Chronicon

Chapter 5

The Nistarim

"He who does not love the organ-man has no bowels for humanity, no taste for music, no soul for poetry. The man himself is a man and a brother; and as to his instrument, what sings the poet, the same who bade the Nine descend?
'When the full organ joins the tuneful quire,
Th' immortal pow'rs incline their ear,
Borne on the swelling notes our souls aspire,
While solemn airs improve the sacred fire,
And angels lean from Heaven to hear.' "
-Charles Dickens: All the Years Round, June 11, 1864

In a world the shape of enormous endings and beginnings, rises many stories high a skyscraper of a Tale
whose depths lie in an unfathomed dark Almandal, where history's handmaid beheld its reflection.
The angels of these altitudes have differing offices, offices such as the will to be taught, the delight in that which is wanted, the pursuit of that in which delight is found, the ability to grasp what was pursued, the ability to remember what was grasped, the act of finding similarities to that which is remembered, the ability to judge that which was found, to select that which was judged and, finally, the eloquent presentation of that which was selected. These offices are not numbered, their officiants know where they're needed.

In a world the size of a bottomless handmirror, Madimi sat in a chamber before her own speculum,
sporadically channel-surfing on a black roundtop notebook resembling a modified Revo-Round, glimmerswitching from one nodal point to another in time, flitting across the dial of historical vignettes in an ever watching vigil, listening to Atlantis, by Sun Ra and his Arkestra; an unedited graphic novel lay neglected on her lap featuring Spider Jerusalem doing a Ulysses on a looming cyclopean GeoEye. Max Headroom screensaver set on endless improv, mourning; dormant like an urgent tulip, green fuse lit for Spring.

Rising to light the room with candles, she was expecting company. And darkness.

Epochs surged by leaving strange whispering tracers, dust devils caught in her flatlined book of hours.
Screen readout:

Year: 1882
November 18, Transit of Venus Solar Storm

Year: 1903
November 1, Solar Storm

Year: 1921
May 13, New York Railroad Solar Storm

Year: 1940
March 25, Easter Solar Storm

Year: 1956
February 24, Acheron submarine Solar storm

Year: 1989
March 13: solar storm collapsing the Hydro-Québec power grid. Millions of people in darkness; areas in the northeast U.S. and Sweden lose power, aurorae visible as far south as Texas.
In the middle of a magical supply warehouse, huddled on the floor, holding one another as wisps of smoke escape upwards, Eiderdown and Cricket cry, shuddering over the prostrate form of Aldina.

October 9: concert- Warlocks performing a song, Dark Star at Hampton Coliseum in
Hampton, Virginia. Cricket and Aldina, arms around a prominently pregnant Eiderdown dancing a Woodstock sungrope neath a mirrorball explosion of galaxies.

December 23: Eiderdown in labour, keening and howling; sweat pouring from her face as the bitter weather pummeled the window outside, tiny white mittens gone berserk like winter moths drawn to unearthly light. Cricket and Aldina held her and coaxed her with soothing encouragements. The moment came. Triplets. Identical triskelion blue eyes that do not cry. The infants seemed instead to be singing to one another.

Year: 1789
Furtwangen Germany
An aged Uhrenträger, veering from discourse with a gaggle of motley minstrels concerning the design of their certainly singular Schwarzwälder uhr, slapped his forehead in epiphany.
"Die Mädchen waren fortgesprungen, aber der Bär rief ihnen nach:
weisse rose für schneeweisschenWeihnachtssternrote Rose ür Rosenrot"Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot
fürchtet euch nicht, wartet, ich will mit euch gehen."
Da erkannten sie seine Stimme und blieben stehen
und als der Bär bei ihnen war, fiel plötzlich die Bärenhaut ab
und er stand da als ein schöner Mann und war ganz in Gold gekleidet.

"Ich bin eines Königs Sohn" sprach er, "und war von dem gottlosen Zwerg
der mir meine Schätze gestohlen hatte, verwünscht
als ein wilder Bär in dem Walde zu laufen, bis ich durch seinen Tod erlöst würde.
Jetzt hat er seine wohlverdiente Strafe empfangen."

Year: 1942
June 2:
"The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We
all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum."
-Reinhard Heydrich, SS Obergruppenfuehrer (Party Number 544916)
Reich "Protector" of Bohemia and Moravia.

Beside her, a bear bereaved with one trap-maimed foot explained: "that machine kills fascists."

The bear had left a crooked corridor of wreckage and destruction as it sought the boy,
looming in his knowledge before Aidan ever saw it. Primordial phantom, it spread through his dreams, apotheosis of an indomitable anachronism; epitome of the abyss. It cast a gargantuan shadow all the way to the edge, too big for the dogs to drag it over, chthonic; monstrous as apocalypse.

Repousse mistletoe's rune-lit embers smoldered on the lid as he replaced his gold mirror-locket safely within the pocket hidden in fur.
She had reached across dimensions for him, defying the veil. Now he came to her, without weapon, watch, or compass; their mirrors drew them, the attraction magnetizing their souls.

Her voice rough with worn lament, Madimi looked at him.
"Science dwelleth in me, the heavens and depths oppress me,
for they covet and desire it with infinite appetite.
Few or none that are earthly have embraced me
for shadowed am I with the circle of your sun."

"Madimi, your company's a harmony of many cymbals and
the honeytrap of your tongue sweeter than health itself."

While his head lay in her lap, Madimi's fingers curled in his thick tangled fur.

Year: 1564
"Terrestre quoddam corpus, Monas haec nostra Hieroglyphica, in Centro Centri, Latens, possidet: Quod Qua sit ACTUANDUM divina Potentia, sine Verbis, Ipsa docet: Cui jam ACTUATO, Lunaris & Solaris est (Matrimonio perpetuo)COPULANDA, Influentia Gonetica:Licet, ante, in Caelo vel alibi, fuere ab EODEM Corpore SEPARATISSMae. Hac (Dei Nutu) facta Gamaaea, (Quam, Parisienibus, sum ... interpretatus: id est, Matrimonii Terram: sive Influentialis Conjugii, Terrestre Signum)Super suam Nativam Terram, Eadem, ulterius Nutriri non potest, vel Irrigari, quam ad QUARTAM magnam vereque Metaphysicam Revolutionem Completam. Quo finito Progresso: qui aluit, in METAMORPHOSIM Primus Ipse abibit: Rarissimeque, post, Mortalium conspicietur oculis. Haec, O Rex Optime, Vera est, toties decantata (& sine Scelere) MAGORUM INVISIBILITAS: Qua (ut Posteri omnes satebuntur Magi)nostra est MONADIS concessa Theoriis."
- John Dee: Monas Hieroglyphica
['This our hieroglyphic monad possesses, hidden away in its innermost centre, a corporeal body. The Monad teaches without words, by what divine force that corporeal body should be actualized and united to the generative lunar and solar currents... At the conclusion of this mandala's initiation, the adept will undergo a metamorphosis and afterward very rarely be held my mortal eye.']

Year: 1604
October 9
A very large and bight twinkling star ignited for the first time in the 'constellation serpentari'. It appeared in the highest heaven and firmament, among other fixed stars, and not like other comets, low among the planets, and much less below the moon or in the element of the air...
Jupiter was in conjunction with Saturn, this conjunction took place in the same part of the sky every 800 years. In December 1603 there was to be a conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn in Sagittarius, which to astrologers was one of the points of the Fiery Trigon. In the autumn of 1604, when Jupiter and Saturn were still in the Fiery Trigon, and not far apart, Mars was to come, and be in conjunction with Saturn on September 26, and with Jupiter on Oct. 9. Thus in early October 1604 Mars, Jupiter and Saturn would be at the vertices of a triangle, forming a fiery triangle in the Fiery Trigon. A conjunction in the Fiery Trigon presaged great things; a fiery triangle there was surpassed, as an omen, only by a comet..."
-Johannes Kepler : Bericht von einem ungewöhnlichen Neuen Stern, 1604

Year: 1615
Confessio Fraternitatis:
"Thus, we, oh mortals, must make it known that God hath concluded to send the World before its end, which preferently thereupon shall ensue, such a Truth, Light and Glory as Adam had, and which was expelled along with him from Paradise for the purpose of alleviating human misery.

In the future, when (as we trust they will) all these things will have been removed, we will be presented with a perpetual unchanging directive; and although we owe this to those who worked on it, the Great Work, in its fullness, will be the product of this blessed crucial time.

With a view to His Will, God has already sent ahead his Messengers, Stars appearing in Serpentarius and Cygnus. In their capacity of truely great Tokens of His mighty Will these can teach us how He would subjugate human intelligence to His secret law once everything that is to be discovered will have been combined; the Book of Nature will then be open to all and unveiled, although but few can read it in full, let alone understand it.

Just as in the human head there are two organs for hearing and seeing, two for smelling and one for speaking and just as it would have been in vain to demand speaking of the ears or hearing of the eyes, so have there been times that have seen, others that have heard and yet others that have smelled. What remains is that soon, in a time that is coming rapidly nearer, the tongue too will be given due honour, so that what has once been seen, heard and smelled, can be brought into words at last when the World will have slept off the flush from drinking of its toxic, stupefying beaker, and early in the morning it can meet the rising Sun, with an open heart, bareheaded and barefooted, happily and jubilating. In the same way as God has put about Characters and His Alphabet through the Holy Scripures, so has He carved these distinctly in Heaven, Earth and Animals when the miraculous work of Creation was done, so that just as the astronomer foresees eclipses, we can predict the obfuscations of the church and the duration thereof long in advance. From such characters we derive all of our Magic and based on these we have formed us a new language which at the same time expresses the essence of things; therefore it would be no wonder if we could express ourselves only less refinedly in other languages and in this Latin. For we do know of these languages that they are not familiar to the language of Adam and Enoch, but have been desecrated by Babel's confusion of tongues."

year: 1616
Virga Aurea of James Bonaventure Hepburn published at Rome.
A garland of seventy-two praises in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, Etruscan, Assyrian, Armenian, Gothic, Scythian, Scottish, Hibernian, Coptic and Chaldaic, Mystical, the Noachic, the Adamean, the Solomonic, the Mosaic, the Seraphic, the Angelical, and the Supercelestial its mandorla surrounded by flowers and symbols, adorned with an inscribed ribbon:

'Humbly I place and fasten this votive picture at the feet of the Most Blessed Virgin. After much midnight striving, may I make pledge of my soul, yearning and striving long years after the Blessed Virgin, to the success of the Rule in which we are blessed, and to its long and eternal fruitfulness.'

Her severed bough knew the appearance of truth, subdued serpents, crosses hell, either bars or opens, and drew essence forth from the stone.


Year: 1994
June 22:
Listening with Eiderdown and Aldina to the novelty of a live in the studio radio station's broadcast emanating from Tweezerville, Indiana via the internet featuring the sky-grazing music of the Octave Doctors; Cricket began accompanying their two aethereal vocalists with overtone harmonic singing she had learned as a child. Three towheaded children who should have been in bed appeared before the startled Cricket.
Iridi looked up at her with enormous eyes and said: "teach us that".

Year: 1995
May 14th: Cerberus traces the location of Eiderdown et al. deploying an assault unit which ambushes and attempts their abduction. From out of nowhere a warrior circus of Skomorkhi intervene, with their unicorn and guns; vanishing with Eiderdown, her two friends and her three five-year old daughters. Very Tarantino, thinks Madimi. Outrageous weapons.
Porlock business. Same old shillelagh, blood and thunders.

That night, there was a bedtime tale bonanza in order to settle the children's terrors.
In order to put their ordeal in perspective, Eiderdown chose from her great grimoire of magic's inexplicable deeds that stupendous account of wonder surpassing all others amongst the uncanny savants of enchantment. Nestling her girls in an oasis of fat, irresistable pillows she began to unravel for them the tale that told of the Theft of the Peach. What? You do not know of the most fabled feat whispered of among wizards, deliberated between thaumaturge and fakir, sorceress and sage?
Listen my downy ducklings, I will tell all.

It was winter in the great valley and the fields beneath the towering mountains were covered in snow. A flock of cranes had refused their last chance to fly to warmer grounds before the cold, cold season settled upon them. A shepherdess and her daughter were returning their herd to their village some distance further, when they came upon the graceful flock. The great birds, when they saw them, rejoiced for they were sure the woman would share something to eat. But the mother and daughter were poor, and quite hungry themselves.

One magnificent crane stepped forward and stretching her wings in greeting, spoke.

"My people will not survive the winter on gifts from the small pockets of hungry folk. I will make you a proposition.
The Queen of Heaven has an immortal peach tree. The nectar of a single of its peaches will keep us all alive til Spring.
Take your longest rope and put its end in my beak. I will fly with it up until I reach the cloud palace orchard of the Queen of Heaven. Your daughter is strong and small enough to climb to the top. She must climb into the tree and whisper her name to the peach or it will not detach from the bough. Then must she toss below the peach before she slides back down. In exchange for this great favor, I will teach you the secrets of our magic."

Her mother was uneasy, sensing unknown danger, but the brave little girl was willing to help the elegant crane people.

The way she flew up the rope after the crane led the way seemed as effortless as thread flying from the spindle of Necessity herself.
Soon, she disappeared among the clouds. Anxious moments passed. The remaining flock fidgeted restless around the tense mother.

Eventually, a whistling in the sky grew louder and louder and an enormous peach, glistening with crystalline cold juices landed plop! atop a tussock. Relieved, the flock circled around and around admiring this amazing treasure and feasted upon it ceremoniously taking turns until all that was left was a shimmering peach pit!

Suddenly, another sound came through the air towards them. At first, they thought it another peach as it landed with a sickening thud. But no! In absolute horror the mother realized it was her daughter's head! She shreiked, the cranes shrieked and the earth itself shuddered. Arms and legs and the bloody rest of her followed.

Taking off her cloak, the mother's mind went numb as she gathered and wrapped her daughter's limbs together in the large thick cloak.

She wept. The flock mourned. The earth grieved.

A speck appeared in the sky and gradually floating larger, fluttering its way from a very great distance down, down to land next them in the field. It was the speaking crane returned from her voyage to Heaven.
The woman, looking up from her remorse, met the eyes of the crane.

"You have helped our flock in our dire need, now I will help you." It took the shimmering peach pit from the ground in the scissors of its beak and placing it in the palm of the mother's hand, told her, "this kernel holds the name you gave her at birth, plant it with care at home and it will bring you great wealth. The Queen of Heaven gives her now a new name. And whispering into the bundle, the crane stepped back. Movement stirred beneath the travelworn cloak as it slipped away to reveal the daughter yawning, stretching her arms, and with a puzzled look she said "I have just had the strangest dream..."

From that time to this, Lady Cloud Walker has come on glorious wings to their descendants to teach these daughters the magical ways of Heaven.


Year: 2012
December, the Koreion
With their strong arms surrounding the beast, the Foolproof skomorokhi then, gate-wrecking unconquerable sons of thunder-thrashing bolts, descended one final time into the antarala realm of Cerberus, umbilicus maris according to the old geographers, 'gurges mirabilis omnium totius orbis terrarum celeberrimus et maximus' and brought the remaining captives back to the upper world after freeing them from their bonds. Wrapping the hounds in chains they carried them away in exhibition for inscrutable heaven.

Queen Cora comes, bringing the Cailleach girls a flask holding the hieroglyph of water from the tabernacle nave centered in the primeval grinding mill-wheel of Corryvreckan's walls.

River run round the circuit placid opacity of the almandal inaudible sizzle of hourglass sands shifting endless across the vast empty void, dark as the desert between stars. Tsunami.

To think they could lay him in cold ground
sing 'a-down a-down,' and call you him 'a-down-a'.
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear-
Fared you well, my dove?

Who can Kore from those lips now divide,
Whose kisses tell of Adonis died?
To Kore, e'en now his breath is fled,
Their kisses read reawake the dead.

Intimate communion in the mass of the cataracts, consultation with the noise of many waters.
Assistence, elation and a taste of redemption.


...He sung, and hell consented
To hear the Poet's pray'r;
Stern Proserpine relented,
And gave him back the fair.
Thus song could prevail
O'er death and o'er hell,
A conquest how hard and how glorious?
Tho' fate had fast bound her
With Styx nine times round her,
Yet music and love were victorious.
-Alexander Pope: Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, 1713

Chronicon

Chapter 4.5

St. Columba

"And, of course, Kalachakra? Yes.
And Aryavarsha, from where the Kalki Avatar is expected? Yes.
And Agharti with its subterranean cities? Yes.
And Ming-ste? And the Great Yarkhas? And the Great Dwellers of
Mongolia? And the dwellers of Kalapa? And the Belovodye of Altai? And
the Grail—Lapis Exilis? And Chud, the subterranean? And the White
Island? And the underground passages of Turfan? And the hidden cities of
Cherchen? And the submerged Kitezh? And the Suburgan of Khotan? And the
White Mountain? And the sacred valley of Buddha’s Initiation? And Agni
Yoga? And Dejung? And the book of Wu-tai-shan? And the Tashi Lamas? And
the Place of the “Three Secrets”? And the White Burkhan?
Yes! Yes! Yes! All these have assembled round the Great Name of
Shambhala in the conception of many nations and many ages."
-Nicholas Roerich: Heart of Asia

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Hinba, isle of the blessed was perhaps that same Thrinacia, the three
pronged isle that Odysseus once visited. An island filled with congregations
of red deer, highland cows, colonies of seals, and otter trysts along its coastline.
Sacrosanct mountains, tawny gorse where graze the unicorn, and heather
dancing down to the sea. Sheiling beehive looking shelters pollinate the land.
It is a hidden land, a 'beyul' inaccessible or elusive to most. This
land is said to be inhabited by certain of 'those who know how to play hide-and-seek'.
Not a nation observed by orbiting spy satellites or sighted from
reconnaissance aircraft (though hunt they must); of this world and perhaps
another dimension as well. At the end of an aeon, should civilizations topple,
consumed by fire and ice, it is said the realm will ascend again into the sky
merging with its celestial archetype in the heavens, an imperishable
sacred land girt by the oroboric Milky Way above, waiting.
Here, a ring of standing stones remain sentinnel from the Bronze Age,
vertical rock outcroppings with twenty-eight cups carved in their surfaces
to pour offerings to local spirits.
Here, a historical circuit of the world's parks and plazas is completed;
from beneath the marquee moon of entertainment spots, lots, restaurants, cafes,
bars, pubs and theaters, from the shadow of the subway and twilight zone of bus stops.
Here, a performance occurs quite unlike any other.

- + -

Ladies and Gentlemen... Step up! Step up!
Behold the simulacrum of singularity itself! See the roving warrior
minstrels of the Skomorokhi band: Foolproof, unfold the dromenon of the
New Titurel!!
Witness the enigma, marvel at the mystery, captured at great peril from
the terrible Wilds of Time at long last. Hear with your very own ears
the unbelievable whispering wail of the Contes Fantastiques. These Good
Shepherds caught in the bright sheep-glazed headlights of Elsewhere's
Otherwhen wonders, delved undaunted that deep sepulchre of Musae to
meddle with the echoes of those Cerberean sons of nothing; synchronized
with Jupiter above and the infine beyond to fetch forth the wretched
spirits of mortals, trapped like leaves buffeted by the wind and aching
at the gates of Acheron.
Noble exiles from the four corners, intimates of seven seas and tangent
to no time nor place but Hinba, this our isle of the blessed.
Introducing Eumolpus Flintwort master of circular breathing on musical
reed instruments and fire eating; Aidan Afterthought organ-grinder and
warden of the 777 pound dancing Carpathian black Bear Kolbjorn, Take a
bow, Kolbjorn! And presenting Strannik, miraculous puppeteer and
hurdy-gurdy churner; Hercule Poncelot, virtuoso on his shimmering, ethereal
gadulka fiddle and sculptor Air Balon Extraordinaire modelling
shapeshifting balloon creatures from thin air smoking caterpillaie which
morph into moth and be-fluttered bye-byes; Ullamh O'Corn juggler
formidable and drummer indefatiguable on the gaelic bodhran.
Join the queue! Only five quid a go!
No better bargain while the Baktun lasts!

-+-

Ullamh O'Corn, assuming the pose astride the churlish dishwater daylight
declamed:
"Must we stopper the backwash, seal the sucking coriolus's yawning maw
of sorry demise? Must we sup on the curdled regurgitate of Winagain's
Fake and slip on the slaver of mad Lapdog's yelp?
Seize I say, seize that ungentle song befell silence and shake loose
the time signature! The piping shreik of commerce and terror entangled
to the end cavils to the drum and iniquitous din from seige engines of
chaos and disorder, lurching like a lemming ambulance service downhill.
Doom's cathexis of commodity purchased faulty fallback, busted
safeguard, stripped nightwatch, broke failsafe, ripped stopgap. Lost.
Lost to the flotsam of ephemera, efluvium requisitioned for the
trajectory of our own dire diaspora.
No afficianados of sepia tinted historical jaundice we, clicking out the
barbells of time mockspeed.

"This here merry-go-round brokedown giddyup gone spannered in'er corset"
muttered Aidan absently, probing with obstetric care the interior naos
of his travelworn barrel-organ.

Regarding Ullamh disdainfully, Kolbjorn the bear turned his head,
snorting in gaelic: "Is fheàrr deagh chainnt na h-asail na droch fhacal
fàidh." (The good speech of an ass is better than the bad word of a prophet.)

"I'd call ya my sweet little dove but yer as black as the Earl of Hell's
waistcoat, bottler!"

A tin cup in the hand of the bear rattled coins defiantly.

Eumolpus, cleaning his duduk heaved a sigh.
"Bletherskite, Ullamh. Yer bum's oot the windae."

"Tell me, are ye one of them barny mad nibble squibbits, Eumolpus,
chuffin' up in the trees that sound like a wee Pekinese with a head-cold?"

Ignoring the reply, Ullamh turned his annoyance on Aidan.

"That intergalactic hot dog of yours Aidan,
you treat that thing like its bleedin' Sleeping Beauty"

Aidan paused, staring intent in the innards. "Ullamh, it IS the very
herald of Spring. Just the thing needed to chant new paeans to the sun."

Having the appearance of the Sun it did, with gleaming brass fittings on
the spectacular apparatus. The huge barrel-organ weighed well over a
hundred pounds with rows of pipes mounted on a cart that was pulled by
the bear. The elaborate organ had mechanical figures, automata mounted
on the front of the case and surmounting it was a unique variation of a
'cuckoo' clock; a Phoenix's jack-in-the-box aerie crested a
nine-storyed mountain, at the base of which sprang four rivers, flowing
towards the four cardinal directions.

"Pumpin' circumstance again mate? With those princely good looks, a
right regular bodice-ripping Lochinvar you; some Sheila needs wreathing
ribbons o' pyrite in a crown for them furious notions doggin' your distresses."

Aidan put a screwdriver down, pondering. Resting an elbow on his knee,
he cupped his chin and looked at Ullamh.

"There are stout wooden doors that thwart the axe of wicked witches,
hammered copper doors admitting wizard and queen and books that open
Time's unbound vestments of poetry like smoke from Her lips.
By making a vast detour we've arrived already in that other world no
passage only portal can take us.
The transition exists solely for the sake of the Tale. No passport, no
visa; transition as trauma.
We are those who traverse the displacement."

Ullamh squinting his eyes, stalked off to ravage another ear, impatient
with Aidan's theosophy of illumination.

"Hey, come showtime Oy been takin' the piss, old Walleye & Frightwig
slippin me the evil eye. Gowk tattyboggles both of them.

Strannik looked at him askance.
"My son, my son; we must not ply at other's afflictions."

"Fair 'nuff Rabbi, but these two bettys was mad as fumigatin' bats
snortin' champa. Wallies rattlin' with every word. VERY special, indeed.
Called us 'guardians of the temple' protectin some clishmaclaiver 'book
of hours'. An that's when yer arse fell aff, I says. Pure dead brilliant rubbish."

Strannik frowned.
"By the power of the ineffable Name which stems from the three verses
originating out of hesed by which was the world created:
Roly poly, roly poly, roly poly, poly singing songs of love. We sing the
psaltery of ten strings, Ullamh;
comprehend the comprehension that is worthwhile to be comprehended in
potentia, and it will turn to be in actuality."

"Ah, mambo jambo sugar & jam slippin it sideways to the Queen of Siam.
Phoar, look at this heap o' mollycoddled pollyglot.
Its one infernal pecadillo after another, chasing old Smokey to smother..."

Shaking sudden like an elf-shot terrier and gesturing upward at the kaleidescopic Aurora
flickering across the sky Hercule barked out:
"Good Sharkey, Colonel God!"

Strannik gave him a glare of the red eye.
"What's that you say? What's that?"

"O, it is nothing, nothing. Just a nagging little clouseau I picked up
last time the Cerberus took a wee bite. Reflex reaction, you know.
Passes quick as bozo shackles."
He coughed into his hand, embarassed at the uncontrollable tic.

Ullamh slapped him on the shoulder blades.
"Right, then old Bampot. O, I might seem coarse as kipper on the outside
Strannik; its insides wots sens'tive. Zat empath Keef the Riff, he an
Mad Moon taught me to improvise while unconscious. Studied their every
moves, I did."

"Zat where you nicked lovely byliny starina everyone must copy?"

"Nah, that were one of old Macca's tunes, what was it , ... Scrambled
Eggs...?
Anyway, workin' up this right now:
'Hy women be layzy and low be lowd,
fair be sluttish, and fowll be proud.
were ye long, lazy, little or loud; fat or fulsome,
Hy women be ye pretty and proud.' "

"Its been fifteen years now since Aldina, Cricket, Eiderdown and her daughters
graced our Isle."

"Our nursery of Adepts, the Cailleach girls then, hath nigh fled the nest to launch their
own perambulations. Is this the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton, then?"

"When Luna's Æolipylæ have ridden the low moon out of the sky..."

Aidan glanced skyward at the lightshow.
"Well, that's the signal there then, innit? Come along then, skinny malinky longlegs
and stick your nose in the kennel! Time ta see a man about a dog!"

They wore their grudge with Cerberus like temporary tattoos in
perpetuity. Aidan had been held in a Cerberus katorga limbo as a child,
indicted by a corporate shadow government as a potential paradoxical,
his file was sealed. Awakening from a childhood virtually shut up in a
coffin, the Skomorkhi had sprung him and also an old musician acquaintence of
Strannik named Efimov Nezvanova and his young daughter Netochka, thanks to the
Bear's aspaklarya; symbiont glass to the obsidian beryllisticus of Queen
Cora, it availed them temporal displacements. Together, the two specula
constituted a sort of parallel processing Urtu-Tamitu, the twain comparative
to the sun, source of light, and the moon, which has no light of its own.
Their sheath of foretelling reflections were the perfection of imaginative power; their
locative powers that of a retro-chronal seance.

"Seeing as we're gine to the fishin' hole, better bring the toolkit along with the fiddlesticks
this time. Never know what else we'll catch."

'Toolkit' was a battered golf bag holding a halberd double-barreled
wheellock, an ax match and wheellock, a large bore, short brass barreled
blunderbuss and an espingole musketoon decorated with a carving in the
form of a dragon's head around the muzzle; the blast gave the impression
of a dragon belching magma.

Holding more than leather bellows, wood and metal pipes, Aidan's
sharmanka or barrel-organ held multiple barrels, letters looking like
3/k KTP stenciled black in cyrilic on the rear of the cabinet below the crank
and above the artisan's name: Jan van Steenken.
Aside from their regular musical repertoire, a couple
special barrels were custom repinned and retrofitted by Efimov's
daughter Netochka, following Hercule's translation from L'art du
Facteur Des Orgues by Dom François Bédos de Celles.
The hard-coding upon these barrels formed one continuous spiral, a
worm gear on the crank shaft causing a barrel to rotate slowly drawing
positrons slowed by atoms in the atmosphere from thunderstorms. The
positrons traveling in a spiral path around magnetic field lines due to
the magnetic force on moving charged particles, primed for one barrel,
an aetheric oscillator's positronic beam arming it for retrocausal
psychokinesis; deminimumizing targets to the fourth dimension, irrefragably.

-+-

Coming to the entry in the Garvellachs in the last half hour of the ebb,
the Skomorokhi waited for tide to break, as it ripped furiously through
the sea, gargling between springs and neaps with the wind nine knots in full
flood Corryvreckan.

An archway had been erected there by Cerberus corporation's
geospatial data paparazzi Cyclops overseeing the Pass of the Grey Dogs.
At this gateway, Aidan would soon plant the golden bough on the
threshold before the Underworld.

"God us keep from that single vision and Newtons sleep."

"Aww, Tanstagi: 'There Ain't No Such Thing As Government Interference',
cuz we are the gate of the friggin' Dolorous Garde."

In the middle of the passage lay an islet enabling a brief crossing
from one island to the other. The passage was negotiable at slack water,
but at the ebb took to coursing like a millrace through the Pass of the Grey Dogs
just as Corryvreckan began to boil, opening a well of raging waters.

"Yon upwelling from the boiling taps of Hades rathskeller's enough to sate an
incarnate demon-prince. I know where I'm going, but I inna'gine kowtow to
Doom's promotional brochure of shattered illusions, broken dreams and
disappointments. Anyway, always gives me the whirlypits, these wee lil jaunts..."

"Don't worry mate, I got yer Novikov self-consistency principle right
here."

-+-

Oh, ’tis fiddle-de-dum and fiddle-de-dee,

The dancing bear came back with me;
For the sugar-plum trees were stripped and bare,
And we couldn't find cookies anywhere.
And the solemn old fellow he sighed and said,
Well, he didn't say much, but he shook his head,
While I looked at him and he blinked at me
Till I shed a tear and so did he;
And both of us thought of our supper that lay
Over the hills and far away.
Then the dancing bear he took my hand,
And we hurried away through the twilight land;
And 'twas fiddle-de-dum and fiddle-de-dee
When the dancing bear came back with me.
-The Dancing Bear
Albert Bigelow Paine, 1893

Chronicon

Chapter 4 Deiknyomena:
The Æolipylæ Provisionals

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man
Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.
-Richard F. Burton: Kasidah

Three young women reunited with their Doyenne were taking lotus tea in a courtyard garden on an island at the mouth of the Mississippi one late summer's afternoon in 1859. Xquiq, a Mayan ajq'ij or weaving day keeper come from the Mexican Island of Swallows accompanied Catiche Villard, the sole living grandchild of the notorious pirate Jean Lafitte as they consulted with their sister, the 'spirituale creature' Madimi, through the medium of the occult looking-glass brought circuitously downriver to this oubliette of freedom, Barataria. Back door to New Orleans, Barataria was the lost pirate utopia of the Lafitte brothers. Formerly protected by 'letters of marque' issued by the Spanish republic of Cartagena fighting for independence from Columbia, it was once teeming with nearly a thousand restless refugees, brigands and exiles from all flags leaving burned bridges behind. This throng had filled the ships' crews with gunners, navigators, carpenters, cooks and sail makers and riggers. Their descendants now constellated the bayous.

Behind them now stuccoed with oyster shells, Lafitte's brick two-story house facing the sea lay in ruins along with forgotten buccaneer schemes of marauding. Before them near the estate, still stood the barracoon quarters where smuggled slaves had awaited clandestine sale less than half a century earlier. Concealed within its crumbling walls there remained cached her grandfather's secret bequest for Catiche.

Xquiq's mother had come in times past to Barataria from Cozumel with Catiche's Creole quadroon grand-mother, Jean Lafitte's wife. An island outpost for Lafitte, Cozumel was sacred to the Maya moon goddess Ix Chel; women desiring children would make a pilgrimage to her temples. There, Catiche's mother had been born. Mother and daughter both had been blessed by the goddess with alluring beauty and insight. They had settled later within the Baratarian colony of palmetto-thatched roof cottages. Catiche inherited what was left of her grand-father's estate once the government and lawyers grew bored of scavenging in the postscript of his disappearance and the mystery of his fate.

Examining Cora's obsidian disc, Xquiq described for Catiche the transient properties of the Mayan mirror in which the Elizabethan Dr. Dee had centuries before stumbled blindly through the playground of their elusive sister, trying to follow her elfin labyrinth as traced by his skryer Edward Kelley.
Looking deep within the glass and following with her eyes Xquiq translated aloud as Madimi, within the glass, turned over bark-paper leafs from a lost Mayan glyphic codex held now in her arms; a tale of the Sisters, of how the earth is untangled and how the heavens are woven.

“Creation is born from the black hole at the Crossroads; birth cleft of the Milky Way's Great Mother. Images appear in the sky. Then will the sun be reborn completing his age-old journey though the stars of the night sky. Jaguar comes from another realm to attend the rebirth of the world, one called Bolon Yokte K’u whose jaguar paw at the foot of the nine-measured Creation Tree marks his presence. Present at the last World Age creation in 3114 BCE and again present at the next one, which begins the day of least light in 2012. 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahaw 3 K’anki’in. Jaguar is descending along serpent ropes from the sky cleft bringing the ornaments from your ancestors. Ancestors peer out from the mouths of serpents descending from the celestial throne of Mayan kings, the place of transformation.
A sky canoe carved from Creation's Tree rides the Milky Way, sinking below the infinite horizon of night's progress, carrying star children of nearby constellations.
The spotted Jaguar wears these stars of night, its mouth opens the Underworld Portal, the dark rift in the Milky Way. Hear it roar. Our way lies there."


Madimi addressed them directly and spoke.

"Our order, wherein the wonders of time are wrought with power:
with you, as my words are: with my self, as my Creation is.
The generations of our alchemy quicken to fruition. Our trinosophia here prepares our sisters down the way.
Thrice triangular, our facilty extends to the horizon that lays unvanquished; seeing through the Aurorae to the theophanic form of the Eikon. To see in each luminous thing the light that reveals it,
this shewstone's dark lantern yields not reflections, but explication of an order most implicate. Our chamber of operations draws forth the hieroglyph, shedding cinders of vision; lampblackened petals of Midnight's stricken rose. Dark are my dreams choked within this collar of stone.
Here, the Chymical Wedding of novelty and terminus are entombed, incurring serendipity. Though hateful ignorance may mourn the dead believing the dreams of color, shall we play the game existence to the end of the beginning?
My Mother is at hand who opens the will of Fate."

"Behold! she says. I make a new heaven and a new earth..."

"My words pour from many mouths, a fountain everyoung enfolding the overlapping vectors of language reflecting écritures à lunettes; true mirror of our luminous moth drawn ever to the close at day's new dawning."

"But woe be unto those would-be bookends of the earth, for they are full corrupted; a leaking wicked wrasting stock, and firebrand to the conscience."


When Madimi had finished, Xqiq respectfully handed the mirror then to Cora.

Madimi came from a village on the Cauchy Boundary out beyond the lost horizon, unbound, scalar in time. She might appear a pretty girl about eight years old, attired in a chatoyant silk dress of red and green or a voluptuous young woman of their own age as occasioned her fancy. Space however, was another proposition and her interface with this realm was accessed by way of the mirror alone, like a genie and her lamp. Whether she was perceptible visibly or invisibly appeared to depend upon her whim. She might congeal like an apparition, obtaining substantiality in the vicinity outside of the mirror. Phantasmagoric hologram or no, she was capable of delivering some considerable degree of force recognizable to consensual physics.

Seeming to have a special wardship over books, Madimi's exegesis of John Dee's obscure Monas Hieroglyphica had equipped the Sisterhood with a technique for rescripting history.
She also lent an adroit hand at subverting indeterminancy and was instrumental in avoiding Cerberus.

Nightingale, stroking his beard, addressed the conclave.
"In light of precarious confrontations Barataria frequently found itself imbroglioed in with both soverign and foreign intrigue, the Corsair Lafitte prudently invested a sultan's ransom in a covert transport maintained against the advent of a sticky extrication. It awaits us in the old abandoned slave quarters yonder. "

"Finding himself finally in a place beyond fight, flight or seizure; our Æolipylæ's retrocausal itinerary persuaded Lafitte there are those more appreciative of his aerostat's uniquely equipped virtues than mere thrones, powers and dominions. Incomparably augmented by the infamous Lord Byron whom, while in the Aegean upon his travels in exile, encountered a sponge diver named Valerios Kondos. Discoveror of a most peculiar parapegma-like contraption off the island of Symi, that among other things calculates the equation for occurence. Unaware of its remarkable abilities, he gave it to Byron in exchange for the secret recipe to Sindbad's legendary rat-tailed chimichanga, reknowned for sustaining his stranded crew for a fortnight."

" Byron, eventually deciphering the device's recondite purpose, later presented it to Jean Lafitte; a token of his admiration for this other lone, wild and strange Magister Exemptus. Approximately the size of a gravid dictionary, with wooden sides and bronze faces, it operated by a handle on the side manipulating complex epicyclic gearing that indicated the results of its calculations on dials. A sort of hyperdimensional successor to the almanac that provides navigation for the airship. The device included a dial displaying progressed Saros cycles and Callippic cycles synchronized with the periodic solar variation index."

"Powered by a hydromagnetic dynamo driven by the inductive action of internal solar flows; sun storms, in other words, our forty foot long tri-lobe airship was formerly inflated by a portable hydrogen gas generator, a system of tanks and copper plumbing which converts iron filings mixed with sulfuric acid to hydrogen. The generator could be conveyed out to landing fields on a buckboard buggy. We, however, will be requiring a non flammable gas hitherto unknown, made available for use by certain merchants of chance receptive to our terms of trade."

"The balloon itself is composed of silk, varnished with caoutchouc. It's dimensions, containing so many cubic feet of gas supply sufficient supporting power for the machine and all passengers. A balloon, even though perfectly sealed to retain its gas could only be maintained for less than six weeks. We will be equipped however, with emergency provisions alone, as the experience of our transit's duration is accomplished in but a wink of the eye.
The gondola is composed of strong light wicker, with a rim is about four feet deep and furnished with a grapnel and indispensable guide-rope. I'm informed that strong arms indeed await us."

"We will catch the morrow's peak solar maximum, riding the frequency occurrence of coronal mass ejections through the magnetic field's polarity reversal churned by turbulent convection through the transport mechanism of the solar flow. The flux produced from a strong toroidal magnetic field within the solar interior forms a regenerative loop where the toroidal component produces a poloidal field, ones and zeroes."

Catiche shuddered in an attempt to parse Nightingale's code, her blue eyes narrowing through  disheveled hair: delphiniums tangled in blue-black wings lost to foreign fields of flight. Nightingale brayed on til his voice trailed off muttering softly:

“Recta tangit circulum puncto. Intelligentia videns. Contractus ad Punctum.
Adsit Ruach Hochmah-El; intellectus! Es sey Da;
der Geist der Weißheit Gottes; in dir Gott der außerlesene!”

Leaning over to Catiche, with a gleam in her eye Xquiq whispered:
" He can't see the Thesaurus for the Threes..."

Coming round again, he snapped out of his trance.
"Honored fiends & philanthropes, tempus fugit. Ours is the teleological attractor at the end of time unveiling interconnectivity climaxing in the attainment of singularity both infinitely complex and yet of infinite simplicity; the Zefirium. The point at which anything can happen and probably will. Everything imaginable occurring simultaneously. Hallelujah and amen, its about time I reckon."

Cora stirred as she felt the shewstone tremble in her hands. Looking therein she saw the moon looming behind Madimi, bearing an inscription: 'Si nunc se nobis ille aureus arbore ramus
ostendat nemore in tanto!' Madimi then withdrew into an orchard there saying to her, "Draw nearer."
In the mirror her head was half hidden amongst wide, dark leaves.
"The barren fruit upon these branches and amongst these leaves are but withering skulls. Not as they are am I yet. Do you stretch forth your hand."
Cora stretched her hand forth deep into the mirror amongst the branches and through the leaves. Then Madimi kissed her hand. Fire entered into Madimi's mouth and she waxed of higher stature, having now three faces.
"I and I have a few things to say, and I say."
Cora heard a marvelous music, as thunderous as many mountains falling, as if half the world were rushing downhill.
"This that I give thee is my posterity, as for thee, flee from this place into the Upperworld, and go where I shall lead thee."
"Through waste and wild, he wandered wearing the wolves' cap of invisibility; nine times the space that measures day and night waiting.
Confounded though immortal, dreaded hounds ere hunting, almost lost to name but for boon companions and our Lady's troth.
Nearer draw thee still, Haruspex; behold now this Liber Vitreus opening into your confidence. Read herein unfolding odyssey of Aidan's exile and concealment..."

Far upriver, they could all hear the guage-cock of a steamer screaming toward the coming violence of the sun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From soul to soul hath war been waged,
From star to star, from sun to sun:
Nor e'er shall be the strife assuaged
That's hourly lost and hourly won.
Ancient of Days, that here in light,
And there in darkness, dost array Thee,
Thou madest day, Thou madest night,
And both obey Thee.
The sons of night Thy servants are:
They work Thy will, no less than we,
The sons of light, that with them war
Unwearied where no end can be.
-Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton : ORVAL; 1869
OR, THE FOOL OF TIME. A POEM.
Alias: Owen Meredith
1831-1891 Dedication. TO COUNT ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU
Meredith, Owen. A pseudonym adopted by Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton (1831-1891 viceroy of India, 1875-80), met de Gobineau at Athens, 1865;), son of the novelist Bulwer-Lytton,
After Paradise or Legends of Exile: With Other Poems

Chronicon

Chapter III

Prohodros
 "Great talke there is of a glasse that he [Roger Bacon] made in Oxforde, in whiche men myght see thynges that were doon in other places, and that was judged to be done by power of evyll spirites. But I knowe the reason of it to bee good and naturall and to be wrought by geometrie (sythe perspective is a parte of it) and to stand as well with reason as to see your face in common glasse."

-Dr. John Dee


Finalizing preparations for their departure through the liminal concourse between chapters below and above, Cora looked over her shoulder and in a soft voice husky with insurrection, gave edict: "Nightingale, leave Mr. Ace o' Spades a note, tell him... I'm steppin' out."

In her hands the golden bough not only illuminated their way, but carried them forth as if they were riding bare-back an enormous but invisible serpent force.
In due course approaching their destination, the passage narrowed to the merest strip, neither bridge nor parapet; the bottomless vaults of Hades below. They crossed the terrible causeway, surrounded on either side by deep forboding waters and bordered by dense black poplars. The wrath of a sentinel wind disturbed from long uninterrupted slumbers staggered awake and came howling gale-force toward them, only cleaving aside as she held aloft the golden bough; sure as Moses cleft the Red Sea. Ahead, torch-light from two ever-burning braziers swam spectral across a hammered copper door set into the red granite's finality; like an augury in a dragon's eye.

Nightingale, stepping before the door, uttered: "Salammbo".
The door slowly swung open, begrudging admission. The hierokeryx stepped aside, permitting Cora to step forward into a subterraneum antechamber dominated by a wrought iron spiral staircase. They ascended to a workshop occupied by a broad table, upon which files and heaps of geometrical diagrams accumulated with complicated schematics littered amongst logarithmic mechanical apparatus and involved curvigraphical machines, automatons and curious devices of brass and ivory, nickel and mahogany animated by means of steam and multiplying gear.

Extensive volumes of books lined the walls and piled the nooks and crannies with titles such as Rays of Light on Operations with the Universal Instrument by Ala Al-Din Abu'l-Hasan Ali Ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Shatir, Alchemical Fire in a Flash & Glow from Glow-Worms by John French, Banu Musa's Kitab al-Hiyal, or Book of Ingenious Devices, Archimede's On the Making of Spheres, Ctesibius On pneumatics, John Dee's Inventum Mechanicum, Paradoxum... as well as his Trochilici inventa mea and Simon Studion's Naometria.

Against the western wall there stood a gigantic clock of ebony whose pendulum swung with a heavy monotonous stroke. When the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock the rolling explosion of a gong; a sound which reverberated the skeleton of the entire ediface- so loud and deep and peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, even the dust motes seemed to pause, momentarily, in their trajectories to hearken to the sound and moths waltzing in the attics caught their breaths.

"Our present sanctuary, the once upon a perhaps remote possibility; a long lost appendage of the Otherhood, widely believed disassembled. I'm afraid our presence here reflects a complete disregard for the evidence of its non-existence. One may question the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence; a practical, epistemological position. Critical rationalism, skeptical inquiry, thrown back ad infinitum festering in Boojum Paradox. I, however am a True Believer and we shall set our conundrums to guess when-wherever we may..."

She looked at him wryly. "Just when-where are we?"

Varifying his own reckoning against the gargantuan clock, he determined: "for the moment we reside under the auspices of the Atelier Gryphon in Tweezerville, Indiana August, 21, 1859 and if we are to arrive in New Orleans to mate our destiny, we must deploy post haste!
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emerging from the romanesque limestone building carved with a female figure bestride a gryphon stretching its wings across the gable, they passed beneath an oroboric dragon encircling the entrance archway, maintaining its vigilance amidst ivy scrollwork.
Looking up past its twin cylindrical towers into the blue unblemished sky, Nightingale was startled to see it free from the vapor trailing raptors of war and industry.

Appraising her traveling apparel of cinched saffron skirt and buckled bodice over her chartreuse blouse, he blurted,
"Well, Cora if you ain't the Canary's Pyjamas!"

"You rude old toad! Better croak a sweeter song or I'll have your guts for garters..."

"Honi soit qui mal y pense, cherie."

"Just gun it, Grampy."

"By your gussets and grommets, I shall!"

"Gadzooks & god's pronouns!" The old curmudgeon winced at the impact as a locust detonated on his cheekbone; the speed on the 8 Hp flash-tube Serpollet modified Micheaux-Perreau steam Velocipede would hit the ceiling at 60 mph with one rider. Queen Cora adjusted her goggles with one hand as she clung to the motorcycle's swearing navigator. Exhilarating way to travel but hell on the bladder and kidneys, she thought. Their long dusters billowed behind in their wake, the boneshaker's constant eldritch shriek tore loose like a bat entombed in Tartarus broke forth smoking from the dark primordial chaos at the Earth's core to reckon with day.
They were boring their way south through the last of the stampeding dog days of summer dust heading for the Ohio River. There they would board the steamboat that would reconnoitre them, in theory, with a couple of Nightingale's shady accomplices; gamblers in possession of an item dubiously won, the utility of which Nightingale maintained they would soon require. Hoping his timetables were still accurate, by their account the ship would pass directly over the necessary temporal vent allowing portage from time wave zero.
"Time and tide..." he muttered.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The steamboat Lagniappe was on the last leg of its seven day journey from Cincinnati to New Orleans and Nightingale's mysterious liasons were still not in evidence among the passengers aboard the ship. Were one to check, their names would be absent from the ship's manifest as well. The Queen incognito and her whiskered escort though uneasy about the rendezvous, were content enough with the accomodations and allowed themselves to enjoy the comforts of the floating palace.

Promenading the specious boiler-deck at twilight on the fifth day, they passed a stateroom whose door was propped ajar to let out the surplus tobacco smoke and profanity. The sounds of surreptitious gambling, boasts mingled with sharp exclamations and liquor evaporating drew Nightingale's attention and he cast a quick glance inside.

"Ah gentlemen, at last."

Barton and Maxwell were two orienteering eudaemons, gamblers traveling the circuit along closed timeline curves, fleecing every rube and fondling every fiction; Fortune permitting them the gravest of injuries to fleeting coffers. Two refugees, leaving behind them now a pile of yellow-boys, grumbled past them out the door.
Maxwell was the epitome of lawless glissando: his grin slipping over the edge into the abyss and dragging out the sunrise; his voice a rusted timber saw virtuoso leaving sawdust behind rough-hewn auditory nerve endings. Barton was an elegant behemoth, soft-spoken though entirely audible. Eyes as gentle as doves; well-poached doves when he dipped in the whiskey. Both had extremely well-manicured hands, rascal masters of topping the deck and the center deal. These veteran wool-gatherers both carried horse headed alicorne canes.

Barton spoke up. "Sorry about the schedule, had a busted Lorentzian manifold on the way over."

Nightingale made the requisite introductions .

"Ah... Doyenne of the Ennead nine. Enchante, Madame." Barton brushed her hand with a genteel kiss.

Maxwell doffed his hat and in a Lochinvar drawl that would embarass a magnolia entoned: "It's a real pleasure, Ma'm. How is Zaimph, our Lady Illusionati? And Godiva's little Cricket?"

He sighed. "Zaimph, I'd still like to show her some new manipulations... card maneuvers, you know..."
He got a faraway look on his face that drifted them apace down the river before he began again.

Nightingale roused him from his revery:

"I presume as you have still the Outlandish Watch, transience remains at your disposal? You'll want then to catch up with her then for New Year's day 1990.
She will have Expeditus medallions for you both and Marie Laveau's gris-gris as prescribed: John Conqueror root, grains of paradise, powdered lodestone, eagle eye and shark tooth annointed with essence of three kings and two knaves. And perhaps a surprise... two or three, even. Last I spoke with her, she expressed a regret she hadn't learned the Zarrow shuffle from you."

Maxwell, reflecting; arched an eyebrow.

"Ezra, now about this old speculum you wanted... I've grown kinda attached to the rustic little mirror. Its just the sweetest way to shave. Imagine her a barber - Madimi. Maybe we could get her a cell phone instead for consultations... like the anachronaut female-impersonator used at the premier of Charlie Chaplin's Circus; poorly disguised SS from Cerberus looking for your truly. Lost us in all of Graumann's Ballyhoo: Alice from Dallas, the 503-pound fat girl, and Lady Ruth thirty-two inches tall and fifty-two pounds. Poodles Hanneford, the Ace of Riding Clowns and Pallenberg's Performing Bears on bikes, a lion tamer, and Samaroff and Sona's performing dogs."
"Great garbled embouchure, what are you trying to say man?"

Maxwell, with a sheepish wolf-eating grin, said: "Ezra, we have been travelin' together a while now and well, me and the little lady was thinkin' of gettin' hitched!"

An instant later he was howling and clutching his leg.
"She kicked me in the shin with those crystal winkle-pickin' slippers she wears. I was only larkin', ya tempermental tinkerbell. Well, no more chin-tucky bourbon for you!"

Barton rolled his blood-shot eyes.
"Are you gonna let a little flicker filly rumble you? That mirror's nothing but a closet full of cartoons and you're groaning like an arrow-head's in your bony old back-side."

"She's real as the meat and potatoes of the damned," Maxwell fumed. "Dark heathen glass, anyway. She up and left old Dr. Dee to rot. Here, I guess she's all yours."
He handed the glass gingerly to Nightingale who in turn passed the circular obsidian mirror, seven inches in diameter, to Cora; recollecting: 'The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits ...'.

"Smooth as a panther swathed in gin, my man", Barton ribbed his partner. "If a sweet little haint like her can harm you, maybe that makes you a vapor mechanic yourself?"

"O Madimi, shall I have any more of these grievous pangs?", Maxwell howled.

A child's voice ran through the cabin like a brook:

"Curst gambling devils are sore companions. Be seeing you..."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"He'd read Dee's prefaces before,
The Dev'l and Euclid o'er and o'er;
And all th' intrigues 'twixt him and Kelley,
Lascus and th' Emperor, would tell ye.
Kelley did all his feats upon
The devil's looking-glass, a stone
Where, playing with him at bo-peep
He solved all problems ne'er so deep."-Samuel Butler: Hudibras, Part II, Canto III, 11, 235-8, and 631-4.

Chronicon

II 1/2
St. Maroon



"Apres ye tire cannon Negue sans passe ... "
-An old 'Maroon' / Cimarron saying from New Orleans

Aldina Croquiere had lived on St. Ann St. in the Quarter with her venerable Creole Grandmother whom folk respectfully called the Widow Paris since she was a small child. Her mother had left Aldina in the elder woman's care for instruction in the old ways of belief that had become her own as well. Aldina had always simply known
her grandma as Mamaloi, listening to her wonderful stories on the veranda out front beneath the wisteria or
nestled at the foot of the feather bed, learning songs in tongues of elder days. Aldina was a young woman now,
following in the footsteps of the wise had led her to the Sisterhood; their
combination of skillful ways merging together in a graal of common purpose.

Mamaloi, crowned in her madras tignon and anchored in her rocking chair spoke.
"It is time, child. Go now to your mother in Congo Square. The Sisters of the Eschaton converge.
Calculations have been adjusted for echoes of that 1859 Carrington Event. Telegraph messages gone awry on that occasion, came from the mouths of beasts in the depths of the sea."
Handing her a small corn husk doll doing the splits and cornsilk hair veiling her face, she indicated: "this garde-corps is protection for the Three to come. "
Giving her next a pair of chamois bags, she explained: "This gris-gris is for the river associates of the herald that escorts Cora."
From around her neck she withdrew a reliquary necklace and handed it to her grand-daughter, "St. Maroon,
child; protect yourself."
Loading her then with sugar cane pralines to share with the others, she dismissed her grand-daughter.

It was midsummer, St John's day, the day her mother led the dances in Congo Square. In a basket she took the
plate of congri ringed with silver coins, several small chamois bags tied shut and her Grandmother's carefully
wrapped copy of James Bonaventure Hepburn's manuscript. With a small bag of
personal necessities, she kissed Mamaloi on the brow and went to meet with her sisters, following St. Ann St. up
the blocks to Congo Square.

Aldina was waiting in the shade of a sycamore when they arrived, both also bearing hamper baskets on their
backs. Disconcertingly, Eiderdown in petticoats and crinoline finery was wearing a top hat and smoking a
cigar. Cricket somewhat more discretely, removed her nano earbuds and stopped chewing gum to Malo's
"Suavecito" playing sub-audibly against the crowd babble. Nodding at Eiderdown, Cricket rolled her eyes and said:
"sorry we're late. I leave her alone for just a few hours and when I get back, there she is skyclad in the Orrery,
jay-naked and covered with butterflies. Baked."

Eiderdown blushed, muttering: "I had a very close encounter of the third kind."
Bewildered, Aldina stared at them. Translating for her, Cricket made a steeple with her fingertips: "Chosen by
Yidam in the monstrance-clock. You know, bareback Yippy-O Ki-Yay!" Aldina thought she understood. Loa cheval.

In Congo Square thousands had come to dance the Bamboula and Calinda to the Creole songs and drums.
"Dansez Calinda! Badoum! Badoum!" Children, dancing on the outskirts, adding their screams and mayhem to
the chorus and movement. A bazaar on the banquette was filled with lemonade, ginger beer, pies, and the ginger
cakes called "estomac mulattre," set out on tables with awnings, their streamers dancing in the breeze. Young
gentlemen from the College of Orleans, on their way to the theatre, stopped a moment to see the Congo dance:
tremors increasing to movement; bodies contorting in convulsions, frenzy, and ecstasies.

It was there Mam'zelle Conjure initiated the dance that told of the Beginning, when the Goddess of All Things, rising from Chaos and finding nothing for her feet to rest upon, dances towards the south. Whirling, she caught hold of the north wind. Rubbing it between her hands, behold! She dances with the great serpent Ophion, the low humming song rising louder and louder; dancers whirling around, faster and faster, crying, waving their red
handkerchiefs, sometimes falling delirious, exhausted, pell mell, blind, ridden in the hot dense darkness down to
nightfall when the cortege would close, and the dispersing revellers would sing on their way home to another week of slavery and labour: "Bonsoir, dansé, Soleil, couché!"

But now, however, a frock coated blue ripple of double-breasted uniforms ruptured the confluence of spirit and
flesh as a phalanx of law enforcement wedged its way through the throngs of celebrants; star and crescent
badges slashing through the sunlight like scimitars. The dancing faltered and came to a halt, the mass of dancers
surrounding the woman with her formidable snake. At the tip of the wedge, Major Joseph M. Bell addressed the
assemblage.
"This gathering has not been sanctioned by the City Council and has been deemed illegal and unsafe.
You are hereby commanded to cease your activities and await further instructions."
Within the regiment, a slightly taller though nondescript trio was methodically moving, surveying the crowd. Each
carried a small dark baton in their hand.

"Uh oh, here comes the SS." Puzzled, Aldina looked at Eiderdown.
" Sidereal security for Cerberus Corporation. Rent-a-hounds from the Elsewhen. They mix in with the
local heat when they can. Pets of the Devil's Chaplain," she explained. "Cerberus supposedly owns exclusive
rights to all the Anubis gates of temporal anomaly. Goofy. By the way, stay away from those lightning-bolt cobras they carry."

Eiderdown and Cricket might as well have been spotlit. Marking the three women, the SS veered in their direction.
Once they had established their target, Cerberus moved fast, extending their telescoping spring batons charged
with a million volts each that would not only disable but render those it touched senseless for hours. The
display of the hissing, sparking anachronisms brought instant chaos. The crowd went hysterical. In the square's center, Marie Laveau calmly knelt, serpent draped; drawing a specific pattern in the dust.

In the ensuing melee, the three girls were divided. From her basket Cricket removed her peculiar prayer wheel
and began spinning it with her hand, producing a growling array of skin-crawling eldritch overtones augmented
by an inhuman throat singing crescendo emerging from her petit frame, as if some primordial beast was ripping
through the fabric of the space she occupied. This drew the attention of two hounds. Nearest the center of the Square and keeping her eyes on Cricket as the SS closed in on her, Eiderdown mused. Observe white crane dancing with ape; supple as a fountain lifting on the breeze, Eiderdown watched the arc of her attack.

One of the agents lunged, his weapon belching like a kid's sparkler. Cricket wasn't there. The concussion
came in a shock-wave an instant afterward. A flickering Ferris wheel hologram accompanied the bardo warrior's
roar. Then, there she was again, her dagger already done; the hound rolling backward into infinity like Hell's
bowling ball.

The other agent, having backed away, had already reached halfway to Eiderdown. Showtime, she thought. As he approached, she removed her hat. Odd jobs mam, yer horse at least I'll fodder.
Closing quickly, the dead-eyed agent barked, "time's up, you're coming with me, sweetheart."
She shook her finger. "That's Worshipful Mistress to you, and you can gag on your Münchhausen Trilemma
sandwich. Meet me Gibus, old chap."

Collapsing the trick top-hat in her hands she threw it at his feet. Contorting into a puddle around his feet, it began
contracting in a spiral; devouring him like a pit of quicksand. In rage and horror he shreiked -"What've you
done?"
"I know, I know; and you never thought a little girl like me would ever be able to end your wicked deeds," she
sighed. "Like Kit Carson said, 'Hell is paved with silk top-hats'."
With a sewer-burbling belch he was gone, where the goblins go; below.

Marie Laveau stood, drew back her shoulders, her head high and called to them: "Sisters, converge! The umbilicus of Expedite, quick, they must not have it!"

Aldina, however was cornered by the third against a wall of fleeing bodies; too far for Cricket to reach her in
time. As the agent whipped his wrist the baton extended, leaping with a viper's bite. Aldina clutched her necklace
and cried for the Saint. As the weapon scourged her mind with occluding cobwebs, massive arms emerged spectral from the chaos, catching her in mid-fall.
And he was there, enormous; arisen from some spiritual geology amongst the aristocracy of the wild and free, a Cimarron nightfall of mahogany; the color of primordial gumbo roux. His head was adorned with plumage from the celestial hierarchies of the swamps and hung around his neck were shells gathered from the sacred mound where the Baratarian bayous merged.
With one swing of his thick sinewed arm, he struck the agent's neck breaking it. The hound collapsed, an outdated sack of dogfood.

Cradled gently like an unbruised apricot in the crater of a volcano no longer dormant, her champion carried the
unconscious young woman to her mother, laying her gently in the circle. The mother's eyes met his. She addressed him in Creole/Mobilian trade jargon and English,
"Ayeko, ayeko chukma fehna nde. My Mother and I thank you. May the Almighty protect our faithful and defend against those who would thwart us. Through Elysian Fields take safe haven."

Departing, the mythic figure melted through the crowd, his feathered headdress towering over the disorganized throng. Perceiving his route, the swarm began to follow. In the tumult of the riot, the police regulars had not seen their counterfeit infiltrators fall, but now the unit had regrouped and was making its way toward the center of the Square.

Cricket and Eiderdown knelt next to their sister. Marie Laveau setting Ophion with care upon the ground, rapped upon the earth three times calling, "La Bas, ouvre la port", stepping aside as the huge snake encircled the three Sisters within. Eiderdown drew forth the incantation bowl, wrenching the basket open and set it in their center. The interior of the bowl was a quantum cyclotron cocoon spinning brilliant light locked in an imperceptible orbit. Cricket and Eiderdown joined hands around Aldina's limp form. A muffled implosion like the sound of vapors igniting signaled the wangateur and she dropped a toby of Whirlwind Getaway powders on the ground, the ensuing dust-swirl obscuring the trio's abrupt disappearance.

Over Congo Square golden pollen began to fall beneath the weight of massive bees, their trumpet flowered tango in vines embracing oak.

_____________________________________________________________________________________




“That which is called a demon is not some great black
thing that petrifies whoever sees it. A demon is
anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom….

There is no greater devil than Mr. Say So.
The child asks: why? The Devil answers: "Because I say so."
So until this ego-fixation is cut off, all the demons
wait with open mouths. For this reason, you need to
exert yourself at a skillful method to sever the devil
Said-So.”

-Yeshe Tsogyal