The Best of Lucius Shepard (36 page)

“You’d
do better to set your sights elsewhere,” the arcevoalo once told Orlando. “Even
if you win her, you’ll regret it. She’s the kind of woman who uses marriage
like a vise, and before you know it she’ll have you squealing like a stuck
pig.” He had no idea whether or not this was true—it was something he had
overheard another disappointed suitor say—but it accorded with his own
impressions of her. He believed that Orlando was leaving himself open to the
possibility of grievous hurt, and he told him as much. No matter how forcefully
he argued, though, Orlando refused to listen.

“I
know you’re only trying to protect me, friend,” he said. “And perhaps you’re
right. But this is an affair of the heart, and the heart is ruled by its own
counsel.”

And
so the arcevoalo could do nothing more than to step aside and let Orlando have
a clear field with Sylvana.

On
one occasion Caudez invited them to dine at the governor’s mansion. They sat at
a long mahogany table graced by golden candelabra through whose branches the
arcevoalo watched Sylvana daintily picking at her food, ignoring the heated
glances that Orlando sent her way. After the meal, Caudez led them into his
study, its windows open onto the orchid-spangled courtyard where Sylvana could
be seen strolling— as elegant as an orchid herself—and held forth on his scheme
to milk the resources of the Amazon: how he would reopen the gold mines at
Serra Pelada, reinstitute the extensive-farming procedures that once had
brought an unparalleled harvest, and thus feed and finance hundreds of new
orbital colonies. Orlando’s attention was fixed upon Sylvana. but the arcevoalo
listened closely. Caudez, with his piratical air and his dream of transforming
the Amazon into a tame backyard, struck him as being a force equal to the
jungle. Pacing up and down, declaiming about the glorious future, Caudez seemed
to walk with the pride of a continent. Late in the evening he turned his fierce
black stare upon the arcevoalo and questioned him about his past. The questions
were complex, fraught with opportunities for the arcevoalo to compromise the
secret of his birth; he had to summon all his wits to avoid these pitfalls, and
he wondered if Caudez were suspicious of him. But then Caudez laughed and
clapped him on the shoulder, saying what a marvel he was, and that allayed his
fears.

*
* * *

Whereas in the jungle, time
passed in a dark green flow, a single fluid moment infinitely prolonged, within
the walls of Sangue do Lume it passed in sharply delineated segments so that
occasionally one would become alerted to the fact that a certain period had
elapsed—this due to the minuscule interruptions in the flow of time caused by
the instruments men have for measuring it. And thus it was that one morning the
arcevoalo awoke to the realization that he had lived in the city for a year. A
year! And what progress had he made? His life, which had once had the form of
purpose, of a quest, had resolved into a passive shape denned by his
associations: his friendship with Orlando (whose wooing of Sylvana had reached
fever pitch), his sexual encounters with Ana, his apprenticeship to Caudez.
Each night he was reminded of his deeper associations with the jungle by the
huge shadow that obscured the stars; yet he felt trapped between the two
worlds, at home in neither, incapable of effecting any change. He might have
continued at this impasse had not Ana announced to him one evening that she was
with child. It would be, according to the old woman who had listened to her
belly, a son. Standing in the garish light of her burning Christ, displaying
her new roundness, flushed with a love no longer dependent on his touch, she
presented him with a choice he could not avoid making. If he did nothing, his
son would be born into the world of men; he had to be certain this was right.

But
how could he decide such a complex issue, one that had baffled him for an
entire year?

At
the point of desperation, he remembered the old Indian man and his “truth,” and
that same night, after the machines in the walls had been switched off, leaving
the flaking whitewash of the buildings exposed, he sneaked into the warehouse
where the plant samples were kept and pilfered a quantity of asuero flowers. He
returned to the Valverde house, ground the petals into a fine powder, and ate
the entire amount. Soon pearls of sweat beaded on his forehead, his limbs
trembled, and the moonlight flooding his room appeared to grow brighter than
day.

Truth
came to him in the clarity of his vision. Between the floorboards he saw
microscopic insects and plants, and darting through the air were even tinier
incidences of life. From these sights he understood anew that the city and the
jungle were interpenetrating. Just as the ruins of Manaus lay beneath the
foliage, so did the jungle’s skeins infiltrate the living city. One was not
good, the other evil. They were two halves of a whole, and the war between them
was not truly a war but an everlasting pattern, a game in which he was a
powerful pawn moved from the grotesque chessboard of Manaus to the neat squares
of Sangue do Lume, a move that had set in motion a pawn of perhaps even greater
power: his son. He realized now that no matter with which side he cast his lot,
his son would make the opposite choice, for it was an immutable truth that
fathers and sons go contrary to the other’s will. Thus he had to make his own
choice according to the dictates of his soul. A soul in confusion. And to
dissolve that confusion, to know his options fully, he had to complete his
knowledge of man by understanding the nature of love. He thought first of going
to Ana, of infecting himself with the chemicals of his touch and falling under
her spell; but then he recognized that the kind of love he sought to
understand—the all-consuming love that motivates and destroys—had to embody the
quality of the unattainable. With this in mind, still trembling from the fevers
of the asuero powder, he went out again into the night and headed toward the
governor’s mansion, toward the unattainable Sylvana.

Since
the concept of security in Sangue do Lume was chiefly geared to keeping the
jungle out, the systems protecting the mansion were minimal, easily penetrated
by a creature of the arcevoalo’s stealth. He crept up the stairs, along the
hall, cracked Sylvana’s door, and eased inside. As was the custom with
high-born women of the city, she was sleeping nude beneath a skylight through
which the rays of the moon shone down in a silvery fan. A diamond pulsed coldly
in the hollow of her throat, a tourmaline winked between her breasts, and in
the tuft of her secret hair—trimmed to the shape of an orchid—an emerald
shimmered wetly. These gems were bound in place by silken threads and were no
ordinary stones but crystalline machines that focused the moonlight downward to
produce a salubrious effect upon the organs, and also served as telltales of
those organs’ health. The unclouded states of the emerald, the tourmaline, and
the diamond testified that Sylvana was virginal and of sound heart and
respiration. But she was so lovely that the arcevoalo would not have cared if
the stones had been black, signaling wantonness and infection. Rivulets of
blonde hair streamed over her porcelain shoulders, and the soft brush of sleep
had smoothed away her brittleness of expression, giving her the look of an
angel under an enchantment.

Fixing
his gaze upon her, the arcevoalo gripped his left forearm with the fingers of
his right hand and pressed down hard. He maintained the grip for some time,
uncertain how much of the chemical would be needed to affect him—indeed, he was
uncertain whether or not he could be affected. But soon he felt a languorous
sensation that made his eyelids droop and stilled the trembling caused by the
asuero powder. When he opened his eyes, the sight of the naked Sylvana pierced
him: it was as if an essential color had all along been missing from his
portrait of her. Staring at her through the doubled lens of truth and love, he
knew her coldness, her cunning and duplicity; yet he perceived these flaws in
the way he might have perceived the fracture planes inside a crystal, how they
channeled the light to create a lovely illusion of depth and complexity. Faint
with desire, he walked over to the bed. A branching of bluish veins spread from
the tops of her breasts, twined together and vanished beneath the diamond in
the hollow of her throat, as if deriving sustenance from the stone; a tiny mole
lay like a drop of obsidian by the corner of her lips. Carefully, knowing she
could never truly love him, yet willing to risk his life to have her love this
one and false time, he stretched out a hand and clamped it over Sylvana’s
mouth, while with the other hand he gripped her shoulder hard. Her eyes shot
open, she squealed and kicked and clawed. He held her firmly, waiting for the
chemistry of love to take effect. But it did not. Astounded, he examined his
fingertips. They were dry, and he realized that in his urgency to know love he
had exhausted the potency of his touch. He was full of despair, knowing he
would have to flee the city...but then Sylvana’s struggles ceased. The panic in
her eyes softened, and she drew him into an embrace, whispering that her
fearful reaction was due to the shock of being awakened so roughly, that she
had been hoping for this moment ever since they had met. And with the power of
truth which—though diminished by the truth of love—still allowed him a modicum of
clear sight; the arcevoalo saw that, indeed, she had been hoping for this
moment. She seemed charged with desire, overwhelmed by a passion no less ardent
than his. But when he entered her, sinking into her plush warmth, he felt a
nugget of chill against his belly; he knew it was the diamond bound by its
silken thread, yet he could not help thinking of it as a node of her
quintessential self that not even love could dissolve.

Some
hours later, after the power of truth had been drained from the arcevoalo, Sylvana
spoke to him. “Leave me,” she said. “I have no more use for you.” She was
standing by the open door, smiling at him; the threads of her telltale jewels
dangled from her right hand.

“What
do you mean?” he asked. “What use have you made of me?” He was shocked by the
wealth of cruelty in her smile, by her transformation from the voluptuous, the
soft, into this glacial creature with glittering eyes.

She
laughed—a thin, hard laugh that seemed to chart the jagged edge of such a
vengeful thought. “I’ve never known such a fool,” she said. “It’s hard to
believe you’re even a man. I wondered if I’d have to drag you into my bed.”

Again
she laughed, and, suddenly afraid, the arcevoalo pulled on his clothes and ran,
her derisive laughter chasing him down the hall and out into the dove-gray dawn
of Sangue do Lume, whose machines were already beginning to restore a
fraudulent perfection to its flaking walls.

*
* * *

All that day the arcevoalo kept
to his room in the Valverde house. He knew he should leave the city before
Sylvana called down judgment upon him, but he found that he could not leave
her, no matter how little affection she had for him. He understood now the
nature of love, its blurred, irrational compulsions, its torments and its joys,
and he doubted it would ever loosen its grip on him. But understanding it had
made his choice no easier, and so perhaps he did not entirely understand,
perhaps he did not see that love enforces its own continuum of choices, even
upon an inhuman celebrant. There was no end to his confusion. One moment he
would feel drawn back to the jungle, the next he would wonder how he could have
considered such a reckless course. At dusk his reverie alternated between a
perception of formless urges and a sequence of memories in which Joao Merin
Nascimento staggered through a green hell, his brain afire and death a poisoned
sugar clotting his veins. Night fell, and having some frail hope that Sylvana
would do nothing, that things might go on as before, the arcevoalo left the
house and walked toward the main square.

Though
it was no holiday, though no fete had been scheduled, of all the beautiful
nights in Sangue do Lume, this night came the closest to perfection, marred
only by the whining of the machines functioning at peak levels. In the square
the palm crowns flickered like green torches beneath an unequaled array of
stars, and beams of light from the window shone like benedictions upon the
fountain, whose spouts cast up sprays of silver droplets that fell to the ear
as a cascade of guitar notes. Against the backdrop of gray stones and white
stucco, the graceful attitudes of the young men and women, strolling and
dueling, lost in a haze of mutual admiration, seemed a tapestry come to life.
Even the arcevoalo’s grim mood was brightened by the scene, but on drawing near
the group of young men gathered about Orlando, on hearing Orlando’s boastful
voice, his mood darkened once again.

“..
.his blessing to Sylvana and I,” Orlando was saying. “We’ll be wed during the
Festival of Erzulie.”

The
arcevoalo pushed through the group of listeners and confronted Orlando, too
enraged to speak. Orlando put a hand on his shoulder. “My friend!” he said.
“Great news!” But the arcevoalo struck his hand aside and said, “Your news is a
lie! You will never marry her!”