Servant of the Bones

He sat back. I checked the tape recorders. I removed the small cassettes and replaced them with fresh cassettes, and then made markings on the labels so that I wouldn't confuse myself. I laid both machines back on the hearth.

He was watching me with keen interest and an agreeable look.

Yet he seemed reluctant to begin, or to be finding it difficult, yet yearning to do it.

"Did Cyrus the Persian keep his word to you?" I asked. I had been thinking of this on and off since we'd broken off. "Did he actually send you to Miletus? I find it hard to believe that Cyrus the Persian would keep his word-"

"You do?" He looked at me and smiled. "But he kept his word to Israel, as you know. The Jews were allowed to leave Babylon and they went home and they made the Kingdom once again of Judea and they built the Temple of Solomon. You know all this from history. Cyrus kept his word to his conquered peoples and particularly the Jews. Remember, the religion of Cyrus was not so terribly different from our religion. At heart, it was a religion of ... ethics, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, and I know that under Persian rule Jerusalem prospered." "Oh, indeed, always, for hundreds of years, up until the rime of the Romans, actually, when the rebellions started, and then the final defeat of Masada. We speak of these things to remind ourselves. At the rime, I knew nothing of what was to come. But even I knew that Cyrus would keep his word, that he would send me on to Miletus. I trusted him from the first moment I ever laid eyes on him. He wasn't a liar. Well, not as much as most men."

"But if he had his own wise men," I said, "why would he let something so powerful ... I mean, someone so powerful ... as you slip from his grasp?"

"He was eager to get rid of me!" Azriel said. "And frankly, so were -j his wise men! He didn't let me slip from his grasp. Rather he sent me to Zurvan, the most powerful Magus whom he knew. And Zurvan was loyal to Cyrus. Zurvan was rich and lived in Miletus which had fallen to Cyrus and the Persians without even a skirmish as Babylon had. I Later on, of course, the Greeks of those Ionian ciries, they would rise against the Persians. But at this rime, when I stood there, glaring at the great King and begging that he send me to a powerful magician, Miletus was a thriving Greek city under Persian rule."

He studied me. I started to ask another question but he stopped roe.

"You went into the cold, you shouldn't have. You're warm now, and the fever has risen just a little. You need cold water. I'll get it for you. You drink it and then we'll go on."

He rose from the chair and went to the door. He brought a bottle from near the door. It was very cold, indeed, I could see that, and I was thirsty.

I looked down and saw that he was pouring the water into a silver cup. It wasn't an ancient silver cup. It seemed rather new even, machine-worked perhaps, but it was beautiful, and of course it got cold all over with the water. It was like the Grail, or a chalice or something a Babylonian would drink from. Or perhaps Solomon.

There was another cup just like it in front of the chair.

"How did you make the cups?" I asked.

"Same as I make my garments. I call together all the particles that are required, to come unobtrusively and without disturbance. I am not such a good designer of cups. If my father had designed these cups, they would be gorgeous. I merely told the particles that they were to make ornate cups of the style of this rime . . . There are many, many more words to it than that, much more energy, but that is the gist."

I nodded. I was grateful for the explanation.

I drank all the water. He filled it again. I drank. The cup was solid enough. Sterling. I studied it. It had a common Bacchanalian design to it, clustered grapes carved around the rim, and a simple pedestal foot. But it was very fine indeed.

I was holding it in both my hands, lovingly, I suppose, admiring the fluted shape of it, and the deep carving of the grapes, when I heard a faint sound emerge from it, and felt a riny movement of air beneath my nostrils. I realized that my name was being written on the cup. It was in Hebrew. Jonathan Ben Isaac. The writing went all around and was small and perfect.

I looked at him. He lay back in his chair with his eyes closed. He took a deep breath.

"Memory is everything," he said softly under his breath. "Don't YOU think we can live with the idea that God is not perfect, as long as we are assured that God remembers . . . remembers everything . . ."

"Knows everything, that's what you mean. We want him to forget our transgressions."

"Yes, I suppose."

He poured another cup of water for himself into his goblet, nameless but identical to mine, and he drank it. Again he rested, drifting staring at the fire, his chest heaving.

I wondered what it would be like to live in a world of figures such as his.

Was that what Esagila had been like? Robed and bearded men dripping with gold ornament, and shining with purpose.

"Do you know," he asked me, smiling, "that the old Persians, they thought that . . . during the last millennia before the final Resurrection men would gradually turn away from the eating of meat and milk, and even plants, and that they would be sustained only on water? Pure water."

"And then would come the Resurrection."

"Yes, the bony world would rise . . . the valley of bones would come to life." He smiled. "So I think sometimes, when I want to comfort myself that angels of might, demons of might, things such as me . . . that we are simply the last stage of humans . . . when humans can live on only water. So ... we're not unholy. We are simply very far advanced."

I smiled. "There are those who believe our earthly bodies are only one biological stage, that spirits constitute another, that it's all a matter of atoms and particles, as you've said."

"You pay attention to those people?"

"Of course. I have no fear of death. I hope that my light will rejoin the light of God, but perhaps it won't. But I pay attention, lots of attention to what others believe. This isn't an age of indifference, though it may seem so."

"Yes, I agree with you," he said. "It's a practical, pragmatic time, when decency is the prime virtue-you know, decent clothes, decent shelter, decent food-"

"Yes," I said.

"But it's also a time of great luxurious spiritual thinking, maybe the only time when such thinking carries no penalty, for after all, one can preach anything and not be dragged away in chains. There is no Inquisition in the heart of anyone."

"No, there's an Inquisition, alive in the hearts of all fundamentalists of all sects, but they don't in most parts of the world have the nower to drag away the prophet or the blasphemer. That's what you've observed." "Yes," he said. There was a pause. He sat up, obviously refreshed and willing to talk again. He turned slightly towards me, his left elbow back a bit, his arm outstretched on the arm of the chair. The gold on the blue velvet ran in loops and circles, which no doubt had a venerable history as a pattern, perhaps even a name. It was thick gold thread. It was twinkling in the light of the fire.