The Sibyliad: The Hell Jar: Chapter 3

The Sibyliad is my unfinished "epic" and is composed of several short books.

The Sibyliad

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar

“Ada too, conversation with her, that was something, that's what hell will be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.”

― Samuel Beckett (Embers)

Incanto 3

The ride outlasted their attempts at a conversation, and Daphnis let himself follow every stream of thought until those, too, ran dry.

The woman on fire meant nothing. It meant everything. Plethon was a genius. Plethon was a fool. And Alessandra? Was she a fool? No, not Alessandra. She was a woman but not a fool. She’d shared her logic, the cunning with which she’d face her predicament, and it was sound. He could not answer the many questions such an admission posed about the nature of her vision, but nor could he question the soundness of her mind.

The carriage jostled, and the cushion felt flatter now, having succumbed to the rigors of the journey. His posterior ached. It buzzed and bit, as if he were perched upon an anthill.

Plethon stared resolutely forward, his brow furrowed, and the droop of his great beard suggested a frown.

Daphnis wanted to say something, to challenge Plethon and see him rise to the occasion, but if he were as great as his reputation, then his thoughts were already chasing their own lines of inquiry. Daphnis’s attempts would only distract him. If he were not the man Daphnis believed him to be, then his thoughts were of no greater value than his own. Any other time, he would have considered that idea welcome. Not now.

One of the equi, Marco, came into view, and Daphnis was thankful for him, especially as the last light of evening faded into night.

Without turning to look his way, Marco spoke. “We should be there soon, sir.”

“Be on alert,” Plethon said. “I fear we’re in greater danger than we realized.”

Marco flashed a genuine smile. “Have no worries. We’re ready for whatever comes.”

Plethon’s answer came in a whisper. “None of us are ready, not in the least.”

Marco prodded his mount and rode forward, out of earshot.

“You have concerns?” Daphnis asked.

“I’m a fool, a greater fool than you, for I knew better and still failed to turn this carriage around and question your Miss Lodovico. The very angel of death could be unleashed upon us, and we’d have no idea.”

“The angel of death?”

“Figuratively speaking,” Plethon said. “Whatever awaits us, I don’t expect it’s come from our scriptures.”

“Then God is still with us.”

“Pray if it suits you, but do it quickly,” Plethon said. “The moment is at hand, my friend, and we’re ill prepared.”

Daphnis bowed his head.

“Pray for a hundred men,” Plethon said. “A thousand. Or maybe that one of us would develop wisdom enough to see us through the night. So far, we’ve shown ourselves simple and bloated with pride. An absolute evil stalks our streets, and my intellect fails me. If I die, tonight, I do so deservingly. May God be merciful upon my soul if I’ve taken you with me.”

Daphnis realized he wasn’t praying, only listening.

Firat’s voice reached them, sounding through tension’s mental fog. They had come to a crossroads.

“We’re here,” Plethon said.

Firat called out, again. The monastery lay just beyond. The horses whinnied, and the carriage shook.

Tomasso backed his mount in unwieldy bursts. “They’re spooked. We’ll have to go on foot from here.”

Daphnis exited into a darkness punctuated with hoof beats. He ran for the open gatehouse, and Plethon and their driver followed close behind. Firat, Tomasso, and Marco fought to secure the horses, failed, and fell back into the gatehouse, like men under attack. At the other end of the gatehouse tunnel, the scene changed little. Horses ran wild upon the monastery grounds.

“Stay together,” Firat said. “Horses so frightened won’t want anything to do with us.”

“Are we running for the church?” Marco asked.

“The dormitory,” Plethon said. “There’s no flicker of light in the church windows.”

“What’s got the horses in such a state?” Daphnis asked.

“They’re worked up on both sides of the wall,” Tomasso said. “It has to be something they smell.”

“I smell it, too,” said the driver.

“You’re imagining things,” Firat said and led the way out into the open.

Daphnis followed. The odor hit him like a dagger between the eyes. “It’s rotten and burns my sinuses.”

They ran, and the horses snorted but kept their distance, running in circles.

“Brimstone,” Plethon said.

Above them, beating wings sounded low and loud. A large bird, seen only in silhouette against the lesser black of the sky, roosted atop the narthex.

Firat beat against the dormitory door, but no light shone. No voice responded to their call.

The winged shadow took flight and disappeared, obscured by the high walls of the monastery buildings.

Tomasso spoke for the others. “Where are the monks?”

“I was naive to assume the monk escaped the slaughter unscathed,” Plethon said. “They may have him in the infirmary. It will be farther back, separate from the other buildings.”

A horse approached within fifty paces and struck the ground as if killing a snake. The men watched, unwilling to move until it turned and sprinted away into the darkness.

Firat drew his blade, and the officers followed his example. “Same as before. Move together. Move fast.”

The buildings grew around them, stretching out farther with every step they took. The dormitory became the cloister which became other buildings, the nature of which Daphnis couldn’t identify in the dark, and behind them the horses persisted in their protest until one unsettling idea settled upon him. The horses were warning them off. Go no farther. Turn around. Evil lies ahead.

Memories of skeletons plucked clean overcame every coherent thought. His legs kept moving only because his fear of shame still overshadowed the growing fear of the unknown, and then the walls stopped. Only empty space lay between them and a lonely, long building in the distance, a tiny chapel tucked against its side.

Everyone stopped, lingering on the edge as if watching for an invading army, and Daphnis knew then that his imaginings were not his alone. Everyone sensed the unknowable, unnameable something. The pause continued a heartbeat--two--and when he could take it no longer, Daphnis spoke.

“What’s out there?”

His voice broke whatever spell held them. Firat rose from his frozen crouch and stepped out into the open grass.

“Nothing but gloom and gloam,” he said.

No one else moved, but as Firat continued and the night itself to didn’t reach out to grab him, the others stirred and followed, first Plethon and then the officers. The driver and Daphnis moved last of all.

The absence of stone beside him felt like the loss of a mother, leaving him to wander though vulnerable space, a physical lack-of-presence where the air itself reminded him that nothing stood at his back, nothing held him, and nothing cared.

When the buildings ahead stood as far away as the buildings behind, death moved.

A brushing blow struck Daphnis across the chest. Heat singed his face. A sudden burst of light blinded him and then was gone, and in their stumbling and confusion and swinging of blades, Daphnis saw a horrible, empty space where Marco had stood.

The men shouted into the night and at each other. The driver turned and ran back the way they had come. Plethon grabbed Daphnis’s sleeve, as if Daphnis would have run, too, and maybe he would have. Tomasso slashed at the darkness as if upon a manifested legion; three times Firat shouted his orders before Tomasso heard and obeyed, reigning in both his sword and fear.

With Firat at the head, and Tomaso behind, they hurried forward. The infirmary beckoned to them with the promise of safety and respite. They had halved again the distance when something solid dropped out of the heavens and bounced once upon the grassy soil with splayed limps and gangling, flesh-torn neck. Marco’s half-severed head stared out at them; his shriveled, bloodless lips drawn into an endless grimace; his clothes and hair burned; his entrails spilling out of his tunic.

Daphnis held a shriek at the back of his throat, unable to give it voice. Tomaso screamed, and it felt like Daphnis’s own release, until he saw the shadow of wings and the black eyes within a head on fire. The creature struck. Tomaso’s sword spun loose from his grip--his feet, from the ground. The beast swept through them, a shadow peaked by a point of fire at Tomaso’s throat.

The three stood alone again in the quiet and the dark.

Plethon sounded far away. “She spoke the truth, and we wouldn’t receive her witness.”

Firat’s voice rumbled. “What damnable truth is this?”

Tomaso’s sword lay in the grass. Daphnis searched the skies for a sign of the creature and then ran for the weapon. An inhuman screech pierced his ears. Fire fell. Daphnis stumbled, his fingers mere inches from the blade. Grass burst from the shadows as light flared around him. He rolled onto his back, screaming, his eyes wide to behold his doom.

Firat slid along beside him, his sword cutting the air, as if slicing through Daphnis’s scream and into the wing-born beast. Head, torso, and wings tumbled through the grass. The creature rolled to a stop, and the body of a black-winged woman lay crumpled on the ground, her head severed at the jaw.

Daphnis pulled himself to his knees. Firat stood blood-splattered, half-singed, and bathed in the stench of brimstone. The whole world narrowed to the stretch of earth between them and the body.

Oddly jointed wings, leathery and black grew from pale, unblemished skin. From the severed jaws rose multiple rows of serrated teeth, folding forward from a tongueless floor.

Firat mumbled a prayer. Plethon cursed, and Daphnis vomited. The fullness of its contents emptied, his stomach continued its contractions, suffocating him, drowning him in an airless void.

Plethon grabbed him. “Move, while we still can.”

But Daphnis didn’t move. He couldn’t. Plethon pulled harder. Daphnis half rose and stumbled back to his knees.

“Leave him!” Firat yelled.

Plethon hesitated a moment more, pleading, but something broken within Daphnis would not be so quickly put together again. He stared up at Plethon, unthinking, seeing as if through a fog.

Plethon turned away and, together with Firat, stumbled out of the open field, through the embrace of the infirmary doors, and into the dimly lit space beyond. The doors closed, and Daphnis was alone.

He looked again to the creature’s body. Its limbs twitched.

The abbot, the prior, and the monks listened with respect as Alessandra explained what little she understood. The hearts of men were beyond her control. The goddess couldn’t hold her responsible for anything more.

“What crosses now is not like what crossed before,” she said. “When the courage of the others failed, one monk gave his life to create the opening, but the judgment you seek requires more. With that one life given, only her empusa could enter.”

“Her empusa?” asked the prior, and his question seemed to stress the gender of the goddess rather than the nature of the beast.

Candles dimly lit the long hall against the night. One monk, Conrad da Osimo, lay on his death bed, and she sat at his side, the urn clutched in her lap. The others gathered in rapt attention.

“I helped him hold the jar,” Conrad said, and they strained to hear his weak voice. “Our brother plunged the knife into his own throat, setting the example we should follow, and I was holding the jar when he died. I was obedient, but we were afraid and full of doubt. For that disbelief, our lives were forfeit as were our rewards. Arm me now, for I’m ready and won’t hesitate. I will not fail.”

When Conrad drifted into silence, the abbot turned to Alessandra. “We have pledged ourselves to God’s mercy while it lasts and His judgment when it comes. If the end of the age is upon us, we are ready to a man to rise up in obedience—or to fall as the case may be. We are men of faith but also of sound theology, right and true. What I hear now is heterodox at best and blasphemous at worst. The Lord is God, and there is no other.”

Two phrases stuck in Alessandra’s ear, delaying her response. To a man. We are men. An unintended reminder that she was something else and a revelation, perhaps, of his insecurity surrendering leadership to a woman, especially at such a moment. She had come to demand they slice their own throats. Presumably, they understood as much, but his fear was not for his throat but for his balls.

The prior answered for her and waved off the idea, as if a lesser man than the abbot had spoken. “We cannot expect orthodoxy from devils, even when they’re used according to God’s purpose.”

Instead of rebuking the prior, the abbot nodded and looked again to Alessandra for explanation.

She gripped the urn tight and her own fragile composure tighter, and she wished the voice of the urn would speak again, that the winged woman would burst through the door, showing herself solid and true. If these things were real, so were the promises and the hope. Her soul ached for hope.

“With a monster like the empusa, either she’s here or she’s not,” Alessandra said. “The goddess is different. She is both here already and requires the greater sacrifice if she is to physically cross the divide. The empusa may bring death to some, but the goddess will rain down vengeance upon Florence, and her judgment will begin in the house of God.”

“Judgment will begin in the house of God,” echoed the abbot.

The other men murmured in approval.

Alessandra breathed and felt the spark of that breath surge through her. Something she’d said, something she’d been given to say, spoke truth to these men. Though she spoke of the realities of hell, they heard from her some hint of heaven, and maybe she could still believe God was in this. Maybe, she spoke according to His will and not against it. Either way, whatever her sin or righteousness, this tiny piece of the church was ready to listen. They could just as easily have condemned and strangled her and burned her body, rendering it unusable by God and alienated from the hope of resurrection.

“To whom much is given, much is expected,” said the prior. “God forgive us all.”

She watched him, uncertain of his meaning. Part of her silently screamed for them all to run. Death had come to their door.

The distant hand of her son held shut her mouth. Marsilio was growing up without her; soon he would be seven. He still smiled, certainly, but he no longer smiled for her. He ran, but he longer ran to her. He would grow into someone she didn’t know, forever a child in her memories—his memories of her, thin and ghostly.

“He who stayed the hand of Abraham does not call His children to human sacrifice,” said the abbot.

“He who stayed Abraham’s heart first called him to ascend the mountain,” Alessandra said, even as she questioned the judgment she meant to bring upon the world. How many mothers would lose how many sons? How many sons, their mothers?

“He called Abraham to build the altar and bind his son,” the abbot said, continuing the thought.

“And only as he brought down the raised knife did God hold back his hand,” said the prior. “This was the son of promise, and in faith, Abraham counted God able to raise him, even from the dead.”

Again, the monks murmured in agreement.

“The manuscript sent eight men to San Marco,” the abbot said. “No more than that should be required now. Bernardo, take those uncertain in this calling and lock yourselves in the chapel to pray, that the rest of us should be resolute in our duty.”

“I let others go in my place once before, I won’t do it again,” said the prior. “We raise the knife in faith or we live to see God’s judgment. If those are our choices, I know my duty and will not shun it.”

Again, the murmurs rose.

“Do we have weapons to arm us all?” asked the abbot.

The rector gave a nod, and the men behind him distributed the weapons among the monks, including Conrad in his bed. “It is enough.”

“And the coins?” Alessandra asked.

Another monk held up a jingling sack and disbursed its contents among the brethren.

Their focus returned to Alessandra, their dying brother, and the urn. Alessandra hid her trembling with a redoubled grip. The men had set firm their will. Whether she doubted or believed no longer mattered. Death had come.

The hall’s distant door burst open and a soldier stumbled in, sword drawn, followed by Plethon, Daphnis’s friend from the Council. Plethon stood at the door. He held it half-closed and tight to him like a shield and peered out into the night, his free hand moving in anxious circles.

“Get up,” he called. “Please, get up!”

Alessandra rose to her feet. “Plethon?”

Plethon didn’t turn to face her, and the soldier returned to his side, ready to fight whatever waited for them in the night.

The abbot stepped forward. “Who are you? What is this?”

Still holding the urn, Alessandra stood alongside the abbot and the rector. “They’re representatives from the Council in Florence.”

“They know,” the rector whispered. “We must act now, before it’s too late.”

“But the Council…” the abbot began.

The rector reached for the urn. “They’d defy God and hide behind a dozen inquisitions.”

Alessandra pulled back. In the rector’s other hand, the knife glinted in the candlelight. Alessandra screamed.

“Plethon!”

The rector grabbed at the urn, and in that moment, the voice of the urn broke her silence. “Enough!”

The rector pulled back. The abbot approached Plethon and the soldier, and several of the monks moved with him. The rector, his eyes wide, remained focused on Alessandra and the urn. He reached out again, but hesitated, watching Alessandra as if for permission, the knife still in hand, but forgotten, unimportant.

In this moment, she saw finality. She might turn back now but never again. If she repented, the city could be spared. Her son would grow up without her, but he’d have a chance at a good and normal life.

Normal. Why should a life stripped from the one who loved him most ever be considered normal? She’d be a fool to sacrifice herself for a society designed to crush and discard her.

Alessandra nodded to the rector, and he lay his fingers upon the urn’s surface.

“You’ve chosen your path?” asked the voice.

Inwardly, Alessandra answered. I have.

The rector nodded. “We will obey.”

“How many remain with us?” asked the voice.

Alessandra looked, but before she could count them out, the voice answered.

“Five. Seven including Conrad and yourself. It is enough. Alessandra will hold the jar but is to be unharmed, and this time, none can falter in their duty.”

At the far end of the hall, the soldier reached past Plethon and closed the door. The abbot had halved the distance between them.

“We will not fail,” said the rector.

“Alessandra,” the voice said, “take your place beside the bed. Every man’s hand must be upon me.”

Trembling, Alessandra stepped back. Conrad’s pale wrist rest against her arm. His hand gripped the urn. At the rector’s orders, the monks did the same. Each man’s arm raised, each knife’s blade pointed at its owner.

Alessandra wanted to cling to the memory of her son’s face, but the image wouldn’t come. She saw only the streets of Florence stained with blood, its buildings burning.

The dry heaves stopped, and Daphnis knelt in the grass, cold and drenched in sweat. The wind swept over the hill and brushed against stone walls and summer-thick trees. No cricket chirped, and no bird called in the night. The whole world waited, asking if it was safe to challenge the dark.

He’d come close to death, had felt it upon his flesh, and he wondered who’d mourn at the news of his passing. Perhaps someone would hear that a secretary of the emperor had died and would assume him to be an important sort of secretary, a secretary of this or of that, and think to themselves, What as shame.

Nannoccio would think himself bereft of a suitor. Perhaps, Alessandra would mourn, truly mourn. For all her plans, she might still hold some hope that he’d propose and take her awake to Constantinople, as if anything or anyone awaited them there. The city itself was doomed, it’s empire long ago cut off and consumed. Nothing remained but what its walls could hold.

He should have told her. Her family’s ruin mirrored Constantinople’s and his own, where the loss of empire meant the loss of family and lands. Only a lucky few reached refuge within the golden horn. Her sorrow was akin to his. She’d have felt herself knitted to his grief, knowing too well the loss of spouse and child.

He could have been honest with her.

He lifted his face, and the creature stared back at him, eyes fixed and dull, strands of hair blurring with congealed flows of blood. Somehow, in looking into those eyes, he found his strength to stand. He snatched up the head by the hair and studied the fringe of pointed teeth. The killer was dead. Whatever horror birthed the monster, they had killed her. The morning’s impossible crime had become the night’s impossible culprit. Head in hand, he marched to the infirmary and threw open the door.

Plethon and Firat stood in animated discussion with a group of monks and one who, by his dress, appeared to be their abbot. At the back of the room, another crowd gathered around the bed, tending to their injured friend.

He lifted high the head. “This is the demon! This is your killer!”

All talk stopped. Everyone turned to see. At the back of the room, the cluster broke, and at its center, a woman sat, bedside, clutching a pot.

Alessandra.

Her lips moved, and though he could not hear her, he knew their form: No.

Even in such a moment as this, she feared more for him than for herself, and he knew that of all his sins, failing her had been his most egregious. On that alone, he deserved the bowels of hell, kindled hot in anticipation of his flesh, but God had delivered him in this moment to be her savior. He’d rescue her, redeem himself, and return to the city to claim both her and it as his own. The emperor would release him to the people who clamored for him as their hero and not condemn him for abandoning Constantinople to its fate. In gratitude, Nannoccio would give him the inheritance once reserved for his son, and he and Alessandra would retire to the garden to drink wine in its shade, a paradise bursting with the growth of spring ripened into these first days of June.

The monks moved, closing in around Alessandra, their hands raised; in each, a knife.

Daphnis ran, pushing through the nearest cluster of monks who grabbed at him and held him back. He fought with the only weapon he had, the monster’s head. Her dreadful teeth shredded robes, and men shrieked and tumbled out of his way.

His eyes met Alessandra’s, full of muddied emotion. He felt in his gut what he saw in her eyes and surged forward as if driven by the wings of the murdered beast.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the knife drawn from the monk’s cloak. He saw the arc it cut as it drove down into his side and sliced between his ribs. He took another step before the pain ripped through him, another before his legs buckled, and one more before he fell.

From the floor, he could no longer see Alessandra, only the monks and the face of the monster staring back. A red stream pooled, ran out to where the monster’s teeth pierced the floor, and trickled between the gaps.

Daphnis fell.

The monks drove their blades through their own throats. Their blood traced red arches through the air. It ran down Alessandra’s face and dripped from her arms as if it were her own. She turned away and met Conrad’s glazed, lifeless eyes. A knife lay in his open palm. His throat remained intact. He had tried to hold on for the others, to live long enough to die for their shared cause, but his wounds had won.

The monks’ hands slipped away from the urn, leaving only hers and Conrad’s.

Daphnis lay in a pool of his own blood. Plethon knelt beside him, screaming. The foreign soldier held back the others, but all that was needful was done, the sacrifice, complete.

But Conrad? Natural death opened the path one way; violent death, another. The urn remained silent.

Plethon pulled Daphnis into his lap, held his head to his chest.

The room spun and blurred. Its edges smeared and the space around her opened like the blossoming of a black rose. For an instant, she thought she’d faint. Instead, she floated over a dark land cut through by rivers as if they described a whirlpool, and one of those rivers ran with flame.

She was falling, and as she fell, a dark swamp rose up below her, a ghost forest sprinkled with the memory of trees. On the bank of the swamp, a woman stood, pale and regal. The woman looked up, revealing impossible beauty, her eyes and hair as dark as night and skin as white as bone.

The woman spoke, her voice, a chorus.

A rush, a wind, a name lost within the roar.

Alessandra sat again upon the bed in the long, dim hall of the infirmary, her arms wrapped around the urn. The woman stood beside her; the faintest smile crossed her perfect lips, and her gaze moved to the fallen monks. Her beauty shifted with the movement of the muscles of her smile. It became something less human, more than human, and the room shrank away in its presence.

The others—the living—fell still and silent. They watched as the woman glided toward them and plucked the empusa’s head from the floor. She gazed into its eyes and then walked through the crowd of men and out the door; the moment the night embraced her, she vanished, as if she’d never been.

The empusa’s head rolled lazily in the grass. The infirmary walls drew up straight and near.

Still carrying the urn, Alessandra knelt beside Daphnis, but Plethon pulled him away from her. His eyes fixed on the crumpled and bloodied bodies of the monks.

Daphnis blinked. His eyes focused on her, and his mouth wrought itself into a wretched smile. “I should have believed you.”

Light and focus left his eyes, and he slumped in Plethon’s arms. Outside the open door, a new wind howled. Alessandra looked to the abbot. “Place your coin in his mouth.”

Plethon hissed. “You’ll do no such thing.”

“It’s the only favor I’ll ask of you,” she said. “His journey into death must be paid.”

She didn’t expect him to understand. She hardly understood, herself, but with a nod, he allowed the abbot to place a coin upon Daphnis’s tongue.

“What was that woman?” Plethon asked.

“A minister,” she said, and it was all she knew to say. Any greater truth was locked within the urn, and the urn was silent.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Table of Contents: The Sibyliad