The Dragon Griaule (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) by Lucius Shepard

Author:Lucius Shepard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-10-10T06:00:00+00:00

‘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.

During the first thirty-one years of his life, Hota had made love to but one woman: his wife. Since then, he had made love to many more and thought himself reasonably knowledgeable as to their ways. Magali’s ways, however, enlarged his views on the subject. For the most part she lay quiescent, her eyes half-closed, as if her mind were elsewhere and she were merely allowing herself to be penetrated; but every so often, abruptly, she would begin to thrash and heave, pushing and clawing at him, breath shrieking out of her, throwing herself about with such apparent desperation, he was nearly unseated. Initially, he took this behavior for rejection and flung himself off her; but she pulled him back down between her legs and, once he had entered her, she lay quiet again. This alternation of corpselike stillness and frenzied motion distressed him and he was unable to lose himself in the act, half-listening to the sounds of more commercial passions emanating from adjoining rooms. When he had finished and was lying beside her, sweaty and breathing hard, she demanded that he repeat the performance. And so it went, the second encounter like the first, equally as awkward and emotionally unsatisfying. In her frenzied phase, she seemed even less a complicitor in pleasure than she did when she was still. She took to snapping at his arm, his shoulder, making cawing noises deep in her throat. But their third encounter, one into which Hota had to be vigorously coerced, was different. She drew up her knees and met his thrusts with sinuous abandon and kept her arms locked about his neck, her eyes upon his face, until at long last she offered up a shivery cry and clamped her knees to his sides, refusing to let him move.

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