Red Snow (2017), page 14
So that was who I was. That was what I’d become. I grew a fever and lay in a dark place, afire with a hunger which has never left me since. I was no longer Ila, who knew how to bark back at dogs, and where to hit nuisance boys. This master of the castle, who was too old to be either a man or a woman, or even truly living, had chosen me through generations of faces, races, and bodies, bred me like a thoroughbred mare and made me into the likeness of someone long-lost who had also been called Sibylla. But I couldn’t be. Wasn’t. I was a mirror held to a mirror. The ancient clothes he made me wear. The ancient languages I was commanded to speak. I sometimes wondered if even the first Sibylla had ever been the creature my master had wished her to be. Wondered, as well, why we were alone of all his kind, although I think I soon came to better understand the ancient, sacred nature of our role.
I was drawn into the changed nights. We bathed together in the pools of our need. I learned how to stalk, and which creatures to choose, and when to be savage and when to be delicate. I was what I was, and for a while I was happy. There were joys to be found of which little Ila would never have dreamed.
I became a wild thing, then, Ezekiel. Cantankerous and dangerous and terrible. I explored all the ways and means of the flesh, both dead and living. I did many things which now shame me. Things which would have caused the once-living Ila to call me a demon. There never seemed to be an end to anything. Not the darkness. Nor, of course, my greed. Once or twice, just to show that I could, I walked through fires or flung myself off buildings, and the remains I dragged back to Skala were like a cat with a ruined mouse in its mouth, except the mouse was also me.
Perhaps it was as simple as my needing to prove that I was myself—that I was my own and not the master’s Sibylla. But there always seemed to be something else beneath all the smiles and the easy grace and the good manners and all the exquisite gifts I’d been given. That silver sickle, for instance, which somehow felt as if it should have been mine, and was clearly ancient. I unravelled skeins of history from ancient books. I turned over old stones and studied their messages.
My very name, Sibylla, was the answer I was seeking. For was that not the name of the ancient priestess who guarded and tended the mouth of an oracle? And, if that was true, surely it was I who possessed the true blood-lineage, and should be master? But master or mistress of what? Then there was the castle we lived in, rising high above the other roofs of the city. Heavy-walled, with battlements, embrasures, and arrow-slits. A maze indeed, with passageways winding within its walls, hidden rooms, blocked doorways, dangerous dead-ends, and surprising perspectives.
I explored Skala. Down and down, stairway after stairway, and deeper and deeper, until the passageways became tunnels and the tunnels became caves cut into bare rock, and time and the outside world no longer held any meaning. A dripping place. A place so dark it hurt even my eyes to see. Yet somewhere I knew, a place of sacrifice where something dwelled for which I, the master, anyone, could only ever be a mere servant. This was where the true sacrifices were made. This was where that sickle knife flashed, and the ultimate gift of life, which is of course death, was given. This was where the blood had flowed for so long that I could feel the very stones screaming. And it stank—there was that as well, Ezekiel, and I could feel something stirring, a rise of voices and a need that mirrored, but was somehow older and far deeper than, my own, and I knew I had to flee before I surrendered every chance of ever escaping…
There were no visions now, and Sibylla’s voice was a choked whisper. Then, by slow degrees, they rose back to the world of this Strasbourg cellar. He would never have thought that such a grim and stinking place could feel so life affirming.
“So there you are, Ezekiel. Now you know the little I know, but perhaps at least understand why I fled Skala and Warsaw more than two centuries ago, and have lived—hidden, you might say—alone in Strasbourg ever since, and changed my surname from Lis to Lys, for the French could not pronounce the Polish Lis correctly, and the fox become a lily.”
“There was a carriage,” he said. “It came to me on the streets of this very city. And inside it—inside—there was something, a dark figure, and there was talk of a place called Fontville, which I believe lies close to the Rhine. That, and of leaving these lands, fleeing across the seas to the New World, and that you should follow.”
“And you were spared by this creature, so you could bear me such a message…?” She sighed. “But perhaps we’re both here as part of some slow, dark revenge.”
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”
She stirred. Shifted. The scent she gave off was stronger now. Her breathing also. If she really had been a woman, Ezekiel might almost have thought she was inflamed with passion. But he knew her, in that moment, almost as well as she knew herself. Knew, above all, the strength of her hunger.
“Have me,” he muttered.
“Don’t say that, Ezekiel…” But she was drawing close.
“What have I got left to lose?”
“Your family, Ezekiel.” He felt the quickening of her breath against his face. The crawl of her hands. “You said so yourself.”
“They’ve probably been captured. Which means—”
“Means they’ll be brought back here to Strasbourg—tried, and held to account. If you can hold on, Ezekiel, if you can survive this night, there’s still a chance.”
“I’m just an old man. But…”
Hope again. That thing which returned like a bad genie, long after it should have died. And Sibylla was close to him, her chained and ruined body embracing his, and somewhere within those stinking rags was still the thing of terror, power, and beauty she could become. All it needed was his life, his blood. He could feel his cock hardening as it hadn’t done in years. Could smell her darkly feral scent. Could feel her strange lust entwining with his own.
“It’s been so long since I’ve fed, Ezekiel,” she drawled, clotted and slow. “I fear I couldn’t stop.”
The little death and the big death—perhaps they weren’t so very different?
“You have to help me in this,” she said, her voice now a spitting whisper, “if we are both to survive.”
Burnt, slippery twigs, he felt the fingers of her left hand entwine with his own. Now that I am weak, Ezekiel, you must be strong. If we are both to last this night, you must make me stop before the darkness closes over you—break my fingers when you still can… Then, in a hot spill of glistening drool, her lips were on his throat. He gasped at the pinprick tickle of her teeth. Cried out at the moment of puncture. Sibylla was every saint and devil incarnate—she was his darkest lust and purest aspiration and he was no longer Ezekiel Morel, family man and réparateur from the great city of Strasbourg. He was the sacrifice. She was the god.
Already, he could feel the darkness of his submission spreading. In all his life, he’d never wanted anything so much. He’d imagined this moment as many things over the years. As a consummation, as an instant of falling, or sheer, blinding terror—or even as something obscene. But now he felt it for what it really was, he was amazed to find it was simply a matter of letting go. But he mustn’t. Couldn’t. Butterflies of impossible light fluttered before his eyes. Sibylla’s need and her will to consume him were overwhelming. Not just his blood, but everything he was. The dance of storks. The smell of hot glue. The lamplit stone forests of the cathedral. Grete’s welcoming smile. But some part of him knew he could never turn his back on his family when they might still be alive. If he was going to stop Sibylla from destroying him—if he was going to step back from the edge of everything and witness another dawn—it would have to be now.
His fingers, slow as winter roots, found the thin shape of her smallest finger and began to bend it back. The pulse of her feeding—weakening him, strengthening her—scarcely changed. He pushed harder, felt something give. Sibylla’s need faltered. Then it flooded on.
There was little will—there was little of anything—left in him now. Thinking of Grete, although he knew Grete was long dead, he drew the next finger back in a single, quick lunge. This time, he heard her give, like a sleeper stirring in a dream, a surprised grunt. Now, although he doubted he still had the strength, he took her index finger and broke that as well, and felt the darkness tremble as he heard the bone snap. The thing that was against him hissed and writhed, trying to break free of the pain without letting go. This wasn’t Sibylla Lys. This was something wild and ugly, ultimate spawn of a faceless master and some pestilential pit. It was only when he broke the last finger of her hand that he felt the creature’s will weaken, and struggled from its grasp, and it crawled, half-sated, back into the farthest shadows, where it belonged.
Tired, shivering, dizzy, depleted, he sat waiting for another dawn. When his fingers explored his throat, all they found were two tiny indentations and, as meticulous daylight slowly revealed the scene in the customhouse’s cellar, what had happened already seemed vaguer than a dream.
“Sibylla?”
The dark heap didn’t stir.
Then the citizen guards returned and—thank the pure spirit of Reason!—there was a little mouldy bread to go with this morning’s water. We could be kept down here for days, he thought as he forced the stuff down. Or years. But then, the guards produced more chains and looped the prisoners together one by one. Those who didn’t promptly stand up were kicked. Those who still didn’t move were struck with iron batons, to check that they were dead.
He found himself standing in the line between an old woman with a missing arm and a mumbling young man with a lost expression whom he was almost sure he’d known as a priest. Looking back into the cellar, he saw one of the guards stride over to its furthest corner and lift his boot toward a last pile of rags. Sibylla raised her arms just before the boot connected and stood bent to shield her face. Her left hand was a ruined mess, fingers jutting back and forth like broken claws, and it was hard to tell where the burned flaps of skin ended and the tatters of whatever she’d been wearing began. Muttering his disgust, the guard linked her shackles to the rest. Then, in a puzzling act of charity, he extricated an old cape from a nearby corpse, laid it across her shoulders, and pulled up the hood to cover her blistered face.
Urged, yelled at, and prodded, the line of prisoners shuffled into the surprising light of a city still cloaked in purest white. He couldn’t imagine what Sibylla was feeling. Scarcely knew what he felt himself. People emerged from their houses to jeer them on. Snowballs and frozen lumps of dung were thrown. But still no sign of Josette, Julie, or their children.
Then they were in the great square which housed what was now known as the Palace of Justice. Just as always, though, he felt his soul lift as he entered the echoing inner space beyond the west door. Many of the statues were covered, and most of the crosses and other sacred symbols which could be easily reached had been removed. But the rood screen still rose before the transept in a glorious glitter of painted wood, and the glass apostles still blazed in their windows. The building had somehow kept its dignity, and he was pleased to see how much of his own handiwork remained. The famous clock, though, had stopped with the skull-face of death emerging from his dark cavity. The faces of the many onlookers who spat at and cursed the prisoners as they processed along the nave had something of death about them as well, although even with an artist’s—no, a réparateur’s—eye, it was hard to say exactly what. A greeny-greyness beneath the eyes, perhaps? A pallor of the lips? Something deathly, too, about the citizen judges who sat at the long high table before the rood screen. Or perhaps they were merely bored.
This pre-trial ceremony was very much like a service of old. The same bowings and shufflings. The same moments of sacred hush. All that was lacking was some incense to disguise the reek of unwashed humanity. Then, something very much like a hymn was sung.
Arise, children of the Fatherland
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny
Raises its bloody banner…
He saw that many of his fellow prisoners also raised their voices as the “Marseillaise” rang out beneath the great stone arches. Not, it seemed, out of fear, but from sheer belief. Then the Chief Prosecutor emerged, striding forth in his elaborate robe and glittering silver staff.
Here was the man of the hour, and of the people. Even before the first charge was pronounced, the citizens were roaring their verdict from the aisles. A false look, a wrong word, a questionable association—these were all that were now needed, but Roland Morel roused his audience to new heights of outrage.
Strasbourg had always been a city in a hurry, and there was clearly no point in allowing these miscreants to await their fate at some later hour, let alone some other day. Far better, so much more humane, to have them immediately borne off to the guillotine. Much scurrying at the back of the cathedral as citizens hurried to follow the tumbrel on its short journey, and returned to report on how well or badly this particular miscreant had died. All in all, it was easy to understand why so many citizens had become addicted to this spectacle, to the want of sleep and food.
It was already noon when he felt a sudden release of his chains. Weak and light-headed, he was dragged up towards the platform beneath the great, dead clock where the accused were required to stand, and where the sheeted easel from his workshop had already been placed. He heard his son pronounce his name.
“Morel—yes Morel! That’s right… For this man who stands before us, accused of the most heinous crimes is, or was, my father.”
Astonished gasps. A few citizens who’d been heading out through the west door to follow the tumbrel’s latest journey crowded back in. Then, reaching to a side table, Roland silently handed a sheaf of papers to the judges. Their effect, as the pages were grabbed and passed down into the hands of the watching crowd, was profound. There were horrified gasps. Some of the more sensitive citizens, who’d surely seen worse things than some chalk, ink, and pencil sketches of a beautiful woman naked—and wasn’t Liberty herself bare-breasted?—cried out or swooned. Such was people’s need to be shocked, that the drawings ended up in shreds.
“I know, I know…” Roland rapped his staff and nodded in horrified agreement. “These things are decadent. They are ugly. Above all, they are un-revolutionary. And to think that they came from the mind and hands of this sorry old man. It beggars belief. Yet it is true…” He strode up to his father. “Do you dare deny it?”
He tried to move his mouth, but the aisles of the great building were suddenly filled with a sea-roar of horrified gasps as Roland ripped off the sheet covering the panel. Even to Ezekiel, and especially in the bright glare of this daylight, the thing looked truly ghastly. It was death, but something more than death. It grinned with terrible, knowing intimacy. It drew the eye even as you tried to look away.
Roland, who knew when eloquence was pointless, simply stood there waiting as the cries of behead him began to grow. Soon, even the judges were joining in, and a dreamy lightness began to grow in Ezekiel’s head. He’d been expecting to be accused of helping his family flee France, but all this seemed to be about was his last portrait of Sibylla… He’d heard it said that real artists, proper painters, would die for the sake of their work. As a practical man, he’d always doubted such sentiments. Now, though, he would have done so happily. If only he could know that his daughters and grandchildren were safe…
“You’re right,” he croaked. Not particularly loudly, but the crowd had an instinct for the last words, and fell silent. “I abhor the revolution. I worship the King. No, I worship God, even though I know he no longer exists. I don’t believe in Reason. I hate Equality. I spit on your Rights of Man. Instead, I follow the dark ways of—”
“Enough!” A slap rang hard across his face, but Roland soon recovered his composure and turned back toward the crowd. “You see—not only has this man striven all his life against the forces of Enlightenment. He has conspired to destroy his—my—own family, as well…”
The citizens settled a little. They’d been looking forward to seeing this old man sent swiftly off to the guillotine, but the Chief Prosecutor’s performance this morning had been exemplary, and they knew they were in good hands.
“Bring forth the evidence!” He banged his staff. “Bring it forth now.” Suddenly, great performer that he was, Roland Morel was close to tears. “For this is what this old man has done to all that I once loved…”
Two citizens emerged, dragging two stained and heavy sacks through what had once been the chancel door. When they shook them out, half a dozen or so roughly roundish objects tumbled across the tiled space between the onlookers and the judges. Without realising he’d even left his platform, Ezekiel found he was raising them one by one. What had once been the faces of his grandchildren gazed back at him with blanched eyes and rigoured grins. When he lifted the two largest heads and parted their matted hair, he found he still struggled to tell his two daughters apart.
Meanwhile, and from somewhere very far away, Roland’s voice was announcing how this group of traitors had been halted on the banks of the Rhine by a party of concerned citizens, who had dispensed immediate justice with a sharpened ploughshare, as was their inalienable right. All these things Ezekiel heard, but the words and their meaning were mostly lost in the simple, calm realisation that he’d lived far too long. But this wasn’t even life any longer. This was something else.
The scene, the trial, was complete, and a kind of silence had fallen, and Ezekiel briefly wondered if his son had finally taken things a little too far. Then, though, sensing a stirring and a shift in mood, he looked up and saw a figure dragging itself from the corral of accused prisoners.
Sibylla Lys. Or something like her. She was no longer chained, although it seemed as she raised her hands to remove her rough hood that her shackles must have slid off along with the flesh which had covered her bones. The face revealed was far worse than that in the last panel of Ezekiel’s triptych. Yet it was the same.
