The Dragon Griaule

‘It’s a test, something he does in order to discover whether or not you’re interested in his women. If you don’t show interest, that will buy you some time.’

He expected her to say more, but when nothing was forthcoming he peered out into the hall again.

‘Craig.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I . . . never mind.’

‘What about you and me?’ He turned from the door. ‘Will that piss him off?’

Time became elastic, stretching out into a single un-demarcated moment. At long last she said, ‘I’m not his woman.’

*

Over the next days all Snow’s questions evaporated, those dating from years before as well as those arising from his encounter with Yara. It was obvious she had been correct in her belief that there was magic in the world, albeit of a dire sort. The striping of dark green scale that defiled her body could not be explained by any means other than her contact with the dragon. It had to be a physical consequence of their unnatural spiritual union, a punishment levied upon her for consorting with beasts, a curse she had accepted in order to achieve her ends. He was nearly persuaded to her opinion that Jefe might be a force for good and, left to his own devices, would allow Temalagua to determine its destiny – but the recognition that he would be long dead by the time such a future came to pass diminished his enthusiasm for the idea.

As Yara predicted, on the night following their encounter Jefe herded a group of approximately twenty attractive women into the dining room, all clad in lingerie. Judging by Luisa Bazan’s story, Snow accepted that her husband Enrique had purchased every scrap of silk and lace that adorned them, but that Luisa’s accusations of infidelity were without merit, or else (if he were to believe Yara) Enrique would be dead. Among the women was the girl from the cantina, Itzel. Jefe thrust her at him and, expressionless, she attempted to fondle his genitals. Snow, as instructed, rejected her. Before long the room was aflutter with drunken, chattering, underdressed women who came at him singly and in pairs, making much over him, cooing and caressing, while Jefe watched icily from a doorway. Snow was impervious to their tender assaults, affecting boredom, brushing them off, winding up alone in a corner and thinking that Griuale’s legendary subtlety must have gone glimmering along with his memories, because Jefe was nothing if not unsubtle. He felt he would have been able to see through this deception without Yara’s help, and he speculated that Griaule may never have been a subtle creature, that his reputed prowess in this regard had been exaggerated due to his bulk (even a gross manipulation would be perceived as a subtlety when the manipulator was roughly the size of a county in Rhode Island) and to the ease with which people could be manipulated, thanks in large part to their eagerness to absolve themselves of responsibility and shift blame for their behavior onto an outside influence, as if they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

Coincidentally, there were moments during the ensuing week when Snow saw himself as a master of calculation and guile. Because he was consumed by the prospect of death, these moments were fleeting, and yet they seemed of critical importance, crucial to his self-awareness, his self-worth, his entire sense of self inclusive of his will to survive. Each night, a male Sheherazade, he visited Yara in her room and made love to her, each night extracting information from her (a tip, a tendency, an allusion) that would enable him to prolong his life. Afterward he would have a flash of satisfaction, a not-quite gloating appreciation of his canniness. Yet at the same time his emotional connection with her deepened, as did his desire to please her, to ease her burdens – it injured him to watch her move about the complex, she was so frail and had so little stamina. These two strains of behavior appeared intertwined like the coils of a double helix, neither of them having primacy over nor predating the other, neither seeming more authentic, but he felt certain that one of them concealed a fathering principle. He sought to sneak up on himself, to catch himself unawares and snatch a glimpse of the bottom of his soul, hoping to discern whether selflessness or self-interest was the ground from which all else sprouted, or if they were an embodiment of an essential duality, two sides of the same coin. He failed to reach a conclusion, of course, and it seemed to him that his fear of death was not much greater than the fear that he might never acquire the slightest knowledge of his own heart.