by Harold Bloom
But this growling inner negation did not convince Olam himself. He stared on, and could not harden his feelings to the horror. Saklas had formed these creatures, they were his, and yet he drowned them, not even for sport: they happened to be in the path of the wanderers who had come to Lucifer.
Olam, borne on in the darkness, contemplated the mystery of the Demiurge. What did Saklas fear? Whom did he fear most? Was this flood for Olam and Valentinus, who had experience in evading catastrophes, or for the untried but invariably capable Perscors?
“For all of us together,” Olam muttered into the graywhiteness of dawn. The flood surged on, yet peering west he saw mountain peaks hovering above the waters. There he would beach his raft, and further contemplate the dilemmas of his blocked quest.
By what should have been mid-afternoon, he rested upon a particularly broad crag, where he secured his raft. Climbing up, he had heard a woman’s voice, but he waited for her to find him.
As he did so, he entered upon the deepest of his reveries. It was back before the Beginnings that he had walked in the Pleroma. Even there, in that Fullness, an impatience had lodged in him, though not as strongly as it had in Achamoth. Perhaps, in him, not an impatience but a forwardness, a desire to anticipate and to prevent the catastrophe of the Beginnings, of that Creation which was also a Fall. The first flood, he remembered now, had been sent by the Archons as cruelly as this flood had been launched upon the harsh world of Lucifer. Olam’s mind lapsed into a reverie of darkness.
A woman’s voice, gentle, urgent, and distantly familiar, startled Olam out of what had become a trance.
“If you are what you seem to be, one of the Aeons, wise and benevolent, then help us now against this westward flood!”
Olam blinked as the drowning world of Lucifer came back into focus. In the later moments of his trance, he had forgotten everything: the crag, the flood, the quest, and his separated companions. The woman robed in blue who stood before him was slight and very fair. In her face Olam read no desperation, but only knowledge and dignity.
“I am Olam, one of the Everlasting. But this is not my world. I am pledged to act here only to recover what is my own.”
The woman’s response sounded forth with an intensity that startled Olam: “Though mortal, I too am from the Alien God! Will you drift by and let Saklas drown out all those who know that he is a usurper? Do you visit a world only to provoke the Archons to fresh torments upon the helpless?”
Olam frowned angrily, but knew that his anger was not against the woman. He had not gone down to earth, and then out to Lucifer, to redeem multitudes, but only to recall Valentinus to an abandoned mission, and even that goal was for earth alone.
Yet this nameless woman, he reflected, spoke only the truth. He had brought Valentinus here, in search of a single tower, a place of purgation and recovery into rebirth. But he had brought a living man, Perscors, as well as the reincarnated form of a dead prophet requiring a sojourn in the place of rest. Perhaps he had meant Perscors to terrify the Archons, to distract them from the passage of Valentinus and from his own journey.
The woman watched him patiently and reverently, as he brooded on. How little he understood even of his own strength! He did not even know the source of Perscors’s evident powers, though he sensed uneasily that the giant was a version of Primal Man come back, if the Manichean fable was to be believed.
His attention returned to the woman who stood before him. If the Demiurge, in his terror, drowned thousands in this sparsely populated world, was not part of the blame due to Olam himself?
He spoke to the woman, slowly and reluctantly, but with a gruff chagrin to his tone: “You speak the truth. What Saklas has done, I cannot undo, but wherever I can, I will save the victims. And you I will take with me, from this crag to the far West.”
She inclined her head in acceptance, but did not speak. Helping her down to his raft, Olam again was troubled by half-perceived memories. He began to understand that he also, and not just Valentinus, suffered from lost remembrances. He had spoken to this woman before, in one of her earlier incarnations, and on earth, not on Lucifer. And then he remembered.
“You are called Norea.”
She nodded in confirmation, but kept silence. As they rode the flood together, Olam mused upon that earlier Norea, whose breath had burned the ark of earth’s Demiurge three times, until she was allowed to ride through to survival upon it.
Overhead the birds continued to fly northward, except for the doves, joined now by some ravens, who still followed his course. Olam, troubled, began to wonder what waited for him in the West.
Mystery of Mithra
Perscors awoke in darkness, to find himself alone upon the hunter Nimrud’s death ship. Either the hunter had been washed away while Perscors slept or else some Archon had intervened to claim his own.
How long he had voyaged, or even whether it was night or day, Perscors could not tell. The torrential rains continued to fall, and the death ship went swiftly onward.
Blue-white rays began to sweep the sky. Perscors glanced back at what he took to be the east, and watched the rays develop into a huge flower of light. Hatred energized him as he studied the Demiurge’s triumph of self-celebration. For the first time on Lucifer, Perscors decided that his quest now had a clear aim: to battle against the Archons, though it be in no cause and to no purpose.
The strengthening light revealed that Nimrud had left behind not only the purple mantle that had been his shroud but his weapons also. A great bow, a quiver with a dozen arrows, and a huge jagged lance lay at Perscors’s feet. The hunter of men had been a seven-foot giant, but Perscors was scarcely half a foot shorter. With the mantle wrapped around him for warmth, and grimly armed for the next violence that this world of religion would hurl against him, he faced west.
Full day had come behind him. Overhead the doves flew westward. Perscors realized that he had slept for some days, and that his voyage was nearing an end.
In a few hours the rains suddenly ceased. Peering ahead, he made out what seemed a coast. The Demiurge’s deluge had stopped short of whatever peoples lay there. Perscors felt no anxiety about Valentinus, who perhaps had gotten through the floods before him, and at the thought of Olam, he smiled, wondering how that rough and impatient being had ridden on to his goal. But the smile vanished suddenly, as Perscors remembered his dream about north being the true direction. He shrugged, and leaned heavily upon Nimrud’s lance to brace himself as the battered bark ran aground with a crash that splintered its sides.
Perscors marched forward into swampy ground, which gradually rose to a high plain, from which the cold light revealed hills rising ahead. A sense of futility, of the possibility of repetition, came to him from the slant of the light falling upon those hills. A raven flew close by his left ear, and then circled about the base of the nearest rise.
He quickened his march, keeping the raven in sight. Suddenly it seemed to dart into the hill, disappearing within a cave entrance. Perscors came up to the opening; statues flanked the dark mouth he hesitated to enter. To one side was a five-foot dark marble statue of a naked, lion-headed being, six times entwined by a serpent, whose head rested upon the being’s skull. Four wings with emblems of the seasons upon them extended from the statue’s back; each of its hands held a key. Upon its breast, a thunderbolt was engraved, and along the base Perscors made out a hammer and tongs, and the wand of Hermes, two snakes curled around a scepter. The statue gazed at Perscors as though it were mocking him. He grinned back at it with disdain, and turned his glance to the other statue.
This was a bas-relief in white marble, nearly as wide as its five-foot height. At its center a young god sacrificed a bull, plunging a broad dagger into its throat, while grasping a horn. The face of the god, though expressionless, troubled Perscors, who felt reminded of a past danger. To each side of the sacrifice, a youth stood against what seemed the decorated wall of a cave.
The youth at the left bore an uplifted torch; one held by his counterpart pointed downward. On the cave’s wall, Perscors could identify images of a snake, a dog, and a raven.
But he could read them only in the crudest sense, and shrugging off what he could not comprehend, Perscors entered the high cave, lance at the ready. No sooner in than he was dazzled by light, as though of a brighter sun than Lucifer could ever offer. Before him was a massive rock of white marble, with a knife embedded at its summit. Shifting Nimrud’s lance to his left hand, Perscors drew the knife from the rock without difficulty. Though very sharp, it had a ceremonial look, being made of some shining material he could not identify. Upon its hilt he read the single word nabarze, unknown to any of his memories.
“The knife is here to some purpose,” he said, and then he added, “So am I.” As he looked around the surprisingly large dimensions of the brightly lit cave, he became disturbed at his inability to trace the source of the illumination. The prescience of battle came to him, and with it the awareness that his enemy or enemies were not human. He placed his lance carefully against the cave wall, and removed quiver and bow also. Wrapping the mantle more closely about him, and tightening his grip on the knife, he went forward slowly, into greater depths.
“Is it a world or a cave?” he muttered, after what seemed an hour’s advance into nothingness. The grotto was unchanged and endless, except that as he went on, the glare became more intense.
“A cold light,” he murmured, and then the thought came to him that he was walking in the realm of an interior sun, in a day that had not been the work of Saklas. This is my sun, and though cold it is unconquered. Better to be here, in the light of my own sun, than to be warm in the common light of every day on earth.
But the invisibility of his sun troubled him. He was here in this grotto to perform his own act, and not the will of god or demons, but something in what loomed ahead might occur much against his will. Directly as he sensed his danger, the raven—and whose messenger was it?—appeared again and brushed his side.
“My own sun sends me the raven so that I may kill what must be killed.”
He thought of the bas-relief and shuddered despite himself. An old horror came back to him from his earthly life: it was a sickness that he had felt about bullfighting. But he had not long to suffer such memories, such anticipation.
A bull, huge and black, manifesting itself as if from nowhere, rushed forcefully at him. Perscors seized the beast by its nostrils with one hand, while with the other he plunged deep into its flank the ritual hunting knife.
But the force of the beast’s onrush was greater than he had expected. He avoided the horns, but lost the knife, and was thrown violently against the cave wall. When he scrambled up, the black bull was well beyond him and rushing toward the cave’s mouth. Perscors followed, but stopped to retrieve the bow, quiver, and lance of Nimrud. When he stepped out of the cave’s mouth, the beast was not in sight, but a small half circle of armed men in white tunics confronted him. Arrows sped by Perscors as he withdrew inside the cave.
Mithraeans and Arimaneans
A familiar rage strengthened Perscors. The skill of archery, unpracticed for many years, returned to him as if through Nimrud’s bow itself. Without taking conscious aim, he drew the head of an arrow to his fist, handling it with ease. The arrow hit one of the white-clad warriors under the chin, and punched up through his throat. Within a few moments, the others had fled out of range.
“Like Nimrud, I am best at hunting men. But who these are, and why they attack me, are only fresh signs of my ignorance.”
He came forth from the cave, and went up to the corpse. The quiver of the slain man bore the word nabarze. Had these warriors attacked him because they judged him an impostor? Or because they thought him to be Nimrud, or another Arimanean? Arimanes he remembered now as another name for the evil principle. From old knowledge, there came back to him the name of the bull-slaying god whom he had failed to emulate: Mithras. The dead man must be a Mithraean.
“I fight on the wrong side,” Perscors muttered. He was suddenly very weary. Finding Valentinus could be the only goal for him, to dissolve somehow, through their meeting, the frustrations of this disordered quest.
Resolutely he set himself westward again over the hills, which were becoming higher. Some hours farther on, he put an arrow through a kind of wild pig and made a melancholy feast. He neglected to put out the fire at which he had roasted the pig, but fell asleep, wrapped in Nimrud’s mantle and resting upon the giant hunter’s lance.
Some hours later, when he woke abruptly, only its embers showed forth in the gradually waning darkness. A dream in which Olam’s yellow face, fierce with anger, was shouting at him, fled with Perscors’s awareness of approaching men. Stamping out the embers, he hid in a thicket in the hollow between two hills.
A cluster of purple-clad warriors arrived and gathered around the remnants of his fire and his feast. In the morning’s uncertain light, he counted eight—tall men but, except for one, closer to his own height than to the giant Nimrud’s. They too were armed with lance and bow, except for the tallest, who carried an outsize battle-ax.
Eight, Perscors decided, were too many devil worshippers to attack at once. Better, he thought, to stalk them first, then pick enough of them off to make a direct attack possible later. That they marched westward anyway, after leaving the site, made his decision simpler.
He waited until they were beyond his gaze, and then walked west. The hills began to be wooded, more and more thickly, and gradually Perscors came to realize that the light had been changing. A purplish haze had hovered wherever he looked, but by now it seemed to have become one with the atmosphere.
“Here, beyond the flood, this planet no longer is ruled by Saklas. Is this, then, the world of Arimanes?”
He had spoken aloud, and was startled by what seemed an answering wind around his ears. A dark memory came to him, and he stared up at the treetops, half expecting to see Nekbael floating above him. The wind swept strongly through the woods.
As Perscors moved forward, slowly and uncertainly, he stumbled against a dark object, about the size of the head of a yearling calf. Bending down, he raised it by a stiff, tasseled handle. It was a rude drum, made of some tanned hide stretched over a metal frame. The whole frame, roughly shaped like an inverted, truncated pyramid, peculiarly resembled both a bovine head and the shadow of a kind of harp.
The desire to beat upon it rose strongly in Perscors; given the incessant sound of the wind, he could not believe that the Arimaneans, up ahead of him, would be able to hear. He turned the drum on its side and found again the word of Mithras: nabarze. Holding the drum, he became aware that the word meant something like “unconquered” or “victorious.” Was the hide that of a black bull like the one he had failed to kill?
“This too,” he murmured, “is here to some purpose, to serve me. But how?”
He kept the drum in his left hand and went forward through the mists, feeling his way with Nimrud’s lance. The hills grew higher, and at last the purple of the haze wearied his eyes to the point of blindness. Suddenly he felt no ground ahead as he probed. The mists cleared enough to give him a startled glimpse of a ravine, upon whose edge he precariously verged. As the mists cleared further, he saw a rope bridge suspended over the ravine.
When Perscors came to the bridge, he found it swaying uncertainly across the abyss. Had the Arimaneans crossed just before him, or was this a trap?
The mists cleared away, to and then beyond the other side of the chasm, revealing a tall man, as tall as Nimrud, standing at the bridge’s farther end. Robed in purple, he carried an immense battle-ax. As Perscors watched, this warrior started toward him.
Stunned, Perscors saw that the giant was walking not on, but somehow at least a foot above the ramp of the bridge. Though his first impulse was to charge across toward this being, a deeper drive spoke in Perscors: this was no
t a man but a demon or a god, to be fought, but not with spear or with arrows. As he watched the floating advance of his adversary, Perscors calmly put down Nimrud’s lance, laid aside the bow and quiver, and marched onto the swaying bridge holding the Mithraean drum in his left hand, and beating it with his right fist.
At the first drumbeat, the giant with the battle-ax sank to ground himself on the bridge but continued his advance. As Perscors steadily approached, still beating the drum, the purple-robed warrior hesitated.
With only some seven feet between them, Perscors paused, fascinated and troubled by the fierce, bearded face. Its eyes were enormous, the complexion purplish, almost black.
“Into the abyss with you, wanderer!”
The shrill, screeching cry seemed to come at Perscors from all directions at once.
An awful calm rose in Perscors. He steadily struck the drum and moved closer to the demon. An exultant flame moved in his spirit, and he knew a joy greater than any he had known before on Lucifer.
The demonic face before him suddenly enlarged, while the mists closed in again. As the battle-ax came sharply down at him, Perscors leaned to the right and thrust the narrower bottom of the drum with terrible backhand force into the raging, purplish face. The ax went by Perscors and fell into the abyss. So did the drum; they fell to the far bottom without sound. Perscors found himself alone on the middle of the wildly swaying bridge, with no sense or belief of having thrown his opponent off the bridge. Rather, he began to suspect that the demon had chosen to vanish, perhaps to ambush Perscors on the other side.
Ought he not go back, to retrieve Nimrud’s weapons? Perscors shrugged, and made his way across the bridge, to the other side. Seven Arimaneans would be less of a menace than their demon-leader, who now seemed only a trickster and a coward.
