But I am disobedient in this one thing. I kiss you upon your cheek, your lips, your breasts, your stomach and your sex. Your flesh is so cold. I would warm it with my own breath.
You begin to laugh, but it is a terrible mockery of laughter, containing so much torment it is possible to believe your pain might indeed be half the world’s! I fall back, blocking my ears. This is the least bearable of all the hideous sounds which lately came to me. I cry out, unable to stop my own pathetic pleading. I roll from the roof of the Crucible into the ashy filth below.
I got slowly to my feet. Her laughter continued. She stared directly at me. Her pain and her cynicism were torment for me. I threw my weight against the Crucible, scattering her Witnesses, and I pushed at it, rocking it until it crashed over. As soon as it fell the metal sphere cracked, steaming; I searched amongst pieces of ruptured metal, looking for the helmet. The Grail would save her, I was convinced. The Grail would heal us both, for it cured all pain. As I searched, I heard her laughter cease. There fell a dreadful silence, a silence of expectation. What more could happen? Frantically, I continued to search.
Then, from the darkness above, I heard the beating of huge wings. I looked up. The eagle was rushing back, as if that had been his purpose all along. His curved beak opened in a ghastly croak; his monstrous claws were extended. He fell towards us, striking as if we were prey, his mad, betrayed eyes fixed upon the cross. Unconsciously I fell back, certain I was his victim.
But I was wrong. He had marked the crucified woman! In a hideous confusion of flapping wings and feinting talons, his claws were raking her and his croaking was muffled as his beak rent her flesh.
‘Libussa! Oh, Libussa, my love!’
She had begun to laugh again, that same chilling laugh. She jerked upon the cross but could not get free. Every movement added ruin to her body. She did not wish to die in this way but was yet amused by the irony!
Desperately I searched now for a weapon.
Here is the twisted remains of my Paracelsian dissector. Picking up the shard I fling myself towards the cross. Still the eagle feeds, and still the woman laughs, alive though already half-eaten. Clambering upwards, I am weeping as I stab wildly at the gigantic bird. It is my own body he kills. He screams; his movements growing more agitated. I am inflicting monstrous wounds on him, Libussa, but he refuses to turn on me. He is possessed. He will feed only off your living flesh. You are blood from head to foot and now at last your laughter ebbs. I stab at his throat, at his eyes. Your laughter is almost inaudible now…
His talons are ripping through your breast. Screaming some profoundly obscure victory shout, the eagle holds up one dripping claw, displaying to me your living heart! Your beating, human heart!
Libussa! I love you!
A final burst of laughter. Blood pumps. The eagle glares at me almost benevolently. Then his ragged flesh and gory feathers rise into the air and fly up, up towards the fresh Conjunction, the blinding heavens. His last scream fills the sky, blending with the fading echoes of Libussa’s humour. Libussa, you hang dead upon your black cross, without hope of resurrection. You are Anti-Christ betrayed. How complete was the ritual of reversal which you borrowed from Montsorbier! You did not realise, Libussa, how complete it was.
Frantically, I stood upon the remains of the Crucible, trying to prise out the nails once more, but I could not get purchase and my fingers slipped in her blood. I was wailing in my own unbearable grief. I found that I was licking her corpse, licking it clean as an animal would. I had it in mind to make a fire under the Crucible again, to fling her remains into her Alchemical Womb and somehow bring her back to life. I searched for the spring which had gushed there not long since and restored her to me. Rubble had collected over it. As we performed our abortive wedding in her furnace, the buildings of the Deeper City had continued to subside. Many were still standing, still swaying and groaning, still tumbling majestically into the pit, falling towards the tangent where I stood, my face in her belly, my arms about the cross of charred oak. Here there was no history. We were on the very edge of time.
‘Oh, Libussa, tell me what I must do! Tell me your desire! I serve you. It is all I wish to do.’
More of the tired tenements of Amalorm made a final spastic jig before toppling from the highest rim. Others fell from her many terraces. They flung stone and brick and slate at my feet. There were clouds of dust. The noisy crashing of stone upon stone seemed designed to drive all living creatures out, so there should be no witnesses to their indignity. Only I was left. Up those damaged spirals ran the Witnesses and all the other survivors. Everyone fled to the Lesser City’s dubious sanctuary.
Oh, Libussa, you were never a villain. You did no wrong which had not already been practised on you. You are martyred, as woman is ever martyred, particularly if she seeks her own power.
Is it true, Libussa, that I lacked courage at the last? When I willingly knelt before you and offered blood and flesh in that celebratory wedding feast? I understand now that you meant me no harm and that all I experienced was probably no more than your inspired insanity, the power of your will over mine, my lust for your person. I think you truly believed you could make of us one creature, one physical hermaphroditic immortal. It was not I that slew you, remember? You do understand as much, I am certain. Neither did you slay yourself or engineer self-destruction. It was an inheritance from the past which brought about our ruin. You would not relinquish the past any more than I. And you were destroyed by that, as it will always destroy you, that captured Beast of Paracelsus, that creature of magic and animal rapacity.
Or were we all among the victims of cunning Lucifer?
The power of the Beast cannot be controlled. It must be abolished. The Grail protested because you sought to pervert its function. In your anger you released the Beast and in return the Beast ripped out your heart and flew with it into the stars. Are you fated, Libussa, in some other universe, to suffer for ever that Promethean martyrdom? Or does your heart beat for ever in Hell?
‘You cannot hesitate now!’ you cried as the stars conjoined. You commanded me to enter the Chemical Womb. ‘I trust you with my future, with my spirit. Do not fail me, von Bek.’
Thus woman trusts in man down all the years and so, as always, is betrayed.
Chapter Twenty
In which I witness the end of an age and meet old acquaintances. Some speculation concerning the aspirations of mankind.
I SAT AMONGST the cold ruins of Libussa’s crucible and kept vigil at her feet, occasionally staring up at the fresh constellations and patterns of light which crossed from star to star. All was frozen; lines and spheres. I wondered if it would stay fixed thus for ever. When might they begin to move again? I asked Libussa, but she was in no condition to reply.
I had waited there patiently in the hope that magically she would heal. I did not know, even if she did heal, if the eagle would not return to rip out her heart again. I remembered reading in some old grammar about the dangers of the rituals of repetition. I tried to recall how Prometheus had escaped his similar fate.
The Deeper City was now almost fully down, although a few houses remained upright, defying all the laws of nature, before they too went shuddering into dust with a weary roar.
The Lion was lost to us. I suspect he vanished when her spirit left her body. Yet the longer I waited at her feet the more I believed I could hear, from somewhere beneath the débris, the snorting and panting of a beast. I was certain I had detected, at least once, the angry pounding of some enormous club.
I still did not know the exact nature of Montsorbier’s secret discovery in the depths. Could it have been Libussa’s Minoan ancestor? And mine. (Libussa, your blood is my blood. It remains vibrant, wonderful blood. I need nothing else. I am yours, Libussa, still. And you belong for ever to me.)
It grew increasingly cold in those ruins. The young stars lacked warmth. I breathed too much soot. Could the pair of us have succeeded, at least partially, in changing history’s course? Had w
e perhaps defined just one of the terms by which humankind would live and struggle to seek its cure from pain? Or had we opened the gates of the world to Chaos?
Her ragged corpse was limp upon its cross. She had been an extraordinary woman who had believed she could remake the world in a saner mould. She was no martyr. She died because she longed for power, but she wanted power because she recognised that there was inequality in the world. And that, perhaps, is ever a contradiction.
As I considered this, a thin pallor began to spread across the Deeper City’s broken horizon; a grey strip of light established itself. This gave me to hope that Libussa and I might be astonished by some fresh Mirenburg miracle. If we could only have retreated in time to happier days and retained our experience of the future… We had harmed no-one, changed nothing, save ourselves. The miracle, however, was not for us.
Old Mirenburg’s unique night was coming to an end for ever, with the abolition of the Autumn Stars. Her particular wonder was disappearing from the city. No longer timeless, she would come to know the rule of stricter princes than the Sebastocrator, for it seems that Chronos must inevitably gather power.
I witnessed Mirenburg’s first ordinary dawn. It revealed strange shadows dissipating amongst the broken stones of Amalorm. Little beasts and larger bugs scampered through the fading gloom and wriggled into cracks between the toppled slabs, many doubtless beginning an exodus for lost starlight. The sun shimmered with dissipated radiance which fell upon Libussa’s body. I hoped for a moment it would bring her to life. I watched intensely to see if those new rays would affect her. I hoped to see her lift her head and smile; to tell me simply that she had played a game, that she had sought only to demonstrate a lesson. But there was a raw, red wound in her breast, where her heart used to be, and from it dropped the occasional bead of blood which fell upon her shattered metal womb. The only movement was when the breeze made strips of flesh or hair flutter.
The sun was up in earnest now. For a while I was blinded by golden light. I could not leave her. I had nowhere to go. I loved her.
The light remained bright and the surrounding ruins became misty. Some time later I had the impression of a tall figure wading through the ashes, stopping now and again to pick amongst the rubble. Eventually the figure paused nearby and turned to me. Still dazzled, I could not determine any details of its features, could not see if it were a man or a woman. But then I recognised its outline.
‘Can you save her?’ I asked. ‘Can you restore her to me, Sir? Or tell me how I may command the Grail to do so?’ I realised to my surprise that I had been weeping all the time.
The figure shook its head and gestured sadly. ‘I’m no longer permitted such power, von Bek. Not here on Earth, at any rate. And neither you nor I, nor any living thing, natural or supernatural, can command the Grail. The Grail, as I told you once before, is itself. It brings all to balance. But it will not be manipulated. It is Harmony personified!’
‘Is that why you gave me that terrible sword?’
‘My gift, you recall, was unconditional. You were told as such. It was yours to use as you saw fit. I had no special intent for it…’
‘You are still the old Lucifer, then? Still devious, still mystifying, still obfuscating?’
‘You do me wrong, Sir, if you think so.’
‘Oh, Lucifer, what is it you want from us? Pity? Forgiveness? What?’
‘Victorious triumph!’ said Hell’s monarch frankly. ‘That alone shall restore all to Grace.’
‘And what shall restore Libussa to me?’
‘She is within you.’
‘I do not appreciate your comedy, Sir.’
‘It is for you to determine, Sir.’ Was he hinting at a bargain?
‘I do not serve you, Lucifer.’ I was shivering in the cool air but noted that my body was coming to life again as my anger grew. ‘I would have served her, Sir. I wished to serve her. It was through no lack of desire that I failed…’
‘Not a moral scruple?’
‘For her sake. I did not wish to see her destroying what she valued so highly. I lacked courage. I feared the Beast. Together we would have beaten you, Sir. Where did the eagle carry her heart?’
The figure came to sharper focus for a second. The face was gloriously, androgynously beautiful and very gentle in its concern. ‘Well,’ said Lucifer, ‘at least you serve the truth, still. And I can thank you for that. And you judge, still…’
‘Sir, I do not judge! I cannot judge!’
‘Sir, you judge others and you judge yourself.’ He smiled. ‘As for your question,’ his expression changed, ‘I can only answer that there are certain realities less pleasant than Hell.’
Lucifer had positioned himself where the crucible had burned that night. He stooped very suddenly and bent down. He lifted the battered antique helm into the air. I had no liking for the Grail, for it had destroyed the woman I loved. I considered its guardianship not as a family duty but as my family’s curse.
Lucifer held it up to the sky, almost in celebration, and for a moment a million coloured rays sprang from it, fanning upwards and seeking the bodies of those new constellations.
‘This was in its place?’ He asked. ‘During the Concordance?’
‘Aye.’
‘Then there may be more than a little hope for us, von Bek, after all.’
I wanted no further intercourse with Lucifer, nor any further mysteries. ‘Take the thing back to Hell with you, Sir. That is where it deserves to dwell.’
‘I shall try to hold on to it,’ said Lucifer.
Again the Grail caught the sun and blinded me. When I next could use my eyes both it and Lucifer had vanished.
I spent that morning pulling her corpse from the cross and lighting a pyre on which I placed all surviving relics of her ruined dream, then, gently, I laid her on top of that ramshackle heap. A few coals remained to set the thing afire. It burned well enough. Again I had half a hope it would revive her, that primitive imitation of the night’s rituals, but the corpse burst and roast and stank like Christmas pork and became one with the rest of the ashes. Yet Lucifer had been right. I had her within me.
I walked away from the cooling pyre, with some intention, I recall, of taking my own life, when I heard overhead a familiar collection of coughs and bangs and stutterings. It was the sound of the gunpowder engine.
Flying very low through the noon mist, its peculiar machinery giving off brown smoke, came St Odhran’s battered Donan. The green-and-gold Gryphon had a faintly ridiculous air to it, hanging so soberly, so dramatically, beneath the bulbous canopy of his weather-stained scarlet-and-white balloon. I found that I was weeping again, and waving. I had never guessed how much I should welcome that contraption and her master, or how sweet his friendship would prove to be.
My dandy Scotchman was peering over the side of the basket, a telescope in one long and elegant hand, his finger and thumb upon his valve cord. ‘Halloo, the ground! Come aboard, Sir. We leave the Mittelmarch this day!’
Then St Odhran narrowed his eyes and looked aghast, as if he had just noticed something freshly peculiar about my person.
Then he offered me a devilish broad grin. ‘By God, Sir, ye’re stark naked!’
I looked down at my own resurrected body.
‘By God, Sir,’ said I, ‘so I am!’
Epilogue
THAT SAME DAY we sailed from the Mittelmarch, with the intention of never visiting those regions again. Prince Miroslav’s maps and instructions were invaluable, as was his gunpowder engine. We were able to steer a direct course into our own world.
At my insistence we returned to Mirenburg. There I planned to give up all the money we had raised on our Air-ship swindle. We were received as heroes by the populace and invited to attend the Prince himself. He had not, we discovered, put a pfennig into the scheme but in her will the Landgräfin had left large sums to us both (the reason, it was revealed, for her nephew’s fury), while much of the rest of the gold had come from the estate of the Du
chess of Crete and was judged to be rightfully ours. Suddenly, we were legitimately rich!
If I say that St Odhran was almost suspicious of his own luck, while I had mixed feelings in the matter, the reader will understand. I would have given up everything to have had Libussa restored to me.
Only my old friend and comrade Sergeant Schuster (who, it appeared, had entertained more than an inkling of our original plan) was unambiguous in his joy at our good fortune. He insisted upon giving us a celebratory dinner in the main hall of The Martyred Priest. The atmosphere of good will and jolly fellowship which infected the occasion did something to relieve my grief and remind me of the world’s ordinary pleasures. Shortly thereafter I began the journey back to Bek, leaving St Odhran in Mirenburg where he and several local people of a scientific persuasion intended to discover the secrets of Miroslav’s gunpowder engine and build the aerial boat which until then had only existed in his imagination.
In Bek I was soon enjoying the pleasant comforts and familiar love of my mother and father. Both were delighted to welcome me, though they remarked me much changed (and chiefly for the good, they thought) and my father, who was by that time ailing, began to speak of giving me gradually increasing responsibility in the running of the estate I would inherit, since my older brother was not expected to live much longer.
There was no denying the appeal of that peaceful and ordered life, that rural harmony, that habit of rigorous reasoning and moral investigation which is our family tradition. The Library at Bek is known to be the finest in Germany, and I soon discovered, once I had learned what to search for, that it gave me a wealth of reading upon those subjects dominating my thoughts. Yet in spite of the tranquillity, the profusion of learned works, the benign affection of my dear family, and the leisure, in which to trace almost the whole romantic history of the Cartagenas, the Mendozas, the Chilperics and that specific line which brought the three together, I slowly concluded I did not have the appropriate character nor, indeed, vocation to become Bek’s next Lord.
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