The Language of Bees

“I have to take it back to London with me,” I said in apology.

She patted her pockets until she found a pair of reading glasses, and opened the book.

I extricated the pole from the sucking mud without swamping the boat, and continued idly downstream to the Isis proper, then looped back up the Cherwell. We passed under Magdalen Bridge and were nearly to Mesopotamia when the aged academic closed the book and removed her spectacles.

I continued to punt in silence, though my muscles burned and my back ached.

“He writes as if in conversation with himself,” she mused. “No explanation, no attempt at a reasoned argument, no discursus at all, except to enjoy the sound of his own voice. And yes, it is a he, most definitely.”

“Yet this is not a journal, it is a printed book, of which there are at least two in existence,” I said.

“If there are two, there will be more. This is an esoteric document to be presented only to True Believers. I should imagine he may have another, either in existence or in preparation, to set his beliefs before the outer world.”

“The Text of Lights,” I said. “That was what one of his disciples called it.”

“Light indeed seems to be the basis of his cosmology-or rather, as you say, lights of various sorts: sun, moon, comets. Which reminds me, which comet do you imagine he was born under?”

“We think that of September 1882. There were no meteors then, as far as I can find, but he seems more than a little flexible when it comes to chronology. And to astronomy and geography, for that matter.”

“Hare-brained thinking at its best,” she said in disapproval.

“Madness being no excuse for sloppy ratiocination?” I asked, half joking.

She was not amused. “When one encounters a mystical system based upon the physical universe, it is generally manifested by a tight, even obsessive internal logic.”

“However,” I replied, “internal logic is not the same as rationality. ‘The desperation to support an untenable position to which one is nonetheless committed has caused centuries of extreme mental gymnastics.’”

The statement was a direct quote, levelled at me some years before during the defence of a paper by none other than Professor Clarissa Ledger.

She remembered, and laughed. “I believe that was the only time I heard you apply volume over logic.”

“Around you, only the once. But I think the author of Testimony never had you as a teacher.”

“Pray God, no.” The idea was, clearly, repugnant.

“Does the book suggest anything else about the man?” I asked her.

“He has a particular fascination for Scandinavian mythology, which I should suppose ties in with his interest in light-how the soul craves sunlight in the depths of a northern winter! I don't suppose you found any of the bodies hanging from trees?”

I glanced involuntarily around, but for once, there were no innocents in earshot. “Sorry, no.”

“So he is not specifically fixed on Woden.”

“No, but Norse myth, yes. He served a gathering of his closest followers a drink based on mead, which I think of as very Norse.”

“Just mead?”

“It was drugged as well, with hashish and some kind of toadstool.”

“Oh! Oh dear, that is not at all good.”

“Er, why?”

She looked up, surprise battling the fatigue in her wrinkled features. “Ragnarok, of course. The final battle between chaos and order, the end of times and the beginning of a new age. I should say that, considering the impetus towards synthesis evinced by Testimony's author, the deluded soul that wrote these words sincerely believes that by committing sacrifice under the influence of the ‘Lights,’ he can bring about the end of the world.”

37

Great Work (2): The thrice-born man shapes the world

by learning to focus his will and the will of his community.

He uses the Tool to cut through empty pretence and loose

the contents of a vessel. He calculates the hour and

place to align the Universe with his act. This together

makes his Great Work.

Testimony, IV:1

ARMAGEDDON?” HOLMES STARED AS IF I WERE THE one about to initiate the events of Ragnarok.

“Not precisely, but essentially, yes.”

He had been at Mycroft's flat when I returned at five-thirty and found him disgruntled at failing to locate a seller of illicit drugs on a Sunday afternoon. My own return-glowing with sun, exercise, and information-did not make matters smoother.

“We're not after a gibbering idiot ripe for Bedlam, Russell.”

“No, we're after a very clever fanatic obsessed with dark religion. A man practical enough to use Millicent Dunworthy as a keystone to his church, and at the same time, mad enough to believe in human sacrifice. Holmes, the man makes careful annotations in his books with blood, he doesn't splash it across people in his meeting hall.”

“Not yet,” he retorted grimly.

Mycroft came in then from his daily perambulation, jauntily tipping his cane into the stand and tossing his hat onto the table. He rubbed his hands together, an anticipatory gesture, and went to survey the bottles of wine awaiting his attention.

Holmes glowered at the broad back of this second self-satisfied member of his immediate family, and demanded, “I don't suppose you made any progress in locating the so-called Reverend?”

Mycroft spoke over his shoulder, his hands pulling out one bottle, pushing it back, then sliding out the next. “My dear Sherlock, it is Sunday; my men may work, but the rest of the world is, I fear, enjoying what may be the last sunshine of the summer.”

With an oath, Holmes seized his hat and flung himself down the hallway towards the study's hidden exit. Mycroft looked around, then raised his eyebrows at me. “What did I say?”

Holmes returned late, radiating failure. The next morning found him staring gloomily into his coffee; when I left, he was heaping an armful of cushions into a corner of Mycroft's study, making himself a nest in which to smoke and think. I was just as happy to make my escape before the reek of tobacco settled in.

Yesterday's warmth was indeed looking to be the last of the summer, and the dull sky suggested the rain would return, in earnest, before long. I took an umbrella with me as I set off with my copy of Testimony and my photograph of the Shanghai Reverend, to explore the possibilities of the book-binding trade.

I had a list-Mycroft might not be much for active footwork, but he was a magnificent source of lists-and started with the printers and binders nearest the meeting hall. There were a lot of names on the page, five of them in a circle around the Museum of Natural History. The morning wore on, one printer after another taking Testimony in his ink-stained hand, paging through it with a professional eye, then shaking his head and handing it back to me. I drank a cup of tea in the Cromwell Road, a glass of lemonade with a sliver of rapidly melting ice near the Brompton Hospital, and a cup of coffee on Sloane Street. The photograph grew worn. My right heel developed a blister. At two o'clock I had covered less than a third of Mycroft's list, and I was sick of the smell of paper and ink.

The bell in my next shop tinkled, and I had to stifle an impulse to rip it from its bracket. The shopkeeper was finishing with a customer, a woman with a particularly irritating whine in her voice and an even more irritating inability to make up her mind. I squelched the urge to elbow her to the side, and eventually she dithered her way