The Dragon Griaule

An unusual calm, sudden in onset, was visited upon Snow. Not unusual as regarded its emotional basis, for he knew to his soul Jefe was dying and a menace no more, but in that it seemed to proceed from an inner resource he had not known he possessed. He stood calmly, then, watching Jefe totter from view before returning to the lair. Yara called on him to finish Jefe, but Snow walked over to the panel by the door, keyed in nine-nine-nine, and set the chains to rattling downward. The noise drowned out her cries. Once he knew she would be safe, he went downstairs at a leisurely pace, scooping up the machete, and entered the dining room. He stopped by the sideboard and, taking a minute to make his selection from among the whiskeys and tequilas, he poured a double shot of single malt and sipped it appreciatively. A tremor palsied his hand. He downed the scotch and strolled off along the tunnel, following Jefe’s blood trail.

He had not been out of the complex for almost two weeks and the sight of daylight at the tunnel’s end disoriented him, as did the wideness of the world and the hills enclosing the grassless stretch whereon the village had been established. Under a dreary sky eight or nine women – two of them dressed in filmy peignoirs, the others clad in shawls and long colorful skirts and embroidered blouses of coarse native cloth – had gathered at a point midway between the village and the pink house, and were staring with grim fixity at something Snow could not see from his perspective. On stepping from the tunnel mouth, he spotted Jefe to the right of the entrance – he still dragged his leg, yet made a doddering run across a stretch of sloppy ground, hitching his shoulders repeatedly as he went, going about ten yards before losing his footing and sprawling, splashing down into a puddle. It took several tries for him to stand. A commingling of blood and brick red mud slimed his chest and back, and he wore an expression of abject stupefaction. Appearing to have no awareness of Snow, he made a second and shorter run back toward the tunnel, adding a little hop at the end, but with no better outcome. Snow recognized he was attempting to fly and wondered whether he knew that he did not possess a dragon’s body.

A voluptuous black woman with blond spiky hair, holding the neck of her peignoir shut against the cold, approached Snow, circling away from Jefe. She touched the handle of the machete and said, ‘You did this?’

‘Yes. With Yara’s help.’

‘Yara? I don’t know this Yara.’

‘La Endriaga.’

‘La Endriaga is not Jefe’s woman?’

‘She was his prisoner. Like you.’

As Jefe made another effort to fly, the woman shouted excitedly in Mam to the others – Snow understood only the words ‘La Endriaga.’

One of the village women shouted in response and the black woman asked Snow if Jefe was mortally wounded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood, but he may still be dangerous.’

She reported this to the group and two of the women ran for the village, most likely to spread the news.

Jefe fell again – he lay on his side for a long count, his breath venting in gasps.

Snow’s calm had eroded into a mood as gray and energy-less as the sky above Tres Santos. The clouds looked to have the inert weight and solidity of battered armor plate, though thunderheads with dark bellies had begun pushing in from the north. As Jefe gathered himself for a further attempt, Yara limped from the tunnel. She stood at Snow’s side and watched Jefe perform his miserable trick. Her eyes brimmed with tears. This must be for her, he thought, like watching someone who had once had promise, with whom she had invested her precious time, and was now reduced to an addled derelict with half a functioning liver, putting on a show of his degeneracy and decrepitude in a parking lot, hoping his audience would throw quarters at him so he could buy a pint of fortified wine.

The black woman tapped Snow’s arm and whispered in his ear: ‘If she is not Jefe’s woman, why is she crying?’

‘She was Jefe’s prisoner for most of her life,’ Snow said. ‘When you’ve lived with someone that long, even as a captive, your emotions become confused.’

She nodded at this lie, or half-lie, as if she understood him, but her expression was perplexed.