Cover Him with Darkness (2 page)

Finally we came out into a roofless chamber, where the walls leaned
inward a hundred feet over our heads and the floor was nothing but a mass of loosely tumbled boulders. I looked up, blinking at the light that seemed blinding, though in fact this was a dim and shadowed place. I could see a wisp of cloud against the seam of blue sky overhead, and the black speck of a mountain eagle soaring across the gap.

There he lay, upon a great tilted slab of pale limestone, his wrists and ankles spread and bound by twisted leather ropes whose farther ends seemed to be set into the rock itself. It was hard to say whether the slab had always been underground or had fallen long ago from the mountain above; our little country is, after all, prone to earthquakes. Dirt washed down with the rain had stained him gray, but I could make out the muscled lines of his bare arms and legs and the bars of his ribs. There was an old altar cloth draped across his lower torso—and only much later did I realize that Father had done that, to spare his small daughter the man's nakedness.

“Here, Milja,” said my father, pushing me forward. “It is time you knew. This is the charge of our family. This is what we guard day and night. It is our holy duty never to let him be found or escape.”

I was only little: he looked huge to me, huge and filthy and all but naked. I stared at the ropes, as thick as my skinny wrists, knotted cruelly tight about his broader ones. They stretched his arms above his head so that one hand could not touch the other, and matching tethers held his ankles apart. I felt a terrible ache gather in my chest. I pressed backward, into Father's black robes.

“Who is he?” I whispered.

“He is a very bad man.”

That was when the prisoner moved for the first time. He rolled his head and turned his face toward us. I saw the whites of his eyes gleam in his gray face. Even at seven, I could read the suffering and the despair burning there. I squirmed in Father's grip.

“I think he's hurt,” I whimpered. “The ropes are hurting him.”

“Milja,” said Father, dropping to his knee and putting his arm around me. “Don't be fooled—this is not a human being. It just looks like one. Our family has guarded him here since the first people came to these mountains. Before the Communists. Before the Turks. Before the Romans, even. He has always been here. He is a prisoner of God.”

“What did he do?”

“I don't know, little chick.”

That was when I began to cry.

“What did he do?” became a question I repeated many times as I grew up, along with, “Who is he?” My father didn't lie, but neither could he answer my question truthfully. He was an educated man, though he had taken up the vocation of priest of an isolated village in one of the most barren, mountainous corners of our rugged country. He had studied engineering at university in Belgrade, but he admitted that the answers to my queries were unclear to him. “The gods have condemned him,” he would say, with a sigh. That sounded so strange coming from an Orthodox priest that I didn't know what to think.

Every Sunday, after going down into the village to celebrate the Divine Liturgy with the congregation in the church there—nobody ever climbed up the two hundred steps to our dingy little chapel carved into the sheer rock—he would descend into the prisoner's cave. He would take the man water and bread, and wash his face. My father was not without compassion, even for a prisoner, and he felt the responsibility of his position.

“Is he…Prometheus?” I asked when I was ten, and had been reading the Greek myths in one of the dog-eared books Father had brought from the capital. “The gods chained up Prometheus forever. Is it him?”

“It may be.”

“But…Prometheus was
good
, Papa. He taught us how to be civilized. He stole fire from the gods to bring it to men. He was on our side!”

“What did man do with fire, Milja?”

“Cook?”

“He smelted iron, little chick, and with iron he made swords. He made all the weapons of war, and men have slaughtered men in countless millions ever since. Are you sure Prometheus had our best interests at heart? Would we not have been happier if we'd stayed in the innocence of the Stone Age?”

I was too young to answer that. Father sighed and fetched a blackbound book, laying it on the table by the window where the light could fall upon it. He opened the pages to somewhere near the beginning.

“My grandfather told me that it is Azazel we hold in our keeping. Have you heard of him?”

“No,” said I in a small voice.

“Neither man nor pagan titan, little chick, but a fallen angel. A leader of the Watchers: those Sons of God who lusted after mortal women. The Israelites dedicated their scapegoat sin-offering to Azazel every year when they drove it out into the wilderness. And just like the Greeks' Prometheus, he is credited with teaching men metalworking and war-craft—and women the arts of seduction and sorcery. Here in the
Book of Enoch
, see; the angel Raphael is commanded by God: ‘
bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. And lay upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever.'”

“Which is right, then?” I asked. “Is he a demon or is he Prometheus?”

“Maybe he is both, and it's the same story. Or maybe he is something else altogether. All I know is that he's been here since the beginning, and that it is our duty to keep him bound. It's what our family forefathers dedicated their lives to. And you must carry on when I am gone, Milja. You must marry and teach your husband and your sons, so that it is never forgotten. And you must
never
tell anyone else, all your life. It must not go beyond the family. Promise me!”

“Why not?”

“What if someone, someone who did not understand, felt sorry for him and set him free? What if he is one of the great demons, Milja? What would happen to this world?”

I was eleven when I started to visit him in secret. I took him food, because I couldn't bear any longer to lie awake in bed thinking of how hungry he must be. I knew he could get water—when it rained it would run down the rocks onto his face—but at eleven I was always ravenous myself, and starvation seemed the worst of tortures. And the image of him lying bound there haunted my dreams more and more, evoking feelings I had no words for—not then—until it seemed impossible for me to stay away.

Still, I went at midday, when the light was strongest and the cavern least frightening. I brought him bread crusts and cheese. I picked berries from the mountain bushes and fed them between his cracked lips.

I remember the first time I did it, the first time I went alone. I climbed up on that big rock slab and knelt over his dirt-streaked body, and he opened his eyes and looked up into mine. His irises were so dark that
they couldn't be distinguished from the pupils, and in this half-light they looked like holes.

“What's your name?” I whispered.

I don't know if he heard me. He certainly didn't reply. He just looked at me, from the depths of his private torment.

“I brought you some milk.” I tipped the teat of the little skin of goats' milk to his lips and let it trickle into the side of his mouth, carefully: I was scared of choking him. His throat worked and his lips twitched, bleeding. He drank it all and I sat back. That was when, with obvious and painful effort, the lines of his face pulled into a brief smile—a smile so fragile a butterfly might have trampled it underfoot.

That was when I was lost.

I was fourteen when I first heard him speak.

“Milja,” he murmured, greeting me. His voice was hoarse from disuse, but its depths made the hair stir on my neck. I nearly fled.

“What's your name?” I asked once again, but he didn't answer, withdrawing instead, it seemed, into his anguish once more. He only twisted from one hip to the other to ease the strain on his back, and hissed with pain. The power of his corded body, terrible even under constraint, made me tremble.

He spoke only rarely in the years that followed, and what he said made little sense to me—often it wasn't even in any language I knew, and when I could make out the words they seemed to be nothing but fragments. “Leaves on the brown-bright water…” he might mutter to himself. I think he was remembering things he had seen before he was imprisoned. As I grew to realize how the uncountable years had stolen even his mind, I felt dizzy with horror.

I was eighteen when Father sent me away.

You have to understand: I grew up alone, set apart from the other village children. Oh, when I was a little child I ran and played with them, but as I grew older things changed. Our family had been here for centuries before the village of Stijenjarac was founded, fulfilling our ancient duty until war and political turmoil and expanding horizons had scattered and dwindled its numbers. We had always been treated as
separate
from the
rest of the village; sometimes we would intermarry, but only our boys choosing their girls. I was the last of the line to grow up here. Schooling in the village was little more than rudimentary, and at fourteen I was the only girl still being taught; all the others my age were laboring with their mothers in the house and the fields. At sixteen I was still studying under my father's tutelage, and had become a freak in the eyes of the whole community. The girls turned as one and cut me off from their company, erecting a wall of sneering hostility. The boys just teased me unremittingly, their curiosity expressed in the crudest manner. Thrown stones were the least of my worries.

I think Father was secretly pleased I showed no interest in the village boys. He hoped I would go to university some day, like him.

Perhaps I should have made an effort to understand my peers more, and tried to make friends. Perhaps. But I was naive, and I thought all men should be like my gentle, scholarly father, so I was alone a great deal. I looked after the house when Father was out—his ability to fix generators and rotavators was something the villagers valued him for as much as his priestly status, I think. I cooked and did the laundry. I read. I climbed the hillsides on my own, being careful to avoid the shepherds up there. And I went to visit our prisoner, every day.

As I grew older I grew bolder too. I stole wine for him. I baked him honey cake. I would bring water to wash the grime off his body, slightly shocked by my own recklessness as I wiped down the heavy slabs of his muscles, or slid a hand under a lower leg so that I might massage his calf and relieve the ache of his trapped limbs to some tiny extent. Sometimes he would focus upon my face long enough to whisper my name.

His body fascinated me. I learned its illicit contours in the half dark, mostly by touch. He felt cold all over, like the rock he lay on, but there were smooth bits and there were places rough with hair. There were harder and softer stretches. There was a big, jagged scar over the right side of his abdomen, but it looked old.

There were things only a married woman should see.

I wanted to take his pain away.

I was book-smart, as they say in America—there was no such phrase in our village, though they understood the concept perfectly—and I was burning with curiosity, but not wise. One day I lay down beside him on
the stone and nestled my head on his chest. I could hear the slow beat of his heart. The bars of his ribs were like carved prehistoric rock-glyphs, and I walked my fingertips across each ridge and furrow. The skin above his hip was so smooth it was like stroking feathers, but the old altar cloth felt damp and coarse in comparison. There was something repulsive about the feel of the grimy cloth that preserved his modesty. With my right hand I drew off that swatch, and then for the first time I touched him without the excuse that I was tending him. Without any excuse at all.

Hair, matted into curls. Below that, duskier skin. I shut my eyes. My hand, for once, was bolder than my gaze.

Soft.

Silky.

A small cool heft in my hand, yet heavy with a secret weight: the significance invested in the forbidden. My heart was racing, far faster than the heavy beat against my ear. My mind shied away from what I was doing. But my body seemed to be sure of what it wanted, and urged my hand to its task.

Tentatively I began to caress him.

He responded to that. Not just that sleeping creature stirring to wakefulness under my open palm, but his heartbeat waking with a kicking thud and then his whole frame following—his back stretching, his breath catching in his throat, his toes flexing and curling. I snatched my hand away, terrified and thrilled, and when he groaned deep in his chest I felt it through my bones.

“Ansha?”

I didn't recognize the name, if it was a name. His eyes were wide open, staring, but I couldn't be sure he saw anything. I pushed myself up into his line of sight.

“Milja,” I whispered. “I'm Milja.”

His cracked lips parted, and he made a sound of need. He was beautiful in a way I couldn't understand: so beautiful I felt it as pain. So I returned my hand to its former position and nearly jumped with shock when I found that everything had changed. Nothing soft anymore, and nothing cold, and just so much
more
of him, flesh brought into existence from the nothing, from the void. Like a miracle.