by Tanith Lee
She came down the steps and walked into the space below Malach, where he hung forward from the chains. His arms were pulled up above his head. It must be painful, awkward to breathe, yet he seemed relaxed. There were no marks on him.
‘I’m left-handed,’ she said. She flexed the left hand. ‘That’s because of you. It’s called sinister.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m sinister.’
‘If I call you Ruth,’ he said, ‘will you listen?’
‘Not if I don’t want to.’
‘Want to,’ he said. ‘Just for a moment.’
She looked into his eyes.
Her own, rimmed to the shape of two perfect fish by the malachite paste, glittered. Her gold gleamed. She said, ‘Do you remember me like this?’
‘No. I remember only you. And you’ve forgotten you. But I promise you this, whatever Cain does, or refuses to do, to me, what he wants with you is the old, old useless nothingness. What your mother’s afraid of. A brood queen. His own woman can’t do it. She’s a husk. You’ve seen her. But you are the beginning. He wants to remake himself on you. That’s what interests him. New creations of himself from your matrix. Adamus. Adamus was nothing to this one.’
‘I hear you,’ she said. ‘What do I care? I can have babies.
I can have babies easily over and over. And stay me. Why not? Make him happy. He wants me. There’s more blue in his eyes than in yours.’
‘Or you can go free with me. Think of it, Anna. Free with me, and of me, if you want.’
‘How, he’s subdued you? You’ve succumbed.’
‘Appearances are deceptive.’
‘You can’t win,’ she said.
‘Yes, if you want it.’
‘I want you,’ she said, ‘crushed, destroyed, ruined. I want you dead. I hate you,’ she said quietly, ‘I hate you so much I can’t even feel it. I don’t feel anything. I want to see you screaming in agony so I can feel again.’
‘You could never feel,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait for that.’
‘Yes. I loved you. I did. I did.’
‘Then come with me now. This is a place that isn’t even real. It’s a fantasy. Rubbish. The world goes on, it always has.’
‘Let it go on without me,’ she said.
Then she turned. She was like a slender glittering, gleaming icon, a beetle of gold, the way Ruth had always been, and Anna also, in her pale glowing way. Ankhet beckoned. To the man who had stood above in the shadow beyond the torch.
‘Look,’ she said.
The man wore a sort of leather kilt and iron on his big arms. He carried a scourge, its tails tipped by metal.
‘Are you ready?’ Ruth said to Malach.
He did not answer.
Ruth beckoned again and the man came down the steps, and stood before Malach’s naked, held body, and raised the flail.
‘Do it.’ She put her head on one side.
And the arm of the man went back and back, and rushed forward like a fist of rain and hail that flamed.
Silence.
The blood that was unzipped from Malach’s skin struck her in the face. She licked it off her lips, and stepped away a little distance, to avoid the deluge of the next blow.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Louis the Priest picked his nose.
He did it quickly, to get the business out of the way before the others, his congregation, came up.
It was not what he should do.
Not fitting. But then.
Then, nothing would be right, not really. After all, he no longer belonged to his church, the Children of Time, or Cot for short. Cot and God. And even his name had gone for a burton that last time, under the tooth of the guillotine, Paris 1793.
Once he had thought he remembered all that clearly. The tumbril and the shouting crowd, even the plank they had flung him on, and the nasty way the guillotine killed you—Thankfully the images had faded, dulled. Now, though he stuck to the teaching of reincarnation steadfastly, his own beliefs were blurred.
He had been fourteen when Cot got him. He had wandered into London off the train, eyes round, idiotic, ten pounds, stolen from his mother, in his pocket. He had wanted to get away from them, his parents, the back-to-back terrace house up north, the school, and the prospect of the factory after.
London could have done anything to him, given him away to heroin and prostitution, some quick death in an alley worthy of Paris 1793. But somehow London led him, starving after three days without food, into the hall of Cot.
The Cot left their sect open to everyone. They believed in bodily cleanliness and free sex, between opposite or matched genders—after all, if you were attracted, it was probably because you had slept with this person before in a previous existence. And since reincarnation crossed the gender barriers, you could be a woman now when you had been male before, or vice versa, and that other woman you wanted had maybe previously been your legal wife.
This was all quite convenient.
The Cot ate well too. They begged in bands on the streets in neat green robes, and sometimes did odd jobs, having a common fund for all, which was administered by a committee.
The regression sessions had tickled Louis at first—his name had not been Louis then. Until he fell in love with a girl of seventeen, who reckoned she had died last time in France during the First World War.
The girl refused to make love with Louis because, she said, he was not ready yet. By this he understood that he was not yet initiated into the ranks of the Cot’s true believers.
So then he began to try the regressions, allowing the priests of the order to attempt to put him into a trance. Whether hypnotized or not, Louis received no impressions of anything outstanding. Mostly the trances seemed to bring up memories of childhood, as when his mother had caught him masturbating, or he had had to help wash his Uncle Joseph’s gangrenous foot.
Then Louis asked one of the priests of Cot if they would find out for him a recent life, so that he could try to feel about it.
One of the priests immediately sat down with Louis and scribbled out a long plethora of sentences in an exercise book from Woolworth’s, with his eyes shut.
The other attending priest read this to Louis with some difficulty. It explained that Louis was Louis, when he had perished, and why—he had been a pamphleteer who fell foul of the Paris Convention—and suggested that Louis should now research the subject himself.
Louis was oddly fired. It was a few days after his fifteenth birthday, and though he had no money of his own, the seventeen-year-old girl who would not sleep with him had bought him two bottles of Brown as a present.
Drunk, in his clean green, Louis went into a public library, and read all day about the French Revolution.
By the time he came out, he was bursting with conviction and urine—there had been no toilets in the library—and dizzy with it all, he had stood on Westminster Bridge, place of intimations, and felt that strangest of all schizophrenias, the awareness of living two lives at once.
He never got the girl into the sack, but there, she was hooked on someone else, who had been her mother two hundred years before. Louis ceased to mind.
He went through the world of 1970s London with a new bright joy, an almost tender amusement, content with everything, eager to know all, because everything was for ever, and it always changed, you always came back, death did not matter, and people, however badly they treated you and others, would one day be all good, all clever, and all one.
They were happy and exciting years for Louis.
He wanted and got to be a priest of the Cot, and all the disintegration and turmoil of the metropolis filled him only with bitter-sweet sad acceptance. He helped all he could. He was kind, forebearing, wise, seeing farther than anyone, the man who tried to knife him, the tramp who died in his arms (uncomforted by Louis’ gentle words), the furious police and rankled young souls who thronged the cities of the world.
Louis’ was not a young soul. His was a vintage spark of latest m
aturity, almost old. In ten more lives, maybe, he could make it out. But then again, how fascinating it would be to see even this devastated world unfold. For he would behold the future, everybody would. And in the end, the goodly clever meek ones would inherit the earth. It would be flawless.
The concept used to make him cry with happiness.
And then, somewhere in his early thirties, Louis lost his faith.
God knew—if God was really there after all—why this happened.
It just simply did.
One day it was as if he had seen through a glass darkly, seen as a child saw, and now he saw as a man. He saw the terror and horror of it all, and he knew, in one blinding Damascus moment, that there was, in fact, no point to anything. You did not live for ever. You suffered and you died, and that was it.
He tried to work through the crisis of his faith, but no one could help him, and in the end, he went away, out into the fallen city.
He still called himself Louis, after the one he had once thought he had been. He still boasted of how he had been a priest, and attended the dying, births and weddings of Cot members. He still insisted on reincarnation, although he no longer knew.
How could you know?
How could you? Until you were dead.
And then it was too fucking late.
Louis looked, and along the shoreline of the grey sunken river his congregation came.
It was Camillo who had wanted it, here, under the bridge.
And what the hell was Camillo? Old and young and crazy as a coot.
Louis, an innocent who had known too much and too little, brushed down the stained green robe he kept normally in his bag. His nose was clear now and so his head felt clear. He would do his best.
Lix had chopped her hair again, and shampooed the stubble. She wore her other pair of jeans, and on her coat Janice had pinned a soiled red poppy left over from Poppy Day.
Camillo had been offended.
Too clean. You’ve washed again.’
Janice said, ‘Yer goin’ ter marry her.’
Kirstie giggled.
‘It’s not a real marriage,’ said Lix.
‘Yes,’ said Camillo, ‘it is.’
Lix did not care. She had washed because she always did. It was not that it mattered, only that she hated her own smell. The stink of the others she did not mind. Besides, Camillo did not smell at all, only the muck on his coat. He was like someone very old, odourless with age. Dry.
She went along with this since it had been foisted on her. It meant nothing.
The mad priest, the one who believed in reincarnation, was under the bridge, where Camillo had said he must be.
People did what Camillo said.
Even Two Hats, who had died when the bomb exploded. And Vinegar Tom, who was bombed half deaf now, hearing music in his head. He and Pug wore new trousers, already obscene, which Camillo had somehow found for the men denuded in the explosion.
Pug, with them now, had come for the drink.
Camillo had also found the money, simply produced it, for a box, a good box—red wine and brandy and white Martini. It had been mixed in a broken vase found among the dustbins, and smelled indolently of ancient chrysanthemums.
Lix thought suddenly of Ron, drinking from that. Poor Ron. She never thought of him now. One G and T before dinner, three glasses of a nice claret or a French white during the meal. The occasional whisky as a nightcap. Oh, yes, and whisky and hot milk for ‘flu. Greg had drunk more. But Greg was young—
Wait. Why was she thinking of them? She had not thought of them for a great time. They were gone.
She could say, Sorry, Camillo. I’m married.
But that was not true either.
No, she was at liberty. No ring on her finger. Where had that gone? Oh, yes. Someone tore it off. She had been asleep. Pretended she still was. Thought they would take the finger, too, and then the ring came loose...
Had she cried afterwards?
She had never cried.
‘There he is. He’s nutty,’ said Janice, indicating Louis under the bridge.
‘All the better,’ said Camillo. ‘The mad are sacred.’
The afternoon was white, and noisy. About a quarter to four, probably.
Up on the bridge the traffic stormed along, and people passed like a speeded-up film.
Under the bridge, the thick shadow. Stasis.
Two feet of mud, and in the mud the effigies, like fossils, of shopping trolleys, dead fish, the jaw bone of a large dog, some hound of the Baskervilles, strayed here to die. They kicked through bleach bottles now, and bottles of fabric conditioner, as if, also, weird women came to the river bank to wash their laundry.
‘Too clean, you bitch.’
‘All right,’ Lix said.
She sat down, then lay on the mud, and rolled.
She came up clotted, her face marked as if with war paint. ‘Better?’
‘Much. Much better. Lovely for me. Didn’t know you would.’
Janice tut-tutted.
Camillo looked sixteen, the sixteen of the streets, a hundred.
He took Lix’s elbow and slid with her under the bridge.
The others followed. Janice and Kirstie and the dog, Pug, bombed-deaf, grinning, smoking Vinegar Tom, listening to a Marseillaise in his head.
Louis conducted the service as he remembered it.
He addressed them all solemnly.
They acted well. Janice even looked quite reverential, and the dog did not bark. Sometimes Kirstie yawned, but she was possibly sick, always lethargic. A few years ago he would not have minded sharing the box of drink with such as Kirstie, but now he felt a lurking doubt. Then again, if there was nothing, why worry?
Louis spoke to them of what they shared, and they shared the box.
Then he addressed Lix.
He said was she free to be with Camillo, and would she? Lix said she was, she would. He did not ask her to love, honour and obey, but only to love. To love for always in whatever guise, and to observe the freedom of the other, and to cherish. The words were the same for Camillo. He was surprised, Louis, when both of them said Yes, and in a way, it brought home to him his own inadequacy. For if they had believed he had any authority to perpetrate this service, surely neither would have agreed.
The box went round again.
Louis uttered a prayer.
‘Life is a hard teacher, and we learn through living, under the cane of experience. We smart and sting and are often sorry. But in the end, a golden light shines through our darkness. Though the way seems made of darkness, yet there is always a path. We have only to trust ourselves, and to trust the Infinite, which will always guide us.’
Janice’s eyes were full of tears.
Louis felt a deep objective sorrow for her belief, stronger than his.
He concluded with a blessing.
They shared the box again.
Louis said, ‘You can kiss your bride.’
Camillo turned and took Lix between his hands.
Camillo seemed like a boy, like Louis when he was fourteen and had stumbled into the Cot hall with his sick stomach growling and tuppence ha’penny in his pocket. And yet, Camillo was savage, and sure. Like a pigeon, for they were the best at survival. Camillo the pigeon kissed Lix with his cruel beaked lips.
She allowed it.
Janice said, ‘There!’
And then a curious thing happened.
A wind must have scuffed along the bridge above. It stirred through the lightweight rubble of the day, raised it, and bore it over the parapet, and down, down, through the cold white air.
The scent of the rush-hour came with it, of cigarettes and the vacuum of the tube, the exhaust of cars and buses, fume of deodorized bodies cornered by emotions they must not feel.
Bile-green betting tickets torn up, love-letters on scented paper sealed with a Revlon kiss, technicolour beauty of butterfly papers from unwrapped Quality Street thieved and eaten swift above the river. Bus tickets, discarded bil
ls not useful for tax evasion, a shredded card from a lover unwanted. Two coloured Kleenex, one containing a sneeze, the other full of tears.
These floated down, blew in under the bridge.
The wedding confetti.
‘Ooh, look,’ said Janice.
‘It’s like—’ said Kirstie.
Pug stared and said, ‘Yeah.’
And in the spiky hair of Lix, a golden chocolate wing, held, dropped away. Like a ring torn loose. Like a chip of the veiled sun.
‘Now, honeymoon,’ said Camillo. ‘Who wants to come.’
‘You don’t take no one on your honeymoon,’ advised Janice.
Her dog barked disapprovingly.
Camillo said, ‘This is different.’
He led them away, and even Louis followed, along the dark white beach beside the river of phantom washing.
They climbed the slimy steps.
There against the grey marzipan kerb of the street, where the world rushed, two great black vehicles.
‘Blimey,’ said Janice.
‘S’Rolls,’ said Pug.
‘Be my guests,’ said Camillo. ‘Lix and I in one. Do you see the white ribbons, Lix? And the rest of you in the other.’
Janice stood sullen, clutching her bags and her dog. Kirstie stood beside her, vacant as a house. Pug said, ‘Yeah.’ And Vinegar Tom, over his music, ‘I’ll do that.’
Camillo walked to the forward car and rapped on the smoked glass of its windows.
A chauffeur got out. And another from the second car.
Around them the upper world of the bridge roared by.
Lix got into the first car, and then Camillo, and the door was liquidly shut.
She did not turn to see who climbed into the second car. She did note Janice and Kirstie and the dog, and Louis, marooned on the pavement.
Then the car started.
The last car—
But it had not felt like this one.
‘Here’s some champagne,’ said Camillo.
And she heard, from over the moon, the popping of a cork.
Somewhere—it might have been near Euston—Camillo ordered a halt.
He and Vinegar Tom and Pug went out to pull a man in filthy black up off the pavement.
