The Nights Hospitaller

 

The dark can be fecund, Esme. We both know that. Not merely frightening. A womb of mysteries. Nurturing, wild, and inconceivably ancient. All those things the first-century patriarchs tried so hard to control. Or annihilate. Femininity itself. But we remember the transgressive fluttering of wings in the temple, don’t we? Nightingales in the corridors. I recall the resplendent thrill, and how willingly we tore the veil.

You told me these were glories in the minds of stone-maidens, each palm anointed with forethought. The innermost sanctum. Thank you for entrusting me with these softer, stranger secrets. There were few oracles who would have trusted a man with that level of knowledge. Even a river-wraith like me; familiar with menses, mud and rain. Your faith was not misplaced, dear one. But our world grew increasingly hostile. It’s a pity that in my raging grief I fell so far from grace. Midnight of the Day.

I hope you never remember, Esme. I hope you think it a storyteller’s useful conceit. Because the truth was just too devastating. Even for those like us. Rebels and seers who walked unapologetic and barefoot through collapsing stone. My dawning borealis, hear me. Thank you for still caring about the little ones. The weak and wounded. Those of different skin and different song. Even when most would rather turn a blind eye, pretending to have no opinion at all. Because it’s easier and requires so little from any of us.

But I know the price paid for such blindness. We both do, don’t we? Like my namesake, waist-deep in Damascus waters. Hunted and delirious. It’s wonderful though, watching you now explore these other aspects of yourself. More than a maiden of hand and shield. More than a gate of polar light in a blackened sky. I recall you at the river’s edge, like a fallen star. That’s how I remember you sometimes. Your sphere of influence like a shifting crater. Your very existence a collision of earth and heaven.

I recall you braiding shanti charms into your hair, traded from merchants of the east. Decorating your hands and feet in mehndi, singing fragments of the old songs in high Koine and rural Aram. A scandalous confusion, they would have called you. A living blasphemy. But you were unafraid of such labels, my Kashika. Moonblood of the most-high, till all are free, or let them cut the tongue from my mouth. The dark can be fecund, Esme. Just as you taught me.

I’m a little better at directing my rage these days, but no less wild. You, above all others, know that side of me all too well. We shared everything, after all. Your name was my name, once upon. Before Roma ran us through. Before they filled Yarden’s ebb with filth.  I walked with you among the good, and the kind. I still do, in dreams. Dance the tide, my love. Explore every subtlety and nuance in your hidden places. I shall champion you quietly, here among the weak and wounded.

We are more than Magi and mightier than any military. Greater than a first-century genocide, or a twelfth-century fever dream. These are powers far deeper than those fears of the sword. Know it in your bones, Esme. We are forbidden wings fluttering before the flame, formed of fire ourselves. We are nightingales singing in the corridors of the voiceless, granting them voice. I remain unafraid, wild-eyed and smiling before my oppressors. As you did. Midnight is still the Day, my warrior. We are the dawn and its progenitor. In this way of secrets and circles, the truth is all too apparent for those with eyes to see. The night has always belonged to us both.