Galilee (8 page)

Nor did I want to choke them off, once I felt them inside me. At their entrance the pain in my side seemed instantly to recede, as did the throbbing in my head and eyes. The fear of a lonely demise here went out of my head and I was removed—in one breath—from despair to pleasurable ease.

What a maze of manipulations this chamber contained! First banality, then a blow, then this opiated bliss. I would be foolish, I knew, to believe that it did not have more tricks in its repertoire. But while it was content to give me some relief from my pains I was happy to take what was offered. Greedy for it, indeed. I gulped at the air, drawing in great draughts of it. And with every breath I felt further removed from my pain. Nor was it just the hurt in my flank and the throb in my head that was becoming remote; there was a much older ache—a dull, wretched pain that haunted the dead terrain of my lower limbs—that was now, for the first time in almost two human spans, relieved. It wasn't, I think, that the pain was taken away; only that I no longer knew it as pain. Need I say I gladly banished it from my mind, sobbing gratitude to be relieved of an agony that had attended me so closely I'd forgotten how profound a hurt it was?

And with its passing my eyes—which were more acute than I could ever remember their being, even in my youth—found a new sight to astonish them. The air that I was expelling from my lungs had a bright solidity of its own; it came from me filled with flecks of delicate brilliance, as though a fire was stoked in me, and I was breathing out shards of flame. Was this some representation of my pain, I wondered? The room—or my own delirium's—way of demonstrating the expulsion? That theory floated for ten seconds, then it was gone. The motes were about to show me their true nature, and it had nothing to do with pain.

They were still flowing from my mouth with every breath, but I wasn't watching those I'd just exhaled. It was those that had flown from me first which drew my startled sight. They were seeding their luminescence in the shadows—disappeared into the cloudy bed around me. I watched with what I'd like to think was almost scientific detachment. There was a certain logic to all that happened to me here; or so I now supposed. The shadows were only half the equation: they were a site of possibilities, no more than that; the fertile mud of this chamber, waiting for some galvanizing spark to bring forth—to bring forth
what?

That was the question. What did the marriage of fire and shadow want to show me?

I didn't have to wait more than twenty seconds to discover the answer. No sooner had the first of the motes embedded themselves than the shadows surrendered their uncertainty, and blossomed.

The limits of the dome room had been banished. When the visions came—
and oh, how they came!—
they were vast.

First, out of the shadows, a landscape. The most primal of landscapes, in fact: rock and fire, and a flowing mass of magma. It was like the beginning of the world; red and black. It took me only a moment to make sense of this scene. The next, I was besieged with images, the scene before me transforming with every beat of my heart. Something flowered from the fire, gold and green, rising into a smoky sky. As it rose the blossoms it bore became fruit, and fell back onto the laval ground. I didn't have time to watch them be consumed. A motion in the smoke off to my right drew my gaze. An animal of some kind—with pale, scarred flanks—galloped through my field of vision. I felt the violence of its hooves in my bowels. And before it had passed from sight came another, and another, then a herd of these beasts—not horses, but something close to them. Had I made these creatures? I wondered. Had I exhaled them with my pain; and the fire too, and the rock and tree that rose from the rock? Was all this
my invention, or perhaps some remote memory, which the enchantments of the room had somehow made visible?

Even as I shaped that thought the pale herd changed direction and came pounding at me. I instinctively covered my head, to keep my brains from being beaten out. But for all the fury of their hooves, the passage of the herd did me no more harm than a light breeze; they passed over me, and away.

I looked up. In the few seconds I'd had my eyes averted the ground had given prodigious birth. There were now sights to be seen on every side. Close by me, sliding through the very air from which it was being carved, a snake came, bright as a flower. Before it was even finished with its own creation another creature snatched it up, and my eyes rose to find before me a form that was vaguely human, but winged and sleek. The snake was gone in an instant, swallowed down the throat of this thing, which then settled its fiery eyes on me as though wondering if I too were edible. Plainly I looked like poor fare. Pumping its massive wings the creature rose like a curtain to reveal another drama, stranger still, behind it.

The tree I'd seen born had spread its seeds in every direction. In a few seconds a forest had sprung up, its churning canopy as dark as a thunderhead. And flitting between the trees were all manner of creatures, rising to nest, falling to rot. Close by me, an antelope stood in the dapple, shitting itself in terror. I looked for the cause. There; a few yards from the creature, something moved between the trees. I glimpsed only the glint of its eye, or tooth, until it suddenly broke cover, and came at its prey in one vast bound. A tiger, the size of four or five men. The antelope made to dart away, but its hunter was too fast. The tiger's claws sank into the antelope's silken flank and finished its leap with its prey beneath it. The death wasn't quick or pretty. The antelope thrashed wildly, though its body was torn wide open, and the tiger was tearing out its stringy throat. I didn't look away. I watched until the antelope was steaming meat, and the tiger sank down to dine. Only then
did my eyes wander in search of new distractions.

There was something bright between the trees, I saw; brighter by the moment. Like a fire in its appetite, it climbed through the canopy as it approached, its advance above outpacing its steadier progress below. There was chaos in the thicket, as every species—hunter and hunted alike—fled before the blaze. But above me there was no escape. The fire came too fast, consuming birds in their flight, the chicks in their nests, monkeys and squirrels on the bough. Countless corpses fell around me, blackened and smoking. White hot ash came with them, powdering the ground.

I wasn't in fear for my life. By now I knew enough about this place to be confident of my immunity. But the scene appalled me nevertheless. What was I witnessing? Some primal cataclysm that had scoured this world? Undone it from sky to ground? If so, what was its source? This was no natural disaster, I was certain of that. The blaze above me had made itself into a kind of roof, creating in the moment of destruction a fretted vault, in which the dying were immortalized in fire. Tears started into my eyes, the sight moved me so. I reached to brush them out, so as not to miss whatever new glories or horrors were imminent, and as I did so I heard in my heart the first human utterance—other than my own noise—to come my way since I'd entered this chamber.

It was not a word; or if it was it was no word I knew. But it had meaning; at least that was my belief. To my ear it sounded like an open-throated shout raised by some newborn soul in the midst of the blaze; a yell of celebration and defiance.
Here I am!
it seemed to say.
Now we begin!

I raised myself up on my hands to see if I could find the shouter (whether it was man or woman I couldn't yet decide) but the rain of ash and detritus was like a veil before me: I could see almost nothing through it.

My arms could not support me for more than a few moments. But as I sank back down to the ground, frustrated, the fire overhead—having perhaps exhausted its fuel—went out. The ash ceased falling. And there, standing no more than twenty yards from where I lay, the blaze surrounding her like a vast, fiery flower, was Cesaria. There was nothing about her attitude or her expression that suggested the fire threatened her. Far from it. She seemed rather to be luxuriating in its touch; her hands moving over her body as the conflagration bathed it, as though to be certain its balm penetrated every pore. Her hair, which was even blacker than her skin, flickered and twitched; her breasts seeped milk, her eyes ran silvery tears, her sex, which now and then she fingered, issued streams of blood.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. She was too exquisite, too ripe. It seemed to me that all I had seen before me in the last little while—the laval ground, the tree and its fruit, the pale herd, the hunted antelope and the tiger that took it; even the strange, winged creature that had briefly appeared in my vision—all of these were
in
and
of
the woman before me. She was their maker and their slaughterer; the sea into which they flowed and the rock from which they'd sprung.

I'd seen enough, I decided. I'd drunk down all I could bear to drink, and still keep my sanity. It was time I turned my back on these visions, and retreated to the safety of the mundane. I needed time to assimilate what I'd seen—and the thoughts that the sights had engendered.

But retreat was no easy business. Ungluing my eyes from the sight of my father's wife was hard enough; but when I did so, and looked back toward the door, I could not find it. The illusion surrounded me on every side; there was no hint of the real remaining. For the first time since the visions had begun I remembered Luman's talk of madness, and I was seized with panic. Had I carelessly let my hold on sanity slip, without even noticing that I'd done so? Was I now adrift in this illusion with no solid ground left for my senses?

I remembered with a shudder the crib in which Luman had been bound; and the look of unappeasable rage in his eyes. Was that all that lay before me now? A life without certainty, without solidity; this forest a prison I'd breathed into being, and that other world, where I'd been real and in my wounded fashion content, now a dream of freedom to which I could not return?

I closed my eyes to shut out the illusion. Like a child in terror, I prayed.

“Oh Lord God in Heaven, look down on your servant at this moment; I beg of you . . . I need you with me.

“Help me. Please. Take these things out of my head. I don't want them, Lord. I don't want them.”

Even as I whispered my prayer I felt a rush of energies against me. The blaze between the trees, which had come to a halt a little distance from me, was on the move again. I hastened my prayer, certain that if the fire was coming for me, then so was Cesaria.

“Save me, Lord—”

She was coming to silence me. That was my sudden conviction. She was a part of my insanity and she was coming to hush the words I'd uttered to defend myself against it.

“Lord, please hear me—”

The energies intensified, as though they intended to snatch the words away from my lips.

“Quickly, Lord, quickly! Show me the way out of here! Please! God in Heaven, help me!”

“Hush . . .” I heard Cesaria say. She was right behind me. It seemed to me I could feel the small hairs at the nape of my neck fizzle and fry. I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder. There she was, still cocooned in fire, her dark flesh shining. My mouth was suddenly parched; I could barely speak.

“I want . . .”

“I know,” she said softly. “I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back.”

“Yes . . .” I said. I was close to sobbing.

“But here it is,” she said. “All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it's
yours.”

“No,” I protested. “I've never been in this place before.”

“But it's been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were born.”

“Dreamed it into me . . .” I said.

“Every sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come . . . it's in your blood and in your bowels.”

“Then why am I so afraid of it?”

“Because you've held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you're the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you . . .”

Did I dare believe any of this?

Cesaria replied as though she'd heard the doubt spoken aloud.

“I can't reassure you,” she said. “Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you've ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again.”

“Fall where?”

“Why back into your own hands, of course,” she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn't blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I'd never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that:
I was afraid.

“Ask your question,” Cesaria said. “You have a question. Ask it.”

“It sounds so childish.”

“Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it.”

“Am I . . . safe?”

“Safe?”

“Yes. Safe.”

“In your flesh? No. I can't guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there's other hands to hold you. I've told you that already.”

“And . . . I think I believe you,” I said.

“So then,” Cesaria said, “you have no reason not to let the memories come.”

She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.

“Touch me,” she said.

I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.