by Daniel Mills
His strength is immense: his charge, the weight of it. His buckler strikes the trident to one side, wrenching the weapon from my hand and driving it point-first into the ground.
I stumble backward, unbalanced by the shock of the blow, and his sword is falling toward me, a closing arc like the moon in its waning. I lose my footing. The blade whistles past, cleaving light from sky and casting back the gleam: dazzling, white.
I catch myself, remain standing. My right hand is useless, numb from the shield-blow, but I gather the net from the ground with my left and throw it at my opponent’s feet.
He retreats from it. I hurl myself forward, grabbing at the trident where it juts out of the dust. My left hand closes round it and I bring it up hard, turning with it to meet the next attack.
The trident catches his buckler. It caves in the iron round his fist and knocks him back. His sword goes wide, shearing open my shoulder and scraping the collarbone.
Heat runs down my chest, filling my navel, but there is no pain, not yet, and my opponent is winded, breathing hard. The air whistles in his helm. His wounded side pulses, spitting gouts of bright red fluid. He is losing blood, and quickly.
I press him. With the trident I strike to left and right only to meet the buckler again and again as we cross the arena, drawing near the dead men, their butchered bodies. Our shadows join and pass through one another, dancing, and the crowd thumps and cheers, keeping time.
His footsteps woke me. The other slaves were asleep but the old cook came and knelt before me, the damp standing in his eyes.
“You were at the fountain,” he said. “You heard the teacher speak.”
“Yes.”
“You must not mourn,” he said. “Your brother is dead, but the teacher has promised the just will be reborn. Even the teacher himself, it is said, will die to come again in glory. He has promised this much: his blood, though spilled, will serve to hasten the coming kingdom.”
I asked: “Why do you tell me this?”
“Your grief,” he said. “Your anger. You must leave it behind you as he told the fishermen to leave their nets.”
I shook my head. “What is a fisherman without a net?”
And the cook told of how the teacher had sighted the fishermen from the shore and called to them to leave their nets and follow him. The teacher said: “I will make you fishers of men.”
Fishers of men. The phrase haunted me. I whispered it to myself when seeing to my work, and in the night, when sleep deserted me, I imagined the breaking of water, the sound, and saw the nets hauled up dripping with his naked shape inside.
The centurion. He was stripped of robes and armor, white and twitching like a fish. His mouth worked soundlessly as I split him groin to throat, plunging my hands into the blood-hot viscera. The intestines in ropes. The bags of his lungs.
And always the eyes and mouth open, lips gibbering.
The clangor of iron. Trident ringing off shield and helm as I beat my opponent back toward the far wall. His footing is careful, even as he withdraws, sidestepping the long washes of blood. His head remains upright. His eyes are hidden but locked on mine, probing me as to anticipate my every assault. The feeling returns to my right side, and I wield the trident with both hands now, driving him across the arena like an ox before the goad.
We reach the far wall.
He stands with his back against it, sword low, shield ready.
I jab at his neck, two rapid strokes that catch the buckler. He raises his shield to guard against a third attack and I lunge forward, this time aiming low.
He is too quick. His sword whips down across the trident, deflecting the blow. His buckler, upraised, swings out across his chest to smash into my temple.
Hearing deserts me, the sight in my right eye. My lips split open over my teeth, and the blood fills my mouth and throat. I gasp, reel back.
He surges forward to hack at my neck, but I dodge to the side, somehow, and now I am in retreat, stepping backward, guarding against his attacks with the trident.
The fluid moves in my deafened ear. In my skull, I hear the ocean.
Like the waves of their shouting. Men and women filled the streets, jeering as the condemned were led to the place of execution.
From an upper window, I saw the soldiers pass in two bristling ranks. The mob yielded, clearing the road, and I glimpsed the centurion alongside his men, cracking his whip at those who failed to let pass. His tall plumes swayed.
The shouts grew louder. The condemned appeared.
Their clothes were torn and stained, dripping where the lash-wounds had soaked through. Two of the men were plainly thieves, but behind them limped the one whom cook had called teacher, the holy man whom we had seen at the fountain.
His blood, though spilled. I recalled the old cook’s words and wondered at their prophecy while below me the whole of the city cheered the holy man’s death.
He struggled forward, saying nothing. His wounds left black trails in the dust behind him.
The centurion’s whip cracked and snarled, biting.
He is relentless. The sword streaks toward me, alternating with the swing of his shield, and already, I am near to fainting. My ears ring, the blood in me a struck bell chiming ceaselessly, louder for the din of sword and trident.
His shield glances off my cheek, breaking teeth.
The sword blurs about my head.
I am nauseated, half-blind. I must act. I shift my footing to anchor the base of the trident against the ground. He takes aim at my head and I dodge to one side, catching the sword between the weapon’s prongs. I twist with both hands, stomp down hard.
The sword snaps.
His buckler, cutting sideways, collides with my skull.
The air blows out of my lungs, and the broken sword, jabbing, strikes me through the side, plunging to the hilt. He pulls it free. He rips me open along its edge.
I do not fall. His helm gleams, sun-touched and glowering. The bronze serpent regards me, eyes round and black with dried blood.
The sun eclipsed. Leviathan, leaping, swallowed the light, and all was made dark, as in my dreams, if only for a time. The day returned and later the true night fell.
The old cook, returning to the house, told of how the teacher had expired. The end had come quickly, he said, a mercy. The women had anointed the dead man’s wounds with oil and laid the body to rest in the tomb, and a great stone was rolled across the entrance to seal it off that none might violate it.
“It is finished,” the cook said. He exhaled heavily. To me he appeared older than ever before. He said: “Your kingdom come.”
They were hopeful words, but he would not meet my gaze, and afterward, he tottered off to the kitchen to sleep, to wait. I waited too but only until the hour before dawn when the whole of the house was sleeping and none awake to see me go.
The kingdom was imminent. I felt its coming in my blood and in the beating at my ears as I scaled the outer wall to the centurion’s bedchamber. He was asleep. He snored and blubbered, drunk on wine or the day’s cruelties. He did not stir and made no sound even as his own sword struck him through the chest. His eyes fluttered open, fell shut.
I wrenched out the blade, tearing wide the wound and spattering my face and hands. Beside him the sleeping woman woke, one of the lady’s handmaids.
She saw me. She opened her mouth.
The wounds belch and spurt: his, mine. I thrust my left hand to my side and fumble at the ragged flaps of skin and muscle. I press down hard to dam the flow and stagger backward before his attacks. Five paces more and the net is at my feet.
My opponent advances, sword raised.
I release the pressure on my side. Warmth spills out, wetting my leg, and the arena starts to spin. I transfer the trident to my left hand and allow my right to drop behind me, fingers spread, straining at the fallen net.
He raps his fists together. Broken shield, broken blade.
Breaking stone. The noise of hammers underground. We were chained a
nkle to ankle, seeking for veins in the stone, for the glimmer of ore by the overseer’s torch. A lifetime had passed since I fled the city of my birth but here the din of breaking sufficed to stretch time and swallow years until the day the heretic was sent to us.
The boy was too young to have known the teacher but even so he claimed discipleship, denying the facts of the holy man’s death and of our subsequent abandonment. He spoke of the kingdom as though it were a place nearby, close enough to taste. In chains he pretended to freedom, and his eyes, luminous, caught the torch-light.
“The kingdom is here,” he said. “It surrounds you and still you do not see.”
Later, when the day’s work was done, I heard him whispering to himself. He was praying for me or my deliverance. His hands were pressed together, raised to his mouth to catch the words, the softness of his voice. His eyes glimmered. The hammer, sweat-slick, slipped in my hands.
My fingers in the netting.
He is close, less than three paces away. He protects himself with the buckler and chops at my left arm where it holds the trident.
With my right hand, I sweep the net from the ground. The ends twine round his shoulders. His elbow, netted, strikes his side, and his hand opens to release the sword.
I must be quick. I jam the trident into the ground then use both hands to pull fast on the net. My opponent stumbles forward and I sidestep to avoid his fall. He strikes the ground, stiff as a felled trunk with the net wound about him. I pull at the ropes with what strength is left to me, trapping his arms to his body, then reach with my left hand for the trident.
His breath is low and murmuring, his face upturned.
Eyes flash wetly in his helm.
Open doors. A light beyond all imagining the first time they prodded me out of the darkness and into the arena. Nothing was known of my past crimes save that I had murdered a man in the mines and now must face the judgment.
The heat dizzied me. The air itself was corrupt, tainted by the stink of torn bodies. Excrement. Organ-meat. They pushed me out toward the center of the arena while the surrounding crowd screeched for my death as they had for the teacher’s long ago, and I, too, was naked, with only a net and spear to defend myself.
The arena’s champion bore down on me, wielding a maul and clanking in his armor. He was taller than me, a giant of a man, but he died the same as the others while always the crowds roared their approval, cheering me on through the months and years in which I revenged myself on the hell of this creation, netting men like fish and piercing them, body and spirit.
I gutted the sun: I drank my fill of heaven.
Blood in my mouth. I swallow and choke on it, gasping after breath.
My opponent grasps at the cords that bind him. His hands are wet and cannot find purchase. I clench my fist and draw the ropes taut. I raise the trident, prepare to strike.
His fingers close. He has the net. He pulls hard, unbalancing me. My legs buckle and give and the trident impacts the ground. I fall across it, trapping it under my weight.
He stands and jerks upon the net, tearing it from my hands. He casts it over me.
I attempt to free myself, but he is too strong, the cords too tight about me. His foot connects with my ribs, a crunching sound. He rolls me onto my back then stands over me with one foot on the net, his outline looming cross a blue sky without cloud.
The ropes hold. They bite through flesh like chains but I fight against them, rising. I cannot hear the crowd, only the breath in his helm. I am on my knees.
The tomb before me, the kingdom at hand. Soon their bodies will be found: the centurion, the handmaid. The soldiers will come for me and still I wait.
Dawn approaches. The tomb is sealed, as the cook has said, but I watch the boulder to see it rolled away. My shadow appears and lengthens to cover the ground at my feet. I hear birds, smell cooking fires from the city below. The night is spent.
Desperate, I scrabble at the side of the boulder. My hands are greased and slick, but I haul myself up by broken nails until I reach the gap between the stone and the hillside. I thrust my face to the earth and peer into the chamber beyond.
See nothing, nothingness. Darkness deeper than shadow in the place where no light penetrates. The teacher lies within, hidden beyond sight or rescue, his soul chained to bone and sinew as I too am shackled, even here, with the centurion’s blood cracked and drying on my hands. Smoke rises from the city, visible now. My master’s face fades with the daybreak to be replaced by another as the skies fire and lighten and morning blights the hillside.
He removes his helm. The eyes are familiar, the voice: the memory of rivers become river itself. I am drowning. My lungs fill. I pant after air that will not come even as the blood continues to pump from his wounded side, poured out without cease.
He says: “Did I not promise you I would return? That you would be free?”
The ropes strain, binding me.
His sword is raised. Red hilt, red hand, and falling.
Canticle
Marginalia discovered in a Spanish breviary
“Where have You hidden Yourself,
And abandoned me in my groaning, O my Beloved?
You have fled like the hart,
Having wounded me.
I ran after You, crying; but You were gone.”
My mother is weeping. She hides her face, but the tears run down between her fingers. They wet the dry blood on her hands, staining them crimson. Her shoulders shake. She makes no sound and does not hear me though I call upon her. Mother, I say. The word slips from me, a thin sound, and I am awake. My eyes open on this narrow room, cramped and filthy and no shapes visible but the outline of the high window through which the water drips and puddles on the stone floor. It is not yet Lauds. This house is still, emptied of all but dreaming and the rain.
Three seasons have passed in this prison. Winter and the walls were cold, radiating absence. I fumbled at my beads but my hands were numb, the fingers chilblained. Nights of no sleep and only the moonlight pouring through the window to fill the cell with its silver glowering. Then spring, which was the false spring. Easter passed and winter lingered, would not depart. One morning, a robin settled on the sill above where it remained throughout the day, its call drifting down to me where I lay upon the pallet, an impossible distance. With the song came summer, this summer. Lice in my hair and bedding. Rotten bread, fleabites. The floors gather heat with the sun shining on them, hot as hearthstones by the dusk. The air in damp rags lodges in my throat. The heat sits on my chest: a slow suffocation like that of men who die upon the cross. My wounds open, refuse to heal. They pus.
The scent transports me. Before me loom the hills of my childhood. Perfume wafts from the grass where the wind makes ripples on it. I can picture it all so clearly, the paths down which I ran with my brothers as children, the sights we saw. The priest who stripped himself naked and knelt beside the river to flog himself with a thorn-branch. The old mad shepherd who dressed in animal skins and sang hymns to his flock as he drove them cross the sward, howling like a wolf to speak the name of God. The cries of deer in their mating. We heard them over the next hill: the bellowing males, the yearning of the hart. By the time we reached them, they had gone. They left no trace of themselves but blood splashed in the grass. Writing these words, I lose myself to the memory as once I lost myself in prayer, in those days, long past, when I turned inward to the mansions of the soul. Sext, and the bells are tolling from the chapel. Their chanting washes over me. I answer. The words break from my lips, ragged as the hart's cry. Holy Mother, pray for us.
This cross becomes too heavy, the weight of my penance or sin. I am no longer sure of the difference or if it matters. The days are all the same, counted by this breviary. Evening falls. I watch for moonlight, then for the dawn by which I read the offices. I read without speaking, unable to give voice to the holy words. Once each week, the door is opened, and I am led past the other cells and storerooms to the staircase and the chapel where the Prior a
waits me. He is a good man. He allows me to wield the rod for myself and takes it from me only when my strength fails me. Always the tabernacle is closed. It hides within itself the Host which is denied me. When the beating is over, the Prior dismisses me. He bids the limping friar, oldest among the brothers, to accompany me back to the cell. The old friar is kind to me. He gives me milk or broth and sneaks me quills and ink with which I write my verses, these words. Some mornings he sits with me and listens to the birds outside. He pleads with me to renounce my sin and to make full my confession that the Sacrament might be allowed me. He does not understand there is nothing to confess and no one who might listen.
Vespers. The day yields to its breaking but the heat does not relent. I thirst. I lick the damp from the wall and pant after memories, the frothing cool of mountain streams. Those days, too, have slipped away, emptying themselves like vessels inverted. I remember so little. I was so young. My father’s face is as lost to me as his voice, though I can recall the tales he told us of the saints and of the priests and kings of Israel. After he died, my mother took the three of us to see his people, a journey of some days. On the road we passed a pond where a mule had laid itself down in the shade of the cedars. The animal appeared half-dead from hunger and its right foreleg was broken so it could not stand. Thinking of David, my eldest brother fashioned a sling from a tree-branch and hurled stones at the beast where it lay panting, our Goliath. The long ears split and separated from the skull. We joined my brother in throwing stones at the face till its eyes were battered shut. Blinded, the beast moaned softly, as though to itself, and stretched its bleeding head toward the water. My mother saw what we had done, but she was not angry. Without a word she wrestled the mule’s head into the water and sat upon the neck until the thing was done. We were not punished. It isn’t right, she said, to let a beast suffer. To prolong death when death already takes so much. She knew this too well. My father’s people wanted nothing of us and gave us even less. Days later, returning home, we passed the pond in which the mule had been drowned. Around the corpse the waters had receded, exposing the wiry neck, the bleached skull. The buzzards had been at it and the flesh was stripped away. Only sinew and bone remained, wracked into the outline of the beast in its dying: all life fled from it, the lack made visible.
