Beautiful Blood

Knowing the king to be dead, Rosacher nonetheless searched for a pulse. Finding none, he felt suddenly imperiled. The jungle shrank around him, the air darkened, and the sounds, the scritches and chirrs, the buzz of flies, the chips and chirps from thousands of throats, many heralding the revolting feast that the king would soon become, signaling a troop of tiny nightmare creatures to gather at the banquet table…the horror of the natural world assailed him and he backed away, casting his eyes about so as to apprehend the next terror, the next sinister shape. To have survived the night and now this! Had his failure to assassinate Carlos caused the snake to enact Griaule’s will? He forced himself to be calm and bent to the king. Turning the body, he removed the skinning knife from the sheath belted to his waist. Carlos’ eyes showed all white beneath his drooping lids. Froth had collected at the corners of his mouth. Rosacher had the thought that he would be blamed for the king’s demise. The idea was not entirely without justification. If he had not brought Frederick to Temalagua, the hunt would never have occurred…though he could scarcely be blamed for the snake, unless he was culpable on a cosmic level. He started to walk away and realized that Carlos had given no indication of which direction to take. He scanned the road in both directions, hoping to spot some clue or, barring that, to glean some intimation from the surround, some sense of human passage; but there was nothing other than the steady drip of the rain, the oppressive greenery, the phantasmagoric shapes made by the intersection of leaves, vines, stumps, mold and the shadows that defined them and the imagined beating of a predator’s thirsty heart. The king’s corpse seemed to have acquired a gravity that would not relax its grip, pulling at Rosacher. He covered Carlos’ face with a handkerchief found in the doublet’s pocket and the gravity dissolved. Since the king had been bitten on the left hand, he decided to go in that direction. He went a few steps, thinking how he should tell people what had happened—he had been on a hunt with Carlos, disaster struck and they had fled downstream, winding up near the road where Carlos had encountered the snake. But so much context was missing, it felt like a lie, and he supposed he felt that way because he had not been certain if his appreciation of the man was accurate. Carlos may have been a narcissist, yet perhaps his variety of narcissism was as close as humankind could aspire to producing a good man. He contemplated saying some words over the body, but couldn’t think to whom he should commend the king’s spirit, and so he set forth walking, heading for Chisec, for some fresh green hell, for whatever came next, focusing on the road ahead and trying not to let his mind linger over what might be following behind.

16

Rosacher remained in Temalagua for eight years. With more than a sufficiency of funds and cut loose from his responsibilities, he had no desire to return to his old life. He bought a house in a respectable quarter of Alta Miron and built up a business trading in exotic birds and animals, many of them sent to populate European zoos; but his chief preoccupation was with Frederick, who continued to terrorize the jungles east of the capital. The new king, yet another Carlos, possessed neither his father’s altruism nor his concern for the security of his people, and had not the slightest interest in hunting down Frederick. Alta Miron was a fabulous city, offering diverse pleasures, but Rosacher rarely left his residence, motivated by Frederick’s depredations to spend his days organizing hunts for the creature. He did not participate in these hunts; he had long since accepted the reality that he was not a courageous man. Sometimes, remembering Carlos, he doubted the existence of true courage, thinking that the king’s bravery was the product of a misguided sense of invulnerability, and that the common strain of courage was a matter of venality; but he wasn’t sure he believed this—the men he sent after Frederick had mastered their fears to an extent of which he was incapable and if courage was dependent on a profit motive, it was courage nevertheless. He paid the men well and made certain that they were conversant with the nature of the beast and the dangers involved. Some men were killed, but this failed to dissuade others from taking their place and, though they did not manage to kill Frederick, they succeeded over the years in harassing him, driving him south into the region known as the Fever Coast, a sparsely populated area, home mainly to smugglers and brigands—at this point, Rosacher decided that his responsibility was at an end and called off the hunts, leaving the human wreckage on the coast to fend for themselves and figuring that Frederick would go deeper into the jungle, away from the haunts of men, where animal life abounded.