“Hota!”
Magali was standing by the door that led to the street. Despite the urgency of her shout, she appeared unruffled. Hota released the blond man, who rolled onto his side, cradling his bloody, mangled hand, cursing at Hota. Other men had drawn near, their physical attitudes suggesting that they might be ready to fight. Hota faced them down, squaring his shoulders, and, instead of cautioning them, he roared.
The noise that issued from him was more than the sum of a troubled life, of old angers, of social impotence—it seemed to spring from a vaster source, to be the roar of the turning world, a sound that all creation made in its spin toward oblivion, exultant and defiant even in dismay, a sound that went unheard until, as now, it found a host suitable to give it tongue. Quailed, the men backed toward the kitchen. Recognizing that they no longer posed a threat, his anger emptied, Hota went to Magali’s side. Her face was difficult to read, but he felt from her a radiation of contentment. She took his arm—proudly, it seemed—and they stepped out into the town.
By night, Teocinte had an even more derelict aspect than by day, the crooked little shacks, firelight flickering through cracks in the doors and from behind squares of cloth hung over windows. Streets winded and quiet, except for the occasional scream and burst of laughter. A naked infant, untended, splashed in a puddle formed by that afternoon’s rain. Above, the silhouette of Griaule’s tree-lined back outlined in stars against a purple sky. It had altogether the atmosphere of a tribal place, of people huddled together in frail shelters against the terrors of the dark, dwelling in the very shadow of those terrors.
That night Hota felt estranged from the town and from himself, troubled by the vague presence in his thoughts that had spurred him to violence. But Magali’s closeness, her scent and the brush of her hip, the pressure of her breast against his arm, these things prevented him from brooding. They idled along the downslope of the street that fronted Liar’s House, moving toward the dragon’s head, and as they walked she said, “We should be flying now.”
“Flying?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the most wonderful thing, flying together.”
He suspected that she was dissembling and knew she did not like being pressed; but he had the itch to press her. She rarely spoke about her life prior to their meeting and, though he was not convinced that she was who she claimed to be, he wanted to believe her. It surprised him that he wanted this. Until that instant he had been uncertain as to what he wanted, but he was clear about it now. He wanted her to be a fabulous creature, for himself to be part of her fabulous design, and, sensing that she might be receptive to him, he asked if she could tell him how it was to fly.
She was silent for such a length of time, he thought she would refuse to answer, but after five or six paces she said, “One day you’ll know how it feels.”
Puzzled, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“You can’t…not yet.”
That comment sparked new questions, but he chose to pursue the original one. “You must be able to tell me something about it.”
They walked a while longer and then she said, “Each flight is like the first flight, the flight made at the instant of creation. You’re in the dark, you’re drowsy. Almost not there. And then you wake to some need, some urgency. Your wings crack as you rise up. Like thunder. And then you’re into the light, the wind…the wind is everything. All your strength and the rush of the wind, the sound of your wings, the light, it’s one power, one voice.”
As she spoke he seemed to understand her, but when she fell silent the echoes of her words lost energy and were transformed into generalities. He tried to explore them, to recapture some fraction of the feeling her voice had communicated, but failed.
The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant’s petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule’s head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.
“You keep telling me I can’t understand things,” he said. “It’s frustrating. I want to understand something and I don’t understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this…as a woman?”
She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.
“Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens,” she said. “We control our shapes in ways you cannot.”
“You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?”
“Only a dragon or a woman…I think. I’m not sure,”
He pondered this. “Why can’t Griaule change himself into a man?”
“What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate—a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It’s something done only out of great necessity.”
“You didn’t appear to be in pain…when I found you?”
“It had ebbed by the time you reached me.”
At first there were too many questions flocking Hota’s thoughts for him to single any out, but before long one soared higher than the rest: what great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, “Soon you’ll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient.”
Moonglow fanned up above the hills to the west and in that faint light she looked calm, emotionless. Yet as he considered her, it struck him that a new element was embodied in her face. Serenity…or perhaps it was an absence he perceived, some small increment of anxiety erased.
“Griaule,” she said in a half-whisper.
“What of him?” he asked, perplexed by her worshipful tone.
She only shook her head in response.
Something scurried through the grass behind the boulder. A dull gleam emerged from the shadow of Griaule’s head, the tip of a fang holding the light. The wind picked up, bringing the still palms alive, swaying their fronds, breeding a sigh that seemed to voice a hushed anticipation. Magali folded her arms across her breasts.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
Hota assumed that by those last words, she meant she was ready to return to Liar’s House, for after saying them, she hopped down from the boulder and led him back toward the town; but once they closed the door of his room behind them, it became clear she had intended something more. She undressed quickly and stood before him in a silent yet unmistakable invitation, her skin agleam in the unsteady lamplight. Skeins of hair fell across her breasts, like black tributaries on the map of a voluptuous bronze country. Her eyes were cored with orange reflection. She looked to be a magical feminine treasure whose own light devalued that of the lamp. All his flimsy moral proscriptions against intimacy melted away. He took a step toward her and let her bring him down onto the bed.