The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “Badly done!” Beheim brought his fist down against the railing, cracking it. “You might just as well call it a faux pas! What’s next? Will you call genocide a discourtesy? Infanticide an act of mischief?”

  She did not look at him, continuing to address herself to Kostolec. “If you must teach a lesson,” she said, “there are more effective ways.”

  “Is that what it was?” said Beheim. “A lesson? And what should I have learned from it? Respect for my elders?”

  “Caution, I should hope,” Kostolec said. “Without it, you will not be long among us.”

  When Beheim started to respond, Kostolec shouted, “No more! Try me no more!”

  He turned away, facing outward into the well, the lantern light firing his wisps of white hair, painting a shine along the back panel of his silk shirt. “I’ve done no murder,” he said in a steely voice. “Tipsy pleasures of the blood hold no attraction for me. I am in every way the Patriarch’s man and would never violate his traditions. But believe as you will.”

  There was a trilling vibration newly in the air, the sort of disturbance that might derive from the far-off operation of a mighty engine, and Beheim could not rid himself of the notion, however irrational, that Kostolec was the source of this vibration. He thought that if Kostolec were to turn, he would be much changed, his eyes aflame, his wrinkled face transformed into a barbarous mask of bronze, his tongue a black adder. Yet when he spoke, it was in a ruminative and not a threatening tone.

  “These are difficult times,” he said. “We each must play our part in them as best we can. However, you would do well to remember that my part in all this has nothing to do with the world as you know it. I bear you no ill will, but I will not permit further distractions.” He heaved a sigh. “Do not trouble me again.”

  Alexandra put a hand on Beheim’s shoulder; she nodded toward the entrance several levels above, and Beheim, his temper cooled by a sudden anxiety, let himself be drawn away. But as they ascended the stair leading to the next level, moved by some sense of wrongness, he paused and stooped and peered back down through the railing.

  The rays of lantern light had grown sharply defined, blades of radiance that spread to touch the ranks of books and folios on the opposite wall, and as they brightened further Kostolec himself began to darken, his flesh and his clothing losing detail and color as if he had fallen under a deep shadow, until at last the light dimmed to its normal brilliance, and what stood by the railing beneath it had itself become no more than a shadow, a figure of absolute, unfractionated black. This absence of a man stood without moving, but within a matter of seconds the figure flew apart into papery-looking scraps of black vitality, like bats and ashes, and these remnants fluttered off into the darkness; then, like a seam of gleaming anthracite exposed in midair, a shiny surface manifested at the center of the well, seeming to pour both upward and downward, to be measuring in reflection the passage of a light in motion. Beheim felt a shiver in his flesh, as if some just-less-than-physical thing had passed through him. And with that the gleam faded and everything was as before, except that Kostolec was gone and in his stead were only a few dust motes eddying slowly in the orange glow of the lantern, glittering like the ghosts of nebulae and stars.

  As they proceeded along the corridor that led away from the Patriarch’s library, Beheim began to consider Alexandra in a new light. It did not seem reasonable that she would stand ready to defend him against someone of Kostolec’s power simply to achieve a political goal, and yet it appeared that she had. He recalled her moment of confusion after their embrace. Was it possible, he asked himself, that she had developed some infant attraction for him? He did not think this likely, but neither would he have thought it likely that his attraction for her would have grown as particularized and consuming as it had. He found himself watching her on the sly, noticing her ways. Her habit of gnawing on the edge of the nail of a forefinger when she was perplexed. How shadows appeared to shift about in her green eyes whenever she grew discontent. Her walk, so careful, almost somnambulistic in its cautious energy, contained to the point of repression, except when she became excited, and then she would twist to look at him while she walked, put half skips into her stride and go bouncing along like a gawky schoolgirl. The solemnity she displayed when listening to him, head down, eyes lidded, all her features in repose, like a nun at prayer. She laughed easily, but when she did, it was as if she were not laughing with her whole being, as if the place inside her where vivid responses were manufactured remained blank and gray and dull, and this gave her an eerily inconsistent vitality, like someone under a spell. He wondered how he could ever have thought her extreme height grotesque, for now her body struck him as elegantly slim, exquisitely formed, a miracle of aesthetic proportion, and when he pictured them together, it was not, as previously, in some weird Gordian entanglement, but joined in a sleek and perfectly coordinated union. To entertain such thoughts was ridiculous, he told himself; they were accomplices in some as yet undetermined political action, nothing more. Yet he could not keep from entertaining them, nor could he keep from interpreting her sidelong glances as being other than the articles of a freshly waked affection. He believed that she was affording him glimpses of her true self, now and then dropping the glibly aggressive style that she had affected when she came to his apartments, and letting him see the personality behind the facade, one capable of anger and joy, petulance and sadness, all the usual components, yet tempered by an underlying seriousness and charged by a kind of ardent composure. He still suspected her, he still doubted the character of her intentions; but he felt that he was not entirely deluded in thinking that she had changed toward him, that whatever she had wanted from him in the beginning, she wanted more now.

  They turned into a side corridor, long and lantern-lit, roofed with whitewashed stones, broken by arches that led off into tunnels, open spaces, other corridors, and at a moment when they caught one another staring, Alexandra looked quickly away and asked what he was thinking.

  “Not an easy question to answer,” Beheim said.

  “I disagree,” she said. “It’s the easiest of all questions to answer, unless one has something to hide.”

  “I don’t wish to appear foolish,” he said, after walking a few paces in silence.

  “I believe we have come far enough along this path to be gentle in our judgments.”

  “Very well, then. I was thinking about you.”

  They were just passing a lantern mounted in a niche, and her shadow, which had been trailing behind her on the floor, suddenly leaped up onto the wall and stalked along at her side, a leaner, sharper self, as if the huntress within her had been put on the alert.

  “Oh?” she said, and laughed nervously. “And how am I?”

  “Fascinating. Troubling.” He tried to catch her eye. “Beautiful.”

  “And how exactly am I troubling?” Another laugh. “You see, I accept without complaint the unconditional virtues.”

  “Perhaps it’s not you that troubles me,” he said. “Perhaps it’s a lack of faith in my own discrimination.”

  “That’s only a kind way of saying you’re not sure of me.”

  “I suppose.”

  They came to an arch that opened onto a large unfurnished chamber, where three men and a woman—Family members by their rich clothing—were standing a hundred feet away or more in an oblong island of light cast by two lanterns. The woman was half-naked, the bodice of her gown down about her waist, and the men were all partially disrobed. There was an air of ominous stasis to the tableau, Beheim thought, as if it had been contrived for their benefit and was not a sexual incident that they had interrupted. It made him very uneasy. The woman beckoned to them, but he was not in the least tempted to accept the invitation.

  “Do you recognize anyone?” he asked Alexandra.

  She studied them a moment longer. “Not at this distance. The man in the red tunic, though. That might be—” She broke off, peered at them again. “I can’t tell.”
r />   Once again the woman beckoned.

  “Come on. Let’s leave them to it,” said Beheim.

  “Don’t you want to interview them?” Alexandra asked.

  “A group this large, they’d only support one another’s lies.”

  His sense of uneasiness grew stronger. He took Alexandra’s hand and began trotting along the corridor, half dragging her along, glancing back over his shoulder.

  Alexandra looked startled, but she did not try to pull free, nor did she object when Beheim began to run, leading them on a crooked course through a maze of corridors; but once they had stopped running, she asked him what was wrong.

  “I had a premonition,” he told her. “A feeling that they might be…I don’t know. That they posed a trap of some sort.”

  They had emerged from a corridor into a cavern, a place carved from marble to resemble a cave, whose nether end was submerged beneath a smallish lake, with roughly hewn blocks of marble scattered about its shoreline; a bleached, bluish-white light was provided by the cavern walls, or more particularly, by the luminescent moss that embroidered almost every square inch of stone and floated in crusts upon the black water like miniature glowing islands. One of the walls was pierced by a sizable round hole, large enough to permit a man to walk through without stooping; it offered a view of some complex iron machinery, enormous gears and driving rods and other unfamiliar parts; through gaps in the machinery could be seen sections of a marble plain that sloped steeply upward, thus giving the appearance of an intricate puzzle laid out on a white backdrop with several pieces missing. Overall, the place had a look of fey enchantment, and when Alexandra perched on a marble block, drawing up her knees, resting her chin thereon, she seemed to acquire an aura of unreality, to become a creature of that place, a nymph or one of the Lorelei.

  “A premonition,” she said thoughtfully. “In other words, a feeling in which you placed your trust.”

  “I would have been a fool not to trust it.”

  “Yet you apparently don’t trust certain other of your feelings. Or have you had a premonition concerning me?”

  “Hardly. It’s just I don’t feel on solid ground with you.” He sat next to her; deeper in the cavern, where the ceiling came down low and the walls narrowed, something big and quick was swimming just beneath the surface, making a rippling bulge in the shining black water, but showing no portion of itself. “In any case, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  She tried to conceal a coy smile by lowering her head.

  “You’re playing with me,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I’m trying to persuade you to tell me what you were thinking, but I’m not having a great deal of success.”

  “I’m certain you know what I was thinking,” he said impatiently. “I was thinking about you and me. I was wondering how it might be with us.”

  “That’s candid enough,” she said.

  “Of course,” Beheim went on, put off by her neutral tone, “as I said before, it doesn’t really matter, one way or another.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Among other reasons, in a few days we will be leaving Banat. I will be returning to Paris, you to your home.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s the point of initiating a relationship when there’s so little time to explore it?”

  She shot him a searching glance, then gazed off toward the hole in the wall, twisting a strand of her auburn hair about a finger. “A relationship,” she said. “What a strange thing to want. I want whatever I want without condition. I don’t worry what will happen after I have it.” She glanced at him again. “Usually, anyway.”

  His dignity wounded, he said, “It’s probably just a symptom of my, uh…What did you call it? My ‘time of metamorphosis.’”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said, refitting her gaze to the hole in the wall and the mechanical puzzle beyond. “Agenor said you might be remarkable. It may be that he was right.”

  She seemed truly confounded by him, or by something she felt that was somehow related to him. He had the sense that he could influence her now, so long as he did not overstate his case. “I can’t believe it’s remarkable to want something good to last,” he said.

  “I don’t expect it is. But I haven’t thought in those terms for a long time.”

  There was a silence during which he heard the lapping of water and saw something small and black moving rapidly on the marble plain that lay beyond the hole in the wall, coursing back and forth, becoming visible now and again through the gaps in the machinery. He closed his eyes and could feel her beside him, feel her warmth, the rhythms of her breath and heart. The scents of orange water, her natural musk, and sweet, hot blood mingled in a heady perfume.

  “I’d like to ask you a question,” he said. “One that may anger you.”

  “I’ll try not to be angry.”

  “The man Kostolec killed. How do you reconcile something like that, the acceptance of that sort of callousness and cruelty, with the sensitivity—or should I say the humanity—you’re displaying now?”

  He could not see her face; she had turned her head a bit, and her hair fell across her cheek, obscuring her profile; but he could see the question strike her—the ligature of her neck cabling, a general tightness affecting her posture. But when she answered him, there was no anger in her voice, just a touch of hesitancy.

  “Naturally I find it difficult,” she said. “You have killed to feed. You understand the hypocrisy involved in considering those upon whom we feed in an emotional frame. And yet many of us do exactly that. I have done so myself. The guilt that eventually results from these futile associations, I believe, influences us to treat all mortals as animals, to reject them so that they cannot grow close to us.” She brushed back her hair from her face and looked soberly at Beheim. “When I came to visit you earlier tonight, my treatment of your servant was, I would suppose, to some extent a defensive reaction. And, too”—she darted her eyes toward him—“I suppose I was a bit jealous of her. I’ve been attracted to you for quite a while. But at the same time she disgusted me. Perhaps my disgust was compensatory. Perhaps we only learn to despise them because we must. Or it may be that we change too drastically to respect them in any fashion. Yet sometimes I think we are not so different from mortals, that the one true difference between us is that we are stronger, and our cruelties are but vivid exaggerations of their cruelties. Even the worst of us has his rival in evil among humankind. So”—she clasped her hands, held them to her breast—“when you ask me about Kostolec, I am forced to say, we do what we must to live. What he did may seem evil or a waste, however you wish to characterize it. But he is old, of another generation. He has forgotten what once he was, and he lives only partially in the world that you and I inhabit.” She made a plaintive noise. “That’s all I know to say. That’s…” She shook her head ruefully. “That’s all.”

  He had expected to argue with her, to attempt some proof, but her answer was so succinct and clear, so poignant in its honesty, so free of the bombast with which most of his questions had been greeted, that he was utterly persuaded by it and could think of nothing to say. What she had said roused a feeling of sadness in him, and he tended to equate truth and sadness. Like most good Frenchmen, he thought, he did not believe in happiness, or rather he believed that nothing happy could be truly profound.

  “What’s that? I wonder,” she said, pointing toward the hole in the wall, at the black, swiftly moving thing that appeared now and again on the marble plain.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I want to see.”

  She hopped down from the block of marble and set out around the lake toward the hole in the wall. Reluctantly he followed. He had, he realized, been hoping to kiss her, and now that eventuality seemed remote.

  The machinery that lay without the cavern was functionless, loose gears and frameworks, cogs and rods, much of it tumbled about like the discarded toys of a gigantic c
hild, but some pieces were joined by bolts with heads the size of serving platters, thus creating simple mechanical sculptures. Overhead, an immense, slanted mirror reflected silvery light downward from some invisible source. Like moonlight, Beheim thought, and he wondered if there might not be a system of mirrors channeling moonlight down from the battlements of the castle. Beyond the machinery, the plain of white marble sloped up for several hundred feet toward a wall pierced by a dozen arched doorways, and clattering across it, lowering its head and charging at some imaginary playmate, then cantering off, stopping to stare at Alexandra and Beheim as they approached, was a black stallion. A two-year-old, perhaps. Fully mature, but still coltish in its behavior.

  “It’s beautiful!” Alexandra said as the stallion trotted away, rolling its eyes at them. Its skin looked oiled. Gleams outlined the play of its muscles. It was perfect in its energy and sexual power, a living engine of blood and satiny skin and bone. At a distance, standing stock-still with the slope behind it, it might have been an emblem stamped into the white marble.

  “What could it be doing here?” Alexandra asked.

  Beheim said, “Maybe it’s not really a horse.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Old Kostolec, perhaps. Or an enemy on whom he’s cast a spell. In this place, it might be anything.”

  But the horse was exactly what it appeared to be, for—like a true horse—it refused to allow them to come close and touch it, sensing their strangeness, displaying extreme fear each time they tried, whinnying and moving farther away. Beheim considered the possibility that it might be, as had been the death of the young man at Kostolec’s hands, a kind of lesson, set here to remind them of their unnatural life, of their predator’s natures, and so ruin any illusion of normalcy they might wish to inhabit. That, at least, seemed the measure of its effect on Alexandra. She grew morose, silent, and when Beheim tried to kiss her, when he put his hands on her waist and fitted his mouth to hers, she responded to him for a split second, but then slipped from his grasp and told him that she was no longer sure of what she wanted.