And so it was that I left the stage in the same precarious way I had entered it. The Cavea was my entire world and the only life I ever knew, but I wasn’t the only child she survived. Half a million other men and a million beasts had come before me and would still come after me.
I watched my lifeless body being dragged with a hook. It was an eerie and disorienting sensation. I saw my troupe standing and crying in the shadows; there was nothing they could have done. Even the tribe of chimpanzees fell quiet and somber in that moment, consoling each other inside their cages. Barrus the Indian elephant slipped his trunk between the bars and tried to reach me while the seals taken all the way from Ultima Thule in the frozen North wailed in hair-raising anguish.
Petipor, my guardian and employer, walked with my body all the way into the mortuary, where I was laid on a pile of fresh corpses. He took out his aulos, the only pair he had, and tucked it under my crossed arms because he knew it was my favorite. He bent down to whisper in my ear: “You’re free now, child.”
He felt a shiver as he walked out, and it must’ve been the premonition of his own end that passed him by because not long after that day, he would hang himself from one of the sturdier platforms that carried elephants and hippopotami to the surface.
The door was slammed shut and I felt free at last from a life of toil and violence. The mortuary was completely dark and quiet save for a few beams of daylight coming in and some sand trickling through the timber floor of the games above that made hissing noises. Intermittently I could hear the muffled roar of the crowd floating from the seats through the porta libitinaria down the tunnel. Habet, hoc habet! they screamed. And Ure! Ure! Burn him up!
Without warning, everything fell into a deafening hush as though all the breath in the hall had been sucked away by a fiery explosion. I was astonished to find a strange visitor standing before me, hunched like a vulture, hooded and mysterious. At first I thought it was the executioner who had stayed behind amidst all the dead but he was not attired in his usual costume of bird mask and leather boots. He had also discarded his tunic for a cowl that was the very color of flames, fading from hues of deep orange to light yellow.
He was still the Etruscan Charun, the underworld daemon, but instead of a mallet to deliver finishing blows, this person carried on his back a pair of then folded wings that seemed to be made up of a thousand iron feathers; like those armor-piercing arrowheads of the sagittarii, only each one of them is intricate and polished to razor-sharpness.
I have heard of such a creature only in rumors, this Avalerion. Larger than an eagle and lord over all birds. Plumage the color of fire and wings and talons that could cut through flesh and bone. Only a pair is said to exist at any one time. It was little wonder that the heralds would portray it as a bird without a beak – and without feet! It dawned on me that this being didn’t belong in the Cavea or in the world of the living, and a great coldness rushed through me.
“You are a man among men, Diegis. I have searched far and wide for someone like you,” the outsider spoke in a soft but resonant voice, only gray humanoid lips and chin visible from under hood and shadow. To my surprise, both the voice and contour of the lips suggested a feminine owner. “I have drifted across many worlds, and I am… bone-weary.”
I stood rooted to the spot as though in my insubstantial form I had become the sorceress’ puppet. Like a wisp of jinn trapped inside an unseen bottle.
“I have come to make you an offer. A trade that can only be freely undertaken. I will grant you immortality for an equal lifespan of service. If you so desire, no more will you suffer pain, sickness, death or grief. No man will command above you. You shall have the whole world to roam as your kingdom, and you shall hold power over all life, to match creation with destruction.
“You shall be the Grim Tyrant: unbending, unseen, unchallenged. The Great Equalizer. You shall humble the proudest ruler and bring relief to the lowliest servant.”
She pointed a clawed, long, bony finger at me. And as the sleeve of her robe fell, the rest of her calcified arm was revealed.
“But you must heed this warning: What I speak of is nothing like your paltry human oaths. Once you enter your name into this contract, you shall forsake all vestiges of your mortal existence and all other bonds that come with it. You shall know only the life of a death angel, bereft of company and untouched by nature for all eternity.”
I felt incredulous and undeserving more than anything else, to be chosen among countless others. What was it in me that had drawn her, I wondered. Still I ruled out the possibility of a trick and judged the creature to be free from human guile and to be above malice. There was something in her words that told me she was incapable of lying. At that very moment it also occurred to me that I had lost faith in my own kind, and Death was as pure as the beasts but more intelligent than them. I felt myself warming up to the otherworldly ambassador.
Perhaps it was because she was bound by the same terms of the covenant she spoke of. I was, in essence, to trade one life of servitude for another under a different set of rules. Different and more just. It gave reward to good service and probably meted out an equal dose of punishment for failure and attempts of breach.
Thoughts of immortality didn’t tempt me. In spite of all the injustices I had witnessed and borne in my expired life, I wasn’t embittered. It might seem hard to believe but I had a fairly good idea of what human existence was in its entirety. It was sufferings and triumphs, peaks and troughs. They were halves of a whole; one could not exist without the other. I had my own stolen moments of happiness – with my friends in the circus, my guardian Petipor, all the animals in the Cavea, and of course Aquilia. And though I passed away so young, I had been taught well by my extreme circumstances during the brief sixteen years that was given me. The stark difference had made everything clear in my consciousness.
Death offered and described to me the deal exactly as it was. No more, no less. I sensed this easily enough from my semi-divine negotiator. But it was something in me, something in my own character that flew towards the bargain and made me know my answer even before it had entered my mind. Like it had been written right from the start in some diary of destiny that I would accept.
And so I did. I suppose in my heart of hearts I wanted to be in the best spot this time, at the podium or even the imperial box. It didn’t matter whether I was an active participant or a helpless spectator, I desired to watch over the cessation of bitter-sweet life for every breathing thing in the world. I burned with a sick voyeurism towards the struggle of all creatures that cling on to something so fragile, so ephemeral, and so pointless. After all these formal considerations, I shook Death’s ice-cold hand and walked away from the mortal world without a backward glance.
I couldn’t interfere with human affairs. Only in that final moment between life and death was I permitted to make my presence felt; when I severed the thread of life, the umballicus, that anchored humans onto the land of the living. These were the first of the rules I had to live by in my new role as the Atropos Wyrd, one of a triumvirate of Fate-dealers.
In between my duties, I often watched Aquilia in my phantom form yet was unable to console her with the news that I had moved on to a better though stranger place. I yearned to tell her stories of all my travels and to instruct her how wide the world was – certainly much wider than she had thought or could ever conceive. And when she was finally compelled to marry by her father, I was there too in the house where she had been raised and looked on knowingly at the sadness that hid behind the familiar smile.
Still she became a dutiful wife and a caring mother. And if the affection she eventually learned to feel for her husband was ever found wanting, the love she showered on her children more than made up for it. I watched her attain a life of genuine happiness and contentment.
She surrounded herself with a string of pets: a Vertragus, which was a Celtic breed of hound, a house-snake, a fawn, a tortoise, a swan, a peacock, a pair of doves, a dozen geese, five green parrots, three ravens, a family of hares, and two monkeys. But when she finally lost the fight against old age and succumbed to senility, what names would she be calling but those of the long-dead performers of the Cavea: Barrus the elephant, Artaxias the lioness, Innocence the white bear, and me, Diegis, in her rheumy eyes preserved in all my youth. She would often make hurried and furtive preparations for our elopement and make her way to our long-expired tryst, to the annoyance of the house slaves and the amusement of all her grownup children.
I must admit I was almost tempted every time to violate the rules and reveal my supernatural nature to her. It was very curious how the human mind worked – or faltered. The most urgent things became immaterial while those that are decades-old were pushed to the foreground as though they had happened only yesterday. If Aquilia could only see, she would know that her fantasy was not far from the truth. There I stood in the same room with her, unmoved by the sweeping hands of time and as tall and eternal as the first time she laid eyes on me. She, on the contrary, had been transformed into a shambling, stooped, and wrinkled old woman. Everything had been eroded away but for that small space in her memory where her first love still burned bright.
In the blink of a reaper’s eye came the crumbling of Rome and all its grandeur and decadence. There were looting, rape, more atrocities, and the unrelenting death toll. More work for me and the Crows. We were kept busy. Deep down I also knew I was tearing off and burning the pages of a book that held what little evidence there was of my human existence.
Wiping the world clean of all traces of my former self was a much easier and more irrevocable step than I had anticipated. First there was the Plague of Flavius Justinianus. After that came Atra Mors, the Black Death. Both made all the victims through hundreds of years of the Empire seem nothing more than a drop in the bucket. With poetic justice, the fleas and the black rats took vengeance on man on behalf of all the wolves, the great felines, and the gargantuan elephants that the Empire had slaughtered. And though the masses feared the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there were only me, the Crows, and the anger that I had kept tempered in my heart.
I was the “Pied Piper” who in 1284 bought scores of children and orphans from the German village of Hamelin and had them settle in parts of Central Europe, some of them even in my own motherland, Dacia Superior, left empty by relentless barbarian invasions. The only difference was, I was the more sinister and dramatic version with the rats and instead of taking away waves upon waves of the filthy creatures to drown them in the river, I brought them with me. Yes, scurrying with their tiny feet off the ships and along the mooring lines down to the sewers to breed a whole army parallel to the unsuspecting city; three rat mercenaries for every cringing human. Humankind, for me, was the real vermin that had to be eradicated. Everyone was guilty either in complicity or inaction.
Still, I wasn’t as frenzied as the Crows. And I bore witness to how, in the event of a great pestilence, the line between the living and the dying blurred. There were more than a few executions that passed unaccounted for. It was all I could do stop the insatiable Crows from preying mindlessly.
I suppose what I wanted was to play the role of the flute-playing satyr that the Romans had been so fond of. What was running through my mind but kept eluding me was the marching tune of the Cavea, the Trepak, still formless and sleepless inside my head in that era. I only played pieces from old Petipor’s repertoire as poor substitutes. I had the exact aulos he had gifted me and playing it rewarded me with the feeling that I was in a way avenging him. All of us. For Petipor in particular, it was the aulos subverting the lyra; the slave outwitting the master. Madness finally overtaking reason. No man in all the land was safe. Every soul, from the bowed scum to the lofty emperor, was dancing to my tune.
And the weak, delirious, highly-sensitive children from the frozen steppes outside Khanbaliq to the crowded plague houses of London, they kept hearing me, humming to themselves and creating new tunes. They passed them on to the surviving ones till ultimately the words took shape out of their separate contributions on the playground:
Ring around the rosies,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
But for all these theatrics which would’ve made the Cavea proud, I had been helpless to do that which I desired the most, to be with Aquilia. In her last days, it was like we had exchanged places with the beasts and we lived like exhibits inside a giant terrarium, a pane of glass constantly between us. Or at least I lived in this world, my own version of Pluto, cursed with the ability to see her but not to speak to her or to touch her, and she was perfectly unaware of my presence. It was the pain of non-existence that I suffered.
Yet I held on to hope because our worlds inched closer and closer as she counted down the remaining days of her life. At exactly midnight in her clock, our worlds would both orbit near enough to touch.
But then she was inducted into Heaven. They called it by a different name: Helium, but it was the same paradise most people had been raised to believe. To this ethereal land, it was the elemental Storks, the great white angels, who escorted Aquilia and robbed me of my fraction of time, my sliver of opportunity. There was no possibility for a servant of the dark like me to steal even a glimpse of her or to send word to where she was. Aquilia and I had drifted close and were worlds apart again; this time forever.
The only chance, my predecessor explained, lay in Aquilia’s choosing to be reborn to earth. And tragically, to be reborn is to allow one’s mind to be wiped clean like a slate.
“To find a single soul in all creation is to find a particular star in all the universes,” the previous Atropos taught me. “Leave her be. Refrain from turning back to your mortal shell. Shed all order, outward or inward, that you find comforting. All this sentimentality and your need for a familiar face; what you consider strength is weakness in the eyes of the inhabitants of Terra Mortis. And in the eyes of the Crows in particular. Do not appear humanly weak to them or they shall overthrow you.”
I heeded her advice. It occurred to me then how the human quality, no matter how diluted, was inserted into the equation in the guise of the Atropos. This even though the two other elements of the Fate Trinity, Clotho and Lachesis, were purebred immortals. Indeed, no matter how the Crows detested it, the Atropos Wyrd played a humanizing and balancing role.
Old Death left me to be the last of my breed. She disintegrated and passed on to the Smoke, a place that was neither Heaven nor Hell (nor Limbo) built especially for semi-immortal and ambiguous workers like us.
But let me give you an idea how immense the undertaking was to search for Aquilia in the ocean of souls. Human scientists have estimated that there are ten times more stars than grains of sand in all the beaches and deserts of the world combined. And if I gave them precise knowledge of how big the universe actually was (and how many others there are), it would surely break their flimsy grasp on reality.