Babel Tower

  And before all these women, all these three women, these Mothers of Pain, were row upon row of little lights bravely burning, which, when Culvert considered them closely, could be seen to be helical snail shells full of oil with burning wicks in the oil.

  And the pews in the chapel were piled high with old bedding straw, for it was now a storage chamber, and the walls were lined with bales of hay, and in the centre of the chapel, before the altar, was an old woman on a three-legged stool, spinning thread by the light of three fat wax candles, standing in ornate church-silver candlesticks. She had a face like a nutcracker, the old biddy, and a watery, crazed eye and an empty socket of stitched skin next to it, and a mumbling mouth, fallen in, and knobbed, gnarled fingers like twigs, with sore red tips like bright buds. And Culvert had given orders (or suggestions, for the inhabitants were in theory free to reject his instructions) that the members of the community should wear bright, clear colours to signify the new order, but here was this old crone in a black scarf and a black stuff gown, just as the peasants of his childhood had been, and those of his father’s childhood, and his grandfather’s. And she was spinning a thread that combined scarlet and white, in a fancy twist.

  She greeted him familiarly, “Good day, young master.”

  “Good day,” said he, puzzled.

  “You don’t know me,” said she, “and I could take offence at that, for I was your nursemaid once, your little mouth guzzled and sucked at these dry breasts, and before that I was there at your coming into the world, I was the sage femme who presided, the midwife who saved you, drawing you all bloody and reluctant out of your sweet mother’s bleeding cunt, and slapping life into your backside with one hand, whilst you dangled from your little ankles from my other hand and mewed and howled.

  “My name is Griva,” said she, somewhat huffily since he showed still no sign of knowing her.

  And it seemed to him that he remembered a sweet smell of her laundered undergarments on a sunny day, but he could not swear to it. He felt in his pockets for something to give her and came upon only a wizened little apple, which he looked at, perplexed, until she took it from him, saying, “Thank you,” and bit into it fiercely, so that the juice spurted on her chin.

  “And what are you doing in the bowels of the Tower?” she asked him, chewing with her toothless gums.

  He sat down on the end of a pew, amongst the dusty hay.

  “I am thinking,” he said, “about religion, and what it means, and about the human tendency to need its practices. I am not thinking very well.”

  “Thinking,” said she, “will not get you far, in that context, my sweeting. What do you think, my nurseling, where do your musings lead you?”

  “To ceremonial,” said he. “To rites performed. To the question Why? and the deep question Why in truth? For it is my observation that all peoples observe certain festivals, to wit, the turn of the year, the feast of the dead, the return to life and such matters. I remember the blessing of the fields, a pretty ceremony, and the candles for the dead souls, all flickering and gleaming.”

  “I could tell you much,” said she, “of the Carnival as it was held in the halls of this house in the days of your forefathers, of the dancing there was, and feasting, and mumming, and ceremonies there were performed.”

  “Tell me,” said he, “for this is what I was in search of. And chance led me to you and your memories.”

  “Chance,” said she, “or something by another name, strong too, chance’s sister.”

  So they sat together in the half-dark, the winter-dark, candlelit and waxy-smelling, and she told him of the old Feast of Misrule at the turn of the year in the Old Hall of the Tower. Of how a Lord of Misrule, the Babu, was chosen from amongst the grooms or footmen—“Sometimes he was a bit lacking, as they say, bats in his belfry, and sometimes he was chosen because he was above himself, an uppity being, a pompous nob, a puffed-up capon, and in the first case, your fool would give out silly orders, as it might be, to wash all the ladies’ faces in winelees, or to make pies of live blackbirds, or to dress the hall with bulls’ pizzles and pigs’ bladders, and no matter what it was, it had to be done, for he was the Lord, but only for a day, only for a poor day. But the uppity lordlings whose come-uppance was near, they was more savage, my young nurseling, for they knew what was coming to them and they made sure their pains were paid and their election got its quittance in advance so to speak, so there were roastings and whippings of other young lordlings in plenty, ordered by the Lord of the Day, there was trousers pulled off and spankings performed—and more ingenious punishments, and hangings and danglings and spittings and pokings that would take me a month to retail to you—”

  “I should be delighted to hear them—”

  “And so you shall, my lovely, and so you shall. But in all cases, whether the Lord of the Day, the Babu, was fool or knave, at the end of it certain things happened as sure as night follows day or death follows life. And these things were: the birth of the new Sun out of the fat body of the Babu—who ate beans and other flatulent things to bloat his belly. And the topsy-turvying of all folk, so that the menfolk danced in skirts and bodices and the ladies had the freedom of trousers and hunting-jackets, and at the end all danced and chased in masks all around the stairs and halls of the Tower, beginning at nightfall of the Shortest Day and ending at the first light which finished the Longest Night and brought the New Year, who was a bloodied babe in the skirts of the Babu.

  “And the Yule Log came in—which had been smouldering away for a whole year under the hearth, and the boar’s head came in with it, with spiced apples in its snout, dripping with fat, and the Great Pie came in, which was made of snails and pigs’ tails in a great spiralling savoury tower, topped with a pastry bird to finish. And they lit the fire in the hearth from the old log, and put in the new, and danced in the light of the flames, and they roasted more snails on its crest in great iron pails, dropping the hot oil into the shells so you could hear the creatures wince and sigh and screech as best they could. The peasants, you know, my nurseling, roast a tower of live cats over the great fire at the year’s end, but this was not done in the Tower, for the ladies were squeamish. Indeed in the later days of the Tower they made the little snails from chestnut flour and marzipan but those were soft, sweet parodies of what should be, for there is spirit-life in snails, my dearie, and marzipan is a stolid substitute for succulent flesh.”

  “Why snails, old woman?” asked Culvert, not because he believed the old creature knew the answer, for it was his opinion that the peasants of modern times did many things of which the original sense was lost in the antiquity of inherited practices. But he thought also that these stunted folk with their repetitive lives might have preserved some wisdom of the earth, some harmonious chord between them and the original Nature in which men and beasts and plants all participated, which might be apparent to a keen intelligence. And the idea was coming to him that their practices, reintroduced, might make in his community a new life of the blood, more subtle and profound as a source of energy than cool-headed local reasonings.

  “What spirit-life is in snails?” he asked old Griva, leaning towards her in the half-dark, in the scent of her unclean black garments and the apple-juice of her eating.

  “Men say they go between us and those who sleep under the earth,” said the old woman. “They weep continuously for the dead, their trails are bright with their tears, they go on their bellies like Him who was punished in the garden, but they are not evil beings, but wanderers, between this world and the next. For the fattest ones are always found in the graveyards—and those we do not pick, or only the naughty boys, in secret—and they hang on fennel, the plant of the dead, and taste of it too, when they are stewed or roasted. They are creatures of the night, making moony trails by starlight, but they are creatures of the Sun too, for when he goes to bed early, they go to their long sleep, and pull a horny window over their shelly, spirally houses. And when he returns, they return from their deathly sleep, thei
r flesh stirs and out they come, cold creatures seeking the warm. They go between, you see, my dear boy, they go between earth and sky, they go between fire and water, they can play the king and the queen too, and their children are like glass and pearls. And when we have sucked them from their hiding place we make little lamps of their dead shells, for that they live in the dark and yet come into the light—they make silvery light with their weeping pathways in life, and hot fiery light in death. They are neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, and so magical, as things undecided are magical, because they are not fixed.”

  “This year,” said Culvert, “we shall hold Carnival again in the Tower. We shall make beautiful costumes, and fantastic masks, and there shall be a rite of the new Sun, we shall welcome the new Sun in our blood, we shall have a Babu and a Woman Clothed with the Sun, and be beasts and men. And I shall send people out to collect snails, old woman, and you shall instruct our cooks in the making of the Great Pie.”

  “I am already spinning scarlet and white wool for your robes,” said the old woman.

  “And how did you know that I myself would be the Woman Clothed with the Sun?”

  “I knew,” said the old woman, shaking her head, whether with grief, or palsy, or grim humour, Culvert could by no means see. “As I know you will prick your finger if you play with my distaff as you are doing.”

  “Nonsense,” said he, wielding the distaff and tangling the thread. “I have an insatiable desire to know how things function in this world.”

  And he pricked his finger, as she had foretold.

  And she took his bloodied finger and put it in her own mouth, and her old, brown, wrinkled lips closed softly on his flesh, and her tongue licked his rough skin and sucked sweetly on his blood. And as his blood ran into the wet saliva and apple-juice on her tongue he remembered everything, his nose up against the warm bag of her breast, the scent of her milk, his little fists kneading her like sweet pastry, the hot swaddling bands between his legs. And tears ran down his cheeks, for the onward flow of time, for the crumpling and drying of flesh and blood, for the singularity of a man shut in his skin as time sucked the marrow from his bones.

  “It is odd,” said Colonel Grim, “that there should be such a preponderance of scarlet in the costumes or robes for the coming Carnival. Our honoured leader’s name is evergreen, but his taste runs to flames and blood.”

  “You should not be surprised at that,” said Samson Origen. “For soldiers have always loved to be brilliantly clothed when they parade about, and you yourself have worn a scarlet coat and a scarlet cloak with gilded buttons.”

  “I have heard it said,” said Grim, “that the coats were red so that the blood of wounds should be hidden. But I give that small credence, for our small-clothes were white as driven snow, and there are also green soldiers, like holly trees, and black soldiers, to hide in the night. No, we were red to strike fear of our bloody-mindedness into the enemy, and brassy to glint like the hot sun as we advanced. How we loved our uniforms, and how tender we were to what lay under them.”

  “Judges are scarlet,” observed Turdus Cantor, “and cardinals too have arrogated to themselves that rich colour.”

  “Also the Whore of Babylon,” said Samson Origen. “The original Scarlet Woman on her scarlet beast, swallowing the stars.”

  “Though our sins be as scarlet,” observed Turdus Cantor, “they shall be washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Who is himself woolly-white, with bleaching blood, a paradoxical beast.”

  “A man in a uniform,” said Samson Origen, “or a man in a robe, for they are the same things, is not a man, but a cipher, but a function, but a walking idea; his clothes walk and speak for him. And undercover, who knows who he is, or what he does.”

  Culvert, all alive with enthusiasm, joined their group and begged that they all take parts in the coming Rite or Play for the New Year on the Shortest Day. Colonel Grim, he said, was to be the sage femme, or Wise-woman, or Midwife to the New Year, and was to wear a specially designed gilded mask and a great coif. And Turdus Cantor was wanted as godparent to the New Year, and he would be clad as an old beldame with a black mask and white woolly hair. And the Lady Roseace would be godfather to his godmother and their names were to be Logos and Ananke, and they were to sing sweetly together at the birth.

  “Sweet singing is beyond me,” said Turdus Cantor. “My old voice is cracked.”

  “Then you shall have pan-pipes,” said Culvert. “And there will be gongs, and cymbals, and clanging bells, and zithers and flutes.”

  “And what do you hope to bring about with all this?” asked Samson Origen.

  And Culvert told him how he hoped to make the rhythm of the people’s blood hum to the rhythm of the turning earth and light the fire of the new Sun in all their hearts. And Culvert told Samson Origen that he desired him to be a Pythoness in the Rite and wear a double mask facing backwards and forwards. And Samson Origen said he would not play, he would not take part, he would neither dance, speak, sing nor mum. “I will watch,” said Samson Origen, adding “as long as one man watches and only watches, what you have is art, and intelligent, as opposed to religion, and terrible.”

  “I do not want you to watch,” said Culvert.

  Their eyes locked.

  “But you do not want to make me act against my will,” said Samson Origen. “And my will is to watch, my pleasure is in watching and only in watching. I believe in detachment, Culvert, in the solitary strong mind, as you know. I have seen the Krebs dance for the new Sun, and it is not pretty and not instructive.”

  “Tell me how they dance,” said Culvert, and his eyes glittered.

  So Samson Origen, in an even tone, in quietly polished sentences, sipping his hot wine with cinnamon, told his three companions of the great seasonal feasts of the Krebs, of the building of fires and the binding of prisoners, of the brewing of fermented milk with sour barley and pigs’ blood, of the drumming of the women, of their wailing voices and averted faces, of the great horns belling and coughing and sounding, of the gongs and the cymbals, the castanets and the tambourines, the bladders and the rattles, and of the long, snaking lines of dancers, all moving as one, stamping with flat feet, rolling their oiled buttocks, faster and faster, of the frightened beasts who were driven into the circle round the fire and torn apart slowly by fingernails and teeth, living haunch from haunch, rib from rib, gut from bloody gut, until the Krebs were clothed in bloody hides and crowned with bleeding horns, or with the heads of wolf or wildcat, bear-cub or hind, wild ass or mongoose. And the fire would burn brighter and brighter and sputter with fat from the roasting creatures, and then the prisoners would be brought in, and meet the same fate as the beasts, ripped apart and roasted, licked and tasted. And Samson Origen told of the election of the King of the Day who must lord it over all, and was carried on their black shoulders on a wooden throne in the firelight, and crowned with jewels and fed on wine and honey, whose hands and feet were kissed and slavered over, whose rich robes were embroidered in scarlet and golden silks. And he told how, when the sun came over the dark hills at the edge of the plain, this King was whipped, and roasted and torn to fragments and devoured. Samson Origen told this tale coldly, marshalling his facts, but he saw Culvert’s eyes bright and wet, and saw the hot rheum in Turdus Cantor’s old eyes. Those of Colonel Grim were dry as his own, he saw, and the pulses in his neck and brow were steady as ever.

  “And do the Krebs have a God,” asked Culvert, “in whose name they roast and consume this unfortunate being?”

  “They do,” said Samson Origen. “But they may not speak his name, under pain of death, and I do not know it. But the names of his masks are legion: there is a black horse, and a flaming fire, a great worm and a white kid, all of which at different times they dance for and dress themselves to simulate.”

  “Have you seen this thing?” asked Culvert.

  “I have,” said Samson Origen. “I watched, endeavouring to feel neither fear nor excitement.”

  “And did you obser
ve the face of the King of the Day? Did he show fear?”

  “He showed smiling vacancy, whether from extreme fear or because he was drugged and unaware, I do not know.”

  “Or happy, perhaps, in the mystery.”

  “I think not. You may entertain that idea, but I think not.”

  … So the feasting and dancing, the japes and the singing, went faster and hotter and more lusty. Up and down the staircases and along the corridors they danced, in great human eels, yet not human, for there were bears and boars, horned goats and silly sheep, cunning cats and sly foxes, ravening wolves and hooded crows prancing there, with sweaty human legs and tails, often enough, and little or nothing else, save that the women wore gourds and codpieces and the men wore apple-stuffed breasts, and swishing skirts. And all over the Tower were the brave little snail-lights. And there was no Babo, but at the head of the table was Culvert in the scarlet robes of a priestess, with long, blond curls on his head, and a red mouth and painted fingers. And beside him was the Pope, or Priest, or Bishop, mitred and with a gilded mask, and Colonel Grim, clothed as a beldame, and Roseace and Turdus Cantor as Logos and Ananke, she in a black, studious suit with a silver hawk-mask, and he in many-coloured female robes, with the face of a snake in gold and green. And when the Longest Night was drawing to its thickest, the Yule Log was ignited with great ceremony, and huge trays of snails were put to roast on it, and boiling oil was dripped into their cavities, so that hundreds of tiny boneless bodies writhed and winced and boiled together. And when dawn approached, the ceremony began on the high dais. It was a long and tedious ceremony, for Culvert had not yet got the knack of ceremonies, and did not understand that a mass of men must move, and exult, and engage and if necessary suffer and scream together and as one, if a ceremony is to weld a people. He wished, their Projector, to be all things to all men, Scapegoat and Whore, Mother and Father, Life and Death, Punished and Punisher, and, as will be subsequently clear in this narrative, his folk were not whole-heartedly implicated in his symbolic strutting and groaning, nor were they exempt from that modern saturnalian emotion which is most destructive of religio-aesthetic passion, embarrassed laughter.