The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (21 page)

“If you were to bite me,” Eve asked, “would I die?”

“Not now,” the serpent said, “but if we were on the other side of the hedge, you might. Do you think I should, while it’s still safe, just to see what happens?”

“No, I don’t,” said Eve. “I might store the poison, and drop dead the moment I stepped outside. Did you want to bite me?”

“Not really,” the serpent said. “Perhaps I’ve had my fill of evil for a while.” It paused to flex its coils again, under the spur of a new inspiration, “I suppose I ought to explore the other side of the coin, for the sake of balance. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“I doubt it,” Eve replied.

“It wasn’t
entirely
my fault,” the serpent told her, defensively. “Lilith started it. If I hadn’t seen her eat the fruit of the tree of life, I might not have been tempted myself. I didn’t have to follow her example, though, any more than Adam had to follow yours.”

“Have you eaten the fruit of both trees, then?” Eve said.

“Yes, I have. When the Lord God condemned me to eat dust for all the days of my life, he knew that it would be a long sentence. My children will be mortal, though, just like Lilith’s. Stupid, too. I think I’m going to be lonely.”

“But it was the fruit of the
other
tree that you tempted me to eat, “Eve said, stubbornly following her own line of thought, “not the one that Lilith ate. Why was that?”

“I wanted to figure out whether I’d taken them in the right order—whether eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil first might have given me a different perspective on the virtue of the fruit of the tree of life. As things are, you see, I can only look back. When I ate the fruit of the tree of life, I didn’t have the faintest idea whether it was a good or an evil thing to do. I have an opinion
now
—but I can’t tell whether it’s the same opinion I would have had if I’d eaten the second fruit first. What do you think?” While it spoke, the serpent had succeeded in moving a little way along the branch, and back again. It seemed pleased with its modest achievement.

“I think it might depend,” Eve said, “on where one might have to live after eating the fruit of the tree of life. Not than it matters to me, given that the flaming sword has taken the option away. What’s your opinion?”

“My opinion,” the serpent told her, “is that it all depends on how good a liar you are. To live anything like forever, and find more good than evil in the experience, I’ll probably need to be a very good liar indeed. It’ll require a lot more practice than I’ll need merely to be able to get around—although I seem to be mastering the intricacies of arboreal movement. You wouldn’t care to lift me on to a branch nearer to the ground, I suppose? The height of this one’s making me rather nervous.”

Eve picked the serpent up, and put it down in the grass by her feet. “Take one step at a time,” she said, not without a certain ironic vindictiveness. “You have to learn to walk before you can run, metaphorically speaking.”

“That’s the fruit talking,” the serpent said. “You wouldn’t have been able to try to hurt my feelings two days ago. Aren’t you glad I happened along?”

“Yes, of course I’m glad,” Eve said, suspecting as she said it that she might be lying. “With enemies like you, who needs friends?” If it was a lie, she wondered, ought the lie to be reckoned a mere reckless folly, or an expression of some kind of existential triumph? There was, she realized, a certain aesthetic satisfaction in twisting and turning, even for someone incapable of swallowing her own tail and disinclined even to put her foot in her mouth.

“Where are you going?” asked the serpent, as she turned on her heel.

“To see the Lord God,” she replied. “I think he’s hesitated long enough. It’s time to go.”

“Will I ever see you again?” the serpent asked, hopefully.

“Not if I see you first,” Eve assured it—honestly, this time. “Once we’re outside the garden, the enmity will kick in. It’s nothing personal.”

* * * *

When Eve arrived in the settlement Adam was pleased, partly because he was glad to see her and partly because he thought her presence might make Lilith jealous. He was still undecided as to which of them he wanted to be with, but he certainly wanted to have the choice. He took her into the reed hut, apologizing for the appalling stink, but he wasn’t surprised when she decided that she’d rather sit out in the open, by the fire. They had no privacy there, but Azazel sat down on Eve’s far side while Lilith sat on Adam’s, so the imitations that Azazel had forged faded into the background of shadows.

Adam commiserated with Eve over her expulsion from the garden, and explained that he would have waited by the hedge had he not been so certain that the Lord God would forgive her and let her stay. “It wasn’t your fault, after all,” he told her. “I was the one who should have known better, having had so much more experience—it was my responsibility to protect you. You were weak; that’s the way the Lord God made you. He made me strong, and I should have been strong enough for both of us.”

“The Lord God would have let me stay if I’d approached him the right way,” Eve assured him, “but I couldn’t bear to be alone in the garden, without anyone of my own kind. He refused to make me a new partner, on the grounds that He’d already tried that, so I eventually had to ask Him to let me go. He was grateful, in a way, because that was the only way the terms of His curse could take full effect, and He hates inconsistency, even in Himself. He warned me that you might not want me, because you would surely have found your first wife, just as young and beautiful as when you last saw her, but I had to take the risk.”

Eve was looking past Adam at Lilith’s firelit face while she said this. Lilith, in her turn, was studying her. Adam was studying both of them, although he had to twist and turn in order to look in both directions alternately. He felt a distinct thrill as he tried to imagine what each of them must be thinking.

Lilith was the taller of the two, by far the stronger, and arguably the more beautiful—but Eve was more delicate as well as softer, and arguably the prettier. Adam purred like a lion, and blinked away the smoke that was teasing his eyes.

“You’re very welcome, Eve,” Lilith said to the newcomer, “and you may set your mind at rest. I never was Adam’s wife in any meaningful sense, and never wanted to be—but you were his wife from the moment of your creation, and that’s certainly your destiny now.”

“There’s no need to be hasty,” Azazel put in. “Eve’s still a stranger here, and it would be unwise of her to rush into anything. She must be very hungry and thirsty, as well as tired. We must give her meat to eat, and something pleasant to drink, before we start settling anyone’s future.”

There was a whole lamb rotating on a spit over the cooking-fire, and the scent of its roasting was as exhilarating as any perfume in Eden. Eve paused to savor it before accepting Azazel’s invitation to take her aside and give her something pleasant to drink. Adam got up too, but only to draw Lilith away in the opposite direction.

“He’s not going to take you with him,” Adam said, when they stopped at the edge of the village compound, where the bare ground gave way to a thicket of brambles and thistles. “It won’t matter what you say or do. Making a show of giving me up won’t help. He might flirt with Eve for a while, just to make both of us jealous, but he’ll fly off in the end as a beam of light, to explore the stars alone. He’s not like us—and not like the Lord God, either. He doesn’t need company—not any more.”

“I know that,” Lilith said. “But I’m not like you, either, Adam. I ate the fruit of the tree of life, and never tasted the other. There’s a sense in which I’m more like him than you, and meeting you again has only served to emphasize that fact.”

Adam shrugged his shoulders, with calculated effrontery. “It’s your decision,” he said, disingenuously. “If you want to leave me to Eve, you can. She wants to be with me, it seems—even though she could have stayed in the garden.” Adam did not believe that Eve really could have stayed in the garden, but he was willing to appear to believe it, if it would serve his purpose.

“Apparently so,” said Lilith, “but is that what
you
want?”

“I might not have a choice,” Adam parried, feigning regret. “I’m carrying the burden of the Lord God’s curse, alas. On the other hand, I have a responsibility to you, too.”

At that moment, a snake reared up from a tangled clump of thorns and thistles beside them, and made as if to strike at Adam’s heel. Lilith, however, grabbed the creature behind the head and cracked it like a whip, breaking its back. She took three paces back the way they had come, and threw the corpse into the fire.

Adam went after her, but she turned her back on him and went into the reed hut. Adam hesitated for a moment, but then turned round to greet Azazel and Eve, who were returning to the fire holding bowls full to the brim with foaming liquid.

“It’s rather bitter,” Eve opined.

“Yes,” said Azazel, “but I think you’ll find its after-effects amusing.”

* * * *

When Adam awoke the next morning, Lilith had gone, and so had Azazel. Adam was quite certain that they had gone their separate ways—and he remained certain until his dying day, even though he never saw either of them again, at least in human form.

“The settlement is ours now, wife,” he said to Eve, when his loyal follower eventually awoke, groaning and nursing her aching head. “It’s our legitimate inheritance, and we’ll be its king and queen. We’ll found a dynasty, and our children’s children will rule the world, for ever and ever. Our life and theirs will be hard, to begin with, but they’ll make progress enough to exceed the wildest dreams of the Lord God, and the boldest experiments of demonkind.”

“Yes, husband,” Eve replied, without the least detectable hint of insincerity. “God’s kindness will surely balance out his curses in protecting us and guiding us, and nothing can prevent us henceforth from knowing good from evil.”

And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.

[
Genesis
4:1]

THREE VERSIONS OF A FABLE

In the first version of the fable, which was prepared for human contemplation by Oscar Wilde, a lovesick student laments his inability to find a red rose, which has been demanded as the fee for a dance with a lovely girl. A nightingale, understanding the nature of his desperation, implores the rose-trees in his garden to provide a single red rose, so that the student might pursue his courtship.

The only tree capable of producing such a rose asks that the nightingale press her breast against a thorn, so that her life-blood might supply the necessary color. She complies, singing all the while in order to force the blood from her reluctant veins, but the effort leaves her dead and drained.

When the student finds the unexpected rose he is ecstatic, and he carries it triumphantly to the girl. Alas, she has already received a gift of jewels from a wealthy suitor and she is no longer interested in roses or in students.

The student draws the conclusion from this unfortunate episode that love is silly and impractical, and that he would do better to devote himself to the study of philosophy. This is not, however, the lesson which the reader is intended to draw. The reader is supposed to appreciate the awful tragedy of the nightingale’s sacrifice, born of her admirable but foolishly optimistic conviction that love is better than life, and that the heart of a man is worth far more than the heart of a bird.

Were nightingales actually capable of the powers of thought and judgment that the fable credits to them, they would surely tell the tale differently. No true nightingale, however noble her sentiments might be, would ever be so foolish as to think that the heart of a man held anything uniquely precious. Were nightingales to incorporate some such fable into their plaintive songs, they would surely equip their sister with a much more relevant motive. Perhaps they would not let her die at all, but, if they did, they would want her to die for something more worthwhile than a stupid student’s fatuous love-life.

The nightingale version of the fable might credit the initial capture of the bird’s attention to the student’s mournful lament, but it would be the melody of his mourning rather than its content that would intrigue her, and give her pause to wonder what difference it might make to her own song were she to suffer as he seemed to be suffering, for lack of a red rose. It would not be for his sake that she would press her breast to the thorn, but for her own, and for every drop of blood she gave to the rose she would receive a full reward of inspiration. She would sing as no other nightingale had ever sung before, although each and every one had nurtured the passionate desire.