“They took my children, Patrick. He sent soldiers into our tent and they took my beautiful babies and they fed them to that thing. It opened up their bellies and spread their insides out on the desert floor, and ate them piece … by … piece.”
Maia was silent for a long time, and I didn’t go to her as I might’ve. I wasn’t made to ease grief some 2700 years strong.
“Hezekiah was horrified by what he’d heard happened, and he eventually paid tribute — he ransomed the city, really — so our army went back home again. Except Sennacherib left us behind, Lilah and Salíce and me. Now that he’d killed my children he couldn’t trust us, so he made a gift of us to Hezekiah, to be his own concubines. Seems even he had heard of us, from spies he’d sent to Assyria.
“Even though we were betrayed by Sennacherib, we still didn’t have any love for the Israelites, or their god. So it was mostly a very antagonistic relationship we had with Hezekiah. But then one night, before he took us, he became very drunk, and we were amazed at what a state of terror he was in over their god. He talked to us, I think, because we were the only ones he could talk to, the only ones who didn’t share his religion.
“He was still haunted by the butchery of my babies. It wasn’t their deaths so much as the … the consumption of them that was so abhorrent to him. And this one night, drunk, with his guard down, he confessed that he couldn’t see any difference between that, and certain things their own god Yahweh had demanded.
“Then he mentioned some text he’d acquired from a Chaldean trader. He wouldn’t tell us what it said, specifically — he was too horrified to do that — but he hinted that it was written in angelic script, and that it couldn’t be burned, and that it had something to do with Yahweh and the blood sacrifice of a child.”
As Maia told me these things, they plucked at old misgivings I’d once chosen to ignore … like all those scriptures that plainly had God demanding that his chosen people lay waste to enemies down to the last innocent baby and ignorant animal.
Might these, too, have fed him, along with faith?
“When Hezekiah finally had us that night, something became very different about him. In spite of how drunk he was, he was inexhaustible. His erection had swollen to twice its usual size, and he kept after us long after it was raw. Hours, it must’ve been, and he still hadn’t released once. I don’t know if it was something in his eyes, or the way his throat ballooned out, as if his flesh couldn’t contain whatever was inside him, but we knew it wasn’t Hezekiah any longer. It was the Sacred Marriage, all over again … except this time, it was their god inside him.
“And when we realized this, Lilah and Salíce and I, that was when he orgasmed. His screaming was like a slaughtered pig’s. You can’t have any idea what that sounded like echoing down the palace corridors and back again. And his seed … it was like venom. He held us down and filled us with it, and there wasn’t any end to it, and it burned us from the inside out…”
When Maia went to the window, pressing her hands to the panes of leaded glass, we both gazed on the risen moon that watched over a land once filled with people who’d had no need of anything from the scorching deserts of Palestine. And I thought how right it was that she and her sisters had come to live amongst the Celts, and wait for that day when some magic in our blood might be turned to their advantage, if only to know the enemy a little better.
“And that was the seed of what we became,” she finished. “The punishment from their god for who we were. What we’d heard. He turned us into their idea of what we’d worshipped at home. Turned us into Liliths. And then he turned us away. Forever.”
VIII. O magnum mysterium
Even before they came to Dublin for the divination, I’d begun collectively thinking of them as the Misbegotten.
They came from as near as across the Irish Sea; as far away as the other side of the world. They came, and they were not all the same. Some drank blood while others ate flesh; then there was Salíce. The one called Julius? Before his castrato deafened him, Maia told me, it was the resonances of extraordinary sounds that kept him young. I’d been told of an aborigine who’d been eating eyes since the British used Australia as a penal colony, claiming it kept his view into the Dreamtime clear. I’d been told of a Paris artist who could be nourished only with spinal fluid. They walked and talked like men and women, but only if you looked none too close. For one who knew better, it was as though the gates of some fabulous and terrible menagerie had been thrown wide, and its inhabitants allowed to overrun creation.
Nobody’s ever born this way, Maia had said, but I saw them as misbegotten all the same, of monstrous second births that had, by chance or perverse design, left them equipped to demand accounting for what they’d all become. And even if in the end they might only shake futile fists at Heaven, I felt sure their voices would carry much farther than the rest of ours.
In a way I envied them.
In a way I regretted they hadn’t the power to turn me into one of them.
But to aid their cause, all I had to do was spread wide my arms, fixate my soul upon the Christ, then do what came naturally.
“We’re of two minds on God, Patrick,” she’d explained to me. “But if he really had a son, and there’s even a little bit of him in that son, and if there’s even a little bit of that son now in your blood, and in that single tiny scrap of flesh he left behind, then maybe that’s enough for us to do what men and women have always wanted to do: understand the true nature of God.”
“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.
Having heard stories of their revels and debauches, I’d half-expected them to behave like barbarians as they filled the cellars beneath the house. But they took their places amongst the stones and great oaken beams with grim and solemn faces, and waited with the kind of hungry patience that could only accrue over lifetimes.
When the Sisters came for me I was preparing myself in silent contemplation. The Order of Saint Francis had taught me well in this much, at least. I turned around to find they’d quietly filled the doorway, and when Maia laid her cheek to my bare back, the other two turned theirs, to give us our moment alone.
“We’re of two minds on God,” she’d explained. “Some fear he might really be the creator of everything. In which case, we have no hope at all. Even if there is some lost paradise that was once promised, we’ll never regain it.”
They led me into the chamber, in the center of eyes and teeth and throats, and naked, I lay down upon the waiting cross.
“But there’s another way it might be,” she’d said, reminding me then of how the Assyrians had made their demon by taking that malleable form and imprinting it with all the traits they desired in it, until they’d fed it to the point of independence, so that it broke away on its own.
They lashed my arms to those of the cross; secured my feet as well. The crown of thorns came last. And when they raised the cross upright, and dropped its foot into the waiting hole, all the old devotions came back to me again, and once more I became as one with Father, with Son, and with Holy Ghost.