The Dragon Griaule (35 page)

A scrawny, stoop-shouldered, white-haired man drinking two-handed at the bar was the sole occupant of the common room. Boards and benches had been overturned; bottles and broken crockery littered the floor. George’s hearing had returned to a degree – his ears rang, but he could detect the brighter range of sounds. He asked if the old man had seen Peony and the man did not turn from the bar to confront George and gave no other response. Drying blood from one ear made a track down his seamed cheek. Then the walls shimmied, the floorboards bounced, dust sifted down from the rafters and more bottles fell from a shelf behind the counter – Griaule shifting position once again. Two steps and their world was in chaos.

Upstairs, George hurried along a corridor, throwing open the doors, giving the rooms a cursory inspection, finding un-made beds and nightgowns draped over chairs, but no Peony. He was certain that he would be crushed or incinerated, and that certainty grew stronger with each second. In a room at the end of the hall whose window framed a view of the city, ruddy light flickered on creamy wallpaper with a pyramid pattern, and
a pudgy, dark-haired woman in a pink flannel robe sat on the edge of the bed, watching Teocinte burn. Her eyes fell upon him and an expression of mirth spread like butter melting across her features. She patted the sheet beside her, inviting him to sit. He wanted to urge her to run, but something in her face, some central weakness, told him not to bother. A muscular balding man pushed past him into the room and, after a hostile glance at George, removed his trousers. The woman turned again to the window, plucking fretfully at the lapel of her robe. Abandoning them to whatever exercise they planned, George fled down the stairs and out into the street, almost overlooking the slight ginger-haired figure squatting on her haunches outside the door, rocking back and forth. Peony didn’t complain when he caught her up – she appeared stunned and uncaring.

Whereas the behavior of the couple in Ali’s had impressed George as being utterly final in its dissolution, the streets were an evolution of that finality, a Babel of dimly perceived sounds and voices, a bedlam of people who clawed and clutched and kicked. At one point somebody knocked him off-balance, sending him to a knee; he put out a hand to prevent a fall and braced against the bruised, misshapen face of a boy who had been trampled beneath the feet of the crowd. He yanked back his hand, repelled, yet this intimate contact with death firmed his resolve and he became single-minded in his pursuit of survival, using his size to full advantage, treating people like impediments, clubbing them with his fist, shoving them down and tossing them aside without a thought for their fate or the state of his soul, stained by one death and now, doubtless, by others. Aghast faces surfaced from the melee and he dispatched them one after the other. Dust and the smell of fear, of fury . . . all the toxins of dementia poisoned the air. Yet he felt immune to fear, unstoppable, invincible in his lack of emotion. Then, as he reached the outskirts of the city, where the dirt street gave out onto an upward slope, the crowd fanning out across it, a splintering crack ripped across the other noises, seeming to come both from inside him and from without. George looked back and saw that the dragon’s leg had buckled, a shockingly white shard of bone protruding from the scales above the knee,
blood oozing from the break, and he recognized that Cattanay’s prediction had come to pass.
¹³
Griaule’s gargantuan head swiveled to the left, a malefic golden eye canted downward, and though others must have thought the same, George had the idea that the dragon was staring directly at him, a white star shining deep within his throat. The leg buckled further, the dragon listed toward them, and George sprinted up the hill, running even more desperately than before, carrying Peony under an arm like a small rolled-up rug. The crowd’s wailing became a shriek as they fled from beneath Griaule’s fall.

Perhaps time slowed, subject to a new gravity now that Griaule was truly dying, or perhaps it was simply the chemistry of terror stretching seconds into wider fractions; but George ran for what felt like a long, long time. He heard an eerie hiss and a blast of heat at his back sent him veering out of control; he righted himself and kept going. Time slowed further and he could clearly make out his labored breathing above the ringing in his ears and the shouts of people around him; and then, the last thing he would ever hear: the dragon’s final roar, a percussive sound that shot lightning through his ears and resolved into a fizzing that banished every other sound, grew faint and fainter yet, then faded and faded, stranding him in the midst of a pure unmodulated silence. The earth convulsed, twitching like the skin on a cat’s back, and he was flung through the air, somehow managing to hang onto Peony and shield her from harm. He did not black out, but lay facedown for ten or fifteen minutes, longer perhaps, moving an arm, a leg, not testing his mobility, just incidental movements, content to rest and be thoughtless. When he sat up he found that Peony was unconscious, but breathing steadily. Only then did he turn and gaze through the pall of dust and smoke toward Teocinte.

The better sections of town, Cerro Bonito, Haver’s Roost, and Yulin’s Grove, were still afire, releasing black smoke into
the sky from half a thousand conflagrations; but the shanties of Morningshade had gone up as if made of paper and all that was left of them were smoldering piles of wreckage; indeed, the blaze had moved through the slum at such a pace that a handful of more substantial buildings in the district, those with their own water supply (Griaule’s temple for instance), had survived relatively unscathed, the fire sweeping past them so rapidly that they had not been endangered for long – presumably their staffs and inhabitants had taken steps to protect them. Dwarfing the ruinous landscape, the immensity that was Griaule lay on his side, his back toward the hill where George and Peony were situated, his neck twisted so that his snout angled toward the sky like a scaly tower, a forked tongue lolling between his fangs. His ribcage had shattered and bones poked through the skin in five or six places. It was a sight of such scope and implausibility, George could not frame the whole picture in his mind and for years thereafter, until his actual memories were replaced by a popular rendering of the death of Griaule, he recalled it in fragments. The most memorable element of the scene for him was not Griaule, but the slope that led up from the outskirts of the city. Although the majority of the dead had been incinerated by the dragon’s uncanny fire, reduced to piles of unidentifiable ash, his flame must have weakened toward the end, because several thousand carbonized corpses decorated the hill, replicas of their living selves save for the fact they were blackened and so fragile that the pressure of a finger upon them would cause them to collapse and lose their shape. They were dust held together by habit and little else, yet they looked solid, an intricate weaving together of human forms that might have been mistaken for a work accomplished by some apocalyptic artist.

Peony stirred; her fist opened – the scale slipped from her palm. George picked it up and was startled to feel that cold, crawly vitality he had become aware of in the thickets on the day he and Peony met. An image slipped into his mind, that of a gold coin, a Byzantine solidus, very rare, from the reign of the emperor Aleksii. Then an unfamiliar silver coin, yet Egyptian in aspect, came into his mind, and it was followed by another and another yet, and he saw gems of superb luster and clarity,
golden cups of great antiquity beset with uncut stones, bejeweled daggers and mirrors with gold frames, a small mountain of such objects, a treasure like no other. He knew he should be about the business of survival (they were not safe yet), but he was tired and the gold was so alluring and that other world of death and smoke and flame seemed far away. And then he was exiting the cavern where the gold was kept, going by torchlight along a meandering tunnel, walking slowly and silently as in a dream, and once out in the light of day he could no longer see the entrance to the tunnel. It had vanished, hidden by ferns and vines and perhaps by some ancient magic, but he didn’t concern himself with such trivia – he had the confidence, a serene sense of fate and his relation to it, that he would find his treasure again.

10
The amphitheater was not natural, but had been excavated from the side of a hill during Sylvia and George’s absence from Teocinte (a term of years, and not of months, as they perceived it), its purpose being to provide seating for audiences who had come to witness a Sound and Light performance. Such a performance never occurred, though the lamps had been set in place and a stage built for the orchestra, and some have conjectured that the impulse to construct the amphitheater came not from the city fathers, as had been thought, but from a more subtle agency whose penchant for such ironies had been noted throughout the long history of Teocinte, and it was also thought that the seating had not been intended for tourists, but for precisely the audience that occupied it on the morning after George, Sylvia and Peony had been forced to flee their encampment.

11
Parasitic creatures peculiar to Griaule. Skizzers were relatively benign, but flakes, commonly camouflaging themselves as part of a scale, exuded a poison from their skin that led to the deaths of countless unwary scalehunters.

12
The roar killed and injured several thousand people, most of them struck by flying glass from a myriad shattered windows. Nearly half the population suffered damage to their hearing to one degree or another.

13
Though he did not predict that Griaule would awaken, Cattanay told the city fathers that the poisons in the paint would seep into his system, weakening his internal structure, and, unable to support his weight, the dragon would eventually ‘cave in like an old barn.’

Chapter Eight

Excerpt from
The
Last Days of Griaule
by Sylvia Monteverdi

They were at him the next day, all the hustlers, the thieves, and the entrepreneurs, inclusive of those who had legal rights to his body and those who did not. Their awe annihilated by greed, a force nearly equal to fear, they swarmed over the corpse, cutting, prying, digging up the hillside where the dragon had rested, searching for his hoard. In light of what had transpired, it was disgusting, but it was fascinating as well. I spent much of the next decade documenting the period in my books and stories about the town’s rebirth and its newest industry, the sale and distribution of Griaule’s relics, fraudulent and real. During that time I rarely left Teocinte, but almost eight years to the day after I had last seen George and Peony in the amphitheater, I was in Port Chantay on some protracted business with my publisher and, on a whim, I contacted George, inviting him and Peony for a glass of wine. He suggested we meet at Silk, a trendy waterfront café with wide glass windows, dainty tables and chairs, and no silk whatsoever apart from the woman whose name it bore.

I’d heard that they had both been deafened, that Peony suffered from amnesia and now lived with George as his ward, and that George, who had divorced, was quite wealthy – rumor had it that he had been the one to unearth Griaule’s hoard. It was also rumored that he had an improper relationship with Peony, though on the face of things they appeared to be a typical
father-and-daughter. He slurred his words a bit due to his deafness, but otherwise appeared fit; he sported a mustache and a goatee (his hair had gone gray) that, along with a tailored suit and the fastidiousness that attended his movements, lent him a cultivated air. Yet his physical changes were nothing compared to the mental. Gone was every trace of the city bumpkin I had known, the insecurity, earnestness, the paranoia. He possessed a coolness of manner that was informed, I thought, by an utter absence of emotionality, and this unnerved me. I would not have trusted myself to be able to control him as once I had.

Drastic as these changes were, Peony’s were even more extreme. She had developed into a beautiful, poised young woman who was, in every respect, quite charming. George claimed that her amnesia had wiped out all memory of abuse and thus had assisted in her maturation. Her attempts at speech were difficult to understand, for she did not recall the sound of words, and she relied on sign language to communicate, with George serving as her interpreter. After an exchange of pleasantries, she apologized for having forgotten me and went to have coffee with a friend at an outside table, leaving George and me to talk.

‘Monteverdi,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose that is your real name.’

‘Of course not! What would I be without an alias?’

I had meant this as a joke, but George did not smile – he nodded as if my statement had revealed some essential truth about me, and this caused me to think that perhaps it had.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t try to find you,’ I said. ‘After the fire and everything.’

‘It was chaos,’ said George. ‘You would have been wasting your time.’

‘That wasn’t why I didn’t look for you.’

‘Oh?’

‘I was afraid you were falling in love with me.’

He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I could have fallen in love with almost anyone in those days. You happened to be in the right place at the right time.’

‘And you were acting crazy. At least you were before Griaule herded us back to Teocinte. I didn’t want to be around you.’

George let four or five seconds elapse before smiling thinly and saying, ‘Well, you’re safe from me now.’

‘I don’t feel safe.’ I waited for a response, but none came. ‘You make me uneasy.’

‘Peony says I often have that effect on other people. In your case, I imagine it’s exacerbated by guilt.’

‘Guilt? What would I have to be guilty about? I did nothing . . .’

‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘Really. It’s quite trivial.’

‘I want to know what you’re accusing me of!’

‘Not a thing. Forget I mentioned it.’ He reached a hand into a side pocket of his jacket as if to withdraw something, but let it hang there. ‘I’ve read the little book you wrote about us.’

I was irritated, yet at the same time curious to know what he thought about my work. ‘And how did it strike you?’

‘Accurate,’ he said. ‘As far as it went. I was as you initially described me. Desperate. Desperate to escape my old life. But I would never have admitted it then.’

‘What do you mean, “. . . as far as it went?”’

‘You missed the best part of the story.’

‘I saw enough of Griaule’s death, if that’s what you’re talking about. What’s more, I’ve seen the city rebuilt, which you didn’t see.’

‘The city’s of no consequence. As for Griaule . . .’ He chuckled. ‘We’ve always underestimated him. By hacking him apart and carrying the pieces to the far corners of the earth, we did exactly what he wanted. Now he rules in every quarter of the globe.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You once quoted me a passage from Rossacher. Do you remember? “His thoughts roam the plenum, his mind is a cloud that encompasses our world.” Something of an overstatement, yet it’s true enough. Do you find it so hard to accept now?’

‘Are you telling me Griaule is alive? Bodiless . . . or alive in all his separate parts?’

He inclined his head and made a delicate gesture with his hand, as if to suggest that he had no interest in pursuing the matter.

I drained the dregs of my wine. ‘Don’t you find it strange that we’ve reversed roles? I was once the believer and you the skeptic.’

He took his hand from his pocket and held it out, his palm open to display a glass pendant in which was embedded a chip of lustrous blue-green, darkening to a dull azurine blue at the edges.

‘Is that my scale?’ I asked.

‘Peony and I have no further use for it. I think Griaule intended it to be yours.’

The glass enclosing the scale was cold and somewhat tingly to the touch. I remarked on this and George said, ‘It may be that I am mad, and that Peony is mad, and that we have not been guided in our lives ever since Griaule was disembodied. You can prove this one way or the other by shattering the glass and touching the scale. The sensation will be much stronger that way.’

‘Will it reveal the location of Griaule’s hoard?’ I asked half in jest.

‘Too late for that,’ he said. ‘But he will have something for you, I’m sure. Since we met, everything in our lives has been part of Griaule’s design.’

I tucked the scale into my purse. ‘Perhaps you can explain, since you seem so certain in your knowledge, why he deemed it necessary to uproot so many people and drive us onto the plain. Was it simply to witness his death, or was it something more?’

‘I have come to understand Griaule to an extent, but I can’t know everything he knows. Was it ego, the desire to have at least a few survivors who could bear witness to his death? Yes, I think so. But there is much more to it than that. If he wishes he can control every facet of our lives. And our lives – yours and mine and Peony’s, and thousands of others besides – have been thus controlled. We are part of a scheme by means of which he will someday come to dominate the world as Rossacher’s book claimed he already had. So far, the instrumentality he’s used to implement his scheme has been unwieldy, scattershot. He’s made mistakes. Now that he is everywhere in the world, his manipulations will grow more subtle, more precise, and he
will make no further mistakes. Eventually, I assume we will be unaware of him . . . and he will lose interest in us. It may be that this is, by necessity, how the relationships between men and gods develop.’ George fussed with his napkin and said in a reproachful tone, as if talking to a child, ‘You knew all this once. Have you truly forgotten?’

‘Forgotten? Perhaps I place less value on the specific precepts of my belief than once I did, but no, I haven’t forgotten.’

George was silent for a while, silent and motionless, and I thought how restrained he had grown in his movements; yet he did not seem constrained or repressed in the least – rather it was as though he had become accustomed to stillness. He cleared his throat, took a sip of wine, and said, ‘Let us speak no more of it.’ He nudged the menu with a finger, turning it so he could more read the front page. ‘Shall I order something? The seaweed cakes are excellent here . . . and the cherries confit would go well with your port.’

When it came time for George to leave, I felt strong emotion – we had been through an ordeal together and our conversation had, despite his coolness, brought back fond memories I did not think I had – I would have liked to acknowledge the experience with an embrace and I expected George to feel the same way, but he performed a slight bow, collected Peony, and left without a backward glance.

I have not yet broken the glass in which the scale is encased, yet I know someday I will, if only to satisfy my curiosity about George. I ran into him and Peony once more before returning to Teocinte. Two days following our meeting at Silk, I took the morning air on the promenade, looking at the boats in the harbor, their exotic keels and bright, strangely shaped sails giving evidence of Port Chantay’s international flavor, and caught sight of George and Peony by the railing that fronted the water, engaged in what appeared to be a spirited conversation . . . at least it was spirited on Peony’s part. I ducked behind a small palm tree, one of many potted specimens set along the promenade, not wishing to be seen. We’d said our farewells, as belated and anti-climactic as they were, and I felt rejected – I’d
come to the meeting prepared to rebuff George’s advances and had not expected to be treated with diffidence. If his cool manner had been studied, I would have chalked all he said and did up to hurt feelings; but his dismissive behavior had seemed wholly unaffected.

His back to the water, George leaned against the railing, his hands braced and his face tipped to the sun like a penitent at prayer, while Peony moved about him with quick steps, almost a dance, pacing to and fro, making graceful turns and exuberant gestures. I imagined her to be describing an event that had thrilled or elated her; but as I watched, though there was no overt change in their physical attitudes, I started to view them differently and perceived sexual elements in the dance – it reminded me of Griaule’s temple in Morningshade and how some of my sisters in the brothel would circle the dragon’s statue, caressing it from time to time. There is a sexual component in every young girl’s connection with her father and I’m sure that was all it was between George and Peony . . . even if not, she was twenty-one, old enough to do as she pleased. Like most people, I needed to think meanly about something I valued in order to walk away from it, especially something I had neglected for no good reason and such a stretch of years; so I chose to think about George and Peony as having an illicit relationship and told myself it was none of my business what they did or which god they worshiped or how they went through the world, because they were unimportant to me. Perhaps those feelings and memories that surfaced during our meeting were, as are many of our recollections, born of a marriage between false emotion and a lack of clarity concerning the facts. Perhaps our lives are contrivances of lies and illusions. Yet when I think now about George and Peony, none of this seems relevant and scarcely the day passes when I do not call them to mind.