took a step forward and, with an earthshaking thump, planted a front foot among the shanties of Morningshade, crushing a considerable acreage and all that lived thereon, raising a dust cloud that boiled up around his foreleg, obscuring it. The soil and vegetation surrounding Hangtown, the village on the dragon’s back, slid off his side and wings in huge clumps, and the shacks that constituted the village followed, disintegrating in midair; from his position, George could not tell where the debris landed. Griaule roared, a blast of raw noise that deafened him.12 Pain drove him to his knees; he clasped both hands to his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and when he looked again he saw a gush of flame (patterned with a shifting orange efflorescence that gave it an odd, lacy delicacy) spew from Griaule’s mouth and lance across the valley to engulf the hotels on the slopes of Haver’s Roost. Within seconds, every building on the Roost, even the government offices atop it, was burning. The dragon appeared to wobble for a instant, but maintained his stance and, lowering and turning his head slightly to the right, breathed out a swath of fire to encompass a section of the outlying district of Cerro Bonito, among whose rolling hills the estates of wealthy foreigners were situated. Dollops of flame dropping from the dragon’s lip and from the jet of its exhalation ignited conflagrations in other sections of the city. The smell of the burning held an acrid chemical undertone that stung George’s nostrils.
An animal fear possessed him, but the mental contract he had made to protect Peony enabled him to ignore both fear and pain. It may have been a blessing that he could not hear, for by the time he came to the foot of the hill, the greater portion of the city was on fire (only those areas adjoining and beneath the dragon were left untouched) and streams of panic-stricken people rushed past in the opposite direction, some bleeding and burned, their mouths open in what he assumed to be screams, a sound that would have encouraged his own nascent panic. The streams increased to a flood when he reached the outskirts of Morningshade. He had to fight his way through streets thronged by crowds surging toward the plain. Directly ahead, seen through the dust and across rooftops striped with rust, Griaule’s foreleg sprouted from the
slum like a thewy green-and-gold tree thrust up from an orchard in hell; his dirty white belly sagged low above the finial atop a four-story temple devoted to his worship, more like a billow in a giant’s dirty bed sheet than a piece of sky. An alley opened between storefronts on George’s left. He wedged through the crowd and stepped into it in order to formulate a plan of action without being jostled; however, once away from the turbulence of the crowd, the situation seemed hopeless and he understood he had taken on a fool’s errand. He made ready to plunge back into the crowd, intending to join them in flight, but at the far end of the alley he spotted a sign bearing the crude painting of a cornucopia – the business that it advertised, a pawnshop, was close to Ali’s. He could spare a moment, he told himself, before surrendering to fear. Peony loved Sylvia’s fantasies about the brothel and, if she had survived, she might well have taken refuge in a place Sylvia described as home to a loving sisterhood. He raced along the alley, forged a path toward Ali’s through the sparser crowds on the side street, and burst through the door.
A scrawny, stoop-shouldered, white-haired man drinking two-handed at the bar was the sole occupant of the common room. Boards and benches had been overturned; bottles and broken crockery littered the floor. George’s hearing had returned to a degree – his ears rang, but he could detect the brighter range of sounds. He asked if the old man had seen Peony and the man did not turn from the bar to confront George and gave no other response. Drying blood from one ear made a track down his seamed cheek. Then the walls shimmied, the floorboards bounced, dust sifted down from the rafters and more bottles fell from a shelf behind the counter – Griaule shifting position once again. Two steps and their world was in chaos.
Upstairs, George hurried along a corridor, throwing open the doors, giving the rooms a cursory inspection, finding un-made beds and nightgowns draped over chairs, but no Peony. He was certain that he would be crushed or incinerated, and that certainty grew stronger with each second. In a room at the end of the hall whose window framed a view of the city, ruddy light flickered on creamy wallpaper with a pyramid pattern, and a pudgy, dark-haired woman in a pink flannel robe sat on the edge of the bed, watching Teocinte burn. Her eyes fell upon him and an expression of mirth spread like butter melting across her features. She patted the sheet beside her, inviting him to sit. He wanted to urge her to run, but something in her face, some central weakness, told him not to bother. A muscular balding man pushed past him into the room and, after a hostile glance at George, removed his trousers. The woman turned again to the window, plucking fretfully at the lapel of her robe. Abandoning them to whatever exercise they planned, George fled down the stairs and out into the street, almost overlooking the slight ginger-haired figure squatting on her haunches outside the door, rocking back and forth. Peony didn’t complain when he caught her up – she appeared stunned and uncaring.
Whereas the behavior of the couple in Ali’s had impressed George as being utterly final in its dissolution, the streets were an evolution of that finality, a Babel of dimly perceived sounds and voices, a bedlam of people who clawed and clutched and kicked. At one point somebody knocked him off-balance, sending him to a knee; he put out a hand to prevent a fall and braced against the bruised, misshapen face of a boy who had been trampled beneath the feet of the crowd. He yanked back his hand, repelled, yet this intimate contact with death firmed his resolve and he became single-minded in his pursuit of survival, using his size to full advantage, treating people like impediments, clubbing them with his fist, shoving them down and tossing them aside without a thought for their fate or the state of his soul, stained by one death and now, doubtless, by others. Aghast faces surfaced from the melee and he dispatched them one after the other. Dust and the smell of fear, of fury . . . all the toxins of dementia poisoned the air. Yet he felt immune to fear, unstoppable, invincible in his lack of emotion. Then, as he reached the outskirts of the city, where the dirt street gave out onto an upward slope, the crowd fanning out across it, a splintering crack ripped across the other noises, seeming to come both from inside him and from without. George looked back and saw that the dragon’s leg had buckled, a shockingly white shard of bone protruding from the scales above the knee, blood oozing from the break, and he recognized that Cattanay’s prediction had come to pass.13 Griaule’s gargantuan head swiveled to the left, a malefic golden eye canted downward, and though others must have thought the same, George had the idea that the dragon was staring directly at him, a white star shining deep within his throat. The leg buckled further, the dragon listed toward them, and George sprinted up the hill, running even more desperately than before, carrying Peony under an arm like a small rolled-up rug. The crowd’s wailing became a shriek as they fled from beneath Griaule’s fall.
Perhaps time slowed, subject to a new gravity now that Griaule was truly dying, or perhaps it was simply the chemistry of terror stretching seconds into wider fractions; but George ran for what felt like a long, long time. He heard an eerie hiss and a blast of heat at his back sent him veering out of control; he righted himself and kept going. Time slowed further and he could clearly make out his labored breathing above the ringing in his ears and the shouts of people around him; and then, the last thing he would ever hear: the dragon’s final roar, a percussive sound that shot lightning through his ears and resolved into a fizzing that banished every other sound, grew faint and fainter yet, then faded and faded, stranding him in the midst of a pure unmodulated silence. The earth convulsed, twitching like the skin on a cat’s back, and he was flung through the air, somehow managing to hang onto Peony and shield her from harm. He did not black out, but lay facedown for ten or fifteen minutes, longer perhaps, moving an arm, a leg, not testing his mobility, just incidental movements, content to rest and be thoughtless. When he sat up he found that Peony was unconscious, but breathing steadily. Only then did he turn and gaze through the pall of dust and smoke toward Teocinte.
The better sections of town, Cerro Bonito, Haver’s Roost, and Yulin’s Grove, were still afire, releasing black smoke into the sky from half a thousand conflagrations; but the shanties of Morningshade had gone up as if made of paper and all that was left of them were smoldering piles of wreckage; indeed, the blaze had moved through the slum at such a pace that a handful of more substantial buildings in the district, those with their own water supply (Griaule’s temple for instance), had survived relatively unscathed, the fire sweeping past them so rapidly that they had not been endangered for long – presumably their staffs and inhabitants had taken steps to protect them. Dwarfing the ruinous landscape, the immensity that was Griaule lay on his side, his back toward the hill where George and Peony were situated, his neck twisted so that his snout angled toward the sky like a scaly tower, a forked tongue lolling between his fangs. His ribcage had shattered and bones poked through the skin in five or six places. It was a sight of such scope and implausibility, George could not frame the whole picture in his mind and for years thereafter, until his actual memories were replaced by a popular rendering of the death of Griaule, he recalled it in fragments. The most memorable element of the scene for him was not Griaule, but the slope that led up from the outskirts of the city. Although the majority of the dead had been incinerated by the dragon’s uncanny fire, reduced to piles of unidentifiable ash, his flame must have weakened toward the end, because several thousand carbonized corpses decorated the hill, replicas of their living selves save for the fact they were blackened and so fragile that the pressure of a finger upon them would cause them to collapse and lose their shape. They were dust held together by habit and little else, yet they looked solid, an intricate weaving together of human forms that might have been mistaken for a work accomplished by some apocalyptic artist.
Peony stirred; her fist opened – the scale slipped from her palm. George picked it up and was startled to feel that cold, crawly vitality he had become aware of in the thickets on the day he and Peony met. An image slipped into his mind, that of a gold coin, a Byzantine solidus, very rare, fro
m the reign of the emperor Aleksii. Then an unfamiliar silver coin, yet Egyptian in aspect, came into his mind, and it was followed by another and another yet, and he saw gems of superb luster and clarity, golden cups of great antiquity beset with uncut stones, bejeweled daggers and mirrors with gold frames, a small mountain of such objects, a treasure like no other. He knew he should be about the business of survival (they were not safe yet), but he was tired and the gold was so alluring and that other world of death and smoke and flame seemed far away. And then he was exiting the cavern where the gold was kept, going by torchlight along a meandering tunnel, walking slowly and silently as in a dream, and once out in the light of day he could no longer see the entrance to the tunnel. It had vanished, hidden by ferns and vines and perhaps by some ancient magic, but he didn’t concern himself with such trivia – he had the confidence, a serene sense of fate and his relation to it, that he would find his treasure again.
10 The amphitheater was not natural, but had been excavated from the side of a hill during Sylvia and George’s absence from Teocinte (a term of years, and not of months, as they perceived it), its purpose being to provide seating for audiences who had come to witness a Sound and Light performance. Such a performance never occurred, though the lamps had been set in place and a stage built for the orchestra, and some have conjectured that the impulse to construct the amphitheater came not from the city fathers, as had been thought, but from a more subtle agency whose penchant for such ironies had been noted throughout the long history of Teocinte, and it was also thought that the seating had not been intended for tourists, but for precisely the audience that occupied it on the morning after George, Sylvia and Peony had been forced to flee their encampment.
The Dragon Griaule Page 33
