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a twinge of pain in his shoulder, hooking
his cane over his belt, he inched on to the stair and locked his fingers in the
handholds. The wind whipped his clothes and threatened to pry him loose and
send him pinwheeling off. Once he slipped; once he froze, unable to move
backward or forward. But at last he reached the bottom and edged upslope until
he found a spot flat enough to stand.
     
    The mystery
of the place suddenly bore in upon him, and he was afraid. He half turned to
the stair, thinking he would go back to Hangtown and accept the hurly-burly.
But a moment later he realized how foolish a thought that was. Waves of weakness
poured through him, his heart hammered, and white dazzles flared in his vision.
His chest felt heavy as iron. Rattled, he went a few steps forward, the cane
pocking the silence. It was too dark to see more than outlines, but up ahead
was the fold of wing where he and Lise had sheltered. He walked towards it,
intent on revisiting it; then he remembered the girl beneath the eye and
understood that he had already said that good-bye. And it was good-bye -
that he understood vividly. He kept walking. Blackness looked to be welling
from the wing joint, from the entrances to the maze of luminous tunnels where
they had stumbled on to the petrified man. Had it really been the old wizard,
doomed by magical justice to moulder and live on and on? It made sense. At least
it accorded with what happened to wizards who slew their dragons.
     
    “Griaule?”
he whispered to the darkness, and cocked his head, half expecting an answer.
The sound of his voice pointed up the immensity of the great gallery under the
wing, the emptiness, and he recalled how vital a habitat it had once been.
Flakes shifting over the surface, skizzers, peculiar insects fuming in the
thickets, the glum populace of Hangtown, waterfalls. He had never been able to
picture Griaule fully alive - that kind of vitality was beyond the powers of
the imagination. Yet he wondered if by some miracle the dragon were alive now,
flying up through his golden night to the sun’s core. Or had that merely been a
dream, a bit of tissue glittering deep in the cold tons of his brain? He
laughed. Ask the stars for their first names, and you’d be more likely to
receive a reply.
     
    He decided
not to walk any further; it was really no decision. Pain was spreading through
his shoulder, so intense he imagined it must be glowing inside. Carefully,
carefully, he lowered himself and lay propped on an elbow, hanging on to the
cane. Good, magical wood. Cut from a hawthorn atop Griaule’s haunch. A man had
once offered him a small fortune for it. Who would claim it now? Probably old
Henry Sichi would snatch it for his museum, stick it in a glass case next to
his boots. What a joke! He decided to lie flat on his stomach, resting his chin
on an arm - the stony coolness beneath acted to muffle the pain. Amusing, how
the range of one’s decision dwindled. You decided to paint a dragon, to send
hundreds of men searching for malachite and cochineal beetles, to love a woman,
to heighten an undertone here and there, and finally to position your body a
certain way. He seemed to have reached the end of the process. What next? He
tried to regulate his breathing, to ease the pressure on his chest. Then, as
something rustled out near the wing joint, he turned on his side. He thought he
detected movement, a gleaming blackness flowing towards him… or else it was
only the haphazard firing of his nerves playing tricks with his vision. More
surprised than afraid, wanting to see, he peered into the darkness and felt his
heart beating erratically against the dragon’s scale.
     
     
     
    It’s foolish
to draw simple conclusions from complex events, but I suppose there must be
both moral and truth to this life, these events. I’ll leave that to the
gadflies. The historians, the social scientists, the expert apologists for
reality. All I know is that he had a fight with his