The Golden (31 page)

“I believe
not,” he said, genuine pain in his voice. “I believe what
I have done is stray from the path of my spirit rather than returning
to it. A great deal of worth has come of the philosophy I have helped
to breed. That we stand here in this terrible light is itself a
proof. But how can I be certain that even these things are not the
by-products of willfulness and folly?” He stared at Beheim, his
mouth working. “Do you believe I love you, Michel? In my heart
it seems I love you well, and no matter how this day ends, that will
not change. But do you believe it?”

“Why is it
important what I believe?” Beheim asked, trying not to stare at
Agenor, for it appeared that something was happening to his face,
that the skin was coarsening, reddening.

“In the
centuries to come, perhaps I will forget you, my young friend,”
said Agenor, assuming his familiar lectoral mien. “Then again,
perhaps I will not. The question of your importance has yet to be
decided. However, why the question is important remains another
issue. I would like your opinion on my mental state. I realize it’s
much to ask, considering the circumstances. But nevertheless I
would—”

“Yes, it
is rather much, isn’t it?” Beheim snapped. “But
never mind, I’ll be happy to oblige. You see, it’s an
incredibly easy question to answer. It calls for no consideration
whatsoever. Just look at yourself. In the space of a few seconds
you’ve gone from mawkish regret to the fatuous maunderings of
an old poof, and you haven’t noticed a damned thing that’s
happening to you. You’re mad! And not just a little bit mad.
You’re as mad as that foul thing who calls himself our
Patriarch!”

He was afire
with elation—something was definitely happening to Agenor. The
skin was darkening in patches, reddening overall, the wrinkles
growing more pronounced. The effects of Felipe’s drug were
finally wearing off. Finally! Beheim was surprised that Agenor had
not yet felt any pain.

“And as to
whether you were ever sane, well, I’ll admit that all you ever
said about how we need to change . . . noise. “You’re
living proof of that! But it doesn’t matter if sanity once
gripped you, because you’ll never be sane again. You’re
finished as a rational being. You might as well go hang in the trees
with the rest of the bats!”

Agenor listened
to this outburst with an air of haughty bemusement, like an adult
tolerating an annoying child, and when Beheim fell silent, he gave a
sigh in which it seemed years of dust and patience were collected,
and opened his mouth to deliver what Beheim might have expected to be
a pompous denial or a grandiloquent expression of superiority; but
then his eyes grew distended, he touched his cheek with a trembling
hand as if to reassure himself of its solidity, and what issued from
his mouth was no condescending prattle but a raspy scream that built
in volume and pitch until it became as full-throated as that of a
terrified woman.

Very like,
Beheim thought with satisfaction, how the Golden must have screamed
on the eastern turret that morning when Agenor tore her apart.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

T
he old man clasped his hands to his face. Wisps of smoke trickled
between his fingers, and the fingers themselves began to blister. He
made a gargling noise, and then, flinging out his hands, revealed the
scorched surface of his face, the forehead charring, the blisters on
the cheeks burst and leaking a clear fluid. His hair, too, was
burning, the pale, sunstruck flames leaping merrily. He dropped into
a crouch, hopping about like a bedizened dwarf, trying to pull his
jacket up over his head, all the while emitting a quavery cry. The
backs of his hands were crisping, the blackened skin cracking to
reveal an angry redness beneath, and Beheim, without thinking why he
acted, leaped across the pit and pushed him in.

As Agenor’s
body broke through the mat of branches and hit the water with a heavy
splash, there was a great venting of steam, and when he surfaced,
still burning, he groped wildly for the branches that had fallen in
with him, attempting to arrange them like a thatch over his head.
Beheim searched in the dirt for the iron edge of the camouflaged
shutter, gripped it, and heaved it toward the pit, wrangling it
sideways.

“What are
you doing?” Alexandra shrilled, clutching at him. “Let
him burn! He would have killed us! Burn him!”

But he broke
free of her and maneuvered the shutter until it covered the
imprisoning water and its agonized captive.

Alexandra
grabbed at the shutter, trying to remove it from the pit, and Beheim
shoved her away. She shrieked, enraged, and came at him, clawing at
his face. Again he knocked her away. He spotted a pine branch lying
beside the pit, one that had broken, so that its end was sharp and
pointed; he picked it up, and as Alexandra ran at him a second time,
he slapped her, driving her against the boulder. Before she could
gather herself, he flung himself atop her, bending her backward over
the boulder; he tore the front of her dress and her lace
undergarment, fitted the sharp end of the pine branch to the inner
side of her left breast and pushed until bright blood showed against
the freckly white skin. She stiffened, ceased her struggles. Her eyes
were wheels of reflected light, like frozen eddies in a green river.
He did not look away, but met her dazzling stare with the hot press
of his anger.

“I should
kill you,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m
even hesitating.”

“You’re
as mad as Agenor! I have done nothing to deserve—”

“You were
going to betray me!”

“And first
I tried to trade my life for yours. Does it make sense that I would
do that and then betray you? No sense at all. Unless, of course, I
was trying to distract Agenor in both instances, to delay his
attack.”

He looked at her
doubtfully. “You were most convincing.”

“I’m
convincing in everything I do. Especially in those things I do
because of conviction.”

“Even
this . . . She made a clicking noise with her tongue
and teeth. “Why don’t you stop it? You’re not going
to kill me.”

“I’m
not, eh?”

“No.”

“And why,
pray, will I be merciful?”

“Because
you want me.”

He thought at
first that she was mocking him, though there had been nothing of
mockery in her tone. Her gaze was frank, open, and he had the
impression that she was inviting him to intimacy. He tried a laugh,
but it rang false even to his own ears. “If I release you,”
he said, “then you must leave Agenor to me. His fate will be
decided by the Patriarch.”

“That
‘foul thing,’ you mean?”

Beheim ignored
this. “Will you swear not to harm him?”

“I’ve
no wish to harm him now. I was overexcited. As to his fate, it is
already decided. He will burn. Whether here or on the castle heights,
it makes no difference to the Patriarch.”

“Swear.”

“As you
wish.” A shrug. “I swear he will be safe from me.”

He eased up his
pressure on the branch, tossed it aside; then he lifted his weight
from her.

“You’ve
forgotten something,” she said, still reclining half atop the
boulder.

“Have I?”

“This.”
She pointed to the bead of blood welling from the side of her breast,
a ruby droplet. “You’ve bled me. Now you must drink or
break with tradition.”

Beheim watched
the droplet slide down her ribcage and onto her belly, leaving a
slick track; another was forming in its place. The sight was
powerfully arousing.

“I think,”
he said awkwardly, “I think this falls outside the bounds of
tradition as it is defined.”

“No
matter,” she said. “
I
want you to drink.”

She lifted her
arms, let them fall back behind her head, and smiled. Her tousled
hair, almost red in the sunlight, made the perfect frame for her
face. He could not keep his eyes from her pretty breasts. Warmth came
to his face.

“This is
ridiculous,” he said. “Now’s not the time.”

“Pleasure’s
never ridiculous. It’s serious business. And this now, this is
particularly serious.”

“I don’t
understand.”

She said nothing
for what seemed a very long time. Something broke through the
underbrush nearby, made a hurried rustling in the leaves. The light
dimmed, then brightened. There was a weighty feeling to the
stillness, as if, Beheim thought, a god had turned his eyes their
way. That weightiness nourished him. He felt almost at peace with all
the trouble of the day. The pines were strange, enormous foot
soldiers in shaggy, dark green coats, and the light was in that
instant mild as honey, and the rustles in the woods were spirits and
the boulder was an altar rock.

“Drink,”
Alexandra said, her voice so soft it was barely distinguishable from
a sudden rush of wind through the boughs. “To please me. To
please yourself. Drink.”

Her breasts
tasted of sweat and perfume, and her blood was a strong flavor, not
complex, as he had presumed, but simple and direct. It warmed him, it
renewed his strength, but did not intoxicate except in the way of all
blood. After he had taken the new droplet from her breast, licked the
flesh clean, he rested his head there where he had drunk. Her fingers
played in his hair. The feeling, too, was simple and direct, easy on
the heart. He wanted more of it.

“A kiss,”
she said in a lazy voice, tugging at him, trying to pull his face up
to hers. “Give me a kiss. Just one.”

Her lips parted
for his tongue, her hands traced delicate, teasing patterns on his
chest; her legs parted, letting his member push against the yielding
heated place between them. He could feel how it would be with her
again. Like stirring himself in hot resin, like falling through the
sun into wind and silence, and sailing for a while in some white
palace of the mind through which a sea of fevers flowed, and then
after a timeless time, the time accumulating like a crowd around a
street accident, a tension waiting to be dispersed, emerging from it
as he emerged then from that one kiss, galvanized, one of those
sensational moments when you step out from the curling tendrils of a
Paris fog into a lambent reality of lights and music and wild
laughter, when you snap out of the waking nightmare that has held you
tossing and turning for decades, and you glance up from a desk
cluttered with the reports of a dozen grisly unsolved murders, or
from a losing game of chess, or from the still-breathing body of a
young woman from which you have just siphoned several unbearably
sweet mouthfuls of needed blood, and there it all is, the whole born
world summed up in a single glimpse, shining and clear, a
lightning-bolt clarity, more perfect an expression of what is than
any painting in the Louvre could ever be, everything looking so fresh
and strange in its brightness that you might be a visitor just
dropped in from Atlantis or Mu or some mythic world of the ether, and
you understand once and for all that the truth you have been
searching for your entire life is no mystery, it is like every truth
a simple brightness that will support no interpretation, no analysis,
that is only itself, and it might come to you in the guise of a
pretty girl in a checkered apron setting tables in front of the Café
Japonais just off the Bois de Boulogne; it might reveal itself to you
in an arrangement of pears and cheese on a plate in a hotel in
Cannes; it might stream up at you from the self-inflicted wounds of a
dead boy who painted azure wings around his eyes and spent each
morning posing naked in a mirror and pretending he was a famous
courtesan; it might announce itself in the taste of a stale sandwich
eaten late at night; it might chill you in a dash of cold rain; it
might terrify you in the form of a rat darting from an alley under
your foot; it might arise like steam from the impassioned confession
of a plump, tearful housewife stranded with you in a train station
who shows you the silver angel pin given her as a farewell present by
her lover, a vacationing schoolteacher who could not commit himself
to any woman because of the secret grief he carried that annihilated
his every happiness with guilt; it might be anything, anywhere, but
for now it glided from the process of a kiss, and when you looked up
this time, you saw the face of the kissed woman still rapt from the
pressure of your lips, slivers of green irises showing beneath her
lids, like beautiful gemmy green coins placed on her eyes, her red
lips still parted, dizzy and dying from the truth of her own moment,
and the ranked pines bending all to one side in a strong gust of
wind, shaking their shaggy pelts, then straightening, all with a
slow, ponderous motion like a chorus line of dancing bears, and the
puddled sunlight ebbing and flowing with their movement, and the
trillion brown needles making infinite hexagrams in their decay, and
lastly, mostly, chiefly, the ugly centerpiece of all this excellent
clarity and serenity, a scarred iron shutter half-covered with dirt,
and beneath it, up to its neck in cold water, in the damp,
dust-thronged air, a living being, its blackened head like a bizarre
seed from which the darkness of its prison is seeping, its breath
wheezing, its mind empty of everything but pain, waiting, no longer
hoping, only waiting for your moment to end, for you to remember what
had happened and say, as Beheim said then, “I don’t know
what to do with him.”

Alexandra sat
up; she started tying the torn strips of her blouse together so that
the material covered her breasts; her long hair fell like a veil over
her face. “As far as the Patriarch is concerned,” she
said, “you may wait until dark and return him to the castle if
you wish. Or you may end his life here and now. It’s your
choice.”

“My
choice.” Beheim let the words drift away without resolution. He
wanted someone to take this business off his hands; he had not
bargained on being an executioner. Then, struck by an inconsistency,
he looked over at Alexandra, who was examining her repairs with
displeasure. “How can you know what the Patriarch requires?”