Clemency

Several days passed after that. I, as permitted, remained on the plateau.

It was sometime in the first night that I sparked awake and sat up in the crater.

Frigid air whipped over my skin; I shivered, and hugged my shoulders. With my head hung my hair veiled my face. I still saw my knees; so what would an observer see?

I shuddered. My form shuffled a moment, glimmered like mirror-glass, then disappeared—I was made invisible like a chameleon. But I sighed and the camouflage ebbed. The shear of the wind and the cold insisted to me my solidity, alongside the pith of my own body, and the pump of my own blood, and were I to numb myself to even those reminders, that I might fade my brain into oblivion, well, actually, weirdly, I, it—

Actually the terrified adrenalin gushed so zestfully I wasn’t sure if I even could.

Blood yet wept down every inch of me. My own blood, and panic yet raged.

My core was sliced open. I had no defences. My citadel was broken. I could not form even a claw.

My size is all of what I’ve consumed. Some goes on outside. Some goes on inside. The differential is what makes me dynamic. All had been extinguished but this.

I needed to eat. To rebuild me.

But I was frozen hugging myself in that crater.

I wanted to wail before I would make choices. Yet even opening my mouth was a ‘choice’. I wanted to burrow into the sand and lay until everything just blinked away. But if I would call a lion’s jaws to feast, or a gazelle’s legs to sprint, so did this shape bring its innate instinct, and the instinct demanded by this shape was one that crippled me: humility.

(And how easy it wilts! Oh, Mephi, are you boasting that you...)

The human shape—the same shape as God—it exposes me too much to slavers. It’s the shape reprobates like to tag with a collar. It’s what the eye binds in a straightjacket. A cat is a cat and a beast is a beast, but a human being—oh God, the chisellers think that can be anything.

I guess that in Vamu, and over in Yeshimar, I wanted to hope in this certain naivety, well, not that anyone would really care, but at least be obliged toward me by procedure. In human shape I fell as always through frail hands like an ill fruit through boughs of leaves. Down and down, to dark and dark, until the deep of the dark suspended me. The only one who could catch me, and did in that place, was Czjeir.

There was nobody else. I’m glad, when there’s nobody else. When I grovel every second for another breath, how much attention do you think that I’m getting? Hm?

Now there’s a deed of my ownership branded to Him with my name. My arrears are deep, yet I’m loosed on wide pasture. Look at it; as I live, as I move to do anything, as I delight in anything, simply I’m His.

If I bend to the rush of gluttony and lust, as the Hunger, I’ll still celebrate with ceaseless thanksgiving, relish for every lick of life, extol every gulp of Heaven, sit at His feet eager and zip like an arrow wherever He points.

If I learn one day to straighten my spine, as myself, I’ll do so bound to whatever ethic of penitence could even hypothetically sustain me more than the light of a soul. I am starved and my diet is indefatigable; I’m simply not fulfilled when my cup is ever so small as to reach its rim.

If I burn to assert my own glory, as my so-called ‘conscience’, the perfect laws I invoke to judge myself above everyone will always be His. I’ll reap the swill and raise the Bishops. You’ll not mark any flaw against me that I didn’t castigate first; for the contemptuous snickering sludge that I am, even more than you Saints, I’m just impeccable.

And I adore every one. Now isn’t that freedom?

Yet in the night from my gutted core I am bleeding, shivering with hands looped around my knees, because I know what you will see, the only shape upon which you’ll slam an iron maiden—no, I would rather you did that, it’ll prove I won’t die. I won’t even be nicked. When the door creaks open I hope you’ll gasp and you’ll scream and you’ll curse at your own worthless, wicked boxes.

I am a chimera. I have three heads. They all snap in their own vicious ways. I am a venomous taipan. My words poison the heart and whatever I bite will not survive. I am a cone snail. You cannot touch me. An oryx; fleet escaper. A bustard; terrestrial aviator. A tricky jerboa. A sharp-eared bat. Anything. Anything.

But please, just not a human.

I can’t do that. It’s the sole one I can’t.

I shuddered a sigh, with my brow set upon my knees.

Rajj had been my birthday. I’d had such a party. My biggest gift, from Czjeir, was the stage from which to proclaim, “Here I am!” Yes wow! I’m existing! And so I’ll announce it, I’ll shout it so loud you won’t get it wrong. I am this, I’m like this, I do this, I’m for this, I think I constructed quite the introduction.

And because we were all working together, the Hunger had been nice to me, even my conscience had been nice to me—I felt... for the first time, I really felt anything. I’d actually, probably, maybe, done something... o-okay?

Had I done something okay? I hadn’t scared anyone? Maybe I’d shocked them a moment like, ‘boo!’, but had they all enjoyed it too? Should I have shut up and been quiet? No... it was more polite to reveal myself, since my condition would impose me on people regardless. And it really was fun to explore Rajj. I liked meeting the people—there was Veda, the nun, the Gedjadsyi priest, the palatines, the Bishop...

...Man, I really am worthless.

When I’m not dressed up in fur and hooves, I seize at the thought of facing any one of them.

One-way communications; that’s all I really like. A layer of costumes; it entertains my pretentions. But I hadn’t been lying. Czjeir wants me to talk to people. That’s why I’d been given...

In the cold midnight the whorls of the wind wailed up sand-puffs and goosebumps.

My fingers crawled up to my forehead. Screamers burbled in my glutes.

Slowly I considered that all of my choices may have been wrong.

And the day broke.

On the first day, the Bishop returned with a small coterie. We spoke, marginally. Into the copse he stationed over me palatines, then gave me a breakfast of barley and a book of the paeans. Recited verses did repulse me, much as splashings of acid to the face, but the answer came ‘why’ only after he left. Implications of actionable mercy, of compassion, and of righteous behaviour, set upon me by a pupil so bright with anticipation, scathed. ‘Any human being is capable, or has such a right to be holy’. Then why aren’t you, Mephi? How large is your shortfall? The lesson that I behave poorly is no great revelation to me.

Yet in the night and in the silence the words rose into my thoughts like bubbles to a pond’s surface. No doubt afflicted me on the credence of these edicts. Their advice laid on me as kind, and as sensible, and a lument cloud of fleece that, if I could grasp it, I ought fold around myself preciously. But were I to ask how to personally apply these laws, and shatter the shell of displacement around this cold statue, that hope might permeate in as dye, without making me puke, well, equally you could ask earnest icebreakers to the moon.

On the second day, investigations into Hejat tied the Bishop from visiting. Reports on me from Yeshimar also came in about afternoon. The palatine watch, which occasionally included Ptkiar or Keveh, observed me as though observing a queer and sick lizard. From pity from their lunchbags they offered a meal of scraps. Then blankets, coats—I still don’t understand how I evoke always such autonomous charity. You know, ‘I’m supposed to be fasting’. (Or aha!) I’m sorry, do you all have permission? But it was true at the offer that my mouth started to sweat.

Yet in the night through the pangs, the pains and the breaths heaving like boulders, my thoughts congealed elsewhere. By the days’ acclimatization I wasn’t, as fussed about feeling, still grievously wounded. So on other things I started to focus.

Awareness settled on me that all my acts recently may have been wrong. Everything that sprung upon accepting this constitution. Crucibles of nameless screams—spirits ravaged beyond repair, of course nothing good results. More likely I really was better off taking all this and just being human.

Walking through Rajj and eating a man; both had gratified me. I truly may have been stupid enough not to realise that all I should have been doing was more of the former.

Were I transported backwards with foreknowledge of the past week, though, I would probably change almost nothing. At most elope into the wilds, or speak with Madjea earlier... as though that weren’t two contradictions raised as easy as breath. Perhaps that real humility would’ve been accepting the palatines’ lunch. I never really know what I want.

On the third day, the hunger awoke. Fangs of fire gnashed down my arms and talons of ice shred into my bowels. The cavity inside swelled a void. God, oh God—if I knew anything then, it was that I’d been way too gentle to Hejat.

The beast itself yipped. It loped snickering about the palatines. It wagged its tail. Oh, it knew—happily—what a delicacy we’d caught here, and what a confectionery, we agreed was so irresistible, that we’d soon be untrammelled to have. It howled glee and it skipped and it nipped on my digits careless lovebites that burst pain at five thousand kelvins. And no Bishop today. I reached for a leash; any desirous vector that could shoot me away, into hills or plains but... a dome had closed around Rajj and its outskirts that guaranteed me stuck to this city.

Classic trick, Mephi—to try the alternatives only once you know they will fail.

Saliva sheeted from open jaws. My body pasted to the stone, on the precipice of the rock that shaded Rajj. Sweetness flooded my tongue, ah, that great sun, the tickling mellow cyst—yet my mind scratched for vectors away from this obsession. No part of me cared any more that the palatines were watching, the miniscule twitches, the adjustments of angle, the hitches of hyperventilation, (—but oh God!! Help, I’m bleeding, I’m hurt!? No, no, bask again in his sweetness, see, see, how relaxing—how exciting, to be near such great food—) as though I would swoop on him now, or even that I did this I still looked just like a man.

Yet in the night I would only wish for the monster to be corporeal, so that I could rip into its neck, and wrestle all its joints popped, and crunch its bones and ream it apart. So was the fury. Sans actionable outlet, it hissed like a cooking oil, in which my soul had to sit. By the degree of the braise of fury and pain I could understand the first inch of Hell; and by the fume of the vitriol of my own spite I desired only more, that I could scream louder and tear more viciously and with more indignation and to the sky and to everything crow highfalutin delusions of attaining apotheostically, even such a perfect acrimony.

My rage still could not refine me enough to ignore the dainties in the copse that the palatines had left.

So, perfect? So tepid, it’s barely a whelp. But curse it, I don’t care if they notice. If they celebrate, I’ll peel their stomachs like pork. Though then, what a waste of energy, for such flabby tripe-meat with the savour of dishwater... I should only have to do the things that so pleasure me.

I pared my nails into my own chest. Viscera gushed. Slumped panting over liquids on a mound of embarrassingly open guts, sand became attractive again as fodder to ruminate.

‘Every nucleus I breed is writ HATRED,’ I squawk, but flail so feeble to hold on to even a shard. In the end the arrowhead’s only ever really pointed at me; because I never stop thinking about me; because like a bloated infant all I ever care about’s me; and the rest is ancillary mess.

Clutch onto that obsidian flake I would that night with sweating hands as though it were a heartbeat.

It’s okay, I understand why. Which methodology has championed the fittest bearing onto the trail of ‘life’, can we measure? Maybe those aren’t the right terms. In brute libido, it goes to the Hunger. For guile, you’re purposed far sharper. And I’m just a withering, irresolute dust—I’m sure it’ll never be me. But in every cast the die must fall somewhere.

Tongue slid slowly, tooth over tooth, each a pristinely kept sabre shining ready in an arsenal’s pegs. However the fuss of the argument now, let recourse be the looming permission, and the looming commission, that yes surely, with darkness my tender, I would get to eat—soon.

On the fourth day, the Bishop returned.

And upon hearing him speak, up from my heart burst the glee like a geyser, made each cheek a threat of unveiling open delight—

And upon hearing him speak, into my own ear whispered death’s voice like a shroud, where I saw a parched flower rot to ashes onto the wind, and goose-pimpled hands clench quietly at sand—

And upon hearing him speak, inside my throat a saturnine pen etched instantly every word of a diet like law, a contract folded into an envelope passed onward to me, and the acceptance for the request of a quote by a prosecutor’s dark nod of the head—

Because the words the Bishop spoke, with a subtle grimace were, “we have confirmed the man’s guilt; you were right.”