‘Of course! That’s just more evidence in support of Haukkola. You’re obsessed with Griaule, so you incorporated one of his little friends into your fantasy.’
Dumfounded, Sylvia stared at him. ‘The dragon is Griaule! Didn’t you notice he’s got the same coloring, the same head shape? True, he’s not all nicked up and scarred, and he’s quite a bit smaller. But it’s him, all right.’
‘You can distinguish between lizards?’ He chuckled.
‘I’ve been looking at Griaule most of my life and I can distinguish him.’ She turned onto her side, showing him her back. ‘You and Haukkola! You’re both idiots! If it helps you to blame me, fine. I’m going to sleep.’
9 Though a rift in time or dimensionality would seem to be indicated, George subscribed to the theory espoused by Peri Haukkola, holder of the Carbajal Chair of Philosophy at the University of Helvetia. Haukkola believed that people under extreme stress could alter the physical universe even to the point of creating pocket realities, and George assumed that a reality formed by Sylvia’s self-avowed identity crisis comprised the relatively empty landscape they currently inhabited.
Chapter Four
The wind died shortly before dawn and mosquitoes swarmed the interior of the shelter, waking Sylvia and George, driving them into the water for cover. The sun climbed higher and they sat beside the pool, miserable, baking in the heat. Having nothing better to do, George shored up the walls of the shelter and elevated the ceiling, making it less of a lean-to, and then went off foraging. To avoid the thickets, the thorn bushes and the gnats, he followed the meanders of the stream through stands of bamboo and clusters of palmettos with parched brownish fronds. Once he sighted the dragon circling above the plain and lay flat until it passed from view. From that point on, for the better part of an hour, his thoughts became a grim drone accompanying his exertions. At length he happened upon a patch of dirt and grass enclosed by dense brush, an oval of relative coolness and shade cast by a solitary mango tree with ripening fruit hanging from its boughs in chandelier-like clusters. He fashioned his shirt into a sling and had begun loading it with mangos when he saw two figures slipping through the brush. Alarmed by their furtive manner, he knotted the shirt to keep the mangos safe and turned to leave. Two men blocked his path. A scrawny, balding, pinch-faced fellow dressed in a skirt woven of vines and leaves, his tanned body speckled with inflamed mosquito bites, shook a fist at George and said, ‘Them’s our mangos!’ Grime deepened the lines on his face, adding a sinister emphasis to his scowl.
His companion was a plump young man with unkempt, shoulder-length hair and a brow as broad and unwritten on as a newly cut tombstone – his head was rather large and his features small and unremarkable, imbuing his face with a weak, unfinished quality. He wore the remnants of corduroy trousers and carried a stick stout enough to be used as a club, but hid it behind his leg and refused to meet George’s stare, the very image of a reluctant warrior. George decided the men posed no threat, yet he kept an eye on the figures hiding in the brush.
‘I’ve only taken a dozen or so,’ he said. ‘Surely there’s enough for everyone.’
The balding man adopted an expression that might have been an attempt at ferocity, but instead gave the impression that he suffered from a sour stomach. The plump man whispered to him and he made a disagreeable noise.
‘We’re camped a long way from here – I hate to return empty-handed,’ said George. ‘Let me pass. I won’t bother you again.’
The plump man looked to his friend and after brief consideration the balding man said, ‘We can spare a few, I reckon. I apologize for treating you rude, but we’ve had problems with our neighbors poaching our supplies.’
‘Neighbors? Is there a village nearby?’
‘Naw, just people like us. And you. People what Griaule chased onto the plain. Maybe fifty or sixty of ’em. It’s hard to say exactly because most keep to themselves and they’re scattered all over. Might be more.’
George hefted his mangos, slung them over his shoulder. ‘Griaule, you say? You’re talking about that smallish dragon?’
‘Same as chased you out here,’ said the man. ‘Quite different from the Griaule we’re used to, he is. But you can see it’s him if you looks close.’
‘How long have you been out here?’ George asked.
‘Three months, a piece more. At least that’s how long me and the family’s been here.’ He gestured at the plump man. ‘Edgar joined us a week or so later.’
Edgar grinned at George and nodded.
‘Is that your family?’ George pointed to the figures in the brush. ‘Please assure them I mean no harm.’
‘I’m sure they know that, sir. It’s obvious you’re a gentleman.’ The balding man toed the dirt, as if embarrassed. ‘My daughter took a terrible fright, what with all Griaule’s bellowing. She’s never been right in the head. Now she ain’t comfortable around people . . . except for Edgar here.’ Resentment, or something akin, seeped into his voice. ‘She fair dotes on him.’
‘How many people are with you, Mister?’ asked Edgar, startling George, who had begun to think he was a mute.
‘Just a friend and I.’
He introduced himself and learned that the balding man was Peter Snelling, his wife was named Sandra and his daughter Peony. These formalities concluded, he asked what use they thought the dragon had for them.
‘Might as well ask how much the moon weighs,’ said Edgar, and Snelling chimed in, ‘You’ll get nowhere attempting to divine his purposes.’
‘You must have had some thoughts on the subject,’ said George.
‘Don’t reckon he wants to eat us,’ Snelling said. ‘He wouldn’t go to all this trouble . . . yet he did eat that one fellow.’
‘Didn’t really eat him.’ Edgar scratched a jowl. ‘Chewed on him and spit him out is all.’
‘That was because he tried to run off,’ said Snelling. ‘It were Griaule’s way of telling the rest of us to stay put.’
The idea that anyone could undergo this trial and not expend a great deal of energy in trying to comprehend it was alien to George. In his opinion, it did not speak highly of the two men’s intellect. He asked how they had wound up in this desolate place to begin with. Had they, like him, been transported by a magical agency?
‘You’d have to talk to Peony,’ Snelling said. ‘She were fooling around with something, but she wouldn’t show me what it was. Then the walls of our house vanished and there we were, with nothing but nature around us. Peony let out a screech and flung the thing in her hand away. I suppose I should have searched for it.’ He hunched his shoulders and made a rueful face. ‘It was hard to swallow, you know, that she were the one responsible. But I’m sure now it was her doing.’
‘Even if you had found it, it wouldn’t have done you much good,’ said George.
Edgar’s eyes darted to the side and George followed his gaze. An immensely fat woman with gray tangles of hair framing a lumpish, sunburned face and wearing a tent-sized piece of canvas for a dress, rushed at him, swinging a tree branch. The branch struck him on the neck and shoulder. Twigs scratched his face; sprays of leaves impaired his vision – a confusing blow yet not that concussive. He staggered to the side, but did not fall. Snelling threw himself on him, riding him piggyback, and as husband and wife sought to wrestle him to the ground, Edgar poked him with his stick, more annoyance than threat, his moony face bobbing now and then into sight. George managed to shove the woman away and, when she came at him again, he planted a foot in the pit of her stomach, sending her waddling backwards across the clearing, her arms making circular motions as if attempting to fly out of danger. She made a cawing noise and toppled into a bush – her dress rode up around her hips, leaving the raddled flesh of her legs protruding from the leaves. Snelling clung to him, biting and clawing, until George grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the mouth. Edgar dropped his stick, retreated to the edge of the clearing, and stood wringing his hands, his expression shifting from pained to vacant, and finally lapsing into the feckless grin that George took to be the natural resolution of his features.