‘In this place,’ I said, ‘the trees are made of gold and silver, and their leaves are made of jewels.’ I took from my jacket the jewelled twig.
‘A bauble,’ said the king, ‘a pin for a lady’s hair.’
Sighing I plucked a tiny leaf from the twig and put the rest of it back in my jacket. ‘In this place, they have magical artefacts and here I have a chalice of smoke and fire.’ I withdrew the goblet from my jacket and held it up for all to see. A few courtiers around the chamber made soft sounds of surprise, for indeed the chalice was a beautiful thing, glinting with eerie flames within its depths, around which threads of purple smoke drifted and writhed.
‘Conjuror’s tricks!’ declared the king. ‘Any witch could have made you that.’
‘This place was ruled by two demons,’ I said. ‘And these I slew to rescue your sons, who but for me would now be dead.’
‘They appear near dead in any case,’ said the king in a hostile tone. ‘And where are the demons you spoke of?’
‘Here,’ I said and taking the bundle from Gart who stood behind me, I unwrapped it and threw its contents onto the floor. They rolled to the foot of the king’s dais.
The entire court let out cries of horror, for in this world the demons were not beautiful. Their facial features writhed and sneered and they uttered abominations.
The king stood up. ‘My sons are dying,’ he said, staring with wide eyes at the rolling heads. ‘Does this count as success?’
I said nothing but took out the goblet from my jacket once more and crushed the tiny leaf in my hand. These fragments I put into the goblet. At my signal, Gart lifted one of the demon heads, which protested greatly, and squeezed some black blood from the stump of its neck into the goblet. I mixed the potion with my fingers, then went to the princes to administer it, all the while praying to every god that existed that this would work.
The princes drank the foul juice I poured between their lips and for some moments moaned piteously upon their litters. Then Calobel sat up and said, ‘Papa, Mama, what are we doing here?’
At once, the entire court broke into tears and cheers and everyone began to clap loudly at my success. The queen ran to her sons and embraced them. Now, though still comely, they looked like ordinary young men, yawning and stretching and wondering where they were. I doubted they would remember any of what had happened to them, which was probably just as well.
‘Take these demon heads,’ I said to king, ‘and convey them to a place where you must light a brazier. Throw salt into the flames and then burn the heads. In this way, they will be utterly destroyed. Then, we shall talk about my reimbursement for this task.’
‘You are an astounding woman,’ said the king. ‘Name your price and I will gladly pay it.’
So, there it was. The mystery solved, the enchantment broken. If I’d entered the city along the canal road, I might not have succeeded, and if I’d not heeded the elemental’s words, I would have certainly failed, but I pay attention to omens and advice, so I was instead a heroine, heaped with rewards and praise. The king and queen were most insistent I should marry one of the twins and become a princess, but however handsome the princes were, they were tainted in my eyes, and anyway, I had no desire to live a fat contented life. Instead, I summoned my new servant, Gart, who was proving himself more every day to be an entertaining and resourceful companion, and we rode out of Rappernape on fine horses with full purses. Perhaps for some weeks, we will enjoy the countryside before finding new adventures. Even the strongest, most quick-witted heroine deserves a holiday now and again.
Blue Flame of a Candle
This story first appeared in one of Pete Crowther’s anthologies, ‘Tombs’. It was inspired by a piece I read in a magazine concerning the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. I imagined how it would be if it still existed today, complete with a perfectly-preserved body of the great conqueror. The body in ‘Blue Flame’s’ tomb is not a warrior, but a prophet. I am fascinated by prophets, and wrote about the subject in depth in my novel ‘Sign for the Sacred’.
‘Blue Flame’ was also inspired by a friend’s description of first seeing the pyramids, and how they looked like gigantic spacecraft against the sky, and how, according to a dictionary of mythology I have, a ‘blue woman’ is she ‘whose presence chills and dismays men’. I mixed these images with that of the Great Library of Alexandria, and the story was born. The great river in it is like the Nile, where ancient idols of forgotten gods dream in the shallows, surrounded by browsing water cattle and covered with children who shout and wave at passengers on passing boats. Here is Egypt reinvented, the Egypt of my most escapist visions.
The pilot went ashore again in the blue pre-dawn, carrying his lantern, a gobbet of yellow in the twilight. I was lying on deck, for the heat on that part of the river is almost unbearable, and I saw his bobbing progress up the steep bank path, towards the black silhouette of the temple. He did not use the wide steps that ran down into the water because women were burning the dead there in the dawn chill, their lamenting voices ringing out like a plait of sounds. I fancied I could almost see the ectoplasmic trail of it over the river, but it was likely to have been only smoke from the pyres. The air smelled of charred roses and cooking meat.
The Emmeshara drifted sideways on the water like a sleeping thing, and the oars were all upright, a palisade against the land. Two other pilgrims came out on deck, shaking little rattles and muttering prayers. I thought that was senseless, because the pilot had yet to identify which god held sway on the shore. What if the pilgrims were praying to the wrong one? They all cared so much about that kind of thing.
We were nearing the end of our journey, and both crew and passengers were skittish. I felt like an impostor, disassociated from their fervour because I was only there to accompany my father. This was his pilgrimage, his life-time desire made real. He did not trust me to remain at home without him for, although I was as strong and able as any young man, my father considered me too young and bound to cause trouble, lose his business or burn down the house. It was preferable to shut up shop for the six months it would take us to sail up the great river to Charidotis, to the tomb of the prophet, Mipacanthus. I was bored and too hot; a miserable companion for my father, who was full of a bizarre kind of zealous serenity.
‘When we gaze upon the body, everything will change,’ he told me. ‘A different knowledge will come to us.’
He would never know how true those words were. I never told him what happened to me in Charidotis.
Though dead for a thousand years, the corpse of Mipacanthus lies in his crystal sarcophagus, reputedly uncorrupted and as beautiful as he had been in life. I did not believe it. I knew the ‘corpse’ had to be a waxwork likeness, or an artfully painted wooden statue. My father’s eyes would see sleeping flesh, because that was what he wanted to see. I knew I would only see craftsmanship and, occasionally, in my most waspish mood, I couldn’t help telling my father this.
‘You young ones,’ he would answer patiently. ‘So much of the wonder of life has dried up inside you, but you will see, you will see.’
I could not be interested. All that concerned me at that time was the burgeoning of maturing youth within my body, my approach to manhood. Spiritual truths, or untruths, meant little to me.
Daily, since we had left the city of Elanen, our home, the pilgrims had gathered on deck, under a faded green awning, fringed by tassels. Here, they would produce their books of prophecies. My father would produce his own: a small, densely-printed volume, covered in oil-green leather, entitled The Millennium. Within its pages the utterances of Mipacanthus were interpreted by Cairus Casso, a scholar fifty years dead. There were as many interpreters of the prophet’s quatrains as there were prophecies, and each of them differed in definition. Cairus was a mystic, and his renderings of the chaotic words offered mantras to enrich the spirit, presaging a time when men and women aspired to godhood. Others, such as Adragor the Lame, promised only war, famine and bloodshed. Personally,
after many tedious afternoons of suffering the differing translations read aloud, I had come to believe that Mipacanthus had been a poet rather than a prophet (and a rather florid one, at that), but I kept this opinion to myself. I endured the ennui, sustained by the knowledge that, come sundown, as the cook prepared supper, the pilgrims would begin to argue heatedly. A few evenings past, one man threw himself overboard in pique, and we had to fish him - still ranting -out of the river with a pole.
By the time the pilot came back on board, everyone was up on deck, and the cook had begun preparing breakfast. Savoury aromas competed with the charnel house perfume of the corpse-burnings. Apparently, the river deity, Rooroorus, held sway at this point. (The previous month, no doubt, it had been someone else.) Now we all had to strip off and bathe in the river, as a mark of deference to the god. As I floated, shivering, though at least thankful for the blessed cool, I eyed with misgivings the women sweeping charred rubbish off the river steps into the water. A grey soapy-looking scum floated by me. Seemingly oblivious to this, my father swam contentedly up and down, his expression tranquil. It disgusted me so much I went back on board, whether I had spent enough time in the water or not. The cook, being a foreigner, was sympathetic, and gave me some titbits while we waited for the pilgrims to finish their ablutions.
As we ate our grilled fish and bread bobbins, the Emmeshara lazily turned a corner of the river, the towering, hanging trees peeled away, and the horizon became dominated by an enormous obsidian statue, a seated god, perhaps no longer worshipped, or an ancient king. It was a splendid sight. His toes dipped into the water, and people had built stilted huts between them. Children looked out from a hole in the belly of the colossus and waved to us. Cattle waded in the river shallows under the shadow of the stone, tethered to the giant toes, browsing upon shivering reeds. I stood beside the rail, drinking in the details, next to a woman veiled from head to foot, who wore a face-mask of hanging coins, denominations from around the world. I knew her name was Moomi, though we had only nodded at one another previously. Now she nudged me with her elbow and said, in a deep, thickly-accented voice. ‘He de fader od de Great One’. She gestured at the statue.
‘Father of Mipacanthus?’ I asked.
She nodded and guttered, ‘Oi, oi,’ which I presumed meant yes.
I reflected that I would not have seen any of this if I had stayed at home, but regretted I had no real chance to explore the wonders I saw. We just passed them by, every one. At least in Charidotis, I would be able to wander around, while my father contemplated the abiding beauty of the dead prophet.
The paddling god-king, the river steps, were the gateway to Charidotis; we were nearer to our destination than I had thought. By mid-afternoon, the river widened and became divided by a labyrinth of jetties and piers. Ships and smaller boats negotiated the maze. Market stalls thronged every available surface, some jutting out over the water, their goods swaying perilously in a hot afternoon breeze, which had arisen, surprisingly, from nowhere. A babble of conflicting languages, nonsense tongues, filled the air, and it smelled oily, like cold lamb-fat mixed with myrrh.
Charidotis was a magnet of the world. People were drawn there from every known land to parade before the tomb of the boy-king, the dead prophet. Some came to be healed, others for spiritual renewal, and still more came as tourists. The city itself, white as bone, rose like a fretwork of wind-blasted ivory along the sides of the river. And ahead, I could see the misty outline of the Pyramid itself, the tomb, like a mirage against the lavender sky, at once real and stultifyingly phantasmic.
My father had brought our luggage up on deck, his cloaks hanging over his arm. ‘See, Alexi, see!’ he exclaimed, his outspread fingers encompassing the splendours of the mythical city.
‘It is fabulous,’ I said, the first kind remark I had made to him upon the journey.
He smiled, encouraged, and soon the Emmeshara found her own niche within the labyrinth, and we all disembarked to make the miles-long journey on foot around the maze to reach the shore. Despite the fact the cost of the trip was extortionate and had nearly ruined us, I had been allowed to bring a little money with me. My first impulse was to squander it all in the market. Everything glittered or coiled. The colours were deep and iridescent, mimicking the hues of jewels. Shawls flapped like captive wings, enchanted necklaces swung, exotic foods hissed in their spiced fat, impossible glass wind-chimes filled the air with music. The market people were small and swarthy, with few teeth but wide smiles. Their hands danced upon the air as they extolled the virtues of their goods. We passed a stall devoted solely to Mipacanthus. It bore a forest of identical statuettes that had been fashioned from every conceivable medium, as well as painted leaves, varnished to hardness, that carried the prophet’s ineffable image.
The veiled woman, my companion of the rail, attached herself to us. We learned she was a native of Threnador, a city so distant as to be considered fictional. As we negotiated the maze, my father seemed to understand her speech, while I just nodded and smiled at most of her urgent, delighted exclamations. We found a pilgrim’s inn near the docks and took a communal room to conserve funds. There was so much to see and explore I didn’t know what to do with myself, and just sat on my mattress, dazed, while Moomi and my father made plans for the evening, consulting a library of pamphlets they had purchased on the way from the river. Moomi took off her mask of coins to reveal the most ugly yet fascinating face I had ever seen. Her bones were exquisite beneath her dark skin, yet her teeth jutted out from a stretched mouth like those of an embalmed corpse. Her nose was long and hooked, her eyes abnormally large and of a lustrous black. It looked as if her real eyes had been plucked out, and replaced with dark, polished gems. Her hair had been oiled into coiling locks that fell like snakes over her shoulders. Around her neck hung a treasury of black pearls and gold chains. She was perhaps halfway between my own age and that of my father. Now that we had arrived in Charidotis, my torpor of the journey north had vanished, giving rise to a feverish enthusiasm, which bloomed unexpectedly in my chest. Moomi’s appearance, strange and wonderful as it was, seemed a fitting part of our adventure.
We spent the evening walking around the temple quarter, where architectures of the world competed with each other in magnificence. All the temples were dedicated to Mipacanthus, although every one of them celebrated a different aspect of the prophet. Here a severe tower, crowned flamboyantly with a crenellation of stone lace, symbolised Mipacanthus as law-maker. There a spreading vista of snowy columns, from which clouds of incense oozed, which symbolised Mipacanthus as sensual, the confidante of despairing lovers. And above all, rearing up like a fortress on its hill, skirted with ancient poplars, the Great Library stood. Here scholars worked upon the hundreds of books that contained the prophecies of Mipacanthus and analysed the historical documents of the known world.
Pilgrims and tourists thronged the temple area; a babbling crowd, which effectively dispelled any atmosphere of peace and holiness. Here, the passage of countless feet had worn away the stones of the temple floors into channels. We walked to the plaza of the Pyramid, but both Moomi and my father prolonged their moment of enlightenment by agreeing not to enter the tomb until the morning, when they would feel refreshed. Close to, the monument is so massive as to blot out the sky; it seems inconceivable that human hands built it. From the river, its walls had appeared smooth, but in reality they were covered in carvings, which stuck out at every angle. A million saints, martyrs, sacred concubines, holy soldiers, confirmed kings and the like peered from the towering sides of the Pyramid, each one as life-like as can be achieved in stone. Some threw out their arms in commemoration of their final, agonised moments in life, while others were composed in prayer. Dancing girls, touched by the sacred, swept their stone scarves across the faces of stern men of the sword, who had fought in the prophet’s name. I would have been content to stand there all night, examining the endless seethe of frozen faces, but my father was hungry and wanted to get back to the inn. He point
ed out I would be able to see more in full daylight, clearly pleased I seemed interested in the Pyramid.
I saw the blue woman before Moomi did. My father never noticed her: perhaps that is significant. It was one of those moments when time becomes still; when we can step out of it, and events of significance occur.
The interior of the Pyramid was dark, the light of a thousand candles failed to dispel the gloom but, despite the fact it was heaving with pilgrims, it did not share the sullied atmospheres of the temples we had visited the night before. Here was majesty serene, here was history entrapped in stone and crystal. We had to pass through a series of vaulted ante-chambers, before approaching the centre of the tomb, where the body of the prophet lay. Everyone spoke in hushed voices as they shuffled between roped walkways. I looked around myself, soon bored with waiting, and with moving so slowly, and wished I could go and investigate the triangular doorways reached by perilous flights of steps that pitted the walls above our heads. No doubt they led to secret chambers of the Pyramid, where only the priesthood ventured. Was there ever a time when the place was empty? I would have preferred it so. The press of humid bodies obscured everything I wanted to see: the ancient wall carvings, the grotesque relics in stone niches. The crowd was policed by holy militia, or Guardians, tall, masked individuals (some of whom were women), dressed severely in black. Only when you passed close by, could you see that their obscuring robes comprised layers of a wondrous, floating stuff, like smoke.
When we reached the seventh, and final, ante-chamber, we discovered the reason for the long queue. Only six pilgrims were allowed into the inner chamber at a time. Merchandise was set out on a table by the entrance, where pilgrims could buy perfumed purple candles to light in honour of the prophet. As my father delved in his purse to find coins, having offered to buy Moomi a candle as well, I was given my first glimpse of the holy vault.