Toward noon one morning, as Hota was busy carving, he noticed something flying in loops above Griaule’s snout, difficult to make out against the strong sun, as tiny in relation to the dragon as a swallow fluttering about a bull’s nose. To his astonishment, for Hota had thought Griaule to be the sole survivor of his species, he realized it was another dragon. Thirty to forty feet long, by his estimate. With bronze scales. Enthralled, he watched the creature swoop and soar, maintaining a predictable circuit, as if she (because of her daintiness by contrast to Griaule, Hota thought of the second dragon as she) were tracing the same character over and over, enacting a ritual of some kind. Her wings seemed to ripple rather than to beat against the air, and her long neck glided through its attitudes with the suppleness of a reed borne on a stream, and her tail lashed about with what struck him as a lascivious ferocity. She might be, he surmised, attempting to communicate with Griaule. Or perhaps he was communicating with her; perhaps the patterns of her flight gave visual form to the eddies of his thoughts. At length she broke off her circling and settled onto Griaule’s broad back, passing out of sight behind his sagittal crest.
Dropping his chisel, Hota hurried down the hill, following a track that merged with one of the red dirt paths criss-crossing the valley, and approached Griaule from the side, heading for the bulge of his foreleg. As the dragon came to loom above him, he felt a surge of terror. The tightly nested scales of the jaw; the gray teeth with their traceries of lichen, like the broken wall of a fortress city; the bulge of an orbital ridge: seen close to hand, the monumental aspect of these things dismayed him, and when he moved into the dragon’s shadow, something colder and thicker than air seemed to glove him, as if he were moving in invisible mud. But fascination overbore his fright. The prospect of observing a dragon who was capable of motion excited him. There was nothing of the academic or the artistic in his interest. He simply wanted to see it.
He scrambled up the slope afforded by the brush-covered foreleg, then ascended to the dragon’s thicketed shoulder, catching at shrubs to pull himself higher. His breath labored, sweat poured off him. On several occasions he nearly fell. When at last he stood atop Griaule’s back, clinging for support to a pine branch, looking down at the valley hundreds of feet below, Teocinte showing as an ugly grayish patch amid the greenery, he understood the foolishness of what he had done. He felt unarmored against the arrows of fate, as if he had violated a taboo and been stripped of all his immunities. Adding to his anxiety was the fact that nearby was a dragon who, upon sensing him, would seek to tear him to pieces…unless she had flown away while he was climbing, and he doubted this to be the case. Fear mounted in him once again, but he did not place so much value on his life as once he had—indeed, he often wondered why he had bothered to save himself from the hangman’s rope that night in Port Chantay—and his desire to see her remained strong. Planting his feet with care, easing branches aside, he pressed on into the brush and headed for the spot where he supposed the second dragon had landed.
The heat of the day came full and Hota continued to sweat profusely. The needle sprays of stunted pine and the yellowed round leaves of the shrubs that dominated the thicket limited his view to a few yards ahead and stuck to his damp neck and cheeks and arms. After wandering blindly about for a quarter of an hour, he began to speculate that the second dragon had made no landing at all, but merely swooped down behind the sagittal crest and then leveled off and flew away over the hills. He found a bare patch of ground and sat, deliberating whether or not to give up the search. Scutterings issued from the brush and this alarmed him. Rumor had it that many of the animals living in and on Griaule were poisonous. Deciding that he had been foolish enough for one day, Hota stood and headed back the way he had come. After half an hour, when he had not reached the edge of the thicket, he realized with annoyance that he must have gotten turned around and was walking along the spine. He stood on tiptoes, caught sight of the dragon’s crest, and, thus oriented, started off parallel to it. Another half hour passed and Hota’s annoyance blossomed into panic. Someone—doubtless Griaule himself—was playing a trick on him. Clouding his thoughts, causing him to go in circles. Again he sighted the sagittal crest and beat his way through the brush; but the ground beneath his feet did not slope away as it should have done and when he checked the crest once more, he saw that he had made no progress whatsoever.
After two hours, Hota’s panic lapsed into resignation. This, then, was the fate to which his violence had led him. Trapped in a magical circumstance that he could not hope to fathom, he would wander Griaule’s back until he grew too weak to walk and died of thirst and exposure. He would, he thought, have preferred to be hung. Yet he could not deny that he was deserving of worse and there was no defiance in him. He kicked broken branches aside, cleaning a spot where he could sit and wait for death; but upon reflection, he kept on walking, deciding it would be best to wear himself out and so hasten the inevitable. He hurried through the thicket, no longer trying to hide his presence, for he assumed that the second dragon had been an illusion, bait in the trap Griaule had set. He swatted boughs aside and shouldered through entangled places, forcing himself whenever possible into a lumbering trot. As he went, he began to feel exhilarated and it occurred to him that this might be because he finally had something meaningful to do. All his years of drinking and inept woodcarving, and all the years prior, the numbing labor, shabby, juiceless days and silent evenings spent staring glumly at his wife…it was right they should end here and now. They had profited no one, least of all himself.
The longer he contemplated the prospect of dying, the more eager to have done with life he became. What did he have to look forward to? A few uneventful years followed by the loss of his physical powers? Assaults by younger, stronger men who would rob him and leave him destitute? And that would not be the worst of it. Exhilaration turned to something approaching glee and he increased his pace. Twigs stabbed at him, abrading his skin, but he ignored the pain. He remembered another occasion on which he had felt a similar measure of…what? Enthusiasm? Vitality?
Delirium.
That was the word, he thought.
It was a feeling very like the one he had experienced at the harbormaster’s house in Port Chantay.
Sobered by an awareness of this connection, he slowed to a walk, mulling it over, wondering if what he felt, then and now, might be an indication of mental infirmity or some physical ailment. He was still considering this notion when he slapped aside a pine bough and stepped into a clearing where stood a slender woman with bronze skin, long black hair falling to the small of her back, and wearing not a stitch of clothing.
The woman was so startling a sight, Hota’s initial reaction was one of disbelief. He imagined her to be part of his delirium, or perhaps a further trick of Griaule’s. She was half-turned away, a hand to her cheek, as if she had been struck by a remembrance. A pattern of dark irregular lines covered her body. Like, he thought, a sketch of reptilian scales. He first believed the lines to be a tattoo, but then noticed they were growing fainter every second, and he recalled that the scales of the female dragon had been the exact shade of bronze as the woman’s skin. On hearing his choked outcry, she glanced at him over her shoulder, displaying no indication of fear such as might be expected of a naked woman alone when surprised by a man of his threatening appearance. She remained motionless, calmly regarding, and Hota, unable to accept what he was tempted to believe—that here stood the dragon he had sought, transformed somehow—was torn between the desire to flee and the need to know more about her. In a matter of seconds the lines on her skin faded utterly and, as if this signaled the completion of a process that had restrained her, she turned to face him and said in a dry, dusty voice, “Hota.”