“But you cavort with spirits,” Sheba insisted.
Katrine’s spine straightened. “I do no such thing. I’m a far-seer. I see in the distance of time.”
“Do you, now? That’s very interesting.” Sheba inclined her head to the side and studied Katrine while the maidens washed her neck and shoulders with soft sea sponges. “Tell me, then, what do you see in time for me?”
Now Katrine felt uncomfortable. This strange woman didn’t abide by any of their customs and her courtesy was at a minimum. She spoke her thoughts, no matter what they might be. She seemed to have no fear of reprisal or of censure.
“I...I have not looked,” Katrine lied.
“You far-see for the King then?”
“And the kingdom,” Katrine added.
“What do you see for this great land, my little friend?” Repulsed, she was being grilled and insulted. Katrine was neither little nor was she the girl’s friend. Just the opposite. She saw Sheba as the enemy to both her master and her country.
“I see on your face your thoughts,” Sheba said, pushing away her handmaidens. She stood regal from the milky water and let a maiden wrap absorbent cotton cloth around her nakedness. “You think I’m some sort of demon, don’t you? Some dark lady here to bring harm.”
Katrine jutted out her chin. She rose, fists balled but hidden behind her skirts. With great control, she lowered her head and backed from the room. She would not answer for it would force her to lie to the girl’s face again and she’d know. The girl already knew.
***
Finally, Katrine had another audience with Solomon and this time she insisted he take her seriously. “You know I’ve been right before. You know I kept morale up when I saw rains were coming to save the crops in drought. You know I told you we would be a central spoke for commerce from foreign lands and that event would make you wealthy and your kingdom would increase. You know...”
He raised his palm for her to stop. “I’m grateful for you, High Priestess. I’ve always listened to you. But if this is about Sheba, you can save your breath.”
“But why, Master? Why must you travel down this road to perdition? She is greedy, she’ll have your...”
He stood, bellowing, “ENOUGH.”
Katrine’s gaze lowered to the floor where she stared until tears came to her eyes. He had never spoken to her so harshly.
“I’m sorry, but I won’t have anyone speaking against her. She’s my lover. She will be my queen. Never speak again her name connected with a negative word if you value your position in this palace and beneath my shelter.”
Katrine now sat before the blowing winds, the blanket rain, the rising waters, the tossing sea, and she mourned the falling of both her king and her land. This was the man to whom God gave wisdom. In one instance, two women came to Solomon arguing over a child, each claiming to be the mother. The Great and Wise Solomon decreed they divide the child with a sword. One of the women leaped forward and said she’d give up the child, do not kill it! That was the woman Solomon gave the child, calling her surely the true mother. How could such a wise man be so clouded in judgment by a mere girl-queen?
Sheba goaded him.
He stood in Hiram’s hall entrance between two massive columns housing the Ark of the Covenant and his legendary strength put to test.
Crowds gathered and looked on as Sheba bade him, “Bring them down, Solomon! Bring down the walls!”
She had turned the king to idolatrous gods and away from the god of his father. Sheba told him his strength was given him by these foreign gods and to show them his gratitude he must tear down the temple of his old religion, burying the Ark beneath rubble.
While Katrine stood on the lower steps watching, her heart sunk in despair. It was the vision she’d earlier seen coming to fruition. Solomon pushed until sweat broke out on his massive biceps and shoulders and back. His mighty head hung down, like a lion about to roar, and the columns trembled, the stone ceiling shook, blocks of marble crumbled and fell inside to crash on the floor, and still Sheba screamed, “Bring it down, bring it down now, Solomon!”
When it fatally cracked, the walls and ceiling giving, Solomon walked placidly down the steps and away, his queen’s arm linked in his own, as the temple fell behind him into a monstrous cloud of gray dust.
People wailed, some danced with joy, and Katrine wiped the tears from her eyes and followed behind her Master to the palace.
It was only months later the girl tired of her plaything and left the kingdom, her belly swollen with Solomon’s seed. Katrine went in search of her king and found his locks shorn, his head bald, his face sagging with age. “She left me,” he said simply. “She talked me into shaving my hair. She left with my son in her womb. She took away my heart and my heir.”
Katrine wanted to remind him of her warnings, but said nothing. She walked to him where he sat on his throne, a diminished man, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Master,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
The high priestess lived out her days with the king as his kingdom divided and dwindled and grew dim. He never found his former self, nor his wisdom. He took too many wives, gathered too much gold, and fell into greed, lust, and gluttony.
This day, with the storm raping the land of Solomon, and the sea threatening to swallow the city’s edges, the king lay silent somewhere in the dark depths of his palace. Katrine had been banned from that sacred place years in the past, never enjoying the king’s protection again after she’d spoken against his dark Ethiopian beauty.
More walls would fall. Armies would invade. The lands would be split in two under the reign of Solomon’s Israeli son. After this natural storm came another, one unnatural, one cleaving the kingdom in two and murdering thousands. The nature of those wars were kept secret from her beyond the deaths.
***
Sheba’s son was born with the strength of his father Solomon, yet he died one long night when the moon was full and the stars were bright. Despite all they could do, nothing could save the little boy from a sudden onset of illness.
By morning he was dead.
Sheba dispatched her attendants from her chamber and sat with the body. As she thought her dark thoughts, she heard a rustling and glanced up to see a viper curling over her son’s chest. She stood, horrified his body was being defiled by this evil creature. Even as she tried to think what method to use to remove the snake from him, its triangle head snaked into the boy’s open mouth, between the chalky lips, and slid down the cavern of his throat.
Sheba raised her hands in the air and screamed.
The boy sat up and blinked.
He swallowed noisily and said in a snake’s rasp, “Mother, I’m back.”
From that time on, he was possessed of darkness, his hungers deep and unrelenting, his violence renown throughout the nation. He was King ruling with a dictatorial hand. When his people starved in their villages, he laughed. When his mother grew old and lacked wit, he sneered and kicked at her. When she died, he lit her funeral pyre on fire and danced around it naked, striking terrible fear in witnesses.
This was the man-thing that came galloping into Israel where his father’s other son reigned. This is where he split the country, pushing part of it close to the sea.
Over succeeding years, as Solomon grew old and of no use to anyone, even his many concubines, he heard his son with Sheba was a demon possessed of a magical snake. He called for his old high priestess, Katrine, to ask her for the truth. She lived in a small palace he’d given her long ago.
“My son, the one born of Sheba, is said to be of the devil and that’s how he split my country. What do you know of him?”
Katrine sat still, hands in her lap, dressed in a blue gown. She regarded her master, noticing the passage of time in the face of the once-mighty ruler. Outside the storm raged as she waited for another vision. The far-seeing came seldom these days as if it was only really needed when she was in the employ of Solomon.
She closed her eyes and
she saw evil, the Son of Solomon, the dark one. He was not even a living being. He was infested with the wriggling of black snakes as venomous as any that ever lived. Animated by their squirming, even his brain was coiled with them, and his thoughts poisoned by their venom. Katrine, deep in her vision, saw he made more like him, thousands more. He brought them snakes in their sleep and dropped them into their open mouths. His army of the undead grew and that’s why they won their battles. Nothing could kill that which did not live.
Katrine opened her eyes wide, fear spilling out as a flood. “Oh, dear God, Solomon, he’s the greatest demon and he’s come with abandoned souls to turn the soil and the water to blood.”
This time Solomon believed her. “I’ll send out troops to find him.”
Katrine knew this wouldn’t matter. They’d never find him. He was as destined to be on the earth as was Solomon, and Sheba, and...Katrine herself. They were the three shafts of the trident, but Solomon’s son was the rain of floods, the fire of devastation, and the chaos of the universe.
She bowed to Solomon and slowly backed from the room for the last time. She’d never see the king alive again. At least she wouldn’t live long enough to taste the worst brunt of the coming apocalyptic wars and neither would her sister, the empress. Their generation was fading and the new one—remorseless, conscienceless, and thoroughly evil—was on the way to power. Those without souls would rule the new world.
At the thought of such a thing, Katrine felt a tug on her heart and a pain shot through her chest to double her over. She tried to catch her breath, to calm herself, and she couldn’t. She went to her knees expecting she would die even before her king. She tried to cry out, but darkness invaded her tongue until she lay on the marble floor in death. It had taken her abruptly, without warning, sending her into the great beyond.
From out of the shadowy hall, a servant approached the dead seer. He turned her onto her back to see she was indeed dead. He slipped a black snake from his pocket and dropped the head into Katrine’s mouth to let it wriggle down into the body.
The servant trotted away so she might come awake on her own. He knew she would give the death-gift to her king within days, maybe within hours.
The deadly Son of Solomon would rule all the world one day, they all understood this truly—all the entire living world.
***
Author of more than 50 books, I am a thriller, suspense, and horror novelist, a short fiction writer, and a lover of words. In a diary when I was thirteen years old I wrote, “I want to grow up to be a writer.” It seems that was always my course. My books have been published since 1984 and two of them received an Edgar Award Nomination for best novel and a Bram Stoker Award Nomination for most superior novel. I have been a regular contributor to a myriad of anthologies and magazines, with more than 150 short stories published. My work has been in such diverse publications as Horror Show Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I taught writing for Writer’s Digest and for AOL online, and gave writing workshops locally in Texas. I was an assistant editor at a Houston literary magazine and co-edited several trade paperback anthologies with Martin Greenberg.
Recently I’ve sold short stories to the anthologies Better Weird edited by Paul F. Olson from Cemetery Dance, Fresh Fear edited by William Cook, and Someone Wicked edited by Weldon Burge. My latest novel, The Grey Matter, will be published in May 2014 by Post Mortem Press.
I was born in Alabama and live now in Texas on a small ranch.
News of my e-book publications can be found at: peculiarwriter.blogspot.com
My Facebook page is: facebook.com/billie.s.mosiman
I'm on Twitter as @billiemosiman
***
THE EMPRESS
Flesh in Frame
By Spike Marlowe
The artist bites into the apple, breaking its flesh with her teeth, easing the fruit's meat into her mouth with her lips, full and rouged.
Her model lies on a bed of grass, her body entirely white except for her tiny nipples, two pink blushing bumps beneath the sun's rays. She lies exposed to the world as if newly born—open and vulnerable and cold. An aspen quakes near her head.
The artist closes her blue eyes, and drops her apple to the dirt; clumps of mulch and shards of bark stick to its red and yellow striped flesh, white meat. She raises her hands to the sky, and tips her head back, exposing her face to the sun. She inhales, breathing in the scent of wildflowers, the dirt, the grass, the nearby sea. And then she relaxes, faces her model as before, and opens her completely black eyes.
She begins to blink, and with each blink, there is a click. She stares at her model, blinks faster and faster, and soon the clicks run together until the meadow reverberates with the sound. Click. Click. Click.
The model lies still. She has done this before; she knows the artist will not be pleased if she moves.
Finally, the artist closes her eyes. When she opens them, they are once again blue. She opens her mouth and releases a stream of photographs of the model from which the artist will birth images into wood.
***
The artist sits on a pile of pillows—red, orange and gold—before a white table, surrounded by the lemon-colored walls of her studio. To her right is a corkboard covered in photographs of her pale model, to her left sits a myrtle wood bowl of oranges, before her lies a square of cottonwood. She lifts her right forefinger and runs it across the cottonwood, stripping away wood, as if peeling away a layer of skin.
She works through the night, into the morning, applying fingers that form themselves into knife, gouger, chisel, fluter. When she is done, her model stares back at her from the wood, her body trapped beneath the roots of a tree, twisted and tangled.
***
When the artist takes photographs, she eats apples. When the artist carves, she eats oranges. When the artist makes love, she eats pomegranates.
Her model lies in the plush bed the artist has provided for her, snuggled in a nest of sheets and blankets so white they almost seem to have hints of pale blue.
The artist sits down on the bed, half a pomegranate in each hand. She whispers to her model, murmuring soft promises, if the model will wake.
When she finally opens her eyes, the artist feeds her model pomegranate seeds, dropping them onto her delicate tongue like nectar from the gods. But the artist knows she is not a god, no matter how much the model calls her goddess, no matter how much the artist tells her her name is not goddess but mother.
Mothers are so much more powerful.
When the pomegranate is bare of its seeds and the model’s mouth is red from its juices, the artist kisses her, licks her lips and then pulls away, smiles. She walks to the kitchen, retrieves a sea green clay bowl brimming with pomegranate seeds.
The model sits up, bedclothes as pale as her skin falling to her narrow hips, revealing the perfect breasts and belly of the young. The artist shakes her head. The model reclines on the bed and kicks the sheets and blankets away from her body.
The artist pours the pomegranates onto the model’s body, covering her flesh with red seeds. The artist removes her clothes and sits astride the model, crushing the seeds into the model’s torso with her hands, red pomegranate seeds gushing their juice, soaking the model’s skin, staining the artist’s inner thighs, steeping into the sheets.
Hands on breasts, blood-red sex against blood-stained belly, the artist lowers her mouth to the model’s chest and laps the pomegranate juice up like a kitten laps milk. The model shudders.
It is then that the artist asks, “Would you like me to birth you anew? Would you like to be immortal?”
She sits up and reaches behind her, rubs the model’s mound until the model cries, “Yes, mother!”
And so it is done.
***
Over the succession of many nights and mornings and afternoons, the artist impregnates her model, fills her with pomegranate seeds from which the model’s immortality will grow.
Finally, the model’s belly quickens. Week
s later she births a butternut tree.
The artist is never sure what type of tree her models will birth. No matter—she knows how to carve them all, knows how to carve all woods to immortalize her models, each one in turn.
After the quaking aspen is birthed, the artist sends the model on her way. The model’s body is still ripe from her pregnancy. Her cheeks are plump and rosy. Her eyes luminous. Still, she doesn’t want to leave the artist; she doesn’t want to leave this home.
“You are woman now,” the artist says. “It’s time to go into the world and make your way. It is time for me to carve another into your wood.” With that she pushes the model out the door with a basket of food and a bag holding the model’s worldly goods.
***
The room, wide and white as the tundra in winter, is empty. The artist walks in, followed by a man in an expensive gray suit. He pulls a large wheeled suitcase behind him. He stares at her body’s curves beneath her long red dress.
The artist surveys the room, walking along the walls, studying the matte black floor, the matte black ceiling that rises into forever.
“Open the suitcase,” the artist says.
The man lowers the suitcase to the ground and opens it. Inside are dozens of carved pieces of wood with girls’ images staring at him.
The artist picks up four of the carvings. In one, a girl is bound to a tree with moss, gagged with flowers, blindfolded with giant leaves. In another, a girl hangs from a tree’s branches, strapped to the branches by thick strips of bark, cherries spilling from her ripped open belly. In another, a girl is trapped beneath a tree’s roots. In the last, a girl has a tree growing from the center of her chest.
One by one, the artist nails these carvings to a display wall. She studies the wall from different directions, from different distances.
Finally she says, “This will work. This will be a fine place to house my daughters.”
The man nods his head.
“I will send the rest tomorrow. And leave one space empty—I have one more piece to add.”
***
The artist stands naked in the forest. Her breasts and belly and hips full, yet supple. She props a large, full-length mirror framed in ebony against an oak. She takes several steps back, and closes her eyes. When she opens them again they are black. She stares at her image in the mirror, and she begins to blink.
Allegories of the Tarot Page 3
