The Dragon Griaule (23 page)

‘You killed her . . . and you were going to blame it on Zemaille?’

‘Her death was ruled an accident,’ Lemos said with a shrug. ‘So there was no need to blame anyone.’

‘And then you saw your opportunity with Zemaille.’

‘Mardo was a weak man with power. Such men are easy to maneuver. It took some time, but the result was inevitable.’

Lemos’ hand slid lower to caress Mirielle’s belly. Despite her acquiesence, Korrogly sensed that she was less lover than slave, that her enjoyment was due to coercion, to confusion; a slack, sick look had come to her face, one that had not been evident when he had been touching her.

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever properly expressed my gratitude to you,’ Lemos continued. ‘Without you, I might still be back in Almintra. I’m forever in your debt.’

Korrogly just stared at them, uncertain of what to do.

‘Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m being so open,’ Lemos said. ‘It’s really no mystery. You’re a dogged man, Mister Korrogly. I have a lot of respect for you. Once you got the scent,
and I’ve been aware that you’ve had the scent for some time, I knew you’d keep at it until you learned all there was to learn. I knew we’d play this scene sooner or later. I could have had you killed, but as I’ve said, I’m grateful to you, and I prefer to let you live. It’s unlikely you can harm me in any event. But you can consider this a warning. I’m watching you. If you ever get it in mind to try and harm me, it’ll be one of your last thoughts. And if you should doubt that, then I want you to think back to what you’ve heard today, to realize what I’m capable of, what I was able to do when I had no power, and to imagine what I might do now that I am powerful. Do you understand?’

Korrogly said, ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well.’ Lemos disengaged from Mirielle, who tottered back to her lounge. ‘Then there’s nothing else to do except to bid you good day. Perhaps you’ll visit us again. For dinner, perhaps. Of course you’re always welcome to visit Mirielle. She does like you, she really does, and I’ve learned not to be jealous. I would hate to deny her whatever joy she might find with you. I’m afraid the things I’ve asked her to do have damaged her, and maybe you can help her overcome all that.’ He put his hand on Korrogly’s back and began steering him through the house and toward the front door. ‘Pleasure’s a rare commodity. I don’t begrudge any man his share. That’s something that being wealthy has given me to understand about life. Yet another reason to be grateful to you. So’ – he opened the front door – ‘when I say to you that what’s mine is yours, I mean it in the most profound and intimate sense. Do take advantage of our hospitality. Anytime.’

And with that, he waved and shut the door, leaving Korrogly blinking in the bright sunlight, feeling as if he had been marooned on a stone island in an uncharted sea.

Toward twilight, after walking and thinking for the remainder of the afternoon, Korrogly ended up in Henry Sichi’s museum, standing in front of the glass case in which The Father of Stones was displayed. Lemos had been right – there was nothing he could do to achieve justice, and he would have to accept the fact that he had been used by someone who if anything was more
monstrous than Griaule. His best course, he decided, would be to leave Port Chantay and to leave soon, for while Lemos might have meant all he had said, he might well change his mind and begin to consider Korrogly a threat. But the danger he was in, that was not the thing that rankled him; he was still enough of a moral soul – a fool, Lemos would say – to want a judgment upon Lemos, and that there would be none left him full of gloom and self-destructive impulse, regarding the shattered fragments of his wished-for orderly universe.

He gazed down at The Father of Stones. It sat winking in its nest of blue velvet, a clouded lump of mystery giving back prismatic refractions of the light, the peculiar man-shaped darkness at its heart appearing to shift and writhe as if it truly were the soul of an imprisoned wizard. Korrogly focused on that darkness, and suddenly it was all around him, like a little pocket of night into which he had fallen, and he was looking at a man lying on the ground, an old, old man with sunken cheeks and a hooked nose and dressed in wizard’s robes, with black eyes threaded by veins of blue-green fire. The vision lasted only a few seconds, but before it faded, he became aware of the propinquity of that same cold, powerful mind that he had sensed back in the temple, and when he found himself once again standing in front of the glass case, looking down at The Father of Stones, he felt not afraid, not shocked, but delighted. It had been Griaule after all, he realized; the vision could mean only that Zemaille had been a serious threat, one that Griaule had been forced to eliminate. And he, Korrogly, had actually seen the moribund wizard that night in the temple; it had been no hallucination. The dragon had even then been trying to illuminate him. He laughed and slapped his thigh. Oh, Lemos had worked his plan, but as the ex-member of the cult had said, it had still been Griaule’s idea, he had inspired Lemos to act . . . and he had done it through the agency of this shard of milky stone.

Korrogly’s delight stemmed not from his realization that in a way Lemos had been innocent – innocence was not a word he could apply to the gemcutter – but from a new comprehension of the intricate subtlety with which Griaule had acted; it
spoke to him, it commanded him, it instructed him in a kind of law that he had neglected throughout his entire life. The law of self-determination. It was the only kind, he saw, that could produce justice. If he wanted justice, he would have to effect it, not the system, not the courts, and that was something he was well-equipped to do. He was amazed that he had not come to this conclusion before, but then he supposed that until this moment he had been too confused, too involved with the complexities of the case, to think of taking direct action. And perhaps he had not been ready to act, perhaps his motivation had been insufficient.

Well, he was motivated now.

Mirielle.

It might be that she was unsalvageable, that she had gone too far into perversity ever to emerge from it; but for a moment in his arms she had again been the woman he had loved. It had not been fraudulent. The least he could do was to deliver her from the man who had dominated her and seduced her into iniquity. That he would be also serving justice only made the act sweeter.

He strolled out of the museum and stood on the steps gazing over the shadowed lavender water toward Ayler Point. He knew exactly how he would proceed. Lemos himself had given him the key to successful action in his words concerning Zemaille.

‘Mardo was a weak man with power,’ he had said. ‘Such men are easy to maneuver.’

And of course Lemos was no different.

He was rife with weakness. His investments, Mirielle, his crimes, his false sense of control. That last, that was his greatest weakness. He was enamored of his own power, he believed his judgments to be infallible and he would never believe that Korrogly could be other than as he perceived him; he would think that the lawyer would either do nothing or seek redress through the courts; he would not suspect that Korrogly might move against him in the way that he had moved against Zemaille. Zemaille had probably thought the same of him.

Korrogly smiled, understanding how marvelously complex was this chain of consecutive illuminations, of one man after another being induced to take decisive action. He stepped
briskly down the steps and out onto Biscaya Boulevard, heading for
The Blind Lady
and a glass of beer, for a bout of peaceful contemplation, of deciding his future and Lemos’ fate. By the time he had walked a block he had already come up with the beginnings of a plan.

But then he was brought up short by a disturbing thought.

What if he was obeying Griaule’s will in all this, what if The Father of Stones had had an effect upon him? What if instead of taking his destiny in hand, he was merely obeying Griaule’s wishes, serving as an element in some dire scheme? What if he was by dismissing ordinary means and moral tactics taking a chance on becoming a monster like Lemos, one who would in the end be cut down by yet another of Griaule’s pawns? There was no way of telling. His sudden determination to act might be laid to a long inner process of deliberation, it might be the result of years of failed idealism; the resolution of the Lemos case could have been the weight that caused the final caving-in of his unsound moral structure.

He stood for a long moment considering these things, knowing that he might never come to the end of considering them, but searching for some rationalization that would allow him to put aside such concerns, to cease his analysis and questioning of events, and he found that this had become for him a matter of choice; it was as if the decision to act had freed him from an old snare, from the hampering spell of his ideals, and introduced him into a new and – though less moral – much more effective magic. What did he care who was in control, who was pulling the strings? Sooner or later a man had to stop thinking and start being, to leave off fretting over the vicissitudes and intricacies of life, and begin to live. There was no certainty, no secure path, no absolutely moral one. You did the best you could for yourself and those you cared about, and hoped that this would be a sufficiently broad spectrum of concern to keep your soul in healthy condition. If not . . . well, there was no use in fretting over the prospect. Why trouble yourself with guilt in a world in which everyone was guilty?

He set off walking again, walking with a firm step and a smile for everyone who passed him by, bowing politely to an old
woman sweeping off her stoop, stopping once to pat a young boy on the head, all the while giving thought to his campaign against Lemos, picturing the gemcutter in various states of ruinous defeat, imagining Mirielle in his arms, letting his mind roam freely through the realms of possibility, posing himself in judge’s robes, dispensing the dispassionate rule of the law, fair yet inflexible, full of imponderable wisdoms, and he saw himself as well on the sunny verandah of a mansion on Ayler Point, on a white yacht, in a glittering ballroom, in every manner of luxurious environment, with loyal friends and beautiful lovers and enemies whose secrets he had mastered. Life, which for so long had seemed distant, a treasure beyond his grasp, now seemed to embrace him, to close around him and make him dizzy with its rich scents and sights. What did it matter, he said to himself, who ran the world, it tasted no less sweet, it gave no less pleasure. He laughed out loud, he winked at a pretty girl, he plotted violence and duplicity, all things that brought him joy.

One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay.

LIAR’S
HOUSE

In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality. It has been said that of all living creatures, this duality was best perceived in dragons, for they had flown fully formed from out the mouth of the Uncreate, the first of creation’s kings, and gone soaring through a conflagration that, eons hence, would coalesce into worlds and stars and all the dream of matter. Thus the relation of their souls to their flesh accurately reflected the constitution of the Creator, enveloping and controlling their material bodies from without rather than, as with the souls of men, coming to be lodged within. And of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the dragon Griaule.

How Griaule came to be paralyzed by a wizard’s magical contrivance is a story without witness, but it has been documented that in this deathlike condition he lived on for millennia, continuing to grow, until he measured more than a mile in length, lying athwart and nearly spanning the westernmost section of the Carbonales Valley. Over the years he came to resemble a high hill covered in grass and shrubs and stunted trees, with here and there a portion of scale showing through, and the colossal head entirely emergent, unclothed by
vegetation, engaging everything that passed before him with huge, slit-pupiled golden eyes, exerting a malefic influence over the events that flowed around him, twisting them into shapes that conformed to the cruel designs his discarnate intellect delighted in the weaving of, and profited his vengeful will. During his latter days, a considerable city, Teocinte, sprawled away from Griaule’s flank over the adjoining hill, but centuries before, when few were willing to approach the dragon, Teocinte was scarcely more than an outsized village enclosed by dense growths of palms and bananas, hemmed in between the eminence of Griaule and a pine-forested hill. Scruffy and unlovely; flyblown; its irregularly laid-out dirt streets lined by hovels with rusting tin roofs; it was lent the status of a town by a scattering of unstable frame structures housing taverns, shops, and a single inn, and was populated by several thousand men and women who, in the main, embodied a debased extreme of the human condition. Murderers and thieves and outlaws of various stamp. Almost to a one, they believed that proximity to the dragon imbued them with a certain potency (as perhaps it did) and refused to concern themselves with the commonly held notion that they had been drawn to Teocinte because their depravity resonated with the dragon’s depraved nature, thus making them especially vulnerable to his manipulations. What does it matter whose purpose we serve, they might have asked, so long as it satisfies our own?

By all accounts, the most fearsome of Teocinte’s citizens and, at forty-two, its eldest, was Hota Kotieb, a brooding stump of a man with graying, unkempt hair, his cheeks and jaw scarred by knife cuts. His hands were huge, capable of englobing a cantaloupe and squeezing it to a pulp, and his powerful arms and oxlike shoulders had been developed through years of unloading ships at the docks in Port Chantay. Deep-socketed eyes provided the only vital accent in what otherwise seemed the sort of brutish face sometimes produced by the erosion of great stones. Unlike his fellows, who would make lengthy forays out into the world to perpetrate their crimes, then returned to restore themselves by steeping in the dragon’s aura, Hota never strayed from the valley. Eleven summers previously, after his
wife had been run over in the street by a coach belonging to the harbormaster in Port Chantay, he had forsworn the unreliable processes of justice and forced his way into the man’s home. When the harbormaster ordered him ejected, Hota stabbed him, his two sons and several retainers, himself receiving numerous wounds during the skirmish. On realizing that he would be hung were he to remain in the town, he looted the house and fled, killing three policemen who sought to stop him outside the door. Casting aside a lifetime of unobtrusive action and docile labor, he had murdered ten men in the space of less than an hour.

Though he had never attended school and was ignorant of many things, Hota was by no means dull-witted, and when he meditated on these events, his red victory and the grim chaos that preceded it, he was able to place his actions in a rational context. He felt little remorse over the murders of the harbor-master and his sons. They were oppressors and had received an oppressor’s due. As for the rest, he regretted their deaths and believed that some would have been spared had he not been enraged to the point of derangement; yet he refused to use derangement as a sop to his conscience and recognized that the potential for extreme violence had always been his. He had not wished his wife to die, but neither had he loved her. Thirteen years of marriage had doused the spark that once leaped between them. Their union had decayed into indifference and sham. They were like two plow horses harnessed together, endlessly tilling a field barren of children and every other promise, yet led to continue their dreary progress by the litany of empty promises they spoke to one another. It seemed her death had less inspired than legitimized a violent release, and that he had been longing to kill someone for quite some time, motivated in this by feelings of impotence bred over years of abject poverty. Now this tendency had made itself known, he supposed it would rise all the more easily to the surface. For this reason, though he was lonely, he kept no one close.

The money and gems he had stolen from the harbormaster enabled Hota to live as comfortably as the rough consolations of Teocinte permitted. He occupied a third-floor room at the
rear of Dragonwood House, a weathered, boxlike building with a tin roof and a tavern downstairs and a newer, less ruinous single-story wing attached, where prostitutes were housed. Its ashen gray facade was dressed with a garishly painted sign that depicted a dragon soaring through a fiery heaven. The inn was situated near the edge of town and serviced the steady stream of visitors that came to look at Griaule, offering views of the dragon’s side from its front windows. Its owner, Benno Grustark, claimed that the boards employed in its construction were manufactured from trees that had grown atop Griaule’s back, but his patrons, knowing that few dared to set foot upon the dragon, let alone cut timber, referred to the inn as Liar’s House.

Having no need to work, Hota passed many of his days at woodcarving, a hobby of his childhood that still pleased him, though he displayed no talent for the work. Since there was little in the town to attract his eye, he took to carving likenesses of Griaule. Dozens of such pieces were crowded together on his shelves, atop the bureau and chairs, and scattered across the floor of his room. On occasion he would give one to a child or to a prostitute who shared his bed, but this made no appreciable dent in the clutter. To avoid further clutter, he began working on a grander scale, walking out into the hills, felling trees, chiseling dragons from the trunks, and leaving the completed figures to the depredations of the rain and the insects. He set no great store by the work, caring only that it distracted him, but was nonetheless pleased that the woods were becoming littered with his sculptures, crude figures weathering into objects that – like their model – appeared to be natural formations that bore a striking resemblance to dragons.

In the early spring, eleven years after his arrival in Teocinte, Hota hired a carter to haul the trunk of a white oak to the crest of a hill from which he had a profile view of Griaule with the valley spreading beyond, an undulant reach of palms and palmettos, figs and aguacates, threaded by red dirt paths. There he set about his most ambitious project. Previously he had carved the dragon as he might have appeared during more vital days – flying, crouched, or rampant; now he intended to
create a sculpture that would depict Griaule as he was: the oddly delicate, birdlike head, jaws half open, tongue and fangs embroidered with lichen, vines depending in loops and snarls from the roof of the mouth; the bluish green folds and struts of the sagittal crest, that same color edging the golden scales; his sinuous body, the haunches, flanks, and back mapped by a forest whose dark green conformation was so similar to the shapes of the hills that lifted higher behind him, it caused Hota to wonder if they, too, might not conceal gigantic dragons. He spent a week in laying out the design and then several days more gathering the details of Griaule’s shape in his mind and letting that knowledge flow into his hands.

Toward noon one morning, as Hota was busy carving, he noticed something flying in loops above Griaule’s snout, difficult to make out against the strong sun, as tiny in relation to the dragon as a swallow fluttering about a bull’s nose. To his astonishment, for Hota had thought Griaule to be the sole survivor of his species, he realized it was another dragon. Thirty to forty feet long, by his estimate. With bronze scales. Enthralled, he watched the creature swoop and soar, maintaining a predictable circuit, as if she (because of her daintiness by contrast to Griaule, Hota thought of the second dragon as she) were tracing the same character over and over, enacting a ritual of some kind. Her wings seemed to ripple rather than to beat against the air, and her long neck glided through its attitudes with the suppleness of a reed borne on a stream, and her tail lashed about with what struck him as a lascivious ferocity. She might be, he surmised, attempting to communicate with Griaule. Or perhaps
he
was communicating with her; perhaps the patterns of her flight gave visual form to the eddies of his thoughts. At length she broke off her circling and settled onto Griaule’s broad back, passing out of sight behind his sagittal crest.

Dropping his chisel, Hota hurried down the hill, following a track that merged with one of the red dirt paths crisscrossing the valley, and approached Griaule from the side, heading for the bulge of his foreleg. As the dragon came to loom above him, he felt a surge of terror. The tightly nested scales of the jaw; the
gray teeth with their traceries of lichen, like the broken wall of a fortress city; the bulge of an orbital ridge: seen close to hand, the monumental aspect of these things dismayed him, and when he moved into the dragon’s shadow, something colder and thicker than air seemed to glove him, as if he were moving in invisible mud. But fascination overbore his fright. The prospect of observing a dragon who was capable of motion excited him. There was nothing of the academic or the artistic in his interest. He simply wanted to see it.

He scrambled up the slope afforded by the brush-covered foreleg, then ascended to the dragon’s thicketed shoulder, catching at shrubs to pull himself higher. His breath labored, sweat poured off him. On several occasions he nearly fell. When at last he stood atop Griaule’s back, clinging for support to a pine branch, looking down at the valley hundreds of feet below, Teocinte showing as an ugly grayish patch amid the greenery, he understood the foolishness of what he had done. He felt unarmored against the arrows of fate, as if he had violated a taboo and been stripped of all his immunities. And adding to his anxiety was the fact that nearby was a dragon who, upon sensing him, would seek to tear him to pieces . . . unless she had flown away while he was climbing, and he doubted this to be the case. Fear mounted in him once again, but he did not place so much value on his life as once he had – indeed, he often wondered why he had bothered to save himself from the hangman’s rope that night in Port Chantay – and his desire to see her remained strong. Planting his feet with care, easing branches aside, he pressed on into the brush and headed for the spot where he supposed the second dragon had landed.

The heat of the day came full and Hota continued to sweat profusely. The needle sprays of stunted pine and the yellowed round leaves of the shrubs that dominated the thicket limited his view to a few yards ahead and stuck to his damp neck and cheeks and arms. After wandering blindly about for a quarter of an hour, he began to speculate that the second dragon had made no landing at all, but merely swooped down behind the sagittal crest and then leveled off and flew away over the hills. He found a bare patch of ground and sat, deliberating whether
or not to give up the search. Scutterings issued from the brush and this alarmed him. Rumor had it that many of the animals living in and on Griaule were poisonous. Deciding that he had been foolish enough for one day, Hota stood and headed back the way he had come. After half an hour, when he had not reached the edge of the thicket, he realized with annoyance that he must have gotten turned around and was walking along the spine. He stood on tiptoes, caught sight of the dragon’s crest, and, thus oriented, started off parallel to it. Another half hour passed and his annoyance blossomed into panic. Someone – doubtless Griaule himself – was playing a trick on him. Clouding his thoughts, causing him to go in circles. Again he sighted the sagittal crest and beat his way through the brush; but the ground beneath his feet did not slope away as it should have done and when he checked the crest once more, he saw that he had made no progress whatsoever.

After two hours, Hota’s panic lapsed into resignation. This, then, was the fate to which his violence had led him. Trapped in a magical circumstance that he could not hope to fathom, he would wander Griaule’s back until he grew too weak to walk and died of thirst and exposure. He would, he thought, have preferred to be hung. Yet he could not deny that he was deserving of worse and there was no defiance in him. He kicked broken branches aside, cleaning a spot where he could sit and wait for death; but upon reflection, he kept on walking, deciding it would be best to wear himself out and so hasten the inevitable. He hurried through the thicket, no longer trying to hide his presence, for he assumed that the second dragon had been an illusion, bait in the trap Griaule had set. He swatted boughs aside and shouldered through entangled places, forcing himself whenever possible into a lumbering trot. As he went, he began to feel exhilarated and it occurred to him that this might be because he finally had something meaningful to do. All his years of drinking and inept woodcarving, and all the years prior, the numbing labor, silent evenings staring glumly at his wife, and shabby, juiceless days . . . It was right they should end here and now. They had profited no one, least of all himself.