I am somewhere I do not know.
But the scene is a motif I recognize well: The in-side of a parrish church, by the look of it. Apparently the middle of a moonless night, it would be too dark to give my sudden confines fair description with so much as a candle. There is not so much as a candle's-worth of illumination in here. But there is enough for me to make out the forms of two people near one of the transepts.
In whatever way I can be said to do so, I make my way near to them – likewise careful not to be noticed. Getting as close as I dare – for reasons I dare not consider – I can see them more clearly now. Two priests are speaking in hushed tones. As it turns out, the one who is facing me – a man with a fat face, his chins wrinkling their way down the neck of his alb like a flesh ascot – does indeed have a single candle. Its light seems dim even to my incorporeal eyes, as though the sphere of illumination were somehow smaller than it should be.
“You wrote that you have received a child into your custody?” the priest with his back to me asks. His voice is as impatient as his robe is gray.
“Yes, Frater. A girl. Abandoned by the mother. Very sad.”
If this priest's accent is any indication, we're somewhere in West Francia. Maybe.
“What is the plan for her?”
“Plan, Monseigneur?” The second man is obviously caught off guard by the question and confused – but fearful of the other, his apparent senior. “There is no plan, Frater. I have done as I was instructed upon my assumption of this post.” He dips his tonsured head lower than is typical, bowing nearer to the style in the East than... wherever we are.
“Indeed,” Frater, a man whose voice tingles my ear like a familiar song on an unfamiliar instrument, nods, placing a hand on the other man's neck, angled like a blade. “And well you have done in contacting me so quickly.” He presses the man's cheek with a palm, turning his rabbit's eyes up and exposing his jugular. When the hand is taken away, the bowing man stands. I cannot see Frater's face, but I can see his; and whatever is in Frater's eyes is enough to have this man apoplectic with relief. “Who all know of her?”
“Just me, Monseigneur – effectively.”
“What does that mean, père?”
“Are you concerned, Frater, with what the mother knows?”
Unable to stop myself, I glance to my right, and see Wadjet in her form as Uraeus crown atop the Egyptian hieroglyphic-girl.
S – Is he talking about you?
The girl places a finger to her lips with one hand and points at the conversation with the other.
When I look back, it resumes as though the priests had been waiting for my attention.
Frater chuckles darkly, and the metaphorical hairs at the back of my neck are tickled with recognition. “No. No, I do not. Show her to me.”
They turn and disappear into the transept. A moment later, I have followed them.
They're standing before a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. “It will take a miracle for her to survive the winter,” the père says, shaking his head, his hand either unconsciously or ironically on his distended belly. “Not enough food for little mouths this year. Most striking blue eyes you've ever seen, though – don't you think, Monseigneur?”
The senior priest doesn't say anything. He just looks at the little bundle, balanced almost precariously on a stone altar. I still can't see his face – only that half of the père's which is turned to look, like a boy hoping for praise, to his frater.
“She is what you were looking for? Frater?”
“Robert—“ I turn from the scene to Wadjet. “Is this really what you want?” The serpent asks, and I am glad that she has not chosen to wear a human face – I do not want to be able to read what that look is meant to mean.
S – It is. What does he want with her?
“You know what he wants with her.” The girl puts a hand on her hip like I'm the biggest idiot in the world.
S – Yeah, yeah. You know the reason I didn't spend as much time around my wife as I could was that look?
When I turn back to the priests and baby Metus, I am once more swallowed in the infinite black of the Void. I hadn't expected to find myself here – but maybe I should have. Wadjet is nowhere to be seen.
“No body this time?” I ask the Void. “What does it mean?”
“It doesn't mean anything,” Wadjet says from everywhere and nowhere.
“I don't believe you. Also – I don't care. Metus – they're that little girl? So that means—“
“That little girl is made into the monster Metus, Robert. Yes.”
“It means that that was the Grand Magus.”
“Of course it does. Don't be stupid. Who else would it have been?”
I look into the void, in no way turning what is not my head to look about me – but convincing myself of motion enough to believe that I am. Then I stop. Wadjet is not going to show herself to me. Not this time. Not by my doing this.
“A little orphan girl,” I muse, looking down at a rectangle image of the swaddled bundle suspended in the space before me like I were still there. Like I might have snatched her up and run away. And maybe I might have. Maybe I still can if I—
“All she wanted was to live. It's not your fault, little baby. Did you even get a name? What did they call you, before... before Metus? It can't be your fault. You cannot have chosen this. You could not have been born for... this. You couldn't be. What god would be that cruel?”
“We're all that cruel, Robert.”
I turn from little baby Metus to find Wadjet in her aspect as winged serpent, her feathers resplendent and cascading through every color of every possible spectrum in a magnificent facsimile of motion. I would fall to my knees with awe and wonder if I had them.
And then I'm sitting in the carriage again.
I'd done whatever I'd done to Lamiya. Wadjet's gone. I can't feel her in any sense – and the Rod is as still as stone and wood can be.
S – Interesting. I wonder how I'm doing that.
I don't know. But I do think that Wadjet might be right, all of a sudden: I need to rest about as badly as I ever have.
I try to fight it for a few minutes. I really should stay awake in case something happens. But what's going to happen? And who's going to thank me, in either case?
I don't know I've fallen asleep until I'm riding astride a saddle harnessed to Peitho's tail into battle.
* * * *
I awake with the sudden change in velocity. We've stopped. Where and for why are questions I'm not sure I want answered.
Ted opens the door and smiles wearily at me before he looks to Peitho and his entire body deflates to a concerning degree. There's not much to the man as it is.
“Ya didn't even give 'er your jacket, son? Come on, now.” He winces, shakes his head at me, closes the door. It hadn't even occurred to me – in large part because there used to be highly volatile chemicals in these pockets. As it is, this jacket is my—
Through the crack, Ted says, “Anyway— The horses gotta rest. We're at an inn. Got you an' the li'l lady rooms. Don't you worry about payin. It's all squared away.” He goes quiet long enough I think he might have left when he adds, “Look, I know it's none of mine, so I'm not gonna ask about it. But is she—“
“She's going to be fine,” I say. I don't know where the reassurance in my voice comes from, but it's there. Maybe I needed it too. “She's just sleeping. For how long... I don't know.”
“I see. Well, I was paid to get you back to Venice. And the way I see it, the faster we get, the more I made in the end, eh? So why don't you get her inside, in a bed.” With a sigh, he says, “And maybe I can see about gettin her some clothes.” I can't help but hear the muttered, “Today's generation of men don't know shit about takin care of a woman. Damn idiots,” as he walks away.
Damn idiot is right.
With a sigh, I get Peitho picked up in my arms and eventually laid down in a bed. It's not much, but it's enough. And, finding that I'm tired enough that it may as well not matter, I get myself into a bed, behind a locked door of my own, and the next thing I know I'm sitting in front of a fire with everyone I know.
We're listening to a man I do not know while he plays a stringed instrument and sings a song.
I can't hear him. The scene before me is as much a still image as it is anything. I know this is not real. Not really.
But I can remember the song like it's still playing. And maybe it is, somewhere – some time – in the universe.
I turn to look up at my father; but where there was a man there the last time I experienced this moment, there is now only the facsimile thereof – too-large just enough that I notice it, his bald, muscular body enameled all in shining jet darker than the darkness outside the fire's light, great black bat's wings folded almost considerately behind his back, long horns with piercing points curving high from his brow.
The Yaldabaoth regards me archly from the corner of his eye.
“You,” I say, “were not here this night.” My voice is my own, although my body has not looked this way for nearly or maybe exactly 20 years.
“You don't know that,” he says with a faraway smile, as though independently remembering this moment. And I hate him for it. His eyes then evidently find some interest in the dancing-flame sort of undulating quality to the scene around us. A mimicry at the life and motion and presence and activity of Reality as it is, I realize.
“You are not my father.”
The Yaldabaoth looks down at me, his neck jerking and jaw working as though I have deeply offended him. The jets of his eyes are laughing. Subtle are the creases in his gemstone features. “You don't know that, either.”
“I would know you if he were you.”
“You believe that,” he states. “You are accepting what you are – of what you are capable?”
I cross my little-boy arms over my chest. “I do not know what I am.” My voice is that of a five year-old. I try to ignore this fact. “But I know what I feel.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe you do not. Do you understand what you feel?”
“What do you want from me?”
“What do I want, Fulcrum?” You've never heard a god who could look like any number of archetypes but who chooses to look like the Lord of every Evil sound so innocent. “What I want is for you to take that—“ he points at my feet and I learn that the Rod is lying on the ground so that the serpent is turned away from me— “and I want you to give it back to Lamiya.”
“The Lamiya, you mean,” I correct him, feeling pretty clever.
“Do I?”
“You're lying to me.”
“Am I?”
The world around me shivers like the image in a struck mirror. Then I don't understand what I'm seeing anymore.
“Stop this,” I say, trying to focus on the horned face and hating it. My voice, at least, is my own again.
“This is your doing, son. Not mine. I am only a dream.”
“No. What do you really want?”
“What do you think it means that Jesus was immaculately conceived?” The Yaldabaoth is posed so that he is obviously musing and ignoring me – with his one arm supporting the other's elbow, his chin in that hand.
“What?” I nearly shout. “What does that mean?”
“It means born of a virgin.”
“I know what that means! What did that mean?”
The dirty, ruddy hair and the lank, pale skin of the Prometheus try wanly to smile at me. “Time to wake up, Robert.”
“No. Don't do this. Don't—“
“The choices are yours from here— Robert... uh, Mister Longshore?”
* * * *
I don't even have to open my eyes. I sense the room and know that Ted is trying to wake me through the door before the Yaldabaoth's words have even begun to echo in my head.
“Yeah, Ted,” I say. “I'm up. I'll take care of Peitho. You just—“ I'm sat up already, and now I open my eyes – and meet Ted's. He's come into my room. Guess he had a key, too. Probably smart. Unless he's somehow been flipped and I have to worry he's going to kill me in my sleep.
Might want to do something about that, actually.
The old man looks wrung out like a towel.
“Oh. Hey,” is what I say.
He nods, gives me an appraising look. “You alright, son? You look like shit.”
“I'm fine,” is what I say. “You alright? Tired?”
Ted shakes his head. Works his mouth. “I'm scared, son. Scared as I ever been.” Then he's gone, and I'm the one nodding with not much else to say.
S – Can't imagine I blame him.
R – He can't know that what did that to her isn't behind us.
S – You can't know it's not waiting for us anywhere we go. I should leave him out of it.
I – You're not carrying Peitho. Metus won't hurt the innocent.
S – I am innocent.
R – You are anything but innocent.
I – She warned you.
Metus did warn me. But I'm not sure that's who Instinct means. It doesn't really matter what they mean, though. Somehow, I feel like my whole life has been a warning against this very crossroads in my life. Like this is what it was all for.
S – Does believing that mean it's true?
The silence that meets this question is such that when I look to the Rod, hidden under my pillow, my first reaction is to imagine that Ted was in here because he has stolen it – even she isn't invading my mind. My second thought is that I wish he had because then I can just be done with it. My third, and final, is that I don't want to touch it because I don't want to talk to Wadjet.
Then I think that that's the kind of thing an insane person would think and I pick up the Rod.
“Good morning,” the serpent says, pantomiming a yawn and a stretch as it emerges from beneath the pillow.
Pretending I don't notice, I ignore her and head for the door.
“What is the plan, now, O mighty Fulcrum of Fate? You have what millions have sought – how will you use it?”
I stop outside Peitho's room and look down at the serpent.
“With what would you tempt me, demon?” I whisper.
The serpent recoils, then smiles as though waving a playful hand in front of her face. I want to smash her into the the wall. “They fear you because you are one of them, now.”
“Who?”
“Elohim.”
I look at the door, reading in the patterns of the wood no intelligible message.
I – That's what the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden.
R – Something like it.
S – Yes. I am aware. Thank you.
R – But what does it mean?
S – I don't know! That's what I imagined you for!
Sighing hard through my nose, not unlike a bull about to lose his mind, I push into the room. Peitho sleeps on her back, how I left her. It won't be another 600 years until images of Sleeping Beauty can fill my head – because it will be another 600 years before I describe this moment to the wrong person (and, wouldn't you know I don't even know who he is? Bastard steals my story, publishes it as Perceforest and the rest is history. Even Disney is making money off my life. Jesus, where did I go wrong?)
I guess that's what I'm telling this story to find out.
I am taken by the sight of her – as much now as then.
The blanket covers her to her chin. I can see the shape of her hands, folded on her navel, beneath it. She looks like she's awaiting her funeral.
“Well, Hero?” Wadjet asks, and I am reminded of the reality before me.
Stripping the blanket off Peitho's apparently lifeless from feels like a violation – until I see that she is no longer naked. Someone, my bet is the innkeeper's wife, has put her in a dress that almost fits. It's a dark green and too short by nearly a foot; but the work that went into sewing the piece is remarkable.
S - Someone made this dress for someone very special.
R – A mother made this for a daughter – probably a wedding or another important celebration. This is a priceless article.
R – The innkeeper's wife.
S – Very sentimental of us.
“How is she?”
I turn to the sound of an unfamiliar woman's voice. And just the woman I was accusing of kindness.
“The dress is beautiful,” I say, honestly – the only thanks I can think to give. Too busy trying not to imagine what might have happened if instead of a dress the woman had come in here with a knife.
The middle aged woman smiles, and her eyes brighten in a way I imagine they haven't since she was first married.
“I wore it – once. She's taller than I ever was,” the innkeeper's wife says, lifting her stooped shoulders. “But I didn't always have these.” She indicates her generous breasts and rear end with a devilish grin. “Danny didn't marry me 'n put seven healthy boys in me for my cookin, son. Aw. Don't get scared, now. I ain't had my girlish figure since boy three. Anyway, it's been all downhill since the first one.” She laughs, shoving me with her elbow.
“Not that you'd know anything about my cookin, no way. I got married in that dress. Believe it or not, it ain't seen the light o' day since. No daughters or daughters-in-law to put it on – if you cat my meaning.”
She's pantomiming breasts as big if not bigger than her own – as though her boys like ample women. Understood. Not sure how I could miss it.
“I might have known,” I say as much to myself as to keep the conversation moving. She tilts her head, so I explain: “The look in your eye when I— I've seen it before.”
“Oh? In her eyes –“ she gestures to Peitho – “or those of another?”
I am unsure what to make, either of the probing look in this strange woman's eyes or the question; so I answer it honestly.
“Another. I was married – once.”
“Only once? At your age, you look like you could have five or six of em behind you if you really wanted.”
I look at her, unsure if she's joking, and she makes a face – turning her eyes to the side and quirking her mouth – which suggests she isn't sure why she just said what she had. Almost like she'd opened her mouth to say something else and that's what came out instead.
S – Been there, done that. No worries.
“How did you get out of that?” She asks, putting her hand on my arm and drawing my eyes away from Peitho.
I hadn't realized I was looking at her again. Am I that impatient to get out of this conversation?
I shrug. “It's not funny, so I'm not going to make light of it.”
The woman nods.
“She thinks I'm dead.”
She laughs. “The love seriously died between you two.”
“It's not funny,” I say, trying not to laugh myself. “It's nothing like that. She doesn't want me dead.” I think, suddenly and against any will I might have, of Regina and Francis. She didn't kill him – did she? Did Peitho really do that? But she would have paid someone to eventually – that seems obvious to me, now. I should have seen. She probably would have asked me to do it.
R – Giorgio thinks you did.
S – Yeah, well, Giorgio thinks like an idiot if that's true.
“At least – I don't think she wants me dead,” I manage to say, keeping myself from simply trailing off into a pregnant and suspicious silence.
“Were you good to her?” The woman's eyes are tender, but she will judge whatever I say – has been judging everything I've said.
“I did my best.”
She nods. Giving me the briefest respite from her eyes. “But this woman—“ she nods at Peitho. “She stole your heart so you faked your death, taking only what you could fit in your pockets and leaving the rest for your widow by way of apology? Don't look so surprised,” she laughs. “I know your sort. You got a good heart and a tongue of gold. Girls never know what they're gettin into with you – but they always think they do.” She chuckles, fanning her hand in the air between us like my breath smells or something. “There ain't nothin new under the sun.”
“As true as that is,” I say, “you're wrong about one thing: I didn't leave my wife for—“ I almost call Peitho by her name, stopping myself without only the most barely-noticeable hitch – “her. I left to get away from her.”
The woman's eyes widen. “From the pretty young thing, that's where you were running. Interesting. She chose you, did she? And what does she want from you?”
“I don't know.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
There is a... tickling sensation at the base of my skull, like – like the pin-pricks of a waking limb, only I can't say for certain what sense it is that is numbed and suddenly stimulated.
I shrug. “That her home. To her mother.”
“And then you'll be safe from her?”
I look into the innkeeper's wife's eyes, and I do not understand what I see there. Her face is as scrutable as the swirls in the wood of the door.
S – A woman like her, you're never free from her.
“You know that with a woman like her you're truly never free from her. Not really. Not in life – not after. And what of you? What will you do next? After you've given her back to her mother for safe-keeping? After you have broken her heart and she has sworn vengeance against your eternal soul?”
I am taken aback by this.
S – She doesn't really think that—?
“I... don't know. I'll probably—“
“Go home to your wife and leave all this business behind? Go back to your hashish and your opium and your office?” She pushes out her lower lip like a pouting child.
I frown. She has to be guessing, right? “Yeah. Maybe. If she'll have me back.”
S – I really have got to get away from this woman.
“She was a good wife.”
“Yeah.”
“She loved you.”
“...Yeah.” I feel... really sleepy all of a sudden.
“Protect my daughter, Robert. Fulcrum. Or I will destroy you.”
Lamiya's voice exits the innkeeper's wife's lips, and I realize I am very nearly about to fall asleep right here on my feet. I can barely keep my eyes from rolling up into my head like those antique shutters you see in olde timey cartoons – let alone react.
“And bring me my Rod, you goddammed man.”
When I open my eyes – hadn't I just blinked? – I am alone except for Peitho. I turn to her.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” I mutter. “Before anything worse happens.”
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