“Do they leave a scar?”
“Naw, you seen him. Whatever damage is done gets healed up when he pulls back from eating.”
A host of questions occurred to Rosacher, but he left them unspoken for fear of making Cerruti uneasy.
“Pity we can’t do the same,” he said.
Cerruti looked perplexed, but then he grinned. “If we had a body for feeding and another for healing like Frederick, the law couldn’t never touch us.”
“I don’t suppose it could.”
Cerruti relaunched his tale of mosquitoes and pus, and Rosacher did not attempt to dissuade him. He lay back, responding to Cerruti’s recitation of his maladies with grunts and other affirmations, trying to piece together the few things he knew about Frederick into a coherent picture, and soon drifted off to sleep.
In the morning, they followed the river course through a dense whitish mist that made every feathery frond, every loop of vine, into an article of menace. A pack of howler monkeys trailed them for a while, their cries seeming to issue from the throats of enormous beasts whose heads were thirty feet above the jungle floor. Sunlight thinned the mist and the poisonous greens and yellow-greens of the foliage emerged. Swarms of flies came to plague them, rising from mattes of vines beneath the hooves of their horses. Serpents could be seen swimming in the murky green water. The heat merged the dank scent of the river and that of a trillion tiny deaths with the great vegetable odor of the jungle, combining them into a cloying reek that so clotted Rosacher’s nostrils, he did not think he ever again would be able to smell the slight fragrance of a flower or a woman’s perfume.
In late afternoon they arrived at the village of Becan, on the edge of the king’s hunting ground amidst banana trees and one towering mago tree whose ripening fruit hung from structures that looked as ornate as candelabras—it was a dismal collection of huts constructed of sapling poles and thatch, its muddy streets dappled with puddles. At the center of the village was a longhouse where travelers were permitted to sleep in hammocks for the night, and close by the longhouse was a largish hut, overhung by the leaves of a banana tree, wherein a wizened, white-haired old man, dressed in clothes made from flour sacking, with perhaps a dozen teeth left in his head, sat behind an empty crate and dispensed cups of unrefined rum. The late sun shining through the poles striped the dirt floor. Four wooden tables were arranged about the interior, but only six chairs, one toppled on its side and another occupied by a young woman who might have been pretty had she run a brush through her tangled hair and washed away the grime from her face and worn something more appealing than loose canvas trousers and a blouse that was mostly rips and stains. She affected what Rosacher judged to be a seductive pose and smiled at the two men as they entered, thus advertising her function. With a palsied hand, the old man began to pour from a bottle half-full of yellowish liquid. Rosacher laid a hand over the cup the old man had provided, but Cerruti gulped down his measure and gave a satisfied sigh.
“Another?” the old man asked.
Cerruti looked to Rosacher, who nodded, and the old man proceeded to pour.
“Do you have anything else to drink?” Rosacher asked.
“Yes, but it’s very expensive. Twelve quetzales for a small measure.”
“Let’s see it.”
Cerruti pulled up a chair next to the woman and they spoke together in muted tones.
From the rear of the packing crate, the old man withdrew a bottle wrapped in a red cloth and displayed it: Scotch whiskey, a decent brand. Rosacher signaled him to pour and leaned against the crate, gazing through the door of the cantina. A rooster hurried past, clucking, pursued in short order by a naked toddler. At the rear of one of the huts, a matronly woman in a striped dress was taking down her wash. The old man made a production out of cleaning Rosacher’s cup with a filthy rag and poured. As Rosacher drank, he asked if they had come from Teocinte.
“From Mospiel.” Rosacher pushed his cup toward the old man, asking for a refill, and handed him a fifty quetzal note.
“I have no change,” the old man said.
“I’ll drink it up,” said Rosacher, and the old man beamed.
Cerruti stood, linked arms with the woman and, with a salute to Rosacher, the two of them headed toward a hut on the far side of the longhouse.
“And what are you doing in Temalagua?” asked the old man.
“I am a trader in exotic birds. I’m going to the market in Alta Miron to buy stock.” Rosacher sipped the whiskey. “Truly, I did not think I would ever come to Alta Miron. Last night we were attacked in our camp by a beast. We were lucky to survive.”
“What manner of beast?”
“I did not get a good look at it. But it was black and very large. It trampled the jungle flat around our campsite. We eluded it by diving into the river. It killed one of our horses.”
The old man attempted a whistle in appreciation of Rosacher’s story, but due to his lack of teeth all that emerged was a breathy sound. “I have heard of this beast,” he said. “It’s said it killed a mother and her daughter in Dulce Nombre.”
“What a pity!” Rosacher said, chalking up the story to the rumors started by the riders he had sent on ahead and the typical hyperbole of Temalaguan storytellers.
“Indeed! But there is good news. It is said King Carlos will hunt the beast. Some of the men from our village have gone to the capital to volunteer their services.”
“Why would Carlos look to Becan for help? I’m certain his guards can ably assist him.”
“The men of Becan are accomplished trackers,” said the old man pridefully. “We have assisted the king on other hunts. And Carlos is a friend to the village. In fact it was he who presented me with this bottle”—he indicated the whiskey—“so he might have something suitable to drink when he stops by.”
“If that’s the case, should you be selling me whiskey?”
“Carlos is generous and kind. All I needs do is tell him I’ve run out and he sends me a new bottle.”
“Then I’ll have another.”
Darkness slipped in, lamps were lit in the little huts, their gapped walls revealing families moving about within and the jungle resounded with the singing of insects and frogs. The old man, whose name was Alonso, served a dinner of beans and rice and chorizo, brought by a sallow girl with a cast in one eye. He joined Rosacher at a table and told stories of the village and the king. How Carlos had shot the man-eating jaguar of Saxache, a creature that, once dead, had turned back into an elderly woman, a bruja of some renown. How Carlos had hunted down the great caiman of El Tamarindo, also a killer of men—its head was now mounted above the Onyx Throne. How Carlos had brought doctors and medicine to Becan when the village had been afflicted with dysentery. Other men dropped by and, after being introduced to Rosacher, joined him and Alonso for a drink. They, too, spoke highly of the king’s courage and largesse, and one, a bearded fellow by the name of Refugio, missing a leg, told of how Carlos, his rifle empty, armed only with a machete, had risked his life to save him from a wild boar.
“A man like that,” Refugio said. “A rich and powerful man who would sacrifice his life for someone poor like me when he has so much to live for…he is much more than a king. He has been crowned by the gods and will one day reign with the Beast in heaven.”
“Truly,” said Alonso, and the other men echoed his sentiments.
Tipsy now, sweating profusely in the windless night, in that cramped circle of men, Rosacher understood for the first time that he intended to kill a man who had done far more good than evil. Even if one discounted the stories as embellished, it was impossible to deny that Carlos was an anomaly, a benevolent ruler in a region that consistently spawned kings who were little more than human monsters with the souls of jackals. He tried to think of how to avoid killing Carlos, but made no headway and instead bought the house a round from another example of the king’s largesse, a second and previously unopened bottle of Scotch. This accentuated the air of rough bonhomie that had come to govern the cantina, and soon stories about the king were replaced by songs that celebrated women, famous hunts, and the fictive events that masqueraded as glorious Temalaguan history. A choir of drunken voices served to suppress Rosacher’s guilt, but not to drown it utterly. As a result he happily joined in the singing, but his joy was compromised by an undercurrent of fretful thought and half-formed plans to return to Teocinte, his mission unfulfilled, and the possibility that he could approach Carlos, persuade him not to join forces with Mospiel. He entertained the notion that he was fighting on the wrong side and that he should immediately break with the city council, with Breque, the only member of the council who mattered, and throw his weight behind Mospiel and Temalagua.