The Dragon Griaule (25 page)

One of the serving boys, carrying a plate of rice and shredded pork into the tavern, brushed against Hota’s hip. Hota snapped at him, then felt badly for having frightened the boy. What was he doing here? he asked himself. Cohabiting with a woman who had some mysterious plan for him. Languishing in a room where pictures of dragons manifested upon the walls. He should have done with her. With Teocinte. The next time she asked for food, he should take his bag of gems and cash, and head inland. Make for Caliche or cross the country altogether to Point Horizon. But could he leave? That was the question. Would he wander the valley, confused, unable to find his way out, always winding up back in Teocinte? The answer to this question, he decided, was probably yes. He was still caught in the snare Griaule had set for him the day he met Magali. If he were ever able to escape it, he supposed it would be because the dragon was done with him.

Despite his annoyance, that conversation marked a turning in their relationship. Though she remained less than talkative over the next month, now and then, in addition to asking him for things, she would inquire as to how he felt or, standing at a window, would offer comments on the weather, the unsightliness of the town, or laugh at, say, the misery of a carter whose wheels had gotten stuck in the mud. It appeared she was developing a personality. Mean-spirited, for the most part. Minimal. But a personality nonetheless. She continued her habit of disrobing in front of him and he noticed changes in her body: a faint crease demarking the lower reach of her abdomen; a hint of crow’s-feet; the slightest sag to her breasts. Changes that would have been imperceptible to anyone else, but that to someone who had observed her for seven weeks, whose only occupation had been that observance, they stood
out like mountains on a plain. He wondered if these marks and slackenings signaled the ultimate stage of her transformation, and he found himself, against the weight of logic, thinking of her as a woman more often than not. As a consequence, his desire burned hotter, despite an apprehension that such feelings were touched with the perverse.

During the eighth week of her stay at Liar’s House, Magali became more active, sleeping less, enjoining Hota in conversations that, though brief, served to grow the relationship. One night, rather than sending him for food, she suggested that they eat in the tavern. Her suggestion did not sit easily with Hota. Under the best of circumstances, he preferred solitude. Further, he worried that Magali might not react well on being exposed to a crowd. But when they entered the tavern, a low-ceilinged room with the same gray weathered planking, furnished with long benches and tables, lit by lanterns of fanciful design, each consisting of frosted panes held in place by ironwork dragons, they found only five patrons in the place: two prostitutes and their clients dining together, and a burly blond man with a pink complexion and a pudgy, thick-lipped face who was drinking beer from a clay mug. They stationed themselves well away from the others, close to the wall, and ordered wine and venison. Magali sat without saying a word, taking in the scene, and Hota watched her with more than his usual fixity. The din and angry shouts from the kitchen, the laughter of the prostitutes, all the sounds of the tavern receded from him. It seemed a heartbeat was buried in the orange glow of the lamps, contriving a pulsing backdrop for the woman opposite him, whose bronze skin was in itself a radiant value. He gazed at her thoughtlessly, or else it was a single formless thought that uncoiled through his mind, imposing what seemed an almost ritual attentiveness.

When the food arrived, Magali picked up her venison steak and nibbled a bite, chewed, threw back her head and swallowed. She repeated this process over and over. Hota shoveled down his meal without tasting it, his attention unwavering. Like the icon of some faded gaiety, an old man with wisps of white hair fraying up from his mottled scalp, wearing a ratty purple cloak, entered the tavern and played a whistling music on bamboo
pipes; he stopped at the other tables, begging for a coin, but veered away from Hota after receiving a hostile look.

Hota understood that something was wrong. The ordinary grind of his thoughts had been suppressed, damped down, but he had no will to contend against the agent of suppression, whatever it was, seduced by Magali’s face and figure. He derived a proprietary pleasure from watching the convulsive working of her throat and the fastidious movements of her fingers and teeth. Like an old man watching a very young girl. Greedy for life, not sex. Lusting after some forbidden essence. Although he perceived this ugliness in himself and wanted to reject it, he found he could not and tracked her every gesture and change in expression. She gave no sign that she noticed the intensity or the character of his vigilance, but the fact that she never once engaged his eyes told him she knew he was looking and that all her actions were part of a show. The inside of his head felt warm, as if his brain, too, were pulsing with soft orange light.

More customers drifted into the tavern. The conversation and laughter outvoiced the kitchen noises, but it seemed quiet where Hota and Magali sat, their isolation unimpaired. Then two bulky men in work-stained clothes came to join the blond man at his table. They drank swiftly, draining their mugs in a few gulps, and began casting glances at Magali, who was now devouring her second steak. They leaned their heads together and whispered and then laughed uproariously. Typically, Hota would have ignored their derision, but anger mounted in him like a liquid heated in a glass tube. He heaved up from the bench and went over to the men’s table and glared down at them. The newcomers appeared to know him, at least by reputation, for one, adopting an air of appeasement, muttered his name, and the other fitted his gaze to the tabletop. But either the blond man was only recently arrived in Teocinte or else he was immune to fear. He sneered at Hota and asked, ‘What do you want?’

One of the others made silent speech with his eyes to the blond man, as if encouraging him to be wary, but the man said, ‘Why are you afraid of this lump of shit? Let’s hear what’s on his mind.’

Through the lens of anger, Hota saw him not as a man, but as a creature you might find clinging to the pitch-coated piling of a dock, an unlovely thing with loathsome urges and appetites, and a pink, rubbery face that was a caricature of the human.

‘Can’t you talk, then? Very well. I’ll talk.’ Smirking, the blond man settled back against the wall, resting a foot on the bench. ‘Do you know who I am?’

Hota held his tongue.

‘No? It doesn’t matter. The thing that most matters is who you are. You’re a man who needs no introduction. Useless. Dull. A clod. You might as well carry a sign with those words on it. You announce yourself everywhere you go.’

Hota felt as if his skin were a crust that was restraining some molten substance beneath.

‘I suppose it would be easiest for you to think of me as your opposite number,’ the blond man continued. ‘I employ men such as you. I turn them to my purposes. I might be persuaded to employ you . . . if you’re as strong as you look. Are you?’

A smile came unbidden to Hota’s face.

The blond man chuckled. ‘Well, strength’s not everything, my friend. I’ve bested many men who were stronger than me. Do you know how?’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Because I’m strong up here. I could take things from you and you wouldn’t be able to stop me. Your woman, for instance. Beautiful! I gave some thought to taking her off your hands. But I’ve concluded that she’ll feel more at home with you.’ He gave a bemused sniff. ‘For your sake, I hope she fucks less like a pig than she eats.’

As Hota reached for the blond man’s leg, the closer of his two companions threw a punch at Hota’s forehead. The punch did no damage and Hota struck him in the mouth with an elbow, breaking his teeth and knocking him beneath the adjoining table. He seized the blond man’s ankle, yanked him out into the center of the tavern, holding his leg high so he could not get to his feet. The third man came at him, a lack of conviction apparent in the hesitancy of his attack. Hota kicked him in the groin and, taking a one-handed grip on the blond man’s throat, lifted him so that his feet dangled several inches above the floor. He
clawed at Hota, pried at his fingers. His face empurpled. A froth fumed between his lips. He fumbled out a dagger and tried to stab Hota, but Hota knocked the dagger to the floor, caught his knife hand and squeezed, at the same time relaxing his grip on his throat. The blond man sank to his knees, screaming as the bones in his hand were snapped and ground together.

‘Hota!’

Magali was standing by the door that led to the street. She appeared, despite the urgency of her shout, unruffled. Hota let go of the blond man, who rolled onto his side, cradling his bloody, mangled hand and cursing at Hota. Several other men had drawn near, their physical attitudes suggesting that they might be ready to fight. Hota faced them down, squaring his shoulders, and, instead of cautioning them, he roared.

The noise that issued from him was more than the sum of a troubled life, of anger, of social impotence – it seemed to spring from a vaster source, to be the roar of the turning world, a sound that all creation made in its spin toward oblivion, exultant and defiant even in dismay, and that went unheard until, as now, it found a host suitable to give it tongue.

Quailed, the men backed toward the kitchen. Recognizing that they no longer posed a threat, his anger emptied in that roar, Hota went to Magali’s side. Her face was unreadable, but he felt from her a radiation of contentment. She took his arm and they stepped out into the town.

By night, Teocinte had an even more derelict aspect than by day. The crooked little shacks, firelight flickering through cracks in the doors and from behind squares of cloth hung over windows; winded and quiet except for the occasional scream and burst of laughter; a naked infant, untended, splashing in a puddle formed by that afternoon’s rain; the silhouette of Griaule’s tree-lined back outlined in stars against a purple sky: it had the atmosphere of a tribal place, of people huddled together in frail shelters against the terrors of the dark, dwelling in the very shadow of those terrors. Hota felt estranged, from the town and from himself, troubled by the presence in his thoughts that had spurred him to such violence. But Magali’s presence, her
scent, the brush of her hip, the pressure of her breast against his arm, kept him from brooding. They idled along the down slope of the street that fronted Liar’s House, moving toward the dragon’s head, and as they walked she said, ‘We should be flying now.’

‘Flying,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s the most wonderful thing, flying together . . . that’s all.’

He suspected that she was dissembling and knew she did not like being pressed; but he had the itch to press her. She rarely spoke about her life prior to their meeting and, though he was not convinced that she was who she claimed to be, he wanted to believe her. It surprised him that he wanted this. Until that instant he had been uncertain as to what he wanted, but he was clear about it now. He wanted her to be a fabulous creature, for himself to be part of her fabulous design, and, sensing that she might be receptive to him, he asked if she could tell him how it was to fly.

She was silent for such a length of time, he thought she would refuse to answer, but after five or six paces she said, ‘One day you’ll know how it feels.’

Puzzled, he said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You can’t . . . not yet.’

That comment sparked new questions, but he chose to pursue the original one. ‘You must be able to say something about it.’

They walked a while longer and then she said, ‘Each flight is like the first flight, the flight made at the instant of creation. You’re in the dark, maybe you’re drowsy. Almost not there. And then you wake to some need, some urgency. Your wings crack as you rise up. Like thunder. And then you’re into the light, the wind . . . The wind is everything. All your strength and the rush of the wind, the sound of your wings, the light, it’s one power, one voice.’

As she spoke he seemed to understand her, but when she fell silent the echoes of the words lost energy and died, transformed into generalities. He tried to explore them, to recapture some sense of the feeling her voice had communicated, but failed.

The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish
boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant’s petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule’s head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.

‘You keep telling me I can’t understand things,’ he said. ‘It’s frustrating. I want to understand something and I don’t understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this . . . as a woman?’

She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.

‘Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens,’ she said. ‘We control our shapes in ways you cannot.’

‘You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?’

‘Only a dragon or a woman . . . I think. I’m not sure.’

He pondered this. ‘Why can’t Griaule change himself into a man?’

‘What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate – a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It’s something done only out of great necessity.’

‘You didn’t appear to be in pain . . . when I found you.’

‘It had ebbed by the time you reached me.’

There were too many questions flocking Hota’s thoughts for him to single any one out; but, before long, one soared higher than the rest: What great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, ‘Soon you’ll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient.’