The Dragon Griaule

 ‘Or fifty.’ Meric smiled. ‘That way we’ll have time to finish the painting.’ He turned and walked to the window and stood gazing out at the white stone houses of Teocinte. This was going to be the sticky part, but if he read them right, they would not believe in the plan if it seemed too easy. They needed to feel they were making a sacrifice, that they were nobly bound to a great labor. ‘If it does take forty or fifty years,’ he went on, ‘the project will drain your resources. Timber, animal life, minerals. Everything will be used up by the work. Your lives will be totally changed. But I guarantee you’ll be rid of him.’

 The city fathers broke into an outraged babble.

 ‘Do you really want to kill him?’ cried Meric, stalking over to them and planting his fists on the table. ‘You’ve been waiting centuries for someone to come along and chop off his head or send him up in a puff of smoke. That’s not going to happen! There is no easy solution. But there is a practical one, an elegant one. To use the stuff of the land he dominates to destroy him. It will not be easy, but you will be rid of him. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

 They were silent, exchanging glances, and he saw that they now believed he could do what he proposed and were wondering if the cost was too high.

 ‘I’ll need five hundred ounces of silver to hire engineers and artisans,’ said Meric. ‘Think it over. I’ll take a few days and go see this dragon of yours . . . inspect the scales and so forth. When I return, you can give me your answer.’

 The city fathers grumbled and scratched their heads, but at last they agreed to put the question before the body politic. They asked for a week in which to decide and appointed Jarcke, who was the mayoress of Hangtown, to guide Meric to Griaule.

*

 The valley extended seventy miles from north to south, and was enclosed by jungled hills whose folded sides and spiny backs gave rise to the idea that beasts were sleeping beneath them. The valley floor was cultivated into fields of bananas and cane and melons, and where it was not cultivated, there were stands of thistle palms and berry thickets and the occasional giant fig brooding sentinel over the rest. Jarcke and Meric tethered their horses a half-hour’s ride from town and began to ascend a gentle incline that rose into the notch between two hills. Sweaty and short of breath, Meric stopped a third of the way up; but Jarcke kept plodding along, unaware he was no longer following. She was by nature as blunt as her name – a stump beer-keg of a woman with a brown weathered face. Though she appeared to be ten years older then Meric, she was nearly the same age. She wore a gray robe belted at the waist with a leather band that held four throwing knives, and a coil of rope was slung over her shoulder.

 ‘How much farther?’ called Meric.

 She turned and frowned. ‘You’re standin’ on his tail. Rest of him’s around back of the hill.’

 A pinprick of chill bloomed in Meric’s abdomen, and he stared down at the grass, expecting it to dissolve and reveal a mass of glittering scales.

 ‘Why don’t we take the horses?’ he asked.

 ‘Horses don’t like it up here.’ She grunted with amusement. ‘Neither do most people, for that matter.’ She trudged off.

 Another twenty minutes brought them to the other side of the hill high above the valley floor. The land continued to slope upward, but more gently than before. Gnarled, stunted oaks pushed up from thickets of chokecherry, and insects sizzled in the weeds. They might have been walking on a natural shelf several hundred feet across; but ahead of them, where the ground rose abruptly, a number of thick greenish-black columns broke from the earth. Leathery folds hung between them, and these were encrusted with clumps of earth and brocaded with mold. They had the look of a collapsed palisade and the ghosted feel of ancient ruins.

 ‘Them’s the wings,’ said Jarcke. ‘Mostly they’s covered, but you can catch sight of ’em off the edge, and up near Hangtown there’s places where you can walk in under ’em . . . but I wouldn’t advise it.’

 ‘I’d like to take a look off the edge,’ said Meric, unable to tear his eyes away from the wings; though the surfaces of the leaves gleamed in the strong sun, the wings seemed to absorb the light, as if their age and strangeness were proof against reflection.

 Jarcke led him to a glade in which tree ferns and oaks crowded together and cast a green gloom, and where the earth sloped sharply downward. She lashed her rope to an oak and tied the other end around Meric’s waist. ‘Give a yank when you want to stop, and another when you want to be hauled up,’ she said, and began paying out the rope, letting him walk backward against her pull.