Beautiful Blood (8 page)

“There must be something I can do.”

“You might stop in and have a pint now and again. Having you here tones up the place.” She blushed. “And it would please me.”

“Why would you want me around? First I force myself upon you and then…”

“Oh, don’t be thinking that! Maybe that was your view of things, but it weren’t mine. All the girls what worked in the house had an eye for you…and me most of all.”

“I see.”

“I could have done with a little romance, but you heard no complaints from me at the time and you’ll hear none now.”

Perplexed as much by his concern for her as by her forgiving attitude, he said, “If you want me to come around, I will…though I question whether either the moral or spiritual tenor of your establishment will be improved by my presence.”

She apparently didn’t understand his words and simpered to cover her confusion.

“Well.” She rubbed her hands together and beamed. “I need to start me cooking. Folks will be wanting their tucker.”

He would have liked to catch her hand and make some promise, swear an oath to right all wrongs done her, but shame and the fear of a weakness that shame might reveal locked him into a stoic posture, for he had come to think of himself as a hard man and now, recognizing he was not, understanding how drastically he had changed during the past six years, he thought he should try to preserve the impression, at least, of rigor. He lingered a while, keeping an eye on Martita as she moved between the stove, visible through a door at the back end of the bar, and the front room, hoping business would pick up and allow him to make an inconspicuous exit. A few more customers came in, but not enough to provide him with cover. He finished his second pint, gave her a casual wave and went out.

The cool air seemed to illumine him, bringing new and untried emotions to light. He hurried past Hangtown’s shallow, semi-permanent lake, filmed over by algae and scum, glazed with moonlight, realizing how isolated he had become. With Ludie leading a separate existence and Arthur spending every waking hour with the militia, his life had emptied out and, while he consorted with a variety of women and had no end of business acquaintances, he had not sought to replace these losses with relationships of an equivalent depth. In his solitude he’d had time to dwell on regrets and recriminations, and had developed a streak of self-pity; this in turn had created a sentimental side that he despised on principle, yet had come to depend on as a companion to his calculating and brutal nature, taking the place of lovers and friends. Whereas previously the sight of a mother nursing an infant or a small boy playing with a puppy would have barely registered on his consciousness, now these incidences seemed brightly human, striking him as emblematic of the world’s fragility and beauty, often causing his eyes to tear. Yet he knew better than to accept this change at face value and suspected that his reactions were linked to self-interest, perhaps to a renewed apprehension of mortality and a sense that his personal failures were unredeemable.

The thickets buzzed with insignificant life, the tops of the bushes swaying in the strong wind that flowed over Griaule’s back. He pushed into them, proceeding along a partly overgrown trail that led to the dragon’s crest, rising like a shadowy cliff above. He had never envisioned himself with children, yet the revelation that he’d fathered a son, even one stillborn…it was as if a pebble had been dropped into the waters of his soul, one from which ripples continued to spread long after the event, and he could not cease from thinking about the lost potentials of fatherhood. Overcome by frustration, an emotion never rising to the level of grief or rage, affording him no release, he cast his eyes upward. A scatter of stars lay directly above, like a throw of cowrie shells on a fortuneteller’s dark cloth, and he imagined he saw in them a blueprint for action, his life’s path revealed.

“Richard!” A woman’s voice at his rear.

Clad in trousers and a waist-length jacket, Ludie stood half in the spiky shadow of a century plant, considering him with a glum expression. Her presence put him on the alert—under ordinary circumstances, she would never set foot on the dragon—and he asked what she was doing there.

“Protecting my investment,” she said.

Arthur moved out of the bushes to stand behind her, a long-barreled pistol dangling from his right hand. He slipped his free arm about her waist, nudging a breast with his thumb, and grinned.

“I don’t know what you two have in mind,” said Rosacher. “But I advise you to think things over carefully before you act.”

“Oh, we done that,” Arthur said. “We’ve thoroughly analyzed the problem, as you might say.”

“Ask yourself if you’re capable of running the business,” Rosacher said. “You’ve no idea how complicated it is.”

Ludie extricated herself from Arthur’s grasp. “This has nothing to do with whether or not we can run the business. It has everything to do with your incompetence.”

“Incompetence? Are you mad?”

“In the past year demand has outstripped supply for the first time since we began. Between theft and poor management, our profits are down nearly thirty percent from our peak…which was five years ago. You’ve lost your entrepreneurial instincts, Richard. Your enthusiasm for the game.” She folded her arms. “We’ve struck a new agreement with the council. Breque has assured us he can handle day-to-day operations until we find someone to replace you.”

“You’re not qualified to deal with Breque,” Rosacher said. “He’ll have you for breakfast.”

Ludie’s mouth tightened.

“Why do you think he struck such a deal with you?” said Rosacher. “He knows he’ll be able to outmaneuver you if I’m not around.”

“I’m not an idiot. I understand that Breque will move against us.”

“Understanding and doing something about it are different things. You don’t have the focus, Ludie. The discipline. You won’t put in eighteen hours a day when necessary. You’ll be fine at first, but sooner or later you’ll…”

“Arthur.” She urged the giant forward with a gesture—he covered the distance between them in two steps and seized Rosacher by the collar.

“I’ll meet you below,” said Ludie, shooting the cuffs of her blouse. She stared at Rosacher without emotion, then turned abruptly and struck out along the path. Rosacher started to call after her, but Arthur clipped him behind the ear with the butt of his pistol and, once he had recovered from the blow, still dazed, his vision blurry, the moon jolting in and out of view, he found that Arthur was dragging him by his collar through sparse vegetation and over sloping ground, over mattes of vines, the same that partially curtained Griaule’s sides. He twisted about, wanting to see where they were headed, and caught a glimpse of the lights of Teocinte spread thick as stars across the valley and recognized they were above the dragon’s shoulder, very near the point where a man would have to hang onto something in order to keep from falling off the side. He flung himself about, hoping to break Arthur’s grip, but to no avail, and as he cast about for some other means of escape the giant stopped and hauled him erect, holding him by the shirtfront at arm’s length. Rosacher felt the chill tug of gravity and clawed at Arthur’s arm, attempting to determine which tactic would be the most propitious, whether to cajole or threaten. Arthur smiled, the merest tic of a smile and said, “Mind the drop, now,” and released him, simply opening his hand. Rosacher gave a terrified squawk and clutched at Arthur’s sleeve. His feet skidded on the slick surface of a scale and, flailing with his arms, he managed to maintain his balance sufficiently so that he did not go somersaulting backwards off Griaule, but rather pitched forward onto his stomach and slid down the dragon’s side, clutching at the edges of scales, his fingers too weak to find purchase, grabbing at vines, entangling his arm in one, more by accident than anything else, snagging another, continuing to fall, but slowly, slower yet, until he was less falling than lowering himself. To his amazement, he realized that he might not die.

The flat crack of a gunshot and a bullet ricocheted off a scale hard by Rosacher’s elbow. He allowed himself to slip down beyond the curve of Griaule’s ribcage, out of Arthur’s sight, and hung there, doing a half-spin, bumping against a scale the size of a cathedral door, feeling terribly exposed, as might a criminal escaping prison by means of a too-short rope flung over an outer wall. To this point he had merely been reacting, but now he began to think again, albeit in a fragmented way, unmanned by the sight of Morningshade below, its flickering orange lights tiny as fireflies. The vines had been cut back from Cattanay’s mural, otherwise Rosacher might have climbed across the dragon’s side and then shinnied down onto the scaffolding. He could not descend to the valley floor—the longest of the vines ended hundreds of feet above the tallest rooftop—and thus he began inching across the masonry of lichen-dappled scales, moving vine-to-vine toward the shadows beneath the shoulder joint of Griaule’s foreleg, planning to hide there until morning when he would climb up or, if unable to make the ascent, attract the attention of a scalehunter (areas beneath the joints were prime spots in which to find broken or loosened scales). On reaching the area he wove vines together into a makeshift seat, constructing a virtual cage of vines in which he felt relatively stable. This done, he hauled himself tight against the underside of the joint, securing the cage there, lashing it to other vines. Then and only then did he allow himself to catch his breath and take stock.

He could see nothing of his immediate surround, not even scales close enough to touch, yet it seemed that here, tucked beneath what was essentially the dragon’s armpit, he could make out Griaule’s scent—a pervasive cool dryness unalloyed by the lesser odors of vegetation and lichens, like that of an abandoned fortress, a mass of ancient stone tenanted by wind and the ghosts of lizards. The dragon’s moonstruck side curved away like a planet armored in scales, each of considerable size save for a section about thirty feet overhead that appeared to be composed of hundreds of irregularly shaped scales four or five inches in width…or perhaps it was a single scale struck by innumerable blows that had left it cracked, divided by hundreds of fine fissures. If this were the case, the culprit would have likely been someone other than a scalehunter—scalehunters were notorious for their superstitions and their lore was rife with cautionary anecdotes concerning men who had attempted to pry loose a scale or otherwise cause the dragon to suffer a minor bodily insult, and how Griaule had exacted his revenge upon them. Rosacher was in the habit of scoffing at such stories, but now that he was more-or-less alone on the dragon, he could not dismiss them. When seen from his vantage, the beast’s magnitude was no longer quantifiable. “Gargantuan” was too modest a term for a creature that was its own domain. He recalled the night he had ventured into Griaule’s mouth, the army of strange insects sheltering there, the way they had moved in unison, and he understood that assigning a mystical value to the experience was not entirely irrational from a phenomenological standpoint. Thinking about Griaule as a magical figure rekindled his anxieties and, suspended by vines above a five-hundred-foot drop, staring between his feet at the lights of Morningshade, he placed his palm upon a scale and prayed to be kept safe. The prayer was tinged with shame at having surrendered to fear, yet was no less fervent for all that and, though he mentioned no names, was directed toward Griaule. Afterward he chalked it up to a weak moment, yet he felt calmer. He gazed off along the swell of the dragon’s ribcage, soothed by the shimmer of moonlight on the scales, and marveled at his good fortune. Had Arthur pushed him rather than simply letting him go, he would be lying dead and broken in the street below with his every organ ruptured. He was determined to have his revenge and he needed to act swiftly, before his business was imperiled more than it already had been. Further, he would have to do something about Breque. The council had served as an effective buffer between Rosacher and the Church, a function he preferred them to continue for the foreseeable future; yet it might be the time for bold strokes. His position was not as strong as he would have liked (for one thing, he was uncertain how the militia would react if he removed Arthur as their leader; for another he had no idea what steps Breque had taken to protect himself), but he would have surprise on his side and a sufficiency of funds (salted away for just such an emergency). Within a matter of days he could hire assassins and organize their assignments; then he could sit back and orchestrate events. He’d operate out of Martita’s tavern. Should things go awry, he believed he could depend on her to hide him—her dog-loyalty to him had been evident.

A faint noise interrupted the flow of his thoughts and he saw a lanky figure clambering down Griaule’s side: Arthur. The giant had removed his jacket and his white silk shirt rippled with light. He had wrapped a vine about his waist, using his left hand to control his rate of descent and holding his pistol in the right. He stopped about fifty feet above and scanned the area beneath him. Holstering the pistol, he began traversing the dragon, heading in the general direction of the shoulder joint. There was nothing for Rosacher to do except pray and pray he did, initially to a nameless presence, but as Arthur drew nearer the prayers evolved into fervent pleas to Griaule, begging the dragon to distract the giant, to lead him away or cause the vine to snap. Once he had negotiated slightly more than half the distance between them, Arthur drew his pistol and fired two shots into the shadows beneath the joint, both going wide of Rosacher.

“Show yourself!” Arthur called. “I promise to end things quickly!”

Rosacher tried desperately to think of something he could do or say that might extricate him from this situation, unearthing and discarding old strategies. Suddenly he grew weary and sat plucking at the vines that constrained him. It was as if light and energy were emptying from his mind.

“If you force me to chase after you,” Arthur shouted, “I promise you’ll regret it!” A pause. “Do you hear?”

Rosacher suspected that Arthur might be afraid of the dark space in which he had hidden; but this did no more than give his spirits a momentary boost.