The princess smiled at his discomfort.
‘Brother, the way you allow your self-righteousness to blind you to the truth has always granted me such amusement: perhaps I should help you, now it’s clear we’re of the same blood after all. The Queen of Queens – can’t you recall the tale our mother used to so gleefully regale us with, Brother?’
*
Chapter 49
Queen of Queens
How many tales tell of a primordial darkness, a chaos that has to be dispersed by the bringing of light?
Naturally, we tend to believe such light must be the Sun: and so, too, many supposedly learned men tell us that this must have indeed been the case.
How could it be otherwise?
But think about this for a moment. (If you must, use all your Earthly reason.)
Even just a moment of true and proper thought will enlighten you as to the true and proper nature of this light.
How could, one moment, there be nothing but darkness?
And, voila, the next moment, nothing but light?
Isn’t the latter just as blinding as the former?
What can you see when there is nothing to see?
How do you know how truly bright a light is anyway, when you no longer have anything to compare it to?
Surely it stands to reason that a light would, at first, appear amidst that darkness?
Not like the sun, therefore: supposedly exiling all of darkness, never to be seen again.
(And did that really happen? Have you never, ever come across darkness since that fabulous creation of light?)
For how bright does a light appear when we see it amidst the darkness?
How welcoming, too, is that glorious light?
Think now: what light do you know of that shines so wonderfully brightly amidst the darkness?
What light do you know of that, even on a night, when the sun lazily sleeps, brings the most wondrous illumination to everything it casts its silvery gleam upon?
Isn’t she glorious?
Isn’t she wonderful?
Isn’t she the Moon?
*
Now (now we’ve agreed on this), back to those tales, the tales of primordial darkness and creation itself.
The earliest tales – and if we’re going back to tales of creation, surely these must be the best, the most accurate portrayal of witnessed real events? – tell us that first, created amongst this darkness, there was an egg.
Wait!
You’re thinking of a hen’s egg, aren’t you!
(You see – I do understand the problems of Earthly reason!)
But long before there were hens, there were reptiles.
And long before there were reptiles, there were serpents.
(There is a difference! Haven’t you worked that one out yet?)
So this egg, of course, was more like a silver orb.
Yes, it’s the Moon again, isn’t it?
The Moon, the Serpent; you’re getting tired of hearing of these, aren’t you? But please bear with me!
Come to think of it, it might help if you just think of them as being the very same thing! Oh, and darkness also being a serpent! And think also of the way they’re entwined – for you can’t really have different shades of one without the other, can you?
That way, if you constantly bear all this in mind, I don’t really have to keep on repeating myself so much!
(Besides, I wasn’t the one who came up with this idea! I’m just repeating what you can read in just about any tale of the Creation, if you read it correctly!)
And so that age old question of which came first, the serpent or the egg, is neatly answered for you!
What’s the difference?
*
And so the serpent squeezed the egg.
Squeezed it until it cracked and Heaven and Earth and the Sun were brought into being.
And with the Sun came Night and Day.
Sunlight and shadow.
Spiritual and material
Wisdom and ignorance.
Good and evil.
Because once you’d started a forking, a branching, just where is it all supposed to stop?
Who’s been appointed judge of that?
No one, it seems.
Who could stop such a thing like that once it’s set in motion anyway?
The endless creation of opposites.
Of rivals.
Of conflict.
My word: what a curious thing to bring into being!
*
Naturally, there was a war; a War in Heaven.
And can we really say who came out best from that war?
Can we, indeed, looking at it all from our lowly vantage point of Earth, say that the side of light actually won in the end?
I mean, for one thing, it depends what side you’re coming from, doesn’t it?
Who really fell to earth that day?
(That day? That eon? Time is of no real concern, you know?)
The defeated, or the victor?
Or both?
You see, as even his most biased opponents are prepared to admit, Samael was truly beautiful – ‘Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty: thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness; I will cast thee to the ground.’
So yes, it was Samael who came down to Earth.
Yet why not? For wasn’t Earth his creation, made in line with his designs, his plans?
Here he could be judge.
Here he could still be beautiful.
For how could he fail to shine amongst such relatively dark surroundings?
*
But there is more to this tale than many are prepared to read into it.
Now quite naturally, there are many tales constructed for the benefit of the simpleminded, speaking nonsense about shadows of gods of light, granted life by the Queen of Heaven.
Yet quite obviously (obliviously?), these are tales for those incapable of listening closely to the far more numerous tales recalling how first there was a primordial darkness, an abyss – and then there was the Light, Word, Logos, or whatever name you prefer to call it.
In these tales, don’t you see, we already have our God of Darkness, our God(dess) of Light (not to be confused with her son the Sun, which is all of a different matter entirely).
So why would all this have to be repeated once more, with suns and shadows?
Can you see now that, when darkness fell to earth, he naturally had to bring the Queen of Heaven with him? For as light needs darkness and darkness needs light to be recognised, then they too are one and the same.
She wept at her own fall, of course. A tear falling down her cheek, down to Earth.
And now so few people recognise the once bright and shining Queen of Heaven, for she is increasingly veiled by the darkness.
For the light of the moon only seems bright to you because you have become inured to that darkness.
*
But is all this really Samael’s fault?
For a devious trick had been played upon him!
As many of the stories so honestly state, he was the real creator of the material Earth, and all the things within it. So, naturally, he had been promised control of all the elements to aid him in his work.
Earth itself, of course. But also Water. And Air. And Fire.
But no, not Spirit.
That, unfortunately, that true breath of life, of near divinity, had been kept out of his control.
His creation was spiritless.
Yes, even poor Adam.
And when it dawned on Samael that this was the case, he tried to make amends.
He descended to earth in the hope of granting the offspring of Adam a share of his own divine spirit. He became she, became Lilith; little knowing that he was now fallen, and had too little spirit to share.
Oh, if only she had waited!
For that tear, that tear of the Queen of Heaven, it shattered as it reached Earth.
It scattered, its innumerable
fragments granting light and life and near-divinity to Eve and all her descendants!
And this, of course, brought with it its own unforeseen problems.
*
What problem could there be with man being granted near-divinity, a fragment of the Queen of Heaven’s own tear?
Well when the mortal Semele wished to see Zeus in his true appearance, she was blinded, and burnt to a cinder by his inconceivable brightness.
And man (who never bears any shame when it comes to self-flattery, to self-aggrandisement) floods himself with the supposed brightness of self-entitlement, of self-righteousness, blinding himself to recognising even that truly divine shard that lies within him.
In the brightness of the sun, even the moon becomes completely veiled.
And so man himself severs his link to the Queen of Heaven.
And unrecognised, despite that glorious gift of her tear, of that fragment of her wondrous light sleeping within each and every one of us – a Sleeping Beauty waiting only to be reawakened with the kiss of recognition and longing and love – even the Queen of Heaven begins to lose her brightness; to become ever more as one with the dark materials, indelibly entwined, as ivy weaves its way through stonework and makes it crumble before our eyes.
For she stays here too long in the hope of aiding us, and her hope is hopeless.
She recognises – with no sense of immodesty, with a sense of sad realisation only – that even a fragment of a fragment of her brilliance is too much for something as fragile as man to bear.
He believes that bright light to be his due, desires ever more of it, failing to realise he will never be capable of handling it, refuting any self-knowledge that might declare him no more naturally enlightened than the ass.
And so he forgets that there was darkness before there was Light.
That there must be darkness before there is light.
So now when man looks up, he no longer sees brightly shining there the Queen of Heaven.
He sees her shining only with a borrowed light.
No longer the Light of Darkness, she has become merely a light within the darkness.
*
Chapter 50
As his sister died in his arms, the prince wondered if they should bury her body.
‘Later; we must move on, my lord,’ Sir Grandhan advised sagely, having remarkably survived the onslaughts that had taken so many good knights. ‘We must take advantage of our fortunate victory; we cannot guess what else awaits us in this most forbidding of places!’
The prince nodded in agreement.
If they were successful, they could return to this land and bury his sister. And if they failed, they would be beyond worrying about unburied corpses: unless, of course, you feared that no one would bother burying your own empty shell.
What had his sister meant about it being an inconceivable pearl?
Did that simply mean that his earlier guess to its actual nature had been correct? That it was the tear of god and therefore – naturally – it hadn’t been conceived by any usual means?
Surely she couldn’t have meant inconceivable as in unthinkable? At best, that would, mean that the pearl was something he couldn’t possibly expect it to be.
And as for him being somehow gifted this extra inner light denied other men: how could that be possible, when this Lilith was quite obviously incapable of granting her offspring this light?
Unless, of course, this ‘better nature’ of his mother, this wasting light, had achieved it by separating from the darker aspect of Lilith.
As the prince and his men left the battlefield, leaving even the bodies of their own men to the hungry carrion already flocking around them, they noted that, far ahead, there was a flourishing glow of green reaching up into the already darkened sky, like some odd sunset, or a merging of a moss-strewn river and evening clouds.
The closer they drew towards this increasingly flickering radiance, the more they recognised it as a refraction of light, emanating from the enormous crystals whose highest peaks they soon began to glimpse every now and again through gaps in the rolling hills.
It was a city, a vast citadel with towering walls, constructed entirely of what could have been emerald.
The men around the prince gasped: not in awe, as he’d first supposed, but in a further spark of recognition.
‘This is our capital,’ Sir Grandhan wept bitterly, pointing out the familiar spires encased within the high walls, the ornamentation of their peaks. ‘This is our realm!’
*
Chapter 51
‘It could only be the work of my sister; of the Shamir,’ the prince mused as he studied the incredibly high walled city. ‘Nothing else could build walls like that, let alone in the short amount of time I’ve been away.’
‘Since the death of the king, of your father, my lord,’ Sir Grandhan said, ‘Queen Telete made herself the judge of everything here: but I would never have conceived that she would transform our realm into a kingdom of the dead!’
‘Do the dead protect her city now, do you think?’
‘I sense your hesitation, my lord,’ Sir Grandhan replied respectfully, but nonetheless striking out towards the silently waiting, apparently deserted city, ‘but this is no time to hold back your bow; for even if the walls are manned – if, indeed, that is what you can term it when up against these demons – then it’s better to advance now, while they remain unaware of the defeat of your sister’s “men”.’
All that seemed to stand between them and the gleaming, wide open gate of the otherwise unassailable city were empty fields of corn, flowing in a light breeze like a river of dark, molten gold.
The men were too impatient to wait for orders, too impetuous in their intent to avenge their fallen friends to worry about demonic soldiers, instinctively recognising that any delay would only give the defenders chance to close the gate and prepare for a siege.
They confidently strode towards wafting corn that whispered gently in the wind.
Corn that bowed to them, identifying them as conquerors.
Corn that hardened, rigidly.
That sprang upwards, like so many arrows.
And fell, reaping men.
*
Only the prince had hung back enough to avoid death from the rain of corn arrows.
Yet even he had taken strikes to his legs, his arms, the thick barbs tearing through flesh, bone, and protruding far out from the other side. Only his remarkably strong breastplate had saved him from blows that might have killed him
Sir Grandhan had placed himself at the very edge of the arrows’ range, his body now strewn with a whole bushel of hardened shafts. It was as if the entire corn field had abruptly shifted, its boundaries now only a step away from the prince.
The prince staggered weakly and agonisingly through this new crop, littered with the dead. Quickening his pace as much as he was able, he drew the sword granted him by King Teleion to replace the Prophet he had returned.
If necessary he would kill this queen, his supposed mother, himself. No matter who or what he faced inside this emerald citadel.
Taking his sword, and tightly grasping one of the arrows embedded deep within his leg, he cut the bent end of iron off the shaft. He uncontrollably howled with pain as the blow jarred the hard shaft against flesh and bone.
He gasped, sighed, and gritted his teeth as he pulled the shaft clear of his flesh. With slightly less pained grimaces, he pulled out the other arrows, cutting off any ends that had bent under the impact.
Where the corn had flowed and waved, there was now a barren wasteland, of dark soil and shed husks. A dirt track wove between what had been fields of crops, yet now appeared hardly different from the roughly furrowed soil.
The prince didn’t have the energy to follow that meandering track. He strode across the rippled spoil, taking the most direct route.
He soon regretted his choice, picking up heavy clods of soil with every step. He almost tripped a number of times: the furrows c
ould have been specifically designed to cause him to lurch and reel uncontrollably.
He staggered as his feet struck a hard, immovable obstacle, a roughly hewn, narrow stone sunk so low into the soil he hadn’t seen it. It could have been a burial casket, but he’d seen stones like this before, out in the fields: covered troughs, carved out of a solid piece of stone, and placed here no doubt for grazing sheep who had long since been eaten.
He fell to his knees by the stone, urgently pulling aside its shielding cover, revealing inside its hollowed body a thin layer of surprisingly fresh looking water, the covering having kept it both cold and free of seeds or algae. Even if it had been as scum encrusted as he had expected, however, he was thirsty enough to have drunk it.
First cupping his hands and slaking his thirst, he next ran the cooling waters about his feverish brow, his sweat-stained skin, rejoicing in its sense of refreshment.
He glanced up towards the waiting gate, grateful for this chance to rest awhile, even though he was aware that this hollowed stone had been placed here solely to satisfy the demands of the lowliest of herds, of animals.
It seemed to him a miracle that it was here, where he needed it most.
But then the great gates of the citadel began to swing shut, to firmly close.
Had the trough appeared here, then, merely to delay him?
*
Chapter 52
The blood from the prince’s washed wounds swirled within the waters, serpentine in its coiling, writhing like the birthing of a new cosmos in this fluid, sparkling space.
On the breeze that had whispered through the corn, granting it a life that took life, a small leaf flutter by the prince’s head, dropping listlessly into the waters. Floating on the glittering waters, it glittered too, as translucent and bright as an expertly polished emerald.
And within that small leaf, in the way its threaded veins grew and branched and forked, there was the most perfect image of the great tree it had broken free of.