Harps of the Ancient Temples

Harps of the Ancient Temples
by Dee [about 5000 words]

In the fortified city of Gilgal, set into a canyon where the cold clear waters of a large creek spilled into the great sea of Sebus, the Nephite ruler of the city, Queen Theba knew all. She knew who had written a filthy limerick in her dishonor and so had the poet and his entire family, his wife and three daughters imprisoned in the lowest dungeon far beneath the cliff-face city with little food and water. She knew as well that she had murdered the man she loved the most, a young Nephite captain, Aha, who had journeyed south from the land of Bountiful to campaign against the Lamanites, and had beaten them in a battle that had become a ‘deus ex machina,’ otherwise unexplainable. Still many had died and mourning filled the heart of the tiny city.

Otherwise sunrise on a perfect day in late summer arose on the tail end of a robin’s greeting from the cottonwoods that grew along the shores of Sebus, sprouting as well behind the walls of Gilgal, providing shade to young widows amazed at their sudden loss. The day moved among mourning, and light shined through the tiny windows upon a vacant adobe hut that clung to the outside walls of the city, the home of Cayman the Lamanite and his wife and three daughters, deep in the deepest dungeon awaiting death.

Meanwhile Queen Theba presided over the celebratory ritual adoring the nose-picking stone idol, Momboss, a descendant of Molech, the child murdering god of the Ammonites. She perched impatiently on her throne, a beautiful woman slender of body, her long black hair upon her dainty shoulders, eyes that pierced the retina and filled her subjects with fear. She sat pulling her fingers and twitching with growing annoyance while Dooj, the court harpist played his bestial noises on a twangy thing that was some sort of skin stretched over a gourd, a fretboard fastened to that and several strings tuned to an unholy dissonance that sounded loudly and irritatingly as it echoed in the room.

“Can’t you sing a little louder over that horrible thing?” She asked the Dooj, who stood obscenely in his merest loincloth, a foot hiked on a step:

“We worship you, Momboss, our Lord, to you all blood libations poured…!”

“Enough! You sound like you’re singing in a can!”

The Dooj grinned irrepressibly through his beard and curls, a thing of cuteness; indeed his cuteness got him places and he played the trump, mugging and pursing his lips and demurring with a finger to them, smiling at the queen as if confident he had wowed her. He did not realize that he had been one upped.

The Queen had summoned the poet from the deepest dungeon where he made a tearful farewell to his wife and daughters, then led along a network of tunnels that ascended through subterranean housing and mercantile compartments, and out into a busy market in the blinding daylight, brought to the palace to bathe and be put in fresh garments, finally summoned to the queen, and the flash of fire in her eyes.

“Poet,” she said, “If your verse is any indicator I have no doubt that your hymns will prove superior to his,” and here she pointed a finger toward the Dooj, “our court harpist. He is not good and that is no harp.”

The abject poet in his kneeling stance asked “Why should I bother, Highness?”

She turned her fire on him. “I will have you put to death for that.”

“Done already,” he said. “Along with my wife and my innocent children. You doomed us to die in the dungeon.”

“I don’t like limericks in my honor,” she said.

“Kill me for defending a friend, your Majesty but I have sworn to serve you in any capacity. And I ask only that you let my wife and children go free.”

“You can free them yourself,” she raised an eyebrow as she spoke.

“How can I?”

“Write good hymns and submit them to the high priest, Truk or the chronicler, Brother Daweed. They must approve them and then I must approve them. And they had better be good if you wish your family ever to view the light of day. I will see to their care in the meantime.”

Then she dismissed him and the Dooj with a flick of the wrist, arising from her throne as she did so, followed by a small entourage to the stairs that wound up to her private chambers.

Back in the dust and glaring sunlight, Cayman made his way to the gates of Gilgal and slipped out the tiny guarded entrance, all the while the Dooj at his heels dancing along like a crazed fanatic for the presence of celebrity.

“You may think you’re important but only the Queen can say that,” the Dooj went out of his way explaining the obvious.

“I never said I was important,” Cayman tried to say.

“Yeah but you’re not. Only the queen can say.”

“Fine, then,” said Cayman. “All I want from her is my family returned to me. That’s it. You can be the important one.”

“I already am,” the Dooj said. “I’m the court harpist.”

“You call that thing a harp?”

“What else would it be?”

“A banjo, perhaps?”

The Dooj laughed outright. “And what would you know? A poet! The man who sold it to me, who taught me how to play it, taught me for years and years to play every single melody precisely the way he played it, by rote at his knee, until my mother went broke paying for my lessons, he told me it was a harp. And a harp it is because he would know before you would, a poet!”

“And you compose the hymns—“

“And will be long after you’re done with.”

“How do you come up with the melodies?”

“I borrow the ones my master taught me.”

“I see,” said Cayman, and said nothing more. Now he knew. Dooj, being a rote player and lacking all imagination, simply applied the rustic monads and melodies of a peasant player to the holiest of hymns, scribbled out rhyming doggerel and sang loudly, all the while mugging and strutting and posturing as cutely as possible in his attempt to draw all attention away from the music and to himself. Such a creature had no vision, serving no god but itself, like the snake trying to crawl up its colon forever, with nothing to sustain it but an ever dwindling supply of excrement.

“How did you come to be court harpist anyway?”

“I’m a genius,” said Dooj. “The high priest says so.” To which Cayman said nothing, having heard the rumors about the ‘spit spooge’ Dooj, offering every available orifice to the priest’s proclivities for gain. However, as the Dooj followed Cayman through the door of the poet’s little two room adobe home adjoining the outside walls on the south side of Gilgal, he had no idea that his own queen worked against him even now, that she had put out notice for a new harpist to replace him.

“So you’re the best we have?” Asked Cayman.

“Spit Spooge!” The Dooj replied.

“Not in here,” said Cayman as he knelt to start a fire. “My home is sacred to me.”

Verily, the new harpist came on wings, and with his mother in tow, arriving on a windy sunless day to await an audience in the circle of stones, where the obscene idol called Momboss now replaced the old belief. Cayman having been summoned to meet the new harpist found himself gaping in wonder on the atrocious stone object of the new god, a fat squatting facsimile of a balding man with hair down the sides and back of its head, a finger in a nostril and another in its rectum, teats hanging like a woman’s, and its puny male hubris dangling and ready to ejaculate. A real perversion it was, and Cayman detested the sight of it. Nor was he alone.

The young new harpist smiled ironically and shook his head in Cayman’s direction as if he knew him. He was a black-haired and slender teenager with a full black mustache and eyes that were innocent and sweet. Cayman brightened at the beautiful boy and smiled at his doting mother, who nodded in return. They were dressed in tunics and sandals of a make he had never seen but yet seemed familiar to him somehow. Where did he know these people?

“I am Cayman, the Lamanite,” he said and bowed low.

“The famous poet,” the young harpist said. “We are honored.”

Cayman narrowed his gaze askance and asked “You sure you have the right Cayman?”

“Word travels quickly,” the young harpist said.

At that, the high priest, Truk, an imposing presence with a face of guile and a snake’s charm, entered the chamber and led the others grandly into the circle of stones. “Let us bow in benediction to his wholly-ness, Momboss who delivered us from the Lamanite horde.”

Cayman felt only revulsion and stayed standing while several others including the emaciated Brother Daweed in his shoulder length curls, and the foolish Dooj went right to their knees to drink the piss of desperate thirst. He grimaced in disgust to see grown men carry on so as they asked for the blessings of a block of stone, and glanced over surprised that neither the young harpist nor his mother had moved so much as a hair.

When the prayer ended Truk struggled to find his footing beneath the fat pillars of his legs and scowled meanly. “Too good for our god, are you?” He asked the harpist.
“That will cost you. I don’t care who you say you are.”

The harpist said nothing but took the seat on the stone bench usually reserved for the Dooj, and, mouthing a silent prayer, began to pick the strings; and then the room seemed to take on the life of a great moth humming its wings with electric trembling as transcendent harmonies unknown to Cayman filled the air like a breeze from the sea, a blissful dream-trance carried on waves of perfect playing. Up and down the strings the nimble fingers gathered sound like harvest wheat, a searching melancholy and triumphant joy all akimbo in the jarred psyche of the court poet, that words arrived to fill the meaning of it all upon the silent lips of Cayman the Lamanite:

“That I should live to see these days, oh Lord,
Remembering in the water perfect round vibration
While I trembled at this mystery of being…
Linger with me, Lord, thy merest servant,
Weeping where the river finds the sea of wishes
Where the tears all mingle in the eyes of dream fish
Smiling their indifference in the deep abysses
Under sleeping Sebus far forever rolling
To the west horizon, to the last defeat of light
In sparkling shimmer crimson as the blood
That roils beneath this mystery of stars.
This surge of life, this pulsing wave of movement
Beating in my ears the music of my mother’s love,
Embracing in the rocking rhythm of the ancient tongue
That is symphonic in the leaves of whispering trees,
It is my mother’s language gifted to me in the long
nocturnal breathing:
Wave on wave her whispered love song to her own--

“That’s enough of that,” snapped Truk.

“You don’t like it?” The harpist’s mother asked, her eyes surprised, dismayed. Dooj beside the two priests eyed one another coldly, and the resentment felt by Dooj became a fright masking nearly rage though he said only “spit spooge.”

Brother Daweed approached, his dainty fingers intertwined in supplication. “Not that it isn’t good,” he told them. “Perhaps we need to hear from the harpist only. We feel his mother’s presence may affect his playing and we want to assess his abilities, ah…er, untainted, if you please.”

For a moment she showed shock, and then dismay, and after that a pair of crimson slits for eyes, reached over and kissed her son on the side of his face and said

“I’ll see you on the outside.”

Cayman said “I’ll come along. I need a quiet place to go compose my hymns, and I must say you’re son has greatly inspired me.”

When they had left the circle of stones and the temple dome that housed them and were back in the sunlight, the harpist’s mother said “between you and me, you’d best compose your hymns to the true and living god not some feeble block of granite.”
Cayman replied that he would keep it in mind and asked her if she was hungry. To her nod, he walked her out of the city gates and into his home on the south side where the shade of a cedar tree cooled the adobe interior. He laid out his best blankets and offered her a place and she wondered where his family was.

“They’ve been jailed for my sake. Even now they’re starving to death. But the queen has promised I will see them again if the hymns are to her liking.”

“She’s treacherous, old Theba; but don’t sell your soul, whatever you do.”

“I can’t let my daughters down,” he said as he searched desperately in the hut for his ink and his bark sheets, pulling blankets up as he went along and asking his guest to adjust her position. Instead she held up a beautifully ornate wax tablet about a foot square, and of gold with a gold stylus clipped to it. “Please,” she said. “Use these.”

“My my,” he marveled as he opened the case, and took the stylus in his fingers. “I take it you press the wax with this…” and did so, making a letter. She nodded.

“Busy yourself and I will find your ink and bark.”

So Cayman sat cross-legged with the tablet on his knee and began to work a hymn from his head to the smooth wax:

“Oh stooped stone of Momboss squat
Regaling finger unto snot,
The other in his rectum rent
To excavate his excrement.

He picks the twanger of his need
And stirs his fingers in the mead
That quaff the bounding, standing steed
To water boil with panting speed.

Six times thus he pounded mud
Albino like a milk-ed stud;
Now sterilized in stone to sit,
He merely fingers balls of shit.”

“Not quite faint praise,” the harpist’s mother said, reading over his shoulder, a warm hand upon it, a mother’s hand, “but good enough for the like.”

“When praise doesn’t work the truth has to.”

She sat beside him and took the tablet in her lap and read it again, and said that such a song could be sung to either harp or banjo. Cayman studied her face, the dark hair pulled back and tied in a tail, stray ringlets hanging like side burns.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“My name is Calliope,” she said and smiled. “I love my son. I worry for him.” She paused to think a moment then brightened and said “I found your bark and ink.”

As she watched him then, Cayman managed out four more hymns to the obscene idol of Gilgal, transferring them little by little from wax to bark, until the hymns were finished. “Quick work,” he had to admit as the labor had taken a mere two hours. “Let’s take these to the priests and fetch your son.”

But the doors would not be opened for her. Armed guards held their spears against her while Cayman was allowed through with ease. He asked “who gave these orders?” And the guards replied it was the high priest who gave the order. “Since when does he replace the queen?” Asked Cayman and shook his head. The guard replied “Don’t shake your head at me, little redman.” Cayman blanched at Calliope but hurried on past the guard, assuring her as he turned his head “I’ll bring you your son.”
The temple doors themselves were barred to Cayman now, though he beat his fists on the door and demanded entrance, telling them “I’ve come to fetch the harpist! His mother is worried.”

“He’s a big boy,” cooed the high priest, Truk through the keyhole, and Cayman could hear the unpleasant Dooj in the background asking “Oh, is he in trouble? Spit spooge…spit spooge.”

“Then, will you at least accept these hymns?” Cayman called past the closed wooden door. It creaked a notch, enough that a dainty hand of Brother Daweed poked through grasping air, and Cayman took the hint and laid the sheaves of bark in the priest’s fingers. The hand pulled back as the door slammed shut and Cayman now feared for the harpist’s life. What to do now? No ideas forth came but to sit and worry. All avenues seemed blocked but one, and that to buy food and feed himself. And then he thought of Calliope standing outside the gate to the city. How hungry had she become? He bought a few shum’s worth of ready made meals, some ripe fruit and a smoked fish pulled fresh from Sebus, cradled the lot in his arms and made his way for home.

Her worry became fright when Cayman gave Calliope the news; her eyes went wide with terror but he fed her nonetheless. She ate like a starveling and drank his spearmint tea picked wild along the adobe house and cured and dried by his own rough hands. Still she trembled and pulled her fingers wondering what would happen next, as Cayman lay a blanket around her shoulders and folded another into a pillow and sat beside her, asking if he could sing an old song to mollify her worry.

“I fear for my son,” she managed to say.

“I understand,” said Cayman. “Maybe if you told me about your home it would take your mind off things because I can tell you need to sleep.”

She smiled at him and paused to remember and said finally “It is a place across the outer sea,” she looked off, her head tilted, “a land of grapes and bread and honey, songs and tales, of beautiful women and warrior kings, of poets like you who sing to their pretty children, a place to be buried in myth, someday. You would be a man of stature there, honored and loved by those who understand that music makes meaning.”

“Oh,” he said. “I would love to see it.”

“Sing to me,” she asked and Cayman brought from the depths of ancient memory the tale of the wedding dress, of the young bride who would not consent to marry until her dress was finished, and so never finished it. It was a song as old human nature, filled with the sorrow of the human being, transcending temporal matters like a freed bird from a cage in the depths of consciousness. Indeed, the human soul was the only temple true to its architecture where immortal harps were plucked in the heart of longing, and language tied itself to the music of its syllables anticipating harp songs sent as vespers to the Beloved…

Cayman did not realize he had fallen asleep where he sat cross-legged and awoke to find himself entwined with the harpist’s mother, her head upon his chest, her breathing deep and dreamy like the waves of Sebus. He came up with a start to the knocking at his door, and startled her and she awoke wildly, staring about with a new fear.

Sunset had come, and Calliope glared with a hollow eyed terror, as she met Cayman’s own frightened gaze: “Where is my son?”

The guard at the door was unmoved and addressed Cayman only, saying “you are hereby summoned by the Queen of Gilgal.”

“Just a moment,” said Cayman, slipping his feet in his sandals, and wrapping his robe about his shoulders. He followed the guard down the hill and in through the gates of Gilgal, across the market square and up the steps into the palace. He could hear the obnoxious twanging of Dooj, and a lot of yelling and raucous singing coming from inside the palace, and moved hesitantly through the doors to find himself in the midst of a great deal of merrymaking. The queen was drunk already as were the priests, the courtiers and the courtesans all stripped down to nothing, one of whom pressed her privates to Cayman’s thigh and tickled his chin with a bare nipple in her fingers. She smiled with a wantonness that shocked him, and he struggled free to seek out the harpist.

Then he saw it, the reason for the night’s celebration, a tall stone statue carved quickly and with little art, the headless statue of a man, a warrior, specifically, and Cayman knew it was the headless torso of Captain Aha who had been lately murdered and beheaded. Queen Theba stood before it, toasting with a full goblet of concord grape wine. “I wish my artisans had gotten your face right, Love,” she said to the object, and turned to see the small poet standing bandy-legged and tilting to the left. He wiped his sweaty forehead with a corner of his robe.

“You summoned me, Majesty?” He bowed low.

“Your hymns,” she spoke through wine dribble, “are magnificent.” And then she swayed in the direction of the statue. “Don’t you suppose he needs a head?”

Cayman, noticing the drying blood smear on the shoulders of the statue, said “I see you’ve tried a few, already.”

“My artists,” she said, and studied him with a greedy grin. “You knew the young captain. Perhaps your own head will do.”

“I doubt it,” he said and stepped upon a bench behind and laid his head on the shoulders, staring at her blankly.

“Never mind,” she said. “You did your work well. Go and fill yourself, and pointed at a large banquet table laden with fresh cooked food.

As Cayman studied the main chamber of the palace he saw a long box set on sawhorses in a corner of the room, the priests around it now, staring into it, along with the court harpist Dooj who seemed even from this distance supremely happy. As Cayman stepped near he stopped and his heart skipped as real horror fell upon him to see a body lying in the box, a naked form in nothing but a pale loin cloth. He moved slowly closer and recognized the moustache on the face of the young harpist at peace as if asleep, but the neck terribly bruised. The priests had strangled the boy.
Truk saw him and grinned with hatred. “He was a little too good for us,” he said. “We had to teach him a few tricks of our own. Besides, he made an unwelcome and horrible song about Gilgal being destroyed, and we can’t have that sort of talk from strangers out of town.”

Cayman grimaced in replay and backed off and made his way through the drunken crowd of noisy carousers, until he noticed the jailer jangling his keys and making obscene gestures to a nude courtesan with her slender arm around his neck, her bare and aromatic maidenhead tilted toward him ready for his nightstick.

As the jailer dropped his keys to the floor, and parted the folds of his garment, Cayman bent down and fetched the keys and carried them to the banquet table, and loaded his arms with fruit and flat bread. Then he sneaked past the drunken guards lounging outside the door and made his way across the street to the market, and into the interior, and down the snaking paths into the torch-lit tunnels, deeper and deeper into pitch black places where the dungeons were, calling out “Ruth!” as he went along, hearing her faint reply in the shadows. There were torches lit here as well, but fewer and spiced widely, that the darkness lay oppressively.

He matched the key to the lock and carried the food within and a brought his wife and daughters water as well and watched while they fell to their meal under torchlight. And when they had eaten he brought them to their unsteady feet and led them out of the dungeon, back the way he had come into the open air and through the tiny side door out of the city of Gilgal. He led them to Sebus’ shore to bathe, and brought down fresh clothing for them, and then took them home to meet Calliope, who smiled warmly.

“What about my son,” she asked.

“Cayman glanced down and stared at his feet.”

“Is he alright?”

“I’ll bring him to you,” and with that Cayman left his tiny abode and went running down the hill and back through the tiny side door where the guard welcomed him with a bow, and ran from there to the palace steps and into the palace itself. Inside, mass fornication seemed the main theme of the hour as soldiers and other drunkards pierced between the legs of whorish courtesans, squirting their seed even as the wine poured down their necks from up-raised goblets. The room reeked of dissolution as Cayman found the queen herself embroiled in a mass of naked bodies writhing on a great bear’s fur.

At that moment he saw the head set atop the headless statue standing against the main wall. As he neared it he did not wish to believe it but there it sat as if in sleep, the closed eyes the black hair, the small black mustache, the boyish face, and knew it to be the harpist. It had to be but he wanted to hope and so approached the wooden box set upon sawhorses. A headless torso greet him there, blood drenched now in a pool of the iron-strong stench of death, the spilled bile, the gore dripping out of the wooden box. He gulped as waves of nausea overtook him and whirled to face this orgy of murderers and wished them death, every last one. He removed his robe and went to the statue, and removed the harpist’s head and wrapped it up. He needn’t have been so furtive. No one noticed, so busy were they with the consummation of genital joy, the grape and semen mingling in a pool of fish-milk and sweat, the muscles taught, the eyes rolling back, the gasping and howling out in pleasures dark with the stain of unholy sin. Cayman calmly stepped past and over them, carrying his grisly memento rolled up in his own robes. Near Dooj, knocked out in a pool of vomit and snoring loudly, his exposed member having ‘spit spooge’ enough to be caked in crystallized semen, his hairy chest heaving and a smile of triumph on his bearded face, lay the harp itself tipped over on the floor. Cayman retrieved it too, and moved on.

Past the door, a guard had presence enough to ask him what he carried and he answered truthfully that they were gifts from the queen, and the guard let him go with a wink. “The queen’s favors are a remarkable thing, aren’t they?”

Cayman did not wish to answer that they were not so remarkable as all that, and so merely nodded, bowed and smiled and went on toward the great front gate. Once more he slipped through the little side door beside it and climbed the hill toward his home. Here he hesitated and, with a deep sigh, went through the door and fell to his knees before Calliope whose eyes welled up with tears.

“Please forgive me,” he said as gently he lay the covered head on the ground before her. “Be careful, it is not good to see.”

“Is it my son?” Her eyes pleaded for any other answer.

“I’m afraid so,” said Cayman.

She parted the wrap and turned the face to hers and bent down to kiss the forehead as she broke down in tears, staring upward now to wail at the heavens. “Dear God,” she cried “that this must always be so for my boy!”

“Here is his harp,” Cayman whispered, and laid it at her knee. She took it in her hands and strummed a lullaby for the sleeping face as tears washed down her cheeks:

“Sleep, my sweet little boy
And rock in your mothers arms
The wind and rain they blow without
But the fire inside is warm.

Sleep and I will warm you,
And never my love to part
Though winter rages, nuzzle yourself
To the fire in my heart…”

Then she collapsed and cried in her arms as Cayman and his family arose and went into the other room for the night, and Ruth wrapped the girls in the blankets they had not in enjoyed in nearly a month, and tried to sing to them but could not and so lay beside them staring up at the stars until they fell asleep. He got up and Ruth reached out and held his arm a moment but let it go when he smiled and nodded.

“Thank you,” her silent lips moved to say, and he kissed her hand as he left the room.

He knelt beside Calliope and lifted her up, and held her to him as she continued to cry in his tunic. He said “you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like.”

She met his gaze and said “you are a very kind man but I won’t stay in this city. Tomorrow it will sink into the earth and be consumed—“

“How can you say that,” asked Cayman.

“Tomorrow the ghost of Dionysus the mediator dies once more at the hands of wicked men. They will spill His blood and rend His flesh and think He is dead but He will rise again in three days time. All the world must face the wrath of His Father and this city is certainly no exception. We came to warn you with a hymn to save the city from itself but its wickedness is all too plain.”

“What can I do?”

“I will see to your protection,” she said.

“Such a wonderful mother you are. He must have been a happy boy.”

“His name was Orpheus,” she said through a mother’s tears. “He tuned the crickets’ harps and taught them how to play. And now you know.”

It was then that Cayman noticed it, the eerie quiet of the night where not a breeze came whispering to comfort troubled hearts. The crickets were silent. Would they ever sing again, he wondered, those harps of the ancient temples? Calliope wept, and that was all there was to hear.