‘Clever little Konrad!’ said Bodwild. ‘It all worked out so well, everyone was satisfied. How he writhed and crackled in the flames, his bones cracked and the marrow boiled out. I remembered the smell of his fear as I saw him twisting in the flames, it was almost better than making love. Watching him burn I came again and again.’
‘I had you under my cloak and I was playing with you,’ said Konrad. ‘I could feel how you loved it, how hot you were.’
‘Did you smell the Jew’s fear when he was burning?’ I asked Bodwild.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I had to remember it from before to call up my excitement. He was singing but that did nothing for me.’
‘He were trying to save his self with his Jew magic what they call up devils with,’ said Konrad. ‘There’s a spell they sing, it’s called “Schemmah Yisrowail”; I’ve heard it often when I’ve caught Jews. They sing it when they’re burning but it never puts out the fire.’
‘Do you remember when you smelled me out?’ I said to Bodwild. ‘Do you remember when you told the others to castrate me?’ I said to Konrad.
‘I thought it were you!’ said Konrad. ‘I thought I remembered your ugly Jew face looking up at me when we had you spread out on the ground. Well, you won’t be making no more little Jew brats, will you.’
Bodwild came close to me, nuzzling and sniffing me. At her touch I felt the ghost of an erection spring up, I felt myself rocking like a chip on the torrent of lust that flowed through the first Sophia, the second Sophia, and this sow with her scarlet necklace of blood. Even now as I have these words in my mind I am confused by the presence among them of my lost God, my remembered Christ. How I am flooded with the humming and the roaring of great waters, with the music of the great currents in which rock and dance the Great Mother, the Father, the Son, the Virgin and the Lion! Unseen! Chosen I am, chosen are my people to be the thrall of the multitudinous, of the humming and roaring unseen manyness that whirled the Jews like a bull-roarer round the head of its manifestation as YHWH, made of them a sounding of the unseeable, the unknowable, the utterly ungraspable. How it raged, that idea, when it was YHWH and the Jews whored after stocks and stones and golden calves! How it would not tolerate any limitation of form, of image, of substance! How the everythingness of it commands every flash and glimmer of the mind, how all thoughts that ever were or ever will be run beneath its hand like sheep beneath the hand of the shepherd! Lion-sheep, star-sheep, ocean-sheep! ‘Now I remember you!’ murmured Bodwild with her snout brushing my ear. ‘Now I remember the smell of your fear, it was dark and full, it was like music and strong drink to me. I didn’t smell it when I saw you in the inn yard just before you killed me; you had no fear then, I smelled nothing.’
‘So it was the fear you smelled when you hunted Jews,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t the Jewishness.’
‘It’s all the same,’ said Konrad. ‘When you’re hunting Jews and you smell fear that’ll be a Jew sure enough.’
‘If they don’t know you’re hunting them they won’t be afraid,’ I said.
‘They know that a time will come when they will be hunted,’ said Bodwild; ‘that was what I could always smell.’
‘It doesn’t seem to bother you any more that I’m a Jew,’ I said.
‘Everything seems different now that I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m letting go of things. And I’ve told you I wanted to make love with that first Jew; I’ve wanted to make love with all of them but I’ve had to content myself with their dying. I’m just like anyone else, I take my pleasure where I can.’
‘Here we’re talking like old friends,’ I said, ‘and yet you must be full of rage because I killed you.’
‘Why should I be full of rage more than you?’ she said. ‘I sniffed you out, they castrated you and I ate your male parts. So you killed me, that’s reasonable. A little time one way or the other, it seems a big thing when you’re alive but when you’re dead you wonder what all the fuss was about. When I was alive we hunted you down; now we’re dead and you’re alive and already we’re friends. Very soon you’ll be dead also and you too will wonder why it ever mattered so much who was what and who did what.’
‘And you?’ I said to Konrad. ‘You were the master of this sow, it was you who used her to sniff out the Jews that you tortured and killed. What have you to say for yourself?’
‘What have I to say for myself?’ said Konrad. ‘You lousy Jew eunuch with your soft white hands, in your whole life you probably never done nothing heavier than count your money. You’re all usurers, the whole filthy lot of you, trying to get the whole world in your pocket. Knights going to Jerusalem, they have to pawn their castles to you. Many’s the Christian lady you’ve crept into bed with, I’ll bet, and her lawful husband gone to fight the heathen. Not that it don’t serve them right, they’re nothing but thieves and murderers and their foot on the neck of the poor from the time we’re born till the time we die. Look at my hands next to yours, eh? Mine are more like hooves, ain’t they. They’re that hard. Here I am dead from your Jew magic and how much did I ever have in these hands. Tools to work another man’s land with mostly. Heavy soil and a heavy plough and a six-ox team, you probably wouldn’t have the strength in them white hands of yours to turn a plough like that. How much Christian blood have you drunk?’
‘I wonder what makes Christians think that anybody would want to drink their blood,’ I said.
‘If you don’t drink it you do other things with it,’ said Konrad. ‘Everybody knows about Jew magic.’
‘You’re a Christian, are you?’ I said.
‘What else would I be, you Jew Antichrist-worshipper,’ he said, ‘I been baptized, haven’t I.’
‘And died with your sins heavy on you,’ I said. ‘Died all unshriven.’
‘What difference does that make,’ he said. ‘I ain’t burning in Hell nor nothing like that, am I.’
‘Maybe your Hell will be to walk to Jerusalem with the Jew you castrated,’ I said.
‘Whatever I have to do,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it like a man, I’ve nothing to fear. It’s yourself you’d better be worrying about; the Last Days are coming and then you’ll see what burning is. There’s been signs in the sky, you know — great flaming clouds in the shape of Christ with a sword in his hand fighting the Jewish Antichrist with three heads and seven horns.’
‘Who won?’ I said.
‘You’ll see soon enough, clipcock,’ he said. ‘I forgot, you ain’t even that no more, you’re a no-cock clipcock.’
‘I’m so sorry you’re dead,’ I said. ‘It’s a great loss to me that you could only die once; it would be such a pleasure to kill you.’ Thinking, as I said it, that these dead ones were already like a family to me.
‘It means nothing at all,’ said the bear, ‘whatever you see in the sky.’ The arrows that had killed him were still in him, they nodded as he walked upright with the others. ‘There’s been a Great Bear in the sky all these years and even a Lesser Bear as well and nothing’s come of it, nothing at all.’
‘Did you think anything would come of it?’ I said.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why should I. You can see anything you like in the sky, anything at all. And what it means is anything at all.’
‘That man who killed you,’ I said. ‘What do you think he’s doing now?’
‘He’s looking for another bear,’ said the bear. ‘He’s hopeless, he’s incapable of learning.’
‘You think you’re quite the thing, don’t you,’ said Udo the relic-gatherer to the bear. ‘You think you’re better than us. I seen you slipping through the woods now and again when you been alive. You wouldn’t say nothing to us then, you wouldn’t stop and pass the time of day, you were too good for us.’