Chapter The Axe League
The Axe League
An eternal autumn light dyes the desert in excremental shades: terminal ochers, blood red, earth black, the iridescent green of decomposition, the purple of viscera, the sand’s ashy blond, ether’s translucent blue, the gold of glowing amber or a scorpion’s lethal bite.
Incense shipments are worth their weight in gold and, to avoid attackers and ambushes, Goat Foot directs her caravans along secret routes through hidden regions where air and sand have sculpted Gothic architectures with their spiral dances.
From the outside, the mounds and tall peaks look like rows of knights from ancient times.
Inside, caverns and troglodytic caves serve as refuges and natural trenches.
Some of the peaks are shaped like towers or bishops, others twist gracefully, flatten out, or curve like bells.
There are baroque and subtle ones, hive-shaped and stork’s-nest-shaped ones, peaks as geometric as geodesic domes, organic ones like giant mushrooms or prehistoric ferns.
White stone moons light up the sky and, below, the landscape is mere artifice: the elegant face of nothing.
While Goat Foot—Lady of Olibanum and Great Agha of Caravans—focuses on perfumes, incense, journeys, and trade, in the kingdom of Sheba a plot has been brewing behind her back.
What was foreseen has come to pass: The Butcher and the Maiden have formed a secret pact against her, a non-sancta alliance that is known in clandestine circles as the Axe League.
A simple exchange of brief words, and they sealed the deal.
Just a few brief words, laden with implications:
“Goat Foot is the goat,” the Butcher declares.
“Yes, Goat Foot is the goat,” agrees the Maiden.
The rivalry between the queen mother and the disowned princess has devolved into a stalemate, but now a third party’s arrival on the scene shifts the scales.
The Butcher, who started out quartering sheep and rose from there to officiate bloody rites, has now continued his meteoric rise, and oversees the army.
He’s as sharp as hunger, and has discovered the need for religious matters to be enmeshed with military ones.
Faith by force. Force by faith. Even so, his plan isn’t quite successful yet; something is in the way, and something is missing.
What’s in the way is extremely clear. It’s Goat Foot, who controls all the region’s riches while she herself is controlled by no one.
If he liquefies Goat Foot, the former butcher can complete the triad of his triumph: faith, force, and riches.
And what is missing? He’s missing tradition and legitimacy.
Like all upstarts, the Butcher lacks those two essential qualities, which he now tries to gain by winning the Maiden’s support, as she’s the head of the old regime and wears a thousand-year-old crown.
As for his personal attributes, the ex-butcher perfectly fulfills the profile of a tyrant. He’s a tall, thick-bodied, violent lout who spits through his teeth and smells of rancid sweat. A manly gorilla.
“But he’s also got a pretty face,” the alaleishos point out. “How can we not appreciate his little black cherry eyes, his fanning eyelashes, his pert nose, and his sarcastic smile with those fine lips and almost all his teeth intact?”
Hypersexual and hormonal, the Butcher is also addicted to games, food, and blood.
Fleshy and big by nature, he exudes virility from every pore: That’s what a good-looking fat man tells himself.
Boccato di cardinale. A real stud, phenomenal, insatiable, over-the-top.
The brute manners of a toxic male. A harsh warrior holding the reins of power, who’s recruited the most professional army as yet known to history, so disciplined and vicious that the desert trembles at their approach.
The Butcher commands his troops by brandishing his butcher’s knife in his left hand.
As a young man he learned almost nothing except how to use that tool, a crude one, but that’s allowed him to get to where he is now.
They say he didn’t shed a single tear on losing his right hand to a bad swing of a machete; a man who doesn’t know how to cry is prone to making others do it.
He’s rid himself of all those grandiose titles, he has no interest anymore in being the Son of Antares, or King of Light, or whatever the fuck else.
Now he gets right down to business: He’s had himself named the Supreme Pontiff and Army Commander in Chief as part of the scheme.
He no longer wears the superfluous trappings that seduced him in his upstart amateur phase, enough with the tall purple headdress, chasuble, liturgical belt, alb, and stole!
What has no use shouldn’t get in the way.
He doesn’t want to deal with costumes anymore, he’s here to conquer, not to play with toy soldiers.
He’s got what he needs with his well-sharpened axe, horrendous shriek, rebel’s cap, and old black apron stinking of weakness and caked in blood.
When he officiates as a pontiff, he’s no longer uncomfortable in his chasuble, priest’s girdle, stole, or very tall headgear.
He’s understood that all that is not necessary to inspire love, admiration, or respect: It’s enough to seed guilt and fear.
Guilt and fear, that’s his winning formula.
In later eras, Roman emperors would opt for bread and circuses.
But that would be later; the Butcher, a primitive commander, sticks to guilt and fear.
He counts on the complicity of the gods, who wield their moody lightning bolts to foment fear of heights, remorse, pangs of conscience, and belief in sacrifice as a source of forgiveness and redemption.
Let people confess, kneel, whip themselves, and never stop confessing, let them fall into a cycle of neurotic guilt that can never be paid off or washed clean.
As for the Maiden, the other leg of the righteous league, what drives her to make a pact with the bastard, her of all people, fine and arrogant and blue-blooded as she is, she, the hoity-toitiest of them all, and the fussiest?
If the King of Jerusalem had struck her as insignificant, in this ex-butcher she must have seen little more than an insect, a larva, a bit of slime.
But the alaleishos claim something different.
They say that, though a little late, the Maiden discovers, in the Butcher, shudders of desire and pleasures of the flesh, and that at the man’s call she gets all in a tizzy, dissolves into flirting, surrenders to a shameless sexuality.
She can’t forgive herself for having wasted so much beauty and youth, all that time spent on modesty and virginity, all that softness of skin without a hand to stroke it.
That’s the gossip the alaleishos spill, and they insist that the Axe League’s pact was sealed in bed more than on any battlefield.
Those who say that don’t know the Maiden.
Her ice-and-glass heart allows no weakness, nor lends itself to sentimental stumbles.
For her, the Butcher is no more than a murderer, an evil as repugnant as it is necessary, an instrument she wields for her own purpose: to finish off Goat Foot.
Hatred for the princess is the only connection between the Maiden and the Butcher, they’re not united by love, but by fright, says Borges.
How wrong they are, the alaleishos! They don’t understand that the enduring rage isn’t in him, but in her.
In her haughty calm, the Maiden is the true dust storm, poised to destroy.
The real power lies in her, as does the atavistic matriarchy.
A recent arrival like the Butcher only fulfills a circumstantial role.
In the eternal kingdom of Sheba, male interference is as fleeting as a lone cloud in a clear sky.
The Maiden is the red female pope, the hottest hate, the heart that beats the strongest. The Butcher spills blood, eats raw meat, leads parades and ceremonies; he puts on the show.
But backstage, it’s the Maiden who orchestrates the trance, the hysterical crowd, the divine or demonic possession.
She stays in place and lets the Butcher shake, grow, expose himself, and fall for the illusion of his own glory.
She keeps him around to erase Goat Foot from history and wipe her off the map, and once that job is done, so long to the thug, I don’t know who you are, you can go back to your dirty alley and the stinking slaughterhouse from which you came.
Boccato di cardinale, the Butcher? Yes, because the Maiden plans to scarf him down in a single bite.
All this will happen, probably. Down the line, the quickening pulse of death will come between the Butcher and the Maiden.
But that’ll be later, in another legend.
For now, the Axe League is in motion and well-oiled, gathering strength, preparing little by little, unrushed, one step at a time, sowing the desert with sacred stones that will become altars, which will become shrines, then chapels, synagogues, mosques, churches that will turn into temples, meccas, and cathedrals, and, later still, basilicas and Vaticans.
And alongside them, up will rise the barricades and trenches, barracks that will later be brigades and fortresses, jails that will turn into panopticons, concentration camps, high walls, barbed wire.
The confessionals and flagellations will give way to interrogation rooms and inquisitions, supreme courts and summary trials, condemnations and stonings, gallows and stakes for burning, torture dungeons and central intelligence, secret services, special operations, Mossads, KGBs, CIAs, DEAs.
All that will come. It’ll come with patience and a bit of charm. It’ll come with time and a small stick.