The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “I will remember,” Beheim said solemnly.

  “Then”—another sigh, more, it seemed, a clearing of the lungs, a preparation for the painful trial ahead, than an expression of despair—“then I am ready.”

  Beheim came up into a squat, gripping the edge of the shutter; his muscles bunched, but he could not bring himself to act.

  Alexandra bent to his ear, whispered, “You are being cruel, not kind. Don’t make him wait.”

  He nodded, he closed his eyes, he tightened his grip.

  Her lips brushed his temple. “Do it now.”

  With a shout that seemed to release a fierce heat trapped inside him, Beheim flipped the shutter off to the side of the pit, coming to his feet as he did. He had a glimpse of Agenor in a corner of the pit, his scorched head, his fingers grasping the top of the pit, his heels dug into the soil just above the water level, bunched up, coiled like a man about to spring.

  And spring he did.

  Screaming, he threw himself at Beheim, striking him with his shoulder at the knees, knocking him to the ground. Beheim twisted as he fell, landing heavily on his side. He tried to roll away, but Agenor was on him, battering at his head with burning hands, then coming astraddle of him, grabbing him by the neck, squeezing. Framed incongruously by blue sky and pine boughs, the cracked and blackened oval of his face was nightmarish: the lips crusted with charred tissue, here and there a bloody split, like the rind of some vile fruit bursting with poisonous ripeness; nose reduced to flaps of charcoaled cartilage that flapped horribly with the passage of his breath; the brow so ravaged that through the scorched crackling skin could be seen thin sections of white bone. The teeth, too, were white, revealed in a grimace or a smile, but the gums were blistered and bleeding. Only the eyes were clear, and they were the eyes of a madman, bulging and wild and rimmed with red, making it appear as if someone hale were peering through a mask of hideous deformity. Beheim could not see the flames that were consuming Agenor against the bright sky, but the air around him rippled with heat, and he felt the skin of his neck blistering beneath the old man’s hands. He thrashed about, trying to unseat him, but Agenor’s strength was irresistible. The life was being choked from him. His field of vision was reddening, black wings trembling at the edges, odd tangles of opaque cells drifting, vanishing, the air going dark as if it, too, were being scorched.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alexandra rush forward and jab at Agenor with a stick. The pine branch with the sharp end, the same with which he had threatened her. She slammed it into the side of Agenor’s neck, and it pierced skin, muscle, and cartilage, penetrating deep with a horrid crunching noise, lodging there like a crudely feathered arrow. For a split second Beheim did not think it had had any effect, but then Agenor, without a cry, went sliding out of sight, his weight suddenly removed from Beheim’s chest, the hands slipping from his neck. Gasping, coughing, Beheim crawled a few feet away. Alexandra caught his arm, helped him stand. He spun about, spotted Agenor staggering up, using the boulder for balance and tugging at the pine branch piercing his neck, his movements stunned and slow, like those of a sick animal. Beheim felt no pity for him now, only rage and the desire to inflict pain. He glanced about the clearing. Not far to his right was a pine tree whose lowermost branch was seven or eight feet long and had a forked end. He went over to it and, using the strength of his rage, wrenched at it, pulled, twisted it free. Holding it like a spear, he crossed the clearing to Agenor, and as the old man turned, still tugging at the sharp stick, Beheim jammed the forked end of the branch against his neck and pushed him back onto the boulder, pinning him there as one might pin a serpent. Agenor let out a sibilant cry and tried to wriggle free, but Alexandra joined Beheim, helped him hold the branch in place, and though Agenor’s struggles grew frantic, he could not escape. The pine needles close to his face were burning; his clothes were burning, his flesh, all enveloped in a pale, rippling envelope of flame, but the process of immolation was slower than would have been the case with normal flesh, the erosion of meat and sinew from bone more gradual, and thus, Beheim supposed, the pain was more brightly particular and involving. Agenor’s screams seemed evidence of that, going high, higher, until there was nothing human about them and they seemed the outcries of a bird or the squeals of a rat. Slabs of shiny black char split away from his cheek, from the pierced side of his neck. A large notch had been eaten away from his lower lip, the gum burned through, and the bone beneath going brown. His shoe leather had been seared to his feet, so that he appeared to be wearing special footgear with separate toe sheaths and the laces embedded in glazed, dark red skin.

  “I have a question for you, Lord Agenor!” Beheim shouted, ramming the forked end more tightly against the old man’s throat. “Do you hear?”

  There was a slight diminution of the old man’s struggles.

  “Listen to me! For the Family has need of your witness! Our enemies beset us! We are sorely pressed! What shall we do? Shall we remain in our old fastnesses, or shall we go into the East and make a new home there?”

  Agenor ceased his struggling, shaking with the processes of the flames, his face now a black ruin, shattered textures and planes of carbonized tissue, some bits shining like fresh fractures of anthracite, others bearing traces of color from some baked fluid or another, some yield of vein or gristle. His eyes were gone, boiled away beneath hardened black crescents. The branch piercing his neck was aflame, as was the forked branch that held him.

  And yet he spoke.

  The first words were hopelessly garbled. Beheim, astounded, ordered him to repeat them.

  “Soo…ooo,” Agenor said, growling the syllables; he repeated them several times, then succeeded in pronouncing an entire word, sounding each syllable separately. “Su…ma…rin…da. A town…on the river Maha…” The end of that word, a name, was degraded by his torn throat into a guttural snarl; but after a pause he said, “Mahakam. You must…upriver. Six days.” Smoke trickled from his mouth; a dark clot of blood welled forth and sizzled on his chin. After that he spoke with less effort and distortion. “Six days…by boat. Then three days’ walk. Go south and east. To a hill. A high…hill. Mahogany trees. A stand of mahogany among…lesser trees. Facing a saddle…a saddleback mountain. Across a valley.”

  “Where is this place?” Alexandra asked, but so softly that Beheim was forced to repeat the question.

  “Borneo,” came the response.

  “What then?” Beheim shouted. “What will happen?”

  “Build there,” Agenor rasped. “Build deep. Then there is peace for a thousand years.”

  Another gout of blood, thick as stew, spilled from his mouth and was instantly transformed into smoke and a sticky residue.

  “What do you mean, ‘build deep’?”

  “A house…escape tunnels beneath. Rooms. Armories. Store…houses. If trouble comes…you will need…these things.”

  “And Europe? What of the Family in Europe?”

  From Agenor’s tormented throat issued a terrible, hoarse, declining wail that seemed to Beheim an answer on its own. “A hundred years. Banat in ruins.” He said more, a broken cascade of gravelly syllables, but it was incomprehensible.

  “Ask him whether we—” Alexandra began, but Beheim cut in, saying, “Let him die.”

  “He is dead already,” she said. “Use him. Ask him the question you must ask so that when we leave this place, we do so secure in our hearts as to the future the two of us must face.”

  Her expression was tense and worried; the ends of her hair lifted from her shoulders. Reflected fire danced in her eyes.

  He nodded. “As you wish.” He turned to Agenor, a charred mummy pinned by a black two-fingered hand, and said, “What of Alexandra and me? What lies ahead for us? What should we do?”

  “Su…marin…da.”

  “Are you saying we must go there?”

  “Your only hope,” Agenor said. “There is danger everywhere. Do not linger at the castle. Go…into the East. To Sumarinda.”<
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  “Now?” asked Beheim, incredulous.

  “Now,” said Agenor, making the word into a whispery howl. “You will have your triumph. Your day. Do not hes…hesitate. Go now.”

  Beheim tossed the forked branch into the woods and stepped away, drawing Alexandra with him, as Agenor pitched onto his side and lay at the verge of the pit. One of his legs, utterly carbonized, had snapped, and he clawed at the dirt, trying to pull himself along, making very little progress. Smoke leaked from the splits in his skin. The needles upon which he was lying burst into flame.

  “There’s more to ask!” Alexandra said, clutching at Beheim as he moved away from the pit, searching for a stake with which to finish Agenor.

  “What?” he said. “How long will we live? Will we win at love? I doubt he could tell us much. He only offers possibilities. Let’s kill him and get on with supplying our own answers. It seems we have a great deal to talk about.”

  There was a splash; they glanced back to find that Agenor had fallen into the pit. A veil of steam was rising from the water, obscuring the trees behind it. Agenor was floating, half-submerged, become a figure of almost unrelieved black, his skin crispy and bubbled and ridged, his arms beating ineffectually. An ugly black one-legged doll nearly the size of a man. Thin smoke was lifting from him, the inner meat still burning. Bubbling noises came from his lipless scar of a mouth.

  “Damn!” said Beheim, realizing that he would have to go down into the water in order to finish him, and not at all sure that he wanted to do that.

  Agenor was spinning slowly, as if taken by an idle current, and this bewildered Beheim, seeming contrary to physical laws.

  Then something happened still more contrary to the expected.

  The water immediately surrounding Agenor began to gleam—he might have been leaking some spectacular silver fluid—forming an outline around his body, and from the splits in his skin, a fine radiance began to shine forth, a pale silvery effusion that grew brighter and brighter, the separate beams growing distinct in the gloom of the pit, until it appeared that a hellish core had been exposed deep within that charred shell. The water lapped with increasing force at the walls of the pit, slopping higher, bringing down clods of dirt. The light waxed more brilliant yet. It looked as if stars were being born in the moribund flesh, and soon the flesh started to flake away, in peels, in slices, as if Agenor were being filleted. Not long thereafter the organs and intestines became visible, steeped in light, packed neatly in their cavities, all the intimate horrors of an ordinary life. The light inspired them to a kind of excellent decay; they lost shape, pulped, their substance flowed into a greenish sludge that mingled with the water, and at last the skeleton was left enveloped in a lozenge of shadow, rather like the shadow of a coffin. No common rack of bones, this—a construct of silvery wires set with nine points of incandescent brilliance, resembling the map of a constellation that one might find in a guide to the heavens, though the quadrant of the sky in which this constellation ruled was unknown to Beheim.

  The water seethed and lashed about, and the bones of the skeleton began to drift apart, as if the last of the cartilage were dissolving, the joints losing their hold, making of it a silver puzzle of stars and bones that whirled about in the troubled water, moving to its own rhythms, its own turbulence, and then even these fragments experienced a dissolution, the silvery stuff of their essence blurring and conjoining with the less lambent fluid of the water, until at the last there was a tossing pewter-colored sea within the pit, like an element of a miniature storm.

  Beheim thought it was over, but then a bassy humming vibration issued from the pit, trembling the ground beneath his feet. Alarmed, he yanked Alexandra back from the edge and they moved timorously upslope toward the shelter of the pines. The humming grew louder, its dark note seeming to dim the sun, to spread new depths of shadow from the boughs that overhung the clearing, and with an explosiveness like that of a volcano breaching the earth, the force of it knocking Beheim and Alexandra onto their backs, whatever remained in the pit flew upward in a beam of gleaming stuff…not fluid, not solid, but having the qualities of both, a wide flood of Agenor’s essential things streaming into the heavens, becoming paler and paler against the light, and as the humming died, contriving a curious shape in the upper reaches of the sky, a vague shadowy figure, an emblem of some sort—or so Beheim thought of it—a sigil, the imprint of some cryptic meaning too intricate to hold in the mind except as symbol, very like the symbol he recalled seeing in his mind’s eye upon hearing the song of his blood, and he wondered now if the grand design that particular shape had seemed to signify had only been the promise of this terrible death. It hung motionless for several seconds, maintaining its smoky form against the tuggings of the wind, and then, with no further ado, it faded utterly from the earth.

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  They had expected to find nothing in the pit, but when they looked, they discovered that the dirt walls were flecked with bits of tissue, nuggets of bone, sticky lumps that might have been congealed blood, and this caused them to wonder even more at what they had witnessed, to doubt its reality, though to what degree they should doubt it was yet another problematic matter; it also caused them to shy away from each other for a time—to have seen what they had made them painfully aware of their natures, and the idea that they each had such a death inside them, such a pyrotechnic and unwholesome potential, did nothing to encourage intimacy. Beheim was particularly unsettled by the experience. He kept staring at his hands and expecting to see silver bones and phosphorescent stars, wondering what more he would come to learn about this unfathomable life within him, and when he turned his eyes to Alexandra, instead of finding consolation in her beauty, he thought of what Agenor must have seen, his very mind on fire, staring out through the flesh of his tormentors into a spiraling future of jungle rivers and small brown men and steamy tropical towns, and how he must have felt knowing that his vision, the key, perhaps, to their eternities, was the agonizing engine of his oblivion.

  They idled about for quite some time, speaking infrequently, and as the sun dropped below the pine tops—four o’clock or a little later, Beheim reckoned—they sat down facing one another beneath a tall pine at the edge of the woods, a few hundred yards from the castle walls. A wind lifted the boughs, and that wind was the only sound, a silky rush that infused his agitated thought with a cool trickle of calmness.

  “There’s no reason we have to go back at all,” Alexandra said. “We’ve enough of the drug to last a good while. I have Felipe’s journal. There’ll be no difficulty in making more.”

  “What of the Patriarch?” he asked.

  “It’s not him we have to fear. He may well have forgotten about us by now. For the time being, anyway. It’s the Agenors and the Valeas. Roland’s friends. And Felipe’s. They won’t act at once. Chances are they won’t find out what’s happened until everyone’s gone home. But sooner or later they’ll decide to do something.”

  “Then you’re right,” he said. “We shouldn’t go back.”

  She made a delicate noise, one he took to signal uncertainty.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Everything. I don’t know.” She picked up a pine needle, poked it against the back of her hand, snapping it. “I’m just not sure about any of this.”

  “About me?”

  “You, yes. And me. And everything else.”

  “Do you doubt the credibility of Agenor’s Illumination?”

  “I’d give anything to be able to deny its credibility. But how can I? The fact is, I understand it all too well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Alexandra shifted, sat cross-legged, smoothed her skirt down over her legs. “We’re to go to this place halfway round the world, this…What was the name?”

  “Sumarinda.”

  “Yes, Sumarinda. And we’re to proceed into the jungle, build there, make a life there. Protected. Distant from everything.”

  “So it ap
pears.”

  “Can you imagine anyone else you’ve met in the Family picking up and going off to Borneo? Even if they knew it was because of knowledge gained during an Illumination, knowledge that would save them?”

  He considered this. “A handful, perhaps.”

  “But we have to go,” she said. “And we’ll be alone. Eventually others may come. Perhaps others yet will come hunting us. But we’ll be alone for a long time. Most of the Family will never leave the old ground. They’d rather die…and they will.”

  “You’re frightened of being isolated?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “It’s different for me. I’ve never felt secure within the Family. I’ve always had a feeling of isolation.”

  For a few seconds she concentrated on tracing a design in the dirt with her forefinger, then rubbing it out. “You know,” she said, “if he had worked it all out in advance, Agenor couldn’t have engineered a better result. This is the best he could hope for—to seed a new colony.”

  “Perhaps that’s exactly what he did.”

  “Can you believe that, having gone through what we just have?”

  “The old bastard was lucky, I suppose. But you never know. Perhaps he merely weakened at the end. It might be that his scheme had gained too much momentum for any personal failure to affect it. At any rate, you’re right. He achieved everything he ever wanted. He succeeded in becoming a martyr, and his dream came true.”

  “It might come true,” she said. “Then again, it might not.”

  She lowered her head, and a slant of sunlight fell across her hair, bringing up the reddish highlights. He studied the long white curve of her neck, how it glided up to form her chin, down to the slope of her breast. There was, he thought, no end to that line. It was all through her, a single gliding, graceful premise. It would be easy to forget everything else except that line. And that, he realized, was as close as he would come this day to a decision. He pushed up to his feet, dusted off his trousers.