Here is what Beautiful Blood, the last book in the late Lucius Shepard’s story-cycle of the Dragon Griaule, tells us.
It tells us that art slays dragons, no matter how large or powerful they may be.
It tells us that art takes a very long time to slay dragons, and that the dragon will be unaware of the poison that art is oh-so-slowly injecting.
It says that the artist may not live to see the end of their work and the death of the dragon, and that dragon slaying is still a worthwhile goal.
It says that even in dying, dragons can extract a terrible price.
And it says that as appealing as the idea of using the dragon to get rich and powerful is, in the end, it’s the dragon that’s using you.
Heady stuff, all of it, and you can substitute in whatever modern geopolitical entity you’d like for the dragon; the metaphor is not subtle, nor is it intended to be. It looms over the story like the slumbering body of the dragon Griaule looms over the fictional city of Teocinte.
Beginning at roughly the same time as the first story in the Griaule cycle, 1984’s “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”, Beautiful Blood follows the intermittent adventures of morally flexible medical student Richard Rosacher. A junior league Victor Frankenstein intent on experimenting on the dragon’s blood, Rosacher shorts his procurer and gets a beating and a syringe full of his experimental product as a result. The latter leads to a revelation of sorts: an idea for using the dragon’s blood as a drug, one with a potent high and no side effects or addictive properties.
What follows is a series of vignettes, with the reader dropping in and out of Rosacher’s life much as the man himself does. Often, he’ll drop off to sleep and find himself awakening years later, having missed triumphs, tragedies, love affairs and life in general. In the blink of an eye he becomes a tycoon and a drug lord, a kingmaker and a prophet, a recluse and an assassin, and we drop in on each of these phases for a few pages here and a few pages there. The events of the other Griaule stories are referred to, and their characters stroll through the pages, but in the end the reader gets only the impression of Rosacher’s life — much as Rosacher himself does. And as the one-time med student slouches through the ages, unaging, his view on the dragon changes. Is it merely a lizard? Is it a god? Clearly, he has been changed by his contact with the beast, but does that mean what he is doing is actually Griaule’s will and not his own?
All of these questions simmer quietly until the book’s closing section, wherein Rosacher and a companion set off to assassinate the king of a neighboring city-state in order to protect Teocinte from a two-pronged invasion. Their weapon of choice: a monstrously transformed rapist and murderer, transmogrified into a creature of blood and shadow by the dragon’s power. But neither the target nor the weapon are what they seem. The situation spins wildly out of control, leading Rosacher to question everything he has ever done or believed.
Which, in the end, is the most satisfying ending Shepard could leave us. Beautiful Blood ties off 30 years of stories of Teocinte, not with a definitive stamp, but with an elegant twist. That Griaule wakes and dies is ultimately of less importance than the way in which the beast’s life and death have intersected with the characters we meet, and knowing precisely how much he steered Rosacher is less interesting than pondering the implications of the possibility that he had.
As always, an ending isn’t the best place to make an introduction to a story cycle. Newcomers to tales of Griaule may find the ellipses in the narrative or the way in which major actions occur offstage disconcerting. On the other hand, those who’ve read Shepard’s other stories in the cycle will find it provides immensely satisfying closure, and that in death, Griaule has been treated with the generous respect it deserved.
(Subterranean, 2014)
