R f nelson, p.11
R. F. Nelson, page 11
Finally she said, “Then we’d best enjoy it while we may.”
She took William by the hand and led him out under the sky.
*
Robert, in the place outside of time, could see the years 1791, 1792, 1793
and 1794 all at once, in a single glance, peaceful years, almost uneventful.
He turned his spectral head, looked downtime.
So distant he could hardly see it, a wave of change was coming, a wave of change more profound than Robert had believed possible.
“I must warn William!” cried the spirit, wheeling and darting toward 1794.
*
CHAPTER SIX… 1794
The preceding year William Blake had printed and distributed among his friends and neighbors the following curious document:
“PROSPECTUS, TO THE PUBLIC.
“The labors of the artist, the poet, the musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity. This was never the fault of the public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.”
It went on to tell how William had invented a process for overcoming this problem, and ended by stating, “I have been able to bring before the public works (I am not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country.”
There followed a list of eight illuminated books and two historical engravings.
Nobody, except for the faithful Thomas Butts, had paid the slightest attention.
All the same, William had spent most of his time since then working on the announced books, which, when completed, bore such titles as “The First Book of Urizen.”
“Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” and “America, A Prophecy.” There was another book, “The Book of Vala”, which he wrote but did not print.
Kate, on seeing the title, had asked him, “When will you write a ‘Book of Kate?’ ”
He had hastily changed the title to ‘The Four Zoas,” but then had lost interest in it.
The books were full of images taken from William’s adventures as a time-voyager through the alternate worlds, used to comment on the current political and social scene. The public ignored them. Thomas Butts was almost the only buyer, so William began to cheerfully refer to him as “my employer.”
Kate continued to cut the engravings which put food on the table.
Though some of the publishers had begun to suspect who the real artist was, as her style, against her will, began to take on a character quite distinct from the stiff formal style of her husband, they did no more than exchange winks when she delivered, always before the deadline, her unsigned little masterpieces. Her specialty was sentimental glimpses of children at play; though she had no children of her own, her engravings were so lifelike, in their way, that they moved many a matron to tears.
She worked in the same room with William, sharing his tools, but her method was completely different now. He worked very slowly, sometimes copying or tracing things line for line from other artists’ work. (DaVinci supplied the model for many of his designs.) She, on the other hand, worked with frightening speed, sometimes without preliminary sketches, finishing a plate in a single evening, including a great deal of fine detail work that another hand might have taken a week to do.
Sometimes, as she worked, she broke her intense concentration long enough to look up and see William staring at her moodily, but she would throw him a smile and return to her task. She loved her home and her garden, and there was no way in the world she could have kept them on what they got from poor old Butts.
William had once again taken up the habit of reading aloud to her after supper, but he no longer sang. His writing had become too long-winded and heavy, for the most part, to be set to music. Though she knew who Urizen and Los and Vala and the Daughters of Albion were, she often could not understand what he was talking about, and so couldn’t help but wonder how the general public could be expected to figure it all out.
There was one poem she liked.
It was, as William explained it, a poetic image of Urizen as a flaming tiger, and was meant to be a kind of refutation of his “Lamb Poem.”
Here it is:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand forged thy dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?
When she first heard it, she remarked, “Very pretty, Mr. Blake. I’m glad to see you getting back to animal poems. Much more wholesome!”
He glared at her across the kitchen table, his large eyes glowing in the candlelight. “This is no simple animal poem!”
“Well, I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Genius! Seems to me there’s an animal or two in there somewhere.” She went back to sharpening her graver on a small oilstone.
“The tiger is Urizen! I’m showing how Urizen must have come from some other universe, how he must have been created by some other god.”
“There’s just one God. You know that, I hope.”
“For this universe perhaps but…”
“For any universe. Now I take the poem in a different way, I do. I don’t see Urizen in it at all. I see this beautiful tiger, walking proudly along in the jungle, and someone says, ‘Upon my word, that’s a pretty kitty, a credit to his Maker!’” .
“No, no, no!”
She shook her graver at him. “You’ll see. That’s the way the public will read it too, if they ever look at it at all.”
“Future ages will view it as I do,” he growled, almost as if he were a tiger himself.
“Will future ages pay you for it?”
She instantly regretted her words as she saw the pain in his face. He’s home, she thought in a wave of guilt. Am I going to drive him away again?
They had done no more time-voyaging since returning from Actium.
Robert spoke to them now and then, as they sat before the fire, but otherwise their lives had become quite normal.
William would say, “Is there any danger from Urizen?”
And Robert, a half-visible shadow in the glowing coals, would answer,
“Not yet.”
When the warning finally came, it was in broad daylight, as Kate was throwing on her shawl, getting ready to go shopping. Robert appeared, smokelike, in the dust motes that danced in a beam of sun from the window.
His hissing windy voice seemed to come from far away, but the urgency in his tone was unmistakable. “Get out of the timestream! Now!”
She grabbed William’s wrist and they leaped into the place outside of time.
And saw the wave of change—or did they feel it?—rushing toward them out of the distant past.
*
Kate and William waited until the wave had passed, then re-entered the timestream at the same point they’d left it. Kate’s garden had vanished, along with her home.
Instead she saw, looming over her, an immense silent building of dull green stone, its lines not straight and rectangular as in a normal structure, but curiously curvilinear; in fact there did not appear to be one straight line in it. Even in the hot bright sunlight, it seemed dark and forbidding, as if the smooth stone somehow sucked in the light, creating a halo of blackness around it.
“Careful,” William said, but she had already begun to walk slowly toward it. Alien as it was, it reminded her of something, some half-forgotten vision seen in the glowing coals of her fireplace.
Into its walls were cut in undulating lines the characters of an unknown language, different from anything she’d seen before, yet irrationally, she felt she might be able to read it, if only she concentrated hard enough.
She came to a broad staircase which led upward to a round cavelike entrance near the top of the building. She touched the stone. How cold it was! She drew back her hand, frowning. The steps were worn as if by centuries of use, and they were high, disturbingly high, as if designed for creatures taller than humans. It was only with difficulty that she managed to climb onto the first step.
“Where is everyone?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” William answered in a low voice.
He followed her as, step by arduous step, she ascended the stairs.
Halfway up, she paused to rest and turned to look out over the city.
The skyline still vaguely reminded her of London, and there, unchanged, was the bend of the Thames river, but the endless block on block of various-sized dull green structures stretching to the horizon were constructed according to some insane non-Euclidian geometry never meant for human understanding.
“The streets, the buildings, everything is in curves,” she said, puzzled.
“I noticed that,” William replied.
“And there are no windows, no windows at all.”
“And no people. I shouldn’t wonder if everyone’s asleep.”
“Asleep?”
“Well, they wouldn’t need windows if they slept all day and only came out at night.”
They continued on up and soon came, panting, to the head of the stairs.
At this point the building was considerably narrower than it was at the base, and there was an irregular platform around it. Kate decided that before venturing inside, they should explore this platform. A moment later they turned a corner and came in sight of where they might have expected to look out over downtown London. Kate gasped. “Look!”
On the opposite bank of the Thames, towering above all other structures, was William’s giant statue of Urizen, unchanged except that it was no longer stepping on the serpent god of Oothoon.
“He’s done it again,” William groaned, then added, more cheerfully,
“But he must have liked my statue to have gone to all the trouble of including it in this new reality.”
They continued around the platform until they arrived once again at the cavernous entrance. In all this time they saw not seen a single sign of life or heard a single sound except their own footsteps and whispering voices, but now, as they stood before this opening that gaped from the building’s head like the empty eyesocket of an amoeboid cyclops, then heard, from deep within, distant echoing footsteps.
Without a word the Blakes sprang silently back around the corner of the building and waited. The footsteps were coming closer, but they were not human footsteps. Humans don’t have claws that strike the stone floor with an unmistakable click and scrape. Humans don’t have tails that slither along with a faint frightful rustle. And the voices of humans are are not full of birdlike chirps and sibilant hissing, as was the conversation that now came to her ear. And there was nothing in the least bit human about the smell, the musky, bittersweet utterly alien smell that now came to her out of the darkness inside the building.
She saw them!
Two of them, twice as tall as men, emerged into the sunlight, heavy lids closing to slits to protect huge black glistening reptilian eyes, gaunt clawed bejeweled ringers drawing heavy dark-green capes around brownish-green lizardlike bodies, broad fanged mouths grimacing in evident distaste for the light.
They paused, raising cowls to shield their scaly heads, then continued on down the stairs, tails flicking from side to side.
Kate watched the two in frozen fascination as, reaching the foot of the stairs, they bumped snouts and parted to stride off in opposite directions toward different clusters of buildings.
“Ugly things,” muttered William, his normally ruddy features quite pale.
“I never did care for reptiles,” she answered, “but come…”
She led him through the entrance into the shadowed interior.
*
Because her eyes took a second to adjust to the gloom, she almost tripped over a sleeping lizard. William caught her by the arm not a moment too soon.
“What’s he doing here?” she whispered, more indignant than frightened.
“Look at his cape,” William answered. The cape was worn and dirty.
“He’s poor.”
Kate glanced around, then said with surprise, “There’s more of them!”
Indeed the stone floor was strewn with sleeping lizards, all with worn and dirty capes wrapped around them.
An odd idea struck her. “This is some kind of sanctuary for the homeless, isn’t it? And this building is so much larger than all the others in the neighborhood. Do you suppose it’s a temple?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” William said grimly. “If so we may be trespassing on holy ground.”
They soon passed the last of the lizards and entered a high-ceilinged corridor that sloped gently downward. The walls curved inward slightly and were lined with columns that, because they tapered subtly, suggested bones: Kate could not avoid the impression that the pillars were ribs, and that this was the stomach of some gigantic beast. She could see it all only too clearly, thanks to a dim shadowless green glow from the walls and floor.
It was cool and getting cooler, and a faint breeze blew steadily in their faces, bringing to Kate’s nostrils an occasional scent of the lizards, fetid and sickening. She almost wished she could see the creatures. That would be better than knowing they were around, but not knowing where.
“Maybe we should turn back,” William said uneasily.
Kate reassured him, “We’re in no danger. We can always pop out of the time stream, you know.”
The passageway opened out into a cavern where both roof and floor were so distant that they were lost in the gloom, but a narrow stone bridge, without railings, spanned the gulf. It was here that the stench grew all but unbearable.
Kate knelt on the bridge and peered down, holding her shawl over her nose, for all the good that did. Below, all along the walls of the chasm, she could make out dim white objects. Skulls. Bones.
“Mr. Blake,” she whispered in horror.
He laid his hand on her shoulder. “I know, Kate. I can see them.”
She stood up and turned to him, clutching his powerful forearms, and said, “There’s so many.”
“These are just the few that got stuck on the way down. There’s many more down at the bottom, I’ll wager.”
“What are they? Some kind of sacrificial victims?”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
Kate and William, as they crossed the bridge, were careful not to walk too near the edge.
Beyond the bridge they entered a narrow passage, made a sharp turn to the right and entered a vast arched room that reminded Kate irresistibly of the interior of some medieval cathedral. The light was brighter here, thanks to what appeared to be an airshaft or skylight on the opposite end of the room, behind what could only be an altar.
Between her and the altar there was a wide expanse of open floor, sloping downward, then a long, vaguely oblong or perhaps oval pool of water with steps leading down into it.
On the other end of the pool the steps led up out of the water to a raised platform, almost a stage. Behind the stage, silhouetted against the sunlight that filtered down the airshaft, was a huge statue of one of the lizards on his knees, arms outstretched, reptilian head thrown back. Was the creature praying?
In front of the statue stood two chairs… or were they thrones? If they were thrones, then those must be jewels glittering in the chair arms.
The thrones were in the shadow of the statue, but Kate, shuffling forward in the semi-darkness, could see the suggestion of a figure sitting in one of the thrones, the one on the left. The figure was visible also in the reflection in the pool, a muscular body, long white hair, a white beard.
“It’s a statue of Urizen,” she breathed.
Yes, it was Urizen all right, seated, motionless, elbow on knee and bearded chin on palm, in an attitude of deep thought.
“I believe you’re right,” said William.
Then the statue moved. “No, William, she’s wrong. I’m not a statue,”
said Urizen, his deep voice echoing in the huge empty room.
*
Urizen made no attempt to harm them, but only remained in his place on the throne on the other side of the pool, talking in a light, ironic, sometimes almost loving voice to them, trying, it would seem, to put them at their ease.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer you a chair, my friends. My worshippers are generally content to stand in my presence. And there’s always the factor of efficiency to consider. You may never have thought about this, but it’s a fact that you can crowd more than twice as many worshippers into a given area standing as you can sitting.” Urizen leaned back, enjoying the comfort of his throne. “I have a place for you, William, right here at my side.” He gestured toward the other throne.
“I’ve no use for thrones,” William answered stiffly.
“But once you did. Admit it.” Urizen’s voice was full of scornful amusement.
“I made a mistake, sir,” said William.
“The mistake you made was turning against me,” said Urizen. “Is that Christian? Doing evil to someone who does only good to you? I created a world for you and I to rule together, and now, thanks to you, it’s all gone.
