The Best of Lucius Shepard (34 page)

Mingolla
could see his own face floating in the black plastic of the co-pilot’s visor;
he looked warped and pale, so thoroughly unfamiliar that for a moment he
thought the face might be a bad dream the co-pilot was having.

“What the
hell’s with you, man?” the co-pilot asked. “You don’t believe me?”

Mingolla
wanted to explain that his attitude had nothing to do with belief or disbelief,
that it signaled his intent to obtain a safe future by means of securing his
present; but he couldn’t think how to put it into words the co-pilot would
accept. The co-pilot would merely refer again to his visor as testimony to a
magical reality or perhaps would point up ahead where—because the cockpit
plastic had gone opaque under the impact of direct sunlight—the sun now
appeared to hover in a smoky darkness: a distinct fiery sphere with a streaming
corona, like one of those cabalistic emblems embossed on ancient seals. It was
an evil, fearsome-looking thing, and though Mingolla was unmoved by it, he knew
the pilot would see in it a powerful sign.

“You think
I’m lyin’?” said the co-pilot angrily. “You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ‘bout
somethin’ like this? Man, I ain’t lyin’! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!”

They flew
east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody
enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men in
combat armor fought for no good reason against men wearing brass scorpions on
their berets, where crazy, lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone
Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The co-pilot kept
the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a
response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the co-pilot turned
away.

<>

*
* * *

The
Arcevoalo

One morning nearly five hundred
years after the September War, whose effects had transformed the Amazon into a
region of supernal mystery, a young man with olive skin and delicate features
and short black hair awoke to find himself lying amid a bed of ferns not far
from the ruined city of Manaus. It seemed to him that some great darkness had
just been lifted away, but he could recall nothing more concrete of his past,
neither his name nor those of his parents or place of birth. Indeed, he was so
lacking in human referents that he remained untroubled by this state of affairs
and gazed calmly around at the high green canopy and the dust-hung shafts of
sun and the tapestry of golden radiance and shadow overlying the jungle floor.
Everywhere he turned he saw marvelous creatures: butterflies with translucent wings;
birds with hinged, needle-thin beaks; snakes with faceted eyes that glowed more
brightly than live coals. Yet the object that commanded his attention was a
common orchid, its bloom a dusky lavender, that depended from the lowermost
branch of a guanacaste tree. The sight mesmerized him, and intuitions about the
orchid flowed into his thoughts: how soft its petals were, how subtle its
fragrance, and, lastly, that it was not what it appeared to be. At that moment,
as if realizing that he had penetrated its disguise, the bloom flew apart,
revealing itself to have been composed of glittering insects, all of which now
whirled off toward the canopy, shifting in color like particles of an exploded
rainbow; and the young man understood—a further intuition—that he, too, was not
what he appeared.

Puzzled,
and somewhat afraid, he glanced down at the ferns and saw scattered among them
pieces of a fibrous black husk. Upon examining them, he discovered that the
insides of the pieces were figured by smooth indentations that conformed
exactly to the shapes of his face and limbs. There could be no doubt that prior
to his awakening, he had been enclosed within the husk, like a seed in its
casing. His anxiety increased when—on setting down one of the pieces—his
fingers brushed the clay beneath the ferns and he saw before his mind’s eye the
pitching deck of a vast wooden ship, with wild seas bursting over the railings.
Men wearing steel helmets and carrying pikes were huddled in the bow, and
standing in the door that led to the gun decks (how had he known that?) was a
gray-haired man who beckoned to him. To him? No, to someone he had partly been.
João Merin Nascimento. That name—like his vision of the ship—surfaced in his
thoughts following contact with the clay. And with the name came a thousand
fragments of memory, sufficient to make the young man realize that Nascimento,
a Portuguese soldier of centuries past, lay buried beneath the spot where he
was sitting, and that he was in essence the reincarnation of the old soldier:
for just as the toxins and radiations of the September War had transformed the
jungle, so the changed jungle had worked a process of alchemy on those ancient
bones and produced a new creature, human to a degree, yet—to a greater
degree—quite inhuman. Understanding this eased the young man’s anxiety, because
he now knew that he was safe in the dominion of the jungle, whose creature he
truly was. But he understood, too, that his manlike form embodied a cunning
purpose, and in hopes of discerning that purpose, he set out to explore the
jungle, walking along a trail that led (though he was not aware of it) to the
ruins of Manaus.

Nine
days he walked; and during those days he learned much about the jungle’s
character and—consequently—about his own. From a creature with a dozen bodies,
each identical, yet only one of which contained its vital spark, he learned an
ultimate caution; from the malgaton, a fierce jaguarlike beast whose strange
eyes could make a man dream of pleasure while he died, he learned the need for
circumspection in the cause of violence; from the deadly jicaparee vine with
its exquisite flowers, he learned the importance of setting a lure and gained
an appreciation of the feral principles underlying all beauty.

From
each of these creatures and more, he learned that no living thing is without
its parasites and symbiotes, and that in the moment they are born their death
is also born. But not until he came in sight of the ruined city, when he saw
its crumbling, vine-draped towers tilting above the canopy like grotesque
vegetable chessmen whose board was in process of being overthrown, not until
then did he at last fathom his purpose: that he was to be the jungle’s weapon
against mankind, its mortal enemy who time and again had sought to destroy it.

The
young man could not conceive how—fangless and clawless—he would prove a threat
to an enemy with weapons that had poisoned a world. Perplexed, hoping some
further illumination would strike him, took to wandering the city streets, over
cracked flagstones between which he could see the tunnels of guerilla ants,
past ornate wrought-iron streetlamps in whose fractured globes white
phosphorescent spiders the size of skull crabs had spun their webs (by night
their soft glow conveyed a semblance of the city’s fabulous heyday into this,
its rotting decline), and through the cavernous mansions of the wealthy dead.
Everywhere he wandered he encountered danger, for Manaus had been heavily
dusted during the September War and thus was home to the most perverse of the
jungle’s mutations: flying lizards that spit streams of venom; albino peacocks
whose shrill cries could make a man bleed from the ears; the sortilene, a
mysterious creature never glimpsed by human eyes, known only by the horrid
malignancies that sprouted from the flesh of its victims; herds of peccaries,
superficially unchanged but possessing vocal chords that could duplicate the
cries of despairing women. At night an enormous shadow obscured the stars,
testifying to an even more dire presence. Yet none of these creatures troubled
the young man—they seemed to know him for an ally. And, indeed, often as he
explored the gloomy interiors of the ruined houses, he would see hundreds of
eyes gazing at him, slit pupils and round, showing all colors like a spectrum
of stars ranging the dusky green shade, and then he would have the idea that
they were watching over him.

At
length he entered the lobby of a hotel that—judging by the sumptuous rags of
its drapes, the silver-cloth stripe visible in the moss-furred wallpaper, the
immensity of the reception desk—must once have been a palace among hotels.
Thousands of slitherings stilled when he entered. The dark green shadows seemed
the visual expression of a cloying mustiness, one redolent of a thousand insignificant
deaths. His footsteps shaking loose falls of plaster dust, he walked along the
main hallway, past elevator shafts choked with vines and epithytes, and came
eventually to a foyer whose roof was holed in such a fashion that sharply
defined sunbeams hung down from it, dappling the scummy surface of an
ornamental pond with coins of golden light. There, sitting naked and
cross-legged on a large lily pad—the sort that once hampered navigation on the
Rio Negro due to the toughness of its fiber—was an old Indian man, so wizened
that he appeared to be a homunculus. His eyes were closed, his white hair
filthy and matted, and his coppery skin bore a greenish tinge (whether this was
natural coloration or a product of the shadows, the young man could not determine).
The young man expected intuitions about the Indian to flow into his thoughts;
but when this did not occur, he realized that though the Indians, too, had been
changed by the September War, though they were partially the jungle’s
creatures, they were still men, and the jungle had no knowledge of men other
than that it derived from the bones of the dead. How then, he wondered, could
he defeat an enemy about whom he was ignorant? He stretched out a hand to the
Indian, thinking a touch might transmit some bit of information. But the
Indian’s eyes blinked open, and with a furious splashing he paddled the lily
pad beyond the young man’s reach. “The arcevoalo must be cautious with his
touch,” he said in a creaky voice that seemed to stir the atoms of the dust
within the sunbeams. “Haven’t you learned that?”

Though
the young man—the arcevoalo—had not heard his name before, he recognized it
immediately. With its Latinate echoes of wings and arcs, it spoke to him of the
life he would lead, how he would soar briefly through the world of men and then
return to give his knowledge of them to the jungle. Knowing his name opened him
to his full strength—he felt it flooding him like a golden heat—and served to
align his character more precisely with that of the jungle. He stared down at
the Indian, who now struck him as being wholly alien, and asked how he had
known the name.

“This
truth I have eaten has told it to me,” said the Indian, holding up a pouch
containing a quantity of white powder. Grains of it adhered to his fingers. “I
was called here to speak the truth to someone...doubtless to you. But now I
must leave.” He slipped off the lily pad and waded toward the edge of the pond.

Moving
so quickly that he caused the merest flutter of shadow upon the surface of the
water, the arcevoalo leaped to the far side of the pond, blocking the Indian’s
path. “What is this ‘truth?’” he asked. “And who called you here?”

“The
powder derives from the asuero flower,” said the Indian. “A plant fertilized
with the blood of honest men. As to who called me, if I had known that I might
not have come.” He made as if to haul himself from the pond, but the arcevoalo
stayed him.

“How
must I go about conquering my enemy?” he asked.

“To
do battle one must first understand the foe.”

“Then
I will keep you with me and learn your ways,” countered the arcevoalo.

The
Indian hissed impatiently. “I am as different from those you must understand as
you are from me. You must go to the city of Sangue do Lume. It is a new city,
inhabited by Brazilians who fled the September War. Until recently they dwelled
in metal worlds that circle the darkness behind the sky. Now they have returned
to claim their ancient holdings, to reap the fruits of the jungle and to kill
its animals for profit. It is they with whom you will contend.”

“How
will I contend? I have no weapons.”

“You
have speed and strength,” said the Indian. “But your greatest weapon is a mere
touch.”

He
instructed the arcevoalo to press the pads of his fingers hard, and when he did
droplets of clear fluid welled from beneath the nails.

“A
single drop will enslave any man’s heart for a time,” said the Indian. “But you
must use this power sparingly, for your body can produce the fluid only in a
limited quantity.”

He
flicked his eyes nervously from side to side, obviously afraid, eager to be
gone. The arcevoalo continued to ask questions, but the effects of the “truth”
drug were wearing off, and the Indian began to whine and to lie, saying that
his cousin, whom he had not seen since the Year of Fabulous Sorrows, was coming
to visit and he would be remiss if he were not home to greet him. With a wave
of his hand, the arcevoalo dismissed him, and the Indian went scuttling away
toward the lobby.