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.”
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