Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (6 page)

The war. Lucifer had said it had
been the earthly manifestation of a greater conflict in Heaven and Hell, but
not between them. Under Samael and Molech and some being called Adam Belial,
some of the Fallen had seceded from Lucifer’s domain and Heaven had come to his
aide. Not the war the Rider had thought he’d been fighting at the time. He had
fought on the side of the Lord, yes, but also the side of Lucifer, against the
rebel demons and their Outer God allies. What did they want with the domain of
Hell?

The Rider had been renowned among
his brother Essenes as the most accomplished of the Merkabah Riders. Yet here
was this African man, nominally a Jew, younger than himself, born a world away,
and with him, the Rider was a learner again.

Belden, ignored and apparently
feeling he was in over his head, was snoring in his cell between them.

“What about you,
rabbi
?” the Rider said.

“What about me?”

“We can talk of these things till
havdala
,” the Rider said. “But I don’t
know a thing about you. You’re a
yored
Merkabah
, sure. You descended upon the Throne, I know. But is Kabede your
name, or a title? Who was your father? Your mother? Do you have brothers and
sisters?”

“Let me see,” said Kabede, settling.
“In our enclave, we take the name of an admired person. Kabede was the name of
a
qes
in my village. An elder, who
taught me to read the scripture. He died before I was inducted into the Sons of
the Essenes. I have two brothers and three sisters.”

“That’s quite a family.”

“And you?”

“No, no siblings.”

“My father is a painter,” said
Kabede. “An artist, and my mother a baker.”

“My father was a storekeeper,” the
Rider said.

“He…is dead?”

“Yes, when I was fourteen.”

“Your mother?”

“Not long after I left for the war.
She was ill. We said our goodbyes. I stopped getting letters, you see. That was
how I knew. She wrote me all the time. I wonder what happened to those
letters...”

The Rider looked up at the dark sky
through the barred window.

“When you joined the Sons of the
Essenes,” Kabede asked, “did your father approve?”

“My father thought it was a very
great honor,” said the Rider. “He had prepared me to take over his business,
but when the
rebbes
selected me, he
was glad to give me to them. I remember he said he was too small a man to stand
in the way of HaShem’s will.”

“I used to have three brothers,”
said Kabede. “The eldest, Abatte, was killed in Egypt, working for the British
against the
Corvée
on the Suez Canal.
We don’t know just what happened. We heard it was a Frenchman, and also that it
was a Bedouin. I hardly knew him, but I have lived always in the shadow of his
ghost. My father is an excellent artist you see, but he is an artist in a
village of artisans. He has never thought his profession worthy in the great
scheme of things. Abatte was his conscience. He was the man of action my father
had always wanted to be, and he died for a worthy cause. When I was admitted to
the
yeshiva
, he did not approve. He
did not think highly of a life of study, you see. He told me my head was in the
clouds, and that I must concern myself with the problems of this world. I was
always strange to him. He never believed in the things I knew. And yet…”

“What?”

“How I have wished I could paint the
glories of Heaven I have seen with the hands of my father. I have always felt
that if I could but do that, with his artistry, I could convince the staunchest
unbeliever of the reality of
Igzee’abaihier
.
I could convince even him. But I am no artist, and to my father I am just a
dreamer.”

“Perhaps he sees himself in you,”
the Rider ventured.

“I have no doubt he does,” Kabede
agreed.

“But you have a task now. Possibly
the most important task you could hope for.”

“My father would never believe it.”

“We do not do what we have done so
that it be known, only so that it is done,” the Rider said.

“Yes,” said Kabede. “But a son
always hopes to please his father.”

The Rider was quiet for a time, then
he asked Kabede, “What was it like? The Throne? To be in the Lord’s presence.”

“I could not look upon Him,” Kabede
admitted. “The light of the
seraphim
was blinding. But, remember what you told me about the creature in the pit?
Shub…”

“Shub-Niggurath,” the Rider said,
and an involuntary chill snaked up his spine at the memory.

“You spoke of a feeling of infinite
despair. Of cold darkness and futility. Of boundless, endless antiquity.”

“Yes.”

“In that place of Holy Fire,
shrouded in eternal mists of white, I too understood antiquity. There was a
great presence, an undying benevolence that was old when the light of the stars
was new. It was eternal. It was paternal. Maternal. Familial and familiar. Imagine
if you could awake as a child on your first remembered morning and sit once
more at the table with your parents, as if they had never died. As if they
never
could
die. It was warm, like
hearth light. I felt it fill my heart with assurance. It was attractive too.
The center of my being resonated with it, was drawn to it as if gentle hands
cradled my heart like a bird and drew me near.”

“You said you felt assurance.
Assurance of what?”

“That all was well. Assurance that I
was needed and loved, because some small part of me was part of this that
stretched before me. Assurance too, that wherever light grew, darkness would
shrink. There was no darkness there. Just light. Blazing, and hazy, like the
morning light through a curtain on the day of a sun shower. And colors. So
vibrant, so real as to be realer and more in focus than anything on the earth.
That was the Presence. When I returned to my body, my face was wet with tears
of joy, and I renewed them with tears of sorrow because I could not return.”

“But what did you see?” the Rider
insisted.

“Everything,” Kabede said. “And
nothing at all. All was shrouded in cool mist. Sometimes the clouds parted
around me, and I saw many things I didn’t understand, but can you understand? I
did not turn my attention to them.
Igzee’abaihier
was within that cloud. The Lord was with me.”

The Rider thought back to Lucifer’s
words.

“Each soul,” he had said, “devises
its own suffering. That is the nature of
Gehenna
.”

What if Heaven was the same? What if
Kabede had seen what he wanted and felt what he had expected to? What did that
mean for the Rider?

The
mind is its own place, and in itself

Can
make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Where had he read that?

Kabede was silent for awhile, then
he said, “I think this is why Elisha ben Abuyah was changed,” he said, “why he
became Adon.”

“What do you mean?”

“He went to the Throne, not seeking
Igzee’abaihier
, but knowledge of the
Olam ha-Tohu
, the primordial world of
chaos. I think that is why the angel Metatron turned you away, Rider.”

“I
wanted
to know the Lord,” the Rider said. “It was my only desire.”

“Rabbi Akiba knew and believed in
the Lord already,” Kabede said. “He could not have reached the Throne
otherwise.”

“So, to know the Lord…”

“One must already know Him.”

It was like the old preacher had
told him. He had gone seeking the Lord when he should already have known Him by
His works. Then perhaps Metatron had saved him. Perhaps, like Elisha ben
Abuyah, had he reached the Throne in that state, he might’ve become another
Adon himself.

Perhaps that had been Adon’s plan.

Their meager bread finished, the
Rider recited the
Birkat ha-Mazon
blessing.

It was fully night now, and they
settled into their cots as the bugler blew the Go To Sleep. The Rider thought
of the army again, and found himself singing the words lowly, which were
fitting in their way:

“Day
is done, gone the sun,

From
the lakes, from the hills, from the skies,

All
is well, safely rest;

God
is nigh.”

The Rider soon lay staring at the
ceiling. Kabede sang a song in his own language not unlike the one he’d heard
when they first met. The Rider reflected on the time that had passed, and this
last year to come.

When Kabede had finished, the Rider
asked, “Did you learn anything from that book Lucifer showed you?
The Damnatus Damnatonum
?”

Adam Belial’s book, left behind in
Pandæmonium after he and his rebel demons were expelled from hell. Adam Belial,
a being apparently so tied to the unending conflict that had resulted in the
jointly exhaustive dichotomy of the cosmos that his name was woven throughout
the metaphysical fabric of its occult history, invoked by unwitting magicians
and sorcerers the world over, appearing even in the most sacred treatises of
the Kabbalah itself. Adam Belial, the negative emanation, forever in opposition
to Adam Kadmon, the primal cosmic body of the universe. He had heard the name
in his studies, but he had always thought it more a concept than an actual
entity. Lucifer had claimed Adam Belial was an Outer God, a Great Old One in
the guise of an angel, who had counseled him to rebel against Heaven.

Lucifer had shown the book to Kabede
during their visit.

“I was distracted,” Kabede admitted.
“I couldn’t read everything, but yes. Much of it was vague. Descriptions of
this new age they pine for. The book spoke of it in idyllic terms as an age of
freedom; freedom from order and restraint. Freedom from morality and
responsibility. Rule will be misrule, a whimsical rule of the moment, of
strength and lust and violence. The Old Ones will favor those who bring about
their coming, and suckle upon the misery of the rest.”

“Anything about how they intend to
do it?”

“The only reference I read was that
the land would be prepared and then hell would be loosed or unleashed. The time
these Great Old Ones and their followers are preparing for…”

“The Hour of Incursion,” said the
Rider.

“It is very near.”

But when? Lucifer had said the book
didn’t say. He was growing short on time. Nameless in the Order’s
Book of Life
, he would be dead by Yom
Kippur on the ninth day of Tishri, according to the law, which was September
the twenty second. That was mere months away. A good number sure, if you were
just counting the days on a calendar. Not so many if you were measuring the
remaining time of a life. If the Hour of Incursion came after that, it would be
up to Kabede to carry on. Well then, the Rider would have to get him ready.
Already Kabede was very far along in his wisdom— probably farther along than
the Rider himself. But he lacked practical experience. No doubt he would be
getting a great deal very soon.

Genesis came into his mind then.

And
Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh: ‘for God hath made me forget
all my toil, and all my father’s house.’

It was the passage Rabbi Belinski
came upon when he had renamed the Rider at his mother’s request, to avert an
ailment he’d had as a boy.

“Kabede,” he said. “What’s to stop
me from renaming myself?”

“You propose another
shinnui shem
—a renaming ceremony.”

“Yes.”

“I had thought of that, but you have
no name at all now. It’s a strange circumstance. We cannot hold a proper
brit milah
and name you, as you are, I
presume, already circumcised.”

“Yes,” said the Rider, rather
quickly.

“We would need the
Orit
,” Kabede said. “I don’t think a simple
bound
chumash
copy would do either.
We would need a living
Sefer Torah
,
in scroll form, and a
minyan
for the
blessing
.
Not easy to find in these
parts.”

A living Torah scroll, and a prayer
quorum of ten Jews.

“Not easy, but not impossible. There’s
a town called Tombstone…I passed through it some time back. There were Jews
there,” the Rider mused. He had only been there briefly, but he had seen Jewish
graves, and a few Jewish stores. He knew that Josephine Marcus had gone there.
The town had sprung into his mind when he’d needed a place for Professor Spates
to send the translations of Sheardown’s letters to Adon. Perhaps HaShem was
guiding him yet.

“Then there’s hope,” Kabede said.

The Rider lay back down and watched
the candlelight flickering on the walls, his eyes growing heavy.

“Yes,” he said. “Some.
Gut Shabbes
,” he said, rolling on his
side.

“
Shabbat
Shalom
,” said Kabede.