But how could he decide such a complex issue, one that had baffled him for an entire year?
At the point of desperation, he remembered the old Indian man and his “truth,” and that same night, after the machines in the walls had been switched off, leaving the flaking whitewash of the buildings exposed, he sneaked into the warehouse where the plant samples were kept and pilfered a quantity of asuero flowers. He returned to the Valverde house, ground the petals into a fine powder, and ate the entire amount. Soon pearls of sweat beaded on his forehead, his limbs trembled, and the moonlight flooding his room appeared to grow brighter than day.
Truth came to him in the clarity of his vision. Between the floorboards he saw microscopic insects and plants, and darting through the air were even tinier incidences of life. From these sights he understood anew that the city and the jungle were interpenetrating. Just as the ruins of Manaus lay beneath the foliage, so did the jungle’s skeins infiltrate the living city. One was not good, the other evil. They were two halves of a whole, and the war between them was not truly a war but an everlasting pattern, a game in which he was a powerful pawn moved from the grotesque chessboard of Manaus to the neat squares of Sangue do Lume, a move that had set in motion a pawn of perhaps even greater power: his son. He realized now that no matter with which side he cast his lot, his son would make the opposite choice, for it was an immutable truth that fathers and sons go contrary to the other’s will. Thus he had to make his own choice according to the dictates of his soul. A soul in confusion. And to dissolve that confusion, to know his options fully, he had to complete his knowledge of man by understanding the nature of love. He thought first of going to Ana, of infecting himself with the chemicals of his touch and falling under her spell; but then he recognized that the kind of love he sought to understand—the all-consuming love that motivates and destroys—had to embody the quality of the unattainable. With this in mind, still trembling from the fevers of the asuero powder, he went out again into the night and headed toward the governor’s mansion, toward the unattainable Sylvana.
Since the concept of security in Sangue do Lume was chiefly geared to keeping the jungle out, the systems protecting the mansion were minimal, easily penetrated by a creature of the arcevoalo’s stealth. He crept up the stairs, along the hall, cracked Sylvana’s door, and eased inside. As was the custom with high-born women of the city, she was sleeping nude beneath a skylight through which the rays of the moon shone down in a silvery fan. A diamond pulsed coldly in the hollow of her throat, a tourmaline winked between her breasts, and in the tuft of her secret hair—trimmed to the shape of an orchid—an emerald shimmered wetly. These gems were bound in place by silken threads and were no ordinary stones but crystalline machines that focused the moonlight downward to produce a salubrious effect upon the organs, and also served as telltales of those organs’ health. The unclouded states of the emerald, the tourmaline, and the diamond testified that Sylvana was virginal and of sound heart and respiration. But she was so lovely that the arcevoalo would not have cared if the stones had been black, signaling wantonness and infection. Rivulets of blonde hair streamed over her porcelain shoulders, and the soft brush of sleep had smoothed away her brittleness of expression, giving her the look of an angel under an enchantment.
Fixing his gaze upon her, the arcevoalo gripped his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand and pressed down hard. He maintained the grip for some time, uncertain how much of the chemical would be needed to affect him—indeed, he was uncertain whether or not he could be affected. But soon he felt a languorous sensation that made his eyelids droop and stilled the trembling caused by the asuero powder. When he opened his eyes, the sight of the naked Sylvana pierced him: it was as if an essential color had all along been missing from his portrait of her. Staring at her through the doubled lens of truth and love, he knew her coldness, her cunning and duplicity; yet he perceived these flaws in the way he might have perceived the fracture planes inside a crystal, how they channeled the light to create a lovely illusion of depth and complexity. Faint with desire, he walked over to the bed. A branching of bluish veins spread from the tops of her breasts, twined together and vanished beneath the diamond in the hollow of her throat, as if deriving sustenance from the stone; a tiny mole lay like a drop of obsidian by the corner of her lips. Carefully, knowing she could never truly love him, yet willing to risk his life to have her love this one and false time, he stretched out a hand and clamped it over Sylvana’s mouth, while with the other hand he gripped her shoulder hard. Her eyes shot open, she squealed and kicked and clawed. He held her firmly, waiting for the chemistry of love to take effect. But it did not. Astounded, he examined his fingertips. They were dry, and he realized that in his urgency to know love he had exhausted the potency of his touch. He was full of despair, knowing he would have to flee the city…but then Sylvana’s struggles ceased. The panic in her eyes softened, and she drew him into an embrace, whispering that her fearful reaction was due to the shock of being awakened so roughly, that she had been hoping for this moment ever since they had met. And with the power of truth which—though diminished by the truth of love—still allowed him a modicum of clear sight; the arcevoalo saw that, indeed, she had been hoping for this moment. She seemed charged with desire, overwhelmed by a passion no less ardent than his. But when he entered her, sinking into her plush warmth, he felt a nugget of chill against his belly; he knew it was the diamond bound by its silken thread, yet he could not help thinking of it as a node of her quintessential self that not even love could dissolve.
Some hours later, after the power of truth had been drained from the arcevoalo, Sylvana spoke to him. “Leave me,” she said. “I have no more use for you.” She was standing by the open door, smiling at him; the threads of her telltale jewels dangled from her right hand.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What use have you made of me?” He was shocked by the wealth of cruelty in her smile, by her transformation from the voluptuous, the soft, into this glacial creature with glittering eyes.
She laughed—a thin, hard laugh that seemed to chart the jagged edge of such a vengeful thought. “I’ve never known such a fool,” she said. “It’s hard to believe you’re even a man. I wondered if I’d have to drag you into my bed.”
Again she laughed, and, suddenly afraid, the arcevoalo pulled on his clothes and ran, her derisive laughter chasing him down the hall and out into the dove-gray dawn of Sangue do Lume, whose machines were already beginning to restore a fraudulent perfection to its flaking walls.
All that day the arcevoalo kept to his room in the Valverde house. He knew he should leave the city before Sylvana called down judgment upon him, but he found that he could not leave her, no matter how little affection she had for him. He understood now the nature of love, its blurred, irrational compulsions, its torments and its joys, and he doubted it would ever loosen its grip on him. But understanding it had made his choice no easier, and so perhaps he did not entirely understand, perhaps he did not see that love enforces its own continuum of choices, even upon an inhuman celebrant. There was no end to his confusion. One moment he would feel drawn back to the jungle, the next he would wonder how he could have considered such a reckless course. At dusk his reverie alternated between a perception of formless urges and a sequence of memories in which João Merín Nascimento staggered through a green hell, his brain afire and death a poisoned sugar clotting his veins. Night fell, and having some frail hope that Sylvana would do nothing, that things might go on as before, the arcevoalo left the house and walked toward the main square.
Though it was no holiday, though no fete had been scheduled, of all the beautiful nights in Sangue do Lume, this night came the closest to perfection, marred only by the whining of the machines functioning at peak levels. In the square the palm crowns flickered like green torches beneath an unequaled array of stars, and beams of light from the window shone like benedictions upon the fountain, whose spouts cast up sprays of silver droplets that fell to th
e ear as a cascade of guitar notes. Against the backdrop of gray stones and white stucco, the graceful attitudes of the young men and women, strolling and dueling, lost in a haze of mutual admiration, seemed a tapestry come to life. Even the arcevoalo’s grim mood was brightened by the scene, but on drawing near the group of young men gathered about Orlando, on hearing Orlando’s boastful voice, his mood darkened once again.
“…his blessing to Sylvana and I,” Orlando was saying. “We’ll be wed during the Festival of Erzulie.”
The arcevoalo pushed through the group of listeners and confronted Orlando, too enraged to speak. Orlando put a hand on his shoulder. “My friend!” he said. “Great news!” But the arcevoalo struck his hand aside and said, “Your news is a lie! You will never marry her!”
It may have been that Orlando thought his friend was still trying to protect him from a loveless marriage, for he said, “Don’t worry—”
“It’s I who made love to her last night,” the arcevoalo cut in. “And it’s I who’ll marry her.”
Orlando reached for his cintral, whose green tendrils were dangling over the edge of the fountain; but he hesitated. Perhaps it was friendship that stayed his hand, or perhaps he believed that arcevoalo’s friendship was so great that he would lie and risk a duel to prevent the marriage.
Then a woman laughed—a thin derisive laugh.
The arcevoalo turned and saw Sylvana and Caudez standing a dozen feet away. Hanging from a gold chain about Sylvana’s neck was her telltale emerald, its blackness expressing the malefic use she had made of her body the previous night. Caudez was smiling, a crescent of white teeth showing forth from this thicket of a beard.
Finally convinced that his friend had told the truth, Orlando’s face twisted into an aggrieved knot, displaying his humiliation and pain. He picked up the cintral and lashed out at the arcevoalo. The sharp tendrils slithered through the air like liquid green swords; but at the last second—recognizing their ally—they veered aside, spasmed, and drooped lifelessly from Orlando’s hand. His mind a boil of rage, unable by logic to direct his anger toward his true enemy, the arcevoalo plucked a knife from a bystander’s sash and plunged it deep into Orlando’s chest. As Orlando toppled onto his back, a hush fell over the assemblage, for never had they witnessed a death more beautiful than that of the Valverde’s eldest son. The palms inclined their spiky heads, the fountain wept tears of crystalline music. Orlando’s features acquired a noble rectitude they had not had in life; his blood shone with a saintly radiance and appeared to be spelling out a new language of poetry over the cobblestones.
“Now!” cried Caudez do Tuscanduva, his black eyes throwing off glints that were no reflections but sparks of an inner fire banked high. “Now has the great wrong done my father by the House of Valverde been avenged! And not by my hand!”
Murmurs of admiration for the subtlety of his vengeance spread through the crowd. But the arcevoalo—gone cold with the horror of his act, full of self-loathing at having allowed himself to be manipulated—advanced upon Caudez and Sylvana, his knife at the ready.
“Kill him!” shouted Caudez, exhorting the young men. “I have no quarrel with his choice of victims, but he has struck down a man whose weapon failed him. Such cowardice must not go unpunished!”
And the young men, who had always suspected the arcevoalo of being lowborn and thus had no love for him, ranged themselves in front of Caudez and Sylvana, posing a barrier of grim faces and shining knives.
When men refer to the arcevoalo, they speak not only of the one who stood then beside the fountain, but also of his incarnations, and they will tell you that none of these ever fought so bravely in victory as did their original in defeat that night in Sangue do Lume. Fueled by the potentials of hatred and love (though that love had been mingled with bitterness), he spun and leaped, living in a chaos of agonized faces and flowers of blood blooming on silk blouses; and while the sad music of the fountain evolved into a skirling tantara, he left more than twenty dead in his wake, cutting a path toward Caudez and Sylvana. He received wounds that would have killed a man yet merely served to goad him on, and utilizing all his moon-given elusiveness, he avoided the most consequential of the young men’s thrusts. In the end, however, there were too many young men, too many knives, and, weakening, he knew he would not be able to reach the governor and his daughter.
There came a moment of calm in the storm of battle, a moment when nine of the young men had hemmed the arcevoalo in against the fountain. Others waited their chance behind them. They were wary of him now, yet confident, and they all wore one expression: the dogged, stuporous expression that comes with the anticipation of a slaughter. Their unanimity weakened the arcevoalo further, and he thought it might be best to lay his weapon down and accept his fate. The young men sidled nearer, shifting their knives from hand to hand; the music of the fountain built to a glorious crescendo of trumpets and guitars, and the pale, beautiful bodies of the dead enmeshed in a lacework of blood seemed to be entreating the arcevoalo, tempting him to join them in their eternal poise. But in the next moment he spotted Caudez smiling at him between the shoulders of his adversaries, and Sylvana laughing at his side. That sight rekindled the arcevoalo’s rage. With an open-throated scream, choosing his target in a flash of poignant bitterness, he hurled his knife. The blade whirled end over end, accumulating silver fire, growing brighter and brighter until its hilt sprouted from Sylvana’s breast. Before anyone could take note of the artful character of her death, she sank beneath the feet of the milling defenders, leaving Caudez to stare in horror at the droplets of her blood stippling his chest. And then, seizing the opportunity provided by the young men’s consternation, the arcevoalo ran from the square, through the flawless streets and into the Favelin, past the hovel where Ana and his unborn son awaited an unguessable future in the light of her dying god. He clambered over the gray metal wall and sprinted into the jungle.
Such was the efficacy of the city’s machines that even the natural beauty of the moonlit jungle had been enhanced. It seemed to the arcevoalo that he was passing through an intricate design of silver and black, figured by the glowing eyes of those creatures who had come forth from hiding to honor his return. Despite his wounds, his panic, he had a sense of homecoming, of peacefulness and dominion. He came at length to a mountaintop east of Sangue do Lume and paused there to catch his breath. His muscles urged him onward, but his thoughts—heavy with the poisons of murder and betrayal—were a sickly ballast holding him in place. At any second, ships would arrow up from the city to track him, and he thought now that he would welcome them.
But as he stood there, grieving and empty of hope, a shadow obscured the stars: a great rippling field of shadow that swooped down and wrapped him in its filmy, almost weightless folds. He felt himself lifted and borne eastward and—after what could have been no more than a matter of seconds—gently lowered to earth. Through the dim opacity of the folds, he made out a high canopy of leaves and branches, silvery shafts of moonlight, and a bed of ferns. He could feel the creature merging with him, its folds becoming fibrous, gradually thickening to a husk, and—recalling the darkness that had passed from him at birth—he realized that this incomprehensible shadow was the death that had been born with him, had haunted all his nights, and had come at last to define the shape of his life.
The world dwindled to a dark green vibration, and with half his soul he yearned toward the pleasures of the city, toward love, toward all the sweet futilities of the human condition. But with the other half he exulted in the knowledge that his purpose had been achieved, that he had understood the nature of man. And (a final intuition) he knew that someday, long after he had decayed into a clay of old memories, just as it had with the bones of João Merín Nascimento, the jungle would breed from his bones a new creature, who—guided by his understanding—would make of love a weapon and of war a passion, and would bring inspired tactics to the eternal game. This knowledge gave him a measure of happiness, but that was soon eroded by his
fear of what lay—or did not lie—ahead.
Something nudged the outside of the thickening husk. The arcevoalo peered out, straining to see, and spied the ruby eyes of a malgatón peering in at him, come to give him the comfort of dreams. Grateful, not wanting to feel the snip of death’s black scissors, he concentrated on those strange pupils, watching them shift and dissolve and grow spidery, and then it was as if he were running again, running in the joyful way he had before he had reached Sangue do Lume, running in a harmony of green light and birds, in a wind that sang like a harp on fire, in a moment that seemed to last forever and lead beyond to other lives.
Shades
This little gook cadre with a pitted complexion drove me through the heart of Saigon—I couldn’t relate to it as Ho Chi Minh City—and checked me into the Hotel Heroes of Tet, a place that must have been quietly elegant and very French back in the days when philosophy was discussed over Cointreau rather than practiced in the streets, but now was filled with cheap production-line furniture and tinted photographs of Uncle Ho. Glaring at me, the cadre suggested I would be advised to keep to my room until I left for Cam Le; to annoy him I strolled into the bar, where a couple of Americans—reporters, their table laden with notebooks and tape cassettes—were drinking shots from a bottle of George Dickel. “How’s it goin’?” I said, ambling over. “Name’s Tom Puleo. I’m doin’ a piece on Stoner for Esquire.”
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 25
