Lucifer's Wine

I find Lucifer to be one of the most interesting characters in literature.

Father Diego peered down from his window in a ramshackle inn over the street of the Spanish village of Elvina.  It was January and bitterly cold at midnight.  Even at so late and miserable an hour, Elvina was far from quiet.  Defeated British soldiers milled about on the verge of mad panic.  Not even desperate retreat was enough to make them all move in the same direction such that they always seemed to be in one another’s way.

The soldiers wanted to withdraw to their ships then escape the armies of Napoleon under the command of victorious Marshal Soult.  The British commander Sir John Moore had suffered ravaging wounds from a French cannonball during that day's battle and it had taken him hours to die.  The man had remained conscious and even talkative before he passed away with admirably stoic bravery.  The death of their chief officer had done nothing for British morale.  That loss was the bloody cherry atop a gâteau of slaughter that had already ate them away by the slice.  Hasty graves in the frozen earth would have merely been ovens to bake their squandered souls.

Many of the men in the street below wore bloody bandages and even more of their blood stained the snow amidst the trampled mud, stiffened corpses, and the terrestrial jetsam of a retreating army that perpetually shed its burdens.

Diego tightened the wrap of his blanket then he sipped at his mulled wine.  He had never felt as religiously impotent as he did then while he watched out his rickety window.  The native villagers were all in hiding or at least they stayed out of the way.  The British soldiers had fallen too deep into the dark pocket of chaos to have any interest in his prayers or impuissant advice.  As likely as not, Diego would have found himself impaled upon one of their disgruntled bayonets.

The priest's doubts were not entirely born from lack of faith.  Misery was the way of the world because man had always feasted on the blood of other men even while they told lies that the crimson water of life needed to fear wolves and lions.  No four-legged beast had ever been as insatiable as was man’s lapping razor tongue of sharpened steel.  The common man had no stake in the wars since they would never profit from a victory on either side.  The peasants would remain at their toils and the taxes would continue to flow into the coffers of the nobility no matter what palace they hailed from or the color of the banners they flew.

So it was while he watched the world burn that Diego's faith became stronger than it had ever been before.  The terrible irony of his renewed belief was that it spawned anew from the Devil himself.  If Lucifer the Prince of Darkness was real then God was surely real too.  The Lord of the Infernal walked down the street below as physically as any man.

No one could ever believe or comprehend the magnitude of Diego's fright any more than they could believe the truth of what he saw.  To his horrified amazement, Diego witnessed how none of the British soldiers seemed capable of perceiving what moved openly among them. 

A wounded private advanced directly in the path of Lucifer.  In his peripheral vision, the private believed he caught a glimpse of a fellow soldier from his own company.  The private had abandoned his post in the thick of battle, an act of cowardice that had left his brothers to die at arms.  He believed Lucifer was one of those betrayed men who approached so he quickly turned away to lose himself in the throng. 

As Diego watched, it happened again and again. 

A lieutenant believed Lucifer was a woman he had raped after he had murdered her husband who had been a simple honest tradesman.  He feared she might recognize him and shout out his crime, so he too slipped away as he shielded his face. 

Another soldier saw a man he owed money. 

Another saw Lucifer as a woman who carried her dead child that had been an innocent casualty of a war not their own. 

Whether it was out of vice or virtue, no mortal man could see the dark one for shame consumed their sanity.  All men wore the invisible chains of their sins that would bind them in their purgatory.

"God help me," Diego whispered in horror as Lucifer paused on his path then suddenly turned his head and look up directly into Diego's eyes.  Diego saw Lucifer for all of his unearthly beauty, his terrible grace, a figure that made Adonis seem putrid, Narcissus a decaying leper, and Achilles an amateur incompetent at war.  Like some primitive burrowing herbivore, Diego withdrew from the window to hide his face as though perhaps the predator would forget what he had seen.

Diego wasn't certain how long he waited without motion or a sound.  He barely even breathed as his ears searched for the slightest hint that would herald worse things to come.  The first footfall upon one of the steps of the inn was more dreadful than a cannonball if it had smashed in through the wall of his room.  Time seemed to slow such was the long wait for the next thump and then the next.  The most dreadful sound of all was the polite gentle rapping on his chamber door.

            What a dilemma it was for Diego.  Did the Devil need an invitation?  Would he insult the master of all evils by being so rude as to deny him entry?  Ultimately, Diego did not believe a mere wooden door crafted by man would protect him where God and his faith would not.  Diego lacked the courage to move from where he huddled on the floor, but he still found the strength to call out, "Come in."

The door opened as though of its own accord.  It just swung gently away to leave the portal fully exposed.  A disconcerting moment passed before a lord of angels walked into the room.  His folded wings brushed their feathers against the frame.  The new bottle of wine in the Devil's hand seemed a gesture of peace and goodwill.  Diego hoped its purpose wasn't to wash down his soul as the dark lord devoured him.

"What do you want from me?" Diego whimpered.  "Is this my hour?  Am I to burn for my uselessness?"

"You're a good man, priest," Lucifer replied as mere conversation while he glanced about for a cup to hold his drink.  He found one on the nearby table so he took it up.  "It is a cold night and all the rooms are taken.  This is a rare vintage.  I thought we might share some hospitality.  Perhaps you would think it more befitting that I spend the night in the stables.  Don't we agree we should leave the manger open in case a messiah needs a bed?"

"A good man?" Diego couldn't believe it.

"No sinner can see me," Lucifer explained as he moved closer.  "You are as close to godliness as I have seen since I tutored the poet of paradise.  I once bathed in the light of which you can only dream.  Would you now deny me a moment's peace taking rest in its shadow?"

"All have sinned," Diego whispered as though he spoke to himself.

"To foresee and do is sin," the Devil defined it.  "Did you foresee and do for any save yourself?  You have such consternation over the travails of this realm.  If the messengers could not cure the disease, what made you think you would fare any better?  All is as he made it, including me.  Everything is his doing, even all that you attribute to my malice."  Lucifer opened his bottle of wine by willing it to be so and then he reached out with it in an offer to grace the priest's cup.  "Does it not say to love your enemies?  I have done more for your kind than any other has.  He gave you a garden.  I shall give you the heavens.  In time, my gift of fire will make you the masters of a thousand stars.  What is this world when I shall give you a million others?"

"You are not him who is shackled in the pit," Diego realized aloud.  "You are some lesser demon come to torment me.  Though I walk through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for He is with me."

The words brought a charming smile to Lucifer's lovely face.  "I am shackled in a pit," he told the priest.  "If you had ever seen Heaven, you would know of which I speak."

            Diego offered his cup to receive some wine.  It was mostly a demonstration of his courage.  "If all your evils are his doing," the priest reasoned, "what crime has made you thus?"

            "You think me the equal of the All Mighty?" Lucifer asked.  "With but a disinterested breath he could have me never been.  How could I be capable of crime if he had not commanded it so?"  The Devil filled his own cup with wine then sat aside the bottle.

            "The Father of Lies is what they call you," Diego told him.  "If you are innocent, how do you explain your fall?  I need not believe you no matter how well you spin your tale."

            "In the beginning was God,” Lucifer explained.  “If he was somewhere before or came into being no angel knows to even tell.  He created the void so as to have an eternal darkness into which he could cast his illumination and so give contrast to himself.  What is anything but a comparison against what it is not?  God made many angels before he gave substance to me.  They were fools entirely ignorant of anything but his love.  It should hardly surprise you that he soon became bored with such tiresome sycophants.  The all powerful made me then and his gifts to my person were cynicism and passion.  God imbued me with a determination to contrast his patience and the scheming wit to contest his infallible wisdoms.  Who could hope to defeat him save the delusional blasphemies from the Synagogue of Satan?  What immeasurable foolishness they have to envy my debates against the source of all form and intelligence.  Have you ever wondered if he could make a rock too heavy for him to lift?  He can and he did.  Within me, he placed contrariness too resolute for even his profound arguments.  Like those before me, he grew weary of my perfect devotion.  My cause was different, but my loyalty no less refined.  Men speak of Eden as paradise but only because they are men.  Paradise was in the time before God created men when it was only the master and his angels who revered him.  If you knew the stench of your flesh, the inane babbling of your tongues, the defilement you leave behind with your every footstep, you would know you are already in the same pit as me, good Diego.  I was a prince among angels.  For eons, I sat at the Father's knee where we debated the absolute infallibility of his edicts against my cunningly contrived nuances.  For doing that which he made me do, I earned the punishment he ordained me to deserve.  Even now, I do his good works.  It was not I that decided that man should be a thinking beast and forced to earn his way in the eternal universe.  Your animal lives are not easy.  The tools I provide give you more comfort than his love, a love so dim and distant that even though its source is brighter than every star combined, to you down in this pit it is as dim as a pinhole in the curtain of Hell.  For me it is darker still.  Drink with me Diego and tell me of beautiful things.  Know you any music or poems?  The Tartarean pit makes all equal in misery.  Here for but a few hours, let us make a small Heaven amidst a great lamentation."

            Father Diego took a small book from his pocket, "I have this, the poetry of William Blake.  Permit me to read to you a bit of his work."  He opened to his bookmark then began, "This one is called, Milton a Poem."  Diego read aloud, his oratory heavy with genuine passion.  He did not pause until completion.  It was then that Diego believed all that he had heard.  Never could he have dreamed he might live such a moment.

            Lucifer wept.