by Daniel Caet
“If we use that they will see us coming,” I said.
“They know we have been here since we started our way down that mountain, my lady. The town has surveyors at all entrances to the valley.”
“That means we have lost the surprise factor.”
“That means something much worse, they let us get here,” Helel replied. “She wants us to find her.”
That idea shook me inside. Somehow, I knew Helel was right. This Mama Obeah had no intention of hiding from us. I didn't know if she would be aware of who Helel was and why he was with me, but it was obvious that she was not afraid. And if she wasn't afraid, that suggested another much darker and more disturbing possibility. Maybe she wanted us to come to her.
We continued towards the village, but the path suddenly became a real road that left the inaccessible jungle behind and circulated winding through the trees. Langley explained to us that the inhabitants of the village had cleared the weeds trying to facilitate the many journeys they were forced to do in search of water and to hunt what they could.
Suddenly I realised that we had not heard any birds or seen any creatures since we began the descent of the mountain. It was as if no living being wanted to venture into that valley. And a moment later we understood why.
“Holy mother of god!” said Langley, still in the lead turning his head as if not wanting to look at whatever he had in front of him. I made my way between him and Helel to place myself in the front and what I found in front of me was an act of barbarism that I thought forgotten. On both sides of the road, wooden posts placed on a cross served as an easel for a macabre and repulsive display. The skins of two men, torn out in their entirety, announced to any possible intruder that any step taken beyond those limits had a price, a terrible one. On those skins the same cruel and terrible symbols that I had seen in other bodies before clearly indicated who was the author of that atrocity.
“Wow,” Helel said, “This mama Obeah of yours is increasingly interesting.” And I wanted to hit him right there. How was it possible that Helel had questioned my behaviour in the past when he praised that demonstration of savagery? It was obvious that the creature in front of me was not the same one I had known so many years ago, but what scared me the most was that I really didn't know who Helel was or what he had become.
We continued along the path thanks to the light of the torches. Suddenly, half-hidden figures began to appear in the shadows on the sides of the road, like ghosts trying to protect their home when they saw it invaded. However, none of them came to appear before us or show themselves fully to the light. That was an invasion that, no doubt, was being allowed, the question was why. We reached the end of the road and before us a kind of very basic palisade was deployed, made with not too thick tree trunks that had been sharpened trying to give them a more threatening appearance. I doubted that this barrier could really protect whatever it was that was behind it from a real attack, but I understood that there, in that valley with such difficult access, nature itself was its true palisade. The figures accompanied us at a safe distance up the road to a door in the wall that was wide open and then disappeared.
When we passed through it, we entered a town with only about twenty houses that were arranged around a large empty central space where a kind of stone temple had been erected, not much taller than a man. The town seemed to be completely abandoned, a single figure was crouched on the temple playing with what at first I thought stones, but as we approached a little closer, I saw that they were actually bones soaked in a viscous liquid that reminded too well of blood. I immediately recognised the girl we had come to see even though her face and hair were soaked in the same bloody liquid. She seemed to ignore us completely, her hands played with the bones in a nervous movement as she murmured something I couldn't understand. Her torso was naked, just as I remembered it from our last meeting, and covered with symbols unknown to me. Suddenly her murmurs were silent, she raised her face to look at us and a smile that shouted madness out loud filled her face as she raised her voice so we could hear it.
“On their foot they will come, to their death they will come. Their blood will water the earth and it will open to give birth to a new world, a new god. This is what Eshu said, bearer of the word of Yansa, mother of everything!”
“I don't know who Eshu is,” said Helel, slowly advancing without giving her the opportunity to keep talking, “but, if he refers to us, I'm sorry to tell you he lied to you. Don't get me wrong, there will be blood, I assure you, but not the one you expect.”
“The lamb said on the sacrificial altar when he saw the knife above his head,” the woman replied, undeterred by Helel's arrogance.
“Where is my son?” I interrupted, advancing myself too to stand in front of her.
“Your son no longer exists woman. Now he is my husband and by the power of Yansa we will soon be the new gods that govern this land.”
“Seriously? Is that the reason why you have assembled all this?” Helel laughed out loud. “But what happens to humans? You are obsessed with the gods. Thousands of years ago God turned his back at this world, and we are still here, woman.”
“You laugh at my words, but you will not do so much when you witness my ascent, when I become a goddess of revenge that will erase the white man from the face of this world, when I make them pay for the pain inflicted.”
“Well, that makes more sense. You see? Revenge is a feeling with which I can definitely empathise.”
“I know you well, fallen one! I know all that you have done to transform yourself into the lord of hell, to overthrow your corrupt brothers, to avenge your broken heart. But your time has come to an end. It is time for a new order” she replied and in response to her words the square began to fill with people. Men, women, children of both dark skin that betrayed a slave origin and others that were clearly Arawak. All of them with the same dead, inert face and completely white eyes devoid of all life.
“Oh! You should be careful. That has almost sounded like a threat and that is something I have never taken too well. And with regards to the fallen one, that name has been given to me by the morons of Christians and it happens that I do not like it at all, so it will be better not to use it anymore.”
“Your words are as empty as these bodies that you will soon join and the power that Yansa will give me in exchange for the blood of two immortals will allow me to raise the army of death. Each slave and each Indian killed by the hand of the white man, each woman and each child killed by his ambition for power, will rise from their grave to become an instrument of my revenge and with their own hands and teeth will tear out the life of each white man on this island and, when their blood waters every corner of the land they have usurped, Yansa will be happy and my husband and I will rise as new lords of everything around us, and our new order will change the face of this world.”
“I have to admit that I like your plan, but I'm not sure I can let you get on with it. You see, it has taken me a lot to get used to this new life that I had to live, and I ended up appreciating it in a certain way. Besides, I have enough to deal with my brothers as you well know, I don't have time for new gods. So, let's end this quickly. Give me my sword, and from there what you do with this island, with your hubby and with this bunch of corpses is not my business.”
“Helel, what the hell are you doing? You promised you would help me,” I said in a whisper.
“Silence Liliath, remember our agreement!”
“Teresa, my little Teresa!” Langley´s voice shouted suddenly as he headed towards the group of figures around us. “Is it you? Don't you know me, my little Teresa?”
“Langley, no!” I shouted trying to stop him, but it was useless. In an instant the man had reached the woman and was shaking her with his remaining hand as who tries to wake someone from a bad dream. Without even looking at him, she held the man by the neck with her hands with an immense force until the crunching of the bones when broken into a thousand pieces was heard throughout the esplanade and the li
feless body of the one-handed man fell to the ground with a dry sound.
“Do you still doubt my power?” the woman shouted without an iota of emotion.
“Oh, I don't think you understood me! I don't doubt your power at all, I just think it's not as big as you want us to believe. There are two things that seem curious to me,” Helel continued, walking slowly around the temple, forcing the woman to follow him with her eyes. “The first is that you need so many blood sacrifices to maintain your power. It would seem that your Yansa is not able to give you the power to simply sweep the white man as is your desire at once, you need to pay a price before. It is not something that fits a lot with an almighty goddess in my eyes. It reminds me a lot of what some of my subjects do in the underworld, you know? There are races of demons that deceive pathetic humans like you to make sacrifices in exchange for tiny signs of power, whether for food, for the desire to generate chaos and destruction or because they like the idea of being worshiped as gods. I wonder if your Yansa can be someone I know. On the other hand,” he continued, “all your strategy has cemented from the first moment on the need to have a husband by your side, a husband who in this case turns out to be the son of an angel and an immortal, a most special Nephilim. Isn't it that you need a power source by your side from which you can constantly drain? And in that case,” he said, and in a second she disappeared, and his voice rang out from across the square, “what will you do if I rip your dear husband's heart out?”
My eyes turned immediately to the place where his voice came from and they found him holding Asur's neck from behind while my son's body, with eyes as empty as those of the rest of the town's inhabitants, remained inert.
“Helel, no!” I shouted.
“Release him immediately or you'll regret it!” the girl snorted.
“Seriously? Let me doubt it. Give me the sword or I'll give this bastard's heart to the dogs and, when I'm done with him, I'll start with you. Anyway, I will recover that sword, the only difference is going to be if you keep your life or not.”
“Helel, don't you dare to touch my son. You promised!” I shouted without daring to move.
“I promised to help you get rid of this spoil of a village witch, how I do it is only my business. Also, don't talk to me about broken promises, Liliath, it sounds ridiculous coming from you”
“Is this all you want? Why is it so important to you? It's just a piece of metal,” the woman replied, suddenly wielding the sword that had appeared in her hand out of nowhere.
“It's much more than that and you know it well since you've been using it to increase your power.”
“Yes, it's true,” she said, laughing evilly. “The energy that flows through it is immense and delicious, a source of inexhaustible power capable of allowing me things that nobody can imagine. It gives me a much greater power than I can extract from that pathetic creature.” She let go, and for a moment I thought I saw the surprise on Helel's face. “That miserable son of yours has a great power but is unable to use it. In order to use it I was forced to sleep with him, get him into ecstasy so that his power was released without reservation and I could drain him like a leech. However, this sword is different, It does not ask for anything in return, its power simply flows through the one who wields it, giving away without conditions. Do you really want me to choose? So be it. You will never recover this sword.”
Helel's face contracted in a grimace of rage and a scream came out of his throat to fill the entire valley while his hand was rising through my son's chest holding his heart still beating between his fingers. Asur's eyes stopped being white at that time to recover the life that had just been taken away from him for just an instant, long enough to transform into a spasm of terror. My scream mixed with Helel's as I ran to the body of my son who fell lifelessly to the ground as it fell from Helel's arms who had been transported to the temple and tried to snatch the sword from the girl's hands. My arms surrounded my son's body knowing I couldn't do anything for him. An immense pain filled my heart, not only for the loss, but for the feeling of failure, the knowledge that, in some way, I was the only one responsible for my son never having been happy and that he had finally lost his life in a ridiculous search for power, a search that I had instilled in him, that I had engraved in his mind with my own actions and words. I had been the only responsible for his death, although another had been his executor. Helel, the man I had loved and betrayed, who I had resorted to in my despair hoping to find help, had paid me with the same coin and had taken away what I loved most, the only thing I had left. My eyes rose to look at the temple and in tears I saw Helel tangled up in a deadly embrace with that girl who tried to catch the air that Helel's hand in her throat no longer allowed to pass while her other hand held the one with which she wielded the sword to prevent him from hitting a blow. Helel's fingers suddenly contracted and the girl's neck creaked, but far from stopping, Helel continued to squeeze until the flesh of her neck gave way under her fingers and burst into an explosion of blood, flesh and bone. The woman's body, shaken by the spasms of that horrendous death, released the sword that was thrown against the ground sliding to where I was. My hands, which still caressed my son's body, released him to grab the object that had brought so much misfortune.
“Liliath, give me that sword!” Helel yelled at me from the temple with his bloody hands not only for the girl's blood but for my own son’s. There in front of me was the architect of my pain, a greater pain than I had ever felt and in my hand was the instrument of my revenge. “Give me the sword, Liliath!”
“I asked you to help me, to free us from this monster, both of us! I trusted you! I begged you not to do anything to Asur, but you didn't listen to me, you didn't want to feel the pain of a mother begging for her son's life! You only care about Helel, that is your only interest and anything that is in the way of your interests is a hindrance. You have no capacity to love and you don't know what a father's love is or the pain that goes with it.”
“Liliath, stop being stupid and give me that sword. I will not repeat it to you.”
“This piece of metal is more important to you than the life of any being, than the feelings of any person.” My fingers closed around the edge of the sword and my blood spilled through it until it fell to the ground and I could immediately feel my power growing inside me, large and powerful as I had never felt. I immediately knew what to do and the words came out of my mouth clear and crisp to Helel´s horror.
“I curse you, Helel, by my blood, which is the blood of those you have destroyed, I condemn you. You will never touch this sword until a child's love finds it and gives it to you. And when that happens, you will have your sword, but you will lose your child and the pain of loss will show you how empty your life has been. You will want to die inside just to remember that you will live forever with that pain!”
The sword disappeared immediately from my hands and the power it had shared with me allowing me to cast that curse disappeared as well.
Helel's lips widened and a piercing scream filled the air while a jolt made the earth open across the island. The last thing I saw was his eyes full of anger and tears looking at me wishing to end my life. Why he didn't do it is something I couldn't understand back then, but his body disappeared leaving me alone in that death field and it would be hundreds of years before we met again. With his departure Helel had left for me a last gift. The tremor that had been generated as a result of his pain had devastated the entire island destroying my farm and ending the lives of many of those who had shared mine in that remote paradise. When my steps took me back to Port Royal the houses and taverns I had known were demolished and all I could hear were the screams of those who still lamented over the loss of their loved ones and their possessions. The birdie had died buried in the rubble of her beloved tavern and was not the only person I knew who had lost their lives. My friend Lilly had also died when she was on her way to one of her encounters with the lover that I had provided. Many other anonymous people joined the voices of those I had
met, but all of them with the same pain, a pain that seemed to echo my own loss. It soon became clear that I had no reason to stay there. My life was broken, I was also broken myself and, even if I tried, I knew I would never be the same again, so I plunged into the world again with the sole intention of disappearing with the immense burden of my grief.