The trappings of his life seemed to arrange themselves in orderly ranks as he ate, and he realized that for the first time he had a significant purpose. Aside from momentary impulses, he had never truly wanted anything before Magali appeared atop Griaule’s back. Nor, until the day of his wife’s death, had he ever acted of his own volition. He had done everything by rote, copying the lives of his father, his uncles, compelled by the circumstance of birth to obey the laws of his class. Of course, it was conceivable…no, it was certain, that he had always been the subject of manipulation, that what he had done in Port Chantay and since was not of his own choosing, and he was merely a minor figure in Griaule’s design. It was immaterial, he thought, whether the manipulative force were the arcane directives of a dragon or the compulsions of a society. The main distinction, as he saw it, was that his current purpose—that of surrogate father, caretaker, protector of a woman once a dragon—was a duty for which he had been singled out, for which he was best suited of all the available candidates, and that bred in him an emotion he had felt so rarely, he scarcely knew it well enough to name: Pride. It pervaded him now, alleviating both his anxieties and his aversion toward being used in such a bizarre fashion.
An armada of clouds with dark bellies and silvered edges swept up from the south, grazing the sharp crests of the distant hills and thundering, as if their hulls were being ruptured. White lightnings pranced and stabbed. The rain began to pelt down in scatters, big drops that hit like cold shrapnel, and Hota, leaving the remnants of his food for the ants, returned to his task, tearing up fistfuls of weeds and stuffing them into the sack. Soon the thunder was all around, deafening, one peal rolling into the next. Then he heard a low rumble that came from somewhere closer than the sky, an immense, grating voice that seemed to articulate a gloating satiety, a brute pleasure, and lasted far too long to be an ordinary peal. Hota dropped the sack and stared at Griaule, expecting the hill to shake off its cloak of soil and trees, and walk. Expecting also that the head would lift and pin him with a golden eye. Rain matted his hair, poured down his face, and still he stood there, waiting to hear that voice again. When he did not, he became uncertain he had heard it the first time, and yet it resounded in memory, guttural and profound, a voice such as might have risen from the earth, from the throat of a demon pleased by the taste of a freshly digested mortal soul. If he had heard it, if it had been Griaule’s voice, Griaule who never spoke, Hota could think of only one thing that would have summoned so unique a response. The child. He set about stuffing the sack with renewed vigor, ripping up weeds, unmindful of the rain, and when the sack was full, its girth that of a wagon wheel, he shouldered it and headed back into the hills and along the ridge toward Teocinte.
By the time he began descending through the pine forest, angling for the center of town, Hota was shivering, his clothes soaked though, but his thoughts were of Magali’s well-being and not his own. She might have needed the herb in preparation for the birth and suffered greatly for lack of it. The idea that he had failed her plagued him more than the cold. He increased his pace, hustling down the slope with a choppy, sideways step, the sack bumping and rolling against his back. On reaching the lower slope, where the pines thinned out into stands of banana trees and shrubs, he heard voices and caught a glimpse of several men sprinting up the hill. He was too worried about Magali to make a presumption concerning the reason for their haste. Forcing his way through the last of the brush, he burst out onto a dirt street, repositioned the sack, which had slipped from his shoulder. Then he glanced to his left, toward Liar’s House.
What he saw rooted him to the spot. Off along the bumpy, muddy street, many-puddled, strafed by slashing rain and lined with shanties that in their crookedness and decrepitude looked like desiccated wooden skulls with tin hats, lay the wreckage of the inn. There appeared to have been an explosion inside the place, the walls and roof blown outward…yet not blown far. Just far enough so as to form, of shattered gray boards, crushed furniture, ripped mattresses, and scraps of tin, the semblance of an enormous nest. One corner post with a shard of flooring attached had been left standing, detracting from the effect. Resting at the center of the ruin, her head high and her body curled about a grayish white egg twice the size of Hota’s sack, was a dragon with bronze scales. Perhaps forty feet in length, tip to tail. Twists of black smoke fumed from the boards around her and were dispersed by the rain. Smoke also rose from the wreckage of a shack opposite the hotel. She had breathed fire, Hota told himself. He felt a twinge of regret that he had not been present to see it.
No one else was about and Hota could feel the emptiness of the town. Everyone had fled. All the thieves and murderers. Except for him. The men whom he had passed on the outskirts must have been stragglers. His sack grew heavy. He lowered it to the ground, with no thought of running in his mind, and drank in the scene with the greediness of a connoisseur of desolation, savoring every detail, every variation in tint, every fractured angle. Liar’s House had been constructed from exactly the right amount of timber to make a nest, enough to provide protection, yet not so much as to interfere with Magali’s field of vision as she lay beside the egg. Griaule’s design at work, Hota imagined. The boards had fallen perfectly. Those that had been part of the interior rooms had collapsed outward and thus created a wall around the inner nest; those that had been part of the exterior had fallen inward, creating a field of debris that would afford a treacherous footing to anyone who tried to cross.
Hota was still marveling over the rectitude and precision of Griaule’s plan, when Magali’s neck flexed, her head turned toward him, and she gave a cry that, though absent the chthonic power of the grumbling he had earlier heard, nonetheless owned power sufficient to terrify him. It started as a guttural cawing and narrowed to a violent whistling scream that seemed to skewer his brain with an icy wire. He wanted to run now, but the sight held him. How beautiful and strange she looked at the heart of her ruinous nest, with her child in his glossy shell, smoke rising about them like black incense burnt to celebrate an idol. Her sagittal crest was a darker bronze, a corroded color—some of her scales shaded toward this same hue at the edges. The shape of her head was different from Griaule’s. Not birdlike, but serpentine. Her eyes, also dark, set in deep orbits, were flecked with many-colored brightnesses; her folded wings were of an obsidian blackness, the struts wickedly sharp. All in all, like a relic treasure of the orient in her armored gaud. She screamed again and he thought he understood the urgency her voice conveyed. The herb.
She wanted the herb.
He hoisted the sack onto his shoulder. Got his feet moving. Shuffled toward her, resolute yet weak with fear, his scrotum cold and tightened. He paused at the point where the front steps of the hotel had stood, now smashed to kindling, and imagined the change, the floor giving way beneath her suddenly acquired weight, the walls sundered by lashings of her tail and blows from her head. Even with the heavy odor of the rain and smoke, he could smell her scent of bitter ozone. He opened the sack, preparing to dump the contents on the ground, and she screamed a third time, a blast that nearly deafened him.