Authors: Ron Miller
“Ready enough,” he replied.
“Then let us be off. As you can see, I have pressing business waiting for me elsewhere.”
The Count wheeled his horse around and started off, letting Bradamant follow, his mind a whirl of thoughts, almost all of them evil and self-serving. Now that he knew she was of the family that he and his had loathed and detested for generations, he was already plotting how he might betray her at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, he worried as to what his own fate might be should she discover that he was one of the hated Maganzas. He knew her reputation as well as anyone and had no illusions as to what the outcome of a fair fight would be. So filled was his mind with this inbred hatred, fear, cowardice and confusion that he was deep into the forest before he realized he had somewhere taken a wrong turning. So lost had he been in his evil scheming that he now found that he was lost in fact. He was trying to decide what to do when he came to the edge of a lofty precipice. He had absolutely no idea where they were, but rather than admit this to his companion, he thought that he might be able to take advantage of the situation. They seemed to have arrived at a place as far from human habitation as it was likely to get; he could wish for no better place to do away with the girl if he could manage it safely. As Bradamant joined him, he lied: “It’s getting dark and we’d better find some shelter. I think I know of a castle in that valley below us, just behind that hill. Wait here for me while I climb that spur where I can see.”
As he urged his horse up the steep slope he discovered a deep cleft between the rocks. Dismounting, he crept to the edge and gingerly looked over. It was a precipitous gorge with sheer granite walls, so narrow that he might have jumped to the far rim had he had the heart for such risk, which of course he hadn’t. The bottom was more than a hundred feet below and filled with crawling mists. He was surprised to see toeholds cut into the face of the rock, as well as a glimmer of light at the bottom—evidently, he decided, a cave inhabited by some ancient hermit. There was a noise behind him and he turned to see Bradamant—anxious not to lose her guide—climbing the slope to join him. He gestured for her to join him at the brink of the gorge.
“Good heavens!” she whispered, glancing into the abyss. “It seems bottomless.”
“You won’t believe what I saw down there,” he said, struck by a sudden inspiration as he pointed out the dim light. “A maiden of surpassing beauty. Judging by her fine clothes and distressed appearance, I’m convinced that she must be imprisoned there against her will. I had just started to call to her when a man emerged from a cave and drove her into it with a stick.”
“That’s absolutely unacceptable! We must rescue her immediately!”
“That was my idea, too, but I don’t see any way to get down.”
It was now too dark to see the footholds and Pinabel saw no good reason to tell her of them. Bradamant, meanwhile, cast around for something that might help her and spotted a tall, slim elm tree. Drawing her sword, she cut it down with a single blow. The count winced as he saw the ease with which she did that. A few additional strokes stripped it of its limbs.
“That’s scarcely half long enough to reach the bottom,” Pinabel protested.
“It’s not the idea,” she replied, dragging the timber to the edge of the cliff. “Look. See? There’s a narrow ledge about halfway down.”
“So?”
“I can use this pole to climb down to the ledge. The stumps from the limbs will make excellent handholds. Then I can use the same pole again to reach the bottom.”
“You?”
“Certainly. It only makes sense that the lightest one of us should climb down, while the biggest and heaviest anchor the free end.”
“Good idea,” he readily agreed. “I was about to suggest that I go, but. . . ”
“No, no. This is much more practical.”
“Well, then, if you insist.”
Together, they carefully lowered the pole over the brink until its further end finally rested on the ledge. Only a foot or two protruded above the cliff edge and Pinabel, lying flat on the ground, held this tightly, so that the pole was kept firmly flush against the cliff face.
On her hands and knees, Bradamant swung her feet over the edge. Grasping the pole, she carefully lowered herself over the chasm, descending hand over hand. The stumps of the severed limbs made it a veritable ladder, as she had predicted.
As she approached the middle of the pole, Pinabel called to her.
“How well can you fly?”
“What?” she replied.
Pinabel released his hold, and as the end of the pole swung away from the rim of the cliff, he called out: “Pinabel of Maganza wishes that your damned family were with you, so that I could put an end to your whole foul line at once!”
Bradamant was horrified when she felt the pole fall away from the cliff face. She was only dimly aware of Pinabel’s words. She did not know what to do other than to grasp the pole even more tightly and wish that she had not the additional weight of her armor. She fell free for a dizzying moment, the pole swinging out into open space. Bradamant got a brief, horrifying glimpse of the rocky floor, still nearly a hundred feet below, like the open, snaggle-toothed maw of some hungry, patient beast. There was a second jar as the upper end of the pole struck the opposite wall of the narrow cleft. The pole bounced like a spring, threatening to throw Bradamant from her place like a bucking horse. The upper end skittered down the far wall before jamming against some projecting rocks; Bradamant felt the pole bend like a drawn bow, then spring back high above the abyss; she felt her grasp loosening; then the pole snapped with the wicked sound of a whip cracking. Still holding onto one end of the shattered pole, the other end of which was still embedded in the rocks, Bradamant pendulumed toward the base of the cliff, crashing into a cluster of thorny bushes before falling back onto the rocks.
All that Pinabel could see, in the shadowy depths of the cleft, was an inert figure that lay among the shattered rocks at the bottom. Satisfied that Bradamant was dead, he turned and remounted his horse. To compound his treachery, he took her horse as well. Without a backward glance, he left the scene of his treasonous and unknightly act.
CHAPTER TWO
In which Bradamant is introduced to a Naked Sorceress,
a Dead King and her Destiny
Bradamant lay motionless for some time before she could trust her balance enough to painfully rise to her feet. Though she was stunned and bruised her armor had protected her from all but a few scratches on her face. Astonished that nothing seemed to have been broken she wished that the bushes that had saved her had not been equipped with thorns, even if the quibble seemed a little mean. The chilly drizzle that drifted from the now-dark sky was more refreshing than annoying. The droplets seemed to condense directly onto her, as though her skin were a cold pane of glass. She rubbed the cool moisture into her face with her long, flexible fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly then reopened them. She glanced up at the now-invisible rim from which she had fallen, but there was no sign of Pinabel, only a meandering ribbon of indigo sky. She recalled the words he had thrown after her and ticked off one more score for which the evil Maganza family must be held to account. Now that it was too late, of course, she realized why he had looked so familiar and damned herself for her slow wits. Lowering her gaze, she saw the source of the light she had seen from above: an open doorway carved into the base of the cliff about fifty feet away, from which streamed a meager, oleagenous glow. Having nothing else to do, she picked up her helmet from where it had fallen and went toward the light.
The door was little more than an irregular hole in the rock. It was barely discernable as something created by artifice; perhaps it was merely a natural opening improved by the hand of man. But what man? Who would live in such a place but a hermit or an outlaw? Bradamant drew her sword as she ducked through the low opening. As she stood erect and saw what lay within, she could not repress a gasp of surprise and then of awe. She replaced her sword and removed her helmet, for that seemed the proper thing to do upon entering a cathedral.
At first she had thought it a cavern of unprecedented proportions, a cavern of Gothic perpendicularity, a vast, solemn chamber, its vaulted ceiling supported by a forest of slender alabaster columns. But she quickly realized, with a shudder of superstitious awe, that the fluted columns and the elaborate ornamentation were manmade.
Or perhaps
, she thought with a shudder,
demon-made
. The beautifully multicolored walls, which she had assumed were mineral deposits and incrustations of crystals, were resolved into wonderfully-detailed mosaics, tapestries and paintings. She immediately crossed herself, not wanting to take any chances.
The scenes and figures on the walls, half-hidden in the darkness, assumed an eerie liveliness in the wavering light and shadows that she did not like at all. They were not, as she had first assumed, scenes and figures from the Bible or the lives of the saints. She recognized many of them as representations of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome—since her education was not so strictly ecclesiastical as to exclude the study of either history or the classics. She was modern-thinking enough to realize that, considered as parables, even pagan myths often contained worthwhile morals; that ethical truths can come in many guises. However, as she looked more closely at the murals and tapestries, it was becoming evident that their artists had not been particularly interested in moral or ethical lessons. Indeed, these works seemed to be limited so exclusively to the various permutations of carnal lovemaking as to be obsessive. She felt her face grow hot with indignation and righteous embarrassment. The various abductions and rapes committed by Jupiter seemed to be a popular subject; it did not much matter that Bradamant knew that the bull having its way with Europa or the swan with Leda were in fact Jupiter disguised: she knew bestiality when she saw it. The conjugations of Psyche and Eros were illustrated with an unblushing candor normally reserved for medical textbooks. As were the randy peccadilloes of the fauns, satyrs, nereids, dryads and nymphs, to say nothing of Pan’s joyous and indiscriminate coupling with a startling and unlikely variety of wild and domesticated animals. There were baldly frank Dionysian rituals and reveling, ithyphallic Seileni. There were superb copies—if they were copies—of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, to which the Greeks had devoted an altar in honor of its perfect beauty, and his Aphrodite of Delphi (whose model had been Phryne of Thespiae, notorious for having been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and who was acquitted only after her lawyer bared her naked body to the court, revealing that she “was even more beautiful in the unseen parts.” Such beauty, declared the awestruck judges, could only be divine). Bradamant was shocked to see Jupiter’s unnatural love for Ganymede graphically illustrated as was Apollo’s affection for youthful Hyacinthus. A pornographic frieze was dedicated to Ovid’s
Art of Love
and there were murals from Pompeii that may have been originals for all Bradamant knew. One of them was a shockingly explicit
Atalanta and Meleager;
Bradamant was glad to recognize Atalanta—she had always felt a kinship with that tomboyish heroine—though she certainly disapproved of Atalanta’s present company and activity, which she believed must surely be the libelous invention of the artist. She even recognized gods and goddesses older than those of the Greeks and Romans. Isis was there and Cybele, and Liber (from whom derived the word “libertine”, so little more need be said about
her
), and neolithic mother goddesses, and Atum-Re and Osiris and the scented starry vault of the night-goddess Nut; there was Min of Coptos and the virgin goddess Ninlil (who had once mourned to her lover Enlil: “My vagina is too small; it knows not how to copulate! My lips are too small; they know not how to kiss!”). Inanna-Ishtar was there, singing, “My vulva is moist soil; who shall be my plowman?” There were also gods and goddesses she did not recognize, whom for no special reason she assumed to be products of the heathen East—of the pagan Hindoo perhaps, who knew no better, or maybe the strange deities that must haunt Zeilan, Cathay, Manji or black Ethiopia. Among them, though of course she did not know it, were the Great Goddess Danu, first among the bloodthirsty love goddesses of the Irish, whose voracious appetites did not distinguish between mortal or immortal, and Lady Grainne, whom Merlin the magician knew all too well, and wild-eyed Freyja who by some quirk of shadow and light seemed to be offering Bradamant her talismanic necklace, the erotic magic of which had been infused by the four dwarves Freyja had slept with. Nor did Bradamant recognize Amma-Sky-Father and Amma-Sky-Mother, the Djanggawul and their daughters the insatiable Wawilak sisters, Shotkaman-Agwi and Betman-Agwi, Sky-Father Rangi and Earth-Mother Papa, Xochipilli and Xochiquetzal and the voluptuously evil Tlazolteotl. She did not know that the mosaics, whose glittering tiles winked like the golden eyes of passionate reptiles, represented the most voluptuous scenes from
The Perfumed Garden
and
The Arabian Nights
. The sloe-eyed houris with wasp-waists and joyful melon-breasts, who indulged themselves with singularly gymnastic abandon with their eagle-faced, black-bearded lovers, became weirdly alive under the shifting light; it was a submarine scene, filled with languid, sinuous, shadow creatures. Bradamant fell into a kind of reverie, fascinated in much the same way one cannot avoid gaping at a bad accident, or perhaps as the doomed bird is mesmerized by the cobra’s slow metronome. The figures writhed before her eyes. The coarse stone glistened like coral or oiled flesh, the intertwining limbs supple and subtle as eels. The rhythm of the ponderous ballet began to invade her.
The dark, eagle-faced, black-bearded men reminded her of Rashid, they were very like Rashid, and she could hear someone singing and she was certain it was his voice:
She hath breasts like two globes of ivory,
like golden pomegranates, beautifully upright,
arched and rounded, firm as stone to the touch,
with nipples erect and outward jutting.
She hath thighs like unto pillars of alabaster,
and between them, there vaunts a secret place,
a sachet of musk, that swells, that throbs,
that is moist and avid.
Was the song about
her
? Was it really Rashid singing to her? Bradamant, a prude who had no real natural talent for prudery, a puritan by training and habit rather than disposition, found herself dizzied, disoriented, torn between lust and loathing, prurience and embarrassment. She was a devout Christian scarcely eight centuries removed from uncounted millennia of pagan barbarism. From her own unnatural repression, from her subconscious world of ancient dreams and myths and fantasies, sprang an unexpected eroticism; sublimated sexual emotions that were as irresistibly instinctual as they were denied bubbled, fizzed and frothed like a fermenting wine, as though someone had suddenly shaken a sparkling champagne. And she fought that, fought it like a drowning man fights that final, fatal inhalation of fishy brine. And in the act of that denial—which had lasted all two decades of her life—Bradamant was as obsessed with sex as was her church, which was in turn as obsessed with sex as no other church before it, as obsessed with sex as the Egyptians were obsessed with death. Her mouth was suddenly dry and she licked her lips with a leathery tongue. The thirst seemed to pass through the length of her body like a hot wind, as though she were threaded on a white-hot wire. She discovered a song piping in her brain and though she had never heard the words before, she sang them silently toward the dark mosaic knight whose eyes, even though only chips of obsidian, glinted and winked with understanding:
When I contemplate thy cheek,
Formed in the image of the moon,
O my love,
It is in truth the effect of divine grace
That I am contemplating.
The reply seemed to come in a thousand voices, as though all of the gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines paused in their juicy recreations, craned necks and squinted eyes and unentangled limbs to better see what so rare a thing this girl was, and spoke to her in unison as though raising a great cheer:
The soul that hath not experienced true love,
T’were better never born.
Its existence is but shame.
Be drunk with love, for love is all.
Outside the pleasures of love there is no way to God.
It was no dour Christian prayer she had just sung and its answer had come from no choir of saints—certainly not from the shriveled breast of Paul, in any case. Indeed, she thought, it sounded suspiciously pagan, perhaps something from that false holy book the heathens called the Koran, which she had always confused in her mind with the luxurious tales of
The Arabian Nights
. It was certainly the coarsest of blasphemies. But then, she considered, had not the wise King Solomon sung to his love: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!”? She had been told by her old priest that Solomon’s lush, sweet, passionate song was in reality nothing more nor less than a description of Christ’s love for His Church, but she had found that difficult to believe. What did the priest imagine Christ could possibly have been thinking when He said—according to the priest’s argument—that the Church’s “two breasts are like two young roes that are twins”? No, she had decided, the Song was neither more nor less than what it was: a joyous—and openly honest—hymn to human sensuality and love. How it had ever become part of the Bible, she had no idea—an editorial lapse, she supposed—, but it had once filled her with a bursting warmth and longing she couldn’t understand and could not reconcile with the ascetic religion of her church. It had placed her in a quandary: the words must be Godly, for after all they were in His book, yet the feelings they engendered seemed anything but chaste. There seemed to be no purpose to them—no end, no moral—except that of simple sensuality, and that, she had been carefully taught, was quite wrong. She had done her best to simply forget the verses, but the damage had been done. “I am my beloved,” she thought as the words rushed back to her and her tongue and nostrils filled with the smell and taste of olives and pomegranates, myrrh and figs and lilies of the valley, “and my beloved is mine. I am my beloved and his desire is toward me. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city, in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”
Her virginity resisted the onslaught of that hot desert scirocco, intoxicating with the blood and musk of tawny animals. “Oh!” she raged, her fists clenching until her nails dug into her palms, a droplet of red welling around each point, “I am a garden inclosed! A spring shut up! A fountain sealed!”
The houris’ chubby, mosaic ankles were belled and the rhythmic, insistent jingling seemed to echo the pounding of Bradamant’s blood, which made her veins twitch like firehoses, her mutinous body throb to the unfamiliar harmony, resonating like a sympathetic drum. There was the scent of patchouli and sandlewood and jasmine. The air reeked of incense and musk.
There was soft music on the piccolo.
The flickering illumination whose inconstancy had animated the lifeless people of oil, tempera, glass and stone came from a flame that burned atop a low, drum-shaped altar in the center of the chamber. The flame was uncanny; it was greenish, soundless, rising ten or twelve feet into the air, wavering and twisting slowly, like a ship’s pennant, but with a sinuous deliberation that reminded Bradamant of a snake. She suddenly had the uncanny premonition that the flame was in fact alive, intelligent, and in a rush of backlogged guilt and religious fervency she dropped to her knees and began to pray, which seemed to be the safest thing to do whether she be in the domain of God or Satan. But as the first words were leaving her trembling lips, she saw that a figure was standing just behind the flame—or perhaps within the flame, for all she could tell. The green sheath poured over the pale body like absinthe, flowing silkenly up the long legs, curling over the ivory stomach and breasts, as a mountain stream reluctantly parts for the sleek and mossy stones in its bed, like the caressing and curious tongue of the serpent. The figure took two or three steps toward the knight, emerging from the flame that parted as harmlessly as a silk curtain, and stepped to the edge of the altar and looked down upon the armored girl kneeling on the floor. Bradamant saw to her amazement that the figure was a woman, as white and slender as a tallow candle. She was clothed only in the billowing aura of her pale, golden hair, in much the same way that a blazing brand is clothed in flame or a ship’s mast with St. Elmo’s fire. At first she thought herself victim of yet one more illusion wrought by the deceitful illumination. Then she decided that she must be in the presence of an angel, for nothing demonic would dare be so beautiful; nothing evil could possibly be so full of light and grace. Perhaps that was not golden hair that floated around her shoulders and arms; perhaps it was her wings. She shuddered; somehow Bradamant found the possibility of confronting an angel no less frightening than a demon would have been.