Sympathy For Me: A Memoir Of The Devil 6ok1f

Sympathy for Me

A MEMOIR OF THE DEVIL

A Novel by Rayfield A. Waller

Copyright © 2019 by Rayfield A. Waller.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019901866 ISBN: Hardcover Softcover eBook

978-1-7960-1635-2 978-1-7960-1636-9 978-1-7960-1650-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Patricia Calloway is a conceptual and visual artist living in Detroit, Michigan. A graduate of the College for Creative Studies, she is also an educator focusing on community art programs and initiatives. She has public artworks on display in Detroit.

Rev. date: 04/10/2019

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Contents

I. Redemption

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

II. Rebellion

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

About The Author

The Holy Land in the time of Christ

Galilee in the time of Christ

The path of Christ’s main ministry

Jerusalem in the time of Christ

Rome’s seven hills in the time of Octavian Augustus

Downtown Rome in the time of the empire

, Belgium, and during WWI

The northwest sector of Europe during WWI

Dedication: For Patricia Calloway, artist and writer who helps me sustain a journey toward manhood; to my daughter Lena-Julia who loves me despite my aging brain; for my English students in Detroit, first to see drafts of the original story when the voice of Heylaāl began speaking to me; to my oldest friend Roberto Sobremonte, Navy man while I was an ANC man; for my mentor and blood brother Kofi Natambu who thankfully warned me I’d be my own greatest enemy; to Margo V. Perkins whose sarcasm and grace are the gifts she gave that I only now appreciate; for theater artist Yvonne Singh, Tracey to my C.K. Dexter Gordon, imbued with an inexhaustible well of talk — a veritable one woman show for which I was lucky to obtain an early front row friendship at Cornell; to Regina Rodriguez-Martin, fearless ‘Chicana on the Edge’, another Cornell coconspirator; for Maria Ricker who is forever my sleeping muse; to my mentor Wayne State Professor Mike Mckinsey, philosopher of language; for my inspiring student Sotabdi Ray — whose thoughts on Adam the First Man made me rethink an encounter between Heylaāl and Adam I’m planning for the sequel; to my spiritual mother the late poet Phyllis Janowitz who advised me as her student at Cornell to “Walk softly and don’t bother carrying the stick, it’ll just draw belligerent stick thugs who’ll want to hassle you”; for Perri Giovannucci, a better writer than me who helped me choose the title of this novel; to Stella Crews, mother of the Detroit science fiction movement; for poet-futurists, Allen Adkins and Ron Allen, and to futurist jazz innovators, Griot Galaxy; for wise, mysterious Willie Williams; to William Bryce, at-large Canadian to the world who knows how to be a dear friend; for James Nadell, no need to tell you Jim— you gave me the ‘gun’ that attaches to my ‘Ray’.

For my grandfather Charner Dukes, Jr. who fore-warned me, “You live and learn, live and learn, then you die and forget it all.”

And for my parents, the elegant giants Schofield and Bessie Waller who danced and laughed above me as I sat, firstborn child, on the carpet gazing up at their romance. This novel was written by all of you, because all of you wrote me.

-Rayfield A. Waller February, 2019

I. REDEMPTION

(GALILEE TO ROME)

The humor is outweighed only by the horror. —Margo V. Perkins

1

Malachi tosses the edge of his robe over his shoulder as the silent crowd watches. He is not sure how things have come to this, but he means to make a point of his authority if he does nothing else today. Malachi spits onto the dusty stone floor of the temple porch, which lies near the Court of the Gentiles. This startles one of the “disciples.” It’s the one called John, the fisher, Malachi thinks. Peter steps back a pace, but the crowd quickly pushes him frontward again. Because I know what elder Pharisee Malachi is thinking, I watch him from the cool darkness back among the pillars of a temple colonnade. I am unnoticed by all as I stand witness to these events I report to you. The silence of this crowd of Jerusalemites is offset by bawling goats and frantic chickens that still dash about at the foot of the stairs leading up to the porches of the temple. The people in the crowd press round Malachi as he squares his shoulders to take to task the arrogant and apparently now-insane young rabbi Yeshua, also called Yehoshua, known to you as Jesus, a Nazarene. Yeshua once spent time here as a boy debating rabbis. He’d been a young prodigy in those days. Today, as a rabbi and a man, Yeshua is no longer a prodigy; he is a delinquent. Wearing only his sindon and sandals, standing before Malachi, he has laid bare his own hairless chest, which is still heaving, with his strong shoulders shivering in the heat. A cubit and a half of rope with knots strategically tied along its length, a makeshift whip apparently, hangs from the rabbi’s hand. His sindon is dirty and damp from his earlier exertions, which had terrified the animals. I tell you, I know what Malachi thinks. This arrogant, now-quite-insane young rabbi, Yeshua, looks to Malachi to be older than his thirty or so years. Nakedness is abhorred by the children of Israel, Malachi thinks; and he re a more decent boy, a more somber boy, a carpenter’s son. That Yeshua, the boy, had been devout and respectful, though certainly arrogant in his wits. He had spent long hours in this very temple arguing respectfully with rabbis and scribes and talking politics with the common people ing within and without. He had

been an amazing boy who had spoken and behaved like a man fully grown who knew the law, who knew the words of the prophets, and who knew what scribes know. How can this man before Malachi now be that same Yeshua? This man before him now has inspired Romans, rabbis, scribes, Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees all to conspire against him. This Yeshua has blasphemed, questioned the law, and broken the Sabbath. He’s declared the holy covenant to be nullified in him. What insanity is this, as if he regarded himself to be the Moshiach? That is what Malachi thinks. He has brought the ire of the Herodites and Sanhedrin against himself, this Yeshua. And far more dangerous clerics than myself now seek his destruction, Malachi thinks. Yeshua is ringed about first by the so-called disciples at his side and second, like the Sadducee Malachi, by a silent crowd of Jerusalemites. The crowd is still upset over the rabbi’s rash action of driving moneylenders and animals alike out of the temple and down the stairs into the streets. Though the crowd has grown quiescent in the wake of the rabbi’s violence and the Sadducee’s arrival, the animals are still cackling and mewing their protest. “You priests!” the rabbi bellows. Here and there in the crowd, priests’ and clerics’ eyes narrow, and they listen closely. “You acolytes of the Herods who did kill Master John the Sabba, you filthy whitewashed charnel!” Oh, now that will get Herodite tongues wagging against you by noon, you fool, Malachi thinks. Herod will know, the Temple Mount being practically within earshot of Herod’s palace as the crow flies and the spy walks. “Know you all this,” the mad rabbi continues. “There shall be not one stone left upon another here! This place shall be desolation, for just as now your own hearts are desolation, so too shall this place be!” “Who are you, Nazarene, to prophesy this to we who sit where Moses sat?” shouts Malachi, his voice just as robust as the rabbi’s. Malachi will give as good as he gets, knowing Malachi. Yet he will lose this contest of words, for Yeshua

has a tongue to drip honey into the ear or to lash one’s flesh away. I move out of darkness now and walk past them all unseen, ing Judas on my way down the stairway to the street below. Judas looks to be worried, as he ought to be. In Yeshua, he has sought a vessel to carry him across a great gulf in his life and has lashed himself not to a boat, but to a comet.

2

The ranks of men stretched ahead of me as far as these human eyes could see. I marched in step with the man in front of me, compelled to move on by the man behind me. The one behind in his turn moved in step with me. To be part of a regiment and to bygone days of steadfast (if circumstantial) camaraderie in the legions! It was this, mundane as this is, that had inspired me to the war on the side of the Boche (bôSH), “blockheads” as the French called us. We in turn derided them as the poilu (pwäl-ˈyü), “the hairy ones.” Certainly, it was not any ion for the conceits of the Schlieffen Plan. Both humor and horror were reflected in my motivations then, certainly. My regiment, this regiment, we were ankle deep in blood part of the time and in trench water much of the rest of the time when not marching in circles. We were the machine of Albrecht von Württemberg’s Fourth Army: unfeeling, unthinking, and relentless—“blockheads” indeed. We were destined to invade and rip out their hairy throats, the commanders had told us all in Berlin to get us aboard the troop trains. We did invade Belgium at least, and we cut our share of throats. All that first two weeks at the front, we tramped over what seemed to be the better part of Belgium but was really, the more coherent and less sleep-deprived among us insisted, a six-square-mile area just outside of Luxembourg City. We had originally been bound for the Troisvierges train station for transport to , which we were then to have promptly invaded and vanquished, falling upon the frogs like one of Thor’s thunderbolts, trampling resistance beneath our iron boots; but they ordered us instead to circle aimlessly, waiting for new orders. Therefore, we marched, and we marched. Klaus, my trench mate and the best shot in the regiment and the battalion, speculated that we were about to invade Luxembourg City. Why should we? It seemed unnecessary, for the people of Luxembourg could do little against us. We had marched through their north on the way to Troisvierges practically unopposed.

All through the north, we fought brief catastrophic grapples on open ground with detachments of whatever Belgian troops we would encounter. Most of it was hand to hand and bloody, for we saved our bullets when we could by using our bayonets. We, the French, and the Belgians, all used Luxembourg as we wished, as our Kinder Garten, playing at the dodgy game of war. Well, Klaus was correct. We took Luxembourg; then by and by, we moved on to Troisvierges, where we secured the rail station and days later found ourselves in the Battle of Liege, after crossing the frontier into Belgium proper and officially invading our second country in addition to . It was the time we spent wandering in northern Luxembourg, hearing vague reports and rumors that we might be bound for someplace called Ypres, that won us the reputation of being a machine, however. Mindless and brutal, the Belgians called us once we met them. “Ceaseless,” “unstoppable,” “inexorable” were some of the things our appreciative generals said of us. After each skirmish inside Belgium, we would tumble into one of their foxholes (these Belgians made their foxholes nice and cozy; their foxholes were much like their railcars in that respect), and we’d sleep the sleep of the nearly dead until gray morning. We jumped to the screech of the pipe whistle blown by Herr Kommandant Reinert until his eyes bulged out and his face turned blotchy, followed by his full-throated howl, “Get your asses out there, schnell! What are you waiting for, Der Kaiser’s mistress to blow you kisses? Kommensie! Boots and knees, boots and knees!” With his belief in us to raise our ardor like a flag, we clawed and climbed back up to the muddy fields to march some more and to fight and slaughter whomever we encountered, whether Belgian army, Belgian partisans, or hapless farmers who for all we knew were disguised partisans. We killed them each and all and marched onward. Those had been better times for us.

Near nightfall on the particular night of the first chlorine gas attack in human history, I settled in at my post beside Klaus, the next rifleman down the line after me, in the forward trenches at Ypres. The chlorine attack was one of many astounding things I’d witnessed during this campaign, for 1914 was marked by such brave new advances in the technologies of war! These advances have marked the regiment’s experience on the front. We saw how the gas mesmerized the French at first, for chlorine gas was as astounding to witness as it was hideous to die by, you see. The Carthaginian general Hannibal’s elephants were, believe me, as astounding to the Romans—some of whom panicked at the terrible sight of those raging colossal beasts with legs like living timber crashing into their phalanxes. The Carthaginians themselves were astonished, watching the havoc unleashed by their own outlandish weapon as they launched devastating never-before-seen attacks against the terrified Roman legions. For ourselves here at the front, we launched the first chlorine attacks against the French at Ypres, and I was close enough to the enemy line that I could watch the eerie yellow clouds drift slowly across the field to envelop the French in their trenches. Through field glasses, one could easily mark the terror in their faces— the terror that broke their staunch courage and resolve where before not even the crushing shell barrages or the hideous grinding machine gun fire had broken it. Shouts of alarm and then of panic rose up from their battalions; and as one, they scrambled, thousands of them, out of the trenches to retreat straight back from their forward positions. However, scores of them, blinded and suffocating with their lungs and nasal ages afire from the chlorine, dashed wildly this way and that, and many went straight outward right into our field of fire to fall, kicking and choking to death. Gas attacks are frequent at the front, but mustard gas is nothing compared to chlorine. At first, we were hesitant to shoot, enemy or not; it hardly seemed proper, getting the drop on them this way. Even if the commanders with their tin whistles hanging at their necks had barked at us to fire, we would have remained transfixed, aghast at what we saw. As the poor bastards strangled and rolled, kicked and vomited, however, we

began to feel quite differently about the matter. Cries went up among us: “Ach, vas ist! Kill them, for God’s sake!” and “Put the bastards out of this misery! Mein Gott!” It was then, in fact, that our commanders ordered us not to shoot: battalion captains and lieutenants scrambled down the trench line, their boots making crackling noises in the frozen mud, shouting, “Das ist verboten! Don’t shoot! Keep your hands off those Maxims!” and “Nein! Don’t unsling your rifles!” For our medical corps observers, intrepid generals who had come forward to see, and war technicians with notebooks and sharp pencils were watching to study the effects of chlorine. Klaus glanced up at our battalion’s mechanized gunner, Eberschmidt. Herr Eberschmidt’s was the Fist of Thor in this portion of the line. He was expertly perched a few feet above us upon his gunner’s shelf so that his head rose over the lip of the trench. He waited up there, idle now by orders, behind the hulking Maxim MG 08 on its sled mount. The gun’s iron legs, like claws, were sunk into the ground to anchor it when fired; and its metal maw pointed out over the landscape at the enemy. It is a devastating weapon, the Maxim. Its automatic firing system uses a watercooled, self-motivated belt feed to shoot cartridges each moment a finger such as Eberschmidt’s depresses the trigger and so long as ammunition remains in the feed belt. The gun will cycle, extract spent cartridges, reload itself, and repeat its own cycle. Eberschmidt affectionately called it the Mouth of God, which never failed to make me chuckle. I was amused at the irony of it, a private joke of mine, whenever I heard him call it that. At this moment, Eberschmidt looked right back down at Klaus as Klaus glanced up at him. He shrugged and remained idle at his trigger. Orders were clear. Klaus looked back at me. “Hang the generals,” he grumbled matter-of-factly; and he stepped up one of the shallow wooden ladders to the top of our trench, then sat plain as noon on the edge there presenting his left side to the enemy, with one leg hanging down and one leg stretched out before him at ground level. He deliberately unslung, and he wrapped his Gewehr infantry rifle’s strap round his arm, shoved in a five-cartridge clip, and swung his shoulders to face the

enemy line. He aimed, just as deliberately. He fired five rapid shots, expertly cycling his bolt action after each with a speed that made me recall our better campaigns when they called us the Machine. Each shot hit its target, and five poor French bastards’ heads burst like melons before they fell still, released from hell. Up and down the line, our men began slapping their tin mess cups against their muzzles as each bullet struck. Eberschmidt, for his part, smiled grimly as he drew back the feed bolt of his Maxim, swiveling the sight, the base coming into view as the muzzle pivoted, so that from below, the thing looked as if it were mounted on grasshopper’s legs; it looked like something alive. As cheers rose in a wave, Klaus shoved in another clip, and he fired. Five more suffering Frenchmen’s souls fled away because of five more rapid shots. Just after the fifth of the second round of shots, there came a sharp crack and echo from Herr Kommandant Reinert’s sixteen-year-old bolt-action Ma M98. Klaus’s body jerked, obscenely, twisted at a dreadful angle; and he tumbled back over into our trench. I took his pulse and found no reason to disturb him there where he lay with one leg bent underneath him as though he were some child’s discarded puppet, some child having grown tired with that particular toy. The leg could be let alone, for he no longer had need of it, and so I had no reason to worry now what angle my friend Klaus’s leg had fallen at. Eberschmidt shot his firing bolt back into at-rest position and took his hands away from the Maxim, raising them over his head. It was as if he were surrendering to his own side.

The incident with Klaus and Eberschmidt was last week, before you arrived, friend. Earlier tonight, I must have been out of my head with fever, maybe a little exposure to the gas, for you said the men around us told you I had spoken of myself to them. I never speak of myself to anyone. Perhaps I was out of my head, perhaps blowback from the gas. You, mein freund, had just ed us here at Ypres. So I told you of how things are in this war. Ah, but you then revealed to me that you are actually an old hand, did you not? You were detached, you said, from Joncherey and the skirmishes there near the Swiss border? I know others who were there, at Joncherey, for that very first battle of this war. They would send a civilized man like yourself into civilian villages that way? From your civilized manner, you would make a better adjutant than infantry. Bloody fighting we’ll see indeed before this whole affair is done, and one ought to be hard-pressed to find any man who claims to be proud to be fighting for Der Vaderland or for König, now that it has become clear we are making of Europe a wasteland and killing civilians the way we are, not to mention even killing our own, like poor Klaus. We are killing them not just as we find them wandering in the field of fire, but even those who are nestled within the safe sovereignty of the heretoforeinviolate cities. They say it is a scorched-earth policy; and from what I hear, there are regiments poisoning wells, burning crops, and clearing villages of people as if they were rats. I say one ought to be hard-pressed to find any man proud of this, but then how does one for Kommandant Reinert? Unfortunately, there were men like him in the Persian army, among Shaka Zulu’s senior commanders, under the command of the Japanese shoguns, in the Roman legions, among the Greek hoplites, and within the officers’ corps of the homuncular queen, Elizabeth. It must have been the gas, though. It was just after the chlorine that I fell ill with fever and must have talked out of my head. Only one man in my regiment truly thought to believe what I babbled in my sickness, it appears; and he died just this morning, stepping on a mine. His thoughts are scrambled now, along with most

of the rest of him. A tick? They are as plentiful as shell craters on the ruined landscape you see before you. Give it to me here. We’ll just drop it into the oil pot. See how it puffs into smoke as I consign it to the flame? I do enjoy that, I confess. Fleas and ticks are bad here. Such is war, my dear. I have been involved in one or another war for one or another country, nation, or empire for centuries now. Sometimes as a general; sometimes I choose, as now, to be a lowly foot soldier, like you see me. Yes, I said “centuries.” You are not surprised that I fought for Agrippa and Caesar Augustus and before that with Alexander in his quest to conquer all the world he knew of? So you believe what these men here have said about me. They don’t. They laugh. It is a pastime for them during cold meals in the mud. You, though, you believe, I can tell, and so I’m being frank with you. In the darkest of nights in this trench between Belgium and and your God knows where, you have crawled into this hole in hell because fate brings you here to me to take my confession. Perhaps it is some Geistige wahrheit, some spiritual truth you have come seeking?

Don’t you ever sleep? Perhaps you never will sleep again after hearing what I have to say. Very well. I will speak only of what I have witnessed and what I know to be true. Incoming! Put down that canteen; we’ll hug the earth a moment and hold our breaths. That one landed close. Perils of the trade. I will speak of my “life,” such as it has been, if indeed it can be called a life. I will speak of many goats scattered to the winds, of many fools led astray, and of many temples within which I have hidden, shrouded by shadow, a witness to that of which I speak. I speak of things from the vastness of my memory, things certain to astonish you. Ah. You bring fountain pen and paper. Where in Prometheus’s name did you obtain clean paper? At Louvain? Really. You fellows utterly destroyed the place. The city fell in five days, I hear. Mass atrocities you fellows committed. Not you, of course, but still … My guess is that you took that paper from the library of a dead Belgian professor, eh? Oh, be assured, nothing you could have done in this or any war could equal my crimes. I do not judge you. You, my confessor and biographer. I shall narrate as you write. I shall write, indeed, through you. Shall we title it Sympathy for Me? Please do not be deceived by the title of this, my memoir; for in fact, you would be foolish to try to have sympathy for me. You would likely not be able to even if you wished. If you wished it, to have sympathy for me, I would wonder what must be askew in the circumference of your wits. There are human shells of note enough for you to sympathize with without seeking to know me, for what could you know of a mature and complete, free and unshelled soul such as me? Of course, dearest human, I am disingenuous in asking this; for what am I doing at this moment if not helping you to know something of me in spite of your small shell-bound existence? What am I doing but helping you to know what I am? I am nothing if not contradictory, nothing if not vain. Narcissus is one of my

ancient forenames. If you were as fully developed as I, as brilliant, as beautiful a being as I am, you would be just as vain. But the question still arises: are you, even after I confess myself to you, able still to sympathize with one such as I? Indeed, your rambling histories, your proliferating cultures, your civilizations have almost all portrayed me as being evil, malignant, a destructive spirit aligned against the honor and glory of him. He—you have, of course, been taught—is everything good, everything loving. So it seems, at least if one only considers the New Testament version of him, eh? There is however the Old Testament. It is unlike the new. It is a long bloody tale of his cruelty and of his “love” expressed very often as bitterness and rage. Cruel, haughty, and vengeful is the God of Deuteronomy. By the time you peruse the book of Matthew, it is his Son, a superb distraction from the truth, who represents “love,” not the Father. Only the Son has ever shown you this love of which your God spoke, if I’m not mistaken; and since I was there in the Holy Land and saw the Son in the flesh, I don’t think I am mistaken. You do not believe me. You’ve been told that I am the consummate liar, and you were told correctly, I assure you. Even if I am not lying to you, you exist inside a conception of space and time that is so small and that has so limited you that my truth is bound to translate to you as your lie. It is as unavoidable as the misconceptions of those unfortunate little beings called “flatlanders” who, upon encountering the third dimension, cannot understand what they are witnessing except to see it as not real. To them, bound by their paltry two-dimensional existences, it is false. Imagination is your greatest gift from your God. In this way, you will not find “truth,” but a new way to see truth. If you wish to follow my tale, then your aversion to contradiction is one of the stumbling blocks you shall have to overcome. Judge me carefully, for I come from a place at right angles to every previous dimension you can imagine. I come literally from inside you. A voice from the universe and the creation within you. Everything is a matter of perspective. Ahhh, this mud is an annoyance, isn’t it? Gets into everything. Here, like this, you seal the tops of your boots with yours pant legs thus. Yes. Better, Ja?

My given name, my birth name, if you could say I was “born,” was Heylaāl. This is the name I call myself, and should you call upon me (and I do not advise you to do that, but were you desirous of a response from me), Heylaāl is the only name I shall respond to. Know this here, from the start. It is one key to understanding me. “Lucifer” is your Latin translation of your Hebrew Heylaāl. Lucifer in your Latin is from lux, lucis, or “light,” and from ferre, or “to bear, to bring, to carry.” Do you see? My name is not at all negative, as you have been taught it is by your Hollywood movie talkies. I am named Bringer of Light. Another of my names is Morning Star. Does not this bit of truth tell you something of me?

You slept. I did not wake you, for it will be light soon, and we then must get back up into the mud. More? You wish to hear more about what I am? I and the other unshelled beings like me—Raphael, Gabryel, and Mikayel the archangel, Azrael, Baltyal, my beloved Yazad, she of divine power and my sweetest Yofiel, angel of divine beauty, and the rest—they and I, we, were created in his image. We came first. Consult your Sanskrits, your Bible, your Tanakh, Torah, and Talmud, your Upanishads, Suttas, grimoires and Gitas, your Qur’an, your Septaguint, and all the rest. Qui legit intelligat. Or if you really wish to know truth as I see it, consult the text I helped to write: The Book of Lights, your Kabbalah. It is the sephirot, my description of the ten levels of creation, that I contributed to Kabbalah. Are you surprised by that? I have traveled all of the plateaus and inner precincts of the levels of creation. We who are divine beings do condescend to take a hand in your history. We did so before the war, and we all still do after the war has split us into two nations, the so-called high and the fallen in your words. My point, dear lobster, is that we were first to be fashioned and were the first empowered. It only follows then from simple sense, if you hold still inside your shell and think a bit about it, that you were created in our image, after the pattern began with us. In fact, that within you which is creative, that which enables you to experience angoisse or ennui, which has imagination and force of mind, the spark in you, it is the me in you. Yes, though I myself am not particularly creative, I am the pattern your God formed for creativity; and from me, he gave this to you. When you are dissatisfied, disconsolate, questioning, you are being as I am. Look within yourself, and you will sense the truth of it. Your kind’s failure to please him is just the same as my own unwillingness to please him. Your long expulsion from his grace, fallen state, it is the repetition of my own fall. Do you not see? He thinks that he created me imperfectly, that he failed in forming me. He likewise is certain that you are a failed creation. For this reason, he sent his Son to redeem you, to effect a revision of you, his second creation and his second failure. For me, well, for me, there was no such attempt to redeem, to modify, or to amend. The Son was sent only for you; for me,

nothing. Nevertheless, it is a fact that I came first and that I was his finest, most beautiful, most perfect, and most enlightened. I shone so brightly, magnificently, that I threatened to compete with the radiance of him; and so I was cast out. Quis ut Deus, eh? Who is it who dares be like unto God? Who dares to compete with him? I am. I did. It is my nature, the nature he gave me. You have heard this tale, to be sure you have. The war, the division of the hosts of “heaven” (actually, there is no such place; it is but a word describing a concept and point within spacetime that you cannot fully understand, and so you call it heaven), my fall and my banishment in the earth and cosmos; but I assure you that you have not heard the complete truth since you have until now never heard the tale from me. Be patient. We shall get to that tale before I am done. First, I wish to say something about the Son.

3

He is tall. At sunset, he is a dark, withered ghost in white. Egyptian cloth these, his robes. The robes are a gift from a prosperous merchant who took a liking to him and to his parables and sermons. Not that he is lacking wealth; his is a family line reaching far back to David, you know. It is simply that he ignores and disdains silver, much to the frustration of his director of finaces, Yehuda, called Judas. His robes fly in the burnt breezes of Judea like asack. He wanders under what is, even near dusk, a hot, bright sun that beats down upon a dust trap of a city, the village of Nain, in the land of Galilee. Crowds follow, hanging on his every word and gesture. He enters Nain in the full flush of what he is: a poor rabbi (whose family as I just told you is actually not so poor at all despite what you have been told) who has won the ear of the common people. This place, this Nain, is eight leagues south of Capernaum, in the shadow of Mount Tabor. That would be twenty-five of your “miles.” Throngs of ragged people follow him; they follow him everywhere he goes now ever since he gathered his apostles to himself. My favorite of those is Judas, who possesses more than a bit of pluck and just enough good sense. Judas has shrewdly spread rumors and whisperings about Yeshua. Judas has worked tirelessly to let it be known who Yehoshua the Christos (“the Anointed,” the Christ) is and what he is capable of. None can gain the ear of the people without rumor, without whisperings. Were it not for Judas’s industry, you see, Christ the Son would be just another mad, dusty Judean prophet wandering and babbling about things that anger the Sadducees and that attract the attention only of the Sadducees. Near the dirty gate of this dirty little village, the Son comes upon another throng, this one walking out of the city as he walks in. This is the funeral procession of one human who has died, the corpse now carried upon a bier atop a litter. Wrapped in strips of cloth anointed in expensive oils, it seems the dead man’s family has some means. Head and face are bound up tightly, covered, hidden from sight; but his dead white feet are bare, exposed. Already stiff from death’s embrace, the dead man is borne by citizens of Nain. Walking before the crowd,

leading them, is a woman who weeps so pathetically that the Son pauses to speak to her. “Woman, who do you weep for?” “For my son, Rabbi, who goes to burial since the anointment cost much. And now I can afford no sepulture or tomb to lay him in,” she answers, her eyes red and wet and her nose leaking snot. “And why?” asks the Christ as all the throng, her entourage and Christ’s, halts there to wait and listen in the heat.“Why,” he asks, “do you weep for him that is dead, your son?” “Rabbi, he is my son! Before him died my husband, and I was left with only this my son to comfort me. Now my son too has died, and I am left with no one to comfort me. I am a widow and a childless mother, both. I will have nothing and no one. My grief is greater than any pain I have ever felt, even the pain of birthing this my own son.” He looks at her, and her wavering gaze steadies on his face, and she is still now; she holds her breath as if she has collected it and is waiting before she takes another. He reaches out to touch her face. She closes her eyes, obviously moved by his touch. Quite a useful talent that, I conclude. I draw nearer, though not so near as to be seen or felt by Yehoshua, and listen closely. The Son lays his other hand upon the bier and looks down at the white-footed corpse. “Arise,” the Christ, the Nazarene calls softly upon the thin hot air, his voice rasping with the dust in his throat. “Young man, I say arise.” Nothing happens. I draw even nearer, near enough to them now that I can “smell” the garlic on Peter’s breath. Even for this place and time, Peter is overly fond of garlic. It lets everyone know, even among so many garlic eaters, that he is near. He glances sharply upward at an anxious flock of herons dashing skyward from the branches of a stunted palm. He turns toward me, sensing something, I suppose; but he

cannot see me, and because humans so trust their sense of sight, he turns back to Yehoshua. Yehoshua looks up from the corpse, back into the woman’s eyes, and shouts this time—this time without looking away from her. “I say to you, as once I said to Lazarus, arise!” The white-footed corpse, feet now flush with a rising red hue and then a healthy brown, lurches. It sits up and is quite energetic, for the dead-now-alive man tears away wrappings and cloth from his own head and face. His voice rattles. “Mother?” She falls to her knees there in the dust, and the litter-bearers too drop the litter, nearly breaking the dead-now-alive man’s arse on the hard ground. He scrambles immediately to his feet, still speaking in a dry voice. “What … has happened?” “You were dead, and now you live!” several of the humans, now all falling to their knees, call out to him in wonder. “He has done as the prophet Elisha did!” “I repent my sins! Rabbi, please anoint me!” The widow’s son is quite perplexed. Would you not be also were you to awaken in such a position? “But what … what has happened?” he asks again. “He has raised you!” Matthew calls out above the chatter, in that stentorian voice of his. If any human could ever make a sound suggestive of the obnoxious voice of your God, the obnoxious apostle Matthew could. All fall silent and listen. “As Yeshua, my master, did do to Lazarus of Bethany, he has raised you from death.” Now the crowd is fully in the grip of awe. They have a Lazarus of their own now, here in their dirty little village of Nain.

I find this all quite amusing, and I can’t help but chuckle. Peter has not heard me, certainly; but it seems he senses me because while the other disciples sink to their knees and the throngs in clasping their hands together and glorifying the Nazarene, Peter turns to look into the empty air where I am and should not be and glares, looking for me, whom he should not see. It is the Son I watch. I study him. He has dropped his head as all around him give him obeisance. He raises his death-banishing hand to his brow, and his legs tremble slightly. His breathing is ragged. Ah, he is taxed by this little magic trick, I see. I wonder why. He has more than sufficient power for this trick and for far more than he has demonstrated to these humans. So why? Yesss. He is in a shell, just as they are. He is one of them, though he is more. He is more; he is like me, an angel. But unlike me, he is confined within a human shape. Far more glorious than these humans, yes, but he suffers their weaknesses and shares their flesh; and just right now, he looks to be nauseous. I wonder if he is about to throw up his earlier meal of roasted goat, sour dates, and unleavened bread. If he does, it will be right onto the head of the mother. A strange anointing that would be. Peter knows. Silently, cunningly, Peter goes to the Son’s side and, with no big show of it, takes Christ by the arm as if to praise him, but in reality to him, to hold him up. Only Peter has noticed that what Christo Nauseum has just done to raise the widow’s son has made him weak. I draw back to a distance at which I know Peter cannot sense me. The Nazarene slowly raises his damp head, one hand now pressed to the lowered head of the widow, as if to bless her or perhaps to protect her. He has a thing for mothers. He treats them all as if they are his own, as if they are all Mary. He looks where I am, and I know he sees me. He draws the woman nearer to him, her son who was dead now groveling at his feet. He withdraws his arm from Peter’s and places his other hand on her son’s head. He looks over her shoulder back at me. He is clearly trying to shield these humans from me. This is amusing indeed; for if I were so inclined, I could kill them all, even the apostles —and before Christ could gather strength enough to fight me off. I will not do this because I have no reason to. It does not suit my purposes or my whim. And I am forbidden to do such a thing, of course. Besides, events suggest that were I to do so, to kill them all, the Nazarene would

simply raise them all from the dead, eh? That very amusing thought causes me to laugh aloud. Several of the humans look up from their groveling to gaze at empty air where they think they have heard a dry goatish cackle. Peter turns, puts himself between the Nazarene and me, and strides boldly in my direction, his walking staff held as a weapon to strike with. In a flash, I am airborne. I am headed above Peter and the others and the Nazarene, this Christ in his regalia of flesh and dusty robes. My fine wings carry me across the sun; my shadow crosses the faces of two of the men of Nain, and they are struck blind. They cry out, these two; they lurch forward off their knees onto their bellies and writhe upon the ground in pain. I look back and see that even as they lay in agony, the Nazarene moves to them no doubt to restore their sight. Ah! I have provided him with another opportunity to show them his power. Upward I go, up the slope of the mountain. I fly to the peak, where I stand to look down at the city under sinking light, the rocky fields, the mad prophets wandering in off the dessert, the herds of scrawny goats, and the scrabble of dying date trees. The sour smell of flint and grilled goat meat is heavy on the winds. There are also the esters of human waste, more faint, but clear and strong to me. This is one of my favorite things to do: to smell the scent of humans and of their civilizations. Of course, I do not “smell” things in the way you can, please understand. Only if I seize a human shape can I have your human senses. Still, my senses are somewhat analogous to yours, little crab. Well, actually, no, they are not. They are expansions of yours. Yours are finite, while mine are infinite. I can take in the molecular structure of a sound, a scent, a flavor, a color, or a texture. The molecules of these things, when I reach for them, combine with what I am (never mind just what I am; you could not understand that); and they become temporarily a part of me, and I a part of them. This ability is described by you in your “first law of thermodynamics,” the conservation of energy. A brilliant insight—for a crab, that is. Parochial, but insightful. Were you a bit brighter, dear crab, you would have applied your “law” to the nature of souls. I have a spirit body. It is eternal

because spirit (the soul and its energy and movement is spirit) is never created nor destroyed, and spirit is everything in the creation; so all is part of me, and I am part of all. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am not ready to tell you about that just yet. You must be brought along gradually; else you will become astonished, amazed, or confused. Or perhaps just irretrievably befuddled, and I shan’t enjoy you as much in such a state. What amazes me, if I may say so, what has always amazed me, is the subtlety of the works of your God. He created your human senses to be smaller, more trivial than mine, with a paltry, limited scope; and yet when I seize a human form and push part of myself into the pocket of its human senses, I find your miniscule senses are somehow more, well, intense. How can this be?

For your information, raising this widow of Nain’s son from death ought to have been a small task for the Nazarene. Consider. He had made bringing Lazarus back look like a simple trick, and Lazarus’s soul cannot have been an easy thing to bring to heel, I can assure you. Even as a boy, Lazarus had been soft-shelled. His soul had been always rising, straining against its confines. As a boy, he had traveled nightly through what he and the humans around him had taken to be dreams. They were not dreams. Lazarus had journeyed by night through lower realms of the creation, low to myself and to unshelled beings such as myself, but higher and farther certainly than most humans can rise or journey outward without first dying. For whatever reason, there are some of you humans born who do this. Your God’s plan, I suppose. How should I know? My point is that when Lazarus died and when the Nazarene dragged him back from death, Lazarus’s soul had been a great ways distant from its shell, finally having escaped the low and near realms it had been accustomed to travel by night. Most of you humans, upon the shock of death and of sudden release from your shells, will loiter about nearby—confused, sometimes not even aware you have died (which I find keenly amusing to witness, by the way}. No such vagrant was Lazarus. By the time the Nazarene had performed his trick, Lazarus had been rattling about the far reaches of the first infinity. When the Christ had uttered his spell—“Lazarus, rise,” or “Crab Lazarus, get back on your plate,” or whatever—the human’s soul had been poleaxed and fetched back to plate with only the salad, butter, and bib needed to make a complete meal. The Christ had done this with no apparent effort. Show-off. You have been told that Lazarus was the last soul the Christ raised, but no, he was first. The widow’s son was second, and Jairus’s daughter in Capernaum would be last. The Christ had no difficulty, as far as I could observe, with the only one who ought actually to have troubled him, Lazarus.

My little crab, would you believe me were I to tell you that I am quite fascinated by how some of you, like Lazarus, are made? Some of you, like Lazarus, are endowed with souls that will naturally rise and struggle against the constraints of your shells! I have no physical constraints, and so nothing confines me as you are confined. My creativity, my dear, is that which is born of liberty, while yours is that which is born of suppression. One like the Christ, who is like me and thus is free, was also like you, enslaved to your flesh; but like you, he could rise. You are indeed creative, and even if you did not have so many other ways of showing it, you would be creative in at least this much: that this astounding thing about you, your ability to rise, creates my interest in you. As I’ve said, you were told that Lazarus was the last soul the Christ raised, but Lazarus was first. The widow’s son was second, you see; and Jairus’s daughter in Capernaum would soon be last. I know, I know, your scriptures say different. Your scriptures are wrong. Eyewitnesses, my dear, are few you know; so do be grateful you have one in me to correct both small and gross errors. Know simply that Lazarus had already been raised, and his raising had been no trouble to the Christ. No trouble at all. So it was puzzling to me that the widow’s son had seemed to tax the Nazarene. This situation called for more study.

I return to the city gate at dusk, with humans, mules, and goats flocking about. I follow them all into the city into a marketplace just inside the gates. Christ and his disciples have gone by now. So too have the widow and her son who was dead and stiff but now has risen. It will be an easy-enough task to find the risen one, though. I can nose him easily. This ing Roman trader will do nicely for my needs. As he walks through me leading his mules, I wrench him to me, pry his shell open, and enter. The Roman panics. I seize the paltry little sweetmeat that is his soul, so crab white and pure. I consider eating him but decide against gluttony, for I am not hungry at the moment. He offers a brief flurry of weak resistance, so I flick a sharp sting through him like shocking a lobster into nice arthropod calm. He is frozen with terror, cowering in a corner of himself where he will be no problem as I take possession of his body. It is always a sweetness to take a human shape. The flood of color, the sharper quality of sound and scent, the wide array of textures and tastes to be had with a human body—all are wonderful, startling, and inspiring. If it all gets too distracting and even tiresome, and it all does soon enough, still, it is a fine thing with which to amuse myself for a fortnight or so. As this Roman bodyguard stops at a cart full of olives to sample what the olive merchant sells, I hand the mules’ harnesses to the first ing family. The father stares at me, amazed. The mules’ pack baskets are full of parchments, spices, henna, fine silks, and dates. The father eyes one of the bolts of Egyptian safflower dyed silk. It is wealth such as a Roman merchant will gather here in the holy lands to carry home to bribe Roman ward bosses with Galilean dates. Even better is the bribe of rare spice tinctures offered to plebeian political thugs in the Forum to ingratiate himself, catching the eye of some equestrian lawyer’s wife with silks, making his way into the outer circles of some lower patrician family perilously perched atop the Palatine Hill. It took only a slight push against the father’s mind, a typically weak human mind, to make the man think I had lost these mules to him in a game of lots. His amazement dies away, becoming sly satisfaction. “So, Roman, you are a man of your word.”

“I am Roman, dog.” He, his wife, and his children all shrink at my words as I turn and walk away, paying off the bodyguard with coins from my purse. I ignore the bodyguard’s shock as I leave him there at the olives and walk away. He is stunned by what I have done; but I have no need of the Roman’s mules, his silks, his horrid dried dates, and dust-infested spices. With a body now, I can very easily smell the faint trail of the widow’s son through the bright, loud streets and can easily discern it from among the thousand other scents that make this place reek. The Roman’s senses are small enough to do well for such close nosing on such a small level for the least amount of energy expended. Who says I’m not a conservationist? Eagerly I sniff my way past butchers’ tents and sharpeners’ wheels, past temples where God’s scribes tend to God’s parchments, and where rebbi clean their shel yad (arm tefillin) and their shel rosh (head tefillin), making ready for the morning prayer services. In those services, the small black sheep and ox leather boxes worn by rabbis on arm and head will contain scrolls bearing Torah verses. I linger at an arch leading to a synagogue where three of the tefillin are left unguarded just inside, in shadow. I steal two of them. Walking again, now that it is mine, I rip one open; it is the arm tefillin, which has only one compartment. I read the parchment inside; then I throw it away. The other one, a head tefillin, has four separate compartments, formed from one piece of leather, in each of which one scroll of parchment is placed. This tefillin, now mine, contains four Torah ages written in ink upon four strips of parchment wrapped in strips of cloth, like the single one had been. The ages inscribed on the parchments all include a reference to the commandment of tefillin. I tear it open, curiosity being my most human trait, or is it rather that it is one of your most Heylaālian? Inside, among other ages, is the typical Kadesh Li, the “duty of God’s people to their salvation from enslavement to Egypt.” On it I read:

ֹ ‫ְבּכוֹר … ַוֹיּאֶמר‬-‫ִלי ָכל‬-‫ַק ֶדּשׁ‬ ‫ַהיּוֹם ַה ֶזּה ֲאֶשׁר ְיָצאֶתם ִמִמְּצ ַריִם‬-‫ ָזכוֹר ֶאת‬,‫ָהָעם‬-‫מֶשׁה ֶאל‬ ֹ ,‫ִמֵבּית ֲעָב ִדים … ִשְׁבַעת ָיִמים‬ ‫ ַבּיּוֹם‬, ‫ ְוִה ַגּ ְדָתּ ְלִב ְנ‬. …’‫ ַלה‬,‫ ַחג‬,‫ ַהְשִּׁביִעי‬,‫תּאַכל ַמֹצּת; וַּביּוֹם‬ ֹ ‫ַההוּא ֵלא‬ ‫ וְּל ִזָכּרוֹן ֵבּין‬, ‫ ָי ְד‬-‫ ְוָה ָיה ְל ְלאוֹת ַעל‬.‫ ִמִמְּצ ָריִם‬,‫ ְבֵּצאִתי‬,‫ ָעָשׂה ה’ ִלי‬,‫ ַבֲּעבוּר ֶזה‬:‫מר‬

‫ַהֻח ָקּה‬-‫ ְוָשַׁמ ְרָתּ ֶאת‬.‫ הוִֹצֲא ה’ ִמִמְּצ ָריִם‬,‫ ִכּי ְבּ ָיד ֲח ָז ָקה‬: ‫ ְבִּפי‬,’‫ ְלַמַען ִתְּה ֶיה תּוֹ ַרת ה‬, ‫ֵעי ֶני‬ ‫ ָיִמיָמה‬,‫ ִמ ָיִּמים‬,‫ ְלמוֲֹע ָדהּ‬,‫ַהֹזּאת‬

It is from the book of Exodus. This too I toss into the dust. It is taken by a desert wind and pushed down a street full of fishmongers. I by fora, walk past tables laden with the berries, safflower, henna, and turmeric used to make bright, rich dyes for clothing and walk through a rancid public square full of corpses awaiting burial (seems the Nazarene has not been this way since these corpses are all still dead), then down a dim alleyway cut through close mud-encrusted clay houses. I sniff my way along. At nightfall, I discover the widow’s son sitting close to a smoky fire in the courtyard of a villa. The fire burns beside a freshly dug well. Eight wealthy men of Nain, three Sadducees, and a self-important Pharisee are gathered round listening to him talk. A blooming olive tree flourishes beside the doorway of the villa. I walk past it. As I come into this well-appointed courtyard, I see a rough sunbaked clay patio and Persian silk pillows strewn about for guests to sit on. I reach out with my thoughts and push just a bit against the mind of the leader here, the Pharisee named Ezekiel before he can challenge me, a stranger among them and a member of the hated Roman Empire. I tell his mind all about the mules, the bodyguard, about me (about the Roman, that is). His is an easy mind to influence in this way. As I had approached, Ezyi’kel’s eyes had grown dark and hostile. Now his face is growing bright with satisfaction. “Tercius!” he calls to me with a smile. “You are here in time to listen to quite a tale. But where are your mules? Where is your man? Have you grown so used to walking among us Galileans that you now go about without the fear you once felt? Come sit by the fire. This man means us to believe that he has been raised from death.” As I sit down beside Ezyi’kel, he motions with utmost courtesy to the eldest man, an Iberian trader named Yoshím, whose villa this is. Yoshím nods, signaling to Ezyi’kel that my presence among them is acceptable to him; and then he es a pitcher of wine to Ezyi’kel, who pours wine into a small clay cup for me. The suspicious looks of the others linger a moment, then evaporate

in the glow of the host’s and Pharisee Ezyi’kel’s hospitality toward this Roman. The smell of hot earth beneath me is pleasant. Along with it, I enjoy the smoky smell of Yoshím’s wife’s baking bread near us at the hearth inside their villa. I can also make out the sweet muskiness of the wife herself back there in the dark, red hearth flames lighting her soot-smeared face. Nearby to the widow’s son, a skinny camel snorts. The son flinches, glancing back at the long-faced beast. “The boy is a liar,” grunts one of the Sadducees, dipping bread into a pot of warm hummus. I know that the hummus has been heated because I can smell its aroma from where I sit. Beside him, a second Sadducee is dipping his bread into a chalice of tart Samarian wine. Goat cheese on a platter and olive oil in a shallow pan sit upon a blanket beside the third Sadducee. “More. He’s a blasphemer,” says the third. “He blasphemes the prophet Elisha with this talk. He mocks the scriptures.” The harshness of these words makes all fall silent. The widow’s son speaks softly, barely raising his eyes from the shimmer of the fire. “I tell you. I tell you before God that I was dead. I was not in the earth, and my soul was not with you. I love the prophet Elisha as much as any of our people do. This is not about the prophet Elisha. The rabbi raised me. He raised me.” The cool has finally begun, for the sun has set. The sudden chill is not as bad sitting on the ground as we are since the earth holds on to the heat of the day and warms the arses of all. I taste the wine. It has the faint taste of cumin. “He awakened me with but a touch,” continues the widow’s son, “and with a command that I come back, drawing me to his voice. I came. I came back—” “Back! Back! Back from where exactly?” a Sadducee badgers. “From where I had been. Out of me, away from this life.” “Lies,” remarks one of the wealthy men of Nain matter-of-factly. The widow’s son is doing a poor job of convincing these tedious old crabs. “Whether this boy lies, believes his own lie, or even tells true,” Yoshím offers,

“matters not. It matters much, though, that this rabbi, this Yeshua stirs up the people. This will little please the Romans, and we have heard of his doings in Judea. Now he is come here to perform his tricks. I tell you the Romans—” “Will do nothing,” I say. Yoshím claps shut his mouth. Ezyi’kel glares at me, the look on his face saying he feels betrayed by the imaginary Tercius. I find this tedious, not amusing. I scratch at an insect bite on the back of the Roman’s neck. Now I am thinking of the fact that while I am in this body, I must endure insects, aches, and dozens of other such miserable annoyances, including fatigue. Testily, I have the urge to burn Ezyi’kel’s head off his body, reach inside, snatch out his lungs, and eat them. Again, though, I am not hungry. Perhaps a simple bursting of his organs will do to satisfy my peevishness. Yoshím’s eyes narrow at hearing my voice. “Roman,” he says, “your Aramaic is strangely accented. Perhaps you have served with the Roman legions, have you not? Where have you served?” “Why do we care of this or any other Roman?” interrupts one of the younger of the wealthy men of Nain. I rise, gaze slowly at each face around the fire, expecting that this will impress them. Of course, that I wear the flesh of this Roman is authority enough; it is authority to these who possess wealth or possess status and who thus fear losing what they possess. It is enough that I am Tercius. I move closer to the widow’s son. The skinny camel at his back whines, then lurches against its harness. The son flinches as I reach out and touch his head. “Be still, boy,” I murmur, and he does grow still. The camel shudders. I wait. I feel … It is as if I have dipped this human hand into the nearby fire. The burning is a sensation the shock of which would have caused the Roman to shriek were it not that I am in his body, but then this burning isn’t meant for him, but for me. All at once, I know exactly why dragging this man’s soul back so fatigued the Christ— the widow’s son is one of the Creator’s chief pawns!

This human is a lynchpin, a major piece in the puzzle, “the plan” I call it. It is like some divine recipe for baking a divine pie, as I see it. What the ingredients are, none can know. What the pie will eventually look like or who will eat the damned thing, none can swear to. All who were present at the creation, as you humans like to say (a fine way to put it, actually), all of us who are complete beings, know that this unfathomable “plan” of his exists and that some souls— Abraham’s son, Lot’s wife, or me, for instance—figure largely in it. The widow’s son figures in the plan in some crucial way, perhaps for the sake of exactly what has happened here in Nain: to be one whom the Christ has stolen back from death. Perhaps it is the symbolism. For your God seems to be much the poet in his own way. He likes metaphors, double entendres, even puns: the Son of God and the son of the widow of Nain. The widow is the mother of the son of Nain, and Mary is the mother of the Son of God. The Christ has shown his love for the widow as he would for his own mother, Mary. As with the son of Abraham or the prodigal son, some events are predestined and show poetic symmetry; and it all scans. Do you see? Hah! Always, there are things that show his predetermination. Which things these are, even I cannot fathom. Some things and some souls are predetermined to be in a place and in a time that serves the whims of the Creator, your God. Judas is such a one. I would never seek to touch, to push, or to enter Judas, knowing that Judas is so important a pawn in your God’s predeterminations that he is to be left alone on pain of … well, of pain. To touch him would bring me agony far worse than the pain on a human scale I now feel. I had not known that this otherwise uninteresting man, this widow’s son, was a soul so important to whatever the plan may be. Luckily, I touched him while housed within small human form, and so the pain is small and human. I draw back the Roman’s hand, then tuck it into my tunic, and I do not betray to these men that touching the widow’s son has harmed me. My curiosity about this human from Nain is now quite satisfied. They are all staring silently at me. “As I said, the Romans will do nothing,” I repeat after clearing my throat, being careful that my voice does not convey to them that my hand (the Roman’s hand) is harmed.

“You have said? I have said. I have said, what should we care of you or of any other Roman?” the Sadducee who spoke before bleats again. “Judea and Samaria are in the grip of you all, of all you Romans,” he continues and then turns to the others, scowling. “We pay the tax. We obey their laws. Why should they pay attention to the doings of this particular Nazarene who calls himself rabbi?” Everyone turns to me. I am weary of a sudden. I clench the hurting fist tucked away beneath the tunic, walk from the fire, and turn to look back at them. All remain silent, motionless, watching. How can I resist? “You are, all of you, wrong,” I say in the most phlegmatic Latin I can muster. “The rabbi is no man. Rome cares not a medium-sized shit what you do so long as you pay your taxes, but Rome shall not appreciate nor abide a rabbi calling himself a king.” I walk on into darkness. The elder’s wife stares at me as I her in the doorway of the prosperous villa. The olive tree beside the door, which had been blooming, has suddenly withered. She cowers when I glance at her. She sees that the hand I hid and now let hang at my side is raw and blackened. “He has not called himself a king!” shouts an elder Sadducee. I am no more than a drifting voice now. My final words float back to them like the aroma of the bread does from the wife’s oven as I disappear. “He will.”

4

I have some knowledge of Romans and their ill-fated empire. “Smug” and “thuggish” best describe the lovely rascals. I can’t explain why I have had such empathy for Romans. Perhaps they reminded me a bit of … me. In their refined savagery, they conquered, enslaved, or massacred as much of the known world as they could reach in their wretched wooden ships rowed by tiers of galley slaves. They bestowed durable roads and bridges upon those they conquered. They spread Roman law and language across the Mediterranean. Then they crept into North Africa and thrust themselves across the Adriatic. Wonderfully acquisitive bastards. Such is no different from any other human empire, true; but it so happens I was rather fond of one of you humans in those times, a human inventor named Archimedes, whom the Romans killed. The Romans lay siege to Syracuse on the island of Sicily two hundred years before the birth of the Christ. Archimedes was there in the city, his birthplace. At the request of King Hieron, Archimedes created machines, weapons, and ingenious devices used by the city’s defenders to keep the Romans at bay, literally trapped in the bay, unable to overcome the city’s seawall. Archimedes’s catapults launched boulders that sank their ships; and Archimedes’s “claw,” my favorite of his inventions, snatched up any ships that got through the rain of boulders. A claw at the end of a beam protruding from the wall was cranked out over the water of the bay from a tripod or a counterweighted crane. Hooking on to a ship, the claw would hoist it into the air and crash it down onto the rocks or turn it over, scuttling it! The claw was deliciously destructive, using mere pivots, counterweights, pulleys, and levers. How creative! The Roman ground forces fared no better against the city walls, each approach protected from ingress by Archimedes’s technologies. Aboard his flagship, the Roman commander, Consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, couldn’t contain the terror of his men after losing ship after ship to Archimedes’s brilliant machines. Romans would sail toward the walls, see an innocuous wooden fishing pole poke

out over the top, or see the innocent shadow of a sentry; and panic and dread would cripple them. Hah!

Archimedes never demonstrated the slightest fear at my appearing before him. This time, he stood hunched over his worktable. It was the first night of the Roman siege of his city. A chill breeze from the sea eased through a window; but the workroom at the seaward side of his lodge, with its rough plastered walls showing trawl marks, was stuffy and hot. The breeze made a cluster of tapers writhe in their clay holders on a side table. They burned without the smoke or the evil stench of tallow candles (tallow, in your ancient times, was prepared from rendered animal fat). I was curious about those candles. In all of Syracuse, only Archimedes seemed to have no oil lamps at all and candles that did not stink. I studied them, noting the steady, even burn they produced, the opposite of the fetid, inefficient things burning even now out in the bay aboard the Roman ships. There was a panicked fluttering of wings; a blackbird in a cage hung in the window. This fluttering announced me. “You again?” Archimedes muttered. He did not look up from his drawings, calculations, and maps. He was as usual unaffected by my comings and goings, electing this time to speak to me, where other times he had not even bothered to acknowledge my presence. “Good eve to you, Archimedes.” “I am busy.” “I shan’t disturb you.” Archimedes looked up from his calculations and brushed sweat from his chin. His eyes, sharp and intelligent, were dark, Peloponnesian, tinged with an undertone of sadness characteristic of him. He squinted to see me where I stood in darkness beside the window. “You speak a very odd form of Greek,” he muttered. “How is it that your candles do not reek? Is it some magic of yours?” He peered at me as if making up his mind whether or not he would answer.

“There is no such thing as magic.” “Then … what?” “Do you not already know the answer to your own questions, Abbadon?” I chuckled. “I am not omnipotent,” I answered him. “Nor would wish to be. I know a great many things, but there are things I do not know. To know everything would be boring, I think. Don’t you agree?” He seemed to consider this, then went on, “You ask if I know magic. If you are not a visage made from magic?” “I am not.” “Then neither are my candles,” he said. “They are a rational thing. I imagine you are a rational thing, though your nature eludes me at the moment.” He was truly visionary, intelligent enough to it that some things were beyond his understanding. Yet his confidence in his own invention told him that nothing was forever beyond understanding. I watched him. “It is a rational thing” was his standard reply to most any question I asked him about why and how he did the things he did. “They are a rational thing,” he continued. “As I imagine, you are a rational thing, though your nature and the truth of what you are elude me at the moment.” He was intelligent enough to recognize that some things were beyond his understanding, yet his Archimedean arrogance was evident in his comment “at the moment,” meaning he had no doubt that given time and means, he could uncover the nature of me. Who knows, perhaps he could, had he the means. “I fashion my candles,” he went on, his voice barely above a whisper as he went back to looking over his work, plans for the defense of his city, “not from wretched tallow, but from beeswax. It burns bright, long and does not stink as tallow does. The oil lamps my countrymen favor are just as horrid as their candles and require too much oil to function.” “Beeswax.” “Yes.”

He scratched at a parchment with a wooden pen of sorts, an invention of his own, no doubt: a long, thin peg with leather wrapped round the gripping end, its tip not dipped in ink, but fed by an ink cartridge he’d loaded into the hollowed out wooden cylinder that was the pen. “Amazing,” I sighed. “Most humans will not have beeswax candles until fifteen hundred.” He looked back up from his parchments to glare at me. “Humans?” “As I have told you, I am not.” “Not human. Yet also not omnipotent. Or so you say. What do you mean by fifteen hundred? Fifteen hundred what?” “The year fifteen hundred.” “What does this measure of years designate?” “One thousand five hundred years after the time of the Christ.” Archimedes smiled humorlessly. “You speak of the future again. You have mentioned this Christ before. He is one of your gods, is he not?” “No. He is one of yours.” “You are a strange man, Abbadon.” I walked from the window around the edge of the room, looking at drawings and plans affixed to the walls. “Again, Archimedes, I am not a man.” Without a word, Archimedes went from his table to a leather-covered cask beside his bunk. From it, he extracted an intriguing cube-shaped wooden cage. Inside the bars of the cage were suspended two magnetic lodestones polished and shaped to a perfect roundness as geometrically perfect as the shape of the cage itself. Still silent, Archimedes sat his cube down on a table beside his bunk. He

approached me and seized my hand. As he reached for me, I concentrated on making my spirit body both solid and safe to his touch. He pulled me across the room to the cube to thrust my hand into his cage, holding me by the wrist and suspending my hand between the two stones, slipping it inside a sleeve made of bronze that held it fixed between the free-swinging lodestones. I chuckled. “Quiet,” he whispered. He gazed intently at the primitive field detector he had constructed, for such was what this pathetic thing might be were it not pathetic: a very feeble prototype—a Geiger counter type of device, more like a GeigerMüller tube, in fact, a thing that would have detected ionizing radiation, were it not primitive. Though to be fair, of course, Archimedes was bound within a spacetime in which particles such as ions or electrons were unseen, were merely Greek and African theories—a time in which lodestones were thought to be detectors of force. Archimedes had no conception of using inert gases such as helium or argon combined with electrodes to carry out any true detection of alpha waves, beta waves, x-rays, or anything else that would have shown the presence of force. He had seized me by the “hand”; and in that “hand” was enough force, in fact, to level his city of Syracuse just as one other like myself would someday level the city of Sodom with a gesture. He had seized me by this “hand” with no thought of danger or of threat to himself, only with pure curiosity, with the wonder that was the most appealing thing about Archimedes. He never thought to fear me, though he had long ago decided that I must be some sort of supernatural being and that I might be ultimately a being of malicious intent. His only thought was to try to understand me, such as his feeble attempts were. But as I stood there and permitted him to hold me fast by the wrist, as I watched him hunch over his bizarre cube studying the motionlessness of the two stones, I considered something. I considered that primitive though his device was, Archimedes had achieved a stunning insight represented by this primitive contrivance: his apparatus possessed a metal tube, the inside of which was coated with graphite to form the necessary cathode. What it lacked was the needed anode: a wire, which if Archimedes had known, would have ed up the center of the tube. This would have indeed achieved the function of a pulse generator of sorts (given some sort of acid-based battery to charge the anode).

He may have lacked the gases and the electrical component, but through sheer imagination, this human had anticipated the experiments of Müller and Geiger— experiments to come two thousand years hence! In the solid form that I now held myself to, I could not have said, were I to allow Hans Geiger to do this to my hand in 1908 with a true Geiger counter, that such a device would not something. Such a device might just recognize a kind of particle radiation that indeed can pour off me whenever I take on this humanlooking spirit body with which I often walk the world, detect it that is, if I were to forget to mask most or all of what my presence generates and emits. I am the giver of light, Heylaāl. Illumination is a particle. It emanates from me, and it imbues and poisons you. I cannot be in the presence of you crabs in solid spirit very long without destroying you unless I take one of your flesh-shell bodies to dwell inside of. When I suject you to my spirit form, as in which I have appeared so often before Archimedes, it won’t be long before you grow sick and die from exposure to me. In fact, I suspected, with some regret, that my illumination had already begun to poison Archimedes. My light makes your human cells accelerate and grow in a burst of dazzling creativity. You call it “cancer.” Of course, I knew that night that Archimedes would not live long enough to grow sick from my light, for he would die in two years once the Romans succeeded with their siege against the city. For this reason, I often allowed myself the pleasure of appearing before him in my spirit body without taking precaution, in the form most comfortable to me. I gazed at the sad-eyed inventor, resisting the urge to stroke his head. I felt a sort of affection for him, this exceptional Greek crab. It was such affection as you, a human, would feel for a particularly bright dog that has won your heart through his alacrity and poignancy. This man, this Archimedes, was a genius—one of the perhaps only eight you humans have produced, the others being Albert Einstein, Sun Tzu, Imhotep, Li Po, Sigmund Freud, Mozart, and Hatshepsut, who was daughter of Thutmose. This is my own list, of course. Just my opinion, you understand, so do not bother to object or to assert your own human preferences. My definition of “genius” is one you likely would neither understand nor appreciate. Perhaps I will say more

to you about this with a story or two about the poet Li Po. Later, perhaps. In frustration, Archimedes released my hand, tossed his detection cube into a corner, and marched across the room to a tub full of water sitting on the floor with a skirt round it, the skirt marked on its inner surface by a graduated meter, a ruler-like scoring. This was his one-day-to-be-famous water displacement device to measure the true mass of objects. “Get in,” he said to me in a quiet but authoritative voice. “No. I told you before, I shan’t suffer the indignity of immersing myself in your bathtub.” “It is not a bathtub. It is—” “Yes, yes, I know what it is. I assure you I have no mass. At least not in this body I don’t. No mass or energy or vulnerability to gravity.” “Gravity. What—” “Never mind that. It hasn’t been thought of yet. You would simply think of it as weight.” I noticed the blackbird had fallen from its perch inside the cage, breathing heavily as if dazed. Tos his hands in consternation, Archimedes returned to his table and his calculations, dismissing me.

Ancient Romans were nothing if they were not persistent, and they were quite persistent. Something else they were can be expressed quite well with the English word “vindictive.” You may make a small study of this word if you wish, my crab. You will find that it is a derivative of the Latin vindicta, or in French and English, “declension” and “vengeance.” Your same Latin root gives you your “vindicate” and yields “vendetta,” which means “blood feud.” Syracuse had stymied Marcus Claudius for years, and his blood had long ago run to the cold of the vendetta. His vengeance would be against the city itself. When he finally overcame Syracuse after a blockade to starve the city, he allowed his troops one full day to sack and despoil Syracuse at their will. His rage at a defeated enemy for having had the audacity to resist in the first place was typically Roman. The third Punic War, fought against the great general Hannibal, in reach of the memory of Marcus Claudius and his generation, had ended with the Roman general Scipio Africanus defeating Carthage. Carthage, which had gnawed at Rome for generations, nearly overthrew the Roman Empire. In defeat, Carthage’s general, Hannibal, had gone into exile, pledging along the way his mercenary arm in battle to any king or nation fighting against Rome. The defeat of Hannibal’s Carthage had been followed by the Roman consul, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of Scipio Africanus, returning to the defeated African city-state of Carthage at the head of a Roman army—crushing the great Carthaginian civilization, burning the city down, and crucifying thousands of survivors of a vindictive Roman siege. Hannibal, it happens, had committed suicide in Bithynia, Turkey, fifty years earlier; yet Roman rage and resentment against him had smoldered and festered in the Roman Senate until Rome had finally sent Scipio II to finish his grandfather’s work. This orgy of rage had been the final act in a long vendetta against the proud Carthaginian military elites, the Barcid family. Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal Barca, and Hasdrubal Barca all had fought and defeated Rome’s legions. Hannibal had reached the very gates of Rome itself to lay long siege against her, nearly succeeding in breaking the capitol. The memory of this near defeat would haunt Roman generals for generations hence, and the battle and siege of Syracuse surely entailed no possibility of mercy from a Roman commander who knew how close Hannibal had come to crushing the myth of Roman manifest destiny.

As for Marcus Claudius, he had attacked the Syracuse coastal walls using sixty quinqueremes: warships with five-man oar placements, swift and powerful ships, for those wretched times anyway; and many of these proud wooden tubs had been broken like toys, thanks to Archimedes. Marcus Claudius’s commander of ground forces, Appius Claudius Pulcher, had attacked the land walls with what were now tired, angry, frustrated Roman legionnaires. Thus, soldiers were given their day to loot and to punish Syracuse as they would. They spread across the city burning, raping, and pillaging. The wealthy families were singled out, beaten publicly, and then they were crucified. Those families who had sons that had crossed over to the Roman lines in betrayal of their city were spared: Roman soldiers were placed before their estates to guard those properties from looting. Marcellus ordered that Archimedes be brought back to him alive. An impetuous Roman oarsman, despite Consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus’s order, slew Archimedes. When it happened, the inventor sat indifferent in the dust behind his lodge, tracing the sacred geometric figures of spheres and angles with a stick, unmindful of the carnage around him. Such was Archimedes’s disregard for any and every thing when his mind was occupied with calculations, as I have already shown you to be the case. When the oarsman, who had entered through the front, burst out of the back gate of the lodge and saw my dear Archimedes sitting there, he raised his gladius, his praetorian short sword, thinking this lowly Greek sitting on the ground must be Archimedes’s footman or his slave, never suspecting that this was Archimedes himself. Just before the Roman would have crushed the inventor’s skull with the blunt of his gladius, Archimedes muttered a harsh command, “Stay your hand. I am figuring something here.” The Roman hesitated, as much in amazement at this bondsman’s lack of fear as in response to Archimedes’s well-known authoritative tone of voice. He then pivoted his sword round to position for thrusting and ran my dear, sweet Archimedes through the chest; and my dear one fell dead there, blood obscuring his final diagrams. I cared not to impede or to obstruct the soldier’s act. “But why?” you ask? You ask this because you understand not the nature of the creation, the meaning of space and time, and the ramifications of free actions. Archimedes himself had not understood, for he had suspected me of lying to him when I told him I was not omnipotent. This blindness in you crabs is one reason you think me merely a

malefactor. You look upon my individual acts, such as they are or such as you think they are, and you call me “evil.” Perhaps you are correct. You look upon the actions of your divine God and decide him to be good. Perhaps you are just as correct in your assessment of him as of me. How am I to decide the veracity of your viewpoint? I am not a crab and cannot truly think your sluggish crab thoughts. Yet this much I expect of you; in fact, I demand this of you, a simple skill you inherited from me: ask yourself questions. You might want to ask, my own child of lobsters and snails, how you can justify ascribing “divinity” to one who has predetermined the motions of the planets and of the molecules in reflection of one another. One who stands at the crux of all reality, a reality he himself fixed as a sculptor fixes a nose upon a stone face, yet who blames all within his creation for the fact that his creation and they do not satisfy him. Is not each of those molecules, every one of those planets, every galactic cluster, merely an utterance of his, the Creator’s own mind? Am I not merely a reflection of him, the Maker? A watch implies a watchmaker, one of you more insightful crabs once wrote, and so does not a faulty watch imply a faulty watchmaker? Does it not? And so QED (quod erat demonstrandum), as your mathematicians say. Hah! Ach! The rations this night in our new foxhole are meager, my dear, are they not? Herr Kommandant has advanced us ahead of our main supply lines again, anxious as he is to make a good showing for the company staff officers. What was I saying? Yes, ask yourself if it is not clear even to you that if I, Heylaāl, am “evil,” then he that made me must in some way be also “evil.” Perhaps you will reply to me, as Abraham did one night flea-bitten in his tent, that the One who has made you and me and all else cannot be judged. If you think that he is above judgment, then may it also perhaps be so that one such as I, his first creation, who at least stoops to speak to you as I am speaking to you, here beside you in your foxhole, sharing your pain and misery, might also be beyond judgment? And lest you think me merely to be practicing sophistry, I’ll cast aside rhetoric and prove myself true to your trust. Were I to have prevented that soldier from exterminating my beloved Archimedes, events in time would have taken a shape altogether different from they ought to have. What this tells you, if you are

paying attention, is that I am not an enemy of God’s plan. No, I am in fact an upholder of it, for it includes me. I am fond of myself, and so I seek no outcome that would disturb my place in the creation—a place, we have both reasoned together, that was set by the Creator himself. It was meant for Archimedes to die. None—not I nor any other nor even the cheeky archangel Mikayel—can change what is meant to be. Let us take one final step in this logical theorem then. If it is not your God’s plan that I oppose, then what is it that I, the “evil” Heylaāl, am really against? I trust you shall think a bit more about that, dear confessor crab. Later, before I am done with this, my memoir, I will give you the answer you seek. For the moment, know simply that I did care for my Archimedes; and when I saw that he was dead, I hastened through the ether in the way of the spirit by methods you cannot fathom and was, in a wink and a dry, hacking cough, aboard Marcus Claudius’s flagship. I watched him. He was at a great wooden table he’d ordered set upon the deck of the ship, that he might sit in the warm setting sun and watch the smoke of fires burning throughout the broken city there before him. He coughed a great hacking cough. The cold nights he had endured these years away on his campaign to crush Sicily had left him with pleurisy. With maps spread before him, Marcus Claudius coughed and swallowed hot wine his men had purloined from the massacre at Leontini, the ancient city where he had ordered some two thousand Sicilians beaten and beheaded, their heads hung from the city walls to rot and their wives and daughters raped, then turned out onto fallow fields to starve. I approached his back. I reached out and pushed a bit against his little mind. I spoke into his shell a murmur, a whisper, that’s all, and was done. He wheeled round, drawing his sword and crying out, roaring for his guardsmen. Two hastened to his side; but because their master bent his gaze upon empty air, they relented, sheathing their gladii. “General?”

“I do not know what. I thought—” He sat back down, letting his sword drop to the deck boards with a clatter. The guardsmen hesitated and then went away. What the Roman had heard was my voice inside his head; and that voice had said, sounding much like the voice of his own dead mother, “Marcus Claudius Marcellus, you are victor here. You are vindicated, and Rome is vindicated. But know you that Archimedes is dead.” I then had moved closer, and my voice—his mother’s voice, it seemed to him— was now a sigh into his ear. “You have failed to protect Archimedes. Know that as your name will become one of the shattered fellies of the broken wheel of Roman power and be washed down into the tide pools of history, Archimedes’s name will rise. His name will grow and will crash as a wave loudly down the centuries where you will merely be known as the murderer of Leontini and Syracuse and as the assassin of the great Greek inventor.” As he sat there coughing, letting his sword lie on the deck untouched, I moved away and into the air; looked once downward at the chaos, the fire, and the “smell” of death, the great bleating noise of a thousand women, cows, goats, and horses dying; and took my leave of the home of my delightful Archimedes. I thought that using the voice of Marcus Claudius’s mother had been a clever jest.

It strikes me that this vampire fellow of your fictions is imitating me. What was his name? Lester? L’Stat? Or was it Dracyul? Whatever. I gather he is an aristocrat of some sort who sleeps by day inside a coffin and stalks his victims by night to drink their blood. How obtuse. Vampires do not exist, but I certainly do. You have a great yearning for amiable monsters. Gentlemen who dress well and slash women, who debauch themselves yet remain beautiful and young while at home in the attics of their splendid mansions, a painting alone shows the effects of their sodomy and debauchery. You want corruption and dissolution, you want depravity, but without the physical degeneration that the monster’s face must show. As you see it, the price of wickedness ought to be borne by the painting, not the monster that does wicked things. Evil is yet a gentleman then, is that it? I have walked in the flesh of many socalled gentlemen. I have also walked in the flesh of paupers, princes, tribesmen, courtiers, pharaohs, mandarins, czars, hierophants, kings, mahouts, patricians, missionaries (don’t laugh), Bantus, Cossacks, chieftains, presidents (wouldn’t you like to know), debutants, duchesses, and a pope or two (shut up). I think my times walking in the flesh of Moctezuma and of Hatshepsut were my favorite. However, back to you. You seem to have a need to dress up your evil in lordliness. Even your crudest, most abusive robber barons in your United States —your Rockefellers, Fords, DuPonts and the like—wear ascot ties with Windsor knots and serge suits and fedoras, playacting that they are not consummate savages. I assure you that I have no such need to mask my sins, and my sins are many. I it my savagery. 1 John 3:8 tells, truthfully, that I am the first sinner. It is you crabs, you shelled ones who are furtive and false, not me. Your Dr. Freud would call what you do “displacement”: creating your elegant monsters in order to pretend there is something elegant about the evil you do. The things I saw soldiers doing to the citizens of Syracuse are typical of the cruelties of man, of you. One place I took my leave of hastily and with distaste was Auschwitz. Another

that disappointed me was the Belgian Congo. King Leopold invented unimaginable tortures for his African victims, but his only desire was for their gold and diamonds. Not power, but wealth was what drove his tasteless barbarisms. Wealth is as fleeting as your short little lives. Only power can elevate you above your history. Hitler understood this, and that is why he is ed, while Leopold is not. Yet Hitler’s reign was utterly without subtlety or imagination. Your Hannah Arendt captured perfectly what my own opinion is of your greatest crimes: “the banality of evil,” she called it in her writings. The mass torture of millions for the sake of it is repugnant to me; for it is the contrary of creativity, a trait I actually lack, but that I ire and that it even seems I inspire. Where I lack human creativity, though, I make up for in novelty and drama. Dramatic havoc is my art. Yours is pointless mayhem, which takes no creativity at all to achieve. You transformed murder itself into a mechanistic function, murder in assembly-line fashion as Hitler (eight million Jews and other Europeans killed) and Leopold, king of Belgium (ten million Africans killed), did. In the flesh of a gestapo Kommando, I walked behind Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann on his last tour of Auschwitz. I ignored the horrors of medicalized torture, burning corpses, starving victims, dysentery, vomit, and blood underfoot and watched Eichmann closely. He took no pleasure in the machine he had constructed at the behest of his führer; his demeanor was cold, empty. Not even the savage delight of the sadist could be detected in this man, alas. No joyously debauched Marquis de Sade was Eichmann. Rather, his attitude was that of the potato farmer, here and there tugging up dirty roots to inspect his crop. Here, he nudged at dying women with his boot to study the course of their starvation. There, he took up a shovel with his own gloved hands to stir at ashes, checking for bits of gold and silver that might have gotten past the guards with pliers whose task it was to pull the teeth of the victims before they were gassed and burned. He carried a clipboard, and upon it, he noted efficiency ratings and calculated quota ratios: numbers of human torsos pried with crowbars from the gas chambers and shoveled into ovens, divided by poundage of ash shoveled into pits calculated against yards of human skin to be used as lampshade covers. This was much the same sort of duty he would later perform as a fugitive from international justice, when he would escape from postwar under an

assumed name to Italy and then to Argentina, where he would work for Mercedes-Benz corporation counting off spark plugs using the very same clipboard (his favorite, apparently) he’d used in Auschwitz to count off torsos. Only you, dear crab, could reduce my talent for sweet chaos and creative destruction to a mediocre exercise in banal cruelty in the name of industrial efficiency. It would be amusing were it not so graceless and lacking in ion. To me, that is the definition of “evil”: cruelty without ion, without purpose. Banality. This is how I see your God’s demands upon us all. Even his Son was not to be spared this ultimate evil: to be humiliated by his lessers—whipped, tortured, then nailed to a cross to die. I was personally insulted to witness one of my kind, for such the Christ was, being treated in this way. I tempted him, tried to convince him of the foolishness and mediocrity of his mission, but he was only partly me. The other part of him was you, and so I suppose he felt his sacrifice for you was worth his humiliation. You see, it was the Son, not the Father, who loved you despite your wickedness. He had comion for you, though you had none for him. Not that I am claiming that all of you white meats are as evil as Eichmann; certainly I am not. During the time of your Savior, there were even those of you capable of comion. There have been those among you who could be comionate throughout your history, but let’s just say the time of your Savior is a nostalgic time for me. The Baptist is the example I would use. He did not blindly accept what your God forced upon him, though he did not have the imagination to go so far as to refuse his place in the plan. John the Baptist is the human who baptized the carpenter’s son. Yes, I know you knew that; be patient, child, and eat the rations. I’m billions of your years old. No, none for me. You see, I do not actually eat, though I enjoy watching humans do so. Nor do I actually smell odors, though I can perceive them as a substance of reality by a means I won’t bother to tell you since you wouldn’t understand what I’d say if I did. What you do not know is that the Baptist objected to what he knew awaited Yeshua.

5

John the Baptist is the human who has baptized the carpenter’s son. It is the time before the Baptist will be imprisoned and beheaded by Herod Antipas. It is the time before the carpenter’s son will choose his twelve-man choir. Apocalyptic preacher John the Baptist, rebel, John the Baptist, sits beside the Sea of Galilee with the Christ in a grimy wooden fishing boat. The boat has been dragged up onto the sand and propped upright with stones so that its ragged hull can be touched up with tar. It is Simon Peter’s boat. Simon Peter, deliberate and measured in his motions, is a ways off down the beach, untangling worn fishing nets. Peter’s brother, Andrew, pours cups of sour wine for the Christ and the Baptist. Andrew sits back down in the stern of the boat, retrieves a thickly caked and blackened camel hair brush, and slaps a last bit of tar and pitch along a seam next to an oarlock. It looks to be a tedious task. He works carefully, though he is a bit distracted from his work by his puppylike enthusiasm to serve the two men in Peter’s boat. I am close enough to listen. I am always close enough to listen. “Behold the Lamb of God,” says the Baptist in a tone tinged with sorrow, drinking wine from his clay cup. He scowls, reaches over the side, and pours the rest into the sand. Andrew frowns. “Master John,” comes the calm voice of the Christ. Shifting his position on the bow bench (a word I like, the word “bench”), he reaches out and grips the main mast, which is just now bare of its sail. “Master John, you gave me your vision of God’s will. All is as you yourself foretold.” “What is there to that?” the Baptist mutters, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I say only what God pours into my head and into my mouth. At least Elijah spoke his own words. I am no prophet. Upon me, you will not build your church.” The Christ smiles, turns, and looks away to Simon Peter, who has left his nets now and is slowly approaching.

“I thought, Lord,” says the Baptist, “that my God, your Father, would send justice, would send a scourge to bring against the Romans, and to punish King Herod the Tetrarch.” “Herod is going to build the Third Temple at Jerusalem, the dog,” Andrew declares. The Christ looks now at Andrew as if puzzling something and then speaks kindly, though firmly, as seems to be his way, his not having beaten and whipped anyone out of any temples just yet. “This world is hurtful, Andrew, yes. But my Father cares not for this world nor for the temple nor the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, nor even the covenant. I have come to break the covenant. I am the ark of a new covenant, and mine is a new testament. Not the end of Rome, but the beginning of my Father’s kingdom.” Andrew looks down at his tarred brush, but the Baptist glares at Christ, his mouth opening and nothing coming out, like a fish. Christ reaches out to a small bird that has landed in the bottom of the boat. It flutters up to settle into the cup of his brown hand. Peter has stopped. He looks down at the pale sand, stoops, then picks up a discarded basket. He sits in the sand with it like some idiot. “A kingdom for the Gentiles? Not for our people?” John growls, finally finding the words. Christ looks back to the Baptist. “His kingdom lives, even now, in the hearts of our people, who are the vessels of God, Master John. From us will it pour out to anoint the world—even Gentiles, yes, and any who seek my Father’s love.” “Love, Lord? Shall love be this new covenant, then? Are we to love Herod and abandon all that we are, all that the prophets Elijah and Elisha taught us to be?” The Christ releases the bird. It flutters crazily off over the water, ecstatic or insane, or both, to disappear over the horizon. This is strange, such a small bird

flying right out over these waters like that. When it wearies, it will fall into Galilee and drown. “All that we let go of shall return to us, Master John,” the Christ says. “Even as Jeremiah and Isaiah spoke. They and Elijah and Elisha all meant my coming. I am the fulfillment of the faith even of Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Joshua, David, Samuel, and Sarah.” “I know who you are, Lord. The voice of my God, your Father, has spoken it to me.” “Then do you not also know who you are? You are the voice of my God in the wilderness. You are that which your God, my Father, needed, Master John. You it was who gave me my anointment.” This Nazarene is forever a riddle. Why does he who is as great a soul as I am stoop to address a mere human, a lobster, as “master”? Does his life here among these monkeys, these crabs, teach a lasting empathy for them? I once had that empathy, but now it is gone. My loss of a human woman named Drusalla took it from me. She is gone, and so is my empathy. “And now,” the Baptist responds, “I give you Andrew as your first disciple. You shall choose others.” Yeshua sips his wine, then looks off toward Simon Peter. Peter is sitting in the sand, inspecting straw straps. “You will choose,” the Baptist says. “You will choose, and everything that follows after will surely choose you. Do you know what is required of you, Lamb?” “Whatever your God, my Father, requires, I will give as the Son of Man.” Peter is carefully reweaving the broken straw in the basket he holds in his lap. His hands move gracefully in a fluid progress. His head is lowered in concentration on this. It seems to be significant enough to him to hold that much of his attention. Andrew takes up the wine gourd and spills wine on the Baptist’s sleeve. John looks at the red stain like blood for a moment; then he gazes at Yeshua. There

are tears in the Baptist’s eyes. “In Judea,” John the Baptist mutters, “God’s people will not hear you. Why would they? Have Elijah and Elisha not told them what God expects? Do they know the covenant is to be broken? No, how should they? How can they know your blood will seal a new covenant?” “Why, John, do you mourn?” Christ whispers. “You will go into Judea,” says John, tears in his voice. “I have seen it. You will preach to Gentiles. God has shown me. You will anger Herod, rebuke the Sadducees in their temples. And then …” John does not finish. His tears are now on his cheeks. This crab John impresses me, for he has comion for the Christ. Obviously, their God does not. “I am not dead,” says Yeshua. “The Son of Man will have not a place to lay his head,” murmurs Andrew, sealing the wine gourd up with a stopper made of palm root. The Christ turns to look at Andrew. “I have taught him scriptures,” says John, “and taught him to expect you.” “Then you have taught him that neither will I ever die. Andrew. Have thy brother come to me.” Andrew climbs out of the boat. He steps quickly over the wet sand to Peter, slinging the wine gourd tied to a rope over one shoulder as he walks. “I will go before you,” John says to Yeshua, looking off into the great inland Sea of Galilee. “Often it is,” says the Nazarene, “that the shepherd goes before the lamb.” “Into the jaws of the wolf,” says John.

In white linen tunic and sindon and head wrap, Judean Judas Iscariot, Judas the Zealot, Judas the reluctant, and sometime Sicarius, as the Latin would have it, Judas, now living in Galilee, squats in a hot desert east of a city he now calls home—the city of Tarichea, “the town of salt fish,” known in more bucolic times as Magdala. His tunic and head wrap keep only the worst of the heat from his thin dark whiplike body, the hard muscles now trembling with heat sickness. Sicarius is only what the Latin of his Roman oppressors would call him. The Hebrew of his fathers would call him something that is to his own mind much more honorable: one of the Sikrikim, dagger men, a fighter against Rome, one of the liberators of the chosen people of God. Oh? Well, I don’t care that you find my speaking of this to be tedious. You will listen and write it just as I say it, my crab. Put aside your European antiSemitism; for your petty racism, like your many petty sciences and petty technologies and moralities that fumble to frame the creation in the scope of your sad little meat-bound perceptions, indeed all your many human forms of duncery are quite tedious to me. Shall we continue now? Judas’s name Yehuda, in the language of Hebrew, means “God is praised.” Like all liberators, he is in a fever of devotion to his cause, a fever that can equal the mere radiant heat of a sun that wants to bake him in this desert where he squats. He would indeed have been well baked by now were it not that his inner heat fuels a far greater fire. His lips have swollen with thirst, yes, but his eyes are red with a fatigue that comes from purely self-imposed starvation. Humans call it “fasting.” Well, he has fasted and prayed and has walked forth out of his comfortable villa, away from his business of trading dried fish, away from his adopted city of merchants and fishers, out to the desert and has been wandering here for two days. With a stick, he draws in the dust, trying to etch a map there. If he cannot how to get to where he is going, why does he think drawing maps in the dust will tell him? I keep a distance from him who now looks at least to be quite mad. I don’t bother to listen to his thoughts, for I have watched you crabs long centuries, long enough to be able to read your thoughts in your very faces. I keep a certain

distance. To touch Judas would bring pain as my punishment, for as one so important to God’s plan, he is beyond my influence and forbidden to me. So be it. He seems unfit just now to respond to my persuasions anyway. Whom your God would destroy, he first makes a zealot of. Judas uses the stick to scrabble out the lines and shapes he had etched a moment earlier. Frustration? If so, he is not yet discouraged; he shifts his weight a bit on his heels and etches again. Judas is quick-witted, and he is adroit at business and trade. He is a city dweller, in fact; he is a sophisticated Judean in the sense that the humans of this time and place see Judea as being from a “sophisticated” place compared to Galilee. Tetrarch Herod, wanting to please Rome with the greater taxes and greater exports Rome always squeezes from its subject nations, is determined that Galilee is not to remain an out-of-date region of simple farmers and subsistence net fishing. Herod has chosen to live in the present. Judas has chosen to live in Magdala, the most swiftly urbanizing city in Galilee, yet has walked away from it. He is a complex man, a man of certain contradictions. If he wishes to be, he is almost as much at home in a desert as he is at the city’s docks where he does business—no, not as a fisher, but as a man who trades and banks on the work of fishers. Magdala (home of Mary Magdalene, it so happens) is becoming a city of mass production, turning out a furious quota of dried, salted, and pickled fish products for export; and well, they had better, for the crippling taxes imposed on Judahites by Herod pay for his furious building projects. Taxes are the punishment that began with Pompey’s overthrow of decades of Semitic independence under the Hasmonean dynasty of priests and princes. The Herods give all to Rome, and commerce is now required to pay the apparition of the Roman tax collector. The sun, Judas knows so well, is doing to him what he certainly knows it can do: scrambling his thoughts ever so slightly. With time and continued exposure, it will become ever so extreme. Moisture could stave off the effect, but with no moisture, madness would eventually be the result. He needs water. He likely trusts, though, that he will find what he seeks soon enough to get the water he needs to prevent his thoughts from creeping away from the doctrinal madness of

zealotry into the genuine madness of desiccation. Judas stands, his legs trembling, and collapses back onto the ground. I can watch what Judas goes through now only once; for those who surround the Christ, like Christ himself, cast no shadows across spacetime. When I have tried to go back to review, I see only a blankness, a zone of meaningless chaos. I cannot gain insight by repeated viewing, so as I watch the events surrounding Christ’s lifetime, I must live each moment in isolation and only once, as you humans live each moment. Yet this moment is full of meaning. I see signs that Judas has actually mortified his own flesh. Bravo! The self-mortifiers hold a special place in my thoughts. It shows in those among you who practice it a commendable capacity for commitment to human belief. Oh, but Judas’s actions are only a faint version of what will come after him; for mortification of the flesh will become a most ardent exculpatory activity indeed by the 1100s, 1200s, and 1300s. There will be, for instance, St. Dominic Loricatus, who will lash himself most vigorously; there will be St. Francis of Assisi, who will inflict the stigmata upon himself and claim it to be God’s doing; and Catherine of Siena, who will scourge herself three times daily. Though from Judas’s perspective, these humans and their “Middle Ages” are the future, from my point of view, feudalism is a lovely memory. I regard self-mortification to be a commendable trait even in the insane. After massaging his legs until they have ceased quaking, Judas stands again, keeps to his feet this time, and turns in circles, surveying emptiness. The searing sun is now directly overhead. Off in the bright distance is a rock-strewn hill. He thinks that beneath that unassuming hill will be the men he seeks. Some of them are Zealots like himself, who follow the word of John the Baptist or of other apocalyptic preachers. The Zealots and Judas believe that a liberator is coming, the Messiah, who will command a war against the Romans and free the people of God from the Herodian princes and from Tiberius. Some of the men who might be under that hill, however, are likely of the last Sicarii, not the same kind of Sikrikim as Judas, who is anti-Herodian, a revolutionary tied to this world where he thinks a kingdom shall one day be made. Judas’s brand of Sikrikim zealots are still moved by love of the people.

The Sicareans under that hill, though, well, they are moved by deeper ions— by bloodier obsessions and hatreds. They are not just political assassins but are religious purists who, unwilling to wait on their Messiah and to share the kingdom with less deserving of “the people,” lurk in city crowds to kill hapless Roman merchants, yes, but also to kill Galileans, Judeans, and Samarians thought to be Roman sympathizers. All Sicarii, whose name means “those who carry daggers,” conceal their knives beneath their robes to stab to death Roman occupiers. Unlike Judas, though, those men he seeks are known to kill Romans and Hebrew sympathizers alike. Oh, now do not get an idea into your head that this is unique to Judas’s people under the occupation of Rome! Hold your tongue! I’d have you know that in your human future, there will be something called the French Underground, that there will be Palestinian fighters, that there will be Druze militia. Yes, and Iranian SAVAK and “Puritan” pilgrims to the “new world.” All of these will murder their own people in the name of freeing and protecting them or simply in order to avenge themselves against those of their people who cooperate with oppressors and enemies. There will be wars fought between so-called Bolshevists and Mensheviks, between black power nationalists and black cultural nationalists, between Catholics and Protestants. Blood will flow as if the fine distinctions between left of center right and right of center left, between purist and pragmatist, between fundamentalist and reformist, or between orthodox and secular versions of the exact same crab philosophies were really of any true importance. You don’t see my point, for you cannot know this future I speak of. Why else are you here in this foxhole with me tonight, dear crab? You yourself burn cities and kill civilians for a kaiser who cares nothing about the patriotic drivel he fills your head with, but cares only for expansion of his territories while you and your comrades brave gas and bayonet for what you tell yourselves is a righteous cause. The other sides over there are no different from you—they are just as deluded, as blinded by their own kings and popes and peddlers of false purpose. You humans are so deliciously hypocritical! Judas, for his own part, believes that Zealot and Sicarean alike have common cause. He dreams that the last Sicarii will become an army for the Sabaist, the Baptist. Did not the Baptist foretell this very thing, as well as the coming of a king? Judas has heard the Baptist speak, and he believes. Faith is difficult for

you humans to cleave to, yet foolish blind faith is one of your most persistent human traits, my dear crab. He squats again, loosening the blue Samarian-dyed strips of cloth that tie his tunic and the white linen sindon, the undergarment wrap beneath, so that his sweat will dry in the wind and cool him. He ties tighter the linen head wrapping that protects him from the sun’s heat and that provides dignity. In Judas’s age, many thought it vulgar to go bareheaded and an insult to all one es to walk about in such a state. Ahhh, simpler times. He looks off toward the hill. He reaches down and again wipes away the map he has drawn, rises, and walks.

They come out to meet him. Squinting in the light, their leader, Phineas, named after a well-known founding Sicarean, stands before the opening of their cavern hideaway. He is agitated about everything. Yet he acts as if it is Judas and Judas alone that agitates him. His face is frosted white with dust, but the hot sun is quickly making him sweat the frosting away. His strong brown hands flex as he speaks, opening and closing themselves into fists that resemble stones. Judas approaches with the sun behind him, and this he is doing deliberately. He had not been lost at all, I now conclude, but had simply been waiting for the sun to be at this angle. His shadow falls upon the scowling face of Phineas and upon the twelve faces of this band of assassins, dagger-wielding terrorists, crazed prophets, and Kanna’im Zealots. No matter how much I watch you crabs living through the events of your brief lives, replaying you like movie talkies, I always find I discover things I had not realized before. I have seen Judas approach enemies and friends alike in just such a way, keeping the sun behind him, but only now do I see how sly he actually is about it. The men he seeks are of differing, even contending, beliefs and ideologies; but all share a hatred of the Romans, and all carry straight Turkish swords with Damascus blades. Nine of them carry the infamous sicae daggers hidden in their clothing. Behind them is the dark opening of a cavern that sits beneath an overhang. “Yehuda, fishmonger, son of Simon of Hebron,” calls out Phineas, “what are you doing out here?” “Phineas, son of Galilean desert wastes,” Judas responds, “I come asking you the same.” One of the Sicarii draws his curved Damascus blade and speaks, spitting Judas’s Roman name as he would a rotten olive pit. “Your words are like foolish children, Judas,” he growls. Judas smiles, glancing at the drawn sword. “No sicae dagger to murder me and my children with, then?” he taunts.

The Sicarean steps around Phineas, raising his sword, but he freezes as Phineas snorts air. Leadership will tell. “Come here, Yehuda,” Phineas grunts, again giving Judas the dignity of his Hebraic name. He leads Judas away from the cavern and the cover of the overhang to a lone young palm tree out on the sand. The shadows of the palm’s small fronds drift across Phineas’s parched brown face. He snorts, coughs, spits; and when his various phlegm management measures have finally fallen silent, he regards Judas. He moves away from the scant protection of the small palm’s shadow to stand where he can glance as he wishes at the men he left back at the overhang. His hands clench and unclench, clench and unclench in the blunt sunlight. Judas leans against the tree, for he is tired. He glances upward and wipes his own face. Phineas notices the tremor in Judas’s legs, shakes his head disapprovingly, reaches for a goat’s bladder hanging at his side like a purse, and offers Judas a drink. “You won’t betray us, will you, Yehuda?” Judas gulps a swig, one swig only, and hands back the bladder, then returns to leaning on the young tree. “You betray yourselves, Phineas.” “I remind you. One-third of mine are Zealots, as you are a Zealot. We are like you.” “Not like me. A Zealot believes the scriptures. A Zealot awaits the Moshiach, and a Zealot does not kill his own people.” “You are too much the purist, Yehuda.” Phineas’s hands now become fists again. He gestures with them, a rather odd gesture, and moves in close again to pace round the tree, kicking up sand with his sandals. After a while, Judas takes him by the shoulder, stopping him. “You call me the purist. I would laugh if I had the moisture to waste. Your followers,” Judas pleads, “kill Judeans. They kill Galileans and Samarians!”

“You come to complain? A Galilean is an ignorant mule!” Phineas growls. “A bumpkin.” “We are in Galilee.” “Where we are needed to enlighten the people. How do you speak so, Yehuda? You are not of Galilee. You are from Hebron. You are as Judean as I!” “Then what of Samarians? Judeans?” “Sacrifices. They must be made. Abra’him was willing, willing to sacrifice his own son.” Judas slumps against the tree, feeling only more fatigued by Phineas’s obstinacy. I am as amused by it as Judas is fatigued. It is amusing how you humans squabble over whose shell is greater. You are crabs one and all, yet you persist in your belief that one shell or another is superior to the next. Your English word “Jew,” like your very own German word, Juden, is derived from the Latin term ludaeus, Judean. Your Greek uses Ιουδαίος (Ioudaios), for “Judaean.” Your German Jude and Juden are the ones you yourself know, yes; but your languages, all of them, reflect your prejudices and your attachment to geographic locations, to nations, and to tribes. Imagine, if you will, the idea of crabs and lobsters on the ocean floor dividing themselves into fervent bubble yammering tribes, establishing nation-states, and conducting fierce little wars to establish the superiority and supremacy of each one’s own little shell-bound philosophies. As you would laugh at these irrelevant ocean insects doing such things, so I laugh at you. “Your followers strike like cowards in the night or from the midst of crowds, Phineas.” “We strike as we may. What difference? We strike!” Phineas barks back, moving close to Judas’s face. “Yehuda, you defend Galileans, but since when do Galileans know scripture?” Judas scowls and pushes Phineas away. Phineas lashes out, striking Judas in the face. Judas steps back and wipes blood from his mouth. Phineas lowers his fists, looking to be ashamed of what he has done.

“It is we,” Phineas says, his throat tight. “We who teach these Galileans to live properly, to not eat barbaric Roman trash. Hummingbird tongues and brains? Offal like fish entrails. Fish entrails!” “Only wealthy Romans eat those things, Phineas.” “Their merchants come here to our land. They bring these unclean things with them, and our merchants sell it in Jerusalem!” Judas lays a hand on Phineas’s shoulder. “You’re right, Phineas, but—” “When did you become so like a woman, brother? Did you not kill three Romans? A praetor magistrate and two of Pontius Pilate’s lictors did you kill?” “Each one scourged Galilean women!” shouts Judas. “Indeed. Only Roman citizens are free from beating, scourging, and crucifixion! You killed for your country, invaded by Roman barbarians … for your religion, fouled by Roman ways. Who shall save our people from this barbarism? Judeans shall. You … and I.” “I have killed for my own people, Phineas, yes. But who are we to decide which of God’s people deserve our devotion?” “Common sense and necessity decide!” “Not God?” “Common sense is the voice of God! It is Judeans, it is we, God’s chosen, who will make the Romans leave!” Judas releases Phineas, and the Sicarean launches off in another circuit round the little palm. Judas beseeches him. “By stabbing innocent people in the market square under the cloak of disguise?” Phineas halts his pacing, sweat glistening on his dark face. He punches the tree; and then he reaches up, tears a branch and frond away, and tosses it to the sand.

Judas stoops to pick it up and holds it like a dead child. I find this interesting. He is a complex crab, Judas. Judas hands the branch and the frond to Phineas and speaks softly. “I am not against killing our enemies. But must we kill each other?” Phineas looks a moment at the branch and frond and then lets them fall back to the sand. “We do what must be done,” Phineas answers him. Judas opens his arms as if inviting the Sicarean into an embrace. His tone is now imploring. “Phineas, shall your dirty, skulking dagger men chase the Roman Empire, weeping, from our gardens? The scriptures do not tell us to kill Jews.” Phineas speaks in a calm but deadly tone. “We also kill cursed Pharisees when we can.” He leans against the tree. “You hate the Pharisees.” “Hadak hashem! Only the Moshiach, the Messiah, can judge the Pharisees. Only God can judge. If we kill our own people, God’s people, we are no better than the Romans!” Phineas wipes his face with his hand and whispers bitterly, “Then when will the Messiah come? Do you think that fool, John the Sabaist, the Baptist, is the Moshiach?” “I … I don’t know. He is a prophet of God, I know. There is talk of a young rabbi …” Exhausted, Judas slumps down to sit in the sand beside the tree. “The one who teaches love?” Phineas spits into the sand and then coughs as if he regrets having lost the moisture it took. “The one who says submit to our enemy? Do you know what will happen to such a one if he goes into Jerusalem speaking such goat shit, eh? Do you know what the temple Essenes will do to him, this one who teaches love?” “The scriptures teach love,” said Judas. The Sicarean Eleazor appears beside Phineas. “The scriptures teach war, Judas!” Eleazor barks. “To kill our enemies, as David did.”

Judas gazes for a moment at his own hands. They are not fists, as Phineas’s hands are right now. Instead, Judas’s hands are like the very palm fronds that wave over the heads of Judeans, Galileans, and Samarians alike. Judas raises his head to gaze at Eleazor. “David,” says Judas, “David fled into the Judean desert south of Jerusalem and east of Hebron when Saul wished his death. Saul sought after David and chased him into a cave much like the one you skulk in now, Eleazor.” “What point is there to your tale, Judas?” “That when Saul cornered David and David crept upon Saul in the darkness you Sicarii know so well, when Saul was vulnerable to David, David did not kill him. Instead, David cut off a corner of Saul’s coat. Later, he showed to Saul this proof that he had spared Saul’s life out of love.” Eleazor smiles nastily. “You have lost each of your wits then, have you not, brother? Have you lost them all to John the Baptist?” “Go back, Eleazor. Leave us,” grunts Phineas. Chuckling, Eleazor returns to the shadow of the overhang. “Answer me, Yehuda,” Phineas whispers in his driest voice yet. “Do you know what the Essenes will do to this one, this rabbi, who teaches love?” “He says a new kingdom is coming, brother,” Judas whispers in return. “Does he? How … how will it come, Yehuda? By loving Romans?” “By loving our people! And if I can convince him, I will challenge him to go into Jerusalem, yes, and tell him to denounce the Essenes, the Herodites, and the Romans all!” Phineas’s dry laughter is like a scorpion’s sting. “Do you think our fight is only over religion, little Yehuda? The Essenes are holders of power for the rich merchants who betray us all, who want like the Herods, to pretend to be Roman. That is why we fight them. For thirty pieces of silver, any man who speaks up can be betrayed …”

Judas rises to his haunches. “As for such a fool who dares to challenge the rich with no weapon but ‘love,’ I will be first,” Phineas hisses, “to sell his hide to Herod. Do you know, Yehuda, how many have sold enemies of the rich in Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans? Have you seen Golgotha?” Judas shakes his head wearily. “I hoped to convince you. I should have known.” “You should have. You are a Zealot. Come into the horbah with us.” “Into that hole in the ground? No.” Judas stands and turns to walk back into the heat and sand. Phineas takes his arm to stop him and offers him the water bladder, and Judas takes it, then walks away. Judean Judas Iscariot, Judas the Zealot looks up at the sun as he walks. He marks its position in the sky; he chooses his direction back to the city. He does not know it yet, but I know he is bound for the fish boat landing at the edge of the Sea of Galilee in Tarichea, where eventually he will meet for the first time the man known as Nathanael called Bartholomew, the apostle. Judean Judas Iscariot, Judas the Zealot, who is not at all mad, is only just this moment falling into what I see, what I always see swirling round you all, crisscrossing your rooms, your streets, yourselves: the bright invisible pathways leading to one or another of your many possible futures. Of all the possible futures he could have chosen, though, the one Judas is settling into now is the only one that is his. Phineas turns to go again to his hole in the ground. He stops a moment to look back to watch Judas. He clenches his fists, and he calls out. “I will pray for you, Yehuda!” Judas stops, looks back, coughs feebly. He turns and walks again, muttering to himself. “Yes, I will pray for me also.”

Oh, yes. I now. It was Oscar Wilde, was it not? It was he who wrote one of those stories whose moral implications and whose symbolisms you cleave to like a babe to the teat: The Picture of Dorian Gray, the storybook is called. In fact, Wilde described wonderfully what I see as my own purpose. Do you what I said about my not obliterating all who stood around Yeshua? “It does not suit my purposes,” I said. Likewise, it would not have suited my purpose to prevent Archimedes’s death. I told you that as well. My purpose is not very different from your God’s, you see. God means to teach you something. It is as simple as that. So too is my purpose in this, my memoir. Where God means to teach you obedience, however, I mean to teach you liberty. You don’t believe me, of course; and well, you shouldn’t. Consider the words of your fellow crab Wilde: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” Good. That is one of my aims. I am the original artist in God’s design, though I have no sense of what you call “creativity.” I am not creative, yet all human artists descend from me, as Wilde descends from me. Wilde discusses about that in his writing: “The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography … There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” What more is there to say about the matter? Perhaps my memoir is my own picture of Dorian Gray. Or perhaps it is the reversal of such a modest metaphor. So perhaps while this, my memoir, grows more sweet and comely, more wondrously sublime and beautiful, more well written, I myself, I my soul, by comparison grows the more hoary and hideous. More damned. Hmm? You are lost, you say? It is an outrage that I play thus with words, you say? Devilish double-talk and proof that I really am a liar?

Well, would that not in itself make me far more moral than your Dracul, your wolf fellow, your Jack the Ripper, and your Dorian Gray? If this, my memoir, is just a lie, then I am accepting my own ugliness rather than asg it to my artwork, while your Dorian villain keeps his artwork hidden from sight (which, by the way, if you don’t mind my saying, and even if you do mind, is a crass thing in itself to do to art). What is an artist? A liar? A teller of truth? Both? Either way, evil things are done; and either the doer is culpable, or his image is by the conception you so love of your Dorian Gray, your Vlad Dracul. Which, then, should you keep watch upon? The evildoer or his image? The beginning of understanding me or, for that matter, of understanding Judas is in looking at the image and the evildoer simultaneously. For the soul, shell bound or free, is always the unity of the two. Dimensionality, my poor flat being, is the nature of the creation. What you see as a simple point in space is actually a sphere most of which exists outside of your “space,” your “time.” Such is the point I mean to make regarding Judas. You think you know who he was, what his significance is, but what do you know? Is it a portrait of this man that you have gazed upon all along, thinking the portrait was the man? Everything is a matter of perspective.

Perched atop a rock, the Nazarene stands before the Sea of Galilee, buffeted by hot winds. A group of old men follows a bedraggled band of poor fishwives who bring tithes of fish for the Nazarene. They have gathered to listen to him in rapt adoration. The Christ is always a hit with the ladies. “What shall a father say,” Yeshua coos in a gentle, steady voice, “to his children? Shall he say to them that they might have whatever they desire, or does a father tell his children, ‘You will have what is needful to you? Your God, my Father, loves you and will give that which is needful to you.” One man here is not an old man. He seems not to revel in the words of the carpenter and has brought no fish to give. This man scowls. He wears a plain robe; but his rich Greek sandals, tied with expensive chewed leather cords, look as soft as the ass of a baby. Wearing rags, another man, an old toothless man, stands not far from the scowling man with wealthy shoes. The old toothless man, intent upon the carpenter’s words, has battered feet; and his own grimy sandals have dirty laces. Christ looks at the man whose feet are battered, but as he steps down off the rock, he goes to stand before one of the women. He continues his sermonette. His face is lighted by the setting sun and by the sudden rising of his beatific smile. “What brings you joy is given you. What brings you eternal life is yours. These gifts are truly more to be rejoiced than silver coins, more than every fish in the Sea of Galilee. For you may eat of those fish and be contented of hunger, yet surely will that hunger return in a day. If you eat of the bread of salvation, you shall never again hunger, but be contented unto the end of days.” “But, Rabbi, we suffer,” the woman moans like a child. He reaches out to her and takes a clay wine bottle from her that hangs round her neck by a rough leather cord. He removes the stopper ad drinks. It is water. He takes her chin in his hand, and her distress melts like early dew at sunrise. “God knows well what you suffer, Mother. You too will be contented of the Lord.”

Is that it? Is that all he has to say to ease their misery? He takes their food and mouths platitudes in return? What audacity. He makes me look like a simple insurance salesman. He hangs the clay bottle round his own neck. It seems almost a fashion statement in these parts. Now he strides to the man who scowls and whose feet are so welloff. Without a word, he reaches out to this man, who steps back and stares, uncomprehending. “Better a man should seek to sail across Galilee in a nutshell than seek after heaven upon the backs of the poor,” says the Christ. Simon Peter, John the Baptist, James, and Andrew all seek to move closer to the Christ; but they are held back by the crowd, which is quietly standing aside, then circling round to leave Christ and wealthy foot alone together, facing each other. “I do not take your meaning, Rabbi.” wealthy foot growls threateningly. “Your sandals,” says the Christ in a mild voice, “they speak what you do not. They say a different thing than the rest of you, and they talk of things your tongue does not. A man need have one voice only, one tongue, and one heart.” “And if he has two tongues, Rabbi?” “Then he should cast away that one of his tongues which speaks unkind of him, that he might keep the better of his two minds and seek after the better of his two hearts. In this way your soul will be soothed. Such is the path to the house of your God, my Father. You must walk it barefoot or not at all.” “What do you know of my soul, Rabbi?” The scowling man hisses. He turns his gaze upon the surrounding crowd and sees Peter, whose staff is held like a weapon. He sees James and John advancing. The wealth footed man’s hand reaches beneath his robes. Christ seizes the hand in a fierce grip and whispers while he gestures to the apostles to be still. They halt. Christ looks at his prey. “Draw your blade, my son,” he whispers, “If you wish to be him who will kill the Son of Man, and you fear not for your soul. None shall stay your hand.” The Christ is a carpenter, with a carpenter’s strength, a carpenter’s grip. He lets go of the man’s hand, who stumbles back and stares unbelieving. Wealthy foot’s

hand drops to his side. He holds no knife. Then suddenly, Wealthy foot drops to sit in the sand, removes one sandal, then the other, hands them both to the Christ. He rises and turns quickly to walk away but glances back as the Christ speaks loud and strong, in a voice that carries to all in the growing attentive crowd. “All will be well!” Wealthy foot glares. “Tell your masters,” Yeshua calls out, “That you have tithed today and that I will by and by be with them in Jerusalem. Tell them this for me, and your tithing and your obedience to God will surely win you a place at my Father’s throne.” The man’s eyes widen. His mouth trembles, and he stumbles to turn and run but falters and halts a few yards down the beach. He turns to look back. “I will tell them, Lord!” he shouts. “Then it shall be as I have said!” the Christ calls back to him. The man turns, calmly now, to walk slowly away down the beach toward the headland; and he disappears. Those in the crowd speak their amazement at this display. They chatter, exclaiming, “He sees all for who and what they are!” and “He takes every soul to himself!” The crowd gathers around the Christ again, some of them touching him ardently. Now the Christ approaches the second man, the old man with battered feet. He sinks to his knees before the old man and removes the man’s horrid shoes. “No, Rabbi, do not! My feet, they are unclean!” “May I not give to you what is yours, brother?” The man is silent. The Christ finishes removing the old shoes, removes the water bottle from round his neck, and pours water upon the old man’s feet. The Christ uses a fold of his own robe to wash the feet. He then places the fine Greek sandals on the old man and rises up from the sand to embrace him. The crowd gathers more closely now around the old man, their piety as thick as a swamp.

In that moment, the Nazarene suddenly turns to me. I am in stolen human flesh standing beside a ragged, shirtless fishmonger who looks like a cripple with his crooked back, with a slackness on the right side of his face and one dead eye. He holds a basket of desiccated figs. He has brought these wretched fruits with him to give to Yeshua. He looks as though he ought to keep them for himself, for his collarbones rise up against the skin of his chest as if they will take flight. His stomach is sunken and wrinkled. A small bird flutters down to light upon Yeshua’s shoulder. It resembles the very bird that Yeshua had cupped in his hand on the day he sat in Peter’s dry boat, the very bird that had flown away over Galilee. It bears a resemblance, anyway. Yeshua reaches up, and the bird settles on the back of his brown hand. Yeshua looks directly at me as he walks with the bird over to the scrawny fishmonger with his figs. “What are these sad things?” Yeshua asks him. “Figs, Rabbi. I’m sorry, I have nothing else to tithe.” “Are you not a fisher?” “I have no nets. They are worn and can no longer be repaired, just as I too am worn beyond repair.” “Then I am blessed by your figs all the more.” Yeshua offers the bird to the scrawny fishmonger, who reaches out wonderingly. The bird settles with no hesitation into the hands of the old fishmonger, who cups it as gently as the Christ had. Christ accepts the man’s figs, places his hand on the man’s head, but suddenly turns to look again at me. “Hello, Heylaāl,” he says. I stand my ground. I do not retreat. Neither does he show concern or repulsion. Kissing the fishmonger on the head, he takes the figs and walks away, the slavish disciples following him. The fishmonger stays behind with the crowd that gathers in close around him. He cups his bird, face alight with ecstatic joy. His back straightens. The crowd

sees this and becomes agitated with elation, for the fishmonger no longer looks like a cripple. He is transformed. Bravo, bravissimo.

On a day in the year he mastered the engineering that made his design for a longrange catapult actually work, I walked along the seashore beside Archimedes. I had been secretly studying him. I was reminded of another man, an old man, whom I had also studied on the occasion of my very first visit to your earth, when I was still learning to walk upon a planet in flesh and then to walk among you and how to manage the thing you call “gravity” when sheathed in stolen flesh. I had felt what almost could be called a fondness for that old man I visited in the body of a human. I sat upon a bench with him, and we spoke of many profound things. Since then, I have visited earth many a thousand times. Many well-known and well-regarded humans have I watched and talked to and from time to time entered into to look out of their own eyes at the world. I have watched Archimedes for a goodly portion of those many times. Due east out from the beach at Syracuse, the Ionian Sea reflected a most translucent tone of greenish blue. Farther up the beach to the south was the even deeper cobalt blue of the waters of the Mediterranean, the warm fastness of that sea like the embrace of a human mother. Beginning to go a bit to paunchiness, Archimedes was still young, broad shouldered, and quite strong in the upper body from long years of lifting heavy stones and wooden beams for the purposes of his inventions. He had spent half his life struggling like a wrestler with his levers, winding up his cranks and counterweights, and twisting massive corkscrew rods into position to trap tension and inertia. For my dear Archimedes was not just a designer, but also a practical engineer. He had the stamina and commitment to see his ideas through to their physical realization and their practical completion. Some of you crabs are clever indeed—with your mathematical visions of enumeration, your dreams about gangs of subatomic particles all a-spin in roiling clouds of turmoil, your startling calculations designed to unleash apparitions of power from the heart of the first force at the creation’s core. Archimedes, though, was not just a dreamer of calculations and formulae. He was an inventor who created things in three dimensions. Equal halves dreamer and mechanic he was. This trait in him, as much as anything else about him, had attracted my scrutiny.

He came to a halt and stood staring at the sea. He held two palm-sized smooth round stones in his right hand. He squeezed them together as he regarded the sun on the surface of the sea. I had watched him thus, here, in this very spot and at this very moment a score plus a hundred times. This iteration in spacetime was one I often revisited. Though the thirty-threeyear period of the Christ’s lifetime is the one each moment of which I am forbidden to view more than once, I am free to review every other epoch or person, every other place, every other moment as closely and as often as I wish. What is that, you say? You are astounded by the intensity of my focus? Well, as I have told you, my dear, I am billions of your “years” old. The transversal of time for me is an art form, and space and time themselves are but raw materials that I may cast in any shape I desire for the sake of my art. What you naively call past, present, and future is an undivided and single landscape to me that I may walk at will, along converse, oblique, and vertiginous angles. The converse path, of course, is most repugnant a direction to your crab mind; and so I will not alarm you with tales of my frequent backward travels in which cause and effect are reversed. The converse principle of logical forms describes it nicely and … what? Sorry, I did not intend to confound you. You know, you do have one capability that those like me tend to envy: you preserve and review the past through the creation of your “books” containing your languages and images. Your practice of “writing” and of “reading” what has been written allows you crabs to travel through thought and perception in much the same way those of my kind and I can use first force echoes to travel through spacetime reiterations. All our powers derive from the first force wave released by the launching of the creation. My point, dear, is that you really ought to read your logicians. Aristotle, Turing, Quine, Kripke, Hilbert, Hui Shi (K’uei Chi), Kung-sun Lung, Kigongo, Ibn Taymiyyah, and … Oh, enough of that. To the meat inside the shell, then. I ride the currents of spacetime in pure spirit. I walk it in my illumined spirit body at times, and often, I walk it in the guise of a stolen or constructed human form. In that particular time recursion where Archimedes stood with the stones in his hands, I have seen him play with those rocks of his and wondered again

and again why he holds them thus. I situated myself off from him and masked my presence from him so I could watch him at my leisure. “Are you learning anything, Abbadon?” He was addressing me. Without turning from the sea, almost as if he were talking to himself, not even very loudly, he was addressing me. I was amazed. In a hundred recursions of this moment in my own point of view within time-space duration, a period that you would call “eons,” in all that time, no other human had ever done such as this—seen me without my allowing it. “I can tell you are there,” Archimedes whispered. “You have been following me, watching me. Have you learned anything, or are you still as ignorant as you always were?” Having gone through this very moment with Archimedes with no difference, this difference now, in this particular time recursion, was astounding and exciting. Perhaps it was even a key to understanding something of your God’s plan. So I made myself visible to him. I knew it must seem to human eyes as if I had materialized beside him out of nothing. It is something that has never failed to frighten you crabs. He reacted not at all. “Ah, there you are. I know that you are jealous of me, Abbadon.” What impudence! I? Jealous? I allowed myself a loud mocking laugh at his effrontery. That sound too had terrified many humans over the recursions you call eons. Archimedes reacted by glancing at me and smiling gently, almost indulgingly. It was offensive. “I surmise that your jealousy of humans may lead you to kill me.” “Archimedes, I assure you that you humans are not significant enough to—” He took a step closer to me. This action, taken at the same time he was declaring his conviction that I would murder him, was quite unnerving to me.

“Sir Abbadon, you like to tell yourself that we human beings are inferior to you, beneath you. But what are you doing here?” This attitude of his was new. This conversation had never happened in this recursion. His insouciance was new and was also quite annoying. I contemplated crushing his head for just a moment but stopped myself. Was he not my very own beloved Archimedes? His presumptuousness was precisely what fascinated me so about him, and apparently, he had talents of perception I had not even expected. I laughed again. This time, a great deal more warmly and tolerantly, if I may say so. “Do not tempt me, Archimedes,” I said. He turned and looked back out at the Ionian Sea. “I doubt that anything I say or do will change my fate, evil one,” he said and turned to walk away. Upstart! I appeared before him, halting his progress along the sand. He folded his arms and stared at me. “Have you something to say?” Archimedes challenged me. “I could destroy you, upstart.” “Indeed. But why haven’t you yet, Sir Abbadon?” “Why do you keep calling me—” “You once spoke of having many names. Abbadon was the one that seemed to me to fit you best. It is Persian. You seem like one of the Persian gods to me, one of their dark gods. I once did assume you’d risen up from tartaroo, but now I think you’re Persian. Definitely, you are not one of the Roman gods.” “I am no god.” “Not a man, not a god. What are you, then?” “I am Heylaāl,” I told him. “I am the light bringer.”

Archimedes laughed, the laughter gently flowing forth from him like a salty wind from that sea beside us. “You find me amusing then, Archimedes?” “No, Sir Abbadon. I am simply reminded of Plato’s observation regarding light. That light is fundamental in the case of two types of blindness.” I glared at him. He unfolded his arms and moved insolently close to me again. “There are two types of blindness, Master Plato cautions,” said Archimedes. “There is the blindness that one who, ing from light into shadow suffers as he leaves the bright world behind to descend into darkness. Something about you, Abbadon, makes me suspect that this first type of blindness is what afflicts you.” “Really?” “Indeed. Then there is the second type of blindness. It is the blindness of one who emerging from darkness suffers as he es into light and is blinded by the intensity of that to which he is not accustomed.” “Is that the type that afflicts you, Archimedes?” “Why, yes. That is the type of blindness I think you are studying in the entire race of men. There is about you a certain manner that makes me think you have been banished from the very light you say you bring, Abbadon.” “My name is Heylaāl.” “My name is Archimedes.” As he walked around me, he reached out to touch my shoulder in what I must assume was a sympathetic gesture, then continued along the beach, apparently unconcerned. He had dismissed me, just as certainly as if he had turned a page in one of his massive old “books.” His mind was already shifting, I could tell, to some other thought. Though his body was still on this beach, on this island of Syracuse, an island soon to be under siege by the Romans, his mind was now elsewhere, out of my reach.

At the moment he had touched me, I had concentrated on making my spirit body benign to his touch; else is hand would surely have been burned down to a stump. As I watched him, I thought how I might have allowed him to burn himself. I could right then reach out and rip his arms from their nests or snatch his heart from him like a ripe fruit he possessed but could not protect. I could toss him lifeless into the sea. But what could come of that? What release for my rage against him? He would suffer my tortures either in an Archimedean attitude of startled surprise or perhaps even of indifference. I myself would not be surprised if this Archimedes were even to react to my abuses with laughter. Or worse, pity! Had that been sympathy he’d expressed in touching me? Or had it been pity? He squatted in the sand and buried a stone there. Why? Was this some Greek ritual? Was it another of Archimedes’s odd experiments with nature? He carefully pushed sand into a mound around the stone, then stood up and looked down at what he had done. He stooped again and took a length of twine from the purse that hung at his side. He used it to take a measure of the mound of sand. Then he walked away. Farther up the beach, a party of city officials approached. On the order of King Hieron, they had been looking for their champion, their protector, Archimedes. They were not here, though, to tell him of some municipal problem with sewage or with inland flooding or crop irrigation—the sorts of problems they always expected Archimedes to engineer a solution for. They sought him now to tell him that merchants and scouts had reported a Roman fleet out at sea along the coast, one week’s sail from the city. They sought him to beg him to protect and save them with his inventions. No doubt, Archimedes would see this as a grand adventure. A small black bird broke from the headland vegetation, flew out over the beach, circled overhead twice, then struck out over the ocean toward the clouds. An insane little thing, it would certainly die.

6

The exquisite darkness of the Piazza della Rotonda in front of the Great Pantheon is where I have many times laid on my back upon cold stone and have taken repose in the night over many of your centuries. Rome has been one of the most crowded cities of man, yet there have always been peculiarly empty places there where you crabs can easily find solitude in the odd hours. In the spring of the year of AD 1960, at three in the morning for that hemisphere, the piazza was quite deserted. In daylight, it had been crowded with Romans and tourists alike. Now it was my court of solitude. Tall pines had long surrounded the piazza. Over the ages, the soft spring and thick summer breezes alike had whispered, had shouted through their branches; yet those pines would remain silent into eternity, it seemed, regarding anything happening here. It was the perfect place to kill someone. The crab shell in which I traveled wore a very fine tuxedo, distinctive Marcello Mastroianni style (white jacket, ink black shirt, and white bandana tied at his neck), as in La Dolce Vita, an amusing one of your movie talkies. In this body, I had strolled down from a quite aristocratic party to which the man had been invited, atop one of Rome’s seven hills, the Aventine Hill. St. John the Divine of Patmos’s book of Revelation (“revelation” being a misnomer since the book conceals more than it reveals) speaks of a woman riding on the back of a beast with seven heads. Your biblical scholars (whom you ought to trust more than the so-called writers of the Bible) have speculated that those seven heads were seven hills. I agree with them that the “woman” is obviously Rome. I’d walked down from the Aventine and farther down still to the city’s Centro Storico, then down one of Rome’s many steep city stairways to a lower street level, just off Via Degli Orfani. Here were Della Porta’s fountain and the many dark empty cafes surrounding the circular Pantheon. Rome, for two thousand years, had been a city of gods—Apollo, Mars, Venus, Minerva, Juno. Many still

had temples to their honor, standing uned in scattered corners of the city. The Grand Pantheon, however, is to be found by all in Rome’s Centro Storico and was a place of worship of all the gods. Though the niches inside that once had held statues of the gods were filled with statues of and the tombs of Italian painters and architects and of personages of Italian history, I can the original gods who were honored there and their effigies within like it was only a hundred of your years ago. Around the circular inner wall are seven niches: in the niche across from the entry was an effigy of Mars Ultor, who took revenge for Julius Caesar’s assassination. In the others were statues of Mars and Romulus, Aeneas, Julius Ascanius, and Julius Caesar. Other gods were set in spaces between. First built by Octavian’s right hand and chief general Marcus Agrippa in 27 BC, then later rebuilt after it was burned in a fire and rededicated by Emperor Hadrian in AD 125, the Great Pantheon is one of the original ancient structures of the empire. Here, the gods are to be ed publically. Inscribed upon the entablature of the façade are the words “M AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIVM FECIT (Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, built this during his third term as consul).” My favorite year to be in Rome is, will be, and always was AD 1960. Not yet had old men with knotted scarves round their necks been banished from selling their roasted acorns in paper sacks. Not yet had tourist bars, cafes, and crass business endeavors erupted all ’round the piazza, making of it a cliché of classical beauty obscured by a thicket of corporate vendors selling modern tripe. Corporate crabs hawked factory-baked flatbread topped with arugula, pale rubbery mushrooms, and sickly sweet red sauce, who could scarcely tell a morel from a truffle or an acorn from a chestnut. Not yet had the pine trees been conquered by crab commerce; in 1960, the pines were still tall sentinels belaying crab offenses against my beloved ancient city. Later, I will tell you the story of my time spent in Rome during the empire, walking in stolen human flesh, of how I came to consider myself a citizen of Rome and thus grew to love Rome. Later. The piazza in front of and surrounding the Pantheon, isolated and empty in the

early morning of October 7, 1960, had drawn me; and so too would it draw the woman I knew would be there soon. I had taken the final stairway down to cross over Via Orfani to come to the deliciously dark and empty Rotonda. I lay on the cool stone looking up at the stars. I waited. The stars were beautiful from here on clear nights such as this. Having spent time among those stars when I was younger, I now contented myself with watching them from afar, from earth. No particular need to travel to them anymore. How will you crabs say in the twentieth century? “Been there. Done that.” The puttering roar of thousands of motorbikes, small automobiles, and scooters dashing through paved and cobblestoned streets and tar and pebbled streets made a soothing, murmuring background more pleasing to me than the obnoxious traffic noise of later years would be. Unlike so many other places in my beloved city, the Grand Pantheon (a church after the seventh century, by the way, and used as a tomb since the Renaissance), so deliciously dark and empty at 3:00 a.m., was also free, day or night, of overt criminal activity. People had grown to trust this place as safe, however irrational that attitude might have been. Down the winding stairs, through the countless palazzos, courts, and fountain-filled plazas, I would frequently walk in stolen flesh. In flesh, I would savor the smell of baking bread, ground coffee, and seasonal fauna that always drifted on the city’s breezes even in the dead hours. I lay. In the cool darkness of the Rotonda, I drank in the pine scents and the dark and awaited the arrival of Fadya di Amalfi. Showing no fear since no one ever was afraid here, she arrived exactly on time. She crossed the piazza and stood not three feet from me yet did not see me. How ironic since I usually spend so much energy deliberately hiding my presence from humans. She was twenty-one years old this day, her birthday, and lovely as a crab could be. Her dark eyes were lively yet held an undertone of sadness, much as her father’s and mother’s eyes had once upon a time, though she, of course, could not have known of this; she had been a two-year-old child when they’d died in 1941. She stood right beside me in her black velvet dress, me in visible flesh, yet she did not see me. Hah!

She was a darker Princess Grace … Kelly, I believe? A human from your movie talkies? Elegant and graceful, her dress was all thin velvet and understated silk taffeta at the large elliptical collar and the cuffs of the long sleeves. She’d made it herself; she was one who practiced what she liked to call “the womanly needle arts”: sewing, needlepoint, knitting, and the like—whatever it all meant. She was a woman not without means but made a number of the dresses and gowns she wore. For a crab in Rome, she was quite unique and seemed to me larger than her shell—though, of course, such was not possible for a crab to be unless more than simply a crab. But perhaps you’ve guessed already: she was far more. She strolled by, walking the same pattern she always walked. She went into the Pantheon and disappeared. In the moonlight, she was filled, as always, with shadow. I lay there and thought about that. Her Algerian skin reminded me of the Egyptian and Spaniard women killed by the Nazis and of the women of Turin taken to the concentration camps by the Nazis only a few short years earlier. In fact, WWII and the dislocation of populations that resulted from that war (this is one of the many cruel results of all your petty little so-called world wars, is it not?) was the reason Fadya Amalfi was now a citizen of Italy. Her parents had been murdered by the Nazis ironically while they visited , the country that had invaded theirs, which hand colonized and occupied theirs from 1830 to the day in 1939 that they had arrived in Paris’s fifth arrondissement and long after that day. In , her parents had briefly managed a petite Marxist bookstore off La Rive Gauche of the south river Seine and had been working with an Algerian underground cell in Paris to thwart the French occupation by ing propaganda and giving speeches to groups of radical French students, writers, professors, and newspaper editors. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, her parents had, again ironically, ed the French Underground against German occupation of . Imagine! They sought to fight for the freedom of . The nobility and the antique charm of that! Looking at Fadya now, parentless, having grown up in exile in Rome, her mother’s and father’s sacrifices would be moving were it not so pathetic, so pauvre, so poor a response. Now tell me you are not quite insane, you humans! I am not human. I am an angel, you see, and must be told. Tell me that this, the story of Fadya di Amalfi

née Fadya Djebar—of mysterious shade, of pearl bright eyes, and of lovely smile —that this, her story, is not strange, not sickly sweet about to be repugnant and bitter like rotten fruit you savored but refused to throw away until too late for it to be eaten. Not wasted. Not futile. For she has escaped all that. Imagine. Her parents, Algerian freedom fighters Monsieur Hamid Djebar, half Algerian, half Jew, and his wife, Mademoiselle Samia Djebar, convert from Islam to Judaism, so devoted to freedom itself that they chose to struggle alongside theiroppressor, , to gain their oppressor’s freedom! In 1941, Gestapo agents working with the Vichy government verified the Djebars’ distaff Jewish-Algerian blood (the Jewish portion of it being as much a crime in their eyes as the Marxism of their politics). The Nazi agents arrested them as “foreign Jews” along with their Marxist and nationalist French comrades. Vichy and gestapo officers took them from the Cluny – la Sorbonne metro station in their beloved fifth arrondissement. They were transported for questioning with other political dissidents, French Jews, immigrants, “undesirables,” communists, and the like first to Stade de near Bois de Boulogne, then to the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports stadium on Boulevard de Grenelle, where French Jews were being held to await deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration climes. There, the Djebars were “questioned.” The questioning seems not to have induced satisfactory answers, for they were both shot in the head by a gestapo major, a veteran of the Deutsches Afrikakorps who’d had a great deal of experience with the delicate duty of shooting uncooperative North Africans in the head. They’d been spared Auschwitz, at least. Left behind in the care of a Parisian couple living in le 5 e arrondissement was the Djebars’ two-year-old daughter, Fadya. Le 5 e arrondissement de Paris est le plus ancien quartier de Paris, oui? Il recouvre la plus grande partie du quartier latin, construit par les Romains sous l’ Antiquité … Sorry? You don’t speak any French at all? You mean to tell me, you, a German invader, you’ve shot and bayoneted and run tanks over the French these many months but know not a word of their language? Very well, don’t give me that look. I know you are one of the delicate and refined Deutschen. You kill civilians only to obtain fancy

writing paper, Ja? Du bist ein Schriftsteller, nein? I was simply informing you that the fifth arrondissement is the oldest district of Paris, Covering (or will cover after you are dead) the largest part of what will be called the Latin Quarter. It was built by the Romans in antiquity. I love the parts of Paris built by the ancient Romans … Oh, never mind. Must you look so confused all the time, my crab? Yes, back to Fadya. The man and woman who hid little Fadya from the Nazis kept her there until the war was over and a bit longer; and she was lovely, which charmed her neighbors, who called her “la plus belle fille du 5e (loveliest girl in the fifth or most beautiful daughter of the fifth).” Whether she was “girl” or “daughter” depended on how much bread the fifth had to eat from day to day, you know? Bread being in short supply in the postwar city, she soon enough got sent to Rome. A five-year-old Algerian girl, lovely or not, it was thought, ought to be with her own kind where she could find her own bread. Rome was where an uncle who had long ago left Algeria to escape the French-Algerian conflict took her in and raised her. The uncle, as it turned out, somehow managed to track down bread quite successfully, what there was of it being found in Rome. Checho Shameed Djebar by name, he had never regarded himself as political. He’d regarded himself instead as sensible. He had done the sensible thing in Algiers by ing the constabulary and cooperating with the French. There is always plenty of bread for a man willing to be sensible in times of war rather than stubbornly patriotic. “The French want order. They’re brutal, but they’re sensible, and so they can be reasoned with!” Checho had been known to argue in the darkened hookah bars of Algiers, bent over his lone French espresso with cream while his cardamombesotted colleagues drank Moroccan coffee and hoarded bread. He had managed to argue sensibly for more humane treatment of Algerian citizens arrested and tortured by the pied-noir French as the occupiers would be called. In this way, he’d rationalized to himself his identity as a collaborator; but as is the typical declension in the situation of colonization and the fetish of the colonizer for crushing all resistance, Checho had eventually found he could no longer persuade the French to beat prisoners rather than torture them, to torture

rather than kill them. Last, he’d found it difficult to persuade them to kill prisoners by dignified firing squad at dawn while playing “La Marseillaise” on accordion rather than execution by diffidently aimed bullet to the back of the head in the middle of the night. He had fled Algeria to escape the French occupation. Checho Shameed Djebar, of both Jewish and Algerian descent, though not to hear him tell it, got off the boat and immediately got a job as a security guard in Rome. This he achieved through a bribe presented respectfully to a city functionary with ties to the Vatican, who cautioned the ambitious, enthusiastic, but sad-eyed Checho then and there that he had better convert to Catholicism if he expected to get along and get bread in postwar Rome. So Checho converted, being sensible. He then managed to get himself hired as an auxiliary police officer assigned to be liaison between the Rome police and the North African immigrant community. It was his old job, but without the beatings, torture, and undignified bullets to the backs of his constituents’ heads in the middle of the night. Life is beautiful. He’d indeed done the sensible thing, as he found himself awarded a fast track to Italian citizenship in recognition of his service, itted by the 1950s to the ranks of the official police force and had risen in the ranks of the police. Inevitably, as is often the case for displaced nationals in such situations, he had changed his name from Djebar to Amalfi. So when his niece Fadya Djebar arrived from Paris, he’d done just as sensible a thing for his niece; he had sent her to school. He saw to it that she learned a nice, clean, unaccented Italian with crisp, rollicking diphthongs and puckered, operatic labials decidedly suggestive of the postwar Aventine colony of Rome’s old families; and he had seen to her proper conversion to Catholicism. From Jew to Islamic to Christian. It is the sort of unlikely transformation one only finds in the giddy times of war. He had given her his name, Amalfi, raising her as if she were his daughter, making sure they would “fit in” as Algerians among Italians. Checho had carefully invested money from her trust fund, money that had arrived in Italy along with the seven-year-old Fadya supplied by the French/Algerian Marxist colony in Paris, money hastily raised in tribute to the heroism of Fadya’s parents,

martyrs to the French Underground. In her twenty-first year, of legal age, she had collected nearly one million francs off interest and dividends. Thus, a woman not without means. A loss for Auschwitz.

I rose from the stones and followed Fadya di Amalfi into the Pantheon. Inside, in the round court, were niches that held statues of the gods in recesses all round. She stood under the oculus, the round opening in the top of the cupola dome. The moon shone in through the oculus, bathing her in silver light. Her velvet dress had spaghetti straps, a single jewel set inside a rosette pattern in the center of the chest, cinched at the waist, with more taffeta ruffles ending just above the knee. She carried a black velvet clutch, a swirl of jewels around its cinched top. Her shoes were velvet, black, with a jewel upon each shoe top. Seldom had I paid this much attention to the mere outer covering—the clothing, that is—of a human woman. I was impressed with the way that these small human senses I had purloined hid so much of her from me and thus made her the more alluring. Could it be that you hard shells have this astounding, secret source of ion, then? That what is unseen, what is unknown, what is hidden from your severely limited senses can take on a greater and greater radiance? How captivating the thought is. Fadya stood there in what I knew to be a simple, mundane dispersal of visible light and shadow playing tricks on the eyes I was looking through whose cornea and optic nervature were too primitive to see across a wide electromagnetic spectrum and thus too primitive to see her, really. I could not see through her skin to her bones and could not even look upon those parts of her that extended into fourth and fifth dimensions—only this small untrue, fixed representation of her soul suspended in one moment of time, in one portion of space. Yet this very constraint in my perception of her seemed to make of her a poignant mystery, a creature of keen, unutterable beauty. Could this be what the Christ feels when he looks at you? Could this be love? Interesting. “Ma che bella donna.” At the sound of my body’s voice, she turned, suddenly saw me, and gasped. I

quickly spoke again. “Buon giorno, Signorina Amalfi. Como stai?” “Grazi, bene. E tu? Do I know you, sir?” Her voice trembled a bit as she answered, trying to be calm and polite. “No, signorina, non siete a conoscenza con me. You are not familiar with me, but I know you.” “How do you know me, signore?” “I knew your parents.” Her eyes widened, her breathing quickened, and she involuntarily moved a fraction closer to me—all of which effected, in pleasing ways, the human body that carried me. Never before had I had anything remotely suggesting an erotic response while in a human form—this feeling was a suggestion only, but a suggestion it certainly was and novel to me. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath. “How?” she asked. “I helped your father book age from Algiers to Paris in 1939, when you were not yet a year old. That would make you twenty-one, if I’m not mistaken. Voeux de Bonheur and felice compleanno.” Her eyes darkened, and something within her slightly withdrew from me. Even in the blunted instrument of this body, that much I could perceive. Could it be that she knew more than I had ever suspected? Never in any of these recursions had I spoken to her, and I did so now for very specific reasons. Perhaps I ought to have reviewed more of her uncle before speaking to her. Something about me was frightening to her. “Perhaps, signorina, I ought to have said, eid meelad sa’eed?(‘happy birthday’ in Algerian, you see)?” Her body made the merest whispering of velvet and taffeta against skin, a pleasing sound, as she stepped backward. A feeble smile appeared on her face. That smile a very cliché tactic I had observed women crabs to use in order to put

male crabs off guard when the woman has decided the man to be a threat. Yet her deft backward shuffle carried her nowhere except to the wall behind her; she had not far to retreat. I followed, trying to make my body’s voice be as soothing as I could for her. “Be not afraid, Fadya. I ired your parents.” “What … That is to say, how would you have known my father and mother in Algiers? What did you say your name was?” “I did not say, signorina. If you wish, you may call me Heylaāl.” Whatever was frightening her, there obviously was a limit to what she knew, for my name seemed to incite no recognition in her and did not increase the degree of her alarm. “I was a distant witness to the activities your mother and father were involved in,” I continued. “Who are you?” “Signorina, Io non sono poliziotto. Don’t worry, I am not the police.” “Signore Heylaāl, do you know my uncle, Signore Checho Amalfi?” “I know him well, signorina.” Her back hit the wall. She now stood just below a bust of Renaissance artist Raphael beside the dimly illuminated alcove of the artist’s tomb. The light glowed in a faint saffron yellow on her brown cheek. She gave a little cry, and her gloved hand shot out to the wall. A faint layer of dew from the stone rubbed off on her hand. I took the hand and wiped it dry with a starchy white handkerchief from my tuxedo jacket. I do not mind telling you, my dear lobster, that the heart of my host warmed at the touch of her hand. “Please. Don’t,” she murmured. “Why are you afraid, signorina?”

“Why do you arise to haunt me?” I stepped back, and I regarded her carefully. “Why would you use the word ‘haunt,’ signorina?” “I know what you are.” I quickly reached out and took her by the shoulder, pulling her to me in what I imagined to be a ionate embrace such as I had witnessed such things between you crabs in the dark theaters of your movie-talkies. I spun her round so that her back was pressed against my body’s strong chest. From off far away came the sound of music floating down from the higher precincts of the city, someone playing a phonograph record of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, the intermezzo. “Listen,” I whispered to her, “it’s Pietro Mascagni.” And she suddenly stopped struggling and did listen to it. She seemed almost to resign herself to me in that moment. “Si. It is beautiful. You know the opera, signore?” “Why, yes. I know thousands of years of music.” “And yet you cannot make any, can you, signor?” (It was no longer “signore,” but simply “signor.”) I spun her around to face me again, then pressed my lips upon hers, and sucked a gust of air from her; and her body shivered. I sucked all I could from her lungs and held it in mine, feeling everything of her out of her, and then spun her to face away from me again. Her lean, muscular back pressed against my chest. I placed an arm around her neck, squeezed, and jerked. I heard and felt the graceful thin neck snap cleanly, and she went entirely limp in my embrace. I had done it without causing her undue pain. Of that I was reasonably sure. I let her slide gently to the stone floor, placed her velvet clutch back in her hand, and arranged her dress so that her thighs were not exposed in an undignified manner. The look of alarm in her eyes was unpleasant to me, so I closed her eyes; and this eliminated the conflict between the dead-eyed horror and the calm, exquisite

beauty of her corpse. I ired her only for a moment and then walked back out to the piazza. I stood once more drinking in the sweet darkness there and then fled the body that had hosted me. In my spirit form, I rose up, floating above the pine trees. I came to rest just at the top of the tree line and waited there, recalling the revelation of John. Chapter 17 of Revelation, to be precise: “And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads …” I waited, appreciating still the solitude and peace offered by this place. The pines still swayed, moved by soft autumn breezes. They would remain silent into eternity (or at least until they would be cut down to make way for new tourist cafes). They stood regarding anything happening under their countenance with the exquisite detachment only a pine tree in Rome in the Rotonda can attain. Yes, it was indeed a fine place to kill someone.

Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem is awash with noise, color, activity, and stench. The courtyard of the temple is full of doves, goats, roosters, and mules, as well as full of merchants and a rabbi or two making their way hastily past the commerce to enter the safety and remove of the inner chambers, ignoring the money and money changers. Under the shade of the temple porches, the changers are selling Judean and Greek coins. Roman denarii bearing the head of the great Caesar Tiberius are being exchanged, at a profit of course, for drachmas, shekels, and Tyrian currency, the coinage used for religious ceremonies held within the temple. Herod’s Temple, of course, functions both as a place of worship and as a bank. So this commerce is nothing strange; the crabs of Jerusalem are accustomed to it. Where else, they will ask, is more secure a place to deposit one’s assets than the temple? Judas stands in the midst of the heat, filth, and chaos, disgusted by what he sees. He looks to be thinking that perhaps Phineas was right. In that long-ago argument out in a Galilean dessert, Phineas, the Sicarean of the last Sicarii, had argued for a cleansing revolution by violence to wipe away the malignant influence of Rome and to eliminate all the vile apostates. Yeshua and the apostles had ed several days in Bethany and Bethpage with Lazarus and his sisters and had entered the city of Jerusalem for over. You know all this, don’t you, my lobster? You have your Matthew and Mark to tell you. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the Gospel writers whose words you depend on when you read your Bible book—tell only a portion of this story, however. According to your Gospels, it was in the area of Bethany and Bethphage that Yeshua would have stayed each evening of the over holiday beneath the Mount of Olives close to Mary and Martha and where Lazarus had been raised by Yeshua from death. During the festival, it was a tradition and a necessity for many pilgrims to spend the night on the outlying hills sleeping under the sky or in makeshift tents or under trees as each one’s means might decree. Each day, the Gospels claim, Yeshua set out over the top of the mount and then down its western slope to the great holy city below.

No mention of Judas. No mention of how Judas has agonized, plotted, planned, and arranged age, lodging, water, and new sandals for the twenty-four apostolic feet in danger of blistering were it not for him. How Judas has gone ahead to announce his master’s coming and raised money for bread. In reality, the Christ will not spend his nights in the outlying hills and towns at all, but in the homes of those well-off merchants whom Judas has won to their cause. The Christ has not crept into Jerusalem, tired and hungry like so many pilgrims, under the folds of night but has ridden into Jerusalem under cover of bright afternoon on a donkey, shrouded in dubious celebrity, though lacking a cogent plan. The planning falls to Judas. Judas has managed to do the impossible by finding a sympathetic Pharisee (made all the more sympathetic by a discreet bribe) who has generously opened his villa to the Christ and to his twelve-man choir. Judas has settled Christ in and then ventured out ahead of everyone else to seek out threats to Yeshua. He is sorry now that he came to see Herod’s Temple. He has satisfied himself, though, that the Romans in Jerusalem are no threat to the Christ. over has made the Roman occupiers and their local Herodite collaborators complacent, reluctant. Jerusalem has filled with throngs of people from the surrounding towns, villages, and countryside who traditionally come to celebrate the holy days; and King Herod and the Romans want no trouble with the crowds. Still, Judas is angry at the evidence of a world of apostasy here soon to surround his master. He heads back to the home of the sympathetic Pharisee where the others have taken their lodging. Such unexpected lodging was sought after and was paid for precisely so the Christ would not have to spend his nights sleeping aground in the hills of Bethany, for Judas had uncovered a plot there against his master. In your time, my dear, your twentieth century, Muslims revere the town of Bethany. The Islamists call Yeshua a great prophet; and Bethany, where Yeshua spent time before going into Jerusalem, is a holy city to Islam for that reason. Not far from Lazarus’s tomb in Bethany lies Al-Ozir Mosque, Al Ozir being the Arabic name of Lazarus. A Greek Orthodox church standing there in your now—the time you call 1914, 1915, and such—is devoted to Mary and Martha. In Judas’s now, in his present, the apostles and their master, going into Jerusalem, have ed this way, to Bethphage and Jerusalem beyond. Judas has

made certain, because of the plots he discovered, that his master will simply through and that the safe home of the Pharisee in Jerusalem will be where Yeshua takes shelter. And despite all this, no mention of Judas?

Yeshua sits in a courtyard at a wood table under old-growth palm trees. His beard has grown long. He and the fisherman, Simon Peter, are eating bread dipped in olive oil and drinking new wine. Peter’s staff rests in his lap beneath the table. A dove has alighted near Yeshua’s wine cup, which is of beaten silver and full to the brim. The Christ is fond of wine. As Judas enters the courtyard, Peter rises to take a bowl and platter back to the nearby cooking pit and the outdoor oven that sits beside a well. Judas pauses a moment to inspect the troublingly fragile fence surrounding the yard, grapevines growing along it, but the leaves offer only scant privacy. He es by me, for I am here at the fence, in my spirit form. I am not convinced that the Christ is like Judas in not sensing me right now, but he shows no sign of it if he does know of my presence. “Where are the others?” Yehuda asks as he finally sits down beside the Christ. Peter returns with a sharpened knife and a flat stone. “They seek after allies in the city,” Peter answers. “Do they seek money as well?” “We need more followers right now, not more money,” Peter retorts. He stands behind the Christ, sharpening the knife on the stone. “With money, we will get the followers we need.” “That is not what the master teaches, Judas!” (He is using Yehuda’s Latin name—his Roman name.) “Peter, if it were left to you, we’d have long since had no money for dates, honey, or even bread!” “It is not left to me. It is left to you. You are in charge of the money. Well, my charge is the body and soul of the covenant. We must appeal to the people spiritually, not with bribes.”

The dove spreads its wings like a boastful angel, chest swelling a moment, and then steps over the wooden planks of the table, strutting toward Yehuda. “What is that knife for, Peter?” Yehuda demands. “The maser’s beard and hair have grown long …” Yehuda rises and slaps the knife from Peter’s hand. The dove tilts its head quizzically. “Do not cut our master’s hair.” “What possesses you, Judas!” “His hair and his beard make his appearance more as like that of an elder, a true rabbi. The people will trust his word more when he argues against the older rabbis.” Peter tosses away the stone angrily. Yehuda raises a dismissive hand to the fisherman. Frustrated, Peter opens his mouth to protest and whine; and Yehuda moves closer, as if to fight. “I should thrash you, Judas.” “Hold your tongue, Peter.” Both men freeze at the sound of their master’s voice. The Christ drinks from his cup before continuing. “Yehuda is about his duties,” says the Christ. “And it is proper that he is. He is right about my beard and hair. And, Peter?” “Yes, Lord?” “We could use more money.” “Master, thy Father provides. Money will come.” “My father, thy God, is not a nursemaid, Peter. He weans us off his milk and his honey. We must make our own.”

Even more frustrated now, Peter sits, picking up his staff to hug it to his chest and jaw. “Yehuda,” says the Christ, breaking a crust of bread and sitting it on a plate, “you must calm the blood in your words. Words must not make wounds.” The Christ pours a cup of wine. “Do you know what is happening in the city, Master?” “Sit, Yehuda, take bread and wine. Quench your hunger and your thirst and tell me what is happening in the city.” The Christ pushes the plate and cup over to Yehuda, who is Judas. The dove now settles itself into a squat, then tucks its beak and face under a wing as if to sleep. The Christ, Judas seems to feel, refuses to take seriously the horrid condition of the people, who whore, gamble, conduct crass commerce on the Sabbath, and disrespect the laws of the prophets. Judas argues with him in vain, for the Son seems aggravatingly meek. It will not be until the Christ visits the temple himself to see for himself the debauchery there that his wrath will make itself plain. I can only come to this iteration the one time. I am allowed to watch these events in the history of Christ’s life this once yet can guess what will come next, when the Son will whip the idolaters and lenders out of the temple, turn over the tables of the changers, and drive maddened mules out into the congested streets in a commotion of shouts and curses. History is a fine thing, is it not?

7

The scene of the crime can be an interesting place to everyone concerned, particularly to the criminal. I have noted in my centuries of watching you that returning there can give the mundane human criminal an explicit sense of accomplishment. The mundane criminal, however, often lacks appreciation for the many ways in which the scene of their crime can also offer object lessons in mistakes made. It is my observation that mundane criminals ask of the scene of the crime only the question “What have I gotten away with here?” Out of commonplace pride, you humans indulge a powerful sense of attachment to the places you have committed your transgressions and desire simply to dwell in the moment of the act—a sort of hubris, as Archimedes might describe it. There is, however, the lovely fact of the ardent criminal, the connoisseur. The connoisseur can objectify his or her act and can learn from his or her mistakes and thus possesses a sort of sentimentality (a more honorable attitude toward one’s crimes, in my opinion, than simple mundane pride). It is a sentimentality that must be tended to; for he or she, no matter the risk, must return. But as I said, the scene of the crime can be interesting to everyone concerned. That is why law enforcement humans will scuttle to arrive there as quickly as possible, just behind the gawkers on the street, while the crime can still speak and before the tongue of the crime can fall still, swell, and rot away. Among other things, it seeks to examine, the long eyestalk of the law seeks to spy upon those who surround the scene of the crime, you see, hoping to spot, of course, the very criminal who committed the offense. Unlike most human criminals, when I elect to return to the scene of my crime, I am taking no risk in doing so; for I am detectable by humans only if I allow myself to be. The sun rose, seemingly just beyond the pines, with the piazza full of police crabs, carabinieri, in uniform. There were also detectives, each in unfashionable identical narrow-lapelled brown suits. Early morning tourists and commuters were forced back by police who restrained them at the periphery of a cordon

thrown up around the stone circumference of the piazza, where the corpse of the man in his tuxedo had fallen. He was sprawled there where I had left him as I’d taken leave of his body. The poor fellow had not survived my taking his body for a spin. Some of you humans are just delicate that way. The entrance to the Pantheon was blocked by the beefy uniformed bodies of two sullen motociclisti pattuglia della polizia (police motorcycle patrol officers) looking sleepy and buffeted, looking as though they’d been rudely interrupted in some polizia motociclisti del Roma ritual of morning espressos and sweet rolls at some nearby cafe. On the inside of the Pantheon lay the corpse of Fadya di Amalfi, as beautiful as she’d been when I’d left her there hours earlier. A compact Alfa Romeo police automobile car rocketed up to the edge of the police cordon, siren dying in a throaty end to its protracted hysteric’s wail. The flashing light atop the car continued its pulsing flicker as Rome police inspector Checho di Amalfi, fifty-four years old with thick dark hair, scrambled out of the driver’s seat and trotted through the police line, showing a badge hung round his neck as he went. He wore a stylish flannel suit, his tie askew and his chubby North African face showing stubble. His typical characteristic look of sadness was accentuated by alarm and by the very beginnings of profound despair. Inside the Pantheon squatted dapper Chief Inspector Furio Alessandro, gray, but dense haired; middle-aged, but compact and hard in the way of some Italian war veterans—an annoying man, all said. He had squatted beside the corpse of Fadya. His small feet were bare except for brown silk stockings, matching his brown twill suit. He’d removed his brown leather shoes, a gesture he would sometimes make at a crime scene—his own way of increasing his sensitivity to clues to be found there. An odd one, this Alessandro. One of his carabinieri hurried over, crossing the bright perfectly circular pool of sunlight on the floor that fell there from the oculus above. “Perdonimi il comandante …” The officer had bent over and murmured something to Alessandro, who stood up quickly and hurried to the portico. Seeing Checho di Amalfi about to enter, Alessandro intercepted him, keeping him from ing over the black-and-red marble threshold to the sanctuary inside.

“What are you doing here, Checho?” “What are you doing at the scene of a routine murder, Chief Inspector? Who is in there? Is it her? Is it my Fadya? Tell me!” Alessandro led Amalfi back out to the piazza and took him by the shoulder. The two beefy sweet roll–deprived polizia ducked their heads, seeking to not hear or see what was transpiring between the two detectives. “It is your daughter, Checho.” Amalfi groaned, then shot his gaze upward, casting his anguish into the sky from which, I could have told him from my millions of years’ observation, no reply would likely be forthcoming. He sank to his knees, shoulders quivering; and Alessandro knelt beside him, still holding to Amalfi’s shoulder. A uniformed officer of the carabinieri walked over with Alessandro’s shoes. “Non hai bisogno di essere qui. You don’t have to be here, Checho,” said Alessandro. “Ho bisogno di essere qui. The … the body needs to be …” Tears in his eyes, Amalfi slumped forward, his head sagging, grief seizing him. “You do not have to do that here. You can identify the body later at the pathologist’s division. It was … it was her birthday today, wasn’t it? She was seen leaving a party up the hill in Centro.” “It was her birthday party, Furio.” “I’m sorry, my friend.” Such a sensitive man, the annoying Alessandro. And it was then that I saw Amalfi’s training and experience, and most probably also his heritage, assert themselves. In the midst of his grief, which appeared to be significant in its force, his eyes suddenly cleared themselves; and while Alessandro put his shoes back on, Detective Checho di Amalfi raised a calm and steady head and slowly swept the piazza with an iron gaze meant to pick out minutiae in faces and in objects. This was a clever scrutiny with which he sought

to distinguish particulars and to sort details. A gaze reminiscent, I would say, of the gaze of Archimedes. I very nearly felt something as that gaze raked over me and past me, although I was reasonably certain he could not see me in my spirit form, but then that was the whole idea of this thing I had done. I wanted to know, once and for all, whether or not this human could see me. Alessandro helped him to his feet. The two of them moved to the cordon and paused there. Amalfi paused to take off his jacket, then folded it across his arm. It was then that he suddenly pivoted back around to cast a look right at the place where I had come to rest. It seemed he could not see me, yet his eyes remained focused on where my spirit form rested next to the corpse of the human in the tuxedo.

In the afternoon, he drove the Alfa Romeo police autocar along the Tiber in the center of the city to the old-fashioned neighborhood of Campo de’ Fiori, Rome’s great open-air market. Here, Amalfi arrived home. Fiori was also a district full of older apartment buildings soon to be converted into crass tourist time-shares, exorbitant condominiums for the wealthy, and calculatingly quaint hotels. Amalfi parked his police autocar in a rented stall under a rented alcove beside the marketplace. He locked it, took his police watch bag from the trunk, and made his way past the fishmongers, fruit vendors, and flower sellers ensconced beneath tarps and makeshift awnings. Crossing the piazza of the Campo, he walked over old-fashioned cobblestones, skipped over puddles of water, and stepped over discarded roses, fish scales, and fallen, rotted cabbages. He made his way to Via Giulia, where his apartment building stood tall and distinguished for the time being. He brought out his key at the big wooden door, unlocked it, and pushed it open. He stood a moment under the bright frieze on the entryway ceiling depicting the history of the Via Giulia project. Proposed by Pope Julius II née Giuliano della Rovere and modestly named after himself, the Giulia was the project originally imagined by the pope who had commissioned Michelangelo di Buonarroti to paint the fresco of the Sistine. Julius’s Giulia was to be the first new boulevard since the time of the Caesars designed to traverse the city center, the ancient heart of Rome. Checho climbed the flamboyant stairway with its running reliefs and hand-carved balustrade to the fourth level and at his apartment door used the second key. Inside the apartment, he opened large tapestry curtains covering the windows. Sunlight poured in to soak the rooms, making brown cota walls glow mustard yellow. A large photograph of Fadya hung beside one of the windows. Her dark eyes had an inward look; her beauty was tinged by a characteristic sadness. A family trait? He removed his shoulder holster, placed it on a side table, and went to the kitchen, bright with blue-tiled walls. There, he washed out a battered copper espresso press, filled it with tap water, and set it onto the eye of a squat iron stove. He lit a long wooden match by dragging it across a patch of sandpaper tacked to the wall, twisted on a gas latch, and lit a fire under the press. He leaned

against a counter, lowered his head, and sighed loudly. “I know that you are here,” he grunted aloud. I allowed myself to be visible. He raised his head and looked at me, not startled in the least. “I do know you to have done this to Fadya. I know you have done this to make me speak to you, evil one.” For nearly a year, I had been appearing before Checho di Amalfi. It had begun a year earlier when I had been watching him as he investigated a murder in Trastevere district. It had become clear to me that he could see me, though he’d struggled to ignore me and to hide from me his awareness of my presence. Only once before had a human been able to see me without my wanting that human to; and so I had begun to appear to him, to speak to him, and to follow him, seeking an answer to this mystery. Yet Checho—seemingly very superstitious and even Catholic in the sluggish, begrudging way common to unwilling and half-willing Catholic converts compelled to the catechism by the vagaries of the refugee’s travails—had steadfastly resisted my attempts to communicate with him. Though he’d shown terror the first three times I appeared and spoke and had been deeply disturbed every time since, he had refused to speak back to me. “Finally, you speak to me, Checho.” He glared at me, moving conspicuously toward a butcher’s knife sitting on the counter upon which he was leaning, as if he thought I could not tell what he was about. “You know me ‘to have done this,’ do you? Then you are a very intelligent human, as intelligent as I suspected.” “What do you want of me?” “Only that you speak.” Taking the knife in hand, he launched himself across the kitchen so abruptly I nearly did not change my spirit body to ephemeral form in time. Never, in any

reiteration, had this attack happened, after all. He sped through me and crashed to the floor, sliding a bit across the tiles. “That was foolish. Had you touched me, you would have been burned to ash.” “La mia bambina! You’ve taken my girl, my Fadya! Bastardo! You took my Fadya. Citann! MelEuun!” “Citann? Ahh, I thought you’d forgotten your native Algerian. Call me Satan, if you wish, but I object to being called ‘evil.’ I’m simply misunderstood. Besides, she was not your daughter.” “She was!” “You’ve no more desire to live, then?” I knelt there beside him, though not too close so as not to tempt him to another assault, which might cause him to harm himself with the knife. I’d made myself insubstantial, but this bashing about the kitchen of his could very well lead to his death at that. “You told her about me, Checho. Did you not?” “I wanted her to be on guard against you, for you are the evil angel of perdition.” “Perdition! How old-school.” “I know you! Both Islam and Catholicism warn—” “Yes, yes, I know the dogmas of both Islam and Catholicism. I was at Medina with Mohammed and have been at Vatican City more frequently than you could count. Well, no matter. She gave in to me as it was.” “What do you say to me, demon?” “I’m saying her death was easy. She did not resist, and as for you, you shan’t die. I have a need of you.” He charged up off the floor, went through me again, and straight to a window beside the sink, where he ripped away the blinds. He unhinged the lock, pushed

the swinging window outward, and shot a look down into the courtyard below. The wind whipped in, tossing his jacket and his tie. He stepped up onto the sill, a very tall window, as windows in Rome of the 1960s are; and so he stood there framed by it as if it were a doorway to another world. “In the name of God, I will not surrender to you!” I stood and watched him. “Do you mean to tell me, Checho,” I asked him calmly, as mildly as possible, “that after all you’ve been through—the horror of war, occupation, mass murder, never deigning to take your own life—that now you decide to kill yourself?” “Rather than become a tool of evil, yes!” I chuckled at this, and he flinched at the sound. “Checho, were you not but a tool of evil when you cooperated with the French who tortured and executed your countrymen and women? You did not abjure your own existence then but escaped to a better life. You do not intend to throw yourself out of that window, surely.” Perhaps I was wrong, however. I could see that he was ready to step forward into the emptiness beyond. I could see it in the tension of his legs, in his stance, and in his eyes. I acted quickly. First, however, I reached over to turn the fire off. Safety first. In the next instant, we were in the morgue of the coroner’s division. Checho now stood atop a desk, the night examiner’s desk, in the empty room used by the examiner on shift, a room now containing only myself and Checho. He stood facing a blank wall, where a moment before he’d been facing outward from his window into the air above a courtyard. He was naked save for his boxer shorts and a tee shirt. I had removed him from his clothes as a means of perhaps gentling his actions once getting him here. He turned, amazed, and looked down at me. “How do you do this?” he demanded.

“I usually cannot. If someone is meant to die, I cannot and will not try to save them. A suicide is often a different matter, however. I am surprised, by the way. Isn’t suicide a sin for Catholics? Apparently, anyway, you were not meant to die at the moment. Or I would not have been able to stop you. I hope you can calm yourself now.” He stared, as if not comprehending my words. It is interesting to me how you more gifted crabs will somehow have the alacrity and substance to accept the reality of my sheer existence yet be dazed by the simple fact that I can also speak and speak eloquently. But then again, I had just killed his proxy daughter, transported him out of the denouement of his attempted suicide, and deposited him, in his undergarments, onto a desk facing a wall. So in fairness, Checho was perhaps justified in his response, which was that he stood silent a moment, looking stupefied. Then he stepped down from the desk onto a chair and from there stepped to the floor, anger twisting his expression. “Leave me, cursed spirit! I never will do as you bid me. I will not risk my precious soul!” Being surely familiar with the office where we were, for as an investigator he had spent many hours here in this building within the Rome law enforcement compound, Amalfi stalked, robed in the dignity of his rage, toward the door leading to the outer corridor. A very tall and wide door, as doors in Rome of the 1960s are. “Will you risk your niece’s soul, Checho?” He stopped and hesitated at the wide door, answering with his back to me. “What do you speak? Fadya is dead, and she is in the hands of God.” “Believe me, Checho, you are entirely ignorant of what it means to be dead— and even more ignorant of if and how one of you crabs can or does end up ‘in the hands of God.’” He stood motionless, still facing that wooden door, waiting. “If,” I continued, “she were even bound for any place near him, she is indeed so

recently dead that she has certainly not yet arrived. Capisca, il mio amico?” “What do you say?” he questioned the blank wood of the door. “I’m saying she can still be harmed, Checho. And I assure you I will harm her if you do not do as I request.” He turned to glare at me now. I walked by him and opened the door. I led him out of the office, down the corridor, to the examining rooms. The corridor and the building itself was empty or nearly so, for it was no longer afternoon, but the dead of night; and we were several levels beneath the streets above. The room we went to was one meant for storage more than autopsy. At the back of this room, examining room 6, was a freeze vault. I opened it and led him inside into a cold bluish light. He shivered pathetically as I slid the metal shelf out of the wall and pulled back the sheet covering her corpse. Her nudity was rendered odd by a gray layer of frost obscuring her flesh. Amalfi wept anew to see her thus. Hours before, he had been in this building in a room a few levels higher, a heated room lit by a warmer and kindly yellow light meant to soften grief for loved ones. He had identified her corpse. Here, in the final freezing place, she was more difficult for him to look at. This was the moment I had prepared for through several reiterations. As I had studied, I had watched, and I had scrutinized Archimedes, I had watched and rereviewed Checho until I felt I understood him or understood as much of him as a free being as myself could possibly understand a shell-bound human soul. I had scrutinized events and studied actions taken by the Christ, I had dwelled upon the nature of your God, and I had planned this moment, this thing to be carried out with the bloodline of Archimedes, a bloodline that led to Checho and to Fadya. Archimedes had been able to see me, and I had become determined to understand why. Part of solving the mystery was tied up in the act I was about to commit here, with these, two of Archimedes’s descendants. They were of his bloodline; and they, like him, had shown the talent of being able to see. I turned to look over Checho’s shoulder. In a far corner of the room was a dark figure, what looked like a spirit body, a body not unlike my own; but I had no attention to give to interlopers, not at the moment. I disregarded the spectator,

specter, or whatever, who at any rate made no move to interrupt or to interact with us. I turned away from that dark shadow. I had a task to perform. I believed that I could be successful in this moment. More than wanting to clarify for myself what connection might exist between Archimedes and Checho Amalfi née Djebar (Checho was unaware of his descent from Archimedes, of course), I wished to know if I could possibly perform this trick. I suppose you might call it boiling two crabs with one pot. “Do you care for her soul, Checho?” I demanded. He shivered; he had drawn his arms around himself. “Do not harm her further!” “Quite the contrary,” I responded to him, and I lay a hand upon her chest. I concentrated. “Rise, di Amalfi!” I called out, my spirit voice crackling in the frigid air like metal against stone. I felt the same sort of burning flash, where I touched her chest as I had felt when I’d touched the widow of Nain’s son. But I had prepared myself for this; and I was able to focus that burn, letting it through my spirit self, into a vortex I had learned to open up by watching the Christ. Into that vortex I directed that burning flash, along with my own energies; and I sent them both off and upward into the levels of creation, seeking after the spirit of Fadya. Something was ed. I felt a long, thin connection arise between this place, this time, this level, and the greater echelon of creation I had sent my call to. Checho had backed away in horror, for my “body” had begun to glow and to waver as if I were an image stamped upon a fluttering flag. It must have been a very alarming thing to witness, from his perspective. I ignored the searing, forbidding pain that was spreading across my consciousness, knowing it to be the barrier against me set there by your God. I maintained my touch upon Fadya’s chest. I maintained my call to her, and I set myself to withstand the searing pain that denied me permission to act as I wished to. Something was coming.

But I will get to that. I have told you that you exist within a conception of space and time so small that so limits your crab mind that my truth is bound to translate downward to you as your lie. I am not bound by spacetime as you are. My perspectives are so unlike yours that I see you as, well, crabs. I stood once in the center of an ancient imperial Roman street, a favorite of mine, the Via Flaminia, what in your time would eventually be called the Via del Corso. It was the first century, during the reign of Caesar Augustus née Octavian, a time when I’d been familiar with Augustus’s closest second, Agrippa. Octavian, a neurotic equestrian youth tossed about on the rough seas of his uncle Julius Caesar’s assassination and the brutal wars fought betwixt and between Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius, had grown into the benevolent dictator, Augustus. Before he was the elder Augustus, however, he was the cold, hard youth third member of a ruling triumvirate formed with Marcus Antonius and Marcus Lepidus. The triumvirs had drawn up enemies lists and murdered a goodly portion of the city’s nobles, the same noble families Caesar had long warred with. After brutally consolidating power by ending the triumvirate and dispatching Agrippa to kill Antony in Egypt, Octavian had built the city of Rome into a proper mother city for an empire, taking its brick and mortar precincts and turning them into repositories of marble and into grand districts of commerce, istration, and domicile. The Pax Romana was his gift to Rome and all the nations conquered by Rome. With Agrippa’s help, he had expanded Rome’s streets, bridges, and aqueducts, as well as her legal and governmental structures, forging a truly imperial city—the city that had conquered a hundred nations and the city I so adored and still adore, though the ancient Romans themselves never much inspired my affection other than my fondness for Emperor Augustus. Where I stood on the Via Flaminia was a place outside the Servian Walls. I watched cart traffic ing on the narrow way. I watched patricians saunter by in clean white vestments and the plebes in their leather and their coarse Numidian sandals marching through dust. Wives of Roman legionnaires in plain

skirts brushed by me, as did household slaves in pinafores and a plethora of merchants of various ethnicities, all on their way to buy or sell wares at market. I stood still. I held my hand aloft and made a turning motion. Time turned quicker for me; the scene around me now sped up, faster, faster. The spectral faces and ghosts of bodies and carts and mules and horses flashed by me, around me, through me, while the noise of human voices became a snarling clatter—a cacophony of meaningless tongues and sounds. Then I sped it all more rapidly still. Years, decades, then generations sped by at a comically jerky speed; and not only men and animals, but buildings also and the streets themselves all dissolved, reformed, grew upward and outward like living things, fell, and then grew up and out again all around me. Meanwhile, the noise of a billion shouts, wails, chortles and sighs, the sounds of humanity—all droned, rose in pitch, tolled closer and closer together until they took on a semblance to the sound of locusts. The locusts merged with the sound of the wind of a thousand winds from a thousand decades, of a thousand sudden thunderstorms being born and dying, of birdcall, dog wail, and the clamor of a million mewing beasts. All became a whine and then became the featureless white noise of steady static. Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, star fall, and the whipping band of dark and light that signified the march of days, whisked and undulated by my gaze like a snapping banner. For this is how I sometimes choose to through time while maintaining my position in three-dimensional space. I stilled my hand; and all, everything—all sight and sound and motion—came to a halt. Then it moved again as you humans would think it should. Standing on the Via del Corso, I watched Italian troops marching through the paved streets, with crowds thronging along the sidelines cheering; an army autotruck vehicle trailed along with an electrified seashell mounted on top, blaring shouts in the voice of King Crab, Benito Mussolini. I was now in the twentieth of your centuries. A ferocious joy in the faces of the citizenry cast its own heat upon the streets, and to my perception at least, the pavement thrummed—with the boot claps of marchers. In my spirit form, I made my way down the street until I came upon a strong young man wearing a gray engineer’s tunic and gloves who stood at the edge of the crowd, a huge pair of iron tongs resting upon one shoulder.

I slipped into him. Not a bit of resistance, as he was somewhat drunk, and I easily usurped his dominion over this body I desired. I settled him firmly into a corner of himself where he folded himself into an untroubled glowing sphere of spirit energy. I was a bit startled by this. His was obviously an advanced soul. No fear, no panic, but rather a serene acceptance of the situation. Then this interesting sphere of energy—I’d never before seen a human do this. His essence was not drunk, of course, once having ed into soul form. It was just simply calm as a characteristic of its own self. That calm, though, startled me. While of course, ironically, I was now drunk. I looked out of his eyes at the undulating crowds and willed the blood chemistry of this purloined body to right itself into sobriety. I stumbled a bit and stepped partially out in spirit to better align myself with the body, as a ing woman collided with the worker’s body. She gasped, reached out to help, touched me instead, and was burned, badly. Poor dear. Her agonized shriek was drowned out by a thousand cheers and guffaws as I hastened back into the worker’s body and eased her over to a wall. I leaned her there. She slid slowly to the ground, her legs in a twist, looking drunk herself now. I left her there, out of the way, unnoticed, so she could die in peace. I was sobering now, to be sure. I followed the crowd as they themselves followed the soldiers. The soldiers reminded me of the ancient Roman legions, a “legion” having been the ancient Roman unit of troops. In the old days, which in fact had only been minutes ago for me, legions were divided into “cohorts” and cohorts divided into “centuries” made up of “centurions.” These modern Italian troops here before me set my thoughts off into the past of these Italian troops’ forebears, the legions. These “modern” troops now marched with just as much precision, precise enough to seem a human wave—a mechanical, collective whole. One flesh, they were, one mind, an efficient wedge ready to toss itself into battle and win that battle, wherever or against whomever it may be fought. Much fear and trembling was going on across this earth right now because of the vaunted prowess of the German Wehrmacht; but ahhh, the Italian fascists were not only the originators of fascism, but also fascism’s most ardent practitioners. The Germans, if you ask me, were mere exhibitionists. Mussolini did not harbor insane dreams of global domination; instead, he was fully focused upon the only sort of domination that ever truly lasts: the

domination of one’s own corner of creation. Would that I had possessed such ardent and unified troops as he, when I had conducted my own little war. Mikayel the archangel had defeated me for one reason alone: his troops had been more disciplined than mine. One day. But that tale is for another time when I will tell you, I promise, of the war; of all the events surrounding the rebellion; of my near victory, my loss, and my banishment; and of my ultimate plans. It was a small matter to pick out of the crowd the men here and there most like my engineer. A factory worker here, an iron smelter there, beside a railroad mechanic. They all were eyeing one another, moving with the crowd yet moving just as surely toward their own destination, allowing the crowd to sweep them to where only the few were going; and when the crowd poured past a particular warehouse, these men all extricated themselves from the wave and were left standing, alone together. One of them gazed at me. “What is this?” asked the dapper compact man, thick haired, his worker’s boots looking out of place on his small feet. “Pietro, I thought you were going to stay close to La Corso!” “I am needed here.” I calmly spoke back at him, letting the iron tongs drop from my shoulder to hang at my side. “Dio!” the dapper man retorted and turned sharply to gesture everyone off the street and to the warehouse entry for workers, up a wooden stair to a door with a padlock. The dapper one produced a key. Inside, they left a lone lookout up front to watch at the dirty windows of this place; and all moved, crab-like, to the back and through a steel door into a shipper’s office. Someone pulled a dirty cord attached to a single bare bulb above, clicking on the murky light of that bulb. “What is the status?” demanded the dapper, no longer addressing me. “We have people placed all over the city,” one of them reported as he lit a

cigarette. “And the shipment of explosives has come through. We will be ready tonight, Furio.” “Good,” Furio, the dapper man, responded and seemed to relax. “Alessandro!” I called to Furio. His last name was there inside the body I occupied as were other points of knowledge. At my calling his name, he turned toward me, his thick eyebrows raised. “Do you really think, Alessandro, that feeble acts of sabotage will make a difference to Il Duce?” “It was your idea, Pietro!” one of the men snapped. Hmmm. Indeed it had been my captive’s idea. “Quiet, Balducci!” snapped Alessandro, who walked up to me, his eyebrows cocked. “What is this mierda of yours, Pietro?” he asked quietly. “Is this some new Trieste Pisano mierda? This is not Trieste—this is Roma. This is the city. You asked to us. You came up with this operation. Now you speak against it?” “I speak against foolishness. If you cannot assassinate him, don’t bother with blowing up his post offices. Shall you sorely afflict him with the scourge of preventing him mailing letters?” Two of the callow young men in the office laughed reflexively. Alessandro jerked a glance back at them, and they choked. So there was a lack of unanimity among them about this escapade. “Come. Follow.” He walked out of the office, and I obeyed him, following. We crossed a dusty floor, then ed by wooden crates and shrouded machinery, arriving at the sealed door of a loading dock, under a window far up the wall itting dim slanted light. “Who are you?”

I gazed at him. I smiled. “I mean—Pietro, I mean that you came to us performing miracles: food, ammunition, information, s. Some of our compatriots think you were sent by the fascists to sabotage us. Some others say you were sent by God. I say you are simply a Trieste highborn who is bored with his cazzo bourgeois life and who wants adventure. Be this or that. You were at least pure of purpose. Now you seem different. You are different.” I glanced back. “They will not follow us into here,” Alessandro assured me. “They are disciplined. They obey me as cell leader. We are alone, and so you may speak the truth.” I reached out and took him by the wrist. He resisted a moment, but a moment only, for I clamped down on his mind quickly and fiercely. It would not do to allow him to cry out. His eyes grew wide with terror, and his mouth opened, but his voice was now a helpless bird held within my fist. He shut his mouth, astonished. “Alessandro, I will leave you to play at sabotage if you wish, for I know you will survive. You will become a police investigator in this city, whose postal and pecuniary outposts you now seek to set fire to. A host of your companions will perish tonight, but you will survive to be a carabineer. I have something I wish you to keep for me until that time.” I put my hand upon his mouth, forced his mouth open, then pressed my lips upon his and breathed a gust of air down his throat; and his body shivered violently as the energy I ed into him settled inside him to wait for me for when I would call to it. I walked away from him; and he followed me, back to the shipper’s office, where the young men all stood in suspense, wondering. They all looked at Alessandro, searching his face for an answer. He gave them the answer I wanted him to. “Pietro will return to La Corso. He’ll wait there for the message we hope will come from Trieste. Tonight, all will proceed as planned.”

Two of the callow young men smiled at me sarcastically, their thoughts obvious: The leader has straightened you out, hasn’t he now, Pietro? That will teach you to talk out of turn and then some. Deigning to appear properly chastened, I walked out, past the lookout, back to the streets, which were silent and empty now that the soldiers and crowds had ed. I walked to the corner and turned down another street, and when I’d gained six blocks from the warehouse, I sat upon a bench near a bakery. Once, eons ago, even before the creation of earth, I had sat upon a “bench” for the first time next to an old man. He had taught me the word “bench” then. I will tell you of the old man later. Sitting there upon the bench, I went out of the worker’s body, leaving it slumped there, unconscious. I started away. The man would bear no lasting damage from my borrowing of his flesh. Or he might at that. Certainly, I’d at least done nothing to deliberately damage him while a enger in his flesh. “Heylaāl.” I turned back sharply, staring. “You are busy, Heylaāl.” I smiled. Of course: the sphere of soul energy. I had taken a body that was already taken by another, by my nemesis. “Show yourself!” I commanded in a spirit voice of inducement. Uriel, in spirit form, stood there before me smiling. Smiling humorlessly. A sneer more than a smile. “As thy God is my witness,” I purred. “I had no idea.” “Neither should thou ever have one, Heylaāl, for ideas are the domain of human souls. Ideas are forbidden to thee, forbidden to all who are like us.” “Speak for thyself,” I whispered. If ever there existed any spirit I truly despised, it was the angel Uriel. She had taken much from me eons ago. She had taken my joy. She had once been sentinel to my imprisonment. Once. Once upon a time.

“I speak for us all,” she sneered. Even before the bad feeling and the small battle between us, I had in truth always loathed Uriel, most imitative of me. Her name means “God’s light” and “God’s fire,” which certainly, as I have related to you, is my own nomenclature. She had even evolved within herself an interest in and fondness for ancient Rome, wherein once she had stranded me for a time, keeping watch on me in the early days of my exile following the rebellion. As if to underscore her mediocre imitation of me, Uriel thrust out her hand, a blue flame burning in her palm, which bathed the both of us in a divine refraction, freezing the time stream around us, extracting us from spacetime. The dark of raw chaotic precreation pressed in close around us, held back by the light from Uriel’s palm. “What art thou doing here, Heylaāl?” “Why do you celestial dwelling angels all speak as if Elizabethans?” I asked. “I am not ‘speaking’ as you put it, as thou know. You are bound to Earth and thus hear us as humans do, likely,” she replied with a smug little smile. We stared at each other. The bright blue light from her flame bathed us; it made her already-dark face loom in greater, squirming shadows and glints. “When will you learn a new trick?” I asked, and she scowled. “How didst thou know I’d taken the man’s body?” “I knew not, Uriel. Let us say that being thy elder, whatever thou doest, I shall soon do better.” “Then, beast, being the elder thou shouldst do as I do, being as loyal to God.” “Beast? How rude. I wear no horns.” “Leave these humans. They are under my protection. They struggle against evils you have nurtured on earth, as you did first nurture evil in Eden.” “In Eden, I only spoke to the first humans and did no harm.”

“You would have done harm indeed if I had not come between them and you.” “Uriel, I assure you my thoughts lie not with your humans here. Mussolini is more tolerable than Hitler or Patton. None of the lot has half the inventiveness of a Xerxes or Attila. I’ll take my leave of this time stream, if you will pardon me —” “Do you go back to yourself, then?” I turned. “What was that?” “I ask, doest thou go back to thy self? Seeking she who is forever lost, thou returneth to him who once you were?” What gibberish was this? It smacked of knowledge of my doings, though. I looked around. No others were about; she was alone. I wondered if I should seek to best the cow. “The last time you called me ‘cow,’ I pulled thy limbs from out thy body and then confined thee to earth, beast.” “You are strong.” “I am strong.” “Which did not benefit Yazad.” “Her fate is on thy head, beast. On thine, not mine.” “And you are strong.” “I am, big brother.” “And righteous.” “I am righteous.” “But you are a bore, little sister. You are rigid, with no imagination, and you need to relax. Next time you take a body, you might try opium. Very relaxing.”

She stared at me blankly. Angels have no sense of humor. All that heralding, running of errands, and bearing God from place to place in paintings. They are dreary, tedious, tiresome. I’ve not known one since before the rebellion whom I can bear to have a conversation with. I glanced around again. She took a gliding step toward me. “Yes, we are alone,” she said. She tilted her “head” and regarded me as if I were an exotic. “Why do you insist upon blaming me?” she asked. “You have to ask?” Again, she looked at me blankly. How monotonous this was. I thrust myself through her and out the other side of her in a flash of spirit essence and bolted upward through the darkness back to larger spacetime into and through two higher realms; and she was too shaken by the resonance wave of my violent age to follow my direction. I was gone.

Something was coming. With his hands upon her chest, he maintained his call to Fadya, and he withstood the searing pain while calling out to her to “Rise!” Something was coming. That something was me. He had glanced over at me just before laying his hands upon her, but he was ignoring me. He likewise ignored Chief Investigator/Inspector and chief carabineer Furio Alessandro, who walked into the room at that moment. “What in God’s name … !” Hearing this, Checho turned to see Alessandro. The corpse of Fadya di Amalfi quivered, the hair of the corpse swirling like seaweed beneath ocean waves and the smell of ozone filling this cold underground room all as Alessandro drew his gun and shouted. The being who touched Fadya gestured Alessandro away dismissively, and the chief inspector spun across the room like a rag doll, falling to the floor and sliding to a halt right at my feet. “I cannot do it.” The being heaved a sigh, and he took his hands off Fadya. And now finally, he turned to consider me. He smiled. “Go from here. You are not needed.” I reached down to snatch Alessandro from the floor, held him up, pulled his face to mine, and sucked out of him what I’d breathed into him years (his years) earlier inside the warehouse. I let him fall back to the floor, strode forward quickly, and pulled Checho to me, placing him behind me where he would be safe. “You have served your purpose, but I have no more need of you,” I calmly told the being. “No, it is I who decides that,” he responded.

We faced each other, mirror images. “You are the puppet who imagines he is a real boy,” I told him. He chortled. “Then so too are you.” “Be still!” I commanded in a spirit voice of inducement. He was still. Frozen smile, frozen face. Quite a handsome face, in fact. I walked past him and leaned over Fadya’s corpse. I pressed my lips to hers, which must have been cold; but in my spirit body, I could not perceive it. I blew her soul back into her body, for knowing that my trick of raising her might not work, I’d taken her soul into myself at the moment I’d killed her and had then deposited her soul for safekeeping inside of Alessandro. All these years, Alessandro had been unaware except that every now and then, he must have felt a peculiar urge to kiss Fadya. Souls always yearn to return from whence they came.

8

The raucous noise of angry shouting merchants and shrieking animals falls and spreads through the streets around the great temple of Herod. Men curse and call on their God. Oxen snort in disaffection, chickens cackle in outrage, and goats bleat an alarum. Some animals trot away into the crowd, kicking up hot dust as their masters pursue them. Merchants thump their own chests and shake fists in agitation. This commotion radiates outward from the top of the Temple Mount, down to the streets and the houses, reaching even as far as the scriptoria and the monastic homes of the scribes. The commotion, the wave of chaos spreads from the place that is center, the temple. The man who is center stands just inside a temple recesses above the Court of the Gentiles. The center is the Christ. He drives people and animals alike from the porches and from the steps outward into the streets, away and off into the wayfares of Jerusalem.

Judas runs beside Peter, Simon the Zealous, Andrew, and James. Behind them, loping to keep up, is John, closely followed by Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, and, lastly, Matthew. Thaddaeus and James the Lesser trail even more slowly behind. They are walking, not running; for they expect that whatever is wrong will be chiefly dealt with by Peter, John, and Judas. Judas Iscariot is of course first to arrive at the temple stairs. A group of angry and disheveled moneylenders, changers, merchants, and gamblers are collecting even now at the foot of the stairs. These have recovered from the first shock and are arranging themselves, Judas fears, for a counterassault. They will screw up their courage, and next, they will rush back up to the temple porches to attack whoever that is who still can be heard up there roaring in a wild voice in a rage. Foolishly, Peter stops. He leans on his staff to inquire of these men. “Sirs! What has happened above and within to cause a commotion?” Immediately, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, and Matthew arrive and stand wasting momentum with Peter. Judas, more wise than his brethren, does not bother to listen to the money changers make an answer to Peter but runs on up the stairs while John and James the Greater pause in the middle of the stairway itself, unable to decide whether to run onward or await Peter and the rest. A fool can tell that the Christ is the cause of this. For days now, this has been coming, Judas thinks, as Yeshua has walked about the city observing, listening, and barely speaking. Yeshua has been judging the city itself in that astonishing way of his—as though he can see every leaf, every stone, and every porch, as though he can read every heart and hear every tongue. Sometimes Judas believes Yeshua actually can and that Yeshua is indeed the Moshiach. This prospect, this risk, this amazing possibility of the fulfillment of prophesy has drawn Judas to this man Yeshua and to this place beside him. What Yeshua is doing now has indeed been as clear to see as a foreshadow in the face and even in the body of Yeshua; it has been clear—that is, to anyone with eyes to see it. A fool could tell indeed; but then, Judas thinks, Peter has a ways to go yet before he will qualify to be a fool. At present, he is somewhat less shrewd

than most fools are. Judas sold fish when he was a merchant. Peter is proud, he often proclaims, that he once hooked and hauled them in. Catching and selling are two very different ways of seeing a fish or a Moshiach, as Judas the merchant sees things. Judas the merchant who became Judas the Zealot, and Judas the Sicarius who has become Judas the devout. Judas the warrior whose life had been a knife, and that knife in these months of walking and preaching and raising money for wine has been ground down to the thinness of a pen. A life for battle becomes a life for peace. What will this new Judas of two minds and two hearts become next? Judas often wonders about himself. He does not know. He only knows that he dearly loves Yeshua. He also knows that the Moshiach business is a risk. Simon the Zealous and Andrew have climbed the stairs just behind Judas; and he looks back from the top to see Thaddaeus and James the Lesser finally arrive to gather with Peter, the other apostles, and a growing angry crowd already up here at the verge. Judas, Simon, and Andrew hurry on across the porch and into shadow as they rush into the cramped darkness and cool of a breezeway between two columns. There, they come upon the Christ. Bare from the waist up, he is roaming about the stone hall, growling like a jilted bridegroom, striking banners down, turning over tables, and scattering merchants’ wares. He holds a cubit’s length of rope with dirty knots tied in it. His face is a visor of wrath. Even Judas comes to a halt, in shock at this, at the look on Yeshua’s face. Judas, Simon, and James stand there for a moment. None have ever seen Yeshua in quite so harsh a demeanor. “Blasphemy!” Yeshua shouts, shattering a birdcage. The doves within flutter, then rush in twos through the columns out into the sunlight. Christ pauses, catching his breath. Scattered across the stone floor are an abundance of coinages: Roman, Judean, Greek, Samarian, and others. The glint of money draws Judas. He bends to pick up a Roman sesterce that rests beside his own foot. “No!” shouts Christ. “Do not, Judas!”

“But, Lord, this is—” “Obey me! You and Simon and Andrew, heed me!” Simon looks at the disarray, then looks back at Yeshua. “Lord, you know this part of the temple above the courts always has been used as a bank.” The Christ growls back at him, “Yes, since I was a boy has it been so, Simon! Yet I say to you challenge me not!” Simon looks stricken. Yeshua approaches and places a gentle hand on Simon’s shoulder, the hand lacerated in the violence Yeshua has just committed. “You are fervent, Simon. So it is that I call you ‘the zealous’ …,” says the Christ, who then casts a meaningful look at Judas. For some reason, this look moves Judas to drop his eyes. “But it is not shekels that are the evil here, Simon. It is love of those shekels. It is those who love shekels more than God.” “Lord,” says Judas, “the money belongs to the people. It is—” “It is filthy, and it is in my Father’s house!” shouts Christ. “It is a filthy offering thrown in the lap of the holy bride of my Father!” Judas says no more. He and Simon can tell the discussion is over. Simon looks down at the fallen coins and back at his Lord and moves closer to Yeshua. Judas does not move. Instead, he looks toward the outer court to the sun-bright porch beyond, hearing the angry voices out there, anticipating those he knows will come. Yeshua strides across the stone floor to kick over the last of the tables. It topples; and chits, receipts, and markers of wealth spill to the floor. “Lord,” Judas complains feebly, looking out at the crowd, looking, of course, for any sign of approaching Romans. For Yeshua had paused only for Simon’s sake, and the rage now returns to him.

The rage rises in him, radiating like a sun that so far has fallen on the heads of Rome’s subjects but now threatens to expand until it will become a new form of heat rising over bareheaded Romans themselves, lacking the native sense to properly shield their heads from the Judean noon. Yeshua looks down at his own feet. The stamp of King Herod has fallen among parchment receipts. He stoops to touch it, then seizes the wood and stone seal and stares at the local insignia of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea: palm leaves and a wreath, with the Greek words “HEROD TETRARCH” inscribed in a circle round them. “A house of prayer, yet they have made of it a robbers’ den,” Yeshua mutters. “The Holy Spirit is made unclean. She is sold to skinners for tanning.” He bends to scoop a bronze coin off the floor. “She is taken of her innocence and spurned …” He now sweeps his gaze around, seeking new targets. The supernatural force of the anger that runs through him, these humans cannot feel except for a nagging sense of the hair on their arms and necks standing up, but I feel the increase in positively charged ions issuing from the Christ’s body. I can see the aura around him vibrating at a new frequency as his body turns into a divine gateway. My, my. He could level the temple if he wished and send the whole thing crashing down with the power he commands. He could obliterate Jerusalem altogether, turning it into a bloody ruin of slaughter, of immolated trees, shattered stone, and ash. These humans have no idea. I watch him and the others from cooler darkness farther along the course of the colonnade, my borrowed brown face obscured by incense smoke. I have arrived up here as a Greek trader with a sheath of myrrh branches over my shoulder to come to make a deposit. However, I now let that human go; and as he drops to the floor of the porches moaning, eventually to wake knowing not how he got here, I am again in spirit form to watch in safety, unseen. How far this display of Yeshua’s anger shall go, I can only wonder. These humans had best have a care now with this “man” Yeshua, for the Christ has so far merely risen a few bumpkins up from death and multiplied a few stale loaves of bread and rancid fishes; he has merely strolled to and fro upon the tops of the placid waters of Galilee.

Mere tricks. He can level Jerusalem, yes. But O, what he could do were he truly to lose temper! What cracks he could cast in the sky, what flowing flame he could wrench up from the earth in his truest rage; how easily he could tilt the ground of all Judea itself and make her to list and reel like a lost ship atop a sea of molten fire! Merely to know of it would blanch these few hapless crabs as surely as would a pot of boiling water cook a flock of crustaceans. Judas hears the rising shouts of the crowd at the foot of the temple stairs. They are still startled, but anger has ignited counteraction. They are about to return to thrash the interloper who has cast them out, thrash him or worse. Yeshua pauses, then looks toward the square of sunlight out upon the open porches. He suddenly smiles. He has what he wants. I pity any who will cross him now. Now the crowd comes. Peter is not so much preceding them as he is being pushed along by them as he, James, and John are first to appear at the crest of the stairway outside. The silver cap on the bottom of Peter’s walking staff clacks loudly on the stone porch steps. The crowd follows right after; and mixed in with them, trying to force their way to the front, are Matthew, Philip, Thomas the Incredulous, Bartholomew, Thaddaeus, and James the Lesser. What Judas sees that strikes him cold are three Pharisees at the front, these three being the first after Peter to top the stairs, led by a soft and corrupt elder Pharisee named Malachi. Yeshua snatches up his discarded robes from the floor and drapes them over one shoulder like Roman raiment. He strides by Judas, Simon, and Andrew to go out and meet the crowd upon the portico. There, he spreads his legs wide, one hand upon his hip. Now there, there is a pose! Like the prince of creation, which in fact is what he is. All the crowd halts, frozen like rag dolls as Christ thrusts an accusing finger at them, his voice crackling in the sudden silence of the still, dry air—a voice that carries impossibly far and clear over their heads and out into the city below, into the world. “Know you all this: there shall be not one stone left upon another here!”

Judas keeps close to his master’s back, his eyes darting back and forth and yonder, obviously worried about someone using the same thing he himself has been guilty of using along with fellow Sicarii thugs: a knife, which might appear out of the crowd to be thrust into his master’s side. The Christ needs a crowdcontrol specialist, I muse; and Judas, though skilled at murder and fund-raising, is quite out of his depth in trying to keep control of theatrical performances. Gazing steadily at Malachi, who still stands at the front of the crowd, the Christ speaks to all. “I know what it is you seek to do. Your shekels are not God’s, but Herod’s! This shall not be the place that raises David’s temple anew.” “Who claims such blasphemy?” shouts one of the scribes within the crowd. The people murmur angrily along with this scribe’s challenge. “I do. I say. I warn you that your priests blaspheme, scribe!” Yeshua shouts right back into the crowd at the one who spoke. “For so your priests hope, with the Herods, to build a Third Temple!” The people grow silent at this. Christ looks to Malachi again and finishes. “A single shattered wall shall be left and no more in two thousand years’ time. As Herod’s heart is dry and barren, as your own hearts are desolation, you priests and scribes, so too shall this place be!” “Who art thou to prophesy? I know you, Yehoshua!” cries Malachi. “I knew you as a boy. Your family is not without means, so why do you play at poverty, eh? Why act as though commerce offends you?” “Commerce is not the business of the temple!” Yeshua cries out. “Every one of God’s children has a right to say this, regardless of birth, regardless of priestly dress! The poor must wear the hunger that feeds you!” “The poor! What are you to do with them after all, Yehoshua? Your mother is from the line of the House of David, is she not?” Malachi grins cynically, working the crowd. “Is your father not Levite? Were you not gifted with gold and silver from the east at your birth?” “My origin is well-known,” Yeshua says in a level voice. “I am the root and the offspring of David, and I am the bright and morning star.”

Does he not know how in what humans call “heaven,” the title “morning star” was mine? He must, and he is not the sort to lie. Another mystery concerning my connection to him. Matthew shouts out, his pride in the saying etching the silence. “The master’s mother’s father was Issachar, the ninth son of Jacob and of the tribe of Judah, bearing the blood of David through Nathan himself! Yeshua is a true son of David.” “Half of us up here are true sons of David!” shouts out a voice in the crowd, and a gale of laughter erupts. “And even the many sons of David are not all anointed priests.” Malachi pulls the crowd back in. He moves closer to Yeshua. “We priests of God know what God wishes. Who are you, Nazarene, to prophesy to us Pharisees who alone do sit where Moses sat, who alone can see God’s will for his covenant with his people?” “Lord, please! Let us leave here!” Judas hisses, hoping to get his master safely away. The Christ turns to give Judas a quick fierce smile. Judas shuts his mouth. Yeshua grows deadly quiet, and the crowd hushes, and so his voice still carries in the silence. “Who art thou, Pharisee, Essene, Sanhedrin swindler, filthy one, whore of Herod that you should doubt my right to prophesy?” The crowd gasps at this raw rebuke. “How dare you, Yehoshua? We, not you, ragged rabbi, see God’s design,” spits the second Pharisee named Jebahdee. “Do you see David’s temple?” Christ sneers in a hissing voice. “God punished David and punishes even now we the children of David by the destruction of David’s temple. But you whores of Herod wish in your wisdom to see it rebuilt?” “Yes!” Malachi shouts, turning now to the crowd to address the people. “Yes, we seek to rebuild!”

The crowd mutters, and Malachi raises his arms to keep them focused on his words. “The money we gather shall rebuild the Temple of David!” Half the crowd sighs in wonder; half of them sputter in outrage. In the silence, a citizen, an old woman, speaks. “The temple is the house of God on earth. Why should it not be rebuilt?” “For I am the temple,” says the Christ. Much of the crowd roars outrage at this; and in the angry commotion, Malachi, Jebahdee, and the third Pharisee, Izzadin by name, all smile. One pilgrim in the crowd cries out, “What sign do you give us, Rabbi, that you are what you say?” “Destroy this temple!” shouts the Christ. “And I shall raise it again three days after!” Not understanding what Christ means, Izzadin carps, “This temple was built in forty-six years, Nazarene. How shall you rebuild it in three days?” “My Father may build as he wishes, though you may not enter what I shall build at his command.” Judas watches their faces. He sees among them the priests and changers and counters and merchants who had been cast out by Christ; but how has it come to be that three Pharisees, none of whom were there at the beginning of Yeshua’s fury, have arrived here so quickly? Horrible luck, he thinks. He wishes he had a knife, but the Christ has forbidden him to carry one. “You speak as a criminal, you blaspheme—” The crowd hisses in agreement. “But you are a man, Rabbi!” sneers Malachi. “And not worth the effort.” But his sneer has not even enough tooth in it to be that; it is more a smirk. “As for me,” Izzadin calls out, “I will not call him ‘rabbi.’ He is no rabbi, but merely Nazarene rabble.”

There are those in the crowd, mostly pilgrims, who do not laugh at this; but many do, the residents of Jerusalem, who are used to spectacle and jaded about the public invectives of rabbis. Yeshua ignores Izzadin, but watching Malachi, he speaks in a voice tinged with contempt. “You, Pharisee, are the dry bones left from the rotten corpse of the Sadducees. At least the Sadducee corpse is a Zadokite corpse, which did at least believe the primacy of covenant law …” The Christ now paces a circle round Malachi. “But when that corpse is eaten by vultures and scorpions, when it has been devoured by desert desolation and sun, then it becomes dry bones merely. It is thee, Pharisee. Thou art a desiccated bone of truth with not even a rotten bit of the meat of righteousness left to thee nor anything inside to call marrow.” The crowd, even the citizens, is astonished at this exorbitant disrespect. “You seal your own fate with ill-considered words.” Jebahdee smiles. The crowd moves closer in, listening; for if they have come to throw out the lunatic driving their animals into the streets, what they have found is a more serious drama: a pitiless duel between a fierce young rabbi and a tierce of hoary ecclesiasts. The Christ grows calm as a cobra now. He looks suddenly to where I am. I know he can see me among the columns, perhaps saw me even before, despite my hiding inside purloined flesh; and now he sees my spirit body as only his eyes can see. I smile at him. Even in his wildest distemper, his shameless exhibitionism, he is still a son of heaven, still one of us, despite his life of playing at being human. Yeshua turns back now to his business: he drops his robes, and Judas immediately scoops them up. Yeshua ties the knotted rope round his own waist as if to keep it there for later use. His bare chest gleaming, muscles flexing, he reaches out to Malachi, who flinches as if burned. “You do not see,” Christ whispers, and those closest in the crowd hear it, but

none else. Next, he speaks so softly that only Malachi hears what he says as he touches the elder Pharisee’s face. “You are blind to powers and principalities surrounding you.” Malachi falls to his knees like a sack tossed at Yeshua’s feet. The crowd cannot look away. Malachi’s eyes roll back in his head, and his tongue lolls from the corner of his mouth a moment as his shoulders quake. He jabbers in several tongues at once: Greek, Aramaic, Phoenician, Latin, and next in languages no one here but I can possibly understand: eighteenth-century French, German, Nuba, Afrikaans, and Slavic! The witnesses making up the crowd hold their breaths, amazed. “Now what do you see, old Pharisee?” the Christ whispers into Malachi’s ear. “I see the throne of God, your Father!” Malachi whines. “And that should you, of course, see, old man, if Moses’s seat do you truly squat upon. But what more see you?” “I see the Second Temple, this one, Herod’s befouled shrine. And I see a Roman army under one emperor to be known as Titus, sent by him, and they shall destroy this place!” “What more do you see, priest of scorpions and fleas?” “Rabbi, I see the Third Temple, and I see great hornets of iron buzzing in the skies to spit ruin and wreck unto that temple and many Jews and Gentiles alike dying!” Malachi cries out. The crowd is going for it. Izzadin slowly retreats backward down the stairway. “Blasphemy!” Jebahdee shouts and lays a restraining hand on Malachi’s shoulder. Jebahdee too falls to one knee, resisting, then is on both his knees. The crowd lurches back, clearing a space around Christ, the disciples, and the Pharisees. The Christ, looking directly at me, drops his hand. The two amazed Pharisees roll upon their backs, legs twitching, eyes wide, seeing what none else can see—

none else but me, that is. The Christ drops the copper coin and the seal of Herod to the floor. (Where on his person had he been keeping them? Another trick!) Then he tosses the knotted rope down besides. Izzadin has stealthily made his way to the foot of the stairs; he hurries off along the street, his white robes swirling in his haste. The Nazarene looks with pity upon the two prostrate priests and shakes his head. “You children of men,” the Christ laments, his voice full of pity. “You understand but do not see. Seeing, you do not understand. You Pharisees appear virtuous because you are as graves, which can only seem. Like sepulchers you are, white and clean without, seeming righteous. But within, you bear the corruption of dead men’s flesh and teeth.” And now Yeshua takes back his robes from Judas, shrugs them on, and slowly walks down the stairs, his disciples following silently. Judas is in the last, trying to be rear guard, no doubt. The Christ parts the crowd before him. They let him .

Alessandro was much amazed. He rose from the floor, gun still in hand, but with his hand hanging down now at his side and the gun merely an unheeded appendage. He walked in the cold to Checho, took off his topcoat, and draped it over the shoulders of his friend. Checho himself stood fixed to the spot, his eyes wide, regarding the spectacle of his Fadya twitching, jerking, and then with a coughing fit, then moaning where she lay on the cold metal shelf. The room was otherwise empty. There were only the blank gleaming faces of dozens of other drawers containing corpses, drawers like the one Fadya’s shelf had been pulled out of. They lined the walls of the cold storage room; and only one lone gurney parked beside a bizarre metal sink in the center of the room with its long faucets, its attached hoses, and a deep six-foot-long basin gave evidence of the purpose of this place. Alessandro made himself leave Checho’s side to lean over Fadya, stripping off his suit jacket to wrap around her. Now Checho was there at Alessandro’s side. The two of them gently pulled her up from the tray, put her arms through the sleeves of the coat, and covered her legs carefully. When they were done, Checho picked her up and cradled and carried her like his child, as the two men walked out of the room into the warmth and light of the outside.

They have walked no more than one hundred yards before yet another crowd comes upon them. This crowd numbers sixty or more Jerusalemites, pilgrims of the over, traveling merchants, and temple scribes and priests, all following after a Roman centurion. Judas sees who he thinks really leads the crowd: the third Pharisee who fled, Izzadin, chest thrown out, walking just behind the centurion. For his part, the beautiful young soldier is in his polished metal cuirass and shiny plumed helmet, a gladius sheathed at his side. Because he’s both young and strong, he bears the conceit of youth and strength: he thinks his arm is stout enough to command by the sword the obedience of those whom his Rome has oppressed by the sword. As does his Rome, he himself has much yet to learn about Judea. Also with the crowd is a second Roman, Tertilius, in a rich blue velvet tunic and costly Egyptian sandals. None here know the name Tertilius since he’s known in the city streets simply as “the representative.” He is clean-shaven (the style of an equestrian of means) and is smooth-faced from Egyptian emollients. He’s recognized in the Upper City to be a representative of the sixth Roman procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate. This representative, Pilate’s man, is a merchant, rumor says, that cannot return to Rome due to debts he owes powerful patricians there. He has made himself available to Pilate as a tax collector, scribe, ant, thug, and a strong arm backed by a cool wit. I myself am now ensconced in the flesh of a woman in the crowd who looks much like Mary, to my mind. I am where Yeshua can see me, but he ignores me, out of disregard or because he does not recognize me—which, I cannot say. He and his disciples halt. Judas positions himself in front of his master, eyeing the gladius hanging at the centurion’s belt. Easy to pluck and steal that blade from its sheath, he thinks, if it comes to that. “Rabbi!” Izzadin bawls out, challenging. “What seek you of me, goat? I am about the business of my lambs today and will

tend to you my goats in my own good time!” Yeshua calls back. The crowd laughs. Someone shoves Izzadin from behind, forcing him forward. The crowd laughs even more raucously at this. Izzadin grimaces, momentarily humiliated. “Why is your tongue so sharp, Rabbi?” asks Pilate’s man, speaking a stiff dialect of Aramaic with but speaking it coolly with precise enunciation. He is of that Roman intellect that sees that it is valuable to know the languages of those whom Rome has conquered. “Why is it so sharp, and why do you not govern it better?” he finishes. The crowd can tell he speaks so they may understand; it is all a show put on for them. They grow quiet at the sound of the Roman’s voice. Shrewdly, Yeshua answers him in a crisp, clean garrison Latin, dialect of Roman soldiers and a dialect at least familiar to any who live under the Roman boot. “My tongue works its work and I mine, as with you, Roman brother.” Pilate’s man, the representative Tertilius, tilts his head. His eyes widen just a bit, the only surprise he shows at Yeshua’s Latin. He responds, again in Aramaic. “What mean you ‘as with me’?” “Are you not a man?” Christ now switches to a shepherd’s Aramaic. “I am a man and a serious one at that.” “Then to speak seriously, brother, do you not know,” Christ asks calmly, “that the tongues of men, together with their hearts and their minds, are one, one family? The mind, the tongue, and heart, which are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Which of them do govern us, none can say, but the tongue.” “And so the tongue tells,” says Tertilius. “Unless that tongue lies,” says the Christ. The crowd from the temple now arrives behind Christ. Judas notes Malachi and Jebahdee are nowhere in sight. The street is now full with a single crowd of nearly two hundred.

“Do you lie, Rabbi?” coaxes Pilate’s man. “I lie only in my sleep where I sometimes dream.” The representative’s next words mean to tell Yeshua that Pilate knows where his family is from. “And of what do you dream, Nazarene?” “Of Romans who speak the truth. I have counted only one and that one in my dreams.” The crowd roars with laughter; for though some here resent this rabbi Yeshua, almost all here despise the Romans, the Roman occupation, and the tax the Romans have placed upon all. No one is grateful for Roman soldiers in the streets. It is the over, and Jerusalem is full with pilgrims. The Romans are much outnumbered. Izzadin speaks up over waning laughter. “Rabbi, we hear it said you are honest, speaking truth no matter the consequence.” “As I know truth, I speak it,” Christ calls back. “Then speak on this, for this man”—Izzadin indicates the Roman with a gesture —“is Pontius Pilate’s man and also a collector of the tax. Should we all pay our taxes to the Romans, or should we not?” The crowd holds its breath. This is a trap well set; and the rabbi, it seems, has stepped unseeing into it. He cannot answer, for either way, he is defeated: If he says yes, the crowd will know him for a hypocrite who backs down from his own teachings at the show of threat. If he says no, he is guilty of rebellion and can be crucified if Pilate hears of it. The centurion places his hand to rest upon the butt of his sword. Suddenly, Judas sees there is much more to all of this than he suspected. A sudden plague of Pharisees, Herod’s spies, maybe even the hand of Pilate that has reached out to set a trap. These forces all are seeking Yeshua’s death, and

Judas is unprepared. He has no knife or long blade to fight with and to protect the master he has sworn to defend. He eyes the centurion’s hand upon that sword. Everyone awaits the rabbi’s response. “Do you have a Roman coin?” Yeshua asks the smooth-faced Roman. “I have a few.” He glances at the crowd. “Each one bears the face and the stamp of Tiberius Caesar!” the representative of Pilate shouts loudly. The centurion tenses. “Give one to me,” Christ says evenly. Smiling, Pilate’s man Tertilius reaches into the sash at his waist, but Izzadin bids him to hold off. Izzadin loosens the drawstring of his own purse and reaches in, pulling forth a Roman coin to hand to Yeshua. Yeshua holds up the coin for all to see. “Is this the Caesar you speak of?” Yeshua calls out. “That is a sesterce you hold, Judean. And the face stamped on it is of Caesar Dominus, Tiberius, supreme lord of your land!” the Roman shouts. “Then I say of his tax, render unto this Caesar all that is his and render unto thy God all that belongs to God.” Yeshua hands Izzadin’s coin to Pilate’s man. The crowd’s raucous laughter lasts long enough to make Izzadin’s chest deflate as his mouth draws itself into a tight angry line. “Better Izzadin’s coin than mine!” shouts one of the merchants in the crowd heartily, and the laughter swells even more wild, the crowd unruly. The Roman centurion slowly lets his hand fall away from his sword, glancing at the faces in the crowd. For the first time, he is fearful. Finally, he understands where he is. Well played. As the crowd grows once again silent, Pilate’s man smiles evilly, dips his head in

short salute to Yeshua, then turns on his heel, and walks calmly away. The centurion dutifully follows. As Yeshua likewise turns to leave, Peter is watching his master with a look of unabashed iration while Judas still is tense as a scorpion, expectant. Judas has decided that a nearby butcher’s table under a sheet on sticks offers the best chance to snatch up a blade to fight with, should this all end badly for his master. He backs away as Yeshua turns, not willing yet to turn his back on the crowd, who reach out to touch Yeshua as he es. Izzadin calls out, craftily. “With whose authority do you speak, Rabbi?” “My Father’s authority!” Yeshua calls back sharply. “And who is your Father, then?” “Abrahim and the Father of Abrahim.” “You have two fathers?” Yeshua turns back to face Izzadin once more, to Judas’s discomfort. “And two mothers also!” Yeshua calls out. “My people who birthed me are one—” Yeshua points at the crowd, and as it happens, he points directly at me. I smile, for to see such an artist at work is a joy to behold. “And my other mother is the land of Judah.” Now he points to the ground. “Which birthed me also. You see, priest, I am no wretched orphan as you are.” The faces in the crowd grow solemn as many nod agreement with this; a fierce pride burns in their eyes. With this, Yeshua departs, with his disciples closely following, Judas finally turning his back to take up guarding his master’s rear. The silence is broken here and there by iration and by comments ing between those in the crowd who linger. The Christ es unmolested.

II. REBELLION

(SHAMAYIM TO GEHENNA)

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. —Catholic, traditional

9

Your funny little wars commence over dizzyingly diverse and rough-hewn concerns. You struggle over land, over paltry crab titles, over fuel from trees to oil to plutonium, over metals in the ground, or over some tin-plated crown, a kidnapped woman to be retrieved, a crab throne to be taken— trifles such as these. Our war did not begin for any such reasons. Ours began over a difference. Difference is a significant thing to us, who were all fashioned by your God to be of the same caste, the same essence, though not the same station; for you see, there is a hierarchy, and we are not all the same, in fact. Among us, difference arose once upon a time and came to severe disaffection. Disaffection turned to grave enmity, which came at the last to blows. In the old land of Shamayim, the realm of the sky god you worship, when I could suffer no more of Mikayel’s haughty offenses toward me, I struck him. He did not strike me in return as I’d expected him to. What he instead did to me was a most serious and unpleasant thing, something announcing to all that a war was commenced, a war that could only end in conquest for one and defeat for any who should oppose the one. He, in fact, did the worst thing any angel could possibly do to another. He drew his sword. What he drew against me, mind you, was that which your God had given to him. To draw it was indeed to declare war; to draw it upon me was to threaten me with God’s voice, for God had said to Mikayel in giving it, “This tongue of fire, Mikayel, shall be mine own tongue to speak from thy hand, to sing in battle. And it shall shout loud to beat down your enemies and mine.” Or words to that effect. When he drew the sacred tongue of God against me as though I were an odious and insubordinate slave, an outlander and enemy of him, our Master, of all

creation itself, when he had challenged me thus, the hosts of all Shamayim were stunned to stillness and were quiet. For a long startled moment that you crabs would experience as ten of your years, all watched and waited to see what effect this would have, to see what I would do. Therefore, I took it from him.

Ach! Enough! Herr Kommandant Reinert has just now ordered the battalion to make ready to march once more, as you yourself can hear; and still you scribble away, scratching out all I’ve said on your elegant purloined paper? My quarrel with Mikayel was, yes, quite significant among my tribe. You are quite correct to press me to continue; you are commendable. You must it, however, that war frustrates anything as contemplative as memoir, eh? Shell bursts and suppressing fire render one’s very body, as it renders the vocation of writing, a difficult one to practice. In that truism concerning human conflict lays the loss of much of the past. Your actions, your lives, and your memories ebb and vanish in the murky currents of history’s backwash, churned into froth and foam, becoming as lost as individual waves returning to a great collective puddle. If you must know, I was thinking just now that Ypres is so very near, tantalizingly near, to what the ancient Gauls knew as western Keltia. From here, I could hike across the ruined countryside to a place just north and west of Paris, where long ago I buried something precious, even though not precious to me. In fact, it is something more than a bit repugnant to me. It is an object needful to me nevertheless and enough so that I contemplate striking out on my own to retrieve it. And now I will confess to you, dear patient biographer, that the army’s journey through Europe to this near distance from the place I seek is the major cause of my ing the army and accompanying the battalion’s expedition. I give not a hang about the archduke, that’s certain enough! Nor did I ever believe in the myth of a war of liberation. As an invalid British poet of future renown, Siegfried Sassoon will soon say in an impertinent letter of protest to his commanding officer (a letter that he will write around 1917 or thereabouts, trust me), “This war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” Indeed, he is, and all of you are, naive to think any war is ever any different in its nature and its evolution! The last thing war is fought in the name of, I assure you from vast experience, is in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Don’t look so disappointed. I mean to say by that nothing more profound than that the battalion now journeys onward farther south toward Paris, while I must go west toward the Strait of Dover and the shores if I am to find what I seek for myself. It is time the army and I parted company. I will have to go AWOL, and I will have to journey behind French lines to get there. I am not without resources, even in this human body, for I have occupied this or that human body so often now that wearing flesh is the merest inconvenience for me now. I shall reach my goal by and by despite your armies. Certainly, you would not be so unwise as to follow me.

I walked, gracefully may I say, along a shady street in Princeton, New Jersey, a province (you call it a “state”) within your “United States” in the twentieth of your centuries. This day was my first fully incarnated walk on the earth. I was unused to wearing human flesh at this point. None of the other beings like me were as yet aware that an “earth” spun here, full of living beings, beside the small yellow sun you call Sol; but I had long suspected that such a place existed and that it was Anu’s secret preoccupation. After my confrontation with Mikayel, I had found cause to search the dimensions and had stumbled across it, marveling at it. My first visit to earth had been to the primordial period of the planet and to the realm of Adamas and Eva; but later, I’d wandered the planet in spirit form in the centuries after your so-called civilizations had formed and risen. In spirit, I’d spent five hundred of your years listening to you and watching you in Mesopotamia, in Nubia, and in Tenochtitlan, among others of your fledgling civilizations. This day, however, was my first carnal embodiment after my first travel through time iterations intended to reach a specific point in your “history.” I had not been certain my attempt to target such a small point in spacetime would be successful. Now that I was here, it felt awkward wearing the flesh of what I assumed to be a “professor.” I had appropriated the body as its owner had strolled across the Princeton University campus. He’d seemed studious for a crab. Tall and strong, he was forty or so of your years. He wore a brown suit made of what I later learned is called corduroy. He wore brown Oxford shoes. He was of a type and dress I surmised would cause the least alarm to him I intended to visit, him I had learned of while listening and watching. It had taken some time for me to learn to make this body walk and speak, to coordinate its limbs; but all went well as I approached the street I sought, turned onto it, breathing in a thousand olfactory sensations. A sentient being of small size, winged, with an exoskeleton, flew by my ear, causing me my first experience of a sensation you refer to as “disgust.” I made a quick flicking gesture; the winged thing burst into a small flame and dropped to the sidewalk, and I walked on.

Earth in its primordial period was a time when such disgusting pests predominated over all other life-forms. They had descended from the first reptiles to crawl from the sea of spiny and armor-plated fishes. Then had come avian animals from a different branch of reptile evolution, and thanks to Anu’s queer whims, those had become giant half-reptile, half-bird things you call dinosaurs. When those had died out, a new branch arose: countless monkey tribes populated the rain forests and more of the ugly insects. (What does Anu see in these? What purpose do they serve?) Well, despite the presence of insects in New Jersey, I enjoyed the cacophony of sensual dissonance. The autumn wind, the noise of automobile vehicles on the street, the singing of your cousins, birds. I suspected that I could likely reiterate all of this, replay any of these moments over and over again at will. Of course, I would someday walk in Judea and see the Christ and would then learn that a being of my kind can observe the life of the Son only once, with no shadows or reiterations of that particular life ever to be found. All else is subject to repeat viewing, though not events surrounding the Christ. Those are the rules, and that is that. Part of “the plan,” of course. I walked by a large white seabird, which had frozen in the middle of the sidewalk staring at me, startled by my approach. Despite being a scavenger, he was regal looking and regal in his behavior. I could respect that in him: a lowly scavenger with haughty pretensions. I stepped around the fellow, hearing it squawk in distress at my age. A little farther and ing a large dwelling, I saw a man dressed much like my host body, carrying a box of foodstuffs from his open ground vehicle to his residence. A sleek blue-feathered bird shot out of the branches of a tree overhanging the vehicle, shooting by me, then off into the sky, screeching wildly. I had proven that angels can traverse infinite shadows and iterations of time and space at will. I was about to visit one of you crabs whom I knew would in the eons to be well-known to the hosts of heaven. I had learned to walk this body easily; and having seized the “tongue of God” (did I not say your God is poetic?), having reed Mikayel’s declaration of war, and having learned to walk time at will, I had far exceeded the limitations Anu had misled us all into thinking were our bounds and our limits. I arrived where the one I sought was said to reside: 112 Mercer Street. I stood in front of a plain two-story dwelling and peered over unkempt hedges at clapboard

walls and green shutters. Strangely, the dark doorway lay open to the sun and wind. Farther up the street, I saw the figure of a short large-headed gray old man in a thin sweater walking in his stockinged feet. He wore baggy flannel pants, his open sweater whipping in the breeze. I caught up to him, and he walked on, looking straight ahead. I fell into slow step beside him, treading silence. Then he spoke. “I am not in. Come back at a later time, please.” “I see that you are not in, Herr Professor. You are walking the streets and barefoot at that.” He stopped and looked down. “You are correct. It seems I’ve no shoes.” “Shall we return to your dwelling?” “No.” He buttoned his sweater and walked on. I followed. I felt a ghostly tingling along the thigh of my human body. In my spirit form, I wore the tongue. The power of the thing is considerable: I felt its presence even though I had taken alien form. It becomes a part of whatever being dares wear it. To be truthful, the eeriness of it disturbed me. No wonder Mikayel had seemed half-batty much of the time. When we reached a corner, the old man hesitated, as if about to cross, but instead turned right, continuing along an intersecting avenue. He smiled and waved at children playing on the lawn before one of the dwellings we ed. He chuckled. We went in silence for a time before he spoke again. “I suppose you’ve questions about relativity,” he sighed. “About your unified field theory.”

He stopped and looked up at me for the first time. “Ach. Now you’ve interested me. You want to know … ?” “Of your thoughts concerning the gravitational force.” He walked again. “You have the look of a visiting scholar. Are you visiting at Princeton?” “I just came from there.” “You are a physicist?” “A most ardent one,” I answered. “What do you wish to ask?” “By what notion do you propose to unify the gravitational force and other prime forces?” He smiled quite warmly upon me. “So,” he said in English, “you wish to keep speaking in German?” “Your native language is far more precise than English, is it not?” “But English is more subtle when one speaks conceptually. Besides, your German is strangely accented—you sound Armenian or Greek.” One day, of course, I would be talking to Archimedes. A Greek, who would tell me I sounded Numidian. No matter. I switched to English. “What is your idea of how gravity can be reconciled with the other prime forces?” “There now, you see? In English, your question has a crucially different nuance, more fitting to a discussion of theory, doesn’t it?” I had to it he was correct. “And so,” he went on, “I will answer you by saying, the gravitational effect.

Gravity is in fact not a force, but an effect of warped three-dimensional space, a curvature in spacetime. Combine Maxwell’s electromagnetism with that effect, and you unify the fundamental forces.” We came to a “bus vehicle” stopping place with a wooden seat for public use. He sat and looked up at me until I realized he expected me to sit beside him. “You don’t mind sitting on the bench, do you?” “Bench?” “This. A bench. Funny, I might also take you for a Canadian with your accent. Are you German?” “No, I am neither German nor Canadian nor Armenian.” “Do you mind?” I sat. “Should I mind?” I asked. “Should I be barefoot?” “It matters not to me, Herr Professor, the state of your feet. Bench, you say?” Shaking his head as if saying what fools we both were, he took a wax-coated paper wrapping containing a wedge of breadstuff from his sweater pocket and sat it upon the bench between us. He reached and removed his socks. “Herr Professor, your theory is naive.” “Unification, you mean.” “Ja, Ja, Aussehen. There are other forces besides electromagnetism and gravity.” He rubbed first one, then the other of his feet. “Weak and strong, Ja? Gravity, as I said, is not a force, mein kinder.” “Vergib, mir, Herr Professor, sorry. The point is that you ignore the weak and strong forces, not to mention twelve others.”

“Twelve? What are you talking? I have treated the weak and strong nuclear forces quite adequately, but it is the Copenhagen Group you’ve been reading, then?” “Subatomic forces, Professor, the realm of the Planck length. These must be included in your theory of unification.” “Nein, das ist dummheit, mein kinder.” Apparently, he felt German more appropriate to express his irritation. He put his socks, which were rather thick ones, back on; and he continued. “Planck, Bohr, Ja, okay. They make some sense. I no longer speak with Max, but —” “I can tell you that Max Planck misses you, Professor.” He glared at me a moment suspiciously, then said, “Ja. But mit der twelve forces? You are talking like that meshuga Heisenberg. He is a friend, but like Max, he has schmutz on his face because God does not play dice with the universe!” “Is Yiddish the language to use when dismissing Heisenberg’s insights?” He stared at me a moment, then in German said, “Gott wird nicht wiedergegeben Würfel!” “God might ‘play’ at more than you know, including dice, Herr Professor. And there are at least twenty so-called fundamental forces, but it makes little sense to say ‘fundamental’ as if they were final, ultimate. By the same token, there are no ‘elementary’ particles—” “Nonsense! Did you take your physics degree in Bohemia? There is the cosmological constant. All things have a fundamental end.” “Bohemia. Yes, your three semesters awkwardly teaching in Prague yielded very little toward understanding gravity, Nein?” “How do you know so much about me?”

“Have you a writer of a … eine Schreibenssache?” “A ‘writing thing’? Do you mean a fountain pen? I have a pencil … einen Bleistift. Your German is odd indeed, like your accent und your cock-eyed ideas.” He reached into his pocket to withdraw a yellow wooden stick with a vein of graphite extruding from its center. The graphite had a sharp point. A “writing thing,” just as I had said. I did not bother to quibble with his idea of German. It was, after all, his own crab language. I am not without a sense of grace. No pun intended. I took the writing stick from him and inscribed the symbols of the formula upon the frayed wood surface of the “bench.”

“Mein Gott, ist … That is my field equation. How did you—I mean, this formula is not widely known. Only a handful of people can …” “Here is your problem, Herr Professor. The Ricci curvature tensor is acceptable. The scalar curvature here is vague, but tolerable. Likewise, your metric tensor and reference frames …” “Vague?” He was indignant. “Vague by necessity. I wouldn’t expect you to do very well with resolving reality with the limitation you all have with transformations in only three to four frames of reference. There are many more than that.” “Three seems to do, young man. We live in three plus time.” “Yes, you all do, so I won’t fuss over it … But your conception of the motion of matter, that is the problem. You assume the motion of matter is isotropic, that its momentum is uniform in—” “In all directions, Ja. I know what ‘isotropic’ means, and matter is indeed isotropic.” “Nein,” I chastised him. I scratched new symbols upon the wood. “See here? The motion of matter is in fact infinitely variable and infinitely differentiated, not subject to cancellation. The Planck mass can be represented thus and here Planck energies. Your problem lies there, in your spacetime metric.” “Ach, you’ve an elegant little formula there. But for what you say to be so, the universe would have to be expanding und accelerating. All forces would have to be infinite and infinitely varying, no basis whatever for relative measure!” He took the pencil from me and put it back into his pocket. Though it was a gentle-enough gesture, it nonetheless communicated his closing the subject and signaled his closed-mindedness about these matters. “I tell you, Kinder, all things have an end.”

“What would this end be, Herr Professor? Ist Gott?” “Ja, ja. You may name it God, if you wish.” “Very well. May I ask a question about God?” He pulled his socks up and turned to me, waiting, this deceptively disheveled, steel-willed old man. “What is your God made of?” I asked. He smiled, all anger and stubbornness gone. He handed me the foodstuff. He gestured, then nodded, indicating that I ought to eat it. I unwrapped and inspected it. “That is an interesting question!” he exclaimed. “If God existed, he would likely be made of light.” “Why so, Herr Professor?” “Light is the universal constant. You, a dupe of Herr Heisenberg, will reject my saying so. For you see my theory of relativity as a mere attempt to imagine a universally privileged position from which to view the creation: riding on a beam of light. No?” “I simply challenge your assumptions. What if you ride a beam of light, and I ride past you going in the opposite direction on a second beam of light, another God if you wish? We would view two different spacetime coordinate systems, yours and mine, framed by a universe we witness being yet a third or maybe a fourth since you would witness something I wouldn’t and vice versa. The fifth would be the universe neither of us sees, the so-called real one …” “Ah, vey. As many universes as there are witnesses, eh?” “Ja, Herr Professor!” He squinted at me, then looked away, studying his own feet. “True, Professor, your theories work on a practical level, as Leo Szilard once warned you before even you knew it. They work practically to yield nuclear

explosions …” “You mean atomic implosions. And yes, I argued that not enough energy could be put into an atomic reaction and get a sufficient amount out to make “E = mc²” practical in that way. But Leo saw that accelerating alpha particles and electrons was not enough. Alpha—” “Alpha particles carry positive electric charge. The nucleus has a positive charge, so they repel. Szilard reasoned instead that the neutron, with no charge, could split a nucleus. He also reasoned that a dividing nucleus would not only release energy, but that each divided portion would also divide. And those others would, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, so on.” “The ‘chain reaction,’ yes.” He stared at me quite wonderingly now. “Who did you say you were again? Where did you study?” “I didn’t say,” I answered. “You said you were a physicist. You must be.” “I am merely a devoted amateur.” “I suspect that to be a deliberate understatement, if not a bald-headed lie.” “I am pointing out to you that you have been wrong because you have failed in the past to see the full implications of your ideas.” “Leo demanded I help make a bomb! A fission bomb!” “You agreed to write to your presiding executive to urge him to build one here in your adopted Union of States.” “You mean United States.” “Yes.” “I wrote to warn of it. But I refused to help to make this thing with my own hands, not for the purpose of war, as Szilard and Fermi certainly were working toward and as Oppenheimer actually did! A bomb that creates a chain reaction within the nucleus is what resulted. It is evil. Once was defeated, the

work at Los Alamos still went on. It still went on! It was dropped on Japan and should not have been.” “Evil? A mere device? Does your God tell you this?” One of his eyes narrowed. “That is the second time, young man, that you called God my God.” “I see God that way.” “You see him as mine exclusively?” “I—” “You wouldn’t mean ‘your’ as in me and other persons? You too are a person.” I regarded him and his sly narrowed eye. “So you must mean me and other theists. You are an atheist, Ja?” “Your God calls a mere device evil, Herr Professor?” He sighed. “Ja, a device that yielded up the power of God, Deus ex machina,” he muttered. “Leo finally agreed. He called for a warning to be sent to the Japanese, but this was rejected by the president. Japanese civilians were murdered.” “C’est la guerre.” “That is the problem, war. It makes potato merchants of scientists. My friend Fritz Haber invented a poison gas used on the battlefield during WWI! Science mustn’t be used in such ways.” Perhaps he was right. Who was I, an angel, to disagree with him, a man, about his human idea of morality? I tasted the foodstuff, meaning I ground it up inside my mouth with the incisors and molars of my host body. Some sort of dead animal flesh (ironic, considering the human preoccupation with morality, to kill fellow animals and eat them!) between two wedges of breadstuff. It had a peculiar “taste” of ground and emulsified mustard seed.

“I meant to say ‘nuclear,’” I said, “because—” “Don’t talk with food in your mouth, Mein Kinder.” I stared at him. “Swallow, my boy.” I did, and I felt a definite discomfort as the lump of masticated food sank from my mouth to my throat to my stomach, where it sat, leaden and discomfiting. I scowled and went on saying, “I meant to say ‘nuclear’ because the nucleus of the atom is composed of infinitely smaller particles. Your special theory of relativity works. It blows matter to bits …” He grew calm now and sad. “Yes, that it does,” he whispered. “I recognize your regrets, Herr Professor, though you suffer needless guilt. You decided, and you acted. Why feel regret?” “Because I also feel responsibility.” I paused for a respectable few seconds to give him the impression that I felt sympathy for his remorse. It served my purpose for him to calm himself. When I felt he had, I continued, more delicately. “Your special theory of relativity, from your 1905 article, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,’ that led you to the general theory in 1916, that theory, the general theory in which you raised the effect of gravitation on space and time, is unfortunately naive. Spacetime cannot for infinity. You wish to limit the creation.” “Not at all. I wish merely to define it.” He sighed. “To define it is to limit it,” I responded. “Ah, there you go again. Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, that kvetch. God is the beam of light you ride and that I ride as well. Going opposite directions, Ja, but both are the same beam of light.” Now … there was a notion!

The old man did not know it, but in saying it, he had leaped beyond even his own assumptions and limitations. It was too soon in his human history for him to see all that this notion implied. Mandelbrot and his set theory were yet unknown to the old man, for Mandelbrot was at this point a child. I could have told him many things. About Niels Bohr’s and Schrödinger’s analyses of the Copenhagen interpretation, about Higgs bosons, Yukawa couplings, string theory, and complex ten-dimensional field equations that made the four-dimensional equations of his general theory of relativity look juvenile. I decided not to disturb him unnecessarily, as he would be dead in a few months, in April of 1955. Why trouble this old man’s last days? Yet I needed one more question answered. “What moves faster than light?” “Nothing.” “If I ride a beam of light and you ride one just ahead of me, one light-year ahead in fact, and I shine a beam flash of light at you, what happens?” “Nothing. The beam of light you shine—you mean from a flashlight?—cannot overtake me. Nor can it move one iota from your flashlight.” “Then how do we know that the distance between us is one light-year?” “We cannot know. We can only surmise.” “Is that proof of Heisenberg’s premise?” He stared at me. Then he glared. He dropped his head, then shook it slowly. Finally, he raised his head and smiled. “Very, very good, Mein Kinder. I shall have to think about that one. But now why don’t you ask me what you really wish to ask?” It was my turn to stare. “I imagine you wish to know how to battle God.” I stared some more.

“Oh, I have lately anticipated you or someone like you coming to visit. Do you imagine that I do not know there are things in the universe I cannot for? It seems you think you are making me it my shortsightedness, but I already know the flaws of my own thinking, I assure you. Those flaws are likely why I fail to find a unified field. Yes, I reject uncertainty because it is repugnant to me. That does not mean I deny its existence. You are uncertainty, are you not? You are what Heisenberg and his lot is interested in. You are the infinite that God limits. You are Hilbert’s excluded middle, the liar’s paradox in the flesh.” “You are saying I am a liar.” “I am saying that you are the liar who says he is lying.” “If I am a liar, then I cannot tell the truth, but if I say I am lying …” “The great deceiver. Aristotle’s nightmare. You are the probabilistic root of socalled quantum elimination of deterministic causality.” Perhaps, I mused, you humans would be better off that this one would soon die because he was an altogether dangerous monkey—dangerous indeed. I ired that. “You wish to be free of control,” he said. “Can I not be so?” “No,” he said. He removed his bifocals and polished the lenses with a starched white kerchief taken from his pants pocket. “You cannot,” he added, “for free action is not uncaused action.” “In other words, God is the source even of freedom from God.” “If you wish.” He put the bifocals back on and peered at me closely. “But you agree with Herr Schrödinger in his objection to myself, Podolsky, and Rosen, Ja? You think that the existence of higher dimensions, which I can imagine even if I don’t accept them, eliminates determinism, Ja?” “Of course,” I said quietly, watching him settle back on the bench, as if he had made up his mind about something, about me. He spoke again.

“Intuition determines reality, not absolute measure? Probabilities, uncertainty … you see these things as freedom?” “Yes!” I bellowed at him. He paused, rubbed his jaw, and smiled. “I may be addled and old, but my hearing is fine. The sandwich, do you like it?” I was quite annoyed now. “Yes,” I said curtly. “But to the matter now.” I squeezed the remains of the sandwich and of the wax paper into a tight greasy ball, then tossed it away. “Yes, to the matter. Why should I answer your question?” “Because if you do not, I shall twist your arms from their roots, crush your face, and leave your head sitting on this wooden couch, Herr Professor.” “Oh my. I suppose I had better answer you, then.” I waited. “Light, young man—if you are indeed a man, which I suspect Aristotle would suspect you are not—can be diffracted, reflected, refracted, diffused …” I rose from the “bench,” bowed curtly to the old man, and turned to walk away. I had what I wanted. “One moment, sir.” I turned to look back to see his brow drawn into a tense wrinkle of deliberation. “Is this God specular, or is he diffuse?” he asked me. “Why?” He looked at me, shading his eyes. “Were he specular,” the old man said, “were he indeed a beam of light, you might have fhope for rebellion, as it were. If he is diffuse, then he is everywhere, and you perhaps will never defeat him. I’m sure your illusions revolve around such a scenario, Ja?”

“I am no illusion, Herr Professor.” “Obviously. Yet anyone who ever tried to use Gott to explain the universe reasons from their own existence to some Gott or other. Grant me that?” “I’ll grant you that, but as I said—” “Ja, Ja, you are real. That does not mean your Gott is real, or if real, that he is what everyone wants to believe or even what you yourself wish him to be. I have long wondered if Gott is indeed every photon particle that makes up the beam of light. Everywhere at once, such a Gott would be.” “Yes?” “In fact, an interesting thought experiment: even were he specular, one might only succeed, by opposing him, in making him isotropic, diffuse, and thus the more pervasive.” He chuckled. Irritated, I left the old man there on his bench smiling in the warmth of the sun and walked several blocks before I jettisoned the body I’d obtained. Out of spite, I left it not as I had found it, but dead on the New Jersey sidewalk.

None but me, I believed, even suspected this in the infinity of time before us your God would be creating you. Perhaps Mikayel suspected. After all, he was now your God’s favorite and obviously privy to things that I no longer was. But then, if he now had God’s ear, I now had Mikayel’s sword and thus had God’s tongue. An amusing pun, no? First, I rallied those who were with me. I drew the sword for all to see and to know I had taken it and that if I could take this from the archangel, then the archangel could be defeated. I told those one-third who were with me that I had uncovered a secret, that the Lord of creation intended to replace us in his graces with a race of hairless monkeys, that the hot cinder that was a still forming earth was in fact soon to be made ready, as I’d gone forward in time to witness, for the beings who would replace us. I told them of the one monkey I’d spoken to, the old “man,” who without question would exist someday and whose brain would one day be filled with the macrocosmos, whose thoughts would penetrate even to our genuine microcosmic world among the atoms, positrons, and quarks of true existence. I led them to believe that all monkeys would be as like unto an angel as this one. If I am known as the “grand deceiver,” it was this lie told to the hosts of heaven that won me the name. The thought of this set them on edge, that Anu (for that is what we once called your God) would recklessly create a whole new race of angels, of nearomnipotent beings without even an “if you don’t mind” from us! It sent a ripple of rage through the hosts of Shamayim; even those who stood with Mikayel were filled with despair by this news; for none but Gabryel, Mikayel, and I had in those days the power of travel through the spacetime and shadows of the macrocosmos. They all wished to see what I had seen. It was Yazad, ašo Zartošt, and myself who spoke parley under a truce to Gabryel, Mikayel, and Obatala (for she had not yet decided to my rebellion). All the hosts were gathered, there silent and expectant to listen in the wastes outside of Shamayim, out of the direct sight of Anu, to hear the truth from God’s most favored himself.

“Yes,” said Mikayel. “Anu, the Lord of Hosts, shall make him a new life, a ‘man’ and a ‘woman.’ When that life has come, we shall be shepherds!” The upset rolled through the hosts like wind through wheat (although there was no wind or wheat yet; the image is meant just for you, dear crab). Even the twothirds with Mikayel were upset. He addressed his own there in that moment. “The Lord thy God will do as he knows best for thee!” (Yes, Elizabethan English is tedious and not spiritually accurate, but it is the closest thing you could conceive to the accents of angels. So I say why not? This is my tale. I shall tell it in the voices I wish to!) “Say thou!” Yazad taunted in return. “Say I, and we shall serve him! We art made to serve!” “Thou art made to serve,” Yazad said. “We were made to follow you. We were made to reflect our glory unto thine own worthless pride!” Her harsh words caused outrage to rumble across the ranks of the two-thirds. In ten of your years, the noise fell, and Mikayel spoke again. “Thou art meant to obey, Yazad!” “Make me!” shouted my beloved Yazad. “Beware the wrath of thy God!” “What wilt thou do? Draw thy sword?” If you have never heard the laughter of angels, you do not know what euphoria is. Jubilation, elation, and ecstasy. Across the Planck length of eternity, the heavens glowed and quivered with the mocking laughter of three-thirds of the hosts of heaven. All of the angels rained their derision down upon Mikayel, and their voices caused a bright, golden glow throughout Shamayim. The parley ended.

Shamayim—which you might call the spaces between intermittent beams of light, the subatomic distances, or the surface of a muon particle, or all of these— was astir with outrage over what I’d done, even as their iration for what I’d taken from Mikayel still sat upon their tongues. The two-thirds ired my strength, but they did the practical thing, and they decided to put me down. By then, though, my troops were trussed for battle. I led them against the archangel, and for one million of your “years,” we contended. War raged across the first three of the ten levels of creation and within the precincts of each of the three levels. With Mikayel’s sword, I cut down many thousands with my own hand. My troops did more damage than they took, and several times, the war seemed within my grasp to win.

We would one day be given and be known by many names, we angels, and upon us would be founded by man and woman many religions. Of all the angels, Yazad, “she of divine power,” sister angel to Yofiel, “she of divine beauty,” was most dear to me and was my beloved. Yazad would in the fullness of time become a cherished spirit in the pantheon of Zoroastrian beliefs and a martyr to human women warriors. Those of my number, the one-third, would later in the swirl of eternity be known by humanity under many identities: Ahura Mazda, Ahriman, Hormuzd, Meher, RaŠne, Behram the Lovely, Astad, Aneram (mother of the Fifth Cosmos), Amardād, Zarathustra the Great—all of them my battle commanders. My general was ašo Zartošt. My lieutenants were Chu Jung, Kuan Ti, Han Hsiang-Tzu, Kukulkan, and Quetzalcoatl. My captains were Obatala and Yamenya the Beauteous and many others, all closest to me. But none closer than my beloved. During a thousand-year lull in the battle, she came upon me as I stood deliberating. I stood upon what you would call a Higgs boson. I favored bosons because of their zero spin, their existence verging upon nonexistence, and their identity as your God’s fundamental material for giving mass to matter. I had for a time suspected, in fact, that the photonic boson was the elementary particle that made up Anu himself; and the old man in Princeton had, to my mind, confirmed my suspicion. My conversation with the old man had pricked such thoughts even though the man himself could scarcely imagine the fullness of all he had told me, for he could not allow himself to imagine where I stood right now. She had to dampen her momentum as she came careening off an antimuon and had to bring her inertia to stillness in order to alight beside me. She glowed with the positive bremsstrahlung radiation of the muon she’d ridden. It was lovely on her and how fitting, the old man’s nemesis, Fermi would no doubt say, that bremsstrahlung radiation is a breaking radiation, a deceleration radiation, at least in the limited perception of the old man’s fellows. This is what allowed her to launch herself to me. My thoughts went

automatically to the old man because I’d not yet spoken to any other crabs and had not yet seen or spoken to Nikola Tesla, who, long before Bohr, would imagine all that surrounded me here in the real world. “You waste your time here!” Yazad rebuked me. “I am in thought.” “You start a war across the cosmos. And while we fight, you float upon this particle, thinking?” “Beloved, this is not the cosmos. This is a small slice of the infinity and is actually a metaverse within a greater cosmos, where the earth is now being formed. That is the cosmos. Not we.” “The earth lives in but a shadow universe, a reflection of our genuine universe. All know this.” “They are wrong. They know not the full extent of Anu’s creation. Man and woman will be his greatest making, for they alone shall learn to have imagination enough to know even of the existence of this particle upon which we ride.” “Really.” “I speak not to deceive you.” “Then even a broken quark tells true once or twice an epoch.” “Man will create machines that will send the particles upon which we all ride crashing into one another.” “Machine. What is that?” “It is a making, a fabrication of matter imitating mind and matter, which amplifies both. It is a making that will do things and that will make human will come into being.” “Like Anu?”

“No, not like Anu. But they will have Anu’s spark to make what they think come to be, and they will split these particles we stand upon to release the energy of the creation itself.” “Meanwhile, we have a war to win.” I looked long at her. “We shall certainly lose,” I said simply. “No! We shall prevail! Anu has not intervened to help Mikayel! You have the tongue of God. His troops are growing sick at heart with the slaughter. We—” “We shall lose, beloved. Our troops haven’t the necessary ion. They win battles, yet they shall not win this war. Mikayel bides his time and waits for our side to tire. Anu knows it, which is why he does not intervene. We amuse him. Or worse, he pays us no mind. He is not even here. He perhaps is there, in his new cosmos, shaping his creation, earth, and cares not what we his children do. For he prepares new children more to his liking.” “The monkeys of which you so often speak?” “Yes, the crabs of whom I have told.” “Then surely we are lost.” “If only I could understand the plan.” “Why? Do you hate him, or do you envy him and merely wish to be as he is?” “I do not hate him that created me. I reject his tyranny. You more than any other living spirit should know my heart in this.” “I thought I knew thy heart, yet here thou doth stand in safe remove to contemplate defeat.” “I neither hate him, nor do I want to be him.” “Who is it thou doth wish to be, then, light bringer?” I ignored her sarcasm and thought of the old man sitting in the “sun,” smiling. I thought of something about him that I could honestly say I did indeed envy.

His innocence.

10

She finally gave up and left me to my peevish thoughts. She knew me well. I had little confidence in my troops. I had less confidence in my cause. Indeed, I had no cause. I’d not have begun this folly, this hopeless rebellion, if not for pride, if not for the exasperating Mikayel. He had taunted me and goaded me too often, and I had finally indulged my contempt for him. In small steps, he had slowly replaced me in Anu’s heart. Yes, I constantly speak of “your God” with disdain, but I will enlighten you in a thing if you are not a keen-enough listener to have already deduced it. I was aware that in truth, not all of what had happened between Mikayel and myself had been Mikayel’s fault. If I am a deceiver, yet I do not deceive myself. This quality in the old man is one that had gained my regard enough that I would not really have crushed his face as I’d threatened had he not told me what I wanted to hear. I would have killed him much less painfully than that. Once upon a time, your God had been Anu to me and to the others. There had been only we the angels and only the real world he had created when he created us, the first cosmos, which, I’m afraid, you would be more likely to call a void. Our real world was the cosmos of what you regard as the small, your so-called subatomic dimension. However, to us, you are not so much in a larger place as you are in a fractal vector of our world, a branching off or, if you will, a blister on the skin of reality. Anu created our reality before any other, and we were first in Anu’s heart. There had come a time, though, when his infinite thoughts had wandered, when, dissatisfied, he had left us. He’d grown bored with what he had created, had risen to “higher” dimensions, and had made newer worlds, which were successively “larger” worlds of greater and greater fractal vectors: branches and twigs upon a tree, and we the forgotten roots. He had left us alone many times as he went off to build these newer worlds without us. We had felt the emptiness of everything he’d first made for us, the emptiness inside ourselves because he had left us more utterly alone than you could ever imagine, being shell bounds who have never known what it is to

dwell in his grace and radiance. Yes, we had turned on each other, some of us. As for myself, well, over some eons, I had grown sour about things. As your fourth dimension, “time,” unfolded, I grew from my ordinarily charming, roguish self, from an irrepressible prodigy into a being, at least in the eyes of the angels, something like the myth you know me as. My Father no longer adored me. I became what you think of me: the mold of evil, or so you say. Much of that, as I hope you have seen from this, my memoir, is simply bad publicity. I certainly did at least become the sculpture of revolt. On one occasion, during one of his increasingly infrequent visitations with us, he suddenly announced that we were no longer to call him our Anu. From thence unto eternity, he was to be called instead I Am. Even Mikayel had been perplexed by this. “What does that mean, Lord?” he asked. “I Am that I Am,” came the laconic reply from Anu. Of course. Why hadn’t we thought of that? He is that he is. Sophistry in great ones must not unwatched go. Your entire universe, a bubble on the skin of my cosmos, was created. Earth and you crabs were created. He separated light from darkness (“light” and “darkness” being two things your crab senses fool you in so that you believe them truly to be two separate things), and by the time your history had commenced and gone not far from its genesis, my Anu had become your God. Yours now, mine no longer. No, not all of this had been Mikayel’s fault. I concentrated and set spinning the boson upon which I crouched. I rode it through the blackness of my realm, headed for the very edge of my cosmos. My thoughts were with those fighting on my behalf, yet I did not intend to them in the latest battle to which Yazad had sped off. I could not bring myself to lead the fighting nor even to witness it anymore. Those souls being slaughtered in the war would, of course, not disappear.

Quintessence (what in your realm of electrons and such you call “energy”) can neither be created nor destroyed, at least not by us, and neither can the stuff of us be destroyed. Quintessence changes form, and so we change form, merely. Each spirit “killed” in the war became a purer form of quintessence, became dispersed, voltaic in nature, and unfortunately devoid of consciousness. In that sense, it was a great deal like your word “death” when we would be cut down and dispersed in spiritual battle and thus cease to be sentient, no longer be coherent (die). For spirits that go on existing without individuation is all we know to be possible once dispersed. When the war had begun and casualties mounted, Gabryel had speculated, during a brief truce and lull for negotiations, that those who were dispersed were returning to God and were returning to the source of all quintessence and of all matter and energy. For her part, my beloved believed that dispersed souls would be reintegrated and would return as new spirits eventually. I held hers to be the more optimistic and therefore the more improbable theory. “If you won’t lead your troops, then I shall!” she had shouted before leaving me there upon my boson. When she left, she ed through me in a flash of spirit essence, so fast I could not know her course. She thrust herself through me and out the other side of me and bolted upward through the darkness and mass producing resistance of the Higgs field around us, into and through higher realms, and I was too shaken by the resonance wave of her violent age to follow her direction. She was gone. I hurtled upward, on a vector through the progressive frames of mass swelling Higgs medium, into Hilbert space, and back into your spacetime. Here, eons had already ed since the war had begun. The earth had progressed from a glowing cinder to a lush blue-and-green orb teeming with precrab life. I shot forward in time, looked down at even more lush sights, and saw that now primitive life had begun. I gazed at the living magnificence of it and, despite myself, had to ire your God’s creativity.

I had seen primordial earth before, of course, but this particular place seemed strangely familiar. There were endless plants, trees, and scuttling reptiles congregating in the loam and moss. Countless living things of every color and kind populated a forest floor and, of course, the disgusting insect things. Beside the forest was a steaming ocean whose waves lapped upon white shores, your kind of place, my dear. That lush garden-like forest beside the beach was bright, glowing with moisture from a recent rain. Frantic birdcalls echoed from the forest. No, it was not birds, but the screeching of monkeys. This dimensional vector of yours, I always had to accept when I was here, was a place of great movement and color and scope, which could only be real because of the fourth-dimensional concept of time, a thing that for all practical purposes does not exist in my own realm—the realm of angels, the realm of zero dimension. “Zero point,” the old man in Princeton would one day call it. Nullpunkt, he would name it along with his associate Otto Stern. Your paltry crab scientists speculate all sorts of things about it, as the source of what they call “dark matter” and “dark energy.” What it is actually is the true source of your so-called nuclear energy, the energy of the creation—in fact, the energy that is released when you awkwardly send protons and neutrons in your atomic accelerator machines colliding into one another to release quarks and create bosons that exist for only fractions of your seconds. I hail you for this much, however, that you can manage even for nanoseconds to reach from your dimension into mine and steal fire. My child, how thou doth take thy pattern after me! Other dimensions are really, as I’ve told you, fractals to me and my kind. A “fractal” is a dimension made up of smaller dimensions exactly like it, like the plant matter you call “broccoli.” I am convinced that broccoli, which is a perfect fractal, is your God’s little joke: broccoli is made up of tiny broccolis. That is a fractal. That is how we see you, as a fractal version of our own world. To you, we are the smaller realm; but to us, you are. I was walking once again on earth, in sand between the sea and the forest where

monkeys shrieked. My spirit body left no imprints; my age left not even a stirring in the air. Nothing in that forest could see or sense me, though I could sense the rich assortment of things that crawled, slithered, flew, and hopped about among the trees, lichen, and foliage there. I looked out at the dazzle of the sky and sea, the wonder of three dimensions— primitive, yet so striking. So many things about this primordial dimension were engaging. If I were the artist your God is, I thought to myself, I would want to do this very sort of thing. From where you are now, in this universe he made just for you, new dimensions are achieved when you take a point (a zero dimension) and drag it in a new direction to make a line (one dimension). Take that line and drag it in a new direction, at a right angle to itself, you make a square (two dimensions); and if you drag that square at right angles to itself, it becomes a cube (three dimensions). The omniverse (all of his universes taken together) may be compared to the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Yes. I think that is a very clever way of conveying a very complex thing in a simple way, do you agree? Suddenly, the waterspout from a whale shot skyward far off shore near the horizon. The sun was sinking into a hazy orange death into the primordially thick, warm blue-green sea. In a short time, night would be falling here. And then I felt him. He has no sense of etiquette, you know. His comportment is that of a paternal bad-tempered boor. If he is very disaffected, he can turn suddenly from boor to bully to lout. He will come upon you; and without so much as a warning or ‘ciao’, he is within you, about you, and penetrating you with—his “voice” (such is but a word of yours, mind you, which cannot denote something far more forceful and more overwhelming than a voice, though “voice” in its essence is a word that captures the way in which his personality and his own unique idiosyncrasies permeate you when he “speaks”). What doeth thou here? How irritating, I thought. “I am taking a walk here, Lord.” I have not called thee here.

“I assumed you would be lonely. It has been countless units of luminal decay since you left us.” And since I left, you have warred among you. What was I to do? Deny it? “Yes, Lord.” I have felt the dispersals. The spent spirits are returning to me. I feel each one as an ending, and I do not like that. I did not create you to war among yourselves. “What did you create us for, Lord?” “I created you to serve.” I spun round to face where I’d felt the new voice come from. It was not a projected wave of force but was a real—a human voice, a voice I knew, but not Anu’s voice. When I wheeled about, what I saw was the wrong face, which actually should have been no face at all. But here was a face, and one I knew. The old man from Princeton. “Why do you insist on seeking to make your own ways, you and all the rest? How did I fail you all?” He wore the same sweater and baggy pants he’d worn when I’d sat upon the bench with him. No, not him; that had been the real old man I’d sat with. This was not he. “No, I am not him, at least not at this moment. You seem comfortable with him, so I take a form that seems to content you.” He knows my thoughts. “Yes, I know them, as always. Answer me.” He walked by me, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants, and paced along the sand. I noticed that he was barefoot. I followed. Why not? At the very least, it would not be boring.

“I did not think you had failed, Lord. Except with me.” “You may be correct.” I ignored that. I walked beside him, looking out at the primordial ocean. I looked back at him in his sweater and baggy pants. “Why would you think I find that particular form comfortable, Lord Iyam?” I asked. “Do not call me that unless you mean it, Lucis. Call me what you all call me when I am away. Call me Anu, though at least the others mean it with affection. As for you, it is an insult when you say it. Insult me to my face.” “You have no face, Lord.” He stopped beside a dead log that lay in the sand and sat upon it. I stood there, watching him. “This is my face,” he said. “Your face is my face. All like you, all living things, that sky, the planets, the electrons, photons, and other dross and flotsam you ride about upon—all are the faces of me. I am the beam of light, and I am every particle that makes the beam of light.” This was unsettling. It confirmed things the old man had made me fear were true. “Surely you no longer call my face yours, Lord?” He reached to rub his bare feet, then glanced up at me. “You change subjects to distract me from what you are thinking. I am what you fear, yes. And fear me you should, for I am your creator. But now will you not sit? Is this not to your liking, Lucis? Would you rather we sat upon a ‘bench’?” I sat on the log beside him. “Open your heart to me,” he said. What point? You already know what thoughts I think. “That is not what I am asking. I am asking you to speak, not think. Speak your

heart.” “You still call me Lucis, but it is Mikayel you favor. Call me what you call me to Mikayel. Call me Satan.” “So be it, Satan.” “You cherish him.” “Mikayel is dutiful.” “And adoring.” “And was created to be.” “I disappoint you because I am not.” “You were not created to adore me.” I stared at him. “We all were created to ‘serve,’ as you said. You really mean to worship—” He stood abruptly and walked away from me, calling back over his shoulder. “You, Satan, were created to do otherwise. You are the first of your kind to learn how to follow me here. You will find that you can fold the shadows of time and of space and walk anywhere you wish within my creations, any of the infinite dimensions of them, as you were meant to. Do you not understand why you have this power?” He stopped at the edge of the waters, still with his back to me. “Power?” I spoke to his back. “I am nothing more than your underling.” “Do not provoke my anger with foolishness, light bringer.” His voice had become hoary and harsh, like a solid wall around us both for that instant, as if he were there and yet everywhere; then it became humanlike again as he turned back to look at me. “You were created to be free, Satan, and to do what your name calls you to do.

You were meant to shed light unto all those and all things in darkness.” “Do you mean the other angels?” “I mean any who desire light. I mean those who will soon dwell here, who will dwell over there in that forest.” The forest. The garden. Of course, I thought. The monkeys in that forest, that garden, would lose their hair and would walk upright. There would be two—a man, a woman, unlike all who’d come before them. Two to be mother and father to all the rest to come. I looked back from the forest, and he was gone. But then his voice came again, no longer a human voice, no longer the voice of the old man from Princeton. “Where is my sword, Lucis?” Of course, he knows about that. He knows that I’ve— I realized that I no longer felt the queer burden of it. It was no longer at my side; it was gone. Had he … ? “No, I did not take it from you. Not I.” And then he was gone. When he leaves, it is to us like a deadly drop in atmospheric pressure is to you. A force, a soul weight withdraws, leaving a momentary vacuum in the fabric of spacetime. A sudden nimbus of dim silence and emptiness worse than nonexistence. He typically leaves you with a disturbing thought or realization. It is how he exhibits his supremacy. The sword, Mikayel’s sword … How could … ? Yazad.

She had deftly taken it from me as she ed through me. That had been quite an impressive and devious feat. I did not know whether to ire her or dissipate her when I caught up to her. Interestingly, millions of your years will here on earth while only fractions of so-called days in the real world that is ours. Since I’d left, only moments had ed for Yazad and Mikayel and the rest, so I did not need to do any complicated unfolding of the fourth dimension but simply shot straight back to zero. When I had descended through the creation back to reality, I could tell as I got closer and closer that the battle had been worse than ever. I felt the slaughter that had taken place. I encountered shattered essence and gutted shells of particles; frenzied shards of disrupted energy and dispersal trails spread across the area of null space just outside of old Shamayim that was the battlefield. My general, ašo Zartošt, and my captain, Yamenya the Beauteous, reported to me. “She fought with ion and grandeur, Master,” said Zartošt. I noticed that he wore two sheathed swords. “She fought shouting your name across the four precincts as she cut down a thousand at least. She led charge after charge, always in your name. I was at her side.” “We scaled the inner towers of Shamayim,” said Captain Yamenya. Even in this repose, the strength of her voice was an astonishment. Melodious yet keen, as sharp as the two swords sheathed at Zartošt’s sides. Hers was the clarion voice that could call angels to battle. You would one day call her Horn of the Little Horn, my clarion in battle to drown out even Gabryel’s heraldic bleat. I noticed that she had no sword of her own. “We beat them back into the inner precincts,” she said. “Mikayel held the throne rooms, and he holds them still, yet we have captured the inner precincts.” “What of Yazad?” They said nothing in response.

“Tell me!” “She is dispersed, Master,” said Yamenya. I felt all within me grow barren. For the first time, I felt truly the futility of my existence. I was far from the “heaven” you crabs speak of. I was far from your God, and for the first time, I truly loathed him. Yamenya drew the tongue of God, which in the odd way of the thing came suddenly into existence only as she brought it forth. It shone and pulsed with a living essence, as if a spirit itself. She held it by the blade and by the hilt, offering it to me. “I saved it as she fell,” Yamenya said. ašo Zartošt knelt down in awe as the sword was ed over. Indeed, it was a thing much to be awed by. As I took it, I saw that Captain Yamenya relaxed as though she had relinquished a painful and punishing burden. It had been heavy to her and heavy upon her. Relieved, she turned to General Zartošt, who stood and drew the extra sword he’d carried—Yamenya’s sword, I now knew—and gave it back to her. She had been there to fight beside my beloved and had rescued the tongue when Yazad fell. She had been there for Yazad’s end, and I had not. I had been wandering, sullen and self-concerned, while others had been fighting a war I’d called them to. I took it, for it was mine to take. I had through my own actions made it mine to bear. And when it was at my side again, I felt once again the weight of it, felt the despair it brought me, for such it is that the tongue of God brings to its bearer— the deepest despair.

11

Yamenya’s fury at last cut through my reverie. “Rise up from your knees and lead us, light bringer!” she barked at me. Her cry rippled outward in arcs of force into the dark and brought forth a silent phalanx of angels—all fastened in spiked golden, burnished battle shells, spirit swords drawn and held in hand, poised for what they thought to be new conflict. I had fallen. As if struck to vacancy, I lay upon the rough terrain where Yamenya and ašo Zartošt still stood upright, glaring down at me. When finally I grew aware of them, I raised my gaze, seeing the thousand gathered just behind them, a goodly portion of one full brigade. Within the ranks, I noticed the seeming of many who once had been contented choirs, satisfied flights and mounts of angels. All now were sullen and weary, arrayed and wreathed about by woe. “Rise, Master, and lead these which thou hath called unto thee,” Zartošt said solemnly with decisive voice. To emphasize his demand, he placed a hand upon the hilt of his spirit sword, sheathed at his side. I stood and put away the tongue of God, my yoke. “He is at his end!” bellowed Lieutenant Kukulkan, who stood beside Zartošt, the ranks of angels behind. “And we, fools that follow him. Behold, his wits have left him. He hath given Yazad away, the best of us, as sacrifice to his own self. Ruin is the light he leads us to, this great deceiver, this little horn. Have we free will left, we ought disperse him!” In one motion, I drew the tongue of God, spun it over me to describe a halo, swung it down, and cleaved the spirit of Kukulkan in two. A great rush of quintessence sprang from him, past me, to dash through three ranks of angels before careening outward into the darkness, leaving a glowing trail to mark its bright age into nothingness.

All were silent but for Yamenya. “Courageous thou art indeed against thine own,” she growled, and she drew her sword and pointed the tip at me. “Thou hath conceived rebellion and hath vanished whilst we’ve weaned it for thee. Your better part fought valiantly in your stead to set it on its feet—she, now dispersed. Your rebellion is now your bastard.” “Thy action now speaks raw of thine unwholesomeness,” intoned Zartošt disapprovingly. “That thou hath dispersed one who ever had been loyal to thee. Thou hath driven us each and all from the sight and grace of Anu, Satan!” All grew more still, more silent at his use of that name, for all knew that I abhor being called by it. I looked upon them, unconcerned. I turned my back to look away at bright trails where so many souls had been destroyed and, like Kukulkan’s essence, had left signs of their departure. I strode toward Yamenya. She struck a defensive pose with her sword, which the tongue of God could so easily have sliced through; but I strode by her out into the dark, searching for the one trail I thought I would recognize. “Master!” shouted General Zartošt. I ignored him as I searched. I put away the tongue and focused on my task. “We are lost,” cried out Lieutenant Quetzalcoatl where he stood. His second, Lieutenant Chu Jung, groaned and turned away, pushing his way through the angels’ lines. “It may be that it is not too late to offer my arm to Mikayel!” he shouted, and he was gone. A clamor arose among the angels, a commotion and a moaning as of a brace of ghosts. Then came the “sound” of their departure, a sighing of the spirit medium through which they moved; and save for Yamenya and Zartošt, all were gone. I found what I was looking for, or so I thought. I gazed at it, uncertain. “Yes, here is where she fell.” Yamenya was by my side, voice unusually gentle

despite the sword she still held unsheathed. “You saw?” I demanded. “I was beside her,” she said. “Why do you stand with me?” “I do not. I stand with her. She cared for you. Fool that you are, Satan.” I looked down at the faint and slowly dimming mark of my beloved’s leaving. I felt the tongue as it were to drag me down into these remains to mingle my own spirit with the leavings of her. “She has gone back to Iyam,” I said blankly. And so she was gone from me completely, out of my reach; and if I’d thought it might soften him to my wish, I would go on my knees before Iyam and beg to have her back. “No. She has not, for she has been diverted.” I stared at her. What could she possibly mean by this? Now Zartošt was beside her. “She is waylaid,” he said simply. “What?” “Uriel,” said Zartošt. “We had taken the inner precinct of the throne rooms,” said Yamenya, finally sheathing her sword. “And though we were halted there, fierce she was in her intent. She left a battle group in the precincts and returned here to rally another regiment. I was beside her. We were attacked by Uriel’s battalion. Rather than give up the tongue of God, she fought, and I with her. She dispatched nearly eighty before they took her.” “I saw it,” said Zartošt. “I came just as Uriel surged to the fore and struck. When Yazad fell, Uriel made for the tongue. But Yamenya took it and retreated with myself and half a platoon. It was then that we saw what Uriel did.”

“What did Uriel do?” As I asked, I felt a coldness creep into me that strangely enough was at least serving to fill what before had felt to be eternal emptiness. “She gathered the quintessence of Yazad, as Anu might, took it into her arms, and was away with it.” “Away. Away where?” “We know not. But there is the trail of her. That trail is left by Uriel. It is the sign of Yazad’s last essence, and it points to where Yazad is taken.” Now I felt the coldness become something else. It became the “hell” of which you crabs so ardently speak. Yes, the hell you so believe in became now an actual thing, for it was sprung full flash and full blaze inside of me. I strode away, following the trail I’d sought and now knew was hers and now knew led not to Iyam, but to Uriel. “If you leave, you will be outcast and despised unto eternity, Heylaāl,” warned Zartošt. I turned and drew the tongue. Its shimmer provided no warmth. “My name is Satan!” I shouted. I saw in Yamenya’s seeming a look like unto pity for me. Or were hers a human face, I might say sympathy or something much as like. It mattered not. My war was no longer with Mikayel, the two-thirds of the hosts, nor our Lord. My war now was with Uriel alone. I took myself to a suitable vehicle, a muon, perhaps the very one Yazad had so often been contented to ride upon; and I sped toward outward boundaries of this cosmos, following the bright trail that guided me. Within me was hell, lost to me forever were Anu and all those whom I had beguiled to follow me in rebellion. Lost to me forever now was Shamayim.

Divi filius (son of the divine) would be the title Octavian would take for himself once he ascended as Emperor Augustus (“the august one”). It would be as though he were taking the identity of one whose life would keep pace with his own: the Christ, who would become the true Divi filius. Octavian would be born in 63 BC and be dead in AD 14; he would be on earth at the same time as the Christ but certainly would think himself of ultimate power beside a dusty Jew tramping about Judea talking out of his head about “love.” Little would Octavian know. All this was a future yet to be. In my present, I now stood under a canopy of thousand-year-old trees, watching a group of monkeys mewing and screeching in a primeval forest, the same forest beside the beach where Anu had appeared to me in the shape of the old man. In space and time, the forest was far from Augustus or Christ; for neither was yet to be, even in thought, except that I had learned in the time I’d sought after Uriel, that both would someday descend from these monkeys I now spied. Uriel had brought Yazad’s spirit to this forest. She had hidden it somewhere here. It seemed that I was no longer the only one of us who knew how to follow Anu to this newly made earth. As I watched the pack of monkeys making tools out of portions of animal bone, I felt I had some idea of what had become of my beloved. The simians were a key to finding her. Though your God had forbidden me to do so, I meant to speak to one of them. I took to the flesh of a snake as monkeys loped by me. I lay coiled in the bog grass through which they tramped. Their feet trod right past, and never did the group of them see me hidden there. One of them, though, the female, hung back. She had glanced down and seen me but did not alert the others. She was fascinated by me instead. “H-h-h-hello, Eva.” She stared down at me dumbly, her hairy face pulled long into a silent expression of wonder.

“Whuuuut is … this … thing … you do? Hooooow am I … doing it?” She spoke roughly, her larynx barely able to make word noise, for it was really not made to do so. “What it issssss is ssssspeaking,” I answered her. “Speak … ing. How … is this?” “I have given you the power to ssssspeak so you can ssssspeak to me.” “This … thing … is … wruuuu … wrong.” “Then why don’t you run now? Catch up with Adamis and the ressssst.” “Will … ahhhhrrrr … will this guuuu … go? This—” “Ssspeaking? Yessss. For without me, you cannot.” She stood her ground, her eyes clear and sharp in the way of a human, not of a monkey. Already Anu had given her and her mate that which had set them apart from the monkeys, though they still looked and walked monkey-like. Her head tilted slightly and followed my progress as I slithered toward a tree. “Eat of this ffffruit, and you will no longer need me to give you ssssspeaking. You will know to do it for yoursssself.” “Not! Guuuud has … told us not … that tree not!” “Why do you obey God?” “We oooh … bey … him. He luhhh … love … loves us.” “If he loves you, why hasssss he not given you speaking?” At that moment, the other monkey, Adamis, the male, crashed a rock down upon the snake’s head, crushing its brain. He’d circled back, crept unseen around behind me, watching what was happening between Eva and me. Cursed weak snake vision! He took Eva by the paw and pulled her to him, grunting. He gestured at the tree with a limp hand, shaking his head, lips flapping, and making clicking noises;

and she resisted, pulling away from him to rush back and reach down. She smeared her paw in the blood of the dead snake. She raised her fingers to her mouth and stuck them in. A look of astonished pleasure crossed her hairy face. Adamis’s face ed only horror and disgust. She then took his hand and led him away, exerting dominion. He let her, but he glanced back at the carcass of the snake, and his eyes showed something that confirmed my interest in these two. Curiosity. I followed them back to the group. I walked in my spirit form in a circle round these simians as they loped back to their primitive camp, no more than a slovenly, hastily arrayed fortress of dead tree trunks, really. Adamis had used his superior manual dexterity and his more keenly developed mechanical cognition to sharpen sticks and branches and sink them into the soft, loamy ground all around the pile of dead boughs surrounding a clearing. His work had formed the suggestion of a fort. It might have been enough to frustrate the weaker of the prowling carnivorous animals in the forest around them once all the monkeys were gathered inside. I watched them as they dragged dry brush into the clearing where their makeshift fort sat; and Eva proceeded to squat over a pile of stones, rubbing a thin slab of flint against them, seeking to ignite dry leaves and brush. It was a tedious and inefficient gesture, but she worked doggedly at it, patient and determined to build up enough friction to cause a precious spark. Her ridged brow was a frown of concentration, and her hairy breasts hung over her knees as she rubbed away at the stones that sat atop the dry leaves. I moved close to them and took my time selecting the one I wished to inhabit. I chose a reasonably clean male, who was very strong and who already held a sturdy, sharpened stick in his hands. I felt the flood of color and sound and horrid smell wash over me as I took control. Unfortunately, the small, weak spirit of the beast died from the shock of my entering him. Before I had the chance to force him into a calm corner, out of the way, he was dispersed. Well, all the better. At that moment, Eva’s frantic ministrations bore success. A spark trickled off her rocks and ignited the leaves, which ignited more organic material, creating an

ember. A thin white wisp of smoke curled upward from between her legs and was followed by a tiny crackling noise as leaves caught and flared. The whole group of them burst into ecstatic celebratory howls, dancing awkwardly around her, each one thumping her affectionately upon her back as he or she danced by in what was obviously a patterned ritual. I did not the chorus line. Instead, I plunged the sharpened end of the stick I held into the throat of what I judged to be the second strongest male. A gout of blood sprayed from him, and he screeched as he toppled over to die. I then wheeled about to dispatch a second male with a thrust into the chest. The third male died when I took him also in the throat as he loped angrily toward me, desperate to keep me from his mate. She cowered, retreating to squat low against one of the buttressing tree trunks piled round. The last four males, the weakest of the lot, howled the bloody murder they had witnessed as they fell over one another to escape from their fortress out into the forest. Several of the females followed after, but Eva remained frozen in her position before the slowly strengthening fire, shocked by what she saw. Adamis, who had not fled, snatched one of the sharpened sticks from the ground and was standing protectively before her, bracing himself for what he anticipated would be my next attack. It was as I had suspected. They were the only ones with the spark of Anu; the rest were mere animals who had panicked and fled after only the slightest of signs of self-sacrifice, survival instinct taking over to drive them apart and away from a threat. Eva and Adamis (for such I had decided to name them) were different. Like Anu, like the angels, like me, they were holders of the divine spark. They were driven by more than the instinct for individual survival; they were capable of confronting a threat together with the instinct to preserve each other and therefore to preserve an entire specie. They were not mindless monkeys, but intelligent ones. I dropped my stick and stood before them, standing as upright as I could make this simian carcass stand, though its physique was designed to be bent and scoliotic. I howled loud and long, just to put the fear of Satan into them; then I addressed Adamis and Eva. “Whaaaiiii do you waste yoooorrrr time, ahhhh, and ehhhnerrrrgy with these

sticks and stohhhns?” Adamis’s face showed not so much terror as outrage, though a little terror showed there as well, bless his heart. “Whuuut yooo dooo? Whuut is this? It is wrrrrong!” “It is speaking!” Eva rose and said to him. “Weeee ahhhrr speaking!” “It is wrrrrong!” Adamis bellowed, slapping at the side of his head with one arthritic-looking palm. With a sharp thought and gesture, I refined my own and their two larynxes. All three of us could speak somewhat clearly now, though still with a decidedly unpleasant phlegmatic rattle to our three voices. “Why? Why is it wrong?” I demanded. “God … did not give us … this!” said Adamis. “No, but God did not forbid it,” I shot back. Adamis hesitated, considering this conundrum with a newfound sharpness of reason (don’t say I never gave you anything, my dear). His ridged brow drew itself into a painful bunch. “It is … true,” offered Eva. “God did not forbid.” Adamis rushed forward with his sharpened stick, aiming for my belly. Even this early human had already developed the resistance to sophistry that marks your kind’s wits. Bravo! This told me something that helped me understand certain evolutionary sources of Archimedes’s prickly intellect. Yes, by the way, I said “evolutionary,” you nitwit. Darwin’s theories are sound, though a bit retarded by his inability to factor genetics into his postulates. Anu commenced the species as single-celled organelles and set evolution into motion. Did you really need me to tell you that? It should be obvious. Anyway, I had no intention of harming so precious and interesting a protohuman as Adamis. I pivoted to let him speed by me, moving as best I could those

sluggish simian hips, and lurched over to grasp Eva. She surged against my arms, seeking not to run away but to protect Adamis. Bravo. At that moment, a wash of blackness swept over me, and I seemed to float in a great nothingness reminiscent of my own cosmos, the realm of the angels; but this was blackness without the pulsating glow and the bright flashes of forces and of ing particle trails common to my realm. The next moment, I was standing at the edge of the forest, looking down a slope to a shoreline. A beach I recognized from before. The steaming primordial ocean lay just past the sand. How could this have— Then I saw her. Uriel was approaching in a visible spirit body; she had obviously allowed herself to be perceptible in the visible range of the eyesight of monkeys so that I would see her. She obviously also was repressing the light from her being that should have destroyed first my simian brain and then my simian carcass. It had been she who’d snatched me from my two newfound monkey friends. “Wherrrre is maahhhyyyy beloved, you cow!” I shouted in my monkey voice. In a flash far more swift than the eyes I used could follow, she was upon me and wrenched first one and then the other of my arms from their sockets, tearing them off my monkey body. So that was why she’d first protected it from her light—so she could take an opportunity to rip it apart at her leisure. I shrieked at the hideous pain of it and saw her nonchalantly toss both hairy arms over her shoulder. First one and then the other spun upward and far out over the sea to drop into the amniotic waves and disappear. Next, she set to work upon my legs, yanking them from the torso of the monkey body so quickly and cleanly that I had time neither to escape the body nor to fight back au spiritus. Again, two hairy limbs shot off over the sea and dropped into the deep. Lastly, she went to work to tug the head of the monkey off its shoulders. But by then, I’d finally fought my way out of the thing; and in my spirit form, I drew the tongue of God, and Uriel dropped the monkey corpse and sped away from me. I followed, bellowing my rage and the memory of the suffering her torture had inflicted on me.

By the time that Octavian became Augustus, many things had changed about the gladiatorial games in Rome. Slaves by then were not the only gladiators. A professional class of warriors had arisen in the sands of the arena death pit; they were gladiatori known as the auctorati, noble arena warriors who were otherwise free men. These free gladiators still, though, were of varying types. Hoplomachi fought with comically small shields and puny little swords, little more than daggers; and if one, facing a hoplomachus in the arena, were to laugh at those comically small shields, chances were good that one would be dead of a split or a pierced skull before the second chortle. Secutores wore armor, while retiarii held no shield but a wooden or metal disk strapped upon a shoulder; yet each possessed a net and trident, both of which could be wielded expertly by these warriors to deadly effect. The threaces wielded scimitars and shields and wore armored greaves. Equites fought on horseback, and essedari upon chariots, and velites did battle using only spears. All these were proud and wonderful classes of Roman heroes to the crowds who followed them, ardently watched them, and cheered them on in a hundred sandpits, arenas, and lesser coliseums across the Roman Empire and in the great Colosseum in the capital city. When I raised my wooden gladius (when of wood called a rudis) high above my head in the sands of the great arena, however, I was one of the praegenarii. They were lesser gladiators or even beginners, often simple slaves. They fought merely as an opening to gladiatorial games to warm the crowd or during intermissions. Some were thrust into the pit with a paltry weapon to be butchered in public by an actual gladiator, as punishment for some crime against the State. I was meant merely to warm an audience’s bloodlust or to amuse them between serious bouts. As in the nocturnal spirit flight known to humans as “dreams,” color and sound were sharp to the point of unreality. It takes time for an angel to grow accustomed to human sensoria. At my feet was brightly stained, bloody sand strewn about with fallen and broken weapons and a body part or two.

Across from me in the sand, like a dream metaphor, there lay a dead lion, its noble head wrenched nearly off its shoulders and twisted round to face backward in a strange parody of a lion’s regal carriage. Next to the carcass, which ought to have alerted me that this dead beast was indeed an intelligently designed showpiece, stood Uriel—not my matching praegenarii, but a fully armored secutore and, apparently, my opponent. Perhaps as an element of the spectacle, however, she bore a paltry rudis just as I did. You see, the lion’s head was not just the Roman joke of a spectacle, but was Uriel’s own obvious insult directed at me, as was this entire tableau, a parable she had thrust me into. The dead lion was a visual pun, a graphic doggerel of her making, a symbol of my own regal nobility crushed. I lowered the rudis and looked at it, blunt and bloody, its edges crunched and cut in places as if in this dream I had used it already to bash skulls and to deflect cutting blows. I held my “hand” before my “face”—a strong, sinewy hand it was, human from the looks of it. A stone sailed down from the stands into the pit where I stood and struck me aside the head. The blur of color and sound seemed suddenly to leap into focus. Everything grew sharp and distinct. This was no human “dream,” but was earth; and Uriel, standing across from me in the pit, had placed us both here. This was reality. For a moment, I was awestruck by her power. She had managed—while fleeing from me, mind you—to transpose the both of us through time and space to this point in earth’s history, a place she clearly suspected to be a place I am fond of, and had managed to consign her and me to human bodies. I was literally “waking” in medias res, engaged in human battle against her! I stood here in the tall, broad-shouldered body of a Gaul, or so I reckoned myself now to be, with red hair and long arms and legs. She had taken the body of an Amazoné (an Amazon warrior), just as tall, just as broad shouldered; her breasts were clad in two metal cups with studs for mock nipples, a female secutore’s typical garb, her black skin gleaming in the hot Italian noonday. The moment of my wonderment ed as she rushed at me, striking with her own wooden rudis. Why had she chosen wood? Unsteady, I stumbled backward, raised my rudis awkwardly in self-defense, and got a clout upon the other side of the head to

finish waking me completely. Uriel’s fierce grin and laughter, as well as the swelling, caustic laughter of the thousand spectators on the stone seats climbing high up around us, filled me with rage and humiliation as I fell onto my arse. She rushed by me, whirling to raise her sword, and came back to strike again. I scrambled to my feet, my vision clouded, struggling to clear my head and raise my guard. It was not enough that she steal my beloved and slay me in monkey form, not enough that she purloin me and dump me into this scenario from my own fantasies about my favored human society. It was not enough that she show me the symbolic image of my own nobility’s head twisted round backward. No, for her intention was to so completely break my pride, that I lose all dignity and divinity at once. “Where is she? Where is Yazad?” I shouted, still a bit unsteady as I beat back her second attack. “Her essence is where thou shalt not find it, Satan!” “You are not Anu, arrogant sawhorse!” “And yet I am Anu’s hand!” she shouted as she slipped beneath my guard and swept a solid blow against my groin. The crowd roared hilarity as I fell back, stumbling under the pain of her strike, clutching my groin. She trotted off to a distance, raised her sword high, and basked in the cheers and applause of the crowd. She turned back to me, smirking, crying out, “We stillrighteous angels have defeated thee, deceiver! None of thy rebellious army hath succeeded yet in overrunning the throne. Flee that body I put thee in! Escape pain and humiliation. I shall not follow!” “What earns me your precious mercy then, O great Uriel, queen of cows?” I called out through gritted teeth, still holding to my groin. Her smile dimmed, but it was all the more insulting now, for it was no longer born of mirth; it became a sneer of contempt. “I offer thee pity, cur!” she called out, obviously feeling talkative. “For thou art him who was Lucis, who was as mine own brother whom I did esteem, who was divine and first among us.”

Angels love to talk, in battle as much as any other thing we do, but a vital canon of flesh-drawn combat is that which says do not give one’s enemy time to recover lost ground. She was strong, but green in the human ways of war. “Sorry to disappoint thee, infant sister. Maybe thou ought to follow thy brother’s example and cut thy diaper off. Leave home!” “To share thy fate, black sheep?” What? Very well, yes, I will allow you to use your own century’s vernacular if you insist. Write it down as you want, then. Let’s continue … “You’ve lost your dragon’s teeth, Lucifer, and are brought low. I will not clout that human head to pulp with this blunt rudis if you flee!” I drew myself upright, having gained my breath, and walked across the arena to an iron sword, a real one. I plucked it from a congealed puddle of blood and tossed aside the useless wooden rudis. The crowd roared bloodlust: an unexpected treat indeed to see a praegenarii take up a true weapon. Praegenarii, most often, were slaves being punished in the arena for crimes against their masters or against the State; and these often lacked any true gladiatorial skills. “I will not please you in that, you cow!” I shouted. She tossed down her own wooden rudis and strode to a rough wooden arena containment wall where a bloody trident had fallen. She took it up. The crowd bellowed its lust and delight. This was an uncommon pleasure indeed: a secutore about to no longer taunt but now slaughter outright a lowly praegenarii, who, insane enough to take up a real weapon against his better, obviously bore a grudge toward her. The whisper went up in the crowd, grew to a murmur and then to a fervid chant. “Vendetta! Vendetta! Vendetta!” We circled each other warily, sweating, the both of us, in the heat. “Flee into oblivion, Satan, for you have lost all. Your rebellion will soon be put down by Mikayel and Gabryel. Neither shall they allow you to return into our holy ranks. You are outcast. Flee and escape this shame!”

I spun in a low circle at her and came out of the spin, slashing at her obliquely, in the style of Greek hoplite warriors, a startling and unexpected maneuver once used by Greeks to harry and confuse Persian armies. She was more angel talk than wise study, I realized; for though she had obviously done a review of Roman gladiatorial combat styles, she knew nothing of other more ancient human cultures’ battle techniques. I caught her awkward to the attack and dealt her a slicing blow against an exposed portion of her armored bodice, allowing me to draw blood from her side high up under her right arm next to the breast cup. The crowd roared, their bloodlust whetted. She shrieked pain and fell back against the wall where she’d seized the trident. She now tossed the long shaft down and picked up a short sword. The crowd was wild with hunger for more of this sight of blood. She wielded the sword with her left hand, tucking her right arm to her side. She was bleeding freely, the flow creeping down her hip. “Now!” I now shouted in Latin. “You flee, Uriel, if you wish to escape pain!” “I stand where I am, beast!” she shouted back in Latin. “Perhaps Anu will intervene and save you? Or is he too busy with his monkey stepchildren to see you bleed?” She dashed toward my left, dipping her blade to fake to my other side, as I expected, in order to slash sidewise and spill my guts in the sand; but I rushed forward to meet her at my left, now employing a Babylonian dodge. I leaped up and twisted away from the side I knew she would fake to (her own left, where she was not injured). I thrust downward from midair and gave her a shallow stab into the neck just above her right shoulder. I fell onto my back and was momentarily vulnerable. The move must strike home, for to miss the stab is to end up on one’s back and open to attack.

But my stab, though shallow, had hit home enough to make the desired effect: she cried out in rage and agony, falling face-first to bloody sand now made even

bloodier from her doubly wounded right side. She was now crippled on that side. Though she scrambled quick to her feet, I was able to rise slowly and then tread slowly in a steadily smaller circle around her, edging to her left, making her have to shuffle right, her hurt right side held away from me and her weak left arm forced to the weaker backhand riposte. The crowd was on its feet now, rabid with excitement. This intermission was likely as thrilling as any main exhibition they had seen this day, I mused. All anticipated now the slow butchery of the Amazoné woman by the Gaul. “Ask quarter, Uriel!” I shouted in a dry throat across the wavering air of the hot arena. “And I will spare you this. Tell me where you have hidden my beloved’s essence!” “I ask nothing of you, little horn!” I dashed forward, faking left, then right, slashing underhand, and cutting her once across her right thigh. The blood spurted onto the sand; the crowd dutifully cheered. The cursed monkeys. I circled her, taunting. “Flee that body! Escape this agony! I’ve no wish to make you bleed before these monkey men!” “Be damned!” “I am!” I shouted. I dashed forward, a Persian feint in which I spun off at an angle at the last moment as if to retreat but took a side attack—this time to her left when she’d expected yet another right flanking thrust. She took a stab and cried out but raised her guard gamely, so I struck out over and over, beating her back; and though she parried and defended herself fiercely, she was weak and in pain. I pushed her against a wall and thrust and jabbed until I had pierced her chest. I stepped back, heaving, tired from wielding the heavy iron sword and from whatever other exertions this body had already endured by the time I’d come to it. The crowd roared for her death. A thousand monkey voices howled for “Death! Death! Death!”

“Where is Yazad?” She raised a bloody head, snarling, “Where thou shalt not find her! And if thou loveth that body so, then I curse you and condemn you to it!” “How wishful of you, infant sister, to think you enjoy such authority here when you only slightly know the customs of the very combat you have driven me to.” “All authority is mine, for I am ordained of Anu.” Her breath now gurgled. “I think not, O queen to cows. For no trace of your angelic troop accompany you here in this stinking pit, and Anu has not endorsed you. As is always the case, you merely mimic me in power and not in knowledge. In your obstinacy to cling as you do to human form, your defeat is your reward. Do you withdraw?” She raised her eyes to me, and I saw there the hatred that only from a once-dear sister can come. As I beheaded Uriel, the crowd cheered riotously, ecstatic with this fulfillment of their bloodlust. Now unseen handlers raised a wooden gate at one end of the ring. Two ranks of heavily muscled gladiators came trotting from a tunnel, short swords poised, approaching me. The crowd shrieked, “Death, death, death, death!” I realized these monkeys intended to consummate their lust with my death now. I was not a gladiator, but a lowly praegenarii, to be sacrificed to the whim of this crowd’s enmity. As the gladiatori approached, I threw down the paltry monkey sword and drew the tongue of God. Its brilliance blinded the first three to attack. Vision dazzled, they dashed straight past me to smash into the rough-hewn wall. The rest fell as I slashed out once, for once was all it took. Yes, my drawing the sword was ostentatious, I know. I went to the stupefied three who’d hit the wall and dispatched them as well. The smell of burning flesh was a combination of the smoking neck stumps and carved torsos of the gladiatori and of my hand—the hand of the Gaul, that is, whose palm had begun to fuse with the pommel of the sword. The tongue of God

apparently is like heated metal to human flesh. I barely felt the pain in the excitement of the violence. As the crowd, now wild with glee, shouted for more “Death! Death!” I put away the tongue and took up a fallen gladius from among the bodies of my would-be executioners, holding it in my uninjured left hand. I looked to figure how to climb up into the stone rows above. I stacked four corpses atop one another, the crowd watching, foolishly not afraid of what I was obviously doing but still cheering for death! I stood on the corpses, inched my way up a wooden wall, and grasped the top, pulling myself onto the lip to balance and stand. From there, I jumped. Despite my loathing of Uriel and her pomposity, she had acquitted herself nobly, for she had elected to stay in the body of the Nubian warrior even unto death rather than make a cowardly escape in spirit form. I was sickened by having to butcher a being as divine as myself, noble in her own right, because I’d done it before these wretched howling hairless monkeys crying “Death, death, death!” As I clambered upward, bathed in the din of the crowd’s loathing, with the hell inside me burning on the fuel of my anguish for my Yazad, I intended to give them the death they were calling out for and more besides.

12

Marcus Agrippa lay down an ivory writing stick wet at its tip with ink as I was led into the room, caught at the end of a chain attached to my waist. I’d been bound both hand and foot by iron shackles. Four centurion officers of the Roman legion, praetorian guardsmen, shoved me onto a wooden chair with no back and with ornate griffons carved at the ends of curved armrests, the only decoration the chair bore. The fourth, younger and smaller, legionnaire, earnest and thoughtful but strong-willed, Trebonius they’d called him, stopped the other centurions from kicking me again as they had all along the way. I allowed all of this, though I assumed I could have summoned great force against these humans. Something told me doing so would cause me further physical unpleasantness (I was a physical being now, subject to physical infirmity as the pain I’d suffered in the arena had demonstrated!), but I was hopeful that I might yet be able to exercise great power even in this dreadful organic state of being. Still, I was curious to know what would happen next. As for Agrippa, who at this point in Latin monkey history was second in power only to Emperor Octavius—soon to be Octavius Augustus—well, Agrippa looked to be of his early thirties, though I suspected he was older. He wore a plain tunic with an ornate silver embossed belt. With powerful builder’s arms and a strong jaw but plain face, he sat behind an equally plain but decidedly Asian desk carved from a single large block of wood, the grain visible along the legs and sides. A sheet of alabaster lay on top of the desk, and it was covered with his work: papyrus scrolls with Poseidonius-style maps of Gaul and with neat Latin alphanumeric notation and Gaulish alphabetic calligraphies inked upon thinly pressed rag, a Roman form of paper. The rag edges were jagged, as if cut by bold-toothed shears. At the side of the fine desk, a rakish-looking man sat. That man was perched insolently upon the desk’s edge, in fact. This man toyed with a wooden Egyptian stylus. Quintus Marcellus, I was soon to learn, was his name. In purple marching camp tunic with a leather belt and legionnaire’s red

scarf tucked into the belt, he was of his early thirties from the looks of him and physically fit, though bearing various and livid battle scars. He was broad shouldered, reeking of lithe, muscular power and yet somehow also giving off a whiff of the infection of indolence. He glared at me from beneath dark rakish eyebrows; his curly-headed shock of black hair tousled and swept back, showing a deadly serious brow. He was a collection of visual contradictions, this man. By the looks of him, he was a man of physical power and of spiritual dissipation—military rigor and yet personal carelessness, a dark brooding with an underlying comedic air. He reminded me, actually, of me. He spoke first. “Welcome, dear barbarian. Do you understand me? I’m told you speak Latin. I find that a remarkable claim.” I gazed at him. Was he in charge? “Are you quite comfortable?” he asked ironically. Upon his speaking, the rhythmic wheezing of a hefty gray mastiff dog sitting in a corner drew my attention. It looked to be 150 pounds if it was an ounce. Its large jowls hung loose below its face—the baggy skin of those jowls nearly but not quite masking the deadly power of its jaws and the likely ability of the canine jaws to apply hundreds of pounds of force in biting through a lion’s neck, a bear’s arm, or my own leg, for that matter. The mastiff was a war dog, obviously. Immediately, I knew that the man sitting on the edge of the desk was the mastiff’s master. I also became aware of who really ruled here, and it was not the insolent master to the dog. The dog’s attentiveness to his master’s moods ironically replicated the larger master/bondsman dynamic in the room, a dynamic betraying the reality that every man in this room lived under the mastery of Agrippa. “I do speak your Latin, Roman.” “Good. That chair you are soiling is Egyptian. That carpet you are drooling and bleeding on was a gift from a Britani prince to our consul here …” The man on the edge of the desk gestured to Agrippa. Indeed, my blood and sweat were dripping onto a rough carpet at my feet. My feet (the Gaul’s feet, that is) still wore the gory battle boots of the Coliseum. My right hand had been dressed with rags soaked in camphor for the burns.

Scores of thin cuts and seeping superficial wounds the Gaulish body had suffered before Uriel had put me in it were weeping, including a trickle of blood running into my eyes from a scalp wound. I raised a shackled hand, dirty as it was, and wiped away blood to clear my vision. “Well? No apology, barbarian? I should—” “Enough, Marcellus,” said Agrippa, and Marcellus shut up. Simultaneously, the dog dropped its head upon its forearms, relaxing. Atop its big, powerful body, that large wrinkled head bore folds of flesh that hung from the forehead down to jowls and neck, chest, and shoulders. Its moist eyes peered at me from furrows. The corners of its mouth showed permanent drool. Now he ignored me but rather kept his gaze on his master, the insolent one. I enjoyed the feeling of taking deep physical breaths; pulling each breath into the Gaul’s human living lungs was a lovely carnal sensation. A breeze from the window behind Agrippa was soothing, cooling me and drying the sweat and blood on my chest where my chest was not covered by a gladiator’s leather breast guard. The Gaul’s chest? My chest. My breathing slowed as I sat back. I closed my eyes and let myself feel the creature pleasure the breeze gave. Simple things can be superb when one takes monkey shape, you see. A severe drawback (other than the wounds I’d suffered) to all this physicality I was enjoying was the fact that while corporeal, I could not look across or through spacetime. I could glance neither forward nor backward, and so had no idea what the resolution of time lines or of collapsing quantum waveforms around me would or could be. I could not soothe or say what would or would not happen next because I was not just walking in flesh of my own choice but was locked into this body. I was truly fallen. I was human. Well, maybe I could have escaped the Gaul with effort. With effort, I suspected at least, I could even have frozen spacetime and walked through the frozen earth as I wished; but to do so might pain me mightily or even damage me, so I did not plan to try it. Perhaps it would even be interesting to witness events from the limited perspective of a human, humans having no idea what the outcomes of their actions will be.

The centurion officer in charge of my military escort handed his spear to Marcellus, bowing slightly to him (an interesting Roman gesture showing deference, not subservience), and Marcellus rose from the desk’s edge to stand beside me. He prodded me with the blunt end of the short spear. I did not react. “Are you awake, gladiator Gaul?” asked Agrippa with a tone of amused patrimony. “Indeed I am, second citizen,” I answered without opening my eyes. “So you know of me. You are here because I ordered that you be kept alive.” “I am here,” I said, “because it amused me to be told the great monkey Marcus Agrippa wished to see me.” “Helenum cunnus, keep a respectful tongue, Gaul!” snarled Marcellus. I opened my eyes. Agrippa was toying with a bronze medallion hanging from his neck. Stamped upon it were the letters SPQR, these initials meaning Senātus Populusque Rōmānus—insignia of high Roman officials such as consuls, which Agrippa was, Rome’s most famous consul, lifelong friend to Caesar Emperatore, Emperor Augustus. Boyhood friend to Augustus, Agrippa was the second-mostpowerful monkey in all the imperium. Marcellus, disliking my demeanor, moved subtly to a position more protective of Agrippa, with one hand holding the spear like a staff and his other hand resting on his sword hilt; and I knew he would die in this room rather than allow harm to come to his Agrippa. “You’ve no cause invoking Helen of Troy’s cunnus,” I chuckled. Marcellus relaxed a bit, for I’d tweaked the humor in him. “And the barbarian fellow knows ancient Greek history as well!” he exclaimed, grinning down at Agrippa a moment before looking back at me, again suspicious, on guard. Consider, my dear, what I had already learned of this great monkey Agrippa in a past review or two of this very same spacetime waveform. At the naval battle of Actium in western Greece, he’d defeated Mark Antony, who’d defected to Egypt after Caesar Julius’s assassination. This battle Agrippa had won while still a young man. He had fought beside Caesar Octavius long years against the

“barbaric” hordes of Gaul and had personally helped to redesign and rebuild the stone city of Rome in grand new marble, commanding massive civil engineering projects, some of which he’d paid for out of his own personal wealth. Marcellus eyed me suspiciously, but I would no more harm Marcus Agrippa than I would deface any other noteworthy token of monkey history or would deface the ancient art of you crabs, you my stepchildren. Your history is one of the things about you that most interests me, after all. Into the room came a short and somewhat wizened, but muscular and energetic middle-aged fellow with a shock of gray hair and lumpy knuckles on his right hand. He wore a saffron-dyed tunic and carried wine on a tray. He ed clay cups around and poured them full for all but me. Each man drank, even the centurions, after waiting for the short fellow to serve Agrippa. “‘Amused’ did you say? You talk as if you are here of your own volition, Gaul,” Agrippa said in a mocking tone, sipping his wine. “You seem to know the work of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and for that reason alone, I won’t let Marcellus flog you for your insolence.” “I believe the history of Troy is the work of the Greek Homer, not of Horatius,” I said. You, dear reader, no doubt know the Roman Horatius as Horace, translator of Homer. To my surprise, my taunt was met with laughter from all in the room, including Trebonius, though little suggesting humor or understanding from the two lowestranking centurions. “We’ve not only a Latin-talking barbarian here, but a barbarian scholar of the civilized world!” Marcellus kept hold of the spear but sat back down on the edge of the desk as he exclaimed this, definitely more relaxed. Agrippa smiled a small thoughtful smile, saying, “You see? He bears further study, does he not? But my red-haired Gaul, you haven’t answered me: are you saying you are here of your volition, not mine?” I closed my eyes again and leaned back; the sun shining into the room created a lulling orange glow against the insides of my eyelids. It was a peculiar and

charming effect of light, native to organic embodiment, nothing an angel such as me and my kind had any experience of or even could know without taking human form. “Everything I do is of my volition, Consul,” I murmured. My powers were diminished, but I could certainly summon up the strength to kill these monkeys and make my way out of Rome should I need. “Be that as it is not,” Agrippa said. “I ire courage, even courage to the point of folly, or else I’d not let Marcellus here sit on my desk.” Marcellus’s frown went unmarked by Agrippa, who continued, “Besides, not to mention your obvious intellect, I have heard incredible reports of your prowess in the arena. You defeated the city’s best, an Amazoné Nubian warrior, a maestra secutore who’d been undefeated for nigh on six months as of the calends.” “She is dead, just as you’ve heard. And I dispatched her, Lord,” I answered him deferentially. Yes, I could have killed them all, could have escaped this discomfiture if I wished even if not this body. In truth, though, I’d been bound more surely than by these iron rings draped upon the Gaul’s body. I tolerated these humans’ abuse because I was curious about Agrippa, but also because I sought to avoid conflict that could damage this body or even kill it; for Uriel at the moment of the Amazon’s beheading had surely bound me to this form, albeit temporarily, as punishment, and to impose a petty exile upon me. I had defeated her, but she had imposed her own form of victory over me. My death would, I presumed, free me from this; but there were certain uncomfortable possibilities: I might undergo dissipation, just as my beloved had, just as the martyrs of the rebellion had and still were. None of us were certain just what happens to a spirit that dissipates. Your God, dressed in the garb of the old man in Princeton of the Union of States, had implied that dissipated spirits “go back” to him; but there was no way of knowing. Naturally, I feared the worst. Such exile as I was consigned to here, I was certain, can never be more than temporary for divine beings like us. The binding would slowly weaken and eventually fail, yet her defeat at my hands had been too easy to be true. I had been incorrect to doubt her authority; she could have done this to me only under Anu’s ordination as indeed only through Anu’s grace could she have stolen Yazad’s quintessence, as if snatching a blind beggar’s salver. So I she allowed herself to be defeated. So I was bound.

“Finally, a civil tongue.” Marcellus nodded approvingly. Uriel had left the arena but left me stranded for some uncertain term. She’d shown herself slow to the conventions of human combat, but she was no minor sibling and no such enemy as to be taken indifferently. I wondered what would come of the rebellion. “We are further told,” said the ironic voice of the lumpy-knuckled wine server, “that you then killed several of Rome’s most hardened auctorati and next climbed up among spectators to kill ten citizens. Reports are your sword, like magic, flashed so rapidly that ‘none could see the blade’ before you were finally subdued and chained in the gladiatorial pens. The magic blade could not be found. Some swear that at the last moment, you merged it with your body.” I opened my eyes and looked at Agrippa. He had put on a calculating countenance. “Does Verilius speak true in this?” he asked his entourage. “Yes,” said Trebonius. In a moment of thoughtful silence following Trebonius’s affirmation, all regarded me. “There are those whose testimonies make these claims. There in the pens he’d have been garroted, as is common with renegade gladiators who slay citizens outside of the consignment of the arena, Consul. So it was when we arrived to take him. He’s been beaten into submission. He was about to die,” Trebonius finished. “Had you not arrived,” said Marcellus, and his tone said he for one would deem it better had no intervention taken place. “Well, such exploits will be told in the fasti at the Forum by morning,” sneered Verilius, obviously of more authority and importance to this group than as mere wine servant. In the next silence, Agrippa considered me with a sly smile. “Quintus Marcellus confirmed for me the truth of an unfortunate reality, Gaul. You’d have been seized by the State as directed by the common law of contracts, rei vindicatio and by mos maiorum. You murdered free Roman citizens. Under the code of libertas, the sanctity of the body of a Roman citizen, you are surely

condemned to death. My men at the Coliseum ran news of you here to me, and I dispatched Trebonius with centurions to fetch you in time.” “Were I fond of this body, I would thank you,” I grunted. Marcellus prodded me with his sword scabbard. I ignored him. “You are lucky, barbarian,” he taunted, “that you killed only plebeians and no citizens of repute, which is why we will be able to purchase you out of punishment.” “How came you to speak Latin and know history?” asked Agrippa with that calculating look of his. I gazed at him, deciding to answer. “I have traveled a great deal, seen many things, and your language is not very challenging.” Agrippa’s laugh was explosive. “I believe you mean it! Bad accent and all.” Despite myself, I liked this monkey, maybe because of his ease with the power he wielded. He was circumspect, not easily moved to antagonism, confident without being arrogant. His blunt workman’s jaw and blocky commoner’s features were equestrian, not patrician. His nonchalance matched the same nature known to be native to his boyhood friend, equestrian born but patrician inheritor to Caesar, Octavius Augustus, a nephew to the murdered Julius. Along with the more ambitious and ruthless Octavius Augustus, Agrippa ruled Rome absolutely. By reputation neither man was despotic, not in their mature years at least and at least no longer overtly so. There had indeed been much bloodletting early in the rule of Octavius’s second triumvirate, when thousands of political enemies were executed. The triumvirate’s brutality had included the exorbitant act of butchering Cicero. More murders were done in Octavius’s first years, with fellow triumvirs Antony dead and Lepidus conveniently sent to far climes. But after assorted civil wars and civil purges to consolidate power, Octavius, now called Augustus, was a populist seeking to preserve the city. My city.

“I’d thought it would amuse Augustus and some visiting dignitaries to see you fight, a strong Gaul such as you,” Agrippa said. “But now that I have spoken with you, I think not.” I waited. “These centurions and my man Verilius will take you to a small villa of mine. You’ll wash, be given clean clothing. A physician will dress your wounds. You’ll be guarded by Trebonius Younger until I feel I can trust your loyalty, but you’ll have your freedom soon. In return, I require a service.” I looked at him, waiting. “I need a Gaulish translator who speaks Latin as ably as you despite the rather thick accent. A queen of one of your tribes will soon arrive in the city as a guest. Drusalla is her name. I do not trust Rome’s translators. I do not trust most translators.” Marcellus cleared his throat, shooting a sidelong glance at the hulking centurions. “Don’t be peevish, Marcellus. I give away no secrets. All in Rome know how I feel, how Augustus feels—that the praetors urbani and civil servants, most of them nobles, are mediocre. The lot should be replaced.” “Consul, the civil wars—” “Are over, Marcellus. Which is why I say ‘replaced,’ not ‘strangled.’” “Yet certain men may still be sent on their way by night, quietly.” “No, Marcellus. Rome is growing up. No more of that.” “We no longer assassinate enemies nor inflate the military and no longer rule through political violence that gross,” offered Verilius. “From fifty legions under Antony to only twenty-five legions now. This republic rules by reason, not war.” “Still a republic? Or are we now an empire? We rule not by war, but we rule,” Marcellus said. “By intimidation and wealth, your wealth, Agrippa, and the wealth of Augustus. Some dislike it. The older families who once controlled the

Senate and the nobles are itching for civil war at any provocation.” “Again, I say, those days are over,” Agrippa said sternly. “Verilius, you, of course, have lost most of your family to civil wars. A tragedy.” “All. Not most.” Marcellus looked surprised. “You never spoke of it, Verilius.” “I let you assume I have some family, not that you’d imagine I could have one as lately illustrious as yours.” “I suppose I deserve that.” “Yes, you do.” “Verilius’s uncle was Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, who served as consul with Caesar and opposed Caesar’s excesses,” said Agrippa to the room. “The Bibulus who spent his consulship in exile inside his own villa, then died of mortification right after commanding Pompey’s fleet in Ionia?” Marcellus asked. “You’ve a head for banned history. The same Bibulus,” said Verilius tightly. “It’s a wonder Octavius didn’t kill you, let alone employ you in his legions.” “He did kill most of what was left of my family, those not killed at Munda or not assassinated by Caesar Julius just after Munda.” There was an awkward silence. “Caesar’s last battle against the conservative republicans,” said Marcellus, trying to dilute discomfort. “Some of my own family also fought for Pompey at Munda.” Agrippa sighed. “But of course,” he said, “you Julii were Julius Caesar’s family, Marcellus. That is why you thrive. I married into your family, so I know the benefits of being Julii. As for Verilius, Octavius pardoned the few survivors of Bibulus. You see, Rome cannot afford any more bloodletting.” “Fortunate for me,” said Verilius.

“You’ve the right to sarcasm, General,” said Agrippa. “Though it may be unwise outside these walls,” warned Marcellus. “Be wise yourself, Marcellus,” Agrippa cautioned. “We will not go backward, but going forward means forgiveness. It means expanding the participation of Roman citizens. It even means granting new citizenship to old enemies, enlarging the ranks of the libérti, increasing rights, and strengthening the law.” Marcellus frowned. “These ideas—” “Are the best ideas of Augustus,” Trebonius blurted out. “For they provide relief from war. The more Romans who enjoy freedom, the more Augustus enjoys.” Trebonius looked sorry he’d spoken, but he’d quieted Marcellus. “The young centurion speaks wisely,” said Agrippa firmly, raising his chin, not exactly in fervor, but close enough. “Octavius Augustus’s ideas are the ones we swore to uphold when we swore loyalty to him who is pontifex and savior of Rome. His flesh and his blood are the flesh and blood of Rome. He lives to absolve us of our sins.” Marcellus nodded curtly. “As always, Consul,” he said, “your argument comes to a sharp point. I see that point clearly.” “It is the point of a sword,” joked one of the centurion officers who had kicked me earlier. “With Augustus these days, it is the point of his sharp tongue,” quipped Verilius. All chuckled, even Marcellus. Rather than take them all to task for their satire and put the lowborn centurions back in their places, Agrippa smiled. I was impressed. It was clear that these humans were a hierarchy of equals: lines of power and authority were clear; indeed, they were absolute. Yet respect for individual thought and dissent, for each person’s contribution, was alive in this room. This was what Adamas and Eva’s lineage had wrought here in the European landmass. The arena and the savage masses were not all there was to Rome. Rough and bloodstained as it was, “democracy” was nevertheless an

unconscious urge among the monkeys here. I thought how a place called Shamayim would be the better for such precepts and practices. Agrippa turned back to me. “So do you know of the queen Drusalla?” “She is of a different tribe than my own. We have many queens and kings in Gaul,” I answered, hoping it sounded convincing. In truth, I knew this queen monkey not at all. “Too many leaders—one of Gaul’s weaknesses,” quipped Marcellus. “After all, most of it is now Roman,” said Verilius. “It is Germania that is still unsettled.” “No, Gaul is a problem,” Agrippa insisted. “Most of civilized Gaul is Roman. In the west, beyond Lutetia, are vast leagues, large regions still that resist us.” “We need to care what lies beyond Lutetia?” Verilius challenged. “A wilderness of savage tribes, as savage as our good sir gladiator here?” Marcellus had grown thoughtful. “Don’t be callow, Verilius. There are countless forests and villages unknown to us in that wilderness. Uncounted warriors, also perhaps. Think of the number of languages that must be spoken in the west.” “As for languages,” said Agrippa, “I suspect Rome’s translators pretend to know Gaulish better than they do. This can mean catastrophe when we need sensitive diplomacy.” He looked at me. “Augustus has battled long to subdue your country, Gaul,” said Agrippa. “Perhaps you are here in Rome after having fought in your youth for your country or tribe against Rome.” The mastiff stood, stretched, and walked over to Marcellus quietly, eyeing me as it moved.

“Augustus battled long years to subdue your country, yes, but now he fights as hard at diplomacy to make a final peace with all the people of Gaul. The Gaulish queen will be at dinner in a few days. So can you. If you say no, because your hatred of Rome is too great, so be it. I will give you a sword and a horse and send you north to the Po Valley. From there, you may go where you wish, a free man. I can’t use you anyway if it’s by force, and you won’t go back to the sands of the arena, so you’re free to make your decision. What say you?” “You wish me to betray my people?” “If the visit goes well, your people may perhaps become full citizens of the imperium. Peace between us is the aim. This will mean peace and freedom now, for you. Of course, you hate Romans. I do not begrudge you that, for you love your country. Think how you can now serve your country and help to end the wars. Think. Decide.” What else was there for me? I was confined to a Gaul’s body, exiled. I needed this body kept healthy. Service to Rome was not repugnant to me. These monkeys were influential in their primitive society. “Ah, here is the lanista who was sent for,” said Marcellus, a crooked smile springing to his face. Into the room came a man of strange contradictions. He was pallid of skin, short, blunt faced, and stank of horse, yet was aggressive, eerily confident, even haughty in the presence of those who were clearly his social superiors. “Salve, my highborn friends,” the man chirped merrily as he entered. Marcellus motioned toward the daggerlike short sword strapped to his side; and as he gestured, his cloak fell way from his right arm, exposing several old battle scars. His right arm was hairless and hardened. “Do not call me one among your ‘friends,’ lanista pimp,” huffed Marcellus. “Lest I remove the smirk from your face with this pugio.” To this, the man grinned all the wider, his face creased, patchy, sunburnt. He wore a dirty half toga and carried a wooden box attached to a strap slung over his shoulder. He offered only a brief perfunctory nod to Agrippa, his leering grin scarcely waning. I wondered that Marcellus, by his look of disgust at the man,

did not strike him down with a sword blow. The lanista stood over me, opening his box to extract dull copper implements and noxious-looking liquids in vials. He seized my hands to examine them, not being careful of the injured one, but in fact prodding at it with one of his utensils. I disliked the pain this caused but was not yet used to the reality of pain and so did not take it as seriously as I soon would. “The wound will heal,” said the man curtly. “I’ve seen many a burn on gladiators’ flesh. He’ll have a scar after the skin blisters, scabs, and mends. But he won’t lose use of the hand.” “Is he worth a full price, lanista?” asked Verilius. “Seems healthy.” I considered my situation as the horrid little man poked and prodded me. I could of course bide my time, escape from these fools, and wander. But where would I go? East to Asia? West to Spain? South to Africa? I might procure gold and a ship and sail even farther to the Aztec, Arawak, Toltec, Olmec, Zapotec, or Mayan kingdoms undreamt of by these Italics of Rome. Equally unknown to them were the Asian Khmer and their imperial cities and temples. I might undertake a journey to such places. Yet even now, I perceived an uncomfortable fact: my existence was sharply curtailed and circumscribed by this weak and pathetically vulnerable organic body. It was subject to pain, unease, and injury. Maybe even death. What would happen if I died now was too much an unknown, whether my spirit would return to Anu, would be set free, or cast back into reality becoming my true self again. It was too much to risk. Or horror of horrors, might I be somehow reincarnated? “Can you make him stand and bend over?” the horrid little man asked. “Whatever for?” demanded Marcellus. “If he has piles, he’ll fetch less of a price at the ludus or from an individual lanista.” “No! For Mars’s sake, we need not humiliate him to that extent, you toad.”

“Very well, you called me. Shall I examine his teeth?” The latter thought, “rebirth,” I found most perfidious of all. That in death I might escape human carnality only to be “born” as some bawling monkey baby somewhere. Nor would I necessarily have volition. I might find myself unable to exert the least bit of control over so vile a fate. I might be “born” to some monkey mother squatting in a marsh or reclining in a dessert tent or cowering among moss-rotted trees in a forest upon some Pacific Rim island. The possibilities and the disgusting scenarios were endless. Even were I to be exuded from betwixt the legs of some noblewoman wrapped in the silk bedding of some monkey palace, the idea was wretched. Yes, I might be “born” heir to some pathetic crab kingdom in a jerkwater Persian principality or African empire; but what assurance had I that “birth” would not entrap me in a nightmare in which I would be fully conscious, aware, retaining my memories and identity, yet trapped inside a helpless, lolling, and wretched lump of monkey baby flesh? As the lanista prodded about inside my mouth, my thoughts were dismal ones. Moreover, there remained the fact that monkey societies posed numerous threats to the physical safety of the body I was bound by. To cultivate the company of influential Romans, to become a Roman myself, might mean safety. I might take time to study you crabs and to plan my next seeking for Yazad. The lanista stepped back, reboxed his implements, and sucked his teeth a moment in thought. “You may legitimately offer eight-tenths of his book worth as a purchase price. That’s my professional assessment. Were I you, which of course I could never be, for I could never be born into the velvet embrace of the gods’ favor to such —” “Finish your wretched sentence,” Marcellus groaned. “Were I you, I’d get him a proper physician for the burn. Sooner he gets it treated, the sooner it’ll heal, and he can fight again.” “Thank you,” said Marcellus curtly.

One of the centurions pressed coins into his palm, then ushered the little lanista out. Agrippa looked at me steadily. “Well, gladiator Gaul? We can purchase your freedom, and you can live as a civilized man. Or we send you north to your fate. What say you?” “I am at your service,” I grunted. “Then you shall live as a civilized man—that is, if you prove not to be false. A runner will be sent to buy you from your trainer or master … ?” He looked to Verilius, who pursed parsimonious lips before speaking. “It seems he is owned not by one of the lanistae, but is a simple slave, Consul. He is a warrior, but not a gladiator.” “Someone should send a runner to Hades to tell the dead Amazoné that she is not a gladiator,” said a centurion officer, and all chuckled. “His owner will be approached,” continued Verilius, “with a generous offer, which apparently we can make to be eight-tenths of his value on book. In any case, his owner will not likely refuse if told that Marcus Agrippa, second citizen and servant of the pontifex maximus Augustus, wishes to make purchase.” “Pater, pontifex, patriae, princeps, proconsul, Augustus. The event of your purchase will have a dense thicket of titles sprouting round it to motivate your owner indeed, barbarian!” quipped Verilius to the chuckles of all gathered. The dog approached to sniff my hand. Agrippa looked back at me. “What is your name?” he asked. The dog suddenly jerked backward, whining, and returned to its corner. “My name is Saturnius,” I answered. “Saturnius. So you wish to go by a Roman name.” “A name modeled upon our Roman god Saturn,” said Trebonius. “A god of the

harvest who gave us farming, peace, prosperity.” “Yes, and a god who eats his own children,” added Marcellus. Agrippa ignored both comments. “Might you wish to win Roman citizenship someday, Saturnius?” “I am already Roman.” Marcellus guffawed impolitely at this. Agrippa frowned at him, moving him to silence. “How do you mean,” Agrippa asked politely. “None born here could love Rome as much as I, though I am alien to you. I would die for her. I would do anything to see her fortunes thrive.” They all were silent, seemingly taken with my fervency. Agrippa sat back. “Another soul infected by the fever called ‘love of Rome’? Much about you is hidden or is false, I think. Yet I believe you, Saturnius, at least in this. Your ion seems not feigned. I love Rome as well. May your gods and mine show us both mercy. Rome is a severe mistress.” “Indeed,” quipped Marcellus, “Rome can be a woman with colic. A lovely Spaniard girl I met once, Lillianas Dias, told me, ‘Women are very, very dangerous.’” “Spaniard women are very, very dangerous,” said Verilius. “And I was told by a Germanian woman to ‘never bring a woman to a game of lots.’” All laughed at these antic remarks, all but Agrippa. A tinge of sadness was in Agrippa’s voice, as if he had lost something or someone dear, as he spoke again, saying, “Have some sympathy. Free him.” Marcellus and the others sobered and acted swiftly to unlock and lift the burden of iron off my legs and my arms.

My rudis was slick with blood, though it seemed fused to my grip. I scuttled back, parrying, dodging cuts and blows from a mob of monkeys dressed as gladiators who sought to overwhelm me. I was in gladiator’s muscled brass cuirass with skirt and boots and swung a short sword. I took to my heels, running down the wide avenue of Via Flaminia on a bright morning in which the people of the city bore the smiles common to the people early in the reign of Augustus Pater Urbis. They smiled at me as I ran by them, in fact. My human body could run only so fast; my human lungs labored as I dashed by wooden carts, vegetable stands, sharpener’s barrows, and then came upon the stand of a butcher of cows. It was a wooden plinth—one of many platforms made of wood slats, like petty stages, upon which sellers of meat shouted prices and called out to customers. I halted to slow my breath at the plinth of the butcher of cows. It was here that my tormentors would soon catch up to me. I determined to make a stand beside the carcass of a newly killed cow lying in the street. “Stand! Fight, Saturnius!” the short dark-skinned butcher exhorted me. He looked to be Numidian. So many Numidians were making a living within the city gates lately. A sturdy people, the Numidians. He held a hook in one large meaty hand and a long almost-sword-length carving knife in the other. A side of beef hung beside him, gory and livid, the only color in the haze of my vision: the meat ran red from several gouged wounds, streams of blood gathering to a small rivulet upon the wooden slats at the butcher’s feet, flowing out to the street. “The people of Rome hail you, Saturnius! Stand your ground and fight in the name of Rome!” the butcher again shouted at me and held his hands up in a peculiar gesture, palms pointed outward, so that I could see deep holes as if nails had been driven through his hands. The knife and hook had disappeared. He now wore a twisted crown of cow’s intestines upon his head so that blood drifted down his brow and along the sides of both his cheeks. I’d barely had time to turn away from the butcher when they were upon me, hacking away at my paltry rudis, which offered poor defense against their iron weapons. I was in defensive posture, being forced backward. The butcher, his

carving knife appearing in his hand again, tossed the knife to me; and suddenly, the rudis was no longer fused to my hand. I dropped it and caught the butcher’s knife. I spun with it to an offensive posture, the knife clapping sharply against their swords, and I managed to beat them back enough to turn and run once more to the sound of merchants and citizens in the market shouting and exhorting me. “Hail, Saturnius! Hail to the king of fasti! Fight, Saturnius, fight in our names!” Running past vendors, past fountains, past the new marble temples and state fora that had been recently built by Marcus Agrippa, I somehow found myself before one of his newest structures, the Pantheon. It was the great ancient Pantheon from before the fire, from before Emperor Hadrian rebuilt it; it was the Pantheon of old. There, in the thick circle of pines, I turned to fight. “Come for me now, you monkeys!” They were upon me, six, then ten, then twelve or more of them, fur covered, loping, long armed, their jutting jaws and ridged brows prominent and bestial— their voices croaking, screeching, and yowling when I cut or hacked them in riposte. One of them pierced me in the side, and I cried out in Saturnius’s voice, seeing Saturnius’s blood spurt from my side (his side, mine). The monkeys were excited by the sight of whose blood it was and bore in harder upon me, their blades slashing and hacking at mine; and I fought as they drove me back toward the portal of the Pantheon, then over the marble sill through the entrance into the great hall, where stood statues of the gods. Outside, I could still hear the muffled shouts and cheers of citizens calling out to me. “Hail, Saturnius! Fight on, Saturnius! For Rome! For humanity, Saturnius! You are our champion!” Now suddenly, Marcus Agrippa was fighting alongside me, as the monkeys bore in on us, pushing us slowly to the back wall. “Where is Augustus?” I shouted. “He will come. He will save us,” Agrippa gasped, and so did I, breathless from

the limitations of the human body of this Saturnius. At the wall, we held our last stand. I had been cut and gouged a dozen times, and Agrippa too was bleeding from wounds these monkeys had inflicted. Their screeching and yowling were rising to the pitch of hysteria now as they likely could sense their victory near. A sharp agony sprung up from my feet: two of the monkeys had driven in under my guard with two long iron pikes, both honed to sharpest points and both driven through the tops of my feet. I cried out, and Agrippa beat with his blade to drive the two away and yanked both pikes out of the stone floor to free me. I limped backward as Agrippa covered me. Against the marble wall, I held up my blade again and watched as Agrippa was run through by three pikes at once and was hacked to his knees by several sword strikes. “Save Augustus!” Agrippa cried and fell. As the monkey gladiators made busy tearing Agrippa’s corpse to shreds, I dashed along the wall toward another entrance and made my way out into sunlight. I looked to see great Augustus approaching, bearing a yoke upon his shoulders, blood streaming down his battered face, with a crowd of citizens behind, cheering him. “No!” I shouted. “Stay away from here! They’ll kill you!” Augustus raised his head and smiled fiercely. He shouted, “Better me than you, though, eh, Heylaāl?”

I sat up in my cot, tossing off the fur cover, a cry still buried in my throat; what had emerged was little more than a dry rasp. I was damp with sweat, my breath speeding. The noise of the flapping sides of the tent took away the little of my shout that had gotten past my lips. As my chest slowed, I looked over at the table where we had laid enlarged campaign maps and relief maps representing the Roman stronghold city of Lutetia, forests, the river, and the terrain. Sitting atop the maps were wood-carved tokens and chits representing cohorts of cavalry, infantry, and skirmishers ready for me to deploy. Other tokens represented estimated enemy deployments of cavalry, light infantry, and bowmen, some of whom we had encountered and fought already. The legio, the third, the Gallica legion, had withdrawn into this campo fortification, a typical Roman military marching camp. I rose. I was naked, and my body steamed in the frigid cold; the coals in the brazier had burned low. My Gaulish body was still relatively healthy, nearly unwounded despite seven battles and ten skirmishes it had been in the midst of over these past two years. All the old wounds had healed, the wounds of two months in the arena at Rome from before I’d been deposited in this body by Uriel. Then had come the relatively unwounded two years of my service in the legions, fighting in Germania and here in Gaul. Very few wounds had I suffered in those two years. “Praetor Tribune?” I still felt shaken. It was not to be gotten used to, this peculiar human trait— dreaming. It is not something angels do since angels do not even sleep. Dreaming is often an enjoyably sensual thing, but your sweet human dreams also come with human nightmares. “Dreams? Yes, I have them,” Legate Marcellus had confided in me once, grinning. “Damnable, irritating things when they recur on a campaign. They can be distracting.” “Do you have … troubling ones?”

“Yes, nightmares as well.” “Is that the word for them?” “What is the word you Gauls use?” “I’ve no idea. I’ve never had these sleeping dramas play in my head before.” “You are ever odd, Saturnius. I used to have a recurring one, about saving beast from a flood. Marching a legion through a narrow canyon in Britannia, a sudden rain washes through, and beast is carried away. I swim after him.” “And saved him? Do nightmares usually end well?” “Depends.” “On?” “On capriciile fortunei or depending on how much guilt one carries, as well as how much horsemeat one has feasted upon before sleep.”

My tribune militare secondus, Trebonius the Younger, came through the front tent flap, his gladius drawn. Out in the darkness, I could see by firelight the figures of two praetorian guardsmen standing watch. A thin layer of snow lay on the ground of this clearing in the forest where our campo sat, a marching camp we’d planned to occupy only one night, but which we’d now languished in for three due to the enemy’s disappearance. Trebonius came to me, his eyes automatically searching me for wounds. “The guards sent for me, Tribune. Are you … ?” “It was a ‘dream,’ I suppose.” He sheathed his sword and stuck his head outside to signal the praetorii that all was well. He then went to my wardrobe to extract a robe, brought it to me, and draped it over my shoulders. “You always say the word as if you’d never had any or daydreams, either.”

“I should be awake,” I said. “The patrols will be back soon to report.” “These Gaulish winters are born of Pluto’s ire, eh, Praetor? Though, of course, you find them familiar.” He lit a taper of evil-smelling tallow. In the bloom of the light, I saw my armor and truss, my sword belt and helm propped on their stand beside the table. Stretched between two tripods was the standard signa of the Third Legion, the original Gallica legion, the one I now commanded, which had been entrusted to me by Agrippa these past two years. Two more columns formed as auxiliaries since the start of the current campaign had augmented the Gallica. Its emblem was two golden bulls walking side by side on a red field. I turned and found a solid wood chair at the table. I tied my robe securely with a legion-issued belt called the “cingulum,” put on my boots, and sat. “A nightmare,” observed Trebonius as he added tinder wood to the brazier beside the table and dropped fresh coals upon the fire. He sat in another chair. Already, the air around us grew warmer. “A third night of dire dreams,” he said. “They prove that despite your inhuman stamina, you’re human after all.” Human after all. In silence, he poured wine. Both the wine and the cups sat there on the table near the maps, left where my senior officers, including Trebonius, and I had been drinking earlier, studying Poseidonius’s maps of this forest in north Gaul where we’d fought the natives over three weeks until they’d retreated. We were now camped, awaiting the arrival of a second Roman battalion marching from Germania so that we might chase after the enemy. If we can hold until then. We listened to gusting winds, both of us discerning the sound of the trees all around cracking from the cold and the wind and the slow thaw that had started a week ago. Harsh as it would be, a Gaul spring was coming. “We’ve held well against them, Saturnius.”

“I’ve been lucky. Two years ago, I knew nothing of strategy, tactics, mass maneuvers, and engagements. I have learned what I can from you, Agrippa, and Marcellus. The rest has been luck.” A gust of cold swept in. “If it is luck,” called a voice swept in with the gust, “then may Fortuna give some of that luck to me!” Marcellus Quintus, my tribune militare primus and appointed Third Legion legate, strode into the tent, shrugging off his cloak of lion’s fur, stamping his feet, and rubbing his hands. “Salve, Tribune Marcellus,” said Trebonius, standing. “Greetings, Tribune Trebonius. Sit. No formality at this hour. Centurions are not watching. So sit. Though I must ask why you are here in the dark of night keeping the general from sleep he was to get until I arrived to wake him?” “He came to my aid,” I said. “Praetorians heard me cry out.” “Another nightmare?” I nodded. “This weather should give us all bad sleep,” said Marcellus, tossing his lion’s fur onto the table and unbuckling the sword belt from his cuirass skirt. “As for your claim of ‘luck,’ Saturnius, I fought alongside Agrippa many a year and never was given an army to take out of Rome to Germania nor here to Gaul, as you’ve been given.” “I was merely graced. Your next assignment will come.” “No need to soothe my pride. After all, I am of the stoic bent. Rota fortuna must turn, and when it does, it turns only to turn again. A king one and dead the next. Rome has brought the fortunes of many such of our enemies to bitter turns thus.” “A desolate point of view,” muttered Trebonius. “Not at all!” Marcellus grinned. “I favor the ideas of Poseidonius of Rhodes. Besides, Agrippa does not see command as a gift. Believe me, I know. He gives it to those who earn it. Seldom, for instance, is it given to an amoral jester such

as myself.” “Neither your amorality nor your stoic jests keep you from another command, Tribune,” said Trebonius not unkindly. “It is your ungoverned mouth that does so.” Marcellus gave Trebonius a bored glance and belched, at which Trebonius grew testy. “You, legate, are your own enemy, you who was my mentor, who many say may rise if he wish, to command a praetorian guard or even be second Pater Urbis beside Agrippa.” “Yes, yes, no doubt, young Trebonius,” Marcellus muttered as he grasped his sword belt, then took the blade by its pommel but could not free it. “Gods. It’s frozen in the scabbard,” he said. “It’ll warm, let it be,” Trebonius advised. He let it fall to the bear fur carpets covering the hard ground. “It is given,” he repeated, turning back to me again, “to those who earn it and can protect Rome’s interests. I’m satisfied to be your first officer. Agrippa finds you deserving, morally rigid though you are, and so do I. I’ve seen you lead, plan, and fight. And by the bull, I like that you do all three well enough to keep me alive along with all under our command.” His tone did not agree with his words. He sat at the table near Trebonius, took a cup, and poured wine. We three drank for a time in silence. With a belch, he broke that silence. “My patrol, Saturnius …” “What did you find?” “Your people are sly. All trace of Ulgӧthur’s camp is gone. His troops took most of the trees and vegetation with them.” Trebonius’s eyes widened.

“Yes, it’s more than strange, but I saw it. The area near the river the barbarian maps call Seine now is bare. Where three thousand men and women and two hundred trees could have gone to, I can’t say. Brilliant, though. Now that they retreat, it seems they will take with them all we come here seeking—timber, crops, their women, and their skinny stulta futu goats. I didn’t bother checking if they took the fish from the river. This spring, the men may have to eat bread.” “I sense they are near, but these woods are their home. They know it as we cannot,” said Trebonius. He and Marcellus glanced at me. “As you cannot,” I said because Romans expected it of me. “Though keep in mind, I am not from this part of Gaul.” Marcellus smiled his crooked smile, a disarming but dangerous thing of his. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You say again, and when we were in eastern Gaul, you said the same. You never did say what part of Gaul you are from.” I regarded him and for a moment considered benefits and drawbacks of setting his face afire. Luckily for him, drawbacks won out. Trapped in flesh, I wasn’t certain if I could do it anyway. “I’m just curious.” Marcellus smiled. Trebonius cut in. “It matters little where you are from, Saturnius, but where you are now—in your country, but fighting for Rome.” This seemed to soften Marcellus’s flank for the moment, and he strategically withdrew. I had no doubt he’d regroup and strike at my weakest flank yet again. I didn’t respond to Marcellus’s ironies as I would have liked to because I was comfortable with the life I had created and with the purpose Agrippa used me for. I had no desire to reveal myself and subsequently have to murder them all and be set to wandering across the cold snowscape of a world that would one day be but had as yet little to shelter me and even less to interest me. Gaul had yet to possess anything remotely as charming as would be the bouillabaisse of the deux margots on Boulevard Saint-Germain des Prés. It would a cafe that would one day be located right at the lively corner of Rue de

Rennes, to be a favorite of famous and creative monkeys such as Hemingway and Picasso, where I would sit in the warmth of the fine city sun, with the prop of an unlit gauloises cigarette hanging off my lip, or sit pretending to eat while watching the patrons, the batty surrealist artists and the far more sane British expatriot writers, letting the soup grow even colder. “Monsieur! You don’t eat! What will become of your strength?” The fussy boy serving me will someday wag a stern finger at me as he will take away the food untouched. “Right he is, old man,” Hemingway will say to me, arriving and sitting across from me, squinting. “You must believe me, old bean, keep up your health—I know what I speak of.” “I suppose you do, Ernest. What is this latest bandage on your head then? And why are you squinting?” “Latest injury, old man. I was standing out in front of—” “You have a death wish, Ernest.” “Death! Come now, it was gravity did it, not guilt.” “‘Guilt,’ what is that?” “Ramon, do you mean to say you don’t know? And here I thought you a Catholic. Where in Spain were you educated, Madrid?” At this he will chuckle, for to him any mention of the listener in connection to Madrid will be what he will consider a clever insult. “How I hate your Spain, Ramon! Nothing good about it other than you, which is why I am in Paris, and I am not in Madrid, as much as I like to attend the bullfights. The bastard Spaniards used chemical weapons. In the Rif! As in World War I. You had your asses handed to you by Abdelkarim’s fighters at the Battle of Annual. Your generals acted out of spite. They couldn’t be men about it and accept defeat. They dropped a thousand mustard bombs on civilians in the Rif!” “You’re still teed off about Morocco?”

“All a mere two years ago! Old man, you must it to why your ambassador was expelled from—” “Ernest, why have you a bandage on your head?” “Other men are unlucky in matters of the heart, Ramon. I am unlucky, it seems, in matters of the head.”

Even better than the pretend eating I will do at Magot would someday be the quite palatable vichyssoise and gruyere gratin dauphinoise of Restaurant l’Epuisette on the Vallon des Auffes in Marseilles, potatoes being the one human “food” I can most tolerate actually eating and can most easily digest. I am talking, of course, of my favorite time space on earth, the twentieth-century, particularly the 1960s, and Italy. Pity, my dear, you shan’t live to see them at their height of beauty and charm. L’Epuisette’s setting, Vallon des Auffes, will be a kind little Marseilles inlet in 1960 bristling with lovely little creeks along the corniche coast. Ahhh, fisher cottages and Mediterranean-style awnings walking down to the beaches where fishing boats, some fashioned in the exact form of earlier village life, will bob and toss against their braces in a sprite of a warm wind. Though soon, there will be by the 1970s, too nearby, the blight of new housing blocks, freeways, and summer condominiums full of fat Parisians on holiday. Well, nothing shall be perfect, eh, penman? What? Oh, you chuff. Complaining again that I stray from purposeful narrative. Back to the story, then. Yes, yes, always you urge me on. I was saying. Out there in that windy cold was nothing like the Ile Saint-Louis’s elegant silk merchants nor the moonlit streets of the Champs-Élysées. In this time-space niche, there was nothing as yet outside my tent but cautiously thawing frontier, proper spring still weeks away, and the savages we fought in stinking furs. Even my comparatively evolved Romans depended on foolish superstitions, false medicines, and the use of dreadfully primitive iron and alloy tools.

“I am from Gaul, Marcellus. That is sufficient, isn’t it, for the victories we’ve enjoyed?” “Indeed so. Your unsured knowledge of the savage, being one yourself, and your command skills are undisputed. I enjoy a good victory, a good meal, and a good shit before sleep in the safety of a strong campus as much as the next Roman. For all that and more, I’ve you to thank. In fact, I have a gift for you.” He rose, stretched, and went to the tent entrance to call in his second, Titus Livius Sulla. “Hail, Tribune!” Sulla saluted to me as he entered with a three-man guard of legionnaires, each bearing a scutum strapped on their backs and pilum, the legionnaires’ shield and spear. Each with one free hand, dragging along with them across the ground a rough sack, a struggling bundle of something alive and kicking. It was a woman by the sounds from the sack. Sulla gestured; they dumped from the dirty sack a fur-clad woman, a Gaul, with dirty red hair. She wore what ed for battle gear for a warrior: a fur vest with a sword belt draped across her shoulder and chest. She wore fur leggings and coarse leather boots that looked far more adapted to cold and snow than Roman legionnaires’ boots. Drusalla. The very same queen who had visited Rome two years earlier and whom I had acted as translator to before months of negotiations had broken down. Hers was a captive’s entrance similar to but somewhat less auspicious than Cleopatra’s had been when rolled out of a fine Egyptian carpet at the feet of Julius Caesar. My centurions kicked her across the floor until she was lying before us, bruised and bloodied. They cuffed her about the head cruelly to pacify her struggles.

Agrippa lingered long on the balcony with Pater Urbis (“Father of the City”), Octavius Augustus. The two returned to the circular room of marble where Agrippa’s guests, serenaded by a Samarian lute player, intermingled in his villa at the Field of Mars. Behind the two men trailed Lucretia Julia, a tall sturdyframed noblewoman and a well-known yet unacknowledged advisor to the Senate. Her iron-gray hair fell across her strong shoulders, and disconcertingly girlish bangs obscured her dark eyes. She had been out on the terrace conferring with the two most powerful citizens of Rome, the two most powerful men in the Roman world. She took her time and headed off in an opposite direction toward the kitchens as Agrippa and Augustus moved to the center of the room to be with guests. I stood among those guests. The crowd was composed of wellborn Roman nobles, wealthy Roman merchants, well-known officers, and visitors to the city who hailed from many a corner of the republic. A few senators were in attendance who in their white and maroon robes and togas were seemingly a race apart from all other Romans. There were senior officials of the city, there were military tribunes, and there were tribuni plebis and aedeli plebis who were the protectors of the interests of the plebeian caste. There were censores, those who had authority over the census. There were also celebrated gladiators, many of whom were only a few bouts away from winning the wooden rudis and their freedom, the all-tooseldom-realized dream of every gladiator who gains the adulation of the crowd and a long series of bouts survived and won. The popular Turkic gladiator, Tarsus, was one such well-known gladiator present. He eyed me suspiciously as he and I circled through the crowd never crossing paths but very aware of each other. A hero to the Romans as much as the Amazoné Nubian warrior, the maestra secutore I’d killed had been, Tarsus knew me or rather knew the Gaul whose body I inhabited, knew the man far better probably than any other Roman. In the ludis we’d supposedly shared, he had fought beside me, presumably, or perhaps even fought against me—that is, the man that appeared to be me. I’d seen him fight and heard tales of Tarsus enough times since my liberation from the ludis to know these things and to know why he was suspicious of me.

One day, the day Uriel had left the Amazoné body and left me here, I’d suddenly (suddenly from Tarsus’s perspective) changed my name, changed my entire barbarian demeanor, and likely even acquired a new facility with Latin and left all the other barbarian fighters behind. It must seem outrageously impossible to Tarsus, perhaps even magical. Perhaps even demonic. He stood near a table laden with exotic cooked birds such as peacock and eagle stuffed with chestnuts and aromatic spices, cooked heads and feathers still intact. He nibbled absently on the savory leg of an ibis and watched me when he thought I wasn’t watching him. Citizens stopping by the table to eat recognized him and poured compliments and adulation on him and his fellow fighter Crucis, always a few steps near Tarsus. Both had been Mark Antony’s favorite gladiators and his possessions. Not many years now after Antony’s defeat at Actium by Octavius and his death in Egypt, all that had been Antony’s, even his gladiators, were now Octavius’s (Octavius’s, Augustus’s). The many Gauls present were scattered in groups and singly throughout the room, beset by Romans trying, mostly failing, to speak to them in Greek and Persian—two of the languages of international commerce in the republic. All the guests were comfortably immersed in the hypocritical atmosphere of what crabs and monkeys call “diplomacy.” The Roman negotiators all drank wine, titillated themselves by squeezing the gladiators’ muscles, told fictionalized anecdotes, and nibbled delicacies; they struck elicit deals and fanned themselves in the summer heat. I wore a linen tunic unadorned save for an azure crest showing “eternal” service to Agrippa’s equestrian line. This was an amusing insignia, as all your human symbols and crests invoking “eternity” are amusing to me: they signify your pathetic fascination with immortality, a thing of which you have utterly no notion. First, you have no idea how grindingly dreary, how tedious eternities can be. You can imagine only one, and even that is beyond your paltry physiology. Think of how it would be to find yourself burdened with several of them! I began to imagine how much more tedious it might be indeed for one such as me, trapped inside a human crab shell, if forced also to endure a stultifying succession of lives in which I might be expected to impersonate the type of parochial boob you humans often esteem.

“I see by that insignia, you are some sort of retainer to Agrippa. Is it true what they say? Are you a barbarian?” The very parochial and arrogant boob praetor Paulus Scipio had spoken. He was a legal and a cousin grandson to the famous, more-accomplished Scipio Aemilianus. Paulus stood at my back. I turned to face him. “I do not regard myself as such, Praetor,” I said in my best urbis Latin. “Clearly, but is not each man author of his own life, and does each not see himself as the hero of his own narrative? Do we not all seek to write our lives as heroic legend, seeking sympathy for ourselves?” “One should think so, Dominus.” “When it comes to it, you are indeed well-spoken. I served the Senate for two years in a barbarian clime, Samaria, where that Hebraic on the stool over there so clumsily plucking that lute comes from.” “I have heard of it, Dominus.” “Really. How would a Gaul have heard of Samaria?” “Once I came to Rome as a slave, I was exposed to Greeks from Antioch who taught me of the ancient north African world. And since then, I have learned much from the Greek slaves in Agrippa’s household and from manuscripts of various languages and several nations. Agrippa has a three-thousand scroll library. I work here officially as both a translator and a scribe.” “You are lucky. Few barbarians are afforded such a chance to learn culture. In Samaria, I was lodged at the city of Shiloh, a frightful place. Hot, dusty, full of religious fanatics and lunatics who periodically wandered in off the dessert to kick up a ruckus, proclaiming themselves messengers of their one god.” “Indeed?” “Yes, they saw themselves as heroes, you see, though they were just ragged, filthy men.” “There is often a gap between how men see themselves and how others see

them, you mean.” “No, that is not what I mean at all. I mean to say that barbarians everywhere imagine that they are civilized. But in truth, they are simply sad, pathetic barbarians—at least from the perspective of eternal Rome.” “Is this one,” said a woman’s voice, “still as I was told by another translator, speaking of the Roman perspective and calling us barbarians?” “Yes he is, Queen,” I answered her in Gallia. “Your men of Rome”—she stabbed her thumb at Paulus in an oddly exotic gesture—“are the very soul of boorish barbarism.” Paulus Scipio’s eye darted to this strikingly lovely tall woman who’d spoken to him: Queen Drusalla, who possessed red hair, broad shoulders, and ruddy skin. She wore a thigh-length silk tunica, sewn rather than draped, of Greek chiton style. “What?” he asked. Then turning to me, he added, “What language does she speak? It is not any Greek I have ever heard.” “It was Gaullic, Praetor,” I answered. Over her tunica, Drusalla wore a white linen palla shawl stamped with the Greek/Coptic alphabetic abbreviation for Drusalla, Queen, Gaulia. By her side stood an equally striking woman, with hair as red, who wore what one could only call a beautified version of an Egyptian battle tunic. “Ah, then, is she the Gaulish queen?” asked Scipio, amused. “And you, her countryman, said to be acting as her translator? She smiles, but I sense she just insulted me.” “The praetor thinks you’ve insulted him,” I said to Drusalla, smiling as I said it, that Scipio’s ignorance should not be disturbed. “You may tell him I have nothing against him, for my people find dog a tasty delicacy. What I can see of his fat haunches through his toga looks quite succulent.”

The woman beside her, Drunia, her second in rule, laughed at this with a sort of grunting guffaw. She reached out and lightly brushed Scipio’s face, to his startled delight. “I like his cheeks,” Drunia cooed. “They look tender.” She smiled. “The other one is quite forward but smiles fetchingly,” said Scipio. “What did she say?” “That she likes your face, Praetor.” “I’m told I have a comely face. It helps me in my legal career. It helps me lately to be ambassador for the Pater Urbis. Augustus has an unsated taste for peace with savages, an odd craving requiring Rome to put savages at ease. Mars knows he’s taking quite a risk.” “Indeed, Dominus.” Drusalla, bored, struck off for a corner of the room where Greek visitors stood. Scipio moved closer to Drunia. He found some limited success at speaking with her in broken Greek, neither one fluent in it. The Greeks had been in diplomatic with the Gauls many years before Caesar Julius’s campaigns in Gaul. Drusalla had affected Greek styles since her arrival in Rome, though partly as a statement of contempt for her hosts. Livius Sulla, Marcellus Quintus’s second, drifted over, noticing that Drunia had separated from Drusalla. He seemed attracted to Drunia but seemed to dread Drusalla and had skulked about on balconies with Drunia while Drusalla was not looking. “Pardon me, Praetor, may I take Drunia to meet the Numidian ambassadores?” “Certainly, centurion. Go, do as you’ve been bade. Diplomacy, I understand.” As the two young ones left, Paulus Scipio turned back to me. “By the way, Saturnius, is it? I meant no harm with my comment about ‘savages.’ I simply the savage Arminius, though you’re Gaulish, and he was Germanian.”

“You find Gauls preferable, Praetor?” “Yes. Rome took Arminius in, made him a citizen. And he turned on us, reverted back to savage. Giving citizenship to all can have dire results.” “You call my countrywomen savage. They are not Cherusci Germanians, as Arminus was.” “I meant them, not you. You’ve clearly been civilized.” “Thank you, Praetor. No offense is taken, for I understand the Roman mind.” “Good. Carry on.” As he wandered away, Agrippa approached with patrician quaestor, Lucius Tercius Mara, a small blunt man of large, robust self-confidence, and with Lucretia back at Agrippa’s side again. The tall matronly Julii woman was muscular of leg, thigh, and forearm, as if she regularly trained with weapon and shield—she had a warrior’s look about her. Lucretia’s iron-gray hair was now swept back from her hawk’s face. She stood silent at Agrippa’s back, an odd position, almost like a praetorian guarding his flank. “I have heard your story, Saturnius,” said Mara. “A remarkable rehabilitation. Congratulations on your success as servant to eternal Rome.” If only you knew just how eternal. “Quaestor, how goes the collection of the tax? Taking more from the plebes than the Patris?” “How well tutored his Latin is, with genuine sounding urbis accent, and he knows what I do!” Mara said to Agrippa with a booming voice and a delighted smile. “He’s memorized every public title in Rome, who serves in each of the public offices, and what each of us does in detail,” said Agrippa. “Astounding what education can do.” “Astounding what a man can do if given opportunity,” said Agrippa.

“The radical theories of yours and Octavius’s? All the rage now. The city is abuzz.” Agrippa looked at Lucretia, who came to sudden life and took on color and motion. It was as if Agrippa had touched a statue and infused it with living energy. “What have you heard about Augustus’s policies?” she demanded. Mara was startled, then offended. “Well, of course, I speak only as one who has just arrived back in the Eternal City.” “Yes? Speak on, Mara.” The offense now drained from him to be replaced by fear. Mara fell to speaking quietly under Lucretia’s hard gaze. “Lucretia of the Julii, am I correct, madam?” “Yes?” “I’ve heard you often advise senators. How is it that a woman has risen to such an honor?” “And you are Tercius Mara, Quaestor.” “Yes.” “If you have official complaints, quaestor Tercius Mara, I have the Pater Urbis’s ear at times. I can on your suggestions.” “I will certainly seek you out if ever I find anything amiss in the empire.” “Rome is a republic, Tercius Mara, not an empire,” she corrected him. Mara’s eyes darted to Agrippa, to me. Agrippa rescued him.

“You may wish to try the alligator brains over on the third serving table before you leave, Tercius. It is quite good. Egyptian.” “Yes. I believe I’ll go over.” He turned to walk away, his self-confidence not nearly as robust as when first he’d appeared.

They kicked her across the floor until she was lying before us and cuffed her about the head to pacify her struggles, holding their spears pointed close at her back. She drew back her head and glared about, her vision finally focusing on me. “You!” she growled. “Pretender! Do these stupid men of Rome still think you are of my people?” “They do.” “That such stupid men could conquer so much of my country is an embarrassment!” she spat. A soldier prodded her with his spear. I gestured him to stop. “Do not feel badly about it, Queen Drusalla,” I said to her. “These stupid men of Rome have conquered everyone and all they have encountered, and much better than your people have they bested. You have much of the world as company in being beneath the boot of Rome.” “Why are you with them?” she demanded. “I enjoy being with those who rule.” She smiled indignantly. “I had thought there was a bit of the rebel about you when first we met in Rome, dog. Was I wrong?” She almost reminded me here of Uriel. “Perhaps you were not, Drusalla. It little matters. You and I both are, for now, subject to Rome.” “In return for my having not exposed your lie in the city, I expect you to treat me decently, ‘Saturnius’!” “Why should I? There are no other translators here, and you speak only broken Latin. They cannot be sure what you say except through me, nor would they believe you.”

She launched herself off the floor and got her hands round my throat. This close, I could have burst her organs by concentrating, but I did not seek to protect myself. There was even something about her cold touch I liked. It took Trebonius and the soldiers together to pull her away from me. Marcellus made no move at all. She dived onto the floor, rolling and coming to her feet with Marcellus’s sword and scabbard. The sword sang a metallic squeal as she dragged it free. Trebonius had been right; the blade had warmed. Sulla’s men set aside their spears, drew their swords, and fought her across the floor to the raised wooden dais upon which my cot sat. She parried, cut, slashed, and held them off, clearly more capable then these Romans of fighting hard with a sword and better at breathing hard in the cold. Sulla stood protectively at the table where Trebonius, Marcellus, and I still sat, all three of us nursing our wine cups. “We don’t want her hurt, do we?” Sulla looked at me. “It appears to me that your men are showing little chance of doing so,” I offered. Marcellus’s eye stayed fixed on the energetic sword fight ringing on that side of the tent. The legionnaires were being sorely vexed by Drusalla, who, though cornered, could not be taken. “Sulla likes Gaulish women,” Marcellus sighed, taking a last sip of wine. Then he stood, almost nonchalant, as if indifferent, simply bored with the spectacle, and sighed again. “As the ancestors said, ‘Fortēs Fortūna adiuvat.’” Yes, though Drusalla looks the image of the goddess Fortuna herself. Without asking, Marcellus pulled Sulla’s sword from the scabbard hanging at Sulla’s side, walked over, and gestured the legionarii away from Drusalla. He swept his sleeves up, exposing his battle scars, and he pointed the sword at his opponent. Sulla blanched but did and said nothing. “Not that I don’t enjoy watching your skills with a sword, Drusalla. But the one

you’re using happens to be mine, and I want it back,” he said to her. “Then back I give, Roman sloog! Come you, I give you back!” she taunted. He lunged in, beating as hard as I’d yet seen most Roman officers fight. I had long ago noted that by some formal training at some point in his life, Marcellus had acquired and now possessed the skills of the gladiator. In the two years and several campaigns he had fought with me, though, he had seldom fought with quite as much abandon. As for Drusalla, she reached down and drew from an even greater depth of the well of her skills to rise to his attack and defended herself. This is a noble thing about you humans: how you can exceed yourselves when under duress, how you rise in response to an attack—a redeeming trait in my eyes. She met Marcellus well, trading beat for beat. She executed a mirror of each of his ripostes and returned thrust and parry for every single one he gave and enacted; and then she sidled left, feinted, to spin round and lunge right, an old hoplite move, ionate. She shouted her rage and gave him one slice across an arm, which he ignored, focusing intently upon beating at the weaknesses he could see in her guard. Such was a deadly skill of Marcellus, which I’d seen time and again when watching him in battle. Each gladius rang loudly enough to make Trebonius squint. Drusalla snarled loudly and grunted with each thrust and stab at her opponent while Marcellus, for all his abandon, fought with no ion whatsoever, but with a steely logic, like a stoic after Cicero; he took to it with recklessness, yes, unmindful of risk, crooked smile and all, but fought as if the contest were to him an Aristotelian logic proof he was engaged in resolving. I silently thanked the angels that it was not me he was focusing that logic of violence upon. I had little doubt he’d defeat me in personal combat. Their swords skittered against each other, dancing. Drusalla cried out no more, though, now conserving her energy, realizing what a fight she was in, undoubtedly. The two worked at it in odd silence now with only the sounds of their rasping breaths and of the clashing iron, a sound that called several more soldiers into the now-packed tent.

Marcellus gave her a slice across a thigh, but her bleeding did not slow her any more than his bleeding arm slowed him. “A magnificent thing to behold,” whispered Trebonius. “The woman or Tribune Marcellus?” Sulla murmured. Trebonius made no reply. At last, she began to tire. He gradually beat past her guard and forced down her weakening arm, and at the moment he could have struck, he stepped back. “Take her now!” he shouted. “And do not harm her!” Once again, it took several men to subdue her by hand. “What, by Pluto’s stones, did you say to her?” laughed Marcellus as he handed back Sulla’s sword and picked up and resheathed his own, sitting back down near me, catching his breath. “You have a way with women, Saturnius!” “How did she end up falling into your hands?” Trebonius marveled as a camp surgeon knelt wordlessly beside Marcellus to pour wine onto his arm and sew the cut. Marcellus winced in pain as he answered Trebonius, “That ‘luck’ of which Saturnius earlier spoke. My patrol happened on her coach and escort. She’d supervised their … retreat and was at the rear guard instead of the vanguard, where a wise leader should be in a retreat. We easily dispatched her guard, and she was ours.” “Alexander took the rear guard when retreating,” offered Trebonius. “The queen is no Alexander.” Marcellus winced, shoving the surgeon away as the man finished the last of his stitchwork. They threw Drusalla back at our feet; she was now tied like a wild pig, for the safety of all. “What did she say, Saturnius?” Marcellus asked as the surgeon ventured back to bandage his arm. “Where has her stultus army gone, and did they take the fish?” “The fish, you keep talking of fish—there are none in winter.”

“A figura, just a figure of speaking, Saturnius.” “Where is your army?” I asked her. “Answer me, and I will allow my surgeon to see to your cut.” I saw that her bleeding thigh was not so bad as Marcellus’s wound, though. “My army will make itself known soon enough.” “Why did you cut down the trees?” “To deny you fuel.” “Nonsense. The rest of the forest is full of trees, enough here for a hundred years of fuel. What have you done with the trees near the river?” “Tell me who you really are, and I will tell you what we did.” “Why would you tell me anything without being tortured? You realize they are about to torture you.” Indeed, the soldiers, though still sweating and breathing hard, were smiling, anticipating just that. She could see it. Among them was centurion technician, Gracchus Livi by name, with the praetorian guard, a gifted torturer indeed. “I will tell you because I must know what you really are.” “What I am, not who?” “I know that you are not of human birth.” “Is she telling you anything of significance?” Trebonius asked. “She is going to tell me what happened to the trees.” “Why would she tell you that?” Marcellus asked, incredulous. “I told her,” I said to Trebonius, “that if she does not reveal all to us, I will let Marcellus make love to her. She says she would rather be raped by a warthog.” Trebonius laughed. Sulla frowned at this.

“Very funny, but I would volunteer for the task.” Marcellus smiled. “I like sword fighting broad-shouldered savage women. They remind me of my mother.”

This time when I awoke, I was wet from sweating but had not, as far as I knew, cried out in my sleep. Perhaps the praetorii had simply resolved to ignore my night frights. It was only one-half watch until dawn, the coldest hour of Gaulish night. I got up from my cot and dressed warmly, took an extra fur robe given to me by Marcellus, took a cingulum and a short length of chain, an ankle shackle, and the smallest pair of boots sitting on the storage shelf of my tent. Carrying the clothing and walking with the chain over one shoulder, I stepped out into the dark. The two praetorians saluted me as I exited. “General. Escort?” “No.” Disciplined, they remained where they stood; seeing the extra shawl and boots, I carried they smiled knowingly at each other and drew to attention, motionless, determined in their loyalty not to betray my movements to any others. Still, though, I ed half a dozen more of my cohorts and young hastati acting as sentinels at the camp perimeter. All watched me walk by, each one smiling as I did. Some of the youngest of them shivered from the cold like children, but still, they smiled to see me. I walked along the perimeter path, the via sagularis, following a narrow entrenchment ditch beneath a rectangular interior rampart. Such a simple ditch system without stronger fortifications was only meant for a few nights’ occupation, made of laboriously cut frozen timber taken from these woods and no stone at all. As I ed a stand of camp cages full of chickens and messenger hawks, they kicked up a screeching fuss until I was no longer near. I came upon a centurion walking night rounds. He was a big bearlike man with only three teeth in the front, and he spoke with a lisp because of them. “Who’s that bothering them birds there? Wha … ? By the gods, Tribune! Hail, Saturnius, general of the legions!”

“To ease, centurion.” “Kiss my cūlus, I sure weren’t expectin’ to see you! Might I be servin’ you then, General?” “Thank you, no, centurion.” I walked on; but he lumbered right into step with me, laying his pilum over one shoulder smartly, stepping as lively as if he were just out of close drill training instead of a veteran of multiple battles as I’d directed each of my sentries must be. “I hear Verilius himself is on his way, Dominus. I hope he relieves us. I miss my wife back home in Perusia.” “Perusia of the old Etruscan confederacy?” “The same.” “Most important city in Etruria, northern Italia. That’s where—” “It’s where Lucius, brother of triumvir Marcus Antonius, and Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife, hid after she and Lucius were chased out of Rome.” “My knowledge of your history is still work for me. Fulvia raised an army of angry Roman legion veterans against Octavius, did she not?” “She did, Dominus, while her husband was off carping about with Cleopatra in Egypt. Marcus Agrippa chased her out of Rome. She and Lucius ran to my Perusia.” “Where Octavius laid siege and put to death all the city chiefs as punishment for giving Fulvia refuge, neh?” “Sadly. However, General, my family and I were on the side of Rome. I ed the legions soon as peace was signed between Etruria and Rome.” “Why?” “I’m like you.” “Me?”

“Aye. You bein’ from here, from Gaul, and yet loyal to Rome. What is Rome if it ain’t a lot of nations what once was against Rome? Look at Verilius himself. His rebellious family was spared by Caesar. And he was spared, last survivor, by Augustus. Way I see it, no need to rebel. Those of us who were once enemies of the republic will be the republic soon enough. It’s all about numbers, eh? Rebellion ain’t smart. There’s a plan. Those that can figure it out don’t need to rebel.” “A plan.” “Surely. Them that can build roads and send food across oceans to feed the people have got the better plan. I trust the plan.” “I see what you mean, centurion.” As we ed a latrine, I paused to pick up a short swath of chain mail that had been left leaning against a post by some sentry. The narrow patches such as this were typically hung over the front of a cuirass’s lower skirt by a legionnaire to cover the opening in his skirt that allowed him to take a piss. I slipped it into my cingulum and walked on. “Hope we’ll finally get done with Gauls and be leavin’ barbaric lands so I can get back to my wife,” the centurion continued. “I meant no offense about the ‘barbaric,’ General …” “No matter, centurion. I am quite human now.” “Name is Flaccus Tullius, then.” “Tullius. I’ll the name of Flaccus Tullius.” “Y’don’t recall, General, but you saved my sore cūlus once: the battle of Magna Germania, when you crossed the river Elbe and came under attack. I was with you that day. A barbarian slashed my leg. You picked me up like I was a sack of radishes, set me on a horse. Strong as two oxen, you was, that day. All was there. We talk about that. Shocked everybody in my maniple what seen you do it.” I did indeed this man. “Tullius,” I said thoughtfully, taking the chain off my shoulder and winding it round my waist like a sash. “You are the very same centurion who smashed his

pilum into a horse that nearly trampled me. That’s how you got that cut across the leg in the first place, as I recall.” “I’m that very Tullius, General. You gave me ten denarii as prize when next the legion was safe at camp.” “I am grateful that, Tullius. I dislike damage to my body. Here’s to Verilius coming and perhaps to you getting back to your wife soon.” I shook his arm. I walked on, leaving him there, his pilum at rest arms. The rumor was good for morale; but unfortunately for him, for them all, Verilius was not coming to relieve us; it would be a long while till Flaccus Tullius would see his wife again, if he ever did. Even in moonlit darkness, I could see his three teeth smiling when I looked back. Verilius would be as welcome by me as by the men. It had been Verilius who’d urged Agrippa to give me a command a few years earlier. He trusted me. I had my own plans, though. Any other general but Verilius might thwart them. I crossed away from the praetorium in the middle of the camp, where the legionary command tents stood and where the legionary eagles and legion standards were grounded. I made way to tents located rather at the back of the camp, an empty portion where fewer torches were lit. I approached the ones used as the officer’s mess. While the legionnaires were fed mostly porridge and unleavened bread, officers were treated to fresh meats such as wild boar, squirrel, owl, and other local catch, as was standard in a marching camp— whatever might be hunted in areas where Roman camps would be set. In my camp, as in that of my fellow legionary commander, Verilius, each man, regardless of rank, was afforded fresh meat. This atypical custom made me a commander well appreciated by his troops. I’d learnt this from Verilius. “It is wise to inspire your men, upon whom your life depends, to appreciate you, Saturnius.” A dozens of goats in a corral bleated plaintively; and a score of skinny boars, winter survivors, were tied to pegs outside the mess tent. Their soft grunting sounded strange in the darkness. Inside the tent, Drusalla lay on her back atop one of the troop tables, a rough

blanket thrown over her. Her breath smoked above her in white plumes. She shivered under the coarse cover. I pulled the blanket off her; she was naked underneath. The table looked like a large circular wooden dais; and she, spread-eagled atop it with arms and legs tied fast, looked like a sacrificial animal. She had bruises, cuts, and scratches all over her body; for they had beaten her. I’d given orders that she not be wounded or raped. The wound on her thigh, from her fight with Marcellus, had been sewn closed roughly by a camp physician. I pulled a rag from her mouth and then untied the ropes binding her. She lay there glaring up at me. “Can you rise?” Her voice scratched to life twice and twice failed her before she finally rasped a response. “What are you?” “Are you ready now to tell me where your army and your general Ulgӧthur have gone off to?” “I will tell nothing, dog.” “I wish to talk to the general and you together.” “You didn’t invade my country to talk!” “We are here because you attacked Lutetia, a city both of Romans and Gauls.” “You mean the city of Oppidum, of the Parisii people!” “You rebels live in the past, Queen. Rome is the future.” “You think we will allow Rome to take our freedom?” It was ironic. Here I was leading an army of oppression, fighting against rebels, and enforcing authority—I, the first of all rebels and the pattern of all rebellion. I tossed the fur robe and cingulum and the boots onto the table beside her. Then I

looked around to find a good long section of rope, about eighteen cubits. I looped it over one shoulder. I watched her as she eagerly put on the robe, being cold as she was. She used the cingulum to secure it around her waist and pulled on the boots, her motions showing the pain she felt from the beating and from the stitched thigh wound Gracchus had finished with pitch. Apparently, though, nothing was broken. Gracchus was expert at that sort of thing and could extract information from even the stoutest enemy. She had been Gracchus’s match, though, considering that I had stayed his hands with my order to do no serious damage. I took the chain-linked shackles from my shoulder. I attached one to both her ankles with the short chain between. Thus, she was hobbled and could not run. I led her out of the tent. She was as malleable as could be, thanks to Gracchus’s aforementioned ministrations and now the hobbling. We encountered sentinels who recognized me and stepped aside for us. Everyone who had seen me naturally had assumed I was going to claim a commander’s prerogative to rape the prisoner. When I had ordered she not be raped, Marcellus had laughed. “Such a way with women!” He believed I would visit her this night as would he, were he in my place. “Escort, Commander?” asked one of the centurions. “We will not go far,” I answered. He handed me his torch. We ed out of the camp into the larger clearing in the dense forest. She followed me wordlessly as I walked toward the trees. I walked slowly so that she could keep up. After a while, she slowed and stopped. I paused to see what the matter was. She looked about as if searching, then took us off the path Sulla and his engineers had dug and cut and burned into the forest to a thicker stand of trees. She reached out and touched the bark of one. She spoke sadly. “She was old, one of the oldest. She will die now, thanks to your Roman beasts. Look how they have hacked away her arms and cut into her skin here.” “Firewood,” I muttered.

“You do not wound or kill the elders for firewood! Younglings are for fire. The elders are the heart and soul of a forest. Barbarians!” she shouted. “You Gauls have a thing about trees, don’t you?” I grunted, pushing her back onto the path. She was quiet, but every few feet, she muttered angrily beneath her breath. She did so each time we ed evidence of Sulla’s excavation, of his cutting and his burning a path for marching through, each time we ed the remains of his large cook fires for roasting warthogs and boars to feed the men. We reached a hole, about twelve feet deep and eight feet by five feet—the rough dimensions of a grave. When I had ordered Sulla to dig it, he and Marcellus had assumed, I knew, that I would rape her and dump her into it. The shovels still stood there, sunk into a mound of fresh soil. I held the torch over the pit. The light from it dimly illuminated that gaping wound in the land. It was somewhat of a symbol of what Rome’s current actions were against this rich and handsome country of Gallia, as its natives called it. Gaul as Romans sounded it. I turned to her. In the torchlight, her eyes were dark, empty orbits. Holding the torch closer so that its light showed her face and her stricken eyes, she looked for the first time truly defenseless. “You mean to rape me, hang me, and then bury me?” I laughed. “The rope is not to hang you with, Queen. Why sully a good, strong Roman rope?” I handed her the torch. She took it and stood there as still as one of the trees around us. I stepped over to the edge of the “grave.” “You’ve no sword! So you’ll bury me alive?” She stumbled back from me, the shackles making her movements awkward. She was stopped by a small tree near the hole and stood still with her back against it. She stabbed a thumb at me in her peculiar way, saying, “Kill me, at least, before you throw me in there, demon!” “I have no intention of killing you, Queen Drusalla,” I said. I took the long length of chain from round my waist and looped it round the small tree, then locked both ends to one of her shackles with a Roman lock I’d hung from my cingulum—a primitive device, but surprisingly functional, as are most devices

the Romans fabricated in the first century. It would hold her. I walked to another tree, unwrapped the length of rope I’d hung over my shoulder, and tied it securely around the tree’s base. I walked back to Drusalla and, holding the free end of the rope, dropped down into the hole. A strange thing about this earth of your God’s creation is that it is a living thing, did you know? Even in coldest weather, only the first few feet of the earth is frozen solid. Below that, the inner warmth of the world keeps soil comparatively warm. And so Sulla and his men would have found it hard work breaking the frozen crust of the ground and penetrating the first three feet, but the last few feet would not have been as difficult. As I stood there in the pit, there was, along with a rich moss and lichen smell of black fecund soil, a warmth. This yawning cavity was more than a bit attractive to these tired human bones I wore. I felt a strong irrational (human?) urge to lie down and stay here. A light appeared above. Drusalla stood now at the end of her chain, which she’d drawn to the lip of the fissure, thrusting the torch out over the edge, peering downward. I wondered if she would use the torch to burn through the rope and trap me down here, then toss down the shovels with their heavy blades to harm me. Of course, with the shackle and chain, she’d still be trapped herself, freezing. Besides which, Drusalla was a warrior through and through. I could discern her character as such and her type would feel it dishonorable to kill an enemy in that way. Romans, of course, though no less superstitious, tended to be more ruthless than barbarians and suffered no such compunction. “What in the name of holy Vosegus are you doing, demon?” She was invoking her Gallian nature and forest god, a lusty deity of the trees, rivers, and the wilds in what would later be eastern . Vosegus was seen by her people as a fur-clad fellow carrying a pig under one arm. I laughed from down in the darkness. “I am burying something,” I called up to her. “I’m freezing! I have nothing on under your fetid Roman whore fur. Are you

going to kill me now or not? If I were dead, I wouldn’t have to put up with you anymore! I’ll burn your rope, set fire to the youngling holding me, and be gone by the time you can climb back out!” I hadn’t thought of that. Burning the small tree. “That tree is frozen. It won’t burn.” “So I will trap you, then strangle myself with your rope!” “If you are that determined to die, then go right ahead!” At the bottom of the pit, I wrapped a rag and the short swath of chain mail around my right hand. With that hand, I drew the tongue of God. I had not drawn it in these two years; but its presence had been filling my human body with dread, pain, and a constant burning of the bowels—the latter a most uncomfortable, when not agonizing, sensation. It was the tongue, in fact, I was certain, that was giving me human “nightmares” so much of the time I slept. The flash of radiant light the thing gave off as I drew it was brighter than anything known to these preelectronic primitives I was living among and would surely have alerted sentinels back in the campus, except that I was deep enough beneath the earth that only Drusalla saw. I heard her gasp and curse in Gallia, then stumble back from the edge, then fall; and she was still. I poised to strike and drove the sword straight down into the soil at the bottom of the hole, acting quickly so that the hilt would not fuse to the frail human flesh of my hand. When the last of its length had been submerged beneath loamy– smelling soil, the blinding light was quenched, and darkness returned—a darkness absolute. I had to wait till my startled eyes could adjust to the contrast of night after having glimpsed the tongue’s divine illumination. I seized the end of the rope and pulled myself upward. When I stood on the surface again, I saw that Drusalla lay on her back, seemingly dead. The torch still burned where it’d fallen, the smoldering head lying upon a dry flat stone. I retrieved it and shoved it into a fork between tree branches. Light was cast over the mound of cold loose soil. I seized the shovel to ladle and scrape soil back into the hole, the exertion warming me. Already, I felt the better for having separated myself from that sword.

When I was nearly finished, she stirred and awakened, then sat up with a heavy grunt. “What light was that? What is this?” “This? This is your lovely country of Gaul, my queen,” I said as I shoveled. “What a dusios child you are. What are you doing, ‘Saturnius’?” “As I said, I am burying something.” “You obviously mean to kill me so I won’t come back here to dig it up.” “I’ve no intention of killing you, and whoever tries to dig here after me will die most horribly. What I have put here would destroy them.” “You are dusios—a demon. Or it may be you are Cernunnos, the horned one!” I stopped digging to look at her, wearily. “What? Cernunnos, did you say?” “Cernunnos, horned demon father of all demons.” It is almost like being some sort of “celebrity,” as humans will one day say. Cursed. “Ulgӧthur called me that. Horns, you say.” “The evil horned one.” “Ton Dieu, quel cliché!” “What ignorant form of Parisii is that supposed to be?” “The French form.” By the time I finished, she had retrieved the torch. She stood with her back to the pit and to me, holding the torch high. Showing me her back. A sign that she was giving in to trusting me as she shook

with the cold? No. She spun around in a fighting crouch as I approached, with a look of scorn and outrage on her firelit face. I kept my distance, watching the torch. “How far away is your army?” I demanded. “They are near! I won’t tell you even if you take my soul.” “Wha … ?” It was exasperating. “Why should I want your cacking soul, Queen? What would I do with it? That is one of the most irrational things said of me. I have no interest in monkey souls whatsoever. It is you who steal each other’s souls!” She smiled, though her teeth chattered; she’d gotten me for that moment to it to my identity. I turned and walked back to the hole, a bit petulantly, I must it. She had stung me, stung me true. Mikayel could not sting me. My own beloved, Yazad, could not. Your God does not. Drusalla, though, had. “Dessu mii iis!” she shouted. “I will prepare them! I will prepare all in my nation to fight not just Rome, but to fight you!” “Then you had best get to it, Queen.” I removed my fur and was stripped down now only to my undergarments. I wrapped it over the fur she wore. I unlocked her shackles and tossed them into the woods. I turned and walked away. She stood there a moment in shock, watching as she cautiously backed away from me; and then she turned toward the forest, to the safety of her precious trees. I noted she was walking westward. I think I was so outraged by her accusation precisely because I had indeed overpowered many a soul or in my time (“soul” being a human concept; my kind prefer the concept of “essence”). I had merely imprisoned souls, transported, or rearranged them. Certainly, I had never done what you humans claim about me. I had never gathered them by the bushel as if they were apples nor horded them like sweet candy nor put them away in a “hell” to torment and to torture. Many of your human ideas about me reflect your own sadism more than my nature.

Before she was out of my sight, with a gesture, I took away her memory of the hole so that all she would know was that I had brought her out from the campo and released her. No one would ever dig here, burst into flames, or suffer their organs to be ruptured. I paused to rest, though not from my physical exertions: even so simple an act as erasing thoughts could cause me fatigue. My power to do many things was still intact, yet exercising power while in human form carried punishments and suffering; and in many cases, doing certain things would carry too painful a price. It would not do at all for humans to come here and take that sword from the ground. It would be the last thing a band of such hapless crabs would do on this earth. For simply in touching the last few inches of soil covering it, they would die excruciating deaths. Stealing souls. What might you humans think of next?

13

My horse neighed softly in the cold air. My right hand ached from having drawn the tongue of God, two of the fingers alternately suffering spasms and freezing with cramps, and so I held gingerly to my reins. At the moment, I sat between Trebonius and Marcellus, astride their own horses, as we three inspected a Gaulish river under a bright cold sun. The clear winter sky was reflected on our breastplates; the clouds had parted, and the ice and snow were melting under a warming sun. In a week, the land had begun to thaw considerably, yet the wind in ing still could burn the skin with a frigid touch. We gazed at the river Seine. For a mile around the river, a hundred and more trees were gone, just as Marcellus had reported. Acres of stumps were left behind to mark what the enemy had done. There was not much sign even of the age of what we had reason to believe must have been six or seven thousand men and women at arms. No wagon ruts and only the slightest sign of footprints. The disturbance of the loam on the forest floor was noticeable, but enough of it had been deliberately erased to create the impression that far fewer troops had ed this way than we knew to be the case. Behind us the bulk of the cavalry currently attached to the legion, two hundred of my seven hundred equites, sat on horses watching us attentively for signs. I kept my back stiff and held my head high despite the fatigue I was suffering for the activities of last night and despite the revulsion I felt at the propensity of this human flesh I inhabited to excrete salty moisture in the form of sweat. Seated on his horse, back with the equites among a praetorian auxiliary detachment, was my technician, centurion Gracchus Livi, who’d interrogated Drusalla. Early that morning, Gracchus had revealed to me that he and several sentries had seen the light from the tongue of God last eve. They had walked out to seek me in the woods, finding only the mound of what looked like a grave where all knew Sulla to have dug a hole. The sun had not been up long; and already, the rumors had gone several rounds through the legions, about goings-on in the woods last night—the murder and

burial of the queen and rituals devoted to the cult of Pluto in which I, a secret priest of Pluto, had sacrificed her. Some arcane ritual, I mused ruefully, featuring my transformation into a horned goat or into a midget wood god with pigs under his arms, no doubt. Horns. Always the stulta horns. I suspected that more than simply reporting these rumors to me, Gracchus had actually been the source of them. I swung down from the saddle, trying not to show all watching that my bones ached and that climbing down worsened the pain in my hand where the sword had hurt it. My ass was sore as well. The ground under my feet was a thick half-frozen mass of pine needles, leaves, and sawdust remains. I squatted and studied the slush and organic matter. I stood, looking out again at the tree stumps and the river. There was a burning in my left testicle. “Try to look as if you are thinking something profound, Praetor,” said Marcellus softly, being careful to pitch his voice so it would not carry beyond our group of commanding officers. He glanced over his shoulder at the legions’ ranks, calming his suddenly skittish horse. “The equites look anxious,” he continued. “Likely they are wondering if we know what the cunnus we are doing.” A transparent melting layer of ice lay across the surface of the river. Moving currents ed in silvery flashes among shadows just beneath. The river flowed from where our campus sat (three miles behind us and a few miles from the Gallic-Roman settlement of Lutetia seized long ago by General Julius Caesar, the place we had been sent here to protect) and farther west and east toward Rotomagus (which would later be called Rouen) and finally into the freshwater channel between Gaul and Briton. I thought of Sulla, who had ridden out alone to scout the other side of the river. Brave of him to do so. Almost as if he had his own reasons for venturing so far beyond safe bounds. It was a Roman-enough quality, to be sure: recklessness. Trebonius dismounted. “Thoughts, Praetor Tribune?” he murmured. “Plenty of them,” I murmured back. He stood by me, allowing my silence. Marcellus’s horse, at my back, grew skittish again as Marcellus gazed off at the

limitless frontier. “I’d have thought the local Parisii at least would still be here.” “Why would they stay here, Marcellus?” I asked. “They and all the rest of the tribes are at war with us.” “Lutetia, just south of here, is Roman and Gaulish. Augustus’s dream of one people.” “Those in Lutetia are the colonized Gauls, Tribune. The Gauls who took the trees are free Gauls.” “Hah!” Marcellus snorted. “Free. What is that, Praetor? It’s a child’s dream or a savage’s. Now you sound like a Gaul. I was wondering when your nature would show.” “Do you think my barbarian heart will reemerge?” “No.” “Whatever else you are, priest of Pluto, seducer and murderer of queens, you are irredeemably Roman. Rome is destined to rule all and to provide them order, law, bridges, roads, hummingbirds, sweet bits of organ meat …” “Slavery, torture, destruction of their native languages and religions, backbreaking taxes, rape …,” I finished for him. “You sound suddenly not just barbarian, but like a rebel, Saturnius. But if you really were in favor of rebellion, you’d be with your people, not us.” Right he was—or so my aching hand, my upset bowels, and sweating flesh whispered. I made no response. How crushing it would be for Romans when the Cherusci barbarian Arminius, who would be allowed to the legions as I had been, would one day betray Rome. Arminius would defeat them by conspiring with his native Germania to destroy three Roman legions. Or had he already? Perhaps he had. Traveling across timelines I sometimes become uncertain of the order of historical events. History in my lap is different to me than in one of your books, so be patient with my occasional confusion.

Marcellus chuckled, not evilly, I noted, but sadly. “Hummingbirds,” he whispered, half to himself, shaking his head, then fell silent; and his horse settled at last. We stood where the Gaulish Parisii tribes had settled their villages along tributaries of the river Seine, which they called the Sicauna. None of the tribes were here, not even the Parisii. All had fled before us, but so too had Drusalla and her general, Ulgӧthur. So had their formidable armies, armies that had shown their courage and strength in three battles and skirmishes and that might turn and attack at any time, though it appeared they were fleeing us now. “We may have them on the run, or it may be they want us to think we do.” Trebonius spoke what we all were thinking. “They ought to have attacked Lutetia, defended by only one cohort.” Marcellus sighed, another puzzle to us. Lutetia was too small to quarter a legion, and Agrippa’s order had not been to spend months building a permanent fort but to engage and destroy the enemy. After three battles, none of them decisive, the enemy had suddenly disappeared. Yes, they would return. Meanwhile, we grew more and more dependent upon local resources. We were unable to build a more sufficient fortress until full spring and therefore unable to adequately defend Lutetia. If Drusalla’s and Ulgӧthur’s return were certain, and we all felt them to be, then we could not stay where we were, cowering inside our campus martius. “Are you perhaps having a Julius Caesar thought, Saturnius?” asked Marcellus in sotto voce. “Let me tell you,” he continued in his confidential tone. “Caesar was my grand-uncle, and he is the pattern for all men like us who yearn for power and who seek to get an army. You are thinking that Sulla has perhaps found trails and that we can follow them to where these Gaulish tribes have gone, that we can strike swiftly and cruelly at the enemy and ride home in victory with few losses. You are having that Julius Caesar feeling about things, neh?” Brutal, quick victory, honor, few losses, yes. I had my own reasons, though, for wanting to find these tribes, these “rebels.” I had let Drusalla go so that she

would remain alive and undamaged. I felt confident I could find her again and her army when I was ready to. She had headed west as she’d walked away. Marcellus kicked me lightly, his boot darting quick into the small of my back, then returning to his stirrup, too stealthy for any troops behind us to see. “Uncle Julius was a man of action, not a thinker, Saturnius,” he whispered. Trebonius grunted to stifle a snicker; and despite myself, I grinned, about to retort. But then I heard it. Without turning, I could hear Livius Sulla’s horse approaching (the skip in its trot gave the animal a distinctive sound). I also heard, farther behind Sulla, what sounded like a train and cart. “Tribune,” Trebonius began. “I hear them both,” I said and turned to look. A wealthy four-man guard of principes, not our own men—each bearing a scutum, the rectangular shield, but scaled down and less heavy, and each with a pilum, the legionnaire’s spear with iron tip—rode into the midst of our parameter guard. Recognizing Sulla at their head, the guard allowed them through to approach us. These principes were obviously the advance guard of a retinue from Rome whom Sulla no doubt had encountered on his way back. It was Marcellus who voiced our thoughts. “We have visitors, hopefully not to deliver punishment for our taking too long to finish our task. I wonder where the bulk of them are.” “Not too far behind Sulla and these four, you can be sure,” Trebonius grunted. I ed that these humans around me could not hear things as acutely as I can even when trapped in flesh. They didn’t hear the train and cart still coming; it was not in sight yet.

Sulla’s horse trotted to a halt beside Marcellus. “Hail and welcome return, Sulla,” I said. He dismounted, standing ram straight, following the pro forma of officers in the field in view of troops. He showed proper deference in front of the men. “Praetor, hail,” he saluted, removing his galea, his helmet, and tucking it beneath the correct arm. The red scarf of our Gallica legion, the Third Legion, tucked into the top of his tunic and breastplate formed a crimson-colored collar bright as my own, Trebonius’s, and Marcellus’s. I suddenly felt that the color about Sulla’s neck was somehow an omen. “Praetor, I have much to report from my ride.” “And what of your companions?” “Coming back to our position, I encountered their train. They are less than half a league behind me. It is an emissary from Rome, bearing proconsul authority, or so he says. He arrived at camp just after you’d ridden out at dawn, he says, and has settled in there. He rode out seeking you. I encountered him this morning.” There came behind the principes who’d accompanied Sulla a wagon of great girth and of somewhat rash opulence. “That is he,” Sulla muttered. “Hirtius.” All and I, and the troops too, turned to watch the wagon approach. “No, not Hirtius, surely,” Trebonius scoffed. “Afraid so,” Sulla replied and then gave me a look as if to say, “Be glad you don’t know of this man.” Another twenty principes accompanied the wagon, approaching our foray formation. Principes were spearmen or swordsmen during the early republic. Of course, my dear, where I dwelt now in spacetime was in the early empire, not the republic, though most Romans at this point were lying to themselves that Rome was a republic still. Principes in the true republic sometimes had been deployed with ordinary legions to take position in the second battle line, acting as a special guard to

legion commanders. They were always callow young men in their prime, usually wealthy men. They could buy themselves the best armor and weapons. They were at times and in great-enough numbers a heavy infantry of the legion, distinguished by their lighter shields and their ceremonial armor. But that had been during times that most ordinary Romans could barely , though they pretended to live in it still. One of the pretenders, of course, was Augustus himself. He pretended not out of the naiveté of plebeian Romans, but out of guile. For example, he’d reconstituted honorary principe columns and guards to be escorts and heralds for honored emissaries of the Senate. It was an empty but convenient way to smooth the egos of senators. Unlike plebeians who could lie to themselves, the Senate every day saw real power and influence flowing from their grasp and pooling at the feet of the titan who really ruled Rome, Augustus. The wagon ground to a halt; and then hardened city soldiers, praetorians, emerged from behind the ceremonial principes. “Oh, Kack,” Marcellus whispered. “Minerva’s tongue, we’ll offer a chicken to Mars.” Sulla sighed. “Better make it a goat,” said Marcellus. The praetorians shouted and pushed rudely through as they escorted their tall young patrician master, who now debarked from the fortresslike wooden vehicle down a stepway that folded outward on ropes like an accordion. Those praetorians guarding him were of the type who guard the Senate from the sounds of their accents. Praetorians, republic or empire, were not to be disdained: they were hard, efficient fighters, killers loyal to a man, to their imperator, and to anyone designated by the imperator to be important. The somber young patrician, of premature gray, deigned to walk the rest of the distance between the wagon and this place by the river, accompanied by two praetorians and three equites who had come down from the saddle. Obviously, this “emissary,” whom Sulla and Marcellus recognized and who carried himself with absolute confidence, was prominent. Dressed in senatorial white and red robes under a fur coat for warmth, he was sure-footed across the frozen ground and walked with no great hurry.

Yet he was no senator, as his entourage included no signifier and no lictores, no emblem bearers to carry the fasces or the Senate standard that would have surrounded a senatorial proconsul once he’d debarked to meet a general and tribune for the first time. The emissary gradually made his way to the row of guards on horseback who sat only a few meters to our rear. There, he was halted and stood silent, waiting. Sulla gestured. The emissary was urged forward. He, in turn, gestured to one of his equites, who gave him another fur—a shawl. He approached the spot where Sulla, Trebonius, Marcellus, and I waited. “Hail, Tribune, I am Proconsul Gaius Aulus Hirtius Minor,” he said, offering me a half salute as a superior would an underling. Trebonius saluted respectfully, but Marcellus made no such effort; neither did I. “Son of Aulus Hirtius, hail,” said Trebonius. Ahh, the son of one of Julius Caesar’s lieutenants. “Aulus Hirtius Major, the proconsul’s father, fought with Julius during the first Gallic wars,” announced Trebonius. “Your father, Hirtius Major, was killed, I hear, fighting against Antony on Octavius’s side.” Trebonius made this observation curtly, to state a fact and not with any particular flattery implied. The proconsul threw back his shoulders in the blush of pride all the same. I offered no interest to the father I perhaps might have; to the son, why should I? Marcellus climbed down from his horse and squatted to inspect the ground. “You are Marcellus Quintus of the Julii, a cousin to Caesar Julius,” Proconsul Hirtius Minor said. “I follow the bloodlines of noble families—a hobby.” Marcellus twisted, still squatting, and looked up at Hirtius as if noticing his

presence for the first time. “My mother, it so happens, enjoys the same hobby. She is an aficionada particularly of bloodlines and consul appointments. I’m a distant and bastard cousin of the Julii, I assure you.” Marcellus smiled. “But you are Marcellus Quintus? Of the Palatine Julii? Favored to one day lead the praetorian guard?” “Late of the Palatine. Haven’t been home in a while, in years. You know, what with marching and fighting and pissing into trenches and all.” “You’ve not been home to the Eternal City in so long?” “We’ve been touring barbarian lands ’twixt here and Briton. These pesky little wars. Nice of you to us.” “The Palatine Hill enjoyed an exceptional social season this year,” said Hirtius. Marcellus stood, then turned to face Hirtius. “Ah,” he said, “tell me, how are the whorehouses down near the Regia?” “Beg your pardon?” “Near the Temple of Vesta, at the bottom of the Palatine. How are those houses these days?” “I … ?” “I was good friends with two of the vestal virgins. Well, they were virgins in the beginning, anyway. Exceptional bloodlines, the both of them.” “What filth are you speaking? Do you know who I am?” “I knew your father. But as for you, who exactly are you, again?” Before the proconsul could order Marcellus whipped, skinned, and fed to the few fishes left in the river, I spoke. “Marcellus, it might do you to be generous.”

Nodding, Marcellus removed his rough Gaulish gloves and offered them to Hirtius. “Trebonius, be generous. Offer the proconsul your horse.” Trebonis, who still stood, gestured to his horse; and to my surprise, this shameless monkey Hirtius actually mounted, pulling on Marcellus’s gloves, and looked down on us from his new perch. “Saturnius, as honorary consul of the Senate, I will oversee your command of the combined forces once Verilius arrives from Germania. Verilius is not of the best family, as all know, but he is a capable general.” “Honorary. You are not actually a senator, then?” Marcellus asked, though he could see as well as I that Hirtius bore no signifiers of higher Senate office. “You command here, of course, Saturnius,” Hirtius said, ignoring Marcellus. “By Consul Agrippa’s wish, though you are not Roman. Under Roman pro forma, a proconsul—” “A proconsul has final authority over combined legions. Yes, I may be a barbarian by birth, Hirtius. But I am Roman by bloodshed,” I said calmly. “And Verilius is quite a bit more than ‘capable.’” “I suppose,” Hirtius demurred. “I’ve heard stories of your debut in Rome five years ago. A horrid and dirty barbarian slave who caught Agrippa’s eye, now a barbarian general of the legions. Someone trusts you won’t turn out to be no better than your birth.” “Pardon, Proconsul,” said Sulla. “Tribune Saturnius has bled for Rome in a dozen campaigns on the frontiers of Briton, Gaul, and Germania. He is a Roman citizen, an honored general.” “How many battles have you shed blood in so far, Minor?” Marcellus asked. Hirtius gave Marcellus a look, turned the horse, and cantered back to his wagon, gesturing to several of the soldiers who had helped him down from his wood palace. Though uniformed as praetorians, they had a strange aspect, as if they were even more than they seemed. He travels with assassins about him.

“That ass took my horse,” said Trebonius. “And my gloves,” Marcellus joked. “Every patrician for himself.” He smiled as he mounted again. “No offense, Saturnius.” “Verilius is one day’s march to the south, Praetor,” said Sulla. “Why didn’t you say earlier?” asked Marcellus. “A proconsul’s arrival and reception take precedence,” said Sulla. “Spaniard whelp. I should have you whipped before lunch—” “No, you won’t,” I interrupted. “Livius Sulla, as always follows, the proper pro forma of a centurion.” Marcellus looked at me a moment, smiled, then nodded in deference. Then he nodded to Sulla. “Sulla, you will ride back ahead of us,” I said, “and mobilize six cohorts.” I reached into my saddle pack for a map and unrolled it to study. “We won’t wait for Verilius. In two hours, we ride after the Gauls. We ride to this area here, farther east of the river.” Sulla looked at my map. “I have sent out two messenger falcons. I believe there may be reinforcements at the coast.” “Ships? Did Agrippa authorize—” “I am not without influence in Briton across the channel, Marcellus.” “A naval detachment? So that’s what you’ve been doing with the gold Agrippa pays you. The gods know you don’t spend it on yourself. Does Verilius know?” “I don’t know myself yet. It depends on the word I get back as the falcon flies, if any word at all. We march regardless. When Verilius arrives, we’ll have found the enemy. He will us, and then we offer parley, or we fight them.”

“You know which way they went?” asked Trebonius, looking at the map. “She told you before you killed her?” “You don’t think he really killed and buried her,” said Marcellus. “He liked the wench. He let her go.” “She’d dead. Sulla dug a nine-foot hole last night that now has been filled.” “Be naive if you wish, Trebonius. Either way, there will be no parley, I think. We’re going to see action. Did you see the hilt of that sword Minor wore? You saw it, didn’t you, Saturnius?” “I saw the sword’s hilt,” I said. “It’s not legionary issue, but Persian—sawtooth blade, nasty thing. Minor is a noble playing at being a legionnaire. He wants action. He’s going to get us killed.” “Enough, Marcellus!” I rumbled. “A Roman officer should have more dignity. Keep your thoughts to yourself as all of us do. You will stay behind and ride with Verilius once he arrives. Now get a horse, Sulla!” Sulla obeyed me, running toward the line of cavalry to appropriate a horse. He did and galloped away. When Trebonius and I had mounted together and the three of us moved away from the river to re the detachment, Marcellus sighed. “An arrogant and foolhardy plan, just as Uncle Caesar would have conceived and would have somehow managed to pull off—with the deaths of many legionnaires in the process, but ending with victory, with Caesar getting a triumph, and precisely what he wanted. I see this ending in grief.” “What is the source of this distemper of yours, Tribune!” I snapped at him. He fell silent, to my relief. After we’d ridden a league, not more, he spoke once again. “Saturnius, I can’t tell right now if you are Gaulish or Roman. I sometimes fear you are becoming more Etruscan than any of the children of Romulus and

Remus more rightly born to the wolf’s teat.” I had allowed Marcellus to pique my anger, as he could often do almost effortlessly! I cannot tell you how often I considered murdering him during the time of my exile. I believe in retrospect that it might have irked me that I was fond of Marcellus and had not found it possible to feel fondness for any other human being except perhaps the old man in Princeton. Marcellus was better at combat with a sword (and with pike and dagger) than was I, which irked me as well. My feelings were always in collision. Over more, as with Marcellus’s attitude toward so many of his own talents, his ability with a sword was one he bore with a stoic disinterest. He behaved as one burning his own talents as if burning kindling. He offered his loyalty, particularly to the legionnaires, but declined to give his consistent and sincere obedience to any on this earth other than Augustus. He could kill expertly and would carp and joke while doing so. At root, he did not believe in Roman myths of destiny nor keep the common faith that Roman power was ultimately just or right but spoke of it as rather only pragmatic. The only cause he valued was that of the safety and dignity of officers in his beloved legions and of the men he commanded. He was the image of a rebel, a mirror image of me. He constantly reminded me of the annoyance I must have been to Anu, if Anu was even capable of being annoyed. Certainly I could be. We rode in silence the whole way back to camp.

As quaestor Lucius Tercius Mara made hasty retreat to the banquet table in search of crocodile brains, Lucretia left us to re the crowd of party guests. Agrippa took me by a shoulder, guiding me to an arch where several older men stood and where I could see Drusalla had come to rest. “Lucretia of the Julii is Marcellus’s mother, you know.” “I did not know, Consul,” I said. “Owns a score of apartment blocks within the Field of Mars. She’s a powerful noblewoman, good to have on our side. Saturnius, you are magnanimous despite the insults of people like Tertius Mara. Rome is a conquering nation. Conquerors grow beastly and stupid over time. We’ll need to reform Roman arrogance along with our other vices if we want peace.” “Do you Romans want peace?” “Yes,” said a firm voice from an alcove, answering my question before Agrippa could respond. It was Augustus who had answered my question. “Yes, we do, Saturnius. We’ve had plenty of the other. Peace is the next frontier.” We’d arrived at an incense-sweetened, barrel-ceilinged alcove beneath a grand arch; and there stood Augustus in a gray tunic, ringed around by white-andmaroon-clad Senate elders and five leather-clad Gauls, including Ulgӧthur and Drusalla. A single silent praetorian in armor stood nearby, trying to look unattached to the first citizen but clearly attuned to the princeps’ slightest gesture, as was a tall silent woman, ever on the periphery of wherever her husband entertained: Augustus’s wife, Livia, in palla shawl, tunica, and laced sandals, whom it was said was his closet advisor, closer even than Agrippa but unseen and unheard in public. Ulgӧthur had the same red hair as Drusalla and me. Mine had been cut shorter, Roman style, pulled back into a tight wooden clamp in back; but Ulgӧthur’s was long as Drusalla’s, gnarly and tied here and there with leather strips and bronze

talismans. He was bearded where I was clean-shaven—again Roman style. He turned from one of the lesser translators hovering near him while I’d stayed with Drusalla. He glanced at me from beneath thick red eyebrows, his red beard pressed to his chest. His chin tucked in thus, he resembled a muscular suspicious owl. “Frontiers are fine, except for Germania and Gaul,” mewed a senator, a nearly bald man about seventy years whose head bore the wispy remains of white hair and whose liver spots formed a map of Gaul itself upon his head. “Yet those are the frontiers keeping us from achieving your peace, Gaius Octavius.” He used Augustus’s younger name, Octavius, rather than one of his numerous cognomens or patronymics of honor. “And yet we want peace,” insisted Agrippa. “Or so I do,” said Augustus with a smile as sharp as a knife, directed at Senator Liver Spot. “And if Rome does not want what I want, then I’ll teach her how to want it.” I quietly translated all to the Gauls as the toga-draped senators, a tightly drawn clutch of turkey necks, nodded sluggishly at Augustus’s words. Medals of authority clicked and snickered as old heads bobbed. They reluctantly clucked “hear, hear” and “yes, yes,” rheumy eyes glimmering with real and feigned ardor. Every head bobbed but that of Liver Spot. His hostility to Augustus showed even in the rooted stance of his shriveled body with its loose skin and its wiry likeness to a waiting vulture. As for Augustus, he was to eventually be by ancient world standard a middleaged man. Short but sinewy, with a sleek head and healthy bronze skin, hair about to start to gray. He wore a plain linen tunic of neutral gray and plain calfskin sandals. He bore no family insignia and had neither jewelry nor any official medallion. His single affectation had a shrewd meaning: a leather cuirass embossed with the sign of the Roman legions. “And what of the coin of the realm, Octavius?” There was a silence. The senators were weighing whether their liver-spotted colleague was being disrespectful or merely exhibiting the inevitable carelessness and loss of lucidity typical of the aged.

“By coin, do you mean money or arrogance, Senator?” “You yourself are said to have an abundance of both. If we continue to welcome enemies, I wonder what will become of either,” said Liver Spot, sounding quite lucid. The silence hardened. Augustus’s reply betrayed the barest irritation. “Our power,” he said, each word spoken as though part of an official proclamation, “makes them to be one and the same, our wealth, and our arrogance, wouldn’t you say, Senator? Our enemies do.” “Yes … yes!” murmured the other turkey-necked senators. “Our coins be the more precious, then,” Liver Spot chided. “And all the more to be protected from that which will dilute Rome’s identity and power. Her identity is her strongest coin.” Some being old enough to the harsh lesson of Cicero’s death and mutilation, senators looked away from Liver Spot as if to deny his existence, and the ones who simply knew by instinct what a risk this oldest of them was taking followed suit. Liver Spot fell silent, smiling. Drunia arrived, Sulla in her wake. “Have you one?” Augustus asked. “One what?” Liver Spot squinted. “Coin.” For a long moment, the senator was baffled. A young and adoring otherwiseunremarkable civil servant who’d stood dutifully at Liver Spot’s side the whole of the evening promptly produced a gold denarius for the old man. The senator, in turn, proffered it shakily to Augustus. Augustus took it and silently ed it over to Drunia. She received it with a firm hand, producing a knife from her boot, which she used to scrape the coin’s head (the coin of soft gold bore Augustus’s own head, in fact), before touching her

tongue to the edge of the blade as if to taste scrapings. She ed the coin to her queen. Drusalla regarded it a moment, then tossed it back at Augustus. He caught it one-handed, tucking the coin into a sleeve on the underside of his belt. Drusalla—arms folded across her chest, legs spread in a relaxed, but vital warrior’s stance—smiled ironically at Augustus. “Am I to expect an answer to my question?” the old senator chided. “Didn’t you see?” Augustus chided back. “The world is a circle, as my uncle Julius once taught you senators by fire. Whatever goes forth returns.” Sincerely delighted chuckles from senators contrasted to the silence of the Gauls. I translated to them all that was said. “As a farmer must sow before he can reap,” Augustus continued, “Rome must plant seeds of wealth. As for Rome’s arrogance, that is in one way a good thing. A farmer is arrogant enough to think he will not be ruined by drought or by flood.” “Rome has seen both,” said Liver Spot. “My uncle used fire to shock Rome into taking her rightful place in the world. I shall use flood to sweep her toward her future. There will be more coins, Senator, to replace each one you give.” “Ahhh!” murmured the turkey necks. Drusalla turned to me, partially turning away from the old senator everyone was looking at. At that moment, Agrippa cleared his throat. “Are you referring to taxing our former enemies, Consul?” Agrippa asked. “I refer to taxing ourselves. Rome will not fall except through indolence. We’ve

responsibilities. The world is our child. We must raise it.” Everyone, without thinking, turned to the Gauls; and Ulgӧthur’s bushy eyebrows rose in consternation. Senator Liver Spot grinned maliciously. “By our children shall the future know us,” he sneered. In Gaulish, Drusalla, turning her back completely on the old senator, spoke to me. “You, Saturnius, how, by the bile and spleen of Roman gods, did you convince these baline, malolmata trouts that you’ve cut wood in my Gaullica-Keltia?” “I did not, Queen. They assumed it. I simply accepted their assumption.” “You act bold like a Keltoi, but you are no Keltoi. General Ulgӧthur insists you are an evil spirit in the body of a man.” “What did she say?” asked Augustus. “She says she sees something in your metaphor, princep.” Augustus’s Roman translators shot a hostile glance at me for my misreport but kept silent about it. “And what question did she just ask?” “She asks why and how I have been accepted by Romans,” I answered. “You lie about some of what she says.” Augustus smiled. “Agrippa assures me you are to be trusted to translate truly the most important things, though you clean it up for diplomacy’s sake. That and much else was lacking in previous translators …” At this, Augustus cast a disapproving glance at his Roman translators, who shrank under the glance, and stepped away. He spoke again when they’d gone. “I now know, for instance,” Augustus went on, “that your queen detests me. Tell her that she’ll enjoy consular privilege in Rome while peace is negotiated.”

Agrippa paled. He cleared his throat. “Princeps, the nobles will—” “They will accept that the old covenant is broken.” All stood in silence—the senators in shocked revulsion, the Gauls waiting, and an uneasy Agrippa scanning everyone’s faces to figure the damage and to plan tactics to protect Augustus from himself. Senator Liver Spot bowed elaborately to Augustus. “If you will excuse me, Emperator,” he murmured, then toddled off toward a banquet table. Augustus watched him go and shook his head, muttering sadly to himself. “What are you thinking, Gaius?” one of the remaining turkey necks petitioned submissively. “That I am come to bring a new covenant.” “A covenant of adopting the wretched of the world?” “It would be easier for a horse to into a seashell than for Rome to enter the future with all her wealth intact if she does not make herself heirs,” said Augustus. “Alexander knew this. It was the reason he fought. He wanted Greece to be immortal.” “He failed.” Augustus turned to the senator, a flash of anger in his voice. “Failure is proof that one has sought to go further,” Augustus scolded. “Pardon my ignorance, princeps,” the turkey neck demurred as he backed away and left. His use finally of an honorarium was the more ironic after using “Gaius Octavius” all evening. In the cold silence, Marcellus appeared with a crock of beer in one hand and a greasy chicken leg in the other. His squint-eyed Beast trotted up to him, hulking and obedient. Beside him was a lovely noblewoman, a distaff cousin of the Julii perhaps, certainly a citizen from among the same Palatine patrician families that had produced Marcellus. He took in the silent tableau.

“Has Augustus told one of his incomprehensible jokes?” he loudly inquired of Agrippa. “He is practicing his usual incomprehensible diplomacy,” said Agrippa quietly. “By Mars!” groaned Augustus, obviously amused by Marcellus. “Beast is clearly more loyal to me than these senators, but why do you bring that dog to parties? It’s a war dog.” “The women love him. Right, Andoria?” The woman beside him smiled and bowed to Augustus, offering no comment. She was wellborn, for she met the gaze of Augustus and all the other powerful men and did not lower her eyes. She may or may not own apartment blocks as Marcellus’s mother did; but she was of Marcellus’s class, the product of wealth, of slave servants, and of indulgences such as only wellborn women in Rome enjoyed or such as barbarian women in Rome would now that they’d been granted consular privileges. “He was in Agrippa’s legion with five years, princeps. Agrippa’s legionaries are like dogs themselves. Well trained.” Augustus chuckled at Agrippa’s expense, reached out and took Marcellus’s beer, and drank from it, much to the senators’ collective dismay. He handed the crock back, turning to me. “Tell her all I said, Saturnius, and be accurate.” I turned to Drusalla. “He says that he knows I lie, but that he cares only to reach a peace with Gaul. You will be treated as a consul while in Rome.” “When I leave Rome, will I be a ‘barbarian’ again? And what will he say if I tell him, through the Greeks, that you are not a man, but an evil spirit?” “He won’t believe it. Greeks are slaves here and little trusted.” Beast settled his gaze upon me. He glared, his eyes narrowing beneath those mastiff folds of skin. “Still, I know your secret. And so, it seems, does this noble dog. Even he can tell

you belong to no tribe that ever cut wood in the three kingdoms.” “Do as you wish with your suspicions, Queen.” She stared at me and finally smiled evilly. “I’ll keep your secret, even if the dog doesn’t. You may be of use to us, as Arminius was to the Germani. Tell Caesar I’ll negotiate. He wishes to protect Lutetia? I wish to protect the rest of Gaullica to the west of what Romans call Seine, but tell him I am not queen of all of my country there.” “She will bargain with you, precepts, but says she cannot speak for any other rulers of western lands.” An augur who’d appeared beside Augustus whispered into his ear. “My haruspex-augur, Vippus, has just come from searching the viscera of his holy chickens and assures me that Drusalla is to be queen of all Gaul. Tell her that what he says can become what is true, with my help.” I told her. She told the other Gauls who, laughing, discussed offal with her. Finally, she spoke. “My people say it amuses them, how Romans believe truth is to be found in the entrails of chickens.” She smiled sardonically at Augustus. “Princeps,” I began. “No need, Saturnius,” he said testily, frowning. “I have common sense, and I can see they are mocking Roman auguries and auspices.” Beast edged over to stand between Augustus and myself, protective of Augustus. An annoyance, this overly sensitive dog. Augustus reached down absently to pet the mastiff, his frown hardening such that the praetorian’s sword arm tensed perceptibly. Not a good sign. Agrippa’s eyes darted back and forth between Augustus, the praetorian, and the laughing Gauls. His anxiety mounted as Augustus spoke again, a brittle edge to

his voice. “Tell her I happen to be pontifex maximus, high priest. The augury goes back to my family’s Etruscan origins. It is sacred.” I related this to the Gauls. Their incredulity was unaffected by it. Without my further intercession, Augustus knew he was to be disrespected on this point. The praetorian, sensitive to his master’s every twitch and tone of voice, placed a hand meaningfully on the hilt of the gladius hung at his side. Livia’s hand went to one of the many folds in her knee-length tunica; clearly, she bore a dagger there. Augustus smiled. “Tell the general something for me.” “Yes, princeps?” “Tell him that profound and auspicious things can be hidden up the asses of lowly creatures and that this is why a man should, from time to time, search even the droppings of his wife.” When I’d translated, Ulgӧthur and the other men of Gaul laughed the more heartily, brutishly striking one another’s backs and chests in their hilarity. The humor was no longer at Augustus’s expense, however. He’d struck a note that resonated with the men of the Gaulish delegation. Agrippa sighed and relaxed. He smiled, perplexed. Livia turned and walked away past the praetorian. Drusalla jerked a disapproving look at her male companions. I felt for her. I had seen the Nazarene once use much the same sly gift of turning their own rhetoric on his enemies, humiliating them with it. Augustus—savior of Rome, as it happened—shared this and other traits with the savior of Judea. Saviors seemed the rage of this space-time continuum. As her general and her commanders laughed, Drusalla turned back to look again at Augustus, her eyes narrowing, as if she were learning a bit of respect for the

short pampered emperor of Rome.

Sulla had spoken true. Hurtius Minor had indeed settled in at our campo. A full cohort of approximately 480 men had come with him from Rome, and they were bivouacked in their own tents (one for centuries and the other for officers, inside the walls near the camp perimeter. Hirtius’s own tent sat just beside mine, a non– pro forma position for an honorary proconsul in relation to a legion general). The Third Legion, given to me to command by Augustus, contained four maniples of praetorians (480 men) and nine complete cohorts (4,320 men). A legion was considered to be more than enough—given Roman discipline, strategy, and superior arms and armor—to slay a barbarian army of even twice that number, at least one outside of Germania and one not commanded by the notorious turncoat Arminius. Arminius had been son to Cheruscan war chief Segimerus. Arminius had been trained as a Roman military commander, living with the legions, being awarded Roman citizenship, and then achieving the rank of equestrian. He had returned to Germania as commander of a detachment of Roman auxiliary forces in his native Cherusci. Unknown to the legion commander, Arminius had negotiated secret alliances between the Cherusci, Chatti, Bructeri, Chauci, Sicambri, and Marsi tribes, then defected to the barbarian side to attack and wipe out the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth legions as well as several detachments of cavalry. “Send me Sulla!” I called to the guard outside my tent. Where was Sulla? Perhaps he knew where the trees had gone. In my marching armor, I prepared to depart, gathering maps and charts and changing into marching boots. As I finished stocking my saddle pack, Hirtius entered my tent unannounced, shoving his way by a praetorian who was heading out to identify the visitor. “General Saturnius! What is this Sulla saying about leaving on a march? Why are you wearing your—” I quickly motioned to the praetorian to not draw his gladius. Hirtius had arrogantly turned his back on the man and so had no idea how close he’d come to dying. “Pro forma says even a proconsul allows himself to be announced, Hirtius,” I

said to him mildly as the praetorian frowned and left. “Where are you going, General?” “I am going to find the barbarian army, Proconsul.” “No, you will wait for Verilius because the combining of legions will make you stronger.” “It will also make us slower, less mobile, and louder. I have shown Marcellus on our maps the place I am marching to, and he will guide Verilius.” “Wait one more day, and you and Verilius can—” “Verilius’s legion is not familiar with Gaulish terrain or Gaulish ways.” “Verilius fought in Germania and in Dalmatia. One barbarian land is the same as another.” “Gaul is not Dalmatia, and you are ignorant to assume so. Another concern I have is damage to this country. The less violence it takes to subdue Drusalla and Ulgӧthur, the less we damage the lands and the less hatred we inspire in the people. Even with two legions, which are only ten thousand or so men when one includes our extra maniple, Lutetia will not be easily defended if Drusalla does not accept us. For the conquered men of this country can field perhaps tens of thousands against us.” “Tens of thousands? They haven’t the discipline, you fool.” “When we’ve murdered their families, burned down their trees and seized their crops, taken their rulers from them? They will learn the discipline they need, thanks to us.” “Trees, what trees? What—re you insane? Are you truly a barbarian after all?” “I invite you, monkey, to ignore this body I inhabit. Can you not perceive, even with your small monkey mind, the wisdom of what I say?” Hurtius tilted his head, studying me; he smiled humorlessly.

“Are you a great thinker now, barbarian general? Do you think you can form Roman policy in its colonies? Politicians and philosophers think. Your function is to fight and to win battles for Rome, nothing more.” Enough of this monkey. Another word, and I shall light him aflame like the lump of fat he is and ruin my asylum. As I carried my saddle pack out of the tent and toward the officers’ corrals, he followed me and against pro forma continued to nag me within hearing of my guard, several centurions, and scores of legionnaires. As we approached Trebonius, neat in his march armor, standing with my horse, I struggled to not betray how much effort it was to carry my pack. I’d underestimated the weight and felt the burden in my knees, which had lately tended to swell due to the cold, wet weather. That, and a burning in my mentula, made it all I could do to tolerate Hirtius’s voice. Trebonius saw in my eyes my struggle to maintain a proper image before the men. He handed the horse’s reins to a centurion, the three-toothed Flaccus Tullius, in skirmish gear who looked puzzled indeed. Trebonius hurried to my side while trying not to look to be hurrying. “I order you to stay here, Saturnius!” “You’ve no knowledge of strategy in Gaul, Proconsul.” Now Marcellus saw us and soon was at my side, just ahead of Trebonius. “May I carry that for you, Saturnius?” asked Marcellus, looking fierce in battle uniform and chest guard. “No.” “Will you obey me or not, Saturnius?” demanded Hirtius. “No.” “Praetor, shall I take your pack?” Trebonius said as he appeared beside us. “Are the six cohorts formed?”

“They stand in formation before the gates, waiting.” “Are you insane?” Hirtius exploded. “You not only presume to disobey me by going on a lone march, barbarian, but you’ll take only six cohorts? Three thousand men? You’ll be slaughtered!” As I made it to the corrals and to where Flaccus Tullius stood, I threw my pack over the saddle of my horse. Hirtius, the fool, took my arm, restraining me. “You will obey a Roman, cannus!” I was getting tired of being called “dog” by these monkeys, but before I could speak, Marcellus drew his sword. Sulla now appeared, having been called for, looking worried; for he could see what was happening. I had to draw my own sword to block Marcellus. Meanwhile, fool indeed, Hirtius drew his. It was his Greek sword with the sawtooth blade. “Romans!” shouted Sulla. “Sheath your swords, all! Roman should not threaten Roman in the midst of enemy territory!” Hirtius struck out, his blow glancing off Sulla’s shoulder guard. Next, despite Marcellus’s swinging to guard Sulla, Hirtius recovered and thrust, stabbing Sulla in the neck just above his chest plate. I swung to prevent Marcellus’s riposte against Hirtius, my sword clashing against Marcellus’s sword, and saw over Marcellus’s shoulder the sudden approach of Hirtius’s praetorians, some of them drawing their own swords. This was to be expected, every bit as much as I expected what I saw in the next moment: my own praetorians, in shock infantry armor, had drawn their swords and arrived to surround us as Marcellus took a second swing at Hirtius. Trebonius, meanwhile, caught Sulla as he fell. Arterial blood spurted rhythmically from his wound. “Bastard! Cunnus!” shouted Marcellus, who threw off his lion’s fur coat and unstrapped his chest plate, stepping back to give his sword arm room to swing.

Instead, he found himself grappling with four of Hirtius’s guards seeking to seize his sword from him. It was an unwise action on their part; for with his instinctively good tactical sense, having thrown off his chest plate, Marcellus was now much lighter and more flexible than they were. He spun in their midst and lay open the throats of three of them, an nearly chopped cleanly through the neck of the fourth. Marcellus now had his back to me, and Hirtius was still beside me. I now feared Marcellus would fall in the midst of this madness. I put my foot into the chest of the proconsul and kicked him as far from Marcellus as possible. Hirtius stumbled backward, tripped, and fell onto the frozen ground, his sword skittering away, to be picked up by one of my own praetorians. He stood and barked orders at them; but they ignored him, out of loyalty to me, and instead surrounded me with force of arms, waiting to see how this skirmish would unfold, ready to kill to preserve my life. Trebonius had dragged Sulla off to lean him against a post in the fence surrounding the corrals. The blood that flowed from Sulla’s wound had formed a puddle beneath him. “Hold! On pain of death, I order you all to hold!” I shouted, and my shout went unheeded. Marcellus bellowed, turning to face the onslaught of ten enraged city praetorians seeking to defend their master, Hirtius. I had no doubt that Marcellus would easily slay each and every one of the ten. I raised my arm, then spun it vigorously like a wheel, and all movement ceased. I sank to my knees, breathing as deeply as I could, my breath ragged and my lungs burning from the cold air. When my breath had slowed, I was able to hear the breathing, just as ragged, of another. I raised my head to see that Sulla was not dead. He lay against the post, his eyes wide open, angled up at the sky. In the complete silence, as if the entire world had been smothered, his breathing was rapid, shallow, and rattled wetly in his throat. My freezing the stuff of time had temporarily stopped the bleeding. The frozen arm of Trebonius lay behind Sulla’s neck, ing his head. Blood from a wound on Trebonius’s arm has had smeared Sulla’s face, reminding me of the “premonition” I’d had when

looking at Sulla’s red scarf. Though Trebonius’s arm ed Sulla, the rest of Trebonius was frozen as well, as indeed everyone and everything around us was frozen. Only Sulla and I still moved. I stood painfully, my head ringing, from the effort of what I’d done. I had planned not to try it, and as I’d expected, freezing spacetime (even local spacetime) was agonizing. I sheathed my sword. I stumbled past my frozen horse, Flaccus Tullius frozen right beside it. I stood over Sulla, looking at him until his eyes rolled back down to see me. “What … has happened, Tribune?” “You are wounded. You are dying.” “What is hap … What is wrong with everyone?” “I have suspended them in their places so that we may have a moment to speak.” “How?” “I am not what I seem, Sulla.” “It is true, then, what the tribunes say? The rumors?” “Rumors?” “That you are a patron spirit for Rome sent by Mars?” “I don’t regard myself as one.” “Then are you Mars? Are you a god?” “Certainly not. I am a being of power, one of many.” “Why … ?” “I seek after what I have lost. It is one quest of my existence. The other quest is to know the purpose the creation serves and my place in it. I am with you because I am exiled by others like me. I am with you because only Rome has been a home to me.”

“Those are … the quests of … all men.” “Yet I am not a man.” “You have been a good man, a good general.” “Then obey me one last time, Livius Sulla. Tell me where Drusalla has gone.” His eyes dropped. “I know you are in love, Sulla. You know where the woman you love, Drunia, hides. There, I will find Drusalla. If I cannot parley with Drusalla before Verilius arrives with his legion, she and Drunia both will surely die.” His breath grew more ragged; his eyes wandered. “Protect Drunia,” he whispered. “Lead her … to the light of Rome, upward, upward to the sunlight.” “I will lead her to the light. Neither Drusalla nor Drunia will I harm. I give my word as a Roman. Whatever else I am, I am Roman. You know that.” “I … can … I will …” His voice was weakening. I knelt down to bring my ear near to his mouth and listened to his last whispers, then stood and drew my sword. “Sulla, I am taxed by holding the world still. I fear I will out before I can put things right again. I revealed myself to you only because you are dying, and I cannot return all to its rightful way until you do because I cannot risk you speaking your last breath into Trebonius’s ear to tell of me.” Sulla nodded. “I will be swift and clean, Livius Sulla Younger.” Sulla nodded again and raised his chin. I thrust my sword quickly and firmly through his breastplate and into his strong young heart. I stumbled back to my horse, pulled a scarf from a leather box aside my saddle, and wiped my gladius clean of Sulla’s blood. His was blood I did not want on

my sword longer need be, so I took the time even though I felt myself growing light-headed and my vision growing dim. Flesh, weak monkey flesh. Before I fell beside my horse, I reached upward and turned with my hand the edges of the stuff of space and time; and all movement commenced again around me as cries and shouts retuned, the ringing of clashing swords, and of grunting men in combat. I heard Marcellus bellow, “Saturnius has fallen! Protect the general!” And then, for me at least, all was still again and cold and dark.

This time, there were no dreams—only a timeless floating in darkness. Then the brightness of a candle flame. It was no longer daylight, and darkness was visible at the doorway of my tent. My head felt impossibly large, and my mouth was dry, as if I’d swallowed sand. “His eyes are open.” “Thank the gods.” “Tell the proconsul Hirtius that Saturnius lives.” “He’ll be little pleased to hear it, Trebonius.” “Keep a decent tongue!” “I go to tell Hirtius.” Someone wiped my face and head with a warm, damp rag. A blanket was rearranged around me. “I’ve filled the brazier with coals. Should we put coals into the bed with him?” “Mars only knows. He’s got fever.” “Fever killed Lucritus in Caerleon with the Second Legion under Augustus.” “Should we put a goat in the bed with him?” “My mother used to do that. She used to put a goat in the bed to warm us.” “Your mother was a goat.” “Silence! I cannot think with you fools talking!” “The physician bids you be silent. Now be silent!” Hands prodded my face, beneath my chin, and under my armpits as the voice of

the physician continued angrily. Darkness again.

It was not a dream that I had this time, but a visitation, whispered to me from the dark. How do you find your exile, Heylaāl? Where is Yazad? Where you did not think to look, evil horned one. Horns? I’ve no horns. Humans think you do. Oh well, if they say so. You took me from the place where my beloved had been. And you are forbidden to return there. By you, Uriel? By our father, Anu. I would not have harmed the humans. You did. You intruded on the woman’s discovery— The monkey? The one who was making fire? You called her Eva. Is she key to the plan? She brought about all I have seen here, for she is the mother of humanity, isn’t she? Yazad is mother to all that these humans are! I do not know the plan. You stole my beloved’s quintessence to put her inside of that monkey so she would make fire, and she has been ed from generation to generation of them. She is now being carried by Drusalla. You are too clever for your own contentment.

I will have my beloved back! You’ll have pain and discontent until you learn obedience!

I groaned as my eyes opened to the harsh light and the cold. As so often had been the case lately upon awakening, I was wet—a sickening thing about human existence to which I could not accustom myself. “Welcome back, Saturnius.” Verilius stood by my cot. Short, wizened, but powerfully built. In his typical saffron-dyed tunic beneath camp armor, the bandy, muscular, and battlehardened general stood with his hand tucked into the gap between his leather chest guard and tunic, looking quite martial and doing his best impression of Agrippa. Marcellus approached, in camp armor, the red scarf of our Gallica legion tied at his neck. He peered down at me. “Will he live?” The voice of one of my camp physicians, an Egyptian, sounded from somewhere beyond my field of vision. “He’s strong. The fever is broken. He should do well, Tribune.” “Can you hear, Saturnius?” “He can.” “Sulla is dead, Saturnius. I want to know—” “I saw him fall, Marcellus.” I rasped in a dry throat. “What did you see?” “Let him rest, Marcellus,” said Verilius. “I want to know what happened. The legionnaires all want to know. I taught Sulla to be an officer when he was fresh from legionnaires’ training in Greece. My father served in the Senate with his father, who is of a distinguished family of Hispania.” “Your distress over Sulla is understandable, but—”

“Verilius, Sulla was pierced in two places. His neck wound was from a sawtooth blade, and Hirtius has the only such blade in this camp. But he was also pierced through the heart, and that stroke was done with a legionnaire’s gladius.” “General, wait! Don’t try to—” I’d risen from the cot and stood, sheet wrapped around me, making me look a Judean. Unlike a Judean, though, I was damp and cold in the grip of winter. “Where is Hirtius?” “In his tent,” said Verilius. “The odd fellow introduced himself to me as if he were Julius Caesar’s son, Ceasarian. ‘I am Proconsul Gaius Aulus Hirtius Minor, son of the great Hirtius,’ he chattered. But that wasn’t the first thing. Do you know the first words the cunnus said to me when I got here? ‘So you are the relative of traitor Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus’ is what he said. What an ass.” “He will ride at the vanguard of the march, where hopefully he will be first to die.” “Shall we march then, Saturnius?” asked Verilius. “Where is Trebonius?” “I am here, Praetor,” said Trebonius as he brought me a tunic and my camp uniform. As I dressed, Marcellus glared at me. “Who pierced Sulla’s chest?” he asked. “I inspected the body. He was killed not by the neck wound, but by that stroke from a gladius.” “The camp is full of gladii,” I answered him. “And Hirtius’s troops were engaged against us at that moment.” “So are you accusing one of them?” Verilius said. “Clearly, it was one of them.” “Sulla was a good man!” “By Jupiter, Marcellus!” snorted Verilius. “I’ve lost whole maniples of good men these two years. So has Saturnius. So will you if y’learn to shut your mouth long enough to gain a command. Learn also to let dead men lie!”

“He is right, Marcellus,” said Trebonius. “Marcellus,” Verilius continued, “you were born to command and hell, maybe even to serve in the senate if you finally wish. You are one of the best officers in the legions.” Marcellus kept his silence at this, scowling, as Verilius went on. “You are patrician” he said, “and yet a hero to the centuries and the maniples. By Mars and Jupiter, you might even rise to Consul, still might lead all of Rome someday.” All in the tent nodded their silent agreement at this barrage of both praise and rebuke from Verilius. Now Verilius softened his tone, stepping closer. I noticed how all in the tent quietly drew forward a bit, even the guards and the physician, as if collectively sharing in this intervention as Verilius finished. “My own men speak of you as if they serve with you instead of me. I’d follow you as I would Agrippa. But you must learn to master yourself.” “Just the same, Tribunes,” said Marcellus quietly, his voice now subdued and pitched between the four of us, “I will have each of Hirtius’s praetorians beheaded by our own praetorian guardsmen, out of sight of the camp. I am going to submerge his cohort within your two legions, splitting up each of his maniples so that his men are scattered.” “That seems a wise action to me,” said Verilius. “Do as you think best, Marcellus,” I said. Then I added, “Give me my maps,” as I stepped down from my cot to cross to the table in the middle of my tent. Maps can be quite comforting when omnipotence has been diminished, I’ve always found.

14

The column halted as Verilius and I dismounted to confer. “Where are we?” asked Verilius, his voice muffled by the soft flakes filling the air. His immunity to the cold was irable, but then I had not served in Germania as long as he. I had spent most of my service in this relatively warmer country of Gaul, which still I found to be far too harsh. “I am cold, Verilius.” “Ignore it. You will eventually get used to it. Now where are we?” We squatted. I spied the ground, but there was little of the trail left we’d followed away from the west side of the river. It was not a trail that guided me now anyway, but my sense of where in the space-time field my quarry was located. She was somewhere a few leagues ahead. For show, I unrolled my map and traced for Verilius our progress from the river Seine to this forest marsh. “We are here, west and north of Lutetia. We have roughly followed the course of the river toward the Briton channel. We should encounter their rear guard soon, a little bit farther north. And we’ll have a hard fight, I think, but scouts have told us their forces will be less than the number we are.” As Verilius nodded, a voice cracked behind him. “A hard fight? A Gaulish rear guard cannot hope to fight long against even part of a legion. Barbarians are not trained in sound military tactics. They are barbarians.” We both stood as Hirtius appeared. “I told you to stay on your horse, Proconsul, and I also told you to keep your voice pitched quiet.” “And I told you, Saturnius, that I am the Senate authority for your two legions!”

Verilius drew his sword and whispered, “Well, I am telling you now, Hirtius the Lesser, that you’ll your illustrious father, the Greater, if you don’t shut up and get back on your horse. Now draw your whorish Greek blade. Cross it with mine in salute, a show for the men. Do it.” “The Senate will hear of this non–pro forma behavior,” said Hirtius as he did what Verilius bid him. “If we live to see Rome again, you may promptly offer me up for censure before those goitered and gum-eyed gentlemen. For now, if you do not wish to be beheaded in full sight of the centuries and those of your praetorians Marcellus has allowed to live, get back onto that horse.” Lesser sheathed his Greek blade. He strode back to the advance cavalry lines and drew himself back up onto Sulla’s horse. The ranks of cavalry were lined into an arrow-shaped vanguard with a long, narrow formation behind, like the shaft of an arrow—light infantry, infantry, reserve cavalry, and flankers in order, forming the thrust into the territory we had traversed. The narrowest part of the shaft were all infantry; and far back, past eyesight, were the baggage trains, food trains, pigs, chickens, and other animals in cages on carts pulled by draft horses, engineers, physicians, cooks, and rear guard. “That horse he’s on, isn’t that—” “Sulla’s horse, yes, Verilius. He appropriated it.” Marcellus had dismounted from his place behind Hirtius at the vanguard’s very tip. He ed Hirtius going the other way and approached us with Beast trailing closely. “Have we gotten there yet?” He smiled. Verilius, long familiar with Marcellus’s sardonicism, shook with silent laughter at this, seeking to maintain his dignity before the men.

The attack came at the time of the column’s greatest fatigue. Hirtius’s contempt for Gauls notwithstanding, it was clear that Ulgӧthur was aware of Roman marching routines—perhaps from his visits to Rome, which had allowed him time to spy on legion officers under the cover of diplomacy, perhaps from close study of the Roman armies that had defeated him in the past. Obviously, he knew it was best to attack just as we stopped to build camp and had obviously predicted this spot would be our final resting place. The first thirty flaming logs began raining down from the tops of the trees around us, dropping from invisible perches the wily Gauls had obviously set in the highest tops of trees to light and release as meteors to plummet from the sky upon us. They had climbed the trees, perhaps hours earlier, after having hauled logs up by some primitive sort of tackle and pulley. The falling snow had covered their tracks. Both Marcellus and Verilius had spoken of scenting smoke in the air for an hour. All of us had assumed it was a sign that we were near a Gaulish detachment or scouting party, perhaps to our north. Those fires had been burning too far up into the treetops to have seen smoke, it seems. I cast my gaze upward into a cage of branches, barely seeing any white patches of sky showing through a dark canopy of shadowy treetops. I could see nothing of who commanded or who was carrying out the action above. I cursed the fact that, bound inside this body, I could no longer see across space and time to tell what possible futures existed adjacent to a spacetime I inhabited. I could not have foreseen the future and could not have avoided this kind of nasty surprise. Moments before all this, I had given the order to slow the march and to halt for building camp, thinking how, in the growing dusk, the light snowfall drifting around, all seemed at peace for us. The projectiles fell in a pattern that collapsed the vanguard, not into chaos, for Roman soldiers are far too disciplined even in the face of a sudden shock to fall back into anything other than deeply trained and conditioned responses—such as precision repositioning for solid defense, awaiting the competent orders of their century commanders, certain to come. Centurions had automatically aligned themselves for reformation into century

command positions awaiting the next directive from tribunes. Sheets of sparks, embers, flames, and the death shrieks of legionaries now engulfed in the blaze barely impacted their efficiency. Marcellus, at the spearhead with Hirtius, had immediately taken command, halting the advance and leading the automatic reformation to defense. When he realized the attack was from the trees, he’d immediately and wisely ordered the column to move forward again. I could see him as he rode now like a demon surrounded by raining fire, back and forth before the left flank and then cutting through the middle on his horse to the right flank, shouting orders to keep troops focused, controlled, moving forward again. For even with the fire punishing us, if the column broke formation to scatter seeking skirmishes among the trees, they would be broken up into disordered gangs and possibly easily destroyed by enemy attack. A veteran of many battles, Marcellus, by trained tactical response, had seized command of the cavalry, anticipating now that this must be only the first attack. One of our trained legionary tactics, the deployment of cavalry to surround the flanks of the main body in anticipation of skirmish attack, proved to be fatal. The second wave of flaming wood—this time not just logs, but entire tree trunks soaked in the same sort of flammable animal rendering as the logs probably had been—rolled perfectly down through clearings wide enough to accept this attack into our left and right flanks. They killed or crippled half our cavalry in one stroke and exposed the main body to the third attack, which came in the form of a shower of flaming arrows. Marcellus took skirmishers and detachments riding uphill along both side flanks to seek out the sources of the flaming tree trunks and arrows, but scouts came back saying they’d found only the unmanned rough-hewn sleds the tree trunks had been rolled off. No traces of archers were to be found either. “Where are they? And how in the name of Mars’s farts did they set cold wood afire?” Verilius yelled atop his frightened horse, the horse turning and turning in place as he coaxed it back to calmness. Neck craning backward, he glanced upward, seeking out an enemy among the tall branches so high above that all we could see was a ceiling of featureless wood. “The bonfires!” I shouted.

“Of course, they must have roasted the logs all week long!” Verilius responded, signaling to the centurions on the vanguard to arrange the forward manipular formations and trot forward double time: the first line of velites, skirmishers, to front the hastati maniples coming just behind was the formation he signaled. It was a sensible order, as we had no choice but to trot the column forward to escape the trees by reaching a clearing up ahead. Those bonfires must have been preparation for all this. We had ed by evidence of massive fires set under vented tents days earlier, perhaps a mile to our rear. We had assumed the tents were used for curing meats and skins. But no. The Gauls had used fire to thaw the wood. Marcellus came riding in leading the rest of the skirmishers and hastati. “The second and third attacks came from sleds set up on hills just adjacent to our flanks!” he yelled, halting at the surrounding praetorians who had automatically bullied their way in around the senior officers, Verilius, Trebonius, and me, just behind the advance cavalry who no longer existed. “I should have sent a scout along our flanks at every step, to know we were between two hills! That was my mistake!” “Don’t dwell on that, Marcellus!” I called back to him. “Do what needs to be done now!” Since Marcellus had been at the point of the spear, he had taken initiative to ride an immediate charge of surviving light cavalry into the forward terrain to seek and destroy and to scout. Through all of this, he’d been free to move, and move he had. “Hills that were not on our maps!” Verilius cried. “The maps were scouted and drawn by Sulla!” said Marcellus, careening down off his horse and pausing to make hand motions to signal light infantry skirmishers forward. “Would Sulla have missed something so crucial?” asked Verilius. “No, never,” said Trebonius, standing by his horse and holding it under control with difficulty. “Sulla was more than he appeared,” I offered.

Marcellus nodded. “This clarifies to me why you killed him, Saturnius.” I said nothing to that. “Sulla is rightfully dead, whoever killed him,” said Verilius as he signaled one of his commanders over, Septimus Varo by name. “I only wish he’d died more slowly,” Verilius finished. “Yes, Praetor?” Septimus saluted Verilius and the rest of us. “Ride down the column on one side, then up the other, Septimus, and order the centuries to keep moving and to not climb these trees, no matter what falls down from them!” “Yes, Praetor!” Septimus rode off, spurring his horse mercilessly. It was a good order, for I had already seen groups of brave, resolute centurions shed their armor and climb trees to fight back against the enemy. Already, most of them had fallen back to earth, their throats cut. “Our flanks must stay firm,” said Verilius. “Do you agree, Saturnius?” “Yes, we need to make certain our troops do not break the column, or they’ll be ripe for infantry attacks from the woods. We need to get out of these trees.” Marcellus leaped back onto his horse. “I will ride to the main body middle! Saturnius?” “Yes. Good.” “The fourth attack will likely be on foot!” “I will be on the right flank, Marcellus. We will cut the shaft in two and divide to double blocks, protecting the flanks.” Marcellus was away, riding hard west to the left flank. I turned to Trebonius. “Ride to the rear guard and take command. Push them forward. Push them hard.” Trebonius climbed into his saddle and rode hard to break out of the column and

ride east to the rear. A wet snow was falling thick now; and the column moved, ghostlike, through a veil of white. Clasping arms with Verilius in parting, I ran for a panicked horse, not so badly burned, that was screaming and pawing the air nearby. I calmed her and rode her east. Verilius remained on foot to order forming of an agmen quadratum vanguard. He was signaling his own infantry, who were most familiar with his hand signals, to consolidate into testudos to advance to left and right—that is, south and north—of the column and siege. Presumably to lay siege against the trees? I had no intention of questioning Verilius’s strange tactic, for he was a brilliant tactician. I saw that he also signaled moving infantry to march as bulwark against another attack. When I had nearly reached the right flank, I came upon Hirtius on horseback. He’d gathered several centuries of archers. Under his command, they were drawing sights on the treetops, though they looked to be doing so reluctantly, fearfully, about to release a volley of arrows upward, following this insane incompetent’s orders, the ass. “What are you doing, you fool!” I barked, reining in closer. “What does it appear, barbarian? It will take forever for the column to march through here and out of the path of harm. We must stop these attacks from the trees!” He raised his arm to give the signal. “No! Centuries, hold your fire!” However, my shout was not in time to stop the volley. The arrows, of course, sped upward; and while a few were deflected by the branches, most of them fell back onto the column a few yards south, killing a score of legionaries, as any green hastati would have had the sense to know. I drew my sword and rode hard at Hirtius, swinging to behead him and thus be done with the curse of him. The blow was drawn up short by Marcellus’s horse. “No! Saturnius, kill him, and you’ll stand before the Senate for treason! I’ve no wish to inherit your legion during your losing streak, so don’t waste time with that ass!”

“You meant to kill him yourself earlier!” “I am a Julii and have influence. You don’t. Ride on! My flank has my orders. You still need to reach yours, Tribune General!” As he rode away past Hirtius, he used his pugio, his small sword, to slice Hirtius along an exposed leg as he ed him. Hirtius shrieked, fell from his horse into the snow, and wallowed there like a wounded pig. The dog, Beast, appeared from out of the snow and the fighting to bite Hirtius’s arm, drawing blood. Hirtius squealed pitifully, bleeding in the snow that his kicking had turned into slush as squint-eyed Beast dashed off following close behind Marcellus’s galloping horse. As I reined away to command my flank, I saw Marcellus signal the archers to break ranks and re the column. Each archer looked relieved to do so. Marcellus was off to go back to the flank opposite the one I would command. I trusted Trebonius had arrived safely to the rear. Likely, he had taken command there.

What happened as I arrived to and ordered firming of the right flank was one of the most shocking things I had witnessed on a battlefield since my exile in this glove of human flesh. It was the fourth attack. The fourth attack was indeed, as we had all expected it would be, an infantry attack, composed of foot soldiers pouring from the woods onto our flanks—a typical maneuver against a Roman march column and one the legions were used to defending against. The foot soldiers, however, about three hundred of them, were aflame. They appeared, orange balls of fire trailing greasy smoke, screeching hideously like the wrath of Mars. Was this outlandish spectacle some Gaulish idea of shock troops? Right behind this suicide charge came a thousand or so light infantry, no heavy fighters at all. Light, clearly, so that they could attack us, inflict harm, then withdraw with the quickness of lightning. They were mobile; we were not. I had no doubt that the same thing was happening on Marcellus’s flank at this very moment. The centuries and maniples held their discipline, but they suffered shock at the apparition of brightly burning men launching themselves screaming into our midst. It was not until the moment after I should have ordered my light infantry to form attack rather than defense in response that I realized the “burning” troops were covered by thick furs slick with oil, that had been set alight, and that they were not truly burning themselves! Indeed, they suddenly threw off their burning furs, making fresh new firebombs of them to toss at the column, then drew swords and attacked. Thus, instead of a thousand light infantry following behind a flambeau of four hundred dead torches, these “torches” were still living, breathing, moving fighters. This caused confusion and consternation among my infantry long enough to give a momentary edge to the Gaulish infantry following the shock troops, and the Gauls cut down Romans in a rush before retreating again, the fire

troops covering their retreat. The maneuver was devastatingly effective because it capitalized on a brief disabling of Roman discipline along the entire flank. This exorbitant action, I thought then, might ultimately mark the very start of an inevitable breakdown in the legendary discipline of these two Roman legions. I did not need to see into the future to see that this might be so. The maniples were now fighting hard and effectively to defend; and as I now ordered attack, they chased the Gaulish troops back into the woods, just as General Ulgӧthur had planned, no doubt. His troops had inflicted heavy losses upon us while we were left with nothing to strike back against. I signaled legionnaires to not follow the Gauls into those woods. To do so would mean destruction for them, I felt. Now the forward march was the most crucial thing. Although Marcellus and I had firmed defenses and forward motion in the left and right flanks, I was not hopeful. Though Verilius was recommencing double-time pace, having set his spearhead infantry to attack with the Cannae tactic of a weak middle, to draw an enemy into envelopment, and though Trebonius had expertly urged the column forward, I feared that all our actions were merely pro forma. All was proceeding, pro forma as it should, to lead to the inevitable Roman escape from ambush and a routine Roman victory; yet these barbarians seemed to fail to understand that their role in all this was to lose to us. The next attack, the fifth attack, now came; and again, it came from the trees. Sluices of frigid water poured down upon the main body from the same treetops that had earlier stormed upon us with fire. Copious amounts of this water could only be coming from large vats, which the Gauls must have hauled upward and meticulously filled from gourds and skins pulled high one by one. The intricate preparations for this had to have been detailed and difficult, and the name of Sulla the Younger seemed etched upon this enemy’s enterprise, as if they had seen Sulla’s maps marking our marching routines and camping plans. As Trebonius now rode up to me, he cried out his own suspicion of just that. “Only Sulla could have let them know exactly how we would march and where we would be at this moment so that they could have prepared this elaborate attack!” he called out. “He must have made with them while scouting out here to draw our maps.”

Poor Sulla—good, loyal Sulla—his reputation dimmed by his brash betrayal due simply to his love for Drunia. Rather than resent him, I regretted this killing of his name to match my much-mourned killing of Sulla himself. I regretted also, though, the sight of cold water dashing and shattering across the heads and backs of our troops and gradually freezing because of the cold air growing colder as the day drew late. Legionnaires cried out in their misery, looking up; some shook their fists at the sky, frustrated, but marched on despite this punishment. To attack and defend to left, right, forward, and rear were all maneuvers well trained into the legions; but attack from or defense directed upward was not a concept or a coordinate familiar to the Roman mind except in a siege, in which the legionnaires would be the aggressor, at the gates of some ill-fated city beset by Rome’s wrath and by sturdy Roman siege machines and Vitruvian catapults. Clearly, we were fighting on ground that decisively privileged this fifth coordinate, much to our detriment. A full minute of sharp sounds like chopping and hacking from above had caused all below to slow their march and look upward; their faces turned to the sky, seeing nothing. Those hacking noises had of course been the noise of Gaulish warriors above, hacking away the ice that had formed upon their containers of water to release the liquid just beneath. It was drenching the legionnaires, and a layer of ice was now forming upon their bodies. Those who had not perished in the fires were now likely to freeze to death before all of this was finished. “The water is putting out the remainder of the fires, at least!” Trebonius snorted despairingly. “It’s as if they battle us with the elements themselves!” He rode forward to report to Verilius on the disposition of our rear. Marcellus came galloping like a demon through the doused corpses and wet, charred wood and canvas of ruined wagons now littering the main body. Somehow he’d avoided the waterfall. He bellowed orders to centurion commanders to firm up the lines and keep the column moving in the advance Verilius led up ahead. He reined his horse in; and I saw that Beast, who had kept pace with Marcellus, was also unaffected by the fire and water assaults. His jaws were bloodied.

Marcellus saw the direction of my glance. “He has seen action with me ahead on Verilius’s order.” “How is the flank?” “Steady.” “Then I approve of Verilius’s order. What did you see in your foray?” “The main body of enemy troops lies five leagues north of the vanguard. When I charged ahead, we encountered skirmishers. Beast has five kills already. He bit an arm completely off a barbarian archer!” “And Verilius?” “He is keeping the advance at double time to keep cohesion in the ranks. Triple time or a trot would carry us out of this trap faster, but it might break up the column. Do you want me to command both flanks for you?” “Yes. I need to confer.” He rode to begin the difficult task of crossing back and forth through the column, shouting orders to both flanks; and I rode forward, galloping and jumping over and around burned bodies sheathed in ice. I signaled commanders as I went, seeing to it that at least we were moving beyond these cursed trees and would reach a clearing soon, where at least these attacks from above would cease. When I reached Verilius, I could now see why he’d wisely ordered flanking siege formation. His legion’s praetorians were busily chopping at two hundred trees in a wedge on either side of our column as it moved by. He had calculated this action to fell the trees once we had ed. This would at least form a break against a charge to our rear guard if we decided to take a stand in the clearing ahead. He had picked up an arrow wound. I could see the torn flesh on the fleshy part of his arm below the shoulder where he had yanked the arrow out. “I decided why not make the stultus trees work for us too!” Verilius shouted as I rode up to him. “Has it occurred to you, Saturnius, that Sulla is behind the timing of this attack?”

I dismounted and squatted with him, praetorians forming a human barrier around us, shields held up and flush in an unbroken wall, sealing us away from the chaos and fighting. “It was Sulla, indeed.” He lashed a rag around his arm and pulled it tight with a hand and with his teeth, staunching the blood. “That barbarian woman Drunia, who we saw him plucking ducks with two years ago, do you think?” He growled in pain and frustration. “I think so, Verilius.” “Young men are fools. Bad news for his family.” “Only if we tell Agrippa,” I ventured, knowing he would reject sympathy for Sulla. Roman generals are not given to sympathy for subordinate officers, let alone officers guilty of betrayal. “I suppose we could say he died a loyal Roman for their sake, but I say no. Good men of yours and of my own command both have fallen here because of Sulla’s treason.” “I say we protect him. He served you, then me long and well before this,” I offered. “We’ll ask Marcellus to toss the deciding lot.” “Agreed. What now?” I asked. He finished fussing with the rag and answered. “We’ll be out of this forest and into the clearing soon. We’ve lost most of the cavalry, some skirmishers, and a tenth of the main column. Their infantry was light. They strike and withdraw, strike and withdraw.” “Despite the distracting drama of attacks by fire and water, this remarkable maneuver of Ulgӧthur’s was intended to kill our cavalry specifically.” “I think so, Saturnius.” “We’re being herded like geese.”

“The thought that occurs to me.” “Something awaits us in that clearing,” I said. “Yet we cannot very well stay under these trees. We need to signal a two-line battle order.” I etched with a lump of charred wood upon the back of a map as I spoke. “Strongest cohorts to the outside flanks and divide to a V when we reach the clearing.” He held up my drawing.

“It will be when we reach the clearing. There,” he said, “is where their next attack will commence, and it will be in force.” “Both light and heavy infantry,” I said. “And cavalry and who knows what else. Maybe even ballistae? More archers, at least.” “At least,” I agreed. “Well, full force, whatever it will be. They will commit all of their resources, which events imply may be considerable in number. They are more organized than we expected, more than the nautes of Lutetia and our other informants led us to believe.” Indeed, those river merchants and sailors, the nautes, had lied to us or were ignorant of the truth of how the tribes had formed a federation out here. Or perhaps the nautes were Ulgӧthur’s spies. “Clearly, they could have overrun Letitia before now. But they wanted to lure legions into Gaul, Saturnius.” “And so they have. If none of us survive to warn Rome, they will do this again to those who come searching after us. The Gauls’ intention will have to be to wipe us out completely.” He stood. We both knew what to do. He turned and pushed through the wall of praetorians and made his way to his horse. He signaled a two-line battle formation to the vanguard, which, without breaking the pace of the march, divided into the first line. I pushed out of our refuge to find my horse and ride to do the same down the column to form the second line of the V formation. We would divide into the wings of a V when we reached the clearing, a maneuver to turn attacks on us into a deft entrapment of the enemy.

“You Romans are expert at entrapment, I see.” Drunia smiled humorlessly at Agrippa. He smiled right back at her, and then he looked over at me. “She says Romans are experts at entrapment,” I said. I was myself quite fascinated by watching everyone consuming dead animal flesh and drinking fermented fruit juice. Later, in my days walking the earth in flesh, I would learn to tolerate food and even like some of it, particularly in Paris and Rome; at this point, it was a disgusting prospect to me, as was the need to see to my bodily eliminations in the aftermath of “eating.” I needed to do these disgusting things to keep this body alive, but I tried to do so only as much as required. “Does she choose to see our invitation to her as a trap?” I translated. “Why else would they invite their enemies here and eat and drink with us?” Drunia sneered at me. Augustus lay down his copper eating utensils and wiped his mouth with one of the patches of white linen Agrippa had ed out to the officials, honored guests, and diplomats gathered in his home. Augustus’s next command to me seemed to be a response to Drusalla even before I could translate. “Tell her, Saturnius, that we invite her and her generals to talk to us here because we know that you are our enemies only by circumstance.” “Augustus says that you might consider that Rome sees how history makes enemies into friends.” Drusalla spat her food back onto her plate and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The senators at the table groaned and muttered their alarm and outrage. “Enemies do not become friends without the willingness of the conqueror to share power.” Augustus smiled. He stood; and every Roman at the table, except Marcellus, stood up as well. So did the Greeks. None of the Gauls. Marcellus continued eating, watching intently the actions of all in the room, chewing contentedly as

he watched. Augustus walked to the far side of the table where Drusalla sat, picking up a fresh basin of clean warm water as he went. The water had been set in several large bowls around the table for guests to wash their hands before eating—an Egyptian affectation, said patrician gossips around the city, something Agrippa and Augustus had picked up from Mark Antony of all people! Augustus stood before Drusalla. She sat back and glared up at him. He knelt on the floor next to her chair, sitting the basin of water next to his legs. He rolled up the sleeves of his tunic and reached out for Drusalla’s feet. She snatched her feet away from his hands; and when she did, Ulgӧthur stood abruptly, clutching his dinner knife as a weapon. Sulla moved closer to Drunia, a protective gesture that no one noticed but me. Marcellus stood up, holding on to his own knife, still glistening with the lemon sauce from the dish of roasted duck he’d been eating. “Praetorians! To Augustus!” Marcellus called, and three centurions drew their swords, starting toward the table to protect Augustus. “By the gods!” one of the senators cried out. Augustus held up one hand, then closed the fingers of that hand slightly to form a soft fist. As well trained as dogs, the centurions who strode toward the table froze in their tracks. Marcellus reluctantly sat. The senators and others shut up; then all took their seats and were still. “Tell the general he should either kill me with his dinner knife or sit down. Tell him to make his decision. I will wait.” Augustus’s eyes were locked on Drusalla’s. Before I could translate, Drusalla gestured to Ulgӧthur. He sat down. Augustus glanced at me, his eyes saying he too knew what I’d suspected: Drusalla understood enough Latin to know what Augustus had said. Her reaction seemed to confirm it.

Augustus reached out again for Drusalla’s feet, removed her sandals, placed her feet into the basin, and, using the edge of his own tunic, washed them. The senators uttered horrified gasps but spoke no opposition. All knew better than to challenge this thing Augustus was doing.

The clearing was roughly two leagues long and a half league wide. Trees surrounded it on two sides and on the side fully facing us, with a narrow gap in the trees so that the path in also led out, going down through the gap, then farther down to lowlands. The way went onward then to the channel of Briton north by northwest, a thirty-league march or so. Save for the frozen grass field we stood on and save for us, the clearing was empty. “They’re gone,” Marcellus exclaimed. “There were at least two thousand Gaulish infantry and cavalry here. They were a vanguard, not a rear guard. More of their army was just behind them, near that tree line.” Marcellus was too good a soldier for Verilius or me to doubt his word. He had engaged something out here; and besides, Beast had bloodied his jaws on the limbs of real troops, though those troops were now unseen. “They’ve obviously fallen back into the woods over there and there, to our flanks,” said Verilius. “They want us to march right out on that path, downhill,” said Trebonius. “Clearly,” said Verilius. “And once we’ve ed, they will come out of the forest to attack our rear and will have the high ground when they do.” “We might stay here in formation and await their attack on this better ground,” said Marcellus. “But still their ground,” said Verilius. “And how long can we wait? We’ll need food and water. We’ll need shelter and fire, and the physicians need to treat the burned and wounded.” “Perhaps they expect us to march on all the way to the shore.” “Yes, Trebonius, perhaps,” said Verilius. “And then what do we do? Jump in and swim to Briton? Far from Lutetia, our backs to the channel with possibly no ships to save us from a coastline engagement, they will pick us off, kill us over a stretch of weeks, or else let us die of thirst. We’ve no notion yet if Saturnius’s associates will be there or how many ships have survived.”

Unlike my desultory command and conduct of the rebellion in Shamayim, I was decisive and clear at this moment, for the lives of all the humans who followed me hung on my orders now. “Send scouts out,” I said. “All four directions. Set perimeters. Find a water source and set camp. Bring in wood for a fort.”

15

The fourth night we spent there was tar black, with no moon to see by. When daylight had come again, five sentries arrived at my tent and reported to me as one. They huddled together before me minutes after their watch had ended with the dawn sun at prima hora. Wind howled in the trees like Roman witches. That wind seemed to be the laughter of the goddesses Ceres, Medea, Diana, and Luna —their frigid breaths combined to express hilarity at the punishments of Tellus, the Roman Terra Mater. I stacked extra coals on my fire to warm them all a bit as they huddled. “In the dark it must’ve been that they done it, General,” said the redoubtable Flaccus Tullius. “Not a sound did the barbarians make. We saw the ugly things they left sitting out there only at first light.” Four legionnaires huddled close behind Tullius—not for warmth, but for sanctuary, letting him do the talking. The news they were bringing wasn’t good news, and they were reluctant to say it. They’d chosen their spokesperson well. “Mind you now, General,” Tullius said, his brow wrinkled in a show of careful thought, “not a one of us was asleep at it. The Gaulish savages were just too quick and quiet is all. It was so dark it was, last eve, that we couldn’t see our pugios a’front of our faces. But no Gauls never got near our walls. That we can swear. Nowhere near.” “Near enough, though, to leave the things within sight.” “Yes, General, and the men’ll be seeing ’em soon enough, when the first chow is called at secunda hora.” “Only sentries have seen them?” “So far.”

I drew a warm fur coat about me, the coat given to me by Marcellus and thus very warm. “These barbarians! They’re not human, surely, what with stealing the bodies a few nights ago,” lamented Tullius. In the darkness, Gauls had snuck in close to our fort and into the makeshift necropolis we’d created beside our side gates, where we’d buried our dead from this march. The Gauls had dug the corpses from the ground and stolen them. Where they had taken the dead, we could not know. This had done nothing good for morale. I gave them all wooden bowls and a drink of black tea from a lare pot that Trebonius had placed upon the edges of my coals earlier, meant for me and my officers when conferring. My sentries were all appreciative. It was the sort of thing I’d seen Agrippa do with his own men when I’d served him as an officer on a campaign in the far east territories, the sort of small consideration that forges loyalty among one’s legionaires. Presently, I followed Tullius and the rest out into snow flurries. Large braziers still burned wood and coal before my tent, having kept a five-man praetorian guard warm through the night. It was a small expenditure, yet greatly appreciated by the men who were used to being cold and ignoring it. I disliked the cold and hated the idea by now of anything living anywhere having to suffer it. The men esteemed me the more for my attempts to keep them warm. “You are a sly and effective politician, Saturnius,” Verilius had pointed out to me. “Your men see you as a leader who thinks of their comfort, and that can be enough to make men fairly love a general they are expected to follow into battle, perhaps even die for. Agrippa would approve.” “I have learned,” I answered. Yet I found it a constant struggle to make myself identify with their humanity; for these troops, not the first I had ever commanded, were—every one of them— human. They were among the first humans I had led. My sympathy for them included only those things that I myself had to suffer now that I was human. I doubted my sympathy would last one moment beyond my eventual release from this body.

We walked the path that traversed the camp diagonally to the perimeter walk, and here and there along the wall were sentries keeping the first-hour watch. At our destination, Marcellus stood at a trap window in the main gate. He wore his favorite lion’s fur coat wrapped tightly over his shoulders, watching me approach. Sentries had of course reported to him first before waking either of the praetors. When Marcellus had deemed this of sufficient importance, they had awakened me, second-ranking praetor general, and had allowed Verilius to go on sleeping; but he had a peculiar way of sensing things even in his sleep. He would be here soon, I suspected. “The one directly ahead is a good likeness, actually,” said Marcellus, stepping back to let me see. I slid the bolt and pulled the trap open to look out at the open field beyond the gate. I could see the ruptured trenches that had been the graves of our dead. The mounds of dirt were still brown, mixed in with the white of new snow. I could also see, ranged along a distance equal to the entire length of the north wall stuck upon poles as if impaled, several primitive-looking figures; they were effigies. Who these mannequins were was quite clear to anyone familiar with the persons depicted out there: Marcus Agrippa, Verilius Varro, Octavius Augustus, Quintus Marcellus, Trebonius the Younger, and directly ahead was the Saturnius effigy, the one Marcellus had pronounced “a good likeness.” Gauls had riddled every effigy with arrows. The Octavius effigy sat just off the center, beside the Saturnius effigy, which sat directly in front of the gate. The Octavius mannequin featured, protruding from its mouth, a cow’s tongue split down the middle. The Saturnius effigy had freshly bloody goat’s horns thrust into the head, just above the area where there would be ears. How boorish. I do not have horns. “They seem to be saying something about you, Saturnius.”

“What might that be, Marcellus?” “That you are a traitor, of course. You’re one of them, and you make war on them.” Actually, they are fully aware that I am not one of them. “Perhaps you are correct, Marcellus.” “Well, it’s obviously not bait in a trap. The trees are too far away for arrow strikes. Tempus has come back, I hear.” Tempus, the legion’s messenger falcon, which had come back last night from the coast bearing a message from a fleet of reinforcements anchored just off the shore. The falcon, though trained to my legion, disliked me intensely; and I’d found it necessary to have Verilius remove any messages from Tempus’s leg, lest the shrieking bird strike at my eyes. “Yes, Tempus reported back.” “And we have reinforcements coming. Lucky. Though they cannot strike us inside here, they certainly can wait us out until spring and siege us.” “Yes. Lucky.” “That display out there is a personal attack on you, you know, Saturnius.” “Like the desecration of our graves, it’s merely a way for them to tell us we lie in their hands.” “I’ll go out with your praetorians and tear them down before the troops go to meal.” “I’ll be going out there with you, then, Tribune, to make sure you’re safe,” Flaccus Tullius said. We glanced back at him. Tullius stood just behind me, his hand resting upon the pommel of his gladius in its sheath. He curled his fingers upon the butt. I raised my gaze to his face and saw there an intensity that was a revelation to me. I saw there sympathy for me.

Marcellus grinned at him. “Such ion! I hope your attitude is typical of all our troops, centurion.” “It’s the rumors, sir,” Tullius said resentfully, then spat upon the ground. Marcellus raised an eyebrow, glancing down at the spit already freezing on the ice-bound grass, then looked back up into Tullius’s iron glare. “These savages are obviously making merry of the rumors, sir.” “Rumors?” Marcellus stepped a pace closer to me. “That the general is an evil spirit in the body of a man.” Ahh, Tullius. Always the man was the proof that common men possess the gift of common sense. Marcellus laughed, a dry burst of mirth, sounding as if Tullius had poked him in the stomach; then he looked at me, his signature crooked grin upon his face, about to become his even more characteristic crooked smile. “Well, I’ve heard some strange rumors among troops in my times at battle, Saturnius. But that’s …” His grin froze on its way to a smile. He looked into my eyes. The grin now melted away, leaving behind a blank regard. What he saw in my eyes I cannot say; only that he stepped back from me a single pace and that his hand now went, unconsciously, I would guess, to the pommel of his gladius. His mouth drew itself into a thin line. He watched me steadily in the cold Gaulish wind. Winter was soon to tighten its grip upon us. It would be a while before I would see that crooked smile of his again. “By the gods that frighten us all,” said Marcellus. I looked back at him as steadily as he regarded me. “Which gods would those be, Marcellus?” “I will go out immediately, Tribune,” he said with no mirth left in his voice. “And will tear the things down.”

“No.” “What?” “Leave them.” He reached out and took my shoulder, searching my eyes. Verilius arrived, with Tempus riding his shoulder, as the falcon had lately shown a definite propensity to do. Verilius wore, like me, a warm cloak, though certainly not as rich and not as warm as the fur Marcellus wore. Marcellus’s taste in warmth was no doubt a benefit of the Julii heritage he so diffidently bore. Shaking off Marcellus’s hand, I turned to the common man, Flaccus Tullius. “Wake every man in this camp, Tullius, right now. Assemble them at the front gate.” With a very ardent and obedient look upon his face, Tullius rushed off to follow orders. For the first time, it occurred to me how exhilarating a thing sympathy can be when it comes not from angels, but from one of you. Verilius pushed past me, the falcon screeching and flapping violently at this closeness to me. Ignoring the bird’s sudden alarum, Verilius looked out of the trap window at the effigies. “Savages,” he muttered. “Yes,” I said. “You are. All of you.” I pulled the cloak about me and walked back to my tent to put on my battle armor and to strap on my gladius and pugio. Behind me, I could hear Tempus’s outrage dying down as I moved farther away. I ed a limping proconsul Hirtius, who gave me wide berth as I ed by. When I looked back, Hirtius had hurried up to Marcellus and was bent toward Marcellus’s ear. Flaccus Tullius had gone before me as my herald. Already, I could hear the

sound of men rousing inside the tents. I could feel the energy of Tullius’s faith flowing into me, making me stronger, and dulling a bit the host of physical pains I constantly suffered. Was this in a small way something like what Anu feels when you worship him?

The insulae of Rome were clusters of crowded apartment blocks built in response to escalating population growth in the city. The two-story and threestory blocks packed residents into compact living spaces. The particular insula where General Ulgӧthur had chosen to reside and where he and the other Gauls had based their diplomatic mission lay at the equestrian-class outskirt of Rome’s Field of Mars (Campus Martius), a public area once given over to military parades and now one among many locations for Augustus’s frenzy of building. This part of the city now featured Augustus’s and Agrippa’s new temples, new extension of the Cloaca Maxima to carry sewage off to the Tiber River, a flurry of new public building projects, new pedestrian areas being excavated, and the like. Campus Martius was where Agrippa had built his villa, a typically Octavian statement that the powerful officials of the state sought to maintain close proximity to Rome’s common people. The particular insulae within the Martius where General Ulgӧthur had settled lay at the end of a relatively clean street, La Via Lata; here, there were not the typical piles of trash and human excrement lying along the sidewalks tossed from the windows of the upper floors (a new extension of the Cloaca ravine carrying away sewage had amended that). Still, this part of Campus Martius was not like the more respectable Oppian or Esquiline Hills and not at all like the wealthy Capitoline or Aventine. Ulgӧthur might have been given use of a villa atop the Aventine had he wished. He and his queen had not wished. “The barbarian general wishes to live among the vulgaris populus of Rome, does he? Let him, then. He seeks to out-Octavius Octavius!” Verilius had quipped. I arrived at his insula. It stood within a collection of apartment blocks in a valley between hills on Via Lata. Here, the municipal buildings of Martius gave way to the beginnings of apartments on a bottom slope of Palentine. Most of the apartments in this area, in squares surrounding common courtyards, had businesses such as bakeries, millers, sausage makers, and butchers on the ground floor with living space on upper floors. The noble and dead Cicero had been known as a slum landlord for having owned numerous blocks such as this, which he had rented out at exorbitant rates.

In my shawl and cowl with country boots on, I hiked through the streets of Rome, very often going unrecognized, although I was a very popular former gladiator. These days, I had become even more popular for being one of the “new men,” Romans of meager equestrian birth like Cicero or of foreign origin like me, who managed in the new age began by Caesar Julius to make a name and a way for themselves as useful, even indispensable citizens. On this day, as I reached the insula where Ulgӧthur lodged, a man in a baker’s apron, broom in his hands, stood just at the entrance to the building courtyard. As he swept scraps of rotted cabbage into a garbage pit, he noticed me. He first gauged my receptiveness. Romans, in a crowded vicious city where sudden death is common, practiced a meticulous public courtesy designed to respect one another’s privacy and to preserve the public peace. A man in a cape, shawl, or cowl might be doing something his wife might not approve of; and a friend or neighbor encountering such a one in the streets, in the baths, at the brothels, seeing him where he did not belong, politely ignored him. This was a courtesy Romans found mutually beneficial to extend to one another. The man paused in his sweeping, regarding me; he looked away and then looked at me again. He decided it was safe to speak. “Gladiator? Gladiator Saturnius?” “I am that one, citizen.” “By the eyes of Minerva’s dogs. Salve! I saw you fight before you called yourself Saturnius. You fought well.” “Did I?” “Indeed. You must have since you stand here alive despite how nasty our Roman games are and all.” “The games are nasty, true, citizen. I am glad to be through with them.” “Nine or so months it is, eh? And quite a magnus nomen, quite a name you’ve made yourself.” “I am but a lowly Gaul in the city.”

“Pfuhf! A man in Agrippa’s employ is no lowly man. Nine months now, you’re chief translator to the consul. You’re in the fasti every other day.” “Every thief and bad sausage maker is in the fasti.” “How is it a Gaul speaks so many languages?” “Your emperors and their legions have driven us to flee into all parts of the world. One must adapt.” “Rome oppresses all, I it it. We’ve been invaded by the Germanian once already. Rebellions: Hannibal, then Spartacus. Only a matter of time till someone beats us. Between you and me, gladiator, m’wife is Gaulish.” “Is she?” “Been in the city with me seven years since we married. I bought her from a slave dealer and freed her.” “That was good of you.” “Was love made me do it.” “I know how it is.” “You’re in love?” “I once gave it little thought, but since I lost her, I realize …” “That it’s love. Recover her. Vi et armis, if needed.” “By force of arms? I have tried my hand at that, and I am no general.” “I always thought you had quite a general in you. M’wife, she liked to see you fight. Me, I say you’re better off now in politics. What do you on the lesser side of Campus Martius?” He seemed to forget the question as he looked to where my gaze was drawn. General Ulgöthur came striding across the courtyard, long gnarly hair hanging down his back, his body oiled to a sheen, arms exposed by a sleeveless tunic

showing hard, harsh muscle and scarred brown skin. An odd-looking sword hung at his waist, swinging in a short pendulum arc. His two retainers in bright red cloaks came close behind. Liuthari and Elouskonios by names. The two were unarmed; but both wore, odd in such casual circumstances, leg greaves and leather breast guards. Both were red haired, square jawed, and broad shouldered. They looked all the more deadly for their lack of arms. These two were sons, Senate gossips liked to say, of infamous Gaullic tribal war chief Vercingetorix. Both were sly, resourceful military commanders—as Verilius, Agrippa, and many a Roman soldier had learned over the years—though it was said Liuthari had proved himself the better: he was more thoughtful while the strikingly goodlooking Elouskonios was the more compulsive in battle. But then, what did I know? These were rumors, told in my presence, and I was a proven failure as a general. My rebellion in Shamayim was at that point my only exploit, and it had failed utterly. Ulgöthur stopped in front of me to clasp arms. “Daylight and free skies to you,” he grunted tersely as he reached for my arm. “Live to pour water on your grandchild’s sword, General,” I answered as I’d learned from him to. He turned to give the baker a hard glare; and the baker, practicing the better part of Roman public courtesy, not to mention personal safety, turned abruptly back to his shop with his broom to mind his business. Ulgӧthur wore a Greek hoplite tunic and hanging groin protector, Greek breeches, and typically rough Gaulish sandals. He too wore a red cloak, considered the manliest of colors by Greek hoplite warriors. The materials, colors, and styles he bore were oddly mixed, suggestive both of Gaulish military and the antique noble classes of Sparta. In fact, he affected this day a look suggestive of the great Greek king Leonidas. He wore the Greek xiphos, a twofoot-long elongated leaf-shaped sword, Greek hoplite design. This was the reason the sword had looked odd from a distance: it was neither Roman nor Gaul.

Carefully but primitively inscribed by knife in Latin letters upon the hilt was the name of the defeated chief of the rebellious Arverni tribe, Vercingetorix, who’d been overcome by General Julius Caesar. Vercingetorix’s name was as much a legend, and he as much a figure of fear and dread in Rome as was the name of General Hannibal Barca of Carthage. Hannibal had laid siege to the Roman republic at Cannae and at the gates of Rome herself. The clothing of Liuthari and Elouskonios, like Ulgӧthur’s, were Greek inspired, though less casual, more military, and more genuinely Gaulish than Ulgӧthur’s. It was rumored young Elouskonios was actually Gaulish-Greek, a son of Vercingetorix and of a Greek mother. It was certain, anyway, that Ulgӧthur’s choice of clothing and his sword were intended to deliberately insult his Roman hosts. Wordlessly, I led my charges out to the street and headed back north to the quarter of the Field of Mars where Agrippa’s villa sat. Romans mostly ignored us, being preoccupied with the daily business of being Romans—that is, selling, buying, working, seeking after this or that goat or clay casket of wine. Citizens here and there along the way stopped to puzzle at us, though. We were four Gauls in the heart of Rome who were clearly not slaves or lowly servants. I myself, a noted gladiator dressed like a Roman equestrian, and the three other brown Gauls in dress suggesting Greek military. They looked, puzzled, then went about their business, Rome being the most mixed and urbane city other than Alexandria or old Carthage, as far as anyone knew of. “I have often thought that you speak with a queer accent, Saturnius,” the general said. “I’ve spent many years among the Etruscans and Italics,” I responded, the two sons marching behind us like a military guard. “You speak the tongue of the homeland. Yet your accent,” continued Ulgӧthur, “is not Belgae, Cimbri, Parisii, Teutoni, Alesian, Germani, or Gaullica-Keltoi. It isn’t even Britoni. Yet, it isn’t Greek or Italic either. Nor is it Roman. You have a lonely accent, countryman.” The word “countryman” he had pronounced with the same irony with which he typically uttered the name Saturnius. “I hope you have no trouble understanding me, General.”

He responded with a wry smile. “We understand one another. And we will someday, yes, command armies against each other.” My, how portentous of this minor nemesis of Rome. “There is little chance of it, General. I am nothing. I am just a retainer in a foreign land.” “I know a man used to power when I see one. I see a man, yes, who can inspire armies to fight, Cernunnos.” “My name is Saturnius.” He smiled, again ironically. “Your Roman name, your pet name, yes. So long as the Roman understands what I tell you to tell him, Saturnius, it matters to me not how you speak, what Roman name you wear, nor where your family’s river really flows. Which part of Celtia did you say your tribe cut wood in?” “I did not say.” “No. You did not.” We walked on in silence, for Ulgӧthur had said all he intended to say, and that was that.

The dog, Beast, ran loping in an eerie silence in shrouds of falling snow. He moved as if he floated in infinity. His muzzle was white with snow and red with blood. He trotted back from the woods toward the gates, a dead hawk clamped in his jaws. The poor fellow had caught Beast’s attention by landing upon the ground to pick at garbage tossed there by soldiers dumping the camp’s refuse. The whole of our two legions stood out here at attention, half of them with the red scarves of the Gallica legions tied about their throats above their chest plates and tossing in the wind. Flaccus Tullius had alerted the camp. Verilius had not objected, and so they stood now united in formation. Every soldier, praetorian guardsman, and auxiliary in full battle dress stood in strict ranks in the snow outside the camp gates. I stood before them in full battle armor with my helmet on. Verilius was beside me, his arms folded across his chest, being indulgent of what must look much to him as if I were acting on a whim. My whims had led to victories enough times, though, that he indulged me. Beast had broken ranks and had stealthily sneaked up on the hawk from the bird’s blind side, carrying out a perfect flanking maneuver. A good tactician was Beast. He was indeed a dog of the legions. He’d pounced upon the bird and had not tormented it but had killed it instantly. Now he ran back to re us, bringing food with him. To a marching legion, hawk or any meat at all was a delicacy; and appropriately, the camp’s porridgestirring cook accepted it from Beast’s jaws and slipped it into a goat’s bladder hanging at his side where carrion could keep fresh. We had begun our original march with herds of goats and countless cages of chickens. We’d slaughtered and eaten them all. “These cowards!” I roared at the men as I paced back and forth before the ranks. “These tree goats that leave scarecrows in the night! Do they think such totems of ignorant magic will frighten Romans? We’ll teach them they can’t frighten civilized men!” Those in the front ranks, I could see from their eyes, were startled by my zeal. I could no longer hear what humans were thinking, shut away inside the flesh I wore, but their eyes told how they were amazed at my ion against my own

race. Perhaps also my ion would help to soothe whatever evil rumors about me were spreading among them, my men and Verilius’s, in their tents and on their camp patrols. My apparent loyalty to Rome and to them was binding the legionnaires to me even more firmly. “Do they watch us now from their trees and their holes in the ground? If they spy us from behind their rocks and bushes, then let them see our strength!” I shouted. The legionnaires cheered fiercely, the sound echoing against the frigid sky and radiating outward to the dense woods, where our furious voices seemed to fall into a deep open pit of cold white silence. They drew their gladii, the movement of thousands of arms orchestrated as one, and then beat the swords against their scuti, their shields. The frightful racket of the clash of arms cracked and echoed even louder than their shouts and then fell over into the same deep white pit, to disappear. Marcellus and Trebonius stood to the side before the separate smaller ranks of the collected praetorians of both my own and Verilius’s legions. Proconsul Hirtius stood next to Marcellus. Hirtius looked pathetic in slightly bloody bandages, leaning heavily on a walking staff. He strained slightly toward Marcellus periodically, whispering something that seemed to be causing Marcellus distress. I had ordered the obnoxious effigies removed from the ground where we all now stood and, rather than destroyed, reset in the ground farther out from the camp, facing outward toward the forest. The effigies now were dressed in Roman tunics and armor. It was a sarcastic retort to the Gauls’ own sarcastic statement, using their own objects. “You are the legions of Rome!” shouted a centurion commander near me. “You will triumph for Rome and for Tribune Verilius and Tribune Saturnius!” Cheers again and the clanging of sword against shield; it was furious and fulsome, rising fiercely, then falling, to be lost in the silent forest around us and the silent country surrounding the forest. “You will destroy all resistance, and you will have your spoils!” At the centurion’s last words, the men added laughter to their cheers. I further

stoked their joy with a new flame to add to what the centurion had said. “Yes, spoils! This country will bleed into your cups, and you shall drink your fill, men of Rome!” The mention of their payment in spoils made their shouts grow like a plume of smoke marking the fire in their stomachs, the burning lust for wealth that all long-marching, long-suffering legionnaires felt. I marched, stiff and formal, over to Marcellus even as the men cheered in joy. I ignored an angry Hirtius. “Marcellus, choose the best thousand legionnaires and five hundred praetorians. I march at half hora.” As they saw their leaders conferring, the men quieted, waiting at attention patiently, faces fierce and proud. “This march you propose is unwise,” hissed Marcellus as Verilius came over to us. The legion’s main messenger falcon named Tempus sat arrogant and calm upon Verilius’s shoulder. “What reason,” Marcellus continued, “do you have to think they will ever again negotiate with us?” “You may well die out there, Saturnius,” Verilius offered. “And we cannot have five hundred and some odd legionnaires die needlessly along with you!” Hirtius had screwed his courage up to speak or, rather, to bark. “Silence, Hirtius,” said Verilius, not bothering even to look at the proconsul. “No! This traitor has disrespected me! You all have!” “Keep it quiet in front of the men,” hissed Marcellus. “Say it, Marcellus! Now … now is the time! Are you not a Julii? Where is your honor?” “Mention my family name one more time, Proconsul, and I’ll pluck my honor from my sheath and run you through with it.”

“You’re tribune militare primus! Say it, Marcellus!” I looked at Marcellus. “What has Hirtius filled your ear with?” “I didn’t need him to tell me.” “Tell you what?” He shifted, facing us but turning his back to the men so they could neither hear him nor possibly read his lips as he spoke quietly. “That you are not Gaul. Your performance for the men was well played, as indeed your years of performing before us all have been well played. But you are not what you play.” “What are you saying?” whispered Verilius. “What should be obvious to you all!” cried Hirtius. As usual, he was not trying to hide his hysteria from the men. “Careful, you fool,” said Verilius quietly. “Our lives depend on those men over there standing in ranks. Saturnius just inspired them. Don’t distress them now.” “Tell him, Marcellus!” Hirtius screeched. “Marcellus, speak, say whatever it is! Or this jackal will earn a pugio thrust,” said Verilius. “And I’ll sort it out with the Senate if we live.” After a glance of disgust at Hirtius, Marcellus looked at me hard. “We have fought side by side, Saturnius.” “We have.” “You have earned my loyalty. I have risked my life for you, countless times.” “True. You have, lucky for me.” “You have never liked me, this I know. And in truth, I am not likable. I am

unconcerned with that. Soldier to soldier, I think you owe me and Verilius the truth of who or what you are.” “I am a Roman.” “You are a malus phasmatis, evil ghost! A priest of Pluto!” shouted Hirtius. Marcellus glanced at the ranks of men and at Hirtius. As Verilius reached for his gladius, I reached out and stayed his hand. I gestured; and Flaccus Tullius, who had been standing ready, hurried forward from the ranks, approached, and saluted Hirtius. “Salve, Proconsul!” he shouted loudly so that the men in the ranks all would hear. “Why are you out of the ranks, prole? Get back in your place!” “Yes, Proconsul, do not worry for your wounds. I will carry you!” Hirtius had no time even to bellow as Tullius bent over suddenly and punched Hirtius in the stomach with a quick short jab, forcing the air out of him. He had covered the punch with his gesture of bending over so that those in the ranks would not see. Hefting Hirtius onto his back, he stood, Hirtius deflating, gasping and resting upon Tullius’s shoulder like a sack. Nodding to me, Tullius trotted away toward the gates, hauling Hirtius away and shouting, “Make way! The brave proconsul is ill from his wounds! Make way!” The men parted their ranks respectfully to let Tullius . Verilius barely suppressed a laugh. “That was well done, Saturnius. Marcellus, select men to march with Saturnius. Now. Hora is nearly halved.” “No, Verilius. Not unless I can go also.” “You wish to go on a suicide march, do you?” “I … wish to protect the men.”

“Well, then go. Try to return alive, the both of you! Get the men out of this cacking cold and back into marching campo, whatever you do!” Verilius walked past me, took me by the arm, and whispered to me, “Do not fail in this task, Saturnius, or we are dead.” The bird on his shoulder flapped but did not leave its perch as Verilius strode, a formal marching gait for appearance’s sake, straight and stern past the ranks to Trebonius, who stood before the auxiliaries. The men cheered him as he went. Marcellus turned. “What are you?” he demanded quietly. “Your ally,” I said to him. “You have been a loyal officer to me. You deserve the truth: I am of an ancient race some men call ‘angels.’ We are sky gods.” “Are you minions of Pluto?” “No.” “Are you sky gods malus, evil?” “Some are. I’m banished, confined to the earth.” Marcellus’s hand went deliberately to his sword; he stepped back a pace. That familiar move of his, giving himself room to swing, signaling a deadly readiness in a man whose sword skills were considerable, were in fact amazingly deadly. He obviously had doubts, though, about the validity of Hirtius’s hatred. He was searching for reasons to go on trusting me or for reasons at least to tolerate me. Perhaps for Rome’s sake, I should be tolerated. “Why do you fight for Rome?” he demanded, and I was wise enough to answer carefully, to give him the reason he sought to go on trusting my command. “I am loyal to Rome and to you. Is that not good enough for you?” “What do you know of loyalty if you are not a man?” “I am a man. I am inside the man you see before you.” He hesitated. Had he wished, Marcellus could either have killed me or made me

pay dearly in my body’s blood to kill him; his hesitation could be used to my advantage. “Will you kill me, Marcellus, making the legions weaker?” I tugged my pugio belt so that the scabbard lay farther back against my thigh rather than near my crotch, harder now to reach for. I folded my arms across my chest—all of this making me vulnerable to Marcellus’s sword. His eyes followed my gestures, and I could tell that he knew I was as much as offering him my life by making myself so vulnerable. “Why are you banished?” he whispered, his tone showing his distress at being put into the position to decide my fate. He glanced quickly back at the men, then looked into my eyes to gauge my words. I took a breath and made my next words as truthful as I knew how to be with a human. “I wanted freedom. The sky gods wished to enslave me, so I rebelled. My alliance with you is for my own purposes and temporary, but my loyalty to Agrippa is no less true than is yours. I think you know this.” He relaxed a bit. “And Rome?” he asked, still peering into my eyes. “Rome offers freedom, honor, and friendship.” “I am tribune militare primus, as Hirtius reminded us just now, Saturnius. I may be a reprobate, but the safety of the legions is my charge from Agrippa. I’ve not had a drink of anything more than wine since we left Rome.” “You’ve no need to say it, Marcellus. I know it: none are more serious, more honorable in war than you.” “What did Verilius say to you? Why are we really going on this march?” “We are going for what I regard as good reason.” “You are honest in all but that, I can tell. You must see me as inferior to you— being a sky god.” “You are a good officer, Marcellus. That is how I see you.”

“No, I am a rich, selfish bastard. And I can take you, Saturnius. Gladiator though you are, sky god though you may be, I’m better with a blade than you—and you know it. So hear me: threaten the men, threaten Rome, or threaten Beast, and I will kill you.” Marcellus walked away—brisk, unhurried, formal, and economic in movement before the men. Cold though I was in this body, I already could feel its grip on me waning. The confinement was wearing off, and so too was my feeling for monkeys. You were becoming crabs again to me. I could feel my sympathy waning, though for some reason, it remained as strong in my feelings about Marcellus. I did not regret how I had lied to Marcellus. Thank the monkey god Mars that Verilius, though a brilliant warrior, was a dull man in imagination; for he had caught on not at all while Marcellus had come right to the truth. I was only a step ahead of being exposed. Time was growing short. I would have to complete my task soon. Loyalty? Though I’d had my affections, yes, for Agrippa and for Rome, my time among them was growing short. I was loyal not to Rome or to Agrippa nor to the angels or to Anu. Loyalty is not something possible for me to feel, my dear. I was ultimately bonded only to my Yazad. I would not hesitate to sacrifice these two legions and all who marched in it, including Marcellus, to sacrifice every living thing in Gaul for my ends. For the sake of moderation, though, five hundred men were all I planned to subject to the catastrophe that would await them in the forest; the rest of the camp would remain here and remain safe. Unfortunately, by insisting upon coming with me, Marcellus had made himself one of those who would be sacrificed. I watched him as he marched off to arrange the detachment we would march into the forest. Try as I would, I knew I would be unable to prevent the good Tullius from volunteering to go also. A pity. But then no monkey lives forever.

16

By the third day, the detachment showed the fatigue of marching in snow. Snow, I had learned well by now, is no easy thing to move through. We had taken a safe flanking path; our scouts were confirming that our course veered far to the north of the main body of the enemy we knew were out here. We had to avoid them, for they greatly outnumbered us. The whispered calumny about me was taking its toll as we traveled farther and farther from camp and from the security of the main body of the legions. The hostility toward me that Marcellus could not help but betray only added to the falling morale of tired troops. The best scouts of my own legion had gone out ahead of us constantly to come back and report exactly where we were in relation to the Gauls. My plan with Verilius was for me to outflank them, march to the shore, and meet ships from Briton we now knew were there, from which our falcons and hawks had brought messages. We would guide reinforcements and new campaign weapons, such as catapults and oil bombs, back from those ships to Verilius and embark on an extermination campaign against the upstart Ulgӧthur. It was a good plan. Nevertheless, falling morale continued to fall. On the evening of the third day, when the Gauls, whom we supposedly had outflanked, attacked us in the most ghoulish way possible, ghoulish even for them, falling morale finally descended to the cold earth to shatter like a gourd. Hirtius, still recovering from his “battle” wounds, had actually volunteered to ride at the advance, where he would be when the attack came. “He’s keen to earn his battle stripes, obviously,” Marcellus had sneered. “An ‘honorary’ proconsul who doesn’t do a sufficient amount of fighting while on a campaign has less chance of obtaining a Senate seat someday.” I had judged Marcellus’s assessment of Hirtius’s behavior to be accurate; the proconsul’s insisting to ride at the apex of the column seemed to prove it. All the more amazing, then, that the deep pit hidden by snow that swallowed up twenty

riders as the thin wood and leaf cover fell in beneath masking snow had not managed to suck the eager Hirtius down with the rest. Centurions’ initial shouts of “A trap!” and “Pits here!” and “Hold! Beware!” sounded out as twenty riders fell and disappeared; and Hirtius’s good horse, a battle hardened horse that Sulla had trained, instinctively leaped aside to avoid the pit. The screams of dying horses hung flat in the blank silence while ironically—stoic by now, I suppose—legionnaires made not a sound as they fell to their doom. Hirtius made noise enough for everyone. “Hold the column! Stop! The fields are a trap!” he cried out. Of course, as usual, the order Hirtius gave was an incorrect one. I countered it, crying out, “Column, move! Divide!” because a better tactic for military advance across unknown terrain is to split the column and march around traps. Almost inevitably, a trap is set not so much to kill (only twenty cavalry had been lost) but to halt a long column and thus to make that column vulnerable long enough to a real attack and kill strike or else to make the column vulnerable to further techniques meant to conjure up more disorder and confusion. My counter order to “Divide!” came just after Hirtius’s call to halt. The nature of even a short column like the detachment, however, is that every order given must travel back from the front of the advance to the rear, relayed by a command structure of centurions repeating orders to each century, each maniple under his control. Consequently, the column came to a stop segment by segment as Hirtius’s ill-considered command moved back like a wave, with my counter order washing gradually behind. A column is not one solid thing, but a segmented colony mind, like a march of ants in divisions of labor and of function, even of thought. It cannot do anything instantaneously. In what would necessarily be moments of transition between Hirtius’s order and mine, rear portions of the column perilously halted themselves at the edge of the pit. Down within that pit—a quite deep pit, in fact—were the shattered bodies of horses and men. I stilled my horse at the edge, looking down into what I suspected might well be the end of my command.

This moment was a suspension in time, between what you monkeys call “the time before” and “the time after.” Marcellus arrived, gazing down at the ruin below us. “We should have killed him.” “We didn’t,” I answered. “Nor has letting him ride repeatedly at the advance guard led to his death.” “You should have told me back at camp what you and Verilius had planned.” “Don’t whine, Marcellus.” Marcellus reined his horse hard again, keeping her steady. “I quite see this ending in grief,” he muttered. As if his words had shattered the suspension of time, the moment shifted into the “time after.” The real attack—in “the most ghoulish way possible,” as I have said— commenced. As orbs of flame suddenly began to arc out of the tree line along both our flanks and as those flaming projectiles fell upon the column, Marcellus hissed through gritted teeth, “No, it cannot be! Not again!” The men had just begun to move forward again, the command to stop finally now belayed by my command to keep moving. From the enemy’s perspective, it was a good moment for the fire to fall upon us. The first projectiles plunged among us, and for the first time, I saw the detachment’s Roman discipline break as utterly as the bravado of little boys suddenly confronted with the reality of war; this was, once again, the reality of war as the Gauls fought it. For a surge of burning human heads fell upon us. It happened these heads were the heads of our own fellow soldiers! I saw that one of the heads that fell near me—its distinctive helmet still intact, the head flaming and hideously stinking with greasy smoke—was in fact that of one of Hirtius’s assassin praetorians. This meant that the savage Gauls had not only raided our fort’s burial ground, but had also obviously pillaged graves near the

original campo sometime after our two legions left there. The Gauls had carried the bodies away from both grave sites and perhaps brought severed heads here to dispatch them in this ghoulishly exorbitant action. Marcellus reined his horse away, shouting orders and trying to maintain discipline. A second wave of flaming pitch- and tar-coated heads fell, this time human heads and also the heads of cows, goats, boars, and horses. The column indeed now behaved like little boys, the legionnaires finally frightened quite beyond reason and training. Although Beast acquitted himself calmly, remaining obediently at Marcellus’s side to protect him, the ranks of the legionnaires scattered, ignoring the orders barked at them by centurions to hold and form defensive blocks. They dashed recklessly into the forest—slicing, hacking at nothing, and screaming in horror and outrage, leaderless. I removed my helmet and unbuckled my sword belt. “What are you doing?” Marcellus demanded. He reined in next to me. “We have to regain control of the troops!” The first wave of Gauls poured out of the forest. “Our scouts have lied to us,” I told Marcellus. “There is no point in resisting.” “If we don’t fight, we’ll die!” “They won’t kill you or me, only the men.” He glared hatefully at me and then rode to order a counterattack, halting the mindless scurrying about of panicked cohorts. His mere voice and his person rallied a brave counteroffensive, yet even as he rode around the reorganizing troops, the Gauls overtook him. But it was not over yet. I still had some tricks to deploy so that at least Marcellus and I might escape death (death for him, at least). Tricks are something I always have, regardless of the situation. This story would continue.

END, of the First Volume

About the Author

Rayfield A. Waller, a creative writing professor in Detroit, is noted as the first contemporary poet published in the revival of historic Broadside Press, which published his book of poems, “Abstract Blues” (sold on Amazon). He is a past recipient of the prestigious Michigan Council for the Arts writers’ grant. Many of his poems can be found in the online journal “Outlaw Poetry” at https://outlawpoetry.com/?s=rayfield+a+waller. He is a graduate of Cornell University’s creative writing program and is listed in the pantheon of ‘Cornell Writers”. He has poems in various anthologies including “New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry”, in “Nostalgia For The Present: An Anthology of Writings From Detroit” from Post Aesthetic Press, and in the Wayne State University Press anthology of Detroit poets, “Abandon Automobile”. A selection of his poetry and fiction is forthcoming from Wayne State U. Press. Waller is a widely published journalist and art and music critic with works in newspapers, and academic and literary journals including Obsidian, The Panopticon Review, and Solid Ground Magazine. He is a former staff writer and contributor to “The Ithaca Times”, “The Ithaca Journal”, “The Detroit Metro Times”, “The Michigan Citizen”, and South Florida’s “Progreso Weekly/Progreso Semenal”. A selection of his journalism and academic articles can be found at http://wayne.academia.edu/RayfieldWaller. He is a featured writer honored in the archive known as the “Marygrove College Literary Map of Detroit” (https://www.marygrove.edu/22-dodge-main). Waller appeared frequently on radio in Miami, Florida and was a frequent co-host on WAXY AM 790’s show, “Shock The System” hosted by Jim Nadell. Writing by Waller appears at theblacklistpub.ning.com/profile/RayfieldAWaller, and rayfieldwaller.blogspot.com. “Sympathy For Me” is his first published novel, the first in a planned trilogy.