The Golden (32 page)

“He
instructed me as to his requirements.”

“But the
fact that Agenor is the murderer . . . he can’t
have known. He might consider tempering his judgment.”

“No, he
would not.” She put up a hand to forestall another question.
“He is with me in some fashion. How this is done, I do not
know. But he is with me. He hears what I hear, he makes his wishes
clear.”

“Does he
speak to you?” Beheim asked, his curiosity piqued. “Do
you hear his voice in your mind?”

“It’s
not like that. I simply know his will.” She spread her hands in
a gesture of helplessness. “I can give you no clearer
explanation.”

Something else
occurred to Beheim. “Was the Patriarch with you a moment ago?”

“That’s
difficult to say. Perhaps. I assume so.”

“Then
perhaps I should assume that was his wish, too. What you did.”

“What
we
did,” she said, a frown line etched in her brow. “No, it
was my wish. Our wish.”

The pines
encircling the clearing shivered; the circle of light in their midst
fluttered at the edges, making Beheim think of a peculiar glowing,
agitated creature he had seen once through a microscope at the
Sorbonne.

“You
mustn’t doubt everything,” Alexandra said.

A hollow,
muffled voice sounded from beneath the shutter, its tone one of
complaint.

Beheim paid it
only passing attention; he turned toward the castle, ragged slants of
its dark gray matter visible through the branches. “Oh?”

She came up
behind him, touched his waist. “You should take some things at
face value. If I were your enemy, you would not have survived our
kiss.”

Agenor’s
voice again, louder, unintelligible.

“As I
recall,” Beheim said, “it was I who held the upper hand.”

“You’re
strong for one so new,” she said. “And you’ve grown
stronger for all that has happened. Strength is to a degree a
question of the will, and your will has matured a great deal during
the past day and night. But I am stronger than you.” A pause.
“Shall I prove it?”

“No.”

A pounding on
the iron shutter preceded a slight dimming of the sun.

“Why . . .”
he began; then said, “Never mind.”

“Why do I
fancy you? Is that what you want to know?” She moved away from
him, stepping out toward the center of the clearing, and when she
spoke again, there was an edge to her voice. “I believe that
Agenor was right about you. Eventually you’re going to be quite
a powerful figure. That attracts me.”

“Politics,
eh? That’s all it is?”

“You’re
the one asking difficult questions. Don’t expect honeyed
answers. Those I’ve already given you. If you’re too deaf
to have heard them, too blind to see what I am offering, it’ll
do no good for me to try to enlighten you further.”

They stared
defiantly at one another while Agenor’s pounding grew louder
and more sustained.

If he could not
trust her, he thought, if he could not trust himself, what was the
use in going on? Sooner or later he would have to put his faith in
someone, risk everything, and she was the only one he had ever
trusted, even for a moment. Agenor he had feared, revered, imitated.
But never trusted. He stepped toward her, ready to start over, but
she backed away.

“Not so
fast,” she said flatly. “It takes me a while.”

“Look, I’m
sorry, I—”

“No
apologies,” she said; she pushed the fall of her hair back
behind her ears. “I don’t need your apology. I understand
how it is with you. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. It
just takes me a while to make this kind of accommodation.”

She turned away
from him, gazing off into the woods.

Feeling
half-rejected, Beheim discovered, was no more pleasant than
straightforward rejection. The pounding on the shutter began to grate
on his nerves, and finally he said, “Oh, Hell! What do you
want?” and heaved at the shutter so that a few inches of the
water beneath were exposed. He heard a furious splashing—Agenor
retreating to the far end of the pit—and was ashamed for having
gotten angry.

“What is
it?” he asked, unable to rid his voice of annoyance.

A feeble splash,
a hoarse exhalation.

“Are you
in pain?” Beheim asked, dropping to his knees.

“Yes,”
Agenor said. “But the darkness is healing.”

The silence that
followed seemed to be flowing up from the blackness of the pit, from
the shadowy fathom beneath the shining strip of water.

Beheim felt
unequal to the moment. “What shall I do?” he asked. “I
can see nothing for you at the end of this but death.”

A long pause,
then a sloshing sound, as if Agenor were moving his arms in the
water.

Beheim said,
“Shall I take you back to the castle? After dark, I mean.”

“After
dark?”

Was there a
hopeful note in Agenor’s voice?

“In that
instance I would, of course, send to the castle for an escort,”
said Beheim.

“Of
course.” Another pause. “And is there an alternative?”

“If
returning to the castle is not to your liking, then we would . . .
finish things here. Lady Alexandra is serving as the Patriarch’s
agent. She would witness all you might tell us.”

“I see.”
More stirring and sloshing.

Beheim pictured
Agenor making idle waves in the darkness, mulling things over.

“Michel,”
said Agenor, “will you come down to me? I would see you again
before”—he let out a sodden chuckle—“before
we finish things.”

“No, lord,
I will not.”

“I
understand, my boy. I understand completely.”

“I’m
sorry.”

“Not at
all. It was a foolish request.”

There was a
silence; then, to Beheim’s astonishment, laughter came from the
pit—slow, sly, private laughter such as might have been sounded
by a man alone in his study, delighted by a secret joke. It unnerved
him to hear it.

“What if
I’ve been wrong?” said Agenor, and laughed again. “What
if I have been wrong?”

“Lord?”

“You will
put me to the question, Michel, will you not?”

“If you
wish.”

“I’m
certain you know what questions to ask.”

“I do.”

“Then I
don’t suppose there’s any reason to delay things,”
Agenor said; after the passage of a few seconds, he added, “I’m
getting cold.”

Beheim could
find no words of comfort. There was a heaviness in his chest such as
one feels prior to the onset of tears, but his eyes were dry, and he
did not believe he would shed many tears for Agenor. He no longer was
secure in his conception of the man; those things he thought he had
known about him had all proved flimsy and untrustworthy.

Then there was
the Golden.

Despite the
permissiveness and violence of his new life, he was still enough of a
man—a policeman, at any rate—to be revolted by this
particular crime, to harbor a moral distaste for the incredible
vulgarity of its license.

Yet he was not
without emotion where Agenor was concerned. Some of his memories of
the old man were proof against all that had happened; he could not
believe that the moments they represented were every one of them
empty, worthless, bereft of the good truths they had seemed at the
time to embody.

Alexandra’s
hand fell to his shoulder, giving him a start. The weight consoled
him, and he put his own hand over hers.

“Do you
know,” said Agenor with a trace of his old air of professorial
good nature, “that you two will be the first of our Family ever
to witness an Illumination? Previously those who oversaw the ritual
were forced to stand in a dark place where they could hear the
answers to their questions. But you . . . you will see
everything. It’s quite spectacular. At least so I’ve
heard from servants who’ve borne witness.”

A tremor in his
voice belied the casual tenor of his words.

“Quite an
opportunity,” Agenor murmured. “You must be sure
to . . .” The sentence ended in an exhausted
sigh; apparently he had no more energy for self-delusion.

“Let this
be a lesson to you, my friend,” he said. This was followed by a
harsh noise—laughter or sob, Beheim could not be sure. Then in
a firmer tone, as if he had recalled that he was speaking to a wider
audience: “A lesson to you all. We need no great enemies, no
bloody men with stakes and torches, so long as we have ourselves. So
long as we have the strength to claw at our own hearts.”

He stirred about
for several seconds. The water at Beheim’s end of the pit
rippled and slapped against the bank of black soil.

“You must
put the questions forcefully,” Agenor said. “Shout them
if necessary. I will be in great pain, and you will have to make me
hear you. Once I do, I will fasten onto them as though they were
ropes that might haul me up from the fire. That is how I’ve
heard it proceeds. Felipe held the view that the questioning
triggered some mental process, possibly one akin to those exercised
by Hindu yogis, that made the pain more tolerable. An alteration of
the brain chemistry, perhaps. I find myself hoping that his opinion
was accurate.”

Beheim, moved by
a feeling of uneasiness, a product—he assumed—of his
conflicting tempers, was tempted to heave the iron shutter aside and
have done with it.

“One
envies the Christians at moments like these,” Agenor said. “To
yearn toward Heaven with one’s dying breath, to strain for a
glimpse of whiteness, for the perfumed fantasy of a loving God.
Ignorance is a powerful consolation. It is no solace to know that the
fall is endless. Ah, well!” He splashed about, muttering
something that Beheim failed to catch. “Michel, I cannot ask
that you think well of me, but I hope in the days to come you will
remember the things I have tried to impress upon you and take them to
heart. They may have been spoken by a fool, but there is nevertheless
some virtue in the words.”

“I will
remember,” Beheim said solemnly.

“Then”—another
sigh, more, it seemed, a clearing of the lungs, a preparation for the
painful trial ahead, than an expression of despair—“then
I am ready.”

Chapter
Twenty-Four

B
eheim came up into a squat, gripping the edge of the shutter; his
muscles bunched, but he could not bring himself to act.

Alexandra bent
to his ear, whispered, “You are being cruel, not kind. Don’t
make him wait.”

He nodded, he
closed his eyes, he tightened his grip.

Her lips brushed
his temple. “Do it now.”

With a shout
that seemed to release a fierce heat trapped inside him, Beheim
flipped the shutter off to the side of the pit, coming to his feet as
he did. He had a glimpse of Agenor in a corner of the pit, his
scorched head, his fingers grasping the top of the pit, his heels dug
into the soil just above the water level, bunched up, coiled like a
man about to spring.

And spring he
did.

Screaming, he
threw himself at Beheim, striking him with his shoulder at the knees,
knocking him to the ground. Beheim twisted as he fell, landing
heavily on his side. He tried to roll away, but Agenor was on him,
battering at his head with burning hands, then coming astraddle of
him; grabbing him by the neck, squeezing. Framed incongruously by
blue sky and pine boughs, the cracked and blackened oval of his face
was nightmarish: the lips crusted with charred tissue, here and there
a bloody split, like the rind of some vile fruit bursting with
poisonous ripeness; nose reduced to flaps of charcoaled cartilage
that flapped horribly with the passage of his breath; the brow so
ravaged that through the scorched crackling skin could be seen thin
sections of white bone. The teeth, too, were white, revealed in a
grimace or a smile, but the gums were blistered and bleeding. Only
the eyes were clear, and they were the eyes of a madman, bulging and
wild and rimmed with red, making it appear as if someone hale were
peering through a mask of hideous deformity. Beheim could not see the
flames that were consuming Agenor against the bright sky, but the air
around him rippled with heat, and he felt the skin of his neck
blistering beneath the old man’s hands. He thrashed about,
trying to unseat him, but Agenor’s strength was irresistible.
The life was being choked from him. His field of vision was
reddening, black wings trembling at the edges, odd tangles of opaque
cells drifting, vanishing, the air going dark as if it, too, were
being scorched.

Then, out of the
corner of his eye, he saw Alexandra rush forward and jab at Agenor
with a stick. The pine branch with the sharp end, the same with which
he had threatened her. She slammed it into the side of Agenor’s
neck, and it pierced skin, muscle, and cartilage, penetrating deep
with a horrid crunching noise, lodging there like a crudely feathered
arrow. For a split second Beheim did not think it had had any effect,
but then Agenor, without a cry, went sliding out of sight, his weight
suddenly removed from Beheim’s chest, the hands slipping from
his neck. Gasping, coughing, Beheim crawled a few feet away.
Alexandra caught his arm, helped him stand. He spun about, spotted
Agenor staggering up, using the boulder for balance and tugging at
the pine branch piercing his neck, his movements stunned and slow,
like those of a sick animal. Beheim felt no pity for him now, only
rage and the desire to inflict pain. He glanced about the clearing.
Not far to his right was a pine tree whose lowermost branch was seven
or eight feet long and had a forked end. He went over to it and,
using the strength of his rage, wrenched at it, pulled, twisted it
free. Holding it like a spear, he crossed the clearing to Agenor, and
as the old man turned, still tugging at the sharp stick, Beheim
jammed the forked end of the branch against his neck and pushed him
back onto the boulder, pinning him there as one might pin a serpent.
Agenor let out a sibilant cry and tried to wriggle free, but
Alexandra joined Beheim, helped him hold the branch in place, and
though Agenor’s struggles grew frantic, he could not escape.
The pine needles close to his face were burning; his clothes were
burning, his flesh, all enveloped in a pale, rippling envelope of
flame, but the process of immolation was slower than would have been
the case with normal flesh, the erosion of meat and sinew from bone
more gradual, and thus, Beheim supposed, the pain was more brightly
particular and involving. Agenor’s screams seemed evidence of
that, going high, higher, until there was nothing human about them
and they seemed the outcries of a bird or the squeals of a rat. Slabs
of shiny black char split away from his cheek, from the pierced side
of his neck. A large notch had been eaten away from his lower lip,
the gum burned through, and the bone beneath going brown. His shoe
leather had been seared to his feet, so that he appeared to be
wearing special footgear with separate toe sheaths and the laces
embedded in glazed, dark red skin.