Lilith's Castle by Gill Alderman

Author:Gill Alderman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Parados must have learned, or written this. I did not. I believe it is a tribute to Helen and know I am afraid, not now of Urthamma nor the blue god and his crew, for I have mortal longings greater than my spiritual. I dread to lose Helen and, setting aside those resolutions and questions I should address of pilgrimage and curiosity, pose the terrible query once more:

What if Helen, loving me who am the same in body and looks as Parados was, should tire?

Think, Koschei. Reason it out! She loved me in my own body, passionately, ecstatically among the rocks and stars between our worlds, in the fallow sky-fields where we lay together. That body’s gone, lost to me and ruined like my city and my castle. She loved me for my wit and abilities and these remain, residing in a better case, this fine, fit body Parados abandoned. Further? Then this: I could as easily get another body, one which she’d find novel, entertaining – that of a boy, Chab say; that of strange Ravana; of an ape, a toad, a dog, a demon.

I forget! She’s mistress of all bedroom arts, of each descending step of debauchery. Has she left me to seek a younger lover?

So, snap the journal shut, return it to its place, perambulate, pace up and down. Here, beside Cyllene’s statue, is the portrait of the Ima woman – changed by all that’s ensorcelled and mutable! so she is neither the chaste princess of the Plains nor the dirty shaman I saw in the prism but a living, breathing woman who leans forward, still in rags to be sure, but so infused with the light of love as to be positively desirable – who leans towards me and stares from Eros-enchanted eyes. And I stretch forth my hands to take hers, so life-like is she – I want to touch her youthfulness. The paint is hard and ridged against my fingertips.

After these sad discussions with myself and with the new portrait, I must leave the little building and its garden for the camp. Its noise is welcome: I come to better thoughts, eat well on biscuit and doves spiced with the condiments of this land, hot peppers, cumin seed and fenugreek, drink sour buffalo milk and so to my bed, restored in body and spirit both. Nemione, beside me, as the night grows deeper, is a most fit substitute for Helen. In the haunted hours I wake alert and enervated, exhausted yet afire, athirst for new knowledge and experience. There is my draught, in the carafe. I take a long drink of Ravana’s preparation, tasting each spice and each drug as I come upon it in the suspension: nutmeg, mace and cinnamon, zerumbet, zedoary and cassumunar, red Arcadian wine.

Then come ye sprites of the abyss, pluck out my body-hair, pinch me, prick me with your red-hot irons; bring me at last to Her who with nails of ice and acid spittle will tear me and devour, beginning at my tongue.

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