George spoke to Edgar. ‘You wanted to see Peony, didn’t you?’
‘I’m always wanting to see Peony, but that weren’t why we come.’
‘Did you tell Tony about her?’
Edgar’s mouth worked, as if tasting some sourness. ‘I don’t recall.’
Sylvia threw up her hands. ‘Can’t we have done with this?’
George stood and pulled her aside, out of Edgar’s hearing. ‘Lying or not, he can’t harm us. He’s simple.’
‘You say he’s simple, I say it’s an act. But be that as it may, suppose another Tony happens along – do you think he won’t tell him about Peony? He wants her back, can’t you see that?’
‘We survived Tony, we’ll survive the next one.’
‘We barely survived! You may be willing to put yourself at risk for no good reason, but not me.’
George glanced at Edgar – he was picking at his heel.
‘This is the man you blamed for Peony’s condition,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’m not wrong about that, am I?’
‘I think we need to step back a moment,’ George said. ‘We don’t always have to react straightaway.’
‘You great fucking idiot!’ Sylvia looked as though she wanted to spit. ‘All this time out here, after everything we’ve been through, and you still don’t know who you are . . . or where you are. You just killed a man in self-defense. Held him under the water until his lungs burst because he threatened us. Now you’re reluctant to finish the job. I guess you’d rather pretend you’re a moral sort. That you’re too sensitive to be a killer. You need time to contemplate the idea, to fit it into your philosophy of life. Well, maybe that’ll make you feel better, but feeling better won’t change the fact that there’s no place for morality here. If truth be told, there’s no place for it in Morningshade, either. Nor anywhere, really.’
‘You’re being ridiculous. I keep telling you Edgar’s not a threat.’
‘Everyone’s a threat! There’s no law here except Griaule’s. If he wasn’t flying around all hours, frightening everybody, people would be braver, they’d explore their surroundings. And if that were the case, like as not Peony and I would be slaving away on our backs day and night, and you’d be dead. We’re fortunate the people camped close to us were cowards.’ She prodded his chest with a finger. ‘Sooner or later Edgar’s bound to tell his story to someone more adept at killing than you. Someone who’s not hampered by morality. Then we’ll find out how moral you are.’
Edgar started to mumble. The wind tailed off – George could hear the rush of the stream. The sound fatigued him and filled him with melancholy.
‘You want him dead?’ He offered her the knife. ‘I’ve shed enough blood this evening.’
Her face closed down, armored by a blank expression. George expected her to back away from his challenge, but after a pause, as he was about to say, ‘What are you waiting for?’ she seized the knife and went toward Edgar with a decisive step. At the last instant he turned his head, grinning at her, and she drove the knife into the side of his neck, giving a truncated cry as she struck. The force of the blow knocked Edgar onto his side, tearing the hilt from her grasp, and she fell back, as if shocked by the result. He made a mewling noise and pressed his fingers to the steel protruding from his neck; dark blood jumped between them, spattering his pale shoulder. He seemed to be straining at something, trying to preserve a critical balance, perhaps torn between the desire to yank out the blade and the thought that such an action would be the end of him. His legs kicked out, briefly causing it to appear that he was running in place. Then the straining aspect ebbed from his limbs and he lay staring at the base of the creosote bush. Off in the night, the dragon screamed.
Chapter Seven
From then on, certain illusions went by the board, the illusion that they were a family foremost among them. George and Sylvia stopped having sex, a decision that was mutual albeit unspoken, and there was an overall diminution of pleasantries; yet these things seemed to indicate a larger change, one whose most profound symptom was an atmosphere of dejection, if not outright defeat. It was as if the spark that gave them life had been dampened. Occasionally that spark sputtered and sparked, providing a bright moment, as on the night when Sylvia told a story she’d written and memorized, one of several she related, all set in Ali’s Eternal Reward, concerning a girl of the brothel and her romance with a man who was the spitting image of the Sinistral from a deck of fortune-telling cards. Peony was entranced by the story and George offered extravagant praise that brought a smile to Sylvia’s face; but that flare of good feeling quickly faded and they were as before – three damaged people with no palpable bond to shield them against the oppressions of heaven and the disappointments of the world.
Peony became severely agitated in the week that followed Edgar’s death, and, though Sylvia swore Peony had been asleep, George assumed that it was due to her having witnessed Edgar’s execution . . . or perhaps sensed it in some fashion. She would rock on her haunches, fists clenched, making noises like a tiny teakettle, and nothing would console her. After four days she ceased being agitated and instead sat fiddling with the dragon scale, sometimes lapsing into a state that resembled catatonia, drooling and listless and completely unresponsive. Memories and dreams of the man he had killed and of Edgar, the man in whose death he had been complicit, plagued George’s nights. He wondered if Sylvia had trouble sleeping, curious as to how efficient her justifications were in protecting her against the depredations of conscience – he suspected they served her very well, indeed. His own sleep was fitful at best. He commonly woke well before sunrise, a circumstance that left him exhausted and slow-brained by day’s end, and he would nod off while sitting or even standing. At dusk, ten days after the killings, following a brief lapse of this sort, he stood at the margin of the camp, looking blearily across the plain, and observed a yellowish red glow on the horizon beneath a line of slate clouds. Sunset was his first thought, but then he realized that he was not facing west and what he had taken for clouds were actually the peaks of the eastern hills. The glow issued from an area between the hills and his vantage point. For a minute he watched it brighten and spread, thinking it odd. He heard piping cries and saw four or five people running through the thickets, their heads visible over the tops of the bushes. The dragon wheeled above and he assumed they were fleeing him. Fools, though. The edges of the glow wavered and he thought he detected a smoky odor. He stared dumbly a moment before recognizing the source of the glow. The plain was burning and a brisk wind was driving a wall of flame toward them.
Shouting the alarm, he raced to the shelter and found Sylvia and Peony outside, frightened and clinging together, asking questions with their eyes. He flung out an arm toward the east and said, ‘The thickets are on fire, the wind’s bringing it straight for us. We have to run!’
Light had almost faded from the sky when they began their westward flight, going at a steady pace, carrying nothing other than the rags on their back and a few meager possessions, like a family out of prehistory, united in fear. Soon they were racing in full night, yet before long the darkness was illuminated by the fire – they could see the spikes of separate flames and hear a dim roaring. George tried to keep close to the stream, but Griaule harried and herded them in a direction of his choosing. George had little doubt that he had set the plain afire in order to simplify that chore. Now and again the dragon would drop out of the sky, a creature of shadow with scales burnished by flame, and bellow at them, altering their course and adding his fierce noise to the din of the fire. On several occasions they made contact with other groups, but the people never materialized from the darkness sufficiently to identify or count their number. They shied away, as if their time on the plain had acclimated them to fear and suspicion. Hedgerows of fire closed around them. They stumbled and reeled through the thickets, their glistening faces dark with soot, darting this way and that to avoid sudden new channels of flame that threatened to hem them in. Peony fell and George picked her up; when Sylvia began to stagger and her pace faltered, he supported her with his free hand. There was so much smoke in the air, breathing was a chore, and this broke his concentration, causing him to feel fatigue. Griaule harrowed them onward, looming out of the night with his wings half-unfolded, seeming more terrible for being partially visible in the dark, here a reddened fang gleaming, here flame reflected in a golden eye, his roar outvoicing the roar of the flames, snapping, gusting flames that sucked oxygen from the air and heated it so that he felt his throat crack whenever he inhaled. He lost his bearings and suspected that Griaule was toying with them, that he would wear them out and let them to burn in a cul de sac; but he was too weary to come up with an escape plan, too wasted to care, and found himself hoping for a swift resolution, whatever form it might take.