Part 2: 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 grows 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 hadn't 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 seizes 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 Chivalry, 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 Daphnis 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 desirable?”
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 ninety 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 diaphragm. Releasing it in a great, whooshing sigh, she slumps so thoroughly 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 understand 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 doesn'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.”
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