The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  This is folly, he said to himself, she’ll probably kick you down the stairs, she was only playing with you the last time, and why the hell would you want it anyway . . . just to be away from your thoughts for awhile, no matter how temporary the cure?

  That’s right, that’s exactly right.

  ‘Hell!’ he said to the dark, to the whole unlistening world. ‘Hell, why not?’

  The woman who opened the door, though physically the same woman who had sprawled brazenly on the sofa during their first meeting, was in all other ways quite different. Distracted; twitchy; pale to the point of seeming bloodless, her black hair loose and in disarray; clad in a white robe of some heavy coarse cloth. The dissolute hardness had emptied from her face, and she seemed to have thrown off a handful of years, to be a troubled young girl. She stared for a second as if failing to recognize him and then said, ‘Oh . . . you.’

  He was about to apologize for having come so late, to beat a retreat, put off by her manner; but before he could frame the words, she stepped back from the door and invited him in.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said, following him into the living room, which had undergone a cleaning. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep.’

  She dropped onto the sofa, fumbled about on the end table, picked up a cigar, then set it down; she looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘Well, have a seat.’

  He did as instructed, taking his perch again on the easy chair. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’

  ‘Questions . . . you want . . . oh, all right. Questions.’ She gave a fey laugh and picked nervously at the fringe on the arm of the sofa. ‘Ask away.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ he said, ‘that Mardo had in mind for you to take over the leadership of the temple in case of his death. Is that correct?’

  She nodded, kept nodding, too forcefully for mere affirmation, as if trying to clear some painful entanglement from her head.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘That’s what he had in mind.’

  ‘Were there papers drawn up to this effect?’

  ‘No . . . yes, maybe . . . I don’t know. He talked about doing it, but I never saw them.’ She rocked back and forth on the edge of the sofa, her hands plucking at ridges of its old embroidered pattern. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Why . . . why doesn’t it matter?’

  ‘There is no temple.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There is no temple! Simple as that. No more adherents, no more ceremonies. Just empty buildings.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But . . .’

  She jumped to her feet, paced toward the back of the room; then she spun about to face him, brushing hair back from her cheek. ‘I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk at all . . . not about . . . not about anything important.’ She put a hand to her brow as if testing for a fever. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘My life’s a shambles, my lover’s dead, and my father goes on trial for his murder tomorrow morning. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘I don’t know why your father’s plight should disturb you. I thought you hated him.’

  ‘He’s still my father. I have feelings that hate won’t dissolve. Reflex feelings, you understand. But they have their pull.’ She came back to the sofa and sat down; once again she began picking at the embroidered pattern. ‘Look, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything that can help you with the trial. Not a thing. If I did I think I’d tell you . . . that’s how I feel now, anyway. But there’s nothing, nothing at all.’

  He sensed that the crack in her callous veneer ran deeper than she cared to admit, and, too, he thought that her anxiety might be due to the fact that she did know something helpful and was holding it back; but he decided not to push the matter.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  She glanced around the room, as if searching for something that would support a conversation.

  He noticed that her eye lingered on the framed sketch of the woman and baby. ‘Is that your mother?’ he asked, pointing to it.

  That appeared to unsettle her. ‘Yes,’ she murmured, looking quickly away from the sketch.

  ‘She’s very much like you. Her name was Patricia, wasn’t it?’

  Mirielle nodded.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ he said, ‘for a woman so lovely to be taken before her time. How did she drown?’

  ‘Don’t you know how to talk without interrogating people?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wondering at the vehemence of her reaction. ‘I just . . .’

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ she said. ‘Let that be enough for you.’

  ‘I was only making conversation. You choose the subject, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let’s talk about you.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell.’

  ‘There never is with people, but that’s all right. I won’t be bored, I promise.’

  He began, reluctantly at first, to talk about his life, his childhood, the tiny farm in the hills above the city, with its banana grove, its corral and three cows – Rose, Alvina, and Esmeralda – and as he spoke, that old innocent life seemed to be resurrected, to be breathing just beyond the apartment walls. He told her how he used to sit on a hilltop and look down at the city and dream of owning one of the fine houses.

  ‘And now you do,’ she said.

  ‘No, I don’t. There’s a law against it. The fine houses belong to those with status, with history on their side. There are laws against people like me, laws that keep us in our place.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know that.’

  He told her about his first interest in the law, how it had seemed in its logical construction and order to be a lever with which one could move any obstruction, but how he had discovered that there were so many levers and obstructions, when you moved one, another would drop down to crush you, and the trick was to keep in constant motion, to be moving things constantly and dancing out of the way.

  ‘Did you always want to be a lawyer?’

  He laughed. ‘No, my first ambition was to be the man who slew the dragon Griaule, to claim the reward offered in Teocinte, to buy my mother silver bowls and my father a new guitar.’

  Her expression, happy a moment before, had gone slack and distraught; he asked if she was all right.

  ‘Don’t even say his name,’ she said. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know . . .’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  ‘Griaule . . . God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him, we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him. Cold and vast. Inhuman. This great scaly chill that owned a world.’

  Korrogly was struck by the similarity of phrasing with which the old woman Kirin and now Mirielle had referred to their apprehension of Griaule, and thought to make mention of it, but Mirielle continued speaking, and he let the matter drop.

  ‘I can still feel his touch in my mind. Heavy and steeped in blackness. Each one of his thoughts a century in forming, a tonnage of hatred, of sheer enmity. He’d brush against me, and I’d be cold for hours. That’s why . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She was trembling violently, hugging herself.

  He crossed to the sofa, sat beside her, and, after hesitating for a few seconds, draped an arm about her shoulder. Her hair had the smell of fresh oranges. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I can feel him still, I’ll always feel him.’ She glanced up at Korrogly and then blurted out, ‘Come to bed with me. I know you don’t like me, but it’s warmth I want, not affection. Please, I won’t . . .’

  ‘I do like you,’ he said.


  ‘No, you can’t, you . . . no.’

  ‘I do,’ he said, believing it as he spoke. ‘Tonight I like you, tonight you’re someone it’s possible to care about.’

  ‘You don’t understand, you can’t see how he’s changed me.’

  ‘Griaule, you mean?’

  ‘Please,’ she said, her arms going around his waist. ‘No more questions . . . not now. Please, just keep me warm.’

  Three

  As Korrogly began his opening statement, half his mind was back in the gemcutter’s apartment with Mirielle, still embraced by her white arms, nourished by the rosy points of her breasts and her long supple legs, finding that beneath her veneer of depravity there existed a woman of virtue and sweetness, replaying in memory the joys of mastery and submission. None of this posed a distraction, but acted rather to inspire him, to urge him on to a more impassioned appeal than that he had originally contrived. Strolling alongside the jury box, stuffed with twelve pasty-faced models of good citizenship culled from an assortment of less worthy souls, he felt like a sea captain striding the deck of his ship, and the courtroom, it struck him, was essentially a cross between church and vessel, the ship of state sailing toward the coast of justice, with white walls for sails and boxy divisions of black wood holding a cargo of witnesses and jurors and the curious, and lording over all, the judge’s bench, an immense teak block carved into the semblance of dragon scales, where sat the oracular figurehead of this magical ship: the Honorable Ernest Wymer, white-haired and florid, an alcoholic old beast with a cruel mouth and tufted brows and a shiny red beak, hunched in the folds of his black-winged gown, ready to pounce upon any lawyerly mouse that should happen to stray into his field of vision. Korrogly was not afraid of Wymer; he, not the judge, was in command this day. He knew the jury’s mind, knew that they wanted to believe Griaule was the guilty party, that this suited the mystical yearning of their hearts, and with all his wiles, he set about consolidating that yearning into intent. There was urgency in his voice, yet it was neither too strident nor too subdued, perfect, a blend of power and fluency; he felt that this harmony of intent and skill stemmed from his night with Mirielle. He was not in love with her, or perhaps he was . . . but love was not the salient matter. What most inspired him was to have found something unspoiled in her, in himself, and whether that was love or merely a place left untouched by the world, it was sufficient to renew his old enthusiasms.

  ‘We are all aware,’ he said toward the conclusion of his statement, ‘that Griaule’s power exists. The question remains, is he capable of reaching out from the Carbonales to touch us here in Port Chantay. That is a question we should not need ask. Look there.’ He pointed to the judge’s bench and its carved scales. ‘And there.’ He pointed to crude representations of the dragon carved twining the lintel posts at the back of the hall. ‘His image is everywhere in Port Chantay, and this is emblematic of his propinquity, of the tendrils of his will that have infiltrated our lives. Perhaps he cannot move us with the facility that he does those who dwell in Teocinte, but we are not so far beyond the range of his thoughts that he does not know us. He knows us well. He sees us, he holds us in his mind, and if he requires something of us, do you really believe he is incapable of affecting our lives in a more pronounced fashion? Griaule is, if anything, capable. He is an immortal, unfathomable creature who is as pervasive in our lives as the idea of God. And as with God, we do not have the wisdom to establish the limits of his capacities.’ Korrogly paused, letting his gaze fall on each of their rapt faces in turn, seeing therein a measure of anxiety, understanding how to play upon it; the slants of winter sunlight made them all look wan and sickly, like terminal patients hopeful of a cure. ‘Griaule is here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. He is watching this proceeding. Perhaps he is even involved in it. Search inside yourselves. Can you feel secure that his eye is not upon you? And this’ – he picked up The Father of Stones from the prosecution table – ‘can you be sure that this is not his eye? The prosecution will tell you that it is only a stone, but I tell you that it is much more.’ He held it up to their faces as he passed along the jury box and was pleased to see them shrink from it. ‘This is Griaule’s instrument, the embodiment of his will, the vehicle by which his will has been effected here in Port Chantay, miles and miles beyond the range of his usual sphere of influence. If you doubt this, if you doubt that he could have formed it and injected it with the complex values of his wish and need, then I urge you to touch it. It brims with his cold vigor. And just as you now perceive it, so it is perceiving you.’

  The prosecution’s case was elementary. A constable testified to the authenticity of Lemos’ confession; several witnesses were called to testify to the fact that they had seen him working at cutting The Father of Stones; the old drunkard related his story of Lemos throwing stones on the beach; others claimed to have seen him breaking into the temple. Korrogly limited his cross-examination to establishing the point that none of the witnesses had known the gemcutter’s mind. No more was needed. The defense would rise or fall on its own merits.

  Late in the day, Mirielle was called to the stand. Her testimony, while not as embittered as Korrogly had assumed it would be, was nonetheless of great benefit to Lemos; it was obvious that she was of two minds about her father, that she despised him, and that this attitude warred with the guilt that arose from testifying against him – that she should be in the least guilty implied that Lemos must have been a good parent, that her spite was doubtless a product of Zemaille’s corrupting influence. It was also evident that she was not being entirely forthcoming. She denied knowledge of Zemaille’s great work, and there was – Korrogly was certain – something else that she was keeping from the light. In his cross-examination he touched upon it, establishing the area of vagueness, one having to do with her reasons for entering the temple.

  ‘I’m not quite clear on this,’ he said to her. ‘Surely you didn’t enter into such a dark society on a whim?’

  ‘It was years ago,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it was a whim, perhaps I simply wanted to escape my father.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘your father, who simply wanted to spare you the violent excesses of the temple. Truly, that was overly severe of him.’

  Mervale leaped to his feet. ‘If the defense wishes to frame his lectoral remarks in a question, I suggest he do it.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Judge Wymer, with a cautionary nod to Korrogly.

  ‘Your pardon.’ Korrogly inclined his head in a respectful bow. ‘The temple,’ he went on musingly, ‘what attracted you to it? Was it Zemaille?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . yes, I think so.’

  ‘A physical attraction?’

  ‘It was more complex than that.’

  ‘How so?’

  Her face worked, she worried her lower lip. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s a simple question.’

  ‘Nothing is simple!’ she said, her voice growing shrill. ‘You couldn’t possibly understand!’

  Korrogly wondered if she might be restraining herself from speaking of her father’s alleged abuse – he was not afraid of the topic, yet he did not want to break her down into tears and that seemed a likelihood. He would not have minded rage; but he did not wish to make her in any way an object of sympathy. He could, he knew, always recall her.

  Questioning her, even though her adversary, he felt that a strange connection had been forged between them, as if they were partners in a plot, and it was difficult to maintain a professional distance; she looked beautiful in her lacy black dress, and standing beside the witness box, inhaling her scent of heat and oranges, he began to believe that his feelings for her did run deep, that something powerful had been dredged up from beneath the years of disappointment and failure.

  The close of Mirielle’s testimony was also the close of the prosecution’s case, and Judge Wymer called for a recess until the morning. Lemos, as he had throughout the proceeding, sat without displaying any emoti
on – a gray statement of despair – and nothing Korrogly could say had a cheering effect upon him. He had been given a haircut in jail, his sandy forelock trimmed away, his ears left totally exposed, and this, along with his loss of weight and increased pallor, made him look as if he had been the victim of a prolonged and dehumanizing abuse.

  ‘It’s going well,’ Korrogly told him as they sat at the defense table afterward. ‘Before today I wasn’t sure how the jury would react to our tactics, I was concerned that we didn’t have sufficient detail. But now I don’t know if we’ll need it. They want to believe you.’