The Best of Lucius Shepard (5 page)

“What are
you doing?” asked Meric.

“My
recommendation,” said the major without looking up.

“Which is?”

“That we
initiate stoppage at once.”

They
exchanged hostile stares, and Meric turned to leave; but as he took hold of the
doorknob, the major spoke again.

“We owe you
so much,” he said; he wore an expression of mingled pity and respect that
further irritated Meric.

“How many
men have you killed, Major?” he asked, opening the door.

“I’m not
sure. I was in the artillery. We were never able to be sure.”

“Well, I’m
sure of my tally,” said Meric. “It’s taken me forty years to amass it. Fifteen
hundred and ninety-three men and women. Poisoned, scalded, broken by falls,
savaged by animals. Murdered. Why don’t we - you and I - just call it even.”

Though it
was a sultry afternoon, he felt cold as he walked towards the tower - an
internal cold that left him light-headed and weak. He tried to think what he
would do. The idea of a university post seemed less appealing away from the
major’s office; he would soon grow weary of worshipful students and in-depth
dissections of his work by jealous academics. A man hailed him as he turned
into the market. Meric waved but did not stop, and heard another man say, “
That’s
Cattanay?” (That ragged old ruin?)

The colours
of the market were too bright, the smells of charcoal cookery too cloying, the
crowds too thick, and he made for the side streets, hobbling past one-room
stucco houses and tiny stores where they sold cooking oil by the ounce and cut
cigars in half if you could not afford a whole one. Garbage, tornados of dust
and flies, drunks with bloody mouths. Somebody had tied wires around a pariah
dog - a bitch with slack teats; the wires had sliced into her flesh, and she
lay panting in an alley mouth, gaunt ribs flecked with pink lather, gazing into
nowhere. She, thought Meric, and not Griaule, should be the symbol of their
flag.

As he rode
the hoist up the side of the tower, he fell into his old habit of jotting down
notes for the next day.
What’s that cord of wood doing on level five? Slow
leak of chrome yellow from pipes on level twelve
. Only when he saw a man
dismantling some scaffolding did he recall Major Hauk’s recommendation and
understand that the order must already have been given. The loss of his work
struck home to him then, and he leaned against the railing, his chest
constricted and his eyes brimming. He straightened, ashamed of himself. The sun
hung in a haze of iron-coloured light low above the western hills, looking red
and bloated and vile as a vulture’s ruff. That polluted sky was his creation as
much as was the painting, and it would be good to leave it behind. Once away
from the valley, from all the influences of the place, he would be able to
consider the future.

A young girl
was sitting on the twentieth level just beneath the eye. Years before, the
ritual of viewing the eye had grown to cultish proportions; there had been
group chanting and praying and discussions of the experience. But these were
more practical times, and no doubt the young men and women who had congregated
here were now manning administrative desks somewhere in the burgeoning empire.
They were the ones about whom Dardano should write; they, and all the eccentric
characters who had played roles in this slow pageant. The gypsy woman who had
danced every night by the eye, hoping to charm Griaule into killing her
faithless lover - she had gone away satisfied. The man who had tried to extract
one of the fangs — nobody knew what had become of him. The scale hunters, the
artisans. A history of Hangtown would be a volume in itself.

The walk had
left Meric weak and breathless; he sat down clumsily beside the girl, who
smiled. He could not remember her name, but she came often to the eye. Small
and dark, with an inner reserve that reminded him of Lise. He laughed inwardly
-most women reminded him of Lise in some way.

“Are you all
right?” she asked, her brow wrinkled with concern.

“Oh, yes,”
he said; he felt a need for conversation to take his mind off things, but he
could think of nothing more to say. She was so young! All freshness and gleam
and nerves.

“This will
be my last time,” she said. “At least for a while. I’ll miss it.” And then,
before he could ask why, she added, “I’m getting married tomorrow, and we’re
moving away.”

He offered
congratulations and asked her who was the lucky fellow.

“Just a
boy.” She tossed her hair, as if to dismiss the boy’s importance; she gazed up
at the shuttered membrane. “What’s it like for you when the eye opens?” she
asked.

“Like
everyone else,” he said. “I remember… memories of my life. Other lives, too.”
He did not tell her about Griaule’s memory of flight; he had never told anyone
except Lise about that.

“All those
bits of souls trapped in there,” she said, gesturing at the eye. “What do they
mean to him? Why does he show them to us?”

“I imagine
he has his purposes, but I can’t explain them.”

“Once I
remembered being with you,” said the girl, peeking at him shyly through a dark
curl. “We were under the wing.”

He glanced
at her sharply. “Tell me.”

“We were…
together,” she said, blushing. “Intimate, you know. I was very afraid of the
place, of the sounds and shadows. But I loved you so much, it didn’t matter. We
made love all night, and I was surprised because I thought that kind of passion
was just in stories, something people had invented to make up for how ordinary
it really was. And in the morning even that dreadful place had become
beautiful, with the wing tips glowing red and the waterfall echoing…” She
lowered her eyes. “Ever since I had that memory, I’ve been a little in love
with you.”

“Lise,” he
said, feeling helpless before her.

“Was that
her name?”

He nodded
and put a hand to his brow, trying to pinch back the emotions that flooded him.

“I’m sorry.”
Her lips grazed his cheek, and just that slight touch seemed to weaken him
further. “I wanted to tell you how she felt in case she hadn’t told you
herself. She was very troubled by something, and I wasn’t sure she had.”

She shifted
away from him, made uncomfortable by the intensity of his reaction, and they
sat without speaking. Meric became lost in watching how the sun glazed the
scales to reddish gold, how the light was channelled along the ridges in molten
streams that paled as the day wound down. He was startled when the girl jumped
to her feet and backed towards the hoist.

“He’s dead,”
she said wonderingly.

Meric looked
at her, uncomprehending.

“See?” She
pointed at the sun, which showed a crimson sliver above the hill. “He’s dead,”
she repeated, and the expression on her face flowed between fear and
exultation.

The idea of
Griaule’s death was too large for Meric’s mind to encompass, and he turned to
the eye to find a counterproof - no glints of colour flickered beneath the
membrane. He heard the hoist creak as the girl headed down, but he continued to
wait. Perhaps only the dragon’s vision had failed. No. It was likely not a
coincidence that work had been officially terminated today. Stunned, he sat
staring at the lifeless membrane until the sun sank below the hills; then he
stood and went over to the hoist. Before he could throw the switch, the cables
thrummed - somebody heading up. Of course. The girl would have spread the news,
and all the Major Hauks and their underlings would be hurrying to test
Griaule’s reflexes. He did not want to be here when they arrived, to watch them
pose with their trophy like successful fishermen.

It was hard
work climbing up to the frontoparietal plate. The ladder swayed, the wind
buffeted him, and by the time he clambered on to the plate, he was giddy, his
chest full of twinges. He hobbled forward and leaned against the rust-caked
side of a boiling vat. Shadowy in the twilight, the great furnaces and vats
towered around him, and it seemed this system of fiery devices reeking of
cooked flesh and minerals was the actual machinery of Griaule’s thought
materialized above his skull. Energyless, abandoned. They had been replaced by
more efficient equipment down below, and it had been - what was it? - almost
five years since they were last used. Cobwebs veiled a pyramid of firewood; the
stairs leading to the rims of the vats were crumbling. The plate itself was
scarred and coated with sludge.

“Cattanay!”

Someone
shouted from below, and the top of the ladder trembled. God, they were coming
after him! Bubbling over with congratulations and plans for testimonial
dinners, memorial plaques, specially struck medals. They would have him draped
in bunting and bronzed and covered with pigeon shit before they were done. All these
years he had been among them, both their slave and their master, yet he had
never felt at home. Leaning heavily on his cane, he made his way past the
frontal spike -blackened by years of oily smoke - and down between the wings to
Hangtown. It was a ghost town, now. Weeds overgrowing the collapsed shanties;
the lake a stinking pit, drained after some children had drowned in the summer
of ‘91. Where Jarcke’s home had stood was a huge pile of animal bones, taking a
pale shine from the half-light. Wind keened through the tattered shrubs.

“Meric!”

“Cattanay.”

The voices
were closer.

Well, there
was one place where they would not follow.

The leaves
of the thickets were speckled with mould and brittle, flaking away as he
brushed them. He hesitated at the top of the scale hunters’ stair. He had no
rope. Though he had done the climb unaided many times, it had been quite a few
years. The gusts of wind, the shouts, the sweep of the valley and the lights
scattered across it like diamonds on grey velvet - it all seemed a single
inconstant medium. He heard the brush crunch behind him, more voices. To hell
with it! Gritting his teeth against a twinge of pain in his shoulder, hooking
his cane over his belt, he inched on to the stair and locked his fingers in the
handholds. The wind whipped his clothes and threatened to pry him loose and
send him pinwheeling off. Once he slipped; once he froze, unable to move
backward or forward. But at last he reached the bottom and edged upslope until
he found a spot flat enough to stand.

The mystery
of the place suddenly bore in upon him, and he was afraid. He half turned to
the stair, thinking he would go back to Hangtown and accept the hurly-burly.
But a moment later he realized how foolish a thought that was. Waves of weakness
poured through him, his heart hammered, and white dazzles flared in his vision.
His chest felt heavy as iron. Rattled, he went a few steps forward, the cane
pocking the silence. It was too dark to see more than outlines, but up ahead
was the fold of wing where he and Lise had sheltered. He walked towards it,
intent on revisiting it; then he remembered the girl beneath the eye and
understood that he had already said that good-bye. And it
was
good-bye -
that he understood vividly. He kept walking. Blackness looked to be welling
from the wing joint, from the entrances to the maze of luminous tunnels where
they had stumbled on to the petrified man. Had it really been the old wizard,
doomed by magical justice to moulder and live on and on? It made sense. At least
it accorded with what happened to wizards who slew their dragons.

“Griaule?”
he whispered to the darkness, and cocked his head, half expecting an answer.
The sound of his voice pointed up the immensity of the great gallery under the
wing, the emptiness, and he recalled how vital a habitat it had once been.
Flakes shifting over the surface, skizzers, peculiar insects fuming in the
thickets, the glum populace of Hangtown, waterfalls. He had never been able to
picture Griaule fully alive - that kind of vitality was beyond the powers of
the imagination. Yet he wondered if by some miracle the dragon were alive now,
flying up through his golden night to the sun’s core. Or had that merely been a
dream, a bit of tissue glittering deep in the cold tons of his brain? He
laughed. Ask the stars for their first names, and you’d be more likely to
receive a reply.

He decided
not to walk any further; it was really no decision. Pain was spreading through
his shoulder, so intense he imagined it must be glowing inside. Carefully,
carefully, he lowered himself and lay propped on an elbow, hanging on to the
cane. Good, magical wood. Cut from a hawthorn atop Griaule’s haunch. A man had
once offered him a small fortune for it. Who would claim it now? Probably old
Henry Sichi would snatch it for his museum, stick it in a glass case next to
his boots. What a joke! He decided to lie flat on his stomach, resting his chin
on an arm - the stony coolness beneath acted to muffle the pain. Amusing, how
the range of one’s decision dwindled. You decided to paint a dragon, to send
hundreds of men searching for malachite and cochineal beetles, to love a woman,
to heighten an undertone here and there, and finally to position your body a
certain way. He seemed to have reached the end of the process. What next? He
tried to regulate his breathing, to ease the pressure on his chest. Then, as
something rustled out near the wing joint, he turned on his side. He thought he
detected movement, a gleaming blackness flowing towards him… or else it was
only the haphazard firing of his nerves playing tricks with his vision. More
surprised than afraid, wanting to see, he peered into the darkness and felt his
heart beating erratically against the dragon’s scale.