The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “Let’s take a walk, shall we?”

  She glanced up at him, weary looking around the eyes. “Where?”

  “Up the Mahakam River, eventually.” He extended a hand. “To the village down in the valley for starters. I can’t see any reason to go back, can you?”

  She lowered her head again. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Then what’s the point in waiting here any longer? As I recall, the evening coach passes through the village shortly before midnight. We can stop at an inn and wash up. We’ll sleep on the coach. Have you fed recently?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “I’d prefer not to risk anything in the village. Now come along.”

  He helped her up, and after Alexandra had retrieved her shawl and draped it so as to hide the damage done to her blouse, they started off down the slope, following the stream that cut across the lower portion of the hill. When they reached a notch between hills, they left the stream and headed off along a dusty coach road that wound through a birch forest. Twilight was settling, and the white trunks gleamed pale as ghosts in the accumulating dark. Now and then they passed a cottage with whitewashed walls and a neatly thatched roof and a lantern glowing orange in the window. Beheim felt disconnected from the scene. Like a monster prowling the streets of a sleeping city. Now that he knew who he was, it was strange to walk among men. It seemed he had been a long time absent from them. Yet he also felt that his disconnection was unimportant, irrelevant, and that other, more radical recognitions would come to overwhelm it.

  “Do you have any money?” Alexandra asked as they approached the outskirts of the village; a church steeple was standing up above the trees, its bell tower almost touching the evening star, like a benediction upon the peace and sweetness of the place.

  “Enough for the moment,” he said. “Money won’t be a problem. We can always get money.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just wondered if we’d have to get some now.”

  She stopped walking and stood gazing off into the village. Snatches of music came on the wind, and then, behind them, they heard the creaks and clopping of a horse-drawn cart.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Mystery,” she said.

  He looked toward the cozy houses nestled in among the trees, the pretty lights and proven shadows, the quick, uncertain lives, and he had a flaring up of a wild, plunderous feeling. Yet the feeling did not stay, did not nourish, and when it had fled, the sight of the town seemed for a moment as fabulous and impossible to interpret as had that last fleeting glimpse of Agenor’s being, dissolving against an empty sky.

  The cart was lurching nearer, rattling along. Beheim saw the crooked black silhouette of the driver raised above the plodding bulk of a dark horse.

  “I don’t know what any of it’s going to be like anymore,” Alexandra said. “I can’t imagine why it should be different, but I…” As she turned to Beheim a glint of reflected light streaked her left eye like a meteor crossing a tiny sky. “I know it will be.”

  The driver of the cart grunted a command to his horse and pulled up beside them. He was an old man, older than Agenor and far more frail, with a rag tied around his head, muffling his ears, and fingerless gloves, and a frayed woolen coat. “Can I offer you a ride into town?” he asked. “It’s a bumpy patch ahead. Be hard walking for the lady.”

  Beheim, hearing the flabby rhythm of the driver’s heart, felt a twinge of disgust, a desire to leap aboard the cart and end his sour little life. But he only said, “Thank you, no.” Then, with a forced smile, not wanting to become a story told at an inn about the unfriendly stranger and his tall, silent woman, he added, “We’re going a lot farther than that, so we might as well get used to walking.”

  The driver sucked on a tooth, spat. “So are we all,” he said with bad grace. “Doesn’t mean you can’t be a gentleman and give the lady here a bit of a rest.” He gave the reins a twitch, starting the horse off again into its plodding gait.

  Alexandra laughed. “Serves you right for trying to be one of the country folk.”

  “I hope you’re better at it than I,” he said. “Because in a few minutes we’re going to be sitting down to supper with them.”

  “Oh, I’ll be in my element.” She danced off a ways along the road. “I just shows ’em a few fancy steps, I whispers in their ears, and next you know, they’re begging to be my footstool.”

  He laughed, too, following her. “I’ll wager they’re aiming a bit higher than your feet for their reward.”

  She pretended to aim a slap at him. “You’ve a dirty mouth for such a fine gentleman!”

  He caught her arm, pulled her close, and for a few seconds they went waltzing along the road, teasing one another, their voices happy; but once they disengaged, their mood dimmed.

  “It’s different already,” she said as they stood with their arms about one another. “It’s as if I’ve…” She seemed to be searching for the right words. “As if I’ve shed a skin. That’s it, that’s what it’s like. It’s all so fresh. The smells, the colors. Everything. It’s as if I’ve shed an old skin, and the new skin is more sensitive, but not as strong. Don’t you feel it? You must.”

  He told her yes, he felt much the same. But that was a lie to comfort her. All he truly felt was the absence of an oppressive weight, the freedom of being his own master again after two years of hallucinatory servitude. Changed as he was, new as he was, the world he saw before him was the known world, the familiar, a world he neither feared nor despised, but one toward which he now directed an almost childlike enthusiasm and curiosity.

  The wind picked up, spinning the birch leaves, conjuring a liquid rustling that swelled into a river of breath, singing in a long-voweled rush, pouring along the curved throat of the old coach road; through the fluttering leaves, the lantern-lit windows of the village were fragmented into a fiery orange glitter, like the facets of a jeweled sun showing among the tatters of night; the white trunks of saplings deeper in the forest swayed like drugged dancers; and from somewhere close by, all but overwhelmed by the coursing of the wind, sounded the tinkling of a bell, a crystalline voice that spoke to Beheim in syllables of ice, telling him of something mystical and lost that he could know and be empowered by if he would only go forward now. Then the whole, wild tearing substance of that moment came into him with the abruptness of a revelation, and he wanted to throw back his head and howl, adding the windy noise of his soul to the great movement of time and fate that was carrying him off into the heat and decay of the solitudes.

  Alexandra murmured something. He heard only the words, “I wish…” but knew from the tightness of her waist, the hammering of her pulse, that she was still afraid.

  He cupped her face in his hands, kissed her brow, stroked the cool, massy flow of her hair. The tension left her, and she relaxed against him. Over her shoulder he watched a squirrel hop out onto the road, its gray coat almost blending with the grayed surface of the dust. It stood on its hind legs, sniffing the air, then scampered closer, stood erect again. It showed no sign of fear, apparently undisturbed by their unnatural scent, and Beheim wondered if Alexandra’s image had been apt, if indeed they had shed some dry scaly garment, some burdensome physicality that had prevented them from themselves blending in with the drab colors of the ordinary.

  “Love,” he said, using the word lightly, as a name rather than a pledge.

  She pulled back from him, startled.

  “Time to go,” he said. “They might wonder in the village why we’re not afraid of walking about in the dark.”

  He kissed her on the mouth, let the kiss develop slowly, flirting with her tongue, and when they broke apart, she caught his head and held it still, held his eyes, not searching, not trying to impress her will, but—it seemed—opening to him, allowing him to penetrate her with his own will, to give her his confidence. Something began to show in her face that he had never seen before, a kind of clean expectancy that had nothing to do with want or need.
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  “Well,” she said at last, taking his hand. “I’m ready.”

  Night was closing down over the valley, wild stars showing bright as pain over Castle Banat, and as they walked with their heads bowed their hearts were racing, their minds heavy with thoughts of the future, of how they would pass the evening in the village of their weak and multitudinous enemy, and then travel out along the road of the willful blood, toward the end of an old romantic darkness and the secret splendor of the dead, toward the light of the East and the hill of mahogany, toward the crimes and sacred central moments of a new Mystery and the beginning of a strange green time.

  Lucius Shepard has earned his living as a janitor and a musician as well as by writing fiction. He was the John W. Campbell Award winner in 1985 and, in 1987, he won the Nebula for this novella R & R. His stories and novels have also been finalists for the Philip K. Dick award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Pushcart Prize.