The Secret Book of Paradys (48 page)

“Now this soldier, after some misfortune, had recourse to an amulet said to have been fashioned in Khem.” (“Aegyptus” said the Latin.) “However, the amulet had its origin in the country of the Assyrians, possibly at the City Calah, in the days before David was King in Israel.

“Now the Assyrians worshipped all manner of idols, and were beset by all the races of the demons. The amulet took its power from just such a being, an
utuk
. Its shape was graven on the jewel of the amulet, and was that of a man, but having claws upon the feet and fingers, and the head and beak of a bird of prey.

“At first the Roman found that the amulet was helpful to him. But then, it seemed to draw away his strength, while the demon began to haunt him. At last he assayed riddance of the article, but through this very means was enslaved by it for ever. Thereafter his line was polluted by the demon, which was wont to manifest itself among his descendants here in Paradys. Its method was this, that it was carried in the semen of the male and the blood of the female, in the way of some poisons or diseases. And as with disease, a proportion would prove to have a natural resistance to the effects of the pest. Therefore, generations might pass without any sign, though all were tainted,
until one would be born who was vulnerable, in whom the
utuk
could get a hold. For the
utuk
was given its life through metamorphosis and shape-changing. The woman who was susceptible would birth a son or daughter infected by this evil, most often the former. That man was then, once grown, capable both of transmuting into the form of the
utuk
, and, through his seed, causing other women to conceive a similar miscreation. In this case, tainted kin, or not, all women were impressible. It has been recorded, there are further permutations to this generative transfer at the injection of seed, but no document had been discovered regarding them.

“The
utuk
is in itself a terrible thing, a ravening thing, which craves human life in its form, and more sensually in a robbery of blood and flesh. It is an Eater, a Devourer.

“Though magical safeguards are of protective use, the
utuk
itself, while possessed of a human host, is impervious. For the carrier may be killed through any normal means, at which the demon makes its escape by whatever route is to hand, into another host, for an example in his infection by the spilled blood. Where no transference is likely, that aspect of the demon may be considered extinct, providing the body of the carrier is burned and the ashes laid. However, though every individual manifestation of the demon be destroyed, in its poisonous disease-like form, it remains inherent in that kindred it has afflicted. Who are by name the
Vuscarii
.

“For the amulet itself, it is lost. The hue of it is said to have changed, as do particular jewels when heated, or exposed to wear. This tint, the shade of the jewel as it was or has become, is believed to offer warning through a colour of the eyes of those contaminated.”

Haninuh, having gained the end of the text, replaced the bone marker, shut up the book, and locked it.

As he did this, the candle flickered wildly and would have gone out, but the Jew spoke at it a Word, and the Word stayed the candle flame, which burned up straight and still once more.

It was night, and there was no moon.

Haninuh paused at the threshold of his daughter’s apartment. She had been washed in a little bath of lettuce enamel, and, her prayers said, got into her bed with her wooden doll and her striped cat. There all three were, staring at him clear-eyed, doll, cat and child.

“And are you ready for sleep, Ruquel?”

“Yes, father,” she answered, and put her doll into the sheets with its tow head on the pillow, while the cat purred and kneaded the covers.

“Have the bad dreams stopped, little girl?”

“Oh yes, since you put the water dishes out to catch them.”

“You must tell me if you dream anything bad again.”

Ruquel smiled. “I say to her,” she nodded at the cat, “we’re safe. You won’t let anything hurt us. Though she was frightened when we had the dream. But not now.”

When he had kissed all three goodnight, as was obligatory, wood lips, soft lips, fur cheek, Haninuh climbed up the house to the roof pavilion.

Blackness hung over Paradys, the book of night open randomly at the darkest page.

As usual Haninuh performed three rituals, and uttered some prayers which, upon white deserts and obsidian mountains, had long ago invoked the benign forces of fierce angels.

In just such centuries, the Jews had kept vigil against the hordes of Assyria. They had fought with them sword-to-sword under skies of flying arrows. The wolf-like Assyrians, whose cities were lilies of a river bank, had riven Israel. And Israel had brought down upon them the bolts of the one true terrible limitless God. Until the people angered Him, and He turned from them, and then the Assyrians leapt at the throat of Israel … it was all to do again.

From those times Haninuh’s soul remembered the demon. The
utuk
.

Night lay motionless on Paradys, yet it moved towards the east. Haninuh heard the bells ring for the offices of Christendom, the hymn of drunks from an alley, smelled the corn market, and flowers on the house vine, saw, heard, smelled nothing from the ordinary.

About two hours after Laude had sung from the convent near the quays, deep weariness overcame the Jew. A longing for sleep weighed on him. Soon it would be dawn. Though hidden senses told him grim events had gone on somewhere, he had been vouchsafed no clue.

He rose from the bench and made his way towards the pavilion’s door. His hand was on the latch when he heard a muffled scraping and rustling from nearby, on the wall.

Sleep dropped from him like a mantle. A chord of sparks shot across his body. Something was coming through the vine, up the side of the house.

Haninuh turned to confront the six unshuttered windows of the pavilion, his back to the closed door. He did not have long to wait.

A black lump of darkness came sliding over the roof’s edge and slewed across two windows, enlarging itself into the third.

Haninuh, back to the door, the third window before him, whispered, “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be He, is the maker of all things created … I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true … I believe that the Creator … knows every deed of the children of men, gives heed to all their acts – for my salvation I hope, O Lord! I hope, O Lord, for my salvation! O Lord, for my salvation I hope!”

Blackness, and from the black a sort of twisting into form, like a man’s, but the hands were talons and clacked against the pavilion wall – and out of the black leaned something. It was the head of a bird composed of the green sequins of scales, and a beak black with dried blood, and two eyes like emerald.

There was no intelligence in these eyes – and yet they
were
, they
lived
, they
knew
.

“In the presence of my enemies,” said Haninuh, “You are with me. Even in the valley of the Shadow, You are there.”

The beak of the
utuk
cracked apart, and a snake tongue whipped outward and in again. The eyes were smoky now, as if drowsy. It came and pressed on the open window – and started off again. It had struck the invisible lines of power that barred every aperture of the Jew’s house. And it did not like them; perhaps they stung.

At that instant the Jew woke into movement. Casting before him a cabbalistic incantation that smashed the etheric lattice of the window, and seemed to carry him with it, out of the pavilion he sprang, snatching up as he hurtled through a sword of honed steel from the bench.

In that moment, in his blaze of fear and rage, the magus Haninuh touched terror with his body, came knee to knee with the unearthly, deathly thing, and with a moan of dread raised the sword, on which the names of angels, the script of most arcane talismans, were scored –

But the horror shuffled off from him, like the nightmare. It evaded the stroke, flounced on a flightless wing-beat away, and over the rooftop, smearing and roiling itself in, getting like an ape down the wall. The fragile vine was ripped now, and fell with it into the street. There in the pure black the beast of night disappeared.

Haninuh stood and trembled.

He had been too slow, yet too strong for it – or else, by flight it mocked him. For it was drawn to him as he had sensed it might be. A traditional foe. Doubly in danger now. Worse, he had let it escape to continue its mayhem. For this hour he had planned, but he was found wanting.

The Jew bowed his head before his own failure, consenting, bitter.

For thirty-nine days she was their prisoner. On the fortieth she was their victim. It was her punishment. She knew that she was guilty. She had looked for no kindness, and her first actions were prompted by the habit of human commerce, not fantasies of pity.

The truth had come to her gradually, as if she returned to consciousness: nothing had happened to alert the house.

Even her screams had been those of pleasure, and doubtless, if anyone had overheard them, they were correctly interpreted.

The metamorphosis occurred in silence.

It had been visible only to herself.

At the recollection – the
full
absorption of what had taken place in front of her – Helise wrested herself to her feet and swayed there in her ripped gown, her hair raining round her shoulders. She felt herself dirtied, bloody. But the only wound, of course, was one which would be acceptable, despite the fact that it was out of date.

Nevertheless, her helpless need was to seek others, to raise her voice to a new pitch, and tell what she had been the witness of. That this was not believable did not cross her mind. She had watched. She had no choice
but
to believe.

Some while it took her to recall how a door was to be opened. That achieved, she went out into the corridors of d’Uscaret, almost wandering, and coming to a lighted spot, she did raise her voice, and began to scream. Once begun, this expression was not easy to leave off.

People came. She did not know who they were. Shadows jostled on torchlight and the eyes of candles blinked at her.

What she screamed, if there were words, Helise did not afterwards know.

Presently someone struck her in the face. She fell down, and looking up from the stones, beheld Lord d’Uscaret. One of his rings had cut her eyebrow. She felt the numb hurt of it and putting up her finger, caught a bud of wetness.

She was now quiet and they dragged her to a room. Here the kindred gathered and glared on her. The servants were shut out.

Lord d’Uscaret paced about. His wife sat in a chair and gnawed her lip. For a long while they did not ask. At length, this question: What did Helise mean by her noise?

Helise said, with the clarity of an honest child, “When he lay on me, his face and head became the head of a bird.”

As Helise said this, Lady d’Uscaret let out a single sharp cry, as if she had driven an awl into her hand. Then she rose and left the chamber. Her face was awful, as though its bones had collapsed and no blood was anywhere under her skin. One of the men followed to support her.

D’Uscaret came back to loom above Helise, and he was sweating as he did at his evening drinking.

“Who told you, you witch, to say such a thing?”

Helise was confused and did not answer.

Then d’Uscaret slapped her again, and though now the rings did not cut her face, she darted away, and fell once more, and crouching on the floor she said, “He never would, my husband Heros. But tonight I made him, and he lay on me, and when the thing happened to him which happens, he altered. His flesh broke out in metal spangles, and I saw he had a bird’s face, and the beak, and a demon’s eyes, like a hawk’s eyes, but green. It ran away up the chimney.”

D’Uscaret turned from her. “Go search the bedchamber.”

Pale as their lady, two of the men went out. The few left behind looked half-mad. D’Uscaret sweated. Not one of them had declared these events must be impossible.

Helise saw that her statement seemed obtuse, which was mostly due to a lack of carnal vocabulary. Feeling no reticence, she tried to put this right. “I mean,” she said, “that when he was being a husband to me, when the fit comes, then he was changed.” Suddenly a wild lament swept down on her. Tears gushed. She sprawled on the floor.

Shortly after this, everyone went out, and locked her into the room.

Helise wept until all awareness was wrung from her body. Perhaps she slept then.

She wakened to torchlight. A steward of the house, and a woman who waited on Lady d’Uscaret, pulled Helise upright.

“You will make no sound,” said the waiting-woman.

They took her through the mansion, along passages, up stairs, rather as she had taken herself earlier, searching for the secret apartment of her beloved.

Finally there was another room, with sparse furnishings, a window of lactescent glass. A ghostly servant had arrived before them, and was putting out a ewer and cup, a covered basket. One candle burned.

The servant, the woman, the torch-bearing steward, drew off from Helise, until she was alone in the middle of the gloom.

She said, stupidly, and for no real reason, “What am I to do here?”

“Stay, at my lady’s will,” rapped the woman.

Then they went, and closed the door, and locked it on her as the other door had been locked.

Helise crept to the neglected, ill-prepared bed. She felt nothing, no fear, and no alarm, no longer the agony of sorrow. She slept again, and only realised, reviving to sickly awareness at the entry of light through the vitreous window, that she had been imprisoned for her crime.