on the part of the God of Genesis and of Revelations, creator and destroyer, to have us down on all fours, with Humankind's collars around our necks and leashes on those collars. After a time I came to feel some measure of sympathy for those animals that were little more than slaves, their inarticulate state denying them the power to protest their enslavement, or tell their stories at least. Oxen yoked and straining as they labored to plow the unyielding ground; blinded songbirds in their plain little cages, singing themselves into exhaustion believing that they were making music to pleasure an endless night; the unwanted offspring of bitches or she-cats taken from their mother's teats and slaughtered while she looked on, all unable to comprehend this terrible judgment.
Nor was life so very different for those men who wearily trudged behind the oxen, or who caught the songbirds and blinded them or those who dashed out the brains of unweaned kittens on the nearest stone, only thinking as they did of what labors lay ahead once they'd tossed the corpses to the pigs.
The only difference between the members of your species and those I saw suffering every day of that hundred years was that your people, though they were peasants who could neither read nor write, had a very clear notion of Heaven and Hell, and of the sins that would exile them forever from the presence of their Creator. All this they learned every Sunday, when the tolling of bells summoned them to church. Quitoon and I attended whenever we could, secreting ourselves in some high hidden place to listen to the pontifications of the local priest. If he spent his sermon telling his congregation what shameful sinners they were, and how they would suffer unending agony for their crimes, we would make it our business to secretly watch the priest for a day or so. If by Tuesday he had not committed any of the felonies he'd railed against on Sunday, we would go on our way. But if behind closed doors the priest ate from tables that creaked under a great weight of food and wine the likes of which his congregation would never even see, much less taste; or, if he turned private prayer meetings into seductions and told the girls or boys, once he'd violated them, that to speak of what he'd done would certainly damn them to the eternal fires, then we would make it our business to prevent him from further hypocrisies.
Did we kill them? Sometimes, though when we did so we were careful to make the circumstances of their slaughter so outlandish that none of the shepherd's flock would be accused of his murder. Our skill of inventing ways to torture and dispatch the priests was elevated to a kind of genius as the decades past.
I remember we nailed one particularly odious and overfed priest to the ceiling of his church, which was so high nobody could understand how the deed had been done. Another priest, who we had watched unleash his perverted appetite upon tiny children, we cut into one hundred and three pieces, the labor of which fell to Quitoon, who was able to keep the man alive (and pleading to die) until he severed the seventy-eighth part from the seventy-ninth.
Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't just Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love, and widows; tales to tell to children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing. It seemed to me that there wasn't a single subject he did not know something about. And if he was ignorant about a certain subject, then he lied about it with such ease that I took every word he said as gospel.
He liked chiefly the torn and ruined places in the world, where war and neglect had left wilderness behind. Over time I learned to share his taste. Such places had a great practical advantage for us, of course. They were largely shunned by your kind, who believed that such places were the haunts of malicious spirits. Your superstitions were, for once, not so far from the truth.
What Quitoon and I found alluring about a particular piece of desolation was often appealing to other night- wanderers like us who had no hope of ever being invited over the threshold of a Christian soul. They were the usual gang of minor fiends and bloodsuckers. Nothing we ever had any trouble kicking out if we found some of them still in residence in a ruin we'd decided to haunt for ourselves.
It may seem strange to say but when I think back on those years and the life we two made for ourselves in the ruins of houses, they almost resembled the arrangement between a husband and wife; our century-long friendship became an unblessed and unconsummated marriage before half its span was over.
That is as much of happiness as I know.
It seemed to me, while I was talking of the brief, harsh years of those who plowed fields and blinded birds, that life — any life — is not unlike a book. For one thing, it has blank pages at both ends.
But there's generally just a few at the start. After a matter of time the words appear.
I started this brief story of my far from brief life with a plea for a flame and a quick end. But I was asking for too much. I see that now. I should never have expected you to do as I asked. Why would you destroy something that you had not even seen?
You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug. You have to see the sores on the woman before you kick her out of bed. I understand that now.
But the consuming flame cannot remain unignited forever.
I will tell you one more tale to earn myself that fire. And it will not be, believe me, another like the ones in the pages that came before. My last confession is one that nobody but me could tell, a once-in-a-lifetime story that will end this book. And I will tell you — if you are good and attentive — the nature of that Secret I spoke of earlier.
So, one day in a year I've already admitted to forgetting, Quitoon said to me:
'We should go to Mainz.'
I had never heard of Mainz. Nor at that moment had I any desire to go anywhere. I was soaking in a bath of infants' blood, which had taken no little time to fill, the bath being large and the infants hard to acquire (and keep alive so the bath was hot) in the numbers required. It had taken me half a day to find thirty-one infants, and another hour or more to slit their squealing throats and drain their contents into the bath. But I'd finally done the job and had barely settled into my soothing bath, inhaling the honey and copper scent of infants' blood, when Quitoon came in and, kicking aside the littered providers of my present comfort, came to the edge of the bath and told me to get dressed. We were off to Mainz.
'Why do we need to move on so quickly?' I protested. 'This house is perfect for us. We're in the forest, out of human sight. When was the last time we spent so long a time in one place and were not troubled?'
'Is that your idea of a life, Jakabok?' (He only called me Jakabok when he was spoiling for an argument; when feeling fond, he called me Mister B.) 'Spending time in some place where we won't be troubled?'
'Is that so terrible?'
'The Demonation would be ashamed of you.'
'I don't give a fig for the Demonation! I only care about — '
I stared up at him, knowing he could finish the sentence without any help from me. 'I like it here. It's quiet. I was thinking I might buy a goat.'
'What for?'
'Milk. Cheese. Company.'
He got up and started back towards the door, kicking drained corpses ahead of him as he went.
'Your goat will have to wait.'
'Just because you want to go to someplace called Mainz? To see another failure of a man make another failure of a machine?'
'No. Because one of these bloodless brats under my feet is the grandchild of one Lord Ludwig von Berg, who has raised a small army of all the mothers who lost their babies, plus a hundred men and seven priests. And they are even now coming this way.'
'How did they find out we're here?'
'There was a hole in one of your sacks. You left a trail of wailing children from the town into the forest.'
Cursing my ill luck, I lifted myself up out of the bath. 'So, no goat,' I said to Quitoon. 'But maybe in the next place?'
'Wash the blood off with water.'
'Must I?'
'Yes, Mister B.,' he said, smiling indulgently. 'You must. I don't want them sending dogs after you because we smell of — '
