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ekhmet was sleeping in her temple. It was a sleep which was the sleep of civilizations, and somehow she had aged. But, having no body, the wrinkles showed in her soul. . . .
Janus della Feltres’ soul was still young though, young and frightened. Lexicon Rex, the ancient in the books, had told him all that he had expected to hear and nothing he had hoped to hear, and now the time had come to emulate the ancient Stoics and concede that philosophy does not promise to secure to a soul anything outside of its own person. He had heard it said that the papal nuncios in Paris had already demanded that Giovanni II of Savoy arrest him. His patron, The Patrizio of Palermiti, the mighty Cosimo Marchesi, was in far but unforgotten, unforgiving, Florence.
Trusting to find himself in his fellow man, he had decided to wait at the home of a friend, to hold council with him before . . . something happened. . . . But the friend was not alone. Giotto Infessura was with him. When the servant saw him in, Giotto was frantic, but his friend, Marsilio, seemed calm.
The more animated of the two leaped from the divan where he had been sitting, more like a frog than a man.
“Janus! Why would you come here? Here, when you could be putting us all in danger!”
“How could I not have come, when I was defending what all of us believe! Don’t think that we three met in Paris ignorant of the other’s doings. My ill-fated Theses came from here as surely as your own art Giotto.”
Marsilio gestured for Giotto to be calm with a downwards motion of his hand. With a sweeping turn of the other he begged Janus come and take a cushioned seat in the corner.
“Now please, Janus, Giotto, you are both overreacting. Janus has made every effort to make his work satisfy the censures. That they cannot reconcile themselves is their fault, not his. His Holiness will surely see this given time. Besides, our native Florence is some ways away and hot tempers may be cooled but with a little distance.”
Janus accepted the offer of wine from a servant, cupping it listlessly in his hands.
“Thank you Marsilio, but do you really believe that?”
“Yes. Or rather I should say that things will work out somehow. Even if the papal nuncios cannot be tempered, there is still the sturdy iron of Cosimo Marchesi waiting back for you in Florence.”
Giotto was unimpressed.
“I respect your thoughts Marsilio, but times are not as kind to men of arts as they were before. The only works that garner praise are stories too often told and blame too often made. Every day the censures grow more distrustful that our praise of man and man’s faculties impinge on the worship of the church, in which one man rules alone.”
A servant approached his host and said that there was someone waiting at the door to be let in. He would not give his name . . . Giotto was beside himself with smugness and with fright. He pointed a long finger towards the death-marked man.
“I told you! Your nine-hundred Theses will be the end of a thousand.”
“Giotto! I will not have you mistreating a guest under my roof. If you continue behaving like a beast of the field I will cast you out as one, but if you wish to stay here as a man, then please, be calm.” Marsilio smoothed his cloak and walked to where Janus was still staring into the wine as if trying to see the auguries of future things. “I’m sure that whoever it is, they are merely being cautious, considering, as you said Giotto, the times we live in. They need not be an enemy who are unknown to us . . . Still, it is best if I see him first.”
With that the more composed man left, leaving Giotto to sullenly pace about the apartment while pretending to appreciate the tapestries. As for Janus, he was like a man befuddled by drink, though he had yet to touch his wine. He kept gazing into the red draught, removed, he drifted with every fluid motion. In his mind he was back in many-frescoed Florence, gazing over the splendors of art and architecture that reached to heights that only souls can fathom. In the churches Judas was kissing Jesus, God was creating man and the saints were sanctifying endless hallways with their deeds and with their deaths. . . .
The boats had brought in the strange cameleopard out of Ceasar’s times, and even now it graced the halls of Marchesi’s tapestries and menagerie. From almost unimaginable lands miracles and wonders poured fourth like mana from heaven, all falling at the heart of the human world. Still, in all this, his spirit was from even more distant parts than the cameleopard of far and ancient Egypt.
He felt that distance now.
Janus was broken from his reprieve when a voice from across the room called out.
“Della Feltres you are well, this is good news indeed. I, I do apologize if I frightened you, or you and your servant Monsieur Marsilio, but I did not know if it was wise to give my name about these parts, particularly since I was looking for you. As for my appearance . . .” The new guest simply shrugged.
It was Toussaint Lescot, a Frenchman he had befriended in Paris. He looked disheveled, but from drink or misuse it was not immediately apparent. His eyes were bloodshot, he smelled of wine and he was shaking noticeably, but he did not seem otherwise impaired.
He shook a finger as if scolding a child he knew to be innocent.
“They are looking for you my friend, it is not safe to go back to your apartment. They have half a mind to hold you in Vincennes, and another half a mind to . . .”
“What is it Toussaint!”
The Frenchman looked off into the air, giving a cherub’s pose. “You just don’t know what kind of friend you have in me . . . but I am just a simple artisan without land or title and cannot read the wills of men, that is the providence of God alone . . .”
“So we are indeed harboring a fugitive!”
“Not so hasty Giotto.”
“How can you be so complacent Marsilio? Do you think our movement will last at all here in France’s foreign heart if we are to be hunted like dogs in a kennel? It does not do to congregate when such scandalous and sordid affairs are taking place.”
Toussaint rolled his eyes lazily over the exited Florentine “And . . . who is this man?”
Marsilio softly sighed.
“His name is Giotto Infessura, he is an artist and guest of mine. We were discussing the comparative virtues in the use of perspective before all this began.”
“Ah! That explains it. Please allow me to continue though... They wanted to know where you were, Janus or where else you could be found. I am but a petty artisan as I said, and poor at lying, despite what your beloved Lexicon Rex might have to say. Giovanni’s men, finding your apartment abandoned, are seeking out your friends in an effort to find you. It is not safe, Monsieur Marsilio, to be connected with this fine young gentleman at this dark hour.”
“I told you!”
Toussaint ignored Giotto.
“When they found me I tried to be clever with them, and as you see before you, I paid a clever price. They sealed me in a wine barrel for a night. But still, I did not make so much as a sound as to your whereabouts.”
Janus stood up too quickly, spilling his wine as he went. “Why would you do that Toussaint? They could have killed you!”
Toussaint smiled a devil’s smile. “Resistance is renaissance.”
“More than your misgivings Giotto, Toussant’s situation convinces me that I cannot stay.”
Toussaint stood between Janus and the door when he saw that he meant to leave that instant.
“Where do you plan to go? I know some secretive ways out of Paris that a man might use in such circumstances.”
“No, I do not intend to leave Paris, not just yet.”
“Then you are giving yourself up?”
Giotto also stood before Janus. “Please, I know you think me unsympathetic, but you cannot contradict a papal decree. What would Lexicon Rex’s mentor have done?”
Marsilio, until now quietly appraising the situation and silently arranging for one of his servants to make ready a secret door, spoke up. “Now come, Paris is no Athens, if you’ll forgive me for saying that Monsieur Lescot.”
Toussaint shook his head in the negative, sternly, but willingly, playing the fool.
“Hardly sir, but that will have to wait.”
“My point is that it will not come to that. But it is up to you Janus. I have prepared a secret way out of my villa, you are free to go where you will.”
Numbly, Janus thanked Marsilio for his kindness and apologized for the spilt wine. He thanked Toussaint, but said that he was resolved to nothing at this time. He even thanked Giotto, whose cautious interest in their common goal he assured him would do them all justice someday. Whether that day was today though, he did not know.
Marsilio’s secret exit led him near one of Paris’ numerous marketplaces, which he quickly distanced himself from. He did not feel in the right mind to decline the too loud catcalls of the fishmongers and other traders.
“Resist”
“Submit”
“Negotiate”
None of these thoughts were his own.
For several hours he wandered through the city, watching the life around him and the life within him shrivel and shrink. He followed the Seine River, but the waste and refuse which it refused to wash away prevented him from seeing in it the purity of water. This was no Lethe.
As he walked the rivers length a man bumped into him. He thought of death and tensed from the contact. Was this one of Giovanni’s men? He slowed down and stopped, catching his breath though he had not run.
How often I have mused safely to myself of the imminence and worth of death, he thought. The greatest human achievement . . . Death, if that should be called death which is the fullness of life, the meditation upon which the wise have said is the study of philosophy. It was one thing, though, to die in the words of Thrice-blessed Mercury, Moses, or Lexicon Rex. It was another to call an end to all philosophizing. He was only five and twenty; how could he be expected to climb to the heights of the angels in such a short time? How could he when everywhere his own nature was driving him on, yet his fellow men were everywhere holding him back. Yet how could he hope to do it without them?
It was while riddled with such thoughts that Janus came to the end of the river way and turned away to go across the bridge. Never before had he thought that humanity, the very spirit transcendent of the angels, had truly fallen with Adam’s sin. He tried to contemplate all man-made miracles and wonder, to revive him as they had before, but when he looked around him the people he saw on the street seemed less than human, misshapen somehow by some ineffable mistake of the maker. First Adam, now God, surely meditating upon man was heresy.
He had almost circled the city of Paris. It was growing dark when he happened upon the great courtyard and spire of the Collège de Sorbonne. He stopped to speak to the walls. Just three years ago he had first come here. Here he had conceived his infamous Theses. He had learned how to make the perfect circle, and discovered the principles of philological harmony. In these fertile stones the seeds of his longing had first found a suitable clime that they could call their own.
Yes, here they would find him.
It was late, but not too late, and the night-watch at the door remembered him. He had not heard the news. Still, they spent too long reminiscing before Janus was permitted into the halls of the college.
Why turn to the books when the ancient had already told him enough? Could it be that he, Janus della Feltres, champion of the human cause, had long since in fact despaired in his own abilities and the abilities of his fellows? Yet were not the ancients humans all? Not all, for there were the heathen forces from times before the flood. Heathen forces that had been tamed to walk in the halls of the Lord as signs and symbols of things redeemed. The stone steps were his memory now, and as he trod onward things were coming back to him that only his muscles had bothered to remember . . . There was one last avenue left.
In some allusions by Thrice-blessed Mercury he had learned of the Egyptian Goddess Sacmis. Sacmis, The Powerful One. Sacmis, Avenger of Wrongs, Mistress of Dread, Lady of Slaughter. The names themselves would have warned him away, but he knew better. These many names were to ward off the unwary, unprepared and unready to receive the blessings of this particular force. Though he suspected that there was still some esoteric truth to them. She was a healer, and a bringer of pain, for a cure can be a terrible thing and a terrible thing a cure. . . .
The discovered ritual was prepared tentatively, fearfully, but hopefully. He found it in a secret place on the college grounds long ago, and it was still there waiting as he had left it. It was a place so secret that even those who knew of its existence shunned it: none were supposed to know that secret save for the Lord Jesus Christ himself. As much as the college was a repository for knowledge it was also supposed to serve as a symbol of meekness in the light of divine authority, and it did not do to delve too deeply into the way of things, which in truth scorns all authority of divinities and man. Yet Jesus, that which was not God, was a man no less than Janus. That was why he was so surprised to find pagan texts in the cryptic vaults supposedly devoted to God’s one great secret. The glyphs that he found were of no heavenly design.
Della Feltres had his doubts. He knew well the price of hubris. But surely, it was not a sin to seek the heights? So he went about scribing the strange hieroglyphics into the floor in an often unused and misused quarter of the library. He was fortunate: the text was written in Hebraic, for it showed signs of being of a much older origin than even the venerable Hebrews. In all the questionable pagan rites he felt secured to think that at least the children of Moses had known of this.
The ritual completed at the appropriate time, della Feltres stood back and prayed.
“Not by my force alone, but with all of mankind’s might, I entreat thee Sacmis, esoteric angel of the desert winds, teach me the measure of pleasure and pain, that I may bear mankind’s unkindness and attain to heavenly heights!”
The Tigeroid spirit entered the library with a dry exhalation, like the hot and angry air that wells up from the depths of church steeples on a midsummer’s day. A blackened tangle of hair trailing about a tiger’s skull, and a body, neither woman nor beast with strips of blood and sorrow shifting and splitting, being made anew, then vanishing. Its form was fearful as it flew through the room, its figure being forced like strands of darkened spider webs into a hundred directions at once until it coalesced before the astonished spectator. But it could touch nothing . . . Janus realized this as it passed through the table before him, coming to a stop there as if unconcerned that its hindquarters seemed separated from the rest of it. Its indifference made a horrid impression on the mind. You could never tell where the beast began, and were forced to wonder if perhaps it never did, but kept on like that, forever.
Janus, fearing he was mistaken and had been tricked into making a pact with the devil, prostrated himself before the demon.
“Jesus, my Lord, save me!”
The creature tangled and prowled its way down the table, closer to him, standing tall at its foot.
The monstrosity purred.
“If you had wanted that why would you have done this?”
Seeing that this vision spoke, the frightened youth got off the floor.
“You, you are no angel. Still, are you the Avatar of Sacmis of which Thrice-blessed Mercury first trusted in? Who told the secret to our Lord before the coming of my Trojan ancestors to far flung Rome?”
“I was the will of my mistresses before your mortal saviour had ever performed his first forgotten miracle. Ahh, but your fear belays your trust. I know that my appearance is terrible for man to behold. Do you not also think that I know this to cast all my actions into suspicion in his eyes? Yet your ancestors knew: there are no opposites, to free yourself from bondage you must return to its source.”
“You mean the Trojans knew?”
“No, they were much older than the Menelaus-broken men of distant Troy. But like them, you too grow weary of such strife, I think.”
Janus was not altogether easy with the frightful spirit, but its tone and temperament spoke to some familiar truth.
“Yes I grow weary of all this strife. I philosophize in shades of harmony and divinity, but live in discord and decay. I would live as a chameleon if only I could, safe from my fellow men, or better yet I would be a holy mirror, learning all, showing all, concealing myself alone.”
“Do you grow tired of this life della Feltres?”
The Avatar tangled closer, moving behind him in an unnerving way. Janus recoiled.
“No! This world is overflowing with delights, how could I grow weary of it? I lament only that the pain must so often cut short the thread that tethers us to this resplendent sphere. The dead learn nothing, only teach, and I am much afraid that my persecutor, that pope eight times removed from innocence, will make such a lesson out of me.”
“I am not unfamiliar with you’re suffering. In my duty as sicknurse and avenger I have seen many such as yourself, so fearful, but unwilling to turn away. I myself am unable to fear, yet always forced to see.”
“Oh happy ghost! To see all, learn all, and yet fear nothing; were that I so blessed I would stand betwixt heaven and earth, bridging both.”
“I can give you but one half of such blessings; no mortal mind could stand much more.”
“Come now, surely you jest, the mortal mind is a thing to be reckoned with, for both charm and horror, it overreaches all.”
“For mortal charm, mortal horror, perhaps. And you are a mortal: you long to be a chameleon before your fellow men, yet long also to drive them to divine aspirations.”
“It is a contradictory desire, I confess.”
“Yet even contradictory desires can have their kind fulfilled.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Take you this claw, plucked from the half-starved body of a dying lioness atop the Red Sea Hills of the Eastern Desert. With it, when your darkest hour comes and your soul aches in frustration at the fruitlessness of your chief desire, draw a line upon your body wheresoever it pleases you.”
“Wait! Just a line? What matter of magic is this?”
You can never quite tell, when a skull smiles.
“It is of a kind natural. For there is nothing so ancient in all of nature as this.”
The Avatar began sinking, the black hair which writhed around it spreading out into a gown of snakes, the red ribbons of pain that pocked its insubstantial body receding with it into the stones of the college.
“Remember della Feltres, the darkest hours. There are not enough numerals on a sundial, nor grains in the glass, to mark out your allotted share, but my sigil shall hide you.”
Before the beast subsided into stone, a thread from its squirming gown caressed his leg, he thought he felt the spectral substance touch his own flesh and jerked up with a terrible start.
Janus woke with a spasm in the library, disturbed by the unkind jab from a man’s finger.
“Della Feltres. You’re wanted by the order of the papal nuncios.”
Most everything from there on was too crude for Janus’ mind to comprehend. He was shoved and pushed and threatened through the streets of Paris towards Vincennes. There would be no court to hear his case, for it was as the Pope ordered, and the world was as the courtroom of heaven.
He was not beaten, for he was a noble, and it did not do to set such precedents, but he was otherwise taunted and abused as he was led down to his new cell. The other prisoners shouted mockeries when they saw the fineries that marked him as not one of them, and to the imaginative Florentine the descent was a new inferno.
There were three colours of mold slicking the walls of della Feltres cell: Yellow, green and a sort of brick red that may have in fact been blood. There was a dampness in the air, the feeling that something befouled was slipping rhythmically into his lungs with every breath. The prisoner could pace freely, he was unchained, but he knew this was because he was no threat. The frail son of a Florentine nobleman was not capable of foolish heroics, and the only thing noble here was a title.
How long he festered with the darkened things, he did not know. There were only screams with which to keep the minutes, vermin’s fests to keep the hours steadily rotting away. At first he felt brave to these depravities. He would not be here long. He had family, friends, a powerful patron, and the papal authorities would not keep a noble in these conditions for such a slight offence . . . but he kept getting what he thought to be his daily meals, worse, he kept having to frequent the rancid hole in the back of his cell. The thin nourishment was wreaking havoc on his system. And in the end it was a constant bodily shame which broke his noble certainty. He spent small eons moping. Until, at some unknown time, a stranger came to talk with him.
The visitor was a short and ruddy man, with a crop of white hair on both his hands like a latter day Esau, but very little of it was on his head. Deprived of any new sights by his cell, Janus found himself unable to resist studying the unpleasant man with a hideous eye for detail. His jaw did not seem to fit well to his skull, and there was a strange swaying to his whole body when he walked. He looked more like a fish than a man, with his jowls and swollen eyes encompassing a pointed and recalcitrant jaw. Only his hands and head were visible, but there were strange hintings beneath his clothes of things not all in alignment, a roll of cloth that looked like a roll of fat, or a complete cavity where flesh should be. He was wearing the costume of the papal nuncios.
The nuncios noticed his curious eye. His confessional was the city of Paris, and he thought Janus eager to recount his sins. He waited for a short time with patience, but that did not last.
“Do you have something, young man, that you would like to say to me. I am the papal nuncios, and I could save you.”
Janus said nothing.
“You have not been poorly treated . . .”
Janus said nothing.
“Does hellfire and the devil’s thorny embrace not frighten you?”
Nothing. The nuncios snapped.
“Quit your sulking della Feltres, saints have suffered worse. If you cannot attain their faith through pain then recant your positions, give up your Theses.”
“I already have . . .”
“A trifle public show and lion’s act to placate the lesser clergy. You know what I mean. In your heart della Feltres, twice you have publicly renounced your claims and it has done nothing. Your heart has been hardened by confused dogmas. Man is no great thing. The ancients found no great truths.”
Della Feltres did not defend the man.
“The ancients knew more of heaven and earth than our own censors. They too were shaped in the image of God. Just look ye to Virgil’s light, always giving, never taking.”
“You think so . . . Yes. We are all shaped in the image of God, but the material was too dross to permit of His harmony. He used it masterfully, as only a God could, and still it is good. It is good that the peasant is poorly shod and crude, it is good that the merchant is well shod and crude, for divinities alone are divine. His deed in making this earthly clay into the form of man was always towards his own perfection, not ours della Feltres. We are mere ornaments of the divine. Think, what use have we for clay? As trinket only.”
For the first time the look in Janus’ eyes shifted noticeably as he leaned listlessly against the bars.
“That is heresy. He is not treacherous.”
“No, don’t look that way, of course He’s not: Gods can never be traitors, only betrayed. And I am but His weak and humble servant. You think, perhaps, that it is cruel perversity that makes me say such things, but it is not, it is humility.”
Della Feltres hunched over in his cell, but he did not respond. All men are gods in their own eyes, and, knowing that no god could ever be so blatantly vain, they elevate another in their place. The nuncios, seeing that his congregation had been struck insensate, left that fruitless space. And the cell’s changeless eons once again blotted out the soul of della Feltres.
In a fever forged dream Janus gave in to despair. He ran the whole world over shouting lamentations and wailing Lacrimosas for the dead-in-man. He tore down the temples and galleries and let in the wind and rains to etch away all traceries of human things. He powdered the frescoes and burnt the paintings and drowned the books until the only record was the one left in human blood. He drank of this too, taking into himself the unclean spirit and running violently down the steep place into the sea, to be drowned in the sea.
But the sea would not accept him, though he was no Moses, and dried at his touch. The beasts of the sea rotted away and the pink of coral reefs turned to gray as the landscape died and all was turned to sand. He was in a haunted desert, when a strange and unfamiliar mountain range loomed into view. He had not moved to it, but it had come to him. Snaking it came and opened its cavernous maw, and he went into it as only a dreamer can.
And at the bottom of the cave there was a lion’s den, and for a moment he thought himself to be a second Daniel, but the den was empty. All that remained was a single bleached claw on the cracked stone floor. By the claw he sat down and wept, but weeping gave way to anger. Anger at the narrow cave in which he found himself—the entrance had vanished—at the papal nuncios, at far off Florence, and at himself, his hands, his thoughts; a universe of rage.
There was a foulness in him, poisoning his every deed and will. If only he could get it out. Get it out! In joy and anguish he lifted the claw to his useless, ghostlike hands and drew out the poison as he drew mad lines on flesh. The black venomous stuff flew from his liberated fingertips, issuing forth in a pungent cloud that screamed from the cave mouth—for it had reappeared—and away from him. Janus ran up the incline to the exit, stumbling, fumbling, calling out as he crawled up on knees that would no longer hold him. Get me out!
“Merciful God, Janus. What did they do to you?”
Toussiant and Marsilio were there, their presence marked by torchlight with two others. One was a jailor whom he recognized, but the other... The jailor opened the door and the Frenchman darted into the room where della Feltres lay, his hands a bloody mess beneath him.
“Brutes, what use would it serve?”
The jailor only shook his head.
“No use. No one on my watch is responsible for this Monsieur.”
Marsilio ordered that a clean cloth and basin of water be brought. With time Janus came to himself, if still a little addled. The wounds on his hands unleashed an eruption of holy uncertainty among the others, which he at first did not comprehend. Beneath the mass of blood there were no cuts, only scars that looked years old. The jailor muttered that it was the Stigmata and that they would do best to remove him from this place at once, but the stranger said that the lacerations were too jagged and winding to be twins to the famous impalings of Christ. The other men were of like mind though, and the confused spectator was taken back to Marsilio’s villa to recover and hold council.
The stranger refrained from introductions until it was clear that Janus was once again himself, asking eager questions to Toussaint and Marsilio of the past month’s goings on.
“If you’ll excuse me della Feltres, my name is Flavio Mortara. I am a servant of our mutual benefactor Cosimo Marchesi. I was sent here to fetch you, for the Patrizio of Palermiti has made an agreement with the Pope and you are to live under his protection in Florence. You are safe now, though I’m afraid your days in France are over.”
Janus stood for the first time in several hours and stretched his cramped limbs, then bowed before Mortara.
“I thank you. From the bottom of my heart I thank you. I am free then, from the Pope’s wrath?”
“There is still a papal censure on you, but yes, you can continue in your studies and works unmolested by the church, provided that you stay in Florence.”
“Ah, that I will accept. I have been freed once, God willing, and will not test His mercy unnecessarily.”
With that Mortara told him his plans for the return trip to Florence, which would take place the following day. He had a villa waiting for him and his lands had been kept safe in his absence, Mortara himself would stay there as his secretary.
Janus would echo the introduction of each new fortune with pious thanks and fervor. It was as if he had forgotten all about his pleas to the heathen Sacmis and her Avatar. Yet his thanks were too strained, praises gushed fourth from him with a previously unheard of immoderation. This went all but unnoticed except by Toussiant, who urged caution.
“I do not know what befell you in that hole, friend. But beware, your fervor belays your fears, and I dread to think what unchristian troubles may have found you beneath the earth.”
Janus was startled. No, he meant only the damp cell that was his erstwhile home and prison. But Janus did not hear the pleading of his friend, only the fears that he had been saved not by God’s divine hand, but by the claw of some daemonic entity. He said his goodbyes to the people of Paris, Marsilio, Toussaint and even the squeamish Giotto, and told them that if ever they should find themselves in Florence they should make their way to his final resting place.
Those who knew him from his days in Florence found the same friend returned to them. He did not stop in his works, and delved deeper into the angelic arts than ever before. What was more, his faith in both man and God found itself refreshed by some lethean draught.
Della Feltres was not free of troubles, yet they always seemed to turn away from him, like water breaking before a river stone. None knew of the Avatar’s claw, or that he had returned to its forbidden ways. He would often find himself in that exitless cave in the alien hills and the claw just as before. He would awaken clothed in blood drenched sheets to crimson and scarlet dawns, reinvigorated, released from the troubles of the previous day, and with new marks upon his person. Until at last Janus’ body was covered in long winding scars that looked like the lines on a tiger’s pelt, and he had to wear the longest of his robes before his servants to safely cover them all. Yet this dark ritual was spurring on his praise of man, the bony hook pulling him up in ways where divine sacraments had failed.
While he exulted in man and God he now also feared, feared deeply and purely for his secret blasphemy. It was his heresy that drove him further into faith, not faith itself, though he would not admit this. He continued to work on his works of man, and met often with the artists and the dreamers in the frescoed halls of his youth, yet he also became a follower of John Salvio, the Dominican priest and potential leader of Florence; Salvio who had long launched his barbs against all thoughts of Renaissance, the book-burner and reactionary whose faith led him to acts of vandalism against all art. This double life began to trouble his friends on both sides of the divide, and there were dark mutterings that he could not follow the house of Marchesi and the flock of Salvio. This too he circumnavigated, for a time, with the help of his life-saving crime.
When he reached his thirty-first year, Janus della Feltres thought that he had walked but half of his life’s way, and toasted as much on that cloudy February day when his friends had gathered to celebrate the birth of their longtime companion. But that was almost a year ago now, and as he lay in bed on a cold November’s morn, he was dying. In between the drowning of thoughts and memories that broke to the surface only to crash beneath the waves again, he called out to the cross that Jesus would still accept his soul. And again, he was calling out to the claw to save him from this sickness as it had so many other times before.
Sweating, almost blinded by the salty brine that cried into his eyes, he could still see from his canopied bed the River Arno. Arno, with its many bridges flanked by vibrant hilltop houses beneath red and shingled roofs. Death brought some braveness to his thoughts, and he considered that he never wanted to leave this all behind, unless heaven was to be a second Florence. Where in the holy books did it say that? No, how could anything but an angel bear the sight of paradise? He was still too immature for heaven, needing to ascend further up the cosmic scale.
Again he called out to the Avatar, and again She answered. From the mirrored night table’s varnished wood she came, turning it to black as the reflecting pools of polished glass shrunk and slivered forming the twisting stripes upon her otherworldly flesh. All of it save two small drops, which reflected in her eyes. The blackened wood split and spun until it was her reaching hair. Before the bleary eyes of della Feltres she emerged, taller than any man was tall, more terrible than any beast was terrible, and the dying Florentine smiled. She had not manifested like this for years.
“So my star has at last faded down to be eaten by starless night. Pray tell, if it is your wont, why do I die? Is it from any source more decorative than my own inborn sin, or is it something else?”
The Avatar of Sacmis came from her place by the mirror, and Janus met her approach without fear, for there was terror and love both together in the bony voids of her skull. And as she prowled and unraveled her way to his prone figure she spoke in the voice of an innocent death.
“It was Flavio Mortara who poisoned you. He and his lord feared your associations with the Dominican, Salvio, and sought an expedient release.”
With what strength he had he raised himself from his bed until he was sitting, wheezing out his complaint.
“You know that’s not what I meant. I am not finished yet. My time is still cut short. I am no angel, nor even a Moses or Lexicon Rex. A man cannot be made anything other than a man, even in death, unless he made of himself something more when still alive.”
“Yet I have given you the time to make of yourself more than your fellow men.”
“And alas, I am still too human, all too human. Otherwise I would have cast off your demon given claw ere I even left Paris. Your blessings were all tainted, your kindness corrupt.”
Obeying some law, natural or not, the Avatar seemed to be gaining solidity, and did not move through objects as before, but rather wove her way closer to Janus’ bedside to whisper in the dying man’s ear. Her skeletal visage was fearful, but the softness of her strangely scarred flesh was undeniable, and she placed one arm around him, leaning closer.
“I taught you to trade pain for strength, suffering for stealth amongst your fellow men, and with it you have evaded your end for many years and made of yourself something more than the common lot of life.”
“And still, I ascend no further . . . only to fall as Lucifer, never to rise again.”
“Hush, not so. My blessings were not tainted, you had but stepped upon one rung of the universal ladder, and gone no further, not because of any inward flaw or sinborn doubt, but only from the blind judge of circumstance, who in ineffable ways makes all guilty, and all free. One day you may have had no more need of my blessing.”
“Then I am merely weak, through fate . . . no, that is the astrologer’s heresy.”
“True. But nor were you as free as you had thought. Few men get further than you have della Feltres, and those who do can never know just how high they reached, for the workings of angels and higher things are not as the workings of men.”
Janus was weakening. His head slumped to the side on his pillow. It was painful, hearing these things, but it was calming him in ways he had not believed before. His voice was barely a whisper now, as he gazed from Florence to Avatar, then back again.
“Angel, or Devil, or something else, please tell me. Is it a folly to think that knowledge will make men good, transcendent even?”
“Just as faulty as thinking that knowledge can make them happy. You must speak to pain, and it will answer you with wisdom.”
“But pain has always been the cost of discord, which I have abhorred as my chief enemy all these strife filled years.”
“Ah, poor della Feltres, has not Lexicon Rex taught you this much in his unending effort to make of himself a form. The cost of harmony is discord, you cannot untwine what has been so deeply rooted, or else you will never understand the workings of nature. But rest, for this too shall end.”
The Avatar of Sacmis stroked the dying man’s hair and whispered reassurances to his troubled fears. Janus, with misted over eyes, spoke in a tone that no mortal ears could have heard.
“Why have you been so good to me through all this bloody life, when the years fell fruitfully away from me like the promise-filled tears of an angel?”
“Because you have been my disciple through it all, della Feltres.”
“I have worshiped no God save the one God.”
Again, the fearful Avatar purred as she cradled the mortal in otherworldly hands.
“No, but in doing so you have also worshiped the man, the intellectual spirit of man, that imbued part that gives him the potential which you have deemed so holy. No, I do not intend to mock you on your deathbed . . . but that spirit you thought it most worthy to praise was always the gift of my mistress. Think, della Feltres, you have been made keenly aware of man and man’s failings through your magician’s studies. And in all that time have you not noticed that wisdom always follows pain, that sentience and spirit are in truth nothing more than the toothaches of the mind? You sought to supplicate the kinder force of suffering, and insofar as you have tried, you have succeeded.”
And then he laid himself down to rest in the Avatar’s arms, to be blanketed by the crawling black hair and caressed by the swimming red stripes that twinkled on her body like closely seen, unimaginable nebulae dying ancient deaths upon a pale face of sky. |
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