The first time I saw him fettered there in the dark, I wept.
I was seven years old. My father led me by the hand down the steps behind the church altar, through a passage hewn into the mountainside. I’d never been permitted through that door before, though I knew that the key was kept under a loose floor tile beneath the icon of St. Michael. In those days that picture made me nervous: the archangel’s painted eyes always seemed to watch me, even though the rest of him was busy throwing down the Devil and trampling him underfoot.
All along the narrow tunnel beyond the door there were niches cut into the rock walls, and near our church these were filled with painted and gilded icons of the saints and of Our Lord, but farther back those gave way to statuettes of blank-eyed pagan gods, growing cruder in execution and less human in appearance as we walked on. I clung to Father’s hand and cringed from the darkness closing in behind me, as his kerosene lamp picked out the rock-cut steps at our feet and our breathing sounded loud in our ears. The journey seemed to take forever, to my child’s mind. I couldn’t help imagining the carved and painted eyes in the tunnel behind me: glowing pinpoints of light that watched my retreating back—and I kept looking over my shoulder to see.
Finally we came out into a roofless chamber, where the walls leaned inward a hundred feet over our heads and the floor was nothing but a mass of loosely tumbled boulders. I looked up, blinking at the light that seemed blinding, though in fact this was a dim and shadowed place. I could see a wisp of cloud against the seam of blue sky overhead, and the black speck of a mountain eagle soaring across the gap.
There he lay, upon a great tilted slab of pale limestone, his wrists and ankles spread and bound by twisted leather ropes whose farther ends seemed to be set into the rock itself. It was hard to say whether the slab had always been underground or had fallen long ago from the mountain above; our little country is, after all, prone to earthquakes. Dirt washed down with the rain had stained him gray, but I could make out the muscled lines of his bare arms and legs and the bars of his ribs. There was an old altar cloth draped across his lower torso—and only much later did I realize that Father had done that, to spare his small daughter the man’s nakedness.
“Here, Milja,” said my father, pushing me forward. “It is time you knew. This is the charge of our family. This is what we guard day and night. It is our holy duty never to let him be found or escape.”
I was only little: he looked huge to me, huge and filthy and all but naked. I stared at the ropes, as thick as my skinny wrists, knotted cruelly tight about his broader ones. They stretched his arms above his head so that one hand could not touch the other, and matching tethers held his ankles apart. I felt a terrible ache gather in my chest. I pressed backward, into Father’s black robes.
“Who is he?” I whispered.
“He is a very bad man.”
That was when the prisoner moved for the first time. He rolled his head and turned his face toward us. I saw the whites of his eyes gleam in his gray face. Even at seven, I could read the suffering and the despair burning there. I squirmed in Father’s grip.
“I think he’s hurt,” I whimpered. “The ropes are hurting him.”
“Milja,” said Father, dropping to his knee and putting his arm around me. “Don’t be fooled—this is not a human being. It just looks like one. Our family has guarded him here since the first people came to these mountains. Before the Communists. Before the Turks. Before the Romans, even. He has always been here. He is a prisoner of God.”
“What did he do?”
That was when I began to cry.
“What did he do?” became a question I repeated many times as I grew up, along with, “Who is he?” My father didn’t lie, but neither could he answer my question truthfully. He was an educated man, though he had taken up the vocation of priest of an isolated village in one of the most barren, mountainous corners of our rugged country. He had studied engineering at university in Belgrade, but he admitted that the answers to my queries were unclear to him. “The gods have condemned him,” he would say, with a sigh. That sounded so strange coming from an Orthodox priest that I didn’t know what to think.
Every Sunday, after going down into the village to celebrate the Divine Liturgy with the congregation in the church there—nobody ever climbed up the two hundred steps to our dingy little chapel carved into the sheer rock—he would descend into the prisoner’s cave. He would take the man water and bread, and wash his face. My father was not without compassion, even for a prisoner, and he felt the responsibility of his position.
“Is he…Prometheus?” I asked when I was ten, and had been reading the Greek myths in one of the dog-eared books Father had brought from the capital. “The gods chained up Prometheus forever. Is it him?”
“It may be.”
“But…Prometheus was good, Papa. He taught us how to be civilized. He stole fire from the gods to bring it to men. He was on our side!”
“What did man do with fire, Milja?”
“Cook?”
“He smelted iron, little chick, and with iron he made swords. He made all the weapons of war, and men have slaughtered men in countless millions ever since. Are you sure Prometheus had our best interests at heart? Would we not have been happier if we’d stayed in the innocence of the Stone Age?”
I was too young to answer that. Father sighed and fetched a blackbound book, laying it on the table by the window where the light could fall upon it. He opened the pages to somewhere near the beginning.
“My grandfather told me that it is Azazel we hold in our keeping. Have you heard of him?”
“No,” said I in a small voice.
“Neither man nor pagan titan, little chick, but a fallen angel. A leader of the Watchers: those Sons of God who lusted after mortal women. The Israelites dedicated their scapegoat sin-offering to Azazel every year when they drove it out into the wilderness. And just like the Greeks’ Prometheus, he is credited with teaching men metalworking and war-craft—and women the arts of seduction and sorcery. Here in the Book of Enoch, see; the angel Raphael is commanded by God: ‘bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. And lay upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever.’”
“Which is right, then?” I asked. “Is he a demon or is he Prometheus?”
“Maybe he is both, and it’s the same story. Or maybe he is something else altogether. All I know is that he’s been here since the beginning, and that it is our duty to keep him bound. It’s what our family forefathers dedicated their lives to. And you must carry on when I am gone, Milja. You must marry and teach your husband and your sons, so that it is never forgotten. And you must never tell anyone else, all your life. It must not go beyond the family. Promise me!”
“Why not?”
“What if someone, someone who did not understand, felt sorry for him and set him free? What if he is one of the great demons, Milja? What would happen to this world?”
I was eleven when I started to visit him in secret. I took him food, because I couldn’t bear any longer to lie awake in bed thinking of how hungry he must be. I knew he could get water—when it rained it would run down the rocks onto his face—but at eleven I was always ravenous myself, and starvation seemed the worst of tortures. And the image of him lying bound there haunted my dreams more and more, evoking feelings I had no words for—not then—until it seemed impossible for me to stay away.
Still, I went at midday, when the light was strongest and the cavern least frightening. I brought him bread crusts and cheese. I picked berries from the mountain bushes and fed them between his cracked lips.
I remember the first time I did it, the first time I went alone. I climbed up on that big rock slab and knelt over his dirt-streaked body, and he opened his eyes and looked up into mine. His irises were so dark that they couldn’t be distinguished from the pupils, and in this half-light they looked like holes.
“What’s your name?” I whispered.
I don’t know if he heard me. He certainly didn’t reply. He just looked at me, from the depths of his private torment.
“I brought you some milk.” I tipped the teat of the little skin of goats’ milk to his lips and let it trickle into the side of his mouth, carefully: I was scared of choking him. His throat worked and his lips twitched, bleeding. He drank it all and I sat back. That was when, with obvious and painful effort, the lines of his face pulled into a brief smile—a smile so fragile a butterfly might have trampled it underfoot.
That was when I was lost.
I was fourteen when I first heard him speak.
“Milja,” he murmured, greeting me. His voice was hoarse from disuse, but its depths made the hair stir on my neck. I nearly fled.
“What’s your name?” I asked once again, but he didn’t answer, withdrawing instead, it seemed, into his anguish once more. He only twisted from one hip to the other to ease the strain on his back, and hissed with pain. The power of his corded body, terrible even under constraint, made me tremble.
He spoke only rarely in the years that followed, and what he said made little sense to me—often it wasn’t even in any language I knew, and when I could make out the words they seemed to be nothing but fragments. “Leaves on the brown-bright water…” he might mutter to himself. I think he was remembering things he had seen before he was imprisoned. As I grew to realize how the uncountable years had stolen even his mind, I felt dizzy with horror.
I was eighteen when Father sent me away.
You have to understand: I grew up alone, set apart from the other village children. Oh, when I was a little child I ran and played with them, but as I grew older things changed. Our family had been here for centuries before the village of Stijenjarac was founded, fulfilling our ancient duty until war and political turmoil and expanding horizons had scattered and dwindled its numbers. We had always been treated as separate from the rest of the village; sometimes we would intermarry, but only our boys choosing their girls. I was the last of the line to grow up here. Schooling in the village was little more than rudimentary, and at fourteen I was the only girl still being taught; all the others my age were laboring with their mothers in the house and the fields. At sixteen I was still studying under my father’s tutelage, and had become a freak in the eyes of the whole community. The girls turned as one and cut me off from their company, erecting a wall of sneering hostility. The boys just teased me unremittingly, their curiosity expressed in the crudest manner. Thrown stones were the least of my worries.
I think Father was secretly pleased I showed no interest in the village boys. He hoped I would go to university some day, like him.
Perhaps I should have made an effort to understand my peers more, and tried to make friends. Perhaps. But I was naive, and I thought all men should be like my gentle, scholarly father, so I was alone a great deal. I looked after the house when Father was out—his ability to fix generators and rotavators was something the villagers valued him for as much as his priestly status, I think. I cooked and did the laundry. I read. I climbed the hillsides on my own, being careful to avoid the shepherds up there. And I went to visit our prisoner, every day.
As I grew older I grew bolder too. I stole wine for him. I baked him honey cake. I would bring water to wash the grime off his body, slightly shocked by my own recklessness as I wiped down the heavy slabs of his muscles, or slid a hand under a lower leg so that I might massage his calf and relieve the ache of his trapped limbs to some tiny extent. Sometimes he would focus upon my face long enough to whisper my name.
His body fascinated me. I learned its illicit contours in the half dark, mostly by touch. He felt cold all over, like the rock he lay on, but there were smooth bits and there were places rough with hair. There were harder and softer stretches. There was a big, jagged scar over the right side of his abdomen, but it looked old.
There were things only a married woman should see.
I wanted to take his pain away.
I was book-smart, as they say in America—there was no such phrase in our village, though they understood the concept perfectly—and I was burning with curiosity, but not wise. One day I lay down beside him on the stone and nestled my head on his chest. I could hear the slow beat of his heart. The bars of his ribs were like carved prehistoric rock-glyphs, and I walked my fingertips across each ridge and furrow. The skin above his hip was so smooth it was like stroking feathers, but the old altar cloth felt damp and coarse in comparison. There was something repulsive about the feel of the grimy cloth that preserved his modesty. With my right hand I drew off that swatch, and then for the first time I touched him without the excuse that I was tending him. Without any excuse at all.
Hair, matted into curls. Below that, duskier skin. I shut my eyes. My hand, for once, was bolder than my gaze.
Soft.
Silky.
A small cool heft in my hand, yet heavy with a secret weight: the significance invested in the forbidden. My heart was racing, far faster than the heavy beat against my ear. My mind shied away from what I was doing. But my body seemed to be sure of what it wanted, and urged my hand to its task.
Tentatively I began to caress him.
He responded to that. Not just that sleeping creature stirring to wakefulness under my open palm, but his heartbeat waking with a kicking thud and then his whole frame following—his back stretching, his breath catching in his throat, his toes flexing and curling. I snatched my hand away, terrified and thrilled, and when he groaned deep in his chest I felt it through my bones.
“Ansha?”
I didn’t recognize the name, if it was a name. His eyes were wide open, staring, but I couldn’t be sure he saw anything. I pushed myself up into his line of sight.
“Milja,” I whispered. “I’m Milja.”
His cracked lips parted, and he made a sound of need. He was beautiful in a way I couldn’t understand: so beautiful I felt it as pain. So I returned my hand to its former position and nearly jumped with shock when I found that everything had changed. Nothing soft anymore, and nothing cold, and just so much more of him, flesh brought into existence from the nothing, from the void. Like a miracle.
I wrapped my hand around that burgeoning miracle.
So heavy. So strong. My hand embraced that hardness, stroking. His breath started to come faster, with a little tremble at the end of each exhalation, interspersed with murmured, unintelligible words. Soon he was so eager that he was too thick for my grasp.
I paused. I wasn’t entirely sure where this was going, or how long it would take to get there. My own body was a cauldron of conflicting needs and fears.
“Milja!” he groaned, desperate.
That was when I heard a noise, like an echo of his cry. My head snapped up.
There—again: “Milja? Where are you?” A footfall on rock.
My father, entering the cavern.
I slid off the prisoner’s boulder, scraping raw lines on my bare shins. Clumsy with terror, I found the fallen altar-cloth in the gloom and threw it across his hips in an attempt to hide the evidence of my sin. Then I backed away, but a loose stone turned under my feet and fell clinking among the slabs.
“Who’s there? Is that you, Milja?”
A light sprang out in the half darkness, as my father snapped on his flashlight. There was nowhere for me to hide. I blinked and cringed as the beam caught my eyes.
“Milja! What are you doing down here?”
I couldn’t answer. My skin burned with shame, proclaiming my guilt. I felt like there was no air in my lungs.
Father hurried forward across the fallen stone, frowning. The light swept the agonized lines of our captive, from his clenched hands to the mounded folds draped over his groin and the dig of his heels against the rock, pushing his thighs and hips an inch higher in his vain quest for solace.
“Girl!” Father’s brows were knotted in anger, as if he were the Patriarch Moses surveying the sinning Israelites when he came down from the mountain. I had never seen him with an expression like that. He’d always been so mild and gentle with me. “What have you been doing?” he thundered.
“Nothing!” I lied, shrinking into myself.
“You shouldn’t be here alone!”
The prisoner groaned.
My father shook his head, like the tolling of an execution bell. His heavy voice and damning words made it clear that he believed the man and knew that I was the one bearing false witness. “Didn’t I tell you, child, that Azazel is the teacher of seduction? Did you not hear what I said?”
I bit my lip and wondered if I was going to be sick.
“I will send you away, Milja. You cannot stay near him! Your cousin Vera is in Boston: I will send you to her.”
America?
I was twenty-three before I saw him again.
I went to Boston, Massachusetts, as my father arranged. He sold several of the icons and statues from within the tunnel to pay for me; there’s never any shortage of black-market buyers for that sort of thing. Wheels were greased—some of them, I know, less than legally. I went to college. I graduated as a structural engineer and got a promising job.
I was even engaged to be married, briefly. Father was delighted, although Vera and her husband Josif thought I could do better—by which they meant some Orthodox boy who’d been born in America but whose parents remembered the Black Mountain or at the very least spoke our language—and they only redoubled their efforts to set me up with some ethnic relative.
I never warmed to those young men my cousin steered to me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be on my own…but they weren’t what I dreamed of. Nor was I what they wanted: I wasn’t ugly, I guess, but tallish and skinny, with breasts too small for American tastes, my wavy dark hair tied back and my nose buried in a book.
And anyway, I was no use at talking to men the way they wanted to be talked to. Growing up without a mother or sisters or girlfriends, I’d never learned how. There are ways of conversing, and laughing, and moving, and appearing; signals girls give off that say I’m fun: I’m interested in guys: You want me. I’d never learned how to do any of that. I was too earnest, and when men did hit on me I’d either respond to their flirtations with serious conversation, or curl my lip at their silliness. Aggressive teasing just made me recoil, offended and scared. I did once try dying my hair blonde, which I dimly realized was one of the Right Signals, but the sight of my big dark eyes staring out from among long yellow locks just freaked me out and I hennaed it dark again even before it grew out.
Ben Dearing was, to my cousin’s consternation, as WASP as they come. I met him at college, where he was in a student metal band called Loki Unbound. That was the reason we started seeing each other. I was standing in front of the flyer pinned to the gigs board in the hall, staring, when he first came up to me.
“You going to come see us play, then?”
“What does it mean?” I demanded, pointing at the poster, not even looking up at him. The picture, clearly drawn by someone with crude talent but in need of a lot of training, showed a muscular man in a loincloth bound hand and foot in a cave—the jagged stalactites made the location clear. Over his rage-twisted face dangled a serpent, poison dripping from its fangs. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Loki. The Norse god.”
I felt cold, like all the blood was running out of my body and pooling in my leaden limbs. “Norse?” I made myself look up at the guy, taking in his long fawn hair and happy smile. “Scandinavian, you mean?”
“That’s right. Vikings. You heard of them, yeah? Loki was a trickster and a troublemaker: sometimes on the side of the gods, and sometimes on the side of their enemies the giants.”
“Giants?” I repeated stupidly, like I believed every word.
“Uh, yeah. Eventually the gods got so mad they tied him up under the earth, using the sinews of his own murdered son, and placed a venomous snake over him. When the poison drips in his eyes he thrashes about, causing earthquakes.”
“But he escapes?”
“He will, just before Ragnarok.”
“And what’s that?”
“The End of the World. Are you going to come and watch us? I’m the drummer. And…that’s my picture. D’you like it? You can have a copy if you want one. I’m Ben.”
“I’m Milja,” I said, still not thinking straight.
“Cool!”
Loki. Prometheus. Azazel. Amirani in Georgia, as I found out later when I started searching on the Internet. All demiurges involved in the creation and nurture of mankind. All rebels fettered for eternity by a God or gods who would not tolerate insurrection.
I went to the gig. I didn’t have to dance, which was a relief. I could just stand at the back with my plastic cup of cola and watch. I liked the guys’ long unfashionable hair.
Despite his metal aspirations, Ben was really quite sweet. And I was a good girl from the old country, so we didn’t actually sleep together until we were engaged. We fooled around, of course. I was an expert with my mouth and my hands long before I gave up my virginity. And he did a good job unknotting the insecurities and the ignorance tangled in my psyche. When we did finally go all the way, it was not such a big step as I’d feared.
But it didn’t work out well in the end: on our third night of actually having sex together I begged leave to tie him up, spread-eagled on the bed. Then I straddled him, slipping him into my hungry embrace. Below me, in the warm, dim light of the candles we’d lit, his body lay stretched out like a sacrifice: narrow hips, long pale hair, elbows raised as he braced against the scarves knotted at his wrists.
A stray thought grazed my mind: a wish that he had darker hair, and more of it on his torso. But it was only momentary, a twist in the rising surge of my appetite. I clenched my muscles and moved to make him gasp. Every time I ground against him a wave of heat seemed to billow up from the point where we were joined, filling me to bursting. My vision grew blurred. I tugged at my nipples, grinding them between my fingers. Ben bucked beneath me, thrusting upward, trying to fill the need he saw in me—but without the slightest idea of how great and hollow and ancient was that void in my soul.
For a moment, I didn’t see Ben or the bed. I saw a great slab of rock, and a man without a name, and my wails seemed to echo back from stone walls as I slammed down upon him, burning with the ferocity of my orgasm, my face distorted with pain.
“Whoa,” he said. “Jesus, Milja.”
I burst into tears and struck at him, howling, over and over again. He couldn’t even shield his face.
Poor Ben freaked out then. He told me that I had serious fucking issues, you crazy bitch. And that was it, for that relationship.
Vera was pleased when I told her the engagement was off, though she tried to show sympathy.
Oh, how I tried my best not to think about the prisoner after that, as I studied and made new friends and, after graduation, buried myself in my new job. What would be the point, when Father would not let me go home—not until I was safely married? And to be honest it wasn’t too hard to forget, most days, because in Boston it all seemed entirely unreal: not just the cavern and the bound man isolated in darkness, but the silent little church and the mountain village. It seemed like a story, something from a movie I’d watched as a child. America was loud and roaring with life, and its steel and glass and crowds and wide horizons filled me to the brim, leaving no room for memories. I loved my new world and I tried my hardest to fit in—as much as any shy, bookish foreigner can fit in.
But I dreamed about him at night. I dreamed about him stretched out, shifting hopelessly the few inches permitted by his bonds in a desperate attempt to relieve his locked muscles. I dreamed he stared into the darkness and stretched back his head and called my name, and that he told me everything about himself: secrets always forgotten when I woke. I dreamed him shivering under the snow of our brutal winters, and choking in the flash floods of spring. I dreamed his body under my hands. And every morning for five years I woke with my pillow wet with the tears I’d cried in my sleep.
Then one day I received a phone call.
“Hello, Nana Vera.” I said, cradling the flat plastic slip awkwardly between jaw and shoulder as I tried to wrestle papers back into a folder, and hearing the shutter sound effect that told me I’d accidentally taken a photo of my ear again. “What’s up?”
I was desperately hoping she wasn’t in one of her chatty moods. My boss could see me across the open-plan office and we weren’t supposed to take personal calls during work time. I’d told Vera that, several times, but she was under the impression that the rules didn’t apply to her.
“Milja. I’m so sorry, honey. I’ve got bad news.”
“What?” I dumped the files on my desk and took a proper grip on the phone. “What’s happened?”
“It’s your father. He’s been taken ill. You have to go home straightaway.”
Home. For a moment the shiny modern office around me flooded with shadows, and I smelled damp stone and church incense. On my tongue was the greasy taste of mutton, and under my feet was the bounce of wild thyme.
“Milja? Did you hear me? Are you still there?”
“Father is ill?” I repeated, faintly. Far away, I heard the screech of the mountain eagle, high and cold and cruel.