The Best of Lucius Shepard

The Arcevoalo

One morning nearly five hundred years after the September War, whose effects had transformed the Amazon into a region of supernal mystery, a young man with olive skin and delicate features and short black hair awoke to find himself lying amid a bed of ferns not far from the ruined city of Manaus. It seemed to him that some great darkness had just been lifted away, but he could recall nothing more concrete of his past, neither his name nor those of his parents or place of birth. Indeed, he was so lacking in human referents that he remained untroubled by this state of affairs and gazed calmly around at the high green canopy and the dust-hung shafts of sun and the tapestry of golden radiance and shadow overlying the jungle floor. Everywhere he turned he saw marvelous creatures: butterflies with translucent wings; birds with hinged, needle-thin beaks; snakes with faceted eyes that glowed more brightly than live coals. Yet the object that commanded his attention was a common orchid, its bloom a dusky lavender, that depended from the lowermost branch of a guanacaste tree. The sight mesmerized him, and intuitions about the orchid flowed into his thoughts: how soft its petals were, how subtle its fragrance, and, lastly, that it was not what it appeared to be. At that moment, as if realizing that he had penetrated its disguise, the bloom flew apart, revealing itself to have been composed of glittering insects, all of which now whirled off toward the canopy, shifting in color like particles of an exploded rainbow; and the young man understood—a further intuition—that he, too, was not what he appeared.

Puzzled, and somewhat afraid, he glanced down at the ferns and saw scattered among them pieces of a fibrous black husk. Upon examining them, he discovered that the insides of the pieces were figured by smooth indentations that conformed exactly to the shapes of his face and limbs. There could be no doubt that prior to his awakening, he had been enclosed within the husk, like a seed in its casing. His anxiety increased when—on setting down one of the pieces—his fingers brushed the clay beneath the ferns and he saw before his mind’s eye the pitching deck of a vast wooden ship, with wild seas bursting over the railings. Men wearing steel helmets and carrying pikes were huddled in the bow, and standing in the door that led to the gun decks (how had he known that?) was a gray-haired man who beckoned to him. To him? No, to someone he had partly been. João Merin Nascimento. That name—like his vision of the ship—surfaced in his thoughts following contact with the clay. And with the name came a thousand fragments of memory, sufficient to make the young man realize that Nascimento, a Portuguese soldier of centuries past, lay buried beneath the spot where he was sitting, and that he was in essence the reincarnation of the old soldier: for just as the toxins and radiations of the September War had transformed the jungle, so the changed jungle had worked a process of alchemy on those ancient bones and produced a new creature, human to a degree, yet—to a greater degree—quite inhuman. Understanding this eased the young man’s anxiety, because he now knew that he was safe in the dominion of the jungle, whose creature he truly was. But he understood, too, that his manlike form embodied a cunning purpose, and in hopes of discerning that purpose, he set out to explore the jungle, walking along a trail that led (though he was not aware of it) to the ruins of Manaus.

Nine days he walked; and during those days he learned much about the jungle’s character and—consequently—about his own. From a creature with a dozen bodies, each identical, yet only one of which contained its vital spark, he learned an ultimate caution; from the malgaton, a fierce jaguarlike beast whose strange eyes could make a man dream of pleasure while he died, he learned the need for circumspection in the cause of violence; from the deadly jicaparee vine with its exquisite flowers, he learned the importance of setting a lure and gained an appreciation of the feral principles underlying all beauty.

From each of these creatures and more, he learned that no living thing is without its parasites and symbiotes, and that in the moment they are born their death is also born. But not until he came in sight of the ruined city, when he saw its crumbling, vine-draped towers tilting above the canopy like grotesque vegetable chessmen whose board was in process of being overthrown, not until then did he at last fathom his purpose: that he was to be the jungle’s weapon against mankind, its mortal enemy who time and again had sought to destroy it.

The young man could not conceive how—fangless and clawless—he would prove a threat to an enemy with weapons that had poisoned a world. Perplexed, hoping some further illumination would strike him, took to wandering the city streets, over cracked flagstones between which he could see the tunnels of guerilla ants, past ornate wrought-iron streetlamps in whose fractured globes white phosphorescent spiders the size of skull crabs had spun their webs (by night their soft glow conveyed a semblance of the city’s fabulous heyday into this, its rotting decline), and through the cavernous mansions of the wealthy dead. Everywhere he wandered he encountered danger, for Manaus had been heavily dusted during the September War and thus was home to the most perverse of the jungle’s mutations: flying lizards that spit streams of venom; albino peacocks whose shrill cries could make a man bleed from the ears; the sortilene, a mysterious creature never glimpsed by human eyes, known only by the horrid malignancies that sprouted from the flesh of its victims; herds of peccaries, superficially unchanged but possessing vocal chords that could duplicate the cries of despairing women. At night an enormous shadow obscured the stars, testifying to an even more dire presence. Yet none of these creatures troubled the young man—they seemed to know him for an ally. And, indeed, often as he explored the gloomy interiors of the ruined houses, he would see hundreds of eyes gazing at him, slit pupils and round, showing all colors like a spectrum of stars ranging the dusky green shade, and then he would have the idea that they were watching over him.

At length he entered the lobby of a hotel that—judging by the sumptuous rags of its drapes, the silver-cloth stripe visible in the moss-furred wallpaper, the immensity of the reception desk—must once have been a palace among hotels. Thousands of slitherings stilled when he entered. The dark green shadows seemed the visual expression of a cloying mustiness, one redolent of a thousand insignificant deaths. His footsteps shaking loose falls of plaster dust, he walked along the main hallway, past elevator shafts choked with vines and epithytes, and came eventually to a foyer whose roof was holed in such a fashion that sharply defined sunbeams hung down from it, dappling the scummy surface of an ornamental pond with coins of golden light. There, sitting naked and crosslegged on a large lily pad—the sort that once hampered navigation on the Rio Negro due to the toughness of its fiber—was an old Indian man, so wizened that he appeared to be a homunculus. His eyes were closed, his white hair filthy and matted, and his coppery skin bore a greenish tinge (whether this was natural coloration or a product of the shadows, the young man could not determine). The young man expected intuitions about the Indian to flow into his thoughts; but when this did not occur, he realized that though the Indians, too, had been changed by the September War, though they were partially the jungle’s creatures, they were still men, and the jungle had no knowledge of men other than that it derived from the bones of the dead. How then, he wondered, could he defeat an enemy about whom he was ignorant? He stretched out a hand to the Indian, thinking a touch might transmit some bit of information. But the Indian’s eyes blinked open, and with a furious splashing he paddled the lily pad beyond the young man’s reach. “The arcevoalo must be cautious with his touch,” he said in a creaky voice that seemed to stir the atoms of the dust within the sunbeams. “Haven’t you learned that?”

Though the young man—the arcevoalo—had not heard his name before, he recognized it immediately. With its Latinate echoes of wings and arcs, it spoke to him of the life he would lead, how he would soar briefly through the world of men and then return to give his knowledge of them to the jungle. Knowing his name opened him to his full strength—he felt it flooding him like a golden heat—and served to align his character more precisely with that of the jungle. He stared down at the Indian, who now struck him as being wholly alien, and asked how he had known the name.

“This truth I have eaten has told it to me,” said the Indian, holding up a pouch containing a quantity of white powder. Grains of it adhered to his fingers. “I was called here to speak the truth to someone…doubtless to you. But now I must leave.” He slipped off the lily pad and waded toward the edge of the pond.

Moving so quickly that he caused the merest flutter of shadow upon the surface of the water, the arcevoalo leaped to the far side of the pond, blocking the Indian’s path. “What is this ‘truth?’” he asked. “And who called you here?”

“The powder derives from the asuero flower,” said the Indian. “A plant fertilized with the blood of honest men. As to who called me, if I had known that I might not have come.” He made as if to haul himself from the pond, but the arcevoalo stayed him.

“How must I go about conquering my enemy?” he asked.

“To do battle one must first understand the foe.”

“Then I will keep you with me and learn your ways,” countered the arcevoalo.

The Indian hissed impatiently. “I am as different from those you must understand as you are from me. You must go to the city of Sangue do Lume. It is a new city, inhabited by Brazilians who fled the September War. Until recently they dwelled in metal worlds that circle the darkness behind the sky. Now they have returned to claim their ancient holdings, to reap the fruits of the jungle and to kill its animals for profit. It is they with whom you will contend.”

“How will I contend? I have no weapons.”

“You have speed and strength,” said the Indian. “But your greatest weapon is a mere touch.”

He instructed the arcevoalo to press the pads of his fingers hard, and when he did droplets of clear fluid welled from beneath the nails.

“A single drop will enslave any man’s heart for a time,” said the Indian. “But you must use this power sparingly, for your body can produce the fluid only in a limited quantity.”

He flicked his eyes nervously from side to side, obviously afraid, eager to be gone. The arcevoalo continued to ask questions, but the effects of the “truth” drug were wearing off, and the Indian began to whine and to lie, saying that his cousin, whom he had not seen since the Year of Fabulous Sorrows, was coming to visit and he would be remiss if he were not home to greet him. With a wave of his hand, the arcevoalo dismissed him, and the Indian went scuttling away toward the lobby.

For a long time the arcevoalo stood beside the pond, thinking about what the Indian had said, watching the sunlight fade; in its stead a gray-green dusk filtered down from the holes in the roof. Soon he felt himself dimming, his thoughts growing slow, his blood sluggish, his muscles draining of strength: it was as if the dusk were also taking place inside his soul and body, and a gray-green fluid seeping into him and making him terribly weak and vague, incapable of movement. He saw that from every crack and cranny, jeweled eyes and scaly snouts and tendriled mouths were peering and thrusting and gaping. And in this manifold scrutiny, he sensed the infinitude of lives for whom he was to be the standard-bearer: those creatures in the ruined foyer were but the innermost ring of an audience focused upon him from every corner of the jungle. He apprehended them singly and as one, and from the combined intelligence of their regard he understood that dusk for him was an hour during which he must be solitary, both to hide from men the weakness brought on by the transition from light to dark, and to commune with the source of his imperatives. Dusk thickened to night, shafts of silvery moonlight shone down to replace those of the sun, which now burned over Africa, and with the darkness a new moon of power rose inside the arcevoalo, a silver strength equal yet distinct from the golden strength he possessed by day, geared more to elusiveness than to acts of domination. Freed of his intangible bonds, he walked from the hotel and set forth to find Sangue do Lume.

During the twenty-seven days it took the arcevoalo to reach Sangue do Lume—which means “Blood of Light” in Portuguese, which is the language of sanguinary pleasures and heartbreak—he tested himself against the jungle. He outran the malgaton, outclimbed the tarzanal, and successfully spied upon the mysterious sortilene. He tested himself joyfully, and perhaps he never came to be happier than he was in those days, living in a harmony of green light and birds by day, and by night gazing into the ruby eyes of a malgaton, into those curious pupils that flickered and changed shape and brought the comfort of dreams. One evening he scaled a peak, hoping to lure down the huge shadow that each night obscured the stars, and when it flew near he saw that it was almost literally a shadow, being millimeters thick and having neither eyes nor mouth nor any feature that he could discern. There was something familiar about it, and he sensed that it was interested in him, that it—like him—was the sole member of its species. But otherwise it remained a puzzle: a rippling field of opaque darkness as incomprehensible as a flat black thought.

Sangue do Lume lay in a hilly valley between three mountains and was modeled after the old colonial towns, with cobbled streets and white stucco houses that had ironwork balconies and tiled roofs and gardens in their courtyards. Surrounding it—also after the style of the old colonial towns—was a slum where lived the laborers who had built the city. And surrounding the slum was a high wall of gray metal from which energy weapons were aimed at the jungle (no such weapons, however, were permitted within the wall). Despite the aesthetic incompatibility of its defenses, the city was beautiful, beautiful even to the eyes of the arcevoalo as he studied it from afar. He could not understand why it seemed so, being the home of his enemy; but he was later to learn that the walls of the houses contained machines that refined the images of the real, causing the visual aspect of every object to tend toward the ideal. Thus it was that the precise indigo shadows were in actuality blurred and dead-black; thus it was that women who went beyond the walls veiled themselves to prevent their husbands from taking note of their coarsened appearance; thus it was that the flies and rats and other pests of Sangue do Lume possessed a certain eyecatching appeal.

Each morning dozens of ships shaped like flat arrowpoints would lift from the city and fly off across the jungle; each afternoon they would return, their holds filled with dead plants and bloody carcasses, which would be unloaded into slots in the metal wall, presumably for testing. Seeing this, the arcevoalo grew enraged. Still, he bided his time and studied the city’s ways, and it was not until a week after his arrival that he finally went down to the gate. The gatekeepers were amazed to see a naked man walk out of the jungle and were at first suspicious, but he told them a convincing tale of childhood abandonment (a childhood of which, he said, he could recall only his name—Joao Merin Nascimento), of endless wandering and narrow escapes, and soon the gatekeepers, their eyes moist with pity, admitted him and brought him before the governor, Caudez do Tuscanduva: a burly, middle-aged man with fierce black eyes and a piratical black beard and skin the color of sandalwood. The audience was brief, for the governor was a busy and a practical man, and when he discovered the arcevoalo’s knowledge of the jungle, he assigned him to work on the flying ships and gave orders that every measure should be taken to ensure his comfort.

Such was the arcevoalo’s novelty that all the best families clamored to provide him with food and shelter, and thus it was deemed strange that Caudez do Tuscanduva chose to quarter him in the Valverde house. The Valverdes were involved in a long-standing blood feud ‘with the governor, one initiated years before upon the worlds behind the sky. The governor had been constrained by his vows of office from settling the matter violently, and it was assumed that this conferring of an honored guest must be his way of making peace. But the Valverdes themselves were not wholly persuaded by the idea, and therefore—with the exception of Orlando, the eldest son—they maintained an aloof stance toward the arcevoalo. Orlando piloted one of the ships that plundered the jungle, and it was to his ship that the arcevoalo had been assigned. He realized that by assisting in this work he would better understand his enemy, and so he did the work well, using his knowledge to track down the malgaton and the sortilene and creatures even more elusive. Yet it dismayed him, nonetheless. And what most dismayed him was the fact that as the weeks went by, he began to derive a human satisfaction from a job well done and to cherish his growing friendship with Orlando, who, by virtue of his delicate features and olive skin, might have been the arcevoalo’s close relation.

Orlando was typical of the citizenry in his attitude of divine right concerning the land, in his arrogance toward the poor (“They are eternal,” he once said. “You’ll sooner find a cure for death than for poverty.”) and in his single-minded pursuit of pleasure; yet there was about him a courage and soulfulness that gained the arcevoalo’s respect. On most nights he and Orlando would dress in black trousers and blousy silk shirts, and would join similarly dressed young men by the fountain in the main square. There they would practice at dueling with the knife and the cintral (a jungle weed with sharp-edged tendrils and a rudimentary nervous system that could be employed as a living cat-o’-nine-tails), while the young women would promenade around them and cast shy glances at their favorites. The arcevoalo pretended clumsiness with the weapons, not wanting to display his speed and strength, and he was therefore often the subject of ridicule. This was just as well, for occasionally these play-duels would escalate, and then—since even death was beautiful in Sangue do Lume—blood would eel across the cobblestones, assuming lovely serpentine forms, and the palms ringing the square would rustle their fronds, and sad music would issue from the fountain, mingling with the splash of the waters.

Many of these duels stemmed from disputes over the affections of the governor’s daughter, Sylvana, the sole child of his dead wife, his pride and joy. The bond between father and daughter was of such intimacy, it was said that should one’s heart stop, the other would not long survive. Sylvana was pale, slim, blonde, and angelic of countenance, but was afflicted by a brittleness of expression that bespoke coldness and insensitivity. Observing this, the arcevoalo was led to ask Orlando why the young men would risk themselves for so heartless a prize. Orlando laughed and said, “How can you understand when you have no experience of women?” And he invited the arcevoalo to gain this experience by coming with him to the Favelin, which was the name of the slum surrounding the city.

The next night, Orlando and the arcevoalo entered the cluttered, smelly streets of the Favelin. The hovels there were made of rotting boards, pitched like wreckage at every angle; and were populated by a malnourished, shrunken folk who looked to be of a different species from Orlando. Twists of oily smoke fumed from the chimneys; feathered lizards slept in the dirt next to grimy children; hags in black shawls sacrificed pigs beneath glass bells full of luminescent fungus and scrawled bloody words in the dust to cure the sick. How ugly all this might have been beyond the range of the city’s machines, the arcevoalo could not conceive. They came to a street whereon the doors were hung with red curtains, and Orlando ushered him through one of these and into a room furnished with a pallet and a chair. Mounted on the wall was the holograph of a bearded man who—though the cross to which he was nailed had burst into emerald flames—had maintained a beatific expression. The flames shed a ghastly light over a skinny girl lying on a pallet. She was hollowcheeked, with large, empty-looking eyes and jaundiced skin and ragged dark hair. Orlando whispered to her, gave her a coin, and—grinning as he prepared to leave—said, “Her name is Ana.”

Without altering her glum expression, Ana stood and removed her shift. Her breasts had the convexity of upturned saucers, her ribs showed, and her genitals were almost hairless. Nevertheless, the arcevoalo became aroused, and when he sank down onto the pallet and entered her, he felt a rush of dominance and joy that roared through him like a whirlwind. He clutched at Ana’s hips with all his strength, building toward completion. And staring into her hopeless eyes, he sensed the profound alienness of women, their mystical endurance, the eerie valences of their moods, and how even their common thoughts turn hidden corners into bizarre mental worlds. Knowing his dominance over this peculiar segment of humanity acted to heighten his desire, and with a hoarse cry he fell spent beside Ana and into a deep sleep.

He awoke to find her gazing at him with a look of such rapt contemplation that when she turned her eyes away, the image of his face remained reflected in her pupils. Timorously, shyly, she asked if he planned to return to the Favelin, to her. He recalled then the force with which he had clutched her, and he inspected the tips of his fingers. Droplets glistened beneath the nails, and there were damp bruises on Ana’s hips. He realized that his touch, his secret chemistry, had manifested as love, an emotion whose power he apprehended but whose nature he did not understand.

“Will you return?” she asked again.

“Yes,” he said, feeling pity for her. “Tomorrow.”

And he did return, many times, for in his loveless domination of that wretched girl he had taken a step closer to adopting the ways of man. He had come to see that there was little difference between the city and the jungle, that “civilization” was merely a name given to comfort, and that the process of life in Sangue do Lume obeyed the same uncivilized laws as did the excesses of the sortilene. What point was there in warring against man? And, in any case, how could he win such a war? His touch was a useless power against an enemy who could summon countless allies from its worlds behind the sky.

Over the ensuing weeks the arcevoalo grew ever more despondent, and in the throes of despondency the human elements of his soul grew more and more predominant. At dusk his reverie was troubled by images of lust and conquest stirred from the memories of Joao Merin Nascimento. And his work aboard Orlando’s ship became so proficient that Caudez do Tuscanduva held a fete in his honor, a night of delirium and pleasure during which a constellation of his profile appeared in the sky, and the swaying of the palms was choreographed by artificial winds, and the machines -within the -walls were turned high, beautifying everyone to such an extent that everyone’s heart was broken…broken, and then healed by the consumption of tiny, soft-boned animals that induced a narcissistic ecstasy when eaten alive. Despite his revulsion for this practice, the arcevoalo indulged in it, and, his teeth stained with blood, he spent the remainder of the night wandering the incomparably beautiful streets and gazing longingly at himself in mirrors.

Thereafter Caudez do Tuscanduva took Orlando and the arcevoalo under his wing, telling them they were to be his protégés, that he had great plans for them. Further, he urged them to pay court to Sylvana, saying that, yes, she was an icy sort, but the right man would be able to thaw her. In this Orlando needed no urging. He plied her with gifts and composed lyrics to her charms. But Sylvana was disdainful of his efforts, and though for the most part she was equally disdainful of the arcevoalo, now and then she would favor him with a chilly smile, which—while scarcely encouraging—made Orlando quite jealous.

“You’d do better to set your sights elsewhere,” the arcevoalo once told Orlando. “Even if you win her, you’ll regret it. She’s the kind of woman who uses marriage like a vise, and before you know it she’ll have you squealing like a stuck pig.” He had no idea whether or not this was true—it was something he had overheard another disappointed suitor say—but it accorded with his own impressions of her. He believed that Orlando was leaving himself open to the possibility of grievous hurt, and he told him as much. No matter how forcefully he argued, though, Orlando refused to listen.

“I know you’re only trying to protect me, friend,” he said. “And perhaps you’re right. But this is an affair of the heart, and the heart is ruled by its own counsel.”

And so the arcevoalo could do nothing more than to step aside and let Orlando have a clear field with Sylvana.

On one occasion Caudez invited them to dine at the governor’s mansion. They sat at a long mahogany table graced by golden candelabra through whose branches the arcevoalo watched Sylvana daintily picking at her food, ignoring the heated glances that Orlando sent her way. After the meal, Caudez led them into his study, its windows open onto the orchid-spangled courtyard where Sylvana could be seen strolling— as elegant as an orchid herself—and held forth on his scheme to milk the resources of the Amazon: how he would reopen the gold mines at Serra Pelada, reinstitute the extensive-farming procedures that once had brought an unparalleled harvest, and thus feed and finance hundreds of new orbital colonies. Orlando’s attention was fixed upon Sylvana. but the arcevoalo listened closely. Caudez, with his piratical air and his dream of transforming the Amazon into a tame backyard, struck him as being a force equal to the jungle. Pacing up and down, declaiming about the glorious future, Caudez seemed to walk with the pride of a continent. Late in the evening he turned his fierce black stare upon the arcevoalo and questioned him about his past. The questions were complex, fraught with opportunities for the arcevoalo to compromise the secret of his birth; he had to summon all his wits to avoid these pitfalls, and he wondered if Caudez were suspicious of him. But then Caudez laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, saying what a marvel he was, and that allayed his fears.

Whereas in the jungle, time passed in a dark green flow, a single fluid moment infinitely prolonged, within the walls of Sangue do Lume it passed in sharply delineated segments so that occasionally one would become alerted to the fact that a certain period had elapsed—this due to the minuscule interruptions in the flow of time caused by the instruments men have for measuring it. And thus it was that one morning the arcevoalo awoke to the realization that he had lived in the city for a year. A year! And what progress had he made? His life, which had once had the form of purpose, of a quest, had resolved into a passive shape denned by his associations: his friendship with Orlando (whose wooing of Sylvana had reached fever pitch), his sexual encounters with Ana, his apprenticeship to Caudez. Each night he was reminded of his deeper associations with the jungle by the huge shadow that obscured the stars; yet he felt trapped between the two worlds, at home in neither, incapable of effecting any change. He might have continued at this impasse had not Ana announced to him one evening that she was with child. It would be, according to the old woman who had listened to her belly, a son. Standing in the garish light of her burning Christ, displaying her new roundness, flushed with a love no longer dependent on his touch, she presented him with a choice he could not avoid making. If he did nothing, his son would be born into the world of men; he had to be certain this was right.

But how could he decide such a complex issue, one that had baffled him for an entire year?

At the point of desperation, he remembered the old Indian man and his “truth,” and that same night, after the machines in the walls had been switched off, leaving the flaking whitewash of the buildings exposed, he sneaked into the warehouse where the plant samples were kept and pilfered a quantity of asuero flowers. He returned to the Valverde house, ground the petals into a fine powder, and ate the entire amount. Soon pearls of sweat beaded on his forehead, his limbs trembled, and the moonlight flooding his room appeared to grow brighter than day.

Truth came to him in the clarity of his vision. Between the floorboards he saw microscopic insects and plants, and darting through the air were even tinier incidences of life. From these sights he understood anew that the city and the jungle were interpenetrating. Just as the ruins of Manaus lay beneath the foliage, so did the jungle’s skeins infiltrate the living city. One was not good, the other evil. They were two halves of a whole, and the war between them was not truly a war but an everlasting pattern, a game in which he was a powerful pawn moved from the grotesque chessboard of Manaus to the neat squares of Sangue do Lume, a move that had set in motion a pawn of perhaps even greater power: his son. He realized now that no matter with which side he cast his lot, his son would make the opposite choice, for it was an immutable truth that fathers and sons go contrary to the other’s will. Thus he had to make his own choice according to the dictates of his soul. A soul in confusion. And to dissolve that confusion, to know his options fully, he had to complete his knowledge of man by understanding the nature of love. He thought first of going to Ana, of infecting himself with the chemicals of his touch and falling under her spell; but then he recognized that the kind of love he sought to understand—the all-consuming love that motivates and destroys—had to embody the quality of the unattainable. With this in mind, still trembling from the fevers of the asuero powder, he went out again into the night and headed toward the governor’s mansion, toward the unattainable Sylvana.

Since the concept of security in Sangue do Lume was chiefly geared to keeping the jungle out, the systems protecting the mansion were minimal, easily penetrated by a creature of the arcevoalo’s stealth. He crept up the stairs, along the hall, cracked Sylvana’s door, and eased inside. As was the custom with high-born women of the city, she was sleeping nude beneath a skylight through which the rays of the moon shone down in a silvery fan. A diamond pulsed coldly in the hollow of her throat, a tourmaline winked between her breasts, and in the tuft of her secret hair—trimmed to the shape of an orchid—an emerald shimmered wetly. These gems were bound in place by silken threads and were no ordinary stones but crystalline machines that focused the moonlight downward to produce a salubrious effect upon the organs, and also served as telltales of those organs’ health. The unclouded states of the emerald, the tourmaline, and the diamond testified that Sylvana was virginal and of sound heart and respiration. But she was so lovely that the arcevoalo would not have cared if the stones had been black, signaling wantonness and infection. Rivulets of blonde hair streamed over her porcelain shoulders, and the soft brush of sleep had smoothed away her brittleness of expression, giving her the look of an angel under an enchantment.

Fixing his gaze upon her, the arcevoalo gripped his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand and pressed down hard. He maintained the grip for some time, uncertain how much of the chemical would be needed to affect him—indeed, he was uncertain whether or not he could be affected. But soon he felt a languorous sensation that made his eyelids droop and stilled the trembling caused by the asuero powder. When he opened his eyes, the sight of the naked Sylvana pierced him: it was as if an essential color had all along been missing from his portrait of her. Staring at her through the doubled lens of truth and love, he knew her coldness, her cunning and duplicity; yet he perceived these flaws in the way he might have perceived the fracture planes inside a crystal, how they channeled the light to create a lovely illusion of depth and complexity. Faint with desire, he walked over to the bed. A branching of bluish veins spread from the tops of her breasts, twined together and vanished beneath the diamond in the hollow of her throat, as if deriving sustenance from the stone; a tiny mole lay like a drop of obsidian by the corner of her lips. Carefully, knowing she could never truly love him, yet willing to risk his life to have her love this one and false time, he stretched out a hand and clamped it over Sylvana’s mouth, while with the other hand he gripped her shoulder hard. Her eyes shot open, she squealed and kicked and clawed. He held her firmly, waiting for the chemistry of love to take effect. But it did not. Astounded, he examined his fingertips. They were dry, and he realized that in his urgency to know love he had exhausted the potency of his touch. He was full of despair, knowing he would have to flee the city…but then Sylvana’s struggles ceased. The panic in her eyes softened, and she drew him into an embrace, whispering that her fearful reaction was due to the shock of being awakened so roughly, that she had been hoping for this moment ever since they had met. And with the power of truth which—though diminished by the truth of love—still allowed him a modicum of clear sight; the arcevoalo saw that, indeed, she had been hoping for this moment. She seemed charged with desire, overwhelmed by a passion no less ardent than his. But when he entered her, sinking into her plush warmth, he felt a nugget of chill against his belly; he knew it was the diamond bound by its silken thread, yet he could not help thinking of it as a node of her quintessential self that not even love could dissolve.

Some hours later, after the power of truth had been drained from the arcevoalo, Sylvana spoke to him. “Leave me,” she said. “I have no more use for you.” She was standing by the open door, smiling at him; the threads of her telltale jewels dangled from her right hand.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What use have you made of me?” He was shocked by the wealth of cruelty in her smile, by her transformation from the voluptuous, the soft, into this glacial creature with glittering eyes.

She laughed—a thin, hard laugh that seemed to chart the jagged edge of such a vengeful thought. “I’ve never known such a fool,” she said. “It’s hard to believe you’re even a man. I wondered if I’d have to drag you into my bed.”

Again she laughed, and, suddenly afraid, the arcevoalo pulled on his clothes and ran, her derisive laughter chasing him down the hall and out into the dove-gray dawn of Sangue do Lume, whose machines were already beginning to restore a fraudulent perfection to its flaking walls.

All that day the arcevoalo kept to his room in the Valverde house. He knew he should leave the city before Sylvana called down judgment upon him, but he found that he could not leave her, no matter how little affection she had for him. He understood now the nature of love, its blurred, irrational compulsions, its torments and its joys, and he doubted it would ever loosen its grip on him. But understanding it had made his choice no easier, and so perhaps he did not entirely understand, perhaps he did not see that love enforces its own continuum of choices, even upon an inhuman celebrant. There was no end to his confusion. One moment he would feel drawn back to the jungle, the next he would wonder how he could have considered such a reckless course. At dusk his reverie alternated between a perception of formless urges and a sequence of memories in which Joao Merin Nascimento staggered through a green hell, his brain afire and death a poisoned sugar clotting his veins. Night fell, and having some frail hope that Sylvana would do nothing, that things might go on as before, the arcevoalo left the house and walked toward the main square.

Though it was no holiday, though no fete had been scheduled, of all the beautiful nights in Sangue do Lume, this night came the closest to perfection, marred only by the whining of the machines functioning at peak levels. In the square the palm crowns flickered like green torches beneath an unequaled array of stars, and beams of light from the window shone like benedictions upon the fountain, whose spouts cast up sprays of silver droplets that fell to the ear as a cascade of guitar notes. Against the backdrop of gray stones and white stucco, the graceful attitudes of the young men and women, strolling and dueling, lost in a haze of mutual admiration, seemed a tapestry come to life. Even the arcevoalo’s grim mood was brightened by the scene, but on drawing near the group of young men gathered about Orlando, on hearing Orlando’s boastful voice, his mood darkened once again.

“.. .his blessing to Sylvana and I,” Orlando was saying. “We’ll be wed during the Festival of Erzulie.”

The arcevoalo pushed through the group of listeners and confronted Orlando, too enraged to speak. Orlando put a hand on his shoulder. “My friend!” he said. “Great news!” But the arcevoalo struck his hand aside and said, “Your news is a lie! You will never marry her!”

It may have been that Orlando thought his friend was still trying to protect him from a loveless marriage, for he said, “Don’t worry—”

“It’s I who made love to her last night,” the arcevoalo cut in. “And it’s I who’ll marry her.”

Orlando reached for his cintral, whose green tendrils were dangling over the edge of the fountain; but he hesitated. Perhaps it was friendship that stayed his hand, or perhaps he believed that arcevoalo’s friendship was so great that he would lie and risk a duel to prevent the marriage.

Then a woman laughed—a thin derisive laugh.

The arcevoalo turned and saw Sylvana and Caudez standing a dozen feet away. Hanging from a gold chain about Sylvana’s neck was her telltale emerald, its blackness expressing the malefic use she had made of her body the previous night. Caudez was smiling, a crescent of white teeth showing forth from this thicket of a beard.

Finally convinced that his friend had told the truth, Orlando’s face twisted into an aggrieved knot, displaying his humiliation and pain. He picked up the cintral and lashed out at the arcevoalo. The sharp tendrils slithered through the air like liquid green swords; but at the last second—recognizing their ally—they veered aside, spasmed, and drooped lifelessly from Orlando’s hand. His mind a boil of rage, unable by logic to direct his anger toward his true enemy, the arcevoalo plucked a knife from a bystander’s sash and plunged it deep into Orlando’s chest. As Orlando toppled onto his back, a hush fell over the assemblage, for never had they witnessed a death more beautiful than that of the Valverde’s eldest son. The palms inclined their spiky heads, the fountain wept tears of crystalline music. Orlando’s features acquired a noble rectitude they had not had in life; his blood shone with a saintly radiance and appeared to be spelling out a new language of poetry over the cobblestones.

“Now!” cried Caudez do Tuscanduva, his black eyes throwing off glints that were no reflections but sparks of an inner fire banked high. “Now has the great wrong done my father by the House of Valverde been avenged! And not by my hand!”

Murmurs of admiration for the subtlety of his vengeance spread through the crowd. But the arcevoalo—gone cold with the horror of his act, full of self-loathing at having allowed himself to be manipulated— advanced upon Caudez and Sylvana, his knife at the ready.

“Kill him!” shouted Caudez, exhorting the young men. “I have no quarrel with his choice of victims, but he has struck down a man whose weapon failed him. Such cowardice must not go unpunished!”

And the young men, who had always suspected the arcevoalo of being lowborn and thus had no love for him, ranged themselves in front of Caudez and Sylvana, posing a barrier of grim faces and shining knives.

When men refer to the arcevoalo, they speak not only of the one who stood then beside the fountain, but also of his incarnations, and they will tell you that none of these ever fought so bravely in victory as did their original in defeat that night in Sangue do Lume. Fueled by the potentials of hatred and love (though that love had been mingled with bitterness), he spun and leaped, living in a chaos of agonized faces and flowers of blood blooming on silk blouses; and while the sad music of the fountain evolved into a skirling tantara, he left more than twenty dead in his wake, cutting a path toward Caudez and Sylvana. He received wounds that would have killed a man yet merely served to goad him on. and utilizing all his moon-given elusiveness, he avoided the most consequential of the young men’s thrusts. In the end, however, there were too many young men, too many knives, and, weakening, he knew he would not be able to reach the governor and his daughter.

There came a moment of calm in the storm of battle, a moment when nine of the young men had hemmed the arcevoalo in against the fountain. Others waited their chance behind them. They were wary of him now, yet confident, and they all wore one expression: the dogged, stuporous expression that comes with the anticipation of a slaughter. Their unanimity weakened the arcevoalo further, and he thought it might be best to lay his weapon down and accept his fate. The young men sidled nearer, shifting their knives from hand to hand; the music of the fountain built to a glorious crescendo of trumpets and guitars, and the pale, beautiful bodies of the dead enmeshed in a lacework of blood seemed to be entreating the arcevoalo, tempting him to join them in their eternal poise. But in the next moment he spotted Caudez smiling at him between the shoulders of his adversaries, and Sylvana laughing at his side. That sight rekindled the arcevoalo’s rage. With an open-throated scream, choosing his target in a flash of poignant bitterness, he hurled his knife. The blade whirled end over end, accumulating silver fire, growing brighter and brighter until its hilt sprouted from Sylvana’s breast. Before anyone could take note of the artful character of her death, she sank beneath the feet of the milling defenders, leaving Caudez to stare in horror at the droplets of her blood stippling his chest. And then, seizing the opportunity provided by the young men’s consternation, the arcevoalo ran from the square, through the flawless streets and into the Favelin, past the hovel where Ana and his unborn son awaited an unguessable future in the light of her dying god. He clambered over the gray metal wall and sprinted into the jungle.

Such was the efficacy of the city’s machines that even the natural beauty of the moonlit jungle had been enhanced. It seemed to the arcevoalo that he was passing through an intricate design of silver and black, figured by the glowing eyes of those creatures who had come forth from hiding to honor his return. Despite his wounds, his panic, he had a sense of homecoming, of peacefulness and dominion. He came at length to a mountaintop east of Sangue do Lume and paused there to catch his breath. His muscles urged him onward, but his thoughts—heavy with the poisons of murder and betrayal—were a sickly ballast holding him in place. At any second, ships would arrow up from the city to track him, and he thought now that he would welcome them.

But as he stood there, grieving and empty of hope, a shadow obscured the stars: a great rippling field of shadow that swooped down and wrapped him in its filmy, almost weightless folds. He felt himself lifted and borne eastward and—after what could have been no more than a matter of seconds—gently lowered to earth. Through the dim opacity of the folds, he made out a high canopy of leaves and branches, silvery shafts of moonlight, and a bed of ferns. He could feel the creature merging with him, its folds becoming fibrous, gradually thickening to a husk, and—recalling the darkness that had passed from him at birth— he realized that this incomprehensible shadow was the death that had been born with him, had haunted all his nights, and had come at last to define the shape of his life.

The world dwindled to a dark green vibration, and with half his soul he yearned toward the pleasures of the city, toward love, toward all the sweet futilities of the human condition. But with the other half he exulted in the knowledge that his purpose had been achieved, that he had understood the nature of man. And (a final intuition) he knew that someday, long after he had decayed into a clay of old memories, just as it had with the bones of Joao Merin Nascimento, the jungle would breed from his bones a new creature, who—guided by his understanding— would make of love a weapon and of war a passion, and would bring inspired tactics to the eternal game. This knowledge gave him a measure of happiness, but that was soon eroded by his fear of what lay—or did not lie—ahead.

Something nudged the outside of the thickening husk. The arcevoalo peered out, straining to see, and spied the ruby eyes of a malgaton peering in at him, come to give him the comfort of dreams. Grateful, not wanting to feel the snip of death’s black scissors, he concentrated on those strange pupils, watching them shift and dissolve and grow spidery, and then it was as if he were running again, running in the joyful way he had before he had reached Sangue do Lume, running in a harmony of green light and birds, in a wind that sang like a harp on fire, in a moment that seemed to last forever and lead beyond to other lives.