The Dragon Griaule

Frantic, she wrenched an arm free, in reflex reaching up behind her head, searching for a weapon, anything, and as he prepared to slap her again, grinning, she caught hold of a stick – or so she thought – and swung it at him in a vicious arc. The point of the scaling hook, for such it was, sank into Key’s flesh just back of his left eye, and as he fell, toppling sideways with only the briefest of outcries, the eye filled with blood, becoming a featureless crimson sphere like a rubber ball embedded in the socket. Catherine shrieked, pushed his legs off her waist and scrambled away, encumbered by her trousers, which had slipped down about her knees. Key’s body convulsed, his heels drumming the scale. She sat staring at him for a long seamless time, unable to catch her breath, to think. But swarms of black flies, their translucent wings shattering the sunlight into prisms, began landing on the puddle of blood that spread wide as a table from beneath Key’s face, and she became queasy. She crawled to the edge of the snout and looked away across the checkerboard of fields below toward Port Chantay, toward an alp of bubbling cumulus building from the horizon. Her chest hollowed with cold, and she started to shake. The tremors passing through her echoed the tremor she had felt in Key’s body when the hook had hit into his skull. All the sickness inside her, her shock and disgust at the violation, at confronting the substance of death, welled up in her throat and her stomach emptied. When she had finished she cinched her trousers tight, her fingers clumsy with the knot. She thought she should do something. Coil the ropes, maybe. Store the harness in her pack. But these actions, while easy to contemplate, seemed impossibly complex to carry out. She shivered and hugged herself, feeling the altitude, the distances. Her cheeks were feverish and puffy; flickers of sensation – she pictured them to be iridescent worms – tingled nerves in her chest and legs. She had the idea that everything was slowing, that time had flurried and was settling the way river mud settles after the passage of some turbulence. She stared off toward the dragon’s horn. Someone was standing there. Coming toward her, now. At first she watched the figure approach with a defiant disinterest, wanting to guard her privacy, feeling that if she had to speak she would lose control of her emotions. But as the figure resolved into one of her neighbors back in Hangtown – Brianne, a tall young woman with brittle good looks, dark brown hair and an olive complexion – she relaxed from this attitude. She and Brianne were not friends; in fact, they had once been rivals for the same man. However, that had been a year and more in the past, and Catherine was relieved to see her. More than relieved. The presence of another woman allowed her to surrender to weakness, believing that in Brianne she would find a fund of natural sympathy because of their common sex.

‘My God, what happened?’ Brianne kneeled and brushed Catherine’s hair back from her eyes. The tenderness of the gesture burst the dam of Catherine’s emotions, and punctuating the story with sobs, she told of the rape.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ she said. ‘I . . . I’d forgotten about the hook.’

‘Key was looking to get killed,’ Brianne said. ‘But it’s a damn shame you had to be the one to help him along.’ She sighed, her forehead creased by a worry line. ‘I suppose I should fetch someone to take care of the body. I know that’s not . . .’

‘No, I understand . . . it has to be done.’ Catherine felt stronger, more capable. She made as if to stand, but Brianne restrained her.

‘Maybe you should wait here. You know how people will be. They’ll see your face,’ – she touched Catherine’s swollen cheeks – ‘and they’ll be prying, whispering. It might be better to let the mayor come out and make his investigation. That way he can take the edge off the gossip before it gets started.’

Catherine didn’t want to be alone with the body any longer, but she saw the wisdom in waiting and agreed.

‘Will you be all right?’ Brianne asked.

‘I’ll be fine . . . but hurry.’

‘I will.’ Brianne stood; the wind feathered her hair, lifted it to veil the lower half of her face. ‘You’re sure you’ll be all right?’ There was an odd undertone in her voice, as if it were really another question she was asking, or – and this, Catherine thought, was more likely – as if she were thinking ahead to dealing with the mayor.

Catherine nodded, then caught at Brianne as she started to walk away. ‘Don’t tell my father. Let me tell him. If he hears it from you, he might go after the Willens.’

‘I won’t say a thing, I promise.’