by Ian Watson
They need to avail themselves of a chaste impregnator. Otherwise, half-brothers might abound in the land, disturbing the succession. But once the deed is done, the impregnator’s chastity thereafter will be ensured, by a sword blow. The fact that I am the commonest of men, with whom no noble would dream of comparing himself, at once guarantees discretion and uniqueness, and also roots the succession of the dynasty in some potent ordinary seed. Strange are the customs of mad royal houses! But I have heard rumours, of course – hints that the sire of the heir is always secretly selected from the marketplace. Bazaar gossip is most untrustworthy, but perhaps true this time?
One of the escorting guards guffaws.
‘She wants your’ (I don’t hear what) ‘on a plate!’
And the sword dips towards my loins.
I was wrong. So wrong! So swayed by the dance!
They are going to emasculate me! They are going to bear my genitals to the Throne Room on that dish. The virgin will eat them cooked in sesame oil. She will swallow my manhood whole like an entertainer swallowing a toad. How can this possibly impregnate her? Unless she intends to bear the child quite literally in her belly, behind the jewel in her sea-shell navel? What sort of child would that be?
In a flash of vision I see her organs – her belly and womb, her tubes and entrails – as somehow writ large in the endless halls and chambers of this very palace. The palace is like a body itself – inside of which she is a mere homunculus, and I myself am a single sperm seeking for her. Or wilfully avoiding her! (Yet did I not climb up to that embrasure voluntarily, to gaze at her lascivious dance?)
Such visions are sometimes suspect. Yet this one does not seem entirely impossible. For in this palace everything seems to reflect everything else. All the plethora of decoration comments upon itself and mirrors itself excessively. While the motions of the virgin during the dance (abandoned though they seemed) were really all quite stylized – so that every disposition of her veils constituted the copulas of an obscene, wordless language, product of the place. The palace uttered the dance; the dance uttered the palace; voluptuous and sterile at the same time, each of them.
So what child might be uttered, out of that virgin? As the castrator advances closer, it seems to me fleetingly that another palace might be born, situated in some echo or shadow existence beyond this present world: another vast building of enamelled halls and bedizened corridors which would coast through time itself, sufficient unto itself, self-reflective, empty save when it wishes to summon up Kings and guards and servitors, and a virgin and a golden ram like me!
The castrator tosses the golden dish on to the straw. The other guards seize me and bow me over, dragging my head down by the locks – a crouch which I fall into willingly to protect my unused sex.
‘She wants your head on a plate!’
That was what the guard said earlier. Now he repeats it gloatingly.
Is the virgin waiting just outside the dungeon door, to rush in and bestride my decapitated corpse? They ought to hang me if that’s what she wants to do! I do not imagine that one ejaculates at the moment of beheading. But perhaps I’m wrong.
The sword whistles to and fro, slicing the air, as the executioner swings into his rhythm, building up momentum.
And I am tumbling, unable to halt myself. My arms and legs are stunned by shock – gone, useless. A stink of foul straw fills my nostrils. The executioner hoists me by the hair – and places me upon the golden dish! I squat on it, unable to move though nobody restrains me.
Like a superb banquet master, the eunuch lifts the dish, and I fly upward on it. He pirouettes it, no doubt upon the very tips of his agile fingers.
My body, that sleeve of flesh, lies tumbled in the straw. Blood pumps in ejaculatory spurts from my cleanly severed neck.
And I am a living head, upon a dish.
What kind of miracle is this?
No one eats a head. A head is too hard – though the brains are soft enough, if the skull is sawn open. A head is too bony, too lank with hair which would catch between the teeth. Nothing soft. Except for the eyeballs, cheeks and tongue. (And the brains within.)
I feel no emotion now. I’m free of the lascivious, hateful enchantment of the dance. The nerves and organs which responded earlier are quite separated from me. The body which her dance enticed is discarded on the floor. The head is far distant from the hot heart. I am … yes, detached.
The virgin ordered this as her prize – the fulfilment of the King’s promise – yet the King never expected her to ask for this sort of prize. He expected her to ask for my body! But this is what she asked for, because she is a veritable Jezebel of sterility.
She must be revelling in my execution, awaiting the orgasm which will twist her loins as the eunuch bears me in to her upon this golden charger; the cold orgasm of unconsummation …
How she must have loathed the prospect of losing her virginity! How she must have hated the thought of conceiving a child, whose bones would be the walls and roofs of a second palace in the other world beyond this world – the world of similitudes, according to the philosophers of Arabia. A child, whose bloodstream would be ruby-studded corridors. Whose lungs would be mighty chambers capped with cupolas. Whose stomach, kitchens. The convolutions of whose brain would be written everywhere in arabesques. And outside of this child’s body, too, the black granite of a void would reach as far as the remotest jewels of the stars themselves.
How could she possibly give birth to a palace, out of the little chamber of her womb – even in the world of similitudes? Are my thoughts totally disordered by the slicing of my spine?
Only I, in this dungeon, realize that I am still immortally alive … And all my feelings have been neutered by that sword stroke.
Yet something begins to glow in me. Something that will soon be incandescent.
So at last, not in iron chains but on a golden platter, I am borne in to that depraved, glittering, aromatic Throne Room.
The eunuch bows before the King, holding me to one side. The King merely nods. It is as much as he can do in his musk-maddened, frozen condition.
As I weave through the air towards the virgin, her kohl-shadowed eyes gleam bright with triumph. She smells enticingly of patchouli and other Eastern oils. Her waxen lips are slightly parted, disclosing delicate little ivory teeth like the milk teeth of a child. Rising up quickly on tiptoe, she kisses my dead lips. Her petal tongue flickers, lizardlike, between my lips. And she steps back. With a grand flourish the eunuch sets me down upon one of a flight of low steps leading to the preciously inlaid tabernacle.
And the incandescence bursts from me!
My head rises into the air of its own volition. Like an exploding sun, I illuminate the space around me. Blood, hitherto staunched by contact with the gold, oozes in a rope from my neck as though I am putting down bloody roots into the soil of the air.
‘Why, damsel?’ I demand. Tell me why!’
The virgin falters, aghast. With her left hand she tries to ward off this apparition, whom I am. With her right hand she claws at the banded necklace which laps her throat and shoulders, broad and sparkling as the rings of Saturn – as though that immaculate gewgaw is contracting around her windpipe to suffocate her.
If I cannot pierce those secret lips between her white legs – now that my manhood lies flaccid and bloodless on the dungeon floor together with the rest of my body – and indeed the very thought of doing so appals my chastity, at least I can pierce her soul. I can irradiate that other secret part of her with spokes of sacred, reproachful light. Thus she may become chaste forever too, her organs of generation sterilized by my cold brightness.
No one else moves in the Throne Room. It’s as though people have turned to salt – as if the flash of this moment has interrupted forever the sequence of time.
She moves, though.
She turns – and her last veil whirls away from her. She flees from my presence, dressed only in tiara, necklace, cuirass, anklets, bangles, girdle. Her buttock
s are naked: twin white-skinned melons. A spring of hair shows darkly between them, unshaved.
Propelled by will, I drift after her at speed. Every so often a gobbet of blood falls to mark my passage, from high above the marble floors.
My preaching in the bazaar has by no means failed, I see. For I have begun to understand that my fierce speeches all along had been directed at the harlot-virgin. They had been aimed at drawing me to her attention, so that I could win her. Not in the carnal sense, but in the spiritual. For if she succumbed, then King and Mother and all the court must surely be converted in her wake.
As for sacred love (as opposed to profane), why, I am guaranteed that now in perpetuity by the sloughing off of my body with its shameful, involuntary erections and emissions and all the teasing attendant dreams that trailed the flag for these events. I am granted this at her command.
So, as I chase her, it seems to me now that she was wiser than me. She was well aware long ago that if we should meet each other face to face in any ordinary way, attired in our whole bodies, then she must inevitably seduce me. I in turn must inevitably yield to her. Thus would I lose that power of spirit which attracted her perversely to me, and me to her, in the first place. I would lose it as surely as Samson lost his strength to Delilah.
Yet now instead, because of her choice, I am incandescently pure.
So why does she persist in eluding me?
Is it because she wishes to lead me to a private trysting place, deep in this interminable palace of scintillating brightness and soot-stained shade: a place where we can be quite alone together?
The palace is a maze, indeed. I have little idea of the layout of its majestic entrails. But soon I have no idea of my direction either. She remains just ahead of me, running on her white feet. Her footfalls are quiet, but I can hear the panting of her breath. I can’t quite catch up with her. I’m attracted to her like a moon to a world, yet I’m held off at a distance by the very speed of my pursuit. Thus I follow her, falling through the air into the path of her flight, unable to fall all the way.
Eventually she darts down a flight of marble steps.
To my astonishment – though naturally no quickening of the heart accompanies this – the corridor at the bottom of the steps is the very corridor of the dungeon! Close by, the dungeon door still stands wide open.
She pauses to glance back, then she plunges inside that rank, dark chamber. I drift after her inevitably, and in, to illumine that stone room with my rays. These wash the walls and floor as bright as the desert under full moonlight. The rumpled straw lies in ridgy dunes. Nutty excrements mixed in with it are the droppings of desert foxes and jerboas …
My headless body sprawls bloodless, as white as she herself. She reaches it and clasps it – like a child playing some game of Sanctuary. Some Hide-and-Seek – and here is the magical token of safety.
With a strength that I did not suspect in her, she hoists my corpse to its feet. She claps it in front of her like a shield – or as if she means to engage in intercourse with it in that position, an act of ultimate necrophilia which I must needs watch impotently!
Yet no. Now despite myself, I drift through the air. For my head heeds the attraction of my waiting neck. And so at last my lips meet her lips once again, at the very moment that my head rejoins my body. The saliva of her kiss is a rich gum coursing down my throat, sealing its wound.
She who took away, now gives.
And I am whole again.
Yet no blood flows in my veins. I feel the cells of my flesh unlock, to bleed lymph into my empty vessels in a strange transfusion.
Is this, then, my spiritual body which she holds in her white hands? A spiritual body, purged of rank hot blood?
Is this the dream which all along she secretly nursed: to empty out the wild blood from me, with all its throbbings and promptings, before she could bring herself to touch me? So that, when at last she did so, she would still remain at once both harlot and virgin?
The whitish liquid rises throughout me like sap. It is akin to spermatic fluid – the juice of the groin and glands! In all my veins flows cool white sperm like ass’s milk. It engorges and stiffens me in an elastic rigidity quite unlike rigor mortis. Now I can stand without her aid.
I am as one of those saints from the exotic religions further East, in India: a saint to whom the sexual body and the spiritual body are one and the same. And she is a divine harlot from out of one of those religions. She is the temple whore who initiates the young novice within a temple of holy depravity, which is her body!
Without her ministrations, I fear that I will become a carnal monster like the old King himself, thrusting himself upon the limp bodies of slave boys and slave girls and eunuchs, of she-goats and shaven apes, his organ feebly inflamed by aphrodisiacs and peppery ointment!
She is the priestess now. And I am in her hands.
‘Thou,’ she intones. Her voice is both innocent and weary, as though she has been alive for a thousand years or more, yet is just newly born, too, newly awakened to celebrate another cycle of the stars and worlds.
She intends this soiled straw to be our bed; but her perfumes will drench and sweeten it. Transfigured by light, this dungeon will be our nuptial chamber …
She smiles, coyly. It is the first enticingly human expression I have seen in the whole of this monstrous palace; but it is fleeting.
And is her smile really directed at me at all?
I turn slowly, a statue of salt myself. The sea-tang of sperm-foam, oceanic spirit, teases my lips to thirst for her.
In the doorway of the dungeon I see the old King leaning, supported on the brawny arm of a massive eunuch. He licks his thin grey lips anticipatively with the tip of his tongue. Beside him loiters the Mother, nodding in appreciation.
And I feel the caress of a hand on my white shoulder, as the knowledgeable virgin reminds me why we are here.
The Bloomsday Revolution
‘Why Bloomsday?’ Teresa asked Dennis as he held her hand in the back of the bridal limousine: her black hand in his white hand, while St Anselm’s peal of bells faded into the distance.
As ever, the sky was azure, with some puffy cotton clouds. White ribbons fluttered from the silver mascot of the Rolls. Massed daffodils trumpeted golden notes of spring. As ever, on this their perfect day.
‘Oh, I see: because of all the flowers. I suppose you can’t very well call today Saturday,’ and her voice faltered, ‘not when there isn’t Friday or Sunday any more. But those aren’t the flowers of my native land! They’re all foreign flowers.’ She seemed on the verge of tears.
Dennis squeezed her hand. He hoped to avoid any senseless bickering or heartache. This would be as beside the point as the question of whether they ought to make love tonight. (Of course they would make splendid, practised love, after the initial bother of defloration – with the experience of a thousand identical weddings behind them. Was this not their perfect day?)
‘No, listen, Tess: that isn’t why. I was chatting to Carla before the service yesterday, while we were waiting for you to arrive – ’
‘Carla?’ his wife queried archly.
‘Carla Rushworth, of course. What other Carla is there?’
‘And you were simply … “chatting”?’
‘Actually, Tess, we were having a fairly intense discussion. But don’t feel jealous: that’s all such a long time ago, me and her.’ Casually he added, ‘I invited Carla along to our reception today.’
‘You what?’
‘Goodness, I don’t even know if she’ll be able to get there! But if she can, it’ll be … something new.’
‘Oh, Dennis, Dennis, are you so tired of making love to me for the first time? You must be! The thrill of black flesh has faded, That’s why you really married me isn’t it? The novelty! Now it’s worn thin … But not for me.’
‘Damn it, we must break the pattern somehow.’
‘Must we? Oh yes, Carla Rushworth would love to break our pattern, wouldn’t she?�
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‘Don’t let’s argue, Tess. We haven’t all that much time.’ For already the Rolls was swinging past the War Memorial, with its draped flags sculpted in bronze; and more brazen daffodils.
Teresa sniffed. ‘Time, indeed? We have all of time! And I’m your wife for ever and ever. That’s what it’s all about. Is that what you want to break up?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘And you’re the reason why I’m exiled in an alien land, with all those wretched yellow blooms mocking me!’
Dennis Monsarrat sensed his point of vantage. ‘Obviously you aren’t entirely happy, Tess – those wretched blooms, eh? But getting back to the subject of Blooms-day: that’s the name of the day when Joyce’s Ulysses is set – June 16th, 1904. You see, his book immortalized that one particular ordinary Dublin day for evermore: the pubs, streets, people, horse races, newspaper stories, all preserved as if on a scroll of eternity. And the real Bloomsday is where James Joyce is likely to be, now that he’s dead. Just as we’re here, you and I, getting married for the umpteenth time. That’s his Great Day; and this is ours. The day of our life, transfigured forever.’
‘So?’
‘Well, all these other people are here too, repeating a perfectly ordinary day in their lives, like the characters in Ulysses. This is what Carla has been getting at for ages, every time she can catch me alone.’
‘Oh, has she?’
‘Yes! Do listen. Carla believes that we two – that’s you and I, Tess – hold the key to this particular slice of time. Or at least we’re two of the people who hold the key. Just as Joyce must hold the key to that day in 1904. Today is our Bloomsday; and everyone else is locked up in it. All those who are here.’
And now they were passing the Alexandra Hospital; more beds of yellow daffodils outside, beds of white linen within – in one of which Teresa would give birth two years after this wedding, to the twins, one of whom, Kwame (readopting his mother’s name, as Kwame Open-ibo), would become President of Panafrica West one day. Those twins, whom Dennis and Teresa would never see again, for this perfect day preceded their conception …