“I will help with that, if you ask it.” Then he put his arm warm and strong and close around me and all my terror turned to safety and relief. “Stand tall,” he commanded, “for the night is just beginning.”
Then, as I stared ahead the yew tree parted as if fractured and all its width and its length splayed out with thunder and roaring like the splitting of the earth. A shadow far blacker than the night was released. The moonlight neither illuminated nor entered it. And, from the cradle of Vespasian’s embrace and my vulnerability, the voice that was recognisably not my own, said clearly, “Lybbestre, Mistress Alchimia and divine veleda, it is hallowed Samhain and with moon phosphorus, we have prepared the portals of the way. When you wish it, I will part all the gates.”
A woman stepped from the black pillar of lightlessness within the yew. She was wearing long and shapeless white, her hair was white and her eyes were milky, like pearls within the oyster’s shadow. Her mouth was thin and wide and stern and her face was all bone, both womanly and masculine. She walked, head high, into the glade and she looked only at Vespasian. She was my mother.
Chapter Forty Eight
It was more than two years since I had seen my mother but she had changed very little. Even her milky half blind eyes had neither relinquished more of their colour, nor cleared to full sight.
She took no notice of me at all but I had been used to that since a child. She spoke only to Vespasian. Had she spoken to me, I could not have answered. I was paralysed by shock.
“You are not Vespasian,” she said to him. I knew her voice. It was the same, flat and a little harsh, sentences ending unbalanced with a hint of madness.
He looked at her impassively, unblinking and without emotion, but his eyelids were heavy and the curved lashes hid the glitter. He was poised for either defence or attack and probably for both. “In this life I am Jasper Cesare,” he said, announcing himself as softly as always. Even a demon could be forced to listen. “I am Baron de Vrais of Demis-Bayeux, Gloucester and Stourbury. I am holder of the seal of Thoth and you know me, for it is many years since I first called you. Vespasian is a name I took, because of its association. Its symbolism binds us. You have always known it is not who I am now, though perhaps it is who I once was.”
The group around Arthur had grown, each creeping forward to cross the hidden boundaries, sword gripped with whitening knuckles. Then the quick release of breath once under the open moonlight, and still alive within the glade. I stood a little behind Vespasian now, sheltering in his shadow and clutching at his gloved hand. Gerald stood to his other side, very still and silent as he had been ordered and also because he could not have spoken even if it were asked of him, but his sword was unsheathed.
My mother lifted her chin and said, “Yes, I know who you are and you know me.” Then, for the first time, she looked around.
She was taller, perhaps, than I remembered her. For all the years in the asylum I had seen her only in bed, sometimes apathetic, always incoherent and then later comatose. I had forgotten that she towered over me. Now she looked down on me and her wild white hair echoed the moon’s aura. She shook it back from her face, ghost’s mane, uncombed in twenty years, a thorn bush without obedience to gravity. I stared back at her and she gazed on me as if a spark of curiosity wavered behind the milk smear of her pupils. But she was not blind. She saw me clearly and completely as she saw all of us. Then, to my utter amazement, she smiled. It was like a lizard smiling, a stretching of the wide thin lips, an exercise that the mouth had forgotten or perhaps had never known and was utterly unpractised. It was, incredibly, more than an acknowledgement, it was approval. “The daughter they gave me,” she addressed me, “when I asked. The daughter to keep the gates. You have opened them for me many times when I commanded you. But I see you have grown beyond such simple servitude. The man at your side has empowered himself through violence, taking the right to stand in your place, to close the gates as he wills it and to move your destiny. But he cannot always keep the paths. Without you in his presence, he would need to replenish the power constantly through force. Do you know that, with or without him, you can still open and close the doorway of your own volition?”
I stared at her with my mouth open and my head thumping and all my heart and my brains bundled together in dishevelled confusion. I risked speaking. “No,” I said, as clearly as I could with my tongue twice its size and seemingly stuck to my palette. “I understand not one single word of what you tell me. It was always like this. I never understood you.”
“How could you have?” said the veleda, looking down on me through my mother’s face. “I am seer and diviner, I am goddess and prophet and represent alchemy at source. I have reincarnated many times. I was called back once more into the life we shared by this man who calls himself Vespasian. With the dark power and the light, he summoned me from my grave beyond graves. At his call I returned to life, but no human body could hold me. I took one that I would discard at will, but one that could birth a daughter. When you were sent, I received you, deciding it would suffice, and I taught you to swim between worlds. Through your small child’s heart, I spun you back here many times. I taught you to open the way.”
“He called you?” I whispered, looking from Vespasian to my mother.
“And Lilith used the way, whenever it opened,” Arthur said, interrupting from behind me. “She used it for her own pleasure and patronage and glory.” He moved closer and I felt the brush of his sleeve as he pushed past me, facing the veleda, the sorceress who had been my mother. I cringed, hating his proximity and the stink of his voice, yet his face shone in awe of the divinity before him. “You made no attempt to close the doors to Lilith,” he addressed the veleda. “So tell me, which do you support? Do you stand for the Blood or the Dragon?”
The veleda stared at him from her greater height, all impassive majesty. “Lilith allows no other to speak in her place. She will ask me herself when she comes, if she wishes to know. I do not acknowledge her slaves. I will not speak to the worms who worship her. She is on the path now, for her way has been opened.”
“But you will answer me,” Vespasian interrupted, soft and gentle as the rain that was now falling, and even to her there was the hint of threat in his voice, “for you are here only because of me, and because I summoned you, and it is my power that determined your rebirth. Now tell me, why did you use this child? Throughout history and in all your incarnations, you have always opened the gateways yourself.”
“All history is beyond your scope,” she said, turning back to him. “You cannot judge my choices. But that one choice, in your ignorance, was yours. It was you, human dabbler, demanding my return in human form, even though I have grown so far beyond you all that of necessity a human body could not support my strength. You summoned me and so I was reborn, but the body fractured into madness. I required a living representative. The daughter I created was strong and sane and would obey me. She will still obey, for she has not yet discovered all the powers I have given her.”
“I have no powers,” I said, though she had not spoken to me.
“You have many,” she answered, turning back to me and the little reptilian smile flicked across her mouth. “Do you think I’d bring a foetal reflection into my womb? You will discover all your powers, in time. I give you the freedom to exercise them for good or evil, as you desire. There is joy in both.”
I looked away from her and put my free hand against the hard leather of my belt, behind which nestled the ouroboros. The rain was sleety and the sun had sunk into total dissolution. It was rich black around the moon’s halo, and the rain caught the light in webs and snail slime. The glade was drenched in promise. My cloak sheltered me but I was bitterly cold.
“It is the witching hour,” I quoted softly to my toes, “and Hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.”
“Yes,” said my mother’s voice. “There have been many who knew the secrets, and practised the art without the knowledge of the simple bluff world they
inhabited.” Although I still understood little of what she said, it was the first time we had communicated so clearly since I was a small child at her skirts.
“Who is Lilith?” I asked her. The silence around me now shivered into breathless excitement. I had asked the question for myself but the answer would be for them all.
The veleda continued to look at me with interest and a vague approval. “Adam’s first partner, his and all men’s shadow and the eternal threat,” said my mother. “She has other names. Baphomet, the hermaphrodite deity is one. She is a power of evil far greater than Lucifer, for he was only angelic subterfuge and simple corruption, the pallid disguise which slipped into wickedness for fear of Good. Lilith has never known anything other than evil.”
Arthur stepped forward again, and Joanna came beside him. They dared to face my mother. “Lilith is the greatest power,” said Arthur, all pride. “She personifies it. She and evil, they are united.”
The veleda smiled her frog smile and looked from her white eyes down her white nose at the man, black hooded, black breathed, who stared up at her. “Evil does not unite,” she said in contempt. “Evil scatters, for it hates and mistrusts everything including itself. Evil supports no follower. Beware evil until your own power grows.”
“We have all the power we need,” said Joanna coolly. “And if Lilith uses us, because we wish her to, then we also use her gifts.”
“Lilith sells, but she makes no gifts,” said the veleda. “And her power is not ultimate. Even I and my door keeper can refuse her entrance between the worlds.”
And my voice moved away from my mind as it did when the gatekeeper spoke, and I said to my mother, “Then stand aside, for she is coming and you will welcome her, as you have always done, for she is your mother as you are mine.”
She came through the broken yew as the veleda had, but she came with a snarl, leaping and huge. I stumbled and would have fallen if Vespasian had not supported me. Even Arthur, Joanna and the few of his group who had so far entered the magic glade, scurried backwards. She was a great gleaming toad, legs bent up, knees apart and feet together, balanced forwards on her clawed finger tips. She had the mule teeth and the curved ripe canines I had seen before, and her eyes were seeping blood, striped like crackling scarlet patina with a crocodile pupil. Her nose was smashed hog-like into her bones but her hands were clawed and long, each finger twisting independent like snakes crawling from her palm. At first I thought she was clothed in fire but then I saw her skin was a chameleon’s and although sometimes she was explicitly visible in naked hermaphrodite duplicity, then she merged with the darkness and the grasses and the rain and became both sexes and all things, for she was everything’s darkest shadow.
Had she not demanded I look at her, I could not have faced what disgusted me so deeply. I kept forgetting to breathe. But it was, absurdly, exactly as Vespasian had told me, for I stood central to them all. Arthur and Joanna, with the others crowding excitedly around them, were ignored.
“So, the little bitch is the keeper, as was established without precedence.” Lilith straightened, unbending and rising, gradually becoming the woman. She turned to face my mother. “And you, emperor’s whore, you have never shared your power before. Why now?”
It was what Vespasian had asked her, but faced with Lilith, my mother gave a different answer. “To anger you,” she said.
Which is when Vespasian, who still held my hand hot and crushed in his grip, spoke loud and very distinctly for the first time that I ever remembered. His voice carried, wind born, with stark clarity. It sounded more incantation than conversation. “Hell’s debris, swiving excrement of forgotten and obsolete kingdoms,” he said, looking at both creatures. “Many years ago when I summoned the veleda and the gate was opened for Lilith, I gained what knowledge and power I sought and you took the payment you demanded, which I have given fully and without retaliation, being a just purse. Your jealousies and bickering are now futile, for in the end you service one master or another, and hate us all. Meanwhile, my repayment is witnessed, upheld and completed. Now I have my own price to demand, for I hold the gatekeeper and through her, the path. This night I demand the destruction of the forces of destruction. Neither of you have seen your danger.”
Lilith turned back to us with a screech, black leather wings appeared from her shoulders and she squatted like a harpy, spitting flame. “Be still,” she said. “You cannot challenge me,” but she looked to the yew and its rigid, rapidly narrowing shadow.
“I have closed the pathway,” said Vespasian, his voice sinking back to its usual malefic hush. “I hold you both within this nemeton. You cannot leave. Unless you pay my price.”
The tree had closed with a snap like the sudden breaking of thick glass. The rain streamed through its spiky tangle of leaf and the pool shuddered with rippled reflections from moon and magic. I looked at Vespasian. I had thought his clasp on my hand was for my protection but it had been much more. With the gatekeeper’s power between his fingers and the right he had previously forced on her and ripped from me, he had now shut the gates between worlds.
“The sweet arrogance of humanity,” said my mother without visible rancour. “But the power over the pathway is not yours by right. You have stolen the place from my appointed daughter and soon you must repay it.”
“I will take payment now,” said Lilith. “The time has come to take the last card.”
The two creatures stood and looked down on me, one all creased and dirty white like the woman I remembered from the asylum, the other flowing folds of crocodile skin. I was symbolic of deity myself and could look back without lowering my eyes, though I had once again forgotten to breathe. Vespasian’s strength beside me seemed increasingly immense. To his other side Gerald continued to stand straight, all young princeling, waiting for his turn. He faced the horrors that must have astonished him, with a courage I admired and had not expected. Arthur and his huddled clan seemed quite superfluous, having neither voice nor presence. Joanna was muttering to her husband but he waited, as we all did, to see what would happen.
The dark closed in darker and the silver shrank, now just a simple round moon in a deep October sky. “Cut the pack,” said Lilith.
This time I could see the tarot cards and they were my own. The pack of Thoth designed by Aleister Crowley was held out to me, face downwards, with their coloured crosses bright in the rain sparkle. “Do not touch the cards,” Vespasian said at once. “Stand apart and do not touch the pack.”
Lilith’s claws cupped the tarot, curved and gilt. She grinned into Vespasian’s face. “Then take the card for her,” she said, all sudden sweetness, her claws still tight gripped. “You sweated and grunted, claiming this right. I do not deny it. I watched you. So be her puppet now, and choose the card. I am waiting.”
“Then wait,” said Vespasian, “for I will not cut a tarocchi pack that you have spoiled and slimed. Some of these cards are missing. Bring the pack of Hermes, and I will cut it for the path-holder.”
“I am the diviner of the cards,” breathed Lilith with a growl. “I do not desecrate my own tools. Be careful what you accuse me of, human. I am waiting. Cut the pack.”
For a moment he let me go. In releasing my hand, I felt a chill like ice moving into my veins, as if my support had left me boneless. Vespasian stepped towards Lilith and struck her hand upwards. I could not believe he had done it. I could not believe he had touched her. Then, in seconds, he was back with me and had briefly retaken my hand, his other arm around my shoulders, and my blood heaved back into the easy warmth of normal circulation.
Hurtling and spinning, Lilith’s cards scattered. Colours in a fountain, tumbling one on another around our feet and the tufted wet grass. I heard such a gasp from Arthur and his followers, like waves on a beach. Myself, I was still barely breathing at all.
Lilith sprang, teeth and nails bared, but she never reached us. Vespasian faced her, sword in one hand and the seal of Thoth raised towards her in the other. Beside him, on Ve
spasian’s orders I had drawn my own sword and the ouroboros I held up in my other hand. I saw Gerald, half dazed, also raise his sword high and it caught the moon shine and seemed to sing.
To my complete amazement, Lilith cowered back, dropping again to toad squatting, eyes glaring but lowered. “I do not have the cards of Hermes,” she said. I believed it to be an acknowledgement that Vespasian was right. The cards she’d offered had been doctored.
“But I have,” said Vespasian clearly. “I have the pack of Hermes here.”
Chapter Forty Nine
They were around us now, almost half perhaps of the crow clad worshippers, Arthur’s cult and Lilith’s adorers. Steadily overpowering the forces of the nemeton, breathing in the presence of the dark, shuffling closer like circling wolves though shifting uncertainly, many now summoned strength to pass the threat of the boundaries. Now they waited only to see what their leader would do to us.
The veleda stood aside as if she had little interest in the play of forces beyond her vision. She neither judged nor showed emotion, but she watched and something behind the flickering pale eyes proved intent. I did not look at her. Intimidating as she had always seemed to me, I could not trust her detachment nor her equanimity. I realised then that though Lilith was evil itself, the veleda represented neither love nor hate, but absolute amorality which would not attack nor support me.
Gerald, myself and Vespasian faced Lilith as she took the pack of cards that Vespasian handed her. It seemed she disliked their touch. Between her claws I could see their parchment beauty, hand painted in gold leaf with raised mercurial lines, liquid, slithering and smooth. They smelled of something that reminded me of home. It was another sort of power. Happiness, perhaps.
Beneath my feet spread the scattered tumble of the cards of Thoth, my own, now just wet cardboard. Lilith held out the cards that Vespasian had given her. “If you touch me again,” she spat at him, “I will flay you from prick to knee. Now, cut the pack.” And Vespasian smiled, leaned forward, and took a card.
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