In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality. It has been said that of all living creatures, this duality was best perceived in dragons, for they had flown fully formed from out the mouth of the Uncreate, the first of creation's kings, and gone soaring through a conflagration that, eons hence, would coalesce into worlds and stars and all the dream of matter. Thus the relation of their souls to their flesh accurately reflected the constitution of the Creator, enveloping and controlling their material bodies from without rather than, as with the souls of men, coming to be lodged within. And of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the dragon Griaule.

How Griaule came to be paralyzed by a wizard's magical contrivance is a story without witness, but it has been documented that in this deathlike condition he lived on for millennia, continuing to grow, until he measured more than a mile in length, lying athwart and nearly spanning the westernmost section of the Carbonales Valley. Over the years he came to resemble a high hill covered in grass and shrubs and stunted trees, with here and there a portion of scale showing through, and the colossal head entirely emergent, unclothed by vegetation, engaging everything that passed before him with huge, slit-pupiled golden eyes, exerting a malefic influence over the events that flowed around him, twisting them into shapes that conformed to the cruel designs his discarnate intellect delighted in the weaving of and profited his vengeful will. During his latter days, a considerable city, Teocinte, sprawled away from Griaule's flank over the adjoining hill, but centuries before, when few were willing to approach the dragon, Teocinte was scarcely more than an outsized village enclosed by dense growths of palms and bananas, hemmed in between the eminence of Griaule and a pine-forested hill. Scruffy and unlovely; flyblown; its irregularly laid-out dirt streets lined by hovels with rusting tin roofs; it was lent the status of a town by a scattering of unstable frame structures housing taverns, shops, and a single inn, and was populated by several thousand men and women, a mingling of cutpurses, highwaymen, and murderers, their families and friends. Almost to a one, they believed that proximity to the dragon imbued them with a certain potency (as perhaps it did) and refused to concern themselves with the commonly held notion that they had been drawn to Teocinte because their depravity resonated with the dragon's depraved nature, thus making them especially vulnerable to his manipulations. What does it matter whose purpose we serve, they might have asked, so long as it satisfies our own?

By all accounts, the most fearsome of Teocinte's citizens and, at forty-two, its eldest, was Hota Kotieb, a brooding stump of a man with graying, unkempt hair, his cheeks and jaw scarred by knife cuts. His hands were huge, capable of englobing a cantaloupe and squeezing it to a pulp, and his powerful arms and oxlike shoulders had been developed through years of unloading ships at the docks in Port Chantay. Deep-socketed eyes provided the only vital accent in what otherwise seemed the sort of brutish face sometimes produced by the erosion of great stones. Unlike his fellows, who would make lengthy forays out into the world to perpetrate their crimes, then return to restore themselves by steeping in the dragon's aura, Hota never strayed from the valley. Eleven summers previously, after his wife had been run over in the street by a coach belonging to the harbormaster in Port Chantay, he had forsworn the unreliable processes of justice and forced his way into the man's home. When the harbormaster ordered him ejected, Hota stabbed him, his two sons, and several retainers, himself receiving numerous wounds during the skirmish. On realizing that he would be hung were he to remain in the town, he looted the house and fled, killing three policemen who sought to stop him outside the door. Casting aside a lifetime of unobtrusive action and docile labor, he had murdered ten men in the space of less than an hour.

Though he had never attended school and was ignorant of many things, Hota was by no means dull-witted, and when he meditated on these events, his red victory and the grim chaos that preceded it, he was able to place his actions in a rational context. He felt little remorse over the murders of the harbormaster and his sons. They were oppressors and had received an oppressor's due. As for the rest, he regretted their deaths and believed that some would have been spared had he not been enraged to the point of derangement; yet he refused to use derangement as a sop to his conscience and recognized that the potential for extreme violence had always been his. He had not wished his wife to die, but neither had he loved her. Thirteen years of marriage had doused the spark that once leaped between them. Their union had decayed into indifference and sham. They were like two plow horses harnessed together, endlessly tilling a field barren of children and every other promise, yet led to continue their dreary progress by the litany of empty promises they spoke to one another. It seemed her death had less inspired than legitimized a violent release, and that he had been longing to kill someone for quite some time, motivated in this by feelings of impotence bred over years of abject poverty. Now this tendency had made itself known, he supposed it would rise all the more easily to the surface. For this reason, though he was lonely, he kept no one close.

The money and gems he had stolen from the harbormaster enabled Hota to live as comfortably as the rough consolations of Teocinte permitted. He occupied a third-floor room at the rear of Dragonwood House, a weathered, boxlike building with a tin roof and a tavern downstairs and a newer, less ruinous single-story wing attached, where prostitutes were housed. Its ashen gray facade was dressed with a garishly painted sign that depicted a dragon soaring through a fiery heaven. The inn was situated near the edge of town and serviced the steady stream of visitors that came to look at Griaule, offering views of the dragon's side from its front windows. Its owner, Benno Grustark, claimed that the boards employed in its construction were manufactured from trees that had grown atop Griaule's back, but his patrons, knowing that few dared to set foot upon the dragon, let alone cut timber, referred to the inn as Liar's House.

Having no need to earn a livelihood, Hota passed many of the days at woodcarving, a hobby of his childhood that still pleased him, though he displayed no talent for the work. Since there was little in the town to attract his eye, he took to carving likenesses of Griaule. Dozens of such pieces were crowded together on his shelves, atop the bureau and chairs, and scattered across the floor of his room. On occasion he would give one to a child or to a prostitute who shared his bed, but this made no appreciable dent in the clutter. To avoid further clutter, he began working on a grander scale, walking out into the hills, felling trees, chiseling dragons from the trunks, and leaving the completed figures to the depredations of the rain and the insects. He set no great store by the work, caring only that it distracted him, but was nonetheless pleased that the woods were becoming littered with his sculptures, crude figures weathering into objects that—like their model—appeared to be natural formations that bore a striking resemblance to dragons.

In the early spring, eleven years after his arrival in Teocinte, Hota hired a carter to haul the trunk of a white oak to the crest of a hill from which he had a profile view of Griaule with the valley spreading beyond, an undulant reach of palms and palmettos, figs and aguacates, threaded by red dirt paths. There he set about his most ambitious project. Previously he had carved the dragon as he might have appeared during more vital days—flying, crouched, or rampant; now he intended to create a sculpture that would depict Griaule as he was: the oddly delicate, birdlike head, jaws half open, tongue and fangs embroidered with lichen, vines depending in loops and snarls from the roof of the mouth; the bluish green folds and struts of the sagittal crest, that same color edging the golden scales; his sinuous body, the haunches, flanks, and back mapped by a forest whose dark green conformation was so similar to the shapes of the hills that lifted higher behind him, it caused Hota to wonder if they, too, might not conceal gigantic dragons. He spent a week in laying out the design and then several days more gathering the details of Griaule's shape in his mind and letting that knowledge flow into his hands.

Toward noon one morning, as Hota was busy carving, he noticed something flying in loops above Griaule's snout, difficult to make out against the strong sun, as tiny in relation to the dragon as a swallow fluttering about a bull's nose. To his astonishment, for Hota had thought Griaule to be the sole survivor of his species, he realized it was another dragon. Thirty to forty feet long, by his estimate. With bronze scales. Enthralled, he watched the creature swoop and soar, maintaining a predictable circuit, as if she (because of her daintiness by contrast to Griaule, Hota thought of the second dragon as she) were tracing the same character over and over, enacting a ritual of some kind. Her wings seemed to ripple rather than to beat against the air, and her long neck glided through its attitudes with the suppleness of a reed borne on a stream, and her tail lashed about with what struck him as a lascivious ferocity. She might be, he surmised, attempting to communicate with Griaule. Or perhaps he was communicating with her; perhaps the patterns of her flight gave visual form to the eddies of his thoughts. At length she broke off her circling and settled onto Griaule's broad back, passing out of sight behind his sagittal crest.

Dropping his chisel, Hota hurried down the hill, following a track that merged with one of the red dirt paths criss-crossing the valley, and approached Griaule from the side, heading for the bulge of his foreleg. As the dragon came to loom above him, he felt a surge of terror. The tightly nested scales of the jaw; the gray teeth with their traceries of lichen, like the broken wall of a fortress city; the bulge of an orbital ridge: seen close to hand, the monumental aspect of these things dismayed him, and when he moved into the dragon's shadow, something colder and thicker than air seemed to glove him, as if he were moving in invisible mud. But fascination overbore his fright. The prospect of observing a dragon who was capable of motion excited him. There was nothing of the academic or the artistic in his interest. He simply wanted to see it.

He scrambled up the slope afforded by the brush-covered foreleg, then ascended to the dragon's thicketed shoulder, catching at shrubs to pull himself higher. His breath labored, sweat poured off him. On several occasions he nearly fell. When at last he stood atop Griaule's back, clinging for support to a pine branch, looking down at the valley hundreds of feet below, Teocinte showing as an ugly grayish patch amid the greenery, he understood the foolishness of what he had done. He felt unarmored against the arrows of fate, as if he had violated a taboo and been stripped of all his immunities. Adding to his anxiety was the fact that nearby was a dragon who, upon sensing him, would seek to tear him to pieces … unless she had flown away while he was climbing, and he doubted this to be the case. Fear mounted in him once again, but he did not place so much value on his life as once he had—indeed, he often wondered why he had bothered to save himself from the hangman's rope that night in Port Chantay—and his desire to see her remained strong. Planting his feet with care, easing branches aside, he pressed on into the brush and headed for the spot where he supposed the second dragon had landed.

The heat of the day came full, and Hota continued to sweat profusely. The needle sprays of stunted pine and the yellowed round leaves of the shrubs that dominated the thicket limited his view to a few yards ahead and stuck to his damp neck and cheeks and arms. After wandering blindly about for a quarter of an hour, he began to speculate that the second dragon had made no landing at all, but merely swooped down behind the sagittal crest and then leveled off and flew away over the hills. He found a patch of dirt and sat, deliberating whether or not to give up the search. Scutterings issued from the brush and this alarmed him. Rumor had it that many of the animals living in and on Griaule were poisonous. Deciding that he had been foolish enough for one day, Hota stood and headed back the way he had come. After half an hour, when he had not reached the edge of the thicket, he realized with annoyance that he must have gotten turned around and was walking along the spine. He stood on tiptoes, caught sight of the dragon's crest, and, thus oriented, started off parallel to it. Another half hour passed and Hota's annoyance blossomed into panic. Someone—doubtless Griaule himself—was playing a trick on him. Clouding his thoughts, causing him to go in circles. Again he sighted the sagittal crest and beat his way through the brush; but the ground beneath his feet did not slope away as it should have done, and when he checked the crest once more, he saw that he had made no progress whatsoever.

After two hours, Hota's panic lapsed into resignation. This, then, was the fate to which his violence had led him. Trapped in a magical circumstance that he could not hope to fathom, he would wander Griaule's back until he grew too weak to walk and died of thirst and exposure. He would, he thought, have preferred to be hung. Yet he could not deny that he was deserving of worse, and there was no defiance in him. He kicked broken branches aside, cleaning a spot where he could sit and wait for death; but upon reflection, he kept on walking, deciding it would be best to wear himself out and so hasten the inevitable. He hurried through the thicket, no longer trying to hide his presence, for he assumed that the second dragon had been an illusion, bait in the trap Griaule had set. He swatted boughs aside and shouldered through entangled places, forcing himself whenever possible into a lumbering trot. As he went, he began to feel exhilarated, and it occurred to him that this might be because he finally had something meaningful to do. All his years of drinking and inept woodcarving, and all the years prior, the numbing labor, shabby, juiceless days and silent evenings spent staring glumly at his wife … It was right they should end here and now. They had profited no one, least of all himself.

The longer he contemplated the prospect of dying, the more eager to have done with life he became. What did he have to look forward to? A few uneventful years followed by the loss of his physical powers? Assaults by younger, stronger men who would rob him and leave him destitute? And that would not be the worst of it. Exhilaration turned to something approaching glee and he increased his pace. Twigs stabbed at him, abrading his skin, but he ignored the pain. He remembered another occasion on which he had felt a similar measure of … what? Enthusiasm? Vitality?

Delirium.

That was the word, he thought.

It was a feeling very like the one he had experienced at the harbormaster's house in Port Chantay.

Sobered by an awareness of this connection, he slowed to a walk, mulling it over, wondering if what he felt, then and now, might be an indication of mental infirmity or some physical ailment. He was still considering this notion when he slapped aside a pine bough and stepped into a clearing where stood a slender woman with bronze skin, long black hair falling to the small of her back, and wearing not a stitch of clothing.

The woman was so startling a sight, Hota's initial reaction was one of disbelief. He imagined her to be part of his delirium, or perhaps a further trick of Griaule's. She was half-turned away, a hand to her cheek, as if she had been struck by a remembrance. A pattern of dark, irregular lines covered her body. Like, he thought, a sketch of reptilian scales. He first believed the lines to be a tattoo, but then noticed they were growing fainter every second, and he recalled that the scales of the female dragon had been the exact shade of bronze as the woman's skin. On hearing his choked outcry, she glanced at him over her shoulder, displaying no indication of fear such as might be expected of a naked woman alone when surprised by a man of his threatening appearance. She remained motionless, calmly regarding, and Hota, unable to accept what he was tempted to believe—that here stood the dragon he had sought, transformed somehow—was torn between the desire to flee and the need to know more about her. In a matter of seconds the lines on her skin faded utterly and, as if this signaled the completion of a process that had restrained her, she turned to face him and said in a dry, dusty voice, "Hota."

The sound of his name on her lips, freighted with a touch of menace, or so he heard it, spurred him to flight. Unwilling to look away from her, he took a backward step, tried to run, but stumbled and went sprawling onto his belly. He scrambled to one knee and found her standing above him.

"Are you afraid?" she asked, tipping her head to the side.

Her eyes were dark, the irises large, leaving room for scarcely any white, and her face, with its sharp cheekbones and full lips and delicate nose, was too perfect, lifeless, as might be an uninspired artist's rendering. She repeated her question and, like her face, her voice was empty of human temper. The question seemed pragmatic, as if she were unfamiliar with fear and was hoping to identify its symptoms. Though she looked to be a mature woman, not a girl, her breasts and hips and belly betrayed no marks of age or usage.

Hota sank back into a sitting position, dumbstruck.

"There's no reason to fear. We have a road to travel, you and I." A cloud passed across the sun; the woman looked up sharply, scanning the sky, and then said, "I'll need some clothing."

Somewhat reassured, Hota edged away from her and got to his feet. He gave thought again to running, but recalled being lost among the thickets and decided that running would probably do him no good.

"Did you hear?" she asked, and again her words conveyed no sense of impatience or anger. "I need clothing."

Hota framed a question of his own, but was too daunted to speak.

"Your name is Hota, isn't it?" the woman asked.

"Yes." He licked his lips, tried to dredge up the courage to ask his question, failed, and succeeded only in making a confused noise.

"Magali," said the woman, and touched the slope of a breast. "My name is Magali."

He could detect nothing of her mood. It was as if she were hidden inside a beautiful shell, her true self muffled. She waited for him to speak and finally, when he kept silent, she said, "You know me. Is that what's troubling you?"

"I've never seen you before," Hota said.

"But you know me. You saw me fly. You saw me while I was yet changing."

This, though it was the answer to his unasked question, only confounded him further, and he merely shook his head in response.

"How can you not believe it? You saw what you saw," she said. "You have nothing to fear from me. I'm a woman now. My flesh is as yours." She reached out and took his hand. Her palm was warm. "Do you understand?"

"No … I …" He shook his head vigorously. "No."

"You will in time." She released his hand. "Now can you bring me some clothing?"

"There are no shops that sell women's clothes in Teocinte."

"Borrow some … or bring me some of your own."

By agreeing to do her bidding, Hota thought he would be able to make his escape. "All right. I'll go now," he said.

"You'll come back. Don't think you won't."

"Of course I will."

She laughed at this—it was, he thought, the first purely human thing she had done. "That's not what is in your mind."

"How can you know what's in my mind?"

"It's written on your face," she said. "You can't wait to be gone. Once out of sight, you'll run. That's what you're thinking, anyway. But later you'll tell yourself that if you don't return, I'll come after you. And it's true—I would. And you have deeper reasons for returning as well."

"How can that be?" he asked. "We have no history together, nothing that would furnish a depth of reason."

She moved away a few paces, turning toward the sun, and a pattern of leaf shadow fell across her hip, reminding him of the pattern that had faded from her skin. She arranged her hair so that it trailed across her breasts, dressing herself in the black skeins.

"You'll come back because there's no other direction for you," she said. "Your life until this moment has been empty, and you hope I'll offer fulfillment of a kind. You'll come back because you want to. And because the road you and I must travel, we have already set foot upon it."

Ushering her into his room, Hota apologized for its sorry condition, but Magali paid no attention to the disarray and walked over to the wall beside his bed and began to inspect the weathered gray boards, running her forefinger along the black complexities of their grain, appearing to admire them as though they were made of the finest marble. Still daunted to a degree, Hota busied himself by straightening the room, picking up carved dragons and stowing them into drawers, dusting his rude furniture with a shirt. Glancing up from these chores, he saw that Magali had taken a seat on the bed and was picking at the folds of her skirt.

"I'd like a green dress," she said. "Dark green. Do you have a seamstress in the town?"

Hota wadded up the dust-covered shirt and tossed it onto a chair. "I think so … Yes."

She nodded solemnly as if he had imparted a great wisdom and then swung her legs up and lay back on the bed. "I want to sleep for a while. Perhaps we can have something to eat afterward."

"The tavern downstairs has food, but it's not so good."

She closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and after a minute or two Hota assumed that she had drifted off; but then, with a sudden violent twisting of her body, she turned onto her side and said, her words partially muffled by the pillow, "Just so long as there's meat."

Sitting beside her day after day, week after week, Hota grew discontented with his surroundings and thought this might be because Magali's presence pointed up their shabbiness. He became assiduous in his cleaning, brought in flowers, new cushions for the chairs, and purchased prints to hang on the walls, brightening the long-gray space. The footsteps and voices that sounded from the hallway irritated him, and to mute them he hung blankets across the door. He dispersed the room's stale odor with cachets he bought in the market. None of these improvements registered with Magali. For no reason he could grasp, she seemed interested only in the boards. Then one night while she slept, as he was pacing about, he noticed that the grain of the planking looked sharper than before, considerably sharper than could be expected to result from his daily dusting. Curious, he examined them in the light of an oil lamp and discovered that the patterns of the grain had, indeed, grown more pronounced, forming intricacies of dark lines in which it was possible to see almost shape. At least this was his initial impression. As he continued to peer at them, certain shapes came to dominate. He saw narrow, ragged wings with struts protruding, sinuous scaled bodies, fanged reptilian heads. A multiplicity of dragons. Every plank bore such images, all cunningly devised. And more were emerging all the time, as if they had been buried beneath gray snow that was now thawing. Holding the lamp above his head, he studied them and began to think he was not looking at many dragons, but at countless depictions of one. There were similarities in the architecture of the scales and the birdlike profile, the …

"What do you see?"

Given a start, Hota yipped and spun about to face Magali, who had padded up behind him. Her dress was unbuttoned to her navel, exposing the swell of her breasts, and though her hair was tousled from sleep, her usual neutral stare was not in evidence. She looked animated, excited, and this acted to suppress the anxiety her nearness inspired in him. She repeated her question, and he said, "Dragons … or maybe one dragon. I'm not sure. Is that what you see?"

She ignored the question. "Anything else?"

"No. Is there more?"

"There's no end of things that can be seen."

She stepped up beside him and ran a hand along one of the boards, as if caressing it, then pointed at one of the images. "Here. Do you see the way this fang juts out at an angle? What does it remind you of?"

Uncomprehending, he gazed at the board for the better part of a minute and then he saw it. "Griaule! Is it Griaule?"

"All this"—she made a sweeping gesture, her voice quavering as with strong emotion—"it's his life. Ingrained within the trees that sprouted from his back. The entire inn is a record. All his days are written here."

So, Hota thought, Benno had not lied. It was difficult to believe. In Hota's experience, Benno had never exhibited an ounce of physical bravery, and the idea that he would chop down trees on Griaule's back was laughable. It was equally unlikely that he could have hired anyone to do the cutting for him. Those few who claimed to have set foot upon the dragon spoke of climbing onto the tail—none had trespassed to the degree that Hota himself had. And yet he remembered the way Benno had gaped at Magali. Might that have been a recognition of sorts, evidence that Benno, being more familiar than most with dragons, had sensed her hidden nature?

"Whatever else there is to see …," Hota said. "Will I see it?"

"Who knows?" She returned to the bed, and as she settled upon it, smoothing out her skirt beneath her, she said, "You've seen what's necessary."

"Why's it necessary for me to see this much and no more? What's the point?"

She reclined upon the bed, braced on an elbow. "So you'll understand the extent of Griaule's dominion. So you'll accept it."

This half-answer irritated him, but he was not sufficiently confident with her to express anger. "Why is that important? I already know he shapes our lives to some extent."

"Knowing a thing is far from accepting it."

"What are you talking about?"

She put an arm across her eyes and said nothing.

"Are you saying I need to make an acknowledgment of some sort? Why? Explain it to me."

She would say no more on the subject, and shortly thereafter she asked him to bring food from the tavern. Hota did not care to be treated like a child, given answers that suggested there were things he was better off not knowing—that was how he interpreted her responses—and as he waited for Magali's food to be prepared, standing by the kitchen door, gazing through smoke and steam at the hubbub generated by two matronly cooks and several grimy children, he thought contemptuously about her. How could he doubt she was who she claimed to be? For all her good looks, the woman behaved like a lizard. Torpid the day long. Rising only to piss and stare at the boards. And the way she ate! She brought to mind geckos back in Port Chantay, clinging to the walls for hours, motionless, before finally flicking out their tongues to snag a mosquito, lifting their … One of the serving boys, carrying a plate of rice and shredded pork into the tavern, brushed against Hota's hip. Hota snapped at him, then felt badly for having frightened the boy. What was he doing here? he asked himself. Cohabiting with a woman who had some mysterious plan for him. Languishing in a room where pictures of dragons manifested upon the walls. He should have done with her. With Teocinte. The next time she asked for food, he should take his bag of gems and cash and head inland. Make for Caliche or cross the country altogether to Point Horizon. But could he leave? That was the question. Would he wander the valley, confused, unable to find his way out, always winding up back in Teocinte? The answer to this question, he decided, was probably yes. He was still caught in the snare Griaule had set for him the day he met Magali. If he were ever able to escape it, he assumed it would be because the dragon was done with him.

Despite his annoyance, that conversation marked a turning in their relationship. Though she remained less than talkative over the next month, now and then, in addition to asking him for things, she would inquire as to how he felt or, standing at a window, would offer comments on the weather, the unsightliness of the town, or laugh at, say, the misery of a carter whose wheels had gotten stuck in the mud. It appeared she was developing a personality. Mean-spirited, for the most part. Minimal. But a personality nonetheless. She continued her habit of disrobing in front of him, and he noticed changes in her body: a faint crease demarking the lower reach of her abdomen; a hint of crowsfeet; the slightest sag to her breasts. Changes that would have been imperceptible to anyone else, but that to a man who had observed her for seven weeks, whose only occupation had been that observance, they stood out like mountains on a plain. He wondered if these marks and slackenings signaled the ultimate stage of her transformation, and, against the weight of logic, he began to think of her as a woman more often than not. As a consequence, his desire burned hotter, despite an apprehension that such feelings were touched with the perverse.

During the eighth week of her stay at Liar's House, Magali became more active, sleeping less, enjoining Hota in conversations that, albeit brief, served to grow the relationship. One night, rather than sending him for food, she suggested that they eat in the tavern. Her suggestion did not sit easily with Hota. Under the best of circumstances, he preferred solitude. Further, he worried that Magali might not react well to being exposed to a crowd. But when they entered the tavern, a low-ceilinged room with the same gray weathered planking, furnished with long benches and tables, lit by lanterns of fanciful design, each consisting of frosted panes held in place by ironwork dragons, they found only five patrons in the place: two prostitutes and their clients dining together, and a burly blond man with a pink complexion and a pudgy, thick-lipped face who was drinking beer from a clay mug. They stationed themselves well away from the others, close to the wall, and ordered wine and venison. Magali sat without saying a word, taking in the scene, and Hota watched her with more than his usual fixity. The din and angry shouts from the kitchen, the laughter of the prostitutes, all the sounds of the tavern receded from him. It seemed that a heartbeat was buried in the orange glow of the lamps, contriving a pulsing backdrop for the woman opposite him, whose bronze skin was in itself a radiant value. He gazed at her thoughtlessly, or else it was a single formless thought that uncoiled through his mind, imposing an almost ritual attentiveness.

When the food arrived, Magali picked up her venison steak and nibbled a bite, chewed, threw back her head and swallowed. She repeated this process over and over. Hota shoveled down his meal without tasting it, his attention unwavering. Like the icon of some faded gaiety, an old man with wisps of white hair fraying up from his mottled scalp, wearing a ratty purple cloak, entered the tavern and played a whistling music on bamboo pipes; he stopped at the other tables, begging for a coin, but veered away from Hota after receiving a hostile look.

Hota understood that something was wrong. The ordinary grind of his thoughts had been suppressed, damped down, but he had no will to contend against the agent of suppression, whatever it was, so seduced was he by Magali's face and figure. He derived a proprietary pleasure from watching the convulsive working of her throat, the fastidious movements of her fingers and teeth. Like an old man watching a very young girl. Greedy for life, not sex. Lusting after some forbidden essence. Although he perceived this ugliness in himself and wanted to reject it, he could not do so and tracked her every gesture and change in expression. She gave no sign that she noticed the intensity or the character of his vigilance, but the fact that she never once engaged his eyes told him she knew he was looking and that all her actions were part of a show. The inside of his head felt warm, as if his brain, too, were pulsing with soft orange light.

More customers drifted into the tavern. The conversation and laughter outvoiced the kitchen noises, but it seemed quiet where Hota and Magali sat, their isolation unimpaired. Two bulky men in work-stained clothes came to join the blond man at his table. They drank swiftly, draining their mugs in a few gulps, and began casting glances at Magali, who was now devouring her second steak. They put their heads together and whispered and then laughed uproariously. Typically, Hota would have ignored their derision, but anger mounted in him like a liquid heated in a vial. He heaved up from the bench and went over to the men's table and glared down at them. The newcomers appeared to know him, at least by reputation, for one, adopting an air of appeasement, muttered his name, and the other fitted his gaze to the tabletop. But either the blond man was only recently arrived in Teocinte or else he was immune to fear. He sneered at Hota and asked, "What do you want?"

One of the others made silent speech with his eyes to the blond man, as if encouraging him to be wary, but the man said, "Why are you frightened of this lump of shit? Let's hear what's on his mind."

Through the lens of anger, Hota saw him not as a man but as a creature you might find clinging to the pitch-coated piling of a dock, an unlovely thing with loathsome urges and appetites and a pink, rubbery face that was a caricature of the human.

"Can't you talk, then? Very well. I'll talk." Smirking, the blond man settled back against the wall, resting a foot on the bench. "Do you know who I am?"

Hota held his tongue.

"No? It doesn't matter. The thing that most matters is who you are. You're a man who needs no introduction. Useless. Dull. A clod. You might as well carry a sign with those words on it. You announce yourself everywhere you go, in everything you do."

Hota felt as if his skin were a crust that was restraining some molten substance beneath.

"I suppose it would be easiest for you to think of me as your opposite number," the blond man continued. "I employ men such as you. I turn them to my purposes. I might be persuaded to employ you … if you're as strong as you look. Are you?"

A smile came unbidden to Hota's face.

The blond man chuckled. "Well, strength's not everything, my friend. I've bested many men who were stronger than me. Do you know how?" He tapped the side of his head. "Because I'm strong up here. I could take things from you and you wouldn't be able to stop me. Your woman, for instance. Beautiful! I gave some thought to taking her off your hands. But I've concluded that she'll feel more at home with you." He gave a bemused sniff. "For your sake, I hope she fucks less like a pig than she eats."

As Hota reached for the blond man's leg, the closer of his two companions threw a punch at Hota's forehead. The punch did no damage, and Hota struck him in the mouth with an elbow, breaking his teeth and knocking him beneath the adjoining table. He seized the blond man's ankle, yanked him out into the center of the tavern, holding his leg high so he could not get to his feet. The third man came at him, a lack of conviction apparent in the hesitancy of his attack. Hota kicked him in the groin and, taking a one-handed grip on the blond man's throat, lifted him so that his feet dangled several inches above the floor. He clawed at Hota, pried at his fingers. His face empurpled. A froth fumed out between his lips. He fumbled out a dagger and tried to stab Hota, but Hota knocked the dagger to the floor, caught the man's knife hand and squeezed, at the same time relaxing his grip on his throat. The blond man sank to his knees, screaming as the bones in his hand were snapped and ground together.

"Hota!"

Magali was standing by the door that led to the street. Despite the urgency of her shout, she appeared unruffled. Hota released the blond man, who rolled onto his side, cradling his bloody, mangled hand, cursing at Hota. Other men had drawn near, their physical attitudes suggesting that they might be ready to fight. Hota faced them down, squaring his shoulders, and, instead of cautioning them, he roared.

The noise that issued from him was more than the sum of a troubled life, of old angers, of social impotence—it seemed to spring from a vaster source, to be the roar of the turning world, a sound that all creation made in its spin toward oblivion, exultant and defiant even in dismay, a sound that went unheard until, as now, it found a host suitable to give it tongue. The men shrank back toward the kitchen. Recognizing that they no longer posed a threat, his anger emptied, Hota went to Magali's side. Her face was difficult to read, but he felt from her a radiation of contentment. She took his arm—proudly, it seemed—and they stepped out into the town.