By all accounts, the most fearsome of Teocinte’s citizens and, at forty-two, its eldest, was Hota Kotieb, a brooding stump of a man with graying, unkempt hair, his cheeks and jaw scarred by knife cuts. His hands were huge, capable of englobing a cantaloupe and squeezing it to a pulp, and his powerful arms and oxlike shoulders had been developed through years of unloading ships at the docks in Port Chantay. Deep-socketed eyes provided the only vital accent in what otherwise seemed the sort of brutish face sometimes produced by the erosion of great stones. Unlike his fellows, who would make lengthy forays out into the world to perpetrate their crimes, then returned to restore themselves by steeping in the dragon’s aura, Hota never strayed from the valley. Eleven summers previously, after his wife had been run over in the street by a coach belonging to the harbormaster in Port Chantay, he had forsworn the unreliable processes of justice and forced his way into the man’s home. When the harbormaster ordered him ejected, Hota stabbed him, his two sons and several retainers, himself receiving numerous wounds during the skirmish. On realizing that he would be hung were he to remain in the town, he looted the house and fled, killing three policemen who sought to stop him outside the door. Casting aside a lifetime of unobtrusive action and docile labor, he had murdered ten men in the space of less than an hour.
Though he had never attended school and was ignorant of many things, Hota was by no means dull-witted, and when he meditated on these events, his red victory and the grim chaos that preceded it, he was able to place his actions in a rational context. He felt little remorse over the murders of the harbormaster and his sons. They were oppressors and had received an oppressor’s due. As for the rest, he regretted their deaths and believed that some would have been spared had he not been enraged to the point of derangement; yet he refused to use derangement as a sop to his conscience and recognized that the potential for extreme violence had always been his. He had not wished his wife to die, but neither had he loved her. Thirteen years of marriage had doused the spark that once leaped between them. Their union had decayed into indifference and sham. They were like two plow horses harnessed together, endlessly tilling a field barren of children and every other promise, yet led to continue their dreary progress by the litany of empty promises they spoke to one another. It seemed her death had less inspired than legitimized a violent release, and that he had been longing to kill someone for quite some time, motivated in this by feelings of impotence bred over years of abject poverty. Now this tendency had made itself known, he supposed it would rise all the more easily to the surface. For this reason, though he was lonely, he kept no one close.
The money and gems he had stolen from the harbormaster enabled Hota to live as comfortably as the rough consolations of Teocinte permitted. He occupied a third-floor room at the rear of Dragonwood House, a weathered, boxlike building with a tin roof and a tavern downstairs and a newer, less ruinous single-story wing attached, where prostitutes were housed. Its ashen gray facade was dressed with a garishly painted sign that depicted a dragon soaring through a fiery heaven. The inn was situated near the edge of town and serviced the steady stream of visitors that came to look at Griaule, offering views of the dragon’s side from its front windows. Its owner, Benno Grustark, claimed that the boards employed in its construction were manufactured from trees that had grown atop Griaule’s back, but his patrons, knowing that few dared to set foot upon the dragon, let alone cut timber, referred to the inn as Liar’s House.
Having no need to work, Hota passed many of the days at woodcarving, a hobby of his childhood that still pleased him, though he displayed no talent for the work. Since there was little in the town to attract his eye, he took to carving likenesses of Griaule. Dozens of such pieces were crowded together on his shelves, atop the bureau and chairs, and scattered across the floor of his room. On occasion he would give one to a child or to a prostitute who shared his bed, but this made no appreciable dent in the clutter. To avoid further clutter, he began working on a grander scale, walking out into the hills, felling trees, chiseling dragons from the trunks, and leaving the completed figures to the depredations of the rain and the insects. He set no great store by the work, caring only that it distracted him, but was nonetheless pleased that the woods were becoming littered with his sculptures, crude figures weathering into objects that—like their model—appeared to be natural formations that bore a striking resemblance to dragons.
