The Dragon Griaule (31 page)

She continued her cataloging of notable landmarks and he was forced to admit that she was correct. He would have expected her to be upset by this development, fearful and verging on hysteria; but she was outwardly calm (calmer than he), albeit dejected. He asked why she was so unruffled.

‘We’re accustomed to such doings around here,’ she replied. ‘It’s Griaule’s work. The scale . . . he must have shed it when he was young and it wound up in that jar. For some reason he set you to find it. So you could clean it and rub on it, I imagine.’

In reflex he said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

With a loose-armed gesture toward Haver’s Roost, she said, ‘Teocinte is gone. How else do you think it happened?’

Aside from grass swaying, palmetto fronds lifting in the wind, birds scattering about the sky, the land was empty. Odd, he thought, that birds would act so carefree with a hawk in the vicinity. Shielding his eyes against the glare, he tried to spot the hawk, but it had vanished against the sun field. His uneasiness increased.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

Sylvia arranged her towel into a makeshift blouse and appeared to be awaiting instruction.

A bug zinged past George’s ear – he swatted at it half-heartedly. ‘Which way should we go?’

She tugged at a loose curl, a gesture that conveyed a listless air – it had become apparent that she had surrendered herself to Griaule or to some other implausible agency. George grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him.

‘If this is where Teocinte stood, you know where we can find water,’ he said

Sullenly she said, ‘There should be a creek over that way somewhere.’ She pointed toward the depression in which Morningshade had once sprawled. ‘It was filthy last I saw it, but now, with nobody around, the water ought to be all right.’

‘Let’s go,’ he said, and when she showed no sign of complying, he shoved her forward. She swung her fist, striking him in the forehead, an impact that caused her to cry out in pain and cradle her hand.

‘Are you angry?’ he asked. ‘Good.’

‘Don’t go pushing me!’ she said tearfully. ‘I won’t have it!’

‘If you’re going to act like your spine’s been sucked out, I’ll push you whenever I choose,’ he said. ‘You can mope about and wait to die on your own time.’

5
The process by which Griaule purportedly had been killed took more than 30 years to complete and was achieved by the utilization of arsenic- and lead-based paints in a mural painted on his side. The manufacture of these paints had destroyed the lush forests of the Carbonales (a steady supply of timber was necessary to heat the vats in which the paint was distilled) and placed such a stress on the economy that a number of wars had been fought with neighboring city-states in order to replenish Teocinte’s exchequer.

6
Cele Van Alstyne of Port Chantay, who had secured the rights to Griaule’s heart, estimated to weigh nine million pounds, was desperate to revive her failing pharmaceutical company and initiated legal action. She was joined in this by a group of speculators who had bought the approximately one hundred and sixty million pounds of bones (except for the skull, sold to the King of neighboring Temalagua) and planned to export them to foreign countries for use as sexual remedies, charms, souvenirs, etc.; and by a second consortium who had bought the skin, all two hundred and twenty million pounds of it (not counting the mural, destined to be housed in the Cattanay Museum). Lawyers for the council fought a delaying action, claiming that since the dragon’s death could not be proven absolutely, the lawsuits were invalid.

7
She had adopted this
nom d’amour
after George expressed dissatisfaction with the first name she gave, Ursula, and a selection process that winnowed the choices down to three: Otile, Amaryllis, and Sylvia. He had settled on the latter because it reminded him of a grocer’s wife he had admired in Port Chantay, a woman from the extreme south of the country, a region ‘Sylvia’ also claimed as home.

8
The excerpt is from the preface to Richard Rossacher’s
Griaule Incarnate
. Rossacher, a young medical doctor, while studying Griaule’s blood derived from it a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the population of the Temalaguan littoral. After experiencing an epiphany of sorts, he became evangelic as regarded the dragon and spent his last years writing and proselytizing about Griaule’s divinity.

Chapter Three

By the time they had hiked a third of the distance to the creek, George’s practical side had re-established dominance and he had developed a scheme for survival in case their situation, whatever it might be,
⁹
failed to reverse itself. But as he prepared for a solitary life with Sylvia (of whatever duration), planning a shelter that could be added to over the months and years, and devising ways in which they could usefully occupy their time, the hawk reappeared above, swelling to such a size as it dropped toward them that George could no longer believe it was a hawk or any familiar predator. He scooped up Sylvia by the waist, lifting her off the ground, and began to run, ignoring her shrieks, just as a dragon swooped low overhead, coming so near that they felt the wind of its passage. Its scales glinting bright green and gold, the dragon banked in a high turn and arrowed toward them again, and then, with a furious beating of its jointed wings, landed facing them in the tall grasses no more than fifty feet away. It dipped its snout and roared, a complicated noise like half-a-dozen lions roaring not quite in unison. George glimpsed a drop of orange brilliance hanging like a jewel in the darkness of its gullet and threw Sylvia to the ground, covering her with his body, expecting flames to wash
over them. When no flames manifested, he lifted his head. The dragon maintained its distance, breath chuffing like an over-strained engine – it seemed to be waiting for them to act. Sylvia complained and George eased from atop her. When she saw the dragon she moaned and put her face down in the grass.

Taking care to avoid sudden movements, George climbed to his feet. He was so afraid, so weak in the knees, he thought he might have to sit down, but he maintained a shaky half-crouch. The dragon’s lowered head was almost on a level with his, but its back and crest rose much higher. He estimated it to be twenty-five feet long, perhaps a touch more, from the tip of the tail to its snout. The green-and-gold scales fit cunningly to its musculature, a tight overlay like the scales of a pangolin. It emitted a rumbling, its mouth opening to display fangs longer than his arms. A dry, gamey scent seemed to coil about him like a tendril, causing a fresh tightness in his throat. Yet for all its wicked design and innate enmity, there was something of the canine in the way it cocked its head and scrutinized them, like a puppy (one the size of a cottage) confounded by a curious pair of bugs.

‘Sylvia.’ He reached down, groping for her, his fingers brushing her towel.

In response he received a weak, ‘No.’

‘If it wanted to kill us, it would have done so by now,’ he said without the least confidence.

Not taking his eyes from the dragon, he groped again, caught her wrist and yanked her up. She buried her face in his shoulder, refusing to look at the dragon. Putting an arm about her waist, he steered her back in the direction from which they had come, experiencing a new increment of dread with each step. They had gone no more than thirty feet when, with a percussive rattling of its wings, the dragon scuttled ahead of them, cutting them off. It settled on its haunches and gave forth with a grumbling noise and tossed its head to the side. Sylvia squeaked and George was too frightened to think. Again the dragon tossed its head and loosed a full-throated roar that bent the nearby grasses. Sylvia and George clung together, their eyes closed. The dragon lifted its snout to the sky and screamed
– the trebly pitch and intensity of the cry seemed to express frustration. It tossed its head a third and a fourth time, all to the same side, gestures that struck George as exaggerated and deliberate. Taking a cue from them, he went a couple of halting steps in the direction they indicated, dragging Sylvia along. The dragon displayed neither approval nor disapproval, so George continued on this path, heading toward the rise where Griaule’s massive head once had rested.

So began a faltering march, the two of them stumbling over broken ground, harried along by the dragon’s rumbles, herded from the former site of Teocinte, past the rise and out onto a vast plain of yellowish green thickets and sugarloaf hills, crisscrossed by animal tracks. On occasion the dragon bulled ahead of them to divert their course, flattening wide swaths of vegetation. The heat grew almost unbearable and George’s grip on reality frayed to the point that once, when they stopped to rest and the dragon urged them on with a roar, he sprang to his feet and shouted at the beast. After what must have been several hours of sweat and torment, they reached a spot where a stream widened into a clear pool some eighty or ninety feet across at the widest, flowing into other, smaller ponds and fringed by towering sabal palms, hedged by lesser trees and bushes, a cool green complexity amid the desert of thorny bushes and prickly weeds. There the dragon abandoned them, belching out a final cautionary (thus George characterized it) roar and soaring up into the sky until it once again appeared no bigger than a hawk and vanished into a cloud, leaving them exhausted and stunned, relieved yet despairing. They bathed in the largest pool and felt somewhat refreshed. As night fell, George picked shriveled oranges from a tree beside the pool and they made a meal of nuts and fruit. Shortly thereafter, too fatigued to talk, they fell asleep.

In the morning they had a discussion about returning to the spot to which they had been transported, but the sight of the dragon circling overhead ended that conversation and George began constructing a lean-to from bamboo and vines and palmetto fronds, while Sylvia set herself to catch fish, a task for which she claimed an aptitude. After watching her for half an
hour, bent over and motionless in the pool, waiting for the fish to forget her presence and attempting to scoop them up when they swam between her legs, he held out little hope for a fish dinner; but to his amazement, when next he checked in on her he saw that she had caught two medium-sized perch.

That night, with enough of a breeze to keep off the mosquitoes, the two of them reclining on a bed of fronds and banana leaves inside the shelter, gazing at the lacquered reflection of a purple sky so thickly adorned with stars, it might have been a theatrical backdrop, a silk cloth embroidered with sequins . . . that night their predicament was reduced to a shadow in George’s mind by these comforts and a full belly; but it became apparent that Sylvia did not feel so at ease with things, for when he tried to draw her into an embrace, she resisted him vigorously and said, ‘We’re at death’s door and that’s all you can think about?’

‘We’re not at death’s door,’ said George. ‘The dragon was rather solicitous of our welfare. He could have conveyed us to a far more inhospitable spot.’

‘Be that as it may, we’re not exactly sitting pretty.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. One of us is.’ George gave a broad wink, attempting to jolly her with this compliment.

Sylvia returned a withering look.

‘We might as well make the best of things,’ said George.

She sniffed. ‘To my mind, making the best of it would include figuring a way out of this mess.’

‘We had a bargain,’ George said weakly.

‘Back in Teocinte we had a bargain. Here all bets are off.’

‘I don’t see it that way.’

‘Well, I do . . . and I’m in charge of the sweet shop. I don’t have my medicines with me and I won’t risk getting pregnant out here. When we return to Teocinte, I’ll do right by you. Until then you’ll have to take care of your own needs. And I’ll thank you to not do so in my presence.’

A pour of wind rustled the thatched roof of the shelter, carrying a spicy scent. Despite understanding that Sylvia’s reaction was to be expected, George’s feelings were hurt.

‘This is your fault,’ he said glumly.

She sat up, her face pale and simplified by the starlight. ‘What?’

He sketched out Peri Haukkola’s theory concerning the effects of stress on consensus reality.

‘You say I’m ridiculous to blame this on Griaule,’ she said. ‘Then you put forward this Haukkerman as if . . .’

‘Haukkola.’

‘. . . as if it were proof of something. As if because he wrote some stupid theory down, it must be true. And I’m the ridiculous one?’ She gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘You saw the dragon, I assume?’

‘Of course! That’s just more evidence in support of Haukkola. You’re obsessed with Griaule, so you incorporated one of his little friends into your fantasy.’

Dumfounded, Sylvia stared at him. ‘The dragon
is
Griaule! Didn’t you notice he’s got the same coloring, the same head shape? True, he’s not all nicked up and scarred, and he’s quite a bit smaller. But it’s him, all right.’

‘You can distinguish between lizards?’ He chuckled.

‘I’ve been looking at Griaule most of my life and I can distinguish him.’ She turned onto her side, showing him her back. ‘You and Haukkola! You’re both idiots! If it helps you to blame me, fine. I’m going to sleep.’

9
Though a rift in time or dimensionality would seem to be indicated, George subscribed to the theory espoused by Peri Haukkola, holder of the Carbajal Chair of Philosophy at the University of Helvetia. Haukkola believed that people under extreme stress could alter the physical universe even to the point of creating pocket realities, and George assumed that a reality formed by Sylvia’s self-avowed identity crisis comprised the relatively empty landscape they currently inhabited.

Chapter Four

The wind died shortly before dawn and mosquitoes swarmed the interior of the shelter, waking Sylvia and George, driving them into the water for cover. The sun climbed higher and they sat beside the pool, miserable, baking in the heat. Having nothing better to do, George shored up the walls of the shelter and elevated the ceiling, making it less of a lean-to, and then went off foraging. To avoid the thickets, the thorn bushes and the gnats, he followed the meanders of the stream through stands of bamboo and clusters of palmettos with parched brownish fronds. Once he sighted the dragon circling above the plain and lay flat until it passed from view. From that point on, for the better part of an hour, his thoughts became a grim drone accompanying his exertions. At length he happened upon a patch of dirt and grass enclosed by dense brush, an oval of relative coolness and shade cast by a solitary mango tree with ripening fruit hanging from its boughs in chandelier-like clusters. He fashioned his shirt into a sling and had begun loading it with mangos when he saw two figures slipping through the brush. Alarmed by their furtive manner, he knotted the shirt to keep the mangos safe and turned to leave. Two men blocked his path. A scrawny, balding, pinch-faced fellow dressed in a skirt woven of vines and leaves, his tanned body speckled with inflamed mosquito bites, shook a fist at George and said, ‘Them’s our mangos!’ Grime deepened the lines on his face, adding a sinister emphasis to his scowl.

His companion was a plump young man with unkempt, shoulder-length hair and a brow as broad and unwritten on as a newly cut tombstone – his head was rather large and his features small and unremarkable, imbuing his face with a weak, unfinished quality. He wore the remnants of corduroy trousers
and carried a stick stout enough to be used as a club, but hid it behind his leg and refused to meet George’s stare, the very image of a reluctant warrior. George decided the men posed no threat, yet he kept an eye on the figures hiding in the brush.

‘I’ve only taken a dozen or so,’ he said. ‘Surely there’s enough for everyone.’

The balding man adopted an expression that might have been an attempt at ferocity, but instead gave the impression that he suffered from a sour stomach. The plump man whispered to him and he made a disagreeable noise.

‘We’re camped a long way from here – I hate to return empty-handed,’ said George. ‘Let me pass. I won’t bother you again.’

The plump man looked to his friend and after brief consideration the balding man said, ‘We can spare a few, I reckon. I apologize for treating you rude, but we’ve had problems with our neighbors poaching our supplies.’

‘Neighbors? Is there a village nearby?’

‘Naw, just people like us. And you. People what Griaule chased onto the plain. Maybe fifty or sixty of ’em. It’s hard to say exactly because most keep to themselves and they’re scattered all over. Might be more.’

George hefted his mangos, slung them over his shoulder. ‘Griaule, you say? You’re talking about that smallish dragon?’

‘Same as chased you out here,’ said the man. ‘Quite different from the Griaule we’re used to, he is. But you can see it’s him if you looks close.’

‘How long have you been out here?’ George asked.

‘Three months, a piece more. At least that’s how long me and the family’s been here.’ He gestured at the plump man. ‘Edgar joined us a week or so later.’

Edgar grinned at George and nodded.

‘Is that your family?’ George pointed to the figures in the brush. ‘Please assure them I mean no harm.’

‘I’m sure they know that, sir. It’s obvious you’re a gentleman.’ The balding man toed the dirt, as if embarrassed. ‘My daughter took a terrible fright, what with all Griaule’s bellowing. She’s never been right in the head. Now she ain’t comfortable around
people . . . except for Edgar here.’ Resentment, or something akin, seeped into his voice. ‘She fair dotes on him.’

‘How many people are with you, Mister?’ asked Edgar, startling George, who had begun to think he was a mute.

‘Just a friend and I.’

He introduced himself and learned that the balding man was Peter Snelling, his wife was named Sandra and his daughter Peony. These formalities concluded, he asked what use they thought the dragon had for them.

‘Might as well ask how much the moon weighs,’ said Edgar, and Snelling chimed in, ‘You’ll get nowhere attempting to divine his purposes.’

‘You must have had some thoughts on the subject,’ said George.

‘Don’t reckon he wants to eat us,’ Snelling said. ‘He wouldn’t go to all this trouble . . . yet he did eat that one fellow.’

‘Didn’t really eat him.’ Edgar scratched a jowl. ‘Chewed on him and spit him out is all.’

‘That was because he tried to run off,’ said Snelling. ‘It were Griaule’s way of telling the rest of us to stay put.’

The idea that anyone could undergo this trial and not expend a great deal of energy in trying to comprehend it was alien to George. In his opinion, it did not speak highly of the two men’s intellect. He asked how they had wound up in this desolate place to begin with. Had they, like him, been transported by a magical agency?

‘You’d have to talk to Peony,’ Snelling said. ‘She were fooling around with something, but she wouldn’t show me what it was. Then the walls of our house vanished and there we were, with nothing but nature around us. Peony let out a screech and flung the thing in her hand away. I suppose I should have searched for it.’ He hunched his shoulders and made a rueful face. ‘It was hard to swallow, you know, that she were the one responsible. But I’m sure now it was her doing.’

‘Even if you had found it, it wouldn’t have done you much good,’ said George.

Edgar’s eyes darted to the side and George followed his gaze. An immensely fat woman with gray tangles of hair framing a
lumpish, sunburned face and wearing a tent-sized piece of canvas for a dress, rushed at him, swinging a tree branch. The branch struck him on the neck and shoulder. Twigs scratched his face; sprays of leaves impaired his vision – a confusing blow yet not that concussive. He staggered to the side, but did not fall. Snelling threw himself on him, riding him piggyback, and as husband and wife sought to wrestle him to the ground, Edgar poked him with his stick, more annoyance than threat, his moony face bobbing now and then into sight. George managed to shove the woman away and, when she came at him again, he planted a foot in the pit of her stomach, sending her waddling backwards across the clearing, her arms making circular motions as if attempting to fly out of danger. She made a cawing noise and toppled into a bush – her dress rode up around her hips, leaving the raddled flesh of her legs protruding from the leaves. Snelling clung to him, biting and clawing, until George grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the mouth. Edgar dropped his stick, retreated to the edge of the clearing, and stood wringing his hands, his expression shifting from pained to vacant, and finally lapsing into the feckless grin that George took to be the natural resolution of his features.

He wiped blood from his chin, where a twig had nicked him. Snelling lay on his side, breathing through his mouth, blood crimsoning his teeth. His wife struggled to sit up, teetered for a moment, flirting with the perpendicular before falling back again.

‘Sandra!’ Snelling’s cry sounded forlorn, almost wistful, not like a shout of warning, or even one of sympathy.

‘Are you mad?’ George kicked dirt on him and scooped up his shirt, along with the mangos it held. ‘Risking your lives for a few mangos! Fucking idiots!’

A noise behind him – he spun about, ready to defend himself. Standing at the margin of the clearing was a gangly young girl in deplorable condition, twelve or thirteen years old. Ginger hair hung across her face in thick snarls and her faded blue rag of a dress did little to hide her immature breasts. In addition to a freckling of inflamed insect bites, the skin of her torso and legs was striped with welts, some of them fresh, evidence of harsh
usage. Her lips trembled and she tottered forward. ‘Help me,’ she said in a frail voice. She stumbled and might have fallen had George not caught her. She was so slight, when he put an arm about her, he inadvertently lifted her off the ground.

Snelling collapsed onto his back, breath shuddering, but his wife, displaying renewed vigor, shrilled, ‘Take your hands off my daughter!’

Edgar, displaying unexpected ferocity, charged George with arms outstretched and fingers hooked, as if intending to scratch out his eyes. George stepped to the side and, using the mangos knotted in his shirt, clubbed him in the face. Edgar dropped like a stone, blood spurting from his nose, and began to sob. Between the sobs, George heard Peony speaking almost inaudibly, saying, ‘She’s not my mother . . . she’s not my mother.’

‘Liar!’ Mrs Snelling shrieked. ‘Ingrate!’

‘She may be your daughter, but you most certainly are not her mother,’ George said. ‘No real mother would allow her child to endure such abuse.’

‘Bastard! If we were in Morningshade, I’d have you beaten.’

‘Lucky for me we’re not in Morningshade. And lucky for you I’m less concerned with justice than I am with caring for your daughter’s injuries.’ George’s outrage crested. ‘My God! What sort of people are you to treat a child so? Wild animals would show more humanity! I’m taking her with me. If you attempt to interfere in any way, I’ll finish what I’ve begun. I’ll kill you all!’

To illustrate this message, George kicked Edgar in the thigh. He backed from the clearing and, once he could no longer see them, he picked up Peony and ran.

He had gone no more than twenty-five yards when a blast of sound assailed him, seeming to come from on high, followed by a windy rush. Glancing up, he glimpsed a pale swollen belly and a twitching serpentine tail passing overhead. Moments later, the bushes crunched under an enormous weight and a low grumbling signaled that Griaule had landed nearby and was crashing through the thickets. George flung himself down, burrowed under the dead fronds scattered beneath a palmetto tree, and gathered Peony to him, clamping a hand to her mouth
to prevent an outcry. More crunching, dry twigs snapping like strings of firecrackers; then the great glutinous huff of the dragon breathing. Through a gap in the leaves George saw a thick scaly leg that terminated in a foot as broad as a sofa cushion, with a spike protruding from its heel and four yellowish talons, much discolored. Peony, who had been squirming about, went limp in his arms, and a cold sensation settled over his brain. Cold and seething, like the margins of a tide. He had the impression of an ego gone wormy with age and anger, a malefic, indulgent potency whose whims dwarfed his deepest desires, an entity to which he was intrinsically subservient. A message resolved from the coldness, clear as the reverberations of a gong, silencing every other mental voice, and he knew, as surely as he might know the worn portrait of an empress on a Roman sestercius, that his place was beside the pools, that he should never return to the mango tree. Such behavior would not be tolerated a second time. He shut his eyes, terror-struck by this brush with Griaule’s mind (it had been too alien and powerful to write off as imagination born of fear), and he refused to open them again until he heard leathery wings battering the air and a scream issuing from above the plain.

As they made their way toward home, he rejected all interior conversation concerning the possibility that the dragon had spoken to him (though he was certain it had), and he stuffed any material relating to the encounter into his mental attic and locked it away. Denial was the only rational course in the face of such power. To distract himself further, he poked around in the fume and bubble of his thoughts, hoping to learn what had provoked him to such a rage against the Snellings. Not since his schoolboy days had he lifted a hand in anger and, while he had acted in self-defense, the murderous character of the emotions that had attended his actions astonished him. He could not unearth any inciting event from his past that would have predisposed him to such a vicious reaction, yet he realized he had tapped into a reservoir of ferocity that must have been simmering inside him for years, waiting a proper outlet. His threats had not been empty bluster. He meant every word.