The Dragon Griaule Read Free

last they agreed to put the question before the body politic. They asked for a week in which to decide and appointed Jarcke, who was the mayoress of Hangtown, to guide Meric to Griaule.
    *
    The valley extended seventy miles from north to south, and was enclosed by jungled hills whose folded sides and spiny backs gave rise to the idea that beasts were sleeping beneath them. The valley floor was cultivated into fields of bananas and cane and melons, and where it was not cultivated, there were stands of thistle palms and berry thickets and the occasional giant fig brooding sentinel over the rest. Jarcke and Meric tethered their horses a half-hour’s ride from town and began to ascend a gentle incline that rose into the notch between two hills. Sweaty and short of breath, Meric stopped a third of the way up; but Jarcke kept plodding along, unaware he was no longer following. She was by nature as blunt as her name – a stump beer-keg of a woman with a brown weathered face. Though she appeared to be ten years older then Meric, she was nearly the same age. She wore a gray robe belted at the waist with a leather band that held four throwing knives, and a coil of rope was slung over her shoulder.
    ‘How much farther?’ called Meric.
    She turned and frowned. ‘You’re standin’ on his tail. Rest of him’s around back of the hill.’
    A pinprick of chill bloomed in Meric’s abdomen, and he stared down at the grass, expecting it to dissolve and reveal a mass of glittering scales.
    ‘Why don’t we take the horses?’ he asked.
    ‘Horses don’t like it up here.’ She grunted with amusement. ‘Neither do most people, for that matter.’ She trudged off.
    Another twenty minutes brought them to the other side of the hill high above the valley floor. The land continued to slope upward, but more gently than before. Gnarled, stunted oaks pushed up from thickets of chokecherry, and insects sizzled in the weeds. They might have been walking on a natural shelf several hundred feet across; but ahead of them, where the ground rose abruptly, a number of thick greenish-black columns broke from the earth. Leathery folds hung between them, and these were encrusted with clumps of earth and brocaded with mold. They had the look of a collapsed palisade and the ghosted feel of ancient ruins.
    ‘Them’s the wings,’ said Jarcke. ‘Mostly they’s covered, butyou can catch sight of ’em off the edge, and up near Hangtown there’s places where you can walk in under ’em . . . but I wouldn’t advise it.’
    ‘I’d like to take a look off the edge,’ said Meric, unable to tear his eyes away from the wings; though the surfaces of the leaves gleamed in the strong sun, the wings seemed to absorb the light, as if their age and strangeness were proof against reflection.
    Jarcke led him to a glade in which tree ferns and oaks crowded together and cast a green gloom, and where the earth sloped sharply downward. She lashed her rope to an oak and tied the other end around Meric’s waist. ‘Give a yank when you want to stop, and another when you want to be hauled up,’ she said, and began paying out the rope, letting him walk backward against her pull.
    Ferns tickled Meric’s neck as he pushed through the brush, and the oak leaves pricked his cheeks. Suddenly he emerged into bright sunlight. On looking down, he found his feet were braced against a fold of the dragon’s wing, and on looking up, he saw that the wing vanished beneath a mantle of earth and vegetation. He let Jarcke lower him a dozen feet more, yanked, and gazed off northward along the enormous swell of Griaule’s side.
    The scales were hexagonals thirty feet across and half that distance high; their basic color was a pale greenish gold, but some were whitish, draped with peels of dead skin, and others were overgrown by viridian moss, and the rest were scrolled with patterns of lichen and algae that resembled the characters of a serpentine alphabet. Birds had nested in the cracks,