“Manet died of syphilis,” said Lucien. “Henri and I were just discussing it.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s often syphilis.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lucien. “Why syphilis?”
“It’s a way for their dick to kill them. I’m a goddess, Lucien, there’s nothing we like better than irony. It’s really the only sense of order we have.” She drained her snifter and held it out for a refill. “It’s slow, but before all the madness and amputations set in, so many paintings!”
“Well that’s depressing,” said Henri. “I was sure it was a myth.”
“But Vincent?” said Lucien. “Him you shot?”
“I don’t shoot people. The Colorman did it. What a waste. Vincent’s pain should have been the Colorman’s payment.”
“Then he painted you as Juliette?” asked Lucien.
“They don’t have to paint me for me to inspire them. They just have to paint.”
Lucien and Henri stared across the parlor at each other, each wondering how it was that they could discuss the murder of their friends and heroes over brandy, with a goddess. An increasingly drunken goddess.
“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.”
Twenty-five
THE PAINTED PEOPLE
Britannia, Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire, A.D. 122
QUINTUS POMPEIUS FALCO, PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR OF BRITANNIA, 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.
THEY 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.
THE PAINTED PEOPLE 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.
At the edge of bow range, the Picts began to circle, swinging clay pots of flaming pitch around their heads on lanyards and hurling them into the kill zone between their lines and the walls, until the ground around the Roman fort was a black, smoking hell and the Picts but blue demons beyond the fire.
Pict arrows came down on the Romans from every direction. Legionaries sought cover from one threat, only to find death raining down from another. The cavalry was sent through the gates to break the Pict ranks, but no sooner was the column outside before the oxen-borne litter rumbled out of the flames and the screech of the blue-woman atop it caused their horses to rear.
Her first spear took a cavalry captain in the chest, knocking him back like he’d been tied to a stake. The Colorbringer hurled a javelin from each hand, taking an archer off the wall with the first, the second driving through the wooden rampart to impale a slave carrying water to douse the flames on the walls. A cry went up from the Picts at the sight of their king’s kills, and the whirling mass of blue warriors closed in on the fort.
Roman arrows thunked into the wooden litter around them. A Pict shield bearer fell and was trampled by the heavy oxen. Leanan Sidhe took an arrow in the thigh, and her next thrown lance cleaved the archer’s helmet and took off the top of his head. As she wrenched out the arrow, the Colorman was hit in the chest with one—two—three arrows, their iron tips passing through to stick out his back.
A cry of fury went up among the Picts. The Romans had the range now and a half dozen arrows pinned the Colorman to the wooden frame to which he was strapped.
“Ouch,” said the Colorman. “I hate arrows.”
“I know,” said Leanan Sidhe. She reached forward and snatched out the arrows that protruded from his back, held the bloody shafts aloft, and screamed at the Romans. The scream echoed across the ranks. The Colorman slumped in his harness, his head lolling with the movement of the oxen. She pulled the rest of the arrows from his chest, threw them aside, then grabbed the little man by the ears and shook his head.
“Up, Poopstick, up!” she said. “They have to see you take the arrows and rise again. Fight!”
The Colorman opened one eye and his head came up. “It’s cold. I hate the cold,” he said, grabbing a javelin in each hand and sending them sailing over the walls into the fortress. “And I hate arrows.”
When the litter reached the walls, Leanan Sidhe leapt from her perch, caught the top of the rampart, and vaulted to her feet atop the wall just as an arrow caught her in the side. She whirled, drawing her swords as she did, and looked into the wide eyes of a terrified archer, who was trying to nock another arrow. He turned to run as she fell on him and took off his arms, leaving him to bleed out, then hacked her way through Roman flesh as the Picts placed their ladders and came over the walls in swarms of blue bloodlust.
A half-hour later, every Roman had fallen, every slave taken from Caledonia had been freed, and the crooked little king of the Picts stood on the roof of the villa, a few arrows still protruding from his chest and back, holding aloft the head of Quintus Pompeius Falco, provincial governor of Britannia, whose last thought had been: These crazy fucks really are painted blue.
Behind the Colorbringer, the muse, Leanan Sidhe, smeared Sacré Bleu over the golden Roman eagle staff and held it over her head as the Painted People chanted her name.
Paris, Île de la Cité, 1891
WITH ONLY THE POWER OF A FEW CACHED PAINTINGS, AND NOT THAT OF TEN THOUSAND blue-painted Pictish warriors, it took the Colorman until the next evening before he could regenerate from the gunshot wounds Bleu had inflicted upon him. Fortunately, a morgue worker who was sweeping up got too close and now lay desiccated and dead on the floor, the life drawn out of him.
The Colorman slid off the morgue slab to the cold floor. Bullets pooped from his wounds and plopped on the stone as he limped naked around the room looking for something to wear. All the dead were either naked, too ripe, or too tall for him to use their clothes, so he settled on a white mortician’s
coat that trailed out behind him as he went. The morgue attendant pretended not to see him as he passed, figuring that a spontaneous reanimation would require paperwork that he did not wish to fill out.
It was only three blocks back to the flat, and while it was a very public three blocks, and in the early evening, a time when all classes were out on the street, he went just the same. Gentlemen looked past him and ladies averted their gaze as he crossed the bridge from Île de la Cité into the Latin Quarter. He was near Notre-Dame Cathedral, where often were found cripples and freaks looking for charity, so the crooked little man with the overhanging brow, dragging the tails of a long white coat, attracted no more attention than any other unfortunate soul.
He rang the bell at the building on rue des Trois-Portes and the concierge yelped and leapt back when she answered the door, a woman whose size and cynicism had caused many years to pass since her last yelp or leap. The novelty pleased the Colorman to no end, and he had the urge to pull open his coat for a full penis presentation in celebration, but feared it might be gilding the lily, so he pressed on.
“Bonsoir, Madame,” said the Colorman. “Could you let me in? I seem to have forgotten my key.”
“But, Monsieur,” said the concierge, raising a professionally buoyant eyebrow of suspicion. “I thought you were dead.”
“A scratch, only. Accident. Couldn’t be helped. The new maid was cleaning the gun and it fired.”
“You were shot five times. I heard the shots.”
“She’s not a very good maid. I think we will have to let her go.”
“Your niece said you were attacking the girl.”
“Scolding her for her bad cleaning. Madame, let me in, please.”
“The whole flat is covered in blue powder, monsieur.”