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understood too.
"What are you trying to say?" William demanded scornfully. "That
you're my brother?"
Urizen shook his head. "Think, William. Vala is my mother. You were
Vala's lover. It's simple logic, like mathematics. You, William Blake, are
my father!"
*
Kate and William had sat for a long time on the broad ovoid roof of
Urizen's temple, gazing in silence out over the plains of fog below them
that gleamed white under the full moon like banks of slowly undulating
snow, staring at the only other structure that was tall enough to rise above
the overcast, the statue of Urizen; now she turned toward William,
studying his grim profile, his stocky body clad in rumpled kneepants,
suitcoat, unbuttoned shirt, and buckled shoes. Who was this man? Who
was this man she had thought she knew so well? His shadowed face
revealed nothing.
With a shudder she drew her shawl tight around her throat, though the
temperature was mild. Her first words were hesitant. "You could have told
me."
"I didn't know." His voice, deep and resonant, was so much like
Urizen's, yet she'd never noticed.
"That Urizen was your son? That's not what I mean. You knew what
you'd been up to with Vala. The Bible puts a name to it& adultery!"
William lowered his eyes, unable to meet her steady gaze. "Do you love
me, Kate?"
Love you? Once I did indeed! Once I thought you weren't like other
men, that you were some kind of bloody saint who'd risen above the
'Things of the Flesh', as you put it."
"If you really loved me, you'd rejoice that I'd finally overcome my
problem, that I'd at last been able to be a man. If you loved me you'd pick
out two women for me, a blonde and a brunette, and sit on a riverbank
watching to see which one I'd take."
For a moment she was speechless, then, "Problem? Problem? What
problem?"
"I don't know why." His voice had become low and thick, so she had to
lean toward him to understand. "I don't know why, Kate, but I can't seem
to be a man with a woman unless& " He seemed unable to go on.
Kate almost shrieked.
"Tell me, for God's sake!"
"& unless she's cruel to me," he finished miserably.
As she heard it, she knew it was the truth. It was another of those
things one knows but does not know. She'd known and not known it from
the very first, the day they'd met, when he'd talked of how Polly Wood was
torturing him, his wide madman's eyes gleaming, when he'd pleaded for
pity. She'd known and not known it when he'd tormented and provoked
her, trying to force her to torment him in return. She thought, How con I
condemn him? 1 knew what he was, but I married him anyway.
"If you'd been a little harsher with me& " he murmured.
"I am what I am. To be cruel to a man, to my own husband& that's not
the way of a Christian lady." There was no anger left in her, only an
overwhelming sense of relief, and a touch of guilt. It's Polly he should have
had, she thought. Polly would have made him a hell where he'd feel right
at home.
"Well," he said uncertainly, "now it's all in the open, maybe I can
change."
This time she refused to not know the truth. "No, you are what you are
too."
There was a long silence. An aircraft passed slowly overhead, leaving a
white trail against the stars, so high it seemed to make no sound.
William said softly, "All the same, I'm your friend."
Kate sighed and took his big hand in her little one. "I'm your friend,
too, Mr. Blake. A good friendship's a rare thing. It's worth a dozen of the
kind of marriages most folks have. Isn't it strange, though, that we can
change everything in the universe but the one thing that matters&
ourselves?"
Later Kate and William went down into the temple and watched the
ceremony where the lizard people worked themselves into a frenzy and
threw themselves off the bridge into the chasm. It was exciting, what with
all the dancing and drumbeating and ecstatic reptilian screaming, but
Kate watched William's face the whole time, watched how his large eyes
gleamed and his moist lips hung open as he followed with his gaze one
after the other of the holy suicides. He looked somehow reptilian himself,
and she clutched his thick arm firmly, on the chance that he might, on
impulse, leap off the bridge with the others.
*
Urizen, too, looked vaguely reptilian the following day as he walked
with Kate and William along the banks of what once, in a different world,
had been the Thames. The windowless buildings were silent under the
swiftly moving gray overcast; the lizards were, except for a few
"day-watchmen," asleep.
It puzzled Kate, that touch of green in the skin, that faint suggestion of
scales, but perhaps it was a trick of the light. She stopped a moment to
seriously observe her reflection in the water. Long dark skirt, white blouse, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]