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.
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.