INVISIBLE CELLS Pt.1

Chapter 6. 'assassins'

A ruling class is not brought down by an orgy. Jackie and Jilly had been well instructed in the difference between adventure and revolution. It was like D.H. Lawrence. They belonged to the first generation to be given Lawrence at school. They knew he challenged nothing of substance. The breadmaker remained a source of obsession though, like a dirty book, discarded, sodden in a lay-by, resurrected by the next desperate traveller.

For the record, as Jilly would say, when the priests in Delphi regained control, order returned everywhere. The failing battle swung suddenly in Cyrus' favour and the Persians marched into Sardis. Croesus was taken prisoner and the title to his gold transferred. Cyrus had a funeral pyre built for Croesus and had him tied to it. The ruler, who had ordered pain by the teeth of the saw, then knew pain as a searing, unstoppable sensation, lashing the length of his body.

Later, Hermus, whose inventory of the Lydian gold made him indispensable to Cyrus, put about the rumour that Croesus had survived the burning, resurrected and forgiven for not knowing what he had done. The story was embroidered. As the flames leapt round Croesus, a giant serpent bowed the sky, like a rainbow, and watered the fire, putting it out. Then, some Hyperboreans, who had escaped the purge of Delphi, and had made their way to Sardis to thank Croesus for his sacrifice, spirited him away, chanting something like "clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination". This rumour was the beginnings of a legend which sustained generations of secret societies, all intent on finding the icon, making it whole and rebuilding the world "in a living fabric of Truth".

The sisters believed their knowledge of these stories was rare. The stories lay on the reverse side of knowledge. A literature of black and forbidden books. Possibly, in the past, to have known what they knew would have led to persecution and torture, or so they thought. Reading had not always been without consequences.

In time, the two halves, always heavily guarded, passed from Delphi to the centre of the Graeco-Christian world, Constantinople. However, all who saw the parts, desired to see them whole, and many could not resist the desire. The Scythian became a perversion of the civilised; a fall from grace. Each time she was reassembled the earth seemed to move, and then the odour of guilt and treachery would pour forth from those with divine right on their side. The causal principle of the Dark Ages, inductively established, was the sliding of the top onto the base, and, as Jackie had floated to Jilly one night, half way through a bottle of Jack Daniels, the secret meaning of the cross, there but obscured, "was a, was a T for Tiamat!".

Keen on heavy sliding, and insistent on perfect alignment, was the Empress Irene. She came to power in Constantinople at the end of the C8th. To satisfy her desires she blinded and deposed her son Constantine VI. She was an iconolater. She could not resist the desire to see it whole, whatever the risks. Under her rule the Byzantine prohibition on images was lifted and their worship encouraged.

With the help of her female acolytes she would heave the blocks together and leave them as the whole figure for long periods of time. She had her saddler make a vibrating saddle, from which emerged a supple, leather erection. The saddle would be thrown over a bench and Irene would sit astride, her gaze fixed on the idol, her hands exploring its golden crevices, while her handmaidens would turn the ingenious crank attached to the saddle's mechanical parts. The saddle would begin to vibrate and the leather erection work up and down inside her. From this, Irene experienced a sexual excitement which no other sexual act in her life equalled. Her orgasm would last a whole day, as if she was in the grip of endless grand mal. Afterwards, she would collapse and be confined to her bed for a week or more, barely conscious of anything going on around her, but in her comas, the breadmaker would continue to explode, three-dimensionally, into her mind.

Secret sects of Tiamat continued through the centuries in many different forms. Gnostics, Carpocrations, Manicheists, Karmathites and Assassins. The Assassins, a hashish smoking sect, outlived their historically recorded demise in the C13th. On June 28th, 1914, an Assassin blazed the world into modern times at Sarajevo, and then the deaths had to be counted in millions. The sisters loved the way their "alternative history" allowed them to make sense of events, far and near.

At the time of the Crusades, the Assassins had a plan which altered, inadvertently, the icon's history. In a Syrian climate, with Syrian women and food, the Assassins tempted and corrupted crusading knights. One by one they came over to the Assassins. The great orders of knights, the Hospitallers and the Templars, became Assassin organisations dedicated, not to Rome, but to the infinite orgasm. Their ritual bathing, which was originally a baptism in water as in Galilee, became a wallowing in bulls' blood and sometimes worse. On certain nights the Templars would gather as many women as possible and mingle with them promiscuously. This they taught, was perfection. Outwardly, the Templars were Christian knights, secretly, they extended the Assassins' power throughout Western Europe. When Rome, in 1312, realised this, the Giant fist of Marduk, always growing in size, crashed down. The same fist, it was rumoured, called on patriots after Sarajevo.

Earlier, the Assassins used the influence of the Templars to divert the Crusades from attacking the infidels, redirecting them to the conquest of the Eastern Church at Constantinople. Materialistically, Rome approved. In 1204, Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade. Immediately, the Templars smashed the great altar of St Sophia and found what they were after. With everything in place, a prostitute was brought in to sing, dance and pee on the Patriarchal Chair. The ritual was well established. A puff of smoke, a flash of light and it was Delphi again. For three days, Constantinople was the stage for knockabout farce, a cacophony of rape, sacrilege and anarchic plunder. In their delirious pantomime the Assassins made a fatal mistake, the icon was left to look after itself.

Chapter 7. The Merchant of Venice

"Your honour, the division is unnatural. The treasures of the East should be released to the market, only in this way can their value grow." The merchant of Venice had wheedled for a month to gain this audience with Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice.

"We are resigned to the fall in the East. The Eastern Church is not progressive, it holds everything back. In time, there may be some expansion of the infidel, which is why all the value in the East must be harvested and brought to the centre."

"By way of Venice, with something for Venice and something for the risk - for the merchant - but with the value, of course, accumulating in Rome." The merchant of Venice looked to see if he was understood.

"You are a merchant of Venice. First the army, and then the merchants, that is why we, the legal authority, are interviewing merchants."

"It was very good of your honour to agree to see me, so that I might state my case. Unlike others, who just venture ships, I will accompany this enterprise personally. I commission the best of captains. Domenco Morosini would be my man for this expedition, an excellent navigator and reader of the storms. He has never lost a ship. I have a great knowledge of antiquities, nothing of special interest could escape me."

"You know it is not certain that the Fourth Crusade will succeed." Dandolo's failing eyes tried to make out if there were signs of doubt or fear registered on the merchant's face.

"I advance by risk taking, not by the uncertainties of faith." The dimly perceived face raised its eyes, under heavy black brows, to the ornate, gold leafed ceiling. "Money must follow adventure or where's the profit in it?"

"I am well pleased with your answers. I am prepared to offer you a pass. There are some rare things in the East, look you to them." The Doge stamped a document and then signed it, finally, handing it to the merchant of Venice.

"Your honour, may I inquire how many of these passes will be issued?"

"We are not in business like you. This stamp will launch a hundred or more vessels, but not any riff raff, we have been selective. When you arrive, check your pass with Boniface of Montferrat, he leads the Crusade, and, if he is able, will ensure orderly trade. I will myself attend in order to authorize retributive justice."

Rome did not see or smell the flesh as it pressed for advantage in Constantinople. Nor did Venice. Planning involved the administration and quantification of things. Mathematicians plotted routes to the Bosporus and timescales. The Law listed details of each merchant, the names of their vessels and the ports from which they operated. Every effort had been made to box in straining sinews and light scooping fingers. Everything would be accounted for. But, in the murky hulls it was difficult to count the dead mules, the dying mules and those with enough clatter and push to make one last desperate, disgruntled trip from the quay to St Sophia and back. Afterwards trade would have no further use for them. In the smoke laden streets it was difficult to see the merchants and their hirelings hacking away at the remaining mules, driving them with their baskets and small carts towards those repositories of excellence, whose contents were, later, to awaken the West and eclipse the dominance of popes. In 1204, in Constantinople, as the city fell to the Fourth Crusade and a renaissance of the gratuitous was celebrated, revelling armies were oblivious to the lines of pack mules and their hooded attendants as they wandered, steaming, defecating, swearing and grunting into the great spaces of St Sophia.

The merchant of Venice was a man of little sexuality but he did possess a sharp eye for line, its identity and meaning, and the gaps in its continuity. As he entered St Sophia his eye was dulled, all but exhausted in making crucial value judgments. Many of the merchants saw in the mind's eye only quantity and so melted every distinguishable form down into weighed blocks, but the merchant of Venice was convinced of the quantity of quality. He had already stowed away four, great, bronze horses which his eye told him were original Greek. Later they were to stand, unchanged but for a Trojan inspired detail, on the facade of the Basilica of San Marco: in Venice, a real quantity of quality. His venture had been profitable but he required some small, personal memento. For this the requirement was not a quantity of value, he must not be seen to have gained except through trade. His requirement was for something that would add interest to his fine house in the San Luca district of Venice. An alcove in this house contained a perverse collection of imperfections, objects concealing some isolated flaw. Under the great dome of St Sophia in all the smoke and confusion the merchant's tired eye rested on something miniscule compared to the vastness of the space, something overlook by more avaricious merchants. The breadmaker stood alone, surrounded by fallen masonry. Clearly, it was good quality gold. The merchant took in its line. At first the two halves puzzled him. There would have been no difficulty in using one mould. He decided it was interesting as some kind of illusion, for the onlooker to marvel at how perfectly the two halves fitted together when nudged and smoothed into alignment. "It must be a maquette, or, perhaps, a scaled-down copy of a statue of Helen." The he realized the curiosity of it was that the casting had left the figure missing a right breast. The realism of the genitals was distasteful to him. "The Greeks were barbaric." Only the bust would he add to the basket. The thought crossed his mind that the gold was Lydian, but before he could explore this hypothesis he had to hurry to better direct the looting.

Later, back on board his ship, standing on the deck talking to Morosini, the merchant began to suspect there was more to his personal acquisition than had met his discerning eye. Groups of men fell to fighting each other on the quay. "Find it! Find it!" echoed from adjacent alleyways, and rough knights, bearing torches, began searching ships.

"What's up?" Morosini asked his bosun.

"Something rather important's gone missing, something that should have been left alone. They won't say what, but there are two groups out there fighting each other for it. There's Boniface's lot and then there are the others, I don't know who they are but they look used to slittin' throats." The bosun leaned heavily on the gunnel, peering into the night. "I reckon it's one of those nights when the devil walks the streets. I pity who's got it, whatever it is, they won't wait to ask him no questions."

The sisters knew the bare bones of the story were dressed up and so it would lend misleading clues to the identity of the merchant. The story though always preserved the phrase "the merchant of Venice", to signify his anonymity. Certainly someone had brought her back, but no family would claim the distinction. For his part Dandolo did not return to Venice. He was entombed in St Sophia and later his tomb desecrated.

Chapter 8. Suzanne Bernard

For some reason which she did not understand, Suzanne Bernard loved to dress in men's attire. She was not a masculine woman. She was a soft, rounded, lustrous, black haired, beautiful woman, as all acknowledged. A tender sensibility, a passion for romantic fiction, high spirited, these things were all true of her, but she was also the daughter of a Protestant minister and many things were forbidden.

Certainly, the commedia dell'arte was forbidden, it is a wonder it was ever allowed through the city gates. Dressed as a man, Suzanne felt free to wander the streets of Geneva and, passion of passions, join the crowd awaiting the raising of the curtain and the appearance of the itinerant players, especially sure one day Isaac would do great things. She had loved Isaac from childhood, always being entertained by his bluster and tales of heroism. One day she would marry him and send him on a great mission, if she could think of one.

Men's clothing seemed to resolve some contradiction in her, although they did little to disguise her femininity. One of the players was a gypsy girl called Katya, and Suzanne's appearance attracted her. The tightness of the silk on the curves of Suzanne's legs and the unruly, black curls of hair breaking free from the constraints of the hat, took Katya's fancy. She made it her business to get to know Suzanne.

To Suzanne, Katya was someone exotic. Katya went to so many places, seemed as free as alpine blossom blown by the wind, never really knowing how tomorrow would shape up. By comparison Suzanne's life was boxed in, apart from her secret life as a man and her clandestine friendship with Katya, renewed each time the players came to town. Neither of these glimpses of freedom were to last and by 1712, in her thirties, Suzanne was dead, a victim of a woman's lot to bear children.

The women's friendship was strange. Katya would not have continued it if Suzanne had worn normal clothes. At their meetings, Katya would talk and talk, reducing Suzanne to complete silence, and with her victim in this trance like state, Katya would gently stroke Suzanne's encased curves, occasionally pulling at a dark curl. Katya was hard, but this experience was soft, it seemed to remind her of something missing in her life. Suzanne was astonished, shocked by the stories which delighted her, like the ones she and Isaac would read together and which, later, Isaac would read to little Jean Jacques. She did not like the stories, but Katya said they were true and Suzanne puzzled over the possibility that the world was a very different place beyond Grande Rue, Geneva. Despite her romanticism, Suzanne was clever, and Katya excited her intellectual curiosity. Suzanne was determined to generate sufficient energy to get beyond the great gates. She would lie in bed at night saying over and over to herself "Are there really Assassins? Is Katya really an Assassin? Or is it all as silly as Scaramouche?"

Their meetings were like episodes in a story, Suzanne always reminding Katya of where they had left off.

"The last time you were here, you told me of a merchant of Venice. Tell me more of this."

At this Katya resumed the story and her slow caressing of Suzanne's legs.

"You're worse than Isaac. I smuggle him into my bedroom as well sometimes." Suzanne gave Katya a playful kick but the retaliation was a fierce punch which quickly fixed Suzanne's attention on the storyline.

"Apparently, the merchant had a great hole cut in the stomach of one of the bronze horses and secured "the bust" as he determined to call it, inside. His workmen then repaired the hole with lead. A reputation for devil worship was the last thing wanted by a merchant in an age when money and God had to walk sock in shoe. For that's what they said she was, "the devil's daughter", no less."

This was Katya's understanding of the merchant's guilt. He on the other hand, blamed himself for giving insufficient attention to the figurative meaning of the piece. Like later Modernists, he would be taken to task for seeing only the meaning of the line and not the meaning of the deformed breast. The image was an attack on the mother figure and not an ingenious device for contemplating, in a Platonic sense, the significance of smallness. The sisters were amused by the merchant's modern naivety.

Katya told how Dandolo's ships were able to leave Constantinople for Venice without anyone suspecting, despite the many searches made of their cargoes. As they left a tempest swept the Sea of Marmara and pursued the ships to the Aegean, but Morosini was as good a sailor as Dandolo had predicted and, for all involved, there was a good return on the risk, apart from those whom Morosini felt could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut. These he lost over board in the wash of the storm.

The merchant had marked the horse carrying the "devil's child" by knocking a hoof off of it, this hoof he gave to Morosini as a keepsake. Back in Venice, he wondered why he had not sent the bronze overboard too, but comforted himself with the thought that storms blow over and that what you cannot sell today you may sell tomorrow. In the meantime, the bronze horses, all four of them, he stored at the back of the Venetian Arsenal, waiting for the dust to settle.

"Your dove, Isaac, has the biggest prick in Geneva, the most potent imaginable. Let's send him to Constantinople or to Venice. He's so good with the sword and is so passionate. Let's send him on a quest. He could be your knight. Make a man of him."

"He is my knight. I could make a man of him." They fell around on the bed, laughing.

"Would you let him do this to you? Or, this?"

"I might Katya. I just might. He is wonderfully romantic; he would risk everything for me."

"So men should, when we let them make us pregnant we risk everything for them. Someday, someone will bring it off, think how wonderful it would be if it was your Isaac. Scaramouche said Isaac would be just right for Constantinople."

"'Scaramouche said'! He's a fool, what does he know." Suzanne stretched out on the bed eager to be convinced.

"Scaramouche is not all he seems. He knows a lot. What is Isaac when he's not playing at being a dancing teacher? Katya's face went serious.

"A watchmaker."

"Exactly, Scaramouche knows this. What do the infidels envy most when they look West?"

"I don't know, I don't know any infidels."

"Our mechanical knowledge, our inventions. They've flocks of singing birds but no reliable clocks. The Swiss are famous for telling the time. The Turks would welcome Isaac with open arms and he would be able to get in anywhere. We are sure she's still there. He could find her, steal her and bring her back to us. What danger, what excitement, to succeed where so many have failed! "Katya started imaginary fencing with Suzanne. Suzanne sprang to her feet, circling the bed in combat.

"Why are you so sure it's there?"

"The belly dance! Where do you think they got the idea from?" Katya switched from fencing to a gyrating of stomach muscles.

That a woman is incomplete, separated from herself, and that history was in some way responsible became ingrained in Jackie and Jilly's adult perception of their sex. The stories of the breadmaker influenced their sense of themselves as sisters. It was as if only when together they formed a whole.