The Best of Lucius Shepard
Read The Best of Lucius Shepard Online
Authors: Lucius Shepard
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Collections & Anthologies
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The Best of
Lucius Shepard
By Lucius Shepard
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THE
MAN WHO PAINTED THE DRAGON GRIAULE
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The
Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
“Other than the Sichi Collection, Cattanay’s only
surviving works are to be found in the Municipal Gallery at Regensburg, a group
of eight oils-on-canvas, most notable among them being
Woman With Oranges
.
These paintings constitute his portion of a student exhibition hung some weeks
after he had left the city of his birth and travelled south to Teocinte, there
to present his proposal to the city fathers; it is unlikely he ever learned of
the disposition of his work, and even more unlikely that he was aware of the
general critical indifference with which it was received. Perhaps the most
interesting of the group to modern scholars, the most indicative as to Cattanay’s
later preoccupations, is the
Self Portrait
, painted at the age of
twenty-eight, a year before his departure.
“The
majority of the canvas is a richly varnished black in which the vague shapes of
floorboards are presented, barely visible. Two irregular slashes of gold cross
the blackness, and within these we can see a section of the artist’s thin
features and the shoulder panel of his shirt. The perspective given is that we
are looking down at the artist, perhaps through a tear in the roof, and that he
is looking up at us, squinting into the light, his mouth distorted by a grimace
born of intense concentration. On first viewing the painting, I was struck by
the atmosphere of tension that radiated from it. It seemed I was spying upon a
man imprisoned within a shadow having two golden bars, tormented by the
possibilities of light beyond the walls. And though this may be the reaction of
the art historian, not the less knowledgeable and therefore more trustworthy
response of the gallery-goer, it also seemed that this imprisonment was
self-imposed, that he could have easily escaped his confine; but that he had
realized a feeling of stricture was an essential fuel to his ambition, and so
had chained himself to this arduous and thoroughly unreasonable chore of perception…”
— from
Meric
Cattany: The Politics of Conception
by Reade Holland, Ph.D
1
IN 1853, IN A COUNTRY FAR TO THE SOUTH, in a world
separated from this one by the thinnest margin of possibility, a dragon named
Griaule dominated the region of the Carbonales Valley, a fertile area centring
upon the town of Teocinte and renowned for its production of silver, mahogany
and indigo. There were other dragons in those days, most dwelling on the rocky
islands west of Patagonia - tiny, irascible creatures, the largest of them no
bigger than a swallow. But Griaule was one of the great beasts who had ruled an
age. Over the centuries he had grown to stand 750 feet high at the mid-back,
and from the tip of his tail to his nose he was 6,000 feet long. (It should be
noted here that the growth of dragons was due not to caloric intake, but to the
absorption of energy derived from the passage of time.) Had it not been for a
miscast spell, Griaule would have died millennia before. The wizard entrusted
with the task of slaying him - knowing his own life would be forfeited as a
result of the magical backwash - had experienced a last-second twinge of fear,
and, diminished by this ounce of courage, the spell had flown a mortal inch
awry. Though the wizard’s whereabouts were unknown, Griaule had remained alive.
His heart had stopped, his breath stilled, but his mind continued to seethe, to
send forth the gloomy vibrations that enslaved all who stayed for long within
range of his influence.
This
dominance of Griaule’s was an elusive thing. The people of the valley
attributed their dour character to years of living under his mental shadow, yet
there were other regional populations who maintained a harsh face to the world
and had no dragon on which to blame the condition; they also attributed their
frequent raids against the neighbouring states to Griaule’s effect, claiming to
be a peaceful folk at heart - but again, was this not human nature? Perhaps the
most certifiable proof of Griaule’s primacy was the fact that despite a
standing offer of a fortune in silver to anyone who could kill him, no one had
succeeded. Hundreds of plans had been put forward, and all had failed, either
through inanition or impracticality. The archives of Teocinte were filled with
schematics for enormous steam-powered swords and other such improbable devices,
and the architects of these plans had every one stayed too long in the valley
and become part of the disgruntled populace. And so they went on with their
lives, coming and going, always returning, bound to the valley, until one
spring day in 1853, Meric Cattanay arrived and proposed that the dragon be
painted.
He was a
lanky young man with a shock of black hair and a pinched look to his cheeks; he
affected the loose trousers and shirt of a peasant, and waved his arms to make
a point. His eyes grew wide when listening, as if his brain were bursting with
illumination, and at times he talked incoherently about “the conceptual
statement of death by art”. And though the city fathers could not be sure,
though they allowed for the possibility that he simply had an unfortunate
manner, it seemed he was mocking them. All in all, he was not the sort they
were inclined to trust. But, because he had come armed with such a wealth of
diagrams and charts, they were forced to give him serious consideration.
“I don’t
believe Griaule will be able to perceive the menace in a process as subtle as
art,” Meric told them. “We’ll proceed as if we were going to illustrate him,
grace his side with a work of true vision, and all the while we’ll be poisoning
him with the paint.”
The city
fathers voiced their incredulity, and Meric waited impatiently until they
quieted. He did not enjoy dealing with these worthies. Seated at their long
table, sour-faced, a huge smudge of soot on the wall above their heads like an
ugly thought they were sharing, they reminded him of the Wine Merchants
Association in Regensburg, the time they had rejected his group portrait.
“Paint can
be deadly stuff,” he said after their muttering had died down. “Take vert
Veronese, for example. It’s derived from oxide of chrome and barium. Just a
whiff would make you keel over. But we have to go about it seriously, create a
real piece of art. If we just slap paint on his side, he might see through us.”
The first
step in the process, he told them, would be to build a tower of scaffolding,
complete with hoists and ladders, that would brace against the supraocular
plates above the dragon’s eye; this would provide a direct route to a
700-foot-square loading platform and base station behind the eye. He estimated
it would take 81,000 board feet of lumber, and a crew of ninety men should be
able to finish construction within five months. Ground crews accompanied by
chemists and geologists would search out limestone deposits (useful in priming
the scales) and sources of pigments, whether organic or minerals such as
azurite and hematite. Other teams would be set to scraping the dragon’s side
clean of algae, peeled skin, any decayed material, and afterwards would laminate
the surface with resins.
“It would be
easier to bleach him with quicklime,” he said. “But that way we lose the
discolourations and ridges generated by growth and age, and I think what we’ll
paint will be defined by those shapes. Anything else would look like a damn
tattoo!”
There would
be storage vats and mills: edge-runner mills to separate pigments from crude
ores, ball mills to powder the pigments, pug mills to mix them with oil. There
would be boiling vats and calciners — 15-foot-high furnaces used to produce
caustic lime for sealant solutions.
“We’ll build
most of them atop the dragon’s head for purposes of access,” he said. “On the
frontoparital plate.” He checked some figures. “By my reckoning, the plate’s
about 350 feet wide. Does that sound accurate?”
Most of the
city fathers were stunned by the prospect, but one managed a nod, and another
asked, “How long will it take for him to die?”
“Hard to
say,” came the answer. “Who knows how much poison he’s capable of absorbing. It
might just take a few years. But in the worst instance, within forty or fifty
years, enough chemicals will have seeped through the scales to have weakened
the skeleton, and he’ll fall in like an old barn.”
“Forty
years!” exclaimed someone. “Preposterous!”
“Or fifty.”
Meric smiled. “That way we’ll have time to finish the painting.” He turned and
walked to the window and stood gazing out at the white stone houses of
Teocinte. This was going to be the sticky part, but if he read them right, they
would not believe in the plan if it seemed too easy. They needed to feel they
were making a sacrifice, that they were nobly bound to a great labour. “If it
does take forty or fifty years,” he went on, “the project will drain your
resources. Timber, animal life, minerals. Everything will be used up by the
work. Your lives will be totally changed. But I guarantee you’ll be rid of
him.”
The city
fathers broke into an outraged babble.
“Do you
really want to kill him?” cried Meric, stalking over to them and planting his
fists on the table. “You’ve been waiting centuries for someone to come along
and chop off his head or send him up in a puff of smoke. That’s not going to
happen! There is no easy solution. But there is a practical one, an elegant
one. To use the stuff of the land he dominates to destroy him. It will
not
be easy, but you
will
be rid of him. And that’s what you want, isn’t
it?”