He set off walking again, walking with a firm step and a smile for everyone who passed him by, bowing politely to an old woman sweeping off her stoop, stopping once to pat a young boy on the head, all the while giving thought to his campaign against Lemos, picturing the gemcutter in various states of ruinous defeat, imagining Mirielle in his arms, letting his mind roam freely through the realms of possibility, posing himself in judge’s robes, dispensing the dispassionate rule of the law, fair yet inflexible, full of imponderable wisdoms, and he saw himself as well on the sunny verandah of a mansion on Ayler Point, on a white yacht, in a glittering ballroom, in every manner of luxurious environment, with loyal friends and beautiful lovers and enemies whose secrets he had mastered. Life, which for so long had seemed distant, a treasure beyond his grasp, now seemed to embrace him, to close around him and make him dizzy with its rich scents and sights. What did it matter, he said to himself, who ran the world, it tasted no less sweet, it gave no less pleasure. He laughed out loud, he winked at a pretty girl, he plotted violence and duplicity, all things that brought him joy.
One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay.
In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality. It has been said that of all living creatures, this duality was best perceived in dragons, for they had flown fully formed from out the mouth of the Uncreate, the first of creation’s kings, and gone soaring through a conflagration that, eons hence, would coalesce into worlds and stars and all the dream of matter. Thus the relation of their souls to their flesh accurately reflected the constitution of the Creator, enveloping and controlling their material bodies from without rather than, as with the souls of men, coming to be lodged within. And of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the dragon Griaule.
How Griaule came to be paralyzed by a wizard’s magical contrivance is a story without witness, but it has been documented that in this deathlike condition he lived on for millennia, continuing to grow, until he measured more than a mile in length, lying athwart and nearly spanning the westernmost section of the Carbonales Valley. Over the years he came to resemble a high hill covered in grass and shrubs and stunted trees, with here and there a portion of scale showing through, and the colossal head entirely emergent, unclothed by vegetation, engaging everything that passed before him with huge, slit-pupiled golden eyes, exerting a malefic influence over the events that flowed around him, twisting them into shapes that conformed to the cruel designs his discarnate intellect delighted in the weaving of, and profited his vengeful will. During his latter days, a considerable city, Teocinte, sprawled away from Griaule’s flank over the adjoining hill, but centuries before, when few were willing to approach the dragon, Teocinte was scarcely more than an outsized village enclosed by dense growths of palms and bananas, hemmed in between the eminence of Griaule and a pine-forested hill. Scruffy and unlovely; flyblown; its irregularly laid-out dirt streets lined by hovels with rusting tin roofs; it was lent the status of a town by a scattering of unstable frame structures housing taverns, shops, and a single inn, and was populated by several thousand men and women who, in the main, embodied a debased extreme of the human condition. Murderers and thieves and outlaws of various stamp. Almost to a one, they believed that proximity to the dragon imbued them with a certain potency (as perhaps it did) and refused to concern themselves with the commonly held notion that they had been drawn to Teocinte because their depravity resonated with the dragon’s depraved nature, thus making them especially vulnerable to his manipulations. What does it matter whose purpose we serve, they might have asked, so long as it satisfies our own?
