He wiped blood from his chin, where a twig had nicked him. Snelling lay on his side, breathing through his mouth, blood crimsoning his teeth. His wife struggled to sit up, teetered for a moment, flirting with the perpendicular before falling back again.
‘Sandra!’ Snelling’s cry sounded forlorn, almost wistful, not like a shout of warning, or even one of sympathy.
‘Are you mad?’ George kicked dirt on him and scooped up his shirt, along with the mangos it held. ‘Risking your lives for a few mangos! Fucking idiots!’
A noise behind him – he spun about, ready to defend himself. Standing at the margin of the clearing was a gangly young girl in deplorable condition, twelve or thirteen years old. Ginger hair hung across her face in thick snarls and her faded blue rag of a dress did little to hide her immature breasts. In addition to a freckling of inflamed insect bites, the skin of her torso and legs was striped with welts, some of them fresh, evidence of harsh usage. Her lips trembled and she tottered forward. ‘Help me,’ she said in a frail voice. She stumbled and might have fallen had George not caught her. She was so slight, when he put an arm about her, he inadvertently lifted her off the ground.
Snelling collapsed onto his back, breath shuddering, but his wife, displaying renewed vigor, shrilled, ‘Take your hands off my daughter!’
Edgar, displaying unexpected ferocity, charged George with arms outstretched and fingers hooked, as if intending to scratch out his eyes. George stepped to the side and, using the mangos knotted in his shirt, clubbed him in the face. Edgar dropped like a stone, blood spurting from his nose, and began to sob. Between the sobs, George heard Peony speaking almost inaudibly, saying, ‘She’s not my mother . . . she’s not my mother.’
‘Liar!’ Mrs Snelling shrieked. ‘Ingrate!’
‘She may be your daughter, but you most certainly are not her mother,’ George said. ‘No real mother would allow her child to endure such abuse.’
‘Bastard! If we were in Morningshade, I’d have you beaten.’
‘Lucky for me we’re not in Morningshade. And lucky for you I’m less concerned with justice than I am with caring for your daughter’s injuries.’ George’s outrage crested. ‘My God! What sort of people are you to treat a child so? Wild animals would show more humanity! I’m taking her with me. If you attempt to interfere in any way, I’ll finish what I’ve begun. I’ll kill you all!’
To illustrate this message, George kicked Edgar in the thigh. He backed from the clearing and, once he could no longer see them, he picked up Peony and ran.
He had gone no more than twenty-five yards when a blast of sound assailed him, seeming to come from on high, followed by a windy rush. Glancing up, he glimpsed a pale swollen belly and a twitching serpentine tail passing overhead. Moments later, the bushes crunched under an enormous weight and a low grumbling signaled that Griaule had landed nearby and was crashing through the thickets. George flung himself down, burrowed under the dead fronds scattered beneath a palmetto tree, and gathered Peony to him, clamping a hand to her mouth to prevent an outcry. More crunching, dry twigs snapping like strings of firecrackers; then the great glutinous huff of the dragon breathing. Through a gap in the leaves George saw a thick scaly leg that terminated in a foot as broad as a sofa cushion, with a spike protruding from its heel and four yellowish talons, much discolored. Peony, who had been squirming about, went limp in his arms, and a cold sensation settled over his brain. Cold and seething, like the margins of a tide. He had the impression of an ego gone wormy with age and anger, a malefic, indulgent potency whose whims dwarfed his deepest desires, an entity to which he was intrinsically subservient. A message resolved from the coldness, clear as the reverberations of a gong, silencing every other mental voice, and he knew, as surely as he might know the worn portrait of an empress on a Roman sestercius, that his place was beside the pools, that he should never return to the mango tree. Such behavior would not be tolerated a second time. He shut his eyes, terror-struck by this brush with Griaule’s mind (it had been too alien and powerful to write off as imagination born of fear), and he refused to open them again until he heard leathery wings battering the air and a scream issuing from above the plain.
As they made their way toward home, he rejected all interior conversation concerning the possibility that the dragon had spoken to him (though he was certain it had), and he stuffed any material relating to the encounter into his mental attic and locked it away. Denial was the only rational course in the face of such power. To distract himself further, he poked around in the fume and bubble of his thoughts, hoping to learn what had provoked him to such a rage against the Snellings. Not since his schoolboy days had he lifted a hand in anger and, while he had acted in self-defense, the murderous character of the emotions that had attended his actions astonished him. He could not unearth any inciting event from his past that would have predisposed him to such a vicious reaction, yet he realized he had tapped into a reservoir of ferocity that must have been simmering inside him for years, waiting a proper outlet. His threats had not been empty bluster. He meant every word.
Chapter Five
Peony was too weak to manage a hike and George had to carry her much of the way. When he questioned her about the Snellings, she put her head down on his shoulder and slept, her heart beating against his chest, frail and rapid as a bird’s. With every step, her vulnerability impressed itself on him and his commitment to her deepened. He stopped now and then, hiding in the thickets, waiting until certain no one was trailing them before moving on, and before they reached camp in early afternoon he had reversed the basic situation in his mind and thought about Peony in terms such as might befit a protective parent.
Sylvia was fishing, crouched half-naked in the pool, wearing only her rolled-up trousers. She pretended not to hear his approach. He called out to her and she turned on him a look of exasperation that changed to one of displeasure when she caught sight of Peony.
‘Adding to your stable?’ she said nastily. ‘One woman’s not enough for a man of your dimensions?’
‘Use your eyes,’ he replied. ‘She’s hardly a woman.’
He explained what had occurred and she had him carry Peony inside the shelter, then shooed him away, saying she would tend to the girl.
Five good-sized fish lay on flat stones by the edge of the pool, their glistening sides pulsing with last breaths. One had silvery tiger-stripes on its olive green back – George couldn’t identify it. He sliced off their heads, gutted and filleted them, and wrapped their flesh in banana leaves. That done, he took a stroll into the thickets, located a banderilla tree growing beside a cluster of hibiscus bushes, and began removing the barbs from the tips of the twigs, placing them on banana leaves and carrying the leaves to the perimeter of the camp. He was loading his ninth leaf when Sylvia pushed through the bushes to his side and asked what he was doing.
‘I’m going to rig some booby traps along the trails,’ he said. ‘They won’t do serious damage, but we’ll hear when someone trips them.’