It suddenly occurred to me — as in a Jest of Dream — that my jealousy of Deacon had helped to flesh out the occasion, to give content to both Deacon and Marie in the backward sweep of years since I began to write. There they were indeed, large as life, within the raining, mist-filled savannahs in which Mr Mageye and I stood invisible to them.
We were I calculated halfway between Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant.
Deacon was naked. The tattooed Scorpion Constellation shone darkly on his child’s arm. On the other monstrous, heroic arm stood the double star Aldebaran associated with Taurus, but the Bull had been overturned into Horses on the Moon. I was able to draw close to him with Mr Mageye’s assistance and to read every pore in his body.
Deacon had abandoned his school uniform to come into his own as the masterful child-bridegroom who secures the Virgin of the Wild on her appearance at the end of every long, searing drought when the rains commence.
Deacon had paused as if locked into the thread of my glance. But he shot forward again in my Dream-book. Mr Mageye (Camera in hand) was out of sight — as on a film set — and I (in my Nemesis Hat) kept in touch (though I was invisible to him). Such are the wonders of technology and science within futuristic strategies of the Imagination.
He ran with a miraculous stride. Amazing to maintain his stride on the slippery path that he had taken. But the long drought had hardened the ground. The water table was low and it would take a day or two at least for the soil to change into an ankle-deep rich overflowing sponge.
The rain swept all around as if sky and cloud had been broken in cosmic theatre to provide a Waterfalling shower in the eye of the Camera down which Deacon had floated and come when he fell as an infant in space. Now he was in his tenth cosmic year and destiny was to equip him with a lasso to seize the Horses of the Moon and bring them showering and hoofing their way to Earth.
I saw the affianced child-bride in the corner of my eye. The rain swung into an encircling perimeter around her, the rain lessened, the ground acquired the look of a mirroring, flat wave as if a portion of the sky had fallen to the ground.
Deacon saw her now clearly. She was naked as he was. She too had abandoned her uniform, a child’s nurse’s uniform which the Doctor, her adoptive father, had given her to wear when she assisted him in the Port Mourant hospital after school.
Deacon stopped upon the perimeter. Carven into momentary astonishment. He had not seen her naked before. He knew her from school but she was not the same child that he took for granted when the Doctor-God and his savannah parents met to seal the promise of selves (savannah-self, Godself) in marriage.
His lithe body responded to hers by sheathing itself all at once in wings that blew around him as if a bird, an eagle, a fluid eagle, perched on his head in a fountain of mist as the rain appeared to boil around his ankles in the rising heat of the soil.
Marie began to dance on the mirror. She danced upon a portion of sky, skin of the shining rain on the ground. Her feet were suddenly and lightly and mysteriously laced with three threads that fell from my Nemesis Hat. They were the colour of velvet. Yet the springing grass of slenderest blades of rain were silver. The blades of grass from my mother’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. The blades of grass from Mr Mageye’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. Despite such beauty I was stricken by heart-rending grief. I felt the strangest foreboding. And I would have fired a bullet — if I had possessed one — at Deacon and swept his affianced bride into my arms.
Deacon moved and edged his wings into the mirror on which the Virgin of the Wild was dancing. A long plait of loose hair fell down her back from the nape of her neck to her waist. It was the colour of the mane of a Moon-horse that shook itself and encircled my head. Why me? How was I tied to her? By what fate, or trial of spirit, or torment of freedom?
Deacon seemed to glide and reach for her hair upon the fantastic mirror. He swept it from my brow even as — with a mocking glance — he seemed to nail it into the space where I stood invisible to him. The nail pierced me to the Bone. I cried for immunity to pain such as Deacon appeared to possess.
Marie swirled and the nail fell from my head into Deacon’s wing. He may have felt no pain in the Shadow of the Scorpion but he stumbled and was unable to bind her to him in this instant of a doubling of stars in the sky or mirror on the ground, Aldebaran’s twin stars in which I played an invisible role, twinned to a fallen angel.
The lessening rain and slightly clearing sky brought the pool of the Moon onto the ground. Deacon darted forward as if he flew or danced on water — his wing free again — and he held the Virgin’s hair at last. But when he sought to draw her to him, in the theatre of the Moon, she dazzled him and thrust him away. They encircled each other, sometimes upon the perimeter within which they danced, sometimes upon an upright Wheel as though the flat circle or perimeter inclined itself into a vertical dimension, a wheeling dimension.
Step by step the Horses of the Moon materialized as a turbulent extension of the Passion of the dance. A haunch grafted itself into the archetypal momentum of cavalry of fate. Such apparently insoluble archetypes were native to ancient and modern civilizations and they drew Marie’s Wheel in the dance.
Horses akin to Cortez’s troop fleshed themselves into a scale of grafts within apparitions on the Moon.
Horses akin to Genghis Khan’s hillsides rose into shoulders and necks around the edges of the Moon.
Eyes of flashing, poisoned gold sprang from the bodies of Alexander’s infantry upon Darius’s wheeling chariots beneath Marie’s fleet foot.
From every corner of legend and history arose an assembly of the parts of engines of flesh, jigsaw cavalries, ribs, equine muscularities, bunched muscles, grapelike memories of blood, tanned, leathern proportions, giving substance to the terrible Horses of the Moon within which Deacon and Marie pursued each other in their dance.
No horses in Chichén Itzá but the dreaded Chac Mool possessed the countenance of a Chimera, half-human, half-horse. Chac Mool was a signal of militaristic atrocity in the Maya world and it foretold the decline of a civilization.
Who were the riders, who were the giants of Chaos upon such Horses? Were they Deacon’s kith and kin in heaven and upon earth? Were they Marie’s dangerous host and accompaniment of furies? Furies are omens, signatures of uncanny foreboding, and they tend to arrive hand in hand with Virgins of the Wilderness whose untameable spirituality in nature is misconceived for brute violence.
Were the riders princes of Carnival Lord Death’s regime in theatres of history, were they dictators in South America, were they solid, stable riggers of elections in Nigeria and elsewhere, were they Amens or Amins, were they gagged priests, gagged popes, gagged bishops, bankers, statesmen, scientists, crusaders, evangelists?
Or were they shepherds from times immemorial, poor labouring folk in the savannahs of Guyana since El Dorado fashioned its whip to encircle the slaves who dug the earth, rode the earth from cradle to grave with an eye on the stars for the coming of a saviour, a saviour susceptible to miscasting in the theatres of Church and State, miscast as warrior-crusader-priest?
The poor, labouring, awkward folk seemed to Mr Mageye and to me to combine dictatorship and feudal features in themselves as they rode the Horses. They were also uncanny judges of themselves and others. They were submissive to Deacon now as they rode the Horses, rode the lotteries on the Moon, rode expectations of fortune on the Moon, but I felt — as though I were on trial — that they were capable of breaking themselves, melting themselves, reshaping themselves, in order to judge him in themselves, bring him before them on the Moon.