The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  He was gone, but I understood now how to find him.

  I left Rome and went out into the world, just another forgotten dead man. I went in search of more war and chaos, in search of Judas.

  I went in search of myself.

  A DEAL WITH A GORGON

  And now here I was, centuries later, sitting on a dusty windowsill in a museum, with a few more memories and experiences but still no real idea of where I’d come from or even how I’d come to be. Or, more importantly, why I’d wound up in the body of Christ. It was the sort of thing that could get you down if you let it.

  The window beside me turned dark and cool and a woman announced over the PA the museum was closing. I waited until the sounds of people in the hall faded away before I opened my eyes and looked around. It was just Victory and me.

  Victory isn’t her real name, of course. And she isn’t just a statue. She’s a gorgon who was turned to stone through some misfortune she won’t discuss. All she’s ever told me is it wasn’t a mirror. Apparently that whole business about reflected gazes was a myth. You just can’t trust the people who make up the myths. Who knows—maybe her condition was caused by the gorgon equivalent of osteoporosis. At any rate, you’d be surprised how many statues and gargoyles are more than just statues and gargoyles.

  I watched her and waited for the security guard to make his pass through the area. He patted her on the ass when he did so, and I had to smile and shake my head. If he only knew.

  When the guard was gone, I hopped off the window ledge and went over to Victory. I summoned a bit of grace and blew it into the space where her head should have been. A face formed there, flickering, insubstantial, like a ghost. It writhed in and out of existence, so I could only catch glimpses of it. High cheekbones. Eyes and lips like a snake’s. Which matched the writhing hair you’d expect of a gorgon. I could have used extra grace to make her more substantial, but I’d learned over the years to conserve it. Angels were in short supply these days, and you never knew when you’d stumble across one again.

  I didn’t bother averting my eyes. Victory’s gaze had never done me any harm, other than to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. Besides, she’d told me once the gorgons all had different powers and hers wasn’t her gaze. Of course, she wouldn’t reveal to me what it was. Women and their secrets.

  “Hydra,” she greeted me. That was her pet name for me, because she found my inability to die amusing. “It has been a long time,” she said. I swear she looked like she stretched a little.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” I said. It had only been a couple of decades since I’d gone to her for help with the Perseus affair. Perseus. Now there was a monster.

  “Every second of time feels like an eternity to us,” she said.

  Victory always used the plural when talking about herself and the other gorgons. She said they lived in each other. Like the Holy Trinity, she’d explained to me once, but I told her I didn’t know what that meant.

  “Have you come to give us life and limb again at long last?” she asked me.

  “I’m afraid not,” I told her. “I don’t think the world is ready for that.”

  “It has never been ready,” she sighed, and I somehow felt her breath on my skin. The hair on my arms and neck stood up, and I had to restrain myself from stepping back. “But we are ready for it,” she went on, her voice rising. “The things we have dreamed of doing all these centuries—”

  I motioned for her to keep it down and she frowned at me.

  “When we were free of these earthly chains, we sang until the very sky was rent open,” she muttered, “and no one dared to silence us then.”

  “Now they’d just put you in a crate with soundproof walls,” I told her. “Look, this isn’t a social call. I need your help.”

  “Ah,” she said, and the snakes on her head hissed at me. “Men and their never-ending quests. Why is it that you all come to us with swords in your hands instead of flowers?”

  “Rumour is you ate the one man who actually wanted to be your suitor,” I said.

  “We were young and impetuous then,” she said. “And he was so very meaty. We are far more reserved these days, as befitting our ladylike status.”

  “Give me what I need and I’ll bring you a cup of tea next time,” I said.

  “Replace cup with flagon and tea with blood and we may be able to work something out,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not but what the hell. That’s why we have the Red Cross, right?

  “Tell me what you know about the Mona Lisa,” I said.

  “Go down the hall until you hit the washrooms,” she said. “Turn left and then—”

  “Not that one,” I said. “The real Mona Lisa.”

  She fell silent then as she considered me, which was a first. She’s usually a very talkative gorgon. I suppose being locked in stone for most of your existence makes you chatty in your few moments of reprieve. Even her snakes were quiet as they all watched me. I tried not to look at them and cast about the hall instead, checking for other security guards on their rounds. It would be only a matter of time.

  “What is the nature of your quest?” Victory finally asked.

  “A certain angel has taken an interest in the Mona Lisa,” I said. “If I can deliver it, he will give me something I really want.”

  “The name of this angel,” she said.

  “Cassiel,” I told her. “The watcher.”

  Now she was silent for even longer, and her snakes coiled around each other.

  “You know him,” I said. It was an observation, not a question.

  “We know him,” Victory said.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet I was.

  “We will help you,” Victory said before I could recover enough to ask the obvious follow-up question.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you know Cassiel?” I wasn’t going to leave that one alone.

  “You must earn your answers in the time-honoured manner,” she said. “With a quest.”

  I sighed. There’s always a catch.

  “Can I do the questing part later?” I asked. “After you give me the information and I get this other quest out of the way? I mean, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

  “Find our head,” she said.

  I paused. I wasn’t expecting that.

  “You mean your missing head?” I asked. “The one all the archaeologists and scholars haven’t been able to find?”

  “Find our head and we will reward you with the information you so desire,” she said.

  “I can’t say I have any idea where to look for your head,” I said.

  “This is why it is a quest and not a mere errand,” she said.

  “What do you even want with it?” I asked.

  Her hair hissed at me again. “We don’t ask you why you’re so attached to your head,” she said.

  “What I mean is it won’t do you any good,” I said. “You’ll still be stone.” I paused again. “Won’t you?”

  “We miss it,” she said simply, and I couldn’t take issue with that.

  I thought things over, but I didn’t see as I had much of a choice.

  “All right,” I said. “But you can’t keep it here. I don’t want the curators finding it and putting this place under constant surveillance.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to bring it back to us,” she said. “Just destroy it once you’ve found it.”

  “You want me to find your head and then destroy it?” I asked. “I’m having trouble following your logic.”

  “We are trapped in separate pieces,” she said. “Our spirit torn asunder with our body. Perhaps if you destroy our head, you will free us and we can be one again.”

  She didn’t need to say anything about her missing arms for me to imagine what might happen if I actually did manage to find her head. Every good quest comes in tril
ogy form, after all.

  “And if it doesn’t free your spirit?” I ask. “What if destroying your head destroys what’s left of you?” I wasn’t just talking out loud here—I would actually miss Victory if she were gone. We had our differences, her being a gorgon and me being, well, whatever I was, but we went back a long way. There were a lot of memories.

  “Then we will live on in our sisters,” she said. “Like Medusa.”

  I took a step back involuntarily. “Medusa’s in there with you?” I asked.

  “She is one of us,” Victory said. “She is all of us.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be around when you all fight over the bathroom,” I said.

  “My time here is fading,” she said. “Free us, hydra. Free us and you will be rewarded.”

  And then she was gone and it was just me and the stone statue again. The sounds of someone whistling down the hall meant it was time to be going anyway. I patted Victory on the ass and got the hell out of there.

  I left via an emergency exit that set alarms ringing—nothing wrong with giving the guards a little excitement to distract them from their cameras—and lost myself in the Tuileries gardens and the light rain outside. I ignored a handful of young men smoking a joint underneath some trees who mistook me for a lost tourist and yelled insults at me about—well, my contemporary French was a little shaky. I think they commented on the cut of my pants, but I wasn’t really certain. I’d long since given up getting in fights over such things. There were always young men ready with a quick insult somewhere. They were legion. And I’d learned very early in my life that it was best not to attract too much attention to myself by doing things like getting in brawls with strangers on city streets. Sometimes it attracted the attention of the authorities. And sometimes it attracted the attention of things far more dangerous.

  IN THE POPE’S DUNGEON

  I went to Victory for help because we have a history together. We met in a dungeon under the Vatican well before it was ever called the Vatican. That was back in my early days, when I was still learning how to use the powers Christ had left me.

  I was in the dungeon because of a brawl with some drunks in a tavern. I can’t even remember where it happened these days, other than it was someplace in the south of what’s now known as Italy. I’d travelled to the area because there was a good deal of rioting and burning of villages and such in the region at the time. I figured maybe there was a chance Judas was behind it all and still lingering around. Whatever time I didn’t spend scouring the countryside for him I wasted away in wine and women.

  Imagine Christ’s grace taken away from you, but you can still feel it, or at least its absence. What can I compare it to? Imagine your wife or husband or kids killed but their ghosts haunting you every day. Imagine living your life in the rain and dark with only the memories of sunshine. Imagine having that epiphany in church, the one where you know God exists, that Christ really was here—only they’re never coming back again. All right, that one’s not so hard to imagine.

  Sometimes, the only thing you can do is drink. So that’s what I did.

  I’d had a few too many of this particular tavern’s homemade ale, and they had gone to my head. And every other part of me. For some reason I started comparing battle scars with a few of the other drunks. We tried to outdo each other with longer, nastier wounds. I was expecting to win, given all the times I’d been knifed and hacked and stabbed and such over the years. My scars fade with time, thanks to my miraculous body, but I was always adding new ones, so I had a pretty good collection to show off. But then the tavern keeper himself, a big, bald brute of a man, lifted his tunic to show a vicious red line running from his throat to his groin.

  “I lay on death’s doorstep for an entire winter,” he said, “but the bastard wouldn’t let me in.” He laughed. “If you think this is bad, you should see the other poor soul.”

  My new drinking partners all toasted him and agreed that he’d won. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “Piss on your scar,” I told the tavern keeper. “I’ve had far worse wounds than that. I just heal better than you sickly lot.”

  The tavern keeper snorted and poured himself a victory drink. “If you’d ever had a worse wound than mine, you’d be dead.”

  “I’ve been dead plenty of times,” I said. I tried to drain my cup in a dramatic fashion, but it was empty. Story of my life. I smashed it down on the table instead. I forgot my usual caution about revealing too many personal details because of all the drinks I’d had. “But they haven’t made a weapon yet that can kill Christ for good,” I said. I thought about that for a second, then added, “Or me, anyway.”

  For some reason they took offence at my words, and one of the other drunks hammered me with his stool a couple of times. I threw my goblet at him but hit someone else, and then suddenly the whole tavern was involved. It was everyone against everyone, because that’s just the kind of place it was.

  And then he came out of the crowd at me. I’ve never known his name. He was old, hunched in a robe and cloak, with grey stringy hair that covered half his face, over the eye socket that had been melted shut. To this day I wonder who did that to him, or if he did it to himself.

  As soon as I saw him I felt that familiar hollowness inside. For a few seconds, I thought it was fear. But then I found myself stumbling toward him instead of away.

  He stopped and looked at me as the mayhem continued around us. “You are Christ?” he asked.

  “Christ is dead,” I said. “So the world’s going to have to make do with me.” I threw a punch at him that he caught with one hand and held there in the air. He showed no signs of exertion. A charge ran down my arm at his touch. I wanted to pull him into an embrace, but I settled for spitting at his feet. “And what mockery of nature are you?” I asked.

  “I’m an abomination,” he said. “Just like you.”

  And then one of his hands lashed out from underneath the cape with a knife, and then I had the best scar in the room.

  I resurrected chained to the wall of a cramped dungeon cell. I was hungry as hell, and no idea where I was, or why I was there. I wondered if the one-eyed bastard had been a friend of Judas’s, sent to warn me off his trail, but then the guards came in with the pope, and I knew I was in an entirely different sort of trouble.

  I didn’t know he was the pope at first, of course. He had to introduce himself to me and explain we were in a secret dungeon. I’d tell you his name, but to do so runs the risk of raising him from the grave. Let dead popes lie, I say.

  Even then, I thought perhaps that he was Judas in disguise again. I went so far as to suggest as much, which earned a few well-placed blows from one of the guards. But then the pope asked me how I’d managed that resurrection trick, and I realized he didn’t know anything about me. Which I guess explained the chains. When you’re in the pope business, it’s probably better to play it safe when dealing with things like me. For all the good that it did him in the end.

  “I’m Christ,” I told the pope. “Or at least I used to be. Now I don’t know who I am.” I didn’t see any point in withholding information at this point. Maybe if I was honest with them they’d free me. Or at least give me a drink. Or maybe he’d find some way to put me out of my misery for good.

  “I don’t think so,” the pope said. He held a cloth to his nose while he studied me. I guess I must have soiled myself in my death. Hey, it happens. “I don’t think Christ would return in such a lowly vessel,” he added.

  I shrugged as best as I could in chains. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said, “but in some ways I never really left.”

  That obviously wasn’t good enough for him, because he waved at his torturers to start setting up their equipment. “Tell me what you really are,” he said.

  “And here I was hoping you could tell me,” I said.

  He nodded at his men and they went to work on me. They crossed themselves before
they started. Tough spot for them to be in, I suppose.

  What to say of that time? They did their thing and I did my part by screaming a lot and adding more stains to the floor. At the end of our little session, nobody was really satisfied.

  “I will give you time to rethink your answers,” the pope said, and I skipped my usual witty response on account of what they’d done to my tongue.

  It was while I hung there in my chains that I first noticed Victory. My cell door had a hole with bars in it, and I could see into the cell across the hall. Victory was chained to the wall in that cell, although she was a statue even back then.

  “Help me get out of here and I’ll take you with me,” I called out to her when I could speak again, but she didn’t say anything in response. I figured she was more than just a statue if she was locked up in the pope’s dungeon, but I had no idea at the time exactly what she was. Life’s full of little surprises.

  The torches in the hall had nearly all burned out when the pope returned with his torturers. They lit new torches, but I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Could you at least give me something to eat before we start again?” I asked. I was desperate for something, anything, to fill the emptiness inside me. It had been a long time since I’d killed the angel in the arena, and everything I’d taken from him was gone.

  “Whatever you are, I doubt it’s earthly sustenance you need,” the pope said and settled himself onto a stool one of his guards carried. I hadn’t been through a lot of torture sessions at this point in my life—okay, any—but I figured it didn’t bode well when the guy in charge makes himself comfortable.

  “Let us begin with a fresh page,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “I already told you I don’t know,” I reminded him. But this just wasn’t one of those times honesty paid off. His men did their thing again, and I did mine, and then the pope called a break.

  “If you were the real Christ, you would have borne this suffering with dignity,” he said to me.

  “If I were the real Christ I would have had you crucified by now,” I said. “And I would have added a hot poker up your ass for good measure.”