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This is a book trailer. The poem contains the true etiquette one must observe in Faery.
Enjoy!
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Book One
Royal Hungary
1599
Winter
I
Dragon’s Blood
Blood
Increases potency and power
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“Marcsa Virag, get away from the door!”
The voice struck like a blast of cold wind, blowing me into the shadows below the torchlight. The toes of my pointed shoes caught in the swirling hem of my shirts, tripping me to the floor. I broke my fall with my hands and lay winded for a moment. As I struggled to catch my breath I glanced around for my doll. She was gone. I turned to look back the way I had come and, through a blur of tears, saw my doll’s small, dark shape lying in a wand of firelight between the wall and the door that was cracked open upon the private chambers of the Countess Orzsebet.
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There was a flicker of silence. I crept forward thinking that I might have time slip back and rescue my doll before anybody noticed, when suddenly the door opened wide, and in that shaft of light, the profile of a long-nosed mask appeared, surrounded by an elaborate circular neck ruff. A glimmer of bright fabric rained down from the mask to the floor and a single hand curled there around the handle of a long whip. The mask slowly turned to face me, its eyeholes stared in my direction, and the frill fanned out around it like the neck feathers of a great bird of prey. When the Countess saw me, she drew swiftly back into the room and out of sight, only to reappear and gaze at me again.
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Captured in the beams of the Countess’s eyes, I was unable to move, frozen like a mouse crouching in the witch grass waiting for the descending claws. Suddenly she was walking towards me with a smooth, gliding step that reminded me of the small serpents that slithered into my chamber in the night and hid beneath my bed to escape the winter cold. The eyes behind the holes of the mask bore down upon me, baleful and fiery blue.
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The corridor was colder and darker than ever now. The Countess Orzsebet, my mother, had sucked away all of the heat and light and taken it away into
her personal domain. My doll lay face down like a fragment of torn shadow. Her black hair was tangled. Her dress was draggled and ripped. With my
eyes still fixated upon my mother’s door, I leaned over slowly and picked her up. When I looked at her face I almost dropped her again. Someone had
burned out her eyes!
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“Marcsa Virag, you have not seen what you think you have seen. Mark me! You do not remember a thing.”
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Wheeling around, she threw my doll at my feet, floated back to her chamber and shut me out.
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The corridor was colder and darker than ever now. The Countess Orzsebet, my mother, had sucked away all of the heat and light and taken it away into her personal domain. My doll lay face down like a fragment of torn shadow. Her black hair was tangled. Her dress was draggled and ripped. With my eyes still fixated upon my mother’s door, I leaned over slowly and picked her up. When I looked at her face I almost dropped her again. Someone had burned out her eyes!
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I held my poor doll to my heart and ran as fast as I could down the rest of the corridor, almost tripping down a flight of wide sloping steps. I sped across the wintry cobbled courtyard where the ice-cold waters in the unicorn fountain were frozen in the air like silver ribbons. I plunged into a shadowy, smoky maze of arches and out again into the dim winter light of the Castle Courtyard that stretched behind the Main Gate to the steps of the Reception Hall. My steps echoed as I raced across the flagstones, scattering a flock of pigeons that flew around me like a storm. Finally I arrived at the tall, heavy doors to my wing of the castle and the guard let me inside. I slowed my pace down the wide corridor to the grand staircase that swept up to the galleries. My legs were heavy as I climbed into the gloom. I had to sit down to catch my breath. One look at my doll told me, more than words, that my mother hated me. I pressed the tip of my tongue against my teeth to calm myself. Above the top step, the landing stretched spaciously to the foot of an enormous tapestry of a beautiful walled garden where ladies danced with hares around a tree in the moonlight.
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I fixed my gaze on the rich colors of the tapestry and finished my climb up the stairs. One either side of that weaving were two stained glass windows that shone hot for a moment and then dimmed, telling me that the sun had just fallen below the rim of the Carpathian Mountains.
by Rosemary Carroll
BOMB 17/Fall 1986, LITERATURE
Angela Carter’s 1979 collection of original Fairy Tales, The Bloody Chamber was the book that made me want to write. I found it in the 1980s in the text book section at the University of Washington bookstore as part of an English Lit course I was not taking. It was love at first sight. The tales are Angela Carter’s Freudian adaptations of some of the most famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The title story The Bloody Chamber is of course based on Bluebeard told in breathtakingly rich language and evoking a decadent, bohemian atmosphere worthy of the silent films of the 1920s. The Lady in the House of Death is an unforgettable vampire story, there is The Courtship of Mr. Lion, and homage to Beauty and the Beast. The fairy tale poems of poetry of Anne Sexton that I had been over-exposed to in my youth paled in comparison to Carter’s amazing imagination.
I live almost all of her books and it was very sad to lose her at the age 54 to cancer.
It is impossible to interview Angela Carter now, so I was thrilled to find this form the arts blog BOMB. I could not resist reprinting it–so tipping my hat to the lucky interviewer Rosemary Carroll, here is one our greatest Gothic writers in her own words.
I was unable to match exactly the images used in the original interview, so replaced them close approximations mostly from the Neil Jordan film based on Angels Carter’s In the Company of Wolves.
Angela Carter is a British novelist and short story writer whose works include: The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and The Magic Toyshop. She also co-wrote the screenplay with Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves based on her short story of the same title. Ms. Carter’s most recent collection of short fiction, Saints and Strangers was published in September by Viking Penguin. The following interview took place over the phone, late one night in September, between New York and Iowa, where Ms. Carter is teaching at the Iowa Writers Program.
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Rosemary Carroll How do you like Iowa?
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Angela Carter Actually, we like it a lot. This area is uncrowded, with many trees and not much else for miles. This is where the great glacier was held up, right around here, and the land formations are unusual. You can watch a pickup truck drive along an unmade road and see the dust rise from the tires and settle back down. You can’t often do that elsewhere because too many other things happen.
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RC I know that you lived in New England for a while, but I presume this is the first time you’ve really spent in the Midwest. Do you find it very different?
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AC Yes, it’s quite a surprise. There is so much open space. I hadn’t expected to see so many small rural farms—there’s not much of that left in the United States, is there? It is very low and quiet. We—I and my young man—have a yard here and our son loves it. We watch him turn brown playing in the sun. Lie has taken to catching crickets and keeping them in a cage. I wonder if there is some rule that people who eat whole foods shouldn’t allow their children to imprison crickets.
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RC A vegetarian corollary.
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AC Yes, that sort of thing.
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RC From reading your books, I had the sense that you have an impression of America as a land that is ultimately somewhat disorienting—a place where the light and the heal are so intense that they are almost crippling or mutating. America comes across as a place where things happen to people and people are not in control, or aware, of their own lives. Is that accurate?
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AC I’m not sure. I know what you mean though. I think maybe you’re referring to the short story, The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe, the bit about the “laser light of the republic.”
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RC Yes, that and The Fall River Axe Murders.
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AC Well, they were both written while I was living in Providence, Rhode Island and the area fascinated me. I just walked and watched and listened. (Europeans are often like that around Americans though—like dogs watching their masters.) The atmosphere was so permeated with the Republican virtues. It admitted very little. The feeling was of a place having been chosen and of there being no possibility that the choice was not absolutely correct.
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RC And yet in Passion of the New Eve there is this wonderful depiction of the American desert as a place where transformation is easy, almost infinitely possible, even if it’s not a desirable transformation.
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AC I think the transformation in the novel was certainly desirable. I have actually seen the desert here, though. I made the great cross-country trip Americans always say they want to make. In 1969 my husband, my first husband, and I drove across the United States in a Greyhound bus. We went from New York to San Francisco, by way of New Orleans because we were both fond of the jazz music from there. We went south to El Paso and then through the desert to California. The whole trip only lasted six days but it was quite an experience.
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Stills from The Company of Wolves, courtesy of The Cannon Group.
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RC I have been wanting to ask you whether you liked Neil Jordan’s film version of your story The Company of Wolves?
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AC Well, I wrote the script, you know.
RC You and he collaborated on the script, didn’t you? I imagine the collaborative process would be very difficult. It reminds me of something William Burroughs once said to the effect that to collaborate is to lie.
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AC Oh no, we got along very well. We are good friends and I enjoyed doing it. I’m just sorry for Neil’s sake that the movie didn’t do better commercially. I was afraid that would really hurt his chance to make future films. But his new movie, Mona Lisa, is doing very well, so he’s hitting the high spots.
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RC But the end of the film Company of Wolves is so different from the story.
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AC I was furious about the ending. It wasn’t scripted that way at all. I was out of the country—in Australia when he shot the ending and he told me that it varied somewhat from the script. When I went to the screening I sat with Neil and I was enjoying the film very much and thinking that it had turned out so well—just as I had hoped. Until the ending which I couldn’t believe—I was so upset, I said, “You’ve ruined it.” He was apologetic.
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RC How had the ending originally been scripted?
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AC After she encounters the wolf at her grandmother’s house and what has happened becomes apparent she wakes up. Her body elongates beautifully and she does a perfect swan dive into the floorboards which turn into the surface of a body of water that swallows her. But that proved impossible to film. They tried covering the floor with water, but that didn’t work and she couldn’t just dive into the floor.
But even if it wasn’t possible to end the film as planned, I wish he had ended it right after the part where the white rose turns red.
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RC I prefer the way your story ends—with her lying in grandmother’s bed between the wolf’s paws.
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AC I do, too. Neil kept trying to convince me that his ending was potentially more ambiguous than it seemed. He maintains that her screams when the camera is panning the outside of the house are screams of pleasure, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way to me.
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RC I think men frequently have the mistaken belief that women are screaming in pleasure rather than in terror.
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AC True. Perhaps the problem is that Sarah Peterson is not a very explicit screamer. In any case, I really did like the movie as a whole. I try to think that the falsity of the ending won’t even be noticed—everybody in the audience will be looking for their shoes and it will go right by.
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RC I read an interview with Neil Jordan recently in which he asked what prompted his transition from writing fiction to making films. He said it was related to an increasing awareness on his part of the extent to which his prose had always been affected by cinema. He became more and more obsessed with the look and shape of things and began to feel that prose was an inadequate method of conveying these concerns. Is that a feeling you share? Do you have any desire to do more writing for film?
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AC I enjoyed working on Company of Wolves with Neil. And I have done some other work on scripts. When I do it I like it but I have no great desire to seek it out. Right now, Granada Television is making a film based on another work of mine, my second novel, The Magic Toyshop. I’m quite pleased with it actually. It will be a television movie, at least initially, and so, of course, the budget is much lower than it was for Company of Wolves. The cast includes this wonderful English actor, Tom Bell, have you ever heard of him?
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RC No, is he going to play Finn?
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AC No. He is cast as the uncle. He specializes in heavies—gangsters, Nazis and so on. He has a fantastic knack for portraying motiveless malignity, he will be just right. The director, David Wheatley, has worked mostly for British television—what drew us together was a film he made ages ago about the Brothers Grimm, that was full of terrific imagery and invention. David started out as a sculptor, oddly enough. We had a lovely time inventing imagery for ‘The Magic Toyshop’. He has a real feel for the book.
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RC I love that book—it is such a stunning evocation of adolescence. The scene in which Melanie is trapped while climbing the tree in her mother’s wedding gown is perfect—it completely captures that feeling of uncertain anticipation. This is an underconnectedness of events and you don’t know which one is dependent on the other but you know that there is an incredibly important relation between them and it is all very wonderful and frightening at the same time.
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AC You liked that? I’m glad. I am hopeful about the movie. I don’t think it will suffer from the small budget, because that story shouldn’t really require so much money to realize on film.
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RC I think that is true. Besides, a lower budget doesn’t always translate into a good movie; in fact, the inverse is sometimes true. Do you feel that your prose is affected by cinema?
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AC Since I’ve become a mother, I don’t go to the movies much. But certainly the way I view the world has been influenced by them. I think that must be true for most writers. The early Godard films had a very strong effect on the way I observe and see the world. They are extraordinary. And not just Godard. For example, I think of Barbara Stanwyck’s descent down the stairs in Double Indemnity. First, you see the stiletto-heeled shoe then the ankle with the chain around it, then the legs and the full, rich shine of her stockings. You know she is going to be a femme fatale long before you even see her face.
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RC Have you seen Hail Mary?
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AC No, I refuse to. I could hardly believe Godard would do such a thing. I’ve read about it and I saw clips from it on television and all I could think of was “Jean Luc, you have crapped upon an entire generation.”
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RC What is your favorite movie?
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AC You mean my favorite movie ever, of all time.
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RC Yes.
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AC I would have to say that it is Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis, with a script by Jacques Prévert and extraordinary performances by just about everyone who was anybody in the French cinema: Jean-Louis Barrault, Arletty, Maria Cesarés… It is the definitive film about romanticism; and about the impossibility of happy endings; and also about the nature of monochrome photography, and the character of Pierrot in the Comedia del Arte and lots of things. It is an enormous, cumbersome, comprehensive world of a movie, and one in which it always seems possible to me, I might be able to jump through the screen into, and live there, in a state of luminous anguish, just like everybody else in the movie.
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RC Much of your work seems to exist in the borderline area between consciousness and dreams. The stories are dreamlike in structure and share other qualities with dreams—symbolic transformations, ritualistic, referent use of name and language, and the fulfillment of unexpressed, or even denied, desire. Do you keep a journal of your dreams?
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AC I don’t dream. Rather, I never remember my dreams and on the rare occasions when I do, they are completely banal. Last night, for example, I dreamed that I woke up and went to the bathroom. But this resemblance to dreams is deliberate, conscious as it were. I have studied dreams extensively and I know about their structure and symbolism. I think dreams are a way of the mind telling itself stories. I use free association and dream imagery when I write. I like to think I have a hot line to my subconscious.
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RC One of the themes that recurs is concerned with a sort of cataclysmic upheaval in childhood. Were you uprooted when you were a child?
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AC All English children in my generation were, at least all those living in London. I was born in 1940. My mother left London carrying me in her arms with my twelve year old brother. Almost no one remained actually living in London at that time. We went south to Sussex and stayed there for a while. Then we went to live with my grandmother in the country in the North. My mother would stay with my grandmother and I for a few weeks and then commute to London to be with my father and then return to us. But I remember this as a happy time somehow.
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RC That is interesting to me—that you grew up essentially as an only child in a house full of women. The aspect of your work that I most appreciate is this unique sense of real love for, and protectiveness towards, other women. It is something that I look for in women writers and almost never find.
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AC What you say about the feeling toward women makes me happy—because it is very important to me. But I don’t understand your comparison to other women writers. What do you mean?
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RC Women writers frequently adopt a tone or an attitude toward their female characters which is somewhat negative and ungenerous. It comes across as either whining self-indulgence or congratulatory, stolid self-reliance. There is so little compassion.
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AC To whom do you refer?
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RC Let’s say, Joan Didion, for example.
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AC Yah, boo, sucks. Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didion’s female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest. Like aversion, dare I say it, of the rape of the Sabine women. And bear them off to hard labour in the grease pits. Or else ten years compulsory re-education in the coffee plantations of Nicaragua might do the trick, make those girls feel there are worse things in life than running out of valium. Except what lousy fun it would be for the Angels. And the Nicaraguans might feel with justice it was a particularly foul C.I.A. plot.
Actually, I think Joan Didion is an alien from another planet. Can we talk about a real novelist?
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RC To take a somewhat less obviously despicable example, then—Doris Lessing.
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AC She is quite an odd one, too. But as far as her feelings toward women or women characters go, they don’t seem objectionable.
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RC She seems incapable of finding sustenance or delight in the company of women. There is such an absence of joy.
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AC I wouldn’t limit it to her women characters, though. Some people think life is worth living and others really don’t see the point of the whole thing. She is one of the latter—it is her entire view of the world,
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RC The only woman I can think of, off hand, who is different in this respect is Jane Bowles.
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AC Now you’re talking. She is wonderful, extraordinary. But what a tragically sad end she met—it is, I suppose, a particularly poignant example of the terrifying fatality of being a woman.
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RC In the Sadeian Woman you stated that in Sade’s work women do not exist as a class and are subsumed into the general class of the weak, the tyrannized and the exploited. There is a suggestion that this denigration is connected with the fact that the reproductive aspect of female sexuality was completely devalued in Sade’s culture. Assuming that is valid, its antithesis leaves us with the earth-mother-goddess as the essence of the “valued” woman. And that is a somewhat problematic role model for women in the 20th Century.
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AC Or any century for that matter. Societies have never placed a very high value on the reproductive capacity of their women. The productivity of land, the availability of natural resources, the fecundity of thought, these are the things that must be valued. What concerns me is the fact that the actual physical aspect of this has been ignored for so long. Statistics are compiled about infant mortality. What about maternal mortality? I have three close friends who have had children within the past several years for whom successful childbirth would have been impossible five years ago. All of them would surely have died. I have been reading a collection of Chinese short stories written in China in the 1920s. The only woman writer in the collection died in childbirth at the age of 34. And in so many parts of the world this situation is still unchanged. The reality of it is ignored, or not focused on. Women have not had a voice until so recently and even now this issue is not one with which the women’s movement seems concerned.
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RC Had you always wanted to have a child?
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AC No, never. They had to drag me, kicking and screaming, into the labor ward. I kept insisting that it was too late, that I was too old for such things.
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RC Has being a mother changed your perceptives?
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AC No, not really. Well, it has changed my life. We have so much less time than we did. His father’s life is just as changed as mine.
But Alexander, my son, is a wonderful little person. He is going on three. I am getting used to having these great numbers of people in the car that are all his friends, his made-up friends. He is amazingly busy all the time, and that is hard work.
But we both feel the impact and the joy and the strain. I don’t think that Alexander has a greater effect on me necessarily. That is part of the myth of sexual difference.
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RC What is the myth of sexual difference?
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AC The idea that maleness is normative and that women’s difference from men is somehow pathological. This mythology lends itself, for example, to the idea that there is some mysterious connection between women and madness when in fact women are no more specifically connected with madness than are men.
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RC I wanted to ask you about mythology in general and its place in your work. Reviewers and critics frequently stress the presence of mythological and fabulist elements in your fiction. Yet, you have said, “Myths deal in false universals to dull the pain of particular circumstances.” Do you think this critical emphasis is misplaced?
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AC Yes, but I understand how it’s happened—there is something classy about invoking myth, it implies you’ve got a college education, people like to spot myths, it makes them feel good. That’s fine. I am interested in the way people make sense, or try to make sense, of their experience and mythology is part of that, after all. I’m a Freudian, in that sense, and some others, too. But I see my business, the nature of my work, as taking apart mythologies, in order to find out what basic, human stuff they are made of in the first place.
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Time for a change of pace. This is a brilliant video that shows the artistic influences in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is Nosferatu, Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece Belle et la Bette and some German Romantic paintings in the mix.
The Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists were very strongly referenced in most of images in the Coppola film, though this video doesn’t show that. I think this is what makes this version my favorite. Though I do like all of the film versions of Dracula for different reasons.
by Aline deWinter
On the crown of a hill, the Rose Palace of Ishtar shone like ivory behind a many towered gate of carnelian and gold. As Salome and her handmaidens approached, the huge copper doors swung open to a chamber of fire and reflected fire on a floor of mirror-bright basalt. Two invisible hands touched Salome’s shoulders. Her cloak was gone and she was naked. In the same moment, the Angel dissolved into the effulgent light that billowed about them, carrying the sent of roses, violets, and myrrh.
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“Etana, hold up the mirror! Hold up the mirror before me and turn it towards the Goddess, for I have been instructed not to look directly at her,” said Salome, trembling with awe as she walked along the passageway that glowed golden with torchlight.
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Etana leapt ahead of her mistress, holding her torch aloft and the mirror before her face. Golden Salome looked straight ahead at the long strip of brightness that was the end of the corridor, where she knew that Queen Ishtar, the Lady of Victory, waited. She called for the head of Jokanaan to be carried openly before her so that the Prophet’s eyes should meet those of the Mother of Life.
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And they entered a vast hall whose walls were carved over every inch with figures of divine gods and goddesses entwined among strange flowers and beasts. A wide lake of golden light shone upon the floor and in the midst where Salome saw the reflection of a golden throne in the midst of a pillar of scintillating flame. And on the throne was a woman of noble stature, and strange, narcotic beauty. Her skin was black over gold, as if she had been burned by the desert sun for a thousand years, her long hair was black entwined with gold, and a crown of gold and pearls and rubies was set upon her head. Her neck was a shining column of obsidian, her eyes were as green as if a far off land, the very Garden of Paradise, shone through them. The Goddess lips were red, as if stung by the thorns of the roses that adorned her. When she smiled, the fire and the gold grew brighter than before. Her voice was as the wind blowing through the depths of the earth.
“So, you have arrived, Salome, Princess of Judea. You dare to bring Me the head of the Prophet, Jokanaan—-My sworn enemy—-to ask that I bring him back to life.”
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Salome fell upon her knees, then prostrated herself before the majesty of Ishtar. For the first time in her life, the Princess felt small, as if she did not matter, all of her beauty, her wealth and family was as smoke from one of the mighty Queen’s torches. Salome gazed at the grandeur enthroned before her reflected in the golden lake where the top of the Goddess’s crown came towards her shimmering like a snake. “Yes, my Lady Ishtar…”
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The voice blew hot and the smell of roses and honey filled the room on the breath of the Goddess. “You dare to ask Me to bring My enemy back to life. Look at Me, Princess! Why do you follow the example of your servants who lie with their faces on the floor?”
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Salome reeled, and kept her eyes riveted to the reflection on the lake. “I mean no disrespect, Majesty. But you are too beautiful to look upon and I fear I might be turned to flame were I to do it.”
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She was suddenly jarred by the sound of something clattering to the floor, and saw Etana’s torch thrown free and burning in the golden lake. As Salome reached for her maid, her gaze fell upon the mirror that now lay upon the ground like a pool of shining silver. Salome turned away to save herself from the sight of the Glorious Ishtar. Images of the Goddess’s unforgettable splendor swirled through her mind. Salome saw the open casque laying at her side where Aaliyah had dropped it, and met the blazing eyes of Jokannaan.
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The Prophet’s eyes were dark and staring with a terrible judgment. Yet Salome trembled with a fever that swept through her, igniting her desire like a terrible sickness. How she longed for Jokanaan!
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“Oh, Holy Queen of All that Lives, I have come such a long way to ask a boon of thee!” She cried never taking her eyes from those of Jokanaan.
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“Your desire is consuming you body and soul. Even I can feel it. What a little fool you are. What will you exchange for the life of this — Prophet?” The Goddess spat the name as if it were venomous to her, and the heat of her breath spilled over the face of Jokanaan.
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Suddenly the Prophet’s head shook, rattling the casquet. He blinked his eyes as if waking and his gaze fell upon the Forbidden Queen. A high pitched shriek rose into the air, as streaming with light, glowing like a silver sun, the head of Jokannaan lifted itself into the air.
“What is this abomination that doth stand before me, the prophet of the Lord who should be in Heaven? The curses of the God most High be upon you Queen of iniquities! Begone!”
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The lions of the Goddess roared like ovens of fire. Ishtar laughed. And yet again, she laughed. “The prophet finds himself in the wrong place.”
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“Back! Queen of Babylon! Mock not the chosen of the Lord. Thou hast filled the earth with iniquities, and the cry of thine evil hath come up even to the ears of God!”
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Salome fell back with a sharp cry as the Prophet’s blood dripped into the pool, spattering it bright red.
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“Ah, Prophet, have you come back to life so soon?” the Goddess, Ishtar, Lady of Life, said. “What think you of this child, this Princess of Judea?”
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“Queen of Abominations! Leave me be!” shrieked the Prophet. His eyes started out of his head as he rose higher still.
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Salome reached up to him. “Jokanaan! Jokanaan! Tell her that you love me, Jokanaan!”
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“Who is this woman who is looking at me? I will not have her look at me. Wherefore doth she look at me, with her golden eyes, under her gilded eyelids? I know not who she is. I do not desire to know who she is. Bid her begone, It is not to her that I would speak.”
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Ishtar laughed like the peeling of golden bells. Her eyes flashed at Salome, searing her heart. The Princess’s eyes filled with sudden tears. Her mind whirled and went blank.
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“Whore! Whore! Get thee behind me daughter of Sodom!” the Prophet said.
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Slowly, Salome stood up and gazed at the radiant face of Jokanaan. She swooned with longing, and reached out for him as if to embrace his body. It was but air.
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“Please, Jokanaan. Live again! For me… Surely I cannot feel this — ardor — alone?” Then she cried, “Oh, Goddess, at each Gate an article of my attire I gave, even my crown, so that, when I am before you, nothing of what I am shall either be displayed, or concealed. My girdle of birthstones that are the counter of my very life, I gave. I am at your mercy, yet surely here is a great sign that the Prophet may still live… I ask for his release from death, that he be made whole again. Command me, and I shall dance before you the Dance of the Seven Veils.”
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The Goddess Ishtar’s emerald eyes flashed at Salome so brightly that the startled Princess looked at her. Inwardly, she shuddered and hid her face in her hands.
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“Do you really think the Prophet desires you, foolish Princess?” The Goddess’s voice sizzled in the air as she whispered it. “Ask me for something else. Ask me for anything else and I will give it thee.”
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Salome closed her eyes, and reached languorously out to embrace Jokanaan, for she saw him so clearly in her mind — tall, supple as reed, and pure as purest ivory.
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There was a terrible, anguished cry. “Ah! The wanton one! The harlot! Ah! the daughter of Babylon with her golden eyes and her gilded eyelids! Thus saith the Lord God, Let there come up against her a multitude of men. Let the people take stones and stone her . . .Touch me not. Profane not the temple of the Lord God.”
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Salome’s eyes flew open. “ Jokanaan! You shall live! Are you not happy?”
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The Great Ishtar’s voice rang out,” Ask for something else and I will give it thee, Princess of Judea. You mother, Herodias is a devotee of mine. I would gladly prepare a marriage for you. Perhaps a Prince of Syria with hair in coils like grapes, and skin of bronze. Lands and castles I would give you, gardens with a thousand flowers of every hue and fragrance. Ask for something else, even for immortality if that is what you wish. But do not ask to restore this Prophet who blasphemes Me in the name of his God.”
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A storm of white light enveloped the lustful Princess. Dazzling white birds swirled around the head of Jokanaan. In the midst the Prophet, now high above her, glared down. Rage twisted his face, his hair stood on end. His scream was so high and piercing that Salome covered her ears and fell back to the floor, bruising her knees on the flagstones. The Maids cried out, and then murmured something about there not being veils any more.
>
“I say to you again, do not ask me this boon, oh, Princess of Judea.” The rose breath caused the fire to flare up as its liquor soaked the air.
>
“Most High Goddess, I have come too far to turn from my course now,” Salome said. Suddenly her eyes rolled up in her head, her body undulated with feverish longing. “I must possess the love of Jokanaan.”
>
There fire crackled, and the scent of roses wafted heavy on the roaring air. Salome glanced into the mirror where it lay upon the floor and saw several golden lions circling her, their sinuous bodies gleaming in the silver, one after the other, as they passed. The mirror flashed in the storm of light, reflecting the head of Jokannaan like a strange flower on a stem of blood.
>
The Goddess’s voice hissed above the flames. “You have danced enough, Princess of Judea. You have danced well, though the evil that lives upon your soul has twisted the Rite of the Seven Veils into a mockery.”
>
Salome started up and gazed at the Goddess vexed with sore confusion. “A mockery?”
>
“You shall not dance before Me, the Queen of Heaven who has been buried in the abyss by such as this Prophet, Salome, Princess of Judea. Rather, since it is not Our will that this Prophet shall be resurrected, and I wish at this moment to reduce him to ash, you will be made to pass an ordeal. You will take seven journeys to seven far off lands and dance before seven Kings and seven Queens. Only when you have completed this task, shall the Prophet be brought back to life, only then will you be joined to him in the riot of love you seek, for…” the Goddess smiled secretly and leaned towards Salome. She whispered, “I do believe I see the seeds of great and passionate love buried deep within his soul… for you…Princess…who-will-not-be-denied. Seven journeys to seven lands, Salome, and in the seventh you shall have your wish. Now go! And do not look back, not even for a second.”
Part II of Salome: The Seventh Queen describes Salome journey to dance before the Seven Kings and Queens of seven lands and how she gets lost along the way. Herodias has become Queen of the Witches north of the Mediterranean Sea. What happens to Salome when the she clashes with her mother in the lands of the north?
That is in Part II
I am taking a break for now and may finish this story on the blog or will publish it as a book. I haven’t decided yet…
Art: Gustave Moreau
Some quotes from “Salome” by Oscar Wilde
by Aline deWinter
The song of the ney, high and wild, floated above the whispers of many serpents deep as the stones below the earth. The Princess was a lighted torch, a flame undulating to sounds voluptuous, and strange. The music grew louder and faster. She fluttered in the wind, flew and spun about, insensible to the thorns that cut her bare feet. In the desolate garden she was a blood red moon. Salome fell to the ground and writhed over the broken soil like a snake, rolling over and over, crying out for the living flesh of Jokannaan.
>
“Ahhh, Jokanaan! I am amorous of thy body, Jokanaan! Thy body was white, like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy body was as white as the snows that lie on the mountains of Judæa, and come down into the valleys. Ah Jokanaan, I must possess thy body.”
>
“Mistress! Mistress!” Etana’s voice cut through the heavy water of the music. “The Sixth Gate is nigh.”
>
Salome rose up on one elbow. “Soon we shall cross the forbidden garden of the Great Goddess —She who shall bring my beloved back to life.”
>
The Sixth Gate was covered with dust and the desert winds blew against it. Salome stood before the high pillars crowned with sphinxes and challenged them to riddle her. The sphinxes only stared, though their eyes glittered.
>
“It is almost time. Are you not rapturous, Jokannaan? The Queen of Heaven shall restore your body and you shall let me touch you, for there is nothing in the world that will deny she who wakes the dead.” Salome’s voice soared over the top of the gate. It was so tall, and so worn with time, her voice merely fell like dust.
>
“Is this the Sixth Gate, oh, Princess?” Alliyah asked breathlessly.
>
“Yes,” Salome said. “Now we enter the Sixth Garden and approach the final Gate to the Kingdom of Ishtar, She Who Rules Over Life and Death.”
>
The whistling desert wind carried the smell of amber and fire as if all the cedars of Lebanon were burning.
>
“Open the gate!” shouted Salome.
>
The sphinxes looked at the sky where the nightjar whirled and lights fluttered in the trees like moths.
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“Why does the gate not open?” Salome shouted.
>
“ Perhaps it will never open. Oh lets us return home, mistress Salome,” Aaliyah said.
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“Be quiet. I will have what was promised me.”
>
“Why does the Gate not open? I command this Gate to open. Open, I say. I Salome, Princess of Judea command that you open this Gate!”
>
At that moment a gust of dry wind blew the last of Salome’s veils away and floated them into the air like streaks of fire. Her cloak swirled around her as a chorus of muffled voices vibrated the Gate.
<
“Gatekeeper!” Salome cried. “Open the gate! Open the gate so that I may enter!”
>
Still, the Gate did not open, for it was sealed shut by time and stone and desert winds so that it was no more than an indentation in the rock. Then before her eyes, the wall grew transparent, and the austere figure of an Angel robed in emerald green shone through. The angel looked at Salome without speaking or any sign of greeting.
>
The Princess flew into a rage that even she did not understand. She shouted at the Angel. “If you do not open the gate, I will smash the door!”
>
“Do not be so violent, Princess,” said Etana.
>
“Yes, Princess, be not angry and disordered in your mind,” Aaliyah said.
>
Salome drew herself up and raised her fist high. “Open this Gate. I will go in. Allow me to enter or I will smash the gate and topple the pillars.”
>
The door continued to dissolve. The Angel gazed at her through a serene golden light around his face. When he spoke, his voice was deep with the sound of many voices.
>
“There is no need. I have come to announce your arrival to the Most High Queen. Behold, beyond that stretch of sand, on that high hill, is the Gatehouse to the Rose Palace of Queen Ishtar. You will know by the many votaries set afire along the way to the threshold.”
>
“At last,” said Salome. “Lead me to Her.”
>
“First, you must surrender that that girdle of birthstones from your hips, for all women are subject to the Great Goddess, Mistress of Life, Opener of the Womb.”
>
“My birthstones are my life. I give to you my life so that the dead might live again.”
>
Salome removed her girdle of birthstones and gave it to the Angel. And now naked but for her scarlet cloak, she went through the Sixth Gate.
>
The Angel led them forth across the wind swept sands that rose and fell like the waves of the sea. There was a star sitting on the horizon shedding its rays between pale earth and indigo sky, bright as a cluster of diamonds. The Angel kept turning to gaze at the casque that held the prophet’s head, and Salome shuddered with the sudden apprehension of how alike the Angel was to Jokannaan. The casque blazed forth so brightly that Aaliyah complained her hands were burning.
>
“Surely an Angel of God can come back to life,” Salome said softly. “One such Angel, as Jokannaan is, must be immortal after all.”
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by Aline deWinter
The Fifth Gate loomed high. It was built of gray stones dusted with white, lacy imprints of snowflakes under brown threadbare leaves. A gate like an intricate veil stretched between two pillars upon which two angels stood with wide open wings, whose mouths and hands moved as in exhortation of the small bewildered party below. Behind the gate was a cloud of sparkling whiteness, swirling, full of wind, and cold.
>
The Princess, Salome, gazed at the whiteness and shivered. She indeed wondered at the purple-haired being that had gone through ahead of her, bemused…and where had it gone? She hugged the hot, golden casquet now reveling in its warmth against her skin. How wonderful, gold upon gold, was the treasured casquet; how much more wonderful the living head of Jokanaan!
>
Salome gazed at the freezing whirlwind behind the gate, serene in the certain knowledge that her wishes would be granted and that her life, thenceforth, would be one of endless love with the Prophet. She held the casquet close and saw him standing before her, his body like a shining column of ivory set upon feet of silver, yet now he was silent, his eyes closed and his head turned away from the golden Princess, Salome.
>
“Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music. Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Iokanaan? With the cloak of thine hands, and with the cloak of thy blasphemies thou didst hide thy face. Thou didst put upon thine eyes the covering of him who would see his God. Well, thou hast seen thy God, Iokanaan, but me, me, thou didst never see. If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I saw thee, and I loved thee. Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet, Iokanaan. I love only thee.”
>
Behind the gate, the cloud of snow solidified into the shape of a tall figure in a white robe. The face that formed in the depths of the white cowl was beautiful, its eyes piercing and as blue as water under a layer of ice. His robes sparkled about him like the skin of a white swan, soft and dusted with snow. He smelled of spicy things, aromatic as the cedars of Lebanon.
>
“Open the gate and let me in!” Salome shouted, holding the casquet high and lunging forward with passionate fury. “I am the Princess of Judea. If you do not let me in, I shall smash the gate!”
>
Darkness fell and there was a scraping sound as of wind sweeping branches over the ground. Overcome with the relentless, seething desire within her, Salome stepped forward and cried out, “Let me in, oh Gatekeeper. I would have an audience with the Great Goddess, Ishtar, Queen of All That Lives.”
>
The white wind blew across the entrance on the other side of the gate, obscuring the Gatekeeper. His eyes burned through the crystalline cloud in echoing silence.
>
“Oh, Gatekeeper, open the gate! Open the gate so that I may enter!” Salome cried again.
>
“Let her pass!” The voice was not that of the gatekeeper, but came as if from the trees, or from the cloud. It was a feminine voice, deep, throaty, and insinuating. “Only take the girdle of birthstones from her waist. They belong to me.”
>
“What? Not that! Surly my birth stones are the very pattern and design of my life!” The Princess cried, clutching with one hand the string of heavy jewels at her hips.”Why must you take the girdle of birthstones from my hips?”
>
“Thus are the rules of the Mistress of the Abyss,” the disembodied voice whispered. In an instant, the girdle was torn from Salome’s hips and floated through the air to combust in sudden fire. The air was tinged with the scent of tuberose.
>
“Ah!” she cried. “She who gives birth has all power over life.”
>
“A life for a life,” said Etana hiding her face behind her hand.
>
Aaliyah bent low as if frightened out of her senses. The Gatekeeper slid back from the portal with a sound like wet, dragging draperies, leaving the entrance empty of all but a dim, crimson glow like sunlight setting behind the winter trees on the mountain of Jerusalem.
>
Again, there came flash of purple and the smell of tuberose, brief and unsettling.
>
The gate swung open and Salome stepped onto a path that meandered through a garden gone to seed and ruin. Nothing grew out of the pallid soil but sticks and tangled thorns and branches. The ground was dusted with frost that blew about in little eddies, cold against her skin. Hyenas laughed in the dark and scuttled about, while wide-winged birds floated down from jagged ruined walls and stunted, withered trees. Graves leaned back as if they been blown against by ages of wind, or been turned to stone by fear. The Maids cried with unbearable melancholy, wrapping their arms around themselves for warmth and complaining that they could no longer carry the mirror or the torch, though Aaliyah regretted giving up the warm golden casque of Jokannaan. Salome looked around in a vague hope that her musicians had followed at a distance, but there was nothing but an empty white lane disappearing between two rows of gnarled, black, leafless trees.
>
“There shall be no music, Princess!” cried Etana. “For the musicians have fled.”
>
“Ayiii!” cried Aaliyah. “For the quran player was my friend.”
>
“No mind. No Mind,” Salome said as she moved forward in a fever of obsession and desire. Stumbling over the ground, she ignored the the thorns that tore at her feet, for the fire that consumed her girdle of birthstones penetrated her brain, and burned there, moving down to her throat and into her heart, erasing all pain and even her presence of mind. Now it settled in her root, and burned there hotter still.
>
“This place is cold but I am hot! Hotter than the sun itself,” she cried. “Hotter than love, hotter than desire. Oh, Jokannaan, how close we are to days of ecstasy that will last forever! For I am sure to have found the key to immortality.”
>
Unable to bear the absence of her beloved any longer, the Princess opened the casquet and lifted out the shining head of the Jokanaan.
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Salome raced back to her serving maids.
>
The hyenas shrieked and the wheat began to ruffle as the invisible pack of wild dogs came after her. Aaliyah and Etana turned around frantically calling Salome’s name in all directions, their voices drowned out by the music and the cries and the barking of the hyenas.
>
Something cracked like the sound of bones snapping. Salome was buffeted by gusts of strong wind that blew her cloak up over her face.
>
An eerie voice floated on the wind, a woman’s voice, calling.
>
“ Life, life, life, life…”
>
The hyenas laughed and the wind carried the sounds like a whirlwind around the Princess and her maids. Salome pulled her cloak out of her eyes and watched as the woman in the field turned and walked to the left, stopped, smiled at Salome and walked on again. She was followed by an inky black shadow that slithered over the wheat sheaves like a snake.
>
“ We must follow her,” said Salome. “Come! We are guided out of this place.”
>
“Mistress! I can’t touch the casque,“ cried Aaliyah. “It burns me and oh! He cries so!”
>
Salome went to where the casque was laid upon the ground, glowing golden as if the sun had fallen into the field of aurum. There were lilies too, Salome swore that there were lilies white as death standing among the wheat shafts, around the Prophet’s little house. Loud dark sobs echoed mournfully inside of it. When Salome opened the lid the eyes of Prophet looked up at her, blazing with holy fire.
>
“Back! Daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord. Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her iniquities, and the cry of her sinning hath come up even to the ears of God.”
Salome froze. Had her prayer been fulfilled? The sight of the Prophet speaking through the gates of death was as if a very Angel had descended, a Seraph from behind the very throne of God. Her eyes swimming with tears, Salome reached for her beloved Prophet’s head. “Oh how I love you, Jokanaan. For me you have come back to life! Oh, how powerful is love that it may conquer death! I know you have come for me, Jokanaan. I am very grateful you have come to me.”
>
“Back, daughter of Sodom! Touch me not. Profane not the temple of the Lord God. Ah! The wanton one! The harlot! Ah! the daughter of Babylon with her golden eyes and her gilded eyelids! Thus saith the Lord God, Let there come up against her a multitude of men. Let the people take stones and stone her . . . ”
>
“Singing! They are singing!” Aaliyah cried looking up from her cowering. “It is Chorus of the Angels of the Lord. The Prophet summons the powers of God most high. Can you hear the music of God, Princess Salome?”
>
“Mistress! The guide is gone far before us. If we do not follow we shall surely be lost,” Etana shouted pointing into the distance.
>
“Give me the casquet, Aaliyah. I will carry the head of Jokanaan,“ Salome said moving the trembling Aaliyah aside. “Now I have you my beloved Jonakanaan. You are with me now. Now. Oh how your eyes do shine—-they shine like pattens of bright silver fallen from the hand of the Queen of Syria into the well of the Holy Sanctuary. Thine eyes burn like torches in a tapestry of Tyre. They shine like the breath of dragons in the black caverns of Egypt. Speak to me again.”
>
“Mistress, we must not stay,” cried Etana. “Surely if we stay we shall be lost.”
>
“Yes, Princess Salome. Listen to Etana. It is unwise to stay. The path to the Fifth Gate is being shown and will not be shown much longer.”
>
Salome leaned in to kiss the lips of Jokanaan. He spat at her! She recoiled like a cat.
>
“Back! daughter of Babylon! By woman came evil into the world. Speak not to me. I will not listen to thee. I listen but to the voice of the Lord God.”
>
The golden casquet did burn Salome’s flesh as she closed the the Prophet’s rage inside, but she didn’t care. Rather she reveled in this small discomfort for the sake of her love. Even though she could not bear his cries, that screamed and pounded the sides of the casque so that she could hardly hold it, she embraced it as she would her lover, and endured.
>
“You shall come back to life” she murmured to herself. “You shall come back to life for me, Jokanaan, for I desire nothing on the earth more than you. There is nothing in the world more beautiful than you.”
>
The woman moving through the field had left a ribbon of dark slime along the ground. Salome followed it, all the while in a light trance, dreaming of her beloved’s ivory brow. Suddenly a vision of the woman’s face appeared to Salome’s mind’s eye: skin pale and waxy as a calla lily, hair like a cloud of purple dye, and a mouth so red, it seemed to drip with blood.
>
The music died down to a thin wail as the woman, now slim as a snake, slithered through the Fifth Gate.
>
“Princess, who was that?” Etana asked. “She had something about her like Herod’s Queen.”
>
Salome turned to her Maidservant and raise an eyebrow. “It is not possible.”
>
Aaliyah sighed a low, echoing sigh. “I do not think we should follow any more. Perhaps it is a trap.”
>
“Again!” Salome said impatiently. “Always!” she gave Aaliyah a hard look. “Go back then, if you must.”
>
Aaliyah gazed at her feet and blushed for shame.
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by Aline deWinter
The wheat field glowed and bent in a slight breeze. They walked on for a while longer. Nothing changed.
>
“How long have we been here?” Aaliyah sighed falling to the ground in exhaustion.
>
“Give me the head of Jokannaan,” Salome whispered sharply to Aaliyah. “Give him to me now.”
>
“The head, indeed. A mere fraction of a man, Mistress. How can he be brought back to life?” Aaliyah fretted, pushing the casque over the ground toward Salome.
>
“What you do not see, what I do see, is Jokanaan’s immortal soul.” said Salome holding the Prophet’s head in the golden field that spread around around him like a nimbus of golden light. “He comes to me in the night like a moonbeam walking over a field of lilies, like a shaft of silver; his flesh is cold, cold as ivory. His body is like the lilies of the field after the mower hath mowed. The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as his body when he comes thus unto me. His hair is as black as the long black nights when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid. The silence of the forest is not so black. His mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses are not so red. the beauty of his flesh shall be made more glorious by the terrible command of Ishtar, Queen of Heaven and Mother of All of Life.”
>
As she spoke, Salome looked at her maids, from one to the other, searching for some semblance of a soul in their frightened faces. She looked around at the endless wheat field, down at her scarlet cloak flowing over the stalks like a wake of blood, at her jeweled feet sparkling on the golden ground, and smiled.
>
Etana met her eyes. “I too love a man. In Judea. A soldier. And now I shall never see him again. My spirit goes to him in the night. I wonder if he senses me…”
>
“You? Love?” said Salome astonished. “But you are a slave, Etana. Surely you cannot compare the profane lust of a slave to the divine passion of a Princess before whom the King of Kings has scattered jewels, to whom whole legions must bow? Your love can only as that of the ass to the mule, the ewe to the filthy goat with its keyhole eyes. What can you know of love, Etana?”
>
Etana closed her eyes and seemed to drift away.
>
Salome knelt down and caressed the casquet.
>
“Oh, Jokannaan. Again you shall stand like a tower of ivory, shining white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judea. Your eyes gleam like dark emeralds, and your hair hang like clusters of black grapes. like the cluster of black grapes that hang from the vine trees of Edom in the land of he Edomites. Your lips shall be like redder than than the feet of him who cometh from the forest where he hath slain a lion , and seen gilded tigers. Its is like the bow of the King of the Persians that is painted with vermillion…There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth…Suffer me to kiss they mouth.”
>
“You’re mad,” Aaliyah whispered so softly she thought the Princess did not hear her.
>
“What is that?”
>
The cry of a hyena echoed across the field.
“Oh,” Aaliyah whispered rising to her feet. “Now we are pursued by wild animals.”
>
The cry again. A chorus of cries broke forth, as of a pack of hyenas hidden in the wheat. Wild, shrieking music, as of bagpipes and drums began to play, and human cries rang out as of a soul in torment.
>
“Are my music makers with us after all?” Salome cried glancing around, looking for her players in the field. “I knew they would not desert me!”
>
The serving maids glanced around as well. Aaliyah covered her ears with her hands.
“Oh, what is happening?” she cried.
>
“This is not ordinary music!” cried Etana. “It is the singing of some sorceress over her vessel of abominations.”
>
The music was all around them. Salome sensed that the tormented cries were very close to her, rising out of the earth. She scanned the monotonous golden horizon like a lioness looking for prey. Where are they? She strode forwards, in the direction of the sound, attentive, her eyes dazzled by the brightness of the land against the sky.
>
High pitched laughter riffled through the wheat. Hyenas! Salome screamed. Surely her fate was not to be dragged down and torn by powerful jaws.
>
Suddenly the waves of wheat undulated with the tide of trotting, scrawny, humped, hackle-raised backs; the still air reverberated with wild screams as the Dogs of Chaos raced in for the kill. Salome spun around fixed on the sight of a tall woman standing in the field gazing at her from over the top of the sheaves!
>
Salome fell back with a groan. The woman’s face was stiff as a mask, her head was large and her face round, on her head was a serpentine crown of wheat withys. When she smiled, and then her tongue hung out and her large eyes blinked at Salome as if she knew her. The woman suddenly rose higher to reveal large, copious breasts and a full round belly.
<
She began walking in Salome’s direction.
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