Beautiful Blood

At dawn the next day, with a shimmering red sun balanced in a notch between distant hills, Jarvis and Rosacher (burdened by two twelve-foot-long bamboo poles that Jarvis had cut along the way, to the ends of which he had affixed large hooks, offering no explanation other than “…they’ll come in handy…”) lowered themselves on ropes to a spot beneath the dragon’s wing where an ancient wound—a wedge torn from the flesh over which the scales had grown back warped and deformed—had evolved over millennia into a wide ledge that afforded a view of Griaule’s eastern slope and the countryside below. The scales on that side were obscured by tangles of vines and carpeted in lichen that ranged in hue through a spectrum of vivid greens, with here and there edgings of rust and scarlet and pale brown. Dirt and grass mounded high beneath the dragon’s belly, covering much of his legs, making it appear from a westbound traveler’s perspective that this portion of the beast was a natural formation, a cliff lifting from a plain of palms and thorn bushes and tall yellow grasses. Only the wing, drooping down to shade the ledge, scarcely ten feet overhead, its great vanes and struts supporting a considerable acreage of darkly veined tissue, denied this impression. As the sun climbed higher, the sky lightening to a robin’s egg blue with pink streamers of cloud feathered above the hills, it brought to light the abundance of life that flourished upon and about Griaule. Swarms of insects darted to and fro, doing some dervish duty, and occasionally a cloud of flakes drifted into view, causing Rosacher to tense until they passed from sight. Uncountable thousands of creatures too small to make out moved across Griaule’s body, creating a rippling effect, as if he were seeing through a depth of crystalline water. Hawks patrolled the skies, swooping down to take their prey, and flocks of smaller birds—swifts, starlings, sparrows, and so forth—swept up and away, or flew low above the dragon, following the topography of the back for a second or two before vanishing in the direction of Teocinte. The organic complexity of the scene put him in mind of childhood summers spent on the coast, diving down into the translucent water and observing the reef, the strange unity of fishes darting in schools beneath the shadows of sharks, gorgonians and anemones gently waving, many-jointed crustaceans, frail life forms whose curious configurations beggared classification, a myriad trivial interactions joined in a symphony of movement that seemed to reflect the direction of an enormous brain, to be its living thoughts.