Sacre Bleu (47 page)

“We need to drink more,” said Lucien.

“A toast!” said Henri.

“To Vincent!” said Lucien, raising his glass.

“And Theo!” said Henri, raising his.

“And Theo’s syphilis!” said Juliette, raising her glass and sloshing brandy all over Henri’s rug.

Lucien lowered his glass slowly. “Theo too?”

“And syphilis!” said Juliette, toasting gaily.

“Theo wasn’t even a painter,” said Henri, ruining a perfectly good toast.

“Well I had to do something.” She was both slurring and sloshing her brandy for emphasis. “The Colorman wanted to kill you all, both, everyone. Not that it matters to the little turd. He still wanted to shoot you. To clean up, he said. Which is why I took the last of the Sacré Bleu and ran away.”

“So you’re free.”

“Not exactly. He just hasn’t found me yet. That’s why I had to hide in the dark. If I’m in the dark, he can’t find me. The Sacré Bleu doesn’t really work in the dark. That’s why we couldn’t paint in Henri’s dismal studio.” She sloshed what was left of her brandy at Toulouse-Lautrec. “That studio is dismal, Henri. No offense. You’re a painter, you need light. Aw, remember that window in your other studio, such nice light—”

“But you’re not in the dark now,” Henri said, interrupting her musing. “Won’t he find you?”

“No. Because I shot him.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense, and you said you didn’t shoot people,” said Lucien.

“What are you, a painter or the people-shooter counting person man? I fucking shot him. In the chest. Five times. Maybe six times. No, five.” She leaned in close to Lucien and started to fall forward out of her chair. He caught her but then had to catch himself and ended up rolling back onto the divan as she fell onto him, her face in his lap.

“So you’re free?” said Henri.

She answered, but her voice was muffled by Lucien’s crotch. He kissed the back of her head, then turned her face toward Henri, who was accustomed to being around the intoxicated and so repeated himself automatically.

“So you’re free?” he said.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Of course not,” said Lucien. “And I was worried that everything was getting entirely too simple.”

“Hey, fuck-bubble, am I the muse of sarcasm? No! No, I’m not. You are out of order, Monsieur Lessard. Out of fucking order.” She tried to push herself up to look him in the eye but settled for fixing a steely gaze into his middle waistcoat button.

“I have never heard a goddess swear before,” said Henri.

“Fuck off, Count Tiny Pants!” said the muse, who braced her forehead into Lucien’s groin against her next expulsion.

“Or vomit,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “Look, it’s blue.”

Britannia, Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire,
A.D.
122

Q
UINTUS
P
OMPEIUS
F
ALCO, PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR OF
B
RITANNIA, WAS
pacing the veranda of his villa at the edge of the frontier as he dictated a letter to his secretary, a report to Emperor Hadrian. It was a simple report, but one he was not happy about making. He had lost the Ninth Legion of the Roman army.

Most Exalted Caesar:

It is with great consternation I report that having been sent into the south of the Caledonia district, in the northernmost territories of Britannia, to restore order to savage people we have come to call the Picts, and bring them under the Empire’s control, that the Emperor’s Ninth Legion, numbering four thousand legionaries and officers, has failed to send any dispatches for thirty days and is presumed lost.

“What do you think?” Falco asked his secretary.

“‘Lost,’
sir?” said the scribe.

“Right,” said Falco. “Somewhat vague, isn’t it?”

“A bit.”

Thus, the governor continued:

And by “lost,” I do not mean to imply that the Ninth is somehow wandering around this accursed, sunless, moldering shithole of a province, trying to solve a navigation problem; what I mean is they have been wiped out, defeated, decimated, destroyed, and murdered to a man. The Ninth has ceased to be. The Ninth has not been misplaced; the Ninth is no longer.

“That clears it up, don’t you think?” asked Falco.

“Perhaps some context, sir,” suggested the secretary.

The governor grumbled, then continued:

In the past, the Picts have met our expansion into Caledonia with sporadic resistance from small bands of the savages with no apparent organization or bond beyond their common language. However, recently, their forces have united into a large army. They seem to be able to anticipate our tactics and attack our troops in the roughest countryside, where our war machines cannot travel, and our ranks are necessarily broken by terrain, as well as coordinated attacks and feints by multiple small bands of attackers. One prisoner, captured a fortnight ago, told us through a slave who understands their abominable language that the tribes have been united by a new king that they call the Colorbringer, who travels with a mystical warrior woman, who leads their army. Primitive myths or not, these “Painted People” represent a formidable threat to the Empire here at the end of our supply lines, and without troops to replace the Ninth, as well as another two legions with provisions, I fear that we may not be able to hold the northern border against them.

I eagerly await your instructions.

In fealty,
Quintus Pompeius Falco
Governor, Britannia

Falco walked to the edge of the veranda and stared out over the hills. In his mind’s eye he saw olive trees, lemon trees, a vineyard ripening under the warm Etruscan sun. What he really saw were gray stones jutting like jagged teeth through the mossy hills and a low fog creeping through the valleys under ash-colored clouds.

“Enough context?” asked the governor. “Or shall I go on about the immediacy of securing this miserable bog and subduing these blue-stained apes for the glory of Rome?”

“Is it true, sir?” asked the secretary. “About the Picts uniting under a king?”

Falco turned on his heel to face the scribe, who flinched under the scrutiny. “They swallowed up a Roman legion, the most awesome engine of war the world has ever known; who cares if it’s true? They are dangerous.”

“So, we are sure the Ninth is lost to the Picts?”

“You didn’t see their message then?”

“No, sir. I don’t leave the villa.”

“Sentries found the head of the legion’s commander on a stake. Outside of the walls of the fort—not on the edge of the frontier, but right here at my home. His crested helmet was still in place, and tacked to it a message written on a sheepskin in their infernal blue paint.”

“Written, sir? The savages have writing?”

“It was written in Latin. As perfect as if you had drawn the letters yourself, scribe. It read:
‘Sorry. Accident. Couldn’t be helped.’”

“What does it mean?” asked the scribe.

Just then a cry came out of the sky, like a hundred hawks calling at once, and Falco saw a jagged blue line forming out of the mist at the top of the hills to the north—a line of warriors. Another call, and the tops of the hills to the east were outlined in blue. Another screech, and the western hilltops were turning blue with warriors, moving like a torrent down on the fort, and the Roman garrison within its gates.

“It means we are never going to see Rome again,” said Falco.

T
HEY HAD WALKED OUT OF THE FOREST AND INTO ONE OF THE VILLAGES
of the Picts, having traveled across Europe to get there—following a rumor, a whisper, a secret passed under the breath of those who had been conquered and then enslaved by the Romans.

“These crazy fucks paint themselves blue all over,” said Bleu. “I’m telling you, Poopstick, these are our people. They’re going to fucking love us!”

She wore only a loincloth threaded over a wide leather belt and two wasp-waisted Roman short swords she’d taken off dead legionaries in Iberia. Her hair was woven into five long plaits, encrusted with the Sacré Bleu, which was also smeared over her skin in rough, finger-shaped streaks. She had once been a girl of the tall, fair-skinned, Teutonic tribes that lived above the Rhine, but for months now she had been only Bleu.

“It’s wet and cold here,” said the Colorman.

He wore an ankle-length, unsheared sheepskin tunic that was snarled with sticks, leaves and burrs at its fringe, and a sheepskin hat that came down to his eyes. From a distance, he looked like an abused and unattractive lamb.

“You’ll see,” said Bleu. “They’re going to love us.”

They gave all the Sacré Bleu they had carried with them to the Picts, who mixed it with animal fat and painted each other’s faces and bodies and found themselves, as a tribe, in communion with a goddess, sharing visions of passion and glory and beauty and blood, for theirs was the art of war.

The Greeks had called her a
daemon
(who inhabited artists and stoked them with fires of outrageous invention), the Romans called her
a genius
(for they believed not that one
was
a genius but that one
had
a genius, a patron spirit of inspiration, that must be fed with brilliance of mind, lest it move on to a more spritely host, leaving one as stagnant and dull as ditch water), but the Painted People called her Leanan Sidhe, a singular force, a goddess-lover who rode you, man or woman, into the ecstatic light and took life and love and peace as her price for a momentary glimpse of eternity. All would rise and fuck and fight and die for Leanan Sidhe! Sing praise! Howl and rake your nails across the moon in the embrace of Leanan Sidhe! Dash yourself on the rocks, lick the sweet nectar of death from the breasts of Leanan Sidhe! Fall upon your enemies with the spark of an immortal in your eye! For the Painted People! For the Colorbringer! For Leanan Sidhe!

And when they were spent, lying exhausted in slick mounds of flesh and fluids, the Colorman built his fires, sang his chant, stomped his awkward dance, and with a wicked black glass blade, scraped the sacred blue from the very skin of the writhing Leanan Sidhe.

She was right. They fucking loved them.

T
HE
P
AINTED
P
EOPLE CAME OUT OF THE HILLS IN A GREAT BLUE WAVE.
Leanan Sidhe and the Colorbringer, their king, stood on their fighting litter atop the backs of two oxen, led by a dozen men with shields. The king was in front, strapped to a frame at his waist, quivers of javelins at his sides. Leanan Sidhe held a timber crossbeam behind the king, with a rack of the heavier
gaesum
spears at her back, their cruelly barbed brass points, as wide as shovels, looking like pickets in Death’s garden fence.

No Roman lookout had survived long enough to raise the alarm until the Picts were already in sight of the fort. By the time the cavalry was mounted and the archers on the walls, the Pictish horde had closed off any escape from the compound.