XLVIII. In The Bullʼs Horns

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The painting smirked down at Oro and his lovely hostess Ruth Tudor.

With an abstract eye, it showcased strips of beaded sand swirling around El Coliseo de los Matadores with a thunderous hunger. The thick, forested Chilean shadow of power swallowed the edges of the painting – dipped in aching gold hues – and in the bloodthirsty chaos, wooly clouds overhead oozed and billowed across the sky, blanketing the sun and the sands in patches of topaz yellow and glossy red. People shrieked at the bottom of the painting, whipped to submission, bullets tearing through their bodies and laminating their bodies with a wavy illusion. The strokes of the painting were precise, priceless, imagery entombed by the artistʼs brush.

The prisoners of Pinochetʼs cannibalistic cravings, of his sadistic mind, they surrendered to the heat in the portrait, and as Ruth and Oro took in the portrait, they took in waves. Strips of murky, cherry red, water settling on top of the waves. Waves that were foamy, with their mouths watering in anticipation as they sunk into the bodies of the prisoners and devoured their entrails with a sharpness.

Ruth Tudor frowned and drank her Belizean rum.

"What an ugly f*cking painting," she said simply.

The painting smirked down at Oro and Ruth, and it captivated their ruthlessness, their cruelty. Like sharks craved blood, Oro craved renaissance; a dawning of a golden age. Stability in all the cradles of power, of wealth, of every dark and foul thing that made a poor man a king.

The crownelands were all he ever dreamed of as a boy, a dream he was married to, a dream he sewed together with a three-pronged beard made of golden Brazilian hair dye and stitched from teeth gilded in Chilean zinc. He had refined tastes, luxurious tastes, and Ruth Tudor...she spat on them. With ruthless eyes fashioned from serpentʼs teeth, Cuban features that baked in the Chilean sun, and a monopolized beauty that was chalk full of ethereal makeup and bloodied lips. His jealously consumed him, and her fire gutted him alive.

"Excuse me?"

"The painting youʼre trying to woo me with. Itʼs a sh*t painting – like the one a hyper-masculinized b*stard gives his dime-store mistress. Manʼs motivation to win; do you think I give a f*ck?"

"And what are you? Pinochetʼs mistress?"

Oro leaned back, lips drunk off the sensation of his bourbon, and Ruth toasted to it with a drunken fervor of her own, snorting.

"Iʼm the matador, cabrón. You would be wise to remember that next time you try to gold-dig your way to fame and fortune with a sh*t painting."

She downed the rum in one go, laughing menacingly.

"Whatʼs your name?"   

"Oro."   

"And where are you from...Oro?"   

"São Luís. Near the Ring of Fire."   

"São Luís. One of Escobarʼs sicarios?"

"Yes."

"The one that helped auction virgins to Portuguese p*rnographers and American tourists. That Oro? The p*mp?"

Oro grinned a snakeʼs smile, his cat-like pupils grinning too.    

"I suppose so."

Ruth drank her Belizean rum.

And Oro drank from the holy grail. The luxurious warmth of it all, the foaming thunder inside the bubbling glass, the fury inside it as gold as lightning, the exquisiteness of its taste. He imbibed, indulged, his wildest fantasies, his most inebriated fantasies. A drunken ship sailing through a sea of dark impulse and wry cynicism and sharp, predatory eyes. Oro drank, drank with the thirst of a thousand sailors, drank with the entitled of a Peruvian wineseller, drank as the painting smirked at him with curled lips painted in red lipstick, drank with muffled inspiration, drank...

Drank like he was ready to kill.

Ruth stood up.

"You want me to take out Pinochet; to start a war in his name," she said, impressed.

Oro grinned.

"Well, you did get the first part correct, so I will give you that. I am – how do you Americans say? – a pirate. A bandit. This is war and war always has bloody consequences, señora. But the second part? I am afraid I have to take points off."

His fingers had a mind of their own. Harsh and rough as the rocks that slapped the palaceʼs crustacean walls. The anger of the seven seas thundered in Oro, with the bloodthirstiness of a bull, and with the speed of a scorpion – he imagined clutching Ruth Tudorʼs chin and tucking a Tartessan steel blade under her small, succulent throat. When she struggled, not physically, but because of his bare size – he would deeply and loudly, his throat booming with every thrash of his chest. He imagined Ruthʼs manicured talons having a mind of their own, too. Spitting on him, slapping his golden beard with venomous saliva and poisonous hatred. In a heated fury, with a hunger for vengeance, Ruth Tudor wriggled around him like a worm on a hook...

Violence. He craved that almost as much as he craved gold.

"I donʼt want war, p*ta; I want that Scottish wealth you sons-of-b*tches have buried in the Order of the Dragon. A businessman looking to make as much f*cking money as the man that warms your bed. The power to make kings fall, clergy cower, and the chance to be as rich as that c*cksucker Pinochet."

Oro heard the gears of a gun shift; ghosting the crown of his head. Chuckling, Oro watched the gritty determination on Ruth Tudorʼs face with mirth. The Dragonsguard in Chile were of the privateer assortment, shiny and sleek in their black coat-of-arms with memorabilia from the West Indies, and in the haziness of the moment, Oro grinned cheekily.

What fun.

"You have ten seconds to get out of my damn sight," Ruth snarled. "Ten."

"Nine," Oro murmured.

"Nine?"

"Eight."

"You son-of-a-f*cking bitch, do you think this is a f*cking game?" one of the Dragonsguard shouted.

"Seven," Oro spat.

"Seven," Ruth growled.

The moon was black against the golden Chilean sky, and as Oro swept down on his American prey, the moon moved with him; eyes of fire lighting the sea ablaze. Under the gilded ruin, the winding roots of the Presidential Palace tightened around the infrastructure. The darkness, the decay, it all came alive under Oroʼs touch – and Ruth listened to the hickory trees wrapped around the Presidential Palace rustle. Tangling the castle in a tight squeeze, growling above the sea. The rugged hills of the mangrove forests dotting the seafaring city began to move to, eyes glowing under the sun.

Her screech shook along the screaming walls.

The Dragonsguard cocked their guns immediately, locked and loaded on Oro, on the sounds, on the sight of golden feathers...

"Six," Oro said, mocking.

Ready.

The Queen Teresaʼs Glory reared its kraken-ram. A hundred strong. The Golden Company, in its fiery glory, let out their ethereal cry to the Heavens – the tears from the gunpowder acrid against the sour sky – and the Dragonsguard responded by invoking the Gods. Thousands upon thousands of them flooding the Needleʼs Eye. The jungle was a cavemanʼs tooth, whose venomous bloodlust and minty breath fanned the likes of them; inching closer and closer to them with the ivy running through its veins and its poison on its lips.

"Five," Ruth growled.

Aim.

"Four," Oro snarled. "Three, two, one!"

Fire.

The Phoenix rose from the ashes, raining its unbridled fiery hell on the Chilean territory. With wings of gilded orange bubbling the palace walls in cindery bubbles, the Phoenix flew – the floors exploding from its touch. Peeling, slicing, and carving into the Dragonsguard with its breath and claws. From claws to beak to spiked neck, the Phoenix released acidic fire and heated rain to the world, greeting the Gods in furious sweeps of the air. Craving destruction, incineration. As the skies turned to ash, and seas to ruin, Oro smiled when the Phoenix perched itself on the ledge of Ruthʼs

cupola. Gold as the sun, and dark as the moon, with a hunger for the wind.

Oro kneeled, pickpocketing a few Illyrian swords in the golden puddle of melted Dragonsguard flesh.

Ah, gold.

Oro loved the way its bloody feeling kissed his hands. Sheathing the swords, Oro watched Ruth raise her gun; making his lips twitched into that rugged tobacco-toothʼd smile. With a snap of his fingers, the Dragonsguard rose from the acidic fumes of the Phoenixʼs fire – blistering brown skin and rotting wombs pregnant with witchfyre the Phoenix produced – and with another snap of his fingers, Ruth's canines cracked the caverns of her mouth in rills of blood. Shredding flesh, tearing her limbs. Oro triggered the fair Tudorʼs survival instincts with his dominance of the situation, and the pheromones he produced, and well...

That dirty little secret was richer than all the other fortunes heʼd acquired.

"What is that saying? The one you gringos love?" Oro asked as he watched the bones in Ruth Tudorʼs hands shatter her fingernails as her back expanded and snapped in half.

"History is fiction, literature is currency, and the pure race–" Oro grunted, tangling his hands in Ruth's hair.

"–is the master race, no?"

The blood curdled around his feet, and Ruthʼs

fangs bathed in it as he rammed her to the floor. Cracking against her cranium, every crevice of shattered glass kissing her petite figure. Coughing hoarsely, Ruth gaped at Oro as his fingers worked. Harsh and rough as the fire that slapped the palace's crustacean walls. The anger of the seven seas thundered in Oro, with the bloodthirstiness of a bull, with the speed of that scorpion – squeezing. His fingers worked against her throat, tightening with every struggle as wisps of air spilled from her lungs. She writhed, shaking and erratic as he moved her to the balcony – on the edge of the Pacific Ocean – and that was exactly how Oro wanted her.

How he would get what he wanted.

"And yet, Pinochetʼs mistress – the British Invaderʼs wife – is a Cuban b*tch," Oro hummed.

Ruth laughed.

"What can I say? Iʼm full of surprises," Ruth mocked, grinning as she choked on curdles of blood.

"And full of bullsh*t, amor," Oro murmured, crushing her windpipe. Every low snarl, every menacing growl, it made Oroʼs pulse quicken. The upper hand; there was nothing as carnal as it. As explosive as it. Chile burned with the force of a thousand longship cannons as it submitted to the sea, holdfasts sank under the Phoenixʼs bane, and Ruth Tudorʼs pretentiousness was slowly dying under his touch.

Oro kneeled down.

"You see, I know the truth Virgil DeMarcus died for," Oro murmured. "And that is worth far more than any sh*t painting."

Ruth doubled over when Oro let her go, coughing her lungs out with back turned to him.

"You canʼt run from me, Ruth Tudor."

A beat.

"On the contrary, amor."

It was a covetous move; one that told a story of luxury from larceny. When Ruth Tudor rose, the trophies she paraded were now bruises on her neck. The smeared red lipstick she wore was smudged on her full lips, and the cocky, overconfident Ruth Tudor was nothing more than a Hijazi tale of overcompensating fortune and fame. With her leopard skins wrapped tightly around her petite torso, and her stare burning with eyes of fire ready to strike, Ruth stared at Oro with her neck held high. Laced in sheer Catalan gold and leopard-skinned adornments.

And yet, she smiled. Her mouth cake-full of blood, her voice full of spite. Hardened and callous, Ruth Tudor stared at Oro with a cheeky look, inching closer until the space between them was nonexistent; and when he looked her, she looked like...

No; that wasnʼt possible.

"On the contrary?" he asked.

"On the contrary, Oro," she repeated, taking one step back. Behind her, the waves churned in the fiery charcoal and brimstone of the Revenge's rage, slapping Pinochet's towers with a snakelike growl. His crew had taken the Chilean dictatorʼs ships as prizes for the Golden Company and the Needleʼs Eye burned every sailor to cross the Western seaboard. Ready to strike with its pincer-like arbors, ready to rake up the entrails of Pinochetʼs men.  Removing her animal skins, Ruthʼs muscly figure came to being as she took one final glance at Oroʼs raid – and under her marred Cuban skin – he saw an infinity sign carved into her skin with an inverted cross along the tissue, bright red like it were burning. The devilʼs kiss, as it was called.

Oro froze. Ruth took a step backwards.

She was a Hellbender; a rivaling group of mercenaries fighting to settle the Godsʼ score. The oldest score.

Oro grabbed an Illyrian sword.

"You canʼt catch me. I always win, cabrón."

And she jumped off the edge of the Needleʼs Eye.