The Hercules Buildings was a row of clean, pretty terrace houses on the east side of the street; the Blakes’ home had ten large rooms and a small garden overgrown with unpruned grape vines that concealed a cozy little arbor beneath the shade of a group of poplar trees in the backyard.

  It was a paradoxical neighborhood.

  In times past it had been a resort of the rich, and luxurious gardens and parks were scattered over the area; the Temple of Flora, the Apollo Gardens, the Flora Tea Gardens, and half a mile down York Place, Vauxhall.

  Unfortunately the rich are fickle, and had found other places more fashionable, so that though the area was still open and green with trees, the lords and ladies had been replaced by prostitutes, thieves, and mobs of foreigners who shouted obscenities against King and Church in a dozen alien languages at all hours of the day and night. Not far away was a grim building called the Royal Asylum for Female Orphans, actually a workhouse and little better than a prison.

  Thus the neighborhood, as external surroundings so often do, reflected the internal world within the Blake family; a facade of flowers and green growing things that hid violence and suffering and unrest.

  William had one patron, an admiring humble government clerk named Thomas Butts, who bought an average of one drawing or print a week, including such things as “Elohim creating Adam”, “Newton”, “God judging Adam”, and “Nebuchadnezzer”, and for a time William gave art lessons to the sons of the rich, but it was Kate the publishers admired and, though no one outside the Blake family knew it, Kate’s engravings they published. Without her they might both had found themselves in a poorhouse. If some editor or publisher asked her why her work was unsigned, she would lightly lecture him on her dear William’s modesty.

  In company, as when they had tea with the Butts family, the Blakes presented a flawless image of domestic tranquillity; at home, with no one to see them, they fell into a habit of silence. Better to be silent than speak aloud thoughts that might make it impossible for them to go on living in the same house.

  When he had nothing to do, which was increasingly often, William went for long walks, and on returning would say he’d been down to the intersection of Barley Street, New Road, York Place and Hercules Road and from there perhaps had crossed the Thames by way of Westminster Bridge to wander about in Chelsea.

  She knew and did not know, both at the same time, that he was lying.

  She knew and did not know that he had actually been to Rintrah.

  To know something and not know it… that’s a trick every wife must learn, sooner or later.

  To do it she had to avoid reading what he was writing, because she knew what she would find.

  To do it she had to look away from the drawings he was making, because she knew they depicted things he could not have seen in Lambeth, or even in Chelsea.

  They hired a maid.

  William suggested that Kate help him seduce her.

  Kate wept and the maid was fired.

  William forced her to join him in sitting naked in the grape arbor while he read to her mockingly from “Paradise Lost.”

  And when Thomas Butts had accidentally walked in on them there, William had called out, “Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”

  William began a long poem glorifying the French Revolution, but even though Kate had found a publisher for it, he did not finish the manuscript, shouting at her that he’d outgrown the ideas in it.

  One day, at last, he grew careless, or perhaps he wanted finally to free himself from his own lies. He returned from a one hour walk with a three day’s growth of beard.

  He stood a moment in the front doorway, a shaggy silhouette before the bright noonday sky. (For once the sun was shining.) Then as he saw her looking at him from the other end of the dim hallway, he entered slowly and closed the door behind him.

  “You’ve been with Urizen.” She put it as a statement of fact, not a question.

  “Yes, Kate. I’ve been with Urizen.” His voice was the calm, good voice he’d had so long ago, before he’d been her husband.

  She leaned her broom against the wall. “We must talk, Mr. Blake. Come along now.”

  She led him into the living room. They seated themselves in the comfortable overstuffed furniture her work had bought them, she in the chair, he on the couch, “Did you have to lie?” she asked him quietly.

  “Yes, Kate. If I’d asked you about it, you’d have said no.”

  Kate nodded. That was true, “So you’ve made your choice.”

  “I have.”

  “Without me.”

  “You made your choice, too, without me.”

  Again she nodded. That too was true. “And among the Zoas, which side are you on?”

  “I’m with Urizen.”

  “I needn’t have asked. It’s him what made you the best offer, isn’t it?”

  Her voice, which had been flat and tired, now had an edge on it.

  His voice, too, changed as he answered, grew hard and angry. “Yes he did. A better offer than the other Zoas. A better offer than you.”

  “It’s a good home we have here, Mr. Blake, and it’s rather an easy life you have of it here, doing whatever you like all the time. My father would envy you, he would.”

  “It’s a pretty prison, but a prison all the same.”

  She wanted to stop there, to say no more, to leave it alone, but her mouth, as if it had a life of its own, went on talking.

  “A prison, you say. What are you? A wild animal? Prowling, prowling.

  But I notice you always come home for meals.”

  His face flushed as red as his hair. “I won’t be spoken to like that in my own house.”

  “Your house! When was the last time you chipped in for the rent?”

  “I paid in advance.”

  “Paid in advance, did you? And how do you figure that, Mr. Blake?”

  “I taught you to read and write, to draw and engrave. Did I charge you tuition?” His huge eyes were wide with mingled fury and pain.

  She sprang to her feet and screamed down at him, “I don’t owe you a thing!”

  He looked up at her, his powerful hunky body hunched with wrath.

  “You owe me your life!”

  “My life?” That startled her.

  “Your life. If I wanted to I could go into the past and change something so you’d cease to exist!”

  “You wouldn’t do that.” ’

  “I could!” He was triumphant. “I could, but I didn’t.”

  She wanted to speak now, but could not. William had gone into the future and someone else had come back, a changeling, a monster. Did she really want this being who looked like her husband to stay with her, to live in the same house?

  At last she said softly, “I never thought I’d be frightened of you, Mr.

  Blake. Never thought that, but I am. You can do what you like. I won’t stop you.”

  He stood up. “That’s my good old girl, Kate.” He was smiling now. He reached out to pat her arm, but she shrugged off his hand.

  “So that’s how it is, eh?” he said. “That’s how it is.”

  He walked slowly out into the hall. She heard him speak to someone in a low voice, heard a rustle as of wings, but when she rushed after him she found the hallway deserted, though the front door remained closed.

  She spoke to the emptiness. “My father was a fighter, he was. And I’m my father’s girl. I ain’t done with you yet, William Blake!”

  When she arrived in Rintrah she found Los in the Hall of Windows.

  “I’m looking for William Blake,” she said. Los was puzzled. “Do I know you?”

  “Of course! I’m William Blake’s wife. When we were introduced you kissed my hand.”

  “I see. That Los who kissed your hand must have been me as an older man. I’m Los as a young man. I haven’t yet met you, or let us say, I’m pleased to meet you now.” He kissed her hand. ’

  “Then you can’t help me find my husband?” She realized now that this Los was indeed younger than the one she’d met.

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your husband either, Mrs. Blake.

  You want to talk to my other self, Los as an older man.”

  “And where is he?”

  “I think I saw him going into the Garden of Vala. That’s about a half mile in that direction.” He pointed down a passageway that branched off from the Hall of Windows.

  “Thank you very kindly, sir,” she called back over her shoulder as she set off briskly in the direction he indicated.

  Vala’s Garden was entered through the Gates of Dark Urthona. It was perhaps the strangest part of Rintrah, in that it did not seem to occupy any physical space, as seen from the outside, yet from the inside appeared as vast as a whole planet.

  It was, as she understood it from Urizen’s explanations, a realm of waking dreams, where impressions of despair and hope forever vegetated in flowers, fruits, fishes, birds and clouds, the land of doubts and shadows, sweet delusions and unformed hopes.

  She hesitated before entering. It would not be easy to find someone here, and it might be difficult to avoid getting lost.

  Looking through the entrance she caught a glimpse of William and ran forward.

  Behind her the entrance vanished; ahead of her the figure of William moved and changed. As she ran toward it she saw it was only a curiously humanoid treetrunk.

  She stopped, looked around. In Urizen’s company she had several times glanced into the Garden, but this was the first time she had actually entered. Now she saw on all sides beautiful alien vegetation; vines, flowers, treetrunks and a kind of translucent grass, and it was all in constant motion, growing, blooming and dying as rapidly as normal Earth plants might have done if their life processes were greatly accelerated.

  Fighting back a feeling of panic, she seated herself on a stone, only to leap up again with a little scream. The stone too was alive and moving only a little slower than the plant life.

  A pale low-hanging slow-moving fog, full of vague shimmering iridescent lights, obscured the sky, so it would have been futile to try to tell direction from the sun, and in the brief time since she’d entered, the landmarks in the garden had so greatly transformed themselves that she could no longer tell from which direction she’d come.

  “Los!” she called, but there was, for answer, only the whispering of the plants, which seemed constantly murmuring to each other like a multitude of gossips.

  There was a narcotic aroma in the air, a sweet heavy odor that coaxed her not so much to sleep as to dreaming awake, to aimless somnambulistic wanderings. She fought to keep her mind clear. “Los!” she screamed again.

  The drugged air was softening the edges of her panic. She threw herself down on the grass. For a long time she could not remember what she was doing there, then her eye was caught by the colors in the wings of a beautiful beetle that walked toward her with a show of infinite dignity.

  The beetle was about the size of a large cat. She touched its hard smooth back. “You’re a handsome gentleman, you are,” she whispered in awe.

  The beetle answered with a low growl. “Handsome, anyway,” she added, drawing back her hand.

  Then she remembered her mission. “Los!” she called out. The beetle fled. “I’m coming.” The voice was far away. When Los at last arrived and stood looking down at her, she no longer remembered calling him. “Who are you, sir?” she demanded.

  “I am Los. You called my name.” He was tall, bearded, naked as ever.

  She thought she might have met him somewhere, but couldn’t remember where.

  “Are you looking for your husband?” he asked gently. “My husband?”

  “William Blake.”

  William Blake was a familiar name. She frowned, trying to connect it with a face. “Could you explain… ?”

  Los laughed softly. “When I think of what you have waiting for you, I’m almost persuaded to leave you here. It would be an act of kindness. But…”

  He leaned over and took her hand. “… you have work to do.” He pulled her to her feet.

  “This husband you say I have… where is he?” Her voice was like that of a baby asking where the world comes from.

  “He has gone with his friends back in time.”

  “Back in time?” She frowned again.

  “To the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, when the fleets of Augustus Caesar and Cleopatra fought to determine who would rule the Roman Empire.”

  “These friends of my husband’s… who are they?”

  “One is Urizen.”

  “What an odd name.” Her voice was flat, emotionless.

  “The other is Vala.”

  “Vala?” Suddenly her mind was clear. “Mr, Blake is with Vala?”

  Los grinned. “That’s right”

  “I might have known!” she snapped. “Well, we’ll put a stop to that, won’t we?”

  “We, Mrs. Blake? I will not be with you.”

  “The other Zoas will help me.”

  “No, I’m sorry. We have voted a new policy. No more struggling against Urizen. Let Urizen have his way. He’s so sure he’s in the right, and we have never been sure we were. Perhaps he knows things we do not.”

  “No, Los!”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes, Mrs. Blake. You may do what you wish against him, but we will remain here in Vala’s Garden until the Sun explodes.

  That will be soon. But we will not suffer here.”

  But this much Los did.

  He led Kate to the exit from the garden and kissed her hand one last time before she left him.

  *

  Octavian, seasick and dazed with heat and sun, paced the deck of his command galley while the rowers rested on their oars, trading obscene jokes among themselves to ease the tension. He wiped the sweat from his sunburned narrow features with the back of his slender hand, then squinted up at the savage Mediterranean sun, now almost at the zenith.

  “It’s noon,” he shouted to the ship’s captain. “Why doesn’t the wind come?”

  “Patience, my lord,” answered the old seaman. “It will.”

  When the wind came the battle would begin.

  At least that was the theory of Octavian’s top strategist, the cunning Vipsanius Agrippa, and over the years Octavian had come to regard the faithful Agrippa as almost an oracle.

  There was no shade on the ship, not even the fitful shade from a raised sail. Not only the sails, but the very mainmasts had been left behind on land to make way for archer’s towers, catapults, balistas, sharp-beaked boarding gangplanks and grapplers. On the over four hundred ships that stretched out in a rough line from Octavian’s galley on the south to Agrippa’s on the north, not so much as one small square steering sail could be seen.

  The four hundred ships drifted, rising and falling on the gentle swells of the Ionian Sea, filled with the promise of violence from bright-painted tailfeathers to sharpened metal prow, while above them wheeled clouds of prophetic seagulls hungry for human meat, screaming in their impatience.

  To the east, plainly in sight, the ships of the enemy, a roughly equal force, also drifted and waited, the green shore at their back, and the narrow channel from which they’d come.

  Octavian shielded his eyes with his hand and studied the enemy ships, as if he might, even at this distance, catch a glimpse of the traitor and adulterer Mark Antony and the Greek-Egyptian witch Cleopatra Ptolemy.

  Witch she must be, to have cast a spell that would make a Roman forget Rome! Could it be true what her followers said of her, that she was not human, but the goddess Isis incarnate. “I can fight a man, or a woman if need be, but a goddess?” He felt faint and leaned against the gunwale to keep from falling.

  “The wind’s rising, sir,” announced the old sea captain. Octavian could feel it on his burning cheeks, see it roughen the surface of the slow sea swells… and feel it turn his light ship, exposing his side to the distant enemy. His ships were drifting together, bunching up. The wind was Cleopatra’s friend!

  The captain spoke again, a touch of anxiety in his voice. “Here they come, sir.”

  Faintly Octavian could hear the oarsmen on Cleopatra’s ships begin singing in time with their oarstrokes, hear the boom of the oarmasters’

  drums. Louder and softer by turns, as the wind rose and fell, he could Hear the terrible sound of forty thousand men singing in unison, voices harsh with exhilaration, singing in a barbarous alien mode and barbarous alien languages of which he could understand only a few words at the end of each stanza.

  “Isis! Isis! Isis!”

  “Give the command, sir!” rasped the sea captain. “We’re ready.”

  But the words would not come to Octavian’s lips.

  With a curse the captain gave the command for him.

  Octavian heard a great shout roll down the line of his ships, heard his own oarsmen strike up a familiar battle song, felt his stomach turn as his ship lunged forward.

  “I’m not a well man,” Octavian whispered, but his words were lost in the hiss of the surf and clank of the oars.

  The captain came forward, slapped him on the shoulder. “You could have my head for that, sir,” he said, but he was grinning.

  “Never mind,” whispered Octavian, his eyes on the narrowing expanse of water between him and his enemies. “Never mind. Thank you.”

  The seasickness was fading, the breeze was cooling his fever; the battle-lust of his men infected his own hesitant spirit. He snatched his shortsword from its scabbard, held it high, laughing.

  But his laughter died when he raised his eyes skyward.

  There, where an instant before there had been nothing but wheeling gulls, three winged human figures had appeared, gliding toward him as if leading the fleet of his enemies. There was a woman in flowing red gowns, a redheaded man in a brown coat and kneebreeches, and a powerful muscular man with a white beard and long hair that thrashed in the wind.

  A cry of dismay went up from the crews of Octavian’s ships; their, song ended in mid-phrase as the three figures landed on the foredeck of Octavian’s galley.

 

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