The War Hound and the World's Pain (27 page)

Then he fell forward from his horse. His soul had been taken out of him. Duke Arioch had claimed him.

I dismounted. Klosterheim was quite dead.

Duke Arioch’s forces either continued to sleep on or were beginning to rise and disperse. Those who had awakened wandered off, perfectly at peace with themselves. Not only was the Forest at the Edge of Heaven no longer threatened, but Lucifer would be victorious in Hell.

I wondered at the significance of my Quest and of the cup itself. Somehow it had served both God and the Devil. And then I remembered the woman’s words. She had spoken of Harmony.

From out of my purse I took the scroll and opened it. I read the words that had been written there, and even as I read them I found myself in the library of the castle where I had last seen my Master, Lucifer.

The library was empty, save for its books and its furniture. Morning light came in through the great windows. Outside, the trees were moving in a breeze. Birds perched in them. Birds sang in them.

I realized that this place was no longer within the domain of Hell.

I WONDERED NOW if Lucifer had been defeated and if, in His defeat, He had taken Sabrina’s soul with Him and would continue to claim mine.

For some time I stood by the window, looking out on that ordinary and comforting beauty. I placed the little clay pot upon the table at which Lucifer had been sitting. Then I left the library and I went into the cool hall and climbed the staircase to Sabrina’s room. I did not expect her to be there.

I opened the door.

She was lying in her bed. Her expression was so full of peace that momentarily I believed her to be dead. Her face was as lovely as ever and her wonderful hair flooded the pillows. She was breathing softly as I stooped to kiss her brow. Her eyes opened. She looked at me without surprise. She smiled and she opened her arms to me. I bent to embrace her.

“You have brought the Grail with you,” she said.

“You know?” I sat beside her. I stroked her shoulder.

“Of course I know.” She kissed me. “We are free.”

“I thought I had lost everything,” I said. “Everyone.”

“No,” she said. “You have gained much and you have gained it for all. Lucifer is grateful. You achieved your goal and in so doing you defeated His worst enemy.”

“And He is no longer our Master.”

“No longer.” She looked at me with intelligent eyes. “He has gone back to Hell. He claims no part of Earth for His Realm.”

“We shall never see Him again?”

“We shall see Him. In the library. At noon.” She rose from the sheets and sought her gown. I handed it to her. It was white, like a wedding dress.

“And God?” I asked. “Does He still parley with God?”

“I do not know.” She glanced out the window. “It is almost noon. Lucifer asked us to come together.”

We embraced again, more passionately now. Then we left the room and walked down the staircase to the library.

Once more, as she had done a year before, Sabrina opened the huge doors of the library. And once more Lucifer sat at the table. But He was not reading. He was holding the clay cup in His hands. He turned beautiful eyes upon us. Some of the terror, I thought, had gone out of Him, some of the defiance.

“Good morrow to thee. Captain von Bek,” He said.

“Good morrow, Prince Lucifer.” I bowed.

“You would wish to know,” He said, “that your friends do not reside in Hell. I have released their souls as I have released yours.”

“Then Hell still exists,” I said.

He laughed His old, melodious laugh. “Indeed it does. The antidote for the World’s Pain cannot abolish Hell, any more than it can bring immediate surcease to all that ails Man.”

He replaced the cup gently upon the table and He got to His feet. His naked skin glowed like silver fire and His fiery copper eyes still contained that element of melancholy I had seen before. “I had sought to have no more to do with your Earth,” He told us. Gracefully He moved towards us and looked down on us. There seemed to be love in His eyes, too, or at least a kind of affection. I still did not know if He lied. I still do not know. He reached out His marvelous hands and touched us. I shivered, sensing that strange ecstasy which, to many, could be a compelling drug. I gasped. He withdrew his hands. “I have spoken with God,” said Lucifer.

“And He has refused you, Your Majesty?” Sabrina spoke softly.

His sweet, vibrant voice was almost as low as hers when He replied. “I do not think it is a refusal. But I hoped for more.” The Prince of Darkness sighed and then He smiled. It was a bitter and it was a very sad smile.

“I am not accepted into Heaven,” Lucifer continued. “Instead, Heaven has put the world into my sole charge. I am commissioned to redeem it, in the fullness of time. If I help mankind to accept its own humanity, then I, Lucifer, shall be all that I was before I was cast down from Heaven.”

“Then you are now the Lord of this Earth, Your Majesty?” I said. “God no longer rules here?”

“I do not rule, as such. I am charged to bring Reason and Humanity into the world and thus discover a Cure for the World’s Pain. I am charged to understand the nature of this cup. When I understand its nature and when all mankind understands its nature, we shall both be redeemed!”

Lucifer raised His head and He laughed. The sound was musical and full of irony as well as humour.

“How things turn, von Bek! How things turn!”

“So you are still our Master,” said Sabrina. She was frowning. She had come to be afraid again.

“Not so!” Lucifer turned, almost in rage. “You are your own masters. Your destiny is yours. Your lives are your own. Do you not see that this means an end to the miraculous? You are at the beginning of a new age for Man, an age of investigation and analysis.”

“The Age of Lucifer,” I said, echoing some of His own irony.

He saw the joke in it. He smiled.

“Man, whether he be Christian or pagan, must learn to rule himself, to understand himself, to take responsibility for himself. There can be no Armageddon now. If Man is destroyed, he shall have destroyed himself.”

“So we are to live without aid,” said Sabrina. Her face was clearing.

“And without hindrance,” said Lucifer. “It will be your fellows, your children and their children who will find the Cure for the World’s Pain.”

“Or perish in the attempt,” said I.

“It is a fair risk,” said Lucifer. “And you must remember, von Bek, that it is in my interest that you succeed. I have wisdom and knowledge at your disposal. I always had that gift for Man. And now that I may give it freely I choose not to do so. Each fragment of wisdom shall be earned. And it shall be hard-earned, captain.”

This time Lucifer bowed to us. His glowing body seemed to flare with brighter fire and the library was suddenly empty.

He had taken the clay cup with Him.

I reached out for Sabrina’s hand.

“Are you still afraid?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you. Captain von Bek.”

“The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer.” I held her hand tightly.

“Now we can go home to Bek,” I said.

Sabrina and I were married in the old chapel in Bek. My father died soon after we returned and he was pleased that I was there, to maintain the estates as he would have wished. He said that I had “grown up” and he loved Sabrina, I think, as much as did I. She bore us two girls and a boy, all of whom lived and all of whom are now well. We continued with our studies and came to entertain many great men, who were impressed with Sabrina’s grasp of Natural Philosophy in particular, though I think they sometimes found my own speculations a trifle obscure.

I was not to meet Lucifer again and perhaps I never shall.

I continue to remain unclear, sometimes, as to whether my soul is my own. It is still possible that Lucifer lied to us, that God did not hear Him, that God did not speak to Him. Has Lucifer claimed the whole Earth as His domain in defiance of God? Or did God ever exist at all?

These are not thoughts I express to anyone, of course, save now, when I believe myself to be dying. The world is unsafe for a man who utters such heresies. I see little evidence that Reason is triumphant or that it ever shall be triumphant. But if I have Faith, it is in the faint hope that mankind will save itself, that Lucifer did not, after all, lie.

I have entered into Hell and know that I should not like to spend Eternity there. And I believe that I have been permitted a taste of Heaven.

We came to be happy in Bek. We sought Harmony, but not at the expense of muscular thought and passionate argument, and I believe that we achieved it in a small measure. Harmony is hard-won, it seems.

The War eventually subsided and did not touch us much. And as for the War which had threatened the supernatural Realms, we heard no more of it. The Plague never visited Bek. Without deliberately pursuing commerce we became well-to-do. Musicians and poets sought our patronage and returned it with the productions of their talents, so that we were consistently and most marvelously entertained.

In the year 1648, through no particular effort of goodwill and chiefly on account of their weariness and growing poverty, both of money and of men, the adversaries in our War agreed a peace. For several years afterwards we were to receive men and women at our estates who had known nothing but War, who had been born into War and who had lived by War all their lives. We did not turn them away from Bek. Many of them continue to live amongst us, and because they have known so much of War, they are anxious to maintain a positive Peace.

In 1678 my wife Sabrina died of natural causes and was buried in our family crypt, mourned by all. As for myself, I am alone at present. Our children are abroad; our son teaches Medicine and Natural Philosophy at the University of Prague, where he is greatly honoured; my elder daughter is in London as an ambassadress (there, I gather, her salon is famous and she enjoys the friendship of the Queen), and my younger daughter is married to a successful physician in Lübeck.

To my subjective eye, the Pain of the World is a degree less terrible than it was some thirty years ago, when our Germany was left in ruins. If Lucifer did not lie to me, I pray to Him with all my heart and soul that He can lead mankind to Reason and Humanity and towards that Harmony which might, with great efforts, one day be ours.

I pray, in short, that God exists, that Lucifer brings about His own Redemption and that mankind therefore shall in time be free of them both forever: for until Man makes his own justice according to his own experience, he will never know what true peace can be.

With this, my testament, I consign my soul to Eternity, offering it neither to God nor to Lucifer but to Humanity, to use or to discard as it will. And I urgently beg any man or woman who reads this and who believes it to continue that which my wife and myself began:

Do you the Devil’s work.

And I suspect that you will see Heaven sooner than ever shall your Master.

Signed by my own hand in

this Year of Our Lord

Sixteen Hundred and Eighty;

BEK