Falling Idols (16 page)

*

When she learned how much Salíce had told me, Maia wouldn’t speak to her for two days. After it got to be too much to contain, they shouted at each other for half an hour.

“You didn’t have any right!” Maia cried. “I should’ve been the one to tell him those things.”

“Then what you were waiting for?” Salíce asked. “Until he got too old and decrepit to run away from you?”

I listened to them argue as I listened to them feed: out of sight and out of reach.

“The problem with you, Maia, is that there’s still a part of you that refuses to admit you’re not like the rest of them, and never can be again. Aren’t you ever going to accept that?
Ever?
”

“Because I’m not strictly human anymore, that means I can’t still be humane?” Maia’s voice then turned bitter, accusing. “Of course, you do have to possess that quality before you can slough it off.”

“Inhumane — me? They always thank me when I feed on them. What I take they’re already swimming in to begin with. They can’t wait to give it away. You can’t make any such claim, so don’t you even try.” Salíce groaned with exasperation. “My god, you still think you can fall in love, don’t you? You pick them out when they’re children and you dream about what might’ve been, and on the rare occasion you meet up with one again when he’s grown, you think if you put on enough of a front you’ll both forget what you are.”

“Keep your voice down,” Maia warned.

“You’re afraid he’ll hear something he doesn’t already know? Oh, wake up, he’s got excellent hearing. The only thing he doesn’t know is how you look after a meal. That’s the one thing you can’t pretend away, isn’t it? Not even you’re that naïve. And damn right you are that most of them would have a problem loving you back if they saw how bloated your belly gets with all the blood.”

Whatever Maia said next I didn’t hear. I was too busy facing Lilah when I realized she’d been behind me, watching me eavesdrop.

“It’ll blow over. It always does,” she told me, and nodded in the direction of the argument. “Salíce always has had an attitude of superiority because she never has to get any messier than some little cocksucker bobbing her head beneath a table at Mr. Pussy’s Café.”

“Do you ever resent that?” I asked.

“God, no. But then, I know what really makes Salíce so cocky over it in the first place.” She laughed, long hair uncombed and tangled in her face, as she leaned into mine. “Nobody’s afraid of her. She hates that. Maia and me — they fear us. But nobody fears Salíce.”

“I’m not afraid of Maia, either.”

Lilah loudly clicked her teeth. “But you are of me.” She stared triumphantly through the crumbling of my self-assurance. “Then maybe you’re only half-stupid.”

As she’d predicted, the argument soon blustered away, ending when Maia stormed from the house and cooled down out on the back lawn. Through the windows I watched her, a slight distant figure in somber greys, walking slowly amidst grass and gardens, finally sitting beneath an oak, where she distractedly petted one of the slobbering mastiffs that had the run of the grounds. When I braved the dog and joined her, we sat awhile in that silence that follows the clumsy dropping of another guard from around the heart.

“After that first day, and the bomb,” I said, “why didn’t you come to me again? I’ve always wondered that. I’d’ve followed you anywhere. I’d’ve been anything you wanted.”

“There’s your answer, right there. It’s too easy for someone like us to take whatever we want. Where’s the joy in that? After so long, it’s only gratifying one more appetite.” She watched her hand scruffing the black fur across the dog’s huge head. “It’s important to me that if someone like you comes back … it’s because you do it on your own.”

“Because it’s more real to you then?”

Maia shrugged, stared off into the grey sky. “What
is
real, anyway?” she asked, and while once I thought I had those answers, now I wasn’t even sure of the questions.

In the black-and-white faith I was raised in, there’d been no room outside of Hell for the likes of the Sisters of the Trinity. And while I realized that they weren’t goddesses, neither were they demons. I no longer believed in demons, at least not the sort the Church had spent centuries exorcising. Where was the need of them, other than keeping the Church in business? One pontiff with a private army could wreak more havoc than any infernal legion.

Because of Salíce, now I understood that the Sisters weren’t the only ones of their kind. When I asked how many of them there were, Maia didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, and I realized with an unexpected poignancy that whatever monstrous acts it was in their nature to commit, they were no worse than what went on between wolves and deer, and that those who committed them were still as lost in their world as the most ignorant of us mortal fools in ours, working and loving and praying and dying over our threescore and ten.

Black-haired and black-eyed, hair tousled in the breeze, Maia turned her unblinking serpent’s gaze on me, so unexpected it was almost alien.

“How much would it take to repulse you?” she said.

At first I didn’t know how to respond, then asked why she’d even want to.

“Because it obviously takes more than eating men alive to do it. You don’t find that interesting about yourself?” She wouldn’t look at me, instead smiled down at the dog. “I’ve made lovers of grown-up children before, and sometimes they’ve run and sometimes they’ve stayed, but do you know who I’ve noticed is most likely to stay? It’s you refugees from Christianity. Now why do you suppose that is?”

I had no idea.

“My guess is it’s because, most of you, you were weaned on the idea of serving up your god on a plate and in a little cup and eating him in a communal meal. Then when you can’t believe in him anymore, and you find us, and see how willing we are to eat others just like you, how we need that … then isn’t a little part of you, deep inside, relieved? Because that means
you’re
the god. Your ego is still too fragile to see yourself as just food. So you must be God, right…?

“So let me ask you again: How much would it take to repulse you? To sicken those romantic ideals out of you?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Maia. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but have the good grace to ask me rather than talking your way around it.”

“Hear that, Brutus? Doesn’t want to talk about it,” she said to the mastiff. “You know, Patrick, where we get these dogs, they claim the lineage runs directly back to war dogs used by the Roman army. Like barrels, they were … with legs and teeth and fury and spiked leather armor. And you know something, Patrick? That’s no empty claim on the breeders’ part, it’s absolutely true. Do you know how I know this?”

I shook my head.

“They’re extraordinary dogs. With extraordinary bloodlines.”

She hugged the dog, then slammed it over onto its back, and I could only watch appalled as Maia buried her beautiful face in the coarse fur at the mastiff’s bull neck. It yelped once, and those powerful legs kicked and clawed at the air, its body all squirming steel muscle, and yet she held it down with a minimum of struggle. When after several moments Maia tore her face away and let the dog go, it rolled unsteadily to its feet and lurched to a safer spot. Dazed, it looked back at her and whined, then ran off as if in a drunken lope.

She was on me by then, had flipped me back and down before I knew it was happening. She straddled me, her hands gripping my shoulders, then pressed her smeared face to mine and opened her mouth in a violent kiss, let gravity take the blood straight into me. We spit and we spewed, but I couldn’t fight her.

It would’ve been like wrestling an angel.

So I pretended the blood was her own.

When she sat back against the oak, Maia was breathing hard. I was still lying flat and trying not to retch. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and trembled.

“Julius has always hated the dogs,” she murmured. “He hated the Romans, so he hates the dogs. He still blames the Romans for what he became. And he hates the dogs.”

“Became,” I echoed. “None of you were born this way, then?”

“Nobody’s ever born this way,” she said. When I asked what made them all, she told me it was different on the surface in each case, and sometimes that surface was all they knew. When I asked what made
her
, Maia did not speak for a long time, nor look at me. At last, after we heard the mournful howling of an unseen dog, she said, “If you’re still around late tonight, I’ll tell you.”

VII.
Ignominy patris

“We were Assyrian,” she began, in our room filled with silks and dried orchids, “and we were just women. Devalued, and with no formal power. But we still had our ways. You know the Bible, so you know the sorts of men who made Assyria, don’t you?”

I told her I did. A nation of warrior kings ruling warrior subjects, Assyria had been so feared for its savagery that an Old Testament scribe had called it “a land bathed in blood.”

“In Assyria, as in Babylonia,” Maia went on, “each woman was expected, once in her life before she married, to go to the temple of Ishtar and sit on the steps until a man came and dropped a coin in her lap as the price of her favours. So off they’d go and their bodies became divine vessels for a while, and that was how a woman performed her duty to the goddess of love.

“My sisters and I decided to go the temple all on the same day, and the men who came then, they showered us with coins and started to fight each other over who’d end up having us. Lilah loved it, thought it was hilarious. At night, in secret, she led us and other women in worshipping the demoness Lilitu … the one the Israelites took and turned into Adam’s first wife, Lilith, and thought was so horrible because she fucked Adam from the top instead of lying on her back like a proper woman was supposed to. I’m sure you can see the appeal she had to those of us who didn’t feel particularly subservient to men.

“After that first day at the temple, when we saw what kind of power we had over them, we kept going back. Our fame grew, and so did our fortunes, and the rumours of the pleasure we could bring
 
… until we were finally summoned by King Sennacherib. He wanted to restore a rite that was ancient even then, from Sumerian times: the Sacred Marriage. The king embodied a god and a priestess stood in for the goddess — by then, we were held in much higher esteem than mere temple prostitutes — and out of that physical union the gods and goddesses received their pleasures of the flesh.”

Maia uttered a small laugh. “Lilah never believed Sennacherib really meant any of it, said he only wanted some grandiose excuse for an orgy with us. Probably she was right. After that, we became his most favoured concubines, and whatever in Nineveh we wanted, we had. And I … gave birth to twins, a daughter and a son. Of course the king didn’t publicly acknowledge them as his own. That was only for children born of his queen. But I knew whose they were.

“In 701 B.C. Sennacherib invaded the Israelites. He captured forty-six cities before getting to Jerusalem, but by then, the Jewish King Hezekiah had had an underground aqueduct dug to insure the water supply. Sennacherib besieged the city, as he’d already done at Lachish, but by now they were in a position to outwait us almost indefinitely. I know, because we were there. He might leave his queen at home, but Sennacherib wouldn’t dare leave us behind. Not with the addiction he had to our bodies. So we were there for it all. Waiting for weeks under that merciless desert sun, a few arrows flying back and forth, an attempt at building a siege ramp … but mostly each side just waiting for the other to give up.”

Maia seemed to lose herself in the flickering flame of a pillar candle. “Do you remember what supposedly happened to part of our army there?”

I nodded. It was said that an angel from the one true God of Israel came down and in one night slaughtered 185,000 Assyrians.

“Not true, I’m guessing?”

“Do you even have to ask?” she said. “It was closer to four thousand, and it was Sennacherib’s own fault. He was starting to fear he might lose the siege, so he went to the priests, the ones he knew practiced sorcery, and he had them conjure a demon from out of the desert wastes. He’d meant to send it over the city walls and turn it loose on Jerusalem. But the priests lost control of it and it began slaughtering our own soldiers. When they wrote about it later, the Israelites grossly exaggerated the casualties and credited them to the Archangel Michael.” Maia shook her head. “They did a lot of that sort of thing. Nothing but propaganda for their god Yahweh.