His back to the water, George leaned against the railing, his hands braced and his face tipped to the sun like a penitent at prayer, while Peony moved about him with quick steps, almost a dance, pacing to and fro, making graceful turns and exuberant gestures. I imagined her to be describing an event that had thrilled or elated her; but as I watched, though there was no overt change in their physical attitudes, I started to view them differently and perceived sexual elements in the dance – it reminded me of Griaule’s temple in Morningshade and how some of my sisters in the brothel would circle the dragon’s statue, caressing it from time to time. There is a sexual component in every young girl’s connection with her father and I’m sure that was all it was between George and Peony . . . even if not, she was twenty-one, old enough to do as she pleased. Like most people, I needed to think meanly about something I valued in order to walk away from it, especially something I had neglected for no good reason and such a stretch of years; so I chose to think about George and Peony as having an illicit relationship and told myself it was none of my business what they did or which god they worshiped or how they went through the world, because they were unimportant to me. Perhaps those feelings and memories that surfaced during our meeting were, as are many of our recollections, born of a marriage between false emotion and a lack of clarity concerning the facts. Perhaps our lives are contrivances of lies and illusions. Yet when I think now about George and Peony, none of this seems relevant and scarcely the day passes when I do not call them to mind.
This much is known:
Following the death of the dragon Griaule, after his scales had been removed, his blood drained and stored in canisters, his flesh and organs variously preserved, his bones pulverized and sold as a remedy for cancer, incontinence, arthritis, indigestion, eczema, and much else . . . after all of this, Griaule’s skull (nearly six hundred feet in length) was maneuvered onto a many-wheeled platform and hauled across eleven hundred miles of jungle to the court of Temalagua. The history of this journey, which lasted two decades and featured dozens of pitched battles, a brief and nearly disastrous passage by sea, and cost many thousands of lives, would require several volumes to recount. Perhaps someday that history will be told, but for the purposes of our story suffice it to say that by the time the skull reached its destination, a tract of land outlying the palace grounds, King Carlos VIII, who had purchased it from the city fathers of Teocinte, was dead and buried, and his son Adilberto the First had ascended to the Onyx Throne.
Adilberto’s obsessions were not those of his father. He spent the bulk of his reign pursuing wars of aggression against neighboring states and the skull became a roosting place for birds, home to monkeys, snakes, and palm rats, and was overgrown by vines and fungus. His son, a second and lesser Adilberto, restored the skull to a relatively pristine condition, transformed the land around it into an exotic garden, bronzed the enormous fangs and limned its eye sockets and jaw with brass, jade and copper filigrees that accentuated its sinister aspects and inspired the creation of tin masks that years later came to be sold in the tourist markets. He adorned the interior with teak and ebony furnishings, with gold, silk and precious stones, and therein held bacchanals that established new standards for debauchery (murder, torture, and rape were commonplace at these revels) and contributed greatly toward bankrupting an economy already decimated by the excesses of Adilberto I and Carlos VIII.
