The Reconciliation

by Clive Barker

  “I'm surprised you came back,” she said.

  Jude had heard many exquisite speakers since she'd last heard Celestine, but there was still something extraordinary in the way the woman mingled voices: one running beneath the other, as though the part of her touched by divinity had never entirely married with a baser self.

  “Why surprised?”

  “Because I thought you'd stay with the Goddesses.”

  “I was tempted,” Jude replied.

  “But finally you had to come back. For him.”

  “I was a messenger, that's all. I've got no claims on Gentle now.”

  “I didn't mean Gentle.”

  “I see.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know who you meant.”

  “Can't you bear to have his name spoken?”

  Celestine had been staring at the candle flame, but now she looked up at Jude.

  “What will you do when he's dead?” she asked. “He will die, you realize that? He has to. Gentle'11 want to be magnanimous, the way .victors are supposed to be; he'll want to forgive all his brother's trespasses. But there'll be too many demands for his head.”

  Until now Jude hadn't contemplated the possibility of Sartori's demise. Even in the tower, knowing Gentle had gone in pursuit of his brother intending to stop his malice, she'd never believed he'd die. But what Celestine said was undoubtedly true. There were countless claims upon his head, both secular and divine. Even if Gentle was forgiving, Jokataytau wouldn't be; nor would the Unbeheld.

  “You're very alike, you know, you and he,” Celestine said. “Both copies of a finer original.”

  “You never knew Quaisoir,” Jude replied. “You don't know whether she was finer or not.”

  “Copies are always coarser. It's their nature. But at least your instinct's good. You and he belong together. That's what you're pining for, isn't it? Why don't you admit it?”

  “Why should I pour out my heart to you?”

  “Isn't that what you came in here to do? You won't get any sympathy out there.”

  “Listening by the door now?”

  “I've heard everything that's gone on in this house since I was brought here. And what I haven't heard, I've felt. And what I haven't felt, I've predicted.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for one thing that child Monday will end up coupling with the little virgin you brought back from Yzordderrex.”

  “That scarcely takes an oracle.”

  “And the Oviate isn't long for this world.”

  “The Oviate?”

  “It calls itself Little Ease. The beast you had under your heel. It asked the Maestro to bless it a little while ago. It'll murder itself before daybreak.”

  “Why would it do that?”

  “It knows when Sartori perishes it'll be forfeit too, however much allegiance it's sworn to the winning side. It's sensible. It wants to choose its moment.”

  “Am I supposed to find some lesson in that?”

  “I don't think you're capable of suicide,” Celestine said.

  “You're right. I've got too much to live for.”

  “Motherhood?”

  “And the future. There's going to be a change in this city. I've seen it in Yzordderrex already. The waters will rise—”

  "—and the great sisterhood will dispense love from on high.”

  “Why not? Clem told me what happened when the Goddess came. You were in ecstasies, so don't try and deny it.”

  “Maybe I was. But do you imagine that's going to make you and me sisters? What have we got in common, besides our sex?”

  The question was meant to sting, but its plainness made Jude see the questioner with fresh eyes. Why was Celestine so eager to deny any other link between them but womanhood? Because another such link existed, and it was at the very heart of their enmity. Nor, now that Celestine's contempt had freed Jude from reverence, was it difficult to see where their stories intersected. From the beginning, Celestine had marked Jude out as a woman who stank of coitus. Why? Because she too stank of coitus. And this business with the child, which came up again and again: that had the same root. Celestine had also borne a baby for this dynasty of Gods and demigods. She too had been used and had never quite come to terms with the fact. When she raged against Jude, the tainted woman who would not concede her error in being sexual, in being fecund, she was raging against some fault in herself.

  And the nature of that fault? It wasn't difficult to guess, or to put words to. Celestine had asked a plain question. Now it was Jude's turn.

  “Was it really rape?” she said.

  Celestine glanced up, her look venomous. The denial that followed, however, was measured. “I'm afraid I don't know what you mean,” she said.

  “Well, now,” Jude replied, “how else can I put it?” She paused. “Did Sartori's Father take you against your will?”

  The other woman now put on a show of comprehension, followed by one of shock.

  “Of course He did,” she said. “How could you ask such a thing?”

  “But you knew where you were going, didn't you? I realize Dowd drugged you at the start, but you weren't in a coma all the way across the Dominions. You knew something extraordinary was waiting at the end of the trip.”

  “I don't—”

  “Remember? Yes, you do. You remember every mile of it. And I don't think Dowd kept his mouth shut all those weeks. He was pimping for God, and he was proud of it Wasn't he?”

  Celestine offered no riposte. She simply stared at Jude, daring her to go on, which Jude was happy to do.

  “So he told you what lay ahead, didn't he? He said that you were going to the Holy City and you were going to see the Unbeheld Himself. Not just see Him but be loved by Him. And you were flattered,”

  “It wasn't like that.”

  “How was it then? Did He have His angels hold you down while He did the deed? No, I don't think so. You lay there and you let Him do what the hell He wanted, because it was going to make you into the bride of God and the mother of Christ—”

  “Stop!”

  “If I'm wrong, tell me how it was. Tell me you screamed and fought and tried to tear out His eyes.”

  Celestine continued to stare, but said nothing.

  “That's why you despise me, isn't it?” Jude went on. “That's why I'm the woman who stinks of coitus. Because I lay down with a piece of the same God that you did, and you don't like to be reminded of the fact.”

  “Don't judge me, woman!” Celestine suddenly shouted.

  “Then don't you judge me! Woman. I did what I wanted with the man I wanted, and I'm carrying the consequences. You did the same. I'm not ashamed of it. You are. That's why we're not sisters, Celestine.”

  She'd said her piece, and she wasn't much interested in a further round of insults and denials, so she turned her back and had her hand on the door when Celestine spoke. There were no denials. She spoke softly, half lost to memory.

  “It was a city of iniquities,” she said. “But how was I to know that? I thought I was blessed among women, to have been chosen. To be God's—”

  “Bride?” Jude said, turning back from the door.

  “That's a kind word,” Celestine said. “Yes. Bride.” She drew a deep breath. “I never even saw my husband.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nobody. The city was full, I know it was full, I saw shadows at the window, I saw them close up the doors when I passed, but nobody showed their faces.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “No. It was too beautiful. The stones were full of light, and the houses were so high you could barely see the sky. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. And I walked, and I walked, and I kept thinking, He'll send an angel for me soon, and I'll be carried to His palace. But there were no angels. There was just the city, going on and on in every direction, and I got tired after a time. I sat down, just to rest for a few minutes, and I fell asleep.”

  “You fell asleep?”

  “Yes
. Imagine! I was in the City of God, and I fell asleep. And I dreamed I was back at Tyburn, where Dowd had found me. I was watching a man being hanged, and I dug through the crowd until I was standing under the gallows.” She raised her head. “I remember looking up at him, kicking at the end of his rope. His breeches were unbuttoned, and his rod was poking out.”

  The look on her face was all disgust, but she drove herself on to finish the story.

  “And I lay down under him. I lay down in the dirt in front of all these people, with him kicking, and his rod getting redder and redder. And as he died he spilled his seed. I wanted to get up before it touched me, but my legs were open, and it was too late. Down it came. Not much. Just a few spurts. But I felt every drop inside me like a little fire, and I wanted to cry out. But I didn't, because that was when I heard the voice.” .

  “What voice?”

  “It was in the ground underneath me. Whispering.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The same thing, over and over again: Nisi Nirvana, Nisi Nirvana. Nisi... Nirvana.”

  In the process of repeating the words, tears began to flow copiously. She made no attempt to stem them, but the repetition faltered.

  “Was it Hapexamendios talking to you?” Jude asked.

  Celestine shook her head. “Why should) He speak to me? He had what He needed. I'd lain down and dreamed while He dropped His seed. He was already gone, back to His angels.”

  “So who was it?”

  “I don't know. I've thought about it over and over. I even made it into a story, to tell the child, so that when I'd gone he'd have the mystery for himself. But I don't think I ever really wanted to know. I was afraid my heart would burst if I ever knew the answer. I was afraid the heart of the world would burst.”

  She looked up at Jude.

  “So now you know my shame,” she said.

  “I know your story,” said Jude. “But I don't see any reason for shame.”

  Her own tears, which she'd been holding back since Celestine had begun to share this horror with her, fell now, flowing a little for the pain she felt and a little for the doubt that still churned in her, but mostly for the smile that came onto Celestine's face when she heard Jude's reply, and for the sight of the other woman opening her arms and crossing the room, to embrace her like a loved one who'd been lost and found again before some final fire.

  22

  If coming to the moment of Reconciliation had been for Gentle a series of rememberings, leading him back to himself, then the greatest of those rememberings, and the one he was least prepared for, was the Reconciliation itself.

  Though he'd performed the working before, the circumstances had been radically different. For one, there'd been all the hoopla of a grand event. He'd gone into the circle like a prizefighter, with an air of congratulation hanging around his head before he'd even worked up a sweat, his patrons and admirers a cheering throng at the sidelines. This time he was alone. For another, he'd had his eyes on what the world would shower on him when the work was done: what women would fall to him, what wealth and glory would come. This time, the prize in sight was a different thing entirely, and wouldn't be counted in stained sheets and coinage. He was the instrument of a higher and wiser power.

  That fact took the fear away. When he opened his mind to the pfocess, he felt a calm come upon him, subduing the unease he'd felt climbing the stairs. He'd told Jude and Clem that forces would run through the house the likes of which its bricks had never known, and it was true. He felt them fuel his weakening mind, ushering his thoughts out of his head to gather the Dominion to the circle.

  That gleaning began with the place he was sitting in. His mind spread to all compass points, and up and down, to have the sum of the room. It was an easy space to grasp. Generations of prison poets had made the analogies for him, and he borrowed them freely. The walls were his body's limits, the door his mouth, the windows his eyes: commonplace similitudes, taxing his power of comparison not a jot. He dissolved the boards, the plaster, the glass, and all the thousand tiny details in the same lyric of confinement and, having made them part of him, broke their bounds to stray farther afield.

  As his imagination headed down the stairs and up onto the roof, he felt the beginnings of momentum. His intellect, dogged by literalism, was already lagging behind a sensibility more mercurial, which was delivering back to him similitudes for the whole house before his logical faculties had even reached the hallway.

  Once again, his body was the measure of all things: the cellar, his bowels; the roof, his scalp; the stairs, his spine. Their proofs delivered, his thoughts flew out of the house, rising up over the slates and spreading through the streets. He gave passing consideration to Sartori as he went, knowing his other was out here in the night somewhere, skulking.

  But his mind was quicksilver, and too exhilarated by its speed and capacity to go searching in the shadows for an enemy already defeated.

  With speed came ease. The streets were no more difficult to claim than the house he'd already devoured. His body had its conduits and its intersections, had its places of excrement and its fine, dandified facades; had its rivers, moving from a springing place, and its parliament, and its holy seat, The whole city, he began to see, could be analogized to his flesh, bone, and blood. And why should that be so surprising? When an architect turned his mind to the building of a city, where would he look for inspiration? To the flesh where he'd lived since birth. It was the first model for any creator. It was a school and an eating house and an abattoir and a church; it could be a prison and a brothel and Bedlam. There wasn't an edifice in any street in London that hadn't begun somewhere in the private city of an architect's anatomy, and all Gentle had to do was open his mind to that fact and the districts were his, running back to swell the assembly in his head.

  He flew north, through Highbury and Finsbury Park, to Palmer's Green and Cockfosters. He went east with the river, past Greenwich, where the clock that marked the coming of midnight stood, and on towards Tilbury. West took him through Marylebone and Hammersmith, south through Lambeth and Streatham, where he'd first met Pie 'oh' pah, long ago.

  But the names soon became irrelevant. Like the ground seen from a rising plane, the particulars of a street or a district became part of another pattern, even more appetizing to his ambitious spirit. He saw the Wash glittering to the east, and the Channel to the south, becalmed on this humid night. Here was a fine new challenge. Was his body, which had proved the equal of a city, also the measure of this vaster geography? Why not? Water flowed by the same laws everywhere, whether the conduit was a groove in his brow or a rift between the continents. And were his hands not like two countries, laid side by side in his lap, their peninsulas almost touching, their landscapes scarred and grooved?

  There was nothing outside his substance that was not mirrored within: no sea, no city, no street, no roof, no room. He was in the Fifth, and the Fifth in him, gathering to be carried into the Ana as a proof and a map and a poem, written in praise of all things being One..

  In the other Dominions the same pursuit of similitude was under way.

  From his circle on the Mount of Lipper Bayak, Tick Raw had already drawn into his net of dissolution both the city of Patashoqua and the highway that ran from its gates towards the mountains. In the Third, Scopique-his fears that the absence of the Pivot would invalidate his working allayed— was spreading his grasp across the Kwem towards the dust bowls around Maike”. In L'Himby, where he was soon to arrive, there were celebrants gathering at the temples, their hopes raised by prophetics who'd appeared from hiding the night before to spread the word that the Reconciliation was imminent.

  No less inspired, Athanasius was presently traveling back along the Lenten Way to the borders of the Third and skimming the ocean to the islands, while a self more tender trod the changed streets of Yzordderrex. He found challenges there unknown to Scopique, Tick Raw, or even Gentle. There were slippery wonders loose on the streets that defied easy analogy. B
ut in inviting Athanasius to join the Synod, Scopique had chosen better than he knew. The man's obsession with Christos, the bleeding God, gave him a grasp of what the Goddesses had wrought that a man less preoccupied by death and resurrection would never have owned. In Yzordderrex's ravaged streets he saw a reflection of his own physical ravagement. And in the music of the iconoclastic waters an echo of the blood that ran from his wounds, transformed—by love of the Holy Mother he had worshiped—into a sublime and healing liquor.

  Only Chicka Jackeen, at the borders of the First Dominion, had to work with abstractions, for there was nothing of a physical nature he could win similitudes from. All he had was the blank wall of the Erasure to set his mind on. Of the Dominion that lay beyond—which it fell to him to encapsulate and carry into the Ana—he had no knowledge.

  He hadn't spent so many years studying the mystery without finding some means to tussle with it, however. Although his body offered no analogy for the enigma that lay on the other side of the divide, there was a place in him just as sealed from sight, and just as open to the inquiries made by dreaming explorers like himself. He let mind—the unbeheld process that empowered every meaningful action, that made the very devotion that kept him in his circle—be his similitude. The blank wall of the Erasure was the white bone of his skull, scoured of every scrap of meat and hair. The force inside, incapable of impartial self-study, was both the God of the First and the thoughts of Chicka Jackeen, bonded by mutual scrutiny.