Beautiful Blood

by Lucius Shepard

  “We’d be leaving Teocinte unprotected,” said Breque. “If they were to launch a counter-offensive, it would be unopposed.”

  “The circumstance in which we find ourselves necessitates a certain amount of risk,” said Makdessi. “There is no certain way to accomplish our aims, and to be conservative at this juncture would be to guarantee failure.”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Rosacher.

  “Precisely.”

  After a silence Breque said, “I think it would be best, Colonel, if you gave us an hour or two to discuss the situation. You may rest assured that we will give due consideration to all your recommendations.”

  When the door closed behind Colonel Makdessi, he said, “What do you think?”

  “I’d watch that one if I were you,” said Rosacher. “His ambition is likely aimed higher than the rank of general.”

  “My chief concern at the moment bears upon the question of whether he’s capable of being a general. I’ll worry about his ambition later.”

  “His plan seems reasonable given the circumstances.”

  “Did you think so?” Breque rubbed his cheek with his thumb. “I’m not sure.”

  The councilman’s calm demeanor, the casual way he seemingly glossed over his duplicity, pricked Rosacher’s anger again. “Is there anything else you have omitted telling me? Anything I should know before we decide this matter?”

  “Damn it, Richard!” Breque spanked the table. “I apologize. It was an oversight for which I…”

  “Oh, I very much doubt it was an oversight,” said Rosacher. “You concealed from me the existence of a force whose primary function was to attack Mospiel. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had engineered the entire situation, risked thousands of lives, just to fulfill your dreams of glory.”

  “You’re one to talk about engineering situations!” Breque said, and would have said more, but Rosacher outvoiced him.

  “I can see it now! Statues everywhere! Portraits, busts of Breque the Conqueror! Breque the Deliverer! Breque the All-Powerful!”

  “Before this degenerates…”

  “Who knows? Maybe even Saint Breque. Little schoolchildren will sing of your generosity and caring.”

  Breque, red-faced, mastered himself and said in a strained voice, “Before this degenerates into a shouting match, let me remind you that we have a decision to make. We need to set aside personal differences and act in accordance with our best judgment.”

  Rosacher bit back his response and sat glowering at Breque.

  “I would like to hear more about this monster of yours,” said Breque stiffly. “Do you really believe it’s the same creature that lived for centuries beneath the wing?”

  “What I believe has no bearing on its capacity for killing,” said Rosacher. “But I have no reason to doubt the story. Nor would you, if you had seen it.”

  “It’s made of a gelatinous substance, you say?”

  “I said it appeared gelatinous, but I could just as easily say it appeared to be made of obsidian. What passes for its flesh is mutable in form and density. Once it seemed about to assume a fully defined shape, but…” Rosacher absently pushed papers around. “It is one of Griaule’s creatures and thus we cannot hope to comprehend it. All you need to know is that it literally ripped my horse in half and that its speed is incredible. In the confined spaces offered by the jungle, Carlos and his men won’t be able to stand against it.”

  “Interesting,” said Breque. “That Griaule would choose such a flawed man to be his agent. That is, if Cerruti’s story is true.”

  “All men are flawed.”

  “Yes, but not as terribly as this one.”

  “It strikes me that Griaule is adept at selecting the right man for the job. A deviant, a murderer…he becomes Griaule’s guard dog. I assume that was Frederick’s position before he became Cerruti’s pet. And I’m certain Griaule saw some quality in you that, when nourished, would make you an efficient bureaucrat.”

  “That’s a horrid compliment!” Breque punctuated the sentence with a barking laugh. “Of course it goes without saying that he must have seen something similar in you.”

  Rosacher shrugged.

  “How much did you offer Cerruti?” Breque asked.

  “Five thousand and free lodging at the House whenever he desires it.”

  “So little?”

  “And a hundred horses for Frederick.”

  “I would have thought he’d ask for more.”

  “I told him that if Mospiel succeeded in their aggression, they would expand into the plain and make life difficult for him and Frederick. That engaged his patriotism.” Rosacher placed his hands flat on the table, as though preparing to stand. “If there’s nothing else, I have much to do before I depart.”

  “We haven’t even begun our discussion of Makdessi’s plan,” said Breque.

  “What is there to discuss? Every element of the plan works together in a way that promises the hope of success. A slim hope, perhaps, yet we can expect no more.”

  “But he’s leaving the city undefended!”

  Rosacher got to his feet. “The sole difference between Makdessi’s plan and a plan that leaves a force to defend Teocinte is that, in the second instance, there will be more bodies piled up below Haver’s Roost and our own attack will be commensurately less efficient. You know that as well as I.”

  “So you’re comfortable with the rest of his design?”

  “We might be able to put together a better plan, but how long would that take? How many opinions would we have to seek, how many consultations would we need to validate our conclusion? We cannot afford to mistrust our instincts. You’ve told me that Makdessi is the best available man to lead our troops. Very well. Let him lead.”

  “Of course you’re right,” Breque said after a pause, and sighed. “You’ll be leaving in the morning?”

  “Tonight, if possible. I’ve sent riders on ahead to spread rumors of a dangerous beast terrorizing a specific area of the jungle not far from the palace. I hope that by the time we reach that area, Carlos’ interest will have been engaged, so that when Frederick’s attacks begin, he’ll be primed to come after him.”

  Breque nodded. “Good.”

  The councilman’s tone of voice was dispirited, but Rosacher was in no mood to buck him up. “One more thing,” he said. “We have a sufficient stock of mab to survive a two week lapse in production. I should be able to return by then. But if I do not…”

  “We’ll be fine as far as production goes no matter when you return.”

  “How can that be…unless you have succeeded in spying upon me and secured a knowledge of my process?”

  “There is no process,” said Breque. “I’ve been aware of that for years.”

  Rosacher sat back down.

  “Ludie told me,” Breque continued. “She yielded all your secrets before she died. She was not your friend…certainly not at the end.”

  Breque appeared to take no pleasure in this revelation—his glum countenance did not reflect the slightest joy or satisfaction.

  “If that is so,” Rosacher said, “why tell me? Why am I alive?”

  “Why am I telling you?” Breque shook his head, as if bewildered by the question. “There was a time when I longed to tell you, when I wanted you to know who really was the master of our mutual circumstance. I wanted to tell you that day when I informed you of Ludie’s death, but chose not to because I felt you would be easier to manage if you believed you were in control. But how I felt at that time is irrelevant. As I’ve told you, I’ve come to recognize your value as a resource and a friend.”

  “How could you ever perceive us to be friends? You’ve lied to me for decades.”

  “I understand that is how you see things, but though I had little respect for you in the past, and less love, my lie became a benign form of duplicity, a means of preserving the friendship. Your lies, on the other hand, have been funded, without exception, by your self-interest.”


  “Is this confession intended to persuade me to lower my guard where you’re concerned? If so, I must tell you it has achieved the opposite effect.”

  Breque gestured to the heavens—he might have been importuning a deity. “I’ve always thought of myself as a ruthless politician, a skilled manipulator. Now that we are both facing the possibility of death, I felt that honesty might prove a comfort to us both. As I’ve grown older, I’ve softened my stance, but even in my salad days, I could never match you as regards ruthlessness and manipulation. You are relentless in the practice of those arts. Perhaps the fact that you don’t appear to have aged…perhaps it is not merely appearance. That might explain why you have failed to grow more understanding of other men’s frailties.” He stood. “At any rate, there it is. You have regained the advantage over me. I have no cards left to play.”

  “I realize that is what you wish me to think,” Rosacher said. “But I would not be the man you judge me to be if I accepted your statement as fact.”

  Breque threw up his hands. “Think what you want! I’m done with this discussion.”

  “We’ll talk further upon my return,” said Rosacher—despite himself, he felt badly for Breque.

  “I’m certain you will return,” Breque said. “Griaule is clearly your protector. But is he mine? That remains to be seen.”

  +

  Though they began their journey at night, Cerruti and Rosacher thereafter traveled by day, leaving Frederick to follow their scent. The days passed without significant event. At night, Rosacher could hear Frederick moving out in the brush, beyond the light of their campfire, and on those nights when he did not hear the beast, to ease his mind Cerruti would summon him and Frederick would materialize as a puddle of shadow or a heap of blackness, staying in sight just long enough to fray Rosacher’s nerves.

  The hours that proved the most onerous for Rosacher were those between dusk, when they pitched camp, and when they went to sleep. Simply put, Cerruti was a bore. He regaled Rosacher with stories about minor wounds he had suffered, tooth problems, illnesses he had endured, encounters with poisonous plants and pests such as fleas and lice, as well as afflictions of unknown origin. As he told it, his life had been spent in a condition of mild constant pain, and this was the only subject about which he was at all voluble. In opposition to his usual taciturn manner, he related his experiences with a kind of crude eloquence, describing his various injuries and symptoms in detail. He seemed to have relished each abrasion and cut, each festering sore and fever and runny nose. Everything they saw reminded him of some incidence of sickness or impairment, and whenever Rosacher tried to turn their campfire chats to a subject more to his pleasure, Cerruti would answer in a terse fashion and then go on with his litany of medical woes. Not even Frederick, a topic about which Rosacher thought that Cerruti would wish to display his expertise, warranted a detailed response. When asked to expound on Frederick’s method of communication, the shape he preferred to assume, or any other facet of its behavior, Cerruti would provide an answer both brief and uninformative, leading Rosacher to suspect that he knew considerably less than he pretended and was glossing over his ignorance. He wondered, too, if Cerruti had as much control over Frederick as he claimed and whether or not, when the time came to unleash his pet, Cerruti would be able to reel it in.

  They crossed over the Temalaguan border on the sixth day, passing into a region of dense jungle that impeded their progress and brought to Cerruti’s narratives of illness a new level of intensity. They camped that evening near a bend in the Rio Coco beneath a canopy of aguacate trees, on a patch of packed earth that had been cleared of vegetation by the passage of tapirs and various other animals—it had rained earlier in the day and their tracks pockmarked the moist clay. Ordinarily Rosacher would have chosen a different place in which to camp. It was obviously part of a trail leading to a watering hole and as such was sure to attract predators; but with Frederick lurking nearby and his rifle to hand, he felt secure. As dusk blended into full dark and the vine-hung canopy vanished from sight, he would have expected to hear the droning of insects and the liquid repetitions of frogs, but the only sounds he heard before falling asleep that night were those of Frederick’s predation—a high, thin squeal cut short—and the crackling of their fire and the whining constancy of Cerruti’s voice celebrating each new mosquito bite with a narrative of past travails.

  “I was up on the coast a’ways once, not far from Buttermilk Key, traveling in a caravan,” he said, slathering his arms with a pale yellow ointment that, he claimed, would drive off any six-legged creature. “That was the worst place I ever saw for bugs. When the wind off the water died, you could stick your arm out the window of the wagon and it’d turn black with mosquitoes in a second or two.”

  Rosacher was busy rubbing his exposed skin with water in which he had dissolved a number of small, black cigars. His method of repelling mosquitoes. “I wouldn’t have stuck my arm out, then,” he said.

  “Had to, it was so damn hot. Not like here. Here, the heat’s uncomfortable, but up on the coast the heat’s pestilential.” He repeated the word, as if enunciating it gave him satisfaction. “Anyhow, my bites got infected and my arm swole up the size of a hawser. They were draining pus from it for a week.”

  Rosacher lit one of the cigars and puffed out a cloud of smoke and said without the least emotional inflection, “That’s awful.”

  “Too right it was! They must have took a gallon out of me.”

  “Speaking of bodily fluids and the like,” said Rosacher. “Have you ever noticed whether Frederick defecates after eating?”

  Cerruti, likely irritated by Rosacher’s lack of interest in his arm, said, “Hell, no.”

  “We’ve been traveling with Frederick for a week and I haven’t seen any sign of his spoor. Don’t you find that odd, considering the fact that he’s consumed half-a-dozen large animals…and that’s only the ones we’ve run across?”

  “Frederick’s a fastidious type,” Cerruti said. “He does his business in private.”

  Recalling the condition of the animal cadavers, Rosacher did not think the word “fastidious” would apply to any of Frederick’s behaviors; but he let it pass. “I’d be interested in examining one of his stools. It might prove instructive in determining the workings of his digestive system.”

  Cerruti rubbed ointment into his neck. “Got better things to do than look for Frederick’s shit.”

  “Could you ask him or me? I’m very interested in his physiological characteristics.”

  “You want to rile up Frederick, that’s a good way to do it—asking about his private business. He don’t like talking about it.”

  “What does he like talking about? I’m assuming that you and Frederick have had occasion to chat from time to time.”

  “He don’t usually have much to say,” said Cerruti. He stopped applying ointment and his body language displayed, Rosacher thought, a degree of wariness. “He tells me what’s been hunting, for one thing. His conversation don’t run too deep, if you catch my meaning.”

  “You’re saying that you don’t engage in philosophical speculations, that sort of thing?”

  Cerruti peered across the fire at Rosacher, as if trying to read his face.

  “Do you ever speak about old wounds and illnesses, as you do with me?” asked Rosacher.

  “Oh, aye!” Cerruti brightened. “We swap stories all the time.”

  “I wouldn’t think Frederick would be vulnerable to much.”

  Cerruti sat up straighter, eager to talk now that the subject was more to his liking. “Most of the time he’s not, but there’s times when he’s prone to injury as you or me.”

  A night bird passed overhead, giving an ululating cry; the wind shifted, bringing a sweetish odor off the river to mix in with the dark green scents of the foliage.

  “Really?” said Rosacher, not wishing to appear overly inquisitive, but thinking this might be an opportunity to learn something salient about Frederick.

&
nbsp; “He’s often injured when he’s feeding. He gets so damn hungry, sometimes he fails to finish an animal off before he starts in and whatever it is he takes a bite of is liable to mark him with a claw or a tooth.”

  “Do they leave a scar?”

  “Naw, you seen him. Whatever damage is done gets healed up when he pulls back from eating.”

  A host of questions occurred to Rosacher, but he left them unspoken for fear of making Cerruti uneasy.

  “Pity we can’t do the same,” he said.

  Cerruti looked perplexed, but then he grinned. “If we had a body for feeding and another for healing like Frederick, the law couldn’t never touch us.”

  “I don’t suppose it could.”

  Cerruti relaunched his tale of mosquitoes and pus, and Rosacher did not attempt to dissuade him. He lay back, responding to Cerruti’s recitation of his maladies with grunts and other affirmations, trying to piece together the few things he knew about Frederick into a coherent picture, and soon drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, they followed the river course through a dense whitish mist that made every feathery frond, every loop of vine, into an article of menace. A pack of howler monkeys trailed them for a while, their cries seeming to issue from the throats of enormous beasts whose heads were thirty feet above the jungle floor. Sunlight thinned the mist and the poisonous greens and yellow-greens of the foliage emerged. Swarms of flies came to plague them, rising from mattes of vines beneath the hooves of their horses. Serpents could be seen swimming in the murky green water. The heat merged the dank scent of the river and that of a trillion tiny deaths with the great vegetable odor of the jungle, combining them into a cloying reek that so clotted Rosacher’s nostrils, he did not think he ever again would be able to smell the slight fragrance of a flower or a woman’s perfume.