The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  She began leafing through the loose papers inside, but he said, “Don’t bother showing me. I believe you.”

  It all made sense, he thought, though sense of an extremely sketchy sort. He could not understand why Agenor had bothered to seek an alliance. Instinct, perhaps. Or had he known of Felipe’s researches? Could he have suspected that the murder had been committed during daylight? If so, why then had he not suggested as much to Beheim?

  There was no point, he decided, in further analysis. He would have to wait and see if his plan bore fruit. An unlikely prospect. It was evident that he had misread most of the clues and all the tendencies of the case.

  He settled himself beside Alexandra, still wary of her, but accepting her for the time as, if not a lover, then a neutral observer, possibly an ally. He did not know if he could trust her in a difficult situation.

  “What do you want from all this?” she asked him.

  He laughed bitterly. “I’m hardly in a position to want anything. I’m just trying to survive.”

  She appeared to be waiting for him to continue, to explain, but he did not feel in the mood to rehash his experiences of the past twenty-four hours.

  “Well,” she said finally, “what would you want if wanting were your motive?”

  “Why does that interest you?”

  “I’m interested to see what we might have in common. Perhaps we will become friends again.”

  “Friends? Is that what we were?”

  “It will do for now.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard the word ‘friend’ used since I became part of the Family.”

  “It has, I will admit, something of a different meaning to most of us. But friendship and membership in the Family are not mutually exclusive.”

  With the shawl shading her face, she really looked quite beautiful, softer and more vulnerable than women of the Family were wont to look. But Beheim had learned to distrust beauty. He turned his eyes to the battlements of the castle high above, rearing dark against the pale sky. A few threads of gray cloud were gathering over the valley, netting a portion of the blue, and farther to the west, a flight of blackbirds whirled up from a copse, appearing as if an invisible hand were scattering the ashes of a giant.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t suppose I know enough to have reasonable wants at this juncture. But one thing I’m clear on. I want more than what I’ve been told is possible to want. I want something that would strike most of our cousins as being out of character. If I were to try to name it now, I would most likely seem foolish. Yet it is not a foolish thing to want. I’m clear on that as well.”

  She remained silent for a few seconds, then said, “Not a bad answer. I’ve felt that way myself.”

  “Indeed?” he snapped. “I imagine it’s just another phase I’m passing through.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Michel! I’m trying to befriend you, to help you.”

  “First and foremost, you’re trying to help yourself.”

  “Granted. But our interests coincide in this instance. They have from the beginning. We can help each other. We’d be fools not to. No matter how isolated an instance was our time together two nights ago, it had to signify something. Some form of intuitive trust at the very least.”

  “Trust,” he said thoughtfully, looking out across the field at the castle, like a god in its gray decrepitude and huge, imponderable mass.

  “Yes, what of it?”

  “I was considering whether or not I valued it least of all the bonds that could unite us.”

  She gave no response, and he glanced at her. She was staring with disgust at a beetle—perhaps the same one he had flicked away—that was crawling along the hem of her skirt. He supposed that her disgust was part and parcel of her distaste for all the daylight world; but there was something so fabulously normal about her reaction, so womanly, he laughed and laughed. Yet when she asked him why he was laughing at her, he felt so much, relief, hope, fugitive strands of deeper emotions, once again he was not certain that he knew the answer.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  The sun, a huge, golden, blistered sac of light, edged higher toward the top of the sky; gray clouds continued to gather over the valley. They talked intermittently, casual talk for the most part, Alexandra expressing revulsion for things of the day, having bouts of extreme anxiety, and Beheim comforting her by relating his earlier experiences. They shied away from speaking of what had happened in the white room, on the great carved bed, but it was there between them, almost palpable, a third presence in which they both had a part that sat by their sides and added an accent of warmth to their conversation. Before long they heard a church bell tolling noon, and as the last peal had died away, a man dressed in black came walking around the curve of the castle wall and stood in the shadow of the wall, gazing out toward the spot where the body of the Golden’s companion lay. He wore trousers, jacket, a wide-brimmed hat, and had on tinted spectacles. Most likely, Beheim thought, by waiting he was trying to tempt anyone watching into showing himself, thinking that he could retreat into the castle before his identity was discovered. At length he came forward into the light. It seemed to Beheim that his gait was familiar, the way he swung his left arm farther than his right, and how his head fell slightly to the right as if to counterbalance the swing of the left arm. With each and every step, the man’s presence struck new chords of familiarity. Beheim held his breath, strained his eyes, peering between blades of grass. The tension was such that he felt he was being pressed in a vise. And when at last he recognized the man, when he saw the white hair feathering from beneath the hat, when the craggy nobility of the features became apparent, he refused to believe the evidence of his senses.

  “Agenor!” breathed Alexandra. “It’s Agenor!”

  “No,” he said, trying to put his faith in denial. “No, it couldn’t be.”

  She caught his wrist. “It is! Look! It’s him!”

  Agenor had stopped about five yards from the body; he turned his head in a slow arc, scanning the woods for movement. From his pocket he withdrew a scarf. After another look around, he tied the scarf over his nose and mouth, and stepped close to the body.

  “What will you do?” whispered Alexandra.

  “Nothing,” Beheim said, still shaken. “I’ll report what I’ve seen to the Patriarch. Or you can make the report. You’re his agent.”

  “It’s not enough. You have to force him to confess to the murder. If you don’t, he may be able to invent an excuse for being here.”

  “What possible excuse could there be?” Yet even as he said these words Beheim found himself believing that Agenor would be able to justify his presence. No scenario in which he was the murderer held water. It was absurd, Beheim thought; he would not condemn him without a hearing. And yet if Agenor was the murderer—and he had to admit to the possibility—then by giving him a hearing, he would be exposing himself to grave danger. He had been prepared for this when he had assumed Alexandra to be the guilty one, but Agenor was a far more formidable foe, and all of Beheim’s preparations, his pits, his dilution of the drug, now seemed inadequate. What if Agenor had his own supply of the drug?

  Alexandra was staring at him expectantly, those lustrous green eyes holding his gaze, but exerting no pressure of will.

  “Very well,” he said. “But keep clear of him. If he manages to overcome me, you alone can bear witness to this. If he attacks, you must assume he is guilty and return to the castle. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, touched his hand—for luck, he thought, for assurance. He almost trusted her.

  Standing up from the grasses that had hidden him, Beheim felt that he had grown enormous, that he was towering over the valley, the woods and rivers, towering over even the circumstance of murder, dwarfed only by the imponderable tonnage of Castle Banat. The sight of Agenor—his spectacles now removed—bending over the corpse and plucking at its clothing seemed no different than the sight of anyone he had ever arrested in the moment before the momen
t of truth. The old man looked vulnerable, small, oblivious to the fate about to close its jaws on him, and it was from this perspective, in this frame of mind, that Beheim spoke to him, saying as he walked toward him, “Nice day for a walk, eh?”

  Agenor let out a yelp of alarm, dropping the tinted spectacles, and sprang to his feet. He gaped at Beheim for a second, but then his features relaxed, composed themselves into a calm mask.

  Guilty, thought Beheim, stopping perhaps twenty feet away. Guilty as the devil.

  “Michel!” said Agenor. “I’m surprised to see you here. I’d assumed you were still involved in your interrogations. A servant told me about this.” He gestured at the body. “So I thought I’d investigate. See what was up. I believe”—his brow furrowed as if in deep contemplation—“that this may be the body of the Golden’s companion.”

  “It won’t do, my lord,” Beheim said. “Really. It won’t do at all.”

  Agenor’s face was washed over by a succession of emotions: defiance, rage, sadness. “No,” he said at last, his voice almost inaudible. “No, I don’t imagine it will.”

  Wind laid undulant lines across the field, rippling and striping the tall grasses; the grass made a long, hissing sigh.

  With a rueful laugh, Agenor looked up to the sun, then he waved at it. “Well,” he said breezily, “tell me your opinion, Michel. Can we suffer this on a daily basis? Is it worth all the effort?”

  Beheim had no answer for him.

  Agenor’s Adam’s apple bobbed reflexively. “It seems I’ve gotten what I wanted. Whether I truly wanted it or not.”

  Beheim did not understand this statement, but he had no desire to pursue the matter. Each second he was assaulted by a complex of feelings, old feelings of devotion and allegiance, new ones of anger and resentment at Agenor’s betrayal. “Will you come back with me to the castle, lord?”

  “The castle.” Agenor swept off his hat, ran a hand through his thick white hair. “Yes, well. I’m afraid I can’t do that. I would like to. In fact, I intended to. But I simply can’t.” He glanced up at Beheim. “I wondered if this was a trap. I suppose it was idiotic of me not to recognize it for one.”

  “My lord, if you do not return with me now, you will surely die.”

  “At your hands?” Haughtily. “I think not.”

  “I diluted Felipe’s drug, my lord. I cannot guarantee that you have more than a few minutes of life remaining.”

  All sternness and rigor drained from Agenor’s face, and it appeared his features would dissolve, melt like heated wax, and flow off the bone into a puddle. Then he regained his composure. “That is a lie.”

  “Your pardon, lord, but what would be the virtue of such a lie? I did not know the murderer’s identity. I wished to protect myself. Dilution of the drug was my sole means of protection in the face of powerful enemies.” Beheim took a step forward, suddenly wanting—despite everything—to save the old man. “Time grows short, my lord. I would not see you die in such ignominy.”

  “Ah, but it is precisely the death I sought! And not an ignominious one at all.”

  Agenor, to Beheim’s consternation, seemed merry, giddy with the prospect of immolation; once again he looked up to the sun. “If, indeed, you are telling the truth, and if, in that case, you knew what you were doing when you diluted the drug, which I doubt, I still do not believe that you will ever completely understand the irony of this moment.”

  “Then explain it to me, lord, if explanation pleases you. But be swift, I caution you.”

  “Yes, perhaps I should explain. If for no other reason than that you will be able to confirm my folly.” Agenor edged a step closer to Beheim, a surreptitious movement that put him on the alert. “You see, my friend, I have been experiencing certain—how shall I put it?—certain discomforts of late. Mental difficulties. A tendency toward the erratic, a drifting in and out of delusion. I recognized these to be symptoms of the changes that attend the passage from one stage of this peculiar eternity into the next, and I must tell you I did not welcome them. They seemed like maladies, the products of a curse. Therefore, unwilling to subject myself to these changes, and gripped by the blackest of depressions, I determined to end my life.”

  Agenor shifted nearer, and Beheim prepared to run. He was feeling a bit separate from the world, light-headed, but this did not concern him. He was fascinated by Agenor’s arrogance, his implicit denial of a circumstance that had placed him in mortal peril. It did not greatly surprise him, though; it was in accord with the Family’s penchant for self-destruction.

  “It was not a difficult decision,” said Agenor. “But implementing the decision, that was another matter entirely. I did not wish my death to be the mere spending of a life, and I must also admit to a degree of cowardice. Then one morning—I had been experimenting with Felipe’s drug—after returning from a walk outside the castle walls, I was passing the Golden’s chamber, and it occurred to me that she could serve as the agency of my death. I thought this a stroke of genius. I had always aspired to participate in a Decanting, and now I could satisfy this yearning. I knew the Patriarch would not permit such a breach of tradition to go unpunished. He would sentence me to an Illumination. And therein, I realized, lay the value of my death. I would have questions put to me that would focus the dying light of my mind on the particular portion of the future that has so concerned me these past years: the question of whether the Family should abandon the West and go into the East for safety.”

  Beheim tried to take a step away, but he felt rooted to the spot. Agenor’s tall black figure rippled like something seen through flame, and his voice had the resonance of a great bell; its vibrations dizzied Beheim, made him slow and uncaring.

  “I planned to take a sip, no more. Only a sip. But once I had tasted the Golden, I was unable to stop. Oh, Michel, what a flavor the blood had! And it was not the flavor alone that commanded me. There were visions. It was as if I had become the Golden, as if by drinking I flowed along the river of her life and knew…No, not knew. Felt! I felt all her womanly secrets, the hot pleasure waked by a first kiss, her monthly pains, her sharp virginal longings. I degraded myself in my abuse of her. And so with a single act of violence I rejected centuries of temperate life and scholarly ideals. When I saw what I had done, my desire for death grew stronger, and I set in motion a scheme that would both punish me and elevate you. You see, I believed that despite your inexperience you were the one who should take my place, that you would become the voice in our Family for policies of reason and restraint. I intended to lead you slowly toward the conclusion of my guilt, to make it look as though your brilliance had won the day. But now it appears that my decision to die was not a firm one.”

  He cocked his head as if hearing an inner voice and made a scratchy noise in his throat, as if what he had heard had afforded him mild surprise. His manner of speaking grew increasingly halting and distracted.

  “It was never firm. Never. I…I understand that now. My death wish, if you will, was merely another symptom of the mental erraticism that had so depressed me, a kind of morbid playfulness. Games. I was playing games. With myself, I suppose. With everyone, and everything. And my convoluted attempt at achieving death by means of your investigation, that, too, was a symptom. A game. I both did and did not want to die, you see. Equally attractive ends. So I constructed this scenario against which to play out my ambivalence. Even at this moment I am flirting with the ideas of death and noble sacrifice. But”—a cracked laugh—“I will not do more than flirt with them.”

  Agenor, Beheim realized, had moved quite close to him, less than an arm’s length away. His white hair looked bright as flame. The deepened lines on his brow seemed to write an epic of concern, of deep study; his eyes were hooded, brooding; but there was a febrile slackness to his mouth that spoke of weakness, indulgence, an inner unraveling. That expression was a signal of terrible danger—Beheim knew it well. But all his observations and recognitions were futile. He could not stir a step. Agenor’s lips parted in
a slowly developing smile to reveal his fangs, and Beheim felt that he was shriveling away inside himself, as helpless as a bird before a serpent.

  Then something came whistling down onto the side of Agenor’s head, something that impacted with a solid thunk. He screamed and staggered away. Blood stained his white hair, rilled in a heavy flow down his cheek and jaw, and Alexandra, her hair in disarray, looking half-mad herself with fear, dropped the dead bough with which she had struck him and caught Beheim’s hand and pulled him toward the woods. Still dazed, he struggled against her. She shouted, slapped his face, and stung to alertness, he let her drag him along, running clumsily over the uneven ground, lurching sideways whenever he struck a depression, flailing his arms to maintain balance. There was a roaring at his back, a sound such as a wounded animal might have made.

  They burst through a fringe of chokecherry into shaggy green pines, dappled sunlight, ferns, boulders protruding from a cover of dead needles, the land sloping away sharply. Alexandra started straight downhill, towing Beheim along, but as they descended the steep slope, remembering the pits, he said, “No, this way!” and turned her back uphill, setting a course roughly parallel to the edge of the woods. The sunlight confused him. Every place looked more or less alike, masses of dark green and pine trunks glowing coppery in the strong light, and they were moving so quickly, so erratically, ducking left and right, he became uncertain as to where the pits lay. They were close at hand, he was sure, but he could not pinpoint their location. He could hear Agenor breaking through the bushes not far behind, and once again he thought how inadequate his preparation had been. The pits, even if he were able to find them, would likely be useless. And who knew how long Felipe’s drug, even diluted, would protect Agenor?

  After another minute or so it became clear that Agenor was gaining rapidly on them, and Beheim’s tactics changed; rather than attempting to trap Agenor in one of the pits, he decided that the best course would be to elude him for as long as possible and let the sun do its work. And since his wind was weakening, he thought that they would be better off hiding than continuing to run. Not far ahead he spotted a tangle of secondary growth, a miniature jungle that had sprung up around two fallen trees, their huge root systems clotted with dirt, looking dark and mysterious, like strange ritual wheels just unearthed from a ruin, the closely packed nodules of root tissue and clumps of wet soil contriving an uncanny resemblance to those myriad assemblages of the gods that adorn Indian mandalas. The dead trunks lay one across the other, and were shrouded in thickets of viburnum, spirea, and elderberry, tangled further with ivy and thorny devil’s club, as well as with a crush of dead boughs. Having satisfied himself that Agenor was not within sight, Beheim jumped up onto one of the trunks, hauling Alexandra after him, and they tightroped out to the junction where the two trunks crossed. There they gingerly lowered themselves into the massy vegetation, pushing through tiers of wet needles and stiff webs of branches and ropy vines into the dank cavity beneath, a cavity, Beheim realized gratefully, that deepened into a mossy hollow and would allow them to crawl farther back beneath the tangle should the need arise. They sat on the clammy ground. Dampness soaked through Beheim’s trousers almost immediately, but he felt secure. The foliage was so thick overhead that only a few needling beams of gold light penetrated to their hiding place. He watched as one appeared to glide over Alexandra’s white cheek and center on a glorious green eye. The pupil shrank to a pinprick, the perfectly plucked eyebrow arched as if in inquiry. He squeezed her hand, drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling all his muscles relax.