The Best of Lucius Shepard (37 page)

It
may have been that Orlando thought his friend was still trying to protect him
from a loveless marriage, for he said, “Don’t worry—”

“It’s
I who made love to her last night,” the arcevoalo cut in. “And it’s I who’ll
marry her.”

Orlando
reached for his cintral, whose green tendrils were dangling over the edge of
the fountain; but he hesitated. Perhaps it was friendship that stayed his hand,
or perhaps he believed that arcevoalo’s friendship was so great that he would
lie and risk a duel to prevent the marriage.

Then
a woman laughed—a thin derisive laugh.

The
arcevoalo turned and saw Sylvana and Caudez standing a dozen feet away. Hanging
from a gold chain about Sylvana’s neck was her telltale emerald, its blackness
expressing the malefic use she had made of her body the previous night. Caudez
was smiling, a crescent of white teeth showing forth from this thicket of a
beard.

*
* * *

Finally convinced that his
friend had told the truth, Orlando’s face twisted into an aggrieved knot,
displaying his humiliation and pain. He picked up the cintral and lashed out at
the arcevoalo. The sharp tendrils slithered through the air like liquid green
swords; but at the last second—recognizing their ally—they veered aside,
spasmed, and drooped lifelessly from Orlando’s hand. His mind a boil of rage,
unable by logic to direct his anger toward his true enemy, the arcevoalo
plucked a knife from a bystander’s sash and plunged it deep into Orlando’s
chest. As Orlando toppled onto his back, a hush fell over the assemblage, for
never had they witnessed a death more beautiful than that of the Valverde’s
eldest son. The palms inclined their spiky heads, the fountain wept tears of
crystalline music. Orlando’s features acquired a noble rectitude they had not
had in life; his blood shone with a saintly radiance and appeared to be
spelling out a new language of poetry over the cobblestones.

“Now!”
cried Caudez do Tuscanduva, his black eyes throwing off glints that were no
reflections but sparks of an inner fire banked high. “Now has the great wrong
done my father by the House of Valverde been avenged! And not by my hand!”

Murmurs
of admiration for the subtlety of his vengeance spread through the crowd. But
the arcevoalo—gone cold with the horror of his act, full of self-loathing at
having allowed himself to be manipulated— advanced upon Caudez and Sylvana, his
knife at the ready.

“Kill
him!” shouted Caudez, exhorting the young men. “I have no quarrel with his
choice of victims, but he has struck down a man whose weapon failed him. Such
cowardice must not go unpunished!”

And
the young men, who had always suspected the arcevoalo of being lowborn and thus
had no love for him, ranged themselves in front of Caudez and Sylvana, posing a
barrier of grim faces and shining knives.

When
men refer to the arcevoalo, they speak not only of the one who stood then
beside the fountain, but also of his incarnations, and they will tell you that
none of these ever fought so bravely in victory as did their original in defeat
that night in Sangue do Lume. Fueled by the potentials of hatred and love
(though that love had been mingled with bitterness), he spun and leaped, living
in a chaos of agonized faces and flowers of blood blooming on silk blouses; and
while the sad music of the fountain evolved into a skirling tantara, he left
more than twenty dead in his wake, cutting a path toward Caudez and Sylvana. He
received wounds that would have killed a man yet merely served to goad him on.
and utilizing all his moon-given elusiveness, he avoided the most consequential
of the young men’s thrusts. In the end, however, there were too many young men,
too many knives, and, weakening, he knew he would not be able to reach the
governor and his daughter.

There
came a moment of calm in the storm of battle, a moment when nine of the young
men had hemmed the arcevoalo in against the fountain. Others waited their
chance behind them. They were wary of him now, yet confident, and they all wore
one expression: the dogged, stuporous expression that comes with the
anticipation of a slaughter. Their unanimity weakened the arcevoalo further,
and he thought it might be best to lay his weapon down and accept his fate. The
young men sidled nearer, shifting their knives from hand to hand; the music of
the fountain built to a glorious crescendo of trumpets and guitars, and the
pale, beautiful bodies of the dead enmeshed in a lacework of blood seemed to be
entreating the arcevoalo, tempting him to join them in their eternal poise. But
in the next moment he spotted Caudez smiling at him between the shoulders of
his adversaries, and Sylvana laughing at his side. That sight rekindled the
arcevoalo’s rage. With an open-throated scream, choosing his target in a flash
of poignant bitterness, he hurled his knife. The blade whirled end over end,
accumulating silver fire, growing brighter and brighter until its hilt sprouted
from Sylvana’s breast. Before anyone could take note of the artful character of
her death, she sank beneath the feet of the milling defenders, leaving Caudez
to stare in horror at the droplets of her blood stippling his chest. And then,
seizing the opportunity provided by the young men’s consternation, the
arcevoalo ran from the square, through the flawless streets and into the
Favelin, past the hovel where Ana and his unborn son awaited an unguessable
future in the light of her dying god. He clambered over the gray metal wall and
sprinted into the jungle.

Such
was the efficacy of the city’s machines that even the natural beauty of the moonlit
jungle had been enhanced. It seemed to the arcevoalo that he was passing
through an intricate design of silver and black, figured by the glowing eyes of
those creatures who had come forth from hiding to honor his return. Despite his
wounds, his panic, he had a sense of homecoming, of peacefulness and dominion.
He came at length to a mountaintop east of Sangue do Lume and paused there to
catch his breath. His muscles urged him onward, but his thoughts—heavy with the
poisons of murder and betrayal—were a sickly ballast holding him in place. At
any second, ships would arrow up from the city to track him, and he thought now
that he would welcome them.

But
as he stood there, grieving and empty of hope, a shadow obscured the stars: a
great rippling field of shadow that swooped down and wrapped him in its filmy,
almost weightless folds. He felt himself lifted and borne eastward and—after
what could have been no more than a matter of seconds—gently lowered to earth.
Through the dim opacity of the folds, he made out a high canopy of leaves and
branches, silvery shafts of moonlight, and a bed of ferns. He could feel the
creature merging with him, its folds becoming fibrous, gradually thickening to
a husk, and—recalling the darkness that had passed from him at birth— he
realized that this incomprehensible shadow was the death that had been born
with him, had haunted all his nights, and had come at last to define the shape
of his life.

The
world dwindled to a dark green vibration, and with half his soul he yearned
toward the pleasures of the city, toward love, toward all the sweet futilities
of the human condition. But with the other half he exulted in the knowledge
that his purpose had been achieved, that he had understood the nature of man.
And (a final intuition) he knew that someday, long after he had decayed into a
clay of old memories, just as it had with the bones of Joao Merin Nascimento,
the jungle would breed from his bones a new creature, who—guided by his
understanding— would make of love a weapon and of war a passion, and would
bring inspired tactics to the eternal game. This knowledge gave him a measure
of happiness, but that was soon eroded by his fear of what lay—or did not
lie—ahead.

Something
nudged the outside of the thickening husk. The arcevoalo peered out, straining
to see, and spied the ruby eyes of a malgaton peering in at him, come to give
him the comfort of dreams. Grateful, not wanting to feel the snip of death’s
black scissors, he concentrated on those strange pupils, watching them shift
and dissolve and grow spidery, and then it was as if he were running again,
running in the joyful way he had before he had reached Sangue do Lume, running
in a harmony of green light and birds, in a wind that sang like a harp on fire,
in a moment that seemed to last forever and lead beyond to other lives.

<>

*
* * *

Shades

This little gook cadre with a
pitted complexion drove me through the heart of Saigon—I couldn’t relate to it
as Ho Chi Minh City—and checked me into the Hotel Heroes of Tet, a place that
must have been quietly elegant and very French back in the days when philosophy
was discussed over Cointreau rather than practiced in the streets, but now was
filled with cheap production-line furniture and tinted photographs of Uncle Ho.
Glaring at me, the cadre suggested I would be advised to keep to my room until
I left for Cam Le; to annoy him I strolled into the bar, where a couple of
Americans—reporters, their table laden with notebooks and tape cassettes—were
drinking shots from a bottle of George Dickel. “How’s it goin?” I said, ambling
over. “Name’s Tom Puleo. I’m doin’ a piece on Stoner for
Esquire.”

The
bigger of them—chubby, red-faced guy about my age, maybe thirty-five,
thirty-six—returned a fishy stare; but the younger one, who was thin and tanned
and weaselly handsome, perked up and said, “Hey, you’re the guy was in Stoner’s
outfit, right?” I admitted it, and the chubby guy changed his attitude. He put
on a welcome-to-the-lodge smile, stuck out a hand, and introduced himself as Ed
Fierman,
Chicago Sun-Times.
His pal, he said, was Ken Witcover, CNN.

They
tried to draw me out about Stoner, but I told them maybe later, that I wanted
to unwind from the airplane ride, and we proceeded to do damage to the whiskey.
By the time we’d sucked down three drinks, Fierman and I were into some heavy
reminiscence. Turned out he had covered the war during my tour and knew my old
top. Witcover was cherry in Vietnam, so he just tried to look wise and to laugh
in the right spots. It got pretty drunk at that table. A security
cadre—fortyish, cadaverous gook in yellow fatigues—sat nearby, cocking an ear
toward us, and we pretended to be engaged in subversive activity, whispering
and drawing maps on napkins. But it was Stoner who was really on all our minds,
and Fierman—the drunkest of us—finally broached the subject, saying, “A machine
that traps ghosts! It’s just like the gooks to come up with something that
goddamn worthless!”

Witcover
shushed him, glancing nervously at the security cadre, but Fierman was beyond
caution. “They coulda done humanity a service,” he said, chuckling. “Turned
alla Russians into women or something. But, nah! The gooks get behind
worthlessness. They may claim to be Marxists, but at heart they still wanna be
inscrutable.”

“So,”
said Witcover to me, ignoring Fierman, “when you gonna fill us in on Stoner?”

I
didn’t care much for Witcover. It wasn’t anything personal; I simply wasn’t
fond of his breed: compulsively neat (pencils lined up, name inscribed on every
possession), edgy, on the make. I disliked him the way some people dislike
yappy little dogs. But I couldn’t argue with his desire to change the subject.
“He was a good soldier,” I said.

Fierman
let out a mulish guffaw. “Now that,” he said, “that’s what I call in-depth
analysis.”

Witcover
snickered.

“Tell
you the truth”—I scowled at him, freighting my words with malice—”I hated the
son of a bitch. He had this young-professor air, this way of lookin’ at you as
if you were an interestin’ specimen. And he came across pure phony. Y’know, the
kind who’s always talkin’ like a black dude, sayin’ ‘right on’ and shit, and
sayin’ it all wrong.”

“Doesn’t
seem much reason for hating him,” said Witcover, and by his injured tone, I
judged I had touched a nerve. Most likely he had once entertained soul-brother
pretensions.

“Maybe
not. Maybe if I’d met him back home, I’d have passed him off as a creep and
gone about my business. But in combat situations, you don’t have the energy to
maintain that sort of neutrality. It’s easier to hate. And anyway, Stoner could
be a genuine pain in the ass.”

“How’s
that?” Fierman asked, getting interested.

“It
was never anything unforgivable; he just never let up with it. Like one time a
bunch of us were in this guy Gurney’s hooch, and he was tellin’ ‘bout this
badass he’d known in Detroit. The cops had been chasin’ this guy across the
rooftops, and he’d missed a jump. Fell seven floors and emptied his gun at the
cops on the way down. Reaction was typical. Guys sayin’ ‘Wow’ and tryin’ to
think of a story to top it. But Stoner he nods sagely and says, ‘Yeah, there’s
a lot of that goin’ around.’ As if this was a syndrome to which he’s devoted
years of study. But you knew he didn’t have a clue, that he was too upscale to
have met anybody like Gurney’s badass.” I had a slug of whiskey. “ ‘There’s a
lot of that goin’ around’ was a totally inept comment. All it did was to bring
everyone down from a nice buzz and make us aware of the shithole where we
lived.”