Beautiful Blood (2 page)

The town of Teocinte spread from the dragon’s side to sprawl across a substantial portion of the Carbonales Valley, flowing over a lumpy hill (known as Haver’s Roost, referring to an inn once situated there) that bulged up from the valley floor, atop which stood the white buildings of government and a church under construction—from this point continued to spread in all directions for a mile and more, giving out into clusters of ramshackle structures no less derelict than those of Morningshade; yet while Griaule’s paralysis was a condition of apparent permanence, no one had yet chosen to build upon the ground close by his head, doubtless unsettled by the prospect of walking out their door and seeing the dragon’s gaping mouth the first thing each morning. Thus the area remained overgrown by stands of palmettos interspersed with shrimp plants and wild hibiscus, acacias, banana and thorn trees.

Standing amid the brush at dusk three days after the encounter with Myree and Arthur, Rosacher came to appreciate that Myree might have underestimated the worth of his labors. Viewed from a hundred feet away, Griaule’s head, lowered to the ground, towered above all, looking in its grotesque conformation to be the fantastic conceit of a master builder, an improbable construction that transformed the entrance to a palace into an immense bestial image. The golden scales below the sagittal crest gleamed dully, holding the last of the sun, and one eye, visible beneath the bulge of the orbital ridge, showed black, as if the socket were empty. Framed by the upraised snout and twisted fangs, each as tall as a sabal palm and so festooned with moss that they had the appearance of scrimshaw, the cavern of Griaule’s throat might have been a gateway into the nether regions.

It was cold, as cold as ever it got in the valley, and Rosacher’s breath steamed. As the light faded he began to hear noises issuing from the mouth, perhaps from even deeper within the dragon’s body, belonging to the creatures that wintered there: the ululations of frogs, bats shrilling, and hoarse, strangely exultant cries that he was unable to identify. The shadows merged into true night and insects announced its onset with a whining sizzle. His mind ached with fear, yet he forced himself to move toward Griaule, having to throw his legs forward, his pack bumping against his shoulders like a second, slower heart.

Drawing near the mouth, he removed a lantern from the pack and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The scales of the underjaw, no more than six feet distant, glinted among tall weeds. He raised the lantern, illuminating a section of jaw some thirty feet above; higher yet, a portion of gum, brown as tobacco juice, came to light, as did the base of a fang. The wind blew across Griaule’s face and a breath of dry, dusty coolness briefly dominated the vegetable odors. Rosacher hooked the lantern to his pack, buttressed his mind against panic, and climbed, using vines hanging from the lip like strings of leathery drool to haul himself along. Minutes later, he slung a leg over the lip. He scrambled to his feet in a panic, turning this way and that, holding up the lantern to reveal stunted, pale-leaved shrubs sprouting from soil that had accumulated over the centuries; the head-high thickness of the tongue, a mounded shape shrouded in ground moss, and the dim concavity of the dragon’s cheek. Night sounds closed in around him—bleeps, rustlings, and what might have been thin screams—but he could detect no movement. Calmer now, he pushed through a fringe of vegetation to the tongue and suspended the lantern off the end a branch. From the pack he removed a veterinary syringe, the same Myrie had used. Cautiously, he plucked at the moss until he had cleared a circular area. The tongue was dead black. He placed the tip of the needle against it, but over a minute passed before he mustered the courage to shove it home, applying all his weight in order to penetrate the surface. He waited for a cthonic reaction, a great shudder or grumble of complaint. None occurred, but his anxiety did not subside until he had withdrawn the needle and emptied its contents into a flask. He repeated the process twice more, coming to scoff at Myrie’s fright and his own. There was nothing to harm him here. Only bugs, bats, and lizards. He worked hastily, but not too hastily for the sake of efficiency, filling twenty flasks, nearly a gallon of blood, and nesting them in cotton padding. In the future, he thought, he would contract this work not to men such as Myrie, but to the citizens of Hangtown, the village surmounting the dragon’s back where lived an assortment of outcasts. Though eccentric to a fault, they were honest enough and their familiarity with Griaule would preclude any repetition of the scene he had enacted with Myrie. He would need more blood, of that he was certain. Synthesizing a drug from a fluid whose constituency was a complete mystery would likely remain beyond the scope of his capabilities. Perhaps he could resolve that mystery with time and work, but his initial task was to determine an effective dosage and to find a suitable medium that would allow the drug to be absorbed into the bloodstream (syringes being in short supply).

A thin silver crescent sailed clear above the hills, appearing to hover beside a fang partially cast in silhouette by its light. To Rosacher, shouldering his pack, the sight had the unreal vividness of an opium dream—it appeared to infect the rest of the landscape, lending an occult accent to the dark sky with its freckling of stars and the brush-covered field and the flickering orange lamps in the windows of outlying shanties on the hillside, like an illustration in a book of exotic fairy tales. Odd, he thought, that he could be reflective after having been terrified not long before. It was a transformation like that he had experienced in the narcotic grip of the blood, and he wondered if it were still in his system…or perhaps what he felt was not a relaxation from fear, but Griaule’s approval. The citizens of Morningshade would suggest that since Rosacher had been allowed to draw blood, he must be obeying Griaule’s will, and that his calmness was a sign the dragon had given its blessing to the act. Because they believed that through the exertion of his will Griaule controlled every facet of their lives, they might further suggest that the similarity of effect between this blessing of calm and that of the injected blood proved he had been Griaule’s pawn from the beginning. They might have told him that, if the dragon had been angry, the blood would have changed to acid in his flesh. He was not inclined to ridicule such notions as once he might, but the truth of the matter was irrelevant. Whether or not as a result of the dragon’s manipulation, he was embarked upon a course from which it would be difficult to turn aside.

He moved toward a corner of the mouth, hoping to locate a less precipitous path of descent, and heard sibilance, like a chorus of whispers. He stopped dead in his tracks and the chorus subsided. A fierce tension stiffened his muscles. He lifted the lantern, but saw nothing inimical. Yet when he went forward again, after a half-dozen steps the whispering sounded again, louder and somehow larger, as if the number of whisperers had doubled or tripled. The voices held a querulous note, a charge of mean-spirited intensity, and he did not try to find their source, but picked up his pace, hurrying through the shrubs, skirting a forking of the tongue, head down, his fear restored in full. The voices fell silent, but as he approached the spot where he intended to begin his descent, they started up a third time, so shrill that he could no longer think of them as whisperings, but rather as an insane singing—they had a papery quality reminiscent of the scraping of cicadas. Tremulously, he held the lantern high over his head. Massed together, covering the illuminated portion of the interior cheek wall, were a host of insects. Large insects, each about the size of a two-year-old child, they resembled crickets with gray chitinous bodies, their many-faceted eyes pointed with reflected lantern light. Judging by the volume of their singing, by the way they stirred, seething forward, as if part of a tide, Rosacher guessed there were thousands more hidden by the dark, an army covering the upper wall and palette. They appeared to be one creature with a single cruel, inscrutable face replicated over and over; their feelers waved and their legs worked slightly, causing the tide of bodies to appear to billow and dimple like a mat bearing a repetitive design floating on the surface of choppy water. His astonishment gave way to terror. His bones were stalks of ice, his muscles incompliant. He tottered closer to the lip. The singing broke off and the insects surged lower on the cheek wall. Rosacher stopped walking and the singing resumed. He could, he thought, hurl himself off the lip and hope to snag a vine, or that the bushes below would break his fall. He tried to slow his breathing, to gather himself, certain that the insects would swarm toward him; but instead of attacking, their voices again fell silent and they swung about, all in unison, so they were every one of them facing toward the depths of the dragon’s throat.

Their synchronous action disconcerted Rosacher nearly as much as an attack would have done. He imagined a controlling agency that might pose a more significant threat than that of the insects themselves, and he was half-persuaded to accept the view that Griaule was not simply a moribund lizard of Brobdingnagian proportions, but a fabulous presence whose potentials were myriad and in large part unknown. He resisted the impulse to discover what had commanded the insects’ attention, afraid of looking away from them, but after a second or two, he turned to the throat. At first he saw only darkness, but then he noticed movement, though not the sort of movement he might have expected. A clot of atramentous black had materialized from the lesser blackness and billowed toward him, as if it were an entity that possessed the qualities of a gaseous cloud, one evolving into a shape and acquiring solidity, growing increasingly compact and menacing in form. A lion, he thought. No, a bull…or a crocodile with aspects of both bull and lion. He backed away from the cloud and, as it closed the space between them with a sudden surge, developing into a towering column that trembled with energy, on the verge—he believed—of assuming some final, dreadful shape, fear overwhelmed him and he flung himself from the dragon’s lip and fell screaming into the brush below.

Rosacher’s second thought on waking the next morning was that someone must have happened upon him lying unconscious in the brush and carried him to their home and there tended to his injuries; yet he could not think of one of his acquaintance with access to such a splendid bedchamber. The ceiling was high and cream-colored, worked with designs of leaves and roses and other flowers from which cunning, childlike faces emerged (his initial presumption had been that he was the prisoner of malefic spirits). Paintings in gilt frames hung on the walls and all the furnishings—chairs, bureau, cabinets—were exquisitely carved and finished. He swung his legs off the side of the bed (wide enough for four; green silk sheets and a golden coverlet; pineapple posts of teak with ivory inlays) and was astounded to discover that he had no aches and pains whatsoever. Either he had been lucky in the extreme or else he had been unconscious for several days, sufficiently long for his scrapes and bruises to mend. He crossed to a window, flung open the drapes, and realized that he must be in one of the mansions that occupied the slopes of Haver’s Roost. Looking eastward across the sun-drenched town, he could make out the low, patchwork roofs of Morningshade a half-mile away and the dragon’s ribcage rising above them, its back mapped by dense thickets and a wood, the rude shanties of Hangtown shadowed by the sagittal crest. The view seemed familiar, yet he could have sworn he had never been at that window before. He wandered about the room, touching picture frames, a rosewood end table, the gold and green rug that simulated a pattern of dragon scales, a leather-covered jewelry box holding cufflinks and coins and a dozen things more, and each object he touched brought to mind a memory, a fleeting association baffling in its familiarity. He stopped in front of a mirror. His hair was no longer a mass of dark curls; it was trimmed to stubble. He wore a gold earring bearing a green gemstone. Touching it, he knew it had been a gift from Ludie. Above his right eye, a scar whitened a portion of his eyebrow, an injury received in his fall from the dragon’s lip four years ago…

This revelation, if revelation it were, if he were not lying unconscious beneath Griaule’s lip and having a dream, rooted him to the spot. He examined the memory, attempting to decide whether it had the heft of the actual, but other memories lurched into his mind, shoving one another aside in their haste to make themselves known, filling his brain to bursting with a flood of trivia (appointments to be kept. problems to be dealt with and so on), from which he distilled the undeniable fact that his plan had worked. He was wealthy. This was
his
house. Each and every day his factories produced a sufficient quantity of the drug in smoke-able form to supply the addicts of Teocinte and Port Chantay, and he planned to branch out, to export the drug to other towns and develop a pastille that would allow the drug to dissolve in the mouth, suitable for those who did not smoke. Dizzy with this influx of memory, Rosacher dropped into an easy chair and sought a star by which to steer through the sea of information. How was it possible that he could have these memories and yet never have experienced their reality? Was he to believe that he had been operating in a somnambulistic state for four years? There were cases in which a blow to the head caused a temporary condition similar to the one he seemed to have suffered, but in none of them had the patient prospered while enduring that condition. Four years! His memories relating to that time had little flavor or substance. It was as if he lived those years and yet had not lived them, as if he had riffled through the pages of that portion of his life, skipping ahead in his book of days to this particular day and hour. The memories were scraps, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—fitted together, they assembled a visual image and embodied a related comprehension in each of which a digest history resided…and yet they transmitted almost nothing of the emotional context.

The bedchamber door opened and Ludie walked in, a sheaf of papers in hand. She wore riding breeches, boots, and a loose linen shirt, belted at the waist, and looked scarcely a day older than he recalled, still lovely—but a mask of hard neutrality tempered her beauty. That look, the attitude it embodied, cued another trickle of memories. They had once been monogamous, but as he involved himself more deeply in business, they had drifted apart and now he had his women and she her horses, her daylong trips into the valley where she would rendezvous with lovers, men and women both, and Rosacher’s relationship with her had become a convenience, held together by a shred of reflex intimacy that disguised their fundamental indifference to one another—they were partners (Ludie had helped finance the early stages of the business) and they trusted each other in that way, but trust no longer extended into the emotional realm. Rosacher felt himself slipping into a suit of reactions that accommodated this state of affairs, yet he also regretted that things had reached this pass and struggled to sustain a nostalgic view of her.

She held out the papers to him. “Arthur’s downstairs.”

Rosacher continued to stare.

“It’s the figures you asked for,” she said. “The estimate of next year’s earnings. And the notes for the rest of your presentation.” When he did not take them, she shook the papers at him. “You should look these over before you leave.”

“What are you up to today?” he asked.

A flicker of displeasure—she tossed the papers onto an easy chair. “I’m going for a ride.”

“I’d like to see you this evening.”

“
See
me?”

“Spend some time with you.”

“I don’t…”

“I hoped we might dine together.”

She folded her arms. “Why? What do you want?”

“Not much. A few hours of your company.”

She started to speak, hesitated, and said stiffly, “If you’ve a problem with the way I’ve been handling the books, I want to hear it now.”

“I want to see you. Can that be so difficult to comprehend? My God! How long has it been since we spent an evening together?”

“I haven’t kept track.”

“Nor I…but it must be months.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.” Then, after a pause: “Very well. I’ll cancel my plans.”

That comment touched off yet another rush of confusing memories, these relating to his presentation, and Rosacher experienced a flash of unease—there were so many details to sort through. “Perhaps I should postpone the presentation. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Are you mad? We’ve been working toward this for nearly five years. Don’t worry. They may have summoned you to receive their reprimand, but you’ll have them scrambling to see which one of them can be your best friend before the hour’s out.”

She said this last harshly, as if it were an indictment, and then went to a closet, selected a white suit and laid it out on the bed. She adopted a thoughtful pose. “Perhaps your green shirt. It’ll strike a flamboyant note. That’s the image you want to present. Those stodgy old men will see you dressed like a parrot, dismissive of their conservative conventions, and they’ll admire you for it. They’ll disapprove of you at first, of course. But they’ll come to recognize that you’re establishing your independence from them. They’ll view your disrespect as the byproduct of a bold personal style, and they’ll respect that in you…so long as you make it worth their while.”

She had grown angry as she spoke or, better said, she had let slip her stoic mask and shown him her normal level of resentment.

“Ludie,” he said helplessly.

“I’ll be in my quarters at eight o’clock,” she said, going to the door. “Try to be punctual.”

After she had gone he wondered if it was possible to restore the relationship. The council summons pressed in on him—he recalled its importance and his mind swarmed with details. He selected a green silk shirt from the closet and laid it beside the suit in order to gauge the effect, concluding that Ludie had been accurate in her judgment. It struck precisely the right note.

Arthur Honeyman, the gaunt giant who had broken into Rosacher’s apartment and assaulted him, had changed his outward aspect to a far greater degree than had Rosacher, though Arthur’s transformation was by way of a refinement. Honeyman dressed well these days, given to collarless shirts and embroidered satin jackets that lent him a dandified air ill-suited to his rough-hewn features and bony frame. He smiled incessantly in order to show off his false teeth. They were not white but, thanks to jade inlays, were decorated so as to resemble moss-covered rocks—when he opened his mouth, they gave the impression that you were looking into a forbidding cavern. On the day he had hired Arthur, sitting at the desk in his office, a room adjoining his old apartments, Rosacher made new teeth a condition of his employment.

“The health of your body and that of your teeth are not separate issues,” Rosacher told him. “If you don’t take care of them, sooner or later they’re bound to cause a serious infection and you’ll be of no use to me. Then there’s the consideration of your appearance. I want you to frighten people, but I don’t think it’s necessary to make them giddy with fear.”

“Will it hurt?” Arthur asked.

“Yes. I can do the extractions painlessly, but there’ll be some bruising of the tissues. However, you’ll suffer more living with a mouth like that than you will in losing the teeth.”

Arthur shuffled his feet, glanced out the window. “Why’re you doing this? After what I done to you, it don’t make sense.”

“Everyone in Morningside is afraid of you,” said Rosacher. “I’ve been observing you for several months and you’re not unintelligent, though your methods of intimidation are unnecessarily crude. Most importantly, you’re not an addict.”

“Too right! I’d sooner take poison than smoke a pipe of mab (this the name the citizens of Morningshade applied to the drug, being an acronym for ‘more and better’). I don’t need my view of the world tarted up. I prefer to see things as they are.”

“An admirable trait,” said Rosacher. “One I’ve grown to appreciate.” He got to his feet and came around the desk to stand in front of Arthur. “The past is the past. There’s no need to dwell on it. I can help you and you can help me by dealing with problems that may arise. What I’m proposing is a business relationship pure and simple.” He held out his hand. “Do we have an accord?”

“I’m your man!” Arthur shook his hand gingerly, as if taking pains not to injure him anew. “I’ll deal with your problems. You can trust to that.”

Rosacher was not inclined to extend his trust. For all his coarse exterior, Arthur was no fool and, sooner or later, the instincts bred by his rough-and-tumble existence would turn his intellect in a treacherous direction. Rosacher believed, however, he could find ways to keep him occupied.

Three and a half years later, armed with teeth that were no longer new, grinning fiercely at every passer-by, his huge frame draped in a jacket of cherry-colored satin embroidered in white silk, hair held back from his shoulders by a gay matching ribbon, Arthur accompanied Rosacher to the top of Haver’s Roost. People cleared out of the giant’s path, falling back to either side of the winding street; others came to the windows and doorways of the mansions of brick and undressed stone that lined it, made curious by the passage of this two-man parade. At the summit of the hill lay a cobbled square ringed by buildings of pinkish stucco with ironwork balconies and red tile roofs, open on one end (the opening was due to be closed off by a cathedral, its foundations already laid and a single wall erected). It was toward the largest building, a three-story affair with ornamental iron bars over the windows, that they proceeded.

“I’ve never been up here before.” Arthur sniffed the air. “Don’t smell near as ripe as Morningshade.”

Rosacher mounted the steps. “I think you’ll find the stench more familiar once we’re inside.”

A slender, dark-haired man, appearing to be four or five years younger than Rosacher, sat on a bench in the mahogany-paneled vestibule on the second floor, outside the council chamber, clutching a leather artist’s portfolio, listening as a functionary explained that he would have to wait until Mr. Rosacher finished his business before the council. On hearing this, the young man jumped up and demanded an immediate audience. Rosacher stepped in and said, “Excuse me. Mister…?”

“Cattanay,” said the man, giving the name an angry emphasis, pronouncing each syllable with biting precision. “Meric Cattanay.”

“Richard Rosacher. You have a proposal to put before the council?”

“I’ve been here since yesterday. I’ve come all the way from…”

“Believe me, Mister Cattanay. I understand your frustration. But I think I can assure you that the council will be in a more receptive mood after I have done than they are at the moment.”

Somewhat mollified, yet still agitated, Cattanay expressed doubt as to Rosacher’s claim, but when Rosacher told him that his business involved a considerable financial settlement, he sat down again. And when Rosacher inquired what his proposal entailed, he opened his portfolio and displayed a number of sketches that detailed a scheme for killing Griaule by means of poisoned paint applied to his skin. The idea seemed ludicrous on the face of it, yet Rosacher was forced to acknowledge that the basic notion was ingenious. He asked how long it might take to complete the job.