The Best of Lucius Shepard (2 page)

They were
silent, exchanging glances, and he saw that they now believed he could do what
he proposed and were wondering if the cost was too high.

“I’ll need
500 ounces of silver to hire engineers and artisans,” said Meric. “Think it
over. I’ll take a few days and go see this dragon of yours… inspect the scales
and so forth. When I return, you can give me your answer.”

The city
fathers grumbled and scratched their heads, but at last they agreed to put the
question before the body politic. They asked for a week in which to decide and
appointed Jarcke, who was the mayoress of Hangtown, to guide Meric to Griaule.

The valley
extended 70 miles from north to south, and was enclosed by jungled hills whose
folded sides and spiny backs gave rise to the idea that beasts were sleeping
beneath them. The valley floor was cultivated into fields of bananas and cane
and melons, and where it was not cultivated there were stands of thistle palms
and berry thickets and the occasional giant fig brooding sentinel over the
rest. Jarcke and Meric tethered their horses a half-hour’s ride from town and
began to ascend a gentle incline that rose into the notch between two hills.
Sweaty and short of breath, Meric stopped a third of the way up; but Jarcke
kept plodding along, unaware he was no longer following. She was by nature as
blunt as her name - a stump beer keg of a woman with a brown, weathered face.
Though she appeared to be ten years older than Meric, she was nearly the same
age. She wore a grey robe belted at the waist with a leather band that held
four throwing knives, and a coil of rope was slung over her shoulder.

“How much
further?” called Meric.

She turned
and frowned. “You’re standin’ on his tail. Rest of him’s around back of the
hill.”

A pinprick
of chill bloomed in Meric’s abdomen, and he stared down at the grass, expecting
it to dissolve and reveal a mass of glittering scales.

“Why don’t
we take the horses?” he asked.

“Horses
don’t like it up here.” She grunted with amusement. “Neither do most people,
for that matter.” She trudged off.

Another
twenty minutes brought them to the other side of the hill high above the valley
floor. The land continued to slope upwards, but more gently than before.
Gnarled, stunted oaks pushed up from thickets of chokecherry, and insects
sizzled in the weeds. They might have been walking on a natural shelf several
hundred feet across; but ahead of them, where the ground rose abruptly, a
number of thick, greenish-black columns broke from the earth. Leathery folds
hung between them, and these were encrusted with clumps of earth and brocaded
with mould. They had the look of a collapsed palisade and the ghosted feel of
ancient ruins.

“Them’s the
wings,” said Jarcke. “Mostly they’s covered, but you can catch sight of ‘em off
the edge, and up near Hangtown there’s places where you can walk in under ‘em…
but I wouldn’t advise it.”

“I’d like to
take a look off the edge,” said Meric, unable to tear his eyes away from the
wings; though the surfaces of the leaves gleamed in the strong sun, the wings
seemed to absorb the light, as if their age and strangeness were proof against
reflection.

Jarcke led
him to a glade in which tree ferns and oaks crowded together and cast a green
gloom, and where the earth sloped sharply downwards. She lashed her rope to an
oak and tied the other end around Meric’s waist. “Give a yank when you want to
stop, and another when you want to be hauled up,” she said, and began paying
out the rope, letting him walk backwards against her pull.

Ferns
tickled Meric’s neck as he pushed through the brush, and the oak leaves pricked
his cheeks. Suddenly he emerged into bright sunlight. On looking down, he found
his feet were braced against a fold of the dragon’s wing, and on looking up, he
saw that the wing vanished beneath a mantle of earth and vegetation. He let
Jarcke lower him a dozen feet more, yanked, and gazed off northwards along the
enormous swell of Griaule’s side.

The swells
were hexagonals 30 feet across and half that distance high; their basic colour
was a pale greenish gold, but some were whitish, draped with peels of dead
skin, and others were over-grown by viridian moss, and the rest were scrolled
with patterns of lichen and algae that resembled the characters of a serpentine
alphabet. Birds had nested in the cracks, and ferns plumed from the
interstices, thousands of them lifting in the breeze. It was a great hanging
garden whose scope took Meric’s breath away - like looking around the curve of
a fossil moon. The sense of all the centuries accreted in the scales made him
dizzy
,
and he found he could not turn his head, but could only stare at the panorama,
his soul shrivelling with a comprehension of the timelessness and bulk of this
creature to which he clung like a fly. He lost perspective on the scene -
Griaule’s side was bigger than the sky, possessing its own potent gravity, and
it seemed completely reasonable that he should be able to walk out along it and
suffer no fall. He started to do so, and Jarcke, mistaking the strain on the
rope for signal, hauled him up, dragging him across the wing, through the dirt
and ferns, and back into the glade. He lay speechless and gasping at her feet.

“Big ‘un,
ain’t he,” she said, and grinned. After Meric had got his legs under him, they
set off towards Hangtown; but they had not gone 100 yards, following a trail
that wound through the thickets, before Jarcke whipped out a knife and hurled
it at a raccoon-sized creature that leaped out in front of them.

“Skizzer,”
she said, kneeling beside it and pulling the knife from its neck. “Calls ‘em
that ‘cause they hisses when they runs. They eats snakes, but they’ll go after
children what ain’t careful.” Meric dropped down next to her. The skizzer’s
body was covered with short black fur, but its head was hairless, corpse-pale,
the skin wrinkled as if it had been immersed too long in water. Its face was
squinty-eyed, flat-nosed, with a disproportionately large jaw that hinged open
to expose a nasty set of teeth. “They’s the dragon’s critters,” said Jarcke.
“Used to live in his bunghole.” She pressed one of its paws, and claws curved
like hooks slid forth. “They’d hang around the lip and drop on other critters
what wandered in. And if nothin’ wandered in…” She pried out the tongue with
her knife - its surface was studded with jagged points like the blade of a
rasp. “Then they’d lick Griaule clean for their supper.”

Back in
Teocinte, the dragon had seemed to Meric a simple thing, a big lizard with a
tick of life left inside, the residue of a dim sensibility; but he was
beginning to suspect that this tick of life was more complex than any he had
encountered.

“My gram
used to say,” Jarcke went on, “that the old dragons could fling themselves up
to the sun in a blink and travel back to their own world, and when they come
back, they’d bring the skizzers and all the rest with ‘em. They was immortal,
she said. Only the young ones came here ‘cause later on they grew too big to
fly on earth.” She made a sour face. “Don’t know as I believe it.”

“Then you’re
a fool,” said Meric.

Jarcke
glanced up at him, her hand twitching towards her belt.

“How can you
live here and
not
believe it!” he said, surprised to hear himself so
fervently defending a myth. “God! This—” He broke off, noticing the flicker of
a smile on her face.

She clucked
her tongue, apparently satisfied by something. “Come on,” she said. “I want to
be at the eye before sunset.”

The peaks of
Griaule’s folded wings, completely overgrown by grass and shrubs and dwarfish
trees, formed two spiny hills that cast a shadow over Hangtown and the narrow
lake around which it sprawled. Jarcke said the lake was a stream flowing off
the hill behind the dragon, and that it drained away through the membranes of
his wing and down on to his shoulder. It was beautiful beneath the wing, she
told him. Ferns and waterfalls. But it was reckoned an evil place. From a
distance the town looked picturesque - rustic cabins, smoking chimneys. As they
approached, however, the cabins resolved into dilapidated shanties with missing
boards and broken windows; suds and garbage and offal floated in the shallows
of the lake. Aside from a few men idling on the stoops, who squinted at Meric
and nodded glumly at Jarcke, no one was about. The grass blades stirred in the
breeze, spiders scuttled under the shanties, and there was an air of torpor and
dissolution.

Jarcke
seemed embarrassed by the town. She made no attempt at introductions, stopping
only long enough to fetch another coil of rope from one of the shanties, and as
they walked between the wings, down through the neck spines - a forest of
greenish-gold spikes burnished by the lowering sun - she explained how the
townsfolk grubbed a livelihood from Griaule. Herbs gathered on his back were
valued as medicine and charms, as were the peels of dead skin; the artefacts left
by previous Hangtown generations were of some worth to various collectors.

“Then
there’s scale hunters,” she said with disgust. “Henry Sichi from Port
Chantay’ll pay good money for pieces of scale, and though it’s bad luck to do
it, some’ll have a go at chippin’ off the loose ‘uns.” She walked a few paces
in silence. “But there’s others who’ve got better reasons for livin’ here.”

The frontal
spike above Griaule’s eyes was whorled at the base like a narwhal’s horn and
curved back towards the wings. Jarcke attached the ropes to eyebolts drilled
into the spike, tied one about her waist, the other about Meric’s; she
cautioned him to wait, and rappelled off the side. In a moment she called for him
to come down. Once again he grew dizzy as he descended; he glimpsed a clawed
foot far below, mossy fangs jutting from an impossibly long jaw; and then he
began to spin and bash against the scales. Jarcke gathered him in and helped
him sit on the lip of the socket.

“Damn!” she
said, stamping her foot.

A
3-foot-long section of the adjoining scale shifted slowly away. Peering close,
Meric saw that while in texture and hue it was indistinguishable from the
scale, there was a hairline division between it and the surface. Jarcke, her
face twisted in disgust, continued to harry the thing until it moved out of
reach.

“Call ‘em
flakes,” she said when he asked what it was. “Some kind of insect. Got a long
tube that they pokes down between the scales and sucks the blood. See there?”
She pointed off to where a flock of birds were wheeling close to Griaule’s
side; a chip of pale gold broke loose and went tumbling down to the valley.
“Birds pry ‘em off, let ‘em bust open, and eats the innards.” She hunkered down
beside him and after a moment asked, “You really think you can do it?”

“What? You
mean kill the dragon?”

She nodded.

“Certainly,”
he said, and then added, lying, “I’ve spent years devising the method.”

“If all the
paint’s goin’ to be atop his head, how’re you goin’ to get it to where the
paintin’s done?”

“That’s no
problem. We’ll pipe it to wherever it’s needed.”

She nodded
again. “You’re a clever fellow,” she said; and when Meric, pleased, made as if
to thank her for the compliment, she cut in and said, “Don’t mean nothin’ by
it. Bein’ clever ain’t an accomplishment. It’s just somethin’ you come by, like
bein’ tall.” She turned away, ending the conversation.

Meric was
weary of being awestruck, but even so he could not help marvelling at the eye.
By his estimate it was 70 feet long and 50 feet high, and it was shuttered by
an opaque membrane that was unusually clear of algae and lichen, glistening,
with vague glints of colour visible behind it. As the westering sun reddened
and sank between two distant hills, the membrane began to quiver and then split
open down the centre. With the ponderous slowness of a theatre curtain opening,
the halves slid apart to reveal the glowing humour. Terrified by the idea that
Griaule could see him, Meric sprang to his feet, but Jarcke restrained him.

“Stay still
and watch,” she said.

He had no
choice - the eye was mesmerizing. The pupil was slit and featureless black, but
the humour… he had never seen such fiery blues and crimsons and golds. What had
looked to be vague glints, odd refractions of the sunset, he now realized were
photic reactions of some sort. Fairy rings of light developed deep within the
eye, expanded into spoked shapes, flooded the humour, and faded - only to be
replaced by another and another. He felt the pressure of Griaule’s vision, his
ancient mind, pouring through him, and as if in response to this pressure,
memories bubbled up in his thoughts. Particularly sharp ones. The way a bowlful
of brush water had looked after freezing over during a winter’s night - a
delicate, fractured flower of murky yellow. An archipelago of orange peels that
his girl had left strewn across the floor of the studio. Sketching atop Jokenam
Hill one sunrise, the snowcapped roofs of Regensburg below pitched at all angles
like broken paving stones, and silver shafts of the sun striking down through a
leaden overcast. It was as if these things were being drawn forth for his
inspection. Then they were washed away by what also seemed a memory, though at
the same time it was wholly unfamiliar. Essentially, it was a landscape of
light, and he was plunging through it, up and up. Prisms and lattices of
iridescent fire bloomed around him, and everything was a roaring fall into
brightness, and finally he was clear into its white furnace heart, his own
heart swelling with the joy of his strength and dominion.