Dagger Key and Other Stories

He knew she could extend her neck and snap him up at this distance—there was no reason for him to be more afraid and yet he was. He reshouldered the sack and picked his way across the outer wreckage, scrambling over broken-backed couches, rain-heavied folds of carpet, barricades of splintered wood, and a litter of items belonging to guests: undergarments, shoes, spectacles, books, tin boxes, satchels, hip flasks, a trove of human accessories, all crushed and rent. As he crawled over the last of these obstacles, he saw a taloned foot ahead. The talons gleaming black, the neat scales into which they merged no larger than his hand. The boards beneath him—those that had fallen so they formed a circular wall about the inner nest—they were alive with the images of dragons. Tiny perfect dragons flowing up from the grain of the wood, changing moment to moment, clearer than previously counterfeiting movement by their flow, as if they were pictographs emanating from Griaule’s mind and he was telling a story in that language to his son, the story of a single dragon and how he flew and hunted and ruled. Like, Hota thought, a nursery decoration. Magical in character, yet serving a function similar to that of the fishes he had painted on the ceiling of his own back room in Port Chantay when his wife had informed him she was pregnant. He had painted them over after learning it was a lie told to prevent him from straying.

Standing beneath the arch of Magali’s scaled chest and throat, Hota found he could not look up at her. He dumped the weeds from the sack and remained with his head down, appalled by the chuffing engine of her breath, the terrible dimension of her vitality. He shut his eyes and waited to be bitten, chewed, and swallowed. Then a nudge that knocked him sideways. He fetched up against the wall of the nest and fell onto his back. She peered at him with one opaline eye, the great sleek wedge of her head hanging six feet above the ground, snorting gently through ridged nostrils. Her belly rumbled and her head swung in a short arc to face him and he was enveloped in steamy breath. The implausibility of it all bore in upon him. That his seed had been transformed into the stuff of dragons; that he was father to an egg; that the beautiful woman to whom he had made love now loomed above him, costumed in fangs and scales, an icon of fear. His eyes went to the egg, glistening grayly with the rain. Lying beyond it was a sight that harrowed him. The lower portion of a leg, footless, the calf shredded bloodily. Tatters of brown moleskin adhering to the flesh. Benno. It seemed he had paid for his dutiful trespass by becoming Magali’s first post-partum meal.

Magali’s neck twisted, her head flipping up into the cloudy sky, and she vented a third scream. Once again, Hota understood her needs.

Bring me food, she was saying.

Meat.

How the days passed for them thereafter was very like the passage of all their days. Hota sat, usually on the steps of a shanty across the way, and watched over Magali. Intermittently, she would scream and he would walk to the livery where a number of horses were stabled, left behind by the panic-stricken citizens of Teocinte. He would lead one into the street (he could never manage to get them closer to the inn) and cut its throat; then he would butcher the animal and carry it to her in bloody sections. From time to time he spotted townspeople skulking on the outskirts, returned to reclaim personal possessions or perhaps to gauge when they might expect to reclaim their homes. They cursed at him and threw stones, but fled whenever he attempted to approach. He himself considered fleeing, but he seemed constrained by a mental regulation that enforced inaction and was as steady in its influence as the rain. He assumed that Griaule was its source, but that was of no real consequence. Everywhere you went, everything you did, some regulation turned you to its use. His thoughts ran in tedious circuits. He wondered if Magali had known she would change back into her original form. He believed she had, and he further believed that everything she had said to him was both lie and truth. She had wanted the herb, but she had also sent him to collect it in order to keep him away from the inn, to prevent him from being injured or killed during her transformation. That was the way of life. His life, at any rate. Even the truest of things eventually resolved into their lie. Every shining surface was tarred with blackness. Every light went dark. He speculated absently on what he would do after she left, as he knew she must, and devised infant plans for travel, for work. A job, he decided, might be in order. He had been idle far too long. But he realized this to be a lie he was telling himself—he doubted he would survive her and, though this might also have been a deception, he did not think he cared to survive her.