Some said it was the end of days, the time of the Abomination of Desolation foretold in the Book of Daniel, that the Anti-Christ himself had already set foot in Italy.
In such an atmosphere, Servio, who now looked like one more wandering mendicant among many, entered the city of Rome, finding it impoverished and half-desolate. Nevertheless he stood in the Forum of the Romans, amid the magnificence of the ancient past, with the monuments of illustrious men all around him, the great temples towering over him. On the very steps of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, now the Cathedral of St. Arius, he proclaimed his doctrine, that the heretic Athanasius was both correct and incorrect, that the sword of Islam would conquer the entire world and it wouldn’t, that, given the numerous contradictions in Christian doctrine, all things were possible and impossible, true and untrue simultaneously.
This brought him, first, hecklers and a few pieces of hurled, rotten fruit, then a crowd, then a large crowd, then a riot as the city watch forced its way through to arrest him.
It was what he wanted. He was hauled before a papal court, where he was able to dispute with trained theologians. The pope in those days was a Saxon, Pope Hrothgar, a man of no great learning, but a strictly orthodox Arian. Servio, his mind fully awakened, had not merely memorized the entire writings of the heresiarch Athanasius, but most of the Bible, many works of the Church fathers, and, incidentally, Ammianus Marcellinus. He didn’t need his manuscripts before him. He could quote chapter and verse against the best of them.
It was the Pope who finally could not follow the argument anymore, grew impatient, reportedly exclaimed, “Oh, the Hell with it!” and ordered Servio burnt at the stake.
At this Servio rejoiced, proclaiming that for all he might suffer martyrdom in this world, in a parallel one, in another thread of history’s vast tapestry, he would know only triumph and happiness. Death and life co-existed. No one truly died, for in another place, in another strand of history, they were still alive, contradictorily, at the same time.
In the present world, the executioner botched the job, and the flames reached Servio before the smoke suffocated him, and he suffered a great deal. Yet he died with a look of inexpressible joy on his face, proclaiming that for all he might feel pain in this world, in a parallel one he felt the equivalent pleasure. Toward the very end he broke partially free of his bonds and raised up his arms, as if he expected to float into space. He called out to someone no one else could see. He was shouting something about a rug before his words gave way to incoherent screams and then the roar of the flames, and at last, silence.
It was reported that the smell from the pyre was not the stench of charred flesh, but a sweetness, like roses, the odor of sanctity.
Many of those who beheld the spectacle began to chant, “Begotten, not made. Begotten, not made.” The urban prefect, taking alarm at this, ordered the watch to disperse the crowd with clubs.
There was no further investigation. Rome fell to the Arabs two days later.
V
Sometime during the Umayyad Caliphate in Italy, the rumor began that Servio had risen from the dead, not as the older, more articulate, charismatic hermit who had debated the theologians to a standstill in Rome, but that baby-faced mooncalf of a boy, who was seen in the streets of this or that city or town, barefoot and in rags, preaching that fools are wise even as the wise are foolish, that there is no death, that Christ has redeemed us for our sins, and that, simultaneously, he has not and never will.
The Caliph’s troops caught up with him outside of Ravenna. They crucified him by the side of the road, and watched as he was devoured by crows, while he preached to the crows of the multiplicity of worlds.
When it was over, there was no body on the cross, no bones on the ground, nothing. He had and he had not died. He was and was not risen.
The most extraordinary political development of this period was that as the remnant of the Western Empire continued to weaken, the still pagan Franks finally burst into western Germany and Gaul. Most astonishingly, their king, Charles, known to history as Charlemagne, converted his nation, not to Arian Christianity, but to Athanasianism, which, by the very irreducible nature of its central mystery, proved better able to resist Islam. When Frankish troops poured into Italy, the papacy was reinstituted in Rome, and Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans in the year 800, Servio was also declared a saint along with Athanasius, even though there was actually some doubt as to whether Servio was really dead.
A particularly scruffy, rather bug-eyed, beggar boy with badly scarred hands and feet sat on the cathedral steps outside during the ceremony. Everyone took him for an idiot and no one asked him anything.
VI
Yes, I am a lot older than I look.
This is and is not the secret of everything.
Heresy is a living organism. Its purpose is to multiply, to produce more heresy and spread itself among the multiplicity of worlds. It is a metaphor and personification of that primal chaos which is referred to obliquely in the secret writings of the Gnostics as “the devouring void,” which is likewise, in some other thread of time, the source of all creation.
God exists. Heaven is filled with light.
God does not exist. There is only the void.
You are and are not reading this.
In the absolute clarity of your understanding, you have become completely mad.
Begotten, not made.
THE WITCH OF THE WORLD’S END
The Witch of the World’s End dwelt alone in a tower of glass, at the Earth’s uttermost rim. For attendants, she had only spirits, figures of light that flickered like flame. Whirling columns of dust came and went as she bade them; and brilliantly-plumed, metallic birds sang for her, animated by the captive souls of the dead. At night, stone soldiers guarded her battlements; the statues of her garden stirred to life, eyes hollow and darkly gleaming, animated by the strength of her dreams.
She wanted no other company, for all her waking hours she spent at her loom, weaving a tapestry of shadow and starlight and something infinitely finer than spider’s silk; and in that tapestry were depicted all the lives of men, their deeds and their glories, their sins and their sufferings, and, most especially, their manifold, but ultimately monotonous deaths.
All these things she shaped with her delicate hands, and whether they were true because she wove them, or she wove them because they were true, not even the Witch of the World’s End knew for certain.
Once she glanced up, noticing the Moon as it came drifting through her great hall, high up near the ceiling, entering by the east window and leaving by the west, like a pigeon fluttering under the eaves.
Her hand slipped. A thread tangled, distorting the pattern she had intended. She paused to study this new thing, then sighed softly and continued her work, embroidering around the tangled thread, naming the new figure she created Antharic. She wrought him as a splendid knight, astride a black war-steed, his silver armor gleaming in the moonlight, his spearhead like the flash of an enormous jewel suddenly revealed in the dark, the emblem on his shield that of a charging bull.
That same bull which is sacred to Vastorion, who ranks in Hell as Lord of Vengeance.
Antharic was coming to kill the Witch of the World’s End.
She wove the outline of him, humming softly the litanies of Vengeance, and of Satan.
The long hangings in her chamber rippled in some secret draught.
* * * *
When Antharic was small, he stood ragged and barefoot on a little mound, waving a stick and shouting, “Look! I’m a giant-killer! I am Caesar! I am Alexander! I am braver than all the knights in the world!”
His father laughed bitterly and swatted him with the back of a huge hand, sending the boy tumbling into a puddle.
“You’re just a dirty boy. You’ll grow up to be a dirty man. Now get to work and forget your silly dreams.”
And Antharic labored in the fields beside his father and his brothers, knee-deep in mud. Even his gr
andfather was there for a time, until the work broke him and the old man died. The sun rose and set, rose and set; the stars turned in their courses and the seasons passed in turn. At each harvest, the King’s men came to collect their share, and everyone went hungry.
That was all anyone knew. In the winter, the family sat in the cold and the dark, telling stories no one believed, or singing songs that had no life in them.
“I will be a great hero one day,” Antharic said. “You will be amazed.”
Often his father was too weary even to laugh.
But Antharic dreamed his dreams, and in them he beheld the witch in her chamber, weaving. She was young and slender, as exquisite as anything she wove. Sometimes she spoke to him in a soft voice, and sometimes the weaving seemed to pass through his own hands. He saw the figure of the knight clearly, its visor raised to reveal a broad face with pale, passionless eyes. He admired the strong form of the hero, the massive shoulders and thighs, like those of Hercules in the old stories.
“Antharic,” the witch said to him. “This knight is named Antharic.”
But Antharic was a dirty boy, famine-thin, with a gaping, round face, like a pumpkin atop a stick, people always said.
In his dreams, too, in the witch’s weaving, Antharic saw a second figure, that of Pestilence, a skeleton in a black shroud, sowing seeds of death like dragon’s teeth, out of a pouch worn at the hip.
When he awoke, his mother and his sisters were already dying, shivering and coughing up blood. Only he and his father survived. They had to burn the house to get the contagion out, then bury their dead, and when these things were done, his father looked very old and very tired.
Soon after the King’s men came for the crops, but there were no crops, because no one had been able to harvest them.
That day, for the first time in his life, Antharic beheld a genuine knight, a mighty man of war in tarnished armor, seated on a war-horse, pointing and giving orders to the others.
“Where is your fee?” asked the knight, leaning down from his saddle.
Antharic’s father could only show his empty hands.
“My lord must be paid,” said the knight.
Without further words, he struck off the old man’s head. His men stuck it on a post, as a warning, then all of them rode away, laughing.
Antharic hated that knight at once, and resolved to slay him, but he knew that first, in madness or guile, he would have to become like him; and his hatred was as for one who had stolen what was rightfully his own.
Antharic ran after them, waving his arms and shouting. “Take me with you! I will be a knight too!”
“The child is crazed,” someone said. The men rode on at their own pace.
When he was still following them on the second day, the knight said, “No, I think he is some demon, sent to hound us into sin.” So the others crossed themselves fearfully, and spread out, to find and slay Antharic. But they couldn’t find him, and told their master so. “He has gone back to Hell then,” said the knight.
The others laughed, uneasily.
Antharic, meanwhile, had fallen down in exhaustion and grief, dreaming fierce dreams. In those dreams, he paced back and forth in the chamber of the Witch of the World’s End, ashamed of the rags he wore and his muddy, bare feet shuffling on the witch’s polished floor. But still she wove. The needle in her hand was like a silver fish, leaping from wave to wave, appearing and reappearing, sparkling as it moved. And she sang her soft song; and once she paused to take his hand in hers, and even to place the needle in his hand, though he didn’t know what to do with it.
“What I have made, will be,” she said. “Therefore be comforted.”
He gave the needle back to her, but as he did, he pricked his finger. A droplet of his blood stained the tapestry, and the witch went on with her work, as he shuffled away from her, then back again, then away, glancing fearfully at her handiwork, as his own tale within it grew and changed.
And once he fell down faint from hunger and seemed to awaken into another, different dream, where a holy anchorite had carried him to his cell deep in a forest. There, in the quiet darkness, the holy man healed him; and Antharic confided all he had experienced in his other dream. He spoke of the Witch of the World’s End.
“These are Satan’s tricks,” said the anchorite. “Snares and devouring mouths. If you let them, they will indeed devour you.”
When Antharic at last rose to leave, his host bade him tarry and pray a while, and turn from the path he had already begun to follow. Antharic prayed, but uncertainly, and finally said, “No, Brother. I must be going. I have to be glorious.”
He described again what he had seen in the witch’s tapestry, and told some of the stories of the hero-knight, Antharic.
“Is this what you really want?” said the anchorite.
“Yes. More than anything.”
“Then I weep for you.”
Antharic walked through the forest a little ways, where ghosts of armored men stirred in the darkness and whispered to him of glory, and of destiny. After a while, he awoke from his second dream, back into his first, and he stood once more in the weaving chamber of the Witch of the World’s End.
She held up a section of her work, showing him the tiny figure of the anchorite, his cell enclosed by a circle of thread, and hundreds of warrior figures swirling around and past it like a stream rushing past a rock.
“Go now,” she told him. “Be what you are to be.”
He bowed low to her, as a knight must to his lady. He kissed her hand, his heart racing, shocked that he should be so bold. But the witch merely smiled, and turned back to her weaving. So he left her, and journeyed for a time in the forest among the ghosts; their armor creaked and clanked faintly in the cold wind.
Once he heard the anchorite’s voice, far away and very faint, like the voice of a dove in the morning, calling out to God. But he kept on walking, and after a while he heard it no longer.
Later, came shouts and screams, the thud of hooves and the clangor of arms.
He began to run, and suddenly the forest around him was filled with rushing figures on horseback, and with fire; and the air filled with arrows rattling through the branches like hail. He leapt over corpses and the writhing wounded, and emerged into a field beneath a wintry evening sky, where a castle burned and ash and snow swirled.
The rout of battle raged around him, mounted knights riding down footmen whose lines had broken, knights clashing with other knights, their horses rearing and shrieking. The dead lay in heaps beneath their shields, snow on their faces.
And suddenly, it seemed to Antharic that his eyes were opened for the first time, and he saw no glory in any of this, only horror. He turned and tried to flee, to find his way back to the anchorite’s cell, or back home, somewhere, anywhere; but he heard the Witch of the World’s End singing her song, and in his mind’s eye he saw her hands working at her loom, faster and faster.
A huge knight with a helmet horned like a charging bull bore down on him. He yelped and tried to duck, but the great sweep of the knight’s sword clipped him on the side of the head and he tumbled head over heels through the air, like a leaf in a whirlwind.
There was no sound at all then, nothing in the world but for the song of the Witch of the World’s End, and no other motion but for the silver flicker of her needle, rising and falling from a sea of thread. Dully, far away, someone else, not Antharic, felt the terrible, burning cold, and the dull throb of his wound, and the warmth on one cheek where blood poured over it.
All around him, shadow-men fought and fell in utter silence. He walked among them, and their spears did not touch him.
The drawbridge stretched over the moat of the burning castle. A single armored figure lay there.
“I know you,” said Antharic, kneeling down.
“And I, you,” said the other.
It was that same knight who had killed Antharic’s father.
“I have seen you in my dreams,” this knight said, “and
I know you to be some evil spirit, who brings my death.”
“I have seen you in mine, too,” said Antharic, who drew a dagger from the fallen knight’s belt and slit the knight’s throat with it. “My lady must be paid.”
The knight coughed, then wept softly, his eyes wide, as if he were looking far away and he too beheld the Witch of the World’s End and heard her song. But no, Antharic thought, this man was a simple brute, a coarse butcher who defiled the form of a true knight. Such a one could not possibly share his vision.
Therefore he raised the dagger to drive it through the dying man’s heart, but then he saw there was no need, stripped him of his armor and clothes, and rolled the naked corpse into the moat.
He armed himself then, in the manner of a knight, as best he could manage, through his fingers were numb with cold and the armor was far heavier than he had ever imagined it would be. Nothing fit. The metal pinched and cut. Staggering, rattling, he made his way to the end of the drawbridge, only to confront that same huge, bull-horned warrior who had struck him down before.
“Stand and draw your sword,” said the other, in a voice like thunder rumbling behind hills. “Be not a craven.”
“But…but…” Antharic staggered back, tripped over his own scabbard, and fell in a clanking heap. He struggled desperately to all fours, but could not rise. With sweeping strides, the bull-headed knight crossed the drawbridge. Boards trembled.
“Get up and draw your sword.”
Antharic called out then, to the Witch of the World’s End, and he heard her song. He saw her needle rising, falling, flickering like a silver fish. She worked faster, faster. Antharic knew that is own story could not end here, on this bridge.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 37