So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Tennyson
They were respectful to her, in the City streets, when they saw her now and then going to and fro with her nurse or her maid. They said, she had been educated like a boy, could read many languages, was fluent in Latin, had knowledge of music and ritual dance old as time … which was charming, and of alchemy … which was unsuitable. They did not suggest she was a sorceress, as they never plainly referred to her father as a magician. But they did call her, in general parlance, the Beautiful Jewess.
She had risen very early, and gone to pluck herbs in the house’s inner courtyard; these seen to, she sat reading a treatise of Galen’s, there in her bedroom which caught the morning sun. Her black hair hung about her like clusters of black grapes, and covered only by a little black velvet cap. The striped cat, now a matron of the establishment, lay playing with a sunbeam on the bed. Even the doll remained, seated in a corner on a wooden chest, a toy no longer, but venerable.
There came a noise from the street. The Beautiful Jewess raised her head, and the cat paused, open-mouthed.
The noise was not especially usual. It seemed to be that of a dropped pot, which shattered.
The very next instant, someone knocked on the street door.
Ruquel’s window looked east, into the court. Even the sound had reached her by a sideways trick, vision was not possible.
Yet something caused her to get up, touching the cat upon the forehead as she went by (rather as the mezuzah was touched at the doorway) and out of the room and down the stair.
In the hall below, Liva the porter had already unfastened the door. He was almost seven feet tall, mild as a lamb, but evidently capable of killing with his bare hands. He had come to the household several years since.
The nurse was also at the door, and outside a throng of women and a few men had gathered. There had been exclamations. Now a silence. Into this, Ruquel descended.
The nurse, seeing her, made a motion she should not approach.
“Why not? What is it?”
The nurse put her hand over her own eyes. Though she was protective, she knew Ruquel had not been trained to docility, or ignorance. “An awful sight. A young man has slain himself at our door.”
Ruquel stopped a moment, very pale and straight, then she came down the last of the stair and crossed the hall. Liva too gave way to her in the door.
He lay, the suicide, with no doubt across the very threshold, as if the angel of death, in a passover, had thrown him there. His black hair streamed on the cobbles, his face had been calmed by the darkness of his sleep, all but the eyes. Closed, they had about them a strange tension, as if he had been weeping. One seemly thread of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His hand rested quite gracefully and couthly on the hilt of the knife, which otherwise was sunk into his breast.
Ruquel regarded him. The watchers observed the Beautiful Jewess went whiter than her own whiteness. Then she knelt down, and put her fingers to the temple, the throat, of the cadaver. Then she set her hand in the air over his lips, and brought it away.
After a minute, she lifted her long-lashed eyes and announced: “Liva, you must bring him into my father’s house. He isn’t dead.”
Someone in the street protested. Ruquel did not take notice, but as Liva was leaning forward, Ruquel touched his arm, and said quietly, “Take care as I did to have no contact with the blood.” Without a question Liva nodded. He leaned and gripped his burden, the weight of a full-grown man, like that of a child.
Ruquel rose. “You know that my father has tutored me,” she said to the street. “The muscle in the young man’s chest is very hard, and he, it seems, very weak. He could not complete the blow.”
When the door was shut, the nurse said, “If he lives, they’ll say your father, or you, raised him from the dead.”
“So be it,” said Ruquel, with an abstracted smile.
Haninuh, when he returned from an excursion into the City that twilight, was met by his daughter at the door. Though the house was always well lit, it was the hour of lamp-lighting, and Ruquel presented to her father a poetic oriental image as she stood before him, limned by the ivory candle-lamp she bore, in her silver earrings and little velvet cap, and barefoot as about the house she always was. The striped feline sounded its timbrels at her side.
“Welcome, my father.”
The rite of homecoming was performed swiftly but warmly.
“You have a guest,” she said then. “We housed him in the Cedar Chamber.”
“Oh, does he have a liking for trees?” (The chamber was painted over one wall to the ceiling with a cedar tree; some guests had declared they heard all the owls and doves of Lebanon mewing in its branches.)
“He likes nothing, being nearly dead.”
Haninuh frowned. “He’s a man of the City?” This was a Jew who never spoke of “gentiles.”
“I have not seen him before. If my father has seen him, how can I say.”
But she revealed, as they climbed the stair, the morning’s astonishment, passing on to the afternoon’s labour. In an interpolation, she stressed the care she had felt prompted to take with regard to bodily fluids, the protections she had formed. She was very skilled herself in medicines, for the Jew himself had taught her, and in other elements more mysterious.
“Will he live?” asked Haninuh therefore, in the corridor.
“It’s for my father to say. I trust he will.” Ruquel turned her candle from a draught, and her face was veiled in shadow. “But, he longs to die.”
“Why so, I wonder? You name him a young man, and sound but for the wound.”
They reached the door of the Cedar Chamber. Inside, a lovely lamp of Eastern filigree hung from a stand and dusted the air with frankincense. The great tree spread over the plaster, and the nurse kept watch in its shade. In his bed, bathed and made clean, the suicide lay on his pillows, like a saint of wax.
The Jew went to a basin and washed his hands. He spoke inaudible words. Then he proceeded to examine the unconscious man thoroughly. At length, he straightened up and replaced the covers.
“He gives little enough sign of life. But life persists. Rarely have I seen such a wound seal itself so rapidly. I know your cleverness as a doctor, Ruquel, but from what you tell me, this is not so much your wisdom as some connivance in the flesh. Spirit and body are at odds.”
Later, when they took their supper together, the father questioned the daughter over again, and they discussed their visitor broodingly.
“How is it, finding him thus, you thought he might survive?”
“I hoped for it,” said Ruquel simply. “At first I could find no tremor of the heart. But at my touch it came as if to meet me. And then seemed to grow stronger.”
“I cannot think he and I have been familiar with each other,” said the Jew, “yet there’s about him something I know or imperfectly remember. Well. Until he wakes, speculation bears no fruit. Before you sleep,” he added, “if you’re willing, go to the room and make music on your harp.”
“Your will is mine,” she said.
“And am I to think,” he said, “you do it only to please me?”
The harp which Ruquel brought to the Cedar Chamber was a model of the little kinnor, a crescent of bow-horn which she leaned to her shoulder, from which crescent ten horsehair strings stretched to a horizontal bar of ereb willow. Beneath, the unstretched tails of the strings provided a fringe that, occasionally, the striped cat was wont to bite.
The nurse nodded in her chair. Liva was soon due to take his watch.
Ruquel sat where she could see the mosaic of the filigree lamp upon the sick man’s face.
She plucked chords of a twanging fluidity from the harp, and, as the music found its way, sang very low a melody without words, old as the Jordan, perhaps.
She had serenaded him for less than three minutes when a sigh, more a convulsion, rushed in and out of him. His eyelids fluttered and one arm sought from the covers. (The nurse slept on.)
Ruquel did not stop her music, but now her eyes were fixed only on him.
The wordless song flowed and twined among the reedy pangs of the harp.
Another three or four minutes elapsed.
Abruptly, with no further prologue, the eyes of the young man opened wide.
Ruquel ceased playing and singing.
She was intensely unnerved, as if fire had been thrust into her face.
She had known that his eyes would be dark as her own. But the eyes looked at her now. Focused on her with feral acuity. They were brilliantly, violently and unhumanly green. Emeralds set in optic sockets.
Mastering herself, Ruquel said, “Sieur, you’re with friends. Lie quietly. I shall fetch my father.”
But the young man said, “It hears the music. It knows your song.”
“Who?” said Ruquel, holding back her terror with a rein of steel.
Then he sagged into the pillows, and he only said, “My God, my God. Didn’t I die? It’s all to do over. If you’re kind, fetch your father, someone, to brain me with a mace. Then burn – then burn the body.”
Raoulin slept the slumber of opiates. In that deep sea, he lost himself, and coming back to shore learned a month of days had been sunk there too. He did not protest. In sleep he had been incapable of harming another, or of facilitating – that, which was now his constant companion, the unborn child of death and destruction caged in the male womb of his loins.
Somewhere in the sleep there had been dreams. He recalled none of them, and was glad of that. Sometimes, also, he believed Haninuh the Jew had questioned him, and he had answered. And perhaps it, too, had done so. And he seemed to have heard the soft jangle of the kinnor, then, across dark reedy waters under a lion moon.
There came an evening, when Raoulin had returned from the places of drugged sleep, and he was shown his body, a little emaciated, but with the wound healed to a plaited line. If he should move suddenly, then the muscle quirked and pained him, that was all.
The strong man came and lifted him, and the woman washed him and he was fed. There were some days of that, and some nights of shallow dozing, for sleep had been too long with him and now proved elusive.
He was afraid they would let the beautiful daughter in to tend on him. He was afraid of what the demon would make him do. And of the aftermath.
But the daughter did not come near him now.
There began to be days of letting him out to walk in a small enclosed court with fruit trees in pots, and herbs and flowers and a little sunken well. One day, as he marched aimlessly about there, to toughen himself – because they had said he must – he beheld a striped cat, which arched its back and hissed at him, then jumped up a series of perches to a window above, where it vanished. This furred angel was her messenger, he thought, the room must be that of Ruquel. And he longed to see her there, for an instant, for she was safe enough at that distance from him, he was not vital enough as yet to go after her. She had been very beautiful, very gentle.
He must not try to reason where her room lay inside the house. In any case, there was the giant, thank God, to protect her. And the Jew … surely the Jew was a magician.
As he patrolled the courtyard, Raoulin kept thinking of Ruquel, as of something precious he could never hope to see or touch, some prize once within his grasp, and now lost for ever, like the hope of Heaven. And added to this forfeiture there came to be the remembrance of his family, his friends, the university, the City, time, youth, and the world.
Then he sat down on the plot of grass beside the well, and he cried, and he was so weak his body was rocked and racked with it, this grief. But all the while, even as he wept these scalding tears, he sensed the other, waiting, waiting there, within him, for the hour he would belong to it and exist only to achieve its will.
“Sieur, you’ve been my saviour. I thank you for my life. But I don’t see why you let me keep it. For I believe you know why I shouldn’t be let live.”
These were the first conscious sentences he rendered the Jew.
They met in a parlour above the hall, about lamp-lighting, and the scent of flowers came in from the house vine, and olibanum from the antique lamp. There were a great many books, and some scrolls and ornate cases of leather. The two men sat facing each other over a table where there was wine to drink neither had touched.
“In honesty, Raoulin, I do know, for you spoke of it asleep, and I took the liberty to interrogate you.”
“And that – it – did it answer you also?”
“Not in words. It has no use for those. But it was aware, I think, in its primordial way, of our dialogue. Consider, it has no intelligence, only an instinct and an appetite. Even so, it may employ such knowledge as you yourself possess, to gain its ends. This is a power of desire more pliant and enduring than any of the desires of a man. It is a demon.”
“A demon. Yes.”
“I know its race, even. Out of Assyria, an utuk, having as its own form the body of a man, the head of a bird, but a bird of the beginnings, scaled not feathered, from the fifth day of the earth.”
Raoulin shuddered.
“Did I tell you all her story, too?”
“I have pieced it together. All your story and all the story of Helise d’Uscaret, who died and left her body for the demon to inhabit. For the matter of that, I sent Liva as a spy to the d’Uscaret mansion. He says the old kitchen woman and the groom go on about their doings as if nothing’s amiss. I conjecture that what you left upon that bed crumbled entirely, even to the bones. If they think anything, there, perhaps it’s that you and she have gone off together, in the way of heedless lovers.”
Raoulin said, “That must come. Where else can I go but after her, into the grave and down to perdition.”
The Jew replied, “God made all things. Even the creatures of his servant, the Devil. We are instructed to note the lesson their existence teaches. He never says we must offer them our throats.”
“Do you suppose I might prevent it – by abstaining? Heros made himself a priest, but the Devil won. My blood’s hotter than the blood of Heros. And when it works in me like yeast –”
“There now,” said the Jew. And he poured out the crystal wine, and gave it to Raoulin, as if it were medicine. “This is a clever enemy. It adapts itself as any beast will do. The ways of it are various. It can erupt inward, changing the victim to the semblance of itself, thereafter enacting by that body all it wishes. Or it passes into the body of a woman at intercourse, and her child, when it comes forth, will be the shell of the demon. It can do both, or either. It can lie down dormant too, even as with Helise, where it waited inside the womb, that terrible ambush ten years old. Only the key is constant, the procreative spasm. All the pure line of d’Uscaret were susceptible to it, but it can casually infect anywhere. Now that whole house has perished, only you are left to it. How can it let you die? It resisted the death of Helise until its transference was accomplished. The stabbing you gave yourself was sewn up in a day. I partly believe you might burn yourself alive, Raoulin, and this creature would find some means to build you up again. Death’s no answer.” The Jew sipped his wine. “Neither abstinence from the carnal act. The utuk provokes and seduces others to provoke. As you say, you’re not proof against it.”
The dark was in the windows now. Hesperus rang from a nearby convent. The nights were lengthening and drawing near.
“How can there be any escape?”
Haninuh looked at him steadily.
“You will have decided, perhaps, I’m versed in certain arts.”
“A magician.”
“If you will call it so.”
“Then – can you cast this out of me?”
“Once before,” said Haninuh, “it came, this thing, to mock me. I was unready then, knowing not enough. But after that failure, I studied in the school of demons, gathered together books, and artifacts from the Roman time here, when this began. Strange to say, I felt that the utuk would return to duel again with me. We’re ancient foes. Its primal memory and mine contain rank seeds of all those battles. The cities of the desert, the chariots, and the chains. Yes, I suppose I can cast it out of you.”
Raoulin started up. The Jew stayed him.
“This isn’t without great danger.”
“I’m ready to die,” said Raoulin. “You know as much.”
“Also you must give yourself into my charge. What must be done is in itself unholy. There will be for you shame, rank sweetness, confusion, and agony. You may die indeed, you may lose your mind for ever. But this I do promise, not your soul.”
Raoulin stood before him, white-faced, arrogant with fear and courage. In the dusky lamplight, his eyes were only black.
“Sieur magus, do what you must. I’m your slave. When will it be?”
“In seven days, that is the new moon, God’s remaking. Then.”
The Beautiful Jewess, eighteen years of age, sat playing with her cat on the floor of the bedroom. The cat’s play was more sedate than it had been, still adept.
Haninuh, having been admitted, stood gazing at them.
He saw the child clearly, as the kitten was still visible in the cat. But both were mature, and changed. Ruquel was a woman. He must acknowledge that.
Presently she looked up, and her smile faded into a serene strictness. It was his own habitual look, given back to him like a mirror.
“I’ve read the book, as you instructed, my father.”
“That’s good.”
“You’ve spoken to the young man?” He was touched at her way of referring to Raoulin, as if she were by far the elder. In some ways she was. Raoulin had not been wise, but he had, in the end, striven to be virtuous, prepared to sacrifice himself for the sins of other men.
“We’ve spoken. It shall be done.”
“And I?” she said. He was thankful for her quickness.
“As it’s set down in the book.”
She lowered her eyes. Her face shadowed with the self-consciousness of the girl she was. Then the woman governed the girl, she looked up again and said, “Yes, I’m willing. And I have the skills.”
“I know what’s asked of you,” he said. “Such a dance, though part of your secret training as in the days of Salomé, is a hidden thing. If you refused, I should have had to find some other, a paid dancer, and perhaps she doesn’t exist in this City. Those that tutored you know of none.”
“Besides, the paid one could command no magic.”
He had always allowed her that word, though it was not exactly accurate; it seemed to step appealingly from her tongue. She had from the first recognised she must be careful of its use with strangers.
“That’s true, she could not. But let me say this, too. I’d never have petitioned you, my own daughter, except” — he hesitated, wanting to spare her, yet sure that there must be no lies,—“except, Ruquel, that I noticed at once you love this man, love him as your bridegroom, and your husband.”
She waited, and then she said, “You’ll think me foolish. It happened the moment I saw him there. Perhaps even before, hearing the jar break on the street. He was at my door.”
“How should I think you foolish, Ruquel? You are a sybil. Your awareness has always been profound, even as a child. This love you have recognised, but not invented.”
“I honour you. I’d do nothing against my father’s wishes.”
“I know. It is your father instead requests of you a dishonourable task, which only your love for Raoulin can redeem. You understand, despite everything, he may die?”
“Yes.”
“You understand, though I can protect you by the powers I command, in this arena nothing is certain? We are bound to it by our gifts and his plight. There’s peril for all.”
“Yes.”
“You understand, my daughter, you are my star?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling again, “I understand.”
Raoulin fasted on honey and curds and water, then on water only. The irritating hunger dissipated to a comfortable lack of all thought of food. Then he was cleansed with a potent cathartic herb. On the sixth day, the water was brought in a water-like goblet of glass. There was a drug mixed in it. His senses became abnormally clarified. His body was light, nearly weightless. He could smell the scent of flowering things and decaying things from streets away. He felt he could have reached up and clasped the vault of the sky.
That night, he supposed he would not be able to sleep at all, for everything had become so fascinating and had such nuances, even the creak of the mattress under him. But sleep discovered him and took him away up among the stars. He saw the City far below, he saw stars beneath him. When he woke at sunrise, he believed his soul had flown close to Heaven, and God had not flung him down.
Late in the seventh day, the woman brought him a bittersweet resinous drink. When he had consumed it, every doubt or fear he had had abandoned him. It was like strong wine, but without wine’s blurring or analgesic properties, without wine’s stupidity.
When Liva entered and asked that Raoulin go with him, Raoulin got up and did so, in a wild, still peace that was better than hope.
Nevertheless, Raoulin did not seem to take in the route they went by. Perhaps it only appeared irrelevant at that intrinsic moment.
Liva had brought him to a heavy double door of black wood, not ebony, something more essential, some tree that had altered into coal.
In the door were two handles of cold translucent onyx.
Liva had gone away. Raoulin gripped the door handles and turned them, one to the left and one to the right, or rather they seemed to turn themselves this way at the pressure of his hands.
Within, was midnight, without a star. But the Jew had already impressed upon him that he would come to the chamber and must go in. In he walked, and thrust the doors shut at his back.
Then there was nothing. Only the void.
There was only formlessness and darkness, but then the moon and the sun rose, and divided the day from the night.
After the great lights, came the fish and fowl like patterns, and the beasts and cattle, and there were mountains and valleys and enormous seas, and clouds and winds and stars, but in the end, men and women travelled across the plains, and he saw them though they had no names.
After this, he was aware he lay upon a mountain’s top. A million miles high, gleamed the crescent moon, like the bow of a kinnor.
On all sides, granite, obsidian, salt, the mountain slid to a wilderness.
He knew the loneliness of a single being upon the huge plate of the universe, who can only reach out to God.
His soul seemed to yearn upward. A vast silent finger brushed his forehead. Maybe it was only the wind in that place.
For hours he lay and marvelled, free of anything, and nearly free of self, lying there upon the stone of the mountain, with all night above.
Until, miles off, he heard the murmur of a drum.
He knew it, had heard it often. He tried to guess what it might be or mean. Then he realised that it came always nearer, that the beat intensified, and rumbled in the rock below him, and so strummed upward through his body and his bones.
He became aware of his body. Not any one portion of it, but every inch of flesh, each tier of the recumbent skeleton. The soles of his feet, his legs and thighs, the torso, neck and ears, the arms, the fingertips, the face, the scalp, even the hair, the teeth and nails, even the inner canals, links, crevices, membranes and nerves, each had a sentience, was possessed of a complete conscious concentrating awareness, yet it had life only through him.
The drum he identified now as a heartbeat. Every particle of his body, so autonomous yet so involved with him, responded to its rhythm.
The feeling was of a wonderful totality, and self-knowledge.
It was only then that he began to discern the chamber which contained the mountain top.
It was itself night-black. Its ceiling was enamelled with constellations, and figures of the zodiac, set out in all their stars, and through this the upper heaven glowed, and the new moon, resting upon Aquarius.
No walls upheld this ceiling.
The ground of the mountain was figured over on its blackness. Done in silver, like the sky, a five-pointed star seemed extending to infinity. And within it, a seven-pointed star had been fitted, and within that again, a star of three points, a triangle.
At the three points of the triangle, to each of which somehow he could see, was a smoking silver brazier formed as an animal. All were unnatural. To the north, at the apex, stood a winged bull with a lion’s head, from this the smoke rose white; to the west was a silver calf with the sun on its forehead, it had the tongue of a snake, the smoulder from this was nacreous; east was a scorpion or scarab-thing, with the head of a man horned and bearded like a goat’s, the steam from this one was transparent, remarkable only by a scintillant tremor in the air.
Within the triangle lay Raoulin, with his arms stretched up above his head towards the west and east points, his feet together pointing to the northern tip.
From the braziers came a mingling aroma, of balsam and hypericum, myrrh and orris.
In his ears he heard the rush of the perfumed smoke, and over and beneath, the drumbeat.
He felt no curiosity. He had no thoughts. He was utterly aware, cognizant, content.
A silver-white ewe came picking daintily over the rocks, some way beyond the stars which contained him, up on a peak in the sky. On her brow was a shining ray. She went around the wall of darkness, and was gone.
Then he heard two heartbeats, two drums. Another being, another life, was with him on the mountain.
Something uncurled, stretched itself within him. It was pleasant, had no urgency. He lay inside the triangle, his arms to the east and west, his feet pointing north, attentive.
There was a sudden sensation, like a kiss, on his breast above the heart. It did not startle him, he seemed almost to have expected it. After a moment, it came again, alighting over his ribcage, winging away. The touch was delightful and provocative, he longed for it to be repeated. For a while, nothing, and then, the kiss fell once more, more lingeringly, at his throat, and even as his skin tingled from it, again, over the nipple of his right side, so a string of fire was plucked there. After this, like a fine rain, the kissing came down glittering all across him. In a moment his whole body had become a lyre, sinuously strummed and vibrating – the rain of unseen sprites, to whom clothing was no barrier, fastened on him, their lips and fingers testing every atom of flesh and muscle, the framework of bone, for its potential pleasure. Even beneath him the rock itself seemed to give rise to these quivering entities.
Under the onslaught, he found he was unable to move, like one chained, at the mercy of the incorporeal delicious torture.
Dizzily his eyes remained fixed upon the rock in the sky, from which the second heartbeat seemed to have arisen. He could not apparently keep closed his eyes, though waves of sensation continually drove him to do so.
No, he could not close his eyes, and now upon the rock peak he saw a moon with a woman’s face, which hung there and regarded him, shameless, helpless as he lay. And as the moon stared, the beings which fastened on him stripped him naked, as if for her cajolement, as if to bare him to her light.
But the moon … had black hair, and a head-dress of silver discs which she shook with a sound that matched the sinful rain that kissed him.
The moon had a black cloak. She had white hands that stole out as the hands stole upon him, that made little motions like the circling and flittering of those that played upon his body.
He could not look away from her. (And yet, just then, at a distance, the ends of the earth, he saw a male figure was standing, with his back turned to the moon in her cloak, his head averted both from this and from the naked man bound inside three stars. The figure perhaps had folded its arms across its chest, a wand in either hand, and before him was a kind of shallow basin upturned, or hollow mirror – )
But the moon had a cloak, and she cast it from her. She was all a woman, clad in a garment of silver scallops that covered her from the neck to the wrists and the ankles.
And then, on her arched bare feet, to the rhythm of the drumbeats, one faster, one slower and in counterpoint, she commenced a dance.
It was the dance of a snake. A swaying liquid coiling and uncoiling, like that of a river let along the ground. The arms followed the torso to and fro, the feet scarcely moved. It was not a spectacular or frenzied dance. It was immensely lambent, deeply suggestive and descriptive of the body of a woman, immeasurably cunning. It was the dance of Salomé before the king, which had hypnotised and driven him mad, and brought her, on a salver, the severed head of Jehanus. It was the dance of a snake.
As the languid pulses wove, the silver scallops began to drip away. Under them was a garment of thin stuff, perhaps byssus.
The shoulders of the dancer, her arms, rose from the silver like those of a maiden ascending from water.
Over the shoulders of the bound man, the unseen hands curved back and forth, to the pits of the arms, the line of the ribs, the flared points of the breast, and along the abdomen and the belly, like streams into the restless pounding groin.
As the silver rained off from the girl who was the snake, the rain poured on Raoulin, the torrent of hands and mouths. They stroked him, they teased and tickled him, they ran like threads of moltenness across his skin, over and beneath him. They had woken the root of life. He ached with lust and became lust, played, tautened, tuned, caressed by waters and airs and fire – and the drumbeat galloped, galloped, and the scales quickened like leaves and guttered from the girl’s body wrapped in its second byssus skin. But the byssus too worked gradually away from her, unfurling like the calyx of a flower, slipping from her breasts that were the cups of flowers, that now hid themselves again, that now were again and utterly unveiled, flowers starred with flowers, while the kisses of invisible lips visited like moths and tongues probed like trickles of silk, and hands feathered and persuaded and the girl was naked to her loins dancing upon the silver leaves of her dress, and the byssus unseamed like snakeskin and slid away like water from the moon belly with its tiny drop of shadow, the goblet of black hair, the stemmed thighs smooth like alabaster –
In this instant Raoulin, who had forgotten his own name, felt a terrible resistance, some clutch upon the choking pump of desire, which strangled –
Unable to move, his lust thrashed, trying to burst from the swollen blazing rod –
(And the figure he had not properly seen, and had also forgotten, the figure which did not look at the dancer or the naked man, this figure now stretched out the wands in his hands and touched the metal surface before him. He spoke. The words made no sound. Instead they shouted out in the air above the triple stars of five and seven and three points.)
Evil One show thyself and come forth!
O dweller among ruins and maker of ruins
Get thee up to where thy ruins are;
For the Lord God has sent me
He has elected me his priest in this,
He has given into my hands the Seven Powers
According to the word of the sixth Day.
Evil One, Foul One, show thyself and come forth!
And the snake dancer rippled her hands along her silver body and tore it in two pieces, flinging both aside, to reveal, under the third veil, the nude skeleton.
The stifled death-throe of ecstasy was pierced by a white and screeking pin. It came from inside the young man’s loins. It rent its way through him, through the pelvis, spermary, and phallus. It was a birth. It thrust in surges similar to the birth-pangs of a woman. It seemed to rip his genitals like the beak of a vulture.
He cried, every prayer and blasphemy, every obscenity and childish plea he had ever known. Then he only screamed.
Strand by strand the rope of agony was pulled out of him.
It began as a jet of sheer semen, opalescent in the uncanny light. But the fountain rose and did not slacken or end. The moonstone gush travelled upward, spilling with a fearful elasticity, forming into a springing plume.
Until in its turn the plume, of a substance now composed not of any mortal sexual fluid, but of some astral plasmic material, coalesced, ran inward, began to construct another shape.
The chamber of night had gone all to blackness again. It was once more the void. But in the void, terror was made manifest.
Recreated without flesh, it was colourless, and dully shining. It had the limbs and torso of a man, yet lacking the procreative organ. It was winged. The head was the head of a bird of prey. As it was now, there were no eyes, only two sumps of cloudy darkness. It had no brain, this dark was not that.
Alone upon its stage it stirred, the bird head looked about with the un-eyes. It was seeking for what had been delivered of it, and for what had brought it forth.
Out of the black the figure of the magician Haninuh again grew visible. The two wands were gone from his hands, splintered at the impact of egression. But before him still there lay on the air the hollow length of metal. It was a shield of highly polished hide, iron-bound and gilded, with the lightnings and burning staff, from which stared a Medusa: a Roman relic of Par Dis.
In the left eye of the Medusa glimmered a bit of quartz, or flawed corunda. It, like the demon, had no longer any colour.
Haninuh straightened himself. He stood in the void and showed the shield before the demon.
“Come thou,” said Haninuh, “for here thou art.”
Then the demon spat and sizzled and swirled towards the shield of Retullus Vusca, and into the Medusa’s eye – which like itself had waited, waited: cut by the stroke of suicide from the entrails where, undissolved, this one piece had nestled like a child, washed out by blood under the hand of the dying Roman, thrust by him into the broken socket of the Medusa, his warning, all he could give, a jewel that was an eye – the utuk fell crackling, and met the shield, the eye, the gem, roared – like wind or fire – and was gone.
The Jew bent a little, leaning on the shield after his battle, to see where the jewel-fragment lay, erupted from its setting of eleven centuries. The shield seemed battered at last, brittle, like clinker. And for the jewel itself, it was like a cinder rendered up from the common hearth.
Haninuh spoke a Word over that cinder. Then he spoke a Word to the chamber and the blackness. To God he could not speak. For this, there were no words.
The embers of a morning lay in the green tines of the cedar tree. It seemed a dove was murmuring there.
“Oh that you were my brother that nursed at my mother’s breast. When I should find you I might kiss you, it would be no shame. I would bring you into the house and there feed you on fruit and quench your thirst with wine. His left hand under my head, his right hand caressing me, he will teach me love.”
Raoulin’s lids lifted. Beauty sat by the bed and looked at him with gentle sombre eyes. In colour, no blacker than his own.
“Who is this,” she said, “coming out of the desert, leaning upon her love? Under the tree I woke you; let it be as the place where you were born.”
He was so weak he could not move, could not even speak to her. But he had never thought to see her again. He attempted, and failed, to find some means to offer her his voice.
She shook her head, and touched his lips with her fingers.
Upon the bed itself a striped cat stared at him, pitiless, guileless, angelic, and kneaded his feet.
He slept once more, comforted under their gaze.
Folded in a parchment, corded with seven charms, the amulet, or what remained of it, was buried in a clod of earth the size of a boy’s hand. This then was packed into a box of horn, and that box into another of iron. Between the two boxes was a space, where an alchemical substance, being intruded, began of itself to burn. The iron box was closed, and put into a tablet of lead.
The whole was then carried to the midnight bank of the river, half a mile below Our Lady of Ashes, and thrown far out by the mighty arm of Liva. The tablet sank.
It sank, perhaps, to the mulch of the river’s bottom, to wait once more, now for the deterioration of its containers, horn and iron and lead, earth, air, fire, and water. To wait out the river too, maybe, until that vast elder Leviathan of Paradys should shrink to a few puddles under some future sun. By then, the life of the amulet might also be eroded. If not, in that unpredictable to-come, some wandering one in the dry river-bottom would stoop and take up a lustreless stone, curious, and find the Devil still kept his court in the world. But possibly that day would never be.
For Raoulin, he was a very long time ill in the house of Haninuh. But being excellently, and cleverly and lovingly, tended, recovered before winter sealed the City in its orb of ice.
In the spring letters went from Raoulin to his kindred at the northern farm. But then the happiness turned like cream. For Raoulin had set himself to become a Jew by faith, conceivably more orthodox than his mentor. The reasons that he gave were unhelpful, for the actual spur had risen in him as fiercely and insatiably as young blood. (Perhaps too he remembered a Christian priest under the Sacrifice, who had turned from him in his hour of horrible need.)
But his family cast off Raoulin. That was that.
Among the scholars of Haninuh’s fraternity, this scholar found more than enough to study, and took to these new tutors, these new arcane formulae, with greed. For themselves, the Jews were kind to him. Even in Paradys, in their hearts, they reckoned their way was the only one, and had grown used to the insults and cruelties this knack provoked. For the gentile who approached them from the night, innocent, quietly asking, they could not but feel some wondering affection. As he grew in stature among them, they came to speak of their foundling with pride.
By then, of course, he had wed Ruquel, Haninuh’s exquisite daughter, under the canopy.
These two knew together more happiness than most, less pain than many. They seldom spoke of death. Like the draining of the river, such things were the concern of God.