The Dragon Griaule

Yara had barely spoken since Jefe’s death and she was not given now to speech. As they jounced over ruts and potholes, Snow jamming the gears in order to gain traction in the mud, she rubbed his leg every so often – whether to reassure herself or him, he could not have said – and offered neither commentary nor advice. In truth, he would have had little in the way of response, preoccupied by the gusting wind and the rain driven sideways against the windshield, and by the precipitous drop-off to the right of the narrow road. They were past the halfway point to Nebaj when the storm broke full upon them. In those regions it would not have been considered either an especially fulminant storm or one of great duration, unremarkable as to its apparitions and thunderous concatenations and lurid bursts of lightning that illuminated sections of the pine forest, bleaching the separate trees to bone-white and shrouding them in purple-haloed effulgence like sainted relics set to burn on the mountainside, charms and admonitions against some ghastly form of predation. It sufficed, however, to persuade Snow to shut down the engine and switch off the useless wipers. He cracked a window to prevent the glass from fogging over with their breath. Rain washed down in spills thick as gray paint, its drumming increased to deafening measure. He had wanted to talk to Yara, but now he thought the storm with its progeny of light and sound was a blessing, for there was too much to be sifted through and digested and mulled over before they could begin to discuss what had happened and what would be. And yet to sit there encysted in that musty cab, blind to the world, surrounded by spirits real and unreal, separated one from the other by silence, by a gearbox and a divider with receptacles for drinks and maps and such, that was no better solution to the moment. His mind pulled ahead, worrying about how they would negotiate the border crossing and where they could live and what he would do with a woman as damaged as Yara at his side, all the demeaning practicalities and shameful concerns that would inevitably dissolve the bond they had forged anew, a bond already once broken. He wished he could resist these dour thoughts, but they were ingrained in him – he had too long cohabited with the idea that love born of illusion would never prosper, and the principle that every truth could be fashioned into the lie of itself. It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that – despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death – it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

The rain abated and the worst of the storm moved toward the lowlands. Snow started the engine. Yara reached a hand across the divide and he warmed her chilled fingers. In her face was a serenity he could not fathom. He thought she must be drawing upon some secret female provenance to which he had no access, but something stirred inside him, sparked to life by her expression, and he had then a fresh recognition of what they had accomplished together, the destruction of a monster, the killing of a thing that could not be killed. And although it went against every negative of his former faith in nothing, he submitted to belief and believed . . . believed in alchemy, in the marriage of souls, in accomplishment and noble obligation, and believed also that he would never fail her again, nor she him.