Walls

He built the walls of dressed granite, fitted together so tightly that a knife blade could not penetrate. He built them high enough that no scaling ladder could touch the battlements. He build an inner wall and filled the space between with stone. And, since he believed the weakest pointed of any castle to be its gate, he made no opening in the walls save narrow slits for archers to rain down their deadly hail on the enemy. Entrance and egress was by means of a block and tackle machine capable of lifting any amount from the ground to a platform at the top of the wall. The idea, borrowed from his observations on a ship, did not make his servants happy. They, never having been higher than the surrounding hills, felt unsafe, threatened by the height and motion of the platform. He installed railings, but, to no avail.

By ones, at first, then twos and threes, they slipped away. They murmured amongst themselves of feeling trapped, closed in. They complained of his gloominess, of his mean spiritedness.

But he felt secure, finally, from any depredation. He knew none could penetrate the wall, none could scale it, none could tunnel beneath. He relaxed. But now, only two servants remained to serve him, Morality, a sharp-tongued harridan of a woman whose very presence was difficult to live in, and Sin, who, though strong and loyal, had no grace, no ability to serve, and who filled the air with vile words and curses all the day.

Alone, for that was his name, sighed. Safety without comfort, he thought, was better than no safety, but he had wished for better than this. His long journeys ended, now, his service to king and country faithfully done, he wished to retire to his castle and live in peace. But, now, he realized only the safety part of his wishes would be fulfilled.

In the weeks, months, years that followed, many a rousting army tried to break down the walls, to capture the wealth they believed to be within. But all, without fail were turned away with ease, with even the small band of defenders to protect. At last, none else came, knowing there to be no chance of winning and desiring to avoid the vast outlay of money and manpower that a failed attempt would cost. Alone smiled, knowing his own personal, if lonely triumph.

Morality and Sin quarreled constantly, though, and though he forbade it in his presence, their silent serving was, if anything, worse than their bitter harangues had been. He could hear them muttering in the kitchen as they prepared food, screaming in the dungeon when their tempers could stand it no longer and they withdrew to vent their frustrations. Alone grew more and more unhappy. He could not dismiss either of them, hard as he tried to figure a way, needing this minimum to be safe. He needed Moralitiy’s cooking skills, and Sin’s genius with mechanical things. But, at times, he felt he would go mad with their constant bickering and their attempts to get him to take one side or the other in some dispute.

It seemed as though things would continue this way until his death, but, one day, Sin, from his position in a watchtower, spied a lone horse and rider approaching. His cry of alarm sent Morality to heat the vats of oil and Alone scrambled up the stone stairs to the top of the wall to watch the approaching rider.

It must be a woman, he thought, for she rides sidesaddle. And, indeed, this proved to be the case, for when she drew near, he could see the long hair and pastel hues of her garments.

She directed her mount to the landing place of the platform as if she knew it to be the only entrance into the castle. She looked up, directly at Alone, though he didn’t think she could see him and called for him to lower the platform.

“Go away,” he shouted, “There is naught for you, in this place.”

“Ah, but there is,” she said, smiling, and he was smitten by her smile, a weapon with which he had never fought.

“Allow me entrance, for I would bring you that which you do not now have.”

“I have all that I need, all that necessary for a man to live in security.”

“Ah, but security is not all.” She said.

At that point, Morality approached the wall and, tilting her vast cauldron of boiling oil, spilled it over the ramparts toward her. She danced her horse out of the way as if the deadly oil were but a shower of apple blossoms.

Sin picked up a stone and hurled it at her, mouthing his obscenities as if they would give speed and accuracy to his missiles. These too, she dodged and danced around as if they were but puffs of air.

Then she did a strange thing. Spurring her mount into a furious gallop, she made straight for the wall beneath their feet. At the last moment, she turned the horse and, reaching with her fingertips, touched one of the mighty blocks of stone with her fingertips. The watchers felt something shift, something change, in the wall. Not a tremor, as an earthquake would shake it, not a crumbling, as if the wall had been breached, but, a small movement, nonetheless. Later, discussing it, they would say it felt as if the wall sagged, deprived of some bit of its own support.

She spurred her mount in her escape and she raised her hand in farewell salute without looking over her shoulder at them.

Alone breathed a sigh of relief. This lone warrior, for so he thought of her, made him more fearful than all the combined armies that had attempted to storm his walls in the past. And he didn’t know why. Why should one person, a woman, at that, present such a terrible threat to his safety and security? They discussed it around the dining room table, all three, for the nonce, in accord in their attempt to understand, to devise some strategy for their protection.

Morality declaimed the benefits of her boiling oil. Sin presented the benefits of arrow and stone. Alone sat in deep thought, listening,, pondering.

“She avoided all your heated oil and your stones as if they were naught,” he said, at last, “What makes you think that more of the same will work if she returns?”

The two were struck silent, for once, having no answer.

“We did not shoot any arrow,” Sin finally ventured.

“And you think that would work any better?”

Sin shrugged his shoulders.

“We can but try.”

“I think we should examine the stone she touched.” Said Morality, “Mayhap she has cast some spell on it.”

Both men stared at her with disbelief.

“Nevertheless, believe me or not, you both felt it.” She said.

They nodded.

“The two of you work the windlasses, lower me quickly, I shall run to the stone, examine it, and be ready to raise me on an instant.” Alone decided.

This they did. It felt, to Alone, as if his stomach would rise to his throat and the platform fell and then crashed into the ground, jarring his teeth together and felling him to his knees. He recovered, vaulted over the railing, and ran to the stone. He didn’t know, then, how he would know it amongst all the rest. In confusion, he stopped, examining the stones in the area of her charge. His worry was unfounded. He recognized the stone without difficulty. It was no longer the flecked gray of granite, but the warm skin tones of his own body. It stood out as a beacon on a dark night. He touched it. It was soft, as if it had lost all its strength, not the softness of a down comforter, but the soft suppleness of well-muscled flesh. He knew it could not withstand the weight of the stones above it, if many more stones were thus transmogrified. A terrible fear overpowered him as he ran for the platform.

His fellow defenders pressed him for details as he struggled for breath.

“it is,” he gasped, at last, through his breathlessness and fear, “flesh, living flesh.”

They looked at one another, aghast. The implication for their survival was immediately clear. No wall, no survival, death, at this woman’s hands, or mayhap, only at her fingertips. If she could turn stone into flesh, might she not be able to turn flesh into stone? They shuddered, fearing a death far worse than that of the axe, broadsword or mace of the battle field.

The next day she returned at the same hour.

“Have you decided to allow me entrance?” she called from the back of her mount.

“Nay, we have not. We shall resist with all our resources.” Called Morality and uttered one of Sin’s more vile curses. This so shocked Alone, used as he was to her absolute purity of language, no matter what the provocation and no matter how loudly she was screaming her demands at him or Sin, that he quite forgot the horsewoman below and stared at Morality. Morality blushed, muttering under her breath that the provocation had been too much for her.

Prepared this time, as she came within range, both Sin and Alone shot arrows at her. Even Morality, though never trained as an archer, pulled the bow with amazing strength, for fear of her very life. The arrows, true, fell far wide of their mark, but, they had reasoned the night before, one lucky strike, one attempt was better than nothing.

Again, she danced her horse with the ease and grace of one long used to the saddle, horse and rider seeming to be one in their purpose and knowledge of each other.

And, again, she made the mad dash for the wall, this time in a different location altogether, and, touching it with fingertips brushed against its cold hard surface, they felt the strange sensation, again, beneath their feet.

Alone’s later examination revealed the same change in the stone, the same strange softness in exchange for the cold hard stone. He trembled.

She repeated her performance on each of the succeeding days, with the same results.


“We must repair the damage.” Alone finally said on the seventh day of her visitations. “The wall is beginning to sag. It will fall, ere long, and we will be vulnerable to her attack.”

“But, how?” Morality asked, “she may come while we are repairing.”

“I think not,” Alone said, slowly, “for she seems to have a pattern, coming at the same time each day, without fail, but we see her not between.”

“Mayhap it is a trap?” Sin asked.

Alone thought.

“It is a risk we shall have to take. We have no choice. One or two more days and we will be defenseless.”

From the inner wall, they took stones, stones inferior to the outer walls’ stones, but, still of stone instead of flesh. They hoisted them to the top of the wall, then lowered them on the platform. Alone rigged a screw jack, again borrowed from his ship board observations, to raise and support the stone above the one he needed to replace. With great difficulty, and Sin’s constant profanity, they pried out the soft stone and inserted the true stone. Panting, they stood back to examine their work.

Nearly exhausted, they merely looked at each other and nodded, then went to work on the next stone. With energy born of desperation and fear, they removed and replaced all seven soft stones and replaced them with the hard supporting stone of the inner wall.

Morality took sick, that night, exhausted from her labors of removing stone from the inner wall, carrying them to the top of the wall, and lowering them to the two men, below. Alone feared for her life, so exhausted did her pale face appear in the candle light. She fell, instantly into a deep sleep. Alone pulled the blankets over her, shielding her from the night air.

Sin, however, seemed to have grown stronger, showing no effect from the day’s labor. He seemed stronger, more robust at the work. He broke out more stones from the inner wall and carried them, two at a time, on his shoulders, to the top of the wall, placing them at the loading platform, ready for use. When he had a load, he lowered them and placed them in a neat pile next to the platform’, then ascended, again, for another load. He was tireless, and, Alone noticed, for the first time, silent. He appeared, almost happy, though, on that worn and scarred face, Alone admitted to himself, happiness had no chance of truly revealing itself.

The woman appeared again, the next day, called her usual request, and, as if she knew what they had done, rode her steed, this time at a dignified pace. Along the base of the wall. She seemed to know they would not attempt to shoot, seemed to know they had lost their confidence in their weapons, seemed to know their very thoughts. She touched the very stones they had replaced, each in its respective turn, then, turned to the platform, and bending low from her saddle, touched the pile of stones. Instantly, they, too, turned soft and flesh-colored.

Sin turned pale. His breath rasped in his throat. He took one stone and hurled it at her in his anger.

She turned and smiled at him.

“You have no power or dominion over me,” she called, loud enough for even Morality in her sickbed to hear, because of my name.”

She whirled her horse then, and, touching one final stone in the wall, galloped away on the path that was developing in the grass and weeds from her daily passage.

At her touch the wall shuddered and groaned, the stones grinding together as if tired of holding their own weight.

Racing for their life, Alone and Sin nearly fell down the inner staircase.

“We are lost, master,” Sin cried. “tomorrow we will die.”

“Maybe,” Alone said ,thinking.

The next day, as she approached, he called to her.

“What are your terms?”

“Entrance into your castle.” She called back.

“What will happen to me and my faithful servants?”

“Morality may live if she is willing to become a new person. Sin must die.”

“But,” he protested, “Sin is my faithful servant, these long years he has stayed by me. I cannot submit to such terms.”

“Nay, you know it not, but he is of your enemy. He works to your peril and your downfall.”

Alone turned to Sin and looked him in the eye. Sin cowered and shrank from his look.

“How does he do this?” he demanded, still looking at Sin.

“He undermines Morality, he resists me. Did you se his joyful replacement of the stones I had made flesh?”

“Aye, but that is my will and my doing, also.” Alone said.

“But, if Sin had not been with you, working his will in you, unbeknownst to you, you would not have resisted me as strongly. You would have known my true intentions sooner, known my benefits the quicker.”

“Aye and be turned to stone the quicker,” Alone said under his breath.

“Nay, ‘tis but the opposite, she said,” and wheeled her horse to make her usual dash at the wall.

Sin and Alone scrambled for the stairway to the keep, seeing her intention to touch the cornerstone of the wall. And, just in time, they reached the reed-scattered floor of the keep. They fled from the wall reaching the safety of the opposite wall just as they heard the grating and groaning of the wall as it began to fall.

Turning, Alone watched in horrified fascination, the wall lean outward, hesitate as if uncertain, then with a crash louder than all the thunder of his life, fall to the ground in a mighty jumble of stone.

They watched her, through the newly opened gap in their defenses, circle to her right, disappearing from view along the North wall. Turning to each other they realized what her intent was. In confirmation, they watched this wall, too, fall into a heap of rubble. They sprang away from the west wall, knowing its fate, and, again, just in time, for it followed its supporting neighbors to its demise. The South wall, last of all, met its fate.
Alone gazed in absolute terror and horror at the destruction of all that he had worked so hard to build. His safety, his surety, his protection against all the troubles and turmoils of the world around him, gone, in a moment. Gone at this strange woman’s touch. Gone, not to be rebuilt, he knew. His life, too, now a forfeit for his resistance, he was certain. Tears welled in his eyes, made tracks across his dust-covered face. He wept, perhaps for the first time since childhood, wept for the life, now gone, for the waste of his protection, for what was to come. His fear and exhaustion were too much to bear and he felt something tear within him. Something open, something fall, as if his heart, in sympathy with his walls, was now a jumbled ruin.

He saw her, now, sitting her horse, at the edge of the rubble, on the East of the destroyed castle, where the gate should have been, but was not, because of his desire to keep the world at bay.

“May I come in?” she called.

“Can we prevent you?”

“No, but I will not enter without permission.”

“Enter, then, for we cannot resist.”

She gave her horse its head and it picked its way gingerly, through the piles of stone.

Sin reached into his cloak and sprang toward her, a dagger in his upraised hand, ready to slash and destroy.

She reached her hand and, avoiding his slashing blade, touched his knife hand. Instantly, he turned to stone, reversed from flesh to the hard cold material. He stood in his destroying stance, as if he would, in any moment, resume his attack upon her. Then, to Alone’s horror, the stone statue began to crumble into its component parts, then to smaller fragments, and, at last, to nothing but a pile of dust. Her horse sidled sideways and trampled it into the dust of the paving stones until nothing remained. But a small darker stain on the stone.

“And will you destroy me, too?” Alone asked, bitterly.

“Nay, for you have somewhat within you worth changing. Your tears prove me aright.”

“My tears only show my anger and weakness,” he protested.

“Nay, the stones of your wall resisted me not, nor will your heart. She dismounted and turned to face him. He saw, at once, that her face was the face of his dreams. The dreams of the night, the dreams of the day, the dreams of the one he had never seen in reality. And, now, knowing, his heart swelled and burst, again in the knowing. He felt the anger, the bitterness, the aloneness of his whole life disappear, vanish, fall as the walls of his castle had fallen. Now he wanted not to be alone, reclusive, withdrawn. He wanted the world to come to him, to go to the world, for now he knew her name, knew who she was, what she was.

“Your name is Love, is it not?”

She nodded.

“And I have come to take away the stones of your wall, to turn them into something that will welcome rather than keep away, and, more important, I have come to change your heart, to take away the hard stone of a heart that you have, that you are, and give you a new heart, a heart of flesh, a heart of compassion, a heart of love, a heart that reaches out to others to give and receive.” She smiled and her smile was that of glorious dawn breaking after a night’s fierce storm.

He felt the change within him, felt the renewal, the wondrous joy, happiness, pleasure. And, for the first time in his long weary life, he felt love.

“Come,” she said, “together we will rebuild this castle. Not with stones to keep others out, but from living things. Its walls will grow to accommodate all who wish to shelter there, Windows will open to the light of heaven, and, most importantly, doors will admit all who seek entrance. And happiness and joy and pleasure will be its whole existence.”

“But, what of safety and security?”

“Ah, and that will be the end product,” she said, “for perfect love casts out fear and hatred and sin and welcomes all into its all-encompassing world. You have no enemies who can truly hurt you, now, if you will but join me.”

He hesitated, looking around him at the destruction and disarray of his fortress.

“Naught can resist you,” He said.

“None and nothing.” She answered.

***

They cut the stones into slabs and laid them as a road to their door. The home she built was, indeed, of living stone, growing, accommodating, expanding as need arose. Eventually it encompassed far more land than the original castle, its walls inviting and warm to the touch, a strange beauty in the grace and structure of the building attracted the eye and welcomed the traveler.

Morality recovered, and, in the gracious presence of Love, found her true happiness in serving with the new loving character she emulated in Love.

Among Sin’s meager possessions Alone found a parchment addressed to Sin, written in the hand of his faraway, long-time enemy. It read:

To the hand of Sin I commit all my lands and properties at my death if he will but perform this one service. This service will be the destruction of my mortal enemy, Alone, who has resisted all my efforts, all my wiles, all my cunning, lo these many years. If he will but keep him from my door, will seal him up and make him a slave to his own fears, then I shall grant him a five-year wage each and every year for the rest of his life.

The signet impression was that of his enemy. And, buried in a trunk’s false bottom, he discovered the promised wages, unspent, unused. He served for the pleasure of destruction, not for the wages, Love told him.

“One more thing,” she said to him, one day as they sat in the warmth of the sunshine from the eastern window. “We must change your name. You are no longer Alone.” She thought for a moment.

“You shall be…” she did not finish, for he interrupted her.

“Peace,” he said, and she nodded.

“Peace.” She murmured, and smiled her smile at him.


1998