by Harold Bloom
“By what road do we go back?”
“I have a journey to make tonight. If you accompany me, then I will place you in your forest at dawn.”
Perscors let the javelin fall, as a sign. She beckoned him to pick it up.
“I do not take you under my protection. We will be neither enemies nor friends through this night.”
“I need no protection.”
He retrieved the javelin and waited to follow her back to the stairs. But she turned around to the sea.
“I have no talent for walking upon water,” Perscors said.
Achamoth turned to him again. “We are going on a voyage to an island. There is a boat concealed at the water’s edge.”
“What is on the island?”
“Memories.”
With that word, she swung around decisively and strode down to the sea. Perscors followed, his steps more uncertain, as the darkness was now dense. Beyond the final and largest rock, they found a small sailboat. There was little wind, but Achamoth’s will sufficed to drive the boat along at what seemed to Perscors an incredible swiftness.
He lost any grasp of time. The voyage was rough, and he brooded on the waves, feeling at one with them. Achamoth, had he noticed her, would have astonished him. Her brutal, angry pride left her. Grief, fear, bewilderment, and an expression of yearning ignorance replaced pride. But these metamorphoses of her features had nothing to do with the sea that beat so strongly against her onrushing boat.
They landed with a jolt, the boat suddenly running aground. Perscors, without reflection, leaped out, as though he were invading the island. Achamoth sat upright in the boat, as though not understanding that the voyage was over. Watching her, Perscors became aware that she had changed, that indeed she looked demoralized.
Perplexed, he waited for her, conscious that he was dependent upon a being who had lost all force and all apparent purpose. Anger rising, he resolved to stir her: “Achamoth! Rouse yourself!”
Like a sleepwalker she rose stiffly and stepped onto the land.
“Since we are here, what do we go to see or encounter in this moonless darkness?”
She did not seem to understand his question. Her stare was meaningless, without focus. Perscors shook her shoulder. When there was no reaction, he realized how absurd a dilemma now existed. His guide needed guidance, and he was totally lost.
He led her to a slight rise in the ground, and sat her down upon moss. What seemed her trance continued. He doubted that dawn would see him back upon his western path in the forest as she had promised. Weary and confused, he sat near her, looking with wonderment at her blank features. His horror and hatred of her had gone. Sympathy with so occult a being was grotesque, he thought, but he felt it nevertheless.
Abruptly she spoke into the darkness: “I was cast out into the Places of Shadow and of Emptiness. I found myself outside of the Light, and I looked at myself. I was as formless and as shapeless as an abortion, because I had conceived nothing.
“The Limit shaped me, but gave me no knowledge. I longed for the Light, but was held back by the Limit. I remained outside, in loneliness and abandonment.
“I mourned, because I had not conceived. I was in fear, lest life abandon me, as the Light had gone from me. My grief and consternation produced the substance from which the Demiurge made the cosmos.
“Saklas believed that he made all things by himself, but in reality he made them under my influence. He created a heaven without knowing heaven. He formed a man and did not know man. He produced an earth, without knowing earth. He knew nothing at all of the ideas of the things that he made, or of the mother.
“He thought that he was the only God, and said, through his prophets: ‘Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me.’ ”
In the ensuing silence, Perscors marveled that she had spoken with a voice not her own. Instead of her harsh, deep imperiousness, he had heard a voice that blended those of a feeble old woman and a small, lost girl. But her memories did not aid Perscors in finding his way back. How to deliver her from the trance mystified him. She had come to this island, it must hold something she needed to find or to recall. He resolved to leave her for now and to make his own search of the island, despite the darkness. His fortune, which had carried him through so much on this world, would bring him success again.
He had not gone far in the dark before he seemed to have lost his javelin. Had he lost it? Or had an unseen branch taken it out of his hand? He went a little farther on, and halted abruptly.
What seemed alternately a snake and a lion flashed directly ahead of him, its eyes streaming fire. Weaponless, Perscors hesitated. But his own fire urged him onward. When he was close enough to the beast, he threw himself forward with the agility and force that had been increasing continually since his arrival upon Lucifer. To his fury, the serpentine lion twisted to the side, uttered a hissing roar, and ran away from him, with a speed he could not match. Just for a moment, as it evaded him, the beast’s features had been clear to him. It had the face of a man, a face he remembered from Siniavis: Saklas the Demiurge. Dazed, Perscors turned back to find Achamoth.
She sat where he had left her; yet he saw as he came near that she had returned to herself.
“Do you know where you are, Achamoth?”
“I know. It is enough. I will stay for a time, but you need not wait until dawn. I will guide you to a place here, and it will become the place there.”
“But what are you to Saklas? If that queer beast I frightened off was Saklas.”
“Saklas as he was. Not now. I bore him here, as my child.”
There was a desolation in her voice, but her expression was the prideful scowl he had seen before.
“Guide me to the place, then.”
She rose and walked only seven steps. He followed close upon her in the darkness. Suddenly he stood in daylight, by the stream of his encounter with Ruha. He looked about the clearing and saw that he was alone. Then he went out of the clearing toward the West. “I will encounter them all again—Ruha, Achamoth, Saklas,” he said to himself, and added aloud: “Let them beware of me.”
Desert and Deluge
Olam assumed that he was now much farther west than Valentinus and Perscors could be. This intuition did not disturb him, but he was troubled nevertheless, and as he studied the landscape, he began to understand the causes of his uneasiness.
He had come to the end of the Marcionite lands. Before him the Kenoma began, and beyond this muddy world ought to be the region of the devil-worshipping Arimaneans. There, amid horrors, Saklas had concealed the one place on Lucifer that was no part of his creation, the tower that Olam had built with his own hands, to mark the place of the Pleroma. And there, Olam resolved, Valentinus would be healed and renewed. Perhaps, he thought more dubiously, Perscors might win a release also, if he survived to get there.
But the muddy wastes of the Kenoma, as Olam now saw, extended only a short way from the high ground upon which he stood. Within sight, the wet waste places had dried up and desert spanned the whole horizon. Only the Demiurge could have reduced part of the Kenoma into desert. Olam was too subtle to interpret this imposition of desert as a barrier. More likely, it was a trap.
As he entered the new region, Olam was surprised at how cold it was. He would have expected a western desert on Lucifer to be warm. In this hostile territory, he ought to meet neither men nor animals. Unless, he grinningly reflected, Saklas had thrown in an oasis or two.
Some hours later he did come upon an oasis, and grew suspicious as he studied its elaborate but abandoned gardens, its overblown roses and extraordinarily vivid trees. He sat for an hour in a grove of plane trees, puzzled as to Saklas’s tactics.
Olam knew that he was waiting for someone; it might be some messenger sent by Saklas. Ought he to wait? At the point of rising to depart, he
heard the howl of jackals.
Suddenly they milled about him; their gold eyes glared, but their supple bodies twisted in terror of the Aeon. One jackal, bolder than the others, pressed against Olam, not in menace, but as though, in that cold desert, it needed the Aeon’s warmth.
“They fear me,” Olam mused, “but they fear what is coming even more.”
He studied the jackal’s eyes and then closed his own. Immediately he saw ocean, an ocean in tumult, with enormous waves rolling in just under the level of the sky.
Olam opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. Black clouds swayed heavily, from horizon to zenith. Abruptly he foresaw the danger: desert, and then deluge. Ancient visions crowded his inner sight. And an old text of the Knowers returned to him:
“For first there will come downpours of rain from the Demiurge, that Saklas might destroy all flesh if need be, but mostly those who derive from the seed of those into whom knowledge had penetrated. For those are strangers to Saklas. And unless a glory of the Aeons comes to them, they will perish in the waters.”
“Unless an Aeon perishes in the waters also,” Olam muttered. The dull gold of the jackal’s eyes brimmed. Olam shook himself and stood up. Above, the whole dome of the sky had turned opaque with darkness. More of the text came back to Olam:
“Then the God of the Aeons will give to them of those who serve him, in that they follow the fiery burden.
“They will come to that land where the great men have come.
“Then will fire, brimstone, and asphalt be cast upon those men, and fire and darkness will come upon the Aeons, and the eyes of the powers of the Illuminators will become dark.
“And the Aeons will not see the Illuminators in those days.”
Olam looked out to the western horizon. Against the descending blackness, he saw a glitter of silvery light.
The jackals bolted to the east. Olam swiftly began to tear down plane trees. Lashing them together, after they were stripped, he stood naked in the gathering storm. His torn skin-and-leather garments had provided the lashings, plaited together with thick-clustered vines from the oasis.
As the silvery flood roared in, Olam mounted his raft.
The Waters of Night
Valentinus sat in a stone chamber, watching the priest of Ennoia perform a ritual.
The priest stood before a statue of a sea serpent and muttered names. Though the figure had been the size of a man, it seemed much smaller to Valentinus each time he looked at it. When he gazed again, after staring at the image of a deluge on the chamber’s ceiling, he had to peer closely to see the statue at all.
Then he understood. When this image had shrunk away, a flood would gather in the world above. Suddenly Valentinus called aloud, without rising from his stone bench:
“You are no priest, but the Demiurge! Ialdabaoth, as once I knew you upon earth, but here on Lucifer named Saklas.”
“Memory floods you, heresiarch. I do not resent your interruption, since my task is accomplished. By now, Olam’s wickedness is fated to be washed away into the Kenoma. Even an Aeon cannot swim for six days and six nights.”
Valentinus stared scornfully at Saklas. After an interval, he spoke very quietly, but with the urgency of memory released after long oblivion:
“You are a great repeater of floods, always to small purpose. There is a story told of the Archons.
“They took counsel with each other, and said:
“ ‘Come let us make a deluge with our hands and destroy all flesh, men and beasts.’
“But you, the Ruler of the Archons, came to know of their decision, and you said to one man :
“ ‘Take of the wood that does not rot and hide in it, you and your children and the beasts and the birds.
“ ‘And set it upon my holy mountain.’
“Then Norea, a daughter of Knowledge, came to the man, wishing to board the hiding place of wood.
“And when he would not let her, she blew upon the wooden boat, and three times destroyed it.
“And boarded a fourth time, with Seth, Adam’s son, and rode out the Archons’ flood.”
Saklas stood a long time, frowning upon Valentinus, who remained seated. Then the Demiurge spoke:
“Find your own way back to the world above, and your own way out of the waters.
“It is not given to me to punish you.
“Who can punish you? Who can know if you are alive?
“My faith is in the waters of night. Let them be a judgment upon you, if there can be a judgment upon you.
“Let them judge Olam, and take him from me.
“Let them take the crazed giant, the Primal Man you have brought upon me.”
Valentinus did not see Saklas vanish. Suddenly he was alone in the stone chamber. He rose and walked to the figure of the sea serpent. It was no more than four inches high.
Valentinus grasped the figure with his left hand.
He could not move it. The weight was absolute.
As he watched, it grew smaller before him.
When it was no more than two inches high, Valentinus grasped it with his right hand and raised it from the altar.
It was no lighter, but a strength more than his own was in Valentinus.
He crashed his hand, with the tiny serpent, against the altar. Pain flooded him. Both his hand and the serpent were broken. He swept the fragments of the serpent from the altar, with a single movement.
Holding his shattered hand before him, Valentinus began to mount the stairway out of the altar chamber. His one thought was to find Saklas, and to wound the Demiurge, even if he could not hope to destroy him.
As he climbed up, the pain in his hand increased. So did the realization that he had suffered precisely this pain before. He felt no fear for Olam, for Perscors, or for himself, but knew only the strong need to set himself against the flood of the Archons.
The Hunter Nimrud
Perscors woke to the sound of rushing waters. The stream, near which he had slept, had become a raging river, with waves like an ocean’s.
Rain began to fall, steadily but not alarmingly. After brooding on the transformation of the stream, Perscors looked behind him to the east, where the sky was a threatening black.
He remembered two texts: “My Spirit shall not always strive with man” and “It repenteth me that I have made them.”
“What giant is there in this earth of Lucifer in these days?” Perscors asked aloud. The answer: it could be only himself. If the Archons and the warriors of thiscosmos could not stop him, and they could not, then they would seek to drown him.
He looked up coldly at the eastern sky, and saw that its darkness was spreading quickly. He had not much time. But the fire that had carried him through would not be quenched by these waters. He felt a detached curiosity as to how, but not as to whether, he would survive.
“I will ride it out, but in what?”
Perscors walked west slowly, following the river. The rain fell more heavily. As the river widened, it seemed more and more an ocean, and took over nearly half the western horizon.
Intuiting an approach, Perscors turned around to the east. A clumsy old bark, seemingly deserted, drifted rapidly toward him. Very broad and low, filthy with bilge, yellow-sided, it had a badly split mainmast. The sails seemed crumpled, yet held up strongly in the wind.
Taking it as the sign of his ongoing fate, Perscors leaped aboard midship as it came by him.
At his feet lay a man, taller and broader even than himself. An icy wind had come up, and Perscors shivered violently as he stared at the matted-haired man, laid out in what seemed a shroud, yet staring back at him out of gray-green eyes still alive with anguish. Perscors knelt down near the man and placed his hand on his brow. The giant closed his eyes, but said to Perscors: “Who are you?”
“A wanderer from another cosmos. And you?”
&nb
sp; Opening his eyes, the giant replied: “Nimrud the Hunter. This is my death ship. I sail back to the Arimaneans, in the West, to be buried among my own.”
“Your ship came in good time for me, Nimrud. Soon the water will cover all the West, even unto the Arimaneans.”
Nimrud again closed his eyes, and spoke as from a long way off: “I am already dead. I hunted men among the Sethians and lost my way, falling from a high place. Then my death ship came for me.”
Perscors puzzled it out. “Why did the ship not take you straight to your death?”
“I do not know. Perhaps Saklas holds me between life and death, perhaps it is some other Archon.”
Perscors spoke with great bitterness: “Why would Saklas punish a mighty hunter before the Lord, a servant of the Archons, a slayer of men?”
Opening his eyes, Nimrud stared at Perscors for a long time. “You have the look of another hunter of men. I serve Arimanes, not Saklas. Whom do you serve?”
“I do not serve,” Perscors asserted. He continued to stare at Nimrud. Then he noticed the speeding up of the bark. The waves flew back in response, but ahead and to every side now there was only ocean. The water was so dark that Perscors could not tell from it if it was night or day.
“Nimrud, can I steer this ship?”
The hunter smiled, but only with his eyes. “Our ship has no rudder, wanderer, and we are driven on by a wind that blows from Siniavis, from the icy regions of death.”
Riding the Flood; Norea
Olam, on his raft, was carried on swiftly, farther to the west. Innumerable flights of birds passed over him, all going northward. Only the doves seemed to be flying in his direction.
Brooding on the corpses of men, women, and children, and the carcasses of beasts, all flowing past him, Olam felt his anger grow to an extent where he tried to compel himself not to see any longer.
“I came here for the one purpose, to recover my tower, and to purge Valentinus by it. I am not here to save a doomed world.”
