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II. A MEETING IN BABYLON
One hundred leagues east of Surrender, Gabe put his robe back on and sat down on the riverbank. He remembered how his flock had written about weeping by these waters, in the time before they understood that God lived everywhere and not just in Judea. He wondered how it felt to weep.
He looked back westward over the river and the ruined land and tried to understand how something so wonderful had come to naught.
There was no sign of The Gate of God, the city which had been and was no more. Gabe and his brothers had tolerated its first destruction, held the city's image in their souls, and waited for Socrates to make them an Aristotle and Aristotle to make them an Alexander...and they had waited for Alexander to come rebuild Babylon.
But the great city's second razing was more than even the patient Shepherds could endure, so they had hidden it in the dust of its own ruins. Hidden it so well, in fact, that Gabe could not seem to find it.
Gabe rose and paced the river's eastern bank, searching for the Ishtar Gate which no longer spanned this tributary of the Lower Sea. He summoned the memory of Babylon and held it before him. Aha!
Mica had moved the river’s bed at least three hundred paces to the east.
Gabe plunged into the water and swam for the opposite bank, thinking how clever his dreadful brother was, and hoping that moving the Euphrates had been more of a chore than swimming it was proving to be.
Gabe did not mind the odd bath, but he despised soaking in water. By the time he emerged on the opposite bank he was sopping and muddy and thoroughly out of sorts. Were it in his nature to do so, he would have been cursing.
He was in no better humor when he finally found the Babylon entrance more than two hours later. He had passed it a dozen times before he noticed the spot, roughly a stride-by-a-stride, marked simply by not being marked at all. Clever, clever brother.
Ah, Gabe smiled and pulled on his matted curls, but not quite clever enough, Dear Mica.
Gabe centered within himself and gathered the world around him, weaving reality out of the dream, bidding Babylon to be again.
He opened his pale blue eyes and beheld The Gate of God, in the instant before he dropped twenty feet into the legendary and woeful waters of Babylon. He had misjudged by several strides and entered a bit to the south of the Ishtar Bridge. For a while he simply stood on the bottom and let the river wash away his rage, then he walked westward, surfaced, scaled the high canal wall, and slipped silently, if soggily, into the city.
Even the second dunking could not diminish the joy of seeing Babylon again. Gabe felt so giddy with gladness he had to sit down and steady himself. Stupid sheep, he thought. All this we gave you, heaven upon the earth, and you cast it down without thinking.
Gabe gazed down from his perch atop the palatial roof and drank in the symmetry of sight and of sound, the perfection they had made to comfort themselves and their flocks in the midst of the disharmony, the chaos of the herd. Pure blue canals flowed through the city, coursing beneath great stone arcways and pillared porches of whitest stone, cascading into great marble pools and delightful fountains, filling the air with their soft song, splashing the gem-studded masonry with the cool shimmer of their liquid light. The waterways baffled the noise of the city and drew the various quarters into a breathtaking unity of design.
And above the canals, pristine walls and sculptured bridges lifted ever skyward, lightening the massive foundations and floating the entire city on an illusion of stone webwork. An almost teasing arrangement of greenery--a tiny park, miniature forest, or terraced garden--led the eye north and west to the crown of the city, The Tower.
Gabe rested his chin in his hands and sighed. For a long time he sat motionless, forgetting why he had come, forgetting that he was trespassing like a common thief or spy, forgetting even that he had come here to breach the holy tower which had caught him, unblinking, unbreathing.
He jerked awake suddenly. It might have been an hour or a day, Gabe shuddered. What could he be thinking of, sitting here out in the open like an idiot, mooning over The Tower?
He lowered himself over the roof's battlement and descended the wall into the empty court, exiting into a side street.
An enormous, lightless form floated down behind him, hesitated in the court's shadows and then followed Gabe down the mosaic walkway.
Gabe made slow progress towards The Tower. Babylon was nearly empty this time of year, but it was never completely abandoned. He kept to the narrower lanes and avoided the bridges. Even so, he barely missed running into a gryffin, who--thank the Blessed Father--was too busy preening its pinions to notice him. He had another close call when he was distracted by a clutch of maerdrags splashing noisily in a three- tiered pool. Two mortals appeared in an adjacent doorway almost before Gabe could flatten himself behind a mercifully large pilaster.
Gabe was more careful after that and he had no further scares. An hour later he entered The Tower through a service tunnel whose dusty and trackless floor attested to its emptiness and long disuse.
And the shadow that had followed Gabe's crooked path through the city waited for him to ascend the old stairway into The Tower's heart. It squeezed into the tunnel. There was a brief sparkle of light off its scaled flanks. Then its great bulk blotted out the sun.
Gabe stepped onto the first landing and felt his way along the pitch black, winding tunnel which ended in an ivy-draped archway of the lowest garden. He cocked his head, listening to the chorus of prideful birds and rustling leaves and murmuring brooks. He thought he heard another sound beneath the chorus, but the moment he stopped to listen, there was only the memory of that other sound, a sliding, scraping whisper.
But there was nothing now.
All the same, he decided against returning to the stairwell, and instead stepped out into the garden and followed a moss-cushioned path to an arch that led into the library of The Tower's first floor.
Hugging the wall, he made his way round to an empty cell and retrieved a new cloak. Gabe was a Lord of Virtue and he knew the Lith portion of the library as if it were his home--as it had been during his long apprenticeship. With the river residue combed from his hair and a clean robe he could pass easily as just another librarian and stop skulking about.
He regretted he could not stay longer in the labyrinth of shelves, luxuriating in all the precious words which formed the combined religious experience of all the herds. He did linger in the north stacks, where the treasures of his own flock resided. Here were the scrolls of Moses' five books in their many transformations: the earliest contradictory versions of the Sons of Aaron and the Sons of Moses, and the clever resolution of the Son of Levi. This last had hung the two disparate religions, God the Just and God the Merciful, upon the scaffolding of the List of Generations. Beside these nestled Jeremiah's heart-rending redaction of the triumphant Deuteronomy he had written just before the tragic death of his king, Josiah, and the prophet's exile to this very city. Gabe touched the books reverently and whispered his prayer for forgiveness, heartened by Ezra's great work, the final form of the Torah, which he had begun to assemble while studying the older texts in the Babylon library. The Prophets, and...
Gabe dearly wished to enter the room where they kept The Ark, but tore himself away from this bright, opulent nest of his younger days and climbed the spiral case up the middle of The Tower to the second level of the Pendrake collection: maps floor to ceiling, enormous tables stacked with the ever-changing chronicles of land entitlements and census and herd migration studies, all the political and sociological divisions of the globe down the ages since the beginning. He noticed that some of the texts from Virtues had been moved here, to Demesne and now resided in the eastern stacks, under Law.
Gabe supposed this was proper--what was religion, if not the legal description of the inexplicable? Still, he did not like the portent of this change. He had no time to be considering such petty irritations, though. Gabe climbed upward past the third library of the Cindrake Lords, the Powers, and into the fourth, the war museum of the Arcs. Above this level lay the chambers of the Thrones, the meeting halls and vaulted courts, and outside on the ledge of the ziggurat's giant fifth step, the highest and most beautiful garden of the entire tower.
Gabe gathered his wits and his courage and proceeded upwards, past the Seraphs' courts, above the level of The Choir, and into the crown of The Tower, a stark, sun-dazzled chamber that was walled in carved blocks of crystalline stone and vaulted by the heavens alone. Gabe bowed his head down to his chest and folded his hands. Forgive me, Father, he prayed. Forgive this violation of Your Sacred Hall.
Silently he glided across the northernmost ray of inlaid obsidian which formed the first point of the floor's black star, the ray of Thrones. At the room's center he stepped down into the pentangular pit which formed the step ledges and five-sided bench of the Inner Council of Hosts, the Five Lords who led the worship and formed the laws of the Bene Elohim. The pit seemed a jet black empty wading pool ten strides across with an unlit fire cauldron of copper and bronze lying like an oily island at the exact center of the pit, the exact center of the obsidian star...the exact center of the world.
Gabe turned away from the cold cauldron and crouched before the Ledge of Thrones, the First Facet of Assembly. He fingered the ornate carvings on the upright aspect of the step, moving deliberately through a pattern which was the physical counterpart to The Song of the Key.
Before the world am I,
Before the farthest stars,
Before the sea's first swell,
The firmament's resolve,
My engels' Immortal paean
And reverie, am I
And afterward,
I am.The hidden compartment slid open and Gabe reached in. Empty.
"Good afternoon, Dear Brother," a voice behind him vibrated down the scale from gentle humor to calm malicity. "Have you mislaid something?"
Gabe sank in upon himself and turned his head slowly round. It was no good to lie. He'd been caught and there would be consequences.
Mica overshadowed Gabe with the span of his wide wings and tilted his head as if deferring to an underling. "Get off your haunches and follow me downstairs to my grotto on the fifth terrace. It is not mete for us to be here, except in worship.”
Gabe rose awkwardly and did as he was told. Mica's ebon curls and Gabe's golden had barely disappeared down the well when a gigantic gild forehead floated upward just cresting the window ledge of the seventh level. A scaled lid opened a baleful eye to stare through the crystalline walls of the empty hall.
"Oh, do have some wine, Baby Brother. Baal will not bite you," Mica smiled at the elder mortal who was none-too-skillful as server. "He may drown you, but he certainly won't bite."
Gabe rescued the decanter from the old man, acknowledging him with a smile and complimenting his wondrous white beard with an appreciative stroke. "Thank you, Elder Baal," Gabe said as graciously as he could despite the failure of his mission and the scolding-or worse--he would doubtless be receiving from his fearsome brother.
"Mage," Baal bowed curtly as he corrected Gabe.
"Excuse me, Mage Baal. You are Persian, Aryan?" Gabe amended in his best Aramaic--not the Galilean variety with its "h"-less clip.
"Ah," Baal sighed. "But when one is in Babylon, it is so hard to remember anything clearly about that other world."
Gabe reached for the goblets but his blue eyes never left the mage. This mortal's hands might be stiff, but his mind was as agile as quicksilver. In all seeming sincerity, he had kept hidden his place of origin, while complimenting the city, and appearing to answer Gabe's query. There was no question what he was doing at The Gate of God. Gabe poured the wine and leaned back against the wall of the masoned depression which Mica was pleased to call grotto. The wall was chiseled with shelves and benches, a marble table set conveniently for tea, or in this case wine and a tongue lashing.
A tiny 'fall drizzled down one wall, watering the exotic flora, all flowering in deepest shades of purple and red. The shallow cave opened widely onto miniature hillocks of moss and stunted, perfectly twisted trees, somber willows and capricious red maples, scruffy silver-green olives and a single, still pool reflecting the billowing sky and home to the largest carp Gabe had ever seen.
"I see your present from the northern Emperor is thriving," he commented idly, attempting to lift the conversation to lighter, less incriminating subjects. Mica stood by the pool gazing over the town. His broad hands rested on the wadded robe which he'd rolled down to his waist to free his glorious wings. He turned round suddenly and Gabe was struck, yet another time, at how very beautiful, how exquisitely fair Mica was, from translucent skin to the onyx eyes to the tendrils of dark silken mane, the curve of his neck, the plumb-line rectitude of his unbending back. Gabe was beginning to pick up some of Josh's masonry, beginning to think of beings as noble pieces of architecture, separating those he knew into those who were in- and those who were out-of-plumb. Mica was definitely "in-." Gabe was not so sure about himself.
And the deep bass of his glorious throat, saying now, "You realize, of course, you are fully ten days late, little Gabe.”"Excuse me?" Gabe watched the old mage settle into a distant nook of Mica's aerial grotto and took it for a sign that the mortal was "ducking for cover."
"We shall discuss the matter of excusing your actions in a moment. Just now I said you were late, by which I mean we expected you to come slinking around here, well past the deadline, and try to change the name of The Chosen."
Gabe's shoulders drooped. Clever, clever Mica. Stupid, stupid Gabe.
"Well?" Mica bared his impressive teeth but it was not to smile.
"All right! I admit it. I came here to change the name of the Chosen, to take her scroll from the place beneath the Throne and substitute another. She has just become engaged, she..."
Mica raised his palm and shook his head. "You know very well that none of this matters, Gabe."
"But..!"
Mica pinned his blonde brother in a ferocious stare and Gabe swallowed hard, trying not to tremble. Then Mica turned back towards the pool and the sky and his own thoughts, looking every inch the avenging arc, the Geldrake Lord, he was. And Gabe felt much less a Lith than a humble chick.
After a long, electric silence, Mica spoke, seemingly to the pool, or his own reflection therein, "When we took over as the Guardians--Sama and Rafe, Peni and you, and me--we stopped the feeding in the herds which was making you so ill. We forbad the Elohim to enter our flocks or to enslave our sheep. We endured the Great Hunger in patience and grace, because we valued your judgment that Man was more than a mere beaste."
Gabe knew all of this, but he also knew better than to interrupt.
"We did all of this because we love you and we respect you. Are you hearing any of this, Gabe?"
"Yes, brother," Gabe answered quietly, folding his hands in his lap. He wished the old mortal were not here to witness, but probably Mica meant Baa1’s presence to magnify Gabe's humiliation.
"And in exchange for these excessive, these extravagant allowances, what is required?"
"Murder," Gabe murmured. He was so nervous he'd begun to itch, but he was damned if he would scratch.
"Everything that lives does so because something else dies, Gabriel. That is the price of living. That is the Way of Our Father. Do you question?"
Gabe cringed, first at hearing the sound of his full name in such a derisive manner, and then to hear the implication of Mica's question. "Kill me now if you believe that is so!" he roared, surprised at the volume he could muster.
"Oh, Dear Brother, calm yourself," Mica's voice was suddenly solicitous, almost sensuous. "I did not have you clad to kill you, only to delay you until you had recovered your senses."
"Clad? What are you talking about, Mica?"
"I trust you found your rooms in order?"
Gabe stared stupidly at his brother.
"You found the robe I left for you," Mica continued. "It suits you well, fits you perfectly. Alas, though, if you roll up the sleeves you will see its true purpose. I am sorry it was necessary to trick you."
Gabe pushed up one sleeve with the heel of his hand. Round his wrist was a soft circlet of iron meshwork. The other wrist was likewise done. Moving his hands to his neck, he found a similar circlet there as well. It was the metal and not his nervousness made him itch. Iron clad! He would be bound in mortal form until Mica saw fit to release him!
"Damn you!" Gabe could hardly spit the malediction through his clenched teeth.
"You will surely be the damnation of us all if this nonsense of yours continues unabated, Beloved Brother. Can you not see we only mean the best for you? What would you have us do?"
Gabe said nothing in reply, but his furious rage steamed from him, a nearly visible aura of grim and bitter indignation.
"We have been just. We have been fair. We have been merciful," the Gel Arc's deep voice pleaded softly and his bright wings withered away until his human form bore no remnant of his true nature.
"Savage!” Gabe hissed.
"You yourself agreed to this arrangement. Each of us in turn has given of our flocks to the Beltane sacrament. And now that it is your turn again, Gabe, do you betray your word to us?"
"Beaste!” Gabe growled.
Mica slipped his robe back up to his shoulders and sat down beside his brother. "Tell the mortal mage, Baal, the covenant we have made, and take his counsel concerning this, Gabe."
Gabe looked up. So that was why Mica had brought the mortal to this meeting. "You have told this mage what to say."
"No, Brother. I do not command Mage Baal."
The old man agreed that this was so and bade Gabe to explain what the argument entailed, as he had not understood it up to now.
Mica began. "God, Whose sons we are, made the planets and the suns for our delight and placed the animals and the plants also upon the land for our sustenance. But among the animals is one called Man, and Man has proven--at least, in these latter centuries--to be a beaste of a very different order than the others."
"Thank you, Lord," said Baal.
"And we have decided, since the time of Isaac's Ransom, to reject Man's sacrifice of Man to us and to The Father, and to cease hunting and killing Man ourselves, unless we are directly attacked."
"My Lord is too generous," Baal's wit was dry as blown leaves.
"Wait until you have heard it all, old man," Gabe grumbled."Gabe is right, Baal 1. There is one problem still. We must sacrifice each year, in the spring, to The Lord of Lords, Our Beloved Father. We elevate a single mortal to the status of Chosen and offer him up to God, the highest blessing of any life. The..."
"We still kill them," Gabe interrupted. "Only now we excuse it in ritual and rhetoric and holy proclamation. We glorify ourselves because of our pragmatic moderation, but it is still murder. And murder is against the law, the one our race calls Prime Tenet, and the Law of Moses, 'Thou shalt not kill."'
"Are you going to forbid Baal to eat lamb now?" Mica asked.
"We also have such a law, Lord Gabriel," Baal began most graciously. "But such a law is ever fraught with many extenuating circumstances and exceptions. As your brother has said, nothing lives but that something dies. Should we, should you, kill yourself to keep something from dying this moment so that you might live? But would not killing yourself be also a murder most grievous and sinful?"
Dear Lord, thought Gabe, here was a mortal to stand Rafe down.
"Be that as it may," Mica interjected. "This is all irrelevant. You did not come to stop the sacrifice, only to change the name you had chosen."
Baal’s brows knurled.
"Explain it, Gabe."
"We could not abolish the sacrifice," Gabe began. "So we agreed to the yearly deliverance of a single mortal. Rafe devised a way to peer into the future, along the patterns of Fate, and search out those mortals who despaired of life. From these we chose suitable candidates--those who were as yet undefiled and perfect in form."
The mage's features did not relax from their curious incomprehension.
Mica stepped in. "I will show you this year's Chosen. This is a brief vision of the maiden's future. You will have to pay close attention or you will miss it, but to watch longer would make the instant real, by our witnessing of it... and at that point, we could no longer amend this mortal's future."
Baal nodded and then stared suspiciously at Gabe.
"No," Mica seemed to read the mortal's thought. "Neither Gabe nor myself can extend the time of this image. This is only a memory of Rafe's vision, and Rafe is always most cautious with his seeing."
The beautiful garden terrace vanished in absolute darkness. There was a flash of dim light and a woman in her middle years appeared, kneeling on a marble floor, rocking in the rigor of her folded arms. Her hair was in frantic disarray and her features were drawn in sere lines of pure agony. The abject despair in her broken voice was horrible to hear.
And all she said was, "Oh, God, that I had never been born."
Baal returned last from the illusion, shaken and pale. "That is the Chosen?"
Both angels nodded.
"But she is old...and I think, mad. How can she be worthy, Lords?"
Gabe answered him, "Mira is twelve years old now, fair and fearless, pure and perfect."
"And if she lives, this will be her fate, Lord?" Baal took Mica's arm and sagged back against the cavern's wall, breathing with difficulty against the sodden ache in his old heart.
Gabe nodded slowly.
"Will she suffer if you bring her to the Beltane sacrament, Lord?"
"There will be no pain, no fear. We--it is part of the ritual that we attend the Chosen from infancy on. We vow ourselves in their service, tutor them, wait upon their every desire..."
"Does she know what will happen--about the Beltane, Lord?"
"Yes, Mage Baal, she has known since she was old enough to understand."
"And she accepts this?"
"Thus far, Mira has agreed without reservation, to come to My Father's House in the spring of this year, to live with God forever."
Baal leaned forward over his knees and Mica reached gently beneath the long silver hair and rubbed his neck.
"What is your judgment, Mage?" Mica asked softly.
"Be merciful, Lord Gabriel. End her life now. Spare her this agony."
"Just as I suppose, Mage Baal, you wish for Mica to end your life next year," Gabe said evenly.
"What!" Baal jerked away from Mica's touch, his eyes round as full moons.
Gabe shook his head and laughed. He rubbed his itchy wrists and ignored his brother's ire. "No, Mage, you are not Chosen. I merely said that to make a point."
Mica clearly did not approve of Gabe's cruel tactic, but he did not wander from his original course. "This time, Gabe, there will be no tardy excuses. None of us will come into your flock, because you cannot bear your share of this onerous responsibility, or because your soft heart, which is so dear to us, has softened your reason in the matter of your husbandry. No, Brother, this year you will bring the sacrifice which you yourself chose twelve years ago."
Gabe stood up angrily, and he might have launched for Mica's throat, but the sunlight disappeared as it had with the vision. The black shadow which had dogged his steps since entering the city finally made itself known.
The gargantuan dragon landed on the terrace ledge and the stone shuddered. Baal’s mouth dropped open and his legs remembered their youth, pumping him against the cave wall and then out into the garden and around to the arch which led him to safety.
The elder mage from Th'zar was down all five flights and wandering a back alley before he realized where he was, and then he was only able to find the ground and lie there panting, trying to forget what he had seen.
He had read about dragons, seen paintings and carvings, heard...oh, but none of that was equal to the experience. Painfully spectacular, wondrously brutal, ponderous and lithe, bright as gold, cold as ice. He had seen the intricate filigree of the mask, the brilliant prisms of the sinuous neck, rising like a serpent at the edge of the garden. Great clouds of steaming exhalations and the hollow, cavernous sound of its prodigious, slow breath...but the eyes! Baal had lost himself utterly in the unending depths of those opalescent orbs, entire planets of seductive and irresistible pleasure.
Baal I thanked his mindless flesh for getting him the hell out of there and then he went back to the business of breathing.
Far above poor Baal, on the Fifth Terrace of Babel's Tower, Mica was stirring the air with his wrath.
"Merciful God, Sama! How often have I told you about this? You are tearing the sod to shreds and you will soon have this whole ledge tumbled down to the Euphrates! Off! Off, or change, or..."
"Or what, Little Brother?" the Geldrake Royal roared, but he had already begun the descendence to a lesser, and lighter, form. "Stop howling, Arc Micael, it does not become you."
"Sama, why are you here? Why have you come?" Gabe stared at the swarthy face of the Drake Lord who tended the herds to the north and the far east. Sama hardly ever descended entirely to mandragor as the other four did. Most of the time he remained in the transitional forms of Daemon or Avatar or Hierophant. This afternoon he had chosen the Avatar, or winged version of the Daemon phase: leathern wings, cloven hooves, with just a suggestion of the dragon masque about his features.
The eastern herds were far more sophisticated than the west. They did not abhor a god who was in no way like themselves, but appreciated the difference as a distinction rather than a monstrosity. Sama was the one prince among them who would one day ascend The Throne of God. He was the paragon of the Five Princes and they all acknowledged this fact, Samael included.
"Pay up, Brother Mica," Sama's baritone carried like a clarion. "Admit it. I have won the bet."
"What bet?" Gabe stared at them both. "You are not supposed to gamble!"
"Careful, Mica, Baby Brother is going to report us. Steady, Gabe, it was only a friendly wager that I could trail you through the city in full dragor manifest and you would still be none the wiser."
"I do not believe you!" Gabe protested.
"Did you not enter--or was it splash?--into the Gate beyond the palace? Then up over the roof and down, roughly northwest toward The Tower where you passed the nursery class of maerdrags and two of Baal's friends who nearly ran into you. You took the west entryway up to the First Level when you reached The Tower, out to the garden, back into the room we readied for you, where you changed into the robe with the cladding then..."
Gabe collapsed down on the stone bench of the grotto.
"I could continue..."
"Do not bother yourself, Sama. I believe. How could I have been so stupid, so blind?"
"Baby Brother," Sama draped his long arm over Gabe's shoulder. "You are too trusting, too innocent. That is why you did not see me. That is why it was so easy to trap you." He touched the meshwork at Gabe's left wrist. "They are not uncomfortable, are they?""And might I ask why you have chosen to do so?" Gabe pulled away from his brother's embrace. "What am I charged with?"
"Charged? Oh, do not be ridiculous, Baby--"
"Stop calling me that! The five of us are exactly the same age." Gabe's lower lip pushed out in a gesture of petulance that belied his statement of maturity.
"Chronology is not the problem, Brother Gabriel," Mica asked them to join him in his study within the hour. He excused himself from their company to see to Baal.
When he was gone, Sama poured the rest of the wine into a goblet and offered It to Gabe. "You must know how much we love you, Brother."
"Must I?"
”and this is partly our fault, that--"
"What fault?"
Sama sighed, "At least let me finish. We have doted upon you, treasured your childishness as the one reminder of our own lost youth. Being a Simurgh, you cannot help your tenderness for your charges, and we love you for that all the more, Gabe, but there comes a time to lay down the things of childhood and take up the solemn responsibilities of heritage and destiny. We are all of us old enough now to see that the cycles of Man ebb and flow like the sea, repetitive, directionless. We are no portion of that cycle except to shape the slow and infinitely ponderous advance of the entire pattern. That is our purpose: to guide Man's mortal destiny--not because it is our own, but because we are outside the dictates of Time, because we are the Sons of the Eternal."
"Is this going to be a long scolding?"
"A little longer," Sama smiled. "We have interceded for you down the centuries, Gabe, and it is ultimately no favor that we have done so. Now is the time for you to seize your birthright and stop pretending to mortality."
Sama paused and waited patiently for Gabe to stop playing with Mica's gigantic carp. "We are not expecting you to kill this Chosen, but we do expect you to bring her here at the appointed time, and I suppose you can be counted on to remain with her and comfort her so that she will not be afraid. We will attend to the rest of the ritual."
"Why do you never manifest as angel anymore?" Gabe asked as if he had heard nothing of Sama's carefully crafted speech.
Sama's fingers clenched in spastic fists at his side. "Where is your sense, Brother? You muddle about in your flock, not to their best interest, but collecting bright individuals who particularly fascinate you, so that you may pretend to friendship. Your herd Is wild, Brother, as if they had no Guardian at all!"
"And where is the Guardian of the eastern herds now, Sama?"
"My flock is well-disciplined and I have instilled some of the eternal perspective in their corporate sensibilities--more than I seem able to accomplish with you, Gabe. It is not the same as when Mica took your herd for you. None of us could believe how feral they were when we had them here."
"That was half a millennium ago, Sama. And you did not answer my question."
"I will show you why, Dear Brother," Sama 's voice was strangled by the force of his frustration. "And then perhaps you will see that you are not put upon this earth for pleasant chats with the natives."
Sama proceeded to shift his flesh to the Lith Hierophany which they all shared, the winged manform which so fascinated the mortals. Gabe watched disinterestedly, concentrating on various plans for escape, wondering how long they would keep him fettered like this, thinking...
"Heavenly Father!" he rasped with what little air was left. Gabe had seen Sama in Hierophant before, but this was something entirely different. The Gelcindrake Lord's skin was transparent and luminous as if it could not contain the terrible fire that burned within. Even his wings seemed poised on the verge of ignition. But Sama's face bore the brunt of this frightening mutilation and his eyes were the focus of the apotheosis, more dreadfully changed than all the rest of him.
In Sama's liquid black eyes flared a curious amalgam of intensity and detachment, suffering and ecstasy, vision and blindness. Gabe hid his own eyes behind his hands and began trembling uncontrollably. "I am sorry. I am so sorry," he whispered.
He felt Sama's arms around him, steadying him, and the tremor of his terrible fear ceased.
"It is over, Gabe. You can open your eyes," Sama's tones bore no reflection of the awesome transfiguration. "There is nothing to be sorry about. I only meant to show you what we are to become, what we own as Sons and Princes."
"How can you stand it?" Gabe opened his eyes relieved to find Sama in mandragor but Sama's eyes still hinted at the awful potential to power which Gabe now recognized having seen in Mica's gaze as well.
"Come now, Gabe, admit it. Except to fly here, you have not manifested this past century...I do not count your playing at 'statue' in the new temple."
"Have you been spying on me all along?" He meant his words to be sarcastic but he was still too overcome.
"We have all watched over you, Brother. You are never alone or unloved. We will never desert you, Gabe. Mica and I will stay with you here until the time comes to return to Judea for The Chosen. We will help dissuade you from your folly in the hundred days to come, help you say farewell to your childhood... which we will all miss. We are here to welcome you into your glory, Gabe." Sama held his brother close to him and kissed him on his forehead. But Gabe was as unresponsive as a stone.
"Come," said Sama sadly. "We must meet with Mica and hear what astrologer Baal has to say."
Mica's study was sun-washed in rays of mote-ridden light. Sama and Gabe entered quietly to find Mica and Baal at an enormous wooden table, poring over a dozen velum charts, deep in somber conversation. The mage seemed no worse for his fright in the garden except that he jumped as Sama announced their presence.
Seeing Sama was no longer in dragor, Baal relaxed and returned to his discussion of the chart before them.
"Today, in this year of Seven hundred and forty-seven, ab urb condita," Baal pointed to a perfectly curved line, indicating the date in the Roman fashion. "And here, your Feast of Beltane, which will be celebrated in three months."Gabe peered over the mage's shoulder at a complex array of dots and circles and intersecting arcs.
"During this next Beltane there will be the first instance of conjunction:
Marduk and the Shield of Palestine. There can be no doubt."
"Go on," Sama's command held an urgency which took Gabe by surprise. Did he actually believe in this?
"There will be a second conjunction of these two stars in early fall, and a third during the Sol Invictus at the end of this year. Here and here," Baal pointed.
"In which house?" Sama asked.
"The Fishes," Baal replied apologetically.
"Damn!" Sama's demeanor was entirely serious.
"Surely you do not...?" Gabe began.
"It gets worse," Mica interrupted. "In early winter of 748 auc, next year, there will be a fourth conjunction of these two in the same house."
"No!" Sama leaned over the map.
"And a third planet will join them..."
"Mars!" Sama's hiss whistled round the room.
"I am afraid there is no doubt," Baal pulled on his long white beard. "A triplet of conjunctions, followed by a triple conjunction. It is most ominous."
"And Tiamat's Son, for God's Sake," Sama slumped down beside them on the carved wooden bench. "Well, it is consistent with what Rafe and I discovered at the Gaelic henge, and also what Peni told me when I visited him in Egypt."
"Who is Tiamat's Son?" Gabe asked, wondering why there should be such a fuss about a few coincidental orbits.
"Marduk," Mica replied locking his gaze on Sama's and finding no answer there. "The mortals originally built this temple to him seven centuries ago, to honor him for killing his mother."
"That is disgusting." Gabe's pale eyes squinted as much against the words as the light.
"He was, in form, an angel," Sama added.
"Stop!" Gabe pleaded.
"His mother, Tiamat," Baal completed the ghastly trio, "was a dragon."