Sayaka knew she was really two. The eyes perceiving the scene reaching out before her were her own—and also those of another woman.
Semiramis. The evil queen who once ruled ancient Assyria. As had so many of the rich and powerful before her, she bound the authority of the secular and sacred into a single weapon of uncompromising might, claiming each new bounty with a fresh tide of holy blood.
What Sayaka was looking at was the miserable state of those sacrificial victims.
This was the city of Babylon.
No building was safe. Even the brick houses were consumed in fire. Those that weren’t coughed up black smoke, charred human skeletons clinging to the skeletal remains of the consumed buildings.
The streets ran red, turning into rusty splotches where falling bricks covered up the blood. The dead were young and old, men and women alike. All of them were missing their heads and hands and feet, and many had their bellies ripped open.
Sayaka felt like throwing up, while her other self was drunk with joy. They both knew that this was their doing.
The scene changed. Sayaka was standing on a large stone platform. In front of and behind, to her right and left, was a solid phalanx of Assyrian soldiers holding spears all pointing at a great line of people some distance away from them.
Prisoners of war. Their arms and legs were bound to shackles and balls and chains, their faces clouded with presentiments of their impending fate. Sayaka raised the staff in her right hand.
No, she cried out. This isn’t right!
But another voice commanded, Do it! They are heretics, fools who raised a sword against my god. The least they can do is atone for their sins by spilling their blood upon this altar.
Stop!
Kill them!
The staff came down.
Three knights appeared among the prisoners. One held a long lance. One had unusually long arms and an equally long sword. The third had six arms. The three horses kicked up a curtain of sand and dust as the three knights attacked the defenseless wave of humanity.
Every flash of the lance speared three or four, flinging them groaning through the air. The sweep of the sword beheaded women and children, cleaved skulls in two, and stained the sky with blood.
Some tried to flee. Despite the iron balls and shackles and chains, the fear of death propelled them forward foot by foot. Several hours later, by then thousands of feet from the place of the slaughter, they may have even felt a sense of relief. And then came steel arrows flying from so far away, and yet piercing their chests like paper.
One arrow shot through ten at a time. After five arrows, the slaughter was over. The remaining people scattered in a different direction—guarded by no one—in the direction of a cliff.
The cliff moved. What looked like the boulder holding up the precipice trudged forward. It was a stone giant in the shape of a man. The boulders on its back were damming up something else as well.
Water. A huge quantity of water was stored inside the cliff.
The prisoners couldn’t remove the balls and chains from their ankles and wrists. They could do nothing but stand there as the raging waves swept over them. The defenseless victims sank to the bottom and drowned in the mud. In less than ten minutes, the wastelands had turned into a marsh.
High in the sky, the sun beat mercilessly down on the desert. But here and there amidst the carnage of the execution site, miraculously, could still be found struggling signs of human life.
The stone giant bearing up the cliff stomped with its thousand-ton feet, snuffing out what remained of them.
Stop! Stop! Stop! Sayaka cried out.
Kill! Kill! Kill them! That other woman howled with laughter.
Both were Sayaka, both were her.
The atrocities continued. The stone giant destroyed the Chaldean city of Sarrabani by itself. It approached the strongly fortified battlements bearing a polished bronze shield that reflected the sun’s rays. It became a gigantic mirror amplifying the sunlight a thousand fold, burning down the city walls. Everyone within the walls was burned to ashes.
Sayaka’s tears and despair spilled across the endless desert. Her laughter echoed across the moonlit oases. This is what I commanded. Disgust and white-hot anger engulfed her. That woman is me, the both of them said.
You are not going to kill me. Neither will I let you die. I am the one who will wipe you out of existence. When that time comes, I will be free as the wind. For twenty-five hundred years that damned Doctor Faustus has tormented me.
The scenes of carnage continued. Wherever Sayaka went, only celebrations of war and death and destruction greeted her, the God of Death presiding over the rites.
Sayaka sorrowed, and she was delirious with joy. And there she was, slathering her beautiful body with their blood, submerging herself in pools of blood while indulging herself with her many male slaves.
Setting her apart from the other contending tyrants of the time, her youth and beauty showed no sign of receding. The queen’s battles parading before Sayaka’s eyes went on for decades. And yet her white skin lost none of its luster, not a wrinkle marred its surface.
Or rather, standing in the midst of battle, pierced by swords and arrows of the enemy, when the contest was concluded not a scar remained. As she perched at the edge of hatred and anger and sadness, Sayaka’s curiosity was directed toward that puzzle.
One phenomenon came the closest to an explanation.
The day of the massacre, but only after all of the lives were extinguished, the queen strolled off on her own. Nobody accompanied her. Her glowing body covered by a gauzy veil, she walked the battlefield—that was now piled with corpses and running with rivers of blood.
The dead had begun to reek, and the vultures began to eat. Here and there amongst the heaps of bodies—the torsos missing heads and hands, the lifeless sockets in the severed heads filled with infinite loathing—shone the eyes of wolves.
Here in this hell on earth, where the smell of death was the strongest and the dead were the greatest in number, the queen casually appeared and exposed her naked, voluptuous flesh.
As she stood there like a statue in this “valley of death,” as the Psalmist so aptly described it, an even stranger sight appeared. Before the odor could cling to her ample breasts and slender waist and firm thighs, a white mist roiled up, cascaded from the sky like a twisting waterfall, and was silently absorbed into her body.