Ink

by Hal Duncan

  That was Gabriel's mistake, the Duke knows, to think any one of them could keep the throne themselves. An angel of fire on the throne of God will only make a hell of heaven … and none of the remaining three would fare any better. Besides, he's never been so ambitious or foolish himself; at heart he's just an old soldier, he likes to think, who'd rather stand behind his king as guardian and loyal adviser.

  So, no, if he wants to restore order to the Vellum, he's going to need a little bit of all of them, and in Metatron's absence that means the Book, the lost, hidden, stolen, torn, scattered, remade Book of All Hours. Not some pissant little sampler patched together from fragments but the one and only, the Cant that writes the world, all worlds, graved for eternity on the skin of angels in blood ink.

  And the wonderful thing about the Vellum, about the Book that carves its folds and all the souls that live or die in them, is that even if the Book is in shreds, one of those shreds, one of those broken, twisted fictions, contains, of course, the Book's own story. Everything that ever was or will be, might or might not be, is written in the Book of All Hours; how complete would it be with no mention of itself?

  And how complete would it be without the ultimate invocation, that one little word of Cant that might exist, and therefore does within the Book, one little word by which the Lord of Lords can be called and bound into the flesh of this world?

  “It is beautiful,” he says. “Glorious.”

  “Indeed, m'sire.”

  Dr. Arturo nods, deriving no pleasure from His Lordship's approval. For him, magnificence is an irrational—

  EMERGENCY OVERRIDE.

  NARRATIVE MODE: SHUTDOWN.

  BIOFORM STATUS: PLAY/RECORD.

  The Voice in Your Blood

  17th March, he writes. Events become more curious. After my wild-goose chase out to the Ink Wells yesterday, I woke this morning in a foul mood, so frustrated with the runaround I've been getting, I decided that today I'd do a little exploration on my own. The boy woke while I was in the middle of my ablutions and was all for coming with me. I imagine he wasn't happy at all when he got back with MacChuill to find me gone. But I half believe now that my little loyal native guide has only been leading me to the shops he knows Samuel had not been at. He seems a decent enough lad, but he's clearly been told to try and keep me out of harm's way, to keep me from setting off on Samuel's trail without his master. Whatever Samuel says in this Prussian's favour, my patience with him grows thinner by the hour. The boy will tell me only that he's out in the desert; it's clear from the way he talks though that the Eyn, as he calls him, is deeply involved with these people. Tamuz insists that Eyn is only a mark of respect, but it does have the ring of a tribal title to me, as if the Baron is another of these White Arabs, Anna, gone native and prancing around in robes and headdress. It seems that noble blood is noble blood, whatever race it belongs to. I used to I cannot say but that I have my own ideas upon the nature of the truly noble man.

  Whatever Eyn means, though, it's a part of the puzzle.

  He'd picked up on the word the moment Tamuz first used it, out on the airfields, but had shrugged it off as some local dialect. It was only last night, tackling another entry in Hobbsbaum's little notebook, that he'd come across it in… well, in another of those disturbing little flights of fancy. The translated shorthand is now inscribed on the facing page of his own journal entry:

  From the few records that survived the destruction, it reads, it is impossible to reconstruct the language with any degree of accuracy, but the eminent paleolinguist M. Ventris (1987) argues a strong case that the Enakite tongue, while containing many Semitic loan words, is not a member of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages at all. Ventris speculates that the Enakite eyn may even be derived from the Sumerian en, meaning lord.

  It's not just the dates, the references to works unwritten, wholesale inventions of future history, as if Samuel were working on some fantastic novel in the vein of Wells; it's the detail that disturbs him, and the lack of context. Without any clue to the origins of these scraps of ersatz academia, he feels like a doctor lost in the private language of a patient's delusions, the sort of calm, matter-of-fact insanity he remembers from the Somme…

  Alook of cold hate and a shake of the head from the chaplain as he walks into the dugout. Sketches on brown paper scattered everywhere. Obscene drawings of Carter naked, with fire in his eyes, with wings.

  “Don't you see the angel,” the boy had said, “when you look in the mirror, sir, ye know? Oh, and don't you hear the voice in your blood?”

  Brown eyes in the gray light of dawn, more sad than scared.

  “It's time,” says Mad Jack Carter.

  “Isn't it always?” says Private Thomas Messenger.

  Focus, he tells himself.

  If Samuel's lost his grasp of reality out with some kif-smoking tribal storyteller, these notes may have no more meaning than the automatic scribblings of a spiritualist charlatan. The future isn't written yet, not like the past. And there's no such thing as angels, he tells himself. No, when von Strann returns he may have more of Samuel's notebooks, according to Tamuz. But for now Carter has something more solid to work with, from his own investigations. The world has no angels in it, he tells himself, no magic, no prophecy; that way lies madness … like Samuel's… like the Messenger boy's…

  Focus, goddammit.

  It didn't take me long, he writes, to find the less reputable traders with more valuable antiquities, those who deal in genuine, albeit looted, grave goods rather than the counterfeit trinkets sold to tourists. And, after only the briefest of enquiries, I now know of an incident a fortnight ago or so where Samuel and von Strann saw off two assailants—after a book Samuel was carryingon him, it seems. The stall owner was rather exaggerating, I suspect—she made a great fuss over afire that got started in the struggle, how it could have wreaked havoc upon the kasbah, ruined her business, merciful Allah—but her description of the two “foreign rogues” seems worth the price.

  “No, they were not Arab. Pale skin, blue eyes. Americans, I should think, from the way they talk. But Americans who have lived in many places.”

  The trader stuffs straw packing into a box as she nods to herself. She looks up at Carter from her stool beneath the canopy at the narrow entrance to her shop, a dark room crowded with shelf after shelf of shabti figurines, Jericho skulls covered in clay with shells for eyes, stone statues, cylinder seals. The kasbah seems an easy place to snatch and run, to disappear into the hustle and bustle, but Carter can see how easy it would also be to bungle a robbery in these cramped conditions, to knock an oil lamp over, start a fire.

  “Strange men,” the trader says. “Hair like snakes.”

  She shakes her head, switches to Arabic to explain—not like a woman's flowing down the back, but down to the shoulder in matted, braided, thick, wild locks. Like an African, she says with some disdain before launching again into her bitter complaints about the fire and how she nearly lost her livelihood.

  “That fire was not natural.”

  The voice comes from inside the shop, an old man hobbling out of the shadows to peer at him with a face as timeworn as the cracked clay on the Jericho skulls, cataracts in his eyes white as the seas hells.

  “Go back inside,” she says. “Ignore my father. He is blind but he imagines he can see better than—”

  “I hear well enough, my girl. And I heard his voice; I heard the word the angel used to start the fire.”

  “It was a lamp, a broken oil lamp. Ignore him; he is old and—”

  “Did you find any broken glass, eh? No. I know the voice of the one who took your mother. I know the voice of the angel of death.”

  “Father… enough. Please go, sir. Please. This is not good for him.”

  The woman ushers her father back inside with waving arms, ignoring his protests—/ heard it, I heard it—and Carter finds himself backing away down the street—/ heard the voice in my blood. He's thinking of Samuel's letters and crazy notes, of the
madness that believes in myths and magic.

  And don't vou hear the voice in vour blood?

  EASTERN MOURNING

  A whisper:Jack.

  A flash of Shamash, of shining sun on the silvery steel of the lighter as he flicks it into flame for Don's fag, gleam of it glinting in his eye and his grin in the mirror in the dugout—snicking white teeth, he has, like those of the lion in the corner slouched over the copper-smooth body of the boy, Private Tamuz Messenger, whose dead eyes stare at him now as his blue lips whisper his name again—Jack.

  When do I know you from? When are we?

  Thunder of guns drum his dream with doom DOOM doom, and Jack picks up the sketch of the Phoenician ivory of Adonis and the lioness, places it in a tin mug hanging from a hook on the wall, rattling in time to the prattling Irishman chained in the chair in the corner, Finnan—awake again, Jack. Sure andwefookin need ye ‘cause it's worse than Spain ever would have been if we hadn't gone andfooked it royally, he's saying,yerselfand me and Fox makes three.

  And Jack looks at the Irishman just sitting there on the bunk in his dream of a dugout past, Sergeant Finnan, it is, Seamus Finnan, Shamash or—

  … Prometheus, chained up in the Caucasus for his theft of fire. Of course, given the identification of Japheth with Iapetus, Prometheus's father, this lent further credence to the correlation of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, with the Semitic, African and Indo-European peoples respectively. To the European scholars of the day, the “dynamic fire” of the Aryan warrior race was clearly of immense historical import; it was unthinkable that the Biblical taxonomy would overlook the founders of classical civilization; it was absurd to imagine that the blacks and the Jews should be traced back to their antediluvian roots, but the Aryan race not be legitimized in the same way.

  I made a mistake, says Jack, looking out of the dugout across the mountains of the Caucasus at airships gathering to drop fire on Armenian villages. A grave mistake. Christ, what did he do? What have they done?

  We all make mistakes. All that matters is ye have tofookin wake.

  The wind that blows past him into the cave behind is cold as winter, cold as a Hinter night, though, God, and Jack pulls up the collar of his greatcoat as he turns to the light of the dawn, of the day breaking over Jerusalem where the women wail for Thomas always and forever, singing laments of Eastern mourning, loud and long and ululating as a muezzin in a minaret, paeans of pain to God, no, not to God but to the rising sun, to Shamash, to Seamus, to—

  As a mark of just how far the Romantic model was willing to stretch credibility on the basis of racist assumptions, Schiegel (1853) even went so far as to identify Japheth with Jupiter, and the Hebrew Yahveh with Jove, seeing in the coincidental similarities a great Indo-European God, brought to Rome from Ilium “while the Semites were still sacrificing infants in the furnaces of Moloch.” When the Bible tells us that the sons of Japheth dwelt in the tents of Shem, he goes on to tell us, “clearly it is the civilizing influence of the Aryans that is meant here, everywhere bringing with them the shining ideal of an Almighty God of Gods to replace the heathen Goddess of old.”

  THE SONS OF JAPHETH

  Anna sits in the dark at the back of the antiquities shop, among the clay-covered skulls and shabti figures, in a widow's veil of sorrow for her brother, her other, reading the old blind beggar's withered hand, tracing the lines of the mummified dead man with a clay reed, pricking the skin to bleed black blood that dissolves into vapors in the air, whispers of darkness that shroud him, MacChuill, half blind, half beggar. She reaches out toward Jack.

  Cross my palm with silver. One sekhufor a fortune. All your talents for the one you love.

  He walks into the room—it's hardly high enough to stand or wide enough to fly, six khaibits by six khaibits by six khaibits—and he kneels before the statue of her, under her outspread wings, this angel of mercy with her red hair and her copper skin, her lips kissing his forehead with forgiveness, tears running down to merge with his, salt of her grief running into his mouth, salt of her sweat as he kisses her breast, her neck, her chin, his lips, his puckered, puckish lips and the feel of his nibbling teeth on Jack's ear and nipping fingers on a nipple.

  Tamuz, he murmurs in his sleep.

  In fact, were it not for the use made of Schiegel's “Aryan Yahweh” hypothesis by both Fascists and Futurists seeking to justify their anti-Semitism, the arrogance and absurdity of the claim would render it laughable. The fact is that the compilers of the genealogies of Shem, Ham and Japheth clearly had little interest in the obscure tribes at the far reaches of their sphere of knowledge. Just as the listings of sons of Ham (whose curse, in this Romantic racist model, was of course their black skin) contain far more Semitic tribes, cities and nations than they do African ones, so too the sons of Japheth can largely be identified with indigenous Caucasoid tribes of the northern Anatolian regions. Few of these were Indo-European. None of them were the white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans of Romantic invention.

  Follow me, Jack, says Thomas.

  And Tamuz leads him through the streets of the souk, where angels of death and peace walk, men in long black feathered cloaks, dreadlocked and copper-skinned, faces like vipers, fire blazing from their mouths against the men and women and children dying in flames. A Hassidic Hobbsbaum stands against a wall, murmuring prayers to himself as an angel sniffs him.

  You are ours, old man. You are all ours. You are in the booh of all that is ours, the booh of all ours, all that belonged to—

  And the word he says is a whisper of hhhh, just a breath without vowels, little more than a rounding of lips in the wh- of a why, a who,a when, and the touch of a tongue in they- of a you, a yeah, a jawohl. Yahweh.

  You belongs to us now.

  Jack has his gun in his hand.

  Fuck that shit.

  He wakes, upright in bed, sheafs of Hobbsbaum's notes sliding off the sheets to scatter across the darkness of the floor.

  We need to understand these Biblical genealogies as retroactive attempts to make sense of the melange of ethnicities inhabiting the Fertile Crescent, compiled generations after the forefathers of their writers swept down from the northern area around Hittite Haran to devastate the coastal city-states of Canaan, taxonomies based less on racial distinctions than on the political and cultural divisions between semi-nomadic “Semitic” herders and the “Hamitic” settlers whose towns and cities they pillaged. In this context, it seems quite obvious that these sons of Japheth who “dwelt in the tents of Shem” simply represent the northern Anatolian tribes who spoke non-Afro-Asiatic languages, but who may or may not have been ethnically “Semitic” (given that linguistic and ethnic roots do not always match) and who we know made up a large proportion of those raiders known as “Khabiru,” or “Habiru” … or “Hebrews.”

  Errata

  —

  Coils of a Snake

  innan sits down at the small wooden table under the black awning, chugs a long cold swig from the bottle and pushes his seat back to look out into the crowd. He's getting used to the place now, the subtle shifts in the way the throngs move that keep you from getting from one place to the next by the exact route you'd intended, the way the stalls switch places when you're not looking. It hadn't taken him long to find the old roofless empty bar with a crate of beer behind the counter, covered in dust but ice-cold, the table and chair set up outside, waiting for anyone who cared to use them. A bit of luck.

  He watches a couple of tourists walking round in a circle, one stall to the next, to the next, to the next, and back to the first, asking the same questions each time, getting the exact same answers. He watches the way the Cold Men skirt round them, avoiding the loops, striding through other areas, the crowd parting to let them through, the slipstreams of dust under their feet. The street of curio kitsch doesn't quite hold together, doesn't quite have the logic it should; but it has a certain dynamic to it. Coils of a snake, he thinks.

  He takes another slug from the beer and
lays his softpack of Camels and lighter on the table. He pulls a pack of cards out of his pocket and lays them on the table too; not tarot cards, just everyday spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds. He deals out a hand of solitaire, then lifts off the little mojo bag that hangs around his neck on a leather string, opens it up, takes out a peyote button. You can't beat the serpent playing straight. He knocks it back with another swig of beer.

  Five minutes pass.

  Ten minutes pass.

  An eternity.

  The mescaline is starting to kick in by the time the barker strolls up to the table, casual as a spring day, to ask if he can take a seat. The multicolors of his clothes slide at the edges, streaming by each other like candy-stripe motorways, running rivulets of glows.

  “Help yourself,” says Finnan.

  He lays the Queen of Hearts down onto the King of Clubs. The colors on the cards are liquid television, set turned up to burn-out bright. Simware gone crazy.

  “Join me in a beer, old friend. A game of Happy Families?”

  The barker wanders into the bar behind him, feet thumping on the heavy wooden floor, comes back out with a chair and a bottle. He scrapes the chair rear-first up to the table, opposite Finnan, and straddles it, arms crossed over its back. He takes a slug from the beer. A wry half smile, half grimace.