Beautiful Blood

The greater part of these insights consisted of refinements to the design of the religion and the temple…which was disguised as that most typical of Morningshade businesses: a brothel, one that opened its doors three years before the building had been completed. Rosacher saw no reason why fleshly pleasures could not be used to enhance the ecstasies of religion—it would, to his way of thinking, only create a stronger bond between celebrant and an objectified god. He recruited women (and a goodly number of men) not from Teocinte, but from towns along the coast, the only requisites being that they were beautiful and willing to learn the scripts he wrote for them. He didn’t worry whether or not they were dependable sorts, knowing that an addiction to mab would sublimate their wilder impulses and cause them to believe in the words they spoke to the patrons. Using the funds he had secreted, a massive sum, and operating through proxies, he bought the Hotel Sin Salida, then tore it down and initiated the construction of a much larger and more splendid establishment, the House of Griaule. When finished (the House, as it came to be known), resembled half an eleven-tiered wedding cake buttressed by the dragon’s ankle and foreleg, and topped by twin spires, its shape reminiscent of a gothic cathedral. Yet the building’s various conceits—ornate trims, Asiatic accents done in garish colors, a profusion of lanterns encased in ruby glass, hundreds of carved wooden dragons coated in gilt placed here and there about the façade—detracted considerably from this impression. Thus the immediate effect was of an immense bawdy house, while the subliminal effect was of a house of worship, which was precisely Rosacher’s intent.

The four bottom floors were of granite block quarried in the hills surrounding the Carbonales Valley and contained offices, dressing rooms (patrons were required to wear robes of white linen), an extensive kitchen, banquet rooms, security rooms in which miscreants were dealt with by a highly efficient force, storerooms where stocks of wine, viands and mab were kept, etc…but the majority of the space was occupied by a vast amphitheater furnished with sofas and chaise lounges into which patrons were ushered and there welcomed by beautiful women in white silk robes and men in silk trousers, all emblazoned with the image of a golden dragon coiled around a miniature sun. The function of this space was to introduce patrons to the variety of pleasures and pleasure-givers available to them, but it was also here that their conversion began. At the bottom of the amphitheater lay a stage dominated by a marble-and-gold bas relief of Griaule beneath which dancers clad in gauzy costumes performed erotic ballets to the tune of a small orchestra (strings, flutes, French horns, and guitars), a soft music audible throughout the enclosure, yet due to the acoustic perfection of the space, this in no way impeded the conversations between patrons and the men and women of the House. These conversations were, of course, flirtations that led inevitably to sexual activity in one or another of the rooms above the fourth floor, but into each the ministrants injected portions of the homilies that Rosacher had written for them, ruminations on Griaule’s nature, paeans to his magnificence and so forth…and this stratagem (for such it was) continued to be used in the bedchambers, where every sexual act, however deviant, was preceded by a prayer to an image of Griaule mounted above the headboard.

Rosacher’s idea was to create a fantasy religion that wedded the sybaritic to a faux-spirituality, one that skirted the edge of sacrilege and would eventually transition to the status of a “real” religion. Since the population of the Carbonales already half-believed in Griaule’s divinity, it took little persuasion to push them over the brink of faith—yet even tourists having no familiarity with Griaule or mab came away from the House wearing souvenir dragon necklaces or bracelets embedded with pieces of scale (sold in the gift shop) that they were prone to touch during stressful moments, and their speech was peppered with catchphrases and fragments of litany that had been whispered in their ears during their stay. Seeing how easily people surrendered their wills to the embrace of his scheme, Rosacher envisioned Teocinte as a mecca to which pilgrims from Houses of Griaule spread around the world would flock to celebrate their god; but that was a dream that would only come to fruition if he succeeded in negotiating the hazards that confronted him.