Three. Five. Nine. Nine of them, in three rows. A trinity of trinities. I met a man once who argued that twenty-seven was the holiest imaginable number, because it was three times three times three, a trinity to the power three, and on this basis he presumed that God must be in truth twenty-seven-fold. Here there are only nine assassins. Only nine.
‘Omphalos,’ the maggots whisper. ‘Omphalos, go back.’ Omphalos: the bridge between worlds. If they kill me, will I fold in upon myself, pass through my own bridge into the next world? Will I unfold again and return, only to be killed once more? Prometheus. I will be Prometheus, dying in sight of the promised city.
I dig in my heels. ‘The tears of the mother run in me. I am the Alkahest. Clear the way.’
They bow, their inchworm backs gelid and slick.
‘Omphalos. Go back, or you must die.’
‘Step aside.’
‘You pursue heresy. Thou shalt have no other gods but God.’
‘I pursue my son.’
‘You risk turning from visitor to resident.’
‘Step aside.’
They’re so quick. I had not expected them to be so quick. I had thought to see their names in their bones, to command them or the land. The first slash draws agony across my eyes. My own blood in my skull is the first true colour I have known since I came here.
In the red light of blindness, I see everything.
*
My shirt comes off my shoulders in a single motion, flowing towards the nearest maggot like a whip. The sicarius shrieks, but I am already upon it, hands sliding around face and head, gripping nightmare jaws and twisting and turning so that we stagger together in a wild children’s dance of follow-me: two steps this way and three steps that, and back and up and down. When I send him off, the creature falls with wounds from his companions’ knives up and down his segmented back. I swirl away untouched, and now I have his knives: long stolen crescents that whirl and cut, not in the inexorable chopping of a legion soldier, but in the sharp planes and arcs of high geometry. Here are Pythagoras and his sanctuaries, and there are two dead enemies; here is Euclid’s treatise on conic sections drawn in silver on the endless sky, and an additional thesis on the properties of the spiral that would have delighted Apollonius, and as the spiral finishes and the bodies in motion continue, only one of them moves of its own volition, the other sinking lifeless to the ground. No doubt these maggot sicarii are magical and monstrous, but I am incontestable. This is not combat, it is truth. I step between my enemies, bisecting angles and bodies at once, and each of my movements alters the topography so that my enemies do not understand it and cannot respond. Theon, Autolycus, Pappus: I name them as I use them in a way I had never imagined, and when Ptolemy’s cosmos rolls out before me, the gyrations of the constellations around the earth, I know where each end will come in the inevitable conjunctions of ichor and blood. Stretched an instant on tiptoe I see Orion’s hunt, then the rage of Chiron and the weaving of Arachne, the hands and the knives they hold following the stars in the mortal heavens. I trace the inevitable patterns of summer and winter and speak the names of the goddess: Demeter, Persephone, Isis, as I recall the ebb and flow of the heavens. I see the Crab, the Scorpion, and the Snake, and then the sun and moon themselves as I step between the last two still standing, and for the first time they realise they are alone, and are afraid. I wish for mercy, but the judgement that I have become does not heed me. The Alkahest is the rage of Diana at the affront of Acteon, and the hounds are loosed. My right hand rises like dawn, and my left sketches nightfall. My enemies cough as if at a change in the wind, and I stand alone in a field of corpses, a reeking underworld of my own making.
The Alkahest is not magic to be used by you, Know-all told me. It is divinity – and divinity does not suffer challenge.
The corpses fade back into the sand, all save one, and as I look down I see that he has Scipio’s face, and I have cut him into five parts.
*
In the Chamber of Isis, Cornelius Severus Scipio was cut in five parts by a jinn I could not name. I saw the wounds, and could not place them, save that they had the flavour of godhead rather than mortality. Now, I stand over his corpse, or a corpse that looks like his, and I drew its blood.
Did I do all this?
And if I did, who am I? Who is it, who makes pilgrimage into Hades? There is a woman, Athenais, who goes for her son, by roads she thought unimaginable or perhaps imagined. That son was a prodigy, fathered by a brilliant man upon a brilliant woman, and he was their joy.
But other women have gone into Hades. Demeter braved the underworld for her daughter Persephone, and held open the door for Aphrodite to retrieve Adonis. Persephone in turn prevailed upon the grey king to send Eurydice home with Orpheus. The story has it that Orpheus failed at the last, but: was it meant that he should? Was it happenstance, or some deeper game of gods? Eurydice was killed by a serpent while fleeing lustful Aristaeus, who in turn was the father of Acteon and Macris. Acteon was devoured by hounds, but Macris became the nurse of the infant Dionysus, who was born when the heart of his first, murdered life as Zagreus – also a serpent – was placed within his mother. Dionysus was in turn the son of Apollo, who cast down a serpent to learn prophecy, and his wild worshippers devoured Orpheus when the lyrist returned without Eurydice from the underworld. The head of Orpheus still sang as it passed down the river, and that song is the path by which Persephone enters the mortal world again each year, and thus Demeter’s end is served. Death is springtime and the gods are cyclical, like wheat. They repeat and they return and they rig the game. Whose game do I play now, and what shall be my reward if I should win?
Who rides me, into Hades? Or do I deceive myself? If a god made a disguise, would it fool even her?
If I arrive at my destination, will Athenais be washed away, and replaced with something that feels all the time as I just did: absolute and inevitable? Is there room for hugging and laughter in a god? For burned sausages and drunken pratfalls?
I look down at Scipio, and wonder whether, if I look up again, I will see the interior of the Chamber of Isis, and my own face not only painted on the east panel but staring back at me from where I stood a few hours ago in the middle of the room. Was I the jinn, then, seen through a refracting lens? Am I the jinn now, looking back? Was the choking hive not an attack, but some consequence of my being in close proximity to unbuttressed, undivine, un-Alkahested self? But has someone not told me recently that once the Alkahest is in you, it was always so? That once you step beyond the mortal frame of time, cause and consequence come unbound?
I touch my cheek to remind myself of its shape, and find no wound. When at last I do look up, I am still in Erebus, and it is not one corpse before me, nor even nine, but an army of them laid to rot in the ash – if anything rots here. If I have not frozen decay inside this coffin.
Half of them are like the assassins who came for me: maggots dressed as men. The others are peacocks. Beyond the dead, row upon row of those still living, like corn in a valley. And beyond that: Cocytus, the first river that I must cross.
Cocytus, called ‘Lamentation’, lies beyond the farthest reach of the enemy lines.
‘The gods contend,’ Know-all murmurs in my ear. ‘I did tell you.’
‘Over what?’ I ask. ‘Why do you fight?’
‘Position,’ Know-all says.
‘Position? You mean honours? What?’
‘Say, rather, thrones and dominions. This universe is a certain shape. It is a tool for a certain purpose. I wish it to have another.’
‘Peacock King. Angra Mainyu.’
‘If you like. I killed a serpent but it refuses to die.’
‘Zagreus, then.’
‘Or another serpent. They all look alike to me. In any case, the heart still beats.’
‘In a mortal woman?’
‘The circumstances are unclear.’
‘I don’t pretend to know what that means.’
‘Nor do I – hence: a lack
of clarity. Gods persist. To root one out, one must first ascend.’
‘So you challenge God.’
‘God exists to be challenged. Possibly also to be eaten, as you well know. To be buried and reborn from soil and caves and holy trees. I want not to be devoured. I would make of this universe a siege engine, and storm the castle of the next. I don’t wish to be reborn or remade, to become fertiliser for some holy tree or have my heart swallowed by a charmed sheep and wake up god of agricultural innovation. I’m quite content with what I am, and I propose to persist, even as the universe changes all around. In this, you and I are somewhat aligned.’
‘We are?’
‘Of course. Your son is dead. His soul is flown, his body should give itself up to the soil and the air. From his corpse should spring flowers and bees. You reject this. You rebel against death – and God. You seek his resurrection: a remaking of the universe to a style that suits you. You don’t wish to undo the time since his death. You wish to bring him alive, here, now: to be his saviour and to be able to save him forever more. You have the Alkahest. Tell me candidly: possessing it, would you now give it up? With Adeodatus newly returned, would you place him once again in the hands of fate, and see him die the next day from falling in a lake? Would you then consider his time fairly ended? Of course not. We are one, you and I. We desire continuity and security of self.’
‘Continuity for my son.’
‘And is he not yourself? Made out of you and raised up by you, missing from you now as you might miss a limb? You desire the universe in the shape you would have it, as do I. As our universes are compatible, I say that we are one.’
I look out at the battlefield, and the river beyond.
‘Then get me to the other side.’
Know-all laughs. ‘Get yourself there, witch! Stop pretending you are less than you are – the same quiet woman you were when your lover set you aside. Do you know, your name is nowhere written in the books of his life? He has erased you. That story is done. Shed blood on the soil. Announce your intent, and see what comes.’
I scowl at him, then bite my cheek and spit.
‘I would pass the rivers of Hades.’
I feel the voice of a choir in some vast cave beneath my back, the music thrumming in my lungs. The earth shrugs, and I fall.
The earth, or my son beneath my feet.
Know-all has not moved. ‘See you later,’ he says.
I see something over me, cresting vastly in the sky.
A great white wave is breaking over Erebus.
I watch it, like a scroll unfurling across the night, and then it falls.
*
The dark beneath the water is the dark of a tunnel, strange and cold. There is light here, ahead of me, and stone beneath and around me. In my wake come the shadows of Erebus. I drift forwards, and see the pale white light extinguish in the flow. On I go. There is something waiting: a strange shell like a turtle riding a cart, and standing beside, a man begs for his life.
Do I look so ferocious?
There’s something silver, hanging on a chain. I should take it: the thing calls to me, a piece of my son. I reach for it, but I have no hands with which to lift it from him.
Only a nightmare mouth.
Later, blue lights spiral and flash, and the water changes around me.
In cool blue water, I abide. I can breathe. There is no need for haste. The sea is my body, extended from my flanks and touching everything all around, fish and mammals and boats and stones, beating hearts and barnacled keels, panics and expulsions. Half a mile away, a crab fisher sleeps in his boat. At the same distance in the opposite direction there is a turtle, and if I were hungry he would make a fine meal. There are thousands of fish too small to bother with, and countless humans flouncing in the surf. I can feel them as a patch of thrashing and incompetence all along one side, and then around my mouth there is that sense you do not possess, a tingling aspiration that colours each kinetic bundle with tints of life or its absence. No danger that I might pursue that cast-off net floating a mile behind, mistaking it for a seal. No danger I might miss the tuna out in the blue water, or the shaking, terrified man who hangs before me in an attitude of worship.
What a strange thing is a man beneath the waves. What a weird, dangerous journey to undertake, to venture into a place where you cannot breathe; to mix, without defences, with things that might tear you apart; to float in an alien element over the ruins of a temple empty these thousand years. All done in quest of what, exactly? Not power, not wealth. He possesses both. Wonder? Is there not enough that is beautiful and appalling on dry land?
As the warm river washes me and I dream – stationary in the flow and therefore truly resting for this one instant, however long it may last – he stares back at me, tiny and floundering and only now awake to how absolute is my dominion, here, in this place where we both are.
What is going through his mind? Mortality? You might think so. And yet there is something more, a kind of greed, an ambition to possess me, carry me back on shore with him and have me as his trophy, not dead but still living. In acknowledging my absoluteness, he has fallen in love with me. In some quite sexless way, he wants my body to be his, and his mine.
He drops something, down into the deep. A sacrifice of gold and silver.
‘Quick!’ Know-all says. ‘Quick!’
My body is a better mother than my mind and has already dived after it: spinning glitter in the dark, leaving the man behind.
One, two, and done. I hold my prize.
And turn, and let it fall into the depths of the river. His gift to me, mine to the river. His talisman. My key.
On the far side of Cocytus, the stream that is called Lamentation, I step on to dry land and keep walking. Behind me, on the other bank, two armies of maggots and peacocks are drowned in the desert.
*
On the plain of Erebus in the kingdom of Hades, close by the black and atrocious river Styx, I light a cooking fire and call my dinner by its secret name. Blind river bass, the size of feral tomcats and with ugly heads like mason’s trowels, flop ecstatic at my feet. Strange they may be, but they taste well enough – and in this barren, scentless place the smell of a pan full of oil and spices is like warming sunlight in a winter room. With the mud of Erebus on my fingers, I know all manner of local trivia: the last decent cook to pass this way in full possession of herself was Agata of Delphi, five hundred years ago. She was hunting for her husband, but the wretched man was alive and living in Macedonia with a snake dancer. She cooked the memory of a bird, a goose-like thing from ages past, and by it bought this bitter confirmation of life. Sometime later, with a fruit pie, she gained conveyance to a lesser heaven, and there is served by men with sculptors’ hands, and converses with naiads. I don’t know whether she still does lunches, but all things are possible.
I might try to command Charon, I suppose. But why should I, when I can bargain, and be polite? The mud whispers that he loves to eat, so I cook, and let the smell of tender flesh and pepper be my herald.
I know his presence by the crackle of dry wood and the brush of mountain wind. At length I pick him out, almost invisible against the flow. He poles towards me, hands wet with black water, wiping them on his robe as he steps ashore and drags the ferry up on to the bank. I offer to trade fish for passage, and when he takes a mouthful to test the goods, he laughs aloud. He asks my name, and I go to tell him it is Athenais, but when I try I simply say ‘Alkahest’ and he nods and brings my fingers to his lips. He is handsome, in an alien way.
The fish is good enough, he says, that I must have a cushion, and if I will make it for him again I may steer the boat. I wonder what it would be like to live here, cadging rides along the hateful river and fishing from its banks. Restful, I suspect, to the point of dull. I say as much to the ferryman, and he laughs again. Beneath our keel the hissing water snarls defiance at his mirth, and Charon grins wider still. He sees me to the far side with a flourish, and crushes heavy-heeled some pincer
ed crab that tries to nip at me as I depart.
It occurs to me, as he waves and poles away, that Charon may be desperate to get laid.
Handsome he undoubtedly is. But still: best walk on.
*
The river Lethe is wide, but shallow. Forgetting is a fragile thing, and the memory of pain or anger can resurface when the wind is right. I wade across, and feel the whisper of trivialities departing from my mind: four decades of seeing myself age in the mirror, and the names of countless old lovers wash away on the warm tide. These are my secrets. Let them not come back. The willing sacrifice is pleasing to the water, and I hear her whisper ‘Peace’ as I walk on. I feel for some great change in myself, some loss of acquired wisdom, and find nothing.
Another river behind me.
*
Acheron is home to Cerberus, the Hound of Woe. He comes at me silently across the flood, mistakes and miscalculations shaped into a monster, and each head a horror unto itself. He is doubt given fangs: that ghastly introspective recrimination that rides my chest in the midnight hours, the desperate need to turn back the clock or cut out from myself the choice I made and leave it by the road. Acheron and Lethe are two sides of the same coin. If I had given up more to the last river, this one should not see me at all.
Well, still. Mistakes are what they are, and they make us just as surely as our moments of wisdom. I don’t trust anyone without the scarring of error in her heart, and least of all some cleaned-up version of myself.