The Seventh Priest
When I wrote Galeway back in September, I hadn't expected so many people would like the story: It was written more out of pure fun, to please myself. When I got so many favorites and story alerts I was surprised, really, but at the same time I am happy. Here is a bonus chapter written for my readers who have either added Galeway to their favorites and alerts or simply had dropped in to write me heartwarming reviews.
I always take my readers seriously, both as a writer and as another somebody across the net. Here is a little token of appreciation, just for you guys. :-)
Note: Some scenes are reminiscent from Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 – Since chapter 5 is an optional one, this has nothing to do with it.
Summary: Oneshot – Chapter is made as an alternate to the original epilogue. Starring the real Kisara and Seto in the present-day Japan.
Disclaimer: I just own the plot.
The Seventh Priest
"We will be together again…"
I SAW HIM ONE SPRING EVENING at a small jazz bar located near a fashionable district in Aoyama. He was alone, his whole attention drawn to a book in front of him. It was early evening, still quite bright outside, but something told me that the man would rather be inside the dimly-lit bar, staying with himself. He was a book with its cover concealed, a rare insect protecting himself under an impressive skin. That skin was a classic Burberry trench, the newest model of Tag Heuer sport glasses and a pair of Ferragamo patent leather loafers.
He was sitting at a table right next to the window. I was attracted, alright; I'd never seen that kind of man in a long time. I wouldn't say that he was a handsome man, because he had a passionate look on his face that was somehow intimidating. Regular girls would easily take him as handsome, but not for me, not for that stern air about him.
THE JAZZ BAR was named after a vintage Jean-Luc Goddard film, Pierrot le Fou. Certainly not a famous one: more of a deserted jazz bar at the end of a small street. The atmosphere in there wasn't something I'd say as comfortable: The air reeked of dust, coffee, and leather. The owner was a woman in his mid forties and her young son about my age. Her smile was ill-at-ease as she welcomed me.
"Black coffee," I said to her, "Make it really black."
She smiled.
The man still had his eyes to the book. A medium paperback. I made an attempt to read a line or two, just in case I'd figure out the title. Not so that I would be able to attract him by talking about it later, I simply wanted to know what the book was. For such man the book would be half of his personality, probably even a nice seventy per cent of it. You would be able to know it by just one look that he was a voracious reader.
I SAT TWO TABLES AWAY FROM HIM. I'd rather a wooden chair and a simple wooden table. I disliked the impression of sitting lazily on a sofa. He was still reading very seriously, as if the world around him had vanished. His cell phone rang from time to time, which he ignored for several times before finally turning it off.
The coffee arrived. I was still looking at him.
"Ever wonder why a man like that would rather be inside a ravaged jazz bar?"
The owner's son smiled as he moved the cup from the tray to my table.
I looked around. An old saxophone player and a pianist about the same age were on the small stage in the corner. They were playing their renditions of Bud Powell and Duke Ellington, lighting a cigarette from time to time, as if it was their lives that they were playing for. Really, that was a good performance.
"I wouldn't say 'ravaged'," I said.
"Then I take you are noticing that man," he said, "He's a frequent. I heard he's a boss of this big company."
I said nothing. When he was about to move a small glass of liquid sugar to the table, I waved it off.
He continued: "Whether that 'big company' is a Mitsubishi or not, I'm pretty sure he must be pretty damn rich."
"He sure looks 'damn rich'," I said, chuckling.
The man lifted his eyes from the book, took of his glasses, put it down on the table, took a sip of his coffee then massaged his eyes while glancing out the windows. The way he gazed outside gave me the impression that he was looking for a missing thing amidst the crowds and lights.
It wasn't even a minute later when our eyes met. The owner's son was still there by my table, but soon leaved with an unhappy look on his face.
The music on the background was "The Star-Crossed Lovers".
THE MAN SMILED. OR WAS IT A SMILE? It lasted for several seconds, very short, until he waved at the owner's son who was already behind the counter for a pack of Camels.
"Are yours new?" asked the man as soon as the young man reached his table, "The last thing I want is cigarettes that taste like wet woods."
"New," the young man's voice trembled as he spoke, "We've just restocked them yesterdays."
I waited for a while before taking my own book from the bag; probably our eyes would meet again. That never happened. He had returned to the book. I looked at him for a long time; I took him as an impressive stranger. All of his movements shouted grace and arrogance: The slim, long fingers he used to turn the yellowed pages, the ones that held the cigarette… His long, slim legs wrapped in fine suede trousers were crossed. The entire scene looked like a caption from an old European movie.
Then there was the song "Sophisticated Lady".
I WORKED IN A SMALL LIBRARY IN SHINJUKU, a private-owned one. The library was never crowded. To start with, it wasn't even a very famous place. The biggest number of visitors was about twenty, or thirty. For years I'd never seen the record increased. I guess the place had sort of chosen its own fate. My grandfather's friend who owned it died last year with no heir with a passion for books, so I was kind of in charge of it.
Come to think of it: the previous owner had dedicated his life to collect and read one rare book of another, and he died with no one willing to take care of what used to be his personal sanctuary.
The library struck me as having the life of its own, more like a world detached from the real one. I always believed too much collision with reality would bring the building crumbling.
The building was a mixture of old European and Japanese architecture. More of Japanese actually, except for the glass dome above the round hall in the center. Lights, moon and sun, would filter through, making the round hall looked like an area inside a blurred dream. The round hall was the only place visitors loved the most. Most of them would look up, sometimes for a long time, as if amazed before they sat down on a sofa nearby. Some of them had even told me personally that they took the round hall as a dream, or a sanctuary.
If there was only a visitor or two I'd go to the history books section then take a random title or two, most of them were translated centuries-old literatures of Egyptian history. I didn't know what it was about Egypt that got me enchanted: Once I started reading I could hardly put it down. I'd read for four or six hours with only a cup of coffee in front of me, and an occasional half-an-hour break. So much for this habit, I had gotten horribly skinny. My friends started criticizing my look, some had even accused me of concealing an eating disorder. I remained indifferent.
My "horrible" thinness was caused by thick, leather-bound old books of Egyptian history, nothing else.
THE TITLE OF THE BOOK I WAS READING was The Seventh Priest.
The introduction had mentioned that Priest Seth was among the seven honorable priests of an Egyptian Pharaoh whose name the writer couldn't discover because the emblem found around his mummified neck had been badly scratched as if to conceal the name. Priest Seth was, according to the book, a stern believer in spirits, especially of the ones inside sacred items called Millennium Items (The writer was experiencing difficulty at this point, because most recites from the transcription to justify the fact about the Priest being spiritual was heavy with [illegible] between the words).
The book was in diary format: Probably a diary of an unknown soldier or citizen in that era, the fall of the once-glorious empire. The writer, who had worked on arranging the ancient transcriptions into a story while adding lines of interpretations to complement the age-old literature, was an American who would be 101 if he lived up to this year.
I Googled his name and found out that he'd died a year after the completion of the book.
A mysterious cause.
The kingdom, once glorious, was struck by a sudden turmoil as a spirit-carrying thief [illegible] attacked the palace. The Pharaoh and his seven Priests had taken over the grandest responsibility to defend the kingdom. Most of the priests died defending it, among them one of the strongest one Shada and [illegible], the only priestess.
Priest Seth went missing during the fifth day of the ambush. He was later found escaping from the dungeon, carrying a silver-haired woman in his arms. She was her lover, the possessor of the White Dragon Spirit.
I discovered her name later, engraved on a simple tombstone, [illegible]. The Priest had buried her himself, having allowed no other hand to hold the woman's dead body.
She was very beautiful even in death, [illegible], and I took her as having something inside her spirit, something that had held her beauty in place.
I was about turn the page when a woman walked in. She was wearing a long white dress that looked good on her finely tanned skin. Her hair was very black and very long, and was let down. Her face reminded me of Greta Garbo's Cleopatra, only she looked more original and more Egyptian than the vintage Hollywood rendition. The way she walked were light, fast, almost seem from behind the counter that she was gliding on air instead of walking. She had such ghostly presence, but it was probably because of her haunting beauty and the cold kind of arrogance in her eyes.
She asked me for The Seventh Priest.
"SORRY, THIS BOOK IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR RENTING," I said.
She leaned closer and said in a low, piercing tone:
"You don't know, Lady," she said, "The danger that you're going to face is not going to wait until you've finished reading it."
I shook my head and smiled, trying to give the impression that I was unperturbed.
"I'm sorry for the inconvenience." I said, changing the topic. Something told me that the woman would launch into endless talks of ancient mysticisms if I played her game, so I'd rather not.
She took a small paper from her bag then wrote down her name and contact number. An Egyptian name: Isis. I took her as a perfect personification of the name: her haunting presence, her unbelievably good looks, her throaty voice… She left soon after she'd finished writing, without even a parting word.
The Priest was torn between the dark desire of his father and his humanly kindness, an old priest [illegible] who was possessed by the spirit of death to draw the white dragon spirit out of his lover's body. To this, the Priest Seth had said that he'd rather let her live. He'd rather live, despite his bleeding feet and another close step to the throne.
The lover died at daylight.
I took the book everywhere: to my room, the dining table, to cafés or restaurants I visited during afternoon break… to Pierrot le Fou after I closed the library at seven. That was the second time after a fortnight when I saw that man again. He was sitting right at the table by the window as he was the first time, reading a different book – a thick hardback this time – smoking his regular Camels with legs crossed. He had the same passionate gaze as he leafed through the pages, as he corrected the placement of his glasses, as he crossed and re-crossed his legs. The young man behind looked at him with a distant gaze, as if trying to tell himself that he would rather had nothing to do with the man.
I ordered my usual thick black coffee and was about to spread The Seventh Priest on wooden table when the man looked at me. It was more of a suspecting gaze than an enchanted one, although I wouldn't mind both. He kept looking at me, then the book on the table, as if he'd known and read it over and over again. Before his death, the old owner had told me that The Seventh Priest in the library was the only copy left in Japan, after its massive banning and burning back in the 60s.
He stood up then approached my table. He had a slim glass of thick red wine in his hand. "Can I join you?" he asked with his deep, dark, scratchy kind of voice. I nodded. (Honestly I'd rather this man left me alone, but who was I to turn down a stranger?)
"A very old copy, isn't it?"
"Yes, a… fifties edition," I said, "Probably even the publisher had been folded."
He smiled – or was it? Whether the man wanted to give me the impression that he was actually smiling or not, smiling was probably the expression he disliked the most.
"How would you know if the transcripts could be trusted?"
"Are you talking about the ones in the book?"
He nodded.
"Even these were stories which were collected to lead us into believing that they had once happened – only gods know," I said. "Besides, real or not, it is the essence of the history that got me interested, not the theories."
He glanced at his table for a while, to make sure that his book and cigarette pack were there.
"Sometimes you would know its realness by heart, not science."
I smiled. I didn't care how wide it was: his statement made me really glad.
"Say," I said, leaning forward, "Have you ever got that… distant, sad feeling as you read history books? A feeling of you being so close, yet so far from the history itself?"
In a low tone, he said:
"Yes, at times," he said, "Two books before this one I was reading was a rare edition about a young Egyptian Pharaoh and his seven priests. It was in French, because the author had been doing it discreetly in Algeria."
"Good transcription?"
"Bad transcription," he said, "There were too many unreadable bits between the lines. I wondered why in the first place the publisher had decided to publish the book, although the distribution wasn't meant to cover the areas outside the country."
"Sometimes reasons were just reasons, leave alone the cause." I said.
He smiled: another faint one.
"Say," he said, "a glass of red wine?"
I nodded.
"Name's Kisara," I said. "We've been talking without even knowing the names."
"Kaiba Seto," he said.
"Please tell me that you're not the young CEO in the news?"
He lifted the glasses from his eyes. As he did so, his light brown hair brushed the tips of the rimless lenses.
"Unfortunately," he said, "I am him."
"The press is sort of having this… love/hate relationship with you," I said with a smile. "Where is your famous coldness? I couldn't see it today."
"It doesn't have to be with me all the time," he said. "Probably today's your lucky day, because I don't have it with me."
The red wine was served.
IT WAS A DARK HUNGER that had taken over the soul of the Priest. After her death, all of a sudden he went after the throne, the half-collapsed throne, for a reason kept secret by the gods. The Pharaoh [illegible] agreed to hand it over on one condition: The Priest had to win a match in a battle of spirits…
The woman Isis came again the following day. She stared at me right in the eyes with that piercing look of hers, telling me that the danger was approaching. "You would be able to sense it close, The Dark Heart. He is here in this present-day. He is approaching."
I pretended as if I hadn't heard a disturbing thing. I thanked her for her attention. She asked me again for The Seventh Priest. Again I told her that the book was a private collection, renting was prohibited.
"Lady, you and a man are in danger," Isis said. "You and a man that once had a connection in the past. The times were about to be interlaced atop each other – the old current and the new one."
I shook my head.
"Look, Madame," I said. "Really, I don't know what you're talking about: the time, the mysticism, and this one man with whom we would be in a danger. I know nothing, I am just a reader of these history books. I even had zero connection with the authors, dead or alive, or the original manuscripts. If you really want the book that badly, I could arrange a copy for you, but please never, never again trying to scare me off. I am just a librarian, a Nobody, perhaps and I have nothing to do with Egyptian history."
The time I finished talking, I felt as if I'd run out of breath.
"How about a glass of iced milk? I'm about to prepare one for myself as well."
She said nothing. I took the no-response as a yes, so I went to the kitchen then prepared two tall glasses of iced milk.
The time I returned to the desk, the woman had left.
I had a feeling that I would never see her again.
I SAW THE SPARKS AGAINST THE DARK SKY. The match had taken place amidst the ruined palace; once the stones were majestic, the decorations brimmed with precious stones, but then in a week following the ambush of the Thief, everything had gone. Gone, as if the gods had decided to abandon the young Pharaoh, his kingdom, and the young Priest in front of him.
The White Dragon Spirit tried talking to him from time to time, the Priest. She said that she would protect him, but not for the power he was about to take over. The Priest said nothing, but I had seen his face changed expression. I remembered the day I accompanied him to the street markets, where he had first seen the lover: He, Priest Seth, he had the same look in his eyes as the first time he landed the eyes on the woman.
FIRST DAY OF MARCH.
It was raining when I met the CEO again at Pierrot le Fou. He had with him two books: one was the one he was reading, and the other one a slim volume I'd seen the first time I saw him with.
"There you are," he said. "Something told me that you're going to be here, today, so I have the book with me."
I suggested him to move from the sofa to my usual place, the one with wooden chairs. For a moment I'd merely forgotten that I was asking to a very rich young man with a high social rank to follow my… request. It seemed rather surprising even in the mind.
"I may disappoint you," I said, "But I don't read French."
"No, that's fine," he said. "There are only about two pages where the story reached the peak – that was the time I felt distant, sad. I am going to translate them for you in my notebook."
"Much obliged," I said. "Anyway mine, the story makes me feel distant all the time. I'll lend you this after I'd finished reading, alright? I'm at the tenth chapter now; they were having sort of this… match of spirits, the Priest and the young Pharaoh."
"Seems like you have a lot more to tell."
I wondered for a while whether I should really tell him about Isis and her warnings. I wonder if he'd think that I was crazy, like Isis, or that he would believe me. All of a sudden I became aware of how I'd look in front of him. This insecurity was like no other: This was a sentiment from… a long time ago, a really long time. It was as if I'd experienced this specific kind of sentiment from in the past. When the past was, I knew almost nothing of it.
"There was this woman," I said in a low voice, "It was until two weeks ago she kept appearing, day after day, to warn me about reading this book, and that a danger is waiting for me and a man I know nothing of him yet. I thought she was some kind of a shaman, or magician. She had this ghastly presence about her – how to say – long makes short, she scared me off. I told her that I wanted no more warnings, but she never came back since then.
"Oh, she said something about the possible interlacing between the old time and the new one… Said that it is going to happen soon, the interlacing, and The Dark Heart is approaching: as in present tense. He is approaching…"
When I finished talking, he said nothing, just kept looking at me.
I thought the story about the woman had scared him off, too, but then I realized that I was crying. My tears were falling like melted wax all over my cheeks, for the reason I knew nothing of. I wasn't even sad, really, I wasn't even really scared, to put it frankly. The tears kept falling, falling, soon my hands were trembling too. It was another sentiment that felt strange to me, a sentiment very distant yet very close. Something from a long time ago… but it wasn't from the childhood, no.
He took my trembling hand. "Stay with me, Kisara." – the words echoed in my head, causing a headache. I felt really bad, as if I was about to throw up.
Probably I did, probably I didn't throw up. The next thing I knew was Isis's warning kept repeating itself in the head: The Dark Heart is approaching… The Dark Heart is approaching… I saw the world around me being swallowed into a perfect shade of white. White, then there was nothing else than the echoes intermingling with each other.
"We will be together again, my lord."; "Stay with me, Kisara!"; "My son, you could take over the kingdom, take it over! TAKE IT OVER!"; "This Holy Match is going to give you no satisfaction, Seth!"; "We will be together again, my lord…"
The last sentence sounded exactly like my voice.
You are free to imagine the ending.
Feel free to PM me or type it in the review. I'll certainly get back to you!