The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  Leaping forward, sensing the truth of the blow as he swung the machete, he sank the blade into the side of Jefe’s neck, the tip transecting the hindward portion of his jaw. Jefe made a cawing noise and jerked away, tearing the machete from Snow’s grip, so firmly was it embedded in meat and bone. Blood seeped from around the edges of the blade. Jefe stumbled out onto the landing, his step grown discontinuous. He slipped, clutched ineffectually at the railing, and then pitched forward, bumping down the stairs on his belly and onto the landing below, dislodging the machete. He picked himself up and kept going, blood fron the wound cape-ing his back with a darker crimson.

  An unusual calm, sudden in onset, was visited upon Snow. Not unusual as regarded its emotional basis, for he knew to his soul Jefe was dying and a menace no more, but in that it seemed to proceed from an inner resource he had not known he possessed. He stood calmly, then, watching Jefe totter from view before returning to the lair. Yara called on him to finish Jefe, but Snow walked over to the panel by the door, keyed in nine-nine-nine, and set the chains to rattling downward. The noise drowned out her cries. Once he knew she would be safe, he went downstairs at a leisurely pace, scooping up the machete, and entered the dining room. He stopped by the sideboard and, taking a minute to make his selection from among the whiskeys and tequilas, he poured a double shot of single malt and sipped it appreciatively. A tremor palsied his hand. He downed the scotch and strolled off along the tunnel, following Jefe’s blood trail.

  He had not been out of the complex for almost two weeks and the sight of daylight at the tunnel’s end disoriented him, as did the wideness of the world and the hills enclosing the grassless stretch whereon the village had been established. Under a dreary sky eight or nine women – two of them dressed in filmy peignoirs, the others clad in shawls and long colorful skirts and embroidered blouses of coarse native cloth – had gathered at a point midway between the village and the pink house, and were staring with grim fixity at something Snow could not see from his perspective. On stepping from the tunnel mouth, he spotted Jefe to the right of the entrance – he still dragged his leg, yet made a doddering run across a stretch of sloppy ground, hitching his shoulders repeatedly as he went, going about ten yards before losing his footing and sprawling, splashing down into a puddle. It took several tries for him to stand. A commingling of blood and brick red mud slimed his chest and back, and he wore an expression of abject stupefaction. Appearing to have no awareness of Snow, he made a second and shorter run back toward the tunnel, adding a little hop at the end, but with no better outcome. Snow recognized he was attempting to fly and wondered whether he knew that he did not possess a dragon’s body.

  A voluptuous black woman with blond spiky hair, holding the neck of her peignoir shut against the cold, approached Snow, circling away from Jefe. She touched the handle of the machete and said, ‘You did this?’

  ‘Yes. With Yara’s help.’

  ‘Yara? I don’t know this Yara.’

  ‘La Endriaga.’

  ‘La Endriaga is not Jefe’s woman?’

  ‘She was his prisoner. Like you.’

  As Jefe made another effort to fly, the woman shouted excitedly in Mam to the others – Snow understood only the words ‘La Endriaga.’

  One of the village women shouted in response and the black woman asked Snow if Jefe was mortally wounded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood, but he may still be dangerous.’

  She reported this to the group and two of the women ran for the village, most likely to spread the news.

  Jefe fell again – he lay on his side for a long count, his breath venting in gasps.

  Snow’s calm had eroded into a mood as gray and energy-less as the sky above Tres Santos. The clouds looked to have the inert weight and solidity of battered armor plate, though thunderheads with dark bellies had begun pushing in from the north. As Jefe gathered himself for a further attempt, Yara limped from the tunnel. She stood at Snow’s side and watched Jefe perform his miserable trick. Her eyes brimmed with tears. This must be for her, he thought, like watching someone who had once had promise, with whom she had invested her precious time, and was now reduced to an addled derelict with half a functioning liver, putting on a show of his degeneracy and decrepitude in a parking lot, hoping his audience would throw quarters at him so he could buy a pint of fortified wine.

  The black woman tapped Snow’s arm and whispered in his ear: ‘If she is not Jefe’s woman, why is she crying?’

  ‘She was Jefe’s prisoner for most of her life,’ Snow said. ‘When you’ve lived with someone that long, even as a captive, your emotions become confused.’

  She nodded at this lie, or half-lie, as if she understood him, but her expression was perplexed.

  More women joined the group, swelling its ranks to four times its former size. Some carried garden implements, others pointed sticks and fist-sized rocks – a young girl in chartreuse satin pajamas brandished a pair of sewing shears. They seethed closer to Jefe, their voices a chorus of vituperation, yet did not attack, wary of their tormentor, though he looked to be done with flying. Positioned on all fours amidst a large puddle, his head hanging down, slathered all over in reddish muck, his hair caked with mud, blood oozing from splits and gashes, strings of ruby-colored drool depending from his lips – he might have been an animal of the village, a pariah dog gone rabid, exhausted by fever, his world narrowed to a hideous reflection in murky water. Snow had no pity for him, no disgust, no anger. If he felt anything it was the temper of a functionary compelled to discharge an unpleasant duty. He stepped forward and rested the edge of the blade on Jefe’s neck. The women fell silent and Jefe’s guttering breath could be heard. He sought to lift his head, perhaps to inquire of Snow, perhaps simply alerted by the blade, but either his head was too heavy or else he lacked the will to see, to know what this cold, sharp object was. Perhaps he knew and no longer cared. Summoning his strength, Snow swung the machete in a savage arc. The blade sliced deep, burying itself to the bone, yet Jefe’s reactions were minimal – he gave forth with a grunt and shuddered and listed a degree or two, but remained upright. Frustrated at his inability to finish the job, Snow yanked at the blade, but once again it was stuck. He planted a foot between Jefe’s shoulders, pushed down and wrenched the blade free, shoving him face-first into the puddle. A tide of blood sluiced from the wound.

  As Snow prepared to strike again Jefe’s breath blew a bubble in the mud and, with a choking cough, he flipped onto his back, his entire frame coming off the ground and twisting in mid-air – it was such a physically adept movement that Snow feared Jefe’s strength had been miraculously restored, but then he understood that it had been a lizard-ly reflex, a final surge of vitality, for Jefe was clearly close to death. His limbs jerked and twitched, and a horrid slackness overlay his features and from his throat there issued a repetitive glutinous clicking, indicative of a disruption in some internal function and not an attempt at speech . . . though his eyes yet held a glint of the poisonous hatred that had infected the world for thousands of years.

  The women descended upon him, first Itzel with a hoe, blood welling from the trench she dug in his chest, and then the rest, stabbing and cutting and pounding, exacting their vengeance for rape and murder and innumerable humiliations. They swarmed over the body, blocking it from view, and shoved one another aside in their eagerness to share in his destruction, announcing their fury and delight with orgasmic cries, until a puff of heat and rainbow-colored light (no more impressive to see than the flash powder of a second-rate magician) bloomed from the rags of meat and splintered bone, causing them to fall over backward, to scramble and crawl away yelping with fright, spattered by the same amalgam of mud and thick, dark blood as their ancient enemy, some bearing slashes and bruises received during the melee, inadvertently gotten at the hands of their sisters, and some nursing curious burns they seemed to obtain from some melting process, deriving from the paltry magic of Jefe’s death. Snow glanced up at the sky
, fearful that rippling lights would manifest in the clouds like those seen above the village of Chajul thirteen years before, the beacon of the dragon’s rebirth – but none materialized. Jefe was dead. Utterly and irrevocably dead.

  At the last an elderly woman brought a gasoline can and emptied its contents upon his corpse, which had been rendered unrecognizable as life of any kind, like a red meal that had proved indigestible and been spat forth by the thing that consumed it. She lit a twist of paper and dropped it thereon. The flames yielded were low and of a ruddy translucence in the decaying light, and were whipped about by a cold north wind that soon would bring the storm. An oily smoke arose and was quickly dispersed. All the women of the village had come forth, and those of the pink house as well, and they huddled together in small groupings, somber and silent in that shabby, inglorious place, occasionally exchanging whispered comforts and assurances. When the blaze had burned down some retreated to their homes, but more gasoline was brought and many stayed to watch a second burning, and to stir the coals now and again so that a wisp of transparent flame licked up, signifying the immolation of a crumb of intestine, a scrap of cartilage. The sky darkened. Drops of icy rain began to fall, yet the women covered their heads with shawls, violent nuns at a ritual observance, and kept to their sentinel stations until they were shadows and the wind stiffened, carrying the taste of grit to their mouths, and all that survived of the dragon Griaule and his human avatar were nuggets of charred bone, which they would later collect and grind into meal for a mystical supper, and a cinereal residue indistinguishable from the dusts that had blown across those hills since time was in its cradle and the sky still bright with creation fire.

  VI

  It was raining steadily by the time they drove out from Tres Santos in the late afternoon, heading for Nebaj and the north in one of the battered yellow mini-trucks. The women of the village expressed no interest in having them join their celebration. They wanted a swift return to normalcy, to their traditions, and they treated Snow and Yara, despite their service, with disdain, there being no place amongst them for a gringo and his pale, crippled woman. As for Snow, he had no desire to linger in Tres Santos a second longer than was necessary. He suspected that these women would be forever at their burning, whether in dreams or by means of some surrogate or effigy. Their new husbands, if husbands they took, would be lucky to survive such passion.

  Yara had barely spoken since Jefe’s death and she was not given now to speech. As they jounced over ruts and potholes, Snow jamming the gears in order to gain traction in the mud, she rubbed his leg every so often – whether to reassure herself or him, he could not have said – and offered neither commentary nor advice. In truth, he would have had little in the way of response, preoccupied by the gusting wind and the rain driven sideways against the windshield, and by the precipitous drop-off to the right of the narrow road. They were past the halfway point to Nebaj when the storm broke full upon them. In those regions it would not have been considered either an especially fulminant storm or one of great duration, unremarkable as to its apparitions and thunderous concatenations and lurid bursts of lightning that illuminated sections of the pine forest, bleaching the separate trees to bone-white and shrouding them in purple-haloed effulgence like sainted relics set to burn on the mountainside, charms and admonitions against some ghastly form of predation. It sufficed, however, to persuade Snow to shut down the engine and switch off the useless wipers. He cracked a window to prevent the glass from fogging over with their breath. Rain washed down in spills thick as gray paint, its drumming increased to deafening measure. He had wanted to talk to Yara, but now he thought the storm with its progeny of light and sound was a blessing, for there was too much to be sifted through and digested and mulled over before they could begin to discuss what had happened and what would be. And yet to sit there encysted in that musty cab, blind to the world, surrounded by spirits real and unreal, separated one from the other by silence, by a gearbox and a divider with receptacles for drinks and maps and such, that was no better solution to the moment. His mind pulled ahead, worrying about how they would negotiate the border crossing and where they could live and what he would do with a woman as damaged as Yara at his side, all the demeaning practicalities and shameful concerns that would inevitably dissolve the bond they had forged anew, a bond already once broken. He wished he could resist these dour thoughts, but they were ingrained in him – he had too long cohabited with the idea that love born of illusion would never prosper, and the principle that every truth could be fashioned into the lie of itself. It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that – despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death – it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

  The rain abated and the worst of the storm moved toward the lowlands. Snow started the engine. Yara reached a hand across the divide and he warmed her chilled fingers. In her face was a serenity he could not fathom. He thought she must be drawing upon some secret female provenance to which he had no access, but something stirred inside him, sparked to life by her expression, and he had then a fresh recognition of what they had accomplished together, the destruction of a monster, the killing of a thing that could not be killed. And although it went against every negative of his former faith in nothing, he submitted to belief and believed . . . believed in alchemy, in the marriage of souls, in accomplishment and noble obligation, and believed also that he would never fail her again, nor she him.

  Static spat and crackled on the radio, salseros lamented about injustice and pop divas celebrated the endlessly trivial. In a thin voice Yara sang along with those songs she knew and they talked of inconsequential things, favorite bands and bad movies, touching one another often to reaffirm their connection, for they were their own country now. When they turned onto the highway they lapsed into silence, Yara gazing out the window and Snow focusing on the traffic, each alone with their thoughts, each striving to ignore the outposts of doubt and fear that flashed at them from the darkness, as vivid in their enmity as the gas station-hotel-brothel where they stopped to fill the tank – a big, ugly, raw building englobed in lemony radiance, like the local headquarters of evil and sons, and out front a string of six short-skirted women standing brazen and hipshot along the road, shadowy figures who bared their breasts for speeding cars, watched over by a chain-smoking devil with gold incisors, who strode back and forth, cursing the cars, the women, cursing everything in sight, pimping the apocalypse. Some drunken teenage soldiers, Indian kids with AK-47s, lounged by the entrance, giving people a hard time. In a spirit of playful menace, one lifted the hem of Yara’s skirt with his rifle barrel – upon seeing her disfigured legs he let the skirt fall, made the sign of the cross, and held conference with his friends. Snow hustled her into the truck before they could decide to investigate further and drove away quickly. After that they kept to the back roads, to blue highways and unmapped trails, driving north and west into the realms of the ordinary, ordinary monsters and ordinary seductions, past towns whose sole reason for being was a refusal to die, making for a land of cynical enchantments and marathon sales, of lap dancers for cancer and political doctrine based on new wives’ tales, the Great American Salmagundi in all its glorious criminal delirium, with nothing to sustain them, nothing certain, only the strength of their imperfections and hope reborn a dragon in their hearts, while behind them the old world trembled and the light caught fire and roared.

  STORY NOTES

  THE MAN WHO PAINTED

  THE DRAGON GRIAULE

  The seminal idea for Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write about while attending the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook t
he words ‘big fucking dragon.’ I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.

  The idea of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, that dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, a baleful monster beaming out his vindictive thought and shaping us to its will . . . this seemed an appropriate metaphor for the Reagan Administration, which was then busy declaiming that it was ‘Morning In America,’ laying waste to Central America, and starting to rip the heart out of the constitution. That likely explains the political content carried in one degree or another by the stories. So in a sense, the Griaule stories concern two mythical beasts, a dragon and an addled president whose avatar is an undying monster . . . or vice versa.

  I don’t know what it is that has brought me back so many times to Griaule. Generally speaking, I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Perhaps it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine was the biggest. This caused me to think that I might make a career of writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny, and so forth. Fortunately I never followed up on the idea.

  When I returned home to Ann Arbor from the workshop I asked my brother-in-law, James Wolf, an artist and the guitarist in my band, if he would make me a drawing of the dragon – I wanted something to meditate upon while working out the story. I expected something rudimentary, but he did the dragon in water colors on flimsy, oversized sheets of paper and taped them together, thereby creating a rendering eight feet long and three feet high, complete with all the vats and ladders and etcetera that were part of my conception. I tried to preserve it as best I could, but eventually it became tattered and unsalvageable. Anyway, I stared at the painting for a year or so, endured a thoroughly unhappy love affair that formed the emotional core of the story, and eventually wrote it all down.