Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  When the food arrived, Magali picked up her venison steak and nibbled a bite, chewed, threw back her head and swallowed. She repeated this process over and over. Hota shoveled down his meal without tasting it, his attention unwavering. Like the icon of some faded gaiety, an old man with wisps of white hair fraying up from his mottled scalp, wearing a ratty purple cloak, entered the tavern and played a whistling music on bamboo pipes; he stopped at the other tables, begging for a coin, but veered away from Hota after receiving a hostile look.

  Hota understood that something was wrong. The ordinary grind of his thoughts had been suppressed, damped down, but he had no will to contend against the agent of suppression, whatever it was, so seduced was he by Magali’s face and figure. He derived a proprietary pleasure from watching the convulsive working of her throat, the fastidious movements of her fingers and teeth. Like an old man watching a very young girl. Greedy for life, not sex. Lusting after some forbidden essence. Although he perceived this ugliness in himself and wanted to reject it, he could not do so and tracked her every gesture and change in expression. She gave no sign that she noticed the intensity or the character of his vigilance, but the fact that she never once engaged his eyes told him she knew he was looking and that all her actions were part of a show. The inside of his head felt warm, as if his brain, too, were pulsing with soft orange light.

  More customers drifted into the tavern. The conversation and laughter outvoiced the kitchen noises, but it seemed quiet where Hota and Magali sat, their isolation unimpaired. Two bulky men in work-stained clothes came to join the blond man at his table. They drank swiftly, draining their mugs in a few gulps, and began casting glances at Magali, who was now devouring her second steak. They put their heads together and whispered and then laughed uproariously. Typically, Hota would have ignored their derision, but anger mounted in him like a liquid heated in a vial. He heaved up from the bench and went over to the men’s table and glared down at them. The newcomers appeared to know him, at least by reputation, for one, adopting an air of appeasement, muttered his name, and the other fitted his gaze to the table top. But either the blond man was only recently arrived in Teocinte or else he was immune to fear. He sneered at Hota and asked, “What do you want?”

  One of the others made silent speech with his eyes to the blond man, as if encouraging him to be wary, but the man said, “Why are you frightened of this lump of shit? Let’s hear what’s on his mind.”

  Through the lens of anger, Hota saw him not as a man, but as a creature you might find clinging to the pitch-coated piling of a dock, an unlovely thing with loathsome urges and appetites, and a pink, rubbery face that was a caricature of the human.

  “Can’t you talk, then? Very well. I’ll talk.” Smirking, the blond man settled back against the wall, resting a foot on the bench. “Do you know who I am?”

  Hota held his tongue.

  “No? It doesn’t matter. The thing that most matters is who you are. You’re a man who needs no introduction. Useless. Dull. A clod. You might as well carry a sign with those words on it. You announce yourself everywhere you go, in everything you do.”

  Hota felt as if his skin were a crust that was restraining some molten substance beneath.

  “I suppose it would be easiest for you to think of me as your opposite,” the blond man continued. “I employ men such as you. I turn them to my purposes. I might be persuaded to employ you…if you’re as strong as you look. Are you?”

  A smile came unbidden to Hota’s face.

  The blond man chuckled. “Well, strength’s not everything, my friend. I’ve bested many men who were stronger than me. Do you know how?” He tapped the side of his head. “Because I’m strong up here. I could take things from you and you wouldn’t be able to stop me. Your woman, for instance. Beautiful! I gave some thought to taking her off your hands. But I’ve concluded that she’ll feel more at home with you.” He gave a bemused sniff. “For your sake, I hope she fucks less like a pig than she eats.”

  As Hota reached for the blond man’s leg, the closer of his two companions threw a punch at Hota’s forehead. The punch did no damage and Hota struck him in the mouth with an elbow, breaking his teeth and knocking him beneath the adjoining table. He seized the blond man’s ankle, yanked him out into the center of the tavern, holding his leg high so he could not get to his feet. The third man came at him, a lack of conviction apparent in the hesitancy of his attack. Hota kicked him in the groin and, taking a one-handed grip on the blond man’s throat, lifted him so that his feet dangled several inches above the floor. He clawed at Hota, pried at his fingers. His face empurpled. A froth fumed out between his lips. He fumbled out a dagger and tried to stab Hota, but Hota knocked the dagger to the floor, caught the man’s knife hand and squeezed, at the same time relaxing his grip on his throat. The blond man sank to his knees, screaming as the bones in his hand were snapped and ground together.

  “Hota!”

  Magali was standing by the door that led to the street. Despite the urgency of her shout, she appeared unruffled. Hota released the blond man, who rolled onto his side, cradling his bloody, mangled hand, cursing at Hota. Other men had drawn near, their physical attitudes suggesting that they might be ready to fight. Hota faced them down, squaring his shoulders, and, instead of cautioning them, he roared.

  The noise that issued from him was more than the sum of a troubled life, of old angers, of social impotence—it seemed to spring from a vaster source, to be the roar of the turning world, a sound that all creation made in its spin toward oblivion, exultant and defiant even in dismay, a sound that went unheard until, as now, it found a host suitable to give it tongue. Quailed, the men backed toward the kitchen. Recognizing that they no longer posed a threat, his anger emptied, Hota went to Magali’s side. Her face was difficult to read, but he felt from her a radiation of contentment. She took his arm—proudly, it seemed—and they stepped out into the town.

  By night, Teocinte had an even more derelict aspect than by day, the crooked little shacks, firelight flickering through cracks in the doors and from behind squares of cloth hung over windows. Streets winded and quiet, except for the occasional scream and burst of laughter. A naked infant, untended, splashed in a puddle formed by that afternoon’s rain. Above, the silhouette of Griaule’s tree-lined back outlined in stars against a purple sky. It had altogether the atmosphere of a tribal place, of people huddled together in frail shelters against the terrors of the dark, dwelling in the very shadow of those terrors.

  That night Hota felt estranged from the town and from himself, troubled by the vague presence in his thoughts that had spurred him to violence. But Magali’s closeness, her scent and the brush of her hip, the pressure of her breast against his arm, these things prevented him from brooding. They idled along the downslope of the street that fronted Liar’s House, moving toward the dragon’s head, and as they walked she said, “We should be flying now.”

  “Flying?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the most wonderful thing, flying together.”

  He suspected that she was dissembling and knew she did not like being pressed; but he had the itch to press her. She rarely spoke about her life prior to their meeting and, though he was not convinced that she was who she claimed to be, he wanted to believe her. It surprised him that he wanted this. Until that instant he had been uncertain as to what he wanted, but he was clear about it now. He wanted her to be a fabulous creature, for himself to be part of her fabulous design, and, sensing that she might be receptive to him, he asked if she could tell him how it was to fly.

  She was silent for such a length of time, he thought she would refuse to answer, but after five or six paces she said, “One day you’ll know how it feels.”

  Puzzled, he said, “I don’t understand.”

  “You can’t…not yet.”

  That comment sparked new questions, but he chose to pursue the original one. “You must be able to tell me something about it.”

  They wa
lked a while longer and then she said, “Each flight is like the first flight, the flight made at the instant of creation. You’re in the dark, you’re drowsy. Almost not there. And then you wake to some need, some urgency. Your wings crack as you rise up. Like thunder. And then you’re into the light, the wind…the wind is everything. All your strength and the rush of the wind, the sound of your wings, the light, it’s one power, one voice.”

  As she spoke he seemed to understand her, but when she fell silent the echoes of her words lost energy and were transformed into generalities. He tried to explore them, to recapture some fraction of the feeling her voice had communicated, but failed.

  The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant’s petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule’s head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.

  “You keep telling me I can’t understand things,” he said. “It’s frustrating. I want to understand something and I don’t understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this…as a woman?”

  She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.

  “Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens,” she said. “We control our shapes in ways you cannot.”

  “You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?”

  “Only a dragon or a woman…I think. I’m not sure,”

  He pondered this. “Why can’t Griaule change himself into a man?”

  “What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate—a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It’s something done only out of great necessity.”

  “You didn’t appear to be in pain…when I found you?”

  “It had ebbed by the time you reached me.”

  At first there were too many questions flocking Hota’s thoughts for him to single any out, but before long one soared higher than the rest: what great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, “Soon you’ll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient.”

  Moonglow fanned up above the hills to the west and in that faint light she looked calm, emotionless. Yet as he considered her, it struck him that a new element was embodied in her face. Serenity…or perhaps it was an absence he perceived, some small increment of anxiety erased.

  “Griaule,” she said in a half-whisper.

  “What of him?” he asked, perplexed by her worshipful tone.

  She only shook her head in response.

  Something scurried through the grass behind the boulder. A dull gleam emerged from the shadow of Griaule’s head, the tip of a fang holding the light. The wind picked up, bringing the still palms alive, swaying their fronds, breeding a sigh that seemed to voice a hushed anticipation. Magali folded her arms across her breasts.

  “I’m ready now,” she said.

  Hota assumed that by those last words, she meant she was ready to return to Liar’s House, for after saying them, she hopped down from the boulder and led him back toward the town; but once they closed the door of his room behind them, it became clear she had intended something more. She undressed quickly and stood before him in a silent yet unmistakable invitation, her skin agleam in the unsteady lamplight. Skeins of hair fell across her breasts, like black tributaries on the map of a voluptuous bronze country. Her eyes were cored with orange reflection. She looked to be a magical feminine treasure whose own light devalued that of the lamp. All his flimsy moral proscriptions against intimacy melted away. He took a step toward her and let her bring him down onto the bed.

  During the first thirty-one years of his life, Hota had made love to but one woman: his wife. Since then, he had made love to many more and thought himself reasonably knowledgeable as to their ways. Magali’s ways, however, enlarged his views on the subject. For the most part she lay quiescent, her eyes half-closed, as if her mind were elsewhere and she were merely allowing herself to be penetrated; yet every so often, abruptly, she would begin to thrash and heave, pushing and clawing at him, breath shrieking out of her, throwing herself about with such apparent desperation, he was nearly unseated. Initially, he took this behavior for rejection and flung himself off her; but she pulled him back between her legs and, once he had entered her, she lay quiet again. This alternation of corpselike stillness and frenzied motion distressed him and he was unable to lose himself in the act, half-listening to the sounds of more commercial passions emanating from adjoining rooms. When he had finished and was lying beside her, sweaty and breathing hard, she demanded that he repeat the performance. And so it went, the second encounter like the first, equally as awkward and emotionally unsatisfying. In her frenzied phase, she seemed even less a complicitor in pleasure than she did when she was still. She took to snapping at his arm, his shoulder, making cawing noises deep in her throat. But their third encounter, one into which Hota had to be vigorously coerced, was different. She drew up her knees and met his thrusts with sinuous abandon and kept her arms locked about his neck, her eyes on his face, until at long last she offered up a shivery cry and clamped her knees to his sides, refusing to let him move.

  After he withdrew, pleased, feeling that they had managed actual intimacy, he tried to be tender with her, but she shrank from his touch and would not speak. More confused than ever, he decided that her behavior must be due to a lack of familiarity with her body, and he counseled himself to remain patient. They had come this far and whatever road lay ahead, there would be time to smooth over these problems. Fatigued, his eyes went to the lamp lit ceiling. It looked as if all the dragons imprinted in the grain were quivering, shifting agitatedly, as if preparing to take flight. He watched them, imagining that if he watched long enough he would see one fly, the tiny black sketch of dragon flap up off the boards and make a circuit of the room. Eventually he slept.

  The following morning, gray and drizzly, with a touch of chill, he woke to find Magali at the window, which stood half-open. She had on her favorite green dress and was looking out onto the street. He sat up, groggy, rubbing his eyes. The bedsprings squeaked loudly, but she gave no sign of having heard.

  “Magali?” he said.

  She ignored him. The rain quickened, drumming on the tin roof. Feeling the bite of the cold, Hota swung his legs onto the floor, grabbed his shirt from among the rumpled bedclothes and began to pull it over his head.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  Without turning, she said glumly, “You’ve given me a child.”

  He paused, the shirt tangled about his neck, and started to ask how she could know such a thing, then remembered that she had knowledge inaccessible to him.

  “A son,” she said dully. “I’m going to have a son.”

  The idea of fathering children no longer figured into Hota’s plans and his immediate reaction was uneasiness over having to shoulder such a responsibility. He tugged the shirt down to cover his belly. “You don’t seem happy. Is it you don’t want a child?”

  “It isn’t what I want that’s of moment.” She paused and then said, “The birth will be painful.”

  Her attitude, so contrary to what he would have expected, provoked an odd reaction in him—he wondered how it would feel to be a father. “It might not be so bad,” he said. “I’ve known women to have easy births. At the end we’ll have our son and perhaps that’ll give…”

  “He’s not your son,” she said. “You fathered him, but he will be Griaule’s son.”

  The rain came harder yet and, amp
lified by the tin, filled the room with a kind of roaring, a din that made it difficult for Hota to think, to hear his own voice. “That’s impossible.”

  Magali turned from the window. “Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve told you?”

  “What have you told me that would explain this?”

  She stared at him without expression. “Griaule is the eldest of all who live. Over the centuries, his soul has expanded with the growth of his body. How far it extends, I can’t say. Far beyond the valley, though. I know that much. I was flying above the sea when he drew me to him.” She dropped into the chair beside the window and rested her hands on her knees. “His soul encloses him like a bubble. For all I know that bubble has grown to enclose the entire world. But I’m certain you live inside its reach. You’ve lived inside it your entire life. Now he’s drawn you to him as well. It’s possible he caused the events that drove you from Port Chantay. That would be in keeping with what I understand of his character. With the deviousness and complexity of his mind.”