Spirit Wars (12 page)

She
can’t explain how she came to such a conclusion among a number of more rational
impressions. She can just feel it. By a strange twist of fate it also has
something to do with her past. But the thing about her past is, she’s got
selective amnesia that dims the especially bad patches.

****

Sephtimus
doesn’t know what’s happening to him either. This warm and glowing thing inside
him. A very private creature – more like a coffin that’s been nailed shut,
chained, cemented and then cast down a river – now he feels the need for
something different, for in fact the opposite. He suddenly longs to share.
Everything. All the broken mementos of the mortal life he once gave up, the
petty concerns and squabbles of humankind that he’s now acquainted with only
through a looking glass, and all the lost dreams and fate-balloons floating
down River Akheron to the Drain of the World; the lowest of all depths.

It’s
rising from the core of him, uncontrollable, resurrecting every cell and
cramming every space of his being. His heart has coughed up eons of dust and
has started pumping again. At first rusty but creaking faster and faster and
gaining momentum. He knows the risks. All the alarms inside his brain are
ringing and warning him of the pain of getting burned. But he can’t help it.
For the first time since his appointment as the Unbendable Atropos, the Grim
One, he’s falling deep into a hole he’s glad to have stumbled into.

Diegis,
that was my mortal name. My parents were from Dacia. It was a land in the midst
of and surrounding the Carpathians, where Romania and Moldova now lie. But I
was born in Puteoli in Campania and didn’t really know anything of my roots.
Nor was I aware of how the whole world was changing in those times; every
chess-piece, every square being ushered into place by a long arm and a whisper
in the dark: Imperium Romanum.

The
port city of Puteoli was like a whole country unto itself, certainly world
enough for a little boy like me, what of all the merchants, ambassadors, seamen
and soldiers from territories as distant and enchanted as Parthia and Aegyptus.
On rare occasions but with increasing frequency now, it all comes back to me in
a whiff and a faint echo: the smell of sulfur that pervaded the air from the
Forum Vulcani and the sound of the whole world speaking all at once, with
different lengths of tongue.

Tragically,
instead of being born properly into the light of day, I was born feet first
into a special structure called the Cavea. You probably know it better through
its namesake, the Anfiteatro Flavio, also known as the Colosseo. The Cavea and
the Colosseo both played host to the infamous Blood Games.

I
fell straight down its secret, dark complex of cells and tunnels. Outside, it
was a majestic edifice of stone and marble but it was more than that in the
imagination of a child: a prostrate golem where deep down lay a ticking,
pumping heart of trapdoors, capstans, chains, and lifts. The lining of its
stomach had sluice gates where gallons upon gallons of Neptune’s water poured
forth to wash away all the blood, vomit, urine, and excrement. In a word, the
stink of fear and death.

The
greedy mother that it was, the Cavea did not discriminate. It had all of us
trapped inside the hungry maze of its bowels – man and beast, pagan and
believer, the living and the dying – all cast together into one laughing,
crying, and convulsing heap.

Yes,
the giant mother was blind. It didn’t treat you differently because of wizened
wisdom or youthful passion. Not because of your innocence or guilt or whether
you had two organs hanging on your chest or only one between your legs. She was
very consistent in her criteria. She rewarded only two virtues:  strength
and uninhibited violence. We were all bound by the same oath. Slave or freeman,
everyone had uttered the words “Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari.” (I
will endure to be burned, to be tied, to be beaten, and to be killed by the
sword).

But
who am I fooling? I
was
unique. At least the hot iron for beasts hadn’t
touched my skin. The symbol wasn’t seared on me like on the foreheads of those
slaves who had tried to run away. Like the white chalk that my biological
mother bore on her foot while she stood naked in front of wealthy, fat Romans.
Or the plaque that was hung around my father’s neck detailing his name,
abilities, health, and bad character as he crouched inside a wooden pen in the
public square.  No sooner had the man been purchased out of the market
than he led a revolt with the other slaves, who outnumbered their masters five
to three. He paid with his life when his co-conspirators shrank away at the
moment of truth. He died screaming: “To you, Zalmoxis, I depart!”

My
mother said my father was a real Dacian, unafraid of death. I didn’t think my
father was a brave man, only foolish. That was how most people remembered him
anyway – if they remembered him at all. I would’ve filled my mind with more
practical matters. For instance, if my mother had only become a freewoman, then
by relation I would’ve also been freed. But she had remained a non-person to
the day she brought me into the world. She also cut her throat with the
master’s razor, leaving me at my tender age to pick up the pieces. 

I
remember, over the loss of one of his chattels and apparently his favorite, not
to mention the sudden acquisition of liability in me, the old master was
furious and inconsolable –that is, until another slave offered to buy me to
become
his
slave. This was Petipor, a fellow Dacian who knew my father
and felt a kinship with people of the same natio.

I
wasn’t like the celebrated Secutores or Retiarii. They were born to fight. But
there were others like me, too, inside the stifling belly of the Cavea. For
instance, Petipor was a musician who would sometimes teach me how to play the
aulos. This was a double-reed pipe that you played in pairs. It looked like a
flute, but it was really more of an oboe or a bagpipe in sound.

Among
us, there were dancers, jugglers, acrobats, a magician, a jester, a dwarf, and
a hunchback. We were the freaks, the weaklings. The invisible and
indispensable. The people in the shadows, behind the walls and under the
floors, who made sure doors opened and locked with perfect timing and the
beasts got fed right before they went berserk.

In
the morning, we took care of the parades, the tame circus acts, the skits, and
the simulated hunts. We made varieties of entertainment possible to keep the
inured voyeurs calm before the Games themselves. We put on shows that pitted
bull against bear, bull against lion, bull against monoceros; lion against
tiger, lion against bear, lion against elephant, and so forth. And then there
was the beast called man, unmatched in his brutality, who rattled the cages of
these natural predators and made them fiercer and fiercer in addition to being
starved and whipped for days.  This Beast Master would then place himself
before bull, before lion, before bear, and the whole cycle was repeated.

Finally,
for shows that featured the hunters, the whole place would be transformed
overnight into a grandiose killing-field. In the middle of the harena, rolling
hills and glistening streams would rise, complete with trees and bushes. I
learned there was no end to the imagination of man when it came to killing.

But
no matter how far each of us marched, in the end we all still ended up in the
same place. Like we had been dancing non-stop to the same tune; dancing till
our bodies dropped in exhaustion but the music still played. Like a broken
record. For years, this tune tortured me. I couldn’t put my finger on it and it
haunted me.

But
then all at once, there it was playing to me one day, clearer than I had ever
heard it and more beautiful than I had ever imagined: Mussorgsky’s Trepak.
Across the millennia, a poet found the words and the Russian composer added the
beautiful melody to them, but the music had attempted many times over to emerge
in my inadequate mind. I suppose if I was ever meant to be an artist, I was a
frustrated one and failed to nurture the gift of music to its full potential.

It
was towards the incoherent sounds of the beasts that I gravitated. It was to
them I felt the closest; to the wolves and the great cats, boars and bears,
apes and reptiles. Some of them were born in captivity like me and had never
learned to survive in the wild. All we had to do was survive the harsher
environment of the Cavea.

I
was a cageboy, the youngest in all of Italia.  Apart from me, there was
only one other soul who silently protested against the organized slaughter of
the animals. Aquilia, a free-born and a free spirit. She was the Roman girl
with the lightest-blue eyes and the most infectious laugh; who, in her long
immaculate tunic, often stole away from home and lingered around the cages with
me to feed and heal the innocent – the peacocks and elephants from India, the
cameleopards and monoceroses from Africa, the lynxes and camels from Asiana.
She saw a kindred spirit in those beasts as well. She felt cooped up in the
crowded and dirty city and longed to travel, to sail across the vast sea, and
to gain more knowledge even though she was a girl. She felt suffocated by her
father who pronounced everything in her family, including the man she would
someday marry.  She wanted to grow wings and to live.

“But
you do
live,” I would tirelessly remind her. “You are a rich, free,
legitimate, smart, and… ah… lovely citizen of Rome.” Certain words faltered in
my throat every time I spoke to her. “What more do you wish?”

“It
isn’t the same at all. Living and existing are two completely different things.
It’s like when you gaze into the eyes of any of these animals, I dare you to
say I’m wrong, do you not recognize the glimmer of a soul? Something beyond all
this, something that yearns to be free.”

“I’m
just a slave. There’s no life or peace for me outside these walls, outside the
Cavea. If I can’t see things happening for myself, how can I see them for these
animals?”

“This
is why it has to start from within you, Diegis. You have to know what your
worth is to the world.  Only then will people around you see and respect
you for who you really are…

“You’ve
already glimpsed it: a man–sized Tityrus looking away and breaking into tears
every time the Gladiators step out of those arches to the Games. An elephant
bending the bars of his cage, fighting and dying side by side with his mate. A
she-wolf howling over the death of her offspring. If animals can show this
measure of compassion and decency towards others, then what does that make of
us? What does that make of all of us?”

She
believed in me. That was perhaps the original sin. Because the tiny seed of a
dream could grow a sprout, and then roots. Before I knew it, I was entertaining
newer and bigger ideas in my head. Dangerous ideas of a whole life with Aquilia
outside the Cavea, outside Puteoli. I started scrimping and tucking away my
wages in a pouch that was slung around my neck even when I lay sleeping in the
horses’ stalls. I had giddy fantasies of buying my freedom and becoming a
libertus, a freeman.

But
to be a freeman wasn’t in the cards for me. I was to be a showman of the Cavea
to the very end, to star in the least popular noontime portion of my unnatural
mother’s show: Objicĕre bestiis, meaning devoured by beasts. They tied me
to a post atop a small chariot, very like a wheelbarrow, and then they pushed
me out onto the harena.

I
had become noxii. Because I attempted to escape and, worse, to elope with a
Roman minor. Aquilia and I intended to stow away in one of those giant
Alexandrian grain ships moored to the docks but we were caught. It was the
story of a forbidden young love.

From
the post to which I was bound, stripped of everything save for a loincloth, I
gazed across the hot sand at a lioness, befuddled with hunger and not
recognizing the smell of the boy who had fed and cared for her for years. I
locked gazes with her like Aquilia had asked me to once, but in those fierce
eyes I saw nothing of what she saw and I was even more disappointed with
myself.

In
the eyes of the beast, there were only the pangs of hunger, the urge to slay,
and the law of nature taking over. Artaxias was one of those trained man-eaters
from Parthia. The mob thought she was a male in her ferocity and named her
thus.

She
was a true State Executioner. As soon as she had pounced on me she made sure to
end me. She locked her vice-like jaws on either side of my neck and I made only
the softest whimper, the tiniest sigh as she pressed my windpipe shut.

I
felt her latch on my throat till the last breath of life escaped me. Onto the
other side, she was the perfect doula, or midwife, that a newborn could ask
for.

And
so it was that I left the stage in the same precarious way I had entered it.
The Cavea was my entire world and the only life I ever knew, but I wasn’t the
only child she survived. Half a million other men and a million beasts had come
before me and would still come after me.

I
watched my lifeless body being dragged with a hook. It was an eerie and
disorienting sensation. I saw my troupe standing and crying in the shadows;
there was nothing they could have done. Even the tribe of chimpanzees fell
quiet and somber in that moment, consoling each other inside their cages.
Barrus the Indian elephant slipped his trunk between the bars and tried to reach
me while the seals taken all the way from Ultima Thule in the frozen North
wailed in hair-raising anguish.

Petipor,
my guardian and employer, walked with my body all the way into the mortuary,
where I was laid on a pile of fresh corpses. He took out his aulos, the only
pair he had, and tucked it under my crossed arms because he knew it was my
favorite. He bent down to whisper in my ear: “You’re free now, child.”

He
felt a shiver as he walked out, and it must’ve been the premonition of his own
end that passed him by because not long after that day, he would hang himself
from one of the sturdier platforms that carried elephants and hippopotami to
the surface. 

The
door was slammed shut and I felt free at last from a life of toil and violence.
The mortuary was completely dark and quiet save for a few beams of daylight
coming in and some sand trickling through the timber floor of the games above
that made hissing noises. Intermittently I could hear the muffled roar of the
crowd floating from the seats through the porta libitinaria down the
tunnel.  Habet, hoc habet! they screamed. And Ure! Ure! Burn him up!

Without
warning, everything fell into a deafening hush as though all the breath in the
hall had been sucked away by a fiery explosion. I was astonished to find a
strange visitor standing before me, hunched like a vulture, hooded and
mysterious. At first I thought it was the executioner who had stayed behind
amidst all the dead but he was not attired in his usual costume of bird mask
and leather boots. He had also discarded his tunic for a cowl that was the very
color of flames, fading from hues of deep orange to light yellow.

He
was still the Etruscan Charun, the underworld daemon, but instead of a mallet
to deliver finishing blows, this person carried on his back a pair of then
folded wings that seemed to be made up of a thousand iron feathers; like those
armor-piercing arrowheads of the sagittarii, only each one of them is intricate
and polished to razor-sharpness.

I
have heard of such a creature only in rumors, this Avalerion. Larger than an
eagle and lord over all birds. Plumage the color of fire and wings and talons
that could cut through flesh and bone. Only a pair is said to exist at any one
time. It was little wonder that the heralds would portray it as a bird without
a beak – and without feet! It dawned on me that this being didn’t belong in the
Cavea or in the world of the living, and a great coldness rushed through me.

“You
are a man among men, Diegis. I have searched far and wide for someone like
you,” the outsider spoke in a soft but resonant voice, only gray humanoid lips
and chin visible from under hood and shadow. To my surprise, both the voice and
contour of the lips suggested a feminine owner. “I have drifted across many
worlds, and I am… bone-weary.”

I
stood rooted to the spot as though in my insubstantial form I had become the
sorceress’ puppet. Like a wisp of jinn trapped inside an unseen bottle.

“I
have come to make you an offer. A trade that can only be freely undertaken. I
will grant you immortality for an equal lifespan of service. If you so desire,
no more will you suffer pain, sickness, death or grief. No man will command
above you. You shall have the whole world to roam as your kingdom, and you
shall hold power over all life, to match creation with destruction.

“You
shall be the Grim Tyrant: unbending, unseen, unchallenged. The Great Equalizer.
You shall humble the proudest ruler and bring relief to the lowliest servant.”

She
pointed a clawed, long, bony finger at me. And as the sleeve of her robe fell,
the rest of her calcified arm was revealed.  

“But
you must heed this warning: What I speak of is nothing like your paltry human
oaths. Once you enter your name into this contract, you shall forsake all
vestiges of your mortal existence and all other bonds that come with it. You
shall know only the life of a death angel, bereft of company and untouched by
nature for all eternity.”

I
felt incredulous and undeserving more than anything else, to be chosen among
countless others. What was it in me that had drawn her, I wondered. Still I
ruled out the possibility of a trick and judged the creature to be free from
human guile and to be above malice. There was something in her words that told
me she was incapable of lying. At that very moment it also occurred to me that
I had lost faith in my own kind, and Death was as pure as the beasts but more
intelligent than them. I felt myself warming up to the otherworldly ambassador.

Perhaps
it was because she was bound by the same terms of the covenant she spoke of. I
was, in essence, to trade one life of servitude for another under a different
set of rules. Different and more just. It gave reward to good service and
probably meted out an equal dose of punishment for failure and attempts of
breach.

Thoughts
of immortality didn’t tempt me. In spite of all the injustices I had witnessed
and borne in my expired life, I wasn’t embittered. It might seem hard to
believe but I had a fairly good idea of what human existence was in its
entirety. It was sufferings and triumphs, peaks and troughs. They were halves
of a whole; one could not exist without the other. I had my own stolen moments
of happiness – with my friends in the circus, my guardian Petipor, all the
animals in the Cavea, and of course Aquilia. And though I passed away so young,
I had been taught well by my extreme circumstances during the brief sixteen
years that was given me. The stark difference had made everything clear in my consciousness.

Death
offered and described to me the deal exactly as it was. No more, no less. I
sensed this easily enough from my semi-divine negotiator. But it was something
in me, something in my own character that flew towards the bargain and made me
know my answer even before it had entered my mind. Like it had been written
right from the start in some diary of destiny that I would accept.

And
so I did. I suppose in my heart of hearts I wanted to be in the best spot this
time, at the podium or even the imperial box. It didn’t matter whether I was an
active participant or a helpless spectator, I desired to watch over the
cessation of bitter-sweet life for every breathing thing in the world. I burned
with a sick voyeurism towards the struggle of all creatures that cling on to
something so fragile, so ephemeral, and so pointless. After all these formal
considerations, I shook Death’s ice-cold hand and walked away from the mortal
world without a backward glance.

I
couldn’t interfere with human affairs. Only in that final moment between life
and death was I permitted to make my presence felt; when I severed the thread
of life, the umballicus, that anchored humans onto the land of the living.
These were the first of the rules I had to live by in my new role as the
Atropos Wyrd, one of a triumvirate of Fate-dealers.

In
between my duties, I often watched Aquilia in my phantom form yet was unable to
console her with the news that I had moved on to a better though stranger
place. I yearned to tell her stories of all my travels and to instruct her how
wide the world was – certainly much wider than she had thought or could ever
conceive. And when she was finally compelled to marry by her father, I was
there too in the house where she had been raised and looked on knowingly at the
sadness that hid behind the familiar smile.

Still
she became a dutiful wife and a caring mother. And if the affection she
eventually learned to feel for her husband was ever found wanting, the love she
showered on her children more than made up for it. I watched her attain a life
of genuine happiness and contentment.

She
surrounded herself with a string of pets: a Vertragus, which was a Celtic breed
of hound, a house-snake, a fawn, a tortoise, a swan, a peacock, a pair of
doves, a dozen geese, five green parrots, three ravens, a family of hares, and
two monkeys. But when she finally lost the fight against old age and succumbed
to senility, what names would she be calling but those of the long-dead
performers of the Cavea: Barrus the elephant, Artaxias the lioness, Innocence
the white bear, and me, Diegis, in her rheumy eyes preserved in all my youth.
She would often make hurried and furtive preparations for our elopement and
make her way to our long-expired tryst, to the annoyance of the house slaves
and the amusement of all her grownup children.

I
must admit I was almost tempted every time to violate the rules and reveal my
supernatural nature to her. It was very curious how the human mind worked – or
faltered. The most urgent things became immaterial while those that are
decades-old were pushed to the foreground as though they had happened only
yesterday. If Aquilia could only see, she would know that her fantasy was not
far from the truth. There I stood in the same room with her, unmoved by the
sweeping hands of time and as tall and eternal as the first time she laid eyes
on me. She, on the contrary, had been transformed into a shambling, stooped,
and wrinkled old woman. Everything had been eroded away but for that small
space in her memory where her first love still burned bright.

In
the blink of a reaper’s eye came the crumbling of Rome and all its grandeur and
decadence. There were looting, rape, more atrocities, and the unrelenting death
toll. More work for me and the Crows. We were kept busy. Deep down I also knew
I was tearing off and burning the pages of a book that held what little
evidence there was of my human existence.

Wiping
the world clean of all traces of my former self was a much easier and more
irrevocable step than I had anticipated. First there was the Plague of Flavius
Justinianus. After that came Atra Mors, the Black Death. Both made all the
victims through hundreds of years of the Empire seem nothing more than a drop
in the bucket. With poetic justice, the fleas and the black rats took vengeance
on man on behalf of all the wolves, the great felines, and the gargantuan
elephants that the Empire had slaughtered. And though the masses feared the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there were only me, the Crows, and the anger
that I had kept tempered in my heart.

I
was the “Pied Piper” who in 1284 bought scores of children and orphans from the
German village of Hamelin and had them settle in parts of Central Europe, some
of them even in my own motherland, Dacia Superior, left empty by relentless
barbarian invasions. The only difference was, I was the more sinister and
dramatic version with the rats and instead of taking away waves upon waves of
the filthy creatures to drown them in the river, I brought them with me. Yes,
scurrying with their tiny feet off the ships and along the mooring lines down
to the sewers to breed a whole army parallel to the unsuspecting city; three
rat mercenaries for every cringing human. Humankind, for me, was the real
vermin that had to be eradicated. Everyone was guilty either in complicity or
inaction.

Still,
I wasn’t as frenzied as the Crows. And I bore witness to how, in the event of a
great pestilence, the line between the living and the dying blurred. There were
more than a few executions that passed unaccounted for. It was all I could do
stop the insatiable Crows from preying mindlessly. 

I
suppose what I wanted was to play the role of the flute-playing satyr that the
Romans had been so fond of. What was running through my mind but kept eluding
me was the marching tune of the Cavea, the Trepak, still formless and sleepless
inside my head in that era. I only played pieces from old Petipor’s repertoire
as poor substitutes. I had the exact aulos he had gifted me and playing it
rewarded me with the feeling that I was in a way avenging him. All of us. For
Petipor in particular, it was the aulos subverting the lyra; the slave
outwitting the master. Madness finally overtaking reason. No man in all the
land was safe. Every soul, from the bowed scum to the lofty emperor, was
dancing to my tune.

And
the weak, delirious, highly-sensitive children from the frozen steppes outside
Khanbaliq to the crowded plague houses of London, they kept hearing me, humming
to themselves and creating new tunes. They passed them on to the surviving ones
till ultimately the words took shape out of their separate contributions on the
playground:

Ring around the rosies,

A pocket full of posies,

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

We all
fall down.

But
for all these theatrics which would’ve made the Cavea proud, I had been
helpless to do that which I desired the most, to be with Aquilia. In her last
days, it was like we had exchanged places with the beasts and we lived like
exhibits inside a giant terrarium, a pane of glass constantly between us. Or at
least I lived in this world, my own version of Pluto, cursed with the ability
to see her but not to speak to her or to touch her, and she was perfectly
unaware of my presence. It was the pain of non-existence that I suffered.