The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  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 me
ans 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.

  THE SKULL

  I

  This much is known:

  Following the death of the dragon Griaule, after his scales had been removed, his blood drained and stored in canisters, his flesh and organs variously preserved, his bones pulverized and sold as a remedy for cancer, incontinence, arthritis, indigestion, eczema, and much else . . . after all of this, Griaule’s skull (nearly six hundred feet in length) was maneuvered onto a many-wheeled platform and hauled across eleven hundred miles of jungle to the court of Temalagua. The history of this journey, which lasted two decades and featured dozens of pitched battles, a brief and nearly disastrous passage by sea, and cost many thousands of lives, would require several volumes to recount. Perhaps someday that history will be told, but for the purposes of our story suffice it to say that by the time the skull reached its destination, a tract of land outlying the palace grounds, King Carlos VIII, who had purchased it from the city fathers of Teocinte, was dead and buried, and his son Adilberto the First had ascended to the Onyx Throne.

  Adilberto’s obsessions were not those of his father. He spent the bulk of his reign pursuing wars of aggression against neighboring states and the skull became a roosting place for birds, home to monkeys, snakes, and palm rats, and was overgrown by vines and fungus. His son, a second and lesser Adilberto, restored the skull to a relatively pristine condition, transformed the land around it into an exotic garden, bronzed the enormous fangs and limned its eye sockets and jaw with brass, jade and copper filigrees that accentuated its sinister aspects and inspired the creation of tin masks that years later came to be sold in the tourist markets. He adorned the interior with teak and ebony furnishings, with gold, silk and precious stones, and therein held bacchanals that established new standards for debauchery (murder, torture, and rape were commonplace at these revels) and contributed greatly toward bankrupting an economy already decimated by the excesses of Adilberto I and Carlos VIII.

  Upon his death (under circumstances that even a lenient observer would term suspicious), a third Adilberto known as El Frio (the Cold One) seized power following a protracted and bloody struggle with his elder brother Gonsalvo. El Frio, a religious zealot and occultist, intended to destroy the skull, but received warnings from his fortunetellers that such an act of desecration would not have a felicitous result. Instead, he devoted his energies to the systematic slaughter of his enemies, whom he apparently saw under every rock, for during his reign he put to death over two hundred thousand of his countrymen. His heir, a fourth Adilberto, was so ashamed of his father’s legacy that he changed his name to Juan Miel, a name whose proletarian flavor embodied his proto-Marxist view of the world, and abolished the monarchy, thereby ushering in a period of tumult unparalleled in the tumultuous history of Temalagua. Forty-four days after initiating this radical reform, he was hacked limb from limb by a crowd of cane workers whom he had been addressing – they were inspired to take action by his chief rival in the nascent presidential campaign, a wealthy plantation owner who had suggested that were they to act otherwise, they might lose their jobs. Thenceforth the country was governed by a succession of generals and politicians who had all they could do to combat innumerable revolutions and the economic incursions of more powerful nations to the north. The palace burned to the ground during the early years of the twentieth century and by the 1940s the gardens built by Adilberto II had merged with the surrounding jungle and the skull was hidden by dense vegetation, though it maintained a significant place in the public consciousness and was considered to have been the root cause of Temalagua’s fall from grace . . . if, indeed, grace had ever prevailed in the region.

  Travelers occasionally visited the skull – many would pose for photographs inside the jaws, standing next to one of the brass-covered fangs, sheathed now in verdigris, and then they would hurry away, oppressed by the atmosphere of foreboding generated by the huge bony snout with its barbaro
us decorations protruding from epiphytes and tree ferns and the shadow of the thick canopy. Those who camped overnight at the site reported disquieting dreams, and several adventurers and scientists who had undertaken longer stays went missing, their number inclusive of a herpetologist who was discovered years later living with coastal Indians and had no memory of his former life. In the 1960s the city (Ciudad Temalagua) mushroomed, growing out and away from the jungle that enclosed the skull in much the same fashion that Teocinte had spread in relation to Griaule, as if obeying some arcane and relativistic regulation. No attempt was made to clear the land or destroy the skull, and the area was accorded the status of an historical site, one deemed essential to an understanding of contemporary Temalagua, yet was neglected by historians who preferred to ignore it rather than to risk their lives by studying its central relic (a tactic frequently employed in places whose history is dominated by villains and villainy). Slums sprang up along the western edge of the jungle, creating a buffer zone between the city and the skull, and producing a steady stream of abandoned and abused children who wandered off in one direction or another, into the urban sprawl or the vegetable, there to meet a fate that, although it could be guessed, was rarely verifiable. Over the next forty years, as the country declined toward the millennium, impoverished by corporate greed and narco-business, the slums became a breeding ground for fierce criminal gangs that contended for control of the streets with death squads composed of extreme right-wing factions within the army; yet even they were reluctant to enter the jungle and confront the strange cult purported to flourish there.