Episode 4: No Sleep Til Pavia (Full)

Episode Four: No Sleep Til Pavia

Part One: The Descent to Hell

I am in the carriage first. When I see Peitho walk past the window on her way to joining Tedoro on his bench, I avert my gaze. I hear her private little chuckle and glower.

Little, it seems, is going to be different once we've left Verona. There is no BV/AV divide in our history. One starry night proved not enough to change the diurnal distance between us. Or perhaps it was precisely that one night which made it impossible close it.

I am glad, actually, that she doesn't try to join me in the carriage. Whatever garrulous feelings I had last night are gone, replaced once more with reticence and taciturnity. Is it that I don't want Tedoro to overhear us? Partly, sure. But talking insane thoughts in the dark of night under a blanket of stars is... different from speaking of the secrets of the cosmos in a carriage carrying you to your doom. At night things like heroism and sacrifice are dreams, unreal, abstract. In the day, they are inevitabilities.

More than that, though – there is so much to process – to sort and catelogue and tag and cross reference in my mind – from what she had said last night, that any thought of what questions I might have had or what things I left unsaid are irrelevant.

There would be time to ask them. For now I just want to sleep, really.

For the time I remain awake, I can tell that, while her heart is, Peitho's head is not up to the task of keeping Tedoro company. Eventually I am awoken from a dream which I will return to momentarily – to find the carriage stopping. A moment later, Peiho climbs in. And we're off again. Nearly as quickly, she is asleep.

I do not – or cannot – immediately return there myself. Instead, I watch Peitho. The rhythmic pattern of her breathing, the way her face relaxes. It's cliché, but she looks so peaceful. I must have fallen asleep myself at some point – because what I remember next is the Dream.

Does sleeping together change things?

Who knows.

The entire family, in the common Medieval home, slept together. Did it bind them togeher? Sleeping all in one space, secure in their somnolent safety? Did my sleeping alone as did the nobles make us weird?

I don't know.

I do know that the euphemism sleeping together or to have slept together comes from this time. In rich families, the daughters, especially the eldest, were often afforded rooms of their own. When visitors came, it was these singled-up beds which the guests would share overnight. Whether because it was tradition or because it happened often enough over the centuries, people who were paired to sleep together were expected to couple as well. Or to have had, the next day.

That's why your mom won't let you sleep over with your platonic male friend: Sleeping together is how rumors get started.

If not feelings.

While we're here— Consent wasn't what it is today. This is also where the idea of the Incubus and the Succubus come from. It wasn't uncommon to wake in the night, pinned down, already mid-coitus. One of the ways which became popular for denying any duplicity in or understanding of what was going on – and thus culpability in any deflowerings or adulteries or pregnancies – because let's remember that while the “victims” were often teenage girls, the succubus, the woman who is decidedly not your wife, who sits on your stiff little prick in the night is the threat we remember.

If you woke up in the middle of, initiated, or participated in a nighttime sexual liason, all you had to do if you were confronted with consequences – like virgin pregnancies – was say it was a demon.

A Lilith.

A Lamia.

Not your fault. She was a demon. She had entranced me. Bewitched me.

Had she?

I don't know. I'm getting ahead of myself.

I do know that I didn't think about any of this. Not now. Not for a long time. Not for years, maybe.

It took us four full days of travel to reach Pavia. I did not do much quality thinking during those four days. My thinking was reserved for the nights. During the day, I slept. Or tried to.

The dreams, for as long as I could tolerate them, had changed. Evidently since my last phantasmagorical visit Pepin had arrived in a city. And, whatever was happening, he was hiding in the shadows of an alley, staring, unblinking, at the mouth as people, oblivious of me, walk by. None of them know who I am. I'm not even sure I do. But some of them have heard of what I've done. I know that. What I've done – I know exactly what I've done. They will. Soon enough. They'll see. They'll all see.

I wake up with a start when we stop for the night. A roadside tavern, little more than a shack. But straw on the floor is better than nothing – for Tedoro.

I'm still in the carriage when Ted comes to settle his horses for the night. Peitho climbs in with me.

“You all right?” she asks. Her eyes are big, wet. “That last one seemed bad.”

I look at her, search her face. Had she been watching me?

“It was.... Yes. It was.”

“Do you want to find a tree and talk about it?”

“You sure you're not just here for Tedoro? I can hear him shouting at you to get me to take my ass somewhere else.”

“Oh. You hear that, too? I thought it might be some kind of local birdsong. It's Tedoro?” She's smiling.

Her whole face glows when she smiles.

“I'm pretty sure. It might be a bird – but it sounds an awful lot like Teddy.”

“If you—“ The door suddenly flies open. Tedoro looks about ready to kill us both. Then he's smiling and I think of his little Maria. “—two of you don't get out of there, then I have to wait even longer to eat. While that may be of no matter to you two, and it may seem of little immediate consequence—“ he wags his finger at us. “I, Tedoro, will get might grumpy. And maybe I drive slow tomorrow, eh?”

The three of us are laughing when I climb out of the carriage. I like Tedoro. He seems like a good man.

I hope we aren't endangering him.

Peitho and I skip dinner for our tree. It'll be the same pottage again tomorrow morning. She finds me, this time. Mostly because she is two paces behind me when I sit down.

I look up at her. “Again tonight?”

She nods. “If you want.”

Eventually she's sitting beside me. Close enough that our elbows touch.

“He's reached a city,” I say.

“Pepin.”

“But he's stopped. He's... waiting, I think. He must be up to something.”

“Did he kill last night?”

“I don't know. I was with you.”

“You didn't ask?”

“Ask whom?”

“Well, if not your guide, who else? Him.”

“You are out of your mind!” I exclaim. “Ask him? How would I do that? Why would I do that?”

I feel the motion as Peitho shrugs.

“The question seems to me a matter of why not. Is that not why you are having the dreams? Before you can quibble—“ I feel her eyes on me. I look out at the last of the falling sun. Apollo flees, leaving me to fend the dragon for myself.

“You are not just dreaming about Pepin. As you say, you are dreaming that you are him. It stands to reason that if you are him, you know what he knows, what he feels, what he believes – what he wants and why.”

“Why he's doing this.”

“Right. In that state, it should be no difficult task to descern. You have not...?”

“Explored? No.”

“Why not? It could help,”

“Who could it help? You?”

“It could help you end the dreams, to get back to restful sleep. They say that if you confront the dream—“

“It could hurt, too,” I snap.

It will make this a wildly different sort of story if I do. Good luck ever telling it.

Who wouldn't believe 'God told me' and 'the Devil made them do it'?

Is this really that simple?

“No,” I say after some time.

“No?”

“It's too dangerous. I know too little –“ I hear the Yaldabaoth's words echoed in my mouth, and what I'd planned to say drips, convictionless, from my lips – “of... too... little.”

“I see. The Hero is having his Descent moment.”

“I'm no hero.”

“Not in my story, certainly not. You're not even a good sorcerer.”

“And what would a good sorcerer do?”

“As he was called upon to aid the cause. But in yours, you have begun the Descent to Hell. You're no doubt familiar with it.”

“I've experienced it countless times – in countless initiation rituals and passion ceremonies. Yes.”

“Interesting. The Descent is only the first step on the way to Enlightenment.”

“But wait. What do you think I'm being called to do? And to aid in what cause? Yours? In your story I am only a device to get you the Rod?”

I meet Peitho's eyes as I ask this. I'd been avoiding her stare. If I'd done so because I'd anticipated that she would be glaring those emerald beams fit to drill a hole into the side of my head, I'd anticipated poorly. Her face is neutral, even a little bored.

“Yes. You were. I thought you knew this. In fact – at any point, now included, you could tell me everything I need to to know to find Pepin and the Rod and be well and truly done with this. You could never have left Genoa.”

I scoff, breaking her gaze to turn back to the horizon, what might have been – and what might still be.

“Say I tell you everything I know. Then what? I just wait for you or another Daughter or Lamiya herself to bring me riches? That's more insane than going with you.”

“And here you thought that working with me was the most insane thing you could do.”

“I never said that.”

“You did not. But you fled for Venice like it. Why did you run?”

“You'd already killed Francis before I met you. Did you know that Regina would involve me?”

“I did not. She... I did not anticipate how quickly she would involve you. I was not given any information, just the order. I was instructed to contact you after, but that you would be most agreeable after noon. I waited in the derelict building across the street, keeping myself amused with the play of the rats. I knew nothing of her besides her existence until I saw her enter your office. Did you suspect me? Of Francis?”

“When I met you? Yes.”

“Why? Because I was the first person you'd met after his death – it had to be me?”

“He'd mentioned you. Well, I couldn't know it was you. Not yet. He'd mentioned a rumor about a beautiful foreigner being in Genoa and that he had plans to work her for a business deal.” I think about, but don't mention, his suggesting that the two of us compete over her. So much for that. He got to her first – and she got him dead. First?

“And that's why you thought I was Scholeio. I should have killed him sooner. Actually—“ I close my mouth, having planned to interject with just that. “That isn't why. You think everything is Scholeio, don't you? For good reason, I guess. Being who you are, it probably is – in your story.”

“But you're not.”

“Not at all. The Archi and Matere are long friends. A Matere of the past held seats in the Ogdoad for Millennia.” This perks my eyebrow – and my ears. “But that time has passed. The Scholeio as it exists is a dead thing that refuses its grave. An abomination. If I may say so....” Her hand envelops mine in its cooler-than-the-night embrace. “You chose wisely when you left them. I only wish—“

“You don't know what you're saying.” I snap, pulling my hand away.

Peitho groans in her throat. “I thought we agreed last night to be friendly.”

“I'm not being unfriendly,” I grump.

“You are being evasive and looking for a fight.”

“I don't want to talk about the Scholeio, all right?”

“No. You just want to keep it all to yourself like you think it's what makes you interesting – like it's what makes you you.” I turn to her, and I actually am trying to burn her with my eyes. “The anger, the confusion, the loneliness. And you try to cover up all the years you think you've lost under all the pain and all the disappointment and the drugs and the drink. But it doesn't just go away. Almost half your life doesn't just go away because you want it to.”

By the end of this, Peitho isn't looking at me anymore – and I'm not glaring. My gaze softened about halfway through, but by then she had already turned away. For that matter, I'm not sure she's talking to me anymore, either.

“You act like you think you're the only one who hurts.”

“No, I—“

“You see the hurt in the world. I know you do. I know how you spent youf time, I saw your conversation with the tavernmaster. I know your work, what happened with Maria. I know that you have tried to do good since you have left the Scholeio and that you have been met at every intersection with resistance and failure. But you act like your hurt is what makes you unique. But it's not. You actually are unique, in yourself. There's nothing else like you. You actually are exceptional, you know?”

“No. I don't. Why don't you elucidate me?”

“Is this shitty attitude how you talked to the Master as well? 'Oh, sure. Just get it out. Say what you've got to say. Get your lesson in'?”

“I was not the best student,” I admit.

“Yeah? Well – no wonder you know so little of so little that matters for us right now. If you'd just taken to the lesson in the—“

Take to your Lessons, boy!

The Master's voice, shouting, cuts through my mind like a knife with a seering white light. I cry out in pain, cradling my head in my hands.

“Goddess!” Peitho exclaims. A seond later, and she's on her knees at my side. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” I say through gritted teeth. But the pain is gone, just the lingering memory of the Master's favorite patient criticism, used like a lash upon my psyche.

The Master never shouted like that.

I know.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—“

“No, really. It's fine.”

“I should not have said that. I apologize.”

I nod. She can't know that the Master used to say that. She couldn't have said it on purpose— Could she? She goes back to her place at my side. Closer, now.

“You are the Fulcrum of Human Fate, Awen. The Decider of the Fourth Age.”

Every man wants a pretty girl to talk to him in the hushed, reverent tone in Peitho's voice. And yet I don't enjoy it. Not even a little. Fine, maybe a little. Maybe even a lot. But not more than that. Not more I didn't. I don't even really know what it means.

She said my name. The name my parents gave me. Her hand is around mine. She's so cool at my side. Or am I just hot. Like – really hot?

“You called me that – in Genoa,” My voice is far away. I can't look at her. The gravity between us, it's tugging my eyes to hers. I'm staring at the stars just above the horizon. Speaking is like holding onto a rope while a whirlpool tries to drag me to the bottom of the ocean. “I want to ask you where you learned that name. But I know, don't I?”

“The Master. Yes.”

Why did he tell her that? He never used the name with me.

“Why do you... why do you use it?”

“Why did you abandon it?”

Her voie is a challenge, and when I reflexively look to meet her eyes, their emeralds shine with defiance.

“It's a good name, Awen. It describes you.”

“Awen describes me?” I scoff. “It's a girl's name.”

Peitho's eye brow quirks and I can see the corners of her mouth turn down in a resisted smile.

“Awen means 'Flowing Sprit', does it not?”

“Something like,” I admit. “It's more like inspiration – specifically poetic inspiration.”

“Inspiration,” Peitho repeats, nodding and turning her eyes to my stars above the horizon. “You do not believe that you are an inspired person? An Awenydd, as your people would call it? Are you not a soothsayer and fortune teller? Can you not trip the Weave, can you not see and read its patterns?”

“You sound like Metus, sometimes,” I say. “If it weren't so... obvious, I might not be able to tell you two apart.”

Peitho's hand pulls away. Her shoulder, too. I can still feel her hip, though.

“Should I be insulted?”

“I think Metus thinks I'm Jesus – the Second Coming.”

Peitho settles back beside me. Her hand isn't touching mine anymore.

“I think he think that this all has something to do with the End Times.”

I can feel her scrutinizing me, but I don't look at her.

“It makes sense,” she says a moment later.

“No, it doesn't!” I laugh. “The End that John prophesied in Revelation already came. Rome is no more.”

Peitho starts laughing and I turn to her, shifting my weight forward on my arm and my back away from the tree so that I could be leaning between her legs if I had made that my goal. Her eyes dance like faeries around a ring with some unknowable delight.

“What?” I demand. “How does it make sense then?”

She's smiling so wide when she opens her mouth to speak, it's all I can see – her amusement. I almost forget to actually listen to her.

“We have talked about this. Your priest, this Metus, must have heard the same story I have about the War – only from the opposite perspective. It's the War. The Fourth Age. He knows what I know about you. What you refuse to know about yourself.”

I'm left with only the choice of demanding once more what, so I say nothing, instead crossing my legs beneath me, making my intent to face and listen to Peitho speak what she knows obvious. An interrogation is so much simpler than a casual chat.

“Fine,” Peitho says, tossing her hands into her lap. “Have it your way. The First Age was the Age of Ideas. The first gods, what would come to be Ideals like Justice and Injustice, Good and Evil, walked the face of the world, directly empowered by Order and Chaos themselves. O and C agree to stop influencing their Human creation directly, and allowed the First Gods to do it for them. After banishing most of those gods from the Material Realm.

“The Second Age is the Age of the Fall – the return to Life of the gods who had left – of the Nephilim – the second Generation of gods – and the Flood – the world-changing events and the cataclysm which ended nearly everything. The Third Age is that of Man – of Heroes. This is the Age of History. The Rule, however, has been that the gods – none of them, not even the ones who still remain – are allowed to involve themselves either directly or indirectly in the Material Realm without the consent of and participation with a living, engaged Human.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Rule isn't that explicit, I'm sure. But the way that it's supposed to work is that the gods – all of them – are only allowed to communicate with Humans that have sought them out. And they're not allowed to meddle – only to advise. Even heroes aren't gods on Earth.”

“I see,” I say, sure that I don't.

That isn't my experience with the “gods”.

It seems to be the Ninth's, though.

Yeah. Didn't Yaldy— that's apparently how I think of the Yaldabaoth at this stage – say that he only helps those who help themselves?

Don't be an ass. He said they come to him.

Right.

“The Third Age was also the Age of the Prophet – of the Christ.”

Now I actually do think I'm starting to understand. “The Age of the Middle Man.”

“If that's how you need to think of it.”

“But you said we're in the Fouth Age.”

“I did. Because we are. The Age of the Fulcrum.”

“Fuck you. No. Shut up.”

Peitho's face kind of turns inside out for a moment, contorting from surprise to mild anger to impressed in the same brief seconds it takes me to ejaculate this.

“Wow. All right. Why don't you tell me how you really feel.”

“You're making that up to fuck with me.”

“Why would I make that up to fuck with you?” Peitho laughs. Then she has a real laugh, genuine and clear, the peels of her amusement ringing like bells in my ears. “Are you stupid?” she finally asks some time later, holding her belly as though she has cramp. “You have to be – fucking stupid – to think I would make something like that up to fuck with you. Am I the only person who calls you the Fulcrum?”

I feel well and properly shamed.

“No.”

“Of course not. Because the Rules are different with you. You're the Exception.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that all Rules are off with you. You're basically their attempt to restart the whole Human Experiment. They created you themselves. You aren't Human – not in the way that I am, not in the way that anyone has ever been – even since the Beginning. Order and Chaos made you themselves. In a way, you're the first god. The Material embodiment of Choice.”

“Fuck you,” I spit again. It's reflexive. I don't mean to.

“Robert—“

“You're just manipulating me,” I say. I'm on my knees. I want to be on my feet. But I don't want to make a scene – and I know if I stand I'll start shouting. And if I start shouting she'll try to get me to shut up. And if she tries to get me to shut up something bad is going to happen. So I grab the grass as hard as I can. Clumps of it yank up and I dig my fingers into the dirt for a better hold.

“No.” Peitho's voice is soft. She's on her feet, I realize. Walking toward me. Her hand on my shoulder, my neck, is as cool as a soothing balm. I could lean my head into her legs, wrap my arms around her calves. “I was. But I told you yesterday – no more secrets. No more lies. No more manipulation. I understand what you are now.” I look up at her. The emeralds of her eyes shine like the healing light of a magic pool from a Fantasy. “I can't make you do anything. I can't convince you of anything. Not with my words. But I can show you. There's still time for you to learn some of what you will need if we are going to stop Pepin and retrieve the Rod.”

She lowers herself to her knees and takes my face in her hands. I don't want to let her. I want to resist her. But looking into her eyes – it's like my mind is all the white noise of a waterfall – the crackle and snow of an unattended television.

“Will you let me teach you?”

I'm nodding before she has even finished the question.

“Good.” She releases me, goes back to the tree. “Are you going to stay there?”

I look around me. I'm not entirely sure how I got where I am. Pretending I meant to be here, I make my way back to the tree. My back against it, I idly brush off my knees.

“What is Jesus? What is any Christ – any prophet? What was the Buddha?” Peitho asks a moment later. “If there is a conceivably perfect future, then there is a chain of events that lead to it. That's what time is – and one of the things time does is change things from one state to another. Right?”

I nod.

“Right. So a Christ, or an Anointed One, is someone whose message will reach people in the future.”

“Do you mean they facilitate Change?”

“Let me ask you a different question. Outside of the “rules” for sainthood, what makes a person a saint? You might say their deeds. But I don't think so. Our Matere, her position has a direct line of descent back to the Mother, Lamiya. I understand what it is to worship a living god, even if the tradition is the memory of a dream after six-thousand years.

“This is not the same thing that Christians do with their Saints. Saints seem exclusively to be martyrs. Good people whose stories are worth remembering. But for something to be remembered, it must be remembered. Saints are not gods. They are not even Messengers. They are mnemonics.

“But Zoroaster, Lao Tzu, Moses, Jesus... these sorts of men lived lives, thought thoughts, which were like seeds which grew into mighty trees. We live in their forests. That is to say we are a part of their forests – each person like them forms a protective canopy above us. The Light will kill us if we see too much. But they only grew as tall as they did because they reached for the Light.

“They may have been gods in their own rights. But is it a coincidence that there is a mystery whether they lived at all? Maybe they didn't. But we know their story. IF they didn't, it was just made up. But why? The perfect future. It is possible that a perfect future believes these stories – or that the things they believe come from a synthesis, a fusion, of these things. Maybe the way they discover perfection is by filling in the gaps of our knowledge with our stories. Our storiesw ould have to have it, The Secret, in them in such a way that they could be synthesized.”

I blink at her. “The future causes the past, causes the present? Is that what you're suggesting?”

“It's not what I'm suggesting. Listen to me, but look at the sky.” She does as she commands, scooting down from the tree so that she can rest back with her weight on one of her elbows, head craned up, the other arm pointing at the nighttime firmament.

Smiling a little to myself, I mimick her position, only on both of my elbows. It is nice to gaze out at the stars, talking metaphysics with a pretty girl – two nights in a row, now. Rare. It really was too bad I was getting off this trip in Pavia.

“Look at these stars. Each one of them is a sun like our own. They are so far away that it takes their light thousands of thousand of thousands of years to reach us. It is a miracle that we see them at all. But if we were not here to see them now, right their lights would not shine on this spot. Trees do not fall for no one to hear them. If there is no conscious entity to observe them, they do not exist.

“Time is not the same for you and me as it is for the stuff of Matter. Until it is seen, the contents of a box are nothing and anything. Only when you open it, even if you placed and closed the contents inside, can you be sure you know what is inside.”

“I don't think I know what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about the Nature of Reality. You and I and every conscious being in the universe make reality. Humans are just especially good at it. I know that you know this. There are two ways that anything can be said to exist – either materially or imaginarily – as an Image. Our Realities are individual, but interdependent – there are things which are materialy real to you which I have not imagined, and the same is true of any two conscious beings.

“Example: Do you know where my home is? No. But you can imagine it. It is not real. You have not see it.

“A Christ is someone who saw the Truth. Reality is that which we all agree on. Or enough of us that the System, Reality's Order, can continue to propogate itself.”

“What does that mean?”

“Are you familiar with slight of hand tricks?”

I reach over and into her hair behind her neck, wherefrom I produce a flower I'd plucked out of the grass moments before.

“No. Tell me more about how your hand's honor has been slighted.”

“I should not have phrased that as a question. I deserve this.” She takes the flower, placing it in her hair above her other ear. I feel like the coolest kid in class. “Order is a magician. Order is an illusion.

“If you were to walk today into Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice, but the city had lain empty for centuries, nothing of the world of its builder remains. And yet they will be real to you. You can only imagine them, but they must have existed to build the Cathedral.”

“Unless the Cathedral sprung, formless, out of the void upon my arrival.”

“Entirely possible. If that were the case, however, why did Reality choose to give the Cathedral tool marks and grafiti? Why did Reality leave ashes and wax drippings for you to find? To inspire your curiosity about how such relics might have existed? That you might imagine what it is to be a person who might live in a place like this?”

“That's as good a reason as any for Reality to materialize a Cathedral for my benefit.”

“And yet... they don't. The people who built the Cathedral, who worshiped in it, who left behind ash and wax, they don't exist. If it is as you say and there is no past, no future, only one long, permanent present, not only do they not exist now, they never existed. The Cathedral is all that can be said to exist. Its builders exist only as theory – forever.”

“What's your point, Peitho?”

I'm not getting impatient, I actually want to know.

“This is the Battleground of Order and Chaos. This is the way of the War. The Closed Box. Searching the Temple, deciphering its clues to the Reality of its people. ...This is putting order to the Chaos, limiting possibility with probability, and eliminating it altogether with fact. But, of course, for every question answered there are always more to ask.”

She laughs.

“It's hard to talk about this stuff, huh? I thought it would be easier. With you.”

I nod and shrug. “It's hard because you think ten different things with every one you say. Different ways you could phrase every sentece, how you're wrong, why you're insane, questions like whether I even understand the things you're tying not to have to say because you don't want to have to explain that, too.”

“Yeah.”

“And not saying the things you aren't allowed to.”

She nods.

“Let me see if I understand, then. You think that Metus thinks that I am the Second Coming because whatever is going to happen here is going to ripple somehow into a future where I am someone whose tree stands with those of Moses and Kong Fu Zi?”

She turns to me, her eyes bright as candles in the night. “You are the Fulcrum. It's your Age – you decide.”

“Do you think I am?”

“A reincarnation of Jesus's soul?” She snickers. “Hell no. He was a preincarnation for yours.”

I stare out into the night. I'd meant to steer the convesation toward how how she feels is what it has been like since... these last seven years and how nice this is. But Peitho is focused, if nothing, with little interest in sentimentality.

“I exist. WE know that. Without Jesus, I can't be me as I am now?” I ask.

“Close enough. He isn't a proof of you. You are the First Fulcrum, incarnate. And besides, to Ascent past Sainthood Sanctity and into the ranks of Divinity, the Soul must be purified. Once done, it cannot return as an independent agent.”

I laugh. “What the fuck does that mean?” Is what I hear myself asking. But I'm thinking of Yaldy and the River of Fire.

Peitho is looking at me, concerned. “Do you really not know?”

“I guess not.”

Part Two: That's As Far As It Went

“Hmm.” Peitho falls silent for a long time, tapping her lips with her finger. She thinks this way for so long that even her finger gows tired of awaiting a response and falls still.

In any sort of verbal combat, and we have been sparring – I think – a tactic which is often unexpected is sudden silence. Is that what she's doing?

I don't mind, if so. If Peitho thinks disengagement is victory, I can't blame her. What I wanted tot alk about was both crazy and frightening; the things Peitho is saying are only crazy. When she does again speak, I expect dawn to greet her answer. She's lying flat on her back. She unfolds her arms from behind her head and extends them, palms up, fingers splayed.

“If Order and Chaos can be imagined as circles,” she gestures to indicate each hand is one of Chaos or Order, “and together they account for everything that exists in the Material Universe and any conceivable other, then Humanity –“ she brings her hands together so that the tips of her thumbs and forefingers are touching, forming a roughly oval shape – “is the space where they overlap. The Human Soul is the asymptotic curve – ever increasingly approaching union with the Divine – but never quite reaching it.

“An asymptote because if the Soul ever does intersect with the Divine, it ceases to be Wholly, Uniquely, Human. It may cease to be entirely.”

“Like what happened with Lamiya,” I muse.

“Like what happened with Lamiya,” Peitho agrees.

“And you're saying my Soul isn't Human.”

She nods.

“Therefore I have nothing to worry about if I allow myself full dissolution into the dreams of being Pepin.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I'm wondering why Saints are lesser than gods. Why are they lesser? Is it the passage of time? Does the distance from an Event in time make it more powerful? Or is it more powerful because it will be? The Saints are less powerful because they're more recently distant memory, or because they had less impact. Did they have less impact because they were copies of an original, or because they were less real somehow?”

“Are you asking me? Or are you setting up for a big reveal?”

“You act as though if you thought you could get away with it you would call yourself a Buddhist – then you believe that there is something to reveal?”

“Oh, fuck you. I said last night there's no Secret to Buddhism. But what you're describing is a universe of secrets. Maybe it's just that there's nothing to see. But people have seen something, haven't they?”

You've seen something.

“You have seen something, Robert. You have seen many things.”

“Illusion?”

For a moment, I'm not sure which of us is speaking – whether she has been speaking or whether I've been hearing her voice in my head. And I'm not stoned. I swear it.

It's just... It's her eyes – except no it's not. I'm not looking at her. And it's not the proximity. But it most decidedly is her.

“I can't teach you, Robert. Even as much as I have is forbidden to me.” She looks at me and I see the fear in her eyes. “I could be destroyed for the things I have revealed to you by accident. I may not be. Not for the accidents. Matere may decide to look the other way – because you are you and what you need to hear will come out of my mouth whether I like it or not. That is the power of your questions – they demand to be answered. But what of the things I have volunteered? I will surely be killed.”

She blinks, frowns, looks at the sky.

“Like that. But the Matere is not forgiving. And she does not forget. I can't tell you everything, Robert. We may be in this together for now... but you're bailing at Pavia.”

Is she breaking up with me?

Is she about to tell us she doesn't want to hang out anymore?

Is she about to say she's done talking?

She sits suddenly and effortlessly up, and is then immediately on her feet.

“If you want me to risk my life for you, you're going to have to do better than a nice date.” she waves at me with her fingertips and walks – nay, saunters – off.

There are certain things women say. Who knows what it was. Maybe it was her eyes or the way her lips formed the words or the way her spine curved as she left. Or maybe she meant for this to happen with some kind of womanly witchery. But I am painfully erect for many, many minutes after she leaves. In the sophomoric comedy version of this telling, there is a cut to me lighting candles and giving myself a bouquet of flowers for some alone time.

That didn't happen.

As it is, I try to imagine her version of Reality – instead of what her body might feel like if she were here – and somehow I had gotten her to melt her body against mine. I close my eyes hard against the memory of what her thighs felt like.

You sneak your hand up a girl's skirt to steal her purse when you don't expect to see her for a while – not when you're going to spend a week in a carriage with her. I wish I had never felt the smoothness of her thigh, the coolness of her naked flesh.

Worse is that she knows. Of course she knows. And whether the look I saw in her eye on the bed in Venice were real and not just the wine or not, she was using it like a thumbscrew to my dick. Sighing, I look at the horizon. Still the middle of the damned night. Well, I'm not going to sleep. May as well figure out where she's gotten off to. Maybe she'll want to—

I find Peitho at the stables. She's sitting just inside, evidently keeping the sleeping horses company.

“You're not going to sleep either?” I ask.

“Nah. Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Come on,” she says, taking me outside. “We don't want to disturb the horses. They have a lot of work still to do.”

“Right.”

I follow her outside, around behind the building, where it's just her and me and a copse of tree maybe a few yards away. No sightlines. No one to listen in. Well, maybe not that.

“I can sleep during the day. With you.”

She meets my eye. Spine straight, she puts her hands on her hips. The emeralds of her eyes are dim, challenging.

“I didn't say you couldn't. Wouldn't. You seemed to enjoy spending time with Tedoro.”

“And what if I told you it was my natural habit to sleep during the day?”

“I would say that I haven't slept on a schedule in two years – I don't care.”

“I see.”

“We're not going to find Pepin at night, though. One of us should be able to be alert in the middle of the day.”

“We will not be traveling by carriage forever. Perhaps my sleep will be easier when you are not at my side. Then I won't have to stay up with you all night to get you to talk to me.”

“You've only got two more days. Don't worry.”

“I'm not.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“So if I found a temple back here just now, and not you – who made the temple? The people of Verona?”

“You did.”

“How did I make it?”

“By finding it, and the artifacts of its builders, you make them real. You create them in that sense.”

“No, I don't. I found them. They made them.”

“They did not exist, and then they did. Did they put them in your reality?”

“Of course they did. Their art and writing tell me all about them. Just as though they were talking to me.”

“Because they are. They did all of this for you. You created them so they could tell you about themselves. And so you can tell the world.”

“No. They already told the world. I just listened.”

“By your reckoning, they failed, then. But I tell you they succeeded in reaching you. In the same way that if you were not here to see it there were be no backside of this building in Reality, by find their remains, you also make them anew. Before you, even when they existed, they did not exist – and would not exist – without the inevitability that you would find their work and make them real. It was all for you. Without you, they never existed. Without you, what good is their effort? A waste. In vain.”

“They couldn't have known I would exist.”

“What of their gods? What of their Creator? When they made the Cathedral in worship of their Creator, were they not making it in worship of you – of how you would find them, how you would make them real – how you would create them anew long after they have passed? Think of it this way, and perhaps you won't resist it so strongly: One of the things my family believes is that nothing is truly dead until the last living being forgets its name.”

“The Egyptians believed tha— Right. Wadjet and Lamiya were Egyptian. All right. What you're saying is that to be dead at any point in time is to be forgotten entirely. And to be remembered, even by one person, is to have done everything you did while alive for that one person – because you did it to be found and remembered and he was the last – or the first after a long gap – to do so. I think I get it.”

“In that same way, Robert, these stars are shining for you and I tonight.”

She's standing very close to me all of a sudden. I don't have to look down to meet her eye.

Peitho is, I realize, very tall. I had'nt noticed it – maybe at all. But close to her like this, with the stable at my back, the tips of her nose almost level with mine— Well, I'm noticing it now.

My hands itch at my sides.

“I can teach you,” she breathes.

“What do you want me to learn?” I hear the subtle quaver in my voice, feel the dryness of my tongue.

“I want you to learn how to control the Dreams.”

“Then you want to teach me magick.”

She presses her body closer to mine. So close that if I want my arm that isn't reaching back to the stable as if to remind myself that this isn't a dream – but really for balance – to be comfortable, I should really place my hand on Peitho's lower back...

“Yesss.” She lingers on the syllable, hissed in her lisp as though her tongue is overexcited. “I will teach you magick.”

“And what do you want from me?”

There is effectively no distance between our bodies now. I can feel her, cooler than the night, almost cold to the touch. Her lips brush mine.

“I want you, Robert Longshore.”

I overbalance, trip. My back thuds into the stable wall. Peitho is against me. Her hands are to either side of my shoulders.

And then she's kissing me.

This is not some Disney Princess moment. Not only because— If you are expecting some sort of involved, Adult or Erotic moment between Peitho and me, prepare yourself to be disappointed. This was not a kiss of passion in a romantic Italian getaway. It's more like the kiss of a... viper.

My entire body siezes as by the hand of Zeus himself. My arms go stiff at my sides, fingers splayed wide on my hands. I am surprised by her, the wildness of this, her animal nature as she closed on and struck at me. You're supposed to close your eyes during a kiss – for whatever reason. I mean, I guess it is awkward to be looking at one another. Maybe it makes it easier to concentrate – on something other than how weird what you're doing is. Whatever the case, my eyes fly open.

They goggle wildly around at first, like a half-panicked calf. For a moment – a few seconds, I suppose – the shock of the thing is such that I feel and know nothing besides the cool of Peitho's mouth, her lips linking with mine in one long embrace. Clamping, really – her lips, around my lower – like a venom-delivering bite-and-latch. My eyes relax first. I'm still tense, but I can see in her face – because it is about as close to my eye as it can get without touching it – that she is about as rigid as I am.

I close my eyes. My hands fall, perhaps as they should have done all along, at the small of Peitho's back.

You have heard the expression for a person, particularly a woman, to melt like butter. It's apt.

Peitho's body is all hard angle and micro-tremors and shivering-scared. The muscles at the small of her back are as taut as sails in a storm. My hands find her this way. And then like melting heat were radiating from them, her body melts against mine. She sighs, deep and melodic. Her hands find my shoulders, my chest. She presses them flat against me, close together, folding her arms and sealing them between us with her body.

And then it's over. She releases me with her mouth and pushes away from me.

My hands, already itching to feel the flesh beneath her leather vest – and, yes, it is as supple as I imagined – fall to my sides.

“That was—“

“Shut up,” Peitho breathes before I can articulate my surprise. But she isn't angry. She's smiling, resting her weight with her forearms against my chest, looking into my eyes, searching through whatever she sees behind them.

“Make me.”

“You know I can. Do I need to take you to the ground right here?”

The emeralds of her eyes twinkle, and... something happens to me.

It's like being punched in the stomach. That's sort of what it feels like. Like being bowled over. She's smiling and her right hand has found its way to my neck, to running a finger along my bearded cheek.

Does she like beards?

Do I like wearing a beard?

I don't let go of her. Don't even move. I feel like a tween holding his first girl at his first slow dance – I've eased into position, but I'm not ready for the dancing part yet.

She kisses me again.

This one has none of the jittery quivering – either of her lips or her body, and I almost don't feel her teeth press against my lips.

This feels like her first time.

Her mouth parts, and—

At some point she pulls away from me. Our eyes open, meet.

“You're only doing this to get me to stay with you past Pavia,” I say, my voice husky.

Her lips quirk in something like a grin. “Is it working?”

“I'm not sure. Why don't you keep trying?”

I do not wish to linger on this moment longer than is proper. Is there a statute of limitations on kissing and telling? I don't know. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of living through the Age of Chivlary, of thinking myself, like Don Quixote, a Knight Errant – a defender of women's virtue, et cetera, et cetera, et al. Maybe it's that I don't know who is going to hear this. Or perhaps it was just a kiss. And if it was her first, as I suspect—

Well, how could it be further sullied than being with me – besides if I were to share it with the entire world?

And besides – that's as far as it went.

Not that it couldn't have.

The coital act was not frowned on the way it is today. Back then – well, humans are just animals, aren't you? No matter how you civilize, when the urge to hump strikes people – young or otherwise – it strikes. Maybe back then we remembered that we were animals – or we didn't try so hard to pretend otherwise. In any inn or tavern – to say nothing of private homes – it was not uncommon for partnered couples to copulate right on the floor, where God and everyone could see – including children of all ages – and close family members. Hell, it wasn't uncommon for a mother to suckle her child and satisfy her husband at the same time. Funny – or horrifying – as that image may be to you, Listener.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as Medieval sexual weirdness goes – as far as compared with how you approach it, today.

If Peitho and I had made the beast with two backs and someone had witnessed, we would have had nothing to feel either guilty or ashamed about. Indeed, tavern floors like I've described are where no few incubus and succubus attacks happened – both of the consenting and un- variety alike. And, for all I know Tedoro might actually be disappointed not to be watching us.

We didn't, though.

Eventually, the kiss petered out and we... stood there – I half reclined with my back to the stable wall, her half lying with her head nestled against my neck. Just kind of... holding one another.

And after the month I've had.... Just being kind of held is nice in itself.

Even if some of the comfort I'm seeking is from Francis's killer.

Peitho is afraid. I can feel it in the tenseness of her lower back. Not afraid of me. Not, like Chloe of Daphnus and Chloe, of the act of Love itself. I don't need to wonder what of. I do, however, wonder whether she can feel the heat of her figurine, the winged-serpent statuette, in my jacket. It feels hot enough to burn its way right out of its pocket.

What a moment that might have been – the Statuette plopping to the ground like a turd right as Peitho and I are – finally? I'm not sure – getting close.

Suddenly, after enough moments that were we not standing I would think she were asleep, Peitho pushes herself away from me, looking me hard in the eye.

“You have made me real,” she says.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I'm laughing as I ask this, but it's not funny.

“I am thankful to have met you – that's all.”

“Then you are preparing yourself for a goodbye,” I say. She looks down and away. “What was that, then? Couldn't let me leave without getting a taste?” My voice is soft, ironic. My words, however, have a cutting edge.

“Do you think you are that desireable?”

Peitho takes her hands away, putting them – balled into fists – on her hips. I try to suppress a grin, but only succeed on one side of my face. I can't help it. She looks so... good – her spine all contorted, the slenderness of her waist and curvature of her hips accented by her agitation. Maybe it's just me – but whenever I'm in trouble with a woman, I laugh. I really can't help it. It's not that I'm not taking the situation seriously – it's just—

“Am I funny to you?”

“No. It's not that. I'm – I'm sorry. Really.”

Peitho turns her whole body nintey degrees away from me, crossing her arms under her breasts.

“Peitho, really – I'm – I'm not not taking this seriously. It sounded like you were working up to a goodbye and— I thought I would say something clever—”

“I thought for a moment that you had seen me. I seem to be wrong.”

Believe me, I'm looking at you, all right.

I – And we like what we see.

R – That is not what she means.

I think – I think I do this because it's absurd to me that I've said whatever thing I've just said to upset them. When I was younger – like when I was 25 – I thought they were absurd for being upset.

“I think I liked it better when you thought I only wanted you to stay,” she says.

“Peitho....” I half groan, half sigh. “I didn't mean— You're right. Not the best time to try to be funny.” Now she won't even look at me. “Just – just forget I said anything? All right? I'm sorry.”

She looks at me hard. The kind of look that starts fires and withers hearts. “Perhaps I will.”

A few minutes later – after she has decided that whatever she was trying to kill with that look was good and dead, presumably – she moves to sit with the wall at her back beside me. I sink down to the ground with her.

She takes a deep breath, rolling her shoulders as she fills her entire diaphram. Releasing it in a great, whooshing sigh, she slumps so thooyggly it is as though she has gone completely boneless.

“What I was saying— It's the same thing with the artifacts you find in the ground. By finding them, you make the people who made them real,” she says. “You create them.”

“Peitho, I didn't make you. You existed independent of my knowledge of you. You said yourself – Just because I can only imagine your home and what life was like for you doesn't mean that you don't have a home, you didn't have a life before me.”

She makes a weak noise like a laugh, and what hardly passes as an effort at a smile.

“I didn't – not really. Before my Sister – before Matere sent me to find you and seek your help.... I wouldn't call that a life.”

“Hm,” is the noise I make in my throat. But in my head, I'm trying not to tell her that I think I understand. Would I call the life I led before she showed up in Genoa living?

“It feels like what you're saying is standing on its head,” I say, looking over at her. “Causality is linear – an event in the future cannot influence an event in the past.”

“As above, so below, Robert. If my perspective is standing on its head, it is because it is the mirror image as seen reflected into a crystalline pool of water. But on which side of the pool are you – are you the reflected or the reflection?”

This makes me laugh out loud. What an absurd question. I sober quickly, however, when I realize I don't have a great answer – that is, a great deflection – readily at hand.

“I was taught that the Past takes place before the Present, and that the Future is yet to happen. That causality is a forward-moving progress, like a sentence or an equation. And that the Universe is a cold, dead, unfeeling thing that will eventually kill us, but which is filled with wonder and mystery to explore.” I pause, repeating the words I've just said in my head, pruning them for mistakes or missing clauses. When I have decided that I notice none, I ask: “Which side am I on, then?”

Peitho does not answer this directly. Instead, with the delicacy of a diplomat, she says, “I see in you a contradiction, Robert Longshore. In one moment you will quote a wise idiom, denying or praising the importance of some thing; and in the next you will say with words from your own mind the opposite.”

I frown. So she's noticed that, too.

R - It's no fun being around someone so astute, is it?

I - It's less fun being around the deaf and blind and babbling.

S - Is this what it's like talking to me?

“What are you suggesting?” I look at her.

She looks at me.

“I'm not suggesting anything.” She shrugs and looks away. “If you ask me what I think— I think that you sense the Truth, but that you do not wish to take the next steps to seek it.”

“That—“ I'd opened my mouth to say that this isn't true. And then I realize that – by the very definition I quote so readily – by my own habits, I am not a Seeker anymore. Whatever me had been, I'd grown out of him. Maybe a long time ago.

“I think that in you somewhere is a boy who wants to know The Truth at all costs. But you have imprisoned him within you – or he has been, by circumstance. Whatever the case, that Little Rob inside you is locked away. You try to forget about him – about who you were when you were him. The things you wanted, the things you loved. I think that you're afraid – to want those things you wanted when you were a boy – to love the things you loved when you were young. And rightly so. I think there are forces – entities and confederacies – working against you which you do not understand.”

She says all of this into the dirt. I hear myself describing to the townsfolk of Genoa their flaws, their fears. I remember the looks on their faces – the anger, the betrayal. I try not to feel those things I saw as Peitho lays bare my secret thoughts. No one wants to be open on a surgical table – and I didn't have any anesthetic left.

“And you want to teach me,” I say more than ask. Not in an effort to get her talking about something other than me – but in an effort to be open, to understan why she is saying what she sees.

“I have already said as much. You say that this is another deceit – that I want only for you to continue with me beyond Pavia.”

“Is it?”

“Only?”

She looks at me. Her eyebrows are raised. In the light of the moon, her face looks like fresh pages in a new book.

I nod.

“Not only.” She looks away, into the night, and I can see that she is thinking about something other than what she is saying. “I need your help. I told you that in Genoa, and I tell you now. Without you, I am doomed to fail. Especially now. Without—“ She sighs. “Without the Figurine, I am alone. I could find him. But you – your gifts.... You will bring me right to him if you are willing only to come.”

“Explain to me something,” I say, instead of reacting to what she has said. “If trees do not fall to make a sound unless there is an observer there to witness it, why are trees fallen when a forest is explored?”

“There are two answers for that,” Peitho says with little hesitation. “The first is that every eye in the world shapes it. A forest in which a human has never entered is still populated with uncountable living beings. By existing in and experiencing their environment, they form it. But this is an incomplete answer.

“The answer is made nearly explicit in Genesis. 'The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.”

“He gave them names,” I say pedantically.

“Names are power, Robert. To know an Entity's name is to control it. This is the Song of Solomon.”

“That's just folklore.”

“Folklore or not, there are truths in the stories. I know you know this. You're just being stubborn.”

I frown. You know what makes me feel like being stubborn?

Being told I'm being stubborn.

“Then what are you saying?”

“I'm saying that the order things happened in does not matter. Consider the mind of Atum. If the Cosmos is God's attempt to experience Being, then every sort of being up to an including Humanity is an expression of that Mind. In order for God to make humanity, It necessarily must have made everything else for It to experience once It had taken on the Human form.”

“This is crazy talk,” I hear myself laugh. “I know you keep saying causality doesn't matter, but it must. If very Existence is experiencing itself through the fact of Its existence... a sentence which is,” I laugh, “not easy to wrap your tongue around – to even be sure it forms a working sentence! let alone get your mind around what it actually means.”

Peitho chuckles a little. “Yes. Existence is a paradox of terms. But what you need to understand is that the Universe wishes to be observed – and it wants to catch your attention. So as you observe it the Universe is made more real, and makes itself more real to keep you looking. It fabricates for itself a history. The fallen tree? It only fell to make you wonder whether it would make sound without you around to hear it. For example.”

“I just— All of that history was there before I got there.”

“Was it? Or was it not, because there was no one with eyes to see it? And as soon as someone knew to look for it, it appeared? What if you learned that there were and had never been any people to build your temple? Does that change the fact of its existence? No.”

“Then how does this make me like Jesus?”

“It doesn't. Except people like that have power over the outcomes of their times. The amount varies. Remember, in the Age before History, these kinds of people were gods. Now they are more like trumpets – filled with God's voice, but able only to make a series of loud and beautiful, but largely incoherent noises. You are not only filled with your voice, however. You are able to articulate it.”

“Filled with my voice, yes, yes.” I mutter, having no idea what that might mean.

“The Metus likely believes you to be one of this type. Maybe he knows better. If he is as you say, you can count on it. A priest like that might think to make you the Second Coming by scheming in that direction. If he believes you are, then, to him, at least, you are. Pray that others do not agree, if that is not your desire.”

I'm laughing and shaking my head, putting my eyes behind a steepled hand.

“This all feels like a metaphor for narratives and meta-narratives.”

“Of course it does,” Peitho agrees immediately. “Everything is everything else, differentiated only by the act of differentiation.”

“I really hate philosopher speak,” I groan. “Why can't we speak plainly?”

“We are. These things are just difficult to say by their very natures. We have not yet developed a vocabulary for them. Which— Is hilarious.” She does't laugh. “Language itself was developed to eff, as it were, the ineffable.”

“Are you sure about that?” I ask. “Seems to me you'd develop language for hunting – and diplomacy.”

“You mean for warfare and the treaties which come after. Obviously language was developed in that direction at some point, and has come a very long way in describing our physical, intellectual, and emotional environments. This Italian language—“

“Is great, isn't it?” I ask. “Much better than Latin.”

“Latin as a language should have been smothered in its crib. I do prefer Greek – but yes. It is better.”

“Just you watch – the first publications to be written in a language other than Greek or Latin are going to come from Italy.”

“I'm sure I will not live long enough to see it.” Peitho's voice is at peace with this statement.

But I am not – not at first. Then I realize how long it could be before that prediction comes true.

R - That's the sort of thing you only see played out from Heaven.

I - So you'll never see it play out.

S - Hah hah. Funny.

I think to ask her something deep, like – do you not expect to live long? And then I remembered where she is headed. Right.

That sort of thing makes you think. But I don't let my mind more than flit around the idea of death and its coming – especially if I don't change course very soon – like a fly around the ass of an elephant.

“If I stay...” My voice is low to my own ears. The sound of Peitho's hair brushing the stable as she turns her head toward me is louder. “What will you teach me?”

I can't bring myself to look at her.

“What do you want to learn?” Her voice is the honeyed tongue of the Devil himself. It tingles the base of my spine, fills my mind with memories of her lips against mine, whispers suggestions—

“Magick,” I choke, nearly coughing. “That's what you—“

A silence grows between us – that void, that gravity. It pulls my gaze to her.

The emeralds of Peitho's eyes glow in the dark. Almost as soon as they make contact, mine careen away from them.

“You want to learn how to protect yourself from the Rod?”

“No.” I stare at the sky, but I can feel my jaw and mouth setting in that particular grimace one takes when setting course against all odds.

“I want to know how to use it.”