Lawyers in Hell (58 page)

Terror overwhelmed Lysicles, worse than in any battle gone awry he’d ever fought.  Had Erra and his Seven and his two monsters come to eat his eyes again, his tongue again, his heart again?  To take away his sweet hope of Elysion?  The terrible Erra and his monsters and his seven personified weapons stared at him bleak-eyed, like men choosing a bull for slaughter.

He couldn’t let that happen.  His pride fell from him, and his anger dropped away, leaving only his loneliness and his hope of redemption.

Lysicles turned on his heel and ran.  With strength he didn’t know he had, with a determination he had always had, he sprinted:  away from Erra and his Seven, away from the red monster and the black.  Toward the shore and into the briny water.

His lungs burned.  His eyes stung as he splashed into the tide where the river met the sea.  He no longer cared if he ever found Chares, foul betrayer; he no longer cared to tear Alexander the Macedonian limb from limb; he no longer cared about his bumbling counsels, who had led him to this fate.

He didn’t even care that he fled, as he had never fled in life, desperately, in cowardly rout, as no general ever should flee.  Up to his waist, he plunged deeper into the water and stroked for Elysion with every bit of strength he possessed.

He swam.  And swam on, deeper and deeper, leaving the shore of Erebos behind.  He swam toward the gleaming light in the wine-dark sea, making for Elysion.  He swam for salvation.  He swam with his ravaged heart pounding and his blurry eyes stinging and with brackish water burning his tongue.  It was a long swim.  And if he could not make it, then at least his wife and his sons and his eromenoi would know that when he died again, he died trying to get to them.

*

“So, young Kigali, what do you think of your brave Athenian general now?” Erra asked as they watched the horizon until the soul of Lysicles disappeared from view.

“He
is
brave, godly Erra,” the son of Ki-gal said.  “He is full of love for his family.  He wants to go home.  Will he make it to the farther shore – see his wife again, his children, his friends?”

Erra saw the second of the Seven smile as all the Sibitti sheathed their swords.  “What do you think, son of Ki-gal?  Has he overcome his fury, his lust for vengeance, his rashness?  He goes to his fate.  As do we all.”

The Kigali boy did not reply, only looked away toward far Elysion.

Making good on his word, Erra and his retinue traveled the length and breadth of Erebos all that day with the witch Hecate by his side and her hound beside her, spreading fear and misery among the innocent and guilty alike.  But seldom in Erebos did they find injustice meted out unfairly; for Erebos does not lie in the depths of Hades’ realm where venal souls abide, but only at the crossroads on its outskirts.

When the day was done, Hecate offered them a night in Erebos, a feast by the pool of Memory, and all pleasures from the realm of Hades.  Erra declined:  “We shall come back another time to visit Asphodel and its blood-drinking heroes, but not tomorrow.  Now Duty calls my name.”

So they took their leave under a roiling sky, but not to return to Ki-gal.  Erra’s heart was restless.  Satan’s threat still rankled: 
We shall see whose word reigns supreme.

“We will fly now, Sibitti, over Gehenna and to Lost Angeles.”  Erra would show Satan whose word reigned in the latter-day hells.  “You, Kigali, take hold of the ropes that the second of my Seven will give you.  Once we are in the air, fold your wings, for we’ll spread out a hundred leagues and fly faster than Kigali can.”

“If you do not hold fast to my ropes, you will be left behind,” warned the second of Erra’s Seven, pulling loops of bright blue lightning from the palms of his hands.  “So take care, sons of Ki-gal, how you go.  I will be with thee, watching over thee.”

Almighty Kur and young Eshi grasped the glowing ropes and held on tight, their wings high and beating, and took flight with Erra and his Seven.

They all rose high, in concert, aloft on Erra’s wind of retribution, and spread out through the air.  Wherever their shadows fell, across a hundred leagues of Gehenna’s putrid ground, blight bloomed before them and behind and on either side, striking crops and slaves and fruit and vine and city and town.  Where the shadows of Erra and the Seven and the sons of Ki-gal fell over Christians and Israelites and Canaanites fighting on foot and with chariotry, the soil turned to quicksand and sucked the combatants down – all but their hell-spawned steeds, who ran away, neighing and snorting fire, to find new battles to join.

Over the deepest recesses of Sheol they flew, striking blind the souls below, bringing to the prideful and the learned dead a darkness that would not lift; setting fire to their books as they copied them.

Both the righteous and unrighteous flesh in Sheol, long removed from the light of god, now suffer Erra’s havoc.  Shadows of the passing auditors touch all the pedagogues of Sheol with forgetfulness:  words, once spoken, are immediately forgot.  Those proclaiming innocence and those bemoaning guilt are equally chastened.

From on high comes a just reward to those who’d lorded holiness and rectitude over lesser men, and filled peasants with shame, and castigated the ignorant, and made the common people pay to fund their studies.  Politicians and poets and philosophers and physicians are struck deaf with the passing of Erra and his Seven and the Kigali:  none can hear a word, not a single well-turned phrase nor clever argument; nor can they read or write or count or know any of mankind’s hard-won wisdom ever again.  These will always remember that once they had the keys of knowledge in their hands.  But no more.  The dead in Sheol’s dank depths are brought low, every damned soul in its cities and its towns, in its streets and its assemblies, sunk into stupidity and hopelessness.

Onward flies the wrath from Above, into the latter-day hells of mankind’s dark heart.  On the wings of Erra and his Seven it comes, with the Kigali witnesses towed on ropes of flashing lightning that slit the sky.

Black shadows, beating wings, and torment fit for each benighted soul:  they set afire every plain; they ignite every mountaintop for thousands of leagues, before and behind.  Storm blows behind the wildfires, putting out the flames with raging torrents, flooding Purgatory and washing all artifice away.  The earth cracks open here and there.

There is no forgiveness.  There is no absolution for criminals who sin knowingly and cunningly and think they can merely ask for heavenly forbearance:  this is hell in its horrible glory and all sinners here, no matter how adroit, will pay this day for every crime against the heavens.

Erra’s wings bore him straight and strong, with his vengeful weapons beside him, until they reached Lost Angeles, swathed in its pall of vainglorious excess that turned the air stinking and yellow.

There they alighted on black-paved ground, between buildings high and long and gleaming with glass and sinners festooned with every sort of bauble:  painted and perfumed and covered in silk and furs:  men and women, clutching at each other lewdly, entwining and kissing and sucking on each other’s bodies, copulating in the middle of the street.  Erra waved his own mighty hand and the paint on each face puckered into running sores; silk turned wormy; furs came alive and sank toothy jaws into their wearers, tearing out throats and hearts before scampering up the blazing sky to heaven.  Men ejaculated scorpions and spiders who ate their screaming partners from the inside out.  Women selling sex sold torture now, and ground the members of their partners in gnashing teeth amid their nether parts.

Down Hellywood Boulevard did Erra and Seven drive their judgment:  pointing here and there and everywhere; bringing first fire and ice and lightning, then pestilence and tempest and quake and disease.  Erra raged on, with his terrifying weapons, carving up the very belly of this Satanic beast, Lost Angeles.

Whimpering sinners stumbled and ran.  The Seven cut down soul after soul, broiled them, boiled them, shattered them where they fled, and opened the ground to receive the detritus.  Meanwhile, behind them on either side, buildings tottered and toppled, showering glass and mortar and stone upon the fleeing hordes.

Then Erra heard sounds he’d never heard before:  deep roaring; booming in the sky so that the vault above seemed to shake; deafening thunder from the middle of the air:  the sound of Satan’s forces, come to meet him in battle at last.

The seventh and the second of the Seven looked up and raised their arms.  Huge metal darts swooped at them:  some with souls inside, some not.  Erra’s two Sibitti spat lightning and incandescent plumes, and caught the flying machines and piloted contraptions hurtling down and dragged them from the air.  These crashed amid the tenements and high-rising buildings with an awful banging noise.

Then the third of the seven looks at Erra and smiles his icy smile.  Erra nods, and freezing cold quenches the fires where the metal birds and darts have crashed, and all the mechanisms of modern man’s destruction fall away to glittering powder.

Satan, where art thou?  Come face me.

But Satan does not come.  Instead, a deep growl wells up:  the tramp of marching men; the thrum of great wheels turning.  Now come the tanks and the soldiers of the new dead, a vast army marching down the wide roads of Lost Angeles, crushing trees and people underfoot.

“Enough,”
Erra says aloud.

This one word frees the rest of his Seven, weapons beyond mortal comprehension:  the fifth of the Seven spins himself into a whirlwind of bladed retribution, and goes among Satan’s troops and death machines.  Beside Erra, the first of the Seven opens chasms to the deepest underworld in the path of Satan’s warriors and their tanks.  The front ranks tumble into the abyss, victims of the unstoppable momentum of their own forces coming on behind them.

The fourth of the Seven blows his hurricane winds and deflects every projectile, every missile, every weapon aimed their way.

The sixth brings his torrents, to clean the streets; the third freezes armies in their tracks.  Now the fourth calls forth a plague upon all the soldiers and all Hellywood’s onlookers, voyeurs of death who hide among the rubble:  those who could have run, but didn’t, will learn their lessons too this day.

The torrents clean the streets of corpses; the chasms suck down all the wreckage and accouterments of war, and the city is silent:  ravaged, ruined.  No building stands.  Sobbing and moaning and groaning fill the air with deserved songs.

Still, Satan has not come.  So be it.  With his word made good, Erra gathers his Seven to him, and the lord of Ki-gal and his boy.

“Make your ropes once more,” Erra commands the second of his Seven.  “We go to Ki-gal now, to rest from our labors.  You fought well, all you weapons.  And you Kigali, you have seen what sons of Ki-gal need to see:  how the powers from on high treat those who resist the will of highest heaven.”

Neither Kur nor his boy said a word:  the Kigali youth had his wings wrapped tight round him like a cloak.  His mentor stared around, speechless, at heaven’s wrath.

The second shook out his ropes of blue lightning and the Kigali raised their wings high.

Then up into the air they went, Erra and his Seven and the two Kigali, with the Almighty Kur and Eshi holding tight to the ropes of lightning all the while.

*

Kur had never been happier to be back in Ki-gal, but Eshi was still troubled, lashing his tail, wings half raised.  Kur wanted to take Eshi up the mountainside, let the boy soak his quill-pricked skin in the healing sulphur pools.  Breathe the pungent steam, and let the mountain do its work while the feast-boards for the evening meal were being laid.

But the second of the Seven came for Eshi, as he always did, to take the boy hunting the red-tailed lizards who swooped and played in the green-gold clouds rolling down the mountain at the end of day.

The red-tails squawked overhead, fat and juicy, beating their wings, consumed with their lizardly games.

But tonight Eshi wouldn’t go hunting with the beautiful son of heaven and earth:  “I don’t want to hunt now, Second.  I need you to tell me some things and I want Kur to hear what you say.”  Eshi rubbed the back of one hand with the other, where his new quills itched.

“The three of us will sit together then, Eshi, and you can ask me what you want to know, if the Almighty Kur will indulge us.”  Of the seven Sibitti, this one was the kindest – or the smartest.

“Great Kur, can we?  Do you have time?  Will you sit with us?”

“Not here, Eshi,” Kur said.  “Come with me.”  Kur could see Erra and the other Sibitti, who had not yet repaired to their cavern, lingering close by.

Kur led his eromenos and the second of the Sibitti up and up the mountain’s skirt, Eshi by his side with wings raised.

The three of them climbed high on the slope to sit by the steamy sulphur pools overlooking Ki-gal, magnificent in the gloaming.  Kur said, “Now, Eshi, ask what you will.  And you, second among the Sibitti, tell my boy what truth you know.”

“What happens to you Seven when you are not terrifying mankind?  Where do you go when you are not with Erra?  Or are you always bringing pestilence and mayhem somewhere?”

The Sibitti cocked his head at Kur, then turned his beautiful face to Eshi.  “They put us in a cupboard, prince of Ki-gal.  Weapons must have targets – a purpose.  When there are no targets, we have no life.  There we wait, enclosed, away from the world, the sea, the sky.  I hate being shut up.  A Sibitti wants first to fight a worthy enemy and then to sleep in the open among honest creatures in a beautiful place such as Ki-gal.”  He waved his hand at the agora below, at the feast-boards, at the vault above.  The tribe was gathering, soaring overhead, circling, riding the updrafts and the downdrafts, winging down to join the feast.  “Ki-gal, of everywhere I have ever been, is the most magnificent.  Free of all the foolishness of men.  In harmony with nature.  You are very blessed, you Kigali.”

Kur was unmoved.  This Sibitti still romanced his boy.

“What happens to Erra then?” Eshi pressed.