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(text of a pencil-written note found on the disfigured body of a
male of indeterminate age, preserved in Arctic ice for almost 200 years)
He told me I came to life on the night of the second of April, 17– .
But I contest this – yes, contest it! I remember events previous to that wild night. And some of those memories of a distant past are more lucid, vivid, to me than these delirious days since. Sometimes I’m convinced that I am walking through a dream, almost certain that momentarily I shall wake up in the early dawn, with The Girl next to me.
And then I remember, lucidly, vividly, that I murdered The Girl, remember I closed my hand over her mouth to stop her foul imprecations, remember I closed my hands around her throat after she snapped her teeth deep into my hand and drew warm wet blood.
I still have the scar. There. Still preternaturally fresh – a memory of her frowning mouth.
My poor misbegotten rose – that she should be damned to find me. Out of all the many men who went in and out of her doors, the one she fancied best was by far the worst. Born bad. Born to be bad.
I went to the gallows with a smug satisfaction. I had maneuvered her murderer into giving himself up, for the most part genuinely unaware it was I my own self – my own own self, my own dark self – that I had betrayed. I had lured the murderer into confessing the entire crime, had made him hold his hand aloft in the courtroom, the hand which bore my gold haired Magdalene’s bite.
As the sentence was passed, as the judge donned his black cap, I suddenly, absurdly, recalled a romantic fancy she had – that we would go to the Americas together and start a new life, now that the war with England had been resolved and…
They hanged me -
A sudden rush downwards – almost exhilarating – I might have almost squealed like a child on a swing – until the sudden nonsensical snap to a stop and a notion that something dreadful had happened and then the gray cloud pouring into my eyes, nose, brain …
…and then being aware of sleeping – or not sleeping – being aware simply of being aware. An I that knew it was an I – but ignorant of its origins, its circumstance. An Adam on his first day in the world.
And God said:
“It’s alive!”
The voice shocked me into sentience. My eyes had been open – but now they saw. And the first thing they saw was a face. His face.
My ears had been open – but now they heard. And the first thing they heard was his voice. His voice.
“It’s alive!”
Those sounds – I could not grasp their meaning yet – imbedded themselves in my reconstituted head. I rolled the sounds around and around, repeating, refraining. Backward, forward. For days, for weeks, for months after – those sounds. From his mouth. To my ears.
It was a hot Bavarian June day which threatens a hot mosquito-rich August. I sat at the South Garden table of the grounds – sipping a sweet wine, hearing the bees, itching at the new exquisite suit of clothes, reading Milton’s Book – savouring the matter in its original language, savouring the mere ability to read and apprehend, again.
And those sounds came thundering into my mind – it’s alive. It’s alive!
He had meant me!
I did not know until that moment – that moment – as Satan looked round with baleful eyes – that he had meant me. I was it, it that was alive.
Oh, he had called me his child many times, explained his work, even explained how I fit into his scheme of things, but I hadn’t until that moment…
Cold sweat poured from my hairless torso and I tried to swallow and I could feel the weigh of my great cold tongue like piece of bland fruit in my mouth and I knocked the wine glass over and I jumped up letting Milton go and I had to tear off that fine new coat, the cloth on my skin smothering. Smothering.
I strode into the Baron’s woods. An observer would have though I was set with a firm purpose, maybe struck by a sudden memory of a vital, neglected duty. But I knew nothing of where I was, what I was doing, why.
Only those words:
“It’s alive.”
We went into the woods together – those words and I. Chased each other deep into the woods. It would be a challenge for the philosophers to divine whether it was I who chased the words or the words that chased me. That would be a challenge for the philosophers.
But eventually we threw our lot in together, the words and I, and we holed up in the damp boulder caves near the stream. Crouching in the muck, watching the woods with dread, I listened to the words – as if spoken with my own cold mouth.
It is alive. It is alive. It is alive.
The rest of the story you may know. If not, it is no matter and you ought to count this letter as the last testament of a criminal and madman, another of God’s born sinners, as a last petition of grievance by one more justly punished rebel angel. As the shout before the condemned man is hauled to the gallows. The SHOUT! THE SHOUT!
I grow cold.
Yes, I – even I – grow cold.
And I who need never sleep grow tired.
And there is no time. I who have lived now two lifetimes tell you – there is no time! This low latitude sun creeps along the horizon, as if ashamed to meet me head on, and whether it is beginning or ending the day, I cannot tell.
I can hear the men from here. I hear the groaning of their ship strangled in the pack ice. They have heard me too, playing at being the Unearthly Thing. Calling to them. How they must have trembled in their chilly berths!
All but one of them.
I must be ready for him when he comes.
But now!
Ah, now! Now! Look I see Him! I see Him!
My Master comes across the ice. His face is wet with tears.
My hands need no warmth to do their work. No light, nor desire, nor mind. Let my hands do the work they were made to do. My Mster only need come to me, my hands shall do the rest. He is here. My master is here.
I free my hands
Now I free my hands to do the work for which God made them
Now he was homeless. Ho hum.
Where would he live?
Nowhere? Or live like Thoreau? Live like the lilies of the field? Or…
Ho! Ho! How great and perfect was the white light bouncing off the flowers and lawns of this evergreen city! The light! And the eye-cleansing breeze!
…He wandered the park in awe, with a tuna sandwich, well-pleased with creation and unafraid.
The breeze had lofted enterprising seagulls inland from the Pacific and their wings were translucent Japanese paper transmitting the sunlight.
Gulls are carrion birds. He loved to watch them. They hopped and squalled and squawked and they devoured waste. They perched on the rims of oil barrel trashcans and dipped in and spread refuse about and they walked and they flew, and it was strange to see so many, many animals – animals, wild animals – walking around and flying around here in his busy city on his busy lunch hour.
He supposed they must be at it all day, though he only saw them during his brief break. Unless they took only one hour for lunch too. Possible?
He finished the sandwich, wiped his hands with the paper bag, and threw the bag into an oil barrel trashcan, then walked the asphalt path circumnavigating the park’s eponymous centerpiece – “The La Brea Tar Pits”.
Idiotic name. As every Angeleno will be pleased tell you. “La Brea” means “the tar”. So to say “The La Brea Tar Pits” is to say “The The Tar Tar Pits”.
The ancient smell.
The ancient petrol smell of the past – the tar. It brought to his mind notions of new roads and ways and of tanned men in filthy jeans – Mexican men – working in hours of sunshine laying boiling tar on boiling streets. Men far from home, standing on, dragging tools across, other men’s roofs.
He visited the Tar Pits with his dad when he was seven. His father had taken him to the L.A. County Museum of Art which stood hard by. He didn’t remember much about the museum, except that it seemed to be under construction – scaffolding and plastic sheeting dangling like banners and loud sounds of workers. But he remembered clearly walking past The La Brea Tar Pits. Stopping with his father and peering through the fence at something that was not a pool of water.
The place’s Master Pit is an oblong pond about a hundred meters by fifty meters that vents, at all hours, natural gas. Not far below the surface of the pond, a few feet maybe, there lurks an oozing caldera of hot tar that presses up from below the earth, pushing out into the world through a geological peristalsis. Every moment of every day for a hundred thousand years this football field swollen fat with petroleum, expels countless volumes of dreadful emissions. Plop, plop, plop – all across the surface great bubbles billow up. It is a carboniferous zit that has come to a head and continues to ooze – and to ooze.
And feverish mosquito men dip probosci into the veins and channels and underflows below and live on the riches sucked out.
He remembered seeing the Tar Pits. But more than the Tar Pits, he remembered seeing the mastodons. Who could forget seeing mastodons?
On the other side of the fence, fifty feet from where he stood back then, from where he stood right now, was a mastodon. It had the general build and hide of an Indian elephant, but the rustic lower jaw jutted far forward and the tusks were overlong, stretching, competing with the trunk.
The mastodon, an enraged grey mountain at the pond’s edge, bellowed helplessly as he watched his mate, water halfway up her back, sinking into the hidden tar. At the bull’s side stood a big-eared, big-eyed calf, little trunk worming out, mimicking its father, no sense that its mother, huffing and grunting twenty feet away, was lying in her grave.
The mother bellowed, struggling, trying to shrug the tar off as she would throw a tenacious predator. Pushing tugging and tugging and bellowing and tugging with strength enough to plucks trees out of the ground. And then with a guttural bellow, exhausted stopping to gasp like a furnace. Then – despite having torn her own muscles with the massive effort – doing the same thing again.
The Tar Pit permits movement in only one direction. Down.
The harder she tried to live, the sooner she would die. Soon the tar would begin to cup her great barrel body and the weight of it would vise her ribcage closed. Her massive diaphragm and lungs would fight valiantly – an oak defying an avalanche…and then…and then…and then…she would be suffocated long before she vanished beneath the surface. The constrictors – boa, python, anaconda – do not kill by crushing, but contain their prey in their coils and wait till the prey exhales before drawing subtly tighter. And then tighter with next exhalation, and the next, and the next, and so their prey, with no space left for air to be, suffocates. The tar pit constricts identically.
Condors circled as she died. The first to land nipped out the glassy, barely blinking eyes. Dire wolves might run the length of the pit, back and forth, barking, hunger-eager, but wise to the danger, well aware that this was not a free meal, but they remained in the area, waiting to feed on the other carrion feeders who would be lured by the mastodon’s cries.
One condor, hopped off the mastodon carcass and taking to the air caught just a bare wingtip in the tar, enough to stutter the take off, requiring an extra push off with a foot, which touched tar, the wings touched the tar too. Down he went, flapping like an idiot in the tar, doomed too.
The bull stood by all night and all the next day. Pacing and bellowing. Running off the wolves time and again. Trumpeting impotently at the dancing condors dipping into the cow’s slowly disappearing mouth, tearing pieces from her broad tongue.
Eventually, the wolves overrun him. They take down the calf first. They kill it. The father kills many wolves first, but they did kill the calf and dragged it away in pieces. The bull bleeds. He will die there by the side of the pit.
Animal eats animal eats animal. Living things eat living these. Horrible way to die. But this is how a lion’s share of creatures meet their end – murdered by a fellow beast, eaten by his fellow, chewed swallowed and digested by his fellow. Sometimes murdered beforehand. Sometimes left to die in the stomach.
He stood looking through the fence, with a few curious others, peering down at a slow motion commotion at the tar pit’s edge.
A big round black man grabbed was grabbing a healthy young girl by the waist, anchoring her.
The girl’s gloved hands were immersed in the black pool.
Periscoping from the surface was the head of a bird.
A seagull had somehow gotten stuck, badly stuck, in the tar pit.
The girl birthed the gull from the pit, pulling it, working it gently like a tooth – pulling and releasing then pulling and releasing then pulling and wrapping it in a white smock – exactly like the one she had on. She was a doctor? She was a veterinarian? She was a scientist?
After a long miserable time of it, the gull came free. It trailed a tail of black tail like blackblack paper, or syrup or licorice frosting, or like a snake with half a dozen shiny black skinny tails stretching. Its hooked, long beak was harshly stained.
The girl and man set the bird in a clean cardboard box – “Waste Management”
“Will the bird live?” he asked.
The woman pointed her hand at him and seesawed it left and right.
A small crowd of men and women and children too had gathered, peering in at the animal in the box – unwhite beaked head jutting from a kelpy black web.
The lid was shut. The box was taken away.
He chose to believe this:
The doomed gull, like its condor forefathers, had been diving down to feed upon the paralyzed fiberglass mastodon in the pit. Realizing its error at the last instant, it aborted and ditched onto what was surely only the calm surface of a pond.
Why don’t women burn in Hell?
All across the Hells we see only wicked men condemned to endless tortures for their missteps in life. Sisyphus and Tantalus – those two homos – for a start – and their pal Ixion, the least famous of the menage a trois.
King Ixion, after a long period of resentment against his father-in-law, killed him. The father-in law-had stolen some of Ixion’s horses because Ixion had ducked paying the promised fee for marrying his daughter, Dia. Eventually Ixion went insane from the guilt of what he’d done – the murder, that is, of wife’s father. It wasn’t murder in and of itself that was so wrong. It was the soiling of the sacrosant social structure, the violation of the universally accepted norms. He’d spat upon courtly etiquette, you see. So what happened then…
…well, the story gets complicated, which is why we don’t hear about Ixion much these days.
King Ixion was summoned to Heaven to stand before the Best & Biggest God, Zeus, who gave him a chance to make amends. Instead, Ixion made a pass at Zeus’s wife, Hera. So Zeus, in an act very passive-aggressive for the King Of The Gods, created a cloud that looked exactly like Hera. One night, he floated the cloud into Ixion’s bedroom – in the newly redecorated East Wing of his palace – and Ixion tried to fuck it.
Not just tried. He did fuck it. He fucked the cloud. And Zeus caught it on camera – Olympus was known to be the most surveilled palace in the Heavens at that time.
Caught in The Act, Ixion jumped out of bed, pointing his finger at the cloud, saying “She lead me on!”
Zeus shot him and – because he’s King Of The Wide Blue & Black Heavens and can do anything he wants – sentenced King Ixion to be strapped to the back of a flying saucer for all eternity.
This spinning wheel of fire – spinning, spitting sparks – would sail across the sky again and again and again and again…and Ixion, well, he would just have to put up with it, wouldn’t he?
In nine months, the Hera-shaped cloud gave birth to the race of Centaurs – half-man, half-horse. This makes one wonder: From whence did these equine genes originate? And why in Hades would Zeus keep a cloud shaped like his wife around for nine months?
In later times, as the Heavens became more crowded, Ixion’s blazing bed was pulled down and transported to the Underworld. Probably, Gloomy Pluto Lord Of The Dead bought it for a conversation piece – the ultimate wagon-wheel coffee table/novelty lamp combo.
Illuminating the caverns of the underworld with his torment, I bet Ixion missed sailing through the clouds.
In other news: Ixion’s wife Dia gave birth to a son fathered by Zeus. This royal son became a great horseman. With a steed between his legs and the open sky smiling down, he wandered the wide plains of Northern Greece alone and happy.
I’ve heard people say that the Star over Bethlehem was a nova, that it could’ve been a nova.
“Nova”, in Latin – mother tongue of the foreign occupiers of that town – means “new” or “strange”. A nova is a sun that has shuffled off its mortal coil, a sun with the life squeezed out of it.
Others say the Christmas Star was a comet – a mighty ball of sludge and ice that starts to steam as it nears the sun. Comets have always foretold disasters – The Fall Of Jerusalem to the Romans, The Fall Of England to the Normans. The ancient Chinese too, I’m told, had high regard for the celestial doomsayers.
In fact, a comet, all reasonable people agree, was the gut-shot that doubled our Earth right over about 66 million years ago and allowed furry little meta-lizards to grow big, use tools, and dominate all. This catastrophe we have dubbed “The K-T Extinction Event”.
The Romans though, who wrote everything down, including:
“Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
i.e.,…
“Et haec quidem humanis consiliis providebantur. mox petita dis piacula aditique Sibyllae libri, ex quibus supplicatum Vulcano et Cereri Proserpinaeque ac propitiata Iuno per matronas, primum in Capitolio, deinde apud proximum mare, unde hausta aqua templum et simulacrum deae perspersum est; et sellisternia ac pervigilia celebravere feminae quibus mariti erant. sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus adfixi aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies in usum nocturni luminis urerentur. hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens. unde quamquam adversus sontis et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur.”
… they do not make mention of a Great Comet in 4 B.C.
Some say the Star was a spaceship, looking down upon the young woman, who had been brought aboard some months before and – and she thought it was a dream – received inside her belly a Being who would have access to all its father’s heavenly powers and walk the world in the form of a man – and give wisdom and explain what was important and what was not important.
That low slung star.
The evening star. The morning star.
Did the ancients know that the evening and morning stars were one and the same? That Lucifer The Light was Venus Goddess Of Love?
The fallen beloved brother of Christ. Oh, my sweet Lucifer! And the stinking pagan cauldron that is Venus, that is Aphrodite, that comes on the beach via shellfish. O God, keep them separate in my manly brains!
The Hell that Lucifer was cast into was lonely according to some, chock-a-block and smelling of burning bacon according to others. The Hell that Venus and her marbled uncles knew was utilitarian, necessary, cold, and gleaming with jewels.
When I arrived here, and I looked out and saw what was illuminated by the Star, I saw both of these Hells and many, many more, above and beneath them, before and behind them.
In one of the Hells I saw a Star.
Travelling by gray-blue morning and purple twilight, a caravan made time through the desert – chasing the ghost of Alexander who 320 years earlier had staggered back along this route and died drunk and resentful, the world conquered but so what.
The Star eased westward and soft-lit the way for the long train of concubines and double-humped camels, retainers and men-at-arms. A Wise King of the East headed this host, a mighty one who had taken his crown from the severed head of his own father. This Wise King ruled ten million people in his country and another ten million in the neighboring country.
He travelled west, following this loosed Star, advised by his keenest seers. Again and again, in trances they had told him to chase the bright sign westward, where he would find One who would be King Of Kings and Lord Of Lords, who would one day rule a thousand nations, to whom every other king would kneel.
This Wise King Of The East, and his assembly, had already marched a year and still the Star showed no sign of stopping.
His men-at-arms rebelled and were executed and replaced. Concubines who began the journey virgins had given birth – and the sons anointed and the daughters put out for the sky to eat. Fever had culled the host once – and then again.
And still the Wise King Of The East, ever resolute, ever fixed in purposed – like the North Star, quiet and fixed at the center of the ever-changing cosmos – still he pressed on with such determination that it might be believed that he himself could drag behind him the entire mass of his caravan on his own lone strength and will.
He would follow the star to its destination, however afar. He would. He would be ushered into the presence of this One destined to rule all the earth.
Yes, and when he was announced, when he was brought before this One…then…on this, the oracles and seers always kept silent, none would answer. They swooned into the weeks-long coma which concluded their prophetic trances or they held together their lips so tight the mouth and jaw around went white and blue with the rageful effort of it, the eyes rolling back into the head.
The silence from the oracles was as clear an instruction as any openly spoken. What was to be done next was a matter for the King alone to decide – for the King and the Sky God at his right shoulder.
So the Wise King of the East would face the King of Kings and he would do as he had always done. He would speak and act as King, his voice would itself be the voice of all powers in the Sky and the Earth, and his action would be all the action of Water and Nature. His would be a decision without fault, perfect and true and unquestionable. Incontrovertible. Yes.
But as the King paced sleepless in his hot tent, peeking at the progress of the blazing afternoon, where the star, hanging in the hazy blue sky, still shone bright in the West like a signal mirror flashing from a distant ship, he was afraid.
Every day that passed, every week, his unease about this meeting with the King of Kings blossomed, taking on a hundred grotesque shapes, turning hopes to fears, plans to terrors, mighty pronouncements falling from his lips like lightning bolts turned to the spent heaving of a drunk.
“Alexander died in this waste. Alexander, who conquered my very own grandfathers, even he, he died on this road.”
The Wise King from the east drew the door, and turned to face the blackness in the tent and was blind for a minute.
He called his armorer and bid him again make ready his arms and armor, lest the day should come upon them unaware. He told his captain to drill the men, yes, even in this heat, to be prepared for an encounter with the King of Kings.
Then, one night, encamped outside Jerusalem Crossroads Of The West, at the edge of that vast kingdom ruled by Augustus, the Wise King of the East received his riders, who had at Damascus changed their camels for stallions.
The Star, the riders said, had settled over a town an hour hence.
Many had seen the Star. Many, curious, had come to make of it what they could or would. But in this town there was no sign of a host, there were no banners, no evidence of any Great King there at all, so the riders said.
Without the thousand hard miles behind them, the two riders might have been vexed, mutinous. But now all that was left in them was grief and despair.
There was no one of name in this town, which was called Bethlehem.
The occupying army of Augustus and local worshippers of Yahweh – a cousin of the Wise King’s own Sky God – and that mocking Star, yes, were there, but no King of Kings, no. No one of royal birth at all.
“Oh, your Mightiness has been deceived!” they lamented.
The Wise King of the east thanked them for their service and then had them beheaded there in his own tent and then he displayed the heads in a special pavilion with their four eyes in a porcelain bowl. He decreed that any man or woman or slave or beast in his caravan who should despair or lose hope would meet the same end and as immediately.
But in secret, the King’s own faith flickered. Until this day his concern – his fear, yes – had been how he might act upon meeting the future king of all kings, but his faith in the vision, in the guidance of his oracles, who had shown him the right way time and time again, was so strong as to be a thing out of mind. But now…
“Perhaps they have been lied to. The spirits, the demons and the dead, who run screaming in and out of the shadows of their prophetic vision, they have been playing games. Or worse. Has the Sky God brought me here as Olive-Eyed Athena lured cursed Alexander astray, to kill him in his bed? Has the Great Winged Benevolence lured me away from the green valleys and snow capped peaks of home to make me a fool and hand my kingdom to my enemies in my absence? Does my home palace burn even now? Oh, please let it not be so! Please let it not be so!?”
And he watched with a steely vulture’s stare his subjects pass before the severed heads and the porcelain bowl of eyes, watched as they bowed deeply and silently yes, silently – yes, even the relatives and friends of these two faithless riders, bowing deeply and silently.
That night in his prayer tent, as a priest chanted and incense sent up smoke, the Wise King prayed for guidance and courage, prayed and prayed, until he fell asleep.
Still unaccustomed to travelling by day, he was awake before dawn, covered by his servants, with his priest still chanting
He threw off the covers and called his grooms and had his best horse readied, and he called his body servants and they washed him and shaved him and rouged his lips and braided his beard and lined his eyes with kohl made from the rarest tree in his kingdom.
He put on silks of red and blue and gold from China and a superb sword from farther east still, and he brought for a gift a jar of myrrh – that precious ointment used most especially to anoint the dead.
He would stand before this King. And he would offer the gift of myrrh – used to anoint the dead. And he would let the Sky God inspire him how he would.
And if there was no King Of Kings at all, he would order his archers to shoot the star out of the sky. And would command his seers to eat each other alive.
The Wise King with four hand-picked fighting men and a valet and a fast rider entered the city of Bethlehem while it was still dark.
Bethlehem was spilling over in the middle of a season of census in which Augustus’s subjects were being summed by bureaucrats across his kingdom. The bureaucratic necessity was that each man must return, at his own expense, to his birthplace, to be properly counted.
It was a mad, jovial, rustic mix. Reunited friends who had not seen each other in a decade, traded stories and confessed old hurts. Marriage arrangements were made, murders committed, promising business ventures embarked upon.
The Star hung low over a hillside of sheds and huts at the edge of town.
The Wise King and his bodyguard wound past campfires and up alleys, navigating by the Star above, until finally they cast no shadow before them or behind them or to the left of or the right. And the light – seeming brighter than ever – fell straight down on their heads like a slight warm rain.
They stood there before the open door of a stable, lit inside by a few small lamps.
The Wise King positioned his bodyguards outside and went in.
The place stank of livestock and human excrement. And of blood too. A couple drunken thieves lounged in the straw at one end. In a stall, a man hurriedly copulated with a silent woman who held herself up with one hand, held aside her gown with the other.
In the lamplight sat an adolescent girl, pale and fragile. A man, a tradesman of some kind, crouched by her in the fluttering gloom. The girl held a tiny bundle. A swaddled newborn. An old prostitute sat with them, giving the girl a remedy mixed from vinegar and herbs.
A voice from the shadows, thickly accented by a language closer to his own that to that spoken in this country:
“You have come for an audience with the King of Kings.”
“I seek him,” he replied.
And it was then – called upon to act, called upon to be a king – that the Wise King from the east felt all the weight leave him and felt his shoulders grow strong and his spine gathering up the power of a mighty bow used by the heroes of old. Yes, just as he knew it would.
“There he is.”
In the shadows nearby, two brother Kings of distant lands knelt gleaming with wealth equal to the rest of Bethlehem combined,. One had come from the far west, a Black King from the land of gold and precious wood and ivory. The other, from a bleak land north of the Wise King’s own – a man who, with an army at his back, would have been the Wise King’s enemy. But the present circumstance brought all three to the same befuddled low.
The Wise King stood and approached the weary girl and the tradesman father. And he offered them the jar of myrrh, that ointment used to anoint the dead.
The father took it and bowed deeply and silently and gratefully.
The Wise King turned back to the door, back to wear the other two kings, the Black King and the King of the Bleak North, knelt still.
The Wise King made subtle and secret gestures to his bodyguard crouching outside.
They moved quickly, drawing silent oily swords.
The Black King’s neck was chopped through in one, the heavy blade mixing skin and ivory and flesh and gold into one mess.
The King of the Bleak North lost all sensation in his body as his spine was hacked through, lost all sense of mind when his skull was halved like a dense fruit.
The girl and her husband, before they too were cut down, blinded by the lamps, knew only that someone was again approaching them.
The thieves and anonymous lovers were killed too with equal speed and silence.
The corpses were thoroughly disposed of – every joint disconnected, all distinguishing features annihilated.
The swaddled child, King of Kings, dozing through it all, was hurried off.
The Wise King took the child home, back to his palace in the East.
The King’s own concubines nursed the boy.
And in time, the boy became a mighty king, became the mightiest of kings. His throne was made of ivory, gold and rubies, and all around it were displayed the shattered skulls of his enemies. He had many wives and many sons and he conquered all the nations and he was worshipped as a god.
There are no circles in Hell.
Nothing is so beautiful.
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