‘What you got there?’
A prostitute clad in a robe of peach silk, a thin brunette in her early twenties with curly hair, a dusky complexion, and a face that, though pretty, was too sharp-featured for his tastes, slid onto the bench beside him and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’
Startled not only by her, but by the fact that the tavern had, without his notice, filled with a noisy crowd, he dropped the chip into her hand, an action he instantly regretted, worried that she might abscond with it.
‘I haven’t seen one of these since I was a bare-ass kid,’ the woman said, pushing her hair back from her eyes. ‘My granny wore one like this around her neck. She promised she’d leave it to me, but they buried the old hag with it.’
‘You know what it is, then?’
‘A dragon scale . . . not off a monster like Griaule. The babies have this blue color when they’re born, or so I hear.4 I suppose it could be Griaule’s from when he was little. There ain’t been any baby dragons around these parts for centuries. The scale my granny wore was passed down from her great-great-great.’
George reached for the scale, but the woman closed her hand.
‘I’ll give you a ride for it.’ She opened her robe, exposing her breasts, and shimmied her shoulders.
‘Let me have it,’ said George, snapping his fingers.
‘Don’t act so stern!’ She jiggled the scale in her palm, as if assessing its weight, and then passed it to him. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you liberties for a week. When you go back to Port Chantay, you’ll have more than a guided tour of Griaule to remember, I promise.’
‘How can you tell I’m from Port Chantay?’
With a disdainful sniff, she said, ‘I have a gift.’
Her breasts were fuller than he had thought, quite shapely, with large cinnamon areolae. Ever a pragmatic sort when it came to business affairs, he reckoned the scale to be a curiosity piece, not worth that much to the run of his customers; but he pressed his seller’s advantage.
‘I’m here two more weeks,’ he said. ‘Put yourself at my disposal for that time and the scale is yours.’
‘At your disposal? You’ll have to speak plainer than that. I ain’t letting you tie me up, if that’s how you’re bent.’
‘I’m staying at the Weathers. I’d want you there with me.’
‘The Weathers,’ she said, and made an appreciative face. ‘What else would you want?’
George spelled out his needs in clinical detail; the woman nodded and said, ‘Done.’
She extended a hand and, as if imitating George, snapped her fingers. ‘Give it here.’
‘When the two weeks are up. One of us will have to trust the other to fulfill their end of the bargain. I’d prefer it be you.’
1 The mile-long dragon, paralyzed by a wizard’s spell, in whose lee Teocinte had grown.
2 Portions of this sky, scales shed by the dragon, would occaisionally fall on the rooftops below, crushing the houses beneath, causing the plots of land upon which they had stood to appreciate in value because they would be unlikely to experience another such disaster.
3 As the tale was told, over the centuries people came from the ends of the earth to lay offerings before him, and these offerings had been transported by a succession of creatures and men controlled by the dragon to a hiding place known only to him (its location having been subsequently erased from the minds of his minions). The treasure was said by some to be fabulous beyond belief, and by others to be a complete fabrication.
4 This was true only as so far as dragons native to the region went. Dragons bred in other climes displayed a variety of coloration, ranging from ivory-scaled snow dragons of the Antarctic to the reddish-gold hue of those dragons that once inhabited the wastes north of Lake Baikul, a shade that deepened to a rich bronze at maturity.
Chapter Two
With the death of the dragon Griaule, the city council of Teocinte were forced to confront a question they had failed to anticipate: When dealing with a creature whose heart beat once every thousand years, how does one determine whether he is actually dead? Since the sole perceptible sign of death was the closing of his eyes, it was suggested that he had merely lapsed into a coma induced by the countless gallons of poisoned paint slapped onto his side during the creation of Meric Cattanay’s mural.5 The parasites that lived on and inside him had not fled the body and there was no evidence of corruption (nor would there be for many years if the rate of decay were as glacially slow as the rest of his metabolic processes). Indeed, it had been ventured that since Griaule was a magical being, the possibility existed that his corpse would prove to be uncorrupting.
Decades before, when the council accepted Cattanay’s plan, they had acted in confidence and contracted with various entrepreneurs for the disposal of Griaule’s corpse, selling it piecemeal in advance of his death, thus adding millions to the town coffers; but the current council regretted their predecessors’ decision and refused to honor the contracts.6 Due to their uncertainty about his mortal condition, they still feared Griaule. If he were alive, they could only imagine his reaction to an attempted dissection. Then there was the matter of aesthetics. Thanks to the discovery of mineral springs south of town and, in no small part, to Griaule himself, Teocinte had become a tourist destination. Turning a portion of the town into an abattoir, with several hundred thousand tons of dragon meat and guts and bones lying about, would be an inappropriate advertisement for fun and relaxation. The council was hesitant to act, yet the citizenry of Teocinte, who for generations had lived under Griaule’s ineffable dominion, clamored for an official judgment. It was a touchy situation, one that demanded a delicate resolution, and therefore the council tried – as do all accomplished politicians – to make doing next to nothing seem like a compromise. They tore down the scaffolding Cattanay had erected in order to create his mural, scoured the moss from the teeth, cut away the vegetation from his body, leaving in place only the thickets surrounding the ruin of Hangtown on his back (now uninhabited except for a caretaker), which they designated a historical site. They constructed rope walkways leading to every quarter of the dragon and offered tours, inducing tourists to go where most of the townspeople feared to tread. This, they thought, would promote the idea that they believed Griaule to be dead, yet would provide no evidentiary proof and put off a final determination. If Griaule were still alive and a few tourists died as a result of this experiment in the social dynamic, well, so be it. They further built several luxury hotels, among them the Seven Weathers, on the slopes of Haver’s Roost, each offering excellent views of the dragon. And so, on the day after he found the scale, George stood at a window in his suite at the Weathers, sipping coffee and having a morning cigar, gazing at Griaule: an enormous green-and-gold lizard looming like a hill with an evil head over the smoking slum in his shadow, his tail winding off between lesser hills, light glinting from the tip of a fang and coursing along the ribbing of the sagittal crest rising from his neck, the mural on its side glazed with sun, making it indecipherable at that angle. The huge paint vats that had occupied the flat portion of his skull had been dismantled so as not to distract from the dramatic view.
The woman, Sylvia,7 stirred in the bedroom and George sat down at a writing desk and took up cleaning the scale once again, thinking he might as well make it nice for her. The dirt on the scale was peculiarly resistant and he had managed to clear only a small central patch, about a quarter of its surface, when Sylvia entered, toweling her hair, wearing only sandals and a pair of beige lounging trousers. She dropped heavily into the armchair beside the desk and sighed. He acknowledged her with a nod and bent to his task. She made an impatient noise, which he ignored; she flung her legs over the arm of the chair, the towel slipping down onto her thighs, and said blithely, ‘Well, you don’t fuck like a shopkeeper, I’ll say that much for you.’