Arnulf the Destroyer

by Robert Cely

  The old man’s eager and care-filled eyes stayed on me as I brought the glass to my lips. His lips parted, mirroring my own motions, anticipating that first taste with me. I smiled at his excitement, such a childish gesture in one so old.

  “Drink deeply,” he instructed. “Open yourself to it completely.”

  The wine touched my tongue and at first I thought it was just a bad merlot. I tasted the mild California coast, a cheap grape, overtones of nitrogen fertilizer, migrant worker hands.

  I started to remark as such, to wonder aloud why this salesman had come to the Paris Wine Expo to push a ten dollar bottle of grocery store merlot on the world’s greatest wine taster, when my palate came alive.

  Suddenly, I could taste something older, much older. The Mediterranean sun danced across my taste buds, the salt sea air, an arid but fertile earth. I tasted sawdust from a carpenter’s workshop. I tasted miles of endless, burning wilderness. I tasted a storm, a hatred, thousands of sweaty hands pressed close in, putrefaction and then cleanliness, disease and wholeness, crying, pleading, the awe of thousands, the cry of triumph.

  Then deeper, a taste soaked deeper into me. I tasted anxiety so acute I felt it myself, a distress I didn’t know was humanly possible. The saltiness of sweat and tears filled with cold fear passed through me in a shudder. I tasted the gall of betrayal, cruel laughter, unbridled rage. I tasted the sting of leather, the crack of flesh tearing open. I tasted a burden hefted through dusty streets, a breathlessness, the acrid tang of metal, despair, excruciating pain, thirst, the nausea of abandonment, and then.....

  I almost choked. My whole body trembled at that final taste. I looked up at the old man in horror who was still smiling at me, sadly now. Was he a madman? Who would do such a thing?

  “What do you taste, Leo?” the old man asked as dizziness overtook me.

  I opened my mouth but no words came out. I couldn’t answer.

  “What do you taste?” he asked again.

  I swooned and the world began to fade away. Distantly I felt the floor beneath me and a rush of people. Still that question screamed in my head.

  What do you taste?

  I tasted blood.

  Over the next days everything tasted awful to me. No matter what I put in my mouth it all felt rotten and dying. It seemed I tasted blood everywhere.

  Fresh vegetables were filled with rot, meat was spoiled, even wine had gone sour. I still had my same abilities, I knew the depth of all that I ate or drank. It was just that it all carried a taint. Everything that I put in my mouth was coated with a film that was the essence of decay. Or rather, I began to suspect it was me. My tongue had been fouled by disease and it putrefied everything that touched it.

  Of course, I couldn’t find the old man or his booth again. The Expo had no record of him or his company. I even took the floor manager to the very spot where the booth had been set up and he vehemently denied that there was any table there.

  To make things worse my sleep was plagued with nightmares. I dreamt of every bad thing I had ever done in life. Every time I closed my eyes some old guilt bubbled up from deep within me, tortured me with memories of past regret.

  I dreamt of the girls I seduced with no honest intentions. Too vividly did I remember my excitement in pursuing them and my eagerness to be away from them once they had given me what I sought.

  The night played for me again how I had betrayed my college roommate, framing him for a wrong I had done. I saw again the people I belittled, the wineries I destroyed, the hurtful things I carelessly threw at others. Even the time in fourth grade when I hit Ronnie Sanders in the face with my lunch box rose up to plague my sleep. There wasn’t a night that wasn’t filled with guilt and grief. It was my life’s worst moments lived over and over again.

  For weeks this continued. During the day I could hardly eat or drink because my tastes had become corrupted. At night I couldn’t sleep for dreams of sins past. I felt life draining from me, one day at a time. And for sure I would have died had things not changed.

  It was Rome again, that same city where I had tasted the ‘45 Rothschild, I was hurrying from a nauseous meal back to my hotel. To even think of a nauseous meal in Rome seems heresy itself, but such was my curse. As I hurried through the city, not even taking in the majestic and ancient buildings I passed, I spied for an instant the old man from the Expo.

  It was just a flash. For the briefest moment I caught the grey and grizzled beard, the deep set eyes. There was no mistaking that it was he who fed me that cursed wine.

  Just barely did I catch him hurrying into an old church when the crowd closed in around me. I lost not a single second, barreling through the crowd and into the church.

  The cold darkness of the church closed over me, lit only by the prayer candles that flickered in the narthex. A feeling of holy and silent dread filled me like the shadows behind the stained glass windows and the chilly glare of saints staring from the marble walls.

  “Where are you?!” I screamed, not caring one whit about holy silence.

  “I know you’re here! Where are you?!”

  “Peace, I am here,” an old, velvety voice answered from the darkness beside me.

  I whipped around to face the old man who looked at me with that same, sad smile. It was the same smile he wore as I lost consciousness at the Expo.

  “What did you do to me? Who are you? What did you give me to drink?” I spit the questions out one on top of the other.

  “What do you want to know first?” He asked back with his arms spread out.

  “Who are you?”

  “No one of consequence,” he answered with a shrug. “An old priest with a dangerous curiosity. That is all.”

  “What did you give me to drink?” I questioned further. “What was that?”

  “You are Leo the Incredible Wine Reader, are you not?” the old man smiled, broader this time. “What did you taste?”

  My mouth turned dry and couldn’t answer him. All of a sudden the whole thing seemed ridiculous to me. It couldn’t be what I thought it was.

  The old man only waited a moment for my answer and walked past me. He lit a prayer candle, quietly murmuring to himself and made the sign of the cross. I followed him into the sanctuary and stood beside the pew he seated himself in.

  “What did you give me to drink?” I pressed insistently.

  “A cheap merlot,” the old man shrugged. “A seven dollar bottle out of California.”

  “No, there was more. You put something in it. Something awful.”

  “What did you taste?” the old man asked me again.

  “I tasted blood,” I whispered, barely able to gasp the words out.

  The brows of the old man wrinkled up in thought. He smiled again and shook his head.

  “The mysteries of God are difficult to ponder,” he said. “Did you taste wine at all?”

  “I did. At first I tasted your cheap merlot. Then I tasted a lot of other things: an old vintage, the Mediterranean air, crowds of people, suffering, betrayal, too much to mention. Then I tasted blood.”

  “It was communion wine,” the old priest told me. “Wine but not wine. Blood but not blood.”

  A sudden sense of disorientation whirled through my head. I fell into the pew beside me before I fell down. The dark of the sanctuary seemed to come alive, to surround and fill me.

  “What did I drink?” I just managed to ask. “What was it I tasted?”

  “You tasted all that wine contained which no one else can taste,” he told me. “You tasted suffering, you tasted love, you tasted a man paying the ultimate price for all that we have done wrong. You tasted the cross.”

  “Everything tastes awful to me now,” I said. “I can’t eat. I can’t drink. There is a taint on me that fouls everything that goes into my mouth. I have awful
dreams at night. Every second of the day I live in fear. Why? What did it do to me?”

  The old priest leaned forward and folded his hands. A deep sigh rose from him as he looked up at the altar, his eyes steadily upon the crucifix hanging in frozen agony.

  “You tasted sin,” he said. “Now it won’t leave you.”

  “Whose sin?” I asked.

  “Your own,” he chuckled, leaning back again to look me in the eye.

  “You tasted your own sin and it taints everything in life. That’s the nature of sin. It covers everything, touches everything, fouls everything.”

  Nothing the old priest said made any sense to me. How could I taste my own sin in a glass of merlot? How did I taste blood? A thousand different questions stirred inside of me. But only one concerned me at the moment.

  “How do I get rid of it?”

  I stayed in the church all night. The old priest and I spoke at length. He told me things I had heard before but always ignored. Even hearing some of it for the first time it sounded familiar.

  My whole life I always believed myself too sophisticated to believe as the masses believed. This whole business of being born again, accepting Jesus, repenting and the such was so plebeian I always turned my nose up at it. All that religious nonsense was for those who lacked refinement in life, who only had such superstitious habits to make their lowly lives worthwhile.

  I see the truth now. All that refinement and sophistication that I believed made my life worthwhile only distracted me from the true meaning of life. Only after I saw my life for what it was, what it truly was, did I understand. All along I had used my snobbery as a shield, protecting me from the terror of living a deep life, protecting me from what I tasted in that glass of cheap, blessed merlot. I tasted the truth.

  All that I was had been torn away with that one taste. Even as I spoke to the old man I cared nothing for his religion. Only I couldn’t bear to live anymore as I was, not with that awful taint on everything. I even tried to resist further, leaving the church as the sun rose to mull things over for myself. One taste of breakfast brought it all back, the rot on everything that passed through my mouth.

  That very day I was baptized and nothing has been the same since. Oh, there is much about me that is the same. I have my personality, my shortcomings, much in me that needs reform. But I am trying now. I am trying to be a better man.

  My tastes I got back. The taint that had spilled over and infected everything was washed away as I was washed with baptism. I didn’t taste the taint anymore, although from time to time I can detect hints. But I know now what I must do about it.

  It was impossible to go back to my old life. I am no longer a food and wine critic. What is a critic anyway? Someone who stands on the sides and points out the flaws in the work of others. Easiest thing in the world to do, criticize, and a pretty cowardly way to live.

  Now I work as a consultant to help improve food quality for any buyer, grower or purveyor of food and wine. My work now is to improve the finished product, not criticize it. I work so others can criticize.

  I am still a food snob. With tastes like mine it is even more impossible to eat the antiseptic and plastic-tasting trash that fills our supermarkets and restaurants. But I am a different type of food snob.

  My favorite foods are the simple ones now; an apple that holds all the taste of autumn, tomatoes full of summer goodness, carrots rich of the earth itself, a simple steak that carries in it the flavor of grass and open pasture. The food made by God is still the best.

  Finally, I have found that wine I have searched for my whole life. Every Sunday I taste what has been missing, the piece that fills up the fullness of wine, the words for the blank pages in the book. You can scoff all you want, turn your nose up at me, but you can’t taste like I can. You don’t know what it’s like to experience the true depth of the eucharist, the communion, when I gather with my greater family and we all partake together. I wish you could taste it too. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve tasted in my life.

  It tastes like redemption.

  The Faceless One

  Yodis hated the blood-stained altar. He hated the scars cut into its stone surface by countless mad strokes of the sacrificial knife. He hated the eerie feeling he got whenever they approached Numa Din, the sacred place. But most of all, he hated the stares of the idols that surrounded him, that sent chills through him with their wild and distorted faces.

  Yodis had no choice but to be around them. He did nothing to mask his contempt though Oron didn’t seem to care. The shaman continued with his rituals, heedless of the revulsion on Yodis’ face.

  “Are you paying attention Yodis?” the shaman asked. Though he spoke gently his voice carried the full weight of his authority.

  “Yes, honored one,” Yodis answered, trying to focus on the shaman as he walked around the altar singing quietly to himself instead of the stares of the idols.

  “You don’t have to call me that,” Oron reminded him for the tenth time, not taking his eyes off the altar as he spoke. “You’re my apprentice now, just call me Oron.”

  It would be some time before Yodis could get used to that. After a lifetime of referring to the shaman as “Honored One,” he couldn’t just turn it off. Even if his lifetime had only lasted twelve years.

  Yodis let his eyes drift away from the shaman patiently preparing his cleansing rituals upon the altar. At first glance, Numa Din seemed quite pleasing. Semi-circular in shape the space was laid out in gray, polished stones situated on a high hill affording a breathtaking view of the vast jungle. But quickly the appearance turned morbid.

  In the center of the space sat the ghastly altar, stained in brown coats of dried blood, gouges dug into the stone. Behind the altar the firepit was dug to hold the sacred flames for the festivals of Asher. The pit had long been blackened with soot.

  On the outskirts of Numa Din, surrounding the paved semi-circle, sat a wall about twice the height of a man. It was here that inspired Yodis’ most dreaded fascination. For atop this wall sat the thirteen idols that gazed into Yodis’ soul and haunted his nightmares.

  Over the past months Yodis had come to know each of the idols intimately. Beautifully carved out of pink and white marble, they still looked frightening despite the talent and care that went into their making. Or perhaps because of the fine craftsmanship the idols looked terrifying.

  Standing the tallest, perched in the center of the curved wall, loomed Keltis, god of the dawn and sky, one of the first beings of the world. To his left coiled Sifli, serpent goddess of the night, also one of the first beings.

  At the dawn of time Keltis rose up and warred with Sifli. Upon his victory he forcefully laid with her and from their union sprang Shota, the many-armed goddess of destruction and death, dark and terrible as her mother; and Sithi, the diminutive but beautiful goddess of art and story, radiant and glorious like her father.

  To Keltis’ right waited the idol Yena, also one of the first creatures and his second wife. After the conquest and rape of Sifli, Keltis passed over the waters of chaos, and peering into the waters saw a beautiful woman at the bottom. He reached into the water and pulled her out, thus creating the earth which is her body. Keltis lay with her and from their union came the other gods and goddesses who decorated the wall.

  There was Scada, antler-headed god of the hunt, armed with bow and spear. There was Yana, the voluptuous goddess of fertility and the harvest. Cotl, strange and bearded reigned as the god of knowledge, one that the shaman’s deeply revered. Also dear to the shaman was Laki, the long and thin-limbed god of bulging and mad eyes who guarded the secret lore of the forest. Ithru, the river god, was twin to the feared Nimiyan, god of war and death. Last of these chief gods was Asher, final issue of Keltis and evil Sifli. He was god of the fire, ever hungry, demanding even the flesh of children to feed his insatiable appetite.r />
  While Yodis feared all these idols, there was one that loomed more mysterious and awful than the rest. At the end of the eastern curve of the wall, apart and by itself, sat the Faceless One. His marble figure had been carved with greater delicacy and detail than all the others. Yodis could make out waves of marble hair, veins standing out on the muscular arms, could almost see movement in the figure bending at the knees as if he were crouching to leap into the air.

  Most of these fine details went unnoticed at first. For what stood out most about the thirteenth idol were the hands that covered the face. As the legend went, the Faceless One was a God deep and mysterious. Existing before all else he stood outside of time, beyond every other god and spirit the People worshiped. About him they knew almost nothing, for he always hid his face. They built altars to him rarely, mentioned him in occasional prayers and included him in the yearly sacrifices that were sent up to all the gods. Still they knew nothing of him, only that he filled in the dark spaces of what they did know.

  “What does his face look like?” Yodis asked one day as he tended the idols with Oron.

  “We do not know,” the shaman responded in a reverential whisper. “To see his face is death.”

  “Why?” Yodis wondered aloud.

  “Hold your questions, young one,” the shaman cautioned. “We must not speak of the gods in their presence. They may become offended at what we say. We will talk where they cannot hear us.”