“Janus, Lord. I have news.”
Janus, even seated, reached a full ten feet above Solomon. A fly, standing before a giant toad.
Peace, thoughts, schooled Solomon of his own mind.
“Wonderful news. Grave news, perhaps? My lord will be the judge.”
“Speak, dog Solomon. Don’t waste your words on me. I am busied with battle.”
Solomon rocked upon the turret of the moving tank, but steadied his mind, at least.
“At last, I have felt a challenge to your might. A true challenge.”
Slowly, encumbered by the great weight of his own head, Janus turned his gaze away from the might of Russia arrayed before him, toward his little lapdog.
“Solomon…Solomon…”
“My Lord.”
“Play me false?”
“Never. I owe you my power…my existence…my freedom.”
“Do not forget, Solomon. Do not.”
Janus’ voice rode on rancid breath that made Solomon’s eyes tear.
“I will never forget. But a new threat arises. A direct challenge to your right to battle these fields. In a place of…tremendous worth…to the south. A town called Pripyat.”
“I know it not,” said Janus in a voice that rumbled even louder than the tanks beneath his girth.
“One comes to do battle,” said Solomon, carefully. “One you do know.”
Time to throw the dice, thought Solomon.
“One to rival your power…”
Janus was silent for a minute, two. Thinking, ponderous, like his movements now he had grown so large.
“Mock me, would you? Sulayman? Slayer of BOYS!”
Solomon did not cringe, because he knew Janus had the right of it, but also that this would be his only chance at freedom from the mad God’s leash.
“Aye, my dread Lord. A slayer of boys. Slayer of my son. The most powerful sorcerer upon the earth then…as now. He returns. And he calls us forth to do war. Glorious war, Janus. True war, among equals. What challenge, this? Tanks with shells that cannot pierce nor harm. Stings, nothing more,” said Solomon, shaking his head.
Don’t overdo it, he told himself.
“The sorcerer laughs in Pripyat. I hear him now, his mirth blown on the snow.”
“You lie to me, Solomon…it will be your end.”
But Solomon shook his head. He did not lie.
The insane rarely do.
69
The Styx is no place, no river of man. A place upon the fabric…just a fold, a crease, to wherever the Ferryman wishes.
It is the river to Hades and it is not. It is more, and it is less. Shallow or deep, Charon decides.
Upon the waters, Charon pushed with the bargeman’s pole, and they went into the night. Ank watched the shore recede and wondered if she would see England again. Then a deep, heavy mist rolled across her sight and she could see nothing outside the tattered boat. She had no sense of time, nor place.
I’m in the North Sea, she thought.
But in her smart, immortal heart, she knew she wasn’t.
She wasn’t in any kind of sea. She was…elsewhere.
Is this what the Styx is? The border between death and life no more, but…the infinite?
She was just a half-God. She did not know anything but wonder as they travelled the river.
David, the child inside her was still. Like he slept…but that was not quite right. It was more as though he was dormant, or garnering strength. She let him rest, a while. How long, she did not know. There was no time aboard the ferry, no place. No sense, even, of movement.
Holland’s head rested on his fists, which bunched beneath his chin. Somehow, he had managed to sleep.
She smiled and watched him for a moment. He snorted, on occasion, and jumped. Only she and Charon were awake. She tried to speak, but found her lips and tongue dry with, she supposed, awe. Embarrassment.
Here she travelled with her father and a creature in her head beyond fable, and she was starstruck with a rather ordinary-looking man who owned a boat.
He’s just a guy with a boat. A pyschopomp, a guide. Like me. Nothing more. He’s just a guy.
Ank worked up the courage to speak to him and loosened her tongue.
“Charon,” she said, not sure if she felt stupid or brave. “…are we upon the Styx?”
Charon smiled. For a kind of Death, the man had damn good teeth. “The Styx…maybe, Ankou Holland. But more. We’re in the mist…” he said, like it should mean something to her, at least. “We’re in the mist.”
“The mist? The mist is a thing, too?”
“Of course it is.”
Ank watched the Ferryman’s face, hoping to see some kind of humanity there. He looked human. Good-looking, even, in a way. A kind face, maybe. But one devoid of something…a spark.
He’s not human at all, is he?
Not like me.
One foot in, one foot out. Neither one thing nor another.
Ank had never felt so aware of her mortal self, nor her mystical self. Always, her two halves had been one.
Now, so close to awakening, she felt as though she were split in two.
“Charon…what’s it like? Can I ask?”
“You can ask. You are kin. This is why Holland brought you to me.”
“I have so many questions…so much I don’t know, don’t understand…can’t feel.”
“Feel? …I do not feel. I am the Ferryman. This is my essence, Ank. This boat, this pole, the journey.”
“I feel, though. I am half-human. I can’t be…impassive. I can’t detach my humanity and be…what? What am I? A Ferryman like you, but with no boat, Charon. What am I?”
“I understand, I think,” said Charon after a moment. He worked the sea, or the mist, while they spoke, and never once stopped. Maybe he could not. “You wish to understand Death’s design?”
Ank wasn’t sure that was exactly what she meant…but it was close.
“Is there purpose? Who lives, who dies? Is there justice, is there such a thing as evil, good? ‘Death is not mine.’ Lore, mantra. Holland taught me this since I learned my path. But I still don’t get it.”
“No one knows Death, Ank. No mortal. No God. Is there justice? Perhaps. But if there is, then it is justice dealt with such a fine blade that we cannot see it. We are not party to it.
“Everything dies. Everything. Mortal, God. Worlds and stars. Such a wonder, Ank, is it not? A mere mortal commits a sin and we think a death might be just. He dies. Justice was served…but what sin a star? What sin a world, or a tree, or a piece of fruit, rotting on the vine?
“We are servants, Ank. Of the greatest master, the ineffable.”
“And a good servant does not question?”
“Not what I mean. A good servant knows that they are not given to understand the entire picture. A servant serves the food, or cleans the halls. We all are servants, Ank…even the Gods.”
“Ank?”
Ank jumped, because thinking on Charon’s words, she had been engrossed. For the first time since waking with David’s soul within, she had forgotten him.
David? she spoke his name in her mind for the first time since she heard it.
“I am ready,” he said. “May I…borrow your voice?”
You can, David. We will listen.
“Thank you, Ankou.”
Just Ank, she spoke/thought to her brother, her twin.
“Still? Here, on the river of souls?”
Still, said Ank. Always.
70
Ank had a strange sense of self, retreating. Disquieting, but not entirely unpleasant. Almost like being forced to sit down after a long day’s work.
David stepped forward, within her mind, but also within her body. Took control, gently. Like he was being polite, or considerate. For a split second, Ank had the sense that a man, not a child, was in control of her. She felt…stripped. Adult, naked, before a man. Not embarrassed, but definitely something other than a child might feel walking into a mot
her’s bedroom.
Then, David spoke. He took Ank’s voice.
Holland opened one eye at the voice.
Ank, like a passenger, listened, too, while the boat moved on.
Charon took his payment. David’s story laced the Ferryman’s palm.
Do you really not care at all? wondered Ank, watching Charon. Charon’s bargepole dipped and rose, and he didn’t look…but he listened.
Oh, he listened.
Then, later, he watched. As did they all, because David wasn’t a storybook. He wasn’t the man born in the book. He was more than Solomon the wizard would ever be.
He was the seventh son of Solomon himself. He was the sorcerer, and his words were magic.
Not book, movie, music. Not memory, nor feeling, understand, words, memory.
Magic, and the truth of magic.
71
Solomon strode the halls of the temple, not as an old man, nor as a man used to borrowed legs….but as a mortal. As he had been, once, long, long ago.
He paced the halls of his home, his temple.
His temple.
Built with one purpose. Not as a seat of wisdom, or worship, or power.
Asmodeus the demon furnished him with the design.
Within that wondrous temple were alabaster walls that Ank, watching, knew so well…but she was feeling, smelling, hearing, too…she wasn’t transported into a book, or a movie…she was a ghost, mere spirit, unshackled by the restraints of time…she was there.
Sand, endlessly blown in on the winds, crackled under the great wizard’s sandaled feet.
Back and forth, he strode and stomped upon the sand in those corridors that Ank remembered so well.
Solomon was a relatively young man…maybe mid-thirties, though his face was so sun-blasted he might have been even younger. The wizard was dark skinned, with a thick beard. A glint of cunning intellect shone in his black eyes.
And concern.
Mortality was still in him, then. Concern was not an immortal thing.
A torch flickered in a sconce in the wall and with the motion of the flickering fire, a scream came echoing down long halls.
Ank, Holland, Charon. The three of them watched like a person might watch a movie as it was being made. But more…so much more than a mere movie.
Then, the scene changed, as this memory, this reality, cut away from Solomon’s pacing and the screams of childbirth, back to what David knew, what Solomon knew.
Memory, played out, with the magic in David’s words.
A scream again, but this time one not of pain as a child torn away from a mother’s womb, but a scream of triumph from an infant’s lungs. A smile of joy and knowing on the once-wise man’s dark face. A hint, maybe, of sadness.
But the sadness was fleeting, because Solomon’s seventh son was born, and with him, the wizard’s salvation from doom.
And in the present, in a worn wooden ferry that floated upon the river Styx, David’s words danced in the air, like the joy of birth. On his magic, Ank, Holland and even the immortal Charon, too, were lifted up high, euphoria coursing through their bodies…
Then flung down.
72
The mother Naamah held the child David to her breast and he suckled greedily, a hale child in the early light of a new day.
Solomon smiled down at his wife.
She was one of many. Solomon’s appetites were immense, like his hubris.
The child, too, was one of many…
“There will be more,” he said to his wife as he smoothed the birth-sweat from her brow with a hand that bore a great ring—The Seal of Solomon—upon his middle finger.
Then, gently, but implacably, he pulled the feeding child from his mother’s, from Solomon’s wife’s, breast.
She screamed, but she was weak and could not fight a man like Solomon.
Her cries followed him from the room, but he was deaf to them.
He strode along those corridors that Ank knew all too well.
High windows dragged down a soft breeze and cooled Solomon’s sweat. In the courtyards throughout the temple the magnolia was in bloom, and the scent was heavy in the air.
The babe, Solomon’s seventh son, wailed at the separation from his mother.
“Shh, child. Shh,” said the fucked-up wizard.
Chills ran through Ank’s body as she heard the man’s voice…he comforted the child not because the babe was uncomfortable or frightened or confused, but because he needed to concentrate.
To work.
Solomon took the child to the altar in a long and high room within the great edifice, this temple that was the symbol of his power.
“You become power undiluted, my son. You will hold me. Me. Solomon the Great. Together, we will last forever. No death, no prophecy. No disease nor fall from grace will break us, child.” The words, spoken with Solomon’s sun-scorched face mere inches from the babe David’s unfocused eyes.
But even then, Ank and Holland both felt the insanity boiling off Solomon.
Ank no longer wished to watch. She no longer wished to hear/watch the tale that David spun with his terrible magic upon this boat on the river Styx.
Let him pass, she tried to say to Charon. Let the tale be done. Charon…please let the tale be done. I no longer wish to watch!
But David had her voice and he was not done.
73
Solomon’s tools were ready upon the altar that he had ordered built to a great God.
Knives; long, thin.
Cut.
74
Flesh, drying in the sun. Gut, sewing the flesh. And blood-black ink.
Writing a story more terrible than Ank or even Holland had ever known.
Charon, impassive, pushed them closer to shore. But he listened, still.
Ank/David cried their ink tears, and David’s magic spun on…and on…faster now, toward the terrible end that nobody wanted to see but from which no passenger could look away.
Years, the passage of which the watchers could only gauge with the aging of Solomon’s face. Gray flecks in his beard, then, white hair upon a face so dark now it was nearly night-black.
Until, finally, Solomon opened the pages of the book made from his son. He stared into the book, into the pages within the flesh.
Something was missing, the last thing.
I don’t want to see anymore, David. Let it end.
David spoke to her, the only time he had throughout the tale.
“Ank…bear witness. Be strong. For me.”
Such horror.
“So brave,” he returned, and held the door within her mind open once more, for her to step away, to give him control. He was solicitous and considerate. Like a gentleman pulling out a chair for a dinner partner.
Ank could stop him now, but she did not.
If he can bear to tell, she thought, then I can be witness. I can.
She stepped back once more, and watched the final act. Back, within. Into a single moment in time, Ank slipped. Her heart, broken, she watched. God, she watched.
“Asmodeus. It is time,” said the insane wizard.
From behind the man, a hideous thing that could only be a demon stepped forward.
Ank had never seen a demon, though Holland had spoken of them, and angels, both.
Her mind was unprepared for the vision.
The creature was misshapen, malformed. Ugly, but a creature of purpose. Something grand about the creature. A slave, thought Ank. A slave to Solomon. To the seal upon his finger?
Oh, she recognized that seal well, did she not?
“Time for me to leave, Asmodeus. You must be pleased.”
Asmodeus’ horribly disfigured face could not form words. Instead, it grunted. It might have been that the demon attempted to form mortal words, or spoke its own twisted language.
“Now. Do it now,” said the madman. “Before I change my mind…what’s left of it.”
And the demon did as Solomon commanded. Some pact, some deal, long done, seen thr
ough to the unnatural and barbaric conclusion.
Asmodeus wasted no time. He began to tear pieces from the wizard. Sharp, powerful talons upon deformed hands pulled the man, the wizard, to pieces. The wizard, torn asunder, laughed and laughed.
The demon fed the pieces of the cackling wizard into the book made from Solomon’s seventh son…Asmodeus fed Solomon, the father, into the son…into David.
Every last piece of flesh, bone, blood. The demon put the man, in small portions, inside.
The act took time that could not be gauged. Finally, the deed was done.
The last image was of that terrible face, and a semblance of a smile, as the demon closed the book.
Still, with Ank’s voice, with her body, David spoke, but the magic show was all but done.
“Two millennia and more, I waited for this. And now…my bastard father comes,” said David.
He was a book no more, but a soul laid bare as any human soul ever was.
75
Charon nodded, like he was satisfied, or more, like he was full up. A thing of forever that was sated for a time.
Charon’s palms were laced with silver enough. A tale to pass. The passage had been paid.
Holland pushed himself carefully to his feet, and took two short steps across the boat.
For a moment, he stood before his daughter, but saw someone else within her dark eyes.
He thought many things. Holland’s mind was ever working.
But this wasn’t a thing for thought. This was a thing for love…a thing for humankind. Something, perhaps, Ankou might never understand. Something, perhaps, a tortured, tormented, bodiless sorcerer might never feel or know.
This was humanity.
Holland pulled David, within Ank’s shell, into him and held him tight while he cried. Maybe it was David’s tears that Holland felt upon his grizzled cheek. Or maybe it was his daughter, Ank. Maybe one, maybe the other. Maybe they were one.
Whatever. It did not matter which, to Holland.
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