Ancient Power of Fright and Lust
Tame our sister, the merchants say to the bearded sorcerer. We trapped the moon inside her, but the tides are playing havoc with the ships and Sister won’t obey.
Remedios, their white-haired sibling in a robe of yellow ochre, sits on a metal stool facing the sorcerer. The three merchants, two brothers and one tall sister, all in dark glasses, stand behind her. As instructed the merchants have cut a side shoot from the world-tree and, though commanded to walk it themselves, their servants have carried it night and day for a thousand leagues.
The bearded sorcerer places his white lemur onto the world-tree stick. When the lemur grips the rod, seven green shoots burst from the tip and attach to the ceiling. Leaves grow from the fresh branches and the lemur’s fire-eyes glow. The sorcerer tugs the pole but the new growth holds it fast to the ceiling.
We must make a sacrifice, he says, or my lemur won’t enter.
Can’t we insert the shoot another way? Brother One asks. What use is your animal if it won’t obey us either?
Turquoise butterflies emerge from a rip in the earthen ceiling, then a dragonfly, which alights on the lemur’s paw.
If she’ll eat the dragonfly, the sorcerer says, my lemur may follow.
We’ve starved her and kept her awake for three days, the tall sister replies. She’ll eat.
Brother One reaches for the dragonfly but the lemur bites his hand. Old man, he says, you’ve lost control.
Merely part of the essential offerings, the sorcerer replies, improvising. He asks the tall sister for the scroll knocked to the floor when they dragged Remedios in.
Pierced through with an ankh-headed skewer, the scroll is almost transparent. The sorcerer lets go of the world-tree sapling, which remains rooted to the ceiling. Male and female catkins are growing. A mist of yellow pollen descends.
Removing the ankh, the sorcerer unrolls the tattered scroll, but the translucent hide hasn’t spoken to him for years. Sighs and whimpers, unfurling from the brown ink extracted from a mummified corpse, lift into the air. Shaking, he transmits his intention to the lemur; its white fur stands on end and crackles. The sorcerer’s bald head shines and the merchants sneeze.
I’ll read it, says Brother Two. But when he snatches at the scroll, his fingers rake the sheet as if through water, and the scroll ripples into three silver rivulets.
My apprentice will interpret it, the sorcerer says, though he has no apprentice, only the kitchen boy. Banished from the rituals and ceremonies, the boy is forbidden to touch the scrolls, vessels and totems, although, as always, he’s hiding behind the winged serpent on the doorway curtain, too curious for his own good.
Remedios, in the crown of vines forced upon her, shifts on the stool. Her right hand reaches for the verdigris arrowhead which tops one of the stool’s legs. The dragonfly flits from the lemur’s claw to Remedios’s knee, but the sorcerer and merchants have forgotten about both messenger and steed as they fight over the scroll. More liquid than vellum, the parchment lets its separated selves fall in drops that turn the floor to mud.
In her weakened state, Remedios can’t release the arrowhead from the stool, can’t shed her name while encircled by the vine-crown, can’t speak that these are not her siblings, only gold-sick merchants who don’t want to hear what will happen if the world-tree grows inside her.
The merchants have bound her tongue with shame, but her mind rides the frequency of the lemur’s amber eyes. She doesn’t want to destroy the world, not the old one she belongs to, nor the new one the merchants have commissioned. The lemur understands that she’s tired of holding the worlds together. But now the kitchen boy, green as the world-tree shoot, has been summoned into the room. He’s eager to prove his worth. Armed with trust in his master, and deadly curiosity about feeling the scroll’s sacred tissue, he advances.
Mature cones have formed on the branches of the world-tree sapling. Woody scales open and the seeds spill onto the floor around Remedios’s feet, sinking into the floor made sodden by the scroll’s tears. The merchants’ greed fills the kitchen boy with lust that frightens yet charges his desire.
Remedios need only be tame for a moment. Fire from the lemur’s eyes is stolen by the boy and, though his master hasn’t yet instructed him, he knows to how scoop and mould the droplets of the scroll that still swim in the air. The scroll doesn’t resist. Platinum in the boy’s hands, it is incomplete, lethal now, missing its heaviest components, which nourish the spilled seeds rooting beneath Remedios’s bare feet. The boy feels his burgeoning power. The merchants urge him to create their new world before the sprouting seeds annihilate their hopes.
A being of pure rationality, they shout to the boy, must replace this ancient power of fright and lust. The scroll will tell you how. You must do it before Sister corrupts your innocence. Kill your curiosity. It has no place in the new world.
In desperation, they pull up the seedlings carpeting the floor, but too many are coiling around Remedios’s ankles. The lemur attacks the merchants but the boy is intoxicated by his expansion, can’t imagine retreating from his intended act; he doesn’t know to fear the earth, believes himself one above the many, even as the seedlings climb Remedios’s legs. The merchants insist the boy is the One, the One, the only One who can remake the world, to banish the ancient powers to the underland, from which Remedios now draws power, as she used to draw the tides; and in conjunction with the flares from the lemur’s eyes, which lick the beard from the sorcerer’s chin, she summons a spring tide to nourish the world-tree that braids around her as she breaks through the roof. In the flood, the boy remains a boy.
Written in response to the painting ‘Syssigy’ (1957) by Leonora Carrington