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“You are slipping away from me,” he warned in a whisper. “
No, I know it did not happen that way. But was there a timebefore, Ezekiel? Was there? Was I a child once, did I make mud-pies and leap two-footed into inkwells? Was there a yellow-clouded summer once when I skinned my knee, and felt the prickle of a father’s beard on my cheek as he dried my tears? Did I love a boy once, with hazel eyes and hair like wheat in the sun? Was I a woman once and not this? Did these breasts like swollen apples ever feed a daughter or a son? I could not say, I could not say, there has never been anything but this, but oh, Ezekiel, what if it has not been foralways?”
I was crying, long, stringy hot wax-tears, coloring my face like a Christmas candle. Through the red blur, I could see the landscape changing, the mud drying into desert-cracks, gold streaked with spider-legs, expanding into the horizon, sparse Walls become cacti—filled up with their thick tequila-water, oozing from green shell like mucus. The Road nearly disappeared into the thirsty land, its track crossing back over itself over and over, fashioning from dust and sand a checkered pattern we strode, a weeping candle and a gilded djinn.
A terrible thumping sound came ripping across the land, searing and boiling the air, the sound of a Door opening and slamming shut hungrily.
Thumpthumpthumpthump.
It was the whole sky, eating all other sound. I clasped my hands over my ears, screaming to drown it out.
“We must move quickly, Darling. This place smells of tar and spoiled vines. He is coming! Hoo!”
“I am Sister to Rigor Mortis,” I shrieked as though it were a mantra, a spell to ward off the Door. “I am the Wife of the Crucible. I am still, the desert moves.” I felt a calm pool of darkwater within me, growing, a lake which had never known the rumor of waves. My fear was stopped up like a bottle of wine and speed flowed into my limbs.
“Quickly, Darlingred, quickly!”
We began to run over the flat land, the binary earth, feet trailing bronze clouds like wings. It truly felt as though I stood motionless, and the Labyrinth swing wide and long around me, a farmer’s scythe whipping through grain. Blue and gold, sky and sand. And then nothing.
We halted like a sentence fragment, cut off mid-syllable. Silence reigned and the horrible clamor was gone.
The Road was garrisoned, bordered on all sides, attended like a bride. All around us stood limbs of glass, dismembered legs, arms, heads, blown glass like crystal, like sculpted water. They stood in formation, that old familiar (though how familiar to me who has known no othertime?) phalanx of the chessboard. On each side they stood, silent, transcendent, prisms through which the radiance of the sun-that-is-a-star flew like a wind. Facing Queens of women’s torsos, full regal breasts and prince-bearing, horse-riding hips, Kings with muscles like breastplates, broad, bow-drawing shoulders. The Knights were shapely legs meant to grip the flanks of a war-stallion, cut off at the crown of thigh and the ankle, the slice smooth and perfect, revealing faint rings like great trees. Bishops stood as straight, powerful arms, perched lightly on fingers like insects. Rooks molded into feet, toes like transparent pearls curling into the desert Board. And the Pawns, severed heads all in a row like marigolds in the window. Each of them were beautiful, craggy faces of crusaders and classic profiles of a dozen Helens—
(—I will be Paris, for love of thee—)
I pushed the voice aside like a heap of armor. Their pouting lips full and slightly open, hair falling in glassine waves around slender necks, couching the crystal faces in a sea of refracted light. We gaped, I am certain I no more than the Monkey with all of his smirking knowledge, with all of his high-sounding name. The suddenly equatorial sun streamed through them in broad sword-strokes. I could feel his paw sweating in my hand, and when he spoke his voice was low and growling.
“I think we ought to be very quiet, and go around them. Follow, follow me.” He began to creep along the perimeter of the glass figures, but even as he passed the line of pawns rippling voices pricked the air. A fractured unison, each delicate soprano tone following on the previous note.
“Stop. We know. We see. You are the Magus.”
I froze before the mirrored unblinking eyes and tall limbs. “But I am not.”
“Not you, womanchild. Him,” they sang. I turned towards the bronzed figure of Ezekiel, who stood with bared teeth.
“We should go now. Hoo! I beg you, they will spoil everything!” The response of the crystalline limbs flew outwards like a sonic boom disrupting a choir of castrati. “No, No, you cannot! We know, we know who you are, we can see the flesh beneath your oystershells, we see your Path blazing ahead of you. You have returned! We knew you would, we did not lose faith. You must hear us!”
I began to tremble, as though the precise tonality of their voices had achieved a terrible resonance in my bones, and I was shaking into rubble. There was no change in the figures, the Queens’ breasts still proudly rode the air, the Pawns’ hair did not rustle by strand or lock. They stared at each other, the opposing armies, ever at the instant before battle, before the Knight slides on his severed ankle to his appointed square, never truly fighting, shattering, slivering, poised forever on the edgemoment, the timebefore. The weight of their anticipation creased the wind. Ezekiel snarled and spat, noises bubbling up from his throat as from an ancient cauldron, rimmed in leather and studded with iron slugs. He growled under that stream of sound, “Now, now, now, now. We must go. They will take you away from me.” I knelt and held him, as he had held me, stroked his coarse yellow fur into silk, whispered and pressed my waxwet cheek to his shoulder.
“No, I will stay, I will hear. I have to. I stayed for you, Ezekiel, I stayed to hear you. Perhaps everything ought to be spoiled.”
He seemed to calm, the smooth of rippling muscles under alarmed skin, ruffle of bird’s wing ligaments and joints like mouths. He touched my face with something like tenderness, resigned and hopeless. But his flesh only leapt and hardened again when they spoke, fluttering in the wake of that sapphire music, thirty-two voices striking like a dulcimer hammer.
“This is our mind: the quill-hand is the noble, the tooth-hand indolent. The left foot knows the blistered sky, the right foot treads the leavened Road. This is what we see when we look through the glass-that-is-you. Separation and shattering lie like lovers below your fifth vertebrae. The right hand and the left hand fly apart.”
The Monkey’s shrill vibratory words cut through theirs. “You see? They know nothing, they are lunatics. You can learn nothing from headless pieces who can never Play.” He spat like a woman’s curse.
“Oh, my Ezekiel, but I am a lunatic, too.” My face was an ocean, flowing in its own tidal reds, the effusion of tears eroding the shoals of my cheekbones. My mouth hung open, collecting the leaden drops, lips full and loose, gleaming with salt.
“Magus,” came the glissando of the chessboard, “why do you hate us? We do not harm. We do not lie. We could never harm her, of course not, no, never, never.” It was as though the pieces asked and answered themselves, though they spoke in that same fractured unison.
“That name is not mine. It is a lie.” The Monkey smelted his words like a twisted blade. “It is, it is!” They sang gladly, “The falcon told us, with his leather hood, and the desert mice! You are the Magus, with hands like stars, who walks the sacred marshes with crane-feet, who ate his name. He who made us and has come again.”
If they could have danced, they would have made their chessboard into a ballroom. Their glass flesh glistened and flowed over invisible bones like the currents of a hundred rivers. The long calves of the Knights wanted desperately to tremble, the fingers of the Bishops, arched like flying buttresses, lusted for movement.
“What else could it mean, that you bring her with you, excreting Want like sweat, she who will kiss the belly of our Queen, the Seeker-After, the Player?”
“No one brought me. I came on my own feet,” I protested.
