9. SIN

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (9)

FOREWORD

Decapitation…

THE TALE

Cyril Boniface drifted on. It wasn’t a deliberate thing, to leave the precious girl behind with her thoughts of fear and love and beautiful abstract things like that, but he did it. Not that he had much choice because it might have been him standing still and the rest of creation drifting on. Yet drifting on wasn’t an accurate description in a floaty place that wasn’t a place, was nowhere and led nowhere, but just was.

“I felt regret,” she said or whispered or thought or just mouthed out of the blue or whatever colour eternity was, if it had a colour at all, that is.

Who was she? She felt like a queen, if there ever was such a thing. Not here, surely, where there need be no kings or queens for there didn’t seem to be anyone to rule over, unless he was everyone and royalty at the same time.

“Can you imagine what it was like?” she continued in the void, “to stand condemned of making glorious and mind-wrenching love to your own brother and not doing it? The flesh of your parents’ flesh that you’ve shared some of your childhood with? Not feeling his breath on your neck when it’s him doing the breathing? I, who knew him from childhood, who’d chased him and been chased by him in innocence and joy, who had never so much as lain a finger near his codpiece or dreamed of such a thing, and then accused by my liege lord of lying with him in ecstasy on a dark night that never was… of consummating my childhood innocent love with the adult him… I was wounded to the quick by the thoughts and not the deeds...”

“Gwennie?” asked Cyril, “is that your woe on the world?”

But it was as if he had never spoken, never asked the question, and the mists that weren’t mists swirled, and then became a shape, or not quite a shape. But if it was a shape it was a queenly shape without a crown, for queen if that’s what she was, was without a head or anything resembling one on which to place the crown.

“And the poet,” she moaned, “I would have lain with him a thousand times! His melodic words, his whispered songs, his purity… For in all of that wretched world there is only one thing greater than life and that is song and the beauty of words that tell valiant tales of love and lust and damsels in distress and warriors to the rescue!

“And so he sang thus to me and I did lie with him twice or thrice, truth to tell, for there are no untruths here, no falsehoods, no fictions, and that’s the greatest of blessings. And when I did lie with him, when I did let his flesh penetrate mine, it was as if I was in Heaven. And his whispered words, the poesy of love, I tell you this, Cyril, was nothing like lust. Yet I lusted in great spasms of desire. Didn’t I lust for him? And master Smeaton gave me all I wanted, in rhyme and length of flesh! Poor Mark, poor, poor Mark, he would never have confessed had it not been for the rack and the thumbscrew that combined to focus his thoughts! But tell me, sweet Cyril, where is your love?”

That gave him pause to think.

“I was married, and she died,” he projected into the void, “I had as good a wife as any man could have...”

“And you lay with her? Tell me you lay with her, long nights of passion between the sheets? Tell me that!”

“Of course I did,” he mumbled, “and never once during our years together did I lie with another, or even kiss another on young pale cheeks, yet we ended our lives together, childless… There was some problem with the engine that drives my seed… The doctors told me I would need special treatment that might not work… instead we gave it up as a bad job and still loved each other. Until she passed away, that is… Until then. She must be here somewhere, maybe a shadow amongst the shadows, a love heart amongst the dreams...”

“And that’s where lives cross over,” smiled the queen who wasn’t a queen because she didn’t have a head, or, in that place, any flesh whatsoever.

“What do you mean?” He was confused, or at least, more confused than he had been, which had been confusing enough.

“Well, haven’t you guessed? Haven’t you seen the truth? Worked out the various combinations that led you and Gwennie to me?” she said in a voice that would have smiled if it could, “in another life… in a very different life I called you my Mark and lay with you, and you, dear Cyril, had seed that worked back then. And poetry to melt any heart that heard it...”

“Mark? You called me Mark… and I know that’s my name. Or was. And Cyril.”

“And I was your Anne when you were my Mark,” she laughed, “and didn’t we have fun together, those two lovely times that might have been twenty had not whispered tales got in the way, but it was sin, my lover, and we both paid the price for sin.”

“I died?”

He remembered the feeling of being led to the block. It was something that had lain undisturbed for generations inside the minds of all he had been, and now it resurfaced as a huge and sudden fear.

“I was executed,” he whispered. “They took me on a bright morning for daring to love a queen, and bade me place my head on the blood-stained block, and let me hear the whistle as the blade swung down...”

“It was our sin,” she murmured, if headless queens in a misty nowhere can murmur, “your flesh and my flesh, your seeds flowing like milky cream and the laughter we had when we thought of the scene if Henry chanced to walk in...”

“And I whispered my verses into your ears,” he remembered, “lays of love and poesy of hope, and there was no sin in a syllable of it.”

“Love can never be sin,” she assured him, “for sin is nothing. It doesn’t exist anywhere in any universe because it presupposes there’s a deity to sin against, and look around you, wherefore is your god...”

“So you and I?” he asked weakly, “once upon a time?

“I was Anne and you were Mark, and together we knew love and all its joys...”

“Until we lost our heads,” he sighed, “what was life like back then in that other place?”

“It was ruled by sin, which is the effluence of gods,” she told him. “The bishops and archbishops told it and we were forced to believe. Do this and you sin, do that and you sin, do the other and you sin, make love on a Sunday and you sin, fornicate on a saints day and you sin, never lie with your man on a Tuesday and you sin, and should your bodies merge together on Easter Sunday then the skies will all fall in because of the treachery in that sin!”

“And you knew about the rack and the thumbscrews?” he asked, “and you couldn’t stop them?”

She might have smiled had she flesh to smile with. “I was too concerned to get the right swordsman to sever my own pretty neck,” she whispered, “but we’re all right here, don’t you think?”

“And the best thing,” he admitted, “is we have no flesh to sin with, nor feel the pain of the rack.”

“No flesh,” she sighed, “would that we had, my poetic Mark… But go forth and find your Gwennie, for in finding her you will also rediscover me...”

Then the swirling mist dissolved her if the shape had been her, and he found himself moving on, out of control yet in control, going yet not going, swimming in a sea of eternity.

© Peter Rogerson, 18.03.20