Ink from the Demons' Well

A sculpture, in bas-relief, of the two demons, Anaxike and Malake, decorates the entrance to the chamber where the Sovereign writes. The sculpture depicts the two demons grooming each other, fussing over each other’s bird-like features, their feathery plumes of hair, their jutting beaks. They use the three talons at the end of their crooked arms to smear makeup on their sagging skins, to fix wigs, masks, and prosthetics on their sloping heads, and to apply other tools and tricks of stagecraft to disguise their shape so they can walk among humans undetected. It is written in the great tomes of the city library that, when they finish the work depicted in the sculpture, the two demons travel in their human guise through the port city over which the Sovereign rules.

Right before dawn, they appear in costume on the edges of the city near the sea. They walk along the water, where fisherman haul their baskets of crabs, fish, and clams up the piers and to the stalls, bringing with them the reek of sea and salt. They skirt the cobbled streets near the bay where grocers line carts of fruits and vegetables under umbrellas that cast angular shadows over throngs of customers as the sun rises. In the markets, they bump against beggars holding dirty, supplicating fingers toward merchants and customers who pretend not to see.

In the late morning, Anaxike and Malake make their way up the city, winding through alleys formed by buildings stitched together under the crisscross of clotheslines. The two demons keep to the inner walls of the streets to avoid the sun, now traversing its zenith. They flutter, wherever they can, into the narrow shadows of noon in their compulsion to find enough darkness to do their work. Often, brightness overtakes too much of the city, and the two must huddle in stillness and wait for the blind light of day to recede.

Finally, during the delicate exchange when day ebbs and dusk creeps its oozing fingers into the warm spaces vacated by the sun, Anaxike and Malake walk forth once more. They waddle through drunken crowds at the footsteps of taverns, illuminated by the orange aura of the setting sun. They turn toward houses and apartments, where humans close their useless eyes to while away the night. Eventually, when their work is done, the two demons turn back toward the sea where they started their incursion. At the edge of the land, they push the garments from their feathered shoulders and extend their wings over the dark waters.

When they leave the city, they are not alone. Their foray into the Sovereign’s markets and streets is a search for a warm human body to take with them, sometimes more than one. As they move through the city, they lean into unsuspecting citizens, sniffing skin and hair deeply with their vulture noses. Sometimes, when they convulse with pleasure from the smell of ripe flesh, they probe the body with a pointed talon to make sure they feel what they smell: that the body is ready to be picked from the city and taken.

Startled at the prodding, innocent victims might try to confront their abusers, but they become unsettled, taken aback by what they see. When they look at the pair that has descended upon them, they notice the overwrought artifice of their costuming and sense that something is amiss. The demons are skilled at constructing their subterfuge, but their poor victims intuit the hints of terror that swell from its edges, from the rims of the black eyes where the makeup doesn’t quite reach, or from the uncomfortable stiffness of their hollow garments as they stand shoulder to shoulder. Innocents confronted by the pair feel as if they are trapped in front of a vast stone wall with someone – or something – peaking at them from the other side through slits and openings hidden throughout.

The invariable pause at the hidden terror gives the demons enough time to work. One moves to the side and delivers a mallet swing to the victim’s head. The other embraces the body and carries it casually to a waiting receptacle – maybe a wheelbarrow, maybe a wooden barrel – where they hide it until they’re ready to take it away.

The tomes in the ancient library that describe the two demons do not explain where Anaxike and Malake go when they leave the city or what happens to the bodies they take. Perhaps the authors who wrote the tomes did not know.

But although we do not follow Anaxike and Malake into the darkness of the sea, the scholars who received the tomes that tell the story of the two demons derived a great lesson from it. It is this: The tricks and tools of our culture can deceive us just as much as they can help us see, and what we see determines what we become blind to.

Sight and blindness are two sides of the same coin.

And, now that we can see the coin, now that we can flip it back and forth between its two sides, there is no putting it down.

***

Sovereign 154, like all rulers before him, took charge of the quill, the inkwell, and the duties of the writing chamber on the day of his coronation.

He entered the writing chamber on the morning after he took the headdress, decorated in gold and jewels, and the accompanying accoutrements of his position, such as the scepter. Only 153 people had entered the chamber before him. Like his predecessors, he was unsure of what awaited him on the first morning.

No one prepares the new Sovereigns for what they will find inside the writing chamber on the first day of their reign.

On his first day, Sovereign 154 knew that he was to take the quill and inkwell from the entrance, where the servants had placed them for convenience. He also took a tome that was left with the writing tools. It was filled with blank pages.

Then, he passed for the first time under the statue of Anaxike and Malake, blank demon eyes following him into the chamber. Beyond the door, there were two heavy curtains that granted him privacy from his servants, from the world, and from the gaze of the demons.

He crossed beyond the curtains.

The room was circular. In the center stood a desk of white marble. Gray swirls and wisps infused the stone, moving through it like ripples in a river’s current. The Sovereign placed his hand on the surface as if to still the movement, finding it almost disappointing to discover it was solid after all.

He placed the leather-bound tome on the desk and opened it.

He was ready to languish upon the first blank page of his reign.

He was ready to be led away by the liquid dreams and visions that swirled in the porcelain of the desk, and that stirred in black eddies inside the inkwell that he placed upon it.

***

The story of Anaxike and Malake had been written by the fourth sovereign, or Sovereign 4, as she is referred to in the city’s notation. Later, Sovereigns 7 and 11 embellished the story, adding details about how the two demons take their prey. Sovereign 11 even added an exchange between Anaxike and a fish merchant before Malake delivered instant darkness with his hammer blow.

The fish merchant, startled by Anaxike’s appearance, stared at him with lips parted. The figure that stood before the merchant was dressed like any other citizen. But something seemed inexplicably askew, as if the dress, the face, the expression were alien interpretations of human normalcy.

The poor fish merchant tried to take control of the encounter by marching into his rehearsed greeting, spoken so many times before, but this time with less feeling, his words trailing off in robotic flatness.

 “Happy morning, sir. I have clams, mussels, haddock…”

Anaxike, noticing the effort in the man’s blinking eyes, interrupts. “Release the strain from your eyes, sir. What you think you see is what you see.”

Sovereign 11 did not bother to elucidate the many possible meanings of Anaxike’s sole line in the texts. Elucidation was for the scholars who took the tomes from the Sovereigns when they considered them complete. The city’s laws and cultural institutions arose from this curious practice of writing.

The official explanation of the practice is this: The Sovereign establishes his or her rule through the writing of stories for the enlightenment of humankind. The Sovereign’s words are meant to give shape to the cosmos of thought. They bring both the materials of thinking as well as the objects of the world into illumination under the light of the mind and the eye of reason. When the scholars in the library receive the stories, they study them and form their meaning through public argument and instruction. This is how the stories reach the citizens, and this is how the stories provide the citizens with the spiritual direction they need to live a life of virtue, and with the tools of discernment to be able to distinguish between truth and lies.

The scholars who received the story of Anaxike and Malake saw the opportunity to cement the Sovereign’s role in the life of the city. One possible reading of the story is that Anaxike and Malake represent the corruption of reality through tricks and sleights of hand that bend thought toward falsehood. If what you think you see is what you see, then clarity of thought is a prerequisite for clarity of sight.

And so it falls to the Sovereign to give order to words and things, and it falls to the scholars to communicate the meaning clearly. The statue of the two demons at the entrance to the Sovereign’s writing chamber serves as a reminder that the Sovereign’s role is to protect the city against falsehoods and other agents of social decay.

And, now, tradition mandates that the Sovereign commit to the chamber every day. And every day, before he does so, he must pass under the sculpture of Anaxike and Malake.

***

During the first days of his rule, Sovereign 154 entered the writing chamber each morning. He embraced his position at the desk: this was where he would take control of the city, where his writing would burn like a lantern to illuminate his citizens.

He sat before the porcelain desk and opened the tome.

He examined the blank page.

He dipped the pen into the inkwell.

He dangled the pen over the parchment in loops and arabesques, looking for just the right moment and position to make contact with the blank page.

His fingers tensed and eased, tensed and eased, in pulsating rhythms.

But the blank page overwhelmed him.

The pen would not settle onto the paper.

The Sovereign could not write.

***

Zakrielle and Karadmos were the two scholars who commissioned the statue of Anaxike and Malake. As the scholars that led the effort, they also had a central role in its design. They knew that the eyes of some statues in the city were fitted with gems, or with brightly colored orbs to give them life. The two scholars, however, made sure that the artists who created the statue of Anaxike and Malake represented the demons’ eyes only with smooth, white stone.

Zakrielle and Karadmos formed part of the council of scholars during the time that Sovereign 4 delivered the tome that first made mention of Anaxike and Malake. When new tomes arrived at the library, the council would read them in a room by the sea. They took turns reading in shifts, day and night, and taking notes in the hushed air that vibrated only from the whispers of the waves beyond the windows.

Zakrielle and Karadmos read about Anaxike and Malake for the first time in that room by the sea. When they first read the story, they were astonished – alarmed – by the Sovereign’s writing. The Sovereign could imagine new demons – and new gods? – out of thin air! This is a dangerous magic.

Now that the demons were born in the ink of the tomes, it was too late to send them back. Now, the two demons tinged the reality of the city from end to end. The citizens must look into each other’s faces and ask questions they might not have asked before. Every citizen in the port city must now judge whether they see truth or lies, danger or safety, when they look upon their fellow citizens.

Is the person before me friend or foe?

Zakreille and Karadmos must have wondered how well people see when they look into each other’s eyes.

Zakrielle and Karadmos must have also wondered where the demons go when they leave the city. But they couldn’t know because that place resides beyond the limits of the story. Try as they might, their vision would not reach that place even when they stretched their sight toward the edges of the sea.

But there can be no doubt that they continued to try. The two scholars, along with the rest of the council, must have kept casting their sight through the windows and toward the far reaches of the crystal waters as they reread the story.

Zakrielle and Karadmos must have also looked over the sea as they planned the design of the great statue of the two demons.

No doubt they imagined what their vision could not reach – the far end of the sea, the place where Anaxike and Malake escape to nightly – when they decided it was best that the eyes of the statue remain smooth and blank.

***

Sovereign 154’s days passed in front of a blank page.

Even as those days turned to weeks, the Sovereign repeated the ritual, passing under the statue and into the writing chamber. The statue, there above the door, served as a signal that the demons could be present somewhere else, anywhere else, wherever citizens might cast a questioning gaze.

It was in this state of anxiety that the scholars and citizens of the city waited for instruction.

To feign industry, the Sovereign began to record trivialities. He took notes about anything he could think of. All of it was nonsense, but it allowed him to believe that he was making headway.

He wrote a paragraph about the dinner he had eaten the day before.

He wrote two sentences about the flowers on the balcony in his bedroom.

He listed adjectives that described the taste of raw beef. He was able to list six.

The weeks turned to months.

He began to doodle. He drew circles, cyclones, and boxes with the corners connected by Xs.

He imitated the handwriting of other sovereigns whose books he had studied. The words he chose to imitate were random. “Spirit” was one, “delicacy” another.

He fidgeted. He wrung his hands. He didn’t dare move from the desk.

When he was free to leave the writing chamber, he would walk in the gardens.

There, among the flowers, the trees, and the long curving paths, he began to steel himself for what now seemed inevitable: He would not be able to deliver any writing to the library.

He would be accused of being an imposter.

He would be deposed.

***

Today, there were well over a thousand tomes in the city library. The writing never ends. The world has limits, but not the stories.

And not the interpretations.

The city teeters somewhere in the fevered tension between those stories and interpretations. It is like the tension between two people looking into each other’s eyes, searching, only to discover that there will always be more to find.

The discovery is that they will never be able to rest their gaze.

***

Sovereign 154 became a sickly king. At least, for all outward appearances.

He spent more time in the gardens than in the chamber. As he walked the yards, the gardeners worked along the brick walls and stone paths. They kept a safe distance from the Sovereign to give him privacy, and they kept their gazes lowered to avoid making eye contact.

One morning, sure that his time as ruler was coming to an end, he took an especially long time to reflect upon a gardener, studying how the hands went into the soil, how they toiled and moved. How still the eyes remained, how committed and resolute.

How grounded.

That morning, Sovereign 154 turned back to the palace.

He entered the writing chamber and sat before the tome.

He dipped the pen into the well and began to write.

***

“Anaxike and Malake, with a warm body slung over their backs, pull the night air under their leathery wings and lift their talons from the sandy shore.

“They fly beyond the city into the darkness of the night sky, and over the dark waves of the sea.

“They fly to where the wind becomes cold. The skin of the body they’ve taken chills in the breeze.

“Eventually, they slow the beating of their wings and hug the cold air in a soft descent.

“They land with a muffled thump against what sounds like a wooden deck.

“They lay the body on the cold, slick planks.

“The body lies on its back, with its eyes closed against the night.

“The two demons lurch away, their footsteps becoming faint. In the distance, they fiddle and tinker with strange instruments. Preparations, no doubt, for what they intend to do with the body.

“Now that the demons have moved away, the body stirs. It murmurs.

“It wakes.

“Malake’s hammer swing had failed to finish this one off.

“To reveal the secrets of the place where the demons travel, we need only for the body to open its eyes and see. Any image transmitted to its retina would in turn be transmitted to the ink of this pen.

“The body opens its eyes.

“But when it does so, it sees only darkness.

“The body turns its head in every direction. It hears water nearby and pulls itself to a low wooden banister. It can feel the water butting against the wood of the vessel on which it rests. It lifts itself up to look over the side, to look upon the movement of the water it hears.

“It holds on to the banister.

“It looks over the side.

“But there is no illumination in the pure darkness of perfect midnight.”

***

This was the story that Sovereign 154 wrote.

It was the story that no one read.

Before the ink dried, Sovereign 154 ran his hands over the pages using the same rhythm and measured insistence that he had seen in the hands of the gardener earlier that day. His hands morphed the cool, black marks of even handwriting into grainy streaks and smears. He massaged the story into damp, illegible swirls that ended in sharp points where the ink finally ran dry.

The Sovereign continued moving ink as far as it would go, as far as it would allow itself to be molded. He took the structured lines and elongated them, bent them, curved them into ovals. He worked as fast as he could before the ink gave up its plasticity, before the dry page swallowed the wet possibilities of the inky black.

When the Sovereign’s hands could mold no more, when the angles and shapes hardened into finality, the Sovereign closed the book on his work.

He took the tome to the library.

The scholars opened the tome to the single story it contained. Expecting to see letters, sentences, legibility, they were taken aback.

They were worked into fury and anger.

They peered into the page expecting the page to send back meaning, a beginning, something to think.

Instead, the page looked back at them.

The Sovereign had molded the sentences, words, and letters into two oval eyes that blankly cast a dull, dead gaze.