Servant of the Bones

“You look more cheerful now, more rested,” I said.

“I do?” He laughed. “How is that? Ah, well, I did sleep and I am strong, very strong, there’s no doubt of it. And the story has a way of calling me back.”

He sighed.

“I don’t know much life in death without pain,” he said. “But that I deserve, I imagine, being a demon of might. The last Master I obeyed was a Jew in the city of Strasbourg and they burned all the Jews there because they blamed them for the Black Death.”

“Ah,” I said. “That must have been the fourteenth century.”

“The year 1349 of the current era,” he said with a smile. “I looked it up. They killed the Jews then all over Europe, blaming them for the Black Death.”

“I know. Yes, and there have been many holocausts since.”

“Do you know what Gregory told me? Our beloved Gregory Belkin? When he thought he was my master and that I would help him?”

“I can’t guess.”

“He told me that if the Black Death had not come to Europe, Europe would be a desert today. He said that the population had grown rampant; that the trees were being cut down so fast that the entire forests of old Europe were gone by that time. And the forests of Europe we know now date back to the fourteenth century.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I think. Is that how he justified the murder of people?”

“Oh, that was one of just many ways. Gregory was an extraordinary man, really, because he was an honest man.”

“Not mad, to found this worldwide temple and fill it with terrorists?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Just ruthless and honest. He said to me at one point that there was one man who had utterly changed the history of the world. I thought he would say that that man was Christ or Cyrus the Persian. Or perhaps Mohammed. But he said no. The man who changed the entire world was Alexander the Great. That was his model. Gregory was perfectly sane. He intended to break a giant Gordian knot. He almost succeeded. Almost —”

“How did you stop him? How did it all come about?”

“A fatal flaw in him stopped him,” he said. “Do you know in the old Persian religion, one legend is that evil came into the world not through sin, or through God, but through a mistake. A ritual mistake?”

“I’ve heard of it. You’re talking of very old myths, fragments of Zoroastrianism.”

“Yes,” he said, “myths the Medians gave to the Persians and the Persians passed on to the Jews. Not disobedience. Bad judgment. It’s almost that way in Genesis, wouldn’t you say? Eve makes a mistake in judgment. A ritual rule is broken. That must be different from sin, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. If I knew that, I would be a happier man.”

He laughed.

“What undid Gregory was a flaw in judgment,” he said. “How?”

“He counted on my vanity being as great as his. Or maybe he just misjudged my power, my willingness to intervene…No, he thought I would be swept up with his notions; he thought they were irresistible. It was an error in judgment. Had he not told me things, key things right at the appropriate moment, even I could not have stopped his plan. But he had to tell, to boast, to be recognized by me, and to be loved…I think, even be loved by me.”

“Did he know what you were? The Servant of the Bones? A spirit?”

“Oh, yes, we came together without any question of credibility, as you would say today. But I’ll get to that.”

He sat back. I checked the tape recorders. I removed the small cassettes and replaced them with fresh cassettes, and then made markings on the labels so that I wouldn’t confuse myself. I laid both machines back on the hearth.

He was watching me with keen interest and an agreeable look.

Yet he seemed reluctant to begin, or to be finding it difficult, yet yearning to do it.

“Did Cyrus the Persian keep his word to you?” I asked. I had been thinking of this on and off since we’d broken off.

“Did he actually send you to Miletus? I find it hard to believe that Cyrus the Persian would keep his word —”

“You do?” He looked at me and smiled. “But he kept his word to Israel, as you know. The Jews were allowed to leave Babylon and they went home and they made the Kingdom once again of Judea and they built the Temple of Solomon. You know all this from history. Cyrus kept his word to his conquered peoples and particularly the Jews. Remember, the religion of Cyrus was not so terribly different from our religion. At heart, it was a religion of…ethics, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, and I know that under Persian rule Jerusalem prospered.”

“Oh, indeed, always, for hundreds of years, up until the time of the Romans, actually, when the rebellions started, and then the final defeat of Masada. We speak of these things to remind ourselves. At the time, I knew nothing of what was to come. But even I knew that Cyrus would keep his word, that he would send me on to Miletus. I trusted him from the first moment I ever laid eyes on him. He wasn’t a liar. Well, not as much as most men.”

“But if he had his own wise men,” I said, “why would he let something so powerful…I mean, someone so powerful…as you slip from his grasp?”

“He was eager to get rid of me!” Azriel said. “And frankly, so were his wise men! He didn’t let me slip from his grasp. Rather he sent me to Zurvan, the most powerful Magus whom he knew. And Zurvan was loyal to Cyrus. Zurvan was rich and lived in Miletus which had fallen to Cyrus and the Persians without even a skirmish as Babylon had. Later on, of course, the Greeks of those Ionian cities, they would rise against the Persians. But at this time, when I stood there, glaring at the great King and begging that he send me to a powerful magician, Miletus was a thriving Greek city under Persian rule.”

He studied me. I started to ask another question but he stopped me.

“You went into the cold, you shouldn’t have. You’re warm now, and the fever has risen just a little. You need cold water. I’ll get it for you. You drink it and then we’ll go on.”

He rose from the chair and went to the door. He brought a bottle from near the door. It was very cold, indeed, I could see that, and I was thirsty.

I looked down and saw that he was pouring the water into a silver cup. It wasn’t an ancient silver cup. It seemed rather new even, machine-worked perhaps, but it was beautiful, and of course it got cold all over with the water. It was like the Grail, or a chalice or something a Babylonian would drink from. Or perhaps Solomon.

There was another cup just like it in front of the chair.

“How did you make the cups?” I asked.

“Same as I make my garments. I call together all the particles that are required, to come unobtrusively and without disturbance. I am not such a good designer of cups. If my father had designed these cups, they would be gorgeous. I merely told the particles that they were to make ornate cups of the style of this time…There are many, many more words to it than that, much more energy, but that is the gist.”

I nodded. I was grateful for the explanation.

I drank all the water. He filled it again. I drank. The cup was solid enough. Sterling. I studied it. It had a common Bacchanalian design to it, clustered grapes carved around the rim, and a simple pedestal foot. But it was very fine indeed.

I was holding it in both my hands, lovingly, I suppose, admiring the fluted shape of it, and the deep carving of the grapes, when I heard a faint sound emerge from it, and felt a tiny movement of air beneath my nostrils. I realized that my name was being written on the cup. It was in Hebrew. Jonathan Ben Isaac. The writing went all around and was small and perfect.

I looked at him. He lay back in his chair with his eyes closed. He took a deep breath.

“Memory is everything,” he said softly under his breath. “Don’t you think we can live with the idea that God is not perfect, as long as we are assured that God remembers…remembers everything…”

“Knows everything, that’s what you mean. We want him to forget our transgressions.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

He poured another cup of water for himself into his goblet, nameless but identical to mine, and he drank it.