The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “I’ve been laboring under the impression that you have designs on usurping his power. In assuming the leadership of the Valeas.”

  “That’s no secret. Felipe and I agree on many things, but he’s not aggressive enough. He’s too involved with his pleasures to be a competent steward of our interests.”

  “In what way,” Beheim asked, “do you believe that he’s insufficiently aggressive?”

  “In every way. He’s let our differences with the de Czeges get out of hand, for instance. There was no need for a feud. He simply didn’t exert himself in smoothing things over. And lately, this whole business about the Family moving out of Europe. Ostensibly he sides with Agenor. But he won’t commit. Not entirely. He keeps hedging his bets, not because he’s having doubts, but because he really hasn’t studied the matter.”

  “How do you stand on the question?”

  “I could not support a migration at this juncture,” she said. “But I believe a group should be sent to investigate the possibility at once. And if things are as open and unthreatening as Agenor states, we would be fools not to establish a colony. At the very least, a colony.”

  Her opinion had been delivered with firmness, confidence, and did not seem at all facile. Beheim could detect no trace of duplicity in her speech or manner.

  “Does that surprise you?” she asked.

  “Given your reputed friendship with Dolores, yes, it does. But you haven’t told me about that yet.”

  The stiffness returned to her shoulders. “Dolores has published the rumor that we are friends, but it’s not so.” She let out a sigh and leaned against the post at the foot of the bed. “After Felipe asked me for help, I pretended to become her friend. Perhaps she saw through my pretense. Or perhaps friendship has a different value for her than that I place upon it. One evening when I came to visit her, she seduced me. I have been with women before, but always of my own choice. Dolores used her power to enforce my submission. She was too strong for me. She coerced me, she made me do things against my will. It was every bit as much a violation as the most violent of rapes. I hated her for that. I hate her still. I cannot begin to tell you how much. For Felipe’s sake, I’ve continued to play at being her friend, hoping to learn something that would turn him against her, that would drive him to kill her.”

  “And have you learned anything?”

  She plucked at a fold of blue silk, rolled it between her fingers. “I don’t know. They’re both so damned elusive. I’ve had hints, but nothing incontrovertible. Lately I’ve come to believe that although Felipe wanted me to spy on Dolores, he had something else in mind as well. I think he was playing a double game, using me against Dolores and using Dolores against me, informing her that he would set me to spy on her, as if it were not the truth, and pretending that he was doing this in order to let her make me her lover, something she had always desired. But I can’t be sure. I have no means of discriminating between what he truly intended and what I fear may be his intent. And as to Dolores’s motives…” She gave a dismayed laugh. “Everywhere I turn I find evidence of some sly possibility. I’ve begun to fear for my life. If Dolores seeks to control Felipe, mustn’t she then view me as an impediment? Or could all this merely be theatrics, a horrible joke? I’m not sure even they know at this point.” She put a hand on Beheim’s knee. “That is why I involved you. I was afraid. I saw an opportunity to use you against them.” Her voice faltered. “I wish now that I—”

  “You wish that someone else, not I, had been charged with this weighty responsibility. In the few hours we have been together, it has grown clear that there is a great natural affinity between us, a connection that you value and would not want to risk. But I have been charged with this responsibility, and you must let me go forward, hoping that the assistance you have lent will not only serve your ends, but will enable me to bring the matter to a quick and successful resolution so that we may then employ our affection to the fullest and so all our pleasures prove.”

  He said this in a flat, deferential manner, ending with sheer sarcasm, as if his words were a summation of an obvious and rather dubious state of affairs; he kept his face empty and watched for her reaction. Anger, he had thought, would be the most difficult reaction to interpret, but while a trace of anger—or perhaps, defiance—did show itself in her face, it was swept immediately aside by a dawning look of confusion and alarm, and when he had finished speaking, she turned away, downcast, and said, “Why are you trying to degrade the very feelings you sought to have me confess not an hour ago?”

  He could not believe that the injury in her voice was false, but he refrained from answering her, wanting to accumulate more evidence before he arrived at even a partial conclusion.

  Alexandra looked at him over her shoulder, her expression as grave and sweetly concerned as the faces of the angels that guarded the corners of the room. “I cannot ease your suspicions. Not completely. Suspicion is in the air of this place, especially now, especially considering the task before you.” She lowered her eyes. “But I will do what I can.”

  She stood, crossed to one of the hanging lamps, and reduced its flame to a tiny white spear point.

  “What are you doing?” Beheim asked.

  “As I told you,” she said. “What I can.”

  She turned down the second lamp, creating a lovely dusk in the room. Then she slipped one of the straps of her nightdress from her shoulder. The newly exposed flesh glowed in the half-light.

  “This is scarcely original of you,” he said, feeling a mixture of longing and anxiety. “I’m not a fool. Do you expect this to prove anything?”

  “Proof is not what I have to give you.” She moved close to the bed and stood with her right hand on the remaining strap. “Well, Michel. Tell me what I should do?”

  His tongue was thick, his mouth dry.

  “Can you deny that you want me?”

  “No,” he said. “I cannot.”

  “Forget the murder for a while, Michel. Forget who we are. And where. We may not win at this. It often happens that what one thinks one feels suffers in the consummation. But if we are to lose, let us do so as man and woman, not because we have let suspicion cloud the issue.” She settled on the bed beside him. “I want to make love, Michel. Not sex. Sex is always available. I don’t care about it. It’s never very good. But making love, that’s different. It’s been years since I’ve made love. So many, I can’t remember what it’s like. With you…” She took his hand, ran her thumb across his knuckles. “With you, I have the feeling it will happen. What do you think? Is it possible for us?”

  He started to respond, to murmur something, more an encouragement than an answer, but she put a finger to his lips, stopping him.

  “I know,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper. “I know.”

  In the false dusk a light seemed to accumulate around Alexandra’s body, pale and moon-colored against the sheet. There was so much of her, such incredibly long legs, such an extreme flow of line and volume, Beheim became entranced by the exaggerated perspectives available, gazing up at the equatorial swell of her belly toward the flattened mounds of her breasts with their dark oases of areola and turreted nipples, or down from her breasts toward the unruly pubic tuft between her thighs, in all reminding him by its smoothness of the sand sculpture of a sleeping giantess he had seen years before on a beach in Spain. When he kissed her, minutelong explorations of kisses, his erection trapped between their bellies, she trembled, trembled in her core, in some unprospected secret adit, and those elusive tremors, their seismic delicacy, made him feel huge and potent. He wanted to braid them together into a glorious upheaval that would send comets streaking across her mental sky and set all her flesh to quaking. He began to kiss his way down her body, past her rib cage, making glistening snail tracks with his tongue. “No,” she said weakly, clutching at his head, trying to pull him back. But he was determined, unstoppable. He positioned himself between her legs, his own legs sticking off the end of the bed, and penetrated
her with two fingers, working them deep. As he licked and touched, his hand making an erratic round of her breasts, it seemed that in the rich tartness of her taste he detected subtle accents of dismay, of anxiety, and he knew that he should crawl back up, kiss her mouth, reassure her, because she felt alone and lost, uncertain in her responses, of how he wanted her to respond. Then she began to find a rhythm, and not just in her movements, but an internal rhythm, a sly, uncoiling beat that cued the exercise of his lips and tongue. Her hips rocked, shuddered. She caressed his hair, a tacit permission. Her legs angled wider. He was, he thought, plunging through a stratum of pent-up emotions toward that gray place he had sensed within her, threatening to revitalize its deadness. He slipped his hands beneath her buttocks, lifted her, his mouth barnacled to her, like a man drinking from a tureen. A fierce groan shook her, a birth groan, something ripping from her side. Her slicked thighs clamped to his head. Blood sang in his ears. He could hear her babbling. Unintelligible words, skewed whistles of breath, frills of pretty noise, keenings cut short by gasps. He felt the stew of her responses, fragmentary until that moment, a moil of disparate elements, starting to bubble and mix, pervaded by the heat he had kindled. He loved the violence of the release that was building in her, loved creating it. Like a caveman grunting in delight over his flint-struck flame. But then she was plucking at him, saying, “Michel! Michel, please!”; hauling him up, leaving him crouched beside her, sticky-faced and confused, his erection waggling and waning in the suddenly chill air.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, and she said, the words coming in a clumsy rush, “Not the first time, not like that. Is it all right? I’m sorry. I just want you here. With me.”

  Embarrassed, feeling that he had been failing to please her, he said, “I’m sorry, I thought you’d…”

  “No,” she said, pulling him close, cradling his head to her breasts, “no, it’s not you, I just need to see your face, your eyes.” And when he started to speak again, she kissed him to stop the clutter of words.

  After a moment quiet flowed in to surround them, the way it fills in the ruptured spaces created by an explosion, softening the angles of the room, refining it into an intimate and finite place. They kissed again, and the kiss cured the last of their awkwardness. She lifted her right knee, rested it on his hip, letting his member glide between her legs; if he had shifted a degree, he would have penetrated her, but he held back, a bit unsure of himself now, wanting her to guide him. Her breath quickened. Her kisses grazed his lips, his cheeks; her tongue flicked out. Lamb kisses, serpent kisses. At last she reached behind her, her fingers curling about his member, cool as live marble, and he went deep in one long, sweet plunge, feeling those empty years give way, then close around him, her oiled heat clutching, pressing, all accompanied by a musical exhalation, and then, as he went a fraction deeper, a sharply indrawn breath. Her hips hammered against him, a frantic rhythm, as if she had gone weightless in a flurry of wings.

  “You’re so wonderful, Michel!” she whispered.

  Even submerged beneath the sexual veneer, the luster of intimacy, that childlike phrasing and fairy-tale word sounded with brazen incongruity in his ears. That she could think of him as wonderful in any wise distanced him, made him doubt her once again. And yet bound to her, he could not wholly doubt her, and he was inspired to match her energy, to batter against her, as in some demented contest, breathing fractured endearments into her mouth. But she could not keep up the pace, and when she lapsed, her rhythm becoming sporadic, unguided, he worked her into a slow, lascivious grind, a calm torsion at the heart of their storm, a space in which speech was possible, tenderness expressible. He told her how beautiful she was, and looking up at him, touching his jaw, his cheek, she said, “Michel,” soberly, reflectively, as if he were a treasure she had discovered at the bottom of an old chest and now she was giving it a name, deciding to know it by that name. He drew her tongue into his mouth, and at the same time touched the place where they were joined, the gluey mix of sweat and juice that sealed the join, that was smeared across their groins. She caught at his hand, pressed it to her cheek, then licked the taste of their mutuality from his fingers. He began to move furiously in her, but she held him still, her eyes luminous, half-lidded, and said, “Wait! I want to feel you like this for a minute…just for a minute.” Her head drooped, her brow rested against his. Something was pushing down on him, some dark restraint. He imagined the air was hardening around them, growing warmer as it molded to their shape. Words and emotions crowded together inside him, but he found it impossible to speak. His hands roamed aimlessly over her breasts and waist and flanks, a blind sculptor familiarizing himself with new materials. There was a pulse in every part of her body, rapid as a bird’s. He knew she was eager to engage him fully, but for long minutes she lay quiescent, her face dazed with concentration. Finally she hooked an ankle behind his knee, a movement that conveyed an insistent easiness. And strength. Damn, she was strong! There were vast complexities of strength inside her, all focused upon the place where she held him deep, nets of satiny sinew lashed over a saddle of bone, and those connected to great flows of muscle and bridges of tendon over rivers of blood, wired, webbed constructions that carried a thrilling neural traffic, symphonies of roaring anxiety and screaming joy that evoked an entire city of convulsive power, a female world of incomprehensible endurance and resilience. His own strength seemed insubstantial by contrast, a joke, a measly animal virtue, whereas hers was redolent of timeless mystery and tragic tradition, so self-contained and assured it did not require stupid totemic acts of male authority to validate itself, to ratify its measure. It existed; it flowered in secret; it was its own nourishment. Sensing this, he felt oddly innocent and unsophisticated, and that simple action, the hooking of an ankle behind his knee, made him feel that by moving in her, he would satisfy some inborn purpose of her strength. But when she pulled him atop her, fencing him with her long thighs, he lost this sense of submissiveness and felt absolutely with her, equals in their hunt for pleasure. Their cries and whispers seemed part of a cocoon they were weaving of warmth and closeness, extruding happiness like strands of silk. They progressed from a steady, explorative beat to wild variances of rhythm, suffering only minor incompatibilities of pace and accommodation: thrashing, sweaty passages; gentle, almost balletic shifts of position; idling movements during which they gathered their energies, reminded themselves of tactile specifics before accelerating toward some ill-defined intensity. He had assumed that he would finish before her, a genital assumption based on the thickening heat in his groin, but then he felt her body change beneath him, grow slack, then stiffen, then ripple internally as if she were experiencing alternations of gravity. The tidal flex of her hips and buttocks became spasmodic. She thrust at him, rising to meet his thrusts too soon, their flesh smacking together in midair. An ugly groan was dredged from her belly, the cry of someone just regaining consciousness, rolling over, waking to the pain of the blow that has knocked her out. And then another groan, this one a fevered, rattling expulsion. Her heels dug into the backs of his knees; but a second later her legs fell apart, and the tension that had clenched the muscles of her calves and thighs flooded her abdomen. Her hands fluttered about his face; then she flung them out to grip the edges of the mattress, and with a heave, she lifted her head and shoulders, staring wildly at their toiling hips, as if she had wanted to know what was happening down there and was dumbfounded by what she had seen.

  He soon came to feel that he was participating in a transformation, or rather a repossession, the liberation of an angel of desire and its struggle with the repressive demon who had inhabited her body for so long. Her head tossed back and forth, and she snatched fistfuls of the sheet, trying to rip it up from the mattress. Her features were stretched, distorted. Her hips shimmied and twisted. One leg stiffened, knocking against his side like a loose board in a gale. Then she went limp, and he felt, actually felt through the join of their flesh, a gliding inside her, a planing away
of response, relief in the form of some sensation that was easier to bear, as with rain after lightning. She looked beautiful again, agleam with sweat, past the crisis, and he was once again awed and innocent before her, perceiving her as intrinsically different, alien or angel, one of those characters in fantasy novels who fall to earth from some enchanted sphere and are like us but not like, who hear the heartbeats of insects and smile to display anger and have only love in common with humankind, and who, ensnared in that base and pathetically primitive society, after their own innocent grandeur has been sullied by betrayal, suffer some complicated ecstasy of death…or else are transformed into ethereal beings of whom we have even less comprehension.

  Alexandra’s body began to shake a second time, to tremble, every nerve involved. Sweat beaded her breasts and neck, shone on her face. Her nails raked his back. Her hands fumbled at his hips, and he braced himself above her as she arched and bucked, thinking that she wanted him to hold still. Her cries seemed bewildered, alarmed. Her fangs scored her lower lip, drawing a drop of blood. It was as if she were being violated, savaged by the electric shocks of some godly yet ungovernable and mutant force set loose within her, and he laid his palm on her breast, speaking her name, trying to soothe her as her moment finally subsided, as she sailed down like a feather sails, in gentle pendulum sweeps, through the final shivers and drifts of feeling.

  The shadowy air circulated around them slowly, warmly, pricked by a confusion of pinhole flashes, the way a djinn must circulate in its prison bottle, a murky cloud of genius and magic. Beheim did not want to finish, he wanted to remain inside her, to hold on to the peace and easiness that enveloped them. The things he had been unable to tell her earlier now seemed possible to say, but he was afraid that even something as insignificant as the sound of his voice would infect the atmosphere. He smoothed his hand along her hip, and just that touch, that and her response, a slight shifting beneath him, brought him to the edge. He felt a trickle of pleasure, a trivial unburdening, like a thin, hot gold string being spooled out. He thrust hard into her, trying to enhance the feeling. Thrust again. And recognizing what was happening, she rolled her hips, pulling him deeper, herself climbing one last small peak of intensity, sobbing out bursts of disjointed words, saying, “I’ll never…never…ah, Michel!…I’ll never…never betray you…” And then, as he lay spent, she locked her hands behind his back, pressed her mouth to his throat and—as if trying to speak the word to his blood, to convince whatever dwelled there of her improbable fealty—she whispered fiercely, “Never!”