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The Golden

Page 24

by Lucius Shepard


  “I should kill you,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m even hesitating.”

  “You’re as mad as Agenor! I’ve done nothing to deserve—”

  “You were going to betray me!”

  “And first I tried to trade my life for yours. Does it make sense that I would do that and then betray you? No sense at all. Unless, of course, I was trying to distract Agenor in both instances, to delay his attack.”

  He looked at her doubtfully. “You were most convincing.”

  “I’m convincing in everything I do. Especially in those things I do because of conviction.”

  “Even this…now?”

  She made a clicking noise with her tongue and teeth. “Why don’t you stop it? You’re not going to kill me.”

  “I’m not, eh?”

  “No.”

  “And why, pray, will I be merciful?”

  “Because you want me.”

  He thought at first that she was mocking him, though there had been nothing of mockery in her tone. Her gaze was frank, open, and he had the impression that she was inviting him to intimacy. He tried a laugh, but it rang false even to his own ears. “If I release you,” he said, “then you must leave Agenor to me. His fate will be decided by the Patriarch.”

  “That ‘foul thing,’ you mean?”

  Beheim ignored this. “Will you swear not to harm him?”

  “I’ve no wish to harm him now. I was overexcited. As to his fate, it is already decided. He will burn. Whether here or on the castle heights, it makes no difference to the Patriarch.”

  “Swear.”

  “As you wish.” A shrug. “I swear he will be safe from me.”

  He eased up his pressure on the branch, tossed it aside; then he lifted his weight from her.

  “You’ve forgotten something,” she said, still reclining half atop the boulder.

  “Have I?”

  “This.” She pointed to the bead of blood welling from the side of her breast, a ruby droplet. “You’ve bled me. Now you must drink or break with tradition.”

  Beheim watched the droplet slide down her ribcage and onto her belly, leaving a slick track; another was forming in its place. The sight was powerfully arousing.

  “I think,” he said awkwardly, “I think this falls outside the bounds of tradition as it is defined.”

  “No matter,” she said. “I want you to drink.”

  She lifted her arms, let them fall back behind her head, and smiled. Her tousled hair, almost red in the sunlight, made the perfect frame for her face. He could not keep his eyes from her pretty breasts. Warmth came to his face.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Now’s not the time.”

  “Pleasure’s never ridiculous. It’s serious business. And this now, this is particularly serious.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She said nothing for what seemed a very long time. Something broke through the underbrush nearby, made a hurried rustling in the leaves. The light dimmed, then brightened. There was a weighty feeling to the stillness, as if, Beheim thought, a god had turned his eyes their way. That weightiness nourished him. He felt almost at peace with all the trouble of the day. The pines were strange, enormous foot soldiers in shaggy, dark green coats, and the light was in that instant mild as honey, and the rustles in the woods were spirits and the boulder was an altar rock.

  “Drink,” Alexandra said, her voice so soft it was barely distinguishable from a sudden rush of wind through the boughs. “To please me. To please yourself. Drink.”

  Her breasts tasted of sweat and perfume, and her blood was a strong flavor, not complex, as he had presumed, but simple and direct. It warmed him, it renewed his strength, but did not intoxicate except in the way of all blood. After he had taken the new droplet from her breast, licked the flesh clean, he rested his head there where he had drunk. Her fingers played in his hair. The feeling, too, was simple and direct, easy on the heart. He wanted more of it.

  “A kiss,” she said in a lazy voice, tugging at him, trying to pull his face up to hers. “Give me a kiss. Just one.”

  Her lips parted for his tongue, her hands traced delicate, teasing patterns on his chest; her legs parted, letting his member push against the yielding heated place between them. He could feel how it would be with her again. Like stirring himself in hot resin, like falling through the sun into wind and silence, and sailing for a while in some white palace of the mind through which a sea of fevers flowed, and then after a timeless time, the time accumulating like a crowd around a street accident, a tension waiting to be dispersed, emerging from it as he emerged then from that one kiss, galvanized, one of those sensational moments when you step out from the curling tendrils of a Paris fog into a lambent reality of lights and music and wild laughter, when you snap out of the waking nightmare that has held you tossing and turning for decades, and you glance up from a desk cluttered with the reports of a dozen grisly unsolved murders, or from a losing game of chess, or from the still-breathing body of a young woman from which you have just siphoned several unbearably sweet mouthfuls of needed blood, and there it all is, the whole born world summed up in a single glimpse, shining and clear, a lightning-bolt clarity, more perfect an expression of what is than any painting in the Louvre could ever be, everything looking so fresh and strange in its brightness that you might be a visitor just dropped in from Atlantis or Mu or some mythic world of the ether, and you understand once and for all that the truth you have been searching for your entire life is no mystery, it is like every truth a simple brightness that will support no interpretation, no analysis, that is only itself, and it might come to you in the guise of a pretty girl in a checkered apron setting tables in front of the Café Japonais just off the Bois de Boulogne; it might reveal itself to you in an arrangement of pears and cheese on a plate in a hotel in Cannes; it might stream up at you from the self-inflicted wounds of a dead boy who painted azure wings around his eyes and spent each morning posing naked in a mirror and pretending he was a famous courtesan; it might announce itself in the taste of a stale sandwich eaten late at night; it might chill you in a dash of cold rain; it might terrify you in the form of a rat darting from an alley under your foot; it might arise like steam from the impassioned confession of a plump, tearful housewife stranded with you in a train station who shows you the silver angel pin given her as a farewell present by her lover, a vacationing schoolteacher who could not commit himself to any woman because of the secret grief he carried that annihilated his every happiness with guilt; it might be anything, anywhere, but for now it glided from the process of a kiss, and when you looked up this time, you saw the face of the kissed woman still rapt from the pressure of your lips, slivers of green irises showing beneath her lids, like beautiful gemmy green coins placed on her eyes, her red lips still parted, dizzy and dying from the truth of her own moment, and the ranked pines bending all to one side in a strong gust of wind, shaking their shaggy pelts, then straightening, all with a slow, ponderous motion like a chorus line of dancing bears, and the puddled sunlight ebbing and flowing with their movement, and the trillion brown needles making infinite hexagrams in their decay, and lastly, mostly, chiefly, the ugly centerpiece of all this excellent clarity and serenity, a scarred iron shutter half-covered with dirt, and beneath it, up to its neck in cold water, in the damp, dust-thronged air, a living being, its blackened head like a bizarre seed from which the darkness of its prison is seeping, its breath wheezing, its mind empty of everything but pain, waiting, no longer hoping, only waiting for your moment to end, for you to remember what had happened and say, as Beheim said then, “I don’t know what to do with him.”

  Alexandra sat up; she started tying the torn strips of her blouse together so that the material covered her breasts; her long hair fell like a veil over her face. “As far as the Patriarch is concerned,” she said, “you may wait until dark and return him to the castle if you wish. Or you may end his life here and now. It’s your choice.”

  “My choice.” B
eheim let the words drift away without resolution. He wanted someone to take this business off his hands; he had not bargained on being an executioner. Then, struck by an inconsistency, he looked over at Alexandra, who was examining her repairs with displeasure. “How can you know what the Patriarch requires?”

  “He instructed me as to his requirements.”

  “But the fact that Agenor is the murderer…He can’t have known. He might consider tempering his judgment.”

  “No, he would not.” She put up a hand to forestall another question. “He is with me in some fashion. How this is done, I do not know. But he is with me. He hears what I hear, he makes his wishes clear.”

  “Does he speak to you?” Beheim asked, his curiosity piqued. “Do you hear his voice in your mind?”

  “It’s not like that. I simply know his will.” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I can give you no clearer explanation.”

  Something else occurred to Beheim. “Was the Patriarch with you a moment ago?”

  “That’s difficult to say. Perhaps. I assume so.”

  “Then perhaps I should assume that was his wish, too. What you did.”

  “What we did,” she said, a frown line etched in her brow. “No, it was my wish. Our wish.”

  The pines encircling the clearing shivered; the circle of light in their midst fluttered at the edges, making Beheim think of a peculiar glowing, agitated creature he had seen once through a microscope at the Sorbonne.

  “You mustn’t doubt everything,” Alexandra said.

  A hollow, muffled voice sounded from beneath the shutter, its tone one of complaint.

  Beheim paid it only passing attention; he turned toward the castle, ragged slants of its dark gray matter visible through the branches. “Oh?”

  She came up behind him, touched his waist. “You should take some things at face value. If I were your enemy, you would not have survived our kiss.”

  Agenor’s voice again, louder, unintelligible.

  “As I recall,” Beheim said, “it was I who held the upper hand.”

  “You’re strong for one so new,” she said. “And you’ve grown stronger for all that has happened. Strength is to a degree a question of the will, and your will has matured a great deal during the past day and night. But I am stronger than you.” A pause. “Shall I prove it?”

  “No.”

  A pounding on the iron shutter preceded a slight dimming of the sun.

  “Why…” he began; then said, “Never mind.”

  “Why do I fancy you? Is that what you want to know?” She moved away from him, stepping out toward the center of the clearing, and when she spoke again, there was an edge to her voice. “I believe that Agenor was right about you. Eventually you’re going to be quite a powerful figure. That attracts me.”

  “Politics, eh? That’s all it is?”

  “You’re the one asking difficult questions. Don’t expect honeyed answers. Those I’ve already given you. If you’re too deaf to have heard them, too blind to see what I am offering, it’ll do no good for me to try to enlighten you further.”

  They stared defiantly at one another while Agenor’s pounding grew louder and more sustained.

  If he could not trust her, he thought, if he could not trust himself, what was the use in going on? Sooner or later he would have to put his faith in someone, risk everything, and she was the only one he had ever trusted, even for a moment. Agenor he had feared, revered, imitated. But never trusted. He stepped toward her, ready to start over, but she backed away.

  “Not so fast,” she said flatly. “It takes me a while.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, I…”

  “No apologies,” she said; she pushed the fall of her hair back behind her ears. “I don’t need your apology. I understand how it is with you. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. It just takes me a while to make this kind of accommodation.”

  She turned away from him, gazing off into the woods.

  Feeling half-rejected, Beheim discovered, was no more pleasant than straightforward rejection. The pounding on the shutter began to grate on his nerves, and finally he said, “Oh, hell! What do you want?” and heaved at the shutter so that a few inches of the water beneath were exposed. He heard a furious splashing—Agenor retreating to the far end of the pit—and was ashamed for having gotten angry.

  “What is it?” he asked, unable to rid his voice of annoyance.

  A feeble splash, a hoarse exhalation.

  “Are you in pain?” Beheim asked, dropping to his knees.

  “Yes,” Agenor said. “But the darkness is healing.”

  The silence that followed seemed to be flowing up from the blackness of the pit, from the shadowy fathom beneath the shining strip of water.

  Beheim felt unequal to the moment. “What shall I do?” he asked. “I can see nothing for you at the end of this but death.”

  A long pause, then a sloshing sound; as if Agenor were moving his arms in the water.

  Beheim said, “Shall I take you back to the castle? After dark, I mean.”

  “After dark?”

  Was there a hopeful note in Agenor’s voice?

  “In that instance I would, of course, send to the castle for an escort,” said Beheim.

  “Of course.” Another pause. “And is there an alternative?”

  “If returning to the castle is not to your liking, then we would…finish things here. Lady Alexandra is serving as the Patriarch’s agent. She would witness all you might tell us.”

  “I see.” More stirring and sloshing.

  Beheim pictured Agenor making idle waves in the darkness, mulling things over.

  “Michel,” said Agenor, “will you come down to me. I would see you again before”—he let out a sodden chuckle—“before we finish things.”

  “No, lord, I will not.”

  “I understand, my boy. I understand completely.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. It was a foolish request.”

  There was a silence; then, to Beheim’s astonishment, laughter came from the pit—slow, sly, private laughter such as might have been sounded by a man alone in his study, delighted by a secret joke. It unnerved him to hear it.

  “What if I’ve been wrong?” said Agenor, and laughed again. “What if I have been wrong?”

  “Lord?”

  “You will put me to the question, Michel, will you not?”

  “If you wish.”

  “I’m certain you know what questions to ask.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I don’t suppose there’s any reason to delay things,” Agenor said; after the passage of a few seconds, he added, “I’m getting cold.”

  Beheim could find no words of comfort. There was a heaviness in his chest such as one feels prior to the onset of tears, but his eyes were dry, and he did not believe he would shed many tears for Agenor. He no longer was secure in his conception of the man; those things he thought he had known about him had all proved flimsy and untrustworthy.

  Then there was the Golden.

  Despite the permissiveness and violence of his new life, he was still enough of a man—a policeman, at any rate—to be revolted by this particular crime, to harbor a moral distaste for the incredible vulgarity of its license.

  Yet he was not without emotion where Agenor was concerned. Some of his memories of the old man were proof against all that had happened; he could not believe that the moments they represented were every one of them empty, worthless, bereft of the good truths they had seemed at the time to embody.

  Alexandra’s hand fell to his shoulder, giving him a start. The weight consoled him, and he put his own hand over hers.

  “Do you know,” said Agenor with a trace of his old air of professorial good nature, “that you two will be the first of our Family ever to witness an Illumination? Previously those who oversaw the ritual were forced to stand in a dark place where they could hear the answers to their questions. But you…you will see everything.
It’s quite spectacular. At least so I’ve heard from servants who’ve borne witness.”

  A tremor in his voice belied the casual tenor of his words.

  “Quite an opportunity,” Agenor murmured. “You must be sure to…” The sentence ended in an exhausted sigh; apparently he had no more energy for self-delusion.

  “Let this be a lesson to you, my friend,” he said. This was followed by a harsh noise—laughter or sob, Beheim could not be sure. Then in a firmer tone, as if he had recalled that he was speaking to a wider audience: “A lesson to you all. We need no great enemies, no bloody men with stakes and torches, so long as we have ourselves. So long as we have the strength to claw at our own hearts.”

  He stirred about for several seconds. The water at Beheim’s end of the pit rippled and slapped against the bank of black soil.

  “You must put the questions forcefully,” Agenor said. “Shout them if necessary. I will be in great pain, and you will have to make me hear you. Once I do, I will fasten onto them as though they were ropes that might haul me up from the fire. That is how I’ve heard it proceeds. Felipe held the view that the questioning triggered some mental process, possibly one akin to those exercised by Hindu yogis, that made the pain more tolerable. An alteration of the brain chemistry, perhaps. I find myself hoping that his opinion was accurate.”

  Beheim, moved by a feeling of uneasiness, a product—he assumed—of his conflicting tempers, was tempted to heave the iron shutter aside and have done with it.

  “One envies the Christians at moments like these,” Agenor said. “To yearn toward heaven with one’s dying breath, to strain for a glimpse of whiteness, for the perfumed fantasy of a loving god. Ignorance is a powerful consolation. It is no solace to know that the fall is endless. Ah, well!” He splashed about, muttering something that Beheim failed to catch. “Michel, I cannot ask that you think well of me, but I hope in the days to come you will remember the things I have tried to impress upon you and take them to heart. They may have been spoken by a fool, but there is nevertheless some virtue in the words.”

 

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