The Asp and The Hierophant
29 December 2018 | G | 1,862 words Zachary yells at some bishops to GO TO BED so their accidental invocations can stop bothering him, then feels bad about it. Set a couple months before his pilgrimage, he's late 17~early 18 here.
Zachary, prospective Pontifex, was ruminating in his quarters when the summons came. A messenger called intuition visited him as an electrified spectre, and a nagging one, that trailed fingers down his neck and his arms and his sides and all sorts of places he hated being touched, which was everywhere. Come! It whispered, cloying, with a touch lighter than his own fingernails ghosting over the reliefs of his silver fruitbowl. Moonlight from the window cast a mirror's brilliance upon the thing, while its holdings – grapes and apples, peaches and plums – shone dimly like cabochon crystals. Let pride be in arts, in arts there be beauty, in beauty be sublime ostentation. How virtuously the bishops had inculcated into him their rhetoric, if now even a fruit was a gemstone.
Like a blowfly beating against a window, static tapped at his spine.
Zachary glanced away from his sneering reflection to the silken canopy of his bed. Perhaps he should try settling in again. Though he'd long acknowledged that insomnia made a sinner of him every midnight, at least he could boast of two full years now free of nocturnal elopments or misdemeanours. Scripture recitals so would be his mind's fodder for the inevitable hours of lying on a slab.
Lightning arced across Zachary's face, landing at the back of his skull. He whipped around, hand to his head, as if stricken and nursing the wound. But only air could be his aggressor. Else, the water flowing calmly down the walls, strung with luminant silver that trailed to frame the wall-clock. Not yet midnight.
Fine, then. If they'd insist, he'd attend.
Zachary exited his room into the Hall of Magnificence. Ivory sigils climbed vast walls and vaulted columns, spangled with precious cuts of turquoise, ruby, deep larimar and bright sunstone. Jades were God's eyes, garnets, his halo, and the nacre cast above the windows was the skin of his servant, the Adversary. Virtuous artistry curbed the garishness that an amateur mosaicist would've surely inflicted, allowing only – sublime, ostentatious – beauty to flourish in this abstracted recount, again, of the scriptures. They were truly inescapable here, and more fluently read in this rainbow geometry than in ink and paper for Zachary.
Even with his head buzzing like a wire, it enamoured him. Failure to appreciate this work would be sacrilege indeed. So he paused, and breathed, with head craned to the ceiling, eyes tracing the symbols, then, as though Camille were properly there, judged himself minutely calmer.
With that calmness, he saw a wretch in a holy room of holy symbols adorned in holy vestments. The worst part of him found none of it inappropriate.
The rest of him bit his lip and bowed his head.
Instinct tugged him quietly down the halls, until his intangible harrier faded under the sound of many men whispering. Though the double-doors of the Bishops' Hall muffled their words, their voices soon cleared as Zachary listened. He cared not to individuate them.
“—challenged boy who can't even speak. If the country—”
Ah.
Politics.
Zachary frowned peevishly at the door, then set his ear back against it.
“—rather, that assures his speech, when fluent, is God. The distinction is clearer than ever. We ought to welcome—”
“—often refuses to study. His manner with the acolytes—”
“Yes, they bore him. Because he is decades ahead. That is from inspiration, not study.”
“—impeccable reliability. If not him, who would you name? We've no place to deny—”
“—his legitimacy aside—”
“Legitimacy aside!?”
“—legitimacy aside, none will accept a heretic.”
“A heretic! Who is blessed, who has known scripture more precisely than those who can read it!”
“As we know. But they will see a pagan. Nothing can hide it – his birth shows when he so much as blinks. Upon God's throne we seat what seems a son of solipsism, ego, and Archons—”
Zachary threw the doors open.
They boomed against the walls like thunder.
All bickering stopped. The rest being either too scared or stunned, only one bishop chanced an, “Ah, Zachary,” as he stormed though candlelight up the aisle to the dais. Upon it stood a ceremonial bowl of purified water. Once above it, Zachary bit his hand – painless, beneath his medication – and allowed his blood to dribble into the bowl.
A single droplet breached the water. Ripples broke, the droplet broke, and what would be dissipation instead was an unravelling, an unfurling, a flowerbud blooming to Zachary's mind. When he then struck the bowl off its stand, and its contents splayed like offal over the aisle, the spillage stank keenly of iron and sullied the floor with deep crimson.
It painted a pattern reminiscent of Nine Columbines' zinnias in bloom. And so, with that thought, they were.
To his hushed audience, in Camille's diction, Zachary recited: How ought innocent man cohabit unmolested the domains of the hunter, the wraith, and the spectre. Upon the eve of ghouls, let rejuvenating sleep divest you to daybreak: and may the anointed bladesman stand guard.
The men below him trembled, down in their knees, in their hands. Even the most composed held their jaws rigid as they shortly bowed their heads and departed the room. One poor man, clothes flecked with red petals, shook too violently to stand – fortunately, before Zachary had to consider shouldering him, two of his fellows assisted him instead.
In the wake of those jittery footsteps, the room fell empty but for Zachary, flowers, and an overturned bowl.
Why had he done that.
Wasn't he past this?
There was no use lambasting himself. Zachary knelt to gather the bowl and began shuffling around the room on his knees, scooping up the flowers.
No use lambasting himself. But meditation upon his actions was vital if he was to understand them.
He'd been irritated. He didn't like people talking about him. He wanted them to shut up. He didn't stay in his room when he could've. He didn't leave the door when he could've. And he didn't have the wits, once he intruded, to do anything but scare and corral them.
It bothered him, he slipped, and he did something that was possibly harmful and definitely stupid. That simple.
So, nothing special, just more of the same. He sighed as he set the bowl, now full of flowers, upon its holder. So many petals layered upon each other evoked a pool of blood easily. Zachary closed his eyes and dipped his hand in; cool, thin, and wet, it may as well be water. The liquid, when he looked again, was clear.
Dark little splotches speckled the floor as he flicked his hand dry. Each one seemed a censure, the eyes of voles glaring quite balefully. You link us to God? You link us to your chicanery.
His shame could strangle him. Like it would anyone reasonable. Thank God!
At least, were he ever damned, it wouldn't be for ignorance. Just failure.
Zachary stalked through the Magnificent Hall to his room, where he collapsed on his bed and rubbed his hands against his reddened cheeks to savour the mortification.
Yes. Let sound arguments enrage him – let truth bring out that arrogant god and whip it until it drew knives. The bishops were right in their misgivings. Zachary would be a terrible Pontifex.
Did he want authority so much to keep lying? To start a blood schism? Or a holy war? Was the rule of a rude idiot worth that? Did he know whose council to trust? How to arbitrate? Had he cultivated even a single skill that benefited another? Wisdom he hadn't regurgitated? A personality that was coherently just? So how could he give? What would he gain?
Him, him, him, him, him, him, him. The sickening part was that he never got sick of it.
If he weren't such an egotist to think himself higher than God, he wouldn't need to worry in the first place about surrendering down.
His sheets whistled dimly as he tossed in his bed, answered only by the ticking of the clock, and the tinkling of clear water.
Zachary knocked on the door to the Grand Bishop's quarters, a nectarine cupped behind his back and bold in the early sunlight. The man who answered had a serene haggardness about him, with hair like the tines of a wire brush and skin like old yellowed parchment. Surprise smoothed his wrinkles into something admirably youthful. “Good morning, Zachary.”
Zachary presented the nectarine. “Good morning. I'm sorry.”
The bishop – his name was Amanthus – stooped his head in such a way that, had Zachary been smaller, he suspected the man would have crouched. “What for?”
“Goety.”
“No—no, Zachary, last night was nothing of the sort. Our Lord takes you as His hand; occasionally, He will move you.”
“I moved, sir.”
“Exactly. That is exactly what happened.”
“I. I moved. Me.”
“It must be unbelievable, yes. Perhaps even frightening. But know He will never place you where you mustn't be, or take you where you mustn't go. You are safe with Him, Zachary.”
Poor Amanthus, he's sweet but we're not communicating. Though he amused himself with the thought, equally there flashed an urge to carve out Amanthus' eye with the pit of the nectarine, push him down and stomp his temple. Careening through his head shot frenzied line upon frenzied line of scripture, not only tempering his desires but murdering them, as every hot and lively thing from his throat to his stomach fell numb.
Zachary focused to keep his hand stable; the twitching reminded Amanthus of the nectarine. He accepted it with a kind, “Thank you,” then rolled it reverently in his hands as though it truly were a globe of polished quartz.
As he was distracted, Zachary fled with his own “thank you.” The wetness in his palms seemed a slight too fresh for just sweat, and indeed once he turned the corner he found four crescents' worth of blood guttering down his headline. In the nearest fountain, he washed his hands and face clean, alternatively slapping and splashing his cheeks to exorcise his sudden exhaustion.
He'd rather be languishing in his room. Except not really, so shut up and wake up and die already.
Rather than dwell, he thought of Amanthus. That interaction had more or less gone okay, he decided.
Though he had to question whether an apology still counted when the recipient didn't understand they were wronged, for his own sake, he decided it did.
He stared at his reflection in the fountain, arms spread and hands braced on its rim. He looked fine. Certainly not wrathful, the way the demon inside him wanted him to be. So the scripture was working, and the fact Amanthus had stoked it meant he was right.
He was safe.
There was nothing God allowed for him that was without purpose. Everywhere he'd been had been vital. And since God deemed life a vehicle for joy, Zachary's destination, just as anyone's in the end, would be bright.
He wiped the tear off his cheek before it could hit the fountain.
The day this no longer happened, he will have achieved faith, he decreed, as he dipped his damp finger in the water.