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.”
She appeared to be studying the floor, the boards figured by dragons, blackly emerging from the grain of the wood. “Love and desire,” she said at last, imbuing the words with a wistful emphasis. “For me…” She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know.”
“Try!” he insisted.
“This is so important to you?”
“It is.”
She firmed her lips. “Inevitability and freedom. That’s what I feel. For you, for the situation we’re in…” She spread her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “That’s as near as I can get.”
At a loss, Hota asked her to explain further.
“None of this was our idea, yet it was inevitable,” she said. “Its inevitability was thrust upon us by Griaule. But that’s irrelevant. We have a road to travel and must make the best of it. And so we…we’ve formed an attachment.”
“And freedom? What of that?”
“To find your way to freedom in what is inevitable, within the bonds of your fate…that, for me, is love. Only when you accept a limitation can you escape it.”
Hota nodded as if he understood her, and to a degree he did; but he was unable to apply what he understood to the things he felt or the things he wanted her to feel.
Perhaps she read this in his face, for she said then, “Often I feel other emotions. Strains…whispers of them. I think they’re akin to those you feel. They trouble me, but I’ve come to accept them.” She beckoned him to come stand beside her and then took his hand. “We’ll always be bound together. When you accept that, then you’ll find your freedom.” She lay back and turned onto her side. “Now, please. Bring me the herb. This is the day it should be picked.”
There was no shortcut to the spot where the herb grew, unless you were to climb over Griaule’s back. Hota was loath to run that course again and so he went up into the hills behind the town and walked through pine forest along the ridges for an hour until he reached a pass choked by a grassy mound that wound between hills: the dragon’s tail. Once across the tail, he walked for half an hour more through scrub palmetto before he came to an undulant stretch of meadow close to the dragon’s hind leg, where weeds bearing blue florets sprouted among tall grasses. He worked doggedly, plucking the weeds, cramming them into his sack and tamping them down. When the sack was two-thirds full, he sat beneath a palmetto whose fronds still dripped with rain, facing the massive green slope of the dragon, and unwrapped his lunch of bread and cheese and beer.