“I have a
question for you, Lord Agenor!” Beheim shouted, ramming the
forked end more tightly against the old man’s throat. “Do
you hear!”
There was a
slight diminution of the old man’s struggles.
“Listen to
me! For the Family has need of your witness! Our enemies beset us! We
are sorely pressed! What shall we do? Shall we remain in our old
fastnesses, or shall we go into the East and make a new home there?”
Agenor ceased
his struggling, shaking with the processes of the flames, his face
now a black ruin, shattered textures and planes of carbonized tissue,
some bits shining like fresh fractures of anthracite, others bearing
traces of color from some baked fluid or another, some yield of vein
or gristle. His eyes were gone, boiled away beneath hardened black
crescents. The branch piercing his neck was aflame, as was the forked
branch that held him.
And yet he
spoke.
The first words
were hopelessly garbled. Beheim, astounded, ordered him to repeat
them.
“Soo . . .
ooo,” Agenor said, growling the syllables; he repeated them
several times, then succeeded in pronouncing an entire word, sounding
each syllable separately “Su . . . ma . . .
rin . . . da. A town . . . on the river
Maha . . . degraded by his torn throat into a guttural
snarl; but after a pause he said, “Mahakam. You must . . .
upriver. Six days.” Smoke trickled from his mouth; a dark clot
of blood welled forth and sizzled on his chin. After that he spoke
with less effort and distortion. “Six days . . .
by boat. Then three days’ walk. Go south and east. To a hill. A
high . . . hill. Mahogany trees. A stand of mahogany
among . . . lesser trees. Facing a saddle . . .
a saddleback mountain. Across a valley.”
“Where is
this place?” Alexandra asked, but so softly that Beheim was
forced to repeat the question.
“Borneo,”
came the response.
“What
then?” Beheim shouted. “What will happen?”
“Build
there,” Agenor rasped. “Build deep. Then there is peace
for a thousand years.”
Another gout of
blood, thick as stew, spilled from his mouth and was instantly
transformed into smoke and a sticky residue.
“What do
you mean, ‘build deep’?”
“A
house . . . escape tunnels beneath. Rooms. Armories.
Store . . . houses. If trouble comes . . .
you will need . . . these things.”
“And
Europe? What of the Family in Europe?”
From Agenor’s
tormented throat issued a terrible, hoarse, declining wail that
seemed to Beheim an answer on its own. “A hundred years. Banat
in ruins.” He said more, a broken cascade of gravelly
syllables, but it was incomprehensible.
“Ask him
whether we—” Alexandra began, but Beheim cut in, saying,
“Let him die.”
“He is
dead already,” she said. “Use him. Ask him the question
you must ask so that when we leave this place, we do so secure in our
hearts as to the future the two of us must face.”
Her expression
was tense and worried; the ends of her hair lifted from her
shoulders. Reflected fire danced in her eyes.
He nodded. “As
you wish.” He turned to Agenor, a charred mummy pinned by a
black two-fingered hand, and said, “What of Alexandra and me?
What lies ahead for us? What should we do?”
“Su . . .
marin . . . da.”
“Are you
saying we must go there?”
“Your only
hope,” Agenor said. “There is danger everywhere. Do not
linger at the castle. Go . . . into the East. To
Sumarinda.”
“Now?”
asked Beheim, incredulous.
“Now,”
said Agenor, making the word into a whispery howl. “You will
have your triumph. Your day. Do not hes . . .
hesitate. Go now.”
Beheim tossed
the forked branch into the woods and stepped away, drawing Alexandra
with him, as Agenor pitched onto his side and lay at the verge of the
pit. One of his legs, utterly carbonized, had snapped, and he clawed
at the dirt, trying to pull himself along, making very little
progress. Smoke leaked from the splits in his skin. The needles upon
which he was lying burst into flame.
“There’s
more to ask!” Alexandra said, clutching at Beheim as he moved
away from the pit, searching for a stake with which to finish Agenor.
“What?”
he said. “How long will we live? Will we win at love? I doubt
he could tell us much. He only offers possibilities. Let’s kill
him and get on with supplying our own answers. It seems we have a
great deal to talk about.”
There was a
splash; they glanced back to find that Agenor had fallen into the
pit. A veil of steam was rising from the water, obscuring the trees
behind it. Agenor was floating, half-submerged, become a figure of
almost unrelieved black, his skin crispy and bubbled and ridged, his
arms beating ineffectually. An ugly black one-legged doll nearly the
size of a man. Thin smoke was lifting from him, the inner meat still
burning. Bubbling noises came from his lipless scar of a mouth.
“Damn!”
said Beheim, realizing that he would have to go down into the water
in order to finish him, and not at all sure that he wanted to do
that.
Agenor was
spinning slowly, as if taken by an idle current, and this bewildered
Beheim, seeming contrary to physical laws.
Then something
happened still more contrary to the expected.
The water
immediately surrounding Agenor began to gleam—he might have
been leaking some spectacular silver fluid—forming an outline
around his body, and from the splits in his skin, a fine radiance
began to shine forth, a pale silvery effusion that grew brighter and
brighter, the separate beams growing distinct in the gloom of the
pit, until it appeared that a Hellish core had been exposed deep
within that charred shell. The water lapped with increasing force at
the walls of the pit, slopping higher, bringing down clods of dirt.
The light waxed more brilliant yet. It looked as if stars were being
born in the moribund flesh, and soon the flesh started to flake away,
in peels, in slices, as if Agenor were being filleted. Not long
thereafter the organs and intestines became visible, steeped in
light, packed neatly in their cavities, all the intimate horrors of
an ordinary life. The light inspired them to a kind of excellent
decay; they lost shape, pulped, their substance flowed into a
greenish sludge that mingled with the water, and at last the skeleton
was left enveloped in a lozenge of shadow, rather like the shadow of
a coffin. No common rack of bones, this—a construct of silvery
wires set with nine points of incandescent brilliance, resembling the
map of a constellation that one might find in a guide to the heavens,
though the quadrant of the sky in which this constellation ruled was
unknown to Beheim.
The water
seethed and lashed about, and the bones of the skeleton began to
drift apart, as if the last of the cartilage were dissolving, the
joints losing their hold, making of it a silver puzzle of stars and
bones that whirled about in the troubled water, moving to its own
rhythms, its own turbulence, and then even these fragments
experienced a dissolution, the silvery stuff of their essence
blurring and conjoining with the less lambent fluid of the water,
until at the last there was a tossing pewter-colored sea within the
pit, like an element of a miniature storm.
Beheim thought
it was over, but then a bassy humming vibration issued from the pit,
trembling the ground beneath his feet. Alarmed, he yanked Alexandra
back from the edge and they moved timorously upslope toward the
shelter of the pines. The humming grew louder, its dark note seeming
to dim the sun, to spread new depths of shadow from the boughs that
overhung the clearing, and with an explosiveness like that of a
volcano breaching the earth, the force of it knocking Beheim and
Alexandra onto their backs, whatever remained in the pit flew upward
in a beam of gleaming stuff . . . not fluid, not
solid, but having the qualities of both, a wide flood of Agenor’s
essential things streaming into the heavens, becoming paler and paler
against the light, and as the humming died, contriving a curious
shape in the upper reaches of the sky, a vague shadowy figure, an
emblem of some sort—or so Beheim thought of it—a sigil,
the imprint of some cryptic meaning too intricate to hold in the mind
except as symbol, very like the symbol he recalled seeing in his
mind’s eye upon hearing the song of his blood, and he wondered
now if the grand design that particular shape had seemed to signify
had only been the promise of this terrible death. It hung motionless
for several seconds, maintaining its smoky form against the tuggings
of the wind, and then, with no further ado, it faded utterly from the
earth.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
T
hey had expected to find nothing in the pit, but when they looked,
they discovered that the dirt walls were flecked with bits of tissue,
nuggets of bone, sticky lumps that might have been congealed blood,
and this caused them to wonder even more at what they had witnessed,
to doubt its reality, though to what degree they should doubt it was
yet another problematic matter; it also caused them to shy away from
each other for a time—to have seen what they had made them
painfully aware of their natures, and the idea that they each had
such a death inside them, such a pyrotechnic and unwholesome
potential, did nothing to encourage intimacy. Beheim was particularly
unsettled by the experience. He kept staring at his hands and
expecting to see silver bones and phosphorescent stars, wondering
what more he would come to learn about this unfathomable life within
him, and when he turned his eyes to Alexandra, instead of finding
consolation in her beauty, he thought of what Agenor must have seen,
his very mind on fire, staring out through the flesh of his
tormentors into a spiraling future of jungle rivers and small brown
men and steamy tropical towns, and how he must have felt knowing that
his vision, the key, perhaps, to their eternities, was the agonizing
engine of his oblivion.
They idled about
for quite some time, speaking infrequently, and as the sun dropped
below the pine tops—four o’clock or a little later,
Beheim reckoned—they sat down facing one another beneath a tall
pine at the edge of the woods, a few hundred yards from the castle
walls. A wind lifted the boughs, and that wind was the only sound, a
silky rush that infused his agitated thought with a cool trickle of
calmness.
“There’s
no reason we have to go back at all,” Alexandra said. “We’ve
enough of the drug to last a good while. I have Felipe’s
journal. There’ll be no difficulty in making more.”
“What of
the Patriarch?” he asked.
“It’s
not him we have to fear. He may well have forgotten about us by now.
For the time being, anyway. It’s the Agenors and the Valeas.
Roland’s friends. And Felipe’s. They won’t act at
once. Chances are they won’t find out what’s happened
until everyone’s gone home. But sooner or later they’ll
decide to do something.”
“Then
you’re right,” he said. “We shouldn’t go
back.”
She made a
delicate noise, one he took to signal uncertainty.
“What’s
wrong?”
“Nothing,”
she said. “Everything. I don’t know.” She picked up
a pine needle, poked it against the back of her hand, snapping it.
“I’m just not sure about any of this.”
“About
me?”
“You, yes.
And me. And everything else.”
“Do you
doubt the credibility of Agenor’s Illumination?”
“I’d
give anything to be able to deny its credibility. But how can I? The
fact is, I understand it all too well.”
“What do
you mean?”
Alexandra
shifted, sat cross-legged, smoothed her skirt down over her legs.
“We’re to go to this place halfway round the world,
this . . . what was the name?”
“Sumarinda.”
“Yes,
Sumarinda. And we’re to proceed into the jungle, build there,
make a life there. Protected. Distant from everything.”
“So it
appears.”
“Can you
imagine anyone else you’ve met in the Family picking up and
going off to Borneo? Even if they knew it was because of knowledge
gained during an Illumination, knowledge that would save them?”
He considered
this. “A handful, perhaps.”
“But
we
have
to go,” she said. “And we’ll be
alone. Eventually others may come. Perhaps others yet will come
hunting us. But we’ll be alone for a long time. Most of the
Family will never leave the old ground. They’d rather die . . .
and they will.”
“You’re
frightened of being isolated?”
“Aren’t
you?”
“It’s
different for me. I’ve never felt secure within the Family.
I’ve always had a feeling of isolation.”
For a few
seconds she concentrated on tracing a design in the dirt with her
forefinger, then rubbing it out. “You know,” she said,
“if he had worked it all out in advance, Agenor couldn’t
have engineered a better result. This is the best he could hope
for—to seed a new colony.”
“Perhaps
that’s exactly what he did.”
“Can you
believe that, having gone through what we just have?”
“The old
bastard was lucky, I suppose. But you never know. Perhaps he merely
weakened at the end. It might be that his scheme had gained too much
momentum for any personal failure to affect it. At any rate, you’re
right. He achieved everything he ever wanted. He succeeded in
becoming a martyr, and his dream came true.”
“It might
come true,” she said. “Then again, it might not.”
She lowered her
head, and a slant of sunlight fell across her hair, bringing up the
reddish highlights. He studied the long white curve of her neck, how
it glided up to form her chin, down to the slope of her breast. There
was, he thought, no end to that line. It was all through her, a
single gliding, graceful premise. It would be easy to forget
everything else except that line. And that, he realized, was as close
as he would come this day to a decision. He pushed up to his feet,
dusted off his trousers.