Dagger Key and Other Stories

The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant’s petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule’s head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.

“You keep telling me I can’t understand things,” he said. “It’s frustrating. I want to understand something and I don’t understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this…as a woman?”

She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.

“Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens,” she said. “We control our shapes in ways you cannot.”

“You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?”

“Only a dragon or a woman…I think. I’m not sure,”

He pondered this. “Why can’t Griaule change himself into a man?”

“What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate—a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It’s something done only out of great necessity.”

“You didn’t appear to be in pain…when I found you?”

“It had ebbed by the time you reached me.”

At first there were too many questions flocking Hota’s thoughts for him to single any out, but before long one soared higher than the rest: what great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, “Soon you’ll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient.”

Moonglow fanned up above the hills to the west and in that faint light she looked calm, emotionless. Yet as he considered her, it struck him that a new element was embodied in her face. Serenity…or perhaps it was an absence he perceived, some small increment of anxiety erased.

“Griaule,” she said in a half-whisper.

“What of him?” he asked, perplexed by her worshipful tone.

She only shook her head in response.

Something scurried through the grass behind the boulder. A dull gleam emerged from the shadow of Griaule’s head, the tip of a fang holding the light. The wind picked up, bringing the still palms alive, swaying their fronds, breeding a sigh that seemed to voice a hushed anticipation. Magali folded her arms across her breasts.

“I’m ready now,” she said.

Hota assumed that by those last words, she meant she was ready to return to Liar’s House, for after saying them, she hopped down from the boulder and led him back toward the town; but once they closed the door of his room behind them, it became clear she had intended something more. She undressed quickly and stood before him in a silent yet unmistakable invitation, her skin agleam in the unsteady lamplight. Skeins of hair fell across her breasts, like black tributaries on the map of a voluptuous bronze country. Her eyes were cored with orange reflection. She looked to be a magical feminine treasure whose own light devalued that of the lamp. All his flimsy moral proscriptions against intimacy melted away. He took a step toward her and let her bring him down onto the bed.