Beautiful Blood

by Lucius Shepard

  “You must have gone round and round about Griaule,” said Rosacher. “I mean, you didn’t just make a snap decision.”

  “I gave it due consideration.” Cattanay dipped the brush in indigo, daubed it onto the page, and mumbled something that Rosacher didn’t catch. “The truth is,” he went on, “once I stopped thinking about Griaule as a metaphysical problem, I became more content. I realized that a lot of what had been bothering me…you know, woman troubles, logistical matters, and so forth. I had complicated them by paying so much attention to Griaule. It was more satisfying to focus on questions I had the ability to answer. For instance.” He showed Rosacher the page on which he’d been painting—a splotch of gold partly limned in indigo. “I’ve been debating whether or not to edge the lower right quadrant of the mural with indigo. It wouldn’t serve as a border. It wouldn’t be this neat. Just a ragged evolution of the paint from gold to indigo in this one area. What do you think?”

  Rosacher studied the page. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t. To make a judgment, you’d need to have some expertise, you’d need to understand how the color would work on the scales. You’d have to learn about varnishes. I’ve been using beeswax to fix the colors, but I’ve been considering a more conventional finish on the indigo.” He chuckled. “You’re not qualified to make that sort of decision. And none of us are qualified to assess Griaule’s mystical potential. Let it go. Concentrate on the things you’re expert in. You’ll be much happier.”

  “I’ve become expert on how to handle whores.” Rosacher said glumly. “And drugs. I know how to create a demand for drugs.”

  “You’re a businessman,” said Cattanay. “And a scientist. Perhaps you should focus on science for a while. Stop worrying about Griaule.”

  Rosacher suppressed a laugh. “I’m afraid that science is entwined with metaphysics in this case.”

  The old man’s white hair lashed about in the wind and he groped for his beret, lying on the platform beside the chair. Rosacher handed it to him.

  “When you go down,” Cattanay said. “And I’m not trying to run you off. But when you do go, you may see a redheaded boy standing by the tower. Ask him to bring up a blanket, won’t you?” He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and looked toward the lowering sun, halfway obscured by Griaule’s majestic head. “Astonishing…to be sitting here. I hoped I might open my own gallery, sell a few of my paintings. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be fortunate enough to have witnessed all that I have. You ever think you’d see anything like him?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Rosacher. “But I thought it would be different.”

  +

  Though much of what Cattanay said rang true, Rosacher failed to follow his advice. Encouraged by the reception given his essays, he embarked upon the creation of one a week (a task that entailed his working many late nights), and read it aloud to those assembled in the amphitheater each Friday evening prior to the weekend bacchanal. The most pronounced effect of these essays was not, as might be surmised, upon the audience, but was their effect upon Rosacher himself. Before taking up the pen, he had reached the conclusion that the dragon exerted a powerful influence on human affairs, but his belief was based upon a preponderance of evidence, rarely rising to the level of faith, and he was constantly assailed by doubt; but with every word written and spoken, his belief in Griaule’s divinity was strengthened and transformed into a devout reverence, until he became as zealous in his affirmation of the dragon’s divine potency as he had once been in his determination to paint Griaule as an exemplar of the mundane, somewhat larger than most, yet ordinary nonetheless.

  Rosacher’s investigation into Ludie’s death proved fruitless. Her will, as he had presumed, was a sham, and either the killer had covered his tracks too well or else the accident had been no more than an accident; but he was confident that Breque knew of his agreement to hand over the business to the Church and that he was attempting to turn him against Mospiel in hopes that he would abrogate the agreement. Each week brought a fresh complaint from Breque’s office—the prelates wanted a larger percentage of the foreign markets or demanded a tightening of quality control or else were creating a fuss about some trivial issue that they claimed ran contrary to their doctrine. Rosacher advised Breque to appease them by offering a crumb of what they asked for, and Breque did as advised; yet he kept up his saber-rattling and made bellicose gestures against adjoining countries, massing troops along their borders and holding training exercises. Rosacher felt that something would have to be done to muzzle Breque’s ambitions, but he decided to bide his time. Though the relationship was sorely taxed on occasion, Breque had proved himself a dependable and trustworthy partner, one to whom Rosacher owed much of his success. Not the least of this debt related to Amelita Sobral, one of the operatives that Rosacher had borrowed from Breque in order to investigate Ludie’s death. She was a slender, black-haired woman with a milky complexion and features of an unearthly delicacy (enormous dark eyes, tiny chin, high cheekbones, a face that might have been the work of a master carver with a bent for the exotic) that lent her a deceptively frail, fey manner, like a fairy tale maiden in constant need of rescue, though this was far from the case, and a manner so grave, it challenged Rosacher to extract a smile from her. He assumed that she and her male counterpart would inform Breque about his activities, and his deeper motive in requesting them was to control the stream of information between his office and Breque’s by feeding them material and having his own agents report on what the operatives had communicated to Breque. In particular he wished to learn by this experiment whether Breque would react to false information about the murder investigation and thus prove himself complicit in Ludie’s death.

  Amelita and Rosacher became lovers shortly after she entered his employ. He had thought this would happen, and that it would be entirely cynical on her part, but he allowed the relationship to prosper because it suited his strategy and further because he was smitten with her. Yet he noticed over the months that the information she passed on to Breque excluded details designed to inflame the councilman and eventually became an uninformative digest of what Rosacher permitted her to see. One drizzly morning almost two years after he had requested her services, she came to him out on the ledge, where he had gone to write and to draw inspiration from the shifting pastorale visible from Griaule’s side. She wore the khaki trousers of a Hangtown woman and a blouse of black broadcloth, a garment that signaled self-abnegation among her people, puritanical cultists who dwelled along the banks of the Putomaya in the jungly lowlands of the country. Sitting with her knees drawn up beneath her chin, she confessed her betrayal, telling him that she had reported to Breque on Rosacher’s activities—as her feelings for Rosacher grew, however, she had come to censor her reports, omitting whatever she considered to be crucial, but she could no longer maintain even this level of subterfuge. He was unable to rid himself of suspicion and, though moved by her apparent sincerity, with a fraction of his mind he reserved judgment, knowing her to be an accomplished deceiver—he thought the confession might be a ploy designed to engage his trust. He drew her into an embrace and, his face buried in her hair, said that he loved her, words he fervently believed as he spoke them, but that seemed devalued once he released her.

  “I should never have accepted the assignment,” she said in a small voice. “My instincts told me to avoid you at all costs.”

  “Then we would have never met,” Rosacher said. “Would you have preferred that?”

  “It might have been for the best.”

  “We can move past this,” he said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, I am!”

  “I have higher standards for my behavior than do you…or so it would seem.”

  He tried to read her face, but it remained impassive. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Devise some punishment? You were following orders and deserve none. Forgive you? I forgive you. That should go withou
t saying.”

  She gave him a penetrating look, then hung her head, picking at a fray on her trouser cuff. At last she said, “You’re taking this rather well…and I find it odd that you don’t seem at all surprised by my duplicity.”

  “Did you expect me to put on a show for you? Wail and tear my hair? I’m not a fool. I knew from the outset that you might be carrying tales about me back to Breque.”

  “I see. You were being duplicitous as well.”

  “Naturally I protected myself. I don’t know whether I would call that duplicity. If I had mentioned my suspicions concerning you, it would have ended our relationship. I wasn’t prepared for it to end.”

  Rain plip-plopped on the scales, dripping from the edge of the wing, and an assortment of trivial creatures were poking their heads, feelers and other protuberances up between Griaule’s scales. Amelita absorbed what he had said and then made a slight gesture with her head that might have been a nod signaling acceptance.

  “I have one question regarding Breque,” he said. “Did you ever withhold information from me that would have implicated him in Ludie’s murder?”

  “I found nothing to implicate him,” she said. “That scarcely constitutes proof of innocence, but if he was involved, he left no trace.”

  Rosacher could not hide his disappointment and she put a hand on his arm, saying, “I’ll keep trying to find a connection, if you wish.”

  “No, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Keep turning in your reports to Breque.”

  A bewildered expression crossed her face. “You want me to continue deceiving him?”

  “Your deceit protects us. If you were to go to Breque and tell him you could no longer work for him, he would simply replace you with someone whom I might not be able to detect.”

  Seeing that she was displeased, he said, “You became entangled in this web when you embarked upon a course of deception. It’s going to take some time for you to free yourself.”

  “And so, in order to ‘free myself,’ I must cease being Breque’s creature and become yours? Or have I always been your creature? You knew I was a spy from the outset, didn’t you? You used me!”

  “What would you have done in my place? Breque put me in the position of having to defend myself. I blame him, not you.”

  A squabbling arose from the nests hanging beneath the edge of the wing, and one of them, large and mud-colored, its bottom shaped roughly like a four-pointed star, swayed back and forth. A spasm of frustration struck through Rosacher and he aimed a punch at the scale whereon he sat, but pulled it before impact, recalling the damage done his hand by similar punches thrown in the past.

  “Damn it!” he said. “You’re the most contrary human being I’ve ever come across!”

  For all her reaction, he might have spoken under his breath. She stared into the middle distance, giving no sign of noticing the flight of swifts that swooped low across the dragon’s back, passing with a rush of wings a few feet away. Rosacher waited to see how long it would take her to speak, but lost count of the seconds. Three minutes or thereabouts, he reckoned.

  “So if we are to continue,” she said, “whatever house we build will rest upon a foundation of lies.”

  “That’s all you take from this conversation? That dire prognosis.”

  She remained silent and turned her head to the side, away from him, as if something to the south had caught her attention.

  “Well,” he said curtly. “At least we have a foundation.”

  +

  For the life of him, Rosacher could not fathom why he loved Amelita. In truth, he was unsure that what he felt was love, but he was most certainly obsessed with her. Thanks to mab, every woman was beautiful, but Amelita’s beauty, in his view, was supernal. Each line and curve of her had a sculptural velocity, a flow that led the eye from one place to the next, and whenever she moved it seemed to Rosacher that he had witnessed something wholly of nature, like the movement of wheat in the wind. She was a vigorous and attentive lover, and on those rare occasions when the clouds lifted and her mood brightened, she became vivacious and clever, given to quick-witted repartee; but she was depressed the majority of the time and often he would find her weeping for no reason she could articulate. There was, he thought, a great blank space in his relationship with her, a crucial vacancy that prevented them from perfecting their union. He surmised that the moral and physical rectitude of her childhood was to blame, but since she would speak of it only in the vaguest of generalities, he was unable to connect cause to effect in any practical way and thus incapable of concocting a remedy. As a result, his scrutiny of her grew more focused, more obsessive.

  Not long after this conversation, they moved into an apartment atop the House of Griaule, one that until then had been reserved for visiting dignitaries, and there they lived for the next three years. The opulence of the place cheered Amelita. She would wander through the rooms, trailing her hand across the backs of gilt chairs and sofas upholstered with cloth that presented a dragon motif; she would sit and study the ornately worked tops of teak tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl by the light of brass lamps mounted on the walls, and gaze intently at the icy, delicate chandelier in the living room, as if she saw in its prismatic depths a kind of resolution. Rosacher could not be certain that these luxurious appointments actually increased her happiness, but they did appear to lift her out of herself, to satisfy some vital need, for her tears no longer flowed so easily and she developed an interest in the fauna that occupied Griaule—indeed, she began to go for day-long walks about the dragon, sketching the creatures that she spotted (marvelously complicated sketches that displayed a heretofore unexploited talent for art), and collecting them in a folio, along with her written observations. Her favorite room in the apartment was their bedchamber. It was dominated by a richly carved ebony four-poster mounted on a dais, with a painted canopy (more dragons) and peach-colored satin sheets; but the main attraction for Amelita was the carpet, an intricate weave of reds, purples, gray and white imported from Isfahan. The design was partitioned into two large hemispheres like, she said, an ancient map of an imaginary world, and once she had formulated this connection, she broke off her nature walks and would lie in bed all day sketching the fantastic creature with which her mind populated that world. Rosacher did not think this inactivity was good for her health, either mental or physical, and urged her to start walking again; but she would not budge and told him she found this type of art more creative and inspiring, and assured him that she was content. Before too long, however, her bouts of weeping grew more frequent and prolonged, and her moods darkened to the point that he feared she might take her own life. Her face began to betray signs of aging—faint crowsfeet, a worry line on the bridge of the nose—whereas his face, the undamaged portion of it, betrayed none, and he was led to consider the possibility that this discrepancy might be a factor in her despair.

  One day while he sat beside a twenty-gallon tub of golden blood in the treatment room, entranced by its shifting patterns, it occurred to him that the reason for his lack of aging might be the massive injection of the dragon’s blood given him by the late Arthur Honeyman. And if such were the case, if a huge dose of the blood ameliorated the signs of aging and, perhaps, increased one’s longevity. If the effect were not peculiar to him, he could give a similar dose to Amelita and, once she became aware of its effect, that might have the secondary effect of enlivening her. None of this struck him with the force of a revelation—they were idle thoughts, merely—but he kept returning to them, re-examining them, and they acquired a revelatory power. Here was the answer to a question he had asked himself for decades: why had Griaule sought to distract him from his work? If he had arrived at this conclusion early on (it seemed impossible now that he had not) and, whether correct or incorrect, that conclusion had become known, there would have been a run on the blood by those desiring a longer prime of life. Despite his vast bulk, Griaule would have
been drained, his veins and arteries emptied. Did the fact that the dragon had ceased distracting him from these ideas portend that he was prepared to die, or did he now trust in Rosacher’s devotion and so had offered up the remedy of his blood as a blessing to reward him for his faith? A myriad doctrinal questions attendant on that initial question arose, all of them casting doubt on his basic assumption, but in his eagerness to find a cure for his relationship with Amelita and to bring her the gift of an extended youth, he brushed them aside. That night, as she lay on their bed, naked beneath the peach-colored sheets, he sat next to her and spoke about his experience with the blood and explained what he intended to do, showing her a full syringe. She took the syringe from him and peered at the fluid—in the unsteady lantern light, the dark characters of the blood surfaced and faded with the elusiveness of eels, staying only long enough to give an impression of sinuous vigor before slipping away into their golden medium.

  “Is this something you want?” she asked. “Am I not sufficiently beautiful?”

  He had expected this kind of joyless reaction and advised her that the blood would not enhance her looks, merely maintain them longer than was usual.

  “But is this what you want?”

  “I thought it would please you,” he said. “Doesn’t every women wish to prolong her beauty?”

  “I’ve always been beautiful,” she said. “I think it would be interesting to grow old and wrinkled.”

  Impatient with her, he tried to take back the syringe; but she resisted him playfully and tucked the syringe beneath a pillow.

  “Prove you love me,” she said. “And I’ll give it back.”

  “After all these years,” he said, “I shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

  “‘All these years?’” Her playful mien evaporated. “Has it been such a chore? Putting up with me?”