by Jane Yolen
Then the brother called me a whore. His vocabulary was remarkably basic, though it might have been the shock of his own brutality. The name itself did not offend me. It was my profession, after all. He threw me down on my face in the bloody dirt and treated me like one of his beloved ewes. I thought it was the dirt I was eating. It was blood.
Then he beat me on the head and back with the same stick he had used on his brother, till I knew only night. Belilab. Like my name.
How long I lay there, unmoving, I was never to know. But when I came to, the bastard was standing over me with the authorities, descrying my crime, and I was taken as a murderess. The only witnesses to my innocence—though how can one call a whore innocent—were a murderer and a flock of sheep. Was it any wonder I was condemned to die?
Oh how I ranted in that prison. I cursed the name of G-d, saying: “Let the day be darkness wherein I was born and let G-d not inquire about it for little does He care. A woman is nothing in His sight and a man is all, be he a murderer or a thief.” Then I vowed not to die at all but to live to destroy the man who would destroy me. I cried and I vowed and then I called on the demonkin to save me. I remembered the taste of blood in my mouth and offered that up to any who would have me.
One must be careful of such prayers.
The night before I was to be executed, Lord Beelzebub himself entered my prison. How did I know him? He insinuated himself through the keyhole as mist, reforming at the foot of my pallet. There were two stubby black horns on his forehead. His feet were like pigs’ trotters. He carried around a tail as sinuous as a serpent. His tongue, like an adder’s, was black and forked.
“You do not want a man, Lillake,” he said, using the pretty pet name my mother called me. “A demon can satisfy you in ways even you cannot imagine.”
“I am done with lovemaking,” I answered, wondering that he could think me desirable. After a month in the prison I was covered with sores. “Except for giving one a moment’s pleasure, it brings nothing but grief.”
The mist shaped itself grandly. “This,” he said pointing, “is more than a moment’s worth. You will be well repaid.”
“You can put that,” I gestured back, “into another keyhole. Mine is locked forever.”
One does not lightly ignore a great lord’s proposal, nor make light of his offerings. It was one of the first things I had learned. But I was already expecting to die in the morning. And horribly. So, where would I spend his coin?
“Lillake, hear me,” Lord Beelzebub said, his voice no longer cozening but black as a burnt cauldron. Shema was the word he used. I had not known that demons could speak the Lord G-d’s holy tongue.
I looked up, then, amazed, and saw through the disguise. This was no demon at all but the Lord G-d Himself testing me, though why He should desire a woman—and a whore at that—I could not guess.
“I know you, Adonai,” I said. “But God or demon, my answer is the same. Women and children are nothing in your sight. You are a bringer of death, a maker of carrion.”
His black aspect melted then, the trotters disappeared, the horns became tendrils of white hair. He looked chastened and sad and held out His hand.
I disdained it, turning over on my straw bed and putting my face to the wall.
“It is no easy thing being at the Beginning and at the End,” He said. “And so you shall see, my daughter. I shall let you live, and forever. You will see the man, Cain, die. Not once but often. It will bring you no pleasure. You will be Death’s sister, chaste till the finish of all time, your mouth filled with the blood of the living.”
So saying, He was gone, fading like the last star of night fading into dawn.
Of course I was still in prison. So much for the promises of G-d.
At length I rose from the mattress. I could not sleep. Believing I had but hours before dying, I did not wish to waste a moment of the time left, though each moment was painful. I walked to the single window where only a sliver of moon was visible. I put my hands between the bars and clutched at the air as though I could hold it in my hands. And then, as if the air itself had fallen in love with me, it gathered me up through the bars, lifted me through the prison wall, and deposited me onto the bosom of the dawn and I was somehow, inexplicably, free.
Free.
As I have been these five thousand years.
Oh, the years have been kind to me. I have not aged. I have neither gained nor lost weight nor grayed nor felt the pain of advancing years. The blood has been kind to me, the blood I nightly take from the dying children, the true innocents, the Lord G-d’s own. Yet for all the children I have sucked rather than suckled, there has been only one I have taken for mine.
I go to them all, you understand. There is no distinction. I take the ones who breathe haltingly, the ones who are misused, the ones whose bodies are ill shaped in the womb, the ones whom fire or famine or war cut down. I take them and suck them dry and send them, dessicated little souls, to the Lord G-d’s realm. But as clear-eyed as I had been when I cast out Adonai in my prison, so clear-eyed would a child need to be to accept me as I am and thus become my own. So for these five thousand years there has been no one for me in my lonely occupation but my mute companion, the Angel of Death.
If I could still love, he is the one I would desire. His wings are the color of sun and air as mine are fog and fire. Each of the vanes in those wings are hymnals of ivory. He carries the keys to Heaven in his pocket of light. Yet he is neither man nor woman, neither demon nor god. I call the Angel “he” for as I am Sister Death, he is surely my brother.
We travel far on our daily hunt.
We are not always kind.
But the child, my child, I will tell you of her now. It is not a pretty tale.
As always we travel, the Angel and I, wingtips apart over a landscape of doom. War is our backyard, famine our feast. Most fear the wind of our wings and even, in their hurt, pray for life. Only a few, a very few, truly pray for death. But we answer all their prayers with the same coin.
This particular time we were tracking across the landscape of the Pale, where grass grew green and strong right up to the iron railings that bore the boxcars along. In the fields along the way, the peasants swung their silver scythes in rhythm to the trains. They did not hear the counterpoint of cries from the cars or, if they did, they showed their contempt by stopping and waving gaily as the death trains rolled past.
They did not see my brother Death and me riding the screams but inches overhead. But they would see us in their own time.
In the cars below, jammed together like cattle, the people vomited and pissed on themselves, on their neighbors, and prayed. Their prayers were like vomit, too, being raw and stinking and unstoppable.
My companion looked at me, tears in his eyes. I loved him for his pity. Still crying, he plucked the dead to him like faded flowers, looking like a bridegroom waiting at the feast.
And I, no bride, flew through the slats, to suck dry a child held overhead for air. He needed none. A girl crushed by the door. I took her as well. A teenager, his head split open by a soldier’s gun, died unnoticed against a wall. He was on the cusp of change but would never now be a man. His blood was bitter in my mouth but I drank it all.
What are Jews that nations swat them like flies? That the Angel of Death picks their faded blooms? That I drink the blood, now bitter, now sweet, of their children?
The train came at last to a railway yard that was ringed about with barbs. BIRKENAU, read the station sign. It creaked back and forth in the wind. BIRKENAU.
When the train slowed, then stopped, and the doors pushed open from the outside, the living got out. The dead were already gathered up to their G-d.
My companion followed the men and boys, but I—I flew right above the weeping women and their weeping children, as I have done all these years.
There was another Angel of Death that day, standing in the midst of the madness. He hardly moved, only his finger seemed alive, an organism in itself, choosing the
dead, choosing the living.
“Please, Herr General,” a boy cried out. “I am strong enough to work.”
But the finger moved, and having writ, moved on. To the right, boy. To the arms of Lilith, Belilah, Lillake.
“Will we get out?” a child whispered to its mother.
“We will get out,” she whispered back.
But I had been here many times before. “You will only get out of here through the chimney,” I said.
Neither mother nor child nor General himself heard.
There were warning signs at the camp, BEWARE, they said, TENSION WIRE, they said.
There were other signs, too. Pits filled with charred bones. Prisoners whose faces were imprinted with the bony mask of death.
JEDEM DAS SEINE. Each one gets what he deserves.
In the showers, the naked mothers held their naked children to them. They were too tired to scream, too tired to cry. They had no tears left.
Only one child, a seven-year-old, stood alone. Her face was angry. She was not resigned. She raised her fist and looked at the heavens and then, a little lower, at me.
Surprised, I looked back.
The showers began their rain of poison. Coughing, praying, calling on G-d to save them, the women died with their children in their arms.
The child alone did not cough, did not pray, did not call on G-d. She held out her two little hands to me. To me.
“Imma,” she said. “Mother.”
I trembled, flew down, and took her in my arms. Then we flew through the walls as if they were air.
So I beg you, as you love life, as you master Death, let my brother be the sole harvester. I have served my five thousand years; not once did I complain. But give me a mother’s span with my child, and I will serve you again till the end of time. The child alone chose me in all those years. You could not be so cruel a god as to part us now.
The Singer and the Song
ONCE IN THE SERVICE of the High King of Elb there was a musician named Lark. He could play the plekta till its three strings rang like thirty. He could blow the tenor netto till it wailed like a woman in labor. And when he sang, his voice was so pure, it was said that he spoke a hundred truths in a single breath.
Everyone loved Lark, but none more than the young prince of Elb. Whenever he heard Lark sing, the prince would put his small hand in the musician’s, look up at him, and say: “Oh, Lark, you are the fairest and truest of all the men in my father’s kingdom.”
On hearing that, Lark would squat down on his heels so that he could look the boy right in the eye. “Do not confuse the singer with the song, my prince” he would say.
The prince did not believe him, of course. Princes believe what they will. But many years later, on the day the poor folk of the land rose up against the High King, Lark made a song for their victory. In it he rhymed “tyrant” in a dozen different ways, which one could do in the old tongue.
“I thought you were true,” whispered the prince to Lark, when they took the entire royal family out of the dungeon to be hanged. “I thought you were the fairest in the kingdom,” the prince said as the rope was put around his neck.
But Lark did not answer. He only smiled at the prince. For he had never confused the king with the crown, the rope with justice, or the singer with the song.
Salvage
THE OLD POET LAY in the bow of his ship, dying of space sickness and homesickness and a touch of alien flu. There was nothing to be done for him but to make him comfortable, which meant listening to his ramblings and filling his arm with a strange liquid from his own stores. He had been the only one left alive in the ship when we found it and at first we had thought him dead, too. Only at my touch, he had roused up, pointed a stalk at us, and recited in a bardic chant some alien click-clacks that, run through the translator, turned out to be a spell against goblins and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Whatever night is. Ghoulies was his name for us.
He had immediately fallen back into a deep sleep from which he roused periodically to harangue whoever had a free moment, calling us worms and devils and satan’s spawn. Most of us decided to leave his mouthings untranslated since what spewed out of the machine made little sense and we had not time to properly salvage it. The boxes, after all, were not yet full.
But one of the younglings, a two-year named Necros 29, chose to sit with the poet-traveler and translate his every word. Necros 29 called it salvage, but I wondered. He comes from a family of puzzlers, though, and they are slow to mature and mate. It may be that that side of the line runs true, for it was he who first understood that the creature was a poet, or at least a speaker-of-poems. It was soon clear that the alien did not make up his poems as would any true poet, but rather carried the words of others in his head. Disgusting thought, a crime against nature, this salvage of the mind. If we saved up all our poems, our heads would soon be so crowded with them there would be no room left for savoring new ones. What a strange race we had come upon, whose equipment is new and whose thoughts are so borrowed and old.
But Necros, being a puzzler, kept at his task while we scavenged the ship thoroughly. It was full of salvage and the bones of the poet’s companions were especially fine.
“He calls upon the names of many gods,” commented Necros to me during report, “and that is fine for a poet. But he also says many not-found things.”
“Such as?” I asked. My great-great-grandsire, Mordos Prime, had been a puzzler on his matriarchal side, though my mother denies it when asked. Occasionally I am drawn to such things, though basically I am of a solider nature.
“He speaks of night, a darkness that ends and comes again.”
I passed the bones through my mouth and into the salvage sack before I spoke. They were, as I have said, very fine indeed. As the sack’s teeth ground the bones into dust, I said, “Is night then a birthing cave? Is it the winking of far stars against the Oneness of space?”
Many who heard me laughed, their sections wiggling greatly with their amusement.
Necros shook his head and his eyestalks trembled. “I do not think so. But I will listen to him further. I think there may be some strong salvage in his thoughts.”
“Pah, it is worthless stuff,” remarked my old mate, the long cylinder of his head shaking. His salvage sack was full and grinding away, and the rolling action of it under his belly excited me. But now was the time of work, not pleasure. The boxes were not yet full and it would be days more of grinding before our organs descended enough to touch.
I went back across the boarding platform that linked the silent ship to ours. I emptied my sack of the fine silt, spreading it thinly over the mating box. Days? It would be weeks if we did not fill the boxes faster. As Prime of this ship it was my duty to direct young Necros away from the live poet to the dead and salvageable parts. It is all very well to salvage a culture when the boxes are full, but—and I remembered my old mate’s rolling sack—there is an order, after all, and poetry would have to wait.
Mouthing a small lump of unground bone out of the box, I swallowed it again. Then I turned back and crossed over the platform to the alien ship.
“Necros!” I called out as I crawled. “Come. I would talk with you.”
He came at once though with a slight reluctance on his face, his stalks drooping and his first section slightly faded. I think he already knew what I had to say.
“The boxes are thin,” I said. “There is no time for him.” I gestured with a stalk towards the alien who raised on one side and was babbling again.
“Fe-fi-fo-fum,” spewed the translator. Nonsense in any language is still nonsense. “Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
“What in the universe is bread?” I asked.
Necros touched me, mouth to mouth, then raised his chin, showing me his neck section, the fine lumps of his heart beating a rhythm through the translucent skin. He could not have been more subservient.
“I will work long into the third work per
iod,” he said. “Do you not see that it is such things—bread, night, seasons—that we must salvage from him. Only with salvage,” he reminded me, “is growth.”
I thought of the silty boxes where we would soon lie down and mate, starting the next generation wiggling through our bodies and out our mouths. “Yes,” I said at last, “you are right this time. But still you will have to work the extra period to make up for it.”
He quivered sectionally and scurried back to the alien. At his touch, the alien fainted, though I suspected that he would revive again soon.
Necros 29 kept his word. He worked the extra load, and so much salvage quickened him. He entered maturity early yet lost none of the enthusiasm of a youngling. It was dreadful to see.
Once he came to me wriggling with joy. “I have come to something new,” he said. “Something not-found which is now found. It is called haiku.” He savored the word and gave it directly into my mouth.
I let the word slide down slowly, section by section, to my sack and the slow grinding began. Then it stopped. “I do not comprehend this word, haiku,” I said. “It means no more than his fe-fi’s.”
Necros shivered deliciously. “It is a poem that is worked in sections,” he said.
“A poem in sections?” It was a new idea—and quite fine.
“There are seventeen sections broken into bodies of five-seven-five. And there are rules.”
“That is the first your poet has shown that he understands order,” I said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I was right to let you salvage him.”
Necros nodded, showing his neck section for good measure. “These are the rules. First the poem must rouse emotion.”
“Well, of course. Any youngling knows that.” I turned partly away from him, to show my displeasure.
“Wait, there is more. Second, the poem must show spiritual insight.” He nodded his head and his sections moved like a wave, enticing.