The Flight to Lucifer Read online

  Perscors found he could not answer, as images began to flood his mind. He recognized some of them as being from the projections of a particular man and landscape on the walls of the tower on Krag Island, and felt a connection to the place which Enosh had called the Pleroma.

  “What was the Pleroma?”

  “It was the world of Perfection, of the Fullness of thirty Aeons, in fifteen harmonious pairs. There, in the great heights (for which we have no name) dwelled the Abyss, our Forefather.”

  “It is a strange thing, to call an Abyss your god,” said Perscors. “The religions I know oppose God the Father to the Abyss. He broods on the Abyss and creates out of it.”

  “They are lies, those religions.” Enosh spoke with flat, cold emphasis. A silence ensued.

  “Will you not tell me more of the Pleroma, Enosh?”

  “No; as you are going to its place, its ghostly voices can tell you, if they choose, and if you live to get there.”

  Another silence followed, making it clear to Perscors that it was time to leave the Mandaeans. Enosh seemed to him a fanatic who could neither teach nor learn. By noon, Perscors had been ferried across the nameless river. He had discovered among his increasingly reluctant hosts a great fear of naming, and he felt relief at being abandoned by the Mandaeans on the Sethian bank of the river. The Sethians, he reflected, could be no worse than this fearful, narrow, aggressive remnant of a people that he had left behind him.

  For about an hour, he walked down the path. Even at midday, the sun beaming down upon Lucifer seemed rather grudging in its heat, and the damp chill increased as he walked. Gradually he became aware that the meadows were changing. The foliage grew so dark in its green as to appear almost black. A miasma hung over the land, and thickened on the riverbank. Vigorous as he was, Perscors began to weary. Surely he had marched for more than an hour, and except for the rankness increasing about him, no particular place, haunted or not, came to view.

  He glanced at the river and realized that it had changed, being now more a sluggish marsh than a river. After another space, he came to see that there was no longer a path, and so he stopped, caked in mud to the knees. Looking up again, he saw a woman watching him. She stood a few yards away, half concealed in her nakedness by the rushes, and laughed at him mischievously. Despite exhaustion and surprise, he was charmed instantly and wholly. The exhaustion left him as he moved toward her. Still smiling, she retreated into the rushes and was gone, and he failed to find her, as he went deeper and deeper into the rushes, away from the river. Something in her face had intoxicated him, and he felt no other memory, no other desire than the need to see that face again.

  Some moments later, as he plunged on, Perscors was astonished to find that he was climbing and that the ground under him was now rock. Without apparent transition, he was in another region, with awesome heights ahead of him. As he toiled upward, visions of her face continued to torment him. However briefly glimpsed, the face had joined itself to the daydreams he could recall even from his boyhood, intimations of a grace and glory that no woman since had fulfilled.

  A different sense of dream now began to possess him, as the heights rose at angles so sharp that he was compelled to stop climbing. His dilemma was now insoluble—he could go no farther, yet could not turn back. He was exposed on what had become a veritable precipice, and without aid could make no further efforts. The necessities of survival drove from him his memory of the woman.

  “An absurd end,” he rasped, and his spirit urged him upward. He attacked the heights above him in a fierce rush, and against his own sense of preposterousness at the angle of ascent, he achieved a further stance at a less exposed place. Though he could not get back, it now seemed as if he might climb forward; yet he sensed that he was climbing into a kind of abyss. An intense cold, which he could not bear, surrounded him. In a last effort of desperation, he threw himself onward again, gained the heights, and stood erect on a vast tableland, empty and austere. And in a moment he realized, rather than saw, that he had reached the place of the Pleroma.

  Caves of Ruha

  By Perscors’s reckoning, it should have been no more than early afternoon, yet he stood on the tableland in twilight. Though the bitter cold had abated, a strong wind blew against him. In the uncertain light, he sensed that there were presences in front of him, but still at considerable distances away. The will to go forward, whether to or against them, was strong in him, yet he felt his solitude in a way he never had experienced. He examined, as best he could in the growing darkness, the scene before him.

  No part of Enosh’s description seemed true, since this huge, rocky plain hardly could be disputed as grazing land. But Perscors had learned already, in his few hours on the planet, that both time and place were curiously inconstant on Lucifer. He had learned also to trust his own daemonic inwardness, which told him now that he stood upon enchanted ground, and which encouraged him to explore the mysteries that awaited him. His earthly sense of failure had left him, whether in the tower or on Lucifer he could not tell, and in its stead had come a keen sense of election. On this world, where lost eras of earth’s spiritual history seemed to linger, he had found in himself a conviction of purposiveness. So far, it was a purposiveness without purpose, but he felt that the meaning would be revealed, and would be a true test for him. His ignorance might be a dark fire, but it was a fire nevertheless, and he believed he would burn through every concealment that Lucifer might thrust between his spark and the truth.

  He began to walk toward what he took to be the center of the plateau. The ground was more uneven than he had expected, and his way was slow. Darkness came on. He looked upward and studied a clear, starry sky totally unfamiliar to him, and toward which he felt neither affection nor hostility. Remembering suddenly some reference to Lucifer as “a moony world,” he decided that moonrise came later and was grateful for the amount of starlight he could see.

  A few moments farther on, he had to stop, because the uneven ground was giving way to small hills and to unexpected gullies. Climbing out of a sudden declivity, he confronted what might have been the entrance to a cavern in a hillside and followed his impulse by going up to it. It seemed dark and uninhabited, but the strange thought came that he would illumine it. He went in, lowering his head, and after a few feet turned sharply to his right. Several steps ahead, a light glimmered at another such turning. Rounding this, he approached the bright entrance to a cave-within-a-cave. He went through, and confronted the woman he had seen so briefly at the river.

  She was clothed now in a green robe, and stood waiting for him. The uncanny conviction that she was not mortal came as a warning to him, but he refused the presage. On this world, where all else was inconstant, he knowingly had been thrown into a permanent desire, and he felt no will to resist this aspect of his heimarmene. But though he followed her freely, as she turned and led him more deeply into what became a labyrinth, he was conscious of a detachment in some residue of his being. He thought back to Olam’s distinction between Valentinus and himself, and wondered if it was his psyche or soul that followed the woman, while his pneuma or spark stood apart.

  These thoughts receded as he marveled at the intricacies of the labyrinth through which he trailed the form of his desire. An underground river appeared, some six turns in, directly after they had passed through an arch shaped like the mouth of a sea beast. The noise of the river increased as they walked, a noise for which Perscors was grateful, as it worked against a sleepiness that was intensifying within him. Such drowsiness he attributed to the change in the caverns, which had become gardens, lit by a green-black light that seemed to emanate from below. Obscurely, Perscors half remembered lines from an old poem about such gardens, at once “goodly garnished/With herbs and fruits” but also “direfull deadly blacke both leafe and bloom.”

  They came at last to what seemed a midpoint in the gardens. In a shaded arbor, the woman lay down upon a silver divan. Perscors hesit
ated and then joined her. Confusedly, he lost any sense of dream, since knowing her body brought back a fuller sense of reality; yet the exuberance of his sexual response immediately became a kind of drunkenness. Except for whispering “Ruha” in response to his demand for her name, she made love silently and with no change in her half-mocking expression. How many times Perscors entered her, he could not tell. Except for the terrible intensity of his comings, and a baffled sense of desire continually provoked rather than fulfilled, the embraces at first differed little from those he had experienced in his life on earth. But they began to change. Even as the sense of drunkenness started to weaken Perscors, a series of painful jolts went through his body and rendered him unconscious.

  When he recovered, he was alone. Ruha’s torn robe and his own disarray were what remained of his first union on Lucifer. He washed himself at the river, and yielded to acute hunger, eating some yellow apples, bitter but disintoxicating. Bewilderment followed. Had she gone farther into the caverns, or had she turned back to the hollow hill on the tableland of the Pleroma? His questing temperament directed Perscors onward. But the labyrinthine turns soon branched out so many ways, all somehow accompanied by the river, that he determined to go back to the arbor if he could. His wanderings continued, for some hours as it seemed to him, until he realized that his movement was circular. Weariness overwhelmed him. He lay down in a cypress grove on the riverbank and brooded on the riddle of the woman until he slept.

  The Sethians

  Perscors woke to his second morning on Lucifer. His dreams had been of the woman—of her straight-combed, long, black hair, parted in the middle; of her black eyes detachedly contemplating him; of the red bow of her mouth suddenly transformed into an arch that became the mouth of a sea monster. He had been thrown into that mouth, to find himself reposing at sea bottom. In a coral-walled sphere, he had lain helpless while watching pages drift by him, pages torn from a scripture he needed to have read. Sometimes a page sailed near enough for him to read some phrases, and these fingered in him now as he brushed river water into his eyes.

  “Ruha and the stars forged plans … They took the living water and poured turbid water into it … the mystery of drunkenness … They took the head of the tribe and practiced on him the mystery of love and of lust, through which all the worlds are inflamed. They practiced on him seduction, by which all the worlds are seduced.”

  He could make out little meaning in these fragments, nor could he remember having read them anywhere. His resolution, as he left the cypress grove, was to break out of the labyrinth, and his usual confidence had come back to him. But he was unable to judge among directions, and much walking merely began to numb him, as the gardens and the river showed only small variation. Rounding one turn with particular haste and anger, he was thrown precipitately from a considerable height into what seemed a tidal marsh.

  Stunned, he scrambled out of the bog and lay exhausted and filthy on a red clay surface. Above him were the heights from which he had been thrown. His clay refuge was an island in a panorama of marshes, leading to the river that separated the Mandaeans and Sethians.

  As Perscors recovered some strength, he vowed to himself that he had been thrown for the last time. No shocks or fires, sudden falls or ecstasies of embrace were to overcome him again! Very carefully, he made his way to the Euphrates-like river, where he washed himself. His clothes were now sodden rags, and he was very hungry, but the dim morning sun was warm enough. He turned to the question of aim: ought he now to go west, perhaps to catch up with Olam and Valentinus, or was he to find again the place of the Pleroma, whether to learn its mysteries or to hold Ruha again and question her?

  In the midst of his meditation, he sensed danger and moved back from the river to conceal himself in the rushes. Armed men appeared on both sides of the river. A band of twenty archers, whom he took to be Sethians, were a few yards from him, opposing about the same number of Mandaeans on the other bank. Each force shot against the other, but all the arrows simply fell in the river. As neither band had boats, Perscors judged the skirmish to be only an expression of mutual ill wishes. He chose to stay hidden until both groups moved out of sight. Emerging from the rushes, he encountered a single old man, ornately dressed in a robe of Tyrian purple. The dignified, welcoming smile of the old man resolved Perscors’s hesitations, and after an exchange of greetings, he gladly accompanied Konai, high priest of the Sethians (as he proved to be), to his tents.

  A few hours later, at midday, Perscors was clean, well-fed, and dressed in borrowed Sethian garments. He and his host, with an immediate mutual regard, had postponed explanations. They now sat facing one another, while Konai listened patiently to his guest’s selective account of his first day on Lucifer. When Perscors had finished, a long, diplomatic silence followed. Then Konai spoke, reluctantly and in a cautionary tone.

  “Olam I have met, and spoken with, several times. He may be a man, at least when far off in space and time. Here I think he is a kind of demon, rather than just a man, and a sorcerer. To our west are the followers of Mani, and they honor Olam as a god, or sub-god. Your friend Valentinus I do not recall, nor would I wish to meet him. Between the Mandaeans and the Manichees I am more than weary of the ‘Knowing Ones.’ ”

  “I do not know my friend’s faith,” Perscors mused aloud. “But then,” he added, “I still am not sure of my own.”

  “This light-bearer’s world,” Konai said sadly, “once gave off light. Now it is a dark star, lit by a dimming sun. Yet it, like all the cosmos, deserves worship and glory, for the true God created it, meaning it to be good for His children. The curse of our world is that so many deny its creation by the Father.”

  “Then who made the universe, according to the deniers?”

  “A Demiurge, they say. But they all name him differently, and tell a different tale of how he did it, and why. For them, there is no part of the cosmos empty of demons, and indeed, I believe they have populated us with demons. They call your Ruha a demoness.”

  Perscors brooded a while on this and then asked gently: “But what do you call her?”

  “An outcast Mandaean woman, probably crazed, certainly a sorceress, but no more than that.”

  For a long time they sat in silence. Perscors reflected that he was not yet ready to understand and that he must act before he could understand. To the west were Olam and Valentinus, and he would have to reach them, but that too could wait. The turbulence in his spirit spoke to him, and he knew he must go to seek the woman. He rose.

  “I will go to the heights, to find her again. She and I must speak.”

  “You risk everything” was Konai’s grim but not unfriendly response. “The Mandaeans spread the scandal that she is the woman of Saklas, whom we worship as an angel of God but they deem the Demiurge. Whatever she is, she has been seen with demons, with beings impersonating Saklas.”

  Perscors felt within him, for the first time in many years, the anguish of contamination, a clear sense of jealousy. He felt the madness of the sensation. Here, on the other side of the universe, he was suffering from jealousy because he had embraced, once, a woman who might be only a phantom. And the jealousy was inspired by rumors that this dubious being was involved also with an angel or demon! Perscors, for a moment, doubted his own sense of reality, and wondered if he had been dreaming ever since he had followed Valentinus into the tower. But the doubt and wonder vanished suddenly in the rage of his desire to see and perhaps to touch the woman again..

  With Konai’s troubled disapproval, he left the camp of the Sethians. He had refused the offer of a weapon, and even of provisions.

  “I am a free man.” He laughed. “Free to love my fate. I will burn through.”

  Konai studied this wanderer’s face, for a last time.

  “There is only demonic fire in our world,” he said. “It is the fire that all those terrible Knowers call Ignorance. There is a demon in you, but much else besides. Tho
ugh I like you, I will not bless you. I wish you well.”

  Set upon his road by Konai, Perscors walked through a long, cool afternoon. He headed for the point where the marsh had turned into rocky heights the day before, but the point had vanished. “Not vanished, shifted,” he said to himself as he strode on forcefully through what now seemed endless lowlands. He had begun to have an uncanny sense for space and time shifts on Lucifer, and he followed that sense now.

  Yet the marshes yielded, not to heights, but to broad, level, dry fields, empty except for their grass and thick clusters of red wildflowers, of a kind he had not seen before. Twilight was coming on, and his sense of being fated to find Ruha began to waver. As the sun set, he came in sight of a dark forest, and when he came up to it in early evening, he hesitated. “With my fortune, I am bound to encounter something or someone meaningful,” he said to himself, and so he entered the forest.

  Achamoth

  Half an hour later, he lay bruised and bleeding, bound to the bed of Achamoth.

  He had found a curious house only a few hundred yards into the wood. Built of black stone, short and oval, the structure was ominous and prison-like, and so overgrown with moss as to be hardly recognizable amid the trees that overhung it. Pushing the door open, he had confronted a majestic titaness of a woman, as tall as himself, with shoulders nearly as broad as his own. She had seemed to him then, as she did now, powerfully ugly but sexually compelling nevertheless. Her robe was black, and evidently was the skin of some wild beast. Her eyes were astonishingly large and almost colorless. The expression with which she awaited him was hungry at best, and perhaps even murderous. He had stood in the doorway, urgently drawn to her, but also very much moved to depart immediately.

  That hesitation had been his last freedom down to this bad moment of his bondage. Once he had crossed the threshold, he realized he was trapped. The burly woman’s handmaidens appeared on each side of the door, to bolt it behind him. Two more of them stepped out of the shadows behind her. All four were armed with clubs or daggers. His efforts to speak and explain were lost in their assault upon him. The titaness watched, silently and without emotion, as he struck down the two facing him, and the one to his left, but the fourth clubbed him from behind. Then the demoness, with great strength, moved to pinion him as he staggered. Perscors had nearly broken her hold, which even in his fury and sense of danger he felt as erotic, when he was clubbed again. Before he could recover from being stunned, they had dragged him to the bed and chained him face down, and then bound him more securely. He struggled again, only to be clubbed nearly to insensibility. He lay now in anger and pain, helpless to defend himself further.