Chapter The Axe League #3
“Goat Foot falls to the ambush and is taken prisoner. Her two enemies celebrate her capture in loud, raucous voices and rush to prepare the gallows.”
Goat Foot will be the sacrificial lamb, the expiatory victim, and over her spilled blood the two factions will make peace.
The conflict in the kingdom of Sheba will be over.
The war’s end will be sealed with this ceremony, Goat Foot’s immolation on an altar on a knoll before the two armies in parallel formations, their standards held high, their weapons dropped.
Violence floats over them, weightless and ethereal as a hymn, dispersing elegantly and abstractly through the air.
Violence has already forgotten the war that had occupied its attentions, which now focus exclusively on the sacrificial victim.
Goat Foot is brought out tied up like Zurbarán’s little lamb.
She’s been dressed in white, the color of innocence; she is the goat, the purifying creature.
By express orders of the Maiden, who wants to conceal her daughter’s beauty, her face has been covered with a thick veil.
Hiding her limp as much as possible to avoid seeming pitiful, Goat Foot moves forward, full of dignity, on the back of a great camel, surrounded by funeral chants, a hundred torches, and countless smoking censers.
This takes place on the night of Safar—or on the thousand and one nights of Safar—under a sky tinged with the red glow of Antares, the star known as the Heart That Bleeds.
The icy desert air condenses into incense clouds.
Ritual incense, fragrant, intoxicating. Her own incense, the one from Hadhramaut, made from the olibanum that Goat Foot herself discovered, processed, and spread throughout the world.
Is there not a saying, Sow winds, and you’ll reap storms?
And also, Cultivate olibanum, and you’ll be sacrificed.
So it was written, and so it comes to pass.
Everything happens for something, nothing happens for nothing.
According to the alaleishos, Goat Foot walks toward the gallows as if her mind were elsewhere, in an ecstatic state, with a profound sense of meaning.
The meaning of what? Of something, of everything, of nothing.
She knows her time has come to an end, this time of the now, and she’ll have to plumb the depths to reemerge and begin again.
She already knows the darkest center of the earth, she’s been there, she’s not intimidated.
She holds the amethyst scarab tightly in her hand, and she embraces its mandate—do not fear the universe—and don’t fear death either, for it is part of everything, the other face of this same coin, peaceful old death, already familiar to her.
Goat Foot is a pioneer of ars moriendi, the art of dying well, or the wisdom of surrendering elegantly to a departure that’s never terminal but merely transitory, an open door to somewhere else.
Yes, yes, all of this is clear, clearer than water, but what about the pain?
The terror that takes over a soon-to-be-tormented body?
How to withstand the pain, that baptism by fire, that sorrow corroding the bones, that slow invading drill?
A quick death comes and goes. But what to do with the agony of pain?
Goat Foot’s neck anticipates the blade’s caress, the axe’s cut, and for an instant she’s frozen by panic.
Just an instant. She immediately pulls herself together and keeps moving forward, head held high in full view of all the people of the desert, those who revere her and those who despise her, those who persecute her and those who follow her, all mixed together in the expectant crowd covering the vast plains around the knoll.
So, is this the sad culmination of this long story, the myth’s ignoble end?
No, it’s merely its repetition, cyclical, ad infinitum.
Mythic creatures are eternal, just like gods, as long as they pay for it with a large share of suffering: the repetition of death, over and over, year after year.
Like Jesus on the cross. Like Persephone, forced to live in the depths of Hades.
Like the Phoenix turned to ash, or Aeneas submitted to a descensus ad inferos.
Osiris, drowned in the Nile. Odin, hanging from a tree upside down.
So too with Goat Foot, Princess of Sheba, her throat slit by a butcher’s axe.
All myths burn.
All myths burn and are burned.
But things do not end there. The god who dies on Good Friday is resurrected on Easter Sunday.
If Persephone descends to Hades every winter, it’s so she can joyfully rise up again in the spring.
The Phoenix is reborn from its own ashes.
Osiris, the dismembered one, is reassembled like a puzzle and made whole again.
Aeneas returns from hell unharmed and triumphant, and Odin undoes himself from the tree, illuminated by Knowledge.
So too with Goat Foot, Princess of Sheba, my Moorish Queen, Lady of the Rising Sun, Madonna of the Almond, and Heroine of the People of the Dawn, who will have her throat cut like a young lamb every time Antares reddens the sky, but will emerge again the next morning in the fullness of her beauty, vitality, and strength.
High above, from the roof of her palace, the Maiden watches the bloody ceremony.
She wears her mantle of foam, and a necklace of tears against her chest, a green palm frond in her right hand and a cup of the water of forgetting in her left.
The perfect oval of her face, of her impassable beauty, betrays no emotion.
Below, at the altar, the Butcher swells with pride, as he will personally be carrying out the sentence.
As ceremonial attire, he wears the same black apron as always, but on his head, instead of the Phrygian cap, he wears the costume of infamy, of devious death: an executioner’s hood that covers the whole face except for the essential holes for eyes, which spark.
The strangest part is that the Butcher takes off his hood in one fell swoop before removing Goat Foot’s veil and tunic and gathering her hair to expose the nape of her neck for his axe.
Against all required protocols, the Butcher has shed his hood and revealed his face before the watching crowd.
Why this unusual gesture? To accentuate his cruelty, or as a sign of respect for his victim?
According to the alaleishos, it was an instinctive gesture spurred by his surprise at the young woman’s naked beauty.
In the pallor of a trance, hands tied behind her back, naked from the waist up, offering her swanlike neck with utter dignity, Goat Foot must have been a stunning apparition.
A whole revelation for those who only knew her covered in black cloth.
The Butcher, an eroticized male, feels the moment’s ferocious sensuality.
“You are death,” he whispers into Goat Foot’s ear, “and I am Death.”
Then he makes the cut, almost sweetly, like an act of seduction or even possession, while Goat Foot lets go lightly, without spasms or cries, as if her body were falling into someone’s arms, as if the earth receiving her were soft, like someone seeing off a boat into the distance while the wind flutters their kerchief of farewell.
The scene is so strangely harmonious, so ethereal in its choreography, that the Maiden, from her palace, feels betrayed.
Is it rage, or jealousy? That will never be known.
Victory for the heartless pair? In the end, do the villains win, the Maiden and the Butcher?
More or less, more or less, they will die too, if not today, tomorrow.
Misery loves company, as the saying goes.
But there’s a difference: When they die, it’ll be forever.
Goat Foot, on the other hand, will emerge from her martyrdom victorious, held by eternity and transformed by that axe blade into a mythical, superhuman being.
At least that’s what the alaleishos believe, and they’re happy for her, because they know her story doesn’t end there.
One of the many paradoxes of Goat Foot, Queen of Sheba, is that in truth she never becomes queen, at least not in this turn of the mythic spiral; maybe in one of the next ones she will, though it’s unlikely, because crown and throne are things she doesn’t want, and will not want.
Also, the current cycle is not yet complete, as Goat Foot still has a commitment to keep.
There’s a certain bet in motion that nobody so far has lost or won.