by Harold Bloom
Only when he stood on the other side did the thought come to Perscors that he did not know who his opponent had been. What did it matter, he mused in contempt, since the force within him could overcome whatever rose against him? Even if the sun of Mithras proved not to be his sun, an inward fire would guard and guide him until he died.
“Until I die?” he questioned. So then, he was to die, here on Lucifer? But not before battering at and at least maiming the Archons, and not before serving some purpose of which he sensed Valentinus to be the manifestation. Impatient to master the full range of his fate, he marched westward through the hills. Before him Mithraeans and Arimaneans alike shuddered as they lay in useless ambush. They would go back to their wars again when this mumbling terror of a wanderer had passed them by. The icy wind of death blew on with Perscors, who had crossed the bridge of Sinvat against Arimanes himself, and whose fate it was to carry blindly to an end the revenge of earth against the stars.
Revels of Nekbael
At dawn, Perscors emerged into a green valley, cut through by a lake that seemed to be a violently eddying river. Even in the clear light, he could not make out the precise contours of it; it was extensive enough to vanish into the horizon. But the vista was less strange than the sight of a giant black stone mill at the lake’s edge. As he came up to this huge structure, Perscors distinctly heard a noise of grinding, though there were no signs of people about.
“A demonic mill? Grinding away to produce what? And why here?”
The questions were partly answered after a few glances as he stood at the lake’s edge. The workings ofthe mill were evidently partly underground, since the grinding action was generating a whirlpool in the lake. Perscors brought some of the water to his lips. It appeared that the mill ground out salt, as well as the maelstrom which, eddying out into the lake, seemed darker than it should be, and almost reddish.
Somewhere, on earth, Perscors remembered seeing such a mill, though hardly on this absurd scale. The memory came back to him of a water mill he had come upon once in the Orkney Islands. But there a stream had agitated the mill; here the churning seemed to create an ocean out of a lake. Time, which on Lucifer had become indefinite for him, weighed upon Perscors again because of the oppressiveness of this mill. Not once, he reflected, had he studied the night sky of Lucifer: time and the stars had fled together. Was it that he had learned Olam’s contempt for the world of clocks and starlight? Troubled, he resolved to watch the sky carefully that night, if it were clear, as it promised to be.
He looked up at the mill. It seemed even more grotesquely gigantic: ought he to enter it? He felt profound dread; realizing this provoked his fury. What on Lucifer had the power to frighten him? Perhaps a knowledge that he wished to avoid?
“Here,” he mused, “is a mill that grinds by itself and turns by itself. It is much too large to be of human origin or use. Who made it, then?”
As he stared up at it again, he had the illusion that it towered up more each time he focused upon it. He could hardly see now where it ended and where the sky began. “The maker was Saklas,” he muttered, and with that declaration he resolved to enter and explore the mill, which, in its changing perspective, now looked more like a huge tower with a waterwheel attached than a proper mill.
A walk around it revealed no obvious entrance, which was unsurprising to Perscors, who supposed there to be a covert, underground way in. But circuit after circuit disclosed nothing; short of digging away at the foundations of the entire mill—an endless task—he was baffled. He stood by the lake again and studied the whirlpool. If the pillar was not to be climbed, was the way in through the water? How did one descend without being churned away?
“I am not fool enough to enter your maelstrom, Saklas.” But his hoarse voice was overheard. An answering voice, mocking and female, spoke from just by Perscors’s right ear. “Who gives the measures, you or Saklas?”
Perscors spun around enraged, but he was alone, or seemed to be. This world, he thought, turns under Saklas; he is its millstone. But this world held no sway over Olam, or over Valentinus, and it had little enough power over Perscors, despite all its apparent efforts.
“Saklas moves every handle here,” Perscors deliberately said aloud, hoping to raise the female voice again; he met silence. From somewhere he remembered an ancient remark to the effect that heaven turns around like a millstone, and always does something bad.
The answer to Saklas’s sway came to Perscors suddenly, and sang his spirit to the combat: “Fire, my fire, will burn through this pillar of the sky. Fire will end the grinding of this mill.”
His ecstatic shout raised a wind against him. Dashed against the mill’s stone wall, he rose up vowing silently that the mill itself, if he could partly burn it, would sink into its own whirlpool. But how to burn a vast closed building of massive black stone? Only interminably and from within, until it toppled over into the waters. He was back to the puzzle of finding the way inside it. One of the stone blocks must be movable, if only by enchantment which he could not direct, but perhaps by force as well. He set out to discover the potential opening.
The wind continued with great intensity, and Perscors struggled to keep upright against the eddying motion whirling about him, which it now assumed. He stumbled on a stone, and fell across it; scrambling up, he remembered the Sunday-school text: “Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken,” and was grimly thankful that this was not literal prophecy. But then he remembered the text prior to it: “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.” Perscors assumed that he must discover the imperfect cornerstone.
Still ruminating, Perscors went up to the mill’s northwest corner. He pushed hard against the cornerstone, and slid it easily to one side. The way in was here, and its darkness did not disconcert him. Though unarmed, and bending over, he entered readily and cheerfully, intent upon the mill’s destruction.
There was a glimmering light ahead, fitful and unfocused. It was enough for Perscors to make his way by, but it sputtered out after he had walked only a few steps. He paused, sensing again that he had to descend, and awaiting an intuition of the way. The voice of the mocking woman sounded again fo his right: “I asked you once if 1 was to tell you old stories? Do you remember?”
“How could I forget?” Perscors replied. “It is all you ever have said to me.”
“I left my ring in your gauntlet,” she whispered, her lips now touching his right ear.
“Probably the Marcionites stole it.” His voice was harsh, but the desire for her otherness overcame him again. He moved suddenly to his left, away from her, and spoke with deliberate roughness. “You nearly killed me twice. No one but you in this world of damnation has come so close to ending me.”
Her voice came to him as the most graceful of mockeries, almost as song: “You are to die here on Lucifer, anyway. Take death’s pleasure with me.”
His laughter was so violent that the pain of it surprised him; he stepped still farther away. “Decidedly you are very dangerous. I have learned not to grapple with you. But take a friendly enough warning. I get stronger each day on Lucifer. You might not win this time.”
Her answering laughter faded away, until he knew that she had left him. But her manifestation confirmed his conviction of the mill’s malice. He listened deeply to his own silence, hoping to hear the voice of his knowing self, rather than his questing self. A slow, almost hissing syllable came; “fire” was the word. And so he need only seek a fire. Moving off to his left he saw a flickering light again, and walked slowly toward it. When he came up to it, he stopped in bafflement.
What sprawled before him was a ruined forge, the charcoal smoldering, as though the hearth had been recently in use. What smith had worked within this mill, and to what purpose?
Here was fire for the taking.
“But it is not my fire,” Perscors murmured. Nor was it the fire he longed to steal, if such b
urned on Lucifer. He was filled with deep disdain. “Fire stolen from Saklas is good for one thing only—to consume what serves Saklas.” After speaking, Perscors seized a knobby wooden club from the hearth and held it upon the charcoal, until it flared up violently.
Holding this torch before him, Perscors walked away from the forge, moving toward the sound of the grinding. When it was most intense, he paused, looked about, and found a loose stone block in the floor. He raised it, moved it aside, and saw a narrow stair winding downward.
Torch in his left hand, and right fist ready, Perscors descended. And then horror assailed him from every side: Nekbael was nowhere to be seen, but the victims of her revels were piled up like cordwood, end to end; gashed and battered heads and necks lay alongside twisted feet. Dazed and sickened, Perscors did not pause to count the corpses, or the slashes upon each warrior who had died such a cruelly literal love-death.
The great waterwheel churned away beneath him, turned in the lake water by a process Perscors did not wish to learn. Above was stone, but the underground structure holding the wheel was wood and fit to burn. Wherever the torch could be applied, he did so, until many fires smoldered, finally caught, and flamed until, hissing loudly in the way of wet wood, the great wheel itself began to smoke and came to rest.
Perscors mounted, and went out through the cornerstone. He did not stay for the slow satisfaction of watching the mill topple at long last into its own whirlpool.
Escape into the Kenoma
The moon set early that night, and for the first time upon Lucifer, Perscors searched the stars. Sitting upon the highest hill that he could find, overlooking a steep valley, he sensed that his westward way must soon end and that his solitude would not prevail much longer. The moon of Lucifer, he had realized earlier, was as much brighter than the moon of earth as the sun of Lucifer was more pallid than the earthly one. Now, unfamiliar as he found the patterns of glitter in the starry night to be, Perscors was startled to behold, in the northwest quarter of the sky, a pale swath of what seemed a version of the Milky Way.
He remembered reading somewhere of a Northern tribe that called the Milky Way “the tracks of God.” Was this frail zone of light like that other, a path for the Demiurge? Was the heart of the Milky Way yet one more whirlpool of destruction?
No sense of an earthly Sublime remained in him as he glared at these heavens. He felt their total hostility, and began to imagine that they were scowling back at him, and through their darknesses, rather than with the gentle fancy of starry eyes. Who was he to challenge these vast spaces and intervening brilliances? Sleep overcame him. In his dream he was wandering through Saklas’s mill, searching for a ferryman.
“But to find the ferryman, I must name him!”
His own despairing cry woke him for a second. Perscors blinked up at the mocking light of the stars. A moment passed, and he slept again.
Was the ferryman Olam? No fire stirred in that naming. Perscors wandered on through labyrinthine turnings of corridors in the mill’s interior. But the imprint of no other name touched him.
He floated now in the churning of the Milky Way. “It is grinding away from me,” he muttered, and wondered what he himself meant by “It.” The name? A mountain loomed ahead of him. Towering high, higher than the mill, the mountain was an immense churning club. When the churning mountain flared up, Perscors merged with it, and then was awake.
He rose unsteadily, resolving not to sleep again. The dream had done what he had thought could not be done: he had been made afraid. Not of Saklas, or of Arimanes, or of any other Archon: it could only be of himself. Perscors looked down into the valley. The glance revealed a whole cluster of purple-clad, marching forms moving toward the south base of his hill. Glints of metal flashed faintly and almost impossibly at him in the starry night.
“Arimaneans, perhaps twenty or thirty of them. And I am unarmed.”
For a few moments, he contemplated holding his position and defending it by a hail of stones. But a battle with mere men, even with crazed idolaters of a crazier devil, seemed unworthy of him. His true strife was to be with powers, and he disdained any slaughter of mere Arimanean believers, however brutal their pieties. “Let them call it an escape,” he growled, and began a rapid descent of the hill to its north base.
It was hours later, as he judged, when he realized that he had begun to move through a wholly different terrain. The muddy wastes of the Kenoma stretched all about him. A great exhilaration came over him in his northward march: knowledge that the true way led in this direction could not fail to come as well to Olam and to Valentinus.
At dawn he realized that the Arimaneans had pursued him into the Kenoma. Shouts behind him met answering cries from in front and off to his right. Perscors veered left until he came to a patch of rocky ground in the midst of the soft Kenoma. In the sure knowledge of his fortune, he calmly looked around for a weapon. Against the highest rock someone had heaped up a pile, half as tall as he, of rounded stones. Perscors weighed one in each hand. They would do for missiles, if the Arimaneans came close enough, but how was he to dodge their arrows? Best to go forward nonetheless, he decided, and arm himself from his pursuers.
With a rock in each hand, he turned toward them, in the murk of early light. Glancing up, he found himself grateful for the cloudiness of the morning, and for the mists gathering over the Kenoma. Raising one of the stones, Perscors smashed it square into the face of an Arimanean who had appeared just before him. The man went down, and Perscors fell with him, as the javelin of another warrior went by him overhead. He moved sharply to crush the back of that one’s head with a sweep of his other stone, and then swung instantly to lance through another oncoming Arimanean with the javelin he had recovered from the ground. Gathering his victims’ quivers, a bow, and a lance, he turned back to confront whoever dared to move against him.
But there were no more shouts, and no one came to the combat. The lust to kill now burned in Perscors, and lacking more victims, he shouted in rage. But these roars of fury drove off the other Arimaneans, who fled what seemed to them a hopeless struggle against an unknown demon. Frustrated in and by his wrath, Perscors turned to resume his northern march. As the anger slowly waned, there grew in its place the cold feeling that a subtler trial awaited him somewhere up ahead, concealed within the emptiness.
Loss of Ruha
When the sun was directly overhead, Perscors halted. The tract of the Kenoma across which he had traveled had led on to high ground in the north—bleaker heights than any he had seen upon Lucifer. Bare black cliffs rose in most places to form a barrier so sheer as to seem insurmountable. He came up to the base, and after an hour there discerned a way up, long and narrow and zigzagging between switchbacks. Sometime later, climbing with great difficulty along the rock-littered path, he heard his name being called. Unable to locate the woman’s voice, or even decide the direction it came from, he kept on.
In the softer light of evening, he reached a more inviting upland, a place of rolling meadows among which wandered a single placid stream. He drank of its cold, dark water, finding it bitter, then lay down to rest, weakened by hunger and by his relentless march. He knew now that to keep on in this way was to become either a beast or a god.
“Perhaps I am a mixture of both.” The gloomy hoarseness of his own voice startled him. Ruha’s voice, soft and urgent, sounded in reply: “You cannot become an Archon if you insist upon opposing the Archons.”
Rising and spinning about, he could not see her, and again could not locate the place of the voice. No one was in sight. Did her voice accompany him as a spell, or was she hidden somehow behind or within this deceptive landscape? Or was he haunted by her hmurthas, invisible handmaidens who moved upon the winds? They would have the trick of her voice.
“But do I want her still? I fled her, on her terms.”
His bare whisper provoked her reply, coming now with greater urgency.
“How can you know of want? For what are you but a ceaseless want, afire that cannot procreate?”
Bewilderment diffused through his spirit, which could now know neither grief nor fear; then consternation came strongly upon him.
Perscors turned around, shouting bitterly to every side: “Have the courage to show yourself! If you want to speak to me, then come and speak directly!”
But there was no reply. Perscors gathered himself together, cast off the shock, and marched north out of the meadow. The night was clear again, but he did not deign to look up: the rational fire of the stars did not interest him. His own fire might be dark with ignorance, but he knew it to give a better light than the cosmos could afford him.
Just before dawn, he slept for a little while, having come to a place where the land, beneath increasingly heavy underbrush, began quite suddenly to slope sharply downward. Voices of men woke him, and he concealed himself in a thicket to observe who these might be. In the thin light, a party of hunters filed past him, going north. Whoever these were, they were not Arimaneans or any other people that Perscors had seen on Lucifer. Their cloaks, apparently of sheepskin, were gray, and along with the bows slung behind them, they carried long horsemen’s lances. Some fifty of them stalked by him and vanished in the undergrowth ahead. These wild men, long-haired and desperate-looking, seemed too numerous to have formed only a hunting expedition. A war patrol, perhaps?
“Scythians,” came Ruha’s voice in his ear. “Scythian horsemen, going back to their mounts, and then to the lands in the North.” She stood next to him, as first he had seen her, half mocking, half beckoning. A great weariness came over him, augmenting his hunger and his bewilderment.
“Speak, if you have something I should hear.”
But she stood silently, lips slightly parted, as though awaiting either his anger or his surrender. Even in his exhaustion, Perscors held back from either reaction; a resolve to follow the Scythians to the North took their place. There fulfillment would come to him, and not with this half-treacherous child of Achamoth. Yet, as always, he yearned for her; something incomplete in him had been touched by her. When she spoke, at last, he was startled by the flow of her language and its tone, which seemed to recite an old story but with the immediacy of an intimate instruction given only to him.