Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  Dumuzi in Sumer, Adonis to the Greeks and Adonai Tammuz in all the city-states of Phoenicia, all the sinful cities so reviled in the Bible for their decadence, for their luxuries and their softness, for their crimes of sensuality. Damu, dumu-zi, child, shining lovechild, Thomas, nipper of gnostic gospels, twin of the Christ, kid brother, kith and kin, kidskin to lambswool. O, how the women of Jerusalem wept for him. How many times and in how many places has he died and been reborn, under how many names? Like a kid, the Orphic initiates in white linen once intoned, I have fallen into milk.

  Forgotten for millennia, Dumuzi’s tale might have been lost forever. But instead, in the buried cuneiform, Dumuzi is not dead but merely hidden, and Sam retells his tale, transforming it from cuneiform to Roman alphabet, black ink impressed onto white paper by the clattering keys of his typewriter. His sister cannot save Dumuzi because she is also the wife who has already given him to hell, but maybe Sam can, bringing his excavated text back into the light of day, translated for this modern era of motorcars and megalomaniacs.

  “The churn lies quiet,” said Dumuzi’s sister, “and no milk is poured into a shattered cup. Du muzi is no more.”

  “The shepherd’s fold, like dust,” he said, “is given to the winds.”

  And the problem is, thinks Sam, that Dumuzi’s tale itself is also shattered, given to the winds. His translation is, of necessity, a reconstruction, filling in the gaps where the clay is cracked, footnoting meanings for words with no true parallel in English. Are the ugallu “demons” or “soldiers”? In one version of the tale, Inanna gives her lover up to them, to take her place in the underworld; in another, Dumuzi is a military conscript on the run. Perhaps there are yet other versions, still buried, waiting to be unearthed. And perhaps the true Dumuzi is not to be found in any one version, but somewhere between them, in the transformations.

  Errata

  The Vellum

  Talmud, Midrashim and Pseudapigraphia of Jewish myth—and later sources—all agree that there are seven heavens. Highest of all is Araboth, where the souls of the righteous sit before the Throne of God or walk amongst the ophanim and seraphim, feet treading through the morning dew by which the dead shall be restored to life someday. Beneath this is the heaven of Makhon with its carved ponds of water, caves of mist, chambers of wind and doors of fire. Closing those doors behind us, we would walk on down into the Maon, where the ministering angels sing by night, silent by day. In Szebhul, we might walk the streets of the city of Salem, where the prince of angels, Michael, offers sacrifices in the temple, at the altar there. And down. In the Shekhakim, the millstones grind, Manna is made for pious mouths. In the Rekhia, the moon, the planets and the stars are fixed, like motes of dust in the sun’s rays. But the sun itself has its home in the Villon, in the Vellum.

  I find it an interesting congruence that, in the cheap paperback of myths of Ancient Israel which sits beside me on my desk, folded facedown and open at the page, the writer, Angelo S. Rappaport, simply includes an alternative name—Vellum—in brackets after the more traditional and orthodox Villon. He makes no comment on it, no note that one word is a translation of the other, simply offers it up as an abstract aside, even as he describes this first and closest heaven as a veil, drawn between our world and the other so that the watchmen angels, peeping through windows in it, can view humanity unseen. Down in the world, flocks follow their shepherds through the valleys, to their folds, while eyes of angels follow them from their own vales, veiled within the folds of the Villon, the Vellum. A thin skin between reality and eternity.

  Outside, the sun is setting, off to the west, off to my left, its red light burning on the terra-cotta tiles of the rooftops of the terraces far below, and the chimneys and towers of the towns that string the hillside cast their shadows upward, impossibly tall, stretching toward the sky like the cedars of some mountain coast. It might well be a coast, for all I know, down there beneath the clouds; on days like this the Rift can seem like the very edge of a continent, slipping down into an ocean of cumuli and tumuli. It’s only on clear days that you can see just how far down the terraced hillside goes with all its strips of farmland hugging to its side, its roads winding along the contours of its steep stepped edge, and strata of cities coating it here and there. It’s only on clear days that you can look out north across the great gulf, searching for the far side of this vast valley, for a sign of a mountaintop shrouded in mist in the far distance, and letting your eyes drop gradually down and down and down and down, realize properly that you might never find it.

  The maps in this fold of the Vellum are strange, showing the world not from above but from a forty-five-degree angle, looking south and down into it, the view of a midwinter midday sun. I suppose that does make sense, though, for a people living on the diagonal, living on the staircase of the gods. But it’s also that when you look at the maps you realize just how defined their orientation is. Roads run across the way, from left to right, from right to left, like the plodding square-by-square path of a snakes-and-ladders game, only occasionally going up or down in serpentine zigzags, wide and shallow, where they seek to climb from one ridge to another. Here and there a more vertical path is marked in black where, as I have discovered, great funicular railway carriages haul themselves on grinding pulleys up or down the mountainside.

  The Sheer, Skewed Slant of Their Perspective

  It is a peasant culture, generally, an agricultural system of terraced farming, with only a little industry, quarrying or mining, some chemical works, and sundry other technologies. I would not underestimate their ingenuity, but it seems that the sheer energy involved in traveling upward must have inhibited the people who once lived here in many ways—conquest or trade, communication in all forms—forcing them into a stratified existence. In the rural areas, the villages are strung out like clothes on a washing line, like layers of sediment exposed in a landslide, long thin veins of lamplit civilization marbling the green and gray of earth and rock. The tracks that run between them may be precarious ledges or wide shelves but they almost always link towns on the same level; red rooftops visible over the canopies of trees below or lights glimpsed between crevices in the rocks high overhead may be no more than half a mile away, but might as well be half a world away. So, where on a flat world, one small town might have a dozen villages scattered around it feeding its market with produce and desire, each town here really has only its most immediate neighbors on the same level to the east or west to deal with.

  But, no, as I say, I would not underestimate their ingenuity. The cities that they have here—those that I’ve seen—are something spectacular, like sights from the imaginings of a Brueghel or a Grimmer, not in their medieval or renaissance architecture, not in their picturesque and painterly grandeur—though they have that, they have their castles and their steeples, archways and domes, bridges and buttresses—but in the sheer, skewed slant of their perspective. As in those tourist maps of old towns where important buildings are drawn side-on so that the wandering stranger recognizes the famous towers or ancient palaces and can navigate to them, the cities of the Rift lay out their edifices for all to see, on shelf upon shelf upon shelf of street upon street upon street, rising up and tumbling down the slope. Andean mountain villages were never so perched as the cities of the Rift, pouring like waterfalls downward, reaching like forest fires to the sky. A man would be a fool to call these people backward.

  And I have only seen one tiny fraction of this culture of the Rift; I do not imagine for a second that having seen their tilted Tuscany and their rising, falling Rome, I have seen their world. The geography of the Rift may have limited these people’s awareness of the full extent of their world, but I have the Book that brought me here in the first place, with its maps showing Rift cities quite unknown to the people of this region, far off to the west or the east, thousands of miles downhill or up. I can see that some of them dwarf the cities that I’ve been to so far; there are shelves farther down, deeper into the Rift, that look, on the map
s marked out in the Book at least, as if they must be miles in width.

  The sun is nearly down now. At eight o’clock—the angle, not the time—it’s almost sunken beneath the burning shrouds of clouds, among the apple trees of an orchard beside a redbrick building with a tower and a low white wooden fence around it marking the sheer, sudden drop beyond. And beyond? Beyond that ledge some miles away and down, the glare of the setting sun is just too strong to make out anything, and the even-more-distant lower terraces are just a melted impressionist blur. It’s beautiful.

  I consider staying up to watch the dawn—the nights are short, it won’t be long—but I find myself yawning and decide it’s time to rest. I plan to make my first test flight with the wings tomorrow, and I’m not as young as I used to be, to say the least; I should be ready for it.

  four

  GRAVINGS OF DESTINY

  A SISTER OF SORTS

  Inanna, fierce goddess of war, whose dance was the moving of battle lines toward each other. Inanna, lion-headed thunderbird of the showers of spring, the rains needed for pasture by the shepherds. Inanna, Ninana, mistress of the date clusters, who received her lover Dumuzi Amaushumgalana at the gate of the storeroom, at the bringing in of harvest. Inanna, Ninnina, protector of harlots, mistress owl. As soon as Inanna went down into the Kur, it was said, no cow was fucked by bull, no mare was fucked by stallion, no girl was fucked by any young man in the street. The young man slept in his private room, the girl slept in the company of her friends, the ancient myths say. Inanna, goddess of the evening star, goddess of the morning star, queen of heaven, thief of the Tablets of Destiny. Determined, ambitious Inanna. The little girl who stole the world.

  “I’m going over to the other side,” says Phreedom.

  “You’re already here,” says Madame Iris, dropping the accent, lifting her veil, showing the face that Phreedom looks at in the mirror. The woman doesn’t look any older than her but she’s not sure that matters; Phreedom still wonders if she’s looking at her future, because she knows that she’s not looking at her past. Maybe it’s possible. The unkin aren’t as stuck in time as everyone else. It takes real skill, or desperation, to really cut loose, the way her brother has, but maybe that’s what’s in the cards for Phreedom.

  “You’re…”

  “No,” says Iris. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. I’m not your twenty-seconds-into-the-future other self; I’m not your one-step-to-the-side alternative self. Time isn’t that simple. Time in the Vellum isn’t that simple.”

  Forward and back. Side to side. There’s an…up and down as well, Phreedom knows, dead worlds under her feet, and emptiness above—or beyond and within, maybe—and all of it together making up the Vellum. So this woman isn’t her future or a version from a parallel stream…

  “Who are you, then?” asks Phreedom.

  Eresh, Eris, Iris of the Greater Earth, queen of the underworld. Just as they placed their heavens far above the visible sky, the ancients had their hell beneath the known earth. There in the dust, those with no sons to make burnt offerings for their ancestors would live as beggars, but small children, lost and loved, would play with golden toys, gifts of their parents’ grief. An Assyrian prince who visited in a vision once described the demons dwelling within the walls of the dark city of the dead, and Ereshkigal who reigned over it all, the woman in the mourning dress who raked her fingernails across her own flesh, pulled at her hair, and wept forever for all dead. She never played as other young girls did, for all her joyless life; marked for her role, her only childhood songs were elegies.

  “Let’s say that I’m your sister of sorts. Does it matter? Does it really matter if I’m your second self twice removed or…whatever? You want to break on through to the other side? Think of me as your…foot in the door. I’m a part of you, yes. But then I’m a part of a lot of people.”

  Madame Iris drops the veil back down over her face, but by now her accent is abandoned and her words sound genuine.

  “I am the part of you that feeds on dust and ashes in the darkness, that died, that is dead, and that will always be dead.”

  “Good,” says Phreedom. “Then you’ll help me.”

  Animal Hide Painted with Ochre

  The needle buzzes, wails on her shoulder, low at this point or that, a sickening sound like it’s grinding on the bone, and Phreedom feels a little queasy even though this isn’t her first tattoo by any means. The pain—the physical pain—is distinct and strange, the needle moving at such speed she doesn’t even feel the individual tiny pinpricks, just the pressure and the nip of it, a sharp but dislocated mass of feeling moving across her shoulder, across her skin and under it, and the tickle of trickling, warm here, cool there. Iris pulls the needle away, dabs at the raw area with a pad of sterile, white cotton wool that turns the blackened red of blood mixed in with ink, deep spoiled soiled crimson, and drops it into a steel tray on the counter behind her. Vapors rise from it.

  On the counter, the black ink swirls in the bottles. Glimmers and vortices of involution. It might be nanotech, she thinks. She hears the angels are using high-tech shit for their gravings these days; no reason why the other side should be behind the times. Then again it might be plain old-fashioned magic.

  The needle touches skin again. The pain—the physical pain—is nothing, just another threshold that she has to cross.

  “You understand that this will not remove the graving that’s already there, only obscure it?” says Madame Iris. “You’ll still be, at heart, the little girl who learned too much, who held the power of heaven in her grasp and gave it up to follow her brother to the underworld. You cannot change your—”

  “Destiny?” says Phreedom. She turns her head to stare defiantly at her double. “I don’t believe in destiny. Everything can be changed.”

  “True. But, in the Vellum, you’ll learn, the more things seem to change, the more they are the same…beneath the surface.”

  And the needle bites into her skin, carving her new mark over her old one, although this mark that’s new to her, of course, is older than the world itself, taken from a book written before history even existed.

  Phreedom twitches with an involuntary flinch of doubt. The pain—the physical pain—can’t burn away the part of her she wants to lose. But maybe it can help her find the part of her she’s lost. Time flickers with the buzzing needle and—

  The book lies open on the counter before her, a ring binder of glossy images that look like a historian’s photostats of ancient documents. That’s what they are, ultimately, repros of the gravings of unkin long-since dead, the secret names they once wore, second selves they once were burned into them when they first touched the flux of forces running through reality and the Vellum, when they first woke up to the world and their part in it. Curves and spirals, dots and circles, a script that looks like diagrams of subatomic particles in collision, precise, concise, perfect descriptions of their owners’ souls, written in the Cant.

  Phreedom flicks through the pages, recognizing every sign and sigil even though she’s only ever seen such ciphers three times in her whole life: once when Finnan offered her a glimpse of his soul in the palm of his hand; a second time when that same hand traced her own mark onto her flesh and she looked down at it in wonder; and a third time, when she found her brother in the roadhouse up in the hills where he was hiding and he opened up his shirt to show that he too was a marked man.

  She flicks through the book of dead gods’ names, a history of the world before the world—Anu and Mummu, Ninhursag and Adad, Enlil and Enki, Sin and Dumuzi and…

  “Inanna,” she says.

  Madame Iris lays a hand upon her shoulder.

  “Yes, little sister.”

  The needle moves across her, through her, and she feels it in her thoughts, in her memories, as the shape of what she is—or was—is remade, re-formed, by a new line here, an arc there. Her soul is wet clay, a tablet held in the hand of a priest as he presses a wedge of reed into it, scripti
ng a myth in cuneiform. It’s soft wood carved with runes by knifepoint. It’s animal hide painted with ochre, canvas marked with oil paint by candlelight, wet plaster in a cathedral stained with dazzling indigo powder mixed with egg white on an artist’s brush. Her soul is a tale retold in ink and gilding, in the illumination of a medieval manuscript of vellum.

  “You cannot change your own soul, Phreedom,” says Madame Iris.

  But that’s exactly what’s happening, she thinks. She can feel it. She can feel this other self pressing into her. She can feel the transformation, here, now, happening, as she becomes something else, someone else.

  Madame Iris shakes her head.

  “Change is an illusion,” she says. “Time? Space? These are the things you’re leaving behind. As far as the Vellum is concerned, you have always been Inanna.”

  AN EMPTY ROLE OF RITUALS

  From the Great Beyond she heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond Inanna heard it, coming from the Deep Within. She had no idea of what it was, this strange sound shaking the ground beneath her feet, but she knew that it was calling her away, away from the village and the edin plentiful with food these days and with its earthenware renowned throughout the land between the rivers. Away from her father, the en who had made sure that his little princess had the finest sugurra in all of the surrounding villages. Away from her charming fiancé, Dumuzi. And away from her priestly tutor with his list of dreary mes, the rules and standards, classes, systems that prescribe her world in all its neolithic intricacy in an endless spurious taxonomy of the world.