by Baker, Scott
And yet four grass-green elephants stood upon its ivory coils, and on their backs they supported the world-mountain.
The earth was a tiny protuberance, a minuscule boss, high on one of the mountain's four faces. We were within the mountain, in the network of caverns beneath its roots which formed a world vaster than a thousand earths, looking out and down and through the living stone into the void. The caverns were filled with fires the color of burning blood, with rivers of flowing gold and silver and platinum, with oceans of white fire through which winged serpents of turquoise flame flew and coupled. Vasuki was a river of liquid jade carrying us up and out through the world-mountain's iron crust to its surface, there to become a fountain falling as green rain into the infinite sea surrounding the world-mountain, in which it floated on the backs of four great turtles of blood-red copper.
Around us the waters were golden and cool, sweet-tasting. Indolent dragons with shimmering amethyst scales and long emerald barbels swam in the luminous waters, laired in drifting undersea ice palaces. Great ropes of shining pearls were looped around their necks, around their long fishlike bodies and short reptilian legs. We clung to the ropes of pearls wrapped around Vasuki's broad scaly back as he took us deeper, ever deeper, until at last we came to Patala, to the land beneath the sea, all jeweled palaces, groves, streams and gardens, through whose golden sky the great dragons drifted and swam like luminous purple clouds.
And yet behind it, or around it somehow, like shifting constellations of half-glimpsed afterimages, was the network of fiery caves beneath the world-mountain's roots, was the golden ocean that was at the same time all around us and visible overhead, Patala's sky.
And within and beneath them all, bleeding in and out of them as it bled in and out of the void, the thousand-headed serpent, coiling endlessly and alone in the dark.
It was too beautiful; I couldn't look at it any longer; I could feel myself dissipating, losing myself in the transformations, the multiplicity. I squeezed my eyes, shut, concentrated on Monteleur, the agony in my ripped and torn tissues, but even the pain fled me, lost itself in the fires, the golden sea, the beauty of the world through whose skies we were gliding.
I opened my eyes and stared at Dara, trying to anchor myself to her. But she was looking around in wonder and joy and I was suddenly terrified that I was losing her to the landscape, to her memories, that the woman I knew and loved, who knew and loved me, would become strange and inhuman and lost to me forever.
"Dara—do you remember this? What it was like here, before they took your memories away?"
"No, I—I recognize it, David, I… remember it, being here, but—" There was a pain in her voice, a longing, that seemed to confirm my fears even while it told me she was still mine, that I hadn't lost her. "But that's all. I see it and I remember it."
We came to a cave in the world-mountain's fiery heart that was at the same time a milk-white chamber in an undersea ice palace and an open pavilion of carved jade in a garden, where Saraparajni awaited us on a canopied throne fashioned from a single great ruby.
Saraparajni. My mother. The cobra-headed Queen, the four-armed woman whom I'd seen lapping Michael's congealing blood with her long, black cat's tongue.
But there was nothing inhuman or frightening about her now. She was small, with eyes of liquid gold, lustrous brown skin, long flowing dark hair and a face that could almost have been Dara's but which was younger-looking and somehow more sharply defined. She wore a long, half-transparent sarilike garment of emerald green silk sewn with myriads of tiny pearls, and there was only the depth to her eyes, a sort of infinite still resonance to her every feature to indicate that she was anything more than an exquisitely beautiful girl just ripening into adolescence.
She gestured us to cushions and her movement was a window opening on memories I'd never known I had, memories of things no human could have ever known or experienced, memories that stretched back far beyond the beginning of the human race to the creation of the universe.
I remembered the void in which the thousand-headed serpent Shesha knotted Himself in and out of a darkness that was not absence but paradoxical fullness, that contained all meanings, all possibilities, even as it contained their negation—
Shesha was Patala and the Nagas, as Shesha was the universe and everything it contained. There was nothing that was not Shesha. Imagine Shesha breathing. When He exhaled, His breath, which was no different from His self, became the universe; when He inhaled, the universe was drawn back into Him. In a sense the universe had been created and destroyed, yet it had always been Shesha, and He had been neither created nor destroyed.
Yet though Shesha was One, He manifested Himself as Two, as Shesha and Devi. Seen this way, Shesha was pure, limitless, changeless consciousness, without form or qualities, while Devi was that power by which Shesha veiled Himself to Himself and negated and limited Himself in order to experience Himself as form. Devi was the Veiler, the Creatrix, the Womb of all things.
Devi had created the universe from Shesha's limitless substance; Devi would destroy it. Yet it was Shesha and Shesha alone who had created and who would destroy it, for Devi was none other than Shesha.
Their union-in-opposition was the basis of all creation: the universe was made up of paired opposites whose opposition reflected that primordial duality: male and female, life and death, good and evil, the static and that which was in motion. Yet these oppositions were only apparent: the static was merely that which was not moving, that which was in motion only that which was not static. Each was real, but real only in relation to the other, and neither had any existence beyond that granted by their union-in-opposition.
Man was a microcosm: whatever existed in the universe existed in him; that which was not in him was to be found nowhere else. But where men were microcosms, the Nagas were Devi, and Devi alone. First created, the Veiler, the Demiurge, the Power by which the One hid Its identity from Itself to become the many, they would be the last to be drawn back into Shesha when the universe ended. In a sense they were the universe…
The concepts were too vast to grasp, yet in that timeless instant in which I remembered them I had no need to grasp them: I was one with them, experiencing them from within, directly. But then the memory was gone, I had only the memory of having remembered, the certainty that for a moment I had known, to animate a comprehension reduced to that which I could assimilate and fit into my limited conceptual system even as it showed me the impossible narrowness of that system.
My mother, the seemingly barely-adolescent girl smiling serenely at us from her canopied throne was Devi, the Demiurge, had created the universe. Even here in Patala it was beyond belief, beyond understanding: I could only accept, and trust in my acceptance. But I understood now how my father and his plans for us had gone wrong. He'd had only himself, only his life as a Bathory dhampire, to use to comprehend whatever truths Saraparajni had shown him… and the knowledge that was even now fading further and further from my understanding and taking on the abstract factuality of something learned secondhand from school or books, like the Special Theory of Relativity, could never have been fitted unmutilated into the person my father had been, the life he'd led.
I moved closer to Dara, took her hand, felt in her the same fading memory of the instant of total memory we'd shared.
"What about us?" I asked, retreating to something more comprehensible. "Are we immortal too, or will we die the way Michael did?"
The Queen opened us again to total memory, and we knew that what we'd been granted when we'd entered Patala was not immortal life, for there was no other kind, but the possibility of maintaining unbroken continuity of consciousness and memory until time ended and the universe was once again drawn back into Shesha. Yet though in Patala there was no death, if we returned to the world we would once again become mortal, could die and be reborn like any other humans. Yet with this difference: our Naga souls would be able to reanimate our cast-off bodies, return them to life and health. For their own use
, or so that we could be reborn as ourselves, with our memories intact. As Michael could have survived the death of his body and been reborn as his renewed self, had he not fled in horror to a new body and forgetfulness from that moment of intimacy with his Naga soul, from the knowledge of who and what he was that his contact with his second soul had thrust upon him.
Death—true death, not a vampire's ignorant slavery to Satan—was nothing to fear, neither extinction nor loss, but only change, yet even that necessity could be transcended if we learned to live in intimacy with our Naga souls, so that with their aid we could shed our mortality like snakes shedding their worn-out skins, to emerge fresh and renewed from the discarded envelope.
Reduced to myself once more, I remembered Monteleur, my father crouched over Stephen's body, Larry in Province-town with the familiar squirming through him. Remembering my father's face, seeing it smeared with blood and torn flesh, I knew it for my face, the Bathory face I'd always kept carefully concealed, even from myself, behind my outer masks. It was there, too, behind Dara's face, and as we stared into each other's eyes, our two selves fusing to form one self, our two minds one mind, we knew that we couldn't bear to see that face looking out at us from each other's eyes, from every mirroring surface, for all eternity.
We had to do whatever we could to keep the Bathorys from hurting and enslaving more people, from turning more of their innocent victims into what they themselves had become. Because we were both Bathorys, both alive only through the use we'd been able to make of our ancestors' stolen strength: the vampires we'd left behind to spend their nights in impossible hunger, their days in Hell, were not only our responsibility but part of ourselves.
We had to return to the world, risk not only death and forgetfulness, a new life in a new body, but an eternity of torture and degradation in Hell.
Even as our decision clarified itself within us the Queen allowed new memories, new knowledge to surface within us. I was submerged by my past, our past, all our Bathory pasts: the unending round of days spent with Satan in Hell, merged with Him, suffering the infinite agony of His self-inflicted torments.
Was submerged by the horror, the despair, of that eternally repeated realization that there was no satisfaction, no escape, no hope, that we were Satan's now and forever, that He would never let any of those whom He'd assimilated ever find an instant's peace or freedom again.
Any vampire we killed would only be reborn in another body with its potential for harm intact—as Michael, gone on to rebirth and oblivion, would only find himself Satan's once again when his new life was over. The only way to destroy the evil the Bathorys represented was to free them from Hell by getting them to renounce the Compact they'd made with Satan—but Satan was in them, was them, would no more allow them to free themselves than He would ever free Himself from Hell and the agony which was His very reason for existing…
Saraparajni gestured again, opening me to understanding.
Satan was a god, a totally conscious being, self-created, self-creating, capable of becoming anything His consciousness-of-self could encompass.
And yet—the gods were mortal. Totally conscious, they had only their consciousness-of-self to sustain their existence. Deprive them of that consciousness and they ceased to exist.
Satan was a god, and the gods could be destroyed.
We could destroy Him.
Not out of a desire for vengeance, or to punish Him. Satan had to be destroyed for the same reason the vampires and His other victims had to be liberated. Out of compassion for His suffering.
Because the balance had shifted. In the time of Shesha's Exhalation the Nagas had been ruled by the joy of creation, and though they'd destroyed as well as created (since the old must always be destroyed to make place for the new) yet it had been the will of the One to become many which had filled them. But Saraparajni's marriage to my father had marked the midpoint of the cycle, and with our births Shesha's Exhalation had ended and His Inhalation begun.
Again that transcendent memory faded back into factuality, and I was left with the knowledge that it was for this that Saraparajni had entered the world, for this that Dara and I had been conceived: so that we could attempt to destroy Satan.
Attempt only, because the Nagas no longer knew the outcome of the train of events they'd set into motion. They were not omniscient; they too were capable of forgetting; in pouring themselves into the universe they had taken on the limitations of created beings so that now, at the midpoint between the cycles of creation and compassion, they'd forgotten the future and knew only the role they'd chosen to play, the broad path of their destiny.
We could fail, be swallowed up and consumed by Satan as our ancestors had been, our sacrifice serving some purpose the Nagas no longer remembered.
"How can we destroy Satan?" Dara asked.
Saraparajni opened us yet again to Satan's memories, to His eternal present, in which He suffered His entire existence, His every torment, simultaneously… in which Aunt Judith's suicide, the agonies of those hundreds of thousands of men Vlad Tepes had had impaled when he'd ruled Wallachia, the way Michael had used me and Dara, Christ's tragic farce on the cross—the revelation granted him in the moment of his dying, that he was not the Son of God but only Satan's creature, that he had bought with his sacrifice only another means of in-creasing the deception and despair of those who would come to believe in him—all this was part of the process by which Satan had wrenched Himself into existence…
Satan was at the same time the product of men's fears and the self-created cause of those fears. He had been created afraid—afraid of losing His individual identity and dissolving back into Shesha's undifferentiated Self. Every god creates itself in its own image, and Satan had chosen to create Himself from Shesha through fear and pain. Hell, where He was tormented, He had created from those torments as a prison and a refuge: Satan was both Hell itself, and its prisoner.
Satan had chosen to create His identity, find the definition of His self, through pain. Pain is the interface of the self and the not-self; pain delineates boundaries and limitations, defining the one experiencing it to himself while providing the ultimate proof of that experienced self's own reality. Nothing defines one's separation and distinctness from the rest of creation so sharply as pain and Satan, who as a god was a being whose very existence was dependent upon His consciousness-of-self, had been led by His fear of dissolution to adopt the sharpest possible definition of Himself.
But the opposite of pain was joy. Joy in all its forms breaks down the barriers separating consciousness from that which it experiences, thus threatening the fortress integrity of the barricaded self. So it was joy which Satan feared most, and because Satan was a god—a figment of His own imagination—joy was an objective as well as subjective threat to His existence.
Satan dared not share another's joy, for that shared pleasure would erase, however temporarily, boundaries upon which His existence depended. Yet when He caused pain to another, He imposed His proper reality upon that of His victim, and thus avoided the risk of dissolution. Satan found the pleasure He needed to survive in inflicting pain on others, then merging those He tormented with Himself. Sharing the vampires' insatiable hunger, Alexandra's death, even Uncle Peter's struggles to free himself of the werewolf he'd never really been, Satan was able to preserve His existence.
Yet His need to make those He tortured part of Himself rendered Him vulnerable. If He could be tricked into expanding His self-boundaries to encompass a human experiencing the purest and most intense of all possible joys, that of union with Shesha, then Satan would also experience that bliss and, ex-periencing it, would be freed of His self-inflicted, self-creating torments… and so cease to exist.
"What do we have to do?" Dara asked while I was still struggling to make sense of what remained of that transcendent knowledge, still overwhelmed by Satan's agonies.
Once again memory blossomed within us. I opened my mouth to protest, said, "No—" Fell silent again. Because I knew, a
nd there was no way I could deny that certainty, pretend it was anything other than what it was.
Dara would have to die and become a vampire; I would have to remain alive so I could reawaken the vampire Dara would become to the memory of her humanity, then bring her to share with me the ultimate ecstasy of union with Shesha. There was no way I could take her place; I was too much a Bathory and a dhampire, too shut-off from my Naga soul to ever reawaken to my lost humanity once I became a vampire. Our roles were set, immutable, and had been ever since Saraparajni had allowed Herself to die and become a vampire so that the daughter She bore during Her five years of renewed human life would be marked by Satan for His own, destined from birth to become a vampire.
Saraparajni could never have contaminated Satan with the supreme joy of union with Shesha and so destroyed Him Herself, because She was a Naga and the Nagas, first created, would be the last to know that union once more: Devi could not return to Shesha's limitless consciousness until Shesha's Inhalation was complete and the universe ended. But Dara had already spent a day in Hell: Satan would accept her, would consume her, could be destroyed by her—
If I was strong enough to reawaken her lost humanity without succumbing to her first. If I could bring us born to union with Shesha.
I knew what to do, how it had to be done. Not whether I could fight back the Bathory and the dhampire in me long enough to succeed in doing it.
"What happens to Dara afterward?" I asked. "If we destroy Him?"
But that too was forgotten, lost here at the midpoint between the cycles. Perhaps Satan's destruction would release his victims so that they'd be free to go on to new rebirths—and in that case Dara's Naga soul would reanimate her dead body, so that she could be reborn as herself, with all her memories intact.
Perhaps Dara and all Satan's other victims would dissolve back with Him into Shesha's limitless formlessness, sharing His liberation and annihilation.