Goat Foot Versus the Butcher #2
The next day, she sets out on a voyage at the helm of her long, winding caravan.
She personally oversees every last detail; she’s responsible for keeping the risks of the road at bay, including detours, mutinies, and death by hunger, thirst, or ambush attacks.
She calculates the distance between towns, customs checkpoints, watchtowers, and reservoirs.
She makes lists and more lists of the tasks that have been fulfilled, are being fulfilled, and still need doing.
She monitors the paraphernalia that will be indispensable during travel: saddlebags, packs, carpets, oil, food, mules, spurs, leather shields, clothing, pikes.
Many moons pass, and Goat Foot is returning.
In the distance she glimpses Hadhramaut, the smoke of its fires, the noise of its life, the first awnings of its people, great skinned rocks as white as craniums, trees that weep incense tears.
Her heart speeds up, she quickens her pace; her men shout with joy; the camels grow wild at the promise of water.
Suddenly, Goat Foot pauses and sniffs around her; a scent of rot spreads like fog over the familiar land.
The Great Perfumer comes out to meet her. He welcomes her and renews his vows of loyalty by washing his face and hands with ash.
“What is this nauseating smell coming out of Hadhramaut?” she asks him.
The Great Perfumer delivers the bad news.
During her absence, the people have taken to religious festivals with great sacrificial slaughters, and the blood of hundreds of animals flows from the altars and out of the temples toward the sewers.
A new belief has spread: that the incense offerings are insufficient and must be accompanied by the spilling of blood.
The innocent blood of peaceful animals, an additional gift to gods who are hard to please.
The radical form of this cult—the sacrificial form—has been formalized.
It includes the circumcision of boys, the circumcision of girls, the slitting of bull and lamb throats en masse, and, blurring the lines of rite and punishment, the stoning of criminals, whipping of adulterers, and mutilation of thieves.
Streams of blood run through the Bedouin streets.
“And the olibanum, my lady!” laments the Great Master Perfumer. “They’re using it to mask the stench. They burn our incense to cover the stink of slaughter.”
No one knows precisely when, during Goat Foot’s long absence, the change occurred.
It happened because that’s what is required by the infinite guilt of men, that ambiguous debt to the unknown that can only be eased by sacrificing the most precious, sweet, and innocent of things: the suckling lamb.
The people sing hymns and chants as they lead it to the knife, tied up and anointed with perfumes, wreathed with flowers.
Francisco de Zurbarán captures the ebbing life of such a sacrificial creature in his most austere, sacred painting: Against a dark background, the little lamb seems illumined by the last rays of the sun, exposed as he lies on a gray surface, still alive, but with death already visible in his gaze.
His feet are tied with cord; he senses the knife, and waits.
Gently he awaits the instant in which he’ll be ritually killed.
In Hadhramaut, the sacrificial cult has already set its vicious cycle in motion, an endless fixation that begins with a killing to beg forgiveness, the forgiveness is denied, the guilt intensifies, the killing continues, and it all begins again, obsessive, repeating, interminable.
We burn frankincense for the gods, slit the animal’s throat, and the gods, do they show gratitude, or at least satisfaction?
No. Nothing pleases them. They get drunk on the blood we offer and want to guzzle more.
Their disdain increases our blows to our own chests, our crushing anxiety, our compulsion to take new offerings to the altar.
All ritual sacrifice ends in failure, and thus has to be ceaselessly repeated. 1
Goat Foot can’t fully absorb the wicked process she herself unleashed the moment she first burned those olibanum branches with the simple hope of getting warm.
The whole situation disgusts her, and saddens her, and at the same time benefits her, because the incense business is growing in direct proportion to the spread of these new rites.
The Great Perfumer had already warned her, but she’d turned a deaf ear: All emptiness tends toward being filled.
In her absence, a sedentary authority appeared on the scene, growing and gaining traction and eroding free alliance between peoples, the only form of coexistence Goat Foot finds just or necessary.
But who has established themselves as the head of this nascent religious and state authority?
Who has become its high pontiff? Who is the great executor of sacrifice?
The black pope, Rasputin of the desert, prophet of immolation, granter of forgiveness, owner of people’s conscience, who now washes guilt with blood?
Who? Who is the power behind the throne, or, better put, the power behind the altar? Who?
Goat Foot almost falls back when she hears the answer.
“Atru,” says the Great Perfumer.
“Atru, the Butcher?”
“Atru, the Butcher. He’s proclaimed himself the high authority.”
A laborer of humble origins, at first he had no title beyond his simple name and a reference to his profession: Atru, the Butcher.
He’s known to have only one skill: that of slaughtering and carving up animals with his left hand.
It’s said that he cut off his right hand with his machete while chopping up a rack of ribs.
Even so, with the help of hooks and pincers, he has maintained the skills of his profession and is still good for killing and bleeding out in accordance with the law, as well as for deboning, filleting, grinding into meatballs, calculating weight by sight, and separating flesh from claw.
He even developed a flashy personal style, turning each stab into a theatrical gesture and simultaneously emitting a kind of death growl, the guttural sound of a heavy metal vocalist. His facial features are harmonious, almost feminine, in contrast with his chilling overall look.
His healthy arm is hairy and muscular, the other one’s stump nestled in a coarse leather sheath.
Small eyes like black cherries, a turned-up nose, an apron soaked in blood and fat, black kerchief around his neck, and, on his head, a commoner’s Phrygian cap.
In any case, the guy is insignificant, notorious in a folksy way perhaps, but nothing more.
A cow killer without glory or shame. He’s never brandished his blade against enemies on a battlefield, only against defenseless creatures in the slaughterhouse.
He has a weapon, and he kills, but that doesn’t make him a hero of any kind.
When the sacrificial cult begins and spreads across the land, this Atru, the Butcher, joins the ceremonies in the humble role of slashing the victim with his knife.
Under his strong hand, the young animal surrenders without needing to be forced, waiting for the precise cut that will swiftly bring a painless end.
Once his act of butchery is done, Atru retreats without further ado; that’s how humdrum his imagination is, at first. The prayers, praise, requests, and swaying of censers are overseen by a new and powerful caste of consecrated priests, to whom Atru is an invisible, incidental presence, useful only for the dirty practical task he performs. But little by little, the man finds a way to be noticed.
His flamboyant style, dramatic movements, and heavy metal singer’s growl catch devotees’ attention and turn into an important, showy part of the ritual, until they become the main spectacle.
The leaders of this bloody cult claim the role of legitimate intermediaries between gods and humanity, and, among them, whoever is armed is in command: Atru, the Butcher, owns an axe and the sharpest knives.
Atru, the Butcher, who also has a calling as a tyrant, and soon enthrones himself as the self-declared mafia boss.
He speaks on behalf of the red Scorpion, demands to be called Son of Scorpion, and proclaims himself a great visionary anointed by the Light.
He understands the twisted purpose of ritual sacrifice and knows how to leverage it, exploiting its various forms, spreading its tentacles.
He declares his status to be permanent and hereditary, and he assigns himself the right to keep the leanest meat and best parts of the sacrificial goat for himself and his priests, distributing what’s left to the masses: entrails, viscera, and bones.
He exchanges his red twill cap for a tall purple headdress, and the greasy apron for a complicated outfit composed of a chasuble, liturgical belt, alb, and stole.
In other words, the Butcher has transformed into a spiritual leader, as if in Gangs of New York Scorsese had mashed up a single character out of Bill the Butcher, head of the Natives, and his archrival Priest Vallon, leader of the Dead Rabbits.
From a distance, Goat Foot tries to study the ancient town she so loves, its brown awnings and stark bushes, but she can’t see it.
It barely exists anymore; a nascent stone city has been supplanting it.
Atru has built himself a palace with twelve pillars and high round walls, with an irrigation system and a huge orchard, as well as a limestone temple in which only powerful families can set foot.
In other neighborhoods, crowds throng in sanctuaries as raucous and crammed as bazaars.
Blood-filled drainpipes and mounds of bones fan faith in the sacrifices held there.
Public servants take up residence in minor palaces, while shantytowns surround the city center in a frayed gray ring.
The construction of a city wall begins, shutting the people in, and inscriptions spring up on it perennially, hailing the name of Atru with his many titles: Atru, Son of Antares; Atru, King of Light; Atru, Supreme Heart of the Scorpion.
When did I become someone who hides the stench of blood with perfumed smoke?
Goat Foot wonders, seeing the way an empire is rising on a pyramid of pain and rage.
The pain of a whipped tree, of the bled-out victim, of aching humanity.
And divine rage, which the people try to appease through sacrifice.
Goat Foot refuses to set foot in the deceptive city.
She will not enter, won’t cross its walls.
If she didn’t surrender to Mamlakat Aldam, her mother’s arrogant fortress, she certainly won’t cede to the Butcher’s pretentious castle.
She will not tolerate monuments erected on what used to be open earth.
She won’t return to that place, once free, now oppressed, nor will she let fences or gates stop her migrations.
Am I being exiled from a realm, for a second time?
she wonders, immediately answering her own question: No, this second time they can’t banish me because my realm isn’t in there anymore, but outside.
Nor can they take it from me, because my realm isn’t mine; it belongs to no one.
Goat Foot turns her back on the stone city and sets up camp outside it: a great caravansary with vigorous comings and goings through the seven deserts on paths that converge at their outer limits, like a Mobius strip.
More than a place, Goat Foot has founded a star of destiny, knowing all too well that we never arrive, because each arrival is merely a new point of departure.
“Only that which is light and in motion survives,” the princess says, now serene. “Heavy things succumb, because they sink into the earth instead of gliding across the sand.”
The stone city won’t reach the height of its splendor, nor its fifteen minutes of fame; instead it’ll be sacked and plundered, and swallowed by dust storms, its walls toppled by invading armies and its dams destroyed by bombs dropped from planes.
Despite so much supposedly enduring inscription, the coming centuries won’t know the name of Atru, the Butcher. Only that which is light survives.
But the pure, hard truth, leaving all futurology aside, is that from this moment on, the fight between Goat Foot and the old Butcher will be violent.
A fight to the death between two powers: she, master of olibanum and caravans, and he, master of temples and the conscience.
And a third power bringing discord, like a loose and spinning wheel: the Maiden.