Beautiful Blood

The rain kept the insects down—except for the leaf-cutter ants that carried bits of vegetation along the wire-thin tracks they had etched into the clay—and the two men spoke rarely during the first portion of their walk. Dark shapes in the canopy followed them for a time, but never announced their presence. The undergrowth thinned, the boles of silk-cotton trees became visible, like lotus columns inscribed with a calligraphy of livid green moss, and—in his fatigue—Rosacher imagined that they spelled out variations on his sorry fortune; he died in a green hell, his flesh was consumed by scorpions, beetles drank form the corners of his eyes, that sort of thing.

Carlos’ estimate of a half-hour to reach the road to Chisec proved woefully inaccurate, too short by at least an hour; but reach it they did—a narrow winding track partially overgrown with weeds and displaying ruts caused by the passage of carts and wagons. Rosacher collapsed at the center of the road, his head dropping back, gazing up at the canopy. Carlos sat on a hump of clay covered by an ivy-like growth at the jungle’s edge. “We’ve only a little ways to walk now. Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“Your minutes seem considerably longer than mine,” Rosacher said with bad grace.

Carlos kept silent, but his displeasure was obvious.

After an interval Rosacher, in lieu of an apology, said, “How can people live in this place?”

“The jungle? It’s not so bad…in fact, it’s fascinating. I love coming here.”

“Spoken like a man with the wherewithal to protect himself from the worst it has to offer.”

The king acknowledged this, making a noise of acquiescence. “You can protect yourself only to a degree. Witness last night. But you’re right. The jungle’s not a human place. People live here because it’s where they were born. They don’t have the motivation or the funds to move elsewhere. Still, it’ll be a pity when it’s all chopped down.”

“I doubt that’s going to happen.”

“Admittedly the forests of western Europe are less pestilent than our jungles, yet when people needed room for expansion, they began to disappear. The same will happen here and then there’ll be no more jungles, no more animals.”

“I don’t believe the countries of the littoral will ever achieve the level of economic stability that Europe has.”

“That seems extremely shortsighted.”

“The countries to the north of Temalagua have too great an advantage over you, both as to their size and resources. They’ve been waging a war of oppression for nearly a century. Look at how the fruit companies have moved in. They’ll continue to oppress you until your leaders show some backbone or develop an immunity to bribes. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Your argument strikes me as odd coming from someone who’s spent decades propping up one such leader.” Carlos scratched his calf vigorously. “But it’s true. We have to have better leaders in order for our corruption to assume the guise of statesmanship.”

Rosacher laughed. “You’ve got me there.”

“One way or another, whether under our aegis or that of some other country, the jungles will soon be a memory. My father used to hunt jaguar in this very region and now you’re lucky to catch sight of one.”

“I’ll consider myself lucky not to see one,” said Rosacher.

“You might not say that if you’d seen what I have. A day’s ride from here there’s a lake to which my father used to take me. Lake Izabal. We’d find some high ground that overlooked the water, and hide in the tall grass before dawn, and wait for the jaguars to come down to drink while the morning mist still obscured most of the world. Watching a jaguar emerge from the mist—it gave me the feeling that I’d gone back to the days of creation.”

Carlos leaned back, braced with both hands thrust into the dark green leaves. Rosacher was about to make an observation, a rather snide observation, when the king sat up straight and gave an exclamation of pain and shook his left hand—a banded snake no more than twenty inches long had sunk its fangs into the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, dangling there like a primitive ornament, striped red, yellow and black. Carlos’ eyes locked onto Rosacher’s. He appeared eager to speak, to communicate some desperate intelligence, but all that issued from his mouth was a throaty exhalation. Then he fell back, his face buried in the vegetation, the snake yet attached to his hand. The body underwent a series of tremors and lay still. And Rosacher, who had scrambled to his feet, looked on in confusion and shock as the snake retracted its fangs and slithered away among the leaves, disappearing with a flick of its tail that he found almost insouciant.