The Dragon Griaule (29 page)

There seemed no dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, or perhaps Hota never completely blacked out and, instead, sank only a few inches beneath the surface of the waking world, and was, as with someone partially submerged in a stream, still able to hear muted voices and to glimpse distorted shapes. It seemed he was borne aloft, jostled and otherwise roughly handled, but he did not fully return to his senses until he stood beneath the remnant corner post of Liar’s House, something tight about his neck, surrounded by a crowd of men and women and children, all of whom were shouting at once, cursing, screaming for his blood. He wanted to pluck the tight thing away from his neck and discovered his hands were lashed behind his back. Dazedly, he glanced up and saw that a rope had been slung over the wedge of flooring still attached to the corner post, and that one end of the rope was about his neck. Terrified now, he surged forward, trying to break free, but whoever held the rope pulled it tight, constricting his throat and forcing him to stand quietly. He breathed shallowly, staring at the faces ranged about him. He recognized none of them,
yet they were all familiar. It was as if he were looking at cats or dogs or horses, incapable of registering the distinctions among them that they themselves noticed. A woman, her thin face contorted with anger, spat at him. The rest appeared to think this a brilliant idea and those closest to him all began spitting. Their saliva coated his face. It disturbed him to think that he would die with their slime dripping from him. He lifted a shoulder, rubbed some of it off his cheek. Then the blond man whom he had beaten in the tavern stepped forth from the crowd. Hota recognized him not by his pink complexion or pudgy features, but by his mangled right hand, which he held up to Hota’s eyes, letting him see the damage he had caused. The man waved the crowd to silence and said to Hota, ‘Speak now, if ever you wish to speak again.’

Still groggy, Hota said, ‘None of this is my doing.’

Shouts and derisive laughter.

Once more, the man waved them to silence. ‘Who then should we blame?’

‘Griaule,’ Hota said, and was forced to shout the rest of his statement over the renewed laughter of the crowd. ‘How could I have brought a dragon here? I’m only a man!’

‘Are you?’ The blond man caught the front of Hota’s shirt with his good hand and brought his face close. ‘We’ve been wondering about that.’

‘Of course I am! I was manipulated! Used! Griaule used me!’

The blond man seemed to give the idea due consideration. ‘It’s possible,’ he said at length. ‘In fact, I imagine it’s probable.’

The crowd at his back muttered unhappily.

‘The thing is . . .’ said the blond man, and smiled. ‘We can’t hang Griaule, can we? You’ll just have to stand in for him.’

Hooting and howling their laughter, the crowd shook their fists in the air. Some snatched at Hota, others clawed and slapped at his head. The blond man moved them back. ‘You’ve killed our horses, you’ve stolen from us. You’re responsible for that bitch tearing Benno Grustark to pieces. Any of these crimes would merit hanging.’

‘What could I have done!’ Hota cried.

‘You could have talked to us. Helped us. Brought us food.’
The blond man waved his damaged hand toward the hills. ‘Do you know how many of us died for want of food and shelter?’

‘I
didn’t
know! If you’d told me, if you hadn’t threatened me . . . But I wasn’t thinking about you! I couldn’t! I had no choice!’

‘Lack of choice. A common failing. But not, I think, a legal remedy.’ The blond man moved the crowd farther back, warning that Hota might kick them as he was being hauled up. He turned to Hota and asked blithely, ‘Anything else?’

A hundred things occurred to Hota. Pleas and arguments, statements, things about his life, things he had learned that he thought might be worth announcing. But he could muster the will to speak none of them. The rope made his neck itch. His balls were tightened and cold. His knees trembled. His eyes went out along the street, past the drying mud and the crooked shanties and their rust-patched roofs, and he felt a shape inside his head that seemed to have some correspondence with the green mountainous shape that lay beyond, as if Griaule were telling him a secret or offering an assurance or having a laugh at his expense. Impossible to guess which. A desire swelled in him, a great ache for life that grew and grew until he thought he might be able to burst his bonds and escape this old fate he had avoided for so long.

‘Hang him,’ said the blond man. ‘But not too high. I want to watch his face.’

As Hota was yanked off his feet, the crowd’s roar ascended with him, and blended into another roar that issued from within his skull. The roar of his life, of his constricted blood. It was if he had been made buoyant by the sound. His face was forced downward by the rope and his vision reddened. He saw the upturned faces of the crowd, their gaping black mouths and widened eyes, and he also saw his legs spasming. He had kicked off a shoe. The inside of his head grew hot, but slowly, as if death’s flame were burning low. Fighting for breath, he flexed the roped muscles of his neck and found that he could breathe. The heat lessened.

They had set the knot in the noose incorrectly.

Air was coming through.

Barely . . . but enough to sustain him.

That became a problem, then. To breathe, to hold out against fate, or to relax his muscles and let go. Soon the decision would be made for him, but he wanted it to be his.

A terrible new pressure cinched the rope tighter.

Two children had shinnied up his lower legs and were humping themselves up and down. Trying to break his neck, he realized. The little shits were giggling. He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing all his energy and will on maintaining breath.

Fiery pains jolted along his spine. White lights exploded behind his lids. One such flash swelled into a blinding radiance that opened before him, vast and shimmering and deep, a country all its own. He felt a shifting inside him, a strange powerful movement that bloomed outward . . . and then he could see himself! Not just his legs, but his entire bulky figure. The children jiggling up and down, and the crowd; the exhausted town leached of every color but the redness of his dying sight.

Then he lost interest in this phenomenon and in the world, borne outward on that curious expansion. He recalled Magali and he thought that this – here and now – must be the fulfillment of her promise, the beginning of fulfillment, and that his soul was growing large, coming to enclose the material in the way of a dragon’s soul . . .

And then a violent crack, like that of a severing lightning stroke or an immense displacement, and a thought came to mind that stilled his fears, or else it was the last of him and there was no fear left . . . the thought that it was all a dream, his dream, how he had run and felt joy, how he had leaped – sprawled, really, but that was close enough – and been borne aloft and now he was soaring, and the crack he had heard was the crack of his wings as they caught the air, and the roaring was the rush of first flight, and the light was the high holy sun, and soon he would see Magali and they would fly together along the pattern of their curving fate, with the child flying below them, above the green hill of their religion, and this was his reward, this transformation, this was the fulfillment of every promise, or else it was the lie of it.

THE
TABORIN
SCALE

Chapter One

If a man can be measured by the size of his obsessions, George Taborin might have been said to be a very small man, smaller even than the quarter-men rumored to inhabit the forests of Tasmania. He was a numismatist by trade, by avocation a lover of rare and ancient coins, and he spent his days cataloguing, cleaning, and in contemplation of such coins, picturing as he did the societies whose lifeblood they had emblematized. Rubbing the face of Ptolemy, for instance, on a silver drachma found in Alexandria, struck at the approximate time of the invasion of Cyprus by Demetrios Poliokortes (probably in Salamis, the last city to fall to the Besieger), would conjure not merely the historical context of the Roman empire and Ptolemaic Egypt, but brought visions so vivid that he imagined he felt the weight of an armored breastplate on his chest or caught the scent of naphtha from an arrow dipped in Greek fire smoldering in its victim’s flesh. It was as if the ball of his thumb stirred the energies of the coin, releasing some essence of the moments through which it had passed, and it had been thus ever since his sixth birthday when his uncle gave him a Phoenician copper as a present.

From this you might suppose George, in his fortieth year, to have been a fastidious, obsessive little man given to wool-gathering, with spectacles and a potbelly and few close friends, his minimal life partitioned into orderly sections like the trays
whereon he displayed the best of his collection. You would have been correct in this assessment save for one thing: George Taborin was not little. He stood a hand’s breadth over six feet, more if you measured from the peak of his coarse black hair, which tended to arrange itself into spiky growths when left unwashed, causing it to be said that if George ran into you while walking with his head down (as was his habit), you would be fortunate to survive the encounter without a puncture or two. Thanks to his parents, a farm couple who had viewed him less as a beloved addition to the family than as child labor, he was powerfully built; his sedentary occupation had eroded his strengths and softened his mid-section, but not so much that he was often challenged – he had earned a schoolyard reputation for toughness and durability in a fight and that reputation clung to him yet. He had a slightly undershot chin, a straight nose whose only notable quality was that it was too big for his face, and a mouth through which he was prone to breathe due to a persistent sinus condition (for all that, his was a face that missed being handsome by an ounce here, a centimeter there, and might have passed muster had there been more self-confidence underlying it). These features conspired with his bulk to lend him a doltish aspect, like a gangling idiot boy thickened into a man. When gazing into a mirror, something he did as infrequently as possible, he would have the notion that his soul had not thickened commensurately and was rattling around inside its house, a poor fit for the flesh it animated, stunted and too small by half.

Pursuant to his family’s wishes (the thought being that if George didn’t marry young he would never find a woman), at the age of fifteen he wed Rosemary LeMaster, a chubby, sullen, unprepossessing girl who, over the course of a quarter-century, had matured into a flirtatious, Raphael-esque matron. They had not been blessed with children and, because George deeply desired a family, as did Rosemary (so she claimed, though he suspected her of taking steps to ensure her infertility), they still shared the marriage bed once a week, regular as clockwork; but now that George’s business (Taborin Coins & Antiquities) had prospered, providing them the wherewithal to hire servants,
Rosemary, freed from domestic duties, wasted no time in making up for the period of youthful experimentation she’d never had, aligning herself with a clutch of upper-middle-class wives in Port Chantay who called their group the Whitestone Rangers (named for the district in which many of them lived) and considered themselves prettier, more sophisticated and fashionable than they in fact were. She veered into a social orbit of parties and trivial causes (the placing of planter boxes along the harbor, for one) that served as opportunities to meet the men with whom she and her sisters would share dalliances and affairs. Although troubled by his wife’s infidelities (he had no proof positive, yet he was aware of the Rangers’ liberal attitude toward the matrimonial bond), George did not complain. He and Rosemary led essentially separate lives and this latest separation had not created any disruption in the routines of the marriage. Then, too, he had no grounds for complaint since he was regularly unfaithful to Rosemary.

In the spring of each year, George would travel to Teocinte and pass the next three weeks sporting in the brothels of Morning shade, a district that never received the morning sun, tucked so close beneath the dragon Griaule’s
¹
monstrous shadow, his ribcage bulged out over a portion of the area like a green-and-gold sky.
²
Apart from its brothels, Morningshade was known for its junk shops and stalls where you could find antiquities and relics of Griaule (mostly fakes) among the dragon-shaped pipes and pendants, his image adorning a variety of merchandise including plates, pennants, toys (wooden swords were a big seller), tablecloths, teaspoons, mugs, and maps purporting to divulge the location of his hoard.
³
George would
spend his afternoons combing through these shops, searching for old coins. One evening in May, after such an expedition, he took himself to Ali’s Eternal Reward (the crudely-lettered word ‘Hellish’ had been added and marked for insertion between Ali’s and Eternal), a brothel on the sunnier edge of Morningshade, there to examine his day’s treasures over a pint of bitters.

The common room of the tavern, lit by kerosene lamps and almost empty at that early hour, was shaped like a capital I and smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and several decades of grease. Pitch-covered beams quartered the ceiling, beneath which lay benches and boards, and whitewashed walls gone a splotchy gray from kitchen smoke and innumerable grimy touches, and a counter behind which a corpulent barman wearing a fez (not Ali, who was a purely fictive personage) stood lordly and watchful, punctuating the quiet with the occasional
thwack
of a flyswatter. Three young women in loosely belted dressing gowns sat at the center of the room, talking softly. Carts rattled by outside, and a vendor shrilled the virtues of her coconut sweets. To George, sitting at a window in a rear corner of the I, the conversations of passersby came as bursts of unintelligible words peppered with curses.

While inspecting the contents of a glass jar containing coins and buttons and tin badges that he had purchased as a lot, he unearthed a dark leathern chip stiff with age and grime, shaped like a thumbnail, though three times the size and much thicker. He opened his cleaning kit and dabbed at the chip with a cotton ball dipped in solvent, after some exercise clearing a speck of bluish green at the center. His interest enlisted, he put on the spectacles he used for close work, bent to the chip and rubbed at it vigorously with the cotton ball, widening the speck. The blue-green color held a gem-like luster. He fitted a jeweler’s loupe to his spectacles and held the chip to his eye.

‘What you got there?’

A prostitute clad in a robe of peach silk, a thin brunette in her early twenties with curly hair, a dusky complexion, and a face that, though pretty, was too sharp-featured for his tastes, slid onto the bench beside him and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’

Startled not only by her, but by the fact that the tavern had, without his notice, filled with a noisy crowd, he dropped the chip into her hand, an action he instantly regretted, worried that she might abscond with it.

‘I haven’t seen one of these since I was a bare-ass kid,’ the woman said, pushing her hair back from her eyes. ‘My granny wore one like this around her neck. She promised she’d leave it to me, but they buried the old hag with it.’

‘You know what it is, then?’

‘A dragon scale . . . not off a monster like Griaule. The babies have this blue color when they’re born, or so I hear.
⁴
I suppose it could be Griaule’s from when he was little. There ain’t been any baby dragons around these parts for centuries. The scale my granny wore was passed down from her great-great-great.’

George reached for the scale, but the woman closed her hand.

‘I’ll give you a ride for it.’ She opened her robe, exposing her breasts, and shimmied her shoulders.

‘Let me have it,’ said George, snapping his fingers.

‘Don’t act so stern!’ She jiggled the scale in her palm, as if assessing its weight, and then passed it to him. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you liberties for a week. When you go back to Port Chantay, you’ll have more than a guided tour of Griaule to remember, I promise.’

‘How can you tell I’m from Port Chantay?’

With a disdainful sniff, she said, ‘I have a gift.’

Her breasts were fuller than he had thought, quite shapely,
with large cinnamon areolae. Ever a pragmatic sort when it came to business affairs, he reckoned the scale to be a curiosity piece, not worth that much to the run of his customers; but he pressed his seller’s advantage.

‘I’m here two more weeks,’ he said. ‘Put yourself at my disposal for that time and the scale is yours.’

‘At your disposal? You’ll have to speak plainer than that. I ain’t letting you tie me up, if that’s how you’re bent.’

‘I’m staying at the Weathers. I’d want you there with me.’

‘The Weathers,’ she said, and made an appreciative face. ‘What else would you want?’

George spelled out his needs in clinical detail; the woman nodded and said, ‘Done.’

She extended a hand and, as if imitating George, snapped her fingers. ‘Give it here.’

‘When the two weeks are up. One of us will have to trust the other to fulfill their end of the bargain. I’d prefer it be you.’

1
The mile-long dragon, paralyzed by a wizard’s spell, in whose lee Teocinte had grown.

2
Portions of this sky, scales shed by the dragon, would occaisionally fall on the rooftops below, crushing the houses beneath, causing the plots of land upon which they had stood to appreciate in value because they would be unlikely to experience another such disaster.

3
As the tale was told, over the centuries people came from the ends of the earth to lay offerings before him, and these offerings had been transported by a succession of creatures and men controlled by the dragon to a hiding place known only to him (its location having been subsequently erased from the minds of his minions). The treasure was said by some to be fabulous beyond belief, and by others to be a complete fabrication.

4
This was true only as so far as dragons native to the region went. Dragons bred in other climes displayed a variety of coloration, ranging from ivory-scaled snow dragons of the Antarctic to the reddish-gold hue of those dragons that once inhabited the wastes north of Lake Baikul, a shade that deepened to a rich bronze at maturity.