She appeared to lose interest in the conversation, her eyes traveling across the boards. In the rainy light, her beauty was subdued, diminished. “Are you happy?” she asked after a minute.
“Maybe I was, a little.” He spotted his pants lying on the floor and stepped into them. “Why would Griaule do this? For what reason does he want a son?”
“I’ve no idea. Perhaps it’s just a game he’s playing. You can’t know Griaule’s intent. Some of his schemes play out over thousands of years. He’s unique, as unlike me as I am unlike you. No one can fathom what he intends.”
Of a sudden the rain let up and a weak sun broke through the overcast; the wind gusted and a distorted shadow of the window, pale panes and darker divisions, canted out of true, trembled on floor.
“I need food,” Magali said.
Though Hota held out some hope that their night together would be the beginning of intimacy, he soon recognized it to have been their peak. Thereafter the relationship settled back into one of functional disengagement. He brought her food, whatever she needed, and kept watch over her with devotional intensity. Their conversations grew less frequent, less far-ranging, as her belly swelled…and it swelled much more rapidly than would a typical pregnancy. Four weeks and she had the shape of a woman in late-term. She stayed in bed most of the day. Never again did they visit the tavern or walk out together in the town. Hota sat in a chair, brooding, or stood at the window and did the same. He became familiar with the window much in the way he had become familiar with Magali, noting all its detaiclass="underline" patches of greenish mold on the sill; a splintery centerpiece; areas of wood especially stained and swollen by dampness; rotted inches eaten away by infestation. Its gray dilapidation was, he thought, emblematic not only of the room, but of his life, which was itself a gray, dilapidated region, a space that contained and limited his spirit, stunting its growth.
He recognized, too, that his position in the town had changed. Whereas formerly he had been someone whom people avoided, few had spoken against him; but now when passed in the streets, no one offered a greeting or a salute—instead, men and women would stand closer together, whisper and dart wicked glances in his direction. The reasons for this change remained unclear until one afternoon, as he entered the inn, Benno Grustark accosted him at the door and demanded twice the usual rent.
“I’m losing business, having you here,” Benno told him. “You need to compensate me.”
Hota pointed out that his was the only place in town where visitors could stay and thus he doubted Benno’s claim.
“When people hear about you, some will sleep outside rather than rent my rooms,” Benno said.
“When they hear about me?” Hota said, bewildered. “What do they hear?”
Benno, who was that day dressed in his customary brown moleskin trousers and a red tunic that clung to his ample belly, a costume that lent him an inappropriately jolly look, shifted his feet and cut his eyes to the side as if fearing he would be overheard. “Your woman…people say she’s a witch.”
Hota grunted a laugh.
“It’s not a joke for me,” Benno said. “What do you expect them to think? She’s about to give birth and yet she’s only been with you a few months!”
“She was pregnant before I brought her here.”
“Oh, I see! And where was she before that? Did you keep her in your pocket? Did you make her pregnant at a distance?”
“It’s not my child,” Hota said, and realized that this, unlike his previous statement, was only partially a lie.
An expression of incredulity on his face, Benno said, “I saw her when she came. She wasn’t showing at all. And I’ve seen her since, in the hallway, no more than a month ago. She wasn’t showing then, either.”
“All pregnant women show differently. You know that.”
Benno started to raise a further point, but Hota cut him off. “Since you’re so observant, I have to assume you’re the one who has been spreading rumors about her.”
Benno popped his eyes and waggled his hands at chest-level in thespian display of denial. “Plenty of people have seen her. Other guests. Some of my girls. Her condition’s hardly a secret.”
Hota dug coins from his pocket and pressed them into Benno’s hand. “Here,” he said. “Now leave us alone.”
With a plodding tread, he started up the stairs.
Benno followed to the first step and called out, “As soon as she’s able to travel, I want the both of you gone! Do you hear me? Not one day longer than necessary!”
“It’ll be our pleasure.” Hota paused midway up the stairs and gazed down at him. “But take this to heart. Until that day, you would do well to suppress the rumors about her, rather than foster them.” Then a thought struck him. “What possessed you to cut the boards of the inn from Griaule’s back?”
Benno’s defensive manner was swept away by a confounded look, one similar—Hota thought—to the looks he himself often wore these days. “I just did it,” Benno said. “I did it because I wanted to.”
“Is that another one of your lies?” Hota asked. “Or don’t you even know?”
Over the course of the following two weeks, Magali became increasingly irritable, not asking things of Hota so much as giving orders and expressing her displeasure when he was slow to obey. She otherwise maintained a brittle silence. Thrown back onto his own resources, Hota fretted about the child and speculated that it might be some mutant thing, awful in aspect and nature. Burdened with such a monster, where could he take her that people would tolerate them? It was not in him to abandon her. Whether that was a function of his character or of Griaule’s, he could not have said and was a question he did not seek to answer. He had accepted that this, for the time being, was his station in life. That being the case, he tried to steel himself against doubt and depression, but doubt and depression circled him like vultures above a wounded dog, and the rain, incessant now, drummed and drummed on the tin roof, echoing in his dreams and filling his waking hours with its muted roar. Out the window, he watched the street turn into a quagmire, people sending up splashes with every step, thatched roofs melting into brownish green decay, drenched pariah dogs curled in misery beneath eaves and stairs. The smell of mildew rose from the wood, from clothing. The world was drowning in gray rain and Hota felt he was drowning in the rain of his own existence.
Then came a morning when the rain all but stopped and Magali’s spirits lifted. She seemed calm, not irritable in the least, and she offered apology for her moodiness, then discussed with him what she would require after the child was born. He asked if she thought the birth would be soon.
“Soon enough,” she said. “But that’s not your worry. Just bring me food. Meat. And make sure no one disturbs me. The rest I’ll take care of.”
She needed an herb, she told him, that grew on the far side of the dragon’s tail. It was most efficacious when picked at the height of the rains and she asked him to go that day and gather all he could find. She described the plant and urged him to hurry—she wanted to begin taking it as quickly as possible. Then she brushed her lips against his cheek, the closest she had ever come to giving him a kiss, and tried to send him on his way. But this diffident affection, so out of character for her, provoked Hota to ask what she felt for him.
She gave an impatient snort. “I told you—my emotions aren’t like yours.”
“I’m not an idiot. You could try to explain.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, gazed at him consideringly. “What do you feel for me?”
“Devoted, I suppose,” he said after a pause. “But my devotion changes. I remain dutiful, but there are times when I resent you…I fear you. At other times, desire you.”