The Dragon Griaule (28 page)

Magali’s neck twisted, her head flipping up into the cloudy sky, and she vented a third scream. Once again, Hota understood her needs.

Bring me food, she was saying.

Meat.

*

How the days passed for them thereafter was very like the passage of all their days. Hota sat, usually on the steps of a shanty across the way, and watched over Magali. Intermittently, she would scream and he would walk to the livery where a number of horses were stabled, left behind by the panic-stricken citizens of Teocinte. He would lead one into the street (he could never manage to get them closer to the inn) and cut its throat; then he would butcher the animal and carry it to her in bloody sections. From time to time he spotted townspeople skulking on the outskirts, returned to reclaim personal possessions or perhaps to gauge when they might expect to reclaim their homes. They cursed at him and threw stones, but fled whenever he attempted to approach. He himself considered fleeing, but he seemed constrained by a mental regulation that enforced inaction and was as steady in its influence as the rain. He assumed that Griaule was its source, but that was of no real consequence. Everywhere you went, everything you did, some regulation turned you to its use. His thoughts ran in tedious circuits. He wondered if Magali had known she would change back into her original form. He believed she had, and he further believed that everything she had said to him was both lie and truth. She had wanted the herb, but she had also sent him to collect it in order to keep him away from the inn, to prevent him from being injured or killed during her transformation. That was the way of life. His life, at any rate. Even the truest of things eventually resolved into their lie. Every shining surface was tarred with blackness. Every light went dark. He speculated absently on what he would do after she left, as he knew she must, and devised infant plans for travel, for work. A job, he decided, might be in order. He had been idle far too long. But he realized this to be a lie he was telling himself – he doubted he would survive her and, though this might also have been a deception, he did not think he cared to survive her.

His habits became desultory. He fell to drinking, rummaging through the wreckage of the tavern for unbroken bottles and then downing them in a sitting. He slept wherever he was when sleep found him. Out in the street; in a shanty; amid the ruins of
Liar’s House. Not even the hatching of his golden-scaled child could spark his interest. The cracking of the shell started him from a drunken stupor, but he derived no joy from the event. He stared dumbly at the little monster mewling and stumbling at its mother’s side, asking its first demanding questions, learning to feed on fresh horsemeat. At one point he attempted to name it, an exercise in self-derision inspired by his mock-paternity. The names that he conjured were insults, the type of names given to goblins in fairy tales. Tadwallow. Gruntswipe. Stinkpizzle. When he brought the food, Magali would nudge him with her snout, gestures he took for shows of affection; but he understood that her real concerns lay elsewhere. They always had.

That time was, in essence, an endless gray day striped with sodden nights, a solitude of almost unvarying despondency. Weeks of drinking, slaughtering horses, staring at the sleeping dragon and their reptilian issue. On rare occasions he would rouse himself to a clinical detachment and give thought to the nature of the child. Dragons, so the tradition held, bore litters, and that Magali had borne a single child caused him to suspect that embedded in the little dragon’s flesh was a human heart or a human soul or some important human quality that would enable it to cross more easily between shapes and sensibilities than had its mother. And then he would look to Griaule, the mighty green hill with its protruding, lowered head, and to Magali in her nest, and he would have a sense of the mystery of their triangular liaison, the complex skein that had been woven and its imponderable potentials, and then he would briefly regain a perspective from which he was able to perceive the dual nature of her beauty, that of the woman and that of the sleek, sculptural beast with lacquered scales, monster and temptress in one.

The rainy season drew toward its close and often he woke to bright sunlight, but his thoughts remained gray and his routine stayed essentially the same. The child had grown half as big as an ox, ever beating its wings in an effort to fly. It required more food. After killing all the horses, Hota found it necessary to go into the hills and hunt wild boar, jumping from branches onto their backs, stabbing them or, failing that, breaking their necks. He felt debased by the brutality of these death struggles.
The animal stench; the squeals; the hot blood gushing onto his hands – these things turned something inside him and he began to see himself as a primitive, an apelike creature inhabiting a ruin and pretending to be a man. At night he stumbled through the town carrying an open bottle, singing in an off-key baritone, howling at the night and serenading the tin-hatted wooden skulls, addressing himself by name, offering himself advice or just generally chatting himself up. He refused to believe this was a sign of deterioration. He knew what he was about. It was an indulgence, a means of passing the hours, nothing more. And yet it might be, he thought, the prelude to deterioration. He was not, however, prepared to give up the practice. The sound of his voice distracted him from thinking and frightened off the townspeople, whose incursions had become more frequent, though none would come near Liar’s House. Day and night they shouted threats from the hills, where many had taken refuge, and he would respond by singing to them and telling them what he had recently learned – that a man’s goals and preoccupations, perhaps his every thought, were the manufacture of a higher power. Whatever they threatened had been promised him since birth.

His dreams acquired a fanciful quality that went contrary to the grain of his waking life, and he came to have a recurring dream that seemed the crystallization of all the rest. He imagined himself running across fields, through woods, tireless and unafraid, in a state of exaltation, running for the joy of it, and when he approached the crest of a hill overlooking a steep drop, instead of halting, he ran faster and faster, leaping from the crest and being borne aloft on a sweep of wind, flying in the zones of the sun, and then seeing Magali, joining her in flight, swooping and curving, together weaving an endless pattern above a mighty green hill, the one from which he had leapt, and the child, too, was flying, albeit lower and less elegantly, testing itself against the air. It must be Griaule’s dream, he thought. Though liberating, there was about it the cold touch of a sending. He recalled what Magali had said – that one day he would know how it felt to fly – and he wondered if the recurring dream was a reminder of that promise, or else the keeping
of it. Set against all he had endured, it did not weigh out as a suitable reward. But suitable or not, he enjoyed the dream and sleep became the sole thing in his routine to which he looked forward.

One morning he woke lying in the street down from the inn. His joints stiff, eyelids crusted and stuck together, a fetid taste in his mouth. The brightness of the day pained him. Heat was beginning to cook from the abandoned town, a reek compounded of rotting flesh and vegetable spoilage. His vision blurry, he looked toward the inn. Magali, crouched in her nest, emitted a scream. In reflex, Hota took a step toward the hills, thinking that she was demanding food. Then she screamed a second time. He stopped and rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on her. Clinging atop her back, between her wings, its diminutive talons hooked into her crest, was the child. Before Hota could put reason to work and understand what he was seeing, Magali unfurled her obsidian wings – each longer than her body – and beat them once, producing a violent cracking sound and a buffet of wind that knocked Hota off-balance and caused him to fall. She leaped to the edge of the nest and, using her grip on the shattered boards as a boost, vaulted into the air, paper debris from the street whirling up in her wake. Within seconds she was soaring high above and Hota, stupefied by the abruptness of her departure, felt as empty and abandoned as the town.

Magali disappeared behind Griaule’s back and Hota regained his feet. He stood a while with his hands at his sides, unable to summon a thought; then he walked over to the inn and clambered across the rubble to the inner nest. What he expected to find, he could not have said. Some token, perhaps. An accidental gift. A scale that had worked loose; a scrap from a green dress. But there were only wastes and bloody bones. The images on the boards had receded into the grain. No dragons were visible upon their surfaces, agitated or otherwise. The silence oppressed him. Irrational though it was, he missed Magali’s rumblings, her newborn’s trebly growls. Fool, he thought, and struck himself on the chest. To be mooning over a monstrosity, a twisted union that had been arranged by a still greater monstrosity. He
picked up a fragment of board and slung it toward the looming green hill, as if his strength, inflamed by anger, could drive it like a missile through scale and flesh and guts to pierce the enormous heart. The plank splashed down into a puddle and he felt even more the fool. He crawled up out of the nest and went into the street and sat beneath the remaining corner post of the inn. If he stayed much longer, he thought, people would drift back into town and there would be trouble. It would be best to leave now. Forgo searching for his money, his gems, and walk away. He would find work somewhere. The notion tugged at him, but it refused to take hold. He clasped his hands, hung his head, and waited for another impulse to strike.

And then, as suddenly as she had departed, Magali returned, swooping low above Liar’s House, the rush of her passage shattering the silence. She arrowed off over the hills behind the town, but returned again, swooping lower yet. Restored by the sight, Hota sprang to his feet. Watching her dive and loop, he soon recognized that she was repeating a pattern, that her flight was a signal, a ritual thing like the pattern she had flown above Griaule so many months ago. An acknowledgment. Or a farewell. Each time after passing above the street, a streaking of bronze scales, a shadowing of wings, she loosed a scream as she ascended. The guttural quality of her voice was inaudible at that distance, and her call had the sound of an eerie whistling music, three plaintive notes that might have been excerpted from a longer song whose melody played out closer to the sun. For an hour and more she flew above him. Like a scarf drawn through the sky. Entranced, he began to understand the meaning of the design her flight wove in the air. It was a knot, eloquent in its graceful twists, a sketch of the circumstance that had bound them. They had met, entwined into a minor theme that served the purpose of a larger music, one whose structure neither could discern, and now they would part. But only for a while. They would always be bound by that knot. All its loops led inward toward Liar’s House. He understood what she had told him on the day he went to gather the herb. He understood the congruence of inevitability and love, fate and desire, and, having accepted this, he was able to take joy
in her freedom, to be confident that a like freedom would soon be his.

Even after she had gone, flown beyond the hills, he watched the sky, hoping she would reappear. Yet there was no bitterness or regret in his heart. Though he did not know how it would happen, he believed she would always return to him. They would never be as he might have hoped them to be, but the connection between them was unbreakable. He would go inland, toward Point Horizon, and somewhere he would find a suitable home, a sinecure, and he would await the day of her return. No, he would do more than wait. For the first time in memory, he felt the sap of ambition rising in him. He would soar in his own way. He would not allow himself to settle for mere survival and drudgery.

His mind afire with half-formed plans, with possibility of every sort, Hota turned from the inn, preparing to take a first step along his new road, and saw a group of men approaching along the street. Several dozen men. Filthy and bearded from their exile in the hills. Clad in rags and carrying clubs and knives. A second group, equally proportioned, was approaching from the opposite end of the street. He ducked around the corner of the inn, onto a side street, only to be confronted by a third group. And a fourth group moved toward him from the other end of that street.

They had him boxed.

Hota was frightened, yet fear was not preeminent in him. He still brimmed with confidence, with the certainty that the best of life lay ahead, and refused to surrender to panic. The third group, he judged, was the smallest of the four. He drew his boar-killing knife and ran directly at them, hoping to unnerve them with this tactic. The center of the group, toward which he aimed, fell back a step, and, seeing this, Hota let out a hoarse cry and ran harder, slashing the air with his knife. Seconds later, he was among them. Their bearded, hollow-cheeked faces aghast, they clutched at him, tried to stab him, but his momentum was so great, he burst through their ranks without injury, and ran past the last shanties into the palms and bananas and palmettos that fringed the outskirts. Jubilant in the exercise of strength, he
zigzagged through the trees, knocking fronds aside, stumbling now and again over a depression or a bump, yet keeping a good pace, liking the feel of his sweat, his exertions. His muscles felt tireless, as in his recurring dream, and he wondered if the dream had foreshadowed this moment and he would climb the green hill of Griaule’s back – he was, he realized, heading in that very direction – and leap from it and fly. But though strong, Hota was not fleet. Soon he heard men running beside and ahead of him. Heard their shouts. And as he passed a large banana tree with tattered yellow fronds, someone lying hidden in the grass reached out a hand and snagged his ankle, sending him sprawling. His knife flew from his hand. He scrambled to his knees, searching for it. Spotted it in the grass a dozen feet away. Before he could retrieve it, someone jumped onto his back, driving him face first into the ground. And before he could deal with whoever it was, other men piled onto him, pressing the air from his lungs, beating him with fists and sticks. A blow to his temple stunned him. They smelled like beasts, grunted like beasts, like the spirits of the boars he had killed come for their vengeance.