Israel woke in the morning, proper dewy and shunning in the early rays of sun. The tempest had gave way to an azure and lush grown field of wet grass; sanguine colored in the hazy lights like dipped in the warm, fresh blood of a dying man. Waking through the hutch and across the tiny porch, he entered the world much as he came, and in awe of its vast splendor he waited and watched the rising sun crest over the lonely mountains to the east in an array of impossible red orange light. This is the works of god. It so it must be.
Jim had risen inside the cramped and withered cabin, Israel could hear his heavy steps reverberate from within. Only now when he stood out in the world could he see how broken its frame; how fragile its bounds of life. The roof was shattering, barely there, a mess of thatch and pine beaming with a massive oak branch protruding from its depth like a legendary phallus. The faded wood paneling cracked and pealing with ancient paint, probably lead based and full of venom, scant and shoddy in its builders incapable hands, with leering load poles and indescribable warping until it almost seemed the cabin was a vortex or vacuum, threatening to swallow whole the living world around it.
They had lived there four month now, Israel and Ol Jim. Four month in this shackletoned, bracing fortpost on the edge of the civil society. It was a nightmare, a luciferian dream of emission and rapture and sound and fury; all combatants lined on a spectral essence gearing for some apocalyptian battle for the right of the universe. And Israel was merely a bystander; a picnicker on the side of this iconic power struggle, lying aside his basket as the cannon fire commenced. But he knew this, and was contented.
Jim had other ideas; Jim was a man of action. Not stoic and thirftsure, no miser carefully plotting his next insidious attack or counting his wretched coins in hiding. Jim was cocky and aggressive, always pushing and punching his way in and out of situations with a reckless and virile abandon belying the reverent fear that he held inside his gullet. Jim wanted more from the world than to just live in it. He wanted to rule it, to conquer it wholly under his monogrammed bootheel and be its master and its savior and its grace. He was a man of big aspirations, but as Israel saw it, too simple minded and cruel to ever see them to fruition. He'd be no more than a scavenger and a rake and and an indolent till the rest of his days; like Israel. They were of the same cloth.
They had been from Jameson, originally, born and bred and raised by the old man; some vagrant wretch of a man who lived in a squalid palace of waste and scrap metal by the edge of a tin smelling bogswamp on the slum's edges. Their mama went to the grave over Jim, the baby, an their father not long after over a bottle of gin. Their eldest brother Skinny Pete had run off when that civil war had broken out and they'd never seen of him since. Paul was dead of flu pox during the Wellington riots; he'd been all mangled and sick and bloody with feces when Jim smothered him in his bed. Eased the pain of living this way, Jim said. They ain't had no sister; thank The Lord for that.
Israel had grown up mean in them streets; and so had his brother, but Jim came out the meaner. Jim had come out with a chip on his shoulder, another one. He saw the world, that world, their world, as an abomination and a lie. "There ain't no damn good and no damn unGood! He often said, "there's law and theres chaos and there's good and there's Bad. But in between all that no sense labeling, is the murk of incongruity and conception. It's all in the eyes of the man with the power, nothing else." Jim wanted to go back, wanted to blame Israel for why there were where they was, and Israel didn't give a good goddamn about what Jim thought. He didn't care no more about them and theirs in that city, he didn't care none for their laws and means and gestures of faith; he was more comment, cognizant even, out here in the world; the world they had told them was rife and overrun with orcs and goblins and monstrosities. He felt safe in this place; at peace. There was no damn monsters out here; no, they all lived inside those palisade walls. Orcs and demons only exist in ones mind; they are monsters of perception. We perceive they exist and they come into being. It was all a grand game of chess amongst the cosmic flow and churn of ebbing space time. A lie. A deceiving ploy to frighten and contain. To control.
Out here there were dangerous beasts for sure, wolves and bares and mammoth weasels that could pain or even kill them, but no orcs. No monsters. Just the world as it was in myth and lecture; the world as it had been long go, and still always was. Israel couldn't understand why they feared it so; why they hid it from us, but in the end decided he didn't really care. Or he did and it simply didn't matter one bit what he thought. It was likely of the latter. Jim was calling from inside.
"Israel, come get you some sup" Israel was silent, gazing sleepy eyed into the mists. He was hungry and sore. Jim was still calling him.
"Get ye some sup brother," his voice lilted, "ain't ye hungry? You must be getting hungry by now..." He trailed. Israel looked at the collapsing form of the cabin and sighed. Jim's face appeared in the window.
"Come on now"
"Ain't hungry," he lied, his stomach churning.
"Still?"
"Yea."
"You mustn be starving yousself is all, have some sup. I done finished that little one last night anyhow, ye shouldn't be scared."
"Imma go walking."
"Where to?"
"Don't know."
"Didn't reckon so," Jim came to the door.
"Nope."
"Ye come back right?"
"I may, I just wanna walk is all" Jim strained a simple grin.
"Walk eh?
"Yea"
"Sure you don't want some sup for ya walk?"
"I'm sure" Israel stepped away and turned and went down the little pathway toward the old road. He looked back and waved but Jim had disappeared inside. He beat down the path, turned left on the road, and started walking.
The road was a remnant of the time before the cloistered, claustrophobic cities had sprouted up; when people lived out here, built these shoddy homesteads and then apparently abandoned them. It was uneven and muddy, with massive grooves carved by trailers and woodcarts in that long forgotten summer of man; still here and there remained the hooves of horses, cattle, and pigs, as well as the worn boots and leathery soles of the feet of men and woman. But it had been silent now for ages, in all the four month they had been out on that road, they had seen nothing but wolves and wild pigs out in its ware worn thoroughfare; it had been abandoned along with everything else.
The road weaves deeper in the dark and looming forest, the canopy blocking out all but the mightiest rays of sun as they shone down from the midsts of heaven. Under this encompassing gloom he felt suddenly serene; like all weight had lifted from him and he could think clear and act according and be at peaceful repose. He lay down his raggedy cloak, exposing his naked body, by the roots of a sturdy apple tree and sat, his mind absolved from thought. He stayed there a while until his eyes grew heavy and he drifted into a deep sleep. His dreams were pleasant and sublime.
He dreamt of a castle, a tower, high above the sprawling city, a shinning beacon in an earth of dark. It was great and gleaming, a power of mankinds own awakening; a force for all mankind to see and tremble in its shadow. He stared up at it in disbelief, yet in his heart he had realized his dreaming. Pete was next to him, or was it Pete?
"You sleeping brother?"
"No"
"Good, its time to wake up. We got work to do. Get ye a spade." Israel had an old shovel in his hand.
"This do?"
"I said get ye a spade not a heefenchlab? What you doing he brother?" In the dream he said some nonsensical word, but Israel heard it as "spade."
"Ain't this a shovel?" He looked down and he was holding a chicken, a live chicken at that, who was pecking away at his fingers. Blood ran down his arms and pooled around his palms.
"That's a duck badger if I'd ever seen one" Pete hooted.
"I'm sorry"
"Get ye a spade, we gotta go get that bear that done ate pappy" he rushed off into the woods, Israel still holding the shovel, which was a shovel again. The scene changed, like a curtain pulled or a screen lowered over the stage, and Israel was deep in the woods. Pete was there, but he looked like Jim. Their father, or a man who resembled what Israel though of his father, lay before them disembowled and half engorged by mighty and knife sharp, bladed teeths. Israel had never seen his father before, so it couldn't be him.
"That's him."
"Who?"
"That's yer pappy, Iz"
"That ain't him, it looks more like Jim than he"
"Say a prayer would ye"
"I ain't no preacher"
"For him, yer pappy"
"I ain't doin it"
"That's yet yer pappy"
"Ain't it?" Israel looked up at Pete, but he wasn't Pete anymore, he was the constable from their slum. The one who had given them so much trouble as kids.
"Ain't it yet yer pappy, boy?" He said.
"He ain't," Israel looked down at the body. It was an old friend, but Israel couldn't place his name.
"Then who is he?" Israel didn't say. He couldn't say.
"Somebody lost I'm sure"
"You do this?"
"I ain't."
"Not you? Then who did if you might my asking?"
"A bear." The constable was Pete again, but he looked more n more like Jim.
"Yeah," Israel looked down at his feet.
"What about that?" Pete pointed to the bloody knife in Israel's hand. He looked down at it in shock.
"I didn't-" he stammered.
"Then what's that on your shirt? Blood? Mans blood? And you still got the damn knife in yer hand Israel," he was the constable now, "we done got you red handed"
"It weren't me." They were in a darkened interrogation room. The inspector was Pete, the capo in the corner Jim, the dead mans body laid like a Christ on the table before him.
"You got the knife in your hands still," Pete said, "how can you say it weren't you?" Israel was still covered in blood.
"I never kilt no one."
"You did," said Pete, "but its ok, we all wanted him dead dontcha see? You did us all a favor."
"I never kilt pappy, I never even met him afore"
"Didn't you?"
Awoken only by hunger, he felt his body renter the world with the slow drip of animation, until his eyes had fluttered awake and his dreaming had sufficed. He stood and stretched and wondered at the hour, for he set off up the wandering road back toward the cottage. He arrived to find Jim sitting on the front stoop drinking home brewed whiskey from a ceramic gourd they had found.
"Ye find what you was looking for?" Jim said casually, easing back in his seat with an air of snide.
"What?"
"Out there. Ye find it?"
"I ain't found nothing," he said as he went inside. Jim followed and stood in the hutch way picking at his yellowed teeth with a dull old knife he had found in the brush.
"Sthat right?" He sat down an the dusty table and lifted the gourd to his lips. "You sure bout that?"
"And whatn you thinking I was looking for? It's just a walk is all."
"You hungry."
"A might."
"Meats still good."
"Don't want none of that." Israel looked down at the plate between them on the table. Jim laughed.
"Can't let you starve now."
"I ain't fixing to"
"Then what you gon eat?"
"I done already. I found me some berries on the road."
"Berries?" He shifted the plate toward himself, lifted a black and charred piece and bit in. "You found some berries, then?" There was a condescending tone in his speaking. Israel stood like steel.
"Yea. Berries. Little red ones, they was good."
"Giving you a stomach eh?" Jim had whiskey running down his chin. "They might be poison."
"I doubt it."
"Sure you do...have some sup."
"I ain't gon"
"Don't make me cross now." He sat forward and his face contorted into a wild expression, "you don't wanna make me cross."
"Yea?"
"I'll feed it to you meself, see. I'll shove it down your gullet and ill make you chew each goddamn piece, with my own hand if I has to. You gotta eat."
"I did. I had me some berries."
"Sure you did," he pushed the plate across the table, "eat."
"You thinking you can take me Jim?"
"I'm knowing. You wanna test thr theory?" Israel just stared at the plate and stood there idly.
"It ain't right."
"We done been over this Israel"
"And you ain't changed my mind. I don't wanna eat that no more. It's wrong. I can't do it is all. It tastes all bad to me. I can see there faces is all. Every time. I see their faces."
"You get over that," Jim smiled, "it don't last forever. Eat."
"It ain't right." Jim stood.
"You is trying my patience Israel. Sit and eat. And do it now. Or so help me..."
"Or so help you what," Israel yelped, "what can you do to me that lord almighty ain't already done?" Jim had a look of palpable rage bubbling like a cauldron upon his visage. He moved toward Israel.
"You take that back, you ungrateful slug. Who took you in when no one else would? Who helped you? Carried you? Wasted his hard earned time and money and grace on you? They'd have skinned you alive and left you on the side of the promenade had it not been for me!"
"You didn't do nothing"
"Nothing eh?" He sized Israel in his massive hands and began to squeeze, "NOTHING?" He pushed Israel against the wall.
"I GAVE IT ALL AWAY FOR YOU" he hollered, "I gave away my dreams, my life, for your sorry ass, and you ain't never even had so much as a thank you for me, ye ingrate wastrel!
"Take ye hand off me" Israel warned, but ol Jim only tightened his grips.
"You bastard"
"Let me go, we all know who the bastard is here! Ye ain't even my real brother by law! You just pappy's mistake!" Jim slammed Israel against that wall and raged his way, mouth frothing like an ocean of spit. Israel tried to slump out of his grasp without luck.
"What you call me!" Jim steamed.
"Ye a bastard! Pappy done told me too so don't you deny it."
"You yellow..."
"I ain't a liar, you weren't mummas at all, you was the spawn of some two bit washerwoman pappy thrust hisself in! You ain't even a fit to walk on this earth."
"Well now the old cat showed his claws eh?" Jim gripped him with a ferocious abandon, his eyes wild and darting; his rope was wearing thin. Israel tried once more to push him away, but his brother was thick, strong and broad shouldered; and Israel was loath to refuse him.
"It's the lords truth Jim," Israel said, pleading, "pappy done tolt me."
"You said you ain't never met Pappy"
"He tolt Pete. And Pete tolt me."
"What else that thieving drunk have to say about me? He got any other insights to sling around? Any other insults," Jim voice was rising, "huh? I'm askin you, Israel. You got anything else to say about me?" Israel shook him back and Jim relinquished his hold.
"Get off me, ain't you ever learn to respect yer elder."
"Shut ye goddamn mouth Israel."
"I won't."
"You will or ill shut it for ye."
"You ain't so big."
"So you said."
"Leave me be." Israel made for the door. Jim blocked his path.
"You still ain't ate."
"Leave me be," Israel pushed by him and swept through the hutch way. Jim laughed.
"You gotta eat sometime Israel."
"Leave me be," he called back.
"You can't live on the berries forever brother. You need you some meat." Jim was in the hutch way. He had brought with him the ten penny pistol they kept for bears and bandits and was examining it like some philistine scholar in the haze of humid summer.
"I be fine."
"Sure you will."
"I'm just tired is all."
"Sure you is." Jim smiled at him.
"Why you got that pistol?"
"You accusing me of something?"
"I just askin is all" he started down the path to the road.
"You ain't gonna wait for an answer?" Israel said nothing.
"Turn around." Israel kept walking.
"I said turn around Israel." He kept walking. There was a gunshot. Israel turned around. Jim was striding toward him like some royal vassal assailing; pistol raised.
"You heard me that time eh?"
"Just leave me be Jim." The pistol was leveled at Israel's forehead. Sweat poured from his brow and dripped down his face in a gush.
"Eat. Then I'll leave you be."
"Jim."
"Ain't nothing to be said Israel," he pushed the metal barrel into Israel's skin, gently boring. "Eat. Eat the damn food I got you. I ain't fixing to waste anymore hard time and good energy on getting you fed when you won't even show me the least bit of courtesy. Howm I sposed to just leave you be?"
"I don't want to."
"Eat." Jim walked around Israel until the gun was at his back, and with a steady push, led him back to the cabin. Israel sat at the table and Jim pushed the plate before him and Israel looked up and Jim and Jim gestured with the barrel, and Israel looked back to the carrion feast lain before him.
"Eat." He ate. It was sour on his tongue, harsh and tough to bite through so he had to tear with his teeth like some beast of nature until the tiniest of scraps could be wretched free and consumed. Jim watched him the whole time, pistol trained, a look of victory on his smile. After a while, Israel stopped.
"Keep eating."
"I'm full."
"You ain't."
"I'm full alright! I don't want no more."
"Eat. Finish."
Israel cast him a glare, but then hovered back over the meat and ate. After all, he was the one with the pistol. If Israel had the pistol things would be different. He'd be the one in charge. The one with the power.
"Eat." Jim said with a smirk. Israel ate. "If you're with me, you gotta eat. Ifn you ain't, then you my enemy. An I don't take kindly to the enemy. I'll put you down Israel," he got close, "I'll put you deep in the damn ground if you ever cross me again. You eat when I tell you to and you'll eat what I bring. Ifn you don't like it, keep it to yerself, otherwise imma put a bullet in you. Understand." Israel nodded.
"Then eat."
Fortune favors those built to be bolded by the atrocious acts they commit in their rising; the man who spills the most blood often is named the victor and he is chanted throughout the annals and tomes of our histories and myths and legends with reverent voices. The lone man astride an earth of his own burning ground; upon an ocean of dead he sails under blackened curaiss and through blackened days and with blackened heart. The ship nimbly breaks the waves of viscera and slime, cresting wide the banks of this river of Jordan, bone flutes singing their mellow, hollow tune. Upon its deck rides the man, the thing, that is death himself; not with gold scythe but with terrible icy sword. His insides are rotted and melting from his bones; his eyes cold glowing orbs of sickening light piercing from behind his skull drawn, skin flaked visage like some intense blanketing of St Elmo's fire. Gaze awhile into this abyss and be mad.
The hull of this warship lands upon the burning ground of the shore with a mighty creaking; like a scream deceased by choking hands. He steps from its quarter like lofted on the very air itself; descending to the earth and kissing it cold with each of his deliberately placed footholds. Ice and thick decay follow in his prints; as if grown from his walking alone; and alone he strides, from the mountain deep to the valley above. He thirsts.
He wanders.
He spreads his terror in the hearts of weak willed men.
He comes to a city in the middle; a vast towering city with fortress walls and leering granite parapets with archers notches and fabulous Romanesque balustrades containing the open air courtyards of expansive villas and great and wide grown vineyards plump with their seasonal offerings, grasping vines like tentacled beats of chaos climbing the vast stone archways and low lying county walls in a slow and inevitable conquering and tiny ramshackle huts of wood and thatch and cloth, slums full of starving vagrant people's clutching at those their last vestiges of human form like some imprisoned sprit or titanic god suffering in Erebus. He walked among them and was as a ghost.
He takes the main road through this shanty town, seeing its peasants, its lepers, its maimed and sick, its multitudinous dead on mule carts gathering flies and maggots and hungry dogs. He sees them fighting each other, killing each other, raping and stealing and hate and anger and the pain and the frustration and the murder fuels him. He eats it. He devours it.
He walks through the gilded arches of a palisade and down the wide and empty avenues there and sees the uniform and keen kept streets once awash in the bloody sacrifice. The blood has long been cleaned away, but its smell, its essence, its aura remains. You cannot hide it from thee; he is all seeing, all knowing, all encompassing. Your sins, and the sins of your fathers, are never washed from his sight.
He steps over phantom and memory into the great and towering antechamber, here too the stench of murder and hate; he walks among the senate corridors and sees the men of spurious valors, contrite words eschewing, divide the wills of men between themselves like a game of cards where many the peasant is the prize. They sleaze and guise and tell tall tales spun with deceit and false information; they own souls they have no right of ownership, and sell land that belongs only to him. He reckons them with an analyzers eye and sees they are but simple cogs in a cosmic wheel; his presence remains unheeded.
He steps into the senate floor, rife with much the same political meandering and musing; here these mortal demigods of their fashioning have gathered to feast. But they take not only of the flesh but of the soil, the sky, the fire, and the frost. They feast upon the spoils of their war. They feast upon the sorrow of all men.
He finds his way into a sacred hall, bedecked in Tyne and sage and burning incenses. At its end is the throne of mans emperor; a vicious and vile man of death and blood. He sits upon his golden seat of appointment, anointed with exotic lotions and perfumes, a stinking mass of exorbitant flesh. He is the true emperor, a mere trifle of glorious past; a mere shadow of imperial excess. The man that greets the people is a plausible imposter; a propaganda for the unenlightened, shuttered masses, he is only the idea of the emperor that they wish to see. This man, this Titus Tactus Monogris III, he holds the true seat of the power, the true scepter of the god king. But his power is equal to that of any man in the eyes of death; his soft underbelly just as susceptible to the gutting blade.
In this impossible stink lies the very greatest of what mankind had to offer this island in the cosmos; a mound of pale, glittering obese flesh, worn and aged by time, this was mankind's savior? No. Just another man. Just another soft and fragile human.
He wraps his hands round the thick fat of the throat and the emperor begins to choke. His eyes bulge and his tongue turns blue like the dark, deep ocean until it is wine colored and bleeding puss and grime. The priests shriek and drop their icons to rush to his side. The guards call for a medic. The emperor slowly dies, and as he does, his aggressor becomes clearer in his eyes; he sees the lonely face of death and cries out, sound stuck in his belly, shout lost in his throat where the blockage has set; the life drains out from his body and he goes to the eternal sleep. The priests moan in mourning and drop to their knees.
"The holy emperor is dead!"
The high priest is sent for to read the last rites and anoint the god king for his trip to the underkingdom; more incense and tithes and spiral, spiritual blessings and frantic prayers. They are heard not a one; for there is no god, only death. This he knows, for it is he. The Lord of death.
He leaves the papal hallway and strides out into the world once more; now rife with chaos. They cry for their dead emperor in languished tones; screeching and clawing at their eyes in accepted fashion. They are but lowly humans after all. They could never understand the depths of his grand design; the power of his eternal plan. How could they, as mindless forms of imperfect flesh? They knew nothing of the wider world and its wonders. He walks down the parade toward the lofty temple interior through the golden edged wood gates and past the wailing women who had begun their watch at that door; he enters the temple and sees the priests at their conspirators table, where they planed and planted their seeds of insurrection; where below their feet in the under carin they called the king of the dead out from his torrid palace to commit this their foul deed. They scurry and sweat and mince words. "It is done" they say, and smile at one another as each wonders when the man beside will betray him to the wolves. It is done and he who is death as exacted his will and taken his payment; though these bald priest eunuchs know nothing of this eternal bargain etched in imperial blood. The land shall not reap for seven seasons and death shall feast upon them then; on his ground. They will rise five emperors in that time, each more impotent than the last; a line of puppet kings set to serve this priestly nobility by pain of dismemberment. Death will have his payment.
He walks among them and feels the weight of their suffering minds. Only he knows their short life spans, written on their harried brows like a brand. Not a one shall survive the weeks and months to come; the chaos and peril they have unleashed upon themselves will succumb each and Everyman in this twilight kingdom, and death shall remain. He is lord of this land now, until the coin he desires has changed hands. Seven seasons. Seven seasons in the shadow of his minion, the carrion crow and the scavenging dog. Seven seasons in the winter of growing, under the heel of sacrifice. Seven seasons until a spring.
He makes his way through those blood bedecked passageway, the avenue aligned with the vein of the earth current, along its walls icons of emperors past. Here he stops and watches the flashing images of the past; like the pages of some enlightened tome passing through the length and breadth of time, he is taken back to when there was no city but a barren hillside village in the distance of history. He watches it grow, it's people live and seed and die and repeat the process through generations. He sees them war and spill their blood and he sees them love and learn and sweat under the hot sun in its noon zenith. He sees the city bolster and bloom; until it its the seat of some tactical, ancient power. Soon that power is named dynasty, kingdom, empire. The sons of the wealthy and war heroic take what once was a simple agrarian outpost to a glittering jewel of their god given (or taken) crowns. He sees it all in a matter of fleeting moments, like some spectral prophet perched upon the edge of a void in the natural flow; and once seen he cannot unsee. He has marked these wretched creatures for what they truly are. Gibbering mouthed and ape legged beasts, lords only of communication and terror. They build machines, and machines to make machines, and render themselves a worthless host of pale and placid man flesh.
He knows not of love; he cannot know love, he is above such matters. He can only know what he is; a bringer. And there are many like him, but none quite as definite; as uncontrollable, as menacing. Man fears death, and that fear makes him great. Everyman flees from death, but no man escapes. There are many like him, not a one so deliberate; undefined and floating cosmically altered beings abstain the out reaches of space and time and are minuscule in their connection to the island planet. Not so with he. Like some watchman he strides the gates of our mortal existence and the land of decay, bound to the human cycle that has played out since inception. For his inevitability reigns supreme, a suzerain and a sultan. His coming has been marked.
