The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “But, lord,” said Beheim, “if this is so, why do you use words such as ‘important’ and ‘significant’ when referring to it?”

  “In the first place,” said the Patriarch coldly, “it is not at all certain that I was in our comments referring to the question of a migration. That has yet to be made clear. However, if I was referring to it, perhaps it had some significance to me at the moment. Now, I can assure you, it is of no consequence whatsoever.”

  The irrationality of this statement left Beheim thoroughly bewildered. Yet then he wondered if this mutability of concern on the Patriarch’s part was not evidence of insanity, but an important clue to the nature of a character that had evolved into the alien. And could any marked difference between the two conditions be detected by someone who had experienced neither one?

  “What of your welfare, my lord?” he asked. “And what of the Family? If the world changes as Agenor believes it must, does the question not become significant to us all?”

  “Should the need arise, there are places beyond this world to which I and my court will travel. The rest, as I have said, must make their own decisions. Now, enough!” The Patriarch’s head fell back, his eyelids drooped; it looked as if he were contemplating some abstruse philosophical turn. “I have not enjoyed this conversation, but I intend to reward you nevertheless. I think it just in this instance, however, if your reward were to take the form of instruction.”

  The moon brightened, as if a film had been washed away from it. It hung low above the courtyard, so low that a slim figure standing atop the battlements was cast in silhouette against it. A boy, Beheim thought, dressed in a sleeping robe. He could not quite make him out.

  “Tonight you have learned much of Mystery,” said the Patriarch. “More, I daresay, than you can at this moment encompass. More even than you are aware. It might be decades before you acquire sufficient experience so as to order your knowledge. Because I love you—and I do love you, my child—I will attempt to clarify what you have learned and thus spare you decades of fruitless effort. I’m afraid that the first part of this instruction, however, will be somewhat bitter.”

  He made a graceful gesture, one directed toward the boy on the battlements, and the boy stepped off the edge into space. Beheim sprang from his chair, expecting a fall, a terrible impact, but the boy did not fall. He hovered in midair, his robe taking the wind, belling, then collapsing, pressing tightly against his body, revealing that it was no boy at all, but a young woman with full breasts and flaring hips. She began to drift down toward them, arms at her sides, becoming a shadow as she passed below the edge of the roof and out of the moonlight. As she reached the level of the second story, she came into full view again. Her chestnut hair was done up in an untidy bun; her eyes were quite large, and her mouth was pouty, the lower lip exceptionally full.

  It was Giselle.

  The recognition bred a chill hollow in Beheim’s chest. He turned to the Patriarch, seething with anger; but the Patriarch kept his eyes on Giselle, smiling what seemed to Beheim a doting, approving smile.

  She drifted lower, still lower, until her feet were inches from the stones. There she floated, no more than fifteen feet away, the fingers of her right hand touching a sword fern, the hem of her robe twitching in a ground current. Her eyes were unseeing, fixed on some point far beyond the world.

  Beheim took a step toward her.

  “Hold!” said the Patriarch. “Let her be.”

  Beheim stopped in midstride as if his strings had been cut. The Patriarch nodded happily, like someone who had been proved right against the odds, but had been confident all along.

  “She might have been the first of your line,” he said. “Perhaps the lady of a new branch. The Beheims. That potential was clear in both of you. Now”—he shrugged—“now she will merely be another of my whores. A privileged position, mind you. But not one of such historical import.” He heaved a doleful sigh that was too exaggerated to be genuine. “I trust this will teach you henceforth to act when action is required, to seize your opportunities. It should have been evident that she was long past ready for judgment, and that she had an excellent chance of survival. But then I imagine Alexandra had captured the bulk of your attention.”

  Still stunned by Giselle’s reappearance, Beheim turned again to her. His thoughts of Alexandra were bitter, vengeful.

  “She would have died had I not judged her,” said the Patriarch. “Else I would not have usurped your right.”

  A sudden surge of anger moved Beheim toward her once again.

  “I said hold!” cried the Patriarch, bringing him up short. He had risen from his chair and was standing with his fists clenched at his sides. “She is no longer yours. She is mine! Touch her and you forfeit everything.” Then, in a less peremptory tone, he added, “I’ve left you the blond bitch, the one with the sweet blood. The castle slut for whom you neglected this beautiful creature. Still, that’s more than you deserve.”

  At this mention of Paulina, Beheim experienced not even a flicker of emotion; he could scarcely call her to mind, so consumed was he by guilt and remorse. “What is happening to her?”

  “She is with Mystery, of course. Striving toward life. Fear not. She will soon return to us.”

  “How can that be? She is here.”

  “Ah, now that relates to the second part of your instruction.” The Patriarch reclaimed his chair. “You see, my boy, the Mysteries do not yield easily to analysis. It’s true enough to say that they are death, the place to which death admits us, the place where we may—if we are properly prepared—choose the manner of our rebirth. For those who seek to enter the Family, the choice is simple. Either they will find their way to us, a fortunate few, or else they will fall forever through the dark, enduring torments that far outstrip those depicted in the popular representations of hell.” He snorted in derision. “Hell! What an endearing notion! That evil could have so simple a geography and population. Red imps with pitchfork tails and goats’ horns. Or for that matter, that evil could be so neatly and generally defined as though it were a bottled black juice you’d find at the local apothecary. These Christians and their God!” He made another derisive noise. “I’ve lived in times when gods were six a penny. As a matter of fact, I’ve spoken with several, and believe me, they’re no bargain. Take this Jesus, for example. The famous Messiah. One of my children came just this close”—he held up thumb and forefinger together—“to giving him a little kiss. And would have done if chance hadn’t intervened. Apparently the man—or should I say, the god?—was begging for it.”

  Beheim, still agonizing over Giselle, nonetheless found time to wonder at the Patriarch’s moods, how quickly he flowed from menace to whimsy to senile rambling.

  “But to continue,” the Patriarch said, “Mystery has a more than passing similarity to the Bardos as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. One might assume from this that various Tibetans have experienced Mystery. If so, however, they have mistranslated the experience, for Mystery is far more malleable and complex, and less precise an entity than the Bardos. It would be more accurate to say that Mystery is a cosmic essence embodying a kind of metaphysical geography populated by failures of the spirit. Lost souls, if you will. Yet not even that is entirely accurate. To understand Mystery, to understand it completely, one must dwell in it as I do. But for the purposes of our conversation, it is only important for you to know that immersion in it does not preclude one’s presence elsewhere.” He waved carelessly at Giselle. “Voilà!”

  At his gesture, the wall at Giselle’s back and a section of the flagstones adjoining it melted away, replaced by the black, starred field of Mystery, a sight that was coming to seem commonplace to Beheim. The darkness bulged toward them, as if restrained by a meniscus. It appeared that Giselle was partially embedded in the field, her heels poised on the brink of an abyss.

  “Watch now,” said the Patriarch. “Watch as she flies.”

  A second, translucent Giselle materialized, superimposed
on the first figure and identical in all respects but two: she wore no robe, and she appeared to be straining, struggling against the darkness, twisting about, rolling her head, as if the blackness were an oppressive cloth in which she was wrapped. Gradually this second image took on solidity and richness of color, while the first became as vague and ghostly as the second had been. The perfection and vulnerability of her naked body made Beheim’s heart ache. Then her lips parted the merest fraction of an inch, and a trickle of blackness seeped forth, spilling onto her chin, showing as sharply as might a crack against the pale skin.

  “So did you yourself once fly,” said the Patriarch in a wistful tone. “So did we all. Steeping in the liquor of death, becoming permeated with it.”

  Shame flooded Beheim. Shame that was only incidentally concerned with Giselle’s fate, and related chiefly to the fact that what he regretted most was his failure to judge her, the knowledge that he had forever lost his chance to control her. That would have always been the character of their relationship, he realized. Dominant and submissive. Of all the Family, only with Alexandra had he achieved even the semblance of equality. Yet none of these recognitions dissolved his feelings of remorse. “Bring her back,” he said.

  The Patriarch laughed. “I cannot. And even if I could, I would only succeed in prolonging the inevitable.”

  “Bring her back, damn you!” Beheim shouted.

  “Are you mad?” The Patriarch got to his feet. “Control yourself. This is not seemly. Not in the least.”

  But Beheim was beyond control; he darted forward, thinking—against reason—that he might snatch Giselle from the void; before he could reach her, however, a blow to the back of his head dropped him to all fours and sent lightning shooting back into his eyes.

  “It’s clear,” the Patriarch said, “that you will profit far more from this conversation once all distractions are eliminated.”

  Beheim lifted his head in time to see Giselle arrowing off into the void, swiftly dwindling to a point of white, and as if the blackness had been a sheet held up behind her and in moving away she was drawing the material close about her, the way a hand pushed into a black cloth might gather the cloth about it like a glove, so the void, too, seemed to dwindle, shrinking to a ragged patch no bigger than a window, then an irregular circle the size of a drain, then a speck, and then it was gone, leaving in its stead the flagstones and gray mortised walls of the courtyard.

  The Patriarch grabbed Beheim by the collar, hauled him up as easily as he might have a kitten. “The sole reason you want her is because you’ve been denied a toy, a pet, and you’re sulking.” He lifted Beheim higher, so that his feet dangled, and forced his head up so that their eyes met. “You don’t love her. If you did, you’d be exultant, overjoyed that she is soon to be one of us. Immortal and vital beyond her wildest dreams. Perhaps had things gone differently, you might have formed some sort of affectionate bond once she passed her judgment. But what you think you feel for who she was, that is pretense pure and simple. Do you believe you are a mortal? A creature of weak sentiment and puerile morality? Put that from mind. This is what you are.”

  That wide, pale handsome face began to stretch, its lines to dissolve, and the eyes, dark and expressive of an intelligent calm, came to be cored with hot red fires, and the curly black hair looked like a thicket of brambles that had grown up around but not yet covered a hideous marble head. Even after the dissolution had ceased and the face had returned to its Byronic poise, Beheim could still see the decaying thing beneath. He recalled how he had once thought he would lie to the Patriarch, coerce him into lending his support. What a fool he had been! So bedizened with the newness of his own strength and illumination that he could not for the moment imagine any greater force.

  “Unrelieved black is the color of your nature,” said the Patriarch, letting Beheim fall to the flagstones. “The color of the death in which you were reborn. The color of grave soil and nightmare. You know this is true, you feel its truth, yet you resist it and so fail to understand what it entails. You think of it as evil, but you have no comprehension of the word. You perceive the concept as erroneously as do the Christians. As a terrible, conscienceless process of violence against the order of all things. And so it is. But you fail to see the depths underlying that definition, the logic, the good plain country sense of evil. Therefore listen to me, and I will make you wise.”

  He walked a few paces away; he struck a theatrical pose with his back to Beheim, hands clasped behind him, face tilted to the night sky.

  “Order, my child, is an illusion. At least it is in the common meaning of the word. Both the philosophies of evil and good acknowledge this, though they do so in disparate fashion. Those devoted to the good perceive themselves and everyone like them to be intrinsically imperfect; they seek to impose order on their lives, to delimit the natural urges, to counterfeit order through restraint and mindless devotions. And what has been the result of their efforts? War. Famine. Torture. Rape. The slaughter and incarceration of millions.”

  For an instant the flagstones melted away, blending into a flat gray expanse like the sea of an overcast morning; the ferns grew skeletal and colorless, and the walls of the courtyard lost definition. Then it all returned to normal. It was as if, Beheim thought, the Patriarch, badly affected by his consideration of the good, had experienced some fleeting doubt concerning the substantiality of his worldview.

  “Now we who favor evil,” said the Patriarch, “profess ourselves to be natural creatures and strive only to express our natures. We feed when we must, we give vent to rage and lust, to the full range of our emotions, and we do so without self-recrimination, without the unnatural reining in of our basic urges. We deny ourselves nothing, and we accept the truth of who and what we are. And what comes of this? Some die at our hands, a few are granted immortality. Some unpleasant physical and mental conditions arise, but are these any worse than the cancers and senility and derangement that afflict mortals? On occasion we overindulge, but never on such a grand and fulminant scale as the overindulgences of the Christians. We do not make war on them. We feed upon them, yes. But that is a natural thing, this cutting back of the herd now and again. It is they who seek war with us, they who attempt genocide. That is their way. They have no understanding of moderation.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Beheim. “Both philosophies have at their core the same yearning for peace, the same vision of a perfect serenity. On the one hand, this is seen as a stainless white radiance; on the other, as an infinite darkness. But there are few salient differences between these two apparent poles. In fact, their sole distinction lies in the method of attaining peace. Our method, what is called evil, the exercise of license and power on an individual basis, a stable kind of anarchy with only the loosest form of restraint, that is the most humane way, the way that causes the least pain. It has been argued that this is so only because there are not so many of us as there are devotees of the good. My answer to that has always been, there will under no circumstances ever be as many of us as there are now of the good, for we will keep our own numbers down, we will harvest the weak and legislate against the abusers of power. So which is truly the good? I ask you. And which the evil? The gaudy, blackhearted, self-indulgent way of least pain? Or the pious, psalm-singing, selfless way of war and desolation?” He came back toward Beheim. “The secret of our virtue is this, child: not to care. None of us care. Not you, not Alexandra, not Agenor, not any member of the Family. Oh, it can happen that a kind of caring may spring into existence when two or several of us become fascinated with the other, and admittedly this is sweet, this is a delight. But it is not caring as defined by the Christians. It is a playful delusion, a costume in which we dress our lust, our selfish needs. And this essential lack of concern for others, our almost total self-absorption, that is what makes us less dangerous and ultimately more compassionate than our foes. They have been poisoned, driven mad by the pursuit of those hypocritical eidolons: generosity and love for their fell
owman. By contrast to their penchant for mass violence in the name of salvation, our own madness is a balmy distraction.”

  Once again the entire courtyard appeared to flicker into unreality, becoming for a moment a vague sketch of itself, almost lost in grayness. The Patriarch seized hold of Beheim’s shirtfront and pulled him erect so that they stood face-to-face.

  “Evil,” he said, evoking the essence of the word by his menacing pronunciation of it. “It is no satanic pageant play, it has no infernal city as its capital. Evil is simply what you are, Michel, the stuff of your life. It is the taste of blood, it is the slack feel of a drained supper limp in your arms, and as you lift your head, the sight of the pitted moon like a dead god sailing the dark between the forked limbs of a gallows tree. You can deny what you are for a little while, but in the end your own nature will overwhelm you. As it has begun to do this night. And if you continue to deny, to resist”—he pushed his face nose to nose with Beheim’s, lowered his voice to a savage whisper—“then you will displease me! That, my child, is by far the worst of the fates that can enfold you. That is something I should avoid were I you.” He held Beheim aloft at arm’s length. “Now go! Finish the task I have set you. And when you have finished, think on all I have said this night.”

  He shoved Beheim away, and Beheim, having no desire to anger him further, walked briskly toward the stairs that led away into the depths of the castle. From behind him came the sound of laughter, laughter so liquid and resonant he did not believe it could have issued from a human throat, and thus when the stairs—as he mounted them—and the stone walls began to fade into flat, unrelieved gray, he did not hesitate, but continued on, less fearing the insubstantiality of the place than what he might see if he were to turn back. The ground remained solid beneath his feet, and the air, though colder than it had been in the Patriarch’s chamber, was sweet to breathe. As the final traces of form faded, enclosing him in featureless gray, he felt a twinge of claustrophobic panic, but he maintained his resolve and took heart in the fact that the laughter had faded along with all else; after walking for several minutes, however, and finding no end to the gray, he wondered if panic would not be more appropriate than self-control. Evil, he thought, could not find a more fitting expression than this limbo. Perhaps it was another conceit of the Patriarch’s, an object lesson of sorts. But that was something of a leap. More likely the Patriarch had been distracted and had forgotten what he had done with Beheim, forgotten all about him. Left him to wander, to become the ghost of this supreme emptiness. It was quite possible, he decided, for the image he had gathered of the Patriarch was one of erratic, brilliant decay. But then he realized that in conjuring up the Patriarch’s essence, he was only considering that last, more genteel guise and was failing to add in the ghoulish demon the man had seemed at first, the all-powerful dweller in Mystery. That creature would forget nothing. He might pretend to have forgotten in order to increase one’s anxiety; but he would so delight in every potential for torment that nothing would elude his mental grasp, though he kept a thousand souls dangling at once over the fires of his majestic disdain.