Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

Back in Teocinte, the dragon had seemed to Meric a simple thing, a big lizard with a tick of life left inside, the residue of a dim sensibility; but he was beginning to suspect that this tick of life was more complex than any he had encountered.

“My gram used to say,” Jarcke went on, “that the old dragons could fling themselves up to the sun in a blink and travel back to their own world, and when they come back, they’d bring the skizzers and all the rest with ’em. They was immortal, she said. Only the young ones came here ’cause later on they grew too big to fly on earth.” She made a sour face. “Don’t know as I believe it.”

“Then you’re a fool,” said Meric.

Jarcke glanced up at him, her hand twitching towards her belt.

“How can you live here and not believe it!” he said, surprised to hear himself so fervently defending a myth. “God! This—” He broke off, noticing the flicker of a smile on her face.

She clucked her tongue, apparently satisfied by something. “Come on,” she said. “I want to be at the eye before sunset.”

The peaks of Griaule’s folded wings, completely overgrown by grass and shrubs and dwarfish trees, formed two spiny hills that cast a shadow over Hangtown and the narrow lake around which it sprawled. Jarcke said the lake was a stream flowing off the hill behind the dragon, and that it drained away through the membranes of his wing and down on to his shoulder. It was beautiful beneath the wing, she told him. Ferns and waterfalls. But it was reckoned an evil place. From a distance the town looked picturesque—rustic cabins, smoking chimneys. As they approached, however, the cabins resolved into dilapidated shanties with missing boards and broken windows; suds and garbage and offal floated in the shallows of the lake. Aside from a few men idling on the stoops, who squinted at Meric and nodded glumly at Jarcke, no one was about. The grass blades stirred in the breeze, spiders scuttled under the shanties, and there was an air of torpor and dissolution.

Jarcke seemed embarrassed by the town. She made no attempt at introductions, stopping only long enough to fetch another coil of rope from one of the shanties, and as they walked between the wings, down through the neck spines—a forest of greenish-gold spikes burnished by the lowering sun—she explained how the townsfolk grubbed a livelihood from Griaule. Herbs gathered on his back were valued as medicine and charms, as were the peels of dead skin; the artefacts left by previous Hangtown generations were of some worth to various collectors.

“Then there’s scale hunters,” she said with disgust. “Henry Sichi from Port Chantay’ll pay good money for pieces of scale, and though it’s bad luck to do it, some’ll have a go at chippin’ off the loose ’uns.” She walked a few paces in silence. “But there’s others who’ve got better reasons for livin’ here.”

The frontal spike above Griaule’s eyes was whorled at the base like a narwhal’s horn and curved back towards the wings. Jarcke attached the ropes to eyebolts drilled into the spike, tied one about her waist, the other about Meric’s; she cautioned him to wait, and rappelled off the side. In a moment she called for him to come down. Once again he grew dizzy as he descended; he glimpsed a clawed foot far below, mossy fangs jutting from an impossibly long jaw; and then he began to spin and bash against the scales. Jarcke gathered him in and helped him sit on the lip of the socket.

“Damn!” she said, stamping her foot.

A 3-foot-long section of the adjoining scale shifted slowly away. Peering close, Meric saw that while in texture and hue it was indistinguishable from the scale, there was a hairline division between it and the surface. Jarcke, her face twisted in disgust, continued to harry the thing until it moved out of reach.

“Call ’em flakes,” she said when he asked what it was. “Some kind of insect. Got a long tube that they pokes down between the scales and sucks the blood. See there?” She pointed off to where a flock of birds were wheeling close to Griaule’s side; a chip of pale gold broke loose and went tumbling down to the valley. “Birds pry ’em off, let ’em bust open, and eats the innards.” She hunkered down beside him and after a moment asked, “You really think you can do it?”

“What? You mean kill the dragon?”

She nodded.

“Certainly,” he said, and then added, lying, “I’ve spent years devising the method.”

“If all the paint’s goin’ to be atop his head, how’re you goin’ to get it to where the paintin’s done?”

“That’s no problem. We’ll pipe it to wherever it’s needed.”

She nodded again. “You’re a clever fellow,” she said; and when Meric, pleased, made as if to thank her for the compliment, she cut in and said, “Don’t mean nothin’ by it. Bein’ clever ain’t an accomplishment. It’s just somethin’ you come by, like bein’ tall.” She turned away, ending the conversation.

Meric was weary of being awestruck, but even so he could not help marvelling at the eye. By his estimate it was 70 feet long and 50 feet high, and it was shuttered by an opaque membrane that was unusually clear of algae and lichen, glistening, with vague glints of colour visible behind it. As the westering sun reddened and sank between two distant hills, the membrane began to quiver and then split open down the centre. With the ponderous slowness of a theatre curtain opening, the halves slid apart to reveal the glowing humour. Terrified by the idea that Griaule could see him, Meric sprang to his feet, but Jarcke restrained him.

“Stay still and watch,” she said.

He had no choice—the eye was mesmerizing. The pupil was slit and featureless black, but the humour… he had never seen such fiery blues and crimsons and golds. What had looked to be vague glints, odd refractions of the sunset, he now realized were photic reactions of some sort. Fairy rings of light developed deep within the eye, expanded into spoked shapes, flooded the humour, and faded—only to be replaced by another and another. He felt the pressure of Griaule’s vision, his ancient mind, pouring through him, and as if in response to this pressure, memories bubbled up in his thoughts. Particularly sharp ones. The way a bowlful of brush water had looked after freezing over during a winter’s night—a delicate, fractured flower of murky yellow. An archipelago of orange peels that his girl had left strewn across the floor of the studio. Sketching atop Jokenam Hill one sunrise, the snowcapped roofs of Regensburg below pitched at all angles like broken paving stones, and silver shafts of the sun striking down through a leaden overcast. It was as if these things were being drawn forth for his inspection. Then they were washed away by what also seemed a memory, though at the same time it was wholly unfamiliar. Essentially, it was a landscape of light, and he was plunging through it, up and up. Prisms and lattices of iridescent fire bloomed around him, and everything was a roaring fall into brightness, and finally he was clear into its white furnace heart, his own heart swelling with the joy of his strength and dominion.

It was dusk before Meric realized the eye had closed. His mouth hung open, his eyes ached from straining to see, and his tongue was glued to his palate. Jarcke sat motionless, buried in shadow.

“Th…” He had to swallow to clear his throat of mucus. “This is the reason you live here, isn’t it?”

“Part of the reason,” she said. “I can see things comin’ way up here. Things to watch out for, things to study on.”

She stood and walked to the lip of the socket and spat off the edge; the valley stretched out grey and unreal behind her, the folds of the hills barely visible in the gathering dusk.