An Apotheosis

An Apotheosis

  Forrest Aguirre

  Copyright 2012 Forrest Aguirre

  The blasphemy of it all was not lost on me. Hubris? Perhaps. Hauteur? Most definitely. I stood as Nimrod atop Babel, the wind beneath my feet causing the scaffold to sway like a wounded horse about to expire, casting it’s rider to the earth. The wind was no maelstrom, however, only a soothing breeze wafting away the pungent scent of blood off the cobblestones far below. Oh, if they could see me, sword, no, rapier – the account depends on it being a rapier, my rapier, “Saint Michael” – raised to the heavens that waited to receive me.

  But they – Silver and Cheese, the men, not the metal nor the delectable – could not see me, or rather cannot see me. You see (yet you do not, like Silver and Cheese), I have had to set Saint Michael down to pen these words, but now the triumphant moment is gone, the blasphemous instant dissipated into mere domesticity so that I can record and, in recording, destroy that moment. Domesticity the Destroyer. A fitting title, but a losing struggle, a false victory. The magical, the mysterious, the grand will always prevail. I am about to see to it.

  Not a suitable venue for such grandeur, you say? To the untrained eye, it is true, a rickety scaffold, a place for the hanging of traitors and murderers, is hardly an appropriate place for one’s ascent to the heavens. But this, this splintered monument is sacred. Take thy shoes from off thy feet that the ghost of Rocco Bonetti, my sword master and advocate with the heavenly hosts, may examine your sole, for the place whereon thou walkest is holy ground. Show the mark of the master in your sole.

  I have removed my shoes and the lead plates therein, the instruments of discipline by which Maestro Rocco taught his disciples, of which I am one, nimbleness of feet.

  “Practice on lead, fight on air,” he used to tell us. And thus we did, plodding through footwork exercises, leaping through duels. The English masters laughed at us, mocking our heavy movements at the salle. But on the streets, in the alleyways behind pubs, their laughter was stopped short by a thrust to the neck, a lethal sting so quick that no unwieldy basket-hilt broadsword could hope to deflect the killing stroke before it pinned the opponent like a stunned butterfly. It was liberating, moving from practice to performance; our spirits almost leapt from our bodies when we shed the lead-shod soles. We thought that we had defeated gravity under Maestro Rocco’s tutelage. And we had, almost.

  Almost. We were, no doubt well on our way to unlocking the secret of flight, an angel hair’s width from becoming flaming-sword-wielding seraphim. There was, however, one last enemy to overcome: Silver – the man, not the metal, I must remind you.

  “Man” is generous. Silver is the Devil. Or he was, until I despatched him. And Cheese is, was, his chief imp. Or perhaps they were witch and familiar, I shall never be sure. They are dead and gone to hell, and I am not long for this tawdry sphere. There shall soon be the world between us.

  In life, Silver was a powerful man. He was strong, brutish, and alarmingly hirsute. His belly was the doppelganger of his crude sword’s basket-hilt, which was woven in such a way as to resemble a fly’s multi-faceted eyes. Here I mean the steel of the hilt, not his belly hairs, which he might have woven into any number of decorative patterns. I dubbed his sword “Baalzebuth”. He dubbed it . . . nothing, likely because of his dull wit. Metaphors escaped him. Had he the intelligence to think up a suitable name for his blade, he would have immediately seen the inferiority of the weapon and cast it aside to pick up a good rapier. Thus my story would have had an end before it had a beginning, for he was not a bad swordsman, only an ignorant man wielding an inelegant weapon. Thankfully, Silver’s lack of gray matter allowed a continuation of the narrative. And so I continue.

  Cheese, the man, was as scrawny as Silver was corpulent. Looking down on them now, it seems that Silver could have eaten Cheese in the course of a day and a night – without stopping, of course, let’s not be ridiculous! Cheese’s cowardice was the shadow to the bulk of Silver’s bravado. Still, Cheese chose the broadsword, though he could hardly wield it. It should come as no surprise, then, that Cheese was a treacherous little weasel. A cheat, a sneak, and deserving to be frozen in Cocytus somewhere between Brutus and Judas. Perhaps he is so frozen now. Again, I shall never be sure. I am soon on my way up.

  It was here, where I sit now, bare feet dangling above the ravens who, a few boards down, stare at the corpses below, that Maestro Rocco was sacrificed by Silver and Cheese, or, more appropriately, by Cheese. It was, after all, Silver who had issued the challenge – broadsword versus rapier, atop the tallest scaffold in London, for all to see. Not that the masses understood the magnitude of the confrontation.

  The carnivalesque atmosphere of the event betrayed the mob’s base desires. They were out for blood, screaming, laughing, in anticipation of the maudlin collapse of body under steel. They longed to purge some measure of dreck from their miserable lives by watching the suffering of others. They wanted catharsis. But this was no bear fight, no public hanging. There was bound to be disappointment.

  The duel began slowly, Rocco and Silver both careful to close their lines with miniscule movements of the wrist or shoulder, a barely perceptible shuffle of the foot, an unseen tightening of the abdomen. To the crowd below, it looked as if the pair was not moving at all. After ten minutes of this apparent stalemate, the mob grew silent and started to trickle away from the square. But the maestro’s minds were both a tangled, writhing mass of images, potentialities, and predictions of future moves, feints, thrusts, ripostes. The fight itself first took place on the plane of spirit, transcending flesh and steel. By the time the first move had been made before the crowd, the last move had already been decided on the ethereal.

  This temporal delay proved to be Rocco’s undoing. While the angels rejoiced in heaven as Maestro Rocco thrust the killing stroke three fingers deep into Silver’s profanity-laden throat, a threat developed on Earth below. Cherubim danced as Silver fell to the marble floors of the realms of God. Rocco, raising his arms in triumph before the heavenly host, was unaware of the cowardly back stab on the material plane until Cheese’s broadsword, vile for both its form and its wielder, had slid between my master’s ribs to the heart.

  My concept of time slipped from me even as Rocco’s body slid off of Cheese’s blade. Rocco’s heavenly blow never landed, the angelic kingdom had been taken by surprise. I wandered in a daze for weeks – how many I cannot discern. The constant thrumming of demonic cheers was a roaring background noise to all else I heard and saw. I recall little, save for the voices of town criers announcing Rocco’s death and the sight of posters calling for Cheese’s capture. I mourned with the angels for many days.

  I might have stayed in this state of torpor forever, had I not seen a ghost.

  The vision – for I beheld with my spiritual, not my corporeal eyes – came to me in a Whitechapel alleyway. I would have ascribed the specter to hallucination, had it not reached down and touched me, touched my soul with a deceptively warm, friendly shoulder clasp. For a moment, I thought that my Maestro had risen from the dead.

  “Laurence? Laurence, is that you?”

  I looked up at him, at it, joy and doubt dueling in my heart.

  “Stand up, Laurence. You’re a mess!”

  The apparition pulled me to my feet through some supernatural force. He, it, also cast the bottle from my hand, dashing it against a nearby wall.

  “Laurence, we really need to take care of you. You’ve gone all jaundiced and you reek of gin and piss.”

  “R-Rocco?” Joy gave a feint at doubt.

  “Yes, Laurence, it’s me.”

  “But you’re dead.” Doubt parried, thrust.

  “Hardly,” the ghost laughed so hard that I felt its ectoplasmic vibrations.

  “B
ut I saw it, on the scaffold.”

  “Yes?” it smiled.

  “The duel, you and Silver . . .”

  The doppleganger’s smile broadened.

  “ . . . and Cheese’s cowardly move.”

  His countenance fell. “Yes, Cheese’s cowardly move. Amazing. And the authorities still cannot find him.”

  Joy returned a flurry of blows.

  “I will find him,” I said stoutly, still worried that the ghost might be a demon in disguise.

  “You will find Cheese?”

  “Yes, and avenge your death!”

  Rocco’s ghost looked at me sidelong, examining me.

  “But Laurence, I’m not dead. It was Jeronimo Rocco that Cheese killed. Haven’t you read the news? Ah, how long have you been in