The Secret Book of Paradys (34 page)

“At the end of the cavern was a kind of curtain. It fell and rippled like water, or perhaps steam. The traveller stood before the curtain, and after a moment or so, it swirled and opened, and in the opening showed a stern pale face in middle life, bearded, with shrewd dark eyes. The traveller started back. He made some sign over himself, and then began to shout. He had some cause, for the face he had been shown in the mist was his own. His language baffled me, yet I know what he said. Then the jinn came. I didn’t see it, but the traveller did. He spoke more guardedly, but no less angrily. One of those ethical legendary bargains had been dishonoured, he wanted recompense. And then the jinn – I heard its voice, rough and oddly pitched, like a boy’s voice when it’s on the point of breaking, the jinn said something to the man, which I understood to mean, Look again, and I will show you instead the face of God.

“At this, a proper altercation. Of course, to see the Devil was one thing, but surely God was not accessible, at the beck and call of lesser spirits. But the jinn persuaded the traveller. So the man looked again at the mist or steam, and it parted. I knew what was coming, and so maybe did he, for now he made no comment. It was the same face, shrewd and bearded, just out of its prime. God’s face was the traveller’s face, as the Devil’s had been.

“I woke up in silence, madly overawed by the depths of my own theosophical sense. I never thought I had that side to me.”

After this entry there is a gap of several lines. At the bottom of the page he wrote:

“In a kind of calm hysteria. Something is going on. I can’t hear or see or smell it, it leaves me alone. Forces gathering? What forces could there be. Perhaps poor T is angry, I’ve stopped her expression by burying the focus. It seems I’m reluctant to go out and take away the stone in proper Christian manner, and dig up the prize. Yes, I am reluctant. I’ve so seldom been any more than nervous of anything. I don’t know. Am I afraid? Is this fear?”

Turning the page, you saw he had written:

“I tried to find the place. Something, perhaps a neighbourhood cat, has
moved the stone. I dug about where I thought it must be, found nothing. I’m distrait. I feel as if a cane has come down sharply on my fingers. Bad Louis. Bad negligent child.”

In a dream, the mise-en-scène may simply exist. And so, a hot black night, starred with diamond brooches, moonless. A broad black river, without a bridge, the starlight plinking on it, and frogs faintly chorusing in the reeds. It might have been almost anywhere in a warm climate. On the dim banks shapeless shapes that gave no clue – mounds, huts – beyond, the rising of hills. And here and there, eastwards, a cresset on a wall-tower … The fort too lay east, behind now, with the beacon burning in the great iron brazier on the roofwalk. Dis’ light.

It was not that he walked inside the skin of the one who walked before. But he walked so close, he was her shadow, and invisible. The intimacy of it seemed normal in the dream. He knew himself separate, a witness. He knew himself involved, and not impartial.

There were trees now, heavy castaneas, a wood beside the water, and there an altar of stone against the post of the ferry … He saw these things as she glanced at them, knew them by some trace that came from her. They did not interest her, these known things.

She was alone, not one of her slaves with her, and now there were men standing up in the black of the trees. But they were obeising themselves. They were pulling something forward, showing her – the black and pale flickering among the foliage of the chestnut grove was confusing. Then he saw the face, the lolling tongue and half-moon eyes. It was a corpse they had brought. They laid it on the ground, and she made passes over it. She had put off the cloak. Her arms were smooth and rounded, strong but very female, braceleted wrist to armpit. And her hair was youngly-white.

He did not think, I am dreaming of Timonie by the Nile in Egypt. He knew it was not Egypt. And not Timonie, and not a dream.

Then she made a sign, and all the men slipped away out of the trees, all of course but the naked corpse. Another shape emerged between the castaneas, male and mantled. He spoke to her, and then she said something to him. Her voice was light but throaty. His, harsh, sounding angry, cowardly. They were speaking – not the classical Latin of the modern school-room – but the everyday speech of real life, tailored by a hundred foreign intrusions, and the colloquialisms of a military camp. The City had not been built yet, nor even the Roman town of occupation, just the walls, the towered fort, a storehouse or two. And over there were the bothies of the savages who had been here first. And underneath all, the silvermines for which they had optimistically named the station Par Dis.

He
had told her, in a patrician’s Roman slang, he did not care for it, now it was to happen. And she said, her accent not the same as his, Too late.

Then she made a kind of channel, in the mud among the tree-roots, all about herself and the corpse. At intervals in this channel she thrust in small sticks that seemed to be lying about on the ground. She lit them, it was not certain quite how. The light was bluish, unclear, like dying gas-glim. Yet as she moved, a single earring flamed and darkened from her right ear, and in the other ear, as it seemed to be, a part of an earring. There was a pectoral, over and between her small breasts bound in byssus. The Egyptian enamel and lapis was of eyes and hieroglyphs, but there hung from it a flat moon-disc spider, in silver, and there another and another was sewn on her skirt. She had placed some little images at points along the channel, the invisible watcher could see them now, though again, not exactly where they had come from. They were very small and appeared to have been formed of simple baked clay, and she was breathing on them, like a god giving life in a myth. Three he saw quite distinctly. A man sitting cross-legged, a great belly and a fat man’s bosom on his lap, in either arm an urn, one up-ended to the earth, and one tilted skyward. Near him was a scales, empty and in balance. Now the woman sighed upon two little animals, like lambs or young goats, lying with their forefeet entwined. Having breathed on these, she straightened up. She stood a moment, slender and poised, and unhuman, like some wading bird, attentive to something other than the night.

It was the dark of the moon, and she was making magic, too black for the Roman’s fort to hold it. For they were the children of reason. They built roads and armies, forts and baths and laws. Her kind built from shadows, different things.

Somehow the watcher-witness had been excluded from the spell, pushed back on its rim. He was looking at her then, from a slight distance, not seeing her quite clearly. In the peculiar light, her eyes might not have been blue after all, for all of her had a blue cast, jewels and clothing, skin and hair.

Then she turned to the corpse, and spoke to it shrilly, words that made no proper sense – like commands to an idiot or a beast. And the corpse sat up, and answered her in a whistling moan, not even in words.

There came a prolonged sequence after that, during which the dead thing rose and stood, showing that it glowed a little, and that in places it had indecently decomposed. At first it spoke only noises and gibberish, but the sorceress, she, Tiy-Amonet, she shrilled out again and again at it, she threatened it with its unburial, and some loss injurious to its soul-life. And finally it hung its head and began again to whisper, and the whispering formed words. And then she asked questions and the corpse replied. They were to do
with a battle, and an enemy. It was for the commander of the fortress, her protector, that she asked. While he stood apart, his mantle held over his face, his eyes rolling with fear and nausea and a wish to be gone.

But it was impossible to tell anything from her eyes. Not even colour.

And as the corpse mumbled on, the watcher heard the frogs, unawed, chorusing, and then a deep explosion shook the world, a pane of light broke into a million pieces of rain.

The rain was not wet. It fell beyond a partition of glass and bricks. Louis de Jenier lay in the bed and watched the lightning of the storm crack again across his walls.

Then he sat up, aware that in just this way the corpse in the dream had got itself upright from the earth.

The night was full of noise, the breakages of heaven. A bolt seemed to pass right through the decanter of water at the bedside, and shatter it. On the pillow a fire-ball flashed and died. The silver earring was lying there, the spider at its centre. Louis put one hand to his face and found that, in sleeping, in the dream, he had lain with his cheek pressed against the earring. He left the bed and opened the wardrobe door and looked into the mirror there. In the next lightning flash, he saw the impression of the spider stamped into his flesh.

By ten o’clock the next morning, when he went to see about the costume, the spider mark had faded altogether, which was as well. He had arranged a photographic session to follow, to charm and stall Vlok with budding results.

That the earring had been returned was also – not a stroke of luck – but a stroke of some sort, perhaps of lightning.

By the time of the photography at the shop in the covered alley, Louis had recalled, excavated and read the page of print Curt had given him.

“A stranger, reading
this
, will assume I had seen the item previously, and so manufactured the dream on cue. Perhaps I had, because the name Tiy-Amonet seemed always resonant, in the way Timonie had done. The dream was correct in its details, even to the fact of being set on the north bank. Now even I begin to wonder, did I look at Curt’s page before I went to sleep? Did I find the earring and put it ready on my pillow – sleep-walking, maybe. No, it isn’t any of that. I’m caught in something now, can’t stop, must go on. I dreamed
Timonie’s
dream, her dream of her own alter-
icon
.

“At the photographer’s, in my covert of screens, I donned the costume, exact to my design. Everything was perfect, and such gasps and purrs and
looks
from the camera fellow and his adjuncts, I might have been back in one of Vlok’s carefully-chosen nightclubs. Even some muttered asides to me about a client or two of theirs, who would … etc., to match the other asides when I entered as a male.

“The mirrors in the screened back “room” were full of the image. I felt drunk, or rather full-flush as you do at the start of drinking, before the weight settles over the eyes and in the brain. A marvellous portrait, they assure me. The earring felt very cold. Then, when I removed it, burning blazing hot in my hand so it was nearly dropped. I keep it in my pocket now. Where might it go if, idly, I put it down. Back to the room with the windows, probably.

“Someone may be playing a joke, or I’ve gone mad.

“But – I’m addicted.
Too late
as the lady said in her wild Roman I forget but understood. Though we were never taught Latin, but for the religious niceties where I was raised. I can hardly wait for the darkness. My hand’s shaking.

“I shan’t dine tonight. I only want water from the decanter that lightning speared through. Bathe, put on those garments, the painted mask of cosmetics, the breasts and the hair, the jewel. Then take all of it, and myself, up
there
. Wait.

“If this is fear I’m feeling, it’s more potent than a drug. I never felt anything like it before. The difficulty is if I think: what shall I do afterwards? So I don’t think it.

“The sky through the windows is lapis-lazuli, and they’re lighting the streets. The rain has stopped again. Clear heavens, not a cloud. Every window of the house now like coloured glass. Better start to get ready.”

I looked at this point, in vain, among the documents in the diary pocket, for that torn sheet concerning the sorceress. Eventually I found it pasted in, as with some other of the entries, but at the end of the diary behind many blank pages. It scanned as follows:

Tiyamonet
. Reputedly a healer, diviner and necromancer, as many of her race were reckoned automatically to be. Mentioned in several writings of the period, she was the mistress of that previously noted Roman commander, who controlled his part of the Empire’s campaign here in the north with two legions, inaugurated the building of walls and fortifications, portions of which remain, and opened the silver-mines. These, actually mined out in fifty years, gave the area its original name, which soon came to be rendered in the records as Par Dis. Dis being Pluto, god of the Underworld, its mineral hoards, and incidentally, its kingdom of the dead. At the wish of her patron, Tiyamonet is supposed to have summoned up spirits and thus reanimated cadavers, then enjoining them to answer questions as to the outcome of impending battles, or the weaknesses of the commander’s enemies. An old tavern, the
Imago
– the Apparition – which was destroyed after the Years of Liberty, was built it was said near the site of one such event. It stayed an inn of ill-repute ever after. The personal seal and sigil of Tiyamonet was the spi
der. The arachnid has always enjoyed connections with witchcraft, mostly due to the insect’s abilities as a spinner – see also the Fates – and since it is able to build a trap out of an emanation of its own body – ectoplasm? – the thread and the web. A blue-eyed Alexandrian, Tiyamonet may have been feared in her own land, for in the East blue optics were, and sometimes continue to be taken, for the Evil Eye. When the luck of her patron changed, the commander being killed, as formerly stated, in a revolt of his own garrison, she committed suicide rather than submit to assault and torture. She is said to have employed for this purpose the bite of a poisonous spider, of the species – now extinct – shown in her seal and on the earring. Along with many magicians, Tiyamonet was rumoured to possess a particular secret, in her case to do with the ethereal powers of Air, Pliny the Other’s
Regna Caerulea
, Galen’s
Caerulei mundi regna
. As with most such secrets, for example, the Book of Gates, the precise formulae of the sorcery are unsure, but seem to have to do with a triumph over time and death. The method of the woman’s entombment and rites, if any, go unrecalled. Her possessions were certainly stolen. The spider-earring of Tiyamonet, on view in this museum, came to light in another trove, of far later date, and may indeed be merely a Roman copy; its authenticity has never been verified.