Lasher

by Anne Rice

  But I was not shocked. Once more a strange knowing came to me of a time when all the world had done these things; the Garden of Delights it had been, with all romping naked, and playing and singing and dancing; and flowers all about us, and plenty of fruit to eat.

  Then fear took hold of me. Gone, all that. Blackness.

  I was meantime making like a satyr for these women, which they found very amusing, and which I could not help. At last they tumbled into the bed next to me, covering me with kisses, and I grasped the breasts of the closest woman, and began to suck tenaciously so that I made her cry in pain. The others planted kisses on my naked shoulders, my back, my organ, my chest.

  In a twinkling I was back in the birth chamber in England, in the arms of my mother, knowing the fierce pleasure of drawing the milk savagely from her breast. I was drunk with the pleasure, and now it found its worst culmination in the organ, and I soon rode all the women, one after another, crying out in ecstasy, and then beginning with the first to take them all again.

  It was now evening. The stars were visible above the courtyard. The roar of the city was dying away. I slept.

  I was with my mother, only she was not hating me and crying in terror, but a long slender creature such as me, much too long to be a real woman, and stroking me with fingers which like mine were too long. Didn't everyone see I was a monster like this woman? How could people be so easily fooled?

  I drifted into dreams. I was in a mist, and people were crying, and sobbing, and men were rushing to and fro. It was a massacre. "Taltos!" Someone shouted it, and then I beheld in my dream the farmer from the field near Florence, and heard him whisper, "Taltos!" and I saw before me again a pitcher of milk.

  Thirsty, I woke, and sat bolt upright as was my custom, and stared around me in the dark.

  All the women were still, but with their eyes open. This struck me as horrid, horrid as the illusion that the woman's face had been on the back of her head. I reached out to shake awake the blond woman, so rigid was her gaze. And I perceived the moment I touched her that she lay dead in a pool of her own blood. Indeed, all of them were dead, one on either side of me, and the three who lay on the floor. They were dead. And the bed was soaked with the blood and it stank of human people.

  I rushed out into the courtyard in uncontrollable cowardice, and collapsed near the fountain, on my knees, trembling, unsure of what I had seen. But when I finally rose to my feet and returned, I saw it was true. These women were dead! I laid my hands on them repeatedly but there was no waking them! I couldn't cure them of death!

  I gathered up my robes, my sandals, dressed again and ran away.

  How could these women have died? I remembered the words the Franciscan had said to me. "Never touch the flesh of a woman."

  It was the dead of night in Florence, but I managed to return to the monastery, and there I locked myself in my cell. When morning came, news of the deaths was all over Florence. A new form of plague had struck.

  I did what I have always done at such trouble. I went home to Assisi, walking the whole way. The mild winter was coming, which is nevertheless a winter, and the journey was not easy. But I did not care. I knew someone was following me, a man on horseback, but I only caught glimpses of him from time to time. I was in despair.

  As soon as I reached the monastery I prayed. I prayed to Francis to guide me and to help me; I prayed to the Blessed Virgin to forgive me for my sins with these women. I lay on the floor of the church, arms outstretched as priests do when they are ordained. I prayed for forgiveness and understanding, and I wept. I didn't want to think my sin had killed these women.

  I envisioned the Christ Child, and I became the small helpless baby, and I said, "Christ, succor me, Holy Mother the Church, succor me. What can I do on my own?"

  I went to confession, to one of the oldest priests there.

  He was Italian, but had only just come home from England, where many Protestants were now being put to death. We were rebuilding our monasteries in that land, sending priests back to serve the Catholics who had kept the faith during times of persecution.

  I chose this priest because I wanted to confess all--my birth, my memories, the strange things said to me! But when I was kneeling in the confessional these things seemed the dreams of a madman! And it really did seem to me that I was a man only, and had had some proper childhood somewhere which had somehow been erased from my mind and heart.

  I confessed only that I'd been with the women, that I had brought death to all four but did not know how.

  My confessor laughed at me, softly, reassuringly. I had not killed the women. On the contrary, God had preserved me from the plague which had killed them. It was a sign of my special destiny. I should not think of it anymore. Many a priest has stumbled, taken to his bed a whore. The important thing was to be larger than that sin and that guilt, to carry on in the service of God.

  "Don't be full of pride, Ashlar. So you finally succumbed like everyone else. Put it behind you. You know now that it is nothing, this pleasure, and God has spared you from the plague for Himself."

  He told me that the time would come perhaps when I was to go to England, that England would need us as never before. "Queen Mary is dying," he said. "If the crown goes to Elizabeth, the daughter of the witch," he said, "there shall be terrible persecutions of the Catholics again."

  I left the confessional, said my penance and went out into the wintry windswept fields.

  I was unhappy. I did not feel absolved. My eyes were wide and I was walking in a staggering way. I had killed those women, I knew it. I had thought them witches! But they were not! The face on the back of the head, all that had been trickery and illusion! And they had died as the result!

  Oh, but what was the larger truth! What was the real story? There was but one way to know! Go to England, go as a missionary to England, to fight the Protestant heresies there, and seek the Glen of Donnelaith. If I found the castle, if I found the Cathedral, if I found the window of St. Ashlar, then I would know I had not imagined these things. And I must find the clansmen. I must find the meaning of the words once spoken to me. That I was Ashlar, that I was he who comes again.

  I walked alone in the fields, shivering and thinking that even my beautiful Italy could be cold at this time. But was this cold a reminder to me of where I had been born? This was for me a solemn and terrible moment. I had never wanted to leave Italy. And I thought again of the priest's words, spoken in Donnelaith: "You can choose."

  Could I not choose to stay here in the service of God and St. Francis? Could I not forget the past? As for the women, I would never touch them again, never. There would be no more such deaths. And as for St. Ashlar, who was this saint who had no feast in the church calendar? Yes, stay here! Stay in sunny Italy, stay in this place which has become your home.

  A man was following me. I'd seen him almost as soon as I left the town and now he came riding closer and closer, a man dressed all in black wool and on a black horse.

  "Can I offer you my horse, Father?" he asked. It was the accent of the Dutch merchants. I knew it. I had heard it often enough in Florence and in Rome, and everywhere that I had been. I looked up and I saw his reddish-golden hair and blue eyes. Germanic. Dutch. It was all the same to me. A man from a world where heretics thrived.

  "You know you cannot," I said. "I'm a Franciscan. I won't ride on it. Why have you been following me? I saw you in Florence. I've seen you many times before that."

  "You must talk to me," he said. "You must come with me. The others haven't an inkling of your secret nature. But I know what it is."

  I was horrified at these words. It was the dropping of a sword which had been dangling over me forever. My breath went out of me. I bent double as if I'd been struck and I went further out, that way, staggering, into the field. The grass was soft and I lay down, covering my eyes from the glaring sun.

  He dismounted and came after, leading his horse. He deliberately stood between me and the sun, so that I could take my hand away
from my eyes. He was powerfully built like many from Northern Europe, and he had the thick eyebrows those people have, and the pale cheeks.

  "I know who you are, Ashlar," he said to me in Italian with a Dutch accent. And then he began to speak Latin. "I know you were born in the Highlands. I know that you come from the Clan of Donnelaith. I heard tell of your birth shortly after it happened. There were those who caught the scent of it and spread the story--even to other lands.

  "It took me years to find you here, and I have been watching you. I know you by your height, by your long fingers, by your power to sing and to rhyme, and by your craving for milk. I have seen you take the offerings from the peasants. But do you know what they would do to you if they could? Your kind would always have the milk and the cheese, and in the dark woodlands of the world, the peasants still know this and leave these offerings for you on the table at night, or at the door."

  "What are you calling me, a devil? A woodland spirit? Some demon or familiar? I am none of those things."

  My head was aching; what was real to me? This beautiful grass around me as I rose to my knees, and then to my feet? This cold blue sky above me? Or those wretched ghastly memories and the words this man spoke?

  "Nights ago in Florence, you brought death to four women," he said. "That was the final proof."

  "Oh, God, then you know it. It is true." I began to weep. "But how did I kill them? Why did they die? All I did was what other men have done."

  "You will bring death to any woman whom you touch! Weren't you told this before you left the glen? Ah, the folly of those who sent you away! And for years and years we have watched and waited for you to come. They should have sent for us. They know who we are, and that we would have paid gold for you, gold, but they are stubborn."

  I was horrified.

  "You speak of me as if I were a chattel. I am my father's son, those base-born."

  He went on worrying and wringing his hands, imploring me to understand him:

  "They were told again and again by our emissaries, but they were superstitious and blind."

  "Emissaries? From where? The Devil!" Again I stared at him, this man in black with the black horse. "Who is blind? Dear God in heaven, give me the grace to understand this, to combat the artful lies of the Great Deceiver. You either stop talking in riddles or I will kill you! Tell me why I killed those women, or so help me God, I may break your bones with my bare hands."

  I rose up in a tempest of anger. And it was all I could do to keep from laying my hands on his throat. The anger was as everything else with me, instantaneous and complete. I frightened him as I came towards him. I was so much taller than he was, and when I put my hands out, he fell back.

  "Ashlar, listen, for this is not the lies of the Great Deceiver. This is the perfect truth. No ordinary woman can bear your child--only a witch can do it, or a dwarfed monster--the half-breed spawn of your kind and the witches--or a pure female of your own ilk."

  The words dazzled me. A pure one of my own ilk! What did this conjure to my imagination? A tall beauty, pale of skin and fleet of foot, with graceful fingers like my own? Had I not envisioned such a being when I lay with the whores? Or had I dreamed? I was overcome suddenly, as if by incense or singing. But I remembered my mother. She was no pure one. She had held her hand out, and revealed the witch's mark.

  "You do not know the danger," he said, "if the ignorant peasants of this or any land were to find out. Why do you think the Scots sent you away in such haste?"

  "You frighten me, and I want you to stop it. I live a life of love and peace and service to others. They sent me away to become a priest." At this the calm came over me. I believed these words so completely. I looked up at the sky and its beauty seemed to me the perfect proof of God's grace.

  "They sent you away so the peasants would not destroy you as they have always done with the remnants of your breed. The sight of you, the scent of you, the promise of your seed, could pitch them back into their cruel and pagan ways."

  "Breed. What are you saying? Breed." I could not hear any more. I clenched my fists, unable to lay hands on him, unable to do him harm. In all my life of twenty years or more I had never struck another. I could not do violence. I wept, and I fled.

  "You come with me now," he cried, trying to catch up with me. "I can make all provisions for the journey. You have no cherished objects, no personal possessions. You carry your breviary with you. You need nothing else. Come. We will go to Amsterdam together and when you are safe, I will tell you the truth."

  "I will not!" I said. "Amsterdam! A stronghold of the heretics! You are speaking of hell by another name." I turned around. "What are you saying? That I am not a mortal man?"

  Again, he was frightened as I leant over him, but he was powerfully built and he took a stand.

  "You have a body which can deceive others," he said, "but no one can speak for your soul. In the most ancient legends, it was said your kind had no souls to be converted, no souls to be saved. That you could hover invisible in the darkness forever, between heaven and earth, because heaven was closed to you, so your only hope was to return in a likely form."

  I was awestruck, but not only for myself that someone could believe such a thing of me, but for the sheer possibility that such creatures could exist! Soulless. In darkness, with heaven closed to them! I started to weep.

  I cleared my vision, and looked at this man, who'd given words to such a ghastly thought. His words were like sparks inside of me. Like the snapping and popping of damp wood. The more I stared at him, I sensed that he had to be evil, he was from the Devil, he was from some dark army that would carry my soul to hell.

  "And you say that I have no soul? That I have no soul to be saved? How dare you say this to me! How dare you tell me that I am without a soul?"

  In a fury I did strike him, knocking him with one fine blow all the way to the ground. I was stupefied by my own strength and as alarmed by this sin as I had been by my others.

  I ran out of the field and home.

  This man followed me, but he didn't come close. He seemed in a great state of alarm when I entered the monastery, but he hung back, and I wondered if he was afraid of the Cross, the church, the sanctified ground.

  That night I resolved what I must do. I went down beneath the church and slept on the stones before the tomb of Francis. I prayed to him. "Francis, how can I not have a soul? Give me guidance, Father. Help me. Mother of God, this is your child. I am bereft and alone."

  I fell into a deep sleep and I saw angels, and I saw the face of the Virgin, and I shrank down into a tiny child in her arms. I lay against her breasts, one with the Christ Child. And Francis said to me that that was my way; not to be one with the crucified Christ, leave that to others, but to be one with that innocent babe. I must go back to Scotland, go back to where it had begun.

  I dreaded to leave Assisi so soon before Christmas--not to be here for the great Procession and to help make the creche with the shepherds and the Holy Family--but I knew that as soon as I obtained permission, I would go.

  Travel north and find Donnelaith. See for yourself what is there.

  I went to talk to the Guardian, our Father Superior, a wise and kindly man who had served all his life in the place of Francis's birth. He heard me out calmly and then spoke:

  "Ashlar, if you go it will be to a martyr's death. Word has just reached Italy. The daughter of the witch Boleyn has been crowned Queen of England. This is Elizabeth, and the burnings of Catholics have once again begun."

  The witch Boleyn. It took me a moment to remember who this was, ah, the mistress of King Henry, the one who had enchanted him and turned him against the Church. Yes, Elizabeth, the daughter. And so Good Queen Mary, who had tried to bring the land back to the faith, was now dead.

  "I cannot let this stop me, Father," I said. "I cannot." And then in a rush I told him the whole tale.

  I walked back and forth in the chamber. I talked and talked. I told all the words that had been said to me, trying
not to fall into a cadence. I told about the strange man from Holland. I told about the old Laird, and my father, and St. Ashlar in his window, and the priest who had said to me, "You are St. Ashlar come again. You can be a saint."

  I thought surely he would laugh as had my confessor at the mere statement that I had brought the women death.

  He was thunderstruck. He remained quiet for a long time, and then he rang for his assistant. The monk came in. "You can tell the Scotsman that he might come in now," he said.

  "The Scotsman?" I said. "Who is this man?"

  "This is the man who has come from Scotland to take you away. We have been keeping him from his mission. We did not believe him! But you have confirmed his claim. He is your brother. He comes from your father. Now we know that what he says is true."

  His words caught me utterly unprepared. I realized I had wanted to be proven a liar, to be told this was all devilish fantasy and that I must put such thoughts out of my mind.

  "Bring the young Earl's son to me," said the Father Superior again, to send the baffled attendant on his way.

  I was a cornered animal. I found myself looking to the windows as a means of escape.

  I was in terror that the man who came into the room would be the Dutchman. This cannot happen to me, I thought, I am in the state of grace. God cannot let the Devil take me to hell. I closed my eyes, and I tried to feel my own soul. Who dares to tell me I have no soul?

  There came into the room a tall red-haired man, clearly recognizable as Scots by his wild and rustic attire. He wore the tartan of plaid, and ragged untrimmed fur and crude leather shoes, and seemed a savage of the wood compared to the civilized gentlemen of Italy, who went about in hose and fine sleeves. His hair was streaked with brown and his eyes dark, and when I looked at him I knew him, but I could not remember from where.

  Then I saw in memory...the men standing by the fireplace. The Yule log burning. The Laird of Donnelaith saying, "Burn him!" and these men about to obey the command. This was one of the clan, though too young to have been there, then.