Servant of the Bones

by Anne Rice

  " 'If we destroy these bones, will I die?' I asked.

  " 'I said for you to think, not talk,' he said. 'No, you won't die. You can't die. Do you want to end up a tottering idiot of a spirit mumbling in the wind? You've seen them, haven't you? Or a stupefied angel roaming the fields trying to remember heavenly hymns? You're of this earth now, forever, and you might as well forget any bright ideas of simply dispatching the bones. The bones will keep you together, literally. The bones will give you a badly needed resting place. The bones will keep your spirit formed in a manner that will allow it to use its strength. Listen to what I'm telling you. Don't be a fool.'

  " 'I'm not arguing with you,' I said. 'Have you finished reading the Canaanite tablet?'

  " 'Hush up.'

  "I sighed angrily and sat back. I looked at my fingernails. They were splendid. I felt my hair, thick and the same. What was this like? Being alive in perfect health at a perfect moment of wakefulness and energy, untouched by hunger, fatigue, the remotest discomfort...a seemingly perfect physical statue. I smacked the floor with my slippered feet. I had on my favorite embroidered robes, naturally, and velvet slippers. The slippers made a good noise.

  "Finally he put all the tablets aside and said, 'All right, since you are so reluctant to touch your own bones, finicky, cowardly young spirit, I'll do the work for you.'

  "He came to the center of the room. He dumped all the bones out on the floor. He stood back and he stretched out his hands and then he lowered himself slowly, bending his knees, and out of his mouth came a long series of Persian incantations, murmurings, and I saw from his hands something coming forth, like heat perhaps from a fire, but nothing more visible than that.

  "To my amazement the bones assembled themselves in the form of a man laid out for burial, and now he continued his exhortations, and making a whipping gesture with his hand, as though sewing, he brought to him an immense spool of heavy wire, copper, or gold, or what, I couldn't tell, and now with the gesture repeated over and over he made the wire thread the entire skeleton together as if it were beads. He hooked bone to bone with this wire, without ever touching anything, merely making the motions, and he let his hands linger long over the hands and feet of the body which had so many little bones. Then he moved to the ribs and the pelvis, and finally, with a long sweeping gesture of his right hand, he laid out the spine of this skeleton and connected it to the skull. He now had it all threaded together. One could have hung it from a hook to jangle in the wind.

  "I saw a skeleton laid there as though in an open grave. I pushed aside all memory of the cauldron, of the pain, and I merely looked at it.

  "Meantime he had rushed into another room and now returned with two short little boys, boys about the age of ten, which I realized in an instant were not real, but spirits, barely corporeal. They carried with them another casket, smaller than the first, rectangular, smelling of cedar, yet heavily plated in gold and silver, thick with jewels. He opened this casket. I saw a bed of folded silk. He told the little boys now to take this skeleton and to arrange it as if it were a child in its mother's womb, with its arms drawn up, and its head bent down, and its knees to its chin.

  "The little ones obeyed these commands. They both stood up and looked at me with ink-black eyes. The bent-up skeleton just fit into the casket. It hadn't an inch to spare.

  " 'Go!' he said to the little ones, 'and wait for my next command.' They didn't want to. 'Go!' he roared.

  "They ran from the room, and stood peeping at me from the far door.

  "I stood up and came towards the casket. It was like an old burial now, one found in the hills, from the ancient times when they buried men like this, in the womb of Mother Earth. I looked down at it.

  "He was brooding. 'Wax,' he said. 'I want a great deal of melted wax.' He stood up and turned. At once I felt a shock of fear. 'What's wrong with you?' he demanded.

  "His two servants appeared again, eyeing me cautiously and carrying a big bucket of the melted wax. He took the kettle from them, for that's what it was, more or less, and he poured the wax all around the bones, so that as it hardened before my eyes, it fixed them in place. It was a soft, white fixture for them. And then he told the little ones to go again, get rid of the kettle, and that they could play in the garden for an hour in their bodies if they didn't make noise. They were overjoyed.

  " 'Are they ghosts?' I asked.

  " 'They don't know,' he said, still staring at the bones now fixed in wax. Obviously the question didn't interest him. He shut the casket. It had strong hinges and a strong lock. He tested this and opened it. 'In time,' he said, 'though I won't wait too long, being as old as I am, I will make a tablet of silver to go with this, containing all that is needed from the Canaanite tablet, but for now, the bones are as they should always be. Go into them and come back out.'

  "Naturally I didn't want to do it. I felt a loathing for the bones, and a rebellious temper. But he waited me out like a wise teacher, and I did it, dissolving, feeling the smooth calm darkness, and then being sucked out of it in a whirl of heat and finding myself standing beside him, embodied again.

  " 'Excellent,' he said. 'Excellent. Now tell me all you remember of your life.'

  "Now that request on his part began one of the most unpleasant arguments of my entire immortal existence. I couldn't remember anything of my life. No matter how he badgered me I couldn't remember. I knew I feared a cauldron. I knew I feared heat. I knew I feared bees and the wax had made me think of them. I knew that I had seen Cyrus, King of Persia, and that the favor I had asked of him had not been unreasonable. Other than that? I knew only general things.

  "Over and over he demanded I try. Over and over I failed. I wept. Finally I told him to leave me alone, what did he want of me, and he touched me on the shoulder and said, 'There, there, don't you see, if you don't remember your life, you can't remember its moral lessons.'

  " 'Well, what if there were none!' I said ominously. 'What if all I saw was treachery and lies.'

  " 'That is simply impossible,' he said. 'But you do remember Cyrus, and you do remember what you did today?'

  "All that I could remember--coming to him, all he'd said, being sent to slay the bedouins and enjoying it, and coming back to him and all that had happened since. He threw at me a few random questions about details...such as what had the fire been made of round which the bedouins camped: camel dung was the answer. Had there been any women? No. Where was the place? I had to think and extract an answer, as I had taken no note, but it came to me to his satisfaction, fifty miles from where the desert begins due east of Miletus.

  " 'Who is King now?'

  " 'Cyrus of Persia,' I said. He then went into a whole series of questions. I answered them all. Who were the Lydians, the Medians, the Ionians, where was Athens, who was Pharaoh, what was the city where Cyrus had been declared King of the World. I answered and answered and answered.

  "He asked practical questions about colors and food and air and warmth and heat. I knew all the answers. I knew everything general, but nothing pertaining to my own life. I knew lots about silver and gold and could tell him that--he was impressed. I looked at the emeralds the King had sent him and told him they were most precious and especially beautiful and which was better than another. I told him the names of flowers in his garden. Then I felt tired.

  "A strange thing happened. I began to weep. I began to weep like a child. I couldn't stop myself from it and any sense of being humiliated before him didn't matter to me. Finally I looked up and saw him waiting with his bright, curious, and rather merciless blue eyes.

  " 'Did you really mean it when you said, always remember the hungry and the poor?' I asked.

  " 'Yes,' he said. 'I'm going to tell you the most important things I know now. Listen. I want this repeated back to me whenever I ask you for it. Very well? You call it the lessons of Zurvan and long after I'm dead, you demand of your masters that they tell you what they know, and you keep it in your memory even if it is something stupid, and you'll kno
w when it's stupid. You are a clever, clever spirit.'

  " 'All right, bright-blue-eyed Master,' I said angrily. 'Tell me all you know.'

  "He furrowed his brows at the sarcasm and insult. He sat brooding. He put one knee over the other. He looked bony in his tunic. His gray hair came to his shoulders and there broke off, but his face was most alert.

  " 'Azriel,' he said, 'I could punish you for your impertinence. I could make you feel pain. I could pitch you into the cauldron you fear so that you do not know that it is not real! I can do that at any time.'

  " 'And if you do, I will climb out of that cauldron and I will rip you limb from limb, magician!'

  " 'Yes, that's more or less why I haven't done it,' he said. 'So let me put it to you this way. I want and expect courtesy from you, in return for all that I teach you. I am your Master at your pleasure.'

  " 'Sounds all right,' I said.

  " 'All right. Now this is what I know. Don't ever forget it. As long as you hate, and you roast in a hell of anger, there will be a limit to what you can do. You will be at the mercy of other spirits now and then and magicians. Anger is a confusing force, and hatred is blinding. So. You cripple yourself with this, you see, and that is why I would like to discipline it out of you, but that can't be done.

  " 'But here are the lessons. Accept what your hatred and anger will allow you to accept. First and foremost, there is one God, and his name does not matter. Yahweh, Ahuramazda, Zeus, Aten, it does not matter at all. How he is worshipped, how he is served, by what ritual, it doesn't matter at all.

  " 'There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world--its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn," it does not have value.

  " 'Thirdly, be kind. Always, if you have a choice, be kind. Remember the poor, the hungry, and the miserable. Always remember the suffering, and those who need. The greatest creative power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, or a man or a woman or a child is to help others...the poor, the hungry, the oppressed. To ease pain and give joy are your finest powers. Kindness is a human miracle, so to speak. It's unique to us humans, and our more developed angels or spirits, to be kind.

  " 'Fourth, on the subject of magic. All magic of all lands and all schools is the same. Magic is an attempt to control the unseen spirits, and the spirit within the living, or to bring back the spirits of the dead which still surround the earth. That is all that magic is. Making illusions, doing tricks, bringing wealth, it's all done through spirits, that is, beings without bodies who can move swiftly, unseen, steal, spy, transport, etc. That's all magic. The words differ from country to country, from Ephesus to Delphi, to the northern steppes. But it's all the same. I know all magic that can be known, and I continue my search for more. To learn a new incantation teaches me a new possibility. Now listen to me! It teaches me a new possibility, but it doesn't increase my power, my power increases with understanding and will. All magic is the same. What I'm saying is, you can do most anything whether you know the words or not!

  " 'Magicians are born for the most part, but some men become magicians...incantations school and direct them, but ultimately the words don't count. To God all languages are one. To the spirits all languages are one. Incantations help the weak magician more than the strong. But you can see why, can't you? You are very strong. You can do things without incantations. I've seen that today. So have you. Don't let anyone ever convince you by any incantation that they can have power over you. A magician can have power over you, yes, but don't ever be fooled by mere words. Confront the power if you would resist it. Rouse yourself and make an incantation of your own. Incantations frighten spirits and humans alike. Make a song of strength, a song of might, when you would have your way. Doors will open.'

  "He snapped his fingers. He waited a moment, then proceeded.

  " 'Lastly, no one human ever knows what lies beyond true death. Spirits can come very close to knowing; they can see bright stairways to heaven, they can see the fruit trees of paradise, they can talk to the dead in various forms, they can glimpse the light of God, oh, that is forever happening, these glimpses and glimpses of light, but they can't really know what lies beyond true death! No one who really escapes the earth and its earthbound spirits ever comes back. They may appear to you. They may talk to you. But you can't make them come from beyond death. Once they are dead, it is in their hands or God's hands whether they appear here or not. So don't ever believe anyone who tells you he knows all about Heaven. All of the realms of the spirits and angels that will ever be known to you or to me are of the Earth, not beyond Death. You understand?'

  " 'Yes, I fear I do,' I said. 'But to love and to learn, why? Why is that the purpose of life? I mean how did it become so, why would one set out to do only those things with such dedication?'

  " 'You're asking a stupid question,' he said. 'Doesn't matter why it's that way; it's that way: the purpose of life is to love and to learn.' He sighed. 'Let's imagine answering the question for others...why is it so important to love and to learn? For a cruel, stupid man this would be a sufficient answer: "It is the safest way to live life." For a great man this would be an answer: "It is the most rewarding and illuminating way to live life." For a selfish, blind person, I could say, "It will bring you the greatest peace in the end if you remember the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, if you remember others, if you love, if you learn."' He shrugged. 'To the oppressed themselves, the answer is, "It will alleviate your pain, your terrible pain."'

  " 'I see,' I said. I smiled. I felt a great rush of pleasure. A great sweet rush of pleasure.

  " 'Ah,' he said. 'You do understand.'

  "I started to cry again. 'Is there no simple watchword?' I asked.

  " 'Such as what?'

  " 'It isn't always so easy to love and to learn; one can make hideous errors, hideous mistakes, hurt others. Is there no watchword! For example...in Hebrew the word "Altashheth"--Do Not Destroy.' I could barely speak. I was choked with tears. I began to repeat the word over and over again. I said it in one final whisper. 'Altashheth.'

  "He considered, rather solemnly, and then he said, 'No. There is no simple watchword. We cannot sing "Altashheth" until and unless all the world sings the same song.'

  " 'Will that ever happen, that the whole world will sing the same song?'

  " 'No one knows. Not Medians, not Hebrews, not Egyptians, not Greeks, not warriors from the north countries, no one knows. Remember. I've told you all that can be known. The rest is chant and rattle and stomp and laughter. Now give me your solemn word that you will serve me and I will give you my solemn word that as long as I live you will never know pain, if it is in my power to prevent it.'

  " 'I give it,' I said. 'I thank you for your patience. I think in life I was kind once.'

  " 'Why do you keep crying?'

  " 'Because I don't like to hate or to be angry,' I said. 'I want to learn and to love.'

  " 'Good enough. You will love and you will learn. Now it's night, I'm old, I'm tired. I want to read until my eyes close, as is my habit. I want you to sleep within the bones until I call you forth. Answer no call but mine. There will be none, most likely, but one never knows what demons are up to, what jealous evil angels may try. Answer only my voice. And then we will begin together. If you are called forth, come to me, wake me up. I'm not worried about you really...With your power, you can get me everything I want in this world.'

  " 'Everything you want? But what do you want? I can't...'

  " 'It's books, mostly, son, don't get so excited,' he said. 'I have no use for wealth other than the beauty you see around me, which does indeed mean I am rich, but rich enough. I want books from all lands, to be taken to places, to caves in the north, and to the Egyptian cities in the south. You can d
o this. I'll tell you everything, and by the time I die, you will be strong enough to resist those masters who aren't worthy of your strength. Now go into the bones.'

  " 'I love you, Master,' I said.

  " 'Oh, yes, yes,' he said with a wave of his hand, 'and I shall love you too, and some day you'll have to watch me die.'

  " 'But do you love me...I mean in particular...me...do you love me?'

  " 'Yes, angry young spirit, I love you in particular. No more questions before I send you to sleep?'

  " 'What question would I ask?'

  " 'The Canaanite tablet by which you were made. You haven't once asked me to read it to you, or to read it yourself, and obviously you can read.'

  " 'I can read many languages,' I said. 'I don't want to see it. Ever.'

  " 'Ah, well, I understand. Come into my arms, kiss me, that's it, on the lips as Persians do, on the cheeks as Greeks do, and then leave me until I call you forth again.'

  "The warmth of his body was good to me, so good, and I rubbed my forehead against his cheek, and then without waiting for a further command, I willed myself into the bones, and into darkness. I felt almost happy."

  10

  As I have already mentioned to you, this part of my story--the story pertaining to my two masters--will be the shortest.

  "But I must explain fully about Zurvan and what he taught me and what he was. Masters after Zurvan, whether I remember them in particular or not, did not have his strength, I'm convinced of that, but more significantly, they didn't have Zurvan's interest in learning and teaching, and it was this passion of Zurvan, to instruct me, this lack of fear of me, of my independence, which influenced the rest of my existence, even during periods when I could not recall anything about Zurvan, his sharp blue eyes or his ragged white beard.

  "In other words, I carried Zurvan's lessons forever, even during the darkest times.

  "Zurvan was rich, thanks to Cyrus, and had everything he wanted; and he was true to his word that manuscripts were his primary treasures and I was sent on many errands by him, to detect the hiding places of various manuscripts, sometimes to steal outright, or merely to come back with information which allowed Zurvan to bargain for them. His library was immense and his curiosity insatiable.