254: Longest day of your life (part two)
11:31 am
In the dream Mazreel wins. In the dream the world is made of shadows-- Mazreel's territory, Mazreel's victory.
But the desert burns shadows away, just as it does weakness and water.
She takes stock of herself as she sits across the circle from the demon. Her walls are solid, and she meets the jackal's yellow eyes with her own and feels no fear. Only the bone-deep weariness, the readiness for this to be over, the knowledge that if she fails this time she will have nothing left to fight with. This ends now, because it has to, because she cannot keep this up.
"Come on then, you son of a bitch, I'm not getting any younger," she says, the first English to pass her lips in months.
Mazreel answers with a noise that is snarl and whine and hiss in one, and leaps.
For one frozen second it looks as though he's going to clear the circle, even as big as she's drawn it-- but the jackal's paws touch the ground still well inside the lines. In the next moment he is at the border on her side, and in the next, crashing into the wall formed by chalk, blood, and holy power.
The circle holds and the animal snarls mere inches from her face, hot saliva flecking off a black tongue and onto her cheeks. The jackal retreats a few inches, then launches itself at her again, and again, and each time hits the invisible barrier and falls back to earth. Like nothing so much as the old neighborhood stray that had shaken its body in comic contortions to ease the itch of fleas.
But there is nothing funny here, only grotesque. The beast slavers and its claws scrabble on the stone as it tests her. Then Mazreel retreats, slinks backward with teeth bared and hindquarters raised. And finds her will as strong on the far wall of the circle as the near.
Zipporah's lips and tongue are dry, the former cracked and the latter swollen in a mouth that feels coated with dust, but she does not dare drop her concentration to reach for the water. It has started; it must be seen through.
The Hebrew falls guttural from her lips, rough and harsh as the land itself: "I adjure you... the demon Mazre'el, by the utterance of the watchers and the holy ones..."
It begins. The jackal howls and yips, trying to drown out her words, but this is merely the physical. Mazreel comes for her, for the part of her that exists at the center of the strong walls. For a moment she cannot breathe-- literally cannot, Mazreel reaching through her defenses and assaulting her respiratory process. Clever. New. He hasn't tried this before. She pushes away the instinctive panic that threatens at the lack of oxygen, and shoves. Slam his presence away, fill those gaps in the wall, now, air, breathe in, breathe in so that she can speak--
"--I adjure you by Adonai, by the Holy God of the Heavens--"
Each word must be shaped consciously, power held humming on her tongue and in her teeth until she has tasted the holiness of it. Then it cracks forth-- raw and hot-- to echo off the rocks and drown the jackal's noises.
(Rabbi Weiss had taught her this, murmuring the secrets of the sacred to her in his dingy apartment that had smelled of boiled cabbage, and so this is what she thinks of as she snaps the names of God like whips: cabbage stink and peeling wallpaper and the old man's blind eyes and wheezing voice--
The holy names are words and they are more-than-words, sound and more-than-sound. A fool could repeat them and they would be nothing but their syllables. They would drop from his tongue flat and dead.
This is because HaShem is merciful unto the ignorant and unto children.
But if one who has received understanding and instruction were to utter a Name of Almighty G-d as though it were only a sound, then we should be dead in the next moment. For to speak the Ineffable Name is to change the universe. And to blaspheme it, by any use less than holy, is to invite destruction.)
She is still breathing, and she takes this as a sign that God approves of this usage of His names. Mazreel recoils from the utterance, both psychically and physically. Twists on his haunches with his paws over his ears.
"--with these names I adjure you, the demon Mazre'el..."
He comes at her again, wielding guilt now as his siege weapon. Blood. The wreck of Sophie Kaufmann's body. So much blood, so bright, parabolas of crimson. A red tsunami, and in the flood the child's corpse bobbing like a fishing lure. The wave hits in a pink froth, pounding at her defenses, overwhelming the tops of the ramparts, and what spills over the outer wall spatters onto the next barricade. When the wave recedes, the walls are stained and she herself is fighting down strong nausea--
But it does recede, and the walls have held.
"--I adjure you! By the hosts of fire in the spheres! By the chariots of El-Panim before Him standing, by the names of the beasts worshipping in the fire of His throne and in the water!"
Now he deals in fear. An army comes to the gates of her citadel, dead men all. Her father, her brothers, her mother, Finn, Max, a crowd of all whom she has loved or cared for. The dead. Sinking rotting fingers into the cracks of the walls, clawing at the stone. He killed us all! We are dead! We are dead because of you! If only you had let it go... if only... let it go... save us...
Some of them make it as far as the third ring before she repels them, summoning sheets of white fire on the ramparts. In the circle the jackal writhes on its back, and snarls, and whimpers.
She does not know how long it goes on. The attacks vary. When nightmare pictures fail him he tries sheer pain, setting her nerves howling. Again she forces away his control, again she bars his way with the walls of her teachings.
The jackal is bloody, now, the dusty fur matted with red that leaks from its mouth where it has bitten through its tongue, and from paws that still claw uselessly at the rock. It seeks to get away from the holy names, but she has left no bare stretch within the chalked circle. It whines in pain.
And still she continues the litany. Her mouth and lips are numb, her throat is sore, but she cannot allow herself to stumble over any word.
"...by the signet of El-Shaddai, and by the Seven who are before Him. By the Strong One of Abraham, by the Rock of Isaac, by the Shaddai of Jacob... by Yah His Name, and Yah His Memorial!
"I adjure you. I bind you to obedience. Leave this creature and enter this flask. I order this by the authority of Heaven!"
The jackal goes still, its dusty flanks heaving, Mazreel's energies all on her now. His last assault, once more, just hold out once more, hold the gates, and the walls strong and steady. Ignore the throbbing sun and the sweat-sting in her eyes and the rawness of her throat. Once more, dammit--
The heat does not ease, but it changes in nature... becomes torment of a different sort.
There is a fire in her belly, a blaze stoked by roaming hands that know her intimately. Oh yes, Finn knows her after this many years-- knows just where and how she likes to be touched, he'd been such an eager learner, and damn but those hands of his... she would say that she can sit and watch him work clay for hours except that's hardly true because just over an hour is their record before they end up using his studio table for something a hell of a lot better than clay. Her husband can touch her so deftly, surely, can coax her body into reacting the same way he coaxes life out of the inanimate and when they're making love even those normally placid blue eyes of his are on fire...
(the first wall crumbling, shoved aside--)
...burning along her nerves with each move she makes, riding him, her thighs straddling his hips, the hard muscle of that lean brown body hers to touch. They're on the sand, Chaim bar Ari on his back, and his usual impassiveness is a distant memory as he swears and grunts and thrusts up into her, his fingers bruising her hips but his reactions hers to control. He is hers to control, hers to make moan when she rolls her hips like this, when she drags her nails down his chest like so, when she shows him just what it is he fears so about women's weakness and power and all the reasons they are not permitted the study of the Qabalah. And after this long of Mazreel doing what he wants to her at nights the heat of turning the tables on someone, on anyone, on that asshole Chaim is--
(the inner walls falling one after the other, fire cracking the stones and splitting them into hot fragments--)
--unreal, unimaginable, the heart of the sun could not be hotter. But there is no sun here, only the shadows. Mazreel laughs from all sides, his breath a furnace gust against her skin, and the smoke-thing that is a little like a man pushes her down and burns her clothes from her with a gesture. She would cry out but her throat is long since ash.
Shadow-hands reach for her. Shadow-hands stroke her skin, lay her bare, and shadow-hands part her legs, and the serpent-tongue of fire tattoos her inner thigh and then higher... She is writhing in the blackness, but why? To get away or to get more? Mazreel laughs, and immolates her in pleasure. And his burning tongue hisses against her flesh, My conqueror? My whore, rather. Say thank you, child.
(the last defenses useless as the fire rages inward, and now the flames are at the pool, the cool calm pool that mirrors them, the reflection dancing with mad anticipation of its own boiling end--)
Enough.
Enough. Long enough, two years of this shit, two years of bad sleep and waking up shaking, two years since anything resembling normal, two years of living like this, the hell with it.
She takes control of the image, and in the tableau of shadows her body sits up, shakes her head, and answers him, This is it? This is the best you can do? This? You're a common rapist with special effects. Get out.
Get out.
The flames die like a gas fireplace turned off. The walls remain strong; the doors and gates swing shut. The pool is clear-- no blood, no filth.
The desert asserts itself again-- the real one, not the one where she's screwing Chaim bar Ari's self-righteousness out his ears-- and the heat is merely that of the sun. The jackal's eyes glint mad yellow hatred at her, but this is all he is capable of.
Finish it. She takes up the shofar, the ridges of it providing a grip for her sweat-slick palms, and she takes a gathering breath as well, drawing strength. She feels the names crawling inside her mouth and it takes control she didn't even know she had to keep them in their proper shapes and in their right moments, but--
"Adonai! Elohim! Hakadosh! Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh! Zebaot!"
God.
Names of God. The Divine/Infinite, יהוה, Source of all, rushing through her like-- not a wave so much as an ocean. A vast sea, crashing around her, and sweeping Mazreel inexorably in His flow, on, on, forever and ever amen, the maelstrom washing the world clean of the demon's presence even as it sucks him into the bottle.
"Amen. Amen. Selah. Halleluyah," she whispers, her voice cracking now that it finally can.
...God goes away and fatigue takes His place, in the space of a moment. Her fingers physically shake with the strain of shoving the flask's cork into the mouth of the bottle. She is damp from her hair to her socks with sweat, and only when she licks thick salt from her lips does she realize there is coppery blood too. Either she bit her lips or tongue during the ritual or the strain of it gave her a nosebleed. Both have happened before.
The metallic taste sickens her, and true nausea follows hard on its heels. She loses the morning's oily bread, and the coffee, onto the rock, and then lies on her back for many seconds.
She wouldn't say she feels good, but... purged, perhaps. Weak and shaky and sweaty, but the fever is broken.
Water. She needs water. And there is still work to be done, yes, yes, still words to say, still wax from the candle to be mixed with her blood and used to seal the flask, still the name of God to be written into the wax, still three hairs to be taken from her head and tied around the bottle's neck--
Enough logic pierces the haze of her exhaustion that she manages the water first. The canteen's weight steadies her fingers. The water is hot. She spills it on herself. Sputters. Tries again. Rinses out her mouth. Gets some down.
When this is done she trades one bottle for the other.
Mazreel is not very obvious to the naked eye-- a trace of almost-invisible smoke in the flask, something easy to dismiss as a trick of the light-- but he is there. She turns the bottle over in her hands, then shakes her head and sets it down on the rock.
She has to stand before she can contemplate the next step. Everything aches, every bone, every muscle. She hisses as her legs finally straighten-- how long was she sitting? Her watch says it was only ten minutes. Shmontses. Bupkes. Bullshit.
There is no sense of triumph, only exhaustion. The heat is going to bake her into the rock before she can come to terms with what she has done. Air, she needs air, maybe at the edge of the rock there will be a breeze... Blood flows back into her legs with each step and she winces.
Behind her the jackal's dusty body twitches.
There is a breeze rising from the valley. It's so sweet. Dry and dusty, but sweet, just for the motion of air over her skin. She breathes and repeats to herself a mantra: it's done, it's done, it's done... enough times and perhaps she can believe it.
She looks down over the cliff's edge at the hard endless desert, and thinks, I can go home. Manhattan. Manhattan, which has her husband and her family and her friends. And more importantly, bathtubs.
And air conditioning. Electricity, running water, restaurants-- pizza, oy, for a New York slice right now she would... she would...
She never finishes the thought of what she'd do for a piece of pizza. The jackal has managed to stand.
It is a simple creature. As a species, the jackal does not deserve the negative press it gets; Canis aureus is an effective hunter as well as a scavenger, and fulfills an important niche in the ecology of near Asia. This particular jackal has been the host of the demon Mazreel for weeks now, a confusing and unpleasant time. The demon has driven it far from its own habitat and comfortable hunting grounds, across land that held little in the way of prey and less in the way of water, across ground that has blistered and then lacerated its paws. It is a simple creature, and what it knows is that it is thirsty, hungry, and in pain; and that in some way the two-legged thing near it is connected to that pain.
Perhaps Mazreel motivates some of what happens next, exercising some last desperate influence from within his glass cage. Perhaps the jackal merely reacts as any tormented animal, pushed far past its limits, might do.
But the why does not matter, so much, in the course of things. Only the what.
The what:
The jackal snarls through blood and saliva, and darts forward as a low beige streak, and leaps, and comes down on her back as a maddened ball of claws and teeth. The impact drives her forward.
Except there is no forward. Only the emptiness.
A stumbling step forward before she has even registered what is happening, but there is nothing but air under the soles of her boots. For one microsecond she hangs, an absurd thought in her mind that Heaven is granting her an angel's wings for her victory. She'll become like the little clay bird, like her namesake.
(Because these wings are no longer wings to fly /
(But merely vans to beat the air--)
She becomes no bird. They drop over the edge together, the jackal and the woman. The animal's jaws clenched in her jacket's heavy canvas, claws flailing at air and flesh as they freefall, then hit, then slide.
Down, down, down, in a madness of rock and dust and pain.
***
12:02 pm
Chaim bar Ari squints out over the desert, his eyes defensive slits in the stone wall of his face. He sees no movement, only the empty land. No sign of the woman.
He spits once, into the dust at his feet. His irritation with her is vast enough that even the knowledge that the action wastes moisture doesn't stop him.
A cancer on her. A black one. In her bowels.
This train of thought is satisfying, so he continues to embellish it as he turns back to the campfire to stir the pot of baked beans. A lingering cancer. One that will infest her body with a hundred tendrils and take her out of Israel and back to her own land where the American doctors will tell her there is nothing they can do and she will spend the last months of her life crapping blood and pissing pus.
This is not worthy, my son, he hears the kohen chide him, and grunts in acknowledgment. A cancer on the kohen too.
He follows this with a long, heavy sigh and a brief flicker of his thoughts heavenward, asking the Almighty One for pardon. He wishes no harm on their teacher, of course. He just wishes the kohen hadn't extracted a promise from him to make sure the woman eats.
Nor does he really want the woman hurt. Just gone, may G-d hear and fulfill.
The beans are sticking. Chaim yanks the pot from the fire and drops his head back to stare at the blank, furnace-white sky overhead. The sun is directly overhead now. It's been three hours since she left the camp.
He covers the pot and gets up to find his binoculars.
***
12:24 pm
Consciousness returns like springtime, slow and tentative, and bringing, not flowers, but pain. Agony blooms in wild profusion along her nerves, buds along her limbs, and roots itself firmly in her fertile flesh.
She tries to open her eyes. Light slashes her retinas and she regrets it. The horizon is badly-tilted, wrong, nauseating; she closes her eyes but the dizziness continues.
After a few more attempts she makes the connection that moving makes everything worse. She lies very still, and breathes in careful, shallow breaths.
Eventually she can distinguish between the species that thrive in her garden of pain. There is a spot near her temple that throbs with a sharp insistence, and her hand and one cheek feel as if they are on fire. There is her leg, which as long as she doesn't move is fine, just a background discomfort. (When she tries to move, it screams, or she does, and she feels bone grinding bone and muscle lacerating and--) Over these concentrated pains there is a general ache, a fine moss of bruises blanketing the entire landscape.
That's enough to know, enough for her brain to process. Other things enter in little fits: she's hot. She's thirsty.
Canteen. Water. She has... she has a canteen... the first questing movement sends a lance of agony through her from fingers to shoulder and she stops. Canteen can wait. Pain's bad. Still, still, be still, make no movement in the garden. Less pain. That's good.
Just lie still. Everything else... can wait...
The sun passes zenith. Begins the long, lazy fall into the west.
***
12:32 pm
"Levine!"
There is no answer and Chaim curses, in Arabic so as not to profane the holy tongue.
He has lost her trail, which was clear leading out of camp for several hundred feet. The dirt takes prints well enough for him to have picked out her boot-treads here, there, ten feet further... but then the trail led around the curve of a large rock face, and onto rock scoured bare by the wind, rock showing no trace of passage.
Still he followed, judging how and where she would step, as one walking the easiest route, as one ignorant of the desert. City-dweller. American. Soft and weak in so many ways beyond merely her gender.
She has no idea what it is, to live here.
For himself, he loves this land. Not merely Eretz Yisroel in a poetic and patriotic fashion-- not merely the symbolism of her, the imagery of the Temple ruins and blue star on white flag-- but the land itself, from Haifa to the Negev. And not Israel as his fellow Jews would have her, tamed by water and agriculture, but Israel as so much of her is-- stark, harsh, unforgiving.
He loves Israel, but knows he can never take his lover for granted, that she demands respect more than affection, and that she also demands service and blood. These things he has given her.
Then there is faith, of course, somewhat lower down the hierarchy than the other two. If it were not so irretrievably linked to blood, for a descendant of Abraham-- if God were not, for a Jew, so inherently central-- he doubts he would have time for it. His gospel is that of the gun; his worship the soldier's.
Yet that faith has still led him to the kohen, and the kohen has led him to this: looking for some pampered, ignorant, arrogant American Jewess who barely deserves the name (she is considered one of the faithful? Her?) to make sure that she... eats lunch.
And she has led him to a dead end. No trail, no track, no trace.
He calls her name again, and the echoes sing back from the rocks, mocking.
Chaim bar Ari scratches at his cheek and contemplates force-feeding her the beans when he finds her. He leans back against the nearest rock to take his bearings, mark the path back to camp, then squints up at the sky to gauge the time.
The black shape of a bird wheels against that hammered blankness, describing patient circles.
***
OOC: Due to length, this is being posted in three parts: Part One - Part Two - Part Three.
In the dream Mazreel wins. In the dream the world is made of shadows-- Mazreel's territory, Mazreel's victory.
But the desert burns shadows away, just as it does weakness and water.
She takes stock of herself as she sits across the circle from the demon. Her walls are solid, and she meets the jackal's yellow eyes with her own and feels no fear. Only the bone-deep weariness, the readiness for this to be over, the knowledge that if she fails this time she will have nothing left to fight with. This ends now, because it has to, because she cannot keep this up.
"Come on then, you son of a bitch, I'm not getting any younger," she says, the first English to pass her lips in months.
Mazreel answers with a noise that is snarl and whine and hiss in one, and leaps.
For one frozen second it looks as though he's going to clear the circle, even as big as she's drawn it-- but the jackal's paws touch the ground still well inside the lines. In the next moment he is at the border on her side, and in the next, crashing into the wall formed by chalk, blood, and holy power.
The circle holds and the animal snarls mere inches from her face, hot saliva flecking off a black tongue and onto her cheeks. The jackal retreats a few inches, then launches itself at her again, and again, and each time hits the invisible barrier and falls back to earth. Like nothing so much as the old neighborhood stray that had shaken its body in comic contortions to ease the itch of fleas.
But there is nothing funny here, only grotesque. The beast slavers and its claws scrabble on the stone as it tests her. Then Mazreel retreats, slinks backward with teeth bared and hindquarters raised. And finds her will as strong on the far wall of the circle as the near.
Zipporah's lips and tongue are dry, the former cracked and the latter swollen in a mouth that feels coated with dust, but she does not dare drop her concentration to reach for the water. It has started; it must be seen through.
The Hebrew falls guttural from her lips, rough and harsh as the land itself: "I adjure you... the demon Mazre'el, by the utterance of the watchers and the holy ones..."
It begins. The jackal howls and yips, trying to drown out her words, but this is merely the physical. Mazreel comes for her, for the part of her that exists at the center of the strong walls. For a moment she cannot breathe-- literally cannot, Mazreel reaching through her defenses and assaulting her respiratory process. Clever. New. He hasn't tried this before. She pushes away the instinctive panic that threatens at the lack of oxygen, and shoves. Slam his presence away, fill those gaps in the wall, now, air, breathe in, breathe in so that she can speak--
"--I adjure you by Adonai, by the Holy God of the Heavens--"
Each word must be shaped consciously, power held humming on her tongue and in her teeth until she has tasted the holiness of it. Then it cracks forth-- raw and hot-- to echo off the rocks and drown the jackal's noises.
(Rabbi Weiss had taught her this, murmuring the secrets of the sacred to her in his dingy apartment that had smelled of boiled cabbage, and so this is what she thinks of as she snaps the names of God like whips: cabbage stink and peeling wallpaper and the old man's blind eyes and wheezing voice--
The holy names are words and they are more-than-words, sound and more-than-sound. A fool could repeat them and they would be nothing but their syllables. They would drop from his tongue flat and dead.
This is because HaShem is merciful unto the ignorant and unto children.
But if one who has received understanding and instruction were to utter a Name of Almighty G-d as though it were only a sound, then we should be dead in the next moment. For to speak the Ineffable Name is to change the universe. And to blaspheme it, by any use less than holy, is to invite destruction.)
She is still breathing, and she takes this as a sign that God approves of this usage of His names. Mazreel recoils from the utterance, both psychically and physically. Twists on his haunches with his paws over his ears.
"--with these names I adjure you, the demon Mazre'el..."
He comes at her again, wielding guilt now as his siege weapon. Blood. The wreck of Sophie Kaufmann's body. So much blood, so bright, parabolas of crimson. A red tsunami, and in the flood the child's corpse bobbing like a fishing lure. The wave hits in a pink froth, pounding at her defenses, overwhelming the tops of the ramparts, and what spills over the outer wall spatters onto the next barricade. When the wave recedes, the walls are stained and she herself is fighting down strong nausea--
But it does recede, and the walls have held.
"--I adjure you! By the hosts of fire in the spheres! By the chariots of El-Panim before Him standing, by the names of the beasts worshipping in the fire of His throne and in the water!"
Now he deals in fear. An army comes to the gates of her citadel, dead men all. Her father, her brothers, her mother, Finn, Max, a crowd of all whom she has loved or cared for. The dead. Sinking rotting fingers into the cracks of the walls, clawing at the stone. He killed us all! We are dead! We are dead because of you! If only you had let it go... if only... let it go... save us...
Some of them make it as far as the third ring before she repels them, summoning sheets of white fire on the ramparts. In the circle the jackal writhes on its back, and snarls, and whimpers.
She does not know how long it goes on. The attacks vary. When nightmare pictures fail him he tries sheer pain, setting her nerves howling. Again she forces away his control, again she bars his way with the walls of her teachings.
The jackal is bloody, now, the dusty fur matted with red that leaks from its mouth where it has bitten through its tongue, and from paws that still claw uselessly at the rock. It seeks to get away from the holy names, but she has left no bare stretch within the chalked circle. It whines in pain.
And still she continues the litany. Her mouth and lips are numb, her throat is sore, but she cannot allow herself to stumble over any word.
"...by the signet of El-Shaddai, and by the Seven who are before Him. By the Strong One of Abraham, by the Rock of Isaac, by the Shaddai of Jacob... by Yah His Name, and Yah His Memorial!
"I adjure you. I bind you to obedience. Leave this creature and enter this flask. I order this by the authority of Heaven!"
The jackal goes still, its dusty flanks heaving, Mazreel's energies all on her now. His last assault, once more, just hold out once more, hold the gates, and the walls strong and steady. Ignore the throbbing sun and the sweat-sting in her eyes and the rawness of her throat. Once more, dammit--
The heat does not ease, but it changes in nature... becomes torment of a different sort.
There is a fire in her belly, a blaze stoked by roaming hands that know her intimately. Oh yes, Finn knows her after this many years-- knows just where and how she likes to be touched, he'd been such an eager learner, and damn but those hands of his... she would say that she can sit and watch him work clay for hours except that's hardly true because just over an hour is their record before they end up using his studio table for something a hell of a lot better than clay. Her husband can touch her so deftly, surely, can coax her body into reacting the same way he coaxes life out of the inanimate and when they're making love even those normally placid blue eyes of his are on fire...
(the first wall crumbling, shoved aside--)
...burning along her nerves with each move she makes, riding him, her thighs straddling his hips, the hard muscle of that lean brown body hers to touch. They're on the sand, Chaim bar Ari on his back, and his usual impassiveness is a distant memory as he swears and grunts and thrusts up into her, his fingers bruising her hips but his reactions hers to control. He is hers to control, hers to make moan when she rolls her hips like this, when she drags her nails down his chest like so, when she shows him just what it is he fears so about women's weakness and power and all the reasons they are not permitted the study of the Qabalah. And after this long of Mazreel doing what he wants to her at nights the heat of turning the tables on someone, on anyone, on that asshole Chaim is--
(the inner walls falling one after the other, fire cracking the stones and splitting them into hot fragments--)
--unreal, unimaginable, the heart of the sun could not be hotter. But there is no sun here, only the shadows. Mazreel laughs from all sides, his breath a furnace gust against her skin, and the smoke-thing that is a little like a man pushes her down and burns her clothes from her with a gesture. She would cry out but her throat is long since ash.
Shadow-hands reach for her. Shadow-hands stroke her skin, lay her bare, and shadow-hands part her legs, and the serpent-tongue of fire tattoos her inner thigh and then higher... She is writhing in the blackness, but why? To get away or to get more? Mazreel laughs, and immolates her in pleasure. And his burning tongue hisses against her flesh, My conqueror? My whore, rather. Say thank you, child.
(the last defenses useless as the fire rages inward, and now the flames are at the pool, the cool calm pool that mirrors them, the reflection dancing with mad anticipation of its own boiling end--)
Enough.
Enough. Long enough, two years of this shit, two years of bad sleep and waking up shaking, two years since anything resembling normal, two years of living like this, the hell with it.
She takes control of the image, and in the tableau of shadows her body sits up, shakes her head, and answers him, This is it? This is the best you can do? This? You're a common rapist with special effects. Get out.
Get out.
The flames die like a gas fireplace turned off. The walls remain strong; the doors and gates swing shut. The pool is clear-- no blood, no filth.
The desert asserts itself again-- the real one, not the one where she's screwing Chaim bar Ari's self-righteousness out his ears-- and the heat is merely that of the sun. The jackal's eyes glint mad yellow hatred at her, but this is all he is capable of.
Finish it. She takes up the shofar, the ridges of it providing a grip for her sweat-slick palms, and she takes a gathering breath as well, drawing strength. She feels the names crawling inside her mouth and it takes control she didn't even know she had to keep them in their proper shapes and in their right moments, but--
"Adonai! Elohim! Hakadosh! Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh! Zebaot!"
God.
Names of God. The Divine/Infinite, יהוה, Source of all, rushing through her like-- not a wave so much as an ocean. A vast sea, crashing around her, and sweeping Mazreel inexorably in His flow, on, on, forever and ever amen, the maelstrom washing the world clean of the demon's presence even as it sucks him into the bottle.
"Amen. Amen. Selah. Halleluyah," she whispers, her voice cracking now that it finally can.
...God goes away and fatigue takes His place, in the space of a moment. Her fingers physically shake with the strain of shoving the flask's cork into the mouth of the bottle. She is damp from her hair to her socks with sweat, and only when she licks thick salt from her lips does she realize there is coppery blood too. Either she bit her lips or tongue during the ritual or the strain of it gave her a nosebleed. Both have happened before.
The metallic taste sickens her, and true nausea follows hard on its heels. She loses the morning's oily bread, and the coffee, onto the rock, and then lies on her back for many seconds.
She wouldn't say she feels good, but... purged, perhaps. Weak and shaky and sweaty, but the fever is broken.
Water. She needs water. And there is still work to be done, yes, yes, still words to say, still wax from the candle to be mixed with her blood and used to seal the flask, still the name of God to be written into the wax, still three hairs to be taken from her head and tied around the bottle's neck--
Enough logic pierces the haze of her exhaustion that she manages the water first. The canteen's weight steadies her fingers. The water is hot. She spills it on herself. Sputters. Tries again. Rinses out her mouth. Gets some down.
When this is done she trades one bottle for the other.
Mazreel is not very obvious to the naked eye-- a trace of almost-invisible smoke in the flask, something easy to dismiss as a trick of the light-- but he is there. She turns the bottle over in her hands, then shakes her head and sets it down on the rock.
She has to stand before she can contemplate the next step. Everything aches, every bone, every muscle. She hisses as her legs finally straighten-- how long was she sitting? Her watch says it was only ten minutes. Shmontses. Bupkes. Bullshit.
There is no sense of triumph, only exhaustion. The heat is going to bake her into the rock before she can come to terms with what she has done. Air, she needs air, maybe at the edge of the rock there will be a breeze... Blood flows back into her legs with each step and she winces.
Behind her the jackal's dusty body twitches.
There is a breeze rising from the valley. It's so sweet. Dry and dusty, but sweet, just for the motion of air over her skin. She breathes and repeats to herself a mantra: it's done, it's done, it's done... enough times and perhaps she can believe it.
She looks down over the cliff's edge at the hard endless desert, and thinks, I can go home. Manhattan. Manhattan, which has her husband and her family and her friends. And more importantly, bathtubs.
And air conditioning. Electricity, running water, restaurants-- pizza, oy, for a New York slice right now she would... she would...
She never finishes the thought of what she'd do for a piece of pizza. The jackal has managed to stand.
It is a simple creature. As a species, the jackal does not deserve the negative press it gets; Canis aureus is an effective hunter as well as a scavenger, and fulfills an important niche in the ecology of near Asia. This particular jackal has been the host of the demon Mazreel for weeks now, a confusing and unpleasant time. The demon has driven it far from its own habitat and comfortable hunting grounds, across land that held little in the way of prey and less in the way of water, across ground that has blistered and then lacerated its paws. It is a simple creature, and what it knows is that it is thirsty, hungry, and in pain; and that in some way the two-legged thing near it is connected to that pain.
Perhaps Mazreel motivates some of what happens next, exercising some last desperate influence from within his glass cage. Perhaps the jackal merely reacts as any tormented animal, pushed far past its limits, might do.
But the why does not matter, so much, in the course of things. Only the what.
The what:
The jackal snarls through blood and saliva, and darts forward as a low beige streak, and leaps, and comes down on her back as a maddened ball of claws and teeth. The impact drives her forward.
Except there is no forward. Only the emptiness.
A stumbling step forward before she has even registered what is happening, but there is nothing but air under the soles of her boots. For one microsecond she hangs, an absurd thought in her mind that Heaven is granting her an angel's wings for her victory. She'll become like the little clay bird, like her namesake.
(Because these wings are no longer wings to fly /
(But merely vans to beat the air--)
She becomes no bird. They drop over the edge together, the jackal and the woman. The animal's jaws clenched in her jacket's heavy canvas, claws flailing at air and flesh as they freefall, then hit, then slide.
Down, down, down, in a madness of rock and dust and pain.
***
12:02 pm
Chaim bar Ari squints out over the desert, his eyes defensive slits in the stone wall of his face. He sees no movement, only the empty land. No sign of the woman.
He spits once, into the dust at his feet. His irritation with her is vast enough that even the knowledge that the action wastes moisture doesn't stop him.
A cancer on her. A black one. In her bowels.
This train of thought is satisfying, so he continues to embellish it as he turns back to the campfire to stir the pot of baked beans. A lingering cancer. One that will infest her body with a hundred tendrils and take her out of Israel and back to her own land where the American doctors will tell her there is nothing they can do and she will spend the last months of her life crapping blood and pissing pus.
This is not worthy, my son, he hears the kohen chide him, and grunts in acknowledgment. A cancer on the kohen too.
He follows this with a long, heavy sigh and a brief flicker of his thoughts heavenward, asking the Almighty One for pardon. He wishes no harm on their teacher, of course. He just wishes the kohen hadn't extracted a promise from him to make sure the woman eats.
Nor does he really want the woman hurt. Just gone, may G-d hear and fulfill.
The beans are sticking. Chaim yanks the pot from the fire and drops his head back to stare at the blank, furnace-white sky overhead. The sun is directly overhead now. It's been three hours since she left the camp.
He covers the pot and gets up to find his binoculars.
***
12:24 pm
Consciousness returns like springtime, slow and tentative, and bringing, not flowers, but pain. Agony blooms in wild profusion along her nerves, buds along her limbs, and roots itself firmly in her fertile flesh.
She tries to open her eyes. Light slashes her retinas and she regrets it. The horizon is badly-tilted, wrong, nauseating; she closes her eyes but the dizziness continues.
After a few more attempts she makes the connection that moving makes everything worse. She lies very still, and breathes in careful, shallow breaths.
Eventually she can distinguish between the species that thrive in her garden of pain. There is a spot near her temple that throbs with a sharp insistence, and her hand and one cheek feel as if they are on fire. There is her leg, which as long as she doesn't move is fine, just a background discomfort. (When she tries to move, it screams, or she does, and she feels bone grinding bone and muscle lacerating and--) Over these concentrated pains there is a general ache, a fine moss of bruises blanketing the entire landscape.
That's enough to know, enough for her brain to process. Other things enter in little fits: she's hot. She's thirsty.
Canteen. Water. She has... she has a canteen... the first questing movement sends a lance of agony through her from fingers to shoulder and she stops. Canteen can wait. Pain's bad. Still, still, be still, make no movement in the garden. Less pain. That's good.
Just lie still. Everything else... can wait...
The sun passes zenith. Begins the long, lazy fall into the west.
***
12:32 pm
"Levine!"
There is no answer and Chaim curses, in Arabic so as not to profane the holy tongue.
He has lost her trail, which was clear leading out of camp for several hundred feet. The dirt takes prints well enough for him to have picked out her boot-treads here, there, ten feet further... but then the trail led around the curve of a large rock face, and onto rock scoured bare by the wind, rock showing no trace of passage.
Still he followed, judging how and where she would step, as one walking the easiest route, as one ignorant of the desert. City-dweller. American. Soft and weak in so many ways beyond merely her gender.
She has no idea what it is, to live here.
For himself, he loves this land. Not merely Eretz Yisroel in a poetic and patriotic fashion-- not merely the symbolism of her, the imagery of the Temple ruins and blue star on white flag-- but the land itself, from Haifa to the Negev. And not Israel as his fellow Jews would have her, tamed by water and agriculture, but Israel as so much of her is-- stark, harsh, unforgiving.
He loves Israel, but knows he can never take his lover for granted, that she demands respect more than affection, and that she also demands service and blood. These things he has given her.
Then there is faith, of course, somewhat lower down the hierarchy than the other two. If it were not so irretrievably linked to blood, for a descendant of Abraham-- if God were not, for a Jew, so inherently central-- he doubts he would have time for it. His gospel is that of the gun; his worship the soldier's.
Yet that faith has still led him to the kohen, and the kohen has led him to this: looking for some pampered, ignorant, arrogant American Jewess who barely deserves the name (she is considered one of the faithful? Her?) to make sure that she... eats lunch.
And she has led him to a dead end. No trail, no track, no trace.
He calls her name again, and the echoes sing back from the rocks, mocking.
Chaim bar Ari scratches at his cheek and contemplates force-feeding her the beans when he finds her. He leans back against the nearest rock to take his bearings, mark the path back to camp, then squints up at the sky to gauge the time.
The black shape of a bird wheels against that hammered blankness, describing patient circles.
***
OOC: Due to length, this is being posted in three parts: Part One - Part Two - Part Three.