Beautiful Blood

by Lucius Shepard

  The establishment of a ferry between Temalagua and Port Chantay had cut the duration of the trip in half and, availing himself of this improvement in transportation, Rosacher arrived in Teocinte less than two weeks after the dragon’s death. What he saw appalled him. The House of Griaule and, indeed, all of Morningshade, had been obliterated, either crushed beneath the dragon’s body, which lay athwart the ruined city, or burnt to cinders by the fire he had vomited in his final assault on the world of men. Fire had destroyed the bulk of the city beyond Morningshade—the buildings atop Haver’s Roost had survived, though not unscathed. The rear of the cathedral, now utilized as an orphanage, had been left in ruins and the government buildings had sustained minor damage. A vast tent city had sprung up among the charred ruins and there lived a population composed of survivors and émigrés, the latter mainly people who had come to scavenge the treasure hoard of Griaule’s corpse. Cutthroats and pistoleros and scoundrels of every stamp ruled the place and you took your life in your hands by walking through its crooked byways. At every hour of the day and night, gunshots could be heard, bespeaking the minor wars fought between the embattled remnants of Teocinte’s army, who strove to protect the rights of those who had made pre-mortem arrangements regarding the ownership of Griaule’s scales, bones, organs, and so forth, and those who sought to possess these things extra-legally. Thousands of people swarmed over the carcass, hacking and slicing and prying. They had laid bare one of the dragon’s ribs, the curve of bloodstained bone arching above the host of two-legged flies that milled beneath like the rib of an enormous unfinished ark, and gunfire also issued from dark crimson recesses of the body. Winches had been maneuvered into place and were engaged in removing the teeth and fangs. Men in butcher’s aprons carted away huge slabs of meat. So many people were engaged in picking over the corpse, sawing at bones and scales, sampling fluids, even preying on the dragon’s parasites, the gigantic worms that infested the dragon’s bowels, Rosacher entertained the notion that he was observing the annihilation of a normal-sized lizard by a Lilliputian race of hominids who performed the functions of ants and beetles, and dwelled in a settlement of dirty gray canvas that hid the bulk of their repulsive habits from view. It was both an epic and dismaying sight, one that called to mind the majesty of nature and at the same time posed an inescapable comment on the vile nature of mankind. Rosacher was grateful that Griaule’s flesh seemed to be rotting at a rate commensurate with the pace of his metabolic processes when alive—there was as yet only a hint of the stench that would saturate the atmosphere before too long.

  On the morning following his arrival, Rosacher visited Breque in his home, a white-washed colonial-style mansion with a red tile roof, surrounded by palms and enclosed within high stone walls patrolled by armed guards. Due to its location behind Haver’s Roost, the house and grounds had been shielded from destruction and appeared to exist in a tranquil country at a significant remove from the land on the dragon’s side of the hill. A servant led Rosacher up a curving stair and along a corridor with mahogany panels carved into scenes of Teocinte’s recent history—the fall of Mospiel, Breque’s signature triumph, predominating—and at last into a gloomy, spacious bedroom where he found Breque’s family gathered about a bed the size of a banquet table, canopied in green satin, where lay an unrecognizable shrunken personage whom he identified by process of deduction as Breque. A pale dust-hung shaft of light penetrated from a curtained window, painting a thin stripe up the center of the bed, and medicinal smells, particularly that of camphor, hung in the air. Word of the councilman’s illness had been conveyed to Rosacher, but he had not expected this: Wisps of white hair floated above Breque’s mottled scalp; his face was caved-in, blotched with liver spots, and his bony hands twitched atop the bedclothes like some kind of sea life that had been exposed by low tide and was being killed by the sun. Upon Breque’s instruction, his wife, once a beauty, now reduced to a dry stick of a woman, ushered their two grown sons from the room and in a whispery voice Breque summoned Rosacher to come near. The reek of camphor was stronger close to the bed. Two dark, massive wardrobes hulked along the walls, looking in the shadows like silent, cowled witnesses.

  “You haven’t changed a bit, my friend.” Breque’s voice was stronger, as if enlivened by Rosacher’s propinquity; but he drew a deep breath between sentences. “I marvel at your good health.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so ill,” said Rosacher.

  “All life is an illness, whether of the flesh or of the spirit. I’ve grown accustomed to such frailties. This…” Breque’s right hand made a palsied movement, a mere echo of what would have been a sweeping gesture in his prime. “Death is simply a shabby theatricality at life’s end, one to which we all have been given tickets…with the possible exception of you.”

  It had been Rosacher’s intention to seek redress for Breque’s betrayal, but seeing him so debilitated, his resolve was blunted. “Oh, I’m not the man I was,” he said. “I may not look my age, but I feel every year, believe me.”

  A chair stood against the wall and Rosacher pulled it around so that he could sit facing Breque. He was at a loss for something to say and he related the details of his meeting with Carlos and, given that Carlos’ assertions were true, those concerning his lack of ambitions in Teocinte, he asked what Breque had hoped to gain by sending him on such an irrelevant mission.

  “I wanted you out of the way when I attacked Mospiel. Your presence here might have had a deleterious effect in some way. If you succeeded in killing the king, I assumed the power of the Onyx Throne would be undermined, and that is never a bad thing. One of my many errors. This latest Carlos seems more likely to expand the borders of Temalagua than did his father.”

  The councilman’s eyes seemed to have grown brighter as he spoke and he stared at Rosacher with a discomforting steadiness and avidity. Rosacher began to describe how he had spent the past eight years, but Breque interrupted him, saying, “I’ve kept my eye on you. As a matter of fact, I’ve purchased a number of birds from your company during that time…for my children’s pleasure. And of course I’ve heard all about your efforts regarding Frederick. He’s been chivvied down onto the Fever Coast, has he not?”

  “According to reports, he has taken to hunting in the jungles across from Corn Island. A mangrove shore will prevent anyone from settling there and the jungle abounds with tapir and wild boar. I think we have heard the last of him.”

  “I should have liked to see him once.”

  “To see him as I did, that time on the Rio Coco…It is not a pleasant memory.”

  “Still…” said Breque, and fell silent.

  Rosacher considered how to make a graceful exit—it seemed that he and Breque had little to tell each other, despite their long history together and, though Rosacher understood that his company pleased the councilman, he felt that if he prolonged his visit, things would become awkward. The minutes slipped away and Breque’s ragged breathing became regular. Thinking him asleep, Rosacher made to stand, but Breque’s arm shot out, his hand clutching Rosacher’s wrist.

  “Stay!” he said. “Just a little longer.”

  The sudden effort appeared to have sapped Breque’s energies—his chest heaved, his breath wheezed, his eyes fixed on a spot in the satin canopy, and yet his grip on Rosacher’s wrist grew no weaker. At length he turned his head, locking stares with Rosacher and, his voice straining with intensity, said, “We were great men!”

  Rosacher did not know how he should respond, for Breque’s words seemed at once a proclamation and a seeking of validation.

  “You will deny it, I realize,” Breque went on. “But we were great men. You more so than I. I attempted great things and failed, but you achieved them.”

  “What did I achieve?” Rosacher asked. “Wealth? Many men achieve wealth and few of them are great.”

  “You killed Griaule! And in this, I was your accomplice. Together we destroyed a monster like none other the world has known.”

  “Cat
tanay killed the dragon.”

  “Cattanay was merely an instrument. It was your genius that enabled him, and it was mine to support you, to allow you to function. Yet I will be remembered only for my folly, and you may not be remembered at all. But we were…” His lips trembled. “We were…great men!”

  His grip relaxed and then he let go of Rosacher’s wrist.

  “You won’t accept what I’ve told you,” said Breque in a faltering voice. “I know this. You’ve had to maintain a distance from people, an inhuman distance, in order to complete your work. The sole personal desire you have satisfied is your desire to be unhappy. The one woman you loved was one with a bleaker outlook on life than you. But hearing this from me may stop you from making too harsh a self-judgment. That is my hope for you.”

  Rosacher could not help being moved by these sentiments. His eyes watered and he wanted to offer a similar consolation to Breque, but he could not shape the words; they soured in his mouth and dissolved before he could speak them. The single comfort he could offer was to continue to sit with Breque, and this he did until the councilman asked for his family. Once they had entered the bedroom, Rosacher shut the door and sat down on a bench in the corridor to await the inevitable. His mind traveled back to the day he met Breque, waiting on a bench outside the council chamber, and he wondered briefly at this apparent circularity. He studied the carved mahogany panel across from him, warships approaching a coastal city, and realized that it was not a representation of the past, but depicted a future that would never occur—it had been commissioned in advance of Breque’s planned invasion of Temalagua. The recognition increased his sadness and he thought of Breque’s final message to him, not debating its truth or its purpose, but categorizing it, cataloguing it under the kindness of monsters, the charitable impulses of fiends, men responsible for thousands of deaths who at the end sought to bestow their blessing on the world.

  He had been sitting in the corridor for fifteen or twenty minutes when he felt a wave ripple through his body and experienced a powerful shudder as of some vital passage. He went quietly to the bedroom door and cracked it, thinking that what he had felt was Breque’s soul taking flight; but Breque’s eldest son was bent over the councilman, his ear close to Breque’s mouth, and it was clear that he was whispering some instruction or wish. Rosacher shut the door and sat back down. He could still feel the aftershocks of that passage, faint tremors that came to him as might the inaudible reverberations of a gong, and he imagined that these heralded the passage of a soul of much greater profundity than Breque’s, and that some crucial cut, some last insult to the flesh, had loosed the dragon’s soul from his decaying body, freed him to fly out from his prison, casting a final shadow over the city upon which he had waited so long to avenge himself…or else it was a misperceived symptom of Rosacher’s own decay, a minor unsteadiness of the heart, a palpitation. From behind the bedroom door there arose a muted wail. Rosacher stood and adjusted the hang of his jacket. He was confident that he would make the right noises, say the right things, for though he found people unfathomable on an emotional level, in a formal situation he could always be counted upon to display appropriate behavior.

  Epilogue

  On an island far from anywhere Rosacher has built his home close to the shore. From the verandah he has an unimpeded view of the ocean, a cashew tree, and a strip of tawny sand criss-crossed by beachvine. If he leans forward and to the left, he can see the house of his immediate neighbor through a stand of palmettos—a little box set on stilts against the tides, painted light blue, a darker blue on the window frames. Beneath the house is a pen wherein pigs are kept. Once in a great while his neighbor, a black man named Peter, will shoot one of the pigs and butcher it. The remaining pigs appear to take no notice of the event. On Rosacher’s right, the beach is lined with wind-bent palms and dotted with coconut litter—it stretches away toward a point of land, Punta Manabique, a place so pestilent that no one can dwell there. At night people walk along the shore, shining lanterns to light their way. Occasionally blood is shed over a woman or a property dispute, but otherwise it is a tranquil place, and it is this untroubled quality, this calm imperviousness to minor passions and upheavals that has encouraged Rosacher to put down roots here.

  His mind often turns to Griaule—and how could it not?—and there are times when he suspects he may have witnessed the evolution of a god. Gods, he thinks, are produced by extreme circumstances and what could be more extreme than millennia of imprisonment, century upon century of striving to escape, learning to manipulate people and events to his benefit, growing ever more powerful, creating converts and eventually, having won his freedom, becoming discorporate, abandoning those people, and then, the final stage of evolution, going off somewhere to play a game of fiddlesticks, incomprehensible to all but himself. It’s the kind of idea that once would have excited him, yet now induces boredom. Ideas in general no longer interest him, though he is rankled by the fact that his life seems to have no sum, no coherent shape, to be nothing more than a sequence of imperfectly realized scenes in an ill-conceived play.

  For the longest time he feared that he would not die, that Griaule bestowed upon him an unwanted immortality; but now that he notices a stiffness in his limbs, an uncertainty in his step, a slight diminution of vision, all the minor failures of the flesh, he has come to feel at ease with himself as never before. All he needs of the world washes to his door. His neighbors’ children scamper along the beach in front of Rosacher’s house and he entertains them by playing the guitar, an instrument he took up when he first settled here, and by carving crude wooden toys. He is especially good at carving whistles. Women sail through his life, stopping for days, for a week, but he does not seek to hold onto them, he wants them to leave and, sensing this in him, they do. He has begun to dream of one woman in particular. She is quietly attractive, a slender brunette with a sly wit and a gentle manner. He pictures her in a white summer frock with an unobtrusive floral print. She teases him in his dreams, makes fun of his posturing, his foibles, but does so in a loving fashion. He is not the center of her world—she has her own obsessions and indulges them regularly, cultivating them with an artist’s flair and a gardener’s consistency. In bed she is fiercely concentrated, she assumes different shapes that conform to his, she takes as much as she gives, she promises him eternity without speaking a word. He thinks he will never meet her—she is someone he might have met had he not become involved with Griaule, if life had proceeded at a sedate rhythm, a Prussian waltz instead of a dervish whirl. And yet, knowing that the dream will have to suffice, he continues to look for her in every woman that happens along.

  Of an evening, the people of the beach community come to sit on his verandah, singly for the most part, though on occasion a family will stop by, and they will talk of this and that, the weather, the fishing, their hopes for their children, a piece of gossip overhead in town. From time to time they will express their dissatisfaction with the direction of their lives, they complain about their lot and frequently express some need. They could use a new net, a communion dress for their youngest, a spirit level, a larger skiff, a more dependable clock, a cow to replace one that has died. Often, as if by a miracle, they will one morning find a communion dress neatly folded on their doorstep, a skiff bobbing at anchor just offshore, a net draped across the pilings of a rickety pier. Rosacher realizes that these small gifts are but another example of the kindness of monsters. He has no children and he is grateful that he did not have to watch a son grow to manhood, becoming in opposition to his father a person of sedate habits and accomplishments, viewing himself as a decent man, a moral entity, only to awake in the end to his own monstrous nature, his fundamental indifference to others’ pain. The people of the beach have become his surrogate children, children he can keep at a distance and bless whenever the mood strikes. They appear to understand and respect the anonymity of his charity, infringing upon it only during moments of drunkenness during which they demand money or liquor or
some other inessential that will do nothing apart from establishing a dependency—to these he does not respond.

  Lately he has begun writing in a journal, recording fragmentary conversations, his observations of people and the natural world, bits of description and ironic commentary. A recent entry goes as follows:

  +

  “Two weeks ago, while walking on the beach, I came upon a wooden whistle, one of mine, half-buried in the sand, carelessly tossed aside by a forgetful child. A tiny crab, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, had made its home inside it. Finding this conjunction of the crab and the whistle irresistible, appealing for its incongruity, I carried it home and set it on my verandah railing. The crab must have been terrified. It remained within the whistle for most of the evening, but I managed to entice it forth with a few crumbs of fish from my dinner plate. Having eaten, it scuttled merrily to and fro along the railing, seeming to have gained new confidence in its home, safe now from known predations and the erratic movements of the tides.

  “I’ve fed it every night since and it appears to be growing larger. One day soon it will find the whistle too constraining and will emerge for a last time and explore fresh opportunities for food and housing in the wider world, or perhaps it will drift out on the tide, becoming for a brief span a mariner. I imagined it to be an exemplar among crabs, a crustacean genius nurtured by its musical house and taught to seek in all things a grand design, inspired to explore the possibility of land beyond Punta Manabique, to visit places that I, in my frail shell, cannot, sunset countries with beaches of rose and peach, surmounted by indigo cliffs and stars flashing signals from the depths of the universe that promise spectacular realms of light, infinite answers, a moral with which to caption our petty tale…but then my reverie was interrupted by Walker James joining me on the stoop, and the thought of answers and morals evaporated as he chatted about his day, discussing his daughter’s earache, the girth of his prize sow, and the cupidity of a local tavern owner, a man who ‘wouldn’t stand you a drink unless the sun duppy come down and sour his whiskey.’ On an island of storytellers, he was acknowledged one of the best, and that night he told how the tavern owner became infatuated with a Spanish lady from the mainland and the increasingly ludicrous acts he performed in his efforts to win her affections. Thereafter we sat for a while, enjoying the heavy crush of the surf and the palm fronds lashing in a north wind that threatened a storm by morning, the sky beyond Manabique ablaze with a shrapnel of golden fire. Then Walker heard his name called by a woman’s voice from off along the shore. He stood and stretched, working out a crick in his spine, his head thrown back.