Chapter 8
I
Brugge, 2001
The air inside the art gallery the air was stale and had the sweet sickly smell of old things. The summer heat had made visiting the museum complex with its glass ceilings and hothouse-like constructions as comfortable as going inside a sauna with your clothes on. Groups of sweaty tourists were chain-ganged pass the many artworks in a long tired line. Many of them were wondering why the paint was not yet dripping from the canvases.
The three fallen angels, dressed in conventional 21th century outfits, have confiscated one of the rare benches, and were sitting right in front of a triptych, a 17th century art work consisting of three separate painted panels that depicted a scene in the afterlife. With all the demons, fire and brimstones, and many naked tormented souls crawling all over the place, it was not difficult to guess what it must represent according to the long dead painter.
"So this is hell then." Raguel said, licking the soft serve from his ice cream cone. It was forbidden to consume anything in the art gallery, but being a fallen angel had its merits. The problem was easily remedied with a cheap optical trick. According to the security officer who watched the three men from a corner nearby, the ex angel of vengeance was just licking air, which still struck the human as mightily odd, but was not offensive enough to get a paying visitor removed from the premise.
"I say, that is rather depressing." Raguel concluded with a yawn.
Zambriem squinted his eyes and leaned forward. His skin condition had improved a little. He looked more like a man in his mid thirties suffering of a severe case of eczema instead of a leprosy victim now, but he was still scaring away the little ones. "What is that demon doing over there?" He pointed out the little figure in the left corner of the canvas.
"Ah! That one is eating the sinners. He is consuming them and passing them out in a continues circle." Lucifer explained. He was dressed in fashionable black and wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses that made him look, at least in his own mind, quite intelligent and sophisticated.
"If you expect me to do that, I can tell you right now, I pass." Raguel commented. Appalled by the idea, he had suddenly lost his appetite and dumped the rest of his cold treat in a bin nearby.
"There is nothing unnatural about defecation." Lucifer sighed. "Every living creature does it."
"Are you kidding me? It is very unnatural if you have to spend eternity eating your own shi-"
"Oh why are we even here." Zambriem interrupted Raguel. "I miss master Crock.' He lamented. "This era does not suit me very well. There are so many strange noises and funny smells in the air. Can we not go back to the 15th century when it was all peaceful and quiet?"
"We are here because Lucifer asked me to take you to the very pinnacle of human civilization to see the artworks concerning the concept of hell." Raguel explained with a tired expression on his face while he turned to look at his brother. "Honestly, I do worry about you sometimes. We must have explained it to you a hundred times by now."
Zambriem shook his head stubbornly. "No that is not what I meant. I mean to what purpose are we here?"
"Oh I see, I agree with that." Raguel nodded, turning to Lucifer. "Indeed, don't we have better things to do? I thought we needed to go after the Avernus."
"We are here because I need inspiration." Lucifer put down his pencil that he had used to scribble down notes on a piece of paper. How could these two expect him just design a whole realm from scratch? Sometimes he really wished that his current companions had a more developed intellectual and artistic side. At least Clemens was rather good at sculpting, and Raziel, although boring and uptight as hell, fancied himself a bit of a philosopher. Raguel only had a talent for killing things and god knows what Zambriem was thinking half of the time and why.
"Creating a well-functioning version of hell requires immaculate planning." He tried to explain. "You can't just make it all up on the way. That would result in utter chaos."
"Really? I don't think our father had that much of a plan when he created the universe, and that turned out to be just working fine. Don't you think you're a bit over-complicating this?" Raguel smirked resting his hands against the back of his head.
"Surely, we need to do a little better than our father did?" Lucifer replied, trying to keep his calm.
"Oh no…You're not going down that old route again, are you?" Zambriem asked worriedly. "Seriously, your pride will be the end of us."
Lucifer rolled his eyes and just managed to suppress a sigh of pure agitation. No matter what he said, there was no way of pleasing these two. "I just meant we need to come up with something truly great that would impress him. We can't just muddle up the afterlife for his pet species and present to him a version of hell that is riddled with defects. It has to be worthy of the old man if we want him to take us back."
"That sounds a little bit better." Zambriem muttered, his eyes glazing over as he drifting back into his own jumbled thoughts.
Lucifer removed his glasses and dug his fingernails into his nosebridge, feeling every inch the tormented artist. "Anyway, Raguel, are you sure we are at the right place and the right time here?"
They had been visiting hundreds of museums and had been looking into the collections of thousands upon thousands of artworks that were available for viewing, but none had really given him the much craved fire of inspiration that he had hoped for.
"Yep. Why do you ask?"
"It's just I am not feeling much inspired. Is there not a later time point that we may visit to see what civilization has come up with concerning this subject?"
"Oh no. Absolutely not." Raguel commented, sounding pretty much convinced. "I can assure you, this is the finest moment in human civilization. It is only going downhill from 2001 onwards, from 9th of November to be precise. A couple of decades from now, and there will be elected mad megalomaniacs, pushing in red buttons and ruining it for everyone. The whole thing is going to go up in radiation and smoke. You want to see the best that humankind was ever able to produce? This is it. It is the only moment in history in which most that is worth seeing is more or less still intact and not burnt or blasted into smithereens."
Raguel's face suddenly acquired a more puzzled look. "Lucifer?"
"Hmm, yes." Lucifer mumbled back while he was chewing on the back end of the pencil in contemplation.
"Did you ever, since you took this form, have a good look in the mirror at yourself?"
"Not really." Lucifer replied. He found it a rather strange question. It was just a human vessel, like any other he had before. "What's your point?"
"Is it really just me, or is there something very wrong with how you look?"
"What do you mean?" Lucifer had just finished his sentence when the strong feeling of unsettlement that had occurred to him before returned with a vengeance. He once again could recall having this exact same experience in the larder of the monastery the day his consciousness was restored, and he remembered how Zambriem had reacted when he freed him from his tree prison. He could also, with some panic, recall what happened exactly after these brief moments of clarity.
With trembling fingers, he struggled to pick up the pencil and guide it to paper.
He had to remember it this time. Whatever he was going to find out in the following brief moments, he must not let it slip away again. With a hand that suddenly seemed to have a will of its own, he started to write down the few words that came up in his confusing swirling mind.
"It is the light isn't it?" Raguel muttered. His tongue seemed to speak words that were not his own, and he wouldn't be able to recall any of this in a second or so, but for now, he was pointing out the truth to Lucifer. "That part of you that was once shining, it is no longer there." He whispered.
As sudden as the revelation had exposed itself, as abruptly did it end. Raguel puzzled frown softened and his eyes widened till he was gazing at Lucifer with the same confused look that Zambriem had once showed him. "Did…did I just say anything to you? I can't really remember."
Like Raguel, Lucifer had much forgotten about the conversation from just moments before, but unlike his brother, he had something to help him jog his memory. In his hands, he held a piece of paper with his own handwriting scribbled feverishly across the lines. Puzzled, he brought it closer and studied it.
Remember! It read.
Something lost
Something shining
"I don't see you Morningstar." Zambriem had once said to him, and then there was his scar, the one that ran all the way from his right shoulder to the tip of his right hand.
Lucifer mouth dropped open when he finally recalled what had been hidden from his memories for so long. "Oh hell." He muttered, gazing at the piece of paper with a grim expression on his face. "Oh bloody hell."
He did not need to decipher the final scribbled word on the paper to know exactly what was written on it.
Morningstar
II
"Are you awake Richard?"
It was still dark. The cabin was filled with the scent of wood smoke of the cooking fire that had extinguished hours earlier. Ophelia was standing in front of my bed. She was fully dressed, and carried a bag that hung low near her hip.
"Are you going out into the woods again?" I asked, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
"You want to come along?"
I got dressed and followed her out into the courtyard where Ophelia saddled up her horse and climbed on.
"Where are we going?" I noted that the moon shone full and bright through the crowns of the surrounding trees.
"You will see when we get there." Was her only answer.
I was not accustomed to be the second rider on the back. Noticing that I was searching for something to hold on after I had mounted, she took my good right hand and placed it firmly around her waist.
"This is highly inappropriate." I told her, remembering the strict court etiquettes.
She returned me a smile. "Just hold on. I don't want you to fall off and break your neck."
We rode over the same narrow upwards winding path and passed the exact spot where Greybeard had met his untimely demise. I did not have a natural fear of heights, but as the sharp drop of the cliff began to reveal itself, I could not help myself from tightening my grip around Ophelia's waist.
After we reached the summit, she guided the horse to take a route that diverted from the main path and led into the forest. Trunks and undergrowth grew thicker as we ventured deeper, till there was barely open ground left for the horse to tread on. I looked up at the sky, and noticed that the large moon and the stars were barely visible through the dense crisscrossing tangles of skeletal branches.
The journey continued till the forest growth once again became sparser, and we encountered a small open space. A beam of moonlight spread a silver disk over the forest floor.
We dismounted. Ophelia took out her dagger and knelt down to remove some of the top layer of soil. She soon revealed a circle of growth, saplings with unusual red foliage, half hidden between last year's dry crumble of fallen leaves.
"What are these?" I asked, as I watched her dig out one of the plants from the still half-frozen ground.
"Mandrake roots. I came here often with my father to collect them. You are supposed to harvest these at winter nights when the moon is full. That's when the plant roots are at their strongest, and their medical properties are at their most useful."
I did not immediate understood what she meant, till she had freed enough soil around the little plant and asked me to help her pull it loose. With both of us grabbing on to the stem, it still took a lot of effort to get the roots released from the soil. When it finally let go, an extensive web came with it, with bits of earth still clinging on.
"What do you use this for?" I had no experience with medicinal plants, other than those who had been given to me in one form or another by the court healers.
"You boil it down together with wolfs claw, nettle, worms tongue and a handful of cloves to make it into a thick potion. You could add a table spoon of honey to taste if you like. It is quite bitter. My father used it to treat plaque victims."
"You're telling me that you use this to make a cure for pestilence?" I concluded, furrowing my brows.
"You don't believe me?" She asked, wiping her hands clean over the folds of her dress.
I had never heard of the existence of a cure for the disease, not even from the royal physicians, who were considered the most esteemed and most knowledgeable men of the realm. "I don't think there is anything that works against it. The only way to deal with is to make sure you never catch it."
"Well, this works, because this is no ordinary mandrake." She made a cut in the skin of the root with her dagger and showed it to me.
For a short moment, I distrusted if what I saw was not a distortion of color by the moonlight. The incision was weeping a deep dark liquid. "This looks like blood."
"That's because it is blood. The roots of the plants run very deep. They can reach layers that have not seen daylight for decades."
"You're really telling me this?" I asked, raising my brows. "There is blood, in the soil?" My face must have shown my utter disbelief as plainly as an open book to her, for she responded most defensively.
"Yes, there is blood in this soil, for this the exact place, where many years ago, an angel fell to earth."
I wondered if she was truly mad enough to believe in such tripe or that she was just pulling my leg. It worried me greatly that her expression remained one of grim seriousness.
"You are skeptical?"
"Forgive me, digging for a wonder plant that would cure the world of the plague aside, I indeed find it very hard to believe that this crimson sap that comes out of it, is in fact the sacred blood spilled from a wounded angel." I replied with a voice dripped with sarcasm.
"It is the truth." She said it in a manner that was so full of conviction that I had no residual doubt that she was meaning every word of it. "My father told me this, and I believe him. He would never lie to me."
"What kind of angel was he then talking about?" I smirked, crossing my arms over my chest after having decided to play along with her outrageous story. "Did he mean the fallen one? The devil?" The comment was meant to be light-hearted, but just mentioning the devil caused such sudden unease in my heart that it dampened any impulse I had to tease her any further.
"No." She replied in a soft serious voice. "This angel was kind. He did not fall because of his arrogance. He fell because he was merciful."
"That does not make any sense." I scoffed.
"You don't believe in angels?"
"No I don't." I replied with great stubbornness.
"What do you believe in?"
"In ghosts." I replied, thinking of my dead nephews, and of Buckingham goading me to commit murder. "I believe in the ugliness of human nature that can only be subdued by a merciless rule and by severe punishment." I added, thinking of my own life and what came after. "I believe in witchcraft, and in the devil." I concluded with a slight tremble in my voice, as Margaret's warning of how the devil was after my soul, haunted my mind. Oh for God's sake, who was I to taunt Ophelia, questioning her beliefs and her sanity? My own guilt-ridden mind was a hornet's nest of phobias and hallucinations, and was sicker than hers would ever be.
"So you see the dark, but cannot imagine that there is also light?" There was disappointment in her voice. "I pity you Richard. I truly do. You sound like a man without hope."
"You are my hope." I blurted out, before she turned away from me, before I could stop myself, before even my thoughts could process with I had just so very clumsily said.
She turned and gazed at me with large questioning eyes. Terrified, but realizing that I could not take back what was already spoken, I rambled on.
"Before I met you, my world was a most horrible and frightful place. My whole existence was truly miserable. I thought that my life was over, but then I met you. I am fully aware that I am only still alive because of you. So I wish I could…" I paused, and swallowed the words that I wanted to really say. "I could reward you in any way for your kindness."
"There is really no need -"
"What I mean to say is..." I interrupted her most impatiently. "I am grateful. Although sometimes it doesn't seem so, I am truly grateful to you. I am sorry if I have ever treated you unkindly."
The way she reacted to my clumsy apology, the curling of her lips, the faint blush rushing over her cheeks, it made my damned spirit light up like a star in the darkest of nights.
"Here, take this." she handed me the dagger. It was the same one that I took to wreck her bedding that night in her cabin.
"Help me dig out more of these roots before dawn.' She requested. "We need plenty more for the potion."
TBC
