South is an Aksumite saint, what the Greeks would call an Aithiopian – though they would call me the same. He walks through a burning city, and on his shoulders ride a boy and a girl. In his belt is tucked a painter’s brush. If I had to trust any of them, it would be this one, though something in the single line of his mouth as it is drawn begs me not to. He has enough to carry already. I wonder if the maker of this thing put himself into the image. Painters are apt to do that, in quest of immortality.
And then we come to the east panel, which is me.
In the portrait I am younger, and made a queen – oh, balls, I think I’m supposed to be Tarset – and I stand in stark opposition to a spirit, an ugly thing that the artist has rendered in a succession of touches so that it is rising out of the landscape. Each stroke is barely more than an outline, a ripple in the paint, and yet together they produce a twisted, stork-legged shadow which both reaches out to grasp me and recoils from my touch. The demon from my dream. And looking across the Chamber I can see – because this banquet would not be complete without one more course – the reflection of this image in the first panel. East and west are different, but the arrangement of pieces is the same. One reflects the other, or follows from it. In the conventional flow of time, west follows east. The sun rises and sets in that natural sequence. But in the Chamber of Isis, time is said to be malleable and truth may be reversed.
Said by me.
So am I leaving behind the horrid captivity of spiders and eyes for dominion? Or is that table to be my fate?
Perhaps I am being too eager to see disaster. The faces of dreams are malleable, and the recollection of them even more. How much of last night’s sleep have I just now imagined, seeing this? Perhaps it is all so much coincidence, and my likeness is here plucked out of a crowd, used for no more significant reason than Tarset must have some face and mine will do. Does my fear give the painting familiarity? Or does it spark my denial?
I make myself look again, look closer.
There.
No.
Yes.
There.
No doubt.
Anger flares in me, sharp and hot. The artist’s brush has lingered over this, to make it perfect. Clutched in the demon’s grip: Adeodatus as an infant, and his skin already marked with meridians that carve his soul into five parts.
This cannot be about me. I have no enemies so big, so wide, so wealthy. If I did, they could just snuff me out and move on. Unless, I suppose, this enemy is so vast as to see no difference between this excess and a simple knife in the gut. Perhaps I have a great destiny, and it offends some deity or other, and so this is my pre-emption? But once again: to what possible end? What could be worth this?
I turn again, and the anger drains away, replaced with sadness, the natural grief of one human being for another, however unknown. The end point of the plot – or is he, damn it, the commencement? – lies on the floor.
Cornelius Severus Scipio occupies the silver surface in the centre of the room, his eyes staring upwards at the goddess. Scipio the hero, the farm boy from a collateral line of a high family, who became a soldier like no other: legion champion with a sword, a spear, a dagger, with almost anything you name. People said his true father must have been Mars, or the Archangel Michael in his warlike raiment. They said that to see him fight was to see the business of war taken to a higher form. They said he’d fought the Visigoths to a standstill from among the ranks, then challenged them to find a fighter who could match him one on one. When no one could, a whole army – five times our numbers, or maybe ten – just went back into the forest. People will say a lot of things about a fellow who is cousin to the Pope and drinking buddy of the Eastern Emperor. They’ll say a lot, but not that much, so he must have been quite something.
He’s still young, and handsome. Even slack and staring, his face is lovely, and argues for a ready wit.
Well, if the Chamber were real, Scipio might be returned to life by some sainted alchemist with a close understanding of the ritual and practice of deep religious magic. Here, in this place, such a magus could work miracles to awe the world – or merely raise one man from the dead, by the grace of God. Or perhaps two, if I might beg a boon. Why not? What price would I not pay for such a thing? If the Chamber were real. And yet I stand in it, among it. I am branded on to it and it is filled by me, fleshed by me or through me. Perhaps it is real: perhaps I was drafted in my cups by some angel, and this appalling mockery of hope needs only faith to make it a true holy place. But even if it were so, where in modern Carthage would you begin to find someone like that? Someone of such deep knowledge, faith and daring? I look around the room for a hidden holy fool – and see them all looking back at me. That misplaced, absurd expression on their faces: is that hope? What could they be hoping for, in this place?
In this place.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
I stare about at the lie that is the Chamber of Isis, then down at the dead man. I look straight at him for the first time, taking in the shape of his death, and feel the final blow land in my gut.
Cornelius Severus Scipio, beneath his clothes, has been cut cleanly into five pieces.
*
My son called me ‘Mother Make Right’, and I didn’t. I wasn’t there and I couldn’t and the world was simply bigger than I could carry on my shoulders. I was not enough. He believed in me and I betrayed him. There must be a door between the real world and the godly one, and if there is it must be found in desperation and love. It is known to all of us, that feeling of immanence: the certainty that there is a missing limb, invisible and ineluctable, that answers the need of the soul. The heart can lift mountains and God answers prayers. I failed because I could not prise my chest wide enough to make miracles.
When Adeodatus died, Augustine sent him home to me in a coffin full of honey, so that I could bury him or burn him as I chose, in the country where he was born. He wrote that he would follow later, and attend if I would permit it. I did not wait upon his endless episcopal tasks, and in the event he was delayed for months, so I had not even the satisfaction of denying him an ending. I remember I opened the lid, cleaned the honey from his skin, and spoke the words, and cried, then put him down once more in his box. A true Christian might give him to the soil, but I’d not have him rot. I remember that the honey smelled of rosemary, with the faintest whisper of raw meat and piss.
It wasn’t a cruelty, to pack him so, and it must have cost a fortune. The soul of honey is so dry that a body submerged in it does not decay. Adeodatus looked like a saint, his skin clear and his strong body still round and supple. His eyes were closed; I think Augustine had ordered them sealed. Eyes are brutal. Death comes into them so very quickly as the humours cloud, and I would have gone a little mad seeing the bloom of corruption in that face. It was, I suppose, the last kind thing Adeodatus’s father ever did for me, the funeral of our love as well as our son.
Perhaps that was the right choice. I cannot imagine what it would have been to see him standing there in the midst of us, in his fine robes, granting the love and forgiveness that is his calling to those who should expect them of him most personally, given not from the soul or the intellect but from the bone. It was neither Christ nor Monica that took Augustine from us, but Augustine himself, and it is Augustine who pursues himself with dreams of hell, and Augustine who condemns himself in the night for his sins, and Augustine who bids him turn his face away. It is Augustine who cannot trust in the mercy of the God whose mercy he expounds, and must crawl upon his face for absolution when he has done no wrong save that which he believes is duty. It is Augustine whose soul is growing more and more like honey, so hungry and dry, and Augustine whose heart is preserved and dead in a sweetness that brings no relief.
My son died of a fever. It came on him one night between Milan and Hippo Regius, and by morning he was gone. ‘God has called him home,’ Augustine wrote to me, but I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that every one of us still alive is less lov
ed? Is this one of those Christian riddles, that the priests teach and the old women who see clearly do not understand, that God’s love can be equal for us all and yet at the same time so great for Adeodatus that the King of Kings must needs have him back before I could embrace him again? Augustine says this is an example of my selfishness, and perhaps it is. But if I am selfish, then what is God, that is everywhere and in everything, that is eternal, yet He couldn’t wait another month for my son? He, God, is in me, and my arms could have wrapped the boy, and that surely would have been likewise God welcoming him home. Is there even a word for the perfection of selfishness to an elixir that the whole universe must drink, and call it love?
And here now is poor, stupid, handsome Scipio, and his eyes already have the white and black flowers in them, and I can smell the same damn smell of meat. Is this predestination? Is this why Adeodatus was taken? So that here, in this moment, I would make the decision I am making? Is that the mysterious way we hear about, that I am spurred to do justice for Scipio by a divine injustice I can never redress? Did I meet Augustine in an artist’s studio where I stood naked for a sculptor who had designs on a rather closer encounter, and did I smile at him and desire him so acutely, because I was constructed from before my birth to want him so that the product of our passion and his abandonment of me would die, and thus lead me by the relentless mathematics of love to this choice? Is that what free will is: the right to be flogged to moral action by a deity who could make the world a paradise merely by speaking His desire?
They say that God is merciful, and His mercy is like agony because we are inverted by sin. I know all the arguments, and each more empty than the last. The world is what we make. This Scipio does not look like my son, except in so far as all dead children must share a resemblance in the eye of any parent. He is paler, more northern. Less African. And he has died in a most unnatural way. There is no blood to speak of, and none of the other bodily expulsions seen upon death. The cleanest death I have ever seen or heard of, that should be one of the messiest. Sterile as honey.
Enough. I will see this through. Scipio is not Adeodatus – indeed, with not much shift and yaw in the flow of time, he might have been my lover and even the father of my son, for he studied here only a little later than I – and this is not my dream, prophetic or otherwise, from just before I was brought here. This is a problem, and if they are related, well: I shall reach the greater best by solving the lesser.
Scipio is not Adeodatus, and I owe him nothing.
But my son’s soul is cut in five parts, like this corpse at my feet, and they say that sometimes a murderer does his work not for the sake of hate or silver but to write what is written within himself.
What, then, is twice written here? And to whose address, if not mine?
I do not know. But I will find you, counterfeiter. Forger, trickster. I will find you and I will do to you such things as men will speak of for generations in whispers. You will beg me for demons to rend your flesh. I will find you.
I kneel, in this appalling temple, and I begin to examine the dead man.
*
It helps to have a story, when one must touch the dead and probe the broken machinery in its own stink.
(Although there is very little stink here, and that does not make things better, because there is brine around the corpse like sea water, and where has that come from, and why?)
I have never seen wounds like these, so clean and perfect. This is like a dissection – necropsy being strictly forbidden in Carthage, one is performed annually in the cellar of the butcher’s shop close by the university – if one could do the thing without releasing the fluids within. Around the edges of the bone, I look for drags and splinters, and find none. Something very sharp and very swift, like a barber’s razor through the stalk of a flower.
It helps to have a story, but it is not always possible to control what that story is.
They say the strategos Miltiades contrived the defeat of the Persians at Marathon, but that thereafter he overreached and the goddess Nemesis took his life in payment for his pride. Strict academic history has it that he died of a gangrenous wound after assaulting the island of Paros, but there is a text I have seen which maintains he was devoured from within by the tendrils of an orchid. Upon the beach of Paros, as the men of sixty ships bled their way uphill, Miltiades took his ease and considered his revenge upon the people for an earlier slight. He drank wine and slept, and a flower seeded by the goddess took root in his ear and burrowed inward. For a month he could see the world only through a cage of green shoots, and then he was blind in one eye and then the other. The orchid persisted in its growth, and the island threw back his invaders. By the time he returned to Athens to be tried for his venality, and perhaps more importantly his incompetence, he was half mad with pain and revulsion. He told the judges he could hear the flow of sap in his skull, and they agreed to burn the horror out of him as a combination of punishment and mercy. They summoned the greatest alchemists of the time and saw it done. The process was almost miraculously precise: the flower turned to ash – but Miltiades died anyway, his brain and bones having been almost entirely replaced by green stems.
(The brine is brine, pure and simple. I’m reminded that when Christ was wounded in the side, blood and water came out. I’ve dealt with some gut wounds and I’ve never seen water emerge from anything. Other fluids, yes, in various colours and consistencies, but not water. Until now. Brine. Was he killed by a fish? Once, as a child, I heard that there is a fish in the sea upon whose tongue alone a man might set a horse cart. The jaws of such a thing might do the trick here – but how, once the fish had had its way, would you get the pieces back? Or convince the beast to bite in straight lines? A fish god, then, exacting a bizarre price?)
Until today, I thought that Miltiades’ was the most horrible death I had ever heard of, but I have always wanted to know: if one had seeds from that plant, would it grow in soil, or only in the flesh of one despised by the gods? It is my nature to ask such questions, and to know when they are not answered.
Scipio’s head is attached to a kind of fleshy wedge, like a carved winestopper. I don’t pull it out, even though some part of me is fascinated by the idea, the way a part of me is always fascinated by high cliffs and poisons. The edges of the wound are clean, but they have been disturbed, as if someone has rummaged in him. I’ve heard of secret couriers swallowing messages. Is that what this is about? Is the Chamber a side issue, and the murder a simple bit of espionage?
I go to turn the body, out of habit, and the leg comes away from the flank and hip. I smell viscera, but dry, as if he has been buried in desert sand. I wonder if all the water on the floor came out of him; if a god emptied him out, while it was looking in the secret recesses of his chest. Pentemychos. Pherecydes. Brine.
No. It eludes me. It was not cruel – not more than any death, for he must have died instantly – but it also makes no sense. I do not know what has been done to Scipio, or why. I cannot imagine.
I wonder: if I find out, will it change how I see things?
*
I walk around the room, tapping, touching. The joints are almost seamless. The wood is solid, with no hollow spaces to allow for machinery. I wonder about cords, and even jets of water. I have heard water, forced through a small enough aperture, can be sharp enough to cut. I feel the gold, the lapis, the diamonds; I inhale the rich odours of wood resin and orpiment, ochre, azurite and malachite, the flavours of art. Those flavours, not blood. No fine spray has touched these walls, I will swear to it, and yet he died here, must have done, there was not time for anything else. No more than there was any way for him to bleed salt water, or be quinsected.
In the middle of the room, I stop without meaning to, as if a friend has gripped my arm at the edge of an unseen precipice. In the gap between instants, the room has changed. All the colours have lost their strength. The figures look sickly. My own breath tastes foul in my mouth.
There is something here.
> I can feel the eyes of the pictures on my back. A moment ago I knew this Chamber was a lie, nothing more than an expensive mummers’ prop for some deception. Now I don’t know anything at all. To stand here is to be watched, observed from every angle by eyes concealed behind a veil. Whoever painted this, he had a gift for truth, for showing what is, over what is merely visible.
I hear a noise and turn to look. I can’t say what noise. I know I heard one because I remember knowing it, but I can’t think what it was, the memory gone like dew.
The scene has changed. In the air and on the ground is a great spray of blood, caught as if in white amber. It was not there before. I must have walked through the space, but I left no footprints. There is none on my clothes. Ghost blood, then, seen through a door.
Never mind what it is, for now. I look. This is how it was. Here, the impact, where the wood is scuffed by his heel as he twists at the first contact; there, the exit, where his teeth and skull dimpled the wood. All four blades at once – I say ‘blade’ but that is not quite right – at great speed: an instant death, but not perfectly symmetrical, so his body was given rotation. He was fully clothed, and yet the cloth is untouched. The blade is a ghost, as well, to cut flesh but save linen. I wonder what god would invest time and energy in making a weapon to preserve an enemy’s wardrobe – but perhaps it passes likewise through armour. That would be a terrible thing to face for a man used to doing battle in a caul of steel.
The head hangs in the air. The blood is beautiful, like a wave breaking around a stone.
From all the corners of the Chamber of Isis, the thing presses its way into the world the way the face of the Emperor is stamped upon a coin. I cannot see it, but I know it’s there: a glass flower growing towards me through the air.
It whispers, like a lover: ‘I am torn.’
I remind myself to breathe and find that I can’t. The air is too thick: too heavy and too still, as if it is congealing. Air like honey, like water falling on my face: I have been noticed. My chest clenches. The silence is a lie, a down quilt pulled over the world, and beneath it there are whispers, like voices from another room. Scipio was a flopping fish swallowed whole by a heron. I can feel eyes on me, noticing me, and with that notice comes a buzz like an angry hive or a storm. It fills my ears, my nose, my mouth and down into my lungs. There is a belt of leather around my neck, my arms are fast against my side. I feel a thick wooden branch in my throat, and a weight that would drive me to my knees, except that—
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