Babylon (13 page)

He had become quite excited. And, to my consternation, so had I, though I believe I managed not to show it. I allowed him time to take control of himself, and apportioned a similarly discreet interval to myself, wherein I might moderate my heaving bosom and restore a maidenly pallor to my cheeks.

‘And how,’ I said, ‘is this purification to come about?’

‘By restoration of the cosmic balance,’ he said. ‘By realizing here, on Earth, the ancient life we once enjoyed in Heaven. By recreating the harmony that existed between Sumi-Er and Sumi- An when our respective root races lived amongst the stars.’

I felt my stomach knot. ‘By making us your slaves, you mean?’ I said, in a barely audible whisper.

‘You are very beautiful, Miss Fell,’ he said. I could feel him staring at me and, for a moment, I thought I would not be able to stand it. I bit my lip and fought back the tears. ‘Very beautiful indeed, and really, quite, quite intelligent. But you must understand that epochs in which women have reached autonomy always coincide with epochs of manifest decadence. Enslave you? It cannot be expected of women to return to what they really are and thus establish the necessary inner and outer conditions for the re-emergence of a superior race. No, not when men themselves retain only a semblance of true virility. In this Kali-Yuga, the chthonic nature of the feminine penetrates the virile principle and lowers it to a level that is exclusively phallic—that is, to the level of the beast. Woman dominates man if he himself becomes enslaved to his senses!’

‘Then what is the answer?’

He touched me, lightly, so lightly, I hardly felt it, stroking my hair as if it might have been the mane of a wild, skittish animal he had long since tamed and chosen to keep as a pet. I kept my eyes closed and breathed deep, surrendering myself to the slow, considered deliberations of his caresses.

‘The answer? The Black Order is an order of spiritual virility. And it is alone in facing the consequences of living in a world in which everything is permitted. Religion, politics, friendship, love. What are they? What do such things
mean
? If the skies are really empty, if there are no gods but ourselves, then there are no imperatives. There is only the Will. The Will! The Will is not a god; it is not even a physical force. It does, however, exist, and we find, in its exercise, the only meaning life can ever have. The answer, Miss Fell? The answer is the Will’s triumph: the dominance of the solar aristocracy over the earthly masses.

‘Some have accused us of cruelty. But for us, there is only art. Religion, politics, friendship—love, itself: all are art forms by which societies become instruments for the expression of the will of élites. If the Black Order is cruel, then its cruelty is merely the highest expression of artistic consciousness.’

I felt the train shudder as it applied its brakes. Briefly, I opened my eyes and saw that we were pulling into a siding; and then I closed them again, content, for the moment, to be outside time and space, and simply feel the touch of his hand as, falling into silence, like the train itself, he continued to stroke my hair.

The siding was overgrown with some kind of indigenous bindweed. The stuff had twined itself about the network of rusted, disused rails that forked away from the siding into the parallel streets. The train stood motionless, taking on water. Its own rails gleamed, boasting of regular use, and as ever, its buffers pointed southwards.

We sat on the edge of an old wooden railway platform. We hadn’t reached our destination. We had merely been treated to a rest stop.

‘If you wish to do a little sight-seeing,’ said Mr Malachi, who had walked over from the water-tower to inform us that we would be delayed for at least another hour, ‘then by all means, take a tour of St Messalina’s.’ He gestured towards the ruined cathedral that dominated the skyline. ‘But don’t wander off. Sometimes
things
from outside Babylon’s walls manage to penetrate deep into the city.’ He smiled his trademark cruel smile. ‘And they eat little girls.’

‘Get on with you,’ said Cliticia, batting her eyelids at him so furiously that I almost felt like taking hold of her and giving her a good shaking.

It wasn’t necessary. Mr Malachi had immediately turned about and walked away to attend to the pressing business of replenishing the locomotive’s boiler.

Cliticia gave a mock-salute. ‘Yes,
sir!’
she said, though not so loud that he might hear her. ‘All present and correct,
sir!
Anything you bleedin’ well say,
sir!’

‘What is it with this “sir” business,’ I said.

‘Oh, ol’ Malachi don’t mean no ’arm,’ she said. °E just likes ’is little games.’ She gave me a rather sharp poke with her elbow. ‘Just like I do.’ And then she giggled.

I looked up at the cathedral. ‘I suppose we might as well make the best of things,’ I said.

‘Come on then,’ said Cliticia, getting to her feet and rearranging her creased skirts. Her melancholy had lifted; she was more like her old self. And that undoubtedly had had something to do with the
tête-à-tête
she had enjoyed with Mr Malachi during our journey south. I held up my hand; she took hold of it and helped me up, her mood translating itself into a degree of bodily vigour unusual in so small a girl.

We walked along the platform to where a set of wooden steps led down to the tracks. Holding up the hems and petticoats of our ludicrously extravagant French dresses, we descended, tiptoed over the rails, and then re-ascended by way of the steps that communicated with the opposite platform.

The cathedral was only a stone’s-throw distant.

‘It’s spooky,’ said Cliticia.

‘It’s huge,’ I said. ‘A bit like St Paul’s.’

‘Only bigger,’ she added. She pushed out her underlip and blew a curl of hair out of her eyes. ‘But it’s seen better days, that’s for sure.’ The dome had all but collapsed; only a charred skeleton of spars and rafters offered evidence that it had existed at all. ‘So this is, or was, St Messalina’s,’ she continued. She studied the architecture more intently. ‘Poor Messalina, I wonder what happened to you?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I didn’t bring my Baedeker.’

We crossed a modest, rubbish-strewn piazza, ascended the cathedral steps, passed between the columns of a tumbledown portico, and then entered the cathedral itself through a cavernous hole in its façade that looked as if it might have been perpetrated by cannon fire.

The shadows immediately wrapped themselves about us. But the moonlight pouring through the all but non-existent dome provided sufficient illumination to reveal the cathedral’s secrets.

Like the piazza outside, the nave was strewn with rubbish and fragments of masonry, so that it had the appearance of a temple that might have stood at the foot of Pompeii during its last days. I turned. Above us, what remained of the rose window refracted the opalescent shafts of light that rained down out of the black sky, as if the moon—eager to confirm my first impressions—were imitating Vesuvius. The Romans called the rose the flower of Venus. It was the badge of the sacred prostitute, as symbolic of passionate love as the poppy was symbolic of death. I genuflected.

‘What are you doing?’ said Cliticia.

‘This is a Goddess temple!’ I said, a little shocked that she should question my attempt at piety. ‘I’m making obeisance to the venereal rose!’

‘Then it’s
'er
 that you should bend the knee to,’ she said, jerking her thumb towards a wall cavity. I walked over to it. The surrounding masonry was blackened, and by the same fire, I suppose, as had consumed so much of the rest of the cathedral; but the idol that stood within was blackened by design rather than accident. It was a Black Madonna, no more than two feet high: an image of my patron saint, Mary Magdalene.

Again, I genuflected, and this time bowed my head, too, in a heartfelt act of submission.

‘Christ loved her more than all the disciples,’ I said, quoting from
The Gospel of Thomas
, ‘and used to kiss her often on her mouth.’

‘He cast seven demons out of ’er,’ said Cliticia, who had walked to my side. ‘Or so they say. Poor cow.’

I tsked. ‘Seven demons for each of the seven gatekeepers of the underworld,’ I said. I gazed down at Cliticia, who seemed as captivated by the wooden icon as me. ‘Really, my darling, you
might
show some respect.’

‘Respect? She was a dancer. Like Ishtar, ’er mother, she shed a veil at each gate. I can respect
that.’

‘To distract the attentions of Death,’ I said.

‘Or to seduce ’im,’ she said.

I gazed once more at the Madonna. ‘Do you know the dance?’ I said, nervously. ‘The underworld dance? The dance of the seven veils?’

‘Wot? The dance of death?’

‘Of course,’ I said. It was called ‘the dance of death’ in honour of the Magdalene’s companion, Salome. Salome had danced for the head of Jesus’ chief rival, John the Baptist, and thus laid the way for the Magdalene. On John’s death, his disciples renounced their asceticism and became the disciples of the man the Magdalene was to anoint, seduce, and proclaim the Christ—the founder of a Church whose priests would all be raving nympholepts.

‘Gabrielle taught me a few steps,’ said Cliticia. She rocked her pelvis. Her hips rose and fell. ‘I’m wearing the wrong clothes, of course.’ She paused, as if taking stock of what she knew, then recommenced. ‘You ’ave to imagine you ’ave a baby sitting, like, on your right ’ip.’ Her posture changed. ‘Then, like, you move ’im to your
left
’ip.’ She paused again and scratched her head. ‘Well, think of this, then: a figure eight on the floor. You stand at its centre, right foot in one loop, left foot in the other. Now, what you do is this.’ Her hips swayed, following the line of the imaginary figure eight. ‘You ’ave to think that there’s, like, a
snake
coiled up inside your belly button.’ The pelvic circles became more liquid, more frankly aggressive, one hip and then the other snapping to attention as if at the bidding of a drumbeat. Soon, her pelvis became a riot of jerks, wiggles, and thrusts, as she renounced all elements of dance that were socially permissible and embraced everything that was prohibited. The sweat stood out on her forehead. And then she stopped, doubled over, and started panting for breath. ‘Gawd, a girl’d do well to take off her stays if she’s going to dance like a bleedin’
ghawazee.’
She gasped and wheezed. ‘It ain’t called the dance of death for nothing, that’s for sure.’

‘We’ve never had instruction,’ I said. ‘That could prove a bit of a problem when we get to meet up with other Shulamites.’

‘Naw. We’ll be all right. After all, we know the
essentials.’
She straightened her spine and began rubbing her ribcage. ‘We know about how a Shulamite goes about conferring kingship.’ She laughed and winked. ‘I mean, what else does a girl ’ave to know.’

I shook my head, unwilling to encourage her, especially in a sacred place such as this. ‘She anointed his head and feet with spikenard,’ I said, refocusing on the wooden idol. ‘She anointed him from an alabaster jug. She wiped his feet with her hair.’

‘And then she knelt down in front of ’im, and—’

‘Cliticia!’ I exclaimed.

‘It’s no use being coy, my darling,’ she said. Her left hip circled in a lascivious prelude to dance, and then, with a single, insolent jerk, snapped into position, as if to the accompaniment of a rim- shot. She held the pose.
‘Pow!’
she said.
‘Wham! Crash!’
She executed a half-hearted pirouette. ‘That was the Magdalene for you. She was a
real
daughter of Ishtar.’

The Magdalene. Yes. The Madonna of the Dark Moon, whom the Templars so fervently worshipped: she, whose descendants founded the Merovingian dynasty, the first example of the stranglehold the Illuminati were to exert upon the world. In Languedoc, they had erected shrines to her honour. And here, in Babylon, it had been the same.

‘She seduced the king of heaven,’ I said. ‘The lord of the universe, the living Christ.’

‘Living Christ, my arse. He was an Egyptian sorcerer.’

‘Whatever he was,’ I said, a little shocked, despite myself, ‘she infiltrated the Christian Church and filled it with her own disciples.’ I sighed. ‘We were powerful, in those days, weren’t we?’

‘We were bleedin’ magnificent,’ said Cliticia.

‘But now... ’ I tipped back my head and stared up through the skeletal remains of the dome at the moon-splashed sky. ‘Why is it
always
night here?’ I said. ‘And why is there always that moon?’

‘It’s ‘er world,’ said Cliticia, reaching out to stroke the blackened lines of the Madonna. ‘And she’s the Black Lady, the Midnight Witch.’

‘And night is her constituency,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this world was never discovered. Perhaps it was
created
... by the power of Ishtar. Perhaps we are simply in Ishtar’s mind.’

‘Oo-er,’ said Cliticia, giving me a gentle punch in the side, ‘that’s deep, that is.’

I spun about and clasped Cliticia by the shoulders. She looked up at me, genuinely startled, I think; almost as startled as I was by my unaccountable turn of mood. For in looking up at the sky, I had felt myself falling, falling, and an incipient panic had seized my breast.