you refugees from Christianity. Now why do you suppose that is?”
I had no idea.
“My guess is it’s because, most of you, you were weaned on the idea of serving up your god on a plate and in a little cup and eating him in a communal meal. Then when you can’t believe in him anymore, and you find us, and see how willing we are to eat others just like you, how we need that … then isn’t a little part of you, deep inside, relieved? Because that means
“So let me ask you again: How much would it take to repulse you? To sicken those romantic ideals out of you?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Maia. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but have the good grace to ask me rather than talking your way around it.”
“Hear that, Brutus? Doesn’t want to talk about it,” she said to the mastiff. “You know, Patrick, where we get these dogs, they claim the lineage runs directly back to war dogs used by the Roman army. Like barrels, they were … with legs and teeth and fury and spiked leather armor. And you know something, Patrick? That’s no empty claim on the breeders’ part, it’s absolutely true. Do you know how I know this?”
I shook my head.
“They’re extraordinary dogs. With extraordinary bloodlines.”
She hugged the dog, then slammed it over onto its back, and I could only watch appalled as Maia buried her beautiful face in the coarse fur at the mastiff’s bull neck. It yelped once, and those powerful legs kicked and clawed at the air, its body all squirming steel muscle, and yet she held it down with a minimum of struggle. When after several moments Maia tore her face away and let the dog go, it rolled unsteadily to its feet and lurched to a safer spot. Dazed, it looked back at her and whined, then ran off as if in a drunken lope.
She was on me by then, had flipped me back and down before I knew it was happening. She straddled me, her hands gripping my shoulders, then pressed her smeared face to mine and opened her mouth in a violent kiss, let gravity take the blood straight into me. We spit and we spewed, but I couldn’t fight her.
It would’ve been like wrestling an angel.
So I pretended the blood was her own.
When she sat back against the oak, Maia was breathing hard. I was still lying flat and trying not to retch. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and trembled.
“Julius has always hated the dogs,” she murmured. “He hated the Romans, so he hates the dogs. He still blames the Romans for what he became. And he hates the dogs.”
“Became,” I echoed. “None of you were born this way, then?”
“Nobody’s ever born this way,” she said. When I asked what made them all, she told me it was different on the surface in each case, and sometimes that surface was all they knew. When I asked what made
VII.
“We were Assyrian,” she began, in our room filled with silks and dried orchids, “and we were just women. Devalued, and with no formal power. But we still had our ways. You know the Bible, so you know the sorts of men who made Assyria, don’t you?”
I told her I did. A nation of warrior kings ruling warrior subjects, Assyria had been so feared for its savagery that an Old Testament scribe had called it “a land bathed in blood.”
“In Assyria, as in Babylonia,” Maia went on, “each woman was expected, once in her life before she married, to go to the temple of Ishtar and sit on the steps until a man came and dropped a coin in her lap as the price of her favours. So off they’d go and their bodies became divine vessels for a while, and that was how a woman performed her duty to the goddess of love.
“My sisters and I decided to go the temple all on the same day, and the men who came then, they showered us with coins and started to fight each other over who’d end up having us. Lilah loved it, thought it was hilarious. At night, in secret, she led us and other women in worshipping the demoness Lilitu … the one the Israelites took and turned into Adam’s first wife, Lilith, and thought was so horrible because she fucked Adam from the top instead of lying on her back like a proper woman was supposed to. I’m sure you can see the appeal she had to those of us who didn’t feel particularly subservient to men.
“After that first day at the temple, when we saw what kind of power we had over them, we kept going back. Our fame grew, and so did our fortunes, and the rumours of the pleasure we could bring … until we were finally summoned by King Sennacherib. He wanted to restore a rite that was ancient even then, from Sumerian times: the Sacred Marriage. The king embodied a god and a priestess stood in for the goddess — by then, we were held in much higher esteem than mere temple prostitutes — and out of that physical union the gods and goddesses received their pleasures of the flesh.”
Maia uttered a small laugh. “Lilah never believed Sennacherib really meant any of it, said he only wanted some grandiose excuse for an orgy with us. Probably she was right. After that, we became his most favoured concubines, and whatever in Nineveh we wanted, we had. And I … gave birth to twins, a daughter and a son. Of course the king didn’t publicly acknowledge them as his own. That was only for children born of his queen. But I knew whose they were.
“In 701 B.C. Sennacherib invaded the Israelites. He captured forty-six cities before getting to Jerusalem, but by then, the Jewish King Hezekiah had had an underground aqueduct dug to insure the water supply. Sennacherib besieged the city, as he’d already done at Lachish, but by now they were in a position to outwait us almost indefinitely. I know, because we were there. He might leave his queen at home, but Sennacherib wouldn’t dare leave us behind. Not with the addiction he had to our bodies. So we were there for it all. Waiting for weeks under that merciless desert sun, a few arrows flying back and forth, an attempt at building a siege ramp … but mostly each side just waiting for the other to give up.”
Maia seemed to lose herself in the flickering flame of a pillar candle. “Do you remember what supposedly happened to part of our army there?”
I nodded. It was said that an angel from the one true God of Israel came down and in one night slaughtered 185,000 Assyrians.
“Not true, I’m guessing?”
