The Dragon Griaule (34 page)

‘You’re being ridiculous. I keep telling you Edgar’s not a threat.’

‘Everyone’s a threat! There’s no law here except Griaule’s. If he wasn’t flying around all hours, frightening everybody, people would be braver, they’d explore their surroundings. And if that were the case, like as not Peony and I would be slaving away on our backs day and night, and you’d be dead. We’re fortunate the people camped close to us were cowards.’ She prodded his chest with a finger. ‘Sooner or later Edgar’s bound to tell his story to someone more adept at killing than you. Someone who’s not hampered by morality. Then we’ll find out how moral you are.’

Edgar started to mumble. The wind tailed off – George could hear the rush of the stream. The sound fatigued him and filled him with melancholy.

‘You want him dead?’ He offered her the knife. ‘I’ve shed enough blood this evening.’

Her face closed down, armored by a blank expression. George expected her to back away from his challenge, but after a pause, as he was about to say, ‘What are you waiting for?’ she seized the knife and went toward Edgar with a decisive step. At the last instant he turned his head, grinning at her, and she drove the knife into the side of his neck, giving a truncated cry as she
struck. The force of the blow knocked Edgar onto his side, tearing the hilt from her grasp, and she fell back, as if shocked by the result. He made a mewling noise and pressed his fingers to the steel protruding from his neck; dark blood jumped between them, spattering his pale shoulder. He seemed to be straining at something, trying to preserve a critical balance, perhaps torn between the desire to yank out the blade and the thought that such an action would be the end of him. His legs kicked out, briefly causing it to appear that he was running in place. Then the straining aspect ebbed from his limbs and he lay staring at the base of the creosote bush. Off in the night, the dragon screamed.

Chapter Seven

From then on, certain illusions went by the board, the illusion that they were a family foremost among them. George and Sylvia stopped having sex, a decision that was mutual albeit unspoken, and there was an overall diminution of pleasantries; yet these things seemed to indicate a larger change, one whose most profound symptom was an atmosphere of dejection, if not outright defeat. It was as if the spark that gave them life had been dampened. Occasionally that spark sputtered and sparked, providing a bright moment, as on the night when Sylvia told a story she’d written and memorized, one of several she related, all set in Ali’s Eternal Reward, concerning a girl of the brothel and her romance with a man who was the spitting image of the Sinistral from a deck of fortune-telling cards. Peony was entranced by the story and George offered extravagant praise that brought a smile to Sylvia’s face; but that flare of good feeling quickly faded and they were as before – three damaged people with no palpable bond to shield them against the oppressions of heaven and the disappointments of the world.

Peony became severely agitated in the week that followed Edgar’s death, and, though Sylvia swore Peony had been asleep, George assumed that it was due to her having witnessed Edgar’s execution . . . or perhaps sensed it in some fashion. She would rock on her haunches, fists clenched, making noises like a tiny teakettle, and nothing would console her. After four days she ceased being agitated and instead sat fiddling with the dragon scale, sometimes lapsing into a state that resembled catatonia, drooling and listless and completely unresponsive. Memories and dreams of the man he had killed and of Edgar, the man in whose death he had been complicit, plagued George’s nights.
He wondered if Sylvia had trouble sleeping, curious as to how efficient her justifications were in protecting her against the depredations of conscience – he suspected they served her very well, indeed. His own sleep was fitful at best. He commonly woke well before sunrise, a circumstance that left him exhausted and slow-brained by day’s end, and he would nod off while sitting or even standing. At dusk, ten days after the killings, following a brief lapse of this sort, he stood at the margin of the camp, looking blearily across the plain, and observed a yellowish red glow on the horizon beneath a line of slate clouds. Sunset was his first thought, but then he realized that he was not facing west and what he had taken for clouds were actually the peaks of the eastern hills. The glow issued from an area between the hills and his vantage point. For a minute he watched it brighten and spread, thinking it odd. He heard piping cries and saw four or five people running through the thickets, their heads visible over the tops of the bushes. The dragon wheeled above and he assumed they were fleeing him. Fools, though. The edges of the glow wavered and he thought he detected a smoky odor. He stared dumbly a moment before recognizing the source of the glow. The plain was burning and a brisk wind was driving a wall of flame toward them.

Shouting the alarm, he raced to the shelter and found Sylvia and Peony outside, frightened and clinging together, asking questions with their eyes. He flung out an arm toward the east and said, ‘The thickets are on fire, the wind’s bringing it straight for us. We have to run!’

Light had almost faded from the sky when they began their westward flight, going at a steady pace, carrying nothing other than the rags on their back and a few meager possessions, like a family out of prehistory, united in fear. Soon they were racing in full night, yet before long the darkness was illuminated by the fire – they could see the spikes of separate flames and hear a dim roaring. George tried to keep close to the stream, but Griaule harried and herded them in a direction of his choosing. George had little doubt that he had set the plain afire in order to simplify that chore. Now and again the dragon would drop
out of the sky, a creature of shadow with scales burnished by flame, and bellow at them, altering their course and adding his fierce noise to the din of the fire. On several occasions they made contact with other groups, but the people never materialized from the darkness sufficiently to identify or count their number. They shied away, as if their time on the plain had acclimated them to fear and suspicion. Hedgerows of fire closed around them. They stumbled and reeled through the thickets, their glistening faces dark with soot, darting this way and that to avoid sudden new channels of flame that threatened to hem them in. Peony fell and George picked her up; when Sylvia began to stagger and her pace faltered, he supported her with his free hand. There was so much smoke in the air, breathing was a chore, and this broke his concentration, causing him to feel fatigue. Griaule harrowed them onward, looming out of the night with his wings half-unfolded, seeming more terrible for being partially visible in the dark, here a reddened fang gleaming, here flame reflected in a golden eye, his roar outvoicing the roar of the flames, snapping, gusting flames that sucked oxygen from the air and heated it so that he felt his throat crack whenever he inhaled. He lost his bearings and suspected that Griaule was toying with them, that he would wear them out and let them to burn in a cul de sac; but he was too weary to come up with an escape plan, too wasted to care, and found himself hoping for a swift resolution, whatever form it might take.

The wind must have changed, because the temperature dropped and the light from the burning plain dimmed, occulted by a mixture of smoke and fog – still the dragon herded them along. They emerged from the thickets onto a grassy slope and, after no more than thirty yards, the slope grew steeper, rockier. Visibility was poor and George had to feel his way – it was as if they were ascending a crag whose lower reaches had the semblance of a crude stair, each step a couple of feet high. He couldn’t hear the fire anymore and, though perplexed by this development, he was too enervated to worry. Soon what sounded like muted voices came to his ear. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he realized that the steps of the stair were very wide and scattered about on them were small groups of people.
He steered clear of these and found an unoccupied space where they could sit. The dragon rumbled below, but it was a ruminative sound, or so George chose to interpret it. He was done with running, unable to go another foot.

‘Where are we?’ Sylvia asked, pressing close for warmth – it had gotten cold and she and Peony sheltered under his arms.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I thought we were heading back toward Teocinte . . . where it used to stand. But there’s no place like this near the city.’

‘We’ll puzzle it out in the morning,’ he said. ‘Get some rest.’

George made a manful effort to keep watch, but the gentle breathing of the women seduced him and he fell into a dreamless sleep, waking to discover that the sky had grayed and a dense fog sealed them in against tiers of stone, a kind of amphitheater, perhaps a natural formation.
¹⁰
The morning wind picked up, causing eddies and rifts in the fog, revealing sections of the plain – it disquieted him to see that the thickets showed yellowish green, not a trace of the previous night’s fire, and there was no smell of burning. Every part of his body ached and he would have liked to shake out the kinks and have a look around, as people on the tiers beneath were doing (from what he could tell, there were fewer than fifty altogether, though he could not be certain, what with the fog); but he wanted to let Peony and Sylvia sleep as long as they could and contented himself with passive observation.

The people clustered on the steps, as sooty and ragged as George, kept an eye on the other groups around them, displaying no inclination to socialize, perhaps focused on the hope that their ordeal might be over, thus having no interest in anything apart from their own preoccupations. That hope, however, did not long persist, for an immense shape began to materialize from the fog directly in front of the amphitheater and, while he had no reason to despair (on the contrary, the vista that opened before him should by its familiarity have relieved his every concern), the sight of Griaule, not his lesser incarnation but the great paralyzed, recumbent beast with his evil snout, his fangs festooned with vines and epiphytes, and scales embroidered with lichen and bird droppings, his greens and golds muted by an overcast, ghost-dressed in streamers of mist, the cavern of his mouth enclosing enough darkness to fill the naves of four or five cathedrals, the hill of his body looming above the tin roofs, the shanty districts and factory precincts of Morningshade from which now arose a clangor of bells . . . that sight had such a grim, iconic value, like a gigantic conceit enclosing the gates of some abyssal domain, George’s strength failed him and the other witnesses appeared similarly afflicted. Their murmurous voices grew silent and they stopped milling about and stood frozen in a dozen separate tableaus. Waking, Peony screamed and buried her face in George’s shoulder, and Sylvia drew in a breath sharply and pricked his arm with her fingernails. A chthonic rumbling was heard, so all-encompassing a sound it seemed to issue from the earth, the sky, from the core of all things, as if the basic stuff of matter had gained a voice and were offering complaint, and from Griaule’s mouth, in a trickle at first, and then a tide darkening the grass, came the creatures that dwelled within his enormous bulk, slithering, crawling, creeping, flying, hopping, running on four legs and two (for among the snakes and spiders and skizzers and flakes
¹¹
were a number of derelict men and women who, for whatever reason,
had sought to shelter inside the dragon, in the hollows and caves and canyons formed by his organs and bones and cartilage). As they fled, dispersing across the plain, the witnesses made out a distant clamor composed of the affrighted cries of the citizens of Morningshade and various alarms being sounded. Griaule’s eyes blinked open, wheels of gold flecked with mineral hues, each divided by a horizontal slit pupil, lending a vile animus to his face. In the depths of his throat bloomed an orange radiance that whitened and shone more fiercely until it resembled a star lodged in his gullet. Seeing this, between ten or fifteen of the witnesses broke from the tiers of the amphitheater and raced toward the town below. Among them was Peony. She shrugged off George’s arm, eluded his lunging attempt to snatch her back, and scampered down the tiers.

Somewhat reluctantly, Sylvia made to stand, and George said, ‘It’ll be less of a risk if I go alone. Wait for us on the plain. We’ll find you.’

Relief and shame mixed in her face. ‘I don’t think she knows where she used to live,’ she said. ‘Look for her at Griaule’s temple. She thought it was pretty inside.’

‘Where else?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ And then, as he started off, she called, ‘The brothel! Maybe there! Because of my stories!’

They had been seated near the top tier and George had descended about two-thirds of its height when Griaule, with a coughing grunt that signaled a mighty effort, turned his head and twisted his body in the direction of Haver’s Roost, his snout projecting out across the tin roofs – in the same motion, with a tremendous creaking and popping of calcified joints, noises that might have been created by tree trunks snapping, he pushed himself erect, moving with a ponderous, rickety deliberation bred by thousands of years of muscular disuse. It was an unreal sight, a mountainous transformation, the coming-to-life of a colossus. Griaule took a step forward and, with an earthshaking thump, planted a front foot among the shanties of Morningshade, crushing a considerable acreage and all that lived thereon, raising a dust cloud that boiled up around his foreleg, obscuring it. The
soil and vegetation surrounding Hangtown, the village on the dragon’s back, slid off his side and wings in huge clumps, and the shacks that constituted the village followed, disintegrating in midair; from his position, George could not tell where the debris landed. Griaule roared, a blast of raw noise that deafened him.
¹²
Pain drove him to his knees; he clasped both hands to his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and when he looked again he saw a gush of flame (patterned with a shifting orange efflorescence that gave it an odd, lacy delicacy) spew from Griaule’s mouth and lance across the valley to engulf the hotels on the slopes of Haver’s Roost. Within seconds, every building on the Roost, even the government offices atop it, was burning. The dragon appeared to wobble for a instant, but maintained his stance and, lowering and turning his head slightly to the right, breathed out a swath of fire to encompass a section of the outlying district of Cerro Bonito, among whose rolling hills the estates of wealthy foreigners were situated. Dollops of flame dropping from the dragon’s lip and from the jet of its exhalation ignited conflagrations in other sections of the city. The smell of the burning held an acrid chemical undertone that stung George’s nostrils.

An animal fear possessed him, but the mental contract he had made to protect Peony enabled him to ignore both fear and pain. It may have been a blessing that he could not hear, for by the time he came to the foot of the hill, the greater portion of the city was on fire (only those areas adjoining and beneath the dragon were left untouched) and streams of panic-stricken people rushed past in the opposite direction, some bleeding and burned, their mouths open in what he assumed to be screams, a sound that would have encouraged his own nascent panic. The streams increased to a flood when he reached the outskirts of Morningshade. He had to fight his way through streets thronged by crowds surging toward the plain. Directly ahead, seen through the dust and across rooftops striped with rust, Griaule’s foreleg sprouted from the slum like a thewy
green-and-gold tree thrust up from an orchard in hell; his dirty white belly sagged low above the finial atop a four-story temple devoted to his worship, more like a billow in a giant’s dirty bed sheet than a piece of sky. An alley opened between storefronts on George’s left. He wedged through the crowd and stepped into it in order to formulate a plan of action without being jostled; however, once away from the turbulence of the crowd, the situation seemed hopeless and he understood he had taken on a fool’s errand. He made ready to plunge back into the crowd, intending to join them in flight, but at the far end of the alley he spotted a sign bearing the crude painting of a cornucopia – the business that it advertised, a pawnshop, was close to Ali’s. He could spare a moment, he told himself, before surrendering to fear. Peony loved Sylvia’s fantasies about the brothel and, if she had survived, she might well have taken refuge in a place Sylvia described as home to a loving sisterhood. He raced along the alley, forged a path toward Ali’s through the sparser crowds on the side street, and burst through the door.