Vellum (12 page)

Carter and Pechorin are waiting in the airport car park, his spear carriers. Carter looks like what you'd get if a farmboy of the Midwest married an Elven princess—all corn-colored hair and jut of jaw but greyhound slim, more a gymnast than a quarterback. Pechorin has a Slavic face of angular curves, all cheekbones and quiet, catlike intensity. In their mafioso black suits, they're clean-cut all-American angels, the paragon of efficiency. They should be; Metatron graved them himself.

The other five sebitti will be following them in some unmarked van presumably, backup in case any demons have picked up on his movement, caught sight of the wake, the ripples in the Vellum as he slides through it from one time and place to another. It's unlikely, but there's always the chance.

“Glad to finally meet you, sir,” says Carter as he reaches out a hand to shake, sliding down off the car's hood where he's sat. Neither Carter nor Pechorin have any memory of their graving, of course, or of much else at the moment. Sebitti don't function very well under those hindrances of humanity.

Metatron shakes his hand absently, busy studying the scrolling sigils on his palmtop. He lets Carter open the door for him and slides into the backseat, still looking at the screen.

“I understand you've had some problems tracking the boy,” he says.

“Slippery little fucker,” says Carter.

“He always was,” says Metatron. “Or could be.”

Thomas Messenger, he thinks, looking at the sigils in his electronic book of life. Metatron wonders if the boy even really knows what he is, what they all are. Or could be.

“We'll get him though, sir,” says Carter. “We will get him.”

“I know you will. He's history.”

GOLDEN APPLES AND GREEN LEAVES

In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves, Tammuz, the lover of Inanna, sat, sheened in his
me
-garments, lounging, still, upon his throne. Inanna fastened on Tammuz the gaze of death, spoke out against him words quiet in wrath, uttered against him cries of shame, of blame:

“Take him! Take Tammuz away!”

The
ugallu
grabbed him by his thighs, spilled milk out of his seven churns, smashed the reed pipe the shepherd played. The
ugallu,
who know no food or drink, who eat no offerings and drink no libations, who accept no gifts or invitations, grabbed Tammuz. They dragged him to his feet; they threw him down. They punched the husband of Inanna, slashed him with their axes.

Tammuz wailed. He raised his hands to heaven, to the god of justice, Shamash, begging: “O Shamash, my brother-in-law, I am your sister's husband. I brought cream—I brought milk—to your mother's house, to Ningal's house. It was me who brought food to the sacred shrine, me who brought the wedding gifts to Uruk. It was me who danced upon the holy lap, Inanna's lap. Shamash, you are a god of justice and of mercy. Change my hands into a snake's hands. Change my feet into a snake's feet. Help me flee my demons; do not let them catch me.”

Shamash in his mercy heard the tears of Tammuz, changed the hands of Tammuz into snake's hands, changed the feet of Tammuz into snake's feet. Tammuz fled his demons and they could not catch him. He slipped away, slid from their grasp and off and out and down, down into the eternal tales of transformation, metamorphic, mythic, Tammuz, Dumuzi, escaping out of Arcadia into the Fields of Elusion. Even now the shepherd boy, the king, Dumuzi, runs across cornfields in his mother's white dress, Tammuz, veiled like a bride, a priestess or a whore, his skin, beneath the silk, the smooth and golden gleam of a gazelle under the sun. He stops to drink from a stream, hunted, alive. Sees a reflection and looks up. A dark man, a shadow, some kind of friend or brother, perhaps—or something entirely other—stands on the opposite bank, across the water.

“Who are you?”

Carrion Comfort

Lightning. The rivers rise in rain, deep ochre down among the greenery and rising, brown bubbling up out of the drains, red ruin flowing over where the road should be. The day is dull with thick clouds of a summer storm but somehow still too bright, fierce with an unearthly light, blue-green, blue-blue, the tarmac mirroring the sky, sky mirroring the tarmac. Out on the road, out on the run, the boy flicks up the collar of his sodden afghan coat against the downpour, wondering if somewhere there's a new ark for this broken covenant. This hail of liquid light—
a flash of white
—electric flame over the earth's primordial blood, this second flood…is this to kill more sons of angels? He draggles long hair from his face with fingers of one hand and, with the other, reaches out a thumb, hoping—in vain, it seems—to hitch a ride.

Poet, prodigal, pilgrim Thomas still wears a silver cross around his neck, a half-forgotten article of childhood faith buried among the beads of his new age, an age of adulthood, of newfound, foundering, floundering identity. He feels it in his fingers, behind a wooden amulet, the leather mojo bag that Finnan gave to him back in another time and place, a world away. It's North Carolina. It's not 2017, though. Screw that. Pick a year, any year. Let's make it 1971. New age. New gods…or older ones. The cross is cool, crisp-edged, metallic amongst its rough, organic brethren. He shakes wild rain from his hair, snorting, a horse, and laughs up at the sky, opens his mouth to it. If he had any remnant of that superstition anyway, he shrugs, the situation calls more for Saint Christopher. And anyway, he has his own charms now.

Thunder. He writes in his journal. Sleep is a dark comfort from the dreams of day, sleep in the arms of a stranger. Sex is play. Picked up in a bar, fucking in a motel. Awake. Aware. Await. Away. It's always the same, he thinks, in roadhouse after roadhouse; there's the one that calls you beatnik, and the one that calls you faggot, and the one that doesn't call you anything, just watches, drinking his beer with dry lips, dry mouth, drinking you. Long hair
—hey girly boy
—and hippy badges—
which way you heading, Canada or Mexico
—blue boot-cut hustler hipster jeans ripped at the ass—
you selling that, girly boy.

And all you have to do is wait for him to leave with all his friends…and wait for him to come back in alone.

“Get the fuck out of here. Just…here, take this and go.”

He shrugs. He wasn't going to ask for money, but if it's offered…He slides his fingers through the scruff of rough hair running from his navel down—he shifts position, settling cock into the comfort of its natural canter, pulls on his jeans and buttons them, buckles his belt. It's getting light again outside. And inside the motel room, attraction sated, revulsion burns in the redneck's face now, redder still with shame. Thomas offers an indifferent shrug.

“Good Book says it's a sin to lay with a man as if he was a woman. Don't say nothing about laying with him as if
you
were.”

Carrion comfort for this guy,
he thinks.

“Fucking hippy draft-dodger,” the man mutters, “that's what makes me sick looking at you.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

And Thomas feels, under his shirt, against his chest and buried amongst all the beads, the dog tags…cool, crisp-edged, metallic.
You don't know shit.
This Thomas is a nineteen-year-old veteran. Nineteen years and as old as war itself.

He pulls his coat on and walks out the door into the river of rain that washes his tracks away behind him as he walks. If he walks far enough in the rain, he thinks, maybe it will wash away his scent.

But it would have to wash his scent off the skin of the Vellum itself and he's pretty deeply ingrained in that.

THE LIONESS AND THE GAZELLE

His heart, the shepherd's heart, Tammuz's heart was full of tears. Tammuz staggered across the steppe, stumbled and fell, and sobbed:

“O steppe, sound a lament for me! O crabs in the river, mourn for me! O frogs in the river, cry for me! O Sirtur, mother, sob for me! And if she cannot find the five breads, if she cannot find the ten breads—if she does not know the day I'm dead—then you, tell her, O steppe, I beg you, tell my mother. On this steppe, my mother will weep for me. On this steppe, my sister will grieve for me.

And on that steppe, the shepherd boy lay down to sleep. Tammuz lay down to sleep and, as he lay among the buds and rushes, dreamed a dream.

Tassili-n-Ajer or Lascaux, 10,000
BCE
or today.

It is a dry, hot and sun-bleached day in the savannah, and a lion slouches slowly through the tall grass. A slender buck twitches nostrils at the scent of predator in the air, and looks at us, and blinks long lashes over deep dark eyes. Vultures wheel lazily overhead. Turning to look around us, we can see the herd of aurochs grazing on the open skies and, superimposed like ghost-forms over this vision of a veldt, lithe copper-skinned and dark-haired villagers dance, recline and hunt. A dog lies curled up beside (beyond? behind?) a strange figure wearing animal skins, a beaked mask and what might be perhaps a feathered cloak or wings. Everything is still, poised in the moment.

“These animals in the cave-paintings,” he says, “they've got no fences, no boundaries, no parameters, no perimeters, you see. It's…it's not
where
they run that matters, only
that
they run.”

In ochre sketch, an antelope looks back over its shoulder, eyes wide, nostrils flared, seeing and scenting its own golden, pouncing death. The lioness's teeth touch to its neck, claws dig into its shoulder blades.

“There's no ground to them, you see, no frame, no mud under their feet…no wire caging them. Look, see where these two bison here just overlap…”

“Sure and the artist probably just ran out of space there, Tommy boy.”

“No. No, it's more than that. It's like there is no space.”

It is a dry, hot and sun-bleached day in the savannah, and a lion slouches slowly through the tall
grass. A slender buck twitches nostrils at the scent of predator in the air, and looks at you, and
blinks long lashes over deep dark eyes. Vultures wheel lazily overhead. All are aware, awake, in
an acute sentience of the tensions of the situation. Turning to look around you, you can see the
herd of aurochs grazing on the open skies and, superimposed like ghost-forms over this vision of
a veldt, lithe copper-skinned and dark-haired villagers dance, recline and hunt. For each group
it is the sense of community that sustains them. A dog lies curled up beside (beyond? behind?)
a strange figure wearing animal skins, a beaked mask and what might be perhaps a feathered
cloak or wings. It is known as the Shaman of Lascaux.

Unbound by either frame or forum, the figure turns, and steps out of the moment.

Tassili-n-Ajer or Lascaux, 1916 or today.

YELLOW PAPER AND BROWN PENCIL LINES

“Tommy boy, sometimes ye talk as much rot as I've got between me toes here. Sure and I don't know what ye're on about half the time.”

Seamus looks at the small sketchbook that the boy treasures more than anything, more than any of them treasure anything, he thinks sometimes, more even than all the tattered, battered photographs of sweethearts and mothers, and the lockets, and the father's watches, and all the decks of playing cards with the nudie women on them and all; and he thinks the boy's daft, so he does, but, in a way, he understands. Seamus looks at the drawings that the boy spent so much time on, so much care, last month on leave in Lascaux when he could have been whoring it up with all the rest of them, whooping it up, sure, the way a boy his age stuck in this shite to fight for someone else's King and Country should be; and all that Seamus sees when he looks at the little sketchbook is yellow paper and brown pencil lines. But Tommy now…

Tommy reaches over and takes the book out of his hands, shaking his head.

“Ah, you've got no soul, Seamus, no soul.”

But the boy is blushing shame even as he tries to play the old game of young lads, sure, they way they bandy abuse about but with a twinkle in the eye and a nudge of the elbow, because,
aye now, ye know I don't really mean it.
The boy can't really carry it off—too shy, he is, and too much of a young gent even if he wasn't quite born with a silver spoon in his gob, not that he comes on all Lord Muck-a-Muck, like. He's just…ach, he's just a good lad what misses his mother and his home like the rest of them, only he shows it more. O, but he gets a right roasting from the other lads of the pal's battalion sometimes, he does, just like he got back home, and where would he be without Seamus sticking up for him, as ever?

Seamus wanders over toward the door of the dugout where, apart from the mud and the mud and the fookin more mud, ye can just see a wee blue hint of sky up there, if ye're hunkered down a bit so ye're looking up at the right angle, sure, which ye are anyways on account of the fookin low ceilings. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket to pull out a cigarette from the crumpled packet of Gauloises in there—fookin nasty shite that they are, but what's a man to do when he's smoked all of his and the quartermaster's as crooked as a British politician, sure, and he's just putting it to his mouth—

DOOM!

“Jesus Fookin Christ!”

Tommy's howling like a fookin wean and it's fookin dark but Seamus can feel the fookin dirt raining down on him.

“Jesus Fookin Mary and Fookin Joseph! Fookin shite! Fookin Hun fookin bastards!” Seamus is down on the ground, hands over his head—Christ, and he wasn't even wearing his helmet—and he doesn't even fookin remember diving down there, but he's sure as fook happy to be there and he'll just stay right where he is for the time being, thank you very much, ma'am, and…

“Jesus. Tommy are ye all right there? Ye're not hit or nothing, are ye?”