retty and NICE you’ll be for the feast! All dressed up. With three fingers (for the Trinity, of course) we will scoop the mound of salt from your contorted mouth and remove your teeth to play dice with, and scrape it from your cheeks as though from a fat side of salmon. In the afterglow of your ascension we will dance and dance.
(—That path they take, that beaten seemed most bare—)
Oh, you foolish girl. I am beyond everything that you are. You should not have come, not have come, to the walls of the Labyrinth with its mosaics and cisterns like the vaults of heaven. So becoming with your clear eyes. Yet you could not see the Way. Come and dance for us, Jezebel-witch, Delilah-daemon, show us the calves famed in Gaul and Britannia Ultima, show us the white-armed dervish of the orange groves.
(—This is the wandring wood, this the Errours den—)
This is the end. You know nothing. Do not pretend. You are mine, my very own.
And in my dream, in my sacred madness I see his face how like a stalactite lit by the light of bat’s eyes. The callow face of the Stone, cutting me like an obsidian arrowhead, surgically slicing, glutting himself on me, glowering, gloating. Now that I have chosen sleep he can have me entire.
Oh, but know that I will wake as dreamers do and you will slip back into the white pebble in a macaque-stomach, and I will lurch onwards.
Will you now?
Oh yes. I accept. Here and there, my body is all sweet flesh and curve, ready for the witch’s oven, ready for the gingerbread hut, ready for the peppermint banisters and butterscotch windowpanes, the cinnamon-gummy rugs and white chocolate stairs. Ready for the black licorice whip oven grill and cotton candy pillows, the pumpkin pie floors and caramel apple chandeliers, the lemon-ice wash basin and the cider bath water. But I’ll wake. And in the end, won’t I make a lovely pie, cinnamon crust with a honey glaze, twenty-four blackbirds baked inside, to lend sugar and mystique to my bones? Won’t that be a dainty dish to set before the King? When I lie souffléd at his bedside and he runs his tongue over my soft grape-flavored centre? Won’t I then be the best dish the witch ever served to his Majesty under a silver dome?
Oh, we are just SALIVATING, darling, positively DRIPPING.
You will see. If I accept, if I do not fight, I will prevail.
(—‘Yea but,’ quoth she, ‘the perill of this place
I better know than you—’)
30
Hoo.
I am watching you sleep, Kore, Darlinggold, watching your eyes flutter like bees’ nests, watching your breath whistle through the grass like a scythe. I am watching your coppery chest riseandfallriseandfall, tidal motion of your stomach concealing and cricket-breathing. I am watching your forehead crease like an envelope, lost in dreams I do not share, but can guess.
Oh, womanchild, I have walked beside you and I have chosen to, not because you were weak and needed my padding footsteps next to yours, but because I heard your voice echoed off the faces of every Wall, and came to you drawn as a furry-feelered moth. I dragged my Temple along the Road to you as though it were a plow, as though I were a black-shouldered ox, and I let you breakfast on its fruit. I let you kill my beautiful, simple-minded chess set because even in your delirium you dazzled above all their cut crystal. I let you go mad in my arms. I have pulled you quietly and surely along the Road, to give you what you desire, because you were bright and new against the mud-brick. Just as Maidens cannot help but eat anything they are offered, Beasts cannot resist the pull of Maidens, irrefutable and fierce. We lumber towards you out of our black corners and dripping dungeons, drawn and caught, even when we know it is so. Oh, especially when we know. And I came to you, you and no other, out of the grey of the Temple.
Soon it will be over, my Kore. Soon there will be a blue Door and a Key you do not think I know you have. We have played this scene so many times. Soon there will be a shaft of light through you like a lance and we will part, because that is also the way of Beasts and Maidens. I know. I accept. I have, after all, set this sequence in motion. But as you sleep I am filled like a pitcher with sorrow, because I love you and do not wish to see the last of your many-colored shapes against the sky. But it is the course of these things, and I will follow the tale I know to be ours.
You shift in your sleep and I know it is because of the Stone, the Stone I carry inside me and thus keep close by you, so that it can do its work and change you one last time. You did not want a sequence, but I have given it to you, you were content, and I have given you pain in a silver bowl, for as I love you it is also my nature to harm you, to torture you, to push you along the Road that passes through me and present you amid fanfare with new twists and snarls, with new bottomless wells and dead ends, with Angels and Hares and Lobsters with colored shells. Without pain, there is no progress. Though you cannot see it now, though I am only the little golden Monkey who nuzzles your face, I am also the Stone and the Inquisitor, the Camels and the Carried Women, the Man and the Bar. I am the Voice that Recites verses inside you, from a place you will never remember. I am even the Road itself. I adore you and I worship the presence of you within me, yet I have borne horrors to you on my back, given them like presents. It is the Way, and I have fulfilled it.
I have brought you this far, through the acetylene torch of Walls shrieking a beckoning call, drawing the orange streaks of your soul towards it, to absorb into itself all the cardinal colors, to bring together the reds and yellows and white-heats and oranges, to conflagrate in some Compass Rose which lies at the center of you though you cannot believe in a Center. Nothing grows in this place that cannot carry its own water, the cactus that blooms at night, the single lemon-yellow flower. And you carry seas inside you, the salt and the tide of blood and plasma.
So you walked and became purified, and ascended poles that dwindled skyward like fabled towers covered in thorns, the sky opening like a womb to enfold, envelope, encase, entwine, entreat. The burning blue furnace of heaven, where the world is battered on a white anvil, poured molten into a Labyrinth-shaped mold, spattered with red sparks that become stars and iron-oxide rich soil. You turned your salt-crusted face upwards, creased eyes and parched lips, hands blistered from making corn cakes on the searing rocks, toes calloused from walking through caves with the dark, seductive rustling of bats overhead and the maddening smell of water within, you raised your eyes to the vault of sky, and I saw you like a first revelation. You are so beautiful, Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, painted with metallic dye, extended arms thinned to thread by hunger and ascension.
The balance of one foot on the pole, like a parchment-colored flamingo, will be as it ever is upset by your arms in second position, and you will falter as you must, feel the hot wind rush up from earth and down from heaven, and as you step off into space, into unknown and unknowable, flesh carved with hawk-claws and pictographs, shaded by the great image of the desert snake etched in sunburn on your back, and I will vanish gratefully in a puff of raven feathers. Their Plutonian violet-black will float in a sudden hush down to the red rock below, and I will leave you to do this all over again, for that is also the Way, the cry of events sounding again and again like the tide, full-throated. We have walked together before how many times and will again. So it is not really farewell, though each time my heart tells me that it is. You cannot teach the body to know the lay of the Maze, it will insist always on its own telling. You will not remember me in my golden fur, you never do, with your shivering eyes, and next time I will not be a Temple-Monkey. But you will be a humanchild, fevered, forever and ever, for it is your tale in which I am the villain and helpful guide and the scenery and even the shuffling prop master.
There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.
31
She wakes, with sand in her eyes, for it is the last day.
It is a silver sun, full of diamond sunspots and a nacreous corona, beatific, filling the sky like a supernova. The Monkey, fur made into jewels by the brilliant light, makes her a last breakfast of robin’s eggs and wild turnips. Terns wheel overhead, with their lonely cries, watching the gold woman and the gold animal go about their morning tasks. She washes her gleaming face in a fountain, water trickling off her features in sweet rivulets. Her blank eyes have become beautiful, have become hers, and they are polished like copper pots. She eats the steaming turnips and salty eggs slowly, not entirely knowing why she savors them so. The Monkey grooms her (savoring himself this last contact with her wild, coriander-scented mane) and she allows his touch on her bronzed hair, calmed of her night terrors by his deft fingers.
They are near a long Wall, stretching lazily beyond sight in either direction. It is made of living vines and long tendrils of ivy, tangled together like the woman’s hair, over and under, over and under. Here and there a fat white blossom opens and shuts with a flutter, like a hand. It is well-kept, tended by some loyal hand. There is no stone beneath, the Wall is entirely leaf and stem, entirely alive, displaying its green like a lady her colored fan.
It is the last morning of all mornings until the next, with its cold light and misty breath, the last grooming and the last fountain-washing. Her limbs creak slightly as though she were truly made of gold, a molten statue-woman walking far from her pedestal. She is pure now, in her lionbody and named, and her flesh is liquid light where the sun strikes her, striding like a flame-deva down the Road which is sullen, ashen, carrying Direction inside her, so that she faces herself on all sides. The Monkey clambers up her smooth back and takes his place on her glittering shoulder.
Is it indulgent, perhaps, to take a moment to admire them, their pairing, their shapes against the tooth-white sky, the comfortable lie of his tail around her fleur-de-lis neck, the confident rhythm of her bare feet, the precise matching shades of her skin and his pelt? Is it a distraction to give them this last tableau, this last snapshot under a spring morning, under a willow tree with her eyes laughing?
Let it be. We must make allowances.