Two more black mercenaries opened the doors for me. Of a different tribe, these were tall and thin, the scarifications on their arms like jeweled bracelets of black beads. I nodded to them in passing. Their faces reflected nothing back.
The hall was full of feeding Gipts, served by their slimmer women. On the next to highest tier, there was a line of couches on which lay seven massive men, the faró’s advisors. And on the high platform, overseeing them all, the mass of flesh that was the faró himself, one fat hand reaching towards a bowl of peeled grapes.
“Greetings, oh high and mighty faró,” I said, my voice rising above the sounds in the hall.
The faró smiled blandly and waved a lethargic hand. The rings on his fingers bit deeply into the engorged flesh. It is a joke amongst the People that one can tell the age of a Gipt as one does a tree, by counting the rings. Once put on, the rings become embedded by the encroaching fat. The many gems on the faró’s hand winked at me. He was very old.
“Masha-la,” he spoke languidly, “it grieves me to see you with the Rod of your people.”
“It grieves me even more, mighty faró, to greet you with my news. But it is something which you must know.” I projected my voice so that even the women in the kitchens could hear.
“Say on,” said the faró.
“These death-bearing angels are not so much a plague upon the People but are rather using us as an appetizer for Giptanese flesh,” I said. “Soon they will tire of our poor, ribey meat and gorge themselves on yours. Unless ...” I paused.
“Unless what, Leader of the People?” asked the faró.
I was in trouble. Still, I had to go on. There was no turning back, and this the faró knew. “Unless my people take a small vacation across the great sea, returning when the angels are gone. We will bring more of the People and the monument will be done on time.”
The faró’s greedy eyes glittered. “For no more than the promised amount?”
“It is for your own good,” I whined. The faró expects petitioners to whine. It is in the contract under “Deportment Rules.”
“I do not believe you, Masha-la,” said the faró. “But you tell a good story. Come back tomorrow.”
That saved my own skin, but it did not help the rest. “These angels will be after the sons of the faró,” I said. It was a guess. Only the sons and occasional and unnecessary still women went out in the daylight. I am not sure why I said it. “And once they have tasted Gipt flesh ...” I paused.
There was a sudden and very real silence in the room. It was clear I had overstepped myself. It was clearer when the faró sat up. Slowly that mammoth body raised with the help of two of the black guards. When he was seated upright, he put on his helm of office, with the decorated flaps that draped against his ears. He held out his hand and the guard on the right pushed the Great Gipt Crook into his pudgy palm.
“You and your People will not go to the sea this year before time,” intoned the faró. “But tomorrow you will come to the kitchen and serve up your hand for my soup.”
He banged the crook’s wide bottom on the floor three times. The guard took the crook from his hand. Then exhausted by the sentence he had passed on my hand—I hoped they would take the left, not the right—he lay down again and started to eat.
I walked out, through doors opened by the shadow men, whose faces I forgot as soon as I saw them, out into the early eve, made blood red by the setting sun.
I could hear the patter of the faró’s sons after me, but such was my agitation that I did not turn to warn them back. Instead I walked down the street composing a psalm to the cunning of my right hand, just in case.
The chittering of the boys behind me increased and, just as I came to the door of Isak’s house, I turned and felt the weight of wind from above. I looked up and saw an angel swooping down on me, wings fast to its side in a perilous stoop like a hawk upon its prey. I fell back against the doorpost, reaching my right hand up in supplication. My fingers scraped against the nailed-up feathers. Instinctively I grabbed them and held them clenched in my fist. My left hand was down behind me scrabbling in the dirt. It mashed something on the ground. And then the angel was on me and my left hand joined the right pushing up against the awful thing.
Angel claws were inches from my neck when something stopped the creature’s rush. Its wings whipped out and slowed its descent, and its great golden-haired head moved from side to side.
It was then that I noticed its eyes. They were as blue as the Gipt sky—and as empty. The angel lifted its beautiful blank face upward and sniffed the air, pausing curiously several times at my outstretched hands. Then, pumping its mighty wings twice, it lifted away from me, banked sharply to the right, and took off in the direction of the palace where the faró’s sons scattered before it like twigs in the wind.
Two times the angel dropped down and came up with a child in its claw. I leaped to my feet, smeared the top of my stick with the dung and feathers and chased after the beast, but I was too late. It was gone, a screaming boy in each talon, heading towards its aerie where it would share its catch.
What could I tell the faró that he would not already know from the hysterical children ahead of me? I walked back to my own house, carrying my stick above my head. It would protect me as no totem had before. I knew now what only dead men had known, the learning which they had gathered as the claws carried them above the earth! Angels are blind and hunt by smell. If we but smeared our sticks with their dung and feathers and carried this above our heads, we would be safe; we would be, in their “eyes,” angels.
I washed my hands carefully, called the minon to me, and told them of my plan. We would go this night, as a people, to the faró. We would tell him that his people were cursed by our God now. The angels would come for them, but not for us. He would have to let us go.
It was the children’s story that convinced him, as mine could not. Luck had it that the two boys taken were his eldest. Or perhaps not luck. As they were older, they were fatter—and slower. The angel came upon them first.
Their flesh must have been sweet. In the morning we could hear the hover of angel wings outside, like a vast buzzing. Some of the People wanted to sneak away by night.
“No,” I commanded, holding up the Rod of Leadership, somewhat darkened by the angel dung smeared over the top. “If we sneak away like thieves in the night, we will never work for the Gipts again. We must go tomorrow morning, in the light of day, through the cloud of angels. That way the faró and his people will know our power and the power of our God.”
“But,” said Josu, “how can we be sure your plan will work? It is a devious one at best. I am not sure even I believe you.”
“Watch!” I said and I opened the door, holding the Rod over my head. I hoped that what I believed to be so was so, but my heart felt like a marble in the mouth.
The door slammed behind me and I knew faces pressed against the curtains of each window.
And then I was alone in the courtyard, armed with but a stick and a prayer.
The moment I walked outside, the hover of angels became agitated. They spiraled up and, like a line of enormous insects, winged towards me. As they approached, I prayed and put the stick above my head.
The angels formed a great circle high over my head and one by one they dipped down, sniffed around the top of the Rod, then flew back to place. When they were satisfied, they wheeled off, flying in a phalanx, towards the farthest hills.
At that, the doors of the houses opened, and the People emerged. Josu was first, his own stick, sticky with angel dung, in hand.
“Now, quick,” I said, “before the faró can see what we are doing, grab up what dung and feathers you find from that circle and smear it quickly on the doorposts of the houses. Later, when we are sure no one is watching, we can scrape it onto totems to carry with us to the sea.”
And so it was done. The very next morning, with much blowing of horns and beating of drums, we left for the sea. But none of the faró’s people
or his mercenaries came to see us off, though they followed us later.
But that is another story altogether, and not a pretty tale at all.
SECOND JOURNEY OF THE MAGUS
Ian R. MacLeod
IAN R. MacLEOD’s debut novel, The Great Wheel (1997), won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Since then he has followed it with The Light Ages, The House of Storms, The Summer Isles (which won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in both its novel and novella forms), the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Song of Time and Wake Up and Dream, forthcoming from PS Publishing.
MacLeod has twice won the World Fantasy Award, for novella and novelette, and his short fiction is collected in the Arkham House volume Voyages by Starlight, as well as Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic and Journeys.
“I’d long been thinking of writing something based on what I suppose you might call this story’s theological premise,” reveals the author. “For a long while, I played around with using John the Baptist and Salome as the main protagonists, but I couldn’t get it to work. Then, when Melchior came along, and, with a touch of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem about the magi, everything snapped into shape.
“There’s something horrible about angels, even when they’re described as being at their most holy and brilliant, as a quick perusal of the Book of Revelation will show.”
HE TRAVELED THE SAME WAY, but there was heat this time instead of the dark of winter, and nothing of the lands which he had passed through more than thirty years before was the same. Gone were the quiet houses, the patchwork fields, the lowland shepherds offering to share their skins of wine. Instead, there were goats unmilked, bodies bloating in ditches, fruit left to rot on the branch. And people were fleeing, armies were marching. Fear and dust hazed the roads.
He followed hidden tracks. He camped quietly and alone. He lit no fire, ate raisins and dry bread. He spoke no prayers. Although an old man, weak and unarmed, he felt resignation rather than fear. His camel was of far greater value than he was, and he knew he could never to return to Persia. At least, alive. The Emperor, if he ever knew of his journey, would regard it as treason, and the Zoroastrian priests would scourge his body for honoring a false god.
He came at last to the Euphrates. There were palms and green hills rising from the marshes, but the villages all around were empty. He sat down by the broad blue river as his camel drank long and loud, and quietly mourned for his two old friends. Melchior, who had first read of that coming birth in the scriptures of a primitive tribe. Gaspar, who had found the right quadrant in the stars to pilot their way. And, he, Balthasar, who had accompanied them because he had ceased to believe in anything, and wished to see the emptiness of all the world and the entire heavens proven with his own eyes. That, he supposed, was why he had chosen to bring an unguent for embalming corpses as his gift for this king he never expected to find.
A boat was moored, nudging anxiously into the current as if feared to be left alone in this greenly desolate place. It was evening by the time Balthasar had refound his resolve and persuaded his half-hobbled camel to board the vessel with murmured spells, then made small obeisance to the gods of the river, and poled into the inky currents beyond the reeds. The sky in the west darkened as sprites of wind played around him, but, even as the moon rose and stars strung the heavens, even as he re-moored the boat on the far side and set off across a land which soon withered to desert, the western horizon ahead remained aflame.
He knew enough about war to understand the dark eddies and stillnesses which he had already witnessed on his journey, but it seemed to him that the battleground he encountered as the dawn sun rose at his back and brightness glared ahead was the stillest, darkest place on earth. All Persians should be grateful, he supposed, that this resurgent Hebrew kingdom had turned its wrath against the Empire of Rome. A strategist would even say that war between powerful neighbors can only bring good to your own lands—he had heard that very thing said in the bars of Kuchan—but that presupposed some balance in the powers which fought each other. There was no balance here. There was only death.
Blackened skulls. Blackened chariots. Heaps of bone, terribly disordered. The way the Roman swords and shields were melted as if put to the furnace. The way the helmets were caved in as if crushed between giant fists. Worst still, somehow, was the sheer value of what had been left here, ignored, discarded, when every battlefield Balthasar had ever witnessed or heard of in song was a place ripe for looting. This great Roman army, with its engines and horses, with the linked plate metal walls of irresistibly fearless men and raining arrows, had been obliterated as if by some fiery hurricane. And then everything simply left. It was hard to find a way across this devastation. He had to blindfold his camel and sooth the moaning creature with quite visions of oases to keep it calm. He wished that he could blindfold himself, but, strangely, there was nothing here to offend his mouth and nose. There were no flies even as his feet sunk through puddled offal as he climbed mountains of bones. The only smell was a faint one of some odd kind of perfume, such as the waft you might catch from beyond the curtains of the temple of some unknowable god.
The noon sun was hot, but the blaze in the west had grown brighter still. He remembered that star, the one which Gaspar had been so certain would somehow detach itself from the heavens to lead them. Had it now reignited and settled here on earth? Was that what lay ahead? He swathed his face against the burning light and drifting ash. It seemed to him now that he’d always been destined to re-take this journey at the end of his life. If nothing else, it was due as penance.
The three men who had taken this journey before had thought themselves wise, and were acknowledged in their own lands as priests, kings, magi. Then, unmistakably even to Balthasar’s dubious gaze, a single star had hovered before them, and did not move as the rest of the heavens revolved. It went beyond all reason. It destroyed everything he understood, but the people they asked as they passed through this primitive outpost of the Roman Empire could speak of nothing in their ragged tongue but vague myths of an ancient king called David, and of a great uprising to come. They did not understand the stars, or the ancient scripts. They only understood the gold which the three magi laid upon their palms.
Finally, though, they reached the city called Jerusalem. It was the administrative capital of this little province, and truly, from its fallen walls and the pomp with which the priests of the local god bore themselves, it did seem to be the remnant of a somewhere which had once been far greater. The local tetrarch was called Herod, and even to the cultured eyes of the three magi, his palace was suitably grand. It was constructed on a sheer stone platform with high walls looking out across the city, and surrounded by groves of fine trees, bronze fountains, glittering canals. Thus, the three magi thought, as they were led through mosaic-studded halls, does the Rome honor and sustain those who submit to its power.
They were put at their ease. They were given fine quarters, soft clean beds and hot baths. Silken girls brought them sherbet. Dancing girls danced barefoot. Here, at last, they felt that they were being treated as the great emissaries that they truly were. Herod, bloated on his throne, struck Balthasar as little man made large. But he could converse in the Greek, and the three magi could think of no reason why they should not ask for his advice as to the furtherance of their quest. And that advice was given—generously, and without pause. Astrologers were summoned. Holy books were unfurled, and the bearded priests of this region who clustered around them agreed that, yes, such was the prophecy of which these ancient scriptures spoke—of a new king, of the lineage of a king called David who had once made this city great in the times of long ago. The three magi were sent on their way from Jerusalem with fresh camels, full bellies and happy hearts. Herod, they agreed, as they rode toward the star which now seemed even brighter in the firmament, might be a slippery oaf, but at least he was a hospitable one.
The roads were clogged. It was the calling, apparently, of a census, despite it being the worst time of the ye
ar. Not an auspicious moment, either, Balthasar couldn’t help thinking, for a woman to travel if she was heavy with child. He discussed again with Melchior as they pushed with the crowds and the sleeting rain past the camps of centurions and lines of crucified criminals. Remind me again—is this child supposed to be a man, or a god? But the answer he got from his friend remained meaningless. For how can the answer be both yes, and yes? How can something be both? Difficulties, then, with finding somewhere to reside, for all the documents of passage Herod had so kindly given them, and Gaspar’s navigation was no longer so sure. For all that this star glowed out at them like a jewel set the firmaments both day and night, no one could offer guidance on their quest, and none bar a few wandering shepherds seemed to notice that the star was even there.
Then they came at last to a small town by the name of Bethlehem, and it was already night, and it was clear that whatever this strange light in the heavens signaled had happened here. They enquired at the inns. They spoke once again to the so-called local wise men, although this time, more warily. They made no mention of gods or kings. At the start of this journey, Balthasar had imagined himself—although he had never believed it would truly happen—being led to some glowing presence which would rip down the puny veils of this world. But he realized now that whatever it was that they sought would be painfully humble, and all three magi had began to fear for the fate of the family involved.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 6