Worlds of Hurt Read online

  “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. 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 our 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 favors. 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 horrible just because she fucked Adam from the top instead of lying on her back like a proper woman was supposed to. So maybe 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 rumors 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 favored concubines, and whatever in Nineveh we wanted, we had. And I…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 ensure 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 my sisters and I 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 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 the Israelites wrote about it later, they exaggerated the casualties beyond all reason and credited them to the Archangel Michael.” Maia shook her head. “They were no strangers to that sort of thing. They were masters of propaganda for their god.

  “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 2,700 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. It 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 l
ove for the Israelites, or their god Yahweh. So it was mostly an antagonistic relationship we had with Hezekiah. But then one night, before he took us, he became very drunk, and we were startled 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 climaxed. 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 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 faces grim and solemn, and waited with the kind of hungry patience that could only accrue over lifetimes.

  When the Sisters came for me, I was preparing myself in silent contemplation. The Order of Saint Francis had taught me well in this much, at least. I turned around to find they’d quietly filled the doorway, and when Maia pressed her cheek to my bare back, the other two turned theirs, to give us our moment alone.

  “We’re of two minds on God,” she’d explained. “Some fear he might really be the creator of everything. In which case, we have no hope at all. Even if there is some lost paradise that was once promised, we’ll never regain it.”

  They led me into the chamber, in the center of eyes and teeth and throats, and naked, I lay down upon the waiting cross.

  “But there’s another way it might be,” she’d said, reminding me then of how the Assyrians had made their demon by taking that malleable form and imprinting it with all the traits they desired in it, until they’d fed it to the point of independence, so that it broke away on its own.

  They lashed my arms to those of the cross; secured my feet as well. The crown of thorns came last. And when they raised the cross upright, and dropped its foot into the waiting hole, all the old devotions came back to me again, and once more I became as one with Father, with Son, and with Holy Ghost.

  Whatever those were.

  “Some of us wonder if religion hasn’t gotten it backwards,” she’d said. “If what the world now calls God wasn’t born in the desert out of the needs of people who had to have something bigger than themselves to worship. So it heard them, and asked for more, and they fed it burnt offerings and the blood of their enemies and their devotion, and later on they exported it to the rest of the world. But even before then, it was getting stronger, until after enough centuries had passed, they’d all forgotten where that god of theirs came from and thought it’d always been there, and created them instead…and by then, it was ready to feed on them.”

  The Sisters of the Trinity took their places while my weight tugged at the lashes that held me aloft. My every rib stood etched against flesh as I labored for breath, and now, at long last, the empathy I’d always sought with Christ had come. I was no longer in a Dublin cellar; rather, atop a skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, dying in the hot winds and stinging desert dust.

  “Who better to feed on than those who considered themselves his children?” she’d explained. “They’ve always called themselves his chosen people…but chosen for what? You have to wonder. From the time of the Babylonian exile, to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, right up to the Holocaust…he’s been eating and drinking them all along, like no other people on Earth.”

  Salíce stood before me, below, and slowly, reverently, took me into her mouth. Minutes passed, as I writhed upon the cross between the agony of breaths, until it happened anew—the flesh of my wrists splitting layer by layer, the blood freed at last in a gush of transcendence and ecstasy. It trickled first along my arms toward my rib cage, then began to flow heavier, drizzling down into Maia’s wide and waiting mouth. So th
at none would be wasted, bowls were set beneath my other wrist and my feet.

  I turned my eyes toward the heavens, wide and seeing so very clearly now, like those of the martyr I’d once dreamt of being: Saint Ignatius, in that painting hanging in Greyfriars Abbey. I’d so admired it, always wondering if I could show his sort of courage when the teeth of the carnivores began to close. Perhaps, now, I’d equaled him, even bettered him; or maybe I’d fallen short by the depth and breadth of the darkest abyss.

  There was no truth but this: I was not the father’s son I’d once been.

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

  “Don’t forget, he was circumcised. In the temple, when he was eight weeks old. The Holy Foreskin—that’s what you papists call it,” she’d said, with a teasing shake of her head. “You people and your morbid relics.”

  When I looked down the bloody length of my body, I could see that tiny dark scrap in Lilah’s fingers, stolen from its crystal reliquary north of Rome. Still soft and pliable, it was, neither rotted nor gone leathery; incorruptible.

  But flesh is flesh, and beliefs something else altogether.

  “Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me,” he’d asked, and while I’d never known for sure what impact I might have, perhaps the truth alone would be enough.

  The truth, they’d insisted he said, will set you free.

  Then again, doubt works miracles too.

  Lilah lifted her hand and touched the foreskin to my flesh, to wet it with my blood, then it disappeared between her teeth.

  And in the convulsive rapture of fluids and tissue, in that moment that makes us one with gods, I gave them all they’d asked for, all they needed, all I had to give.