A chair stood against the wall and Rosacher pulled it around so that he could sit facing Breque. He was at a loss for something to say and he related the details of his meeting with Carlos and, given that Carlos’ assertions were true, those concerning his lack of ambitions in Teocinte, he asked what Breque had hoped to gain by sending him on such an irrelevant mission.
“I wanted you out of the way when I attacked Mospiel. Your presence here might have had a deleterious effect in some way. If you succeeded in killing the king, I assumed the power of the Onyx Throne would be undermined, and that is never a bad thing. One of my many errors. This latest Carlos seems more likely to expand the borders of Temalagua than did his father.”
The councilman’s eyes seemed to have grown brighter as he spoke and he stared at Rosacher with a discomforting steadiness and avidity. Rosacher began to describe how he had spent the past eight years, but Breque interrupted him, saying, “I’ve kept my eye on you. As a matter of fact, I’ve purchased a number of birds from your company during that time…for my children’s pleasure. And of course I’ve heard all about your efforts regarding Frederick. He’s been chivvied down onto the Fever Coast, has he not?”
“According to reports, he has taken to hunting in the jungles across from Corn Island. A mangrove shore will prevent anyone from settling there and the jungle abounds with tapir and wild boar. I think we have heard the last of him.”
“I should have liked to see him once.”
“To see him as I did, that time on the Rio Coco…It is not a pleasant memory.”
“Still…” said Breque, and fell silent.
Rosacher considered how to make a graceful exit—it seemed that he and Breque had little to tell each other, despite their long history together and, though Rosacher understood that his company pleased the councilman, he felt that if he prolonged his visit, things would become awkward. The minutes slipped away and Breque’s ragged breathing became regular. Thinking him asleep, Rosacher made to stand, but Breque’s arm shot out, his hand clutching Rosacher’s wrist.
“Stay!” he said. “Just a little longer.”
The sudden effort appeared to have sapped Breque’s energies—his chest heaved, his breath wheezed, his eyes fixed on a spot in the satin canopy, and yet his grip on Rosacher’s wrist grew no weaker. At length he turned his head, locking stares with Rosacher and, his voice straining with intensity, said, “We were great men!”
Rosacher did not know how he should respond, for Breque’s words seemed at once a proclamation and a seeking of validation.
“You will deny it, I realize,” Breque went on. “But we were great men. You more so than I. I attempted great things and failed, but you achieved them.”
“What did I achieve?” Rosacher asked. “Wealth? Many men achieve wealth and few of them are great.”
“You killed Griaule! And in this, I was your accomplice. Together we destroyed a monster like none other the world has known.”
“Cattanay killed the dragon.”
“Cattanay was merely an instrument. It was your genius that enabled him, and it was mine to support you, to allow you to function. Yet I will be remembered only for my folly, and you may not be remembered at all. But we were…” His lips trembled. “We were…great men!”
His grip relaxed and then he let go of Rosacher’s wrist.
“You won’t accept what I’ve told you,” said Breque in a faltering voice. “I know this. You’ve had to maintain a distance from people, an inhuman distance, in order to complete your work. The sole personal desire you have satisfied is your desire to be unhappy. The one woman you loved was one with a bleaker outlook on life than you. But hearing this from me may stop you from making too harsh a self-judgment. That is my hope for you.”
Rosacher could not help being moved by these sentiments. His eyes watered and he wanted to offer a similar consolation to Breque, but he could not shape the words; they soured in his mouth and dissolved before he could speak them. The single comfort he could offer was to continue to sit with Breque, and this he did until the councilman asked for his family. Once they had entered the bedroom, Rosacher shut the door and sat down on a bench in the corridor to await the inevitable. His mind traveled back to the day he met Breque, waiting on a bench outside the council chamber, and he wondered briefly at this apparent circularity. He studied the carved mahogany panel across from him, warships approaching a coastal city, and realized that it was not a representation of the past, but depicted a future that would never occur—it had been commissioned in advance of Breque’s planned invasion of Temalagua. The recognition increased his sadness and he thought of Breque’s final message to him, not debating its truth or its purpose, but categorizing it, cataloguing it under the kindness of monsters, the charitable impulses of fiends, men responsible for thousands of deaths who at the end sought to bestow their blessing on the world.
He had been sitting in the corridor for fifteen or twenty minutes when he felt a wave ripple through his body and experienced a powerful shudder as of some vital passage. He went quietly to the bedroom door and cracked it, thinking that what he had felt was Breque’s soul taking flight; but Breque’s eldest son was bent over the councilman, his ear close to Breque’s mouth, and it was clear that he was whispering some instruction or wish. Rosacher shut the door and sat back down. He could still feel the aftershocks of that passage, faint tremors that came to him as might the inaudible reverberations of a gong, and he imagined that these heralded the passage of a soul of much greater profundity than Breque’s, and that some crucial cut, some last insult to the flesh, had loosed the dragon’s soul from his decaying body, freed him to fly out from his prison, casting a final shadow over the city upon which he had waited so long to avenge himself…or else it was a misperceived symptom of Rosacher’s own decay, a minor unsteadiness of the heart, a palpitation. From behind the bedroom door there arose a muted wail. Rosacher stood and adjusted the hang of his jacket. He was confident that he would make the right noises, say the right things, for though he found people unfathomable on an emotional level, in a formal situation he could always be counted upon to display appropriate behavior.
Epilogue
On an island far from anywhere Rosacher has built his home close to the shore. From the verandah he has an unimpeded view of the ocean, a cashew tree, and a strip of tawny sand criss-crossed by beachvine. If he leans forward and to the left, he can see the house of his immediate neighbor through a stand of palmettos—a little box set on stilts against the tides, painted light blue, a darker blue on the window frames. Beneath the house is a pen wherein pigs are kept. Once in a great while his neighbor, a black man named Peter, will shoot one of the pigs and butcher it. The remaining pigs appear to take no notice of the event. On Rosacher’s right, the beach is lined with wind-bent palms and dotted with coconut litter—it stretches away toward a point of land, Punta Manabique, a place so pestilent that no one can dwell there. At night people walk along the shore, shining lanterns to light their way. Occasionally blood is shed over a woman or a property dispute, but otherwise it is a tranquil place, and it is this untroubled quality, this calm imperviousness to minor passions and upheavals that has encouraged Rosacher to put down roots here.
His mind often turns to Griaule—and how could it not?—and there are times when he suspects he may have witnessed the evolution of a god. Gods, he thinks, are produced by extreme circumstances and what could be more extreme than millennia of imprisonment, century upon century of striving to escape, learning to manipulate people and events to his benefit, growing ever more powerful, creating converts and eventually, having won his freedom, becoming discorporate, abandoning those people, and then, the final stage of evolution, going off somewhere to play a game of fiddlesticks, incomprehensible to all but himself. It’s the kind of idea that once would have excited him, yet now induces boredom. Ideas in general no longer interest him, though he is rankled by the fact that his life seems to have no sum, no coherent shape, to be nothing more than a sequence of imperfectly realized scenes in an ill-conceived play.