The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

“Do you understand what that dream told me? I did the instant I awoke. Christ was Mary. Christ was God and fully human, so the Christians of my village taught. Therefore, his human DNA, his body, had to come from somewhere. From a physical, scientific perspective, unless the Holy Spirit brought with it the DNA of an earthly man, Jesus of Nazareth must have been a masculinized clone of his mother. A perfect genetic duplicate in every way, physically presenting with a dick and a beard.” Miki grinned at the woman’s playful obscenity in proximity to spiritual discussion as slightly smiling Gethsemane asked, “Dig me? The sacred androgyny of Christ is real. The Logos is real. And our Lady, Dominia di Mephitoli, will use his help, and yours, to save the world. But first, she has to change.”

  Change, for sure! While Miki spent months sowing seeds with Kahlil, apologizing to her mother from afar for her false homecoming, she watched the news and waited as she’d been instructed to by further contacts with Gethsemane. She was a real secret agent! And, like most real secret agents, she succumbed to her damned emotions in that little honeypot scheme of theirs.

  Oh, Kahlil. It was never his fault that Miki shut him out! She just had trouble with feelings. After he got comfortable enough with her to start falling asleep near her, she’d watch him sometimes, and think, yes, there was something very cute about him. He had a lot of bad habits and had spent an unfortunate amount of time trying to get in good with the Hunters, but she could see that he, like a lot of men, was just perpetually disappointed every woman he encountered wasn’t also his mother. (Personally, Miki was relieved every woman she’d slept with wasn’t her mother, but that was the difference between men and women!) So, she mothered the bullshit Internet- and Hunter-instilled misogynistic expectations right out of his sorry ass, showing him that her skills extended beyond artful spankings and good—well. The point is that Miki spent a lot of time with Kahlil, cooking for him, seeing movies with him, listening to him nonjudgmentally, spoiling him with gifts like he was just any old friend or family member. And as she saw his gradual drift of interest from the Hunters and onto her, she discovered her own feelings had developed somewhere along the line.

  What was she supposed to do with those? Especially once she considered the business nature of their relationship—and the aspects about which he was unaware. But she got him to open up to her about all he knew, and soon enough she abused that knowledge by passing it along to higher-ups. Then May Day of CE 4042 came around, and, well…there was that change she’d been waiting for. While the red-eyed Governess struggled to hold it together during her wife’s globally televised funeral, Miki pulled the rug out from under Kahlil.

  The fight! Was it worth recounting? He had accused her of using him, of abusing him, of crushing his very heart. All this was like a series of stabs in Miki’s, but this was why she’d kept as far away from those kindling emotions as she possibly could. In as calm and businesslike a fashion as she could manage, she’d laid out the conditions of his future: he would help her and the Governess reach Lazarus. They’d fought and fought until he asked her why she was doing this. She told him about the Lady, withholding her gender identity, because he hadn’t figured her history out and it was none of his business if she didn’t tell him. Then he’d turned on misplaced sympathy. A Hunter, telling her she’d been brainwashed!

  This religious aspect allowed him to forgive her, somewhat—especially when she admitted she did love him. But he was still being blackmailed into betraying his affiliated regime, and that wasn’t pleasing to any man. If he’d been in a proper relationship, it would have been time to rethink that relationship’s whole foundation; but poor Kahlil had thought himself only worthy of the love that he bought, and, well…

  Miki was more loyal to the divine than to romance.

  Of course, sometimes she wondered if she was on the right path. The boy continued to love her in a disappointed way, and Miki couldn’t help but ask if it was worth hurting him to do all this. She questioned right up until that fatal September, when the Governess abandoned her post, and an order came through from Gethsemane: to return to Japan, to say goodbye to her mother, and to prepare to bring the Governess to Cairo in preparation for the Lady’s renewal ceremony.

  The finality of it all…somehow, Miki almost couldn’t manage to see her mother that last time. Yoriko suddenly looked so old! All the skin care in the world, all the mild therapies to which she’d opened up after her daughter’s plight—none of it could save her from the fact that she was still someday going to die.

  Miki, too, would someday get old and die.

  Did she want that? She asked herself while her mother, after dinner, presented her with that same shamisen which had been her partner throughout her famous career. Did she want to get old and die—or did she want to live forever with her consciousness split across two planes of reality and her body hosting the spirit of an immortal goddess?

  The choice was obvious; but, in the cab back to her hotel room, Miki couldn’t help but cry. They felt the same as the tears she’d spend with Dominia, in her room before that ceremony. Those forty days in Cairo had blurred by, and Miki, still reeling from the physical existence of her imaginary friend and the sacrifice that she was about to undergo, could hardly understand Kahlil’s bitterness toward her. She loved him, damn it! Wasn’t it enough for her to love him and be sorry that she couldn’t spend her life with him? Wasn’t it enough for him to be there? But he didn’t even want to be at the ceremony.

  That was why it was so surprising when, as the ringing of her spiritual transference cleared away and she had said goodbye to Dominia, Miki became aware of a body—her body! That body she had seen before the Lady! Oh, what a body!

  But she was aware of this body because of the body across from it. Kahlil’s body. Joy filled her to see him, and sorrow, and Kahlil, tears in his unobscured eyes, said, “I made such a terrible mistake. I’m sorry.”

  Everything he had done: she saw it now. In fact, she saw everything. Somehow, it was as if she’d always known everything—everything in the world. As if she’d put it there, herself. But that was the Lady in her, she knew. The Lady, and the higher spirit behind Her. Miki’s own pains for her crimes filled her breast and she took her lover’s hand.

  “And I used you. Kahlil…I played with your heart like it was my shamisen. You know—I don’t regret anything in my life, my career or any of that. But I wish somehow…it would have been nice to be your wife. I couldn’t have had your kids, though. I’m sorry I lied to you about that, by the way.”

  “It’s okay… I knew.”

  Miki’s eyes widened, and even there, in the Void, she smacked him across the face for her embarrassment. “You cad! Why didn’t you say something? I thought you didn’t know!”

  “Of course I knew. I can’t explain it. I just spent a lot of time with you, so of course I figured it out. But…I didn’t care. Why would Allah care if you really felt like a woman, and presented as a woman, and thought like a woman? I was thrown for a loop about it for a while, but you know, I just loved you too much, and you were always a woman to me, so…”

  “Oh, Kahlil.” As always, when at risk of emotions, she had to turn them into humor. She hid her face behind her heron-dotted sleeve. “Well, it’s paid off for you, now! Would you look at my figure?”

  “You were always perfect.” His smiling faded into hesitation, and he glanced down at her hands as they slipped into his. “Would you be with me now? After the way I betrayed you, got all those women killed?”

  Your own death was punishment enough, I believe.

  The starburst of the ascended Lady struck the two lovers through with the glory of Her light. These same crystal beams dissolved Kahlil through Miki’s hands; she knew without a hint of fear that she would see him soon enough. Instead, she threw her arms around the Lady’s neck and embraced the deity with unabashed joy.

  “See why I had to kiss you when we first met.” Miki laughed. Even the radiant kami smiled at that. “I’m still a little sorry, though, to leave
it all behind.”

  I want to show you something. Something I saw when the True Word was first unveiled to my exposed mind.

  With Miki’s arms around Her, the deity rose high through the Void. They penetrated that sphere of darkness and a brilliant and beautiful light—more brilliant than even that of the Lady!—was left naked all around them. Their pace only increased, the speed so vast that it tore away the flesh of the goddess and revealed, one by one, those beautiful pillars who maintained Her physical presence: first that vast woman found in many an ancient statue, success and happiness where there was famine; then a beautiful man who would someday inspire stories of Adonis; then a glorious beekeeper who became known variably as Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, Inanna, and a bevvy of other titles; then, across the sea, a slender young native woman who traveled through a region later known as the Ohio Valley and, amid varying tribes of people sometimes lumped together as the “Adena,” sowed a language of cultural symbolism full of weeping eyes, and animals becoming men, and the sinful horrors of cannibalism; then, in Europa, as Christianity crested to its height, a schizophrenic barbarian girl babbled herself full of the Lady, and would someday give way to the science-minded Trisha Robbins.

  Then, of course, Trisha peeled Robbins away and revealed the body of Miki Soto: and Miki realized she had never been Miki to begin with. That body chipped off as the unnamed watcher observed on, and lo, Dominia di Mephitoli ascended through those many spheres of reality, those many highest heavens, until Dominia, reaching up, found she was but the eighth vessel of that electric entity known in human tongues as “the Lady.” Beyond that highest sphere against whose membrane she paused to press, the fingers of a ninth, unseen, untouched, too-close Lady wove a lightning that cracked the General down, down, down into the body of Miki Soto, in whose form she dwelt until the fateful night of Dominia’s death.

  XVII

  The Battle for Jerusalem

  It was not possible to express all Dominia now understood. She had, since the nascent turnings of the planets, waited. Suspended in that edge-of-sleep superposition of existence/nonexistence until consciousness began to take root in what could be called “humans.” As the substance of the physical hologram representing that iteration of reality, she lay present in all things. “All things” included human DNA. The Lady was to the human genome what Saint Valentinian was to the sacred protein, perhaps. Where the tail ended and the head began on that strangely orbiting ouroboros, the physical mind could have hardly gleaned. Speech was inadequate to transfer the experiential information; even writing had its shortfalls. Take, for instance, that taboo place with a thousand names. That realm between the living reality and the storage of the Kingdom.

  After all, it was not proper to call this space the Ergosphere. Even that image, devoid of face, possessed too much substance. The true form of that taboo place could not be perceived, could not be thought—for, in thinking It into the shape of any one thing, It craftily made that thought the smoke screen by which It got away. Dominia had existed in a perpetual state of It, even when she dwelled within her avatars and was able, minimally, to interact with that world she supported. Through their hands she guided the flow of human events so that, by the time the Hierophant arrived in 1974 CE—the year of his old self’s birth—he was perpetually entering the iteration midgame.

  He thought it was his wish that brought him to this new iteration of the world. Had he say in the matter, of course, he would have arrived at the dawn of time just as Dominia had. And, in ways, he had. His shadow had, at any rate. Dreams of him emerged in the collective dream of humanity long before he fizzled into existence in this particular plane. Even the Lamb, whose earthly body was not born until soon after that fatal year of 1974, had the ability to afflict probability for such a vast expanse of space-time that his probability field, the Lady now understood, encompassed a great period of time both before his birth and after his death. Many improbable events had occurred in human history, and it was impossible to say which ones had been nudged this way or that by his brother’s future requirements even before that evil brother was physically upon the planet.

  Because the Hierophant was not present until she allowed him to be, and until the hologram of reality could accept the existence of his genetic code error. From the moment of his arrival, he had total freedom. Access once more to all the sweet potential of the unconquered world. A mouse had no say in where its neck would someday be snapped, nor say in the bait or placement of the trap. He was a miserable wretch who had lost the only thing he loved in the world—his brother—and who deluded himself with the notion that there was a way to get him, it, life, back.

  Now, more than ever, the Lady understood Cicero’s plight. But she had no sympathy for his means, his choices, his cruelty. His cruelty. Only after receiving the full input of all those souls within her did the hyper-dense spirit of the former General understand the depth of his horrors. Two thousand years of people, brainwashed from a state of childhood innocence into a race of sexually violent reprobates. It was still possible for them to be saved, and that was why the Lady fought on. But that salvation could only be accomplished once their Church’s Father had been supplanted by a better-intentioned individual.

  The Bearers’ physical tradition had begun with the first avatar’s daughters, who were miraculous for their time in that all nine survived from birth to adulthood. After her ninth, the Lady came upon her and never left; one by one, the daughters dreamed their Bearer-dreams, and the much-worshipped, well-fed, and ultimately widely loved holy Lady began the worldly tradition of devotion to spirits, which, unlike the animal-spirits present all around, were invisible, and took the shapes of men and women. At once, the Bearers set upon her bidding, spreading these teachings and gathering resources. Lady after Lady, into the modern days and nights, amassed a great stockpile of wealth, connections, and blackmail material. There was nothing they could do to stop the rise of martyrs, or her Father—she understood now that many previous iterations had been run with that intention, and the knowledge of their failures (which, prematurely given, certainly would have collapsed living Dominia’s mind into an early black hole) assured her there was nothing that could be done. One way or another, his infestation had to take root to be exterminated.

  In the meantime, she established her base. A silent army, which became a very vocal one when the living Dominia di Mephitoli, disgraced and fleeing her country, stumbled into control of several cells of Hunters. Then, all the years of close conspiracy spent fighting the global bureaucracy paid off. Then, with the help of the Red Market, Miki Soto and many others brought together by the suicidal ideations of the Lamb’s transtemporal probability field, the Lady saved herself.

  How funny to watch Dominia! What a child she had been. Yet, the Lady Dominia was not so far removed from the General Dominia: when Miki, before her ascension, brought Cassandra’s diamond there to Cairo, the slight weight upon the breast of Trisha inspired the first starburst of real emotion the pan-dimensional entity had experienced in an entire reality’s worth of timeless existence. Space-time was but fabric to her, that folding, washing, working laundress who sometimes wove it, too, and she ran it through her fingers to touch any spot that pleased: she touched that spot of private reunion again and again and found such endless bliss that it was good the avatar’s mind was bound to time, or the Lady might never have accomplished anything. Therefore, even the goddess was encouraged by that unseen first moment of Miki’s in the Cairo throne room. All of this was done with good purpose. Miki’s body had been given up for good purpose.

  In Jerusalem, that body ruled with an iron fist. The General, obviously, did not like it, but the city’s outskirts had been left in terrible shape by Akachi and the Israeli attempts to liberate the holy town. As European and UF forces began to amass, first in Turkey and then, with permission after the exit of Israel from the union, the Middle State of Syria, the Lady calmly continued pouring money into fortification efforts—and repair efforts, especially as th
e drone bombings began to stack up. The General grew visibly more frustrated as the year wore on, and her men, having for years resorted to dirty warfare tactics like suicide bombers and exploding trucks, were not content to sit around and wait for the UF to close in on the city’s heart.

  Direct hostilities began in March of 1998 Anno Lucis, when a unit of European troops was accused of entering Israeli territory. Soon enough they were doing it openly, pacing astride mechanical warhorses which bellowed smoke from their nostrils in a touch that served no use to the device: mere grade school intimidation. The Lady continued to enforce this miserable period of waiting, while citizens of Jerusalem were evacuated and the General drove north and south, east and west, begging for money, donating her time to the people of Israel, reviewing the behaviors of (and frequently firing entire offices of) military police units installed by the Hunters, etc. By this point in time, what little military force was ascribed to the state of Israel was nowhere near Jerusalem, and was neither inclined to help Dominia, nor to assist in the Hierophant’s capture of their own holy city. Therefore, that sprawling city had been forced to act as its own state for some time—in the centers and neighborhoods that had been less savaged by the initial Hunter swarms, Akachi’s men had actually established quite an impressive working infrastructure if you didn’t mind a few public beheadings in exchange for clean roads.

  But clean roads meant a lot when you planned to fight in them. If Jerusalem had been forced to act as a sovereign state, the Hierophant’s armies sure invaded it like one. By the time the very angry, very depressed General was shipped off to kidnap Theodore, she had witnessed the systematic loss of about a third of her newly earned city. While she was a brutal killer and an expert military leader, the fact of the matter was that Dominia had been running a city under siege, and from the start, it had about as much hope as the infamous American Alamo. While it was true that it sometimes took as many as two to three days to clear a single large apartment building (sufficiently fortified and defended), the Hierophant had unlimited resources to throw at the problem of Jerusalem, and had been waiting for this moment a mite longer than two thousand years.