With a snort of derision, Joanna grabbed Gerald around the throat. I could see the pointed spikes of her finger nails pressing into the young, pink skin. Gerald choked. Arthur stood beside his wife, gripping Gerald by shoulder and wrist. “Open the gates,” said Arthur, “or we’ll kill him.”
“You’ve no power over me,” said my voice, which was not my voice. “You dare not touch me. What interest does the holder of the paths have for a human child? Your power is a puny thing compared to mine. You cannot do or say anything to make me obey you.”
“That is true,” said a soft voice directly behind me. “But I believe I can.” And as I sank back against Vespasian in relief and delight, the point of his knife came slipping very sharp and bright and cold around my neck and pressed taught against my throat, its point pricking deep into the skin. “Now,” he said, lost malice blown in the retiring force of the winds, “if you do not obey exactly what I tell you, immediately and in explicit detail, I shall kill you at once.”
Chapter Fifty
I stood very still with my pulse racing, leopard ambush, jungle fever. I was lost in unknown territory. I was more Tilda now than Molly, and wanted to cry out to him, but I love you.
He held me, his long knife against my neck and his arm now fast around my chest, crushing my breasts as he gripped me tightly back against him. My breathing was restricted and my gasping burned with a taste of sulphur and mercury, the poisons of alchemy in my mouth.
Around us two dozen bodies or more were scattered, decapitated and ripped in pieces across the wet grass, gutted moans in the dark. I saw that Uta had not been the only one slaughtered in muddy, bloody and devastating dislocation. I believed Lilith had happily murdered her own supporters. She stood before us now, stone gargoyle, immovable snarl.
It was still raining but the wind had slowed to a groan, wood creaking and the gentle rumble of turbulence through the remaining leaves. I was frightened to move. “You will speak no word of any kind,” Vespasian said to me. “You will not order the merging of the ways or the parting of the Styx. You will not unite the worlds and you will not open the gates. You will be silent, or I will kill you.”
Joanna still clutched Gerald, one hand hooked into the collar of his cloak, the other tight around his neck. “You’ll not kill her,” she said to Vespasian, glaring white faced in the moonlight. “She’s your whore. You’ve not the courage to kill her.”
Vespasian’s voice came calmly from just a little behind and above my ear. “And you, who killed your own daughter in a welter of agony and the bloody flaying of flesh, could not understand my painless execution of a demon’s daughter?”
The moon, released from the confines of the storm, glowed brighter now behind the lacery of tree branches. “If you kill her,” croaked Arthur, furiously, “you condemn us all. Why would you die yourself, only to spite us?”
“Oh,” said Vespasian and I knew that he would be smiling, “my desire for your utter annihilation is not spite, I assure you. My wish comes from a holy determination and I will not be crossed. Your death will come tonight, whether it includes my own or not.”
“I don’t believe you,” rasped Arthur. “You’ve never planned your own death.”
“As usual, you are wrong,” said Vespasian, so softly that I could barely hear him and I was as close to him as I had ever been. “I have never feared pain or hardship, least of all, the grave. Death stands in every one of Lilith’s cards, not only the black painted skeleton of the tarocchi. Now you can choose your own death, d’Estropier, since control is what you long for. Stay as you are, and it will be at your own connivance. Or, if you are not yet prepared to die, let go my son.”
The pressure of his knife edge, sharpened and honed like a cock’s spurs for the fight, cut a little deeper and stung like the devil. The point gouged a little further up and under my chin. My jaw was forced upwards, or my neck would have been slit. I smelled the warmth of my own blood.
Joanna was wrenching at Gerald’s wrist as he began to struggle, but she was trying to keep her dignity. “If we let my grandson return to you,” she said, “will you open the door between the worlds? Will you do it at once?”
Gerald, in wretched and puzzled misery, opened his mouth to speak. I wasn’t sure if he would beg Joanna for his own life, or Vespasian for mine. Vespasian looked at him, cold and implacable. “You will say nothing,” he ordered him. “You will be silent.” Gerald bowed his head and sighed, becoming still.
Under my feet, and way beyond the pain of Vespasian’s knife, I felt the rumble and quake of the collision mounting. I heard the echoed calling of the souls approaching on the path, half way to us and crying that they were blocked and the way turned against them. Hallowe’en’s ghosts had arrived, with nowhere to go. I could hear them knocking. Their anger and their lost confusion vibrated through my toes and up through the pulse of my heart, down my fingers and spun through my head. My own needs swam the same wave with theirs as they called on their gatekeeper to open the way, all wistful, desperate supplication. I heard them and could not answer. They were streaming through the valley, pushing forwards, their part blind eyes peering through the mists towards the doorway where the shine of their past lives should have been opening brightness to them, but I had muted the moon voice and their way was hushed. I began to cry. I leaned out to ease their shuddering but my mind could not touch them. Their yearning for the warmth was blocked. I stood useless, with tears pouring down my face and mixing, salt sting, with the blood on my neck.
Vespasian said to Arthur and Joanna, “You will release the boy, and once he is back at my side, I will open the gate and we shall all be saved, for the moment. But first you must swear his freedom. On Lilith’s eyes, swear you will make no further claim on Gerald, either by blood or by birth, by title or by greed. Otherwise I will kill the keeper and you will be lost forever, even though I shall join you on the highway. Hell’s gates are wide enough to accept you all and they do not need me to open them for you.”
As Arthur muttered his agreement, Joanna released Gerald. It was so sudden that he stumbled, but quickly regained his boots, and, grabbing his sword, turned back to his grandmother. His voice was unsteady. “You killed my mother. I think you killed my father.”
“But it is your step father that just wanted to kill you,” said Joanna.
“Come here,” interrupted Vespasian. “I will not tell you twice. Come here, beside me.”
Gerald stared around, and lowered his sword. Meekly, he went to Vespasian’s other side, all the time trying not to look at me. Then he stood solid, sword in hand, glaring at his grandparents. “I hope I get the chance to kill you myself, before the end,” he said, but they were already backing away.
“Now,” spat Arthur, “open the gates.”
Vespasian removed his knife from my throat and turned me at once in his arms, so that my head was against his shoulder, my blood on his mantle and my body crushed against the silky velvet of his cotte. I was still crying on his pearls when, with the knife tucked back into the cuff of his boots, he moved his free hand up into my hair, holding me steady, caressingly close.
“Are you ready for this?” he whispered to me.
I had not been ready for any of it. “They are calling at the gates,” I said in a desperation I could neither control nor understand. “You must let them in. It is the utmost misery. Don’t you hear them? Don’t you pity them?”
For one astonishing moment I thought he kissed the top of my hair. “I am sorry, piccina,” he whispered, “for all that I do to you.” Then, without letting me go, I heard him speak the incantation, very softly so that it became a chant, hazy in my mind. “As it is above, so it is below, and let them be combined this night. Samhain, hallowed gateway of the Underworld, let them through. In the name of Janus and of the veleda, part the river and let them through. Without coinage or challenge, on this one midnight toll, Charon roll back the Styx and let them through. I have the Right, I hold the staff and I demand the gates flung wide.
I open the way to all worlds and as the falling horizon no longer divides the macrocosm from the microcosm, let all be one.”
And so they came. They did not come through the yew tree or from the small graves beside the pools. They came from beyond the nemeton, drifting past us like the melting of candle wax, soft colours all lost in swirls of fog, shining faces and happy eyes, the gift of breath for one last night, they came and they passed by us, wandering out into the heaths and the woods and the fields, searching for those they had once loved, and lost.
I sighed, standing back for them to pass. My tears had dried, but Vespasian still held me tight. “Do you see them?” I asked him gently. “Do you see the light in their smiles? This is how it must be. You cannot bolt the door. Not on Samhain for the worlds revolve too close and must intertwine.”
“I see them,” Vespasian answered me. “But in shadows, the passing light within the shade. I may have taken the right to your place and your power, child, but I do not share all your magic.”
Slowly they faded also from my eyes, and I was Tilda once more. I breathed deeply again. “Would you really have killed me?” I asked him, “if Arthur and Joanna had not let Gerald go?”
He did not look into my eyes. “Perhaps,” he said to the air. “There are some things more important than life.”
“And you had to convince them so - emphatically? I wish it had been more nominal and less explicit.” The pain of the cut stung insistently.
“You do realise, don’t you, zuleikha,” he said softly, “that this night we might all die, whatever I am able to do? It is important only that Arthur and all his people also perish.”
“And Lilith?” I whispered.
I heard her. She was behind me, and I thought she was laughing. “No human can kill me,” she was cackling and slime leaked from her snout. But she had been suffocating. I had seen her and felt it. When Vespasian had closed the gates against her, she had suffered, confined, drowning in bubbles of her own poison. She had crept quietly to a corner of the glade, unseen and small shadowed. Now she could breathe again and was swelling with budding strength. “Your fool of a human thought he killed me when he stabbed the body of my fetch. But Thomas Cambio was no more myself than the other thousand bodies I’ve inhabited.”
The divinity in me sprang again. I was losing my grasp on the knowledge my other self held, but the spirit of the path keeper remained. I stared up at Lilith. “If the gates had not been unlocked, you would have strangled in your own bile,” I said. “Not death, perhaps, but paralysis until I myself died, my person replaced by another opener of the way.”
She had not yet returned to her full self. “Ignorant bitch,” she said. “You think because I lost you in the cutting of the cards, I’ve no further weapons against you? I can still claim you. The man who stands in your place and now controls the doorway, has yet to cut the cards himself. But this time, as he chooses for you, you shall take it for him.”
The glade had changed. All around us the trees leaned down, listening to everything we said, trunks bending in the darkness, creaking and yawning in the echoes of the wind. Many had broken in the storm, now shattered branches and torn bark. The others had closed in and the space left to us, where the pools still gleamed their misted banks, was narrowing. Within now stood the remains of Arthur’s cult, decimated by those many killed in the storm. Arthur stood directly behind Lilith, with Joanna to one side and Malcolm to the other, more than sixty others at his back. They had waited a long time for Lilith to finish her games and lead them. Without her orders they would do nothing, but they were itching to fight. They had come for many reasons, but most of all to kill Vespasian, and myself.
I faced Lilith and this time I no longer sheltered in Vespasian’s shadow but stood before him and his hand rested on my shoulder. I had lost my sword. I felt no need of it but I held the ouroboros which I had never relinquished. Beside Vespasian, Gerald stood, breathing heavily, half in trance. Though struggling with his courage and disbelief, he was determined to prove his value.
I could not see my mother. The march of the ghosts passed between us, mostly unseen except by those few who stared in horror at the shimmer of pale souls coming past the pool, from the tree shadows and from the lost intangibles, through our solid bodies and on towards their own private dreams, called by memory, hurrying to the warmth, silvered transparencies in the night, eager now and thankful that finally the blessed gate was opened and they could fulfil the promise.
No one waited now for me. It was Lilith they waited on again. I stood very still and let the dead pass through me as they went on their own paths, away from us. I could still see them and felt the shiver of pleasure as their souls connected with my own. I said to Lilith, “I will take the card for him, if you order it, but you shall not have what you want. Show me them.” Lilith showed her teeth. From the folds of her skin, she pulled out Vespasian’s pack of cards which he called the tarocchi of Hermes. They glittered, a welcome and not a threat. I reached out my hand.
Behind me, Vespasian said softly, “You hold my life in your hands, little one. Do you know that?”
I was concentrating, and no space for panic. I must not be Tilda, who would cower to Lilith’s control. I must not be Molly, who would snatch and choose at random. I must be the gatekeeper, who could influence the cards and dismantle Lilith’s trance. “I will not give you over to evil,” I said, a whisper as soft as his own. “But I cannot disobey my mistress and I must cut the cards as she orders me. What must I take?”
He answered me calmly, his voice even, his hand on my shoulder unpressured. “There are many which will evade both her cunning and her hunger,” he said, little more than a murmur against my hair. “If you have the power to choose, then take The Aeon or Judgement, which is the number twenty, for this is my card and has been my destiny until now. But if you cannot cut what you will, it is of no matter. If you give me to her, try and get away yourself. Save Gerald if you can, and leave me. I risked Lilith’s vengeance many years ago, and was lucky to escape her then. Perhaps now is my time. I am prepared for sacrifice.”
“Fool,” hissed Lilith. “Be quiet while the divinities choose your fate.” She pushed the cards towards me. I tucked the ouroboros back into my belt, and leaned forwards. I felt the switch. I was no longer myself. I knew I would pick the right card.
As it touched my fingers it felt cold and silky, and sparked with electricity. As though making the choice itself, it sprang into my hand. I turned it over. It was number twenty of the major arcana, Judgment, or as Vespasian had called it, The Aeon. Though I had been so sure, the idiocy of confidence slipped away and I thought I might faint. Vespasian said softly into my ear, “Thank you.” He sounded, quite suddenly and for the first time, desperately tired. “I am grateful, cielo mine. Lilith eats those who are fed to her. And she chews – slowly.”
Lilith had darted back in fury, turning away from us. I breathed relief. For one moment, the air felt fresh. I leaned against Vespasian. He was grateful, he said. But I believed he was still in danger. “Uta’s dead,” I told him. “But before she died in the storm, she said you were foresworn, to her and to Lilith. She said what you said – about Lilith eating her sacrifices. Is your life still forfeit?”
“Not anymore,” said Vespasian. “What Uta told you that I did, I did. At the end of this night I would have stood alone, and battled Lilith, and lost. You have just saved me. Do I deserve it?”
“Judgement is your card, not mine,” I said.
Lilith’s anger did not wait on our conversation. On the turning of the card which denied her, she had sprung back. Now she began to bloat, filling the sky and obliterating the stars and the moon and its fragile aura. The trees pulled back in fluttering revulsion, nature’s consternation. Their own magic was obliterated by Lilith’s.
She started to scream, both arms flailing in a hundred grasping joints. Her grinning liplessness and huge tusked snarl lunged down, her claws in Vespasian’s hair, around his neck and in his eyes.
I thought he would be blinded. I thought he would be dead. Blood poured down his cheek and from the knotted veins in his neck, but he dropped from beneath her, rolled and rebounded, facing her again. He stood panting as she swung towards him. “You cannot deny the card,” he said. “It has been decided. My forfeit is cancelled.”
“I do not deny it,” she said, all gaping growl. “But no puny human, once prick deep in homage to my divinity, dare think to wound the very force he once adored. Your destiny is judgement and now I judge you.”
Vespasian waited, slowly sheathed his sword and held up again the seal of Thoth. Once more the geometric pattern and hieroglyphs sprang into flame. “But it is I who judge,” said Vespasian. “Not you, who have neither capability nor objectivity. Judgement is beyond you, for you know only evil.”
Lilith hesitated. She was breaking her own laws, and knew it. Even I knew it. But she leapt suddenly forwards, stopped, feinting, and lunged. Her claws spread out and lanced his arm, ripped through his cotte and into the muscle, streaming dark blood. Vespasian stepped aside and flung the seal. It spun in whirling sparks and struck her, piercing the side of her throat against the jugular. She roared and belched and squealed, and falling backwards, clutched her neck. Between her trembling, grappling frog fingers slime oozed. She bent low, stamping on the fallen seal, shattering its flames into invisible fragments, the power of magic into decomposed dust in the grass. She screamed again. This time it was a call to her followers.
The battle had begun.
Chapter Fifty One
They rushed us. They had been waiting for more than two hours, pent up with the thrill of suspended excitement, every nerve and every muscle bent like the bow string. They had watched and waited through the brutal shock of the storm and its wild destruction, returning gradually, adrenalin again under control, to more suspense and the struggle for patience. Until Lilith called them, they did not dare advance. At first kept at distance by the sacred trees and the magic of the water and the blending of the worlds, they had been unable to approach, but now all but a very few wretched and dismal weaklings were inside the nemeton and Arthur led the sixty three men and women remaining alive who had followed him and worshipped Lilith for many years. As Lilith screamed her own challenge, they raised their swords in shouts of glee and hatred, at last into action.
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