Dagger Key and Other Stories

There was no shortcut to the spot where the herb grew, unless you were to climb over Griaule’s back. Hota was loath to run that course again and so he went up into the hills behind the town and walked through pine forest along the ridges for an hour until he reached a pass choked by a grassy mound that wound between hills: the dragon’s tail. Once across the tail, he walked for half an hour more through scrub palmetto before he came to an undulant stretch of meadow close to the dragon’s hind leg, where weeds bearing blue florets sprouted among tall grasses. He worked doggedly, plucking the weeds, cramming them into his sack and tamping them down. When the sack was two-thirds full, he sat beneath a palmetto whose fronds still dripped with rain, facing the massive green slope of the dragon, and unwrapped his lunch of bread and cheese and beer.

The trappings of his life seemed to arrange themselves in orderly ranks as he ate, and he realized that for the first time he had a significant purpose. Aside from momentary impulses, he had never truly wanted anything before Magali appeared atop Griaule’s back. Nor, until the day of his wife’s death, had he ever acted of his own volition. He had done everything by rote, copying the lives of his father, his uncles, compelled by the circumstance of birth to obey the laws of his class. Of course, it was conceivable…no, it was certain, that he had always been the subject of manipulation, that what he had done in Port Chantay and since was not of his own choosing, and he was merely a minor figure in Griaule’s design. It was immaterial, he thought, whether the manipulative force were the arcane directives of a dragon or the compulsions of a society. The main distinction, as he saw it, was that his current purpose—that of surrogate father, caretaker, protector of a woman once a dragon—was a duty for which he had been singled out, for which he was best suited of all the available candidates, and that bred in him an emotion he had felt so rarely, he scarcely knew it well enough to name: Pride. It pervaded him now, alleviating both his anxieties and his aversion toward being used in such a bizarre fashion.

An armada of clouds with dark bellies and silvered edges swept up from the south, grazing the sharp crests of the distant hills and thundering, as if their hulls were being ruptured. White lightnings pranced and stabbed. The rain began to pelt down in scatters, big drops that hit like cold shrapnel, and Hota, leaving the remnants of his food for the ants, returned to his task, tearing up fistfuls of weeds and stuffing them into the sack. Soon the thunder was all around, deafening, one peal rolling into the next. Then he heard a low rumble that came from somewhere closer than the sky, an immense, grating voice that seemed to articulate a gloating satiety, a brute pleasure, and lasted far too long to be an ordinary peal. Hota dropped the sack and stared at Griaule, expecting the hill to shake off its cloak of soil and trees, and walk. Expecting also that the head would lift and pin him with a golden eye. Rain matted his hair, poured down his face, and still he stood there, waiting to hear that voice again. When he did not, he became uncertain he had heard it the first time, and yet it resounded in memory, guttural and profound, a voice such as might have risen from the earth, from the throat of a demon pleased by the taste of a freshly digested mortal soul. If he had heard it, if it had been Griaule’s voice, Griaule who never spoke, Hota could think of only one thing that would have summoned so unique a response. The child. He set about stuffing the sack with renewed vigor, ripping up weeds, unmindful of the rain, and when the sack was full, its girth that of a wagon wheel, he shouldered it and headed back into the hills and along the ridge toward Teocinte.

By the time he began descending through the pine forest, angling for the center of town, Hota was shivering, his clothes soaked though, but his thoughts were of Magali’s well-being and not his own. She might have needed the herb in preparation for the birth and suffered greatly for lack of it. The idea that he had failed her plagued him more than the cold. He increased his pace, hustling down the slope with a choppy, sideways step, the sack bumping and rolling against his back. On reaching the lower slope, where the pines thinned out into stands of banana trees and shrubs, he heard voices and caught a glimpse of several men sprinting up the hill. He was too worried about Magali to make a presumption concerning the reason for their haste. Forcing his way through the last of the brush, he burst out onto a dirt street, repositioned the sack, which had slipped from his shoulder. Then he glanced to his left, toward Liar’s House.