Falling Idols Page 11

  “Keep your voice down,” Maia warned.

  “You’re afraid he’ll hear something he doesn’t already know? Oh, wake up, he’s got excellent hearing. The only thing he doesn’t know is how you look after a meal. That’s the one thing you can’t pretend away, isn’t it? Not even you’re that naïve. And damn right you are that most of them would have a problem loving you back if they saw how bloated your belly gets with all the blood.”

  Whatever Maia said next I didn’t hear. I was too busy facing Lilah when I realized she’d been behind me, watching me eavesdrop.

  “It’ll blow over. It always does,” she told me, and nodded in the direction of the argument. “Salíce always has had an attitude of superiority because she never has to get any messier than some little cocksucker bobbing her head beneath a table at Mr. Pussy’s Café.”

  “Do you ever resent that?” I asked.

  “God, no. But then, I know what really makes Salíce so cocky over it in the first place.” She laughed, long hair uncombed and tangled in her face, as she leaned into mine. “Nobody’s afraid of her. She hates that. Maia and me — they fear us. But nobody fears Salíce.”

  “I’m not afraid of Maia, either.”

  Lilah loudly clicked her teeth. “But you are of me.” She stared triumphantly through the crumbling of my self-assurance. “Then maybe you’re only half-stupid.”

  As she’d predicted, the argument soon blustered away, ending when Maia stormed from the house and cooled down out on the back lawn. Through the windows I watched her, a slight distant figure in somber greys, walking slowly amidst grass and gardens, finally sitting beneath an oak, where she distractedly petted one of the slobbering mastiffs that had the run of the grounds. When I braved the dog and joined her, we sat awhile in that silence that follows the clumsy dropping of another guard from around the heart.

  “After that first day, and the bomb,” I said, “why didn’t you come to me again? I’ve always wondered that. I’d’ve followed you anywhere. I’d’ve been anything you wanted.”

  “There’s your answer, right there. It’s too easy for someone like us to take whatever we want. Where’s the joy in that? After so long, it’s only gratifying one more appetite.” She watched her hand scruffing the black fur across the dog’s huge head. “It’s important to me that if someone like you comes back … it’s because you do it on your own.”

  “Because it’s more real to you then?”

  Maia shrugged, stared off into the grey sky. “What is real, anyway?” she asked, and while once I thought I had those answers, now I wasn’t even sure of the questions.

  In the black-and-white faith I was raised in, there’d been no room outside of Hell for the likes of the Sisters of the Trinity. And while I realized that they weren’t goddesses, neither were they demons. I no longer believed in demons, at least not the sort the Church had spent centuries exorcising. Where was the need of them, other than keeping the Church in business? One pontiff with a private army could wreak more havoc than any infernal legion.

  Because of Salíce, now I understood that the Sisters weren’t the only ones of their kind. When I asked how many of them there were, Maia didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, and I realized with an unexpected poignancy that whatever monstrous acts it was in their nature to commit, they were no worse than what went on between wolves and deer, and that those who committed them were still as lost in their world as the most ignorant of us mortal fools in ours, working and loving and praying and dying over our threescore and ten.

  Black-haired and black-eyed, hair tousled in the breeze, Maia turned her unblinking serpent’s gaze on me, so unexpected it was almost alien.

  “How much would it take to repulse you?” she said.

  At first I didn’t know how to respond, then asked why she’d even want to.

  “Because it obviously takes more than eating men alive to do it. You don’t find that interesting about yourself?” She wouldn’t look at me, instead smiled down at the dog. “I’ve made lovers of grown-up children before, and sometimes they’ve run and sometimes they’ve stayed, but do you know who I’ve noticed is most likely to stay? It’s you refugees from Christianity. Now why do you suppose that is?”

  I had no idea.

  “My guess is it’s because, most of you, you were weaned on the idea of serving up your god on a plate and in a little cup and eating him in a communal meal. Then when you can’t believe in him anymore, and you find us, and see how willing we are to eat others just like you, how we need that … then isn’t a little part of you, deep inside, relieved? Because that means you’re the god. Your ego is still too fragile to see yourself as just food. So you must be God, right…?

  “So let me ask you again: How much would it take to repulse you? To sicken those romantic ideals out of you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Maia. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but have the good grace to ask me rather than talking your way around it.”

  “Hear that, Brutus? Doesn’t want to talk about it,” she said to the mastiff. “You know, Patrick, where we get these dogs, they claim the lineage runs directly back to war dogs used by the Roman army. Like barrels, they were … with legs and teeth and fury and spiked leather armor. And you know something, Patrick? That’s no empty claim on the breeders’ part, it’s absolutely true. Do you know how I know this?”

  I shook my head.

  “They’re extraordinary dogs. With extraordinary bloodlines.”

  She hugged the dog, then slammed it over onto its back, and I could only watch appalled as Maia buried her beautiful face in the coarse fur at the mastiff’s bull neck. It yelped once, and those powerful legs kicked and clawed at the air, its body all squirming steel muscle, and yet she held it down with a minimum of struggle. When after several moments Maia tore her face away and let the dog go, it rolled unsteadily to its feet and lurched to a safer spot. Dazed, it looked back at her and whined, then ran off as if in a drunken lope.

  She was on me by then, had flipped me back and down before I knew it was happening. She straddled me, her hands gripping my shoulders, then pressed her smeared face to mine and opened her mouth in a violent kiss, let gravity take the blood straight into me. We spit and we spewed, but I couldn’t fight her.

  It would’ve been like wrestling an angel.

  So I pretended the blood was her own.

  When she sat back against the oak, Maia was breathing hard. I was still lying flat and trying not to retch. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and trembled.

  “Julius has always hated the dogs,” she murmured. “He hated the Romans, so he hates the dogs. He still blames the Romans for what he became. And he hates the dogs.”

  “Became,” I echoed. “None of you were born this way, then?”

  “Nobody’s ever born this way,” she said. When I asked what made them all, she told me it was different on the surface in each case, and sometimes that surface was all they knew. When I asked what made her, Maia did not speak for a long time, nor look at me. At last, after we heard the mournful howling of an unseen dog, she said, “If you’re still around late tonight, I’ll tell you.”

  VII. Ignominy patris

  “We were Assyrian,” she began, in our room filled with silks and dried orchids, “and we were just women. Devalued, and with no formal power. But we still had our ways. You know the Bible, so you know the sorts of men who made Assyria, don’t you?”

  I told her I did. A nation of warrior kings ruling warrior subjects, Assyria had been so feared for its savagery that an Old Testament scribe had called it “a land bathed in blood.”

  “In Assyria, as in Babylonia,” Maia went on, “each woman was expected, once in her life before she married, to go to the temple of Ishtar and sit on the steps until a man came and dropped a coin in her lap as the price of her favours. So off they’d go and their bodies became divine vessels for a while, and that was how a woman performed her duty to the goddess of love.

  �
�My sisters and I decided to go the temple all on the same day, and the men who came then, they showered us with coins and started to fight each other over who’d end up having us. Lilah loved it, thought it was hilarious. At night, in secret, she led us and other women in worshipping the demoness Lilitu … the one the Israelites took and turned into Adam’s first wife, Lilith, and thought was so horrible because she fucked Adam from the top instead of lying on her back like a proper woman was supposed to. I’m sure you can see the appeal she had to those of us who didn’t feel particularly subservient to men.

  “After that first day at the temple, when we saw what kind of power we had over them, we kept going back. Our fame grew, and so did our fortunes, and the rumours of the pleasure we could bring … until we were finally summoned by King Sennacherib. He wanted to restore a rite that was ancient even then, from Sumerian times: the Sacred Marriage. The king embodied a god and a priestess stood in for the goddess — by then, we were held in much higher esteem than mere temple prostitutes — and out of that physical union the gods and goddesses received their pleasures of the flesh.”

  Maia uttered a small laugh. “Lilah never believed Sennacherib really meant any of it, said he only wanted some grandiose excuse for an orgy with us. Probably she was right. After that, we became his most favoured concubines, and whatever in Nineveh we wanted, we had. And I … gave birth to twins, a daughter and a son. Of course the king didn’t publicly acknowledge them as his own. That was only for children born of his queen. But I knew whose they were.

  “In 701 B.C. Sennacherib invaded the Israelites. He captured forty-six cities before getting to Jerusalem, but by then, the Jewish King Hezekiah had had an underground aqueduct dug to insure the water supply. Sennacherib besieged the city, as he’d already done at Lachish, but by now they were in a position to outwait us almost indefinitely. I know, because we were there. He might leave his queen at home, but Sennacherib wouldn’t dare leave us behind. Not with the addiction he had to our bodies. So we were there for it all. Waiting for weeks under that merciless desert sun, a few arrows flying back and forth, an attempt at building a siege ramp … but mostly each side just waiting for the other to give up.”

  Maia seemed to lose herself in the flickering flame of a pillar candle. “Do you remember what supposedly happened to part of our army there?”

  I nodded. It was said that an angel from the one true God of Israel came down and in one night slaughtered 185,000 Assyrians.

  “Not true, I’m guessing?”

  “Do you even have to ask?” she said. “It was closer to four thousand, and it was Sennacherib’s own fault. He was starting to fear he might lose the siege, so he went to the priests, the ones he knew practiced sorcery, and he had them conjure a demon from out of the desert wastes. He’d meant to send it over the city walls and turn it loose on Jerusalem. But the priests lost control of it and it began slaughtering our own soldiers. When they wrote about it later, the Israelites grossly exaggerated the casualties and credited them to the Archangel Michael.” Maia shook her head. “They did a lot of that sort of thing. Nothing but propaganda for their god Yahweh.

  “What our priests had created, they finally got some control over, but they couldn’t get rid of it. I call it a demon, but it’s not like you think of demon. There’ve always been spirits, like unshaped clay, waiting to take whatever form someone with enough knowledge or devotion gives it, and that’s what the priests had done. But with the appetite they’d given it, and fed on the blood of four thousand warriors, it’d reached a degree of independence. Finally it consented to banishment, but only on condition of a sacrifice. It … it wanted flesh and blood from Sennacherib’s own lineage. Even then he got the priests to bargain with it. The thing didn’t care if what it received was a legitimate heir to the Assyrian throne. It was the flesh and blood alone that mattered.

  “They took my children, Patrick. He sent soldiers into our tent and they took my beautiful babies and they fed them to that thing. It opened up their bellies and spread their insides out on the desert floor, and ate them piece … by … piece.”

  Maia was silent for a long time, and I didn’t go to her as I might’ve. I wasn’t made to ease grief some 2700 years strong.

  “Hezekiah was horrified by what he’d heard happened, and he eventually paid tribute — he ransomed the city, really — so our army went back home again. Except Sennacherib left us behind, Lilah and Salíce and me. Now that he’d killed my children he couldn’t trust us, so he made a gift of us to Hezekiah, to be his own concubines. Seems even he had heard of us, from spies he’d sent to Assyria.

  “Even though we were betrayed by Sennacherib, we still didn’t have any love for the Israelites, or their god. So it was mostly a very antagonistic relationship we had with Hezekiah. But then one night, before he took us, he became very drunk, and we were amazed at what a state of terror he was in over their god. He talked to us, I think, because we were the only ones he could talk to, the only ones who didn’t share his religion.

  “He was still haunted by the butchery of my babies. It wasn’t their deaths so much as the … the consumption of them that was so abhorrent to him. And this one night, drunk, with his guard down, he confessed that he couldn’t see any difference between that, and certain things their own god Yahweh had demanded.

  “Then he mentioned some text he’d acquired from a Chaldean trader. He wouldn’t tell us what it said, specifically — he was too horrified to do that — but he hinted that it was written in angelic script, and that it couldn’t be burned, and that it had something to do with Yahweh and the blood sacrifice of a child.”

  As Maia told me these things, they plucked at old misgivings I’d once chosen to ignore … like all those scriptures that plainly had God demanding that his chosen people lay waste to enemies down to the last innocent baby and ignorant animal.

  Might these, too, have fed him, along with faith?

  “When Hezekiah finally had us that night, something became very different about him. In spite of how drunk he was, he was inexhaustible. His erection had swollen to twice its usual size, and he kept after us long after it was raw. Hours, it must’ve been, and he still hadn’t released once. I don’t know if it was something in his eyes, or the way his throat ballooned out, as if his flesh couldn’t contain whatever was inside him, but we knew it wasn’t Hezekiah any longer. It was the Sacred Marriage, all over again … except this time, it was their god inside him.

  “And when we realized this, Lilah and Salíce and I, that was when he orgasmed. His screaming was like a slaughtered pig’s. You can’t have any idea what that sounded like echoing down the palace corridors and back again. And his seed … it was like venom. He held us down and filled us with it, and there wasn’t any end to it, and it burned us from the inside out…”

  When Maia went to the window, pressing her hands to the panes of leaded glass, we both gazed on the risen moon that watched over a land once filled with people who’d had no need of anything from the scorching deserts of Palestine. And I thought how right it was that she and her sisters had come to live amongst the Celts, and wait for that day when some magic in our blood might be turned to their advantage, if only to know the enemy a little better.

  “And that was the seed of what we became,” she finished. “The punishment from their god for who we were. What we’d heard. He turned us into their idea of what we’d worshipped at home. Turned us into Liliths. And then he turned us away. Forever.”

  VIII. O magnum mysterium

  Even before they came to Dublin for the divination, I’d begun collectively thinking of them as the Misbegotten.

  They came from as near as across the Irish Sea; as far away as the other side of the world. They came, and they were not all the same. Some drank blood while others ate flesh; then there was Salíce. The one called Julius? Before his castrato deafened him, Maia told me, it was the resonances of extraordinary sounds that kept him young. I’d been told of an aborigine who’d been eating eyes since
the British used Australia as a penal colony, claiming it kept his view into the Dreamtime clear. I’d been told of a Paris artist who could be nourished only with spinal fluid. They walked and talked like men and women, but only if you looked none too close. For one who knew better, it was as though the gates of some fabulous and terrible menagerie had been thrown wide, and its inhabitants allowed to overrun creation.

  Nobody’s ever born this way, Maia had said, but I saw them as misbegotten all the same, of monstrous second births that had, by chance or perverse design, left them equipped to demand accounting for what they’d all become. And even if in the end they might only shake futile fists at Heaven, I felt sure their voices would carry much farther than the rest of ours.

  In a way I envied them.

  In a way I regretted they hadn’t the power to turn me into one of them.

  But to aid their cause, all I had to do was spread wide my arms, fixate my soul upon the Christ, then do what came naturally.

  “We’re of two minds on God, Patrick,” she’d explained to me. “But if he really had a son, and there’s even a little bit of him in that son, and if there’s even a little bit of that son now in your blood, and in that single tiny scrap of flesh he left behind, then maybe that’s enough for us to do what men and women have always wanted to do: understand the true nature of God.”

  “What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

  Having heard stories of their revels and debauches, I’d half-expected them to behave like barbarians as they filled the cellars beneath the house. But they took their places amongst the stones and great oaken beams with grim and solemn faces, and waited with the kind of hungry patience that could only accrue over lifetimes.