The Dragon Griaule (51 page)
Read The Dragon Griaule Online
Authors: Lucius Shepard
The left-wing group holding the embassy was reacting to the fact that when the owners of immense ranches in the north of the country found that Indians had settled on their land and lived there long enough to establish legal rights, they did not take the matter to the courts, where they were certain to lose, but simply hired the military to massacre the Indians and destroy their settlements – the left-wingers hoped by taking action to initiate a dialogue about land reform. The government’s reaction was to firebomb the building several hours after the takeover, killing everyone inside, including the Spanish ambassador and the ex-president, and thereafter to shut down Guatemala City for a week, closing the airport, burning all the buses that attempted to leave or enter the city, making a show of power. It was an extremely nervous time, people jumping at the least unexpected sound, a heavy military presence on almost every street corner day and night. I’d been planning to leave for Honduras the following day and, prevented from this, I spent a good bit of time at the nightclub during the week. Though I wasn’t as adventurous as my protagonist with regards to the women who habituated the place, I did have a number of conversations with some of them, and it was on these that I based the character of Luisa Bazan and the dynamic that serves a key plot point in the story.
Of all the Griaule stories, this is the most grounded in my life experience and in the political realities of Central America, a place where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time. Temalagua is, of course, a scramble of Guatemala, and the Party of Organized Violence was an actual Guatemalan entity, very much on the ascendancy when I was first there. I could point out a dozen other correspondences between fiction and my Tru-Life Adventures in this piece, but that would be overkill. The important thing, at least to me, is that writing ‘The Skull’ returned me to my original motivation in writing about Griaule, and if there are to be further stories about the dragon and his milieu, I think they’ll be more focused upon the central theme, the political fantasy, than those that preceded it.
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Lucius Taylor Shepard
was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1947. He travelled extensively in his youth, and has held a wide assortment of occupations in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, including rock musician and night club bouncer. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1980 and made his first commercial sale a year later. His work covers many areas of fantastic fiction and has recently encompassed non-fiction, as well. For over a decade, he has contributed a regular column on SF cinema for
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Lucius Shepard has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon and International Horror Guild awards. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
A full list of Fantasy Masterworks can be found at
www.gollancz.co.uk
A Gollancz eBook
Text copyright © Lucius Shepard 2012
Introduction copyright © Graham Sleight 2013
The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
copyright © Lucius Shepard 1984
The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter
copyright © Lucius Shepard 1988
The Father of Stones
copyright © Lucius Shepard 1988
Liar’s House
copyright © Lucius Shepard 2004
The Taborin Scale
copyright © Lucius Shepard 2010
The Skull
copyright © Lucius Shepard 2012
All rights reserved
The right of Lucius Shepard to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Graham Sleight to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 575 09009 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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