the stories of morte...

Becoming

I am conscious. There is no feeling of waking. No transition from the world of dream filled sleep. Only a sudden consciousness of being - and darkness. Darkness, and silence. And memory.

I wake into silence. The last of the dying moon is setting outside my bedroom window. I walk to the window and watch as the bright crescent vanishes below the horizon and wish for my husband's death and my release. It is the new god who hears me and sends his priest in answer.

He comes through the new snow on midwinter's eve. Clad in white astride a heavy-set mountain pony, he rides out of the forest as the moon vanishes. I watch as my husband's men - barbarians all - meet him in the courtyard, their swords drawn. The battle is brief. I see less than nothing - a blur. At the end he stands alone, his white robes stained black with dark blood. He mirrors the snow around him.

I am lying down.

I lie at the top of the stairs - watching, listening - as the stranger enters our hall. My husband lies drunk before the fire. The sound of the door closing wakes him.

"Who are you that you interrupt a Lord at his meat?"

"I am the Lord your God," says the stranger. "I offer eternal life." He steps forward into the candlelight. His arms outspread, he displays the results of the earlier carnage. His hair is liquid gold in the flickering light.

"You are mad." My husband waves his tankard threateningly - a comical gesture.

"I am eternal." The stranger smiles, baring teeth too long, too sharp.

"You are dead." My husband draws his sword and stands, staggers, before the stranger.

I watch as the stranger whispers a prayer to his god, and again all is a blur. When it is over my husband lies dead. The stranger stands, wiping blood from his face. My cry of joy is heard. I am discovered.

There is pain in my head and neck and shoulder. It is like a weight pulling me down, upending a tenuous balance. My fingers, too, pulse with similar fire. I touch thumb to fingertips and feel slippery dampness, shattered nails. There is a taste of blood in my mouth, deep in my throat. A copper tang fills my nostrils. Cold fear fills my heart.

The stranger stands before me, his hands on my shoulders. To my left is the fireplace: warming. To my right is my husband: cold and pale. I do not remember descending the stairs. The stranger strokes my hair and smiles.

"He who drinks of my blood shall have eternal life." His voice is deep and rich, imploring. He takes my hands in his. His eyes are my world - pits of blackness flecked with flame. "Do you wish eternal life, child?"

"Yes." I do not know why I answer so, but I yearn for the power I feel within him.

Slowly I spread my fingers over the surface beneath me. It is hard and rough. Questing they encounter fine ridges, stretching out they explore long corrugations of grain. A sound, a faint scraping, soft and feathered, meets my ears. The surface beneath me is wood, of closely fitted planks. Man made. In places deep fissures interrupt the grain, brittle fragments wedged within tell their own story. I dig the remains of my fingernails into the retreating texture of the timber and a faint squeak is my only reward. That, and more pain.

He reaches forward, teasing my hair away from my shoulders, from my neck. His hands are cold and strong. With one hand on my shoulder, one hand about my back, he leans down and kisses my neck.

Pain explodes - briefly - then a flood of warmth and peace and naked lust overcomes me. I lean in against him, urging him deeper despite the weakness I feel growing within me. Tendrils of warmth spread from my neck, downwards. He licks them clean.

My strength is gone. Only his holds me upright. He senses this and stops, lifting me into his arms.

I reach outward and sideways. Within inches my hands collide with vertical surfaces of the same timber. Gentle, echoing thuds. My searching fingers find a fine gap, a join, and the head of a protruding nail - hard and smooth. I stretch my legs, reaching down and out with my feet and toes. Bare toes meet wood, catch a splinter. I gasp slightly with renewed pain and fear.

He stands above me now. He holds a knife. He opens his wrist and pours eternal life. I open my mouth and drink. It is too much. I gag, struggling. He holds me still - one hand on my head, one hand above me pouring both life and death.

Panicked fists pound the timbers above me. My voice, silent until now, cries out at the terror of confinement, begging an indifferent God for a different truth. Not even echoes answer me. The only change in my world is a fine cascade of dust and earth. Entering through flexing timbers, it settles on my face and arms like a dusting of snow. I close my eyes on the deluge. My arms relax back to my sides. Resigned.

I drink.

I am boxed.

I am cursed.

I am buried.

I am dying.

I am dead.

I live.

Power surges. My hands grab his wrist and I drink, sucking hard against collapsing veins. He pulls back. For a brief moment I smell fear; then, releasing my head, he smashes his fist across my face. His ring cuts into the flesh above my left eye. I subside.

I am not dead. I think and feel and death holds no claim on such qualities. Death knows no pain and I am filled with pain. A deep ache is waking in my throat in response to an even deeper emptiness within. Hunger gnaws at my belly, clenches my throat.

Barely conscious I feel hands grab me, drag me, drop me.

I lie still and listen to my world. No noise greets my ears. Small sounds only, of movement - the brush of flesh on timber, the rustle of cloth, a slight creak as I move my weight within my prison. These are the only sounds I hear. Nothing comes from without.

I open my eyes to darkness interrupted by faint strands of light, of muffled sounds of hammering as I am sealed within my prison.

The realisation that I am not breathing is slow. Once acknowledged panic sucks me a deep lung-full of stale and dusty air. It tastes faintly of pine, and the heavy rich moisture of deep earth. Of something rotten. I spit dust and grit from my mouth then hold my breath and listen again. This time I tune within, to the sounds of my body.

My screams and pleas leave me hoarse. I hear his voice "…and on the third day you shall rise." My heart believes.

There is no growling in my stomach to tell of the building hunger I feel. There is no thrum within my ears to betray a beating heart. I reach a hand to my throat and search for the confirmation of my pulse. Cold fingers meet the cold flesh of my neck, slide over the thick slippery film that surrounds two ragged wounds below my jaw. At least the pain I feel is real. Questing hands move further towards my face, skimming its surface for evidence of other injury. There is a wound above my left eye - long and thin and clean as if delivered by something sharp. The slippery feel I have come to associate with blood is absent here. Only a faint crusting remains. The eye is not swollen, though the bone beneath aches.

I panic and claw at my surrounds, tearing my nails against newly hewn timbers. The smell of my own blood fills me with hunger and sickness.

I laugh out loud, knowing that only I and the Devil can hear.

Three days.

I am dead.

Three days.

I do not breathe. No beating heart exists within my chest. A wound, inflicted after death, has never been the source of flowing blood.

Three days.

I am dead and this is Hell, but not even Hell can hold one such as I.

Rebirth.

I tear at timbers, claw and push at the packed earth above me, shovelling it into the space where I have been. New earth falls on my face, but I am not limited by breath. Each handful brings me closer to my goal while encasing me in a new prison of my own making. Yet hunger drives me. A hunger like I have never known.

I burst through into crisp clear air. It is snowing. I breathe deeply, cleansing my lungs of death and decay. I see him then.

The stranger waits. In his arms is my maid. She is in a faint. I can smell the fear in her blood and ache in hunger at the scent. He lies her on the snow before me, gently brushing the dirt from my hair and face.

"Drink," he says.

I kiss his hand and then her neck, allowing my teeth to tear the tender skin of her throat and pierce the vein below. I drink my fill, quenching the deep hunger within me. New strength flows and I pull myself free of the earth to stand before my saviour.