His scars were permanent and they were not the kind of scars that lent an exotic accent to a man’s features. The skin covering the left side of his jaw and neck had been rendered reddish brown and displayed a coarse, rippled look, as with overdone bacon, and the backs of his hands were much the same, although the effect was not so pronounced. On discovering that the majority of Martita’s patrons bore such scars, he became less self-conscious, yet nonetheless he wore high collars and often gloves, and was prone to incline his head to the left in an attempt to hide the worst of the scarring. A lingering ague caused by the flakes’ poison left him weakened, and he decided to wait until he regained his strength to avenge himself upon Ludie. In truth, vengeance was no longer his first priority. During his recuperation he came to recognize that sooner or later he would have to deal with Ludie and Breque, though not to square accounts—he could live without retribution. His survival was the important thing and if sparing them was less risky than killing them, then that was the course he would choose. He doubted, however, that this would prove to be the case.
He woke each morning with the intention of cutting short his usage of mab, but when Martita brought him the pastilles he swallowed them without hesitation—he was insufficiently motivated to quit taking the drug. Five weeks had elapsed since Arthur’s attempt to kill him and he couldn’t recall ever having been more content. He enjoyed the rough, comfortable atmosphere of the tavern, and liked the way he felt about Martita, and he wanted to do nothing that might affect those relationships, at least until he had time to assess this situation more fully. What did it matter if his contentment were the product of chemicals? Under normal circumstances was not happiness induced by a temporary imbalance of one kind or another? But by far the most compelling reason for using mab was that he no longer dreaded falling asleep—in addition to its palliative benefits, he had stopped losing years and, while he could not be certain that this state of affairs would continue, or that mab was the critical variable involved (it might be, he reasoned, that his sense of lost years was due to some mental affliction, now passed), he was reluctant to change any of his behaviors for fear of a relapse.
He took to helping out in the tavern, working behind the counter during the days—this allowed Martita to leave him in charge and keep the place open whenever she had business in Teocinte. In the afternoons, with the sun slanting through the windows, gilding the rough planking, the patrons encased in distinct beams of light, dust motes whirling above their heads, the kinetic representation of their illuminated thoughts, the smell of cooked apples (dragon apples, grown in a stunted orchard sprouting from Griaule’s back, valued for their medicinal properties), all the peace and sweetness of the place…it was so quiet, so quaint and homey, so unlike any environment Rosacher had known, it charmed him and he basked in that charm, in that ruddy, glowing space, recognizing it for an illusion, knowing that people could ruin any such space with their bloody-minded urges, yet embracing the illusion for as long as it would last. Not long, as it turned out. Before two months had passed, the confines of his new life, giving Martita a daily bounce and having superficial, simpleminded (for the most part) chats with the patrons and handling the ordinary business of the tavern…they began to chafe at him. Mab prevented the chafing from growing too pronounced—it manifested as a nagging sense of dissatisfaction that he could have easily ignored; but Rosacher was not a man who overlooked imperfections and he picked away at this mental sore each day until the only thing that would reduce the aggravation was another pastille.
While talking one afternoon with Jarvis Riggins, the elderly scalehunter who had rescued him from beneath the dragon’s shoulder, Rosacher expressed this very dissatisfaction. Jarvis wore his usual costume of leather trousers and a sleeveless canvas shirt; his arms, cheek, and neck were festooned with tattoos, the majority being tiny representations of green-and-gold scales that signified important finds. The largest of his tattoos was all but hidden by his shirt, a dragon rampant, a portion of the head showing above his collar. He sat facing away from the window, his cloudy nimbus of white hair backlit by the late sun into a flaming halo, his scarred, crumpled face in shadow, a visage so ruinous it might have been an element of terrain that, when seen from a great elevation, resembled a human caricature. He inquired if Rosacher knew where he was and, without waiting for an answer to his question, asked another: “Do they have herds of mile-long dragons where you come from, boy? They must…else how can you live here and not realize you’re walking around on top of a miracle?”
Rosacher let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve had a bellyful of that nonsense. Griaule knows. Griaule will provide. Griaule will answer all of your prayers.”
Jarvis scraped at a tattooed scale on his wrist with a fingernail. “He answered your prayer, didn’t he?”
“I’m sorry I told you about that,” Rosacher said. “It’s true. I’ve had moments when I’ve allowed fear to get the best of me. When I’ve been tempted to cling to superstition. But when I look at the world with a rational eye, I see nothing that will not one day be subject to a clear and credible scientific explanation.”
Jarvis grunted. “It’s like I said. You don’t know where you are.”
“Well.” Rosacher swiped at moisture on the counter with a rag. “If Griaule’s a god, he’s a wildly erratic one. His actions seem completely random.”
The old man made as if to speak, but Rosacher beat him to the mark: “And I don’t want to hear any talk of his inscrutable purposes, his mysterious ways. I’ve had a bellyful of that, too.”
A customer in the back hailed Rosacher and he went to fetch him another pint. The sun shone straight in through the windows of the tavern and the scattering of solitary figures sitting at benches and along the counter with their heads lowered to their mugs resembled figures in a monastic setting, meditating upon some subtle doctrinal issue, encased in beams of dusty light that enriched the reddish color of the boards. Rosacher responded to a second summons and, by the time he returned to his spot by the window, Jarvis was preparing to leave.
“I’ll stop back tomorrow at first light,” said the old man. “I want to take you out under the wing, show you something.”
“What is it?”
“You can decide that for yourself. Bring food and water for the day.”
Rosacher protested that he might have to work and Jarvis said, “Martita’s been running this place alone since Nathan died. She can manage for a day.”
“Isn’t there some animal living under the wing that’s supposed to be dangerous?”
“It won’t bother us none as long as we don’t go in too deep…and I ain’t even sure it’s still there. Been a while since it did for anyone.”
“What about flakes? If all you’re suggesting is a nature walk, I have no desire to be stung again.”
“Flakes won’t bother you no more. Once they sting you, they’re done. You could walk into the midst of a swarm and they’d pay you no mind.”
Unable to think of a reasonable explanation for such behavior, one that would accord with the imperatives of biological necessity, Rosacher asked why this was.
“Mysterious ways,” Jarvis said.
+
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.