Beautiful Blood

For all her reaction, he might have spoken under his breath. She stared into the middle distance, giving no sign of noticing the flight of swifts that swooped low across the dragon’s back, passing with a rush of wings a few feet away. Rosacher waited to see how long it would take her to speak, but lost count of the seconds. Three minutes or thereabouts, he reckoned.

“So if we are to continue,” she said, “whatever house we build will rest upon a foundation of lies.”

“That’s all you take from this conversation? That dire prognosis.”

She remained silent and turned her head to the side, away from him, as if something to the south had caught her attention.

“Well,” he said curtly. “At least we have a foundation.”

+

For the life of him, Rosacher could not fathom why he loved Amelita. In truth, he was unsure that what he felt was love, but he was most certainly obsessed with her. Thanks to mab, every woman was beautiful, but Amelita’s beauty, in his view, was supernal. Each line and curve of her had a sculptural velocity, a flow that led the eye from one place to the next, and whenever she moved it seemed to Rosacher that he had witnessed something wholly of nature, like the movement of wheat in the wind. She was a vigorous and attentive lover, and on those rare occasions when the clouds lifted and her mood brightened, she became vivacious and clever, given to quick-witted repartee; but she was depressed the majority of the time and often he would find her weeping for no reason she could articulate. There was, he thought, a great blank space in his relationship with her, a crucial vacancy that prevented them from perfecting their union. He surmised that the moral and physical rectitude of her childhood was to blame, but since she would speak of it only in the vaguest of generalities, he was unable to connect cause to effect in any practical way and thus incapable of concocting a remedy. As a result, his scrutiny of her grew more focused, more obsessive.

Not long after this conversation, they moved into an apartment atop the House of Griaule, one that until then had been reserved for visiting dignitaries, and there they lived for the next three years. The opulence of the place cheered Amelita. She would wander through the rooms, trailing her hand across the backs of gilt chairs and sofas upholstered with cloth that presented a dragon motif; she would sit and study the ornately worked tops of teak tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl by the light of brass lamps mounted on the walls, and gaze intently at the icy, delicate chandelier in the living room, as if she saw in its prismatic depths a kind of resolution. Rosacher could not be certain that these luxurious appointments actually increased her happiness, but they did appear to lift her out of herself, to satisfy some vital need, for her tears no longer flowed so easily and she developed an interest in the fauna that occupied Griaule—indeed, she began to go for day-long walks about the dragon, sketching the creatures that she spotted (marvelously complicated sketches that displayed a heretofore unexploited talent for art), and collecting them in a folio, along with her written observations. Her favorite room in the apartment was their bedchamber. It was dominated by a richly carved ebony four-poster mounted on a dais, with a painted canopy (more dragons) and peach-colored satin sheets; but the main attraction for Amelita was the carpet, an intricate weave of reds, purples, gray and white imported from Isfahan. The design was partitioned into two large hemispheres like, she said, an ancient map of an imaginary world, and once she had formulated this connection, she broke off her nature walks and would lie in bed all day sketching the fantastic creature with which her mind populated that world. Rosacher did not think this inactivity was good for her health, either mental or physical, and urged her to start walking again; but she would not budge and told him she found this type of art more creative and inspiring, and assured him that she was content. Before too long, however, her bouts of weeping grew more frequent and prolonged, and her moods darkened to the point that he feared she might take her own life. Her face began to betray signs of aging—faint crowsfeet, a worry line on the bridge of the nose—whereas his face, the undamaged portion of it, betrayed none, and he was led to consider the possibility that this discrepancy might be a factor in her despair.