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1
The last two pieces of silver that landed in the bowl fell from the same plump hand. The street singer looked up into the listener’s sea-colored eyes and smiled broadly. “Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed the show! We’ll be performing by the western gate tomorrow.”
“I’ll look for you, if I’m still here,” said the man. The rest of the audience dispersed behind him, and the flautist packed away her instrument, but he smiled in a way that the singer hoped he could do something to merit. “That last song, about the, the serpent and the garden and so on. Did you create that?”
“We did,” the street singer answered. “I made the lyrics, and my little sister made the tune.” The flautist glanced up from beneath her eyelashes; then opened her eyes fully to look the listener full in the face and broke into her rare sweet smile.
“They are both very good,” said the listener. “I enjoyed them immensely. I wish I had a house here and gave dinner parties so I could invite you two to play there. But, yes, I was wondering - it seemed to be referring to a story, and I, I’ve not been in the area very long, I don’t know many local stories. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble - I would pay you for your time, of course - could you, perhaps, tell it to me?”
“I wish I could,” the singer admitted, surprised at himself for not agreeing and fudging the story on the spot, which he easily could have done. “I’d like to know it, myself. But I’m afraid everything I know is in the song.”
“Really?” The listener’s eyes and smile shone bright in the gathering dusk. “I was on the verge of purchasing a little something for my evening meal - if you and your sister would care to join me, perhaps you could elaborate on the process a bit?”
Never ones to refuse free food, the singer and the flautist followed the man to the meat pie vendor on the corner, and then they ate all together on a low wall near the public well. The listener enjoyed his meat pie to a degree that did one’s heart good to see. The flautist ate daintily but very fast. The singer answered the man’s questions as well as he could between bites, admitting without reserve that the admired song was based on the ravings of a drunken man they’d encountered a few nights before.
“What you need to understand is, that the man was very drunk,” he explained. “He couldn’t keep track of where he was in the story and kept going off on tangents. Describing the garden, and the spirit, and there was something about a weapon on fire that we never could make heads or tails of. But the way he spoke about the spirit, well, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes. I was perhaps a little drunk myself.”
The flautist swallowed her crust, tapped his arm, and hissed, sketching a sinuous shape in the air with her finger.
“It’s true, he also felt the serpent’s situation very deeply,” the singer admitted. “Which was natural enough. His eyes were like a serpent’s, you see. Yellow. With a long narrow pupil. Gave me a bit of a fright, but he was - he was kind to my sister,. In spite of being so drunk.”
The listener smiled with a sweetness that made the singer’s heart turn over in his chest. “Yes. Yes, he would be.”
“Oh. This is someone you know, then?” Something more was going on here than curiosity about a song. “Someone you’re looking for?”
“No. That is, not exactly. It’s - well, it’s a story it wouldn’t pay you to learn. I thought it must be him, though. He appears to have made a great impression on the two of you.”
The flautist’s smile bloomed across her face again. “The story did, anyway, maybe more than if he’d actually finished it,” said the singer. “My sister kept making a tune, and I kept fitting words to it, and until we had the song made between us, it wouldn’t let us go. You know how it is.”
“I wish I did. I’m not, not creative at all, you see. Not musical, certainly. Always a little, a little bit flat. But I like singing, when no one can hear my failures. Would you - I hate to take up your time, I’m sure you’re tired - but I would dearly love to learn the song off by heart?”
So they sat by the well and sang the moon up, going over and over the song until the listener could sing it almost perfectly. Almost, because he was always an oddly precise half-note flat.
They never saw the listener, or the snake-eyed drunk, again; but they performed the song, many times. Days on which they sang it were their most profitable days. They prospered, and set up a comfortable home, and found a patron who came to love the flautist tenderly, and she him. Their children learned the song in their cradles. Because the town was at a crossroads, the song spread, for a time, and was put into new languages, the tune borrowed for other songs; until gradually, as Rome rose and fashions changed, it was forgotten, as most songs are, and always will be.
2
“That’s a funny way to write a poem,” said the hipster in sunglasses, leaning over the café table where the grad student had recklessly spread cut-out bits of printout among the sugar packets and crumbs.
“What?” The grad student, brought out of their fugue, blinked at the hipster, and then at the project. “It’s not a poem. I wish it was.”
“What is it, if it’s not a poem? Fortunetelling?”
The grad student ran their hands through their hair. “A headache and the stillbirth of my career.”
“That’s a tad dramatic.”
“I suppose so, but - I’m not going to be able to do this. Or maybe there isn’t anything here to do. I’ll need a new thesis and I’ve spent five years on it and my original advisor died in the pandemic and my new advisor doesn’t know enough about it to be any help at all -“
“Well, but what is it?”
On the one hand, some random stranger wouldn’t be able to grasp the problem before his order was ready, let alone be any use in solving it. On the other hand, he sounded interested and after five years of obsessing over this, the grad student was running out of sympathetic listeners. And there was something in his voice that hooked them beneath the collarbone; that drew their own voice out of them not quite against their will. “The department’s had a box in storage for ages. It was found on a dig in Trier, before my time, below a Roman building, in a layer containing an older structure that had burned down. They got it open, and it was full of scrolls. Or, the remains of scrolls. It was a good box, or there wouldn’t be anything left at all. Fire and over two thousand years in wine country aren’t good for parchment, or papyrus, both of which were in there. So the emphasis was on preservation and recovery and then it just sat in storage for awhile. But we have the tech now to deal with the problems of reading burned documents, and when I was looking for my thesis my advisor showed me the box and I just, I fell on it. There’s no surviving literature from this place and time, you see - even fragments could put me on the map if I make a good job of it.”
“Yeah, I can see that. And these are the bits you’ve translated?”
“This is every last word we could recover. I’ve translated them all, though I needed help from a philologist and some of the translations are necessarily tentative. The key thing was realizing that the scripts didn’t match the languages - the scribes used whatever systems they were familiar with to write down western European speech that had no written form. There’s ancient Hebrew script here, and demotic, and - never mind, specialist stuff, sorry.”
“But you’re confident of the translations in spite of that?”
“Oh, yes, pretty much, except - look, there’s papyrus. And there’s parchment. Which are organic, and fairly easy to date. Not that we tried to date every piece, but the handwritings are consistent between samples of the same script, so if something’s in Hebrew writing we can assume it’s roughly the same date, written by the same person, as the other bits of Hebrew writing. But when you sort by content, fragments that - here, this bit, which translates as the Serpent and, it ought to go with this bit, crawling upon, and this bit, eats the dust, is lovely! But they don’t. They can’t! These three bits are in three different languages and three different scripts with three different ages fifty to two hundred years apart! So even though they look as though they go together, they can’t.”
“And that’s a problem because -?”
“Because it’s not enough for me to translate bits and pieces and say, here’s a random assemblage over which I’ve pored so much I’ve started seeing patterns I can’t prove. I need an actual thesis to defend, some explanation beyond physical proximity for why these random bits are an assemblage, or it’s not a thesis, it’s just lab work. Really, really time-consuming lab work. Which, okay, is valuable, but - I don’t want to start over! I can’t afford to start over! I need my damn doctorate!”
“Ah,” said the hipster, nodding sagely. “And if you don’t base a thesis on this, some professor, or worse some other hot shot grad student, will take all your hard work and build something up with it, and you’ll be a footnote. And footnotes don’t get grants.”
“That’s not the only thing, but - yeah, that could happen. Or this could be a dead end, nobody ever does anything, and that’s five years of my life I’ll never get back and an unsatisfied itch in my head I’ll never get rid of.”
Instead of calling a name, the server brought over a stack of bakery boxes and a takeaway cup larger than the largest size and held them out to the hipster. “Here you go. Thanks for waiting. The scones are on top, straight out of the oven. Tell him hi and I hope these cheer him up.”
“Thanks. They will.” The hipster took the boxes by the knot of twine holding them together and the takeaway cup by the surprisingly sturdy handle. That thing could not possibly be disposable. “In fact, he’s about to be all kinds of cheerful. Look, word person, gather up your stuff and come across the street to the bookshop with me. My husband’s been overdoing the current events and got himself worked up. This sort of thing is right up his alley, exactly what he needs to settle him down. If he can’t help you find your way forward, there’s no way forward.”
The grad student stared at him wearily, trying to process the invitation. “There - isn’t a way forward. I just said so.”
“You’re burned out and not fit to decide that. C’mon, up you get. I don’t want to give the scones time to get cold. Server girl, grab them another of whatever that is they’re having on me, yeah?”
“Right away, sir!” The server made eye contact with them and smiled. “Go on,” she said. “You can trust him. If he says Mr. Fell can help you, he can.”
Trust was only one of many issues, but they had never been referred to as “they” without asking before, the bookshop across the street gave off the siren call all bookshops have for the academic, and the bright confidence on the server’s face as they ran back to the cappuccino machine was persuasive. They scooped their pointless scraps of paper, along with some crumbs and sugar packets, back into their envelope, tucked the envelope into the pocket on the side of the laptop case, closed and packed the laptop, and accepted a fresh cappuccino as they rose to follow the hipster across the street to the closed - but apparently not locked - bookstore. A bell, brass and tingly, rang when the door opened, and the hipster called into the dusty interior: “Angel! Company and a project! You’ll love this!”
“Will I indeed?” A fretful, fluffy man - Mr. Fell, presumably - appeared in the door to the backroom, looking tense and skeptical. “Are there scones? Or should I put the cream back?”
“In the oven when I got there.” The hipster breezed into the back room, where a table was set for tea in the middle with books piled at each end, and began distributing bakery boxes and clearing more space by the simple expedient of piling books higher. He looked older and marginally less hipsterish in this context than he had in the café. “And while I was waiting this word person was getting all worked up about some old words somebody dug up in Trier. Tell him about it, word person.”
So the grad student explained their problem, less haphazardly this time under Mr. Fell’s sharp blue gaze. “I wasn’t getting anywhere working on it in my spreadsheets,” they finished up. “So I did this trick that works for me sometimes, and brought it offline and into the physical world, in slips of paper with each cluster of words on it. But all that did was make me see patterns that weren’t there.”
“Sure about that, are you?” The hipster asked, plucking steaming scones, and muffins, and macaroons, and croissants, out of various bakery boxes and arranging them on a plate, which he set down in front of Mr. Fell with a flourish. Somehow they were all settled around the table, and the grad student had their own plate, though they had to help themselves from the boxes rather than being waited on.
“It can be hard to tell when you’ve picked out the true pattern if you have no idea what it was intended to be,” said Mr. Fell. “Do you have pictures of the fragments? Or the box?”
“Both,” said the grad student, opening their laptop. “Do you read any of these scripts?” Because I should have heard of you if you did. It’s not that big a world in this part of academia.
“It’s been awhile, and I’ve certainly never published, but at one time or another I’ve been familiar with a number of ancient languages.” Mr. Fell bit into a scone (jammed and creamed by the hipster, who sprawled in a chair nibbling a biscotti, with his sunglasses turned toward his husband) and made an appreciative noise which caused the grad student to wonder whether they had, themselves, ever truly enjoyed a flavor.
They opened the project album on their laptop as Mr. Fell, the tension in his face and body relaxing bit by bit, interspersed bites of baked goods with sips from a dainty floral cup that smelled of oolong, and the hipster swivelled dangerously on one leg of his chair drinking coffee from his enormous takeaway mug. “Here. I haven’t actually touched any originals - too fragile - but our lab photographer is very good and I also have scans of all the fragments.” They turned the screen so the two men could see it. “Tap a picture to get a full-size view.”
Mr. Fell wiped immaculate fingers before touching the thumbnail showing the top view of the box, with the scale beside it. He blinked when it expanded to fill the screen, and breathed out: “Ohhh,” as a smile spread across his face and rippled through his body, displacing all the remaining tension in it. The grad student hadn’t looked at the picture in months, and couldn’t recall anything about it that could inspire such a rapturous response; but if Mr. Fell specialized in inscriptions or engraving, that might account for it. Damaged as it was, with one end nearly destroyed and the decorations on the surface much scratched, cracked, and discolored, it took little imagination to see that it had been a fine box once, carved from smooth red-flecked black stone, a winged humanoid with something wrapped around its arms and shoulders engraved on the top amid the wreckage of a fine diapered pattern. Mr. Fell traced the spiral markings on the humanoid’s arms with one finger. “What can you tell me about this box?”
“Bloodstone, lined with lead and some kind of fabric that hasn’t survived well.”
“Some kind? Your fabric expert couldn’t tell silk from linen from wool?”
The grad student squirmed inside at the waspish judgement in the voice. “I - don’t remember, honestly. I read the report on the box once, five years ago, but I’ve been so deep in making sense of the words I’ve forgotten most of it.”
“Well, that’s one avenue to explore a bit more right there.” Mr. Fell had not taken his eyes off the picture. “Words don’t exist in a vacuum. Most of the context of these words is gone without recovery, but they were placed together for a reason, and the place they were gathered into was this box for a reason, and the more you know about the box the better your chances of getting a hint of those reasons. The bloodstone came from somewhere. The fabric was made from something. An artist working within a tradition and possibly with customer instructions carved the lid.”
“I’m not sure how much the archaeology of the find will really help. This was in the level below the main site, part of a previous level of occupation that had burned - which is one reason for the damage to the scrolls. It’s a miracle we have so much to work with. But the dig team didn’t get much else from that level, mostly plain potsherds. I have the relevant site reports if you want to see them.”
“Hmmm,” said Mr. Fell.
The hipster dropped his chair’s airborne feet to the floor and shifted to rest his chin on his husband’s shoulder. “Huh,” he said. “I’ve seen that iconography before.”
Mr. Fell wiggled - there was no other word for it. “Have you, dearest? Where?”
“One of your books, where else? Carry on. I’ll go find it.” He drifted away, drifting back occasionally over the next hour or so to gulp coffee and smile at his husband. Mr. Fell opened all the pictures and all the documents related to them, eating baked goods and pressing the grad student to do likewise. The grad student ate, finished their cappuccino, allowed Mr. Fell to pour them tea when it was gone, answered questions, and felt their mind reviving, like aspirated plants perking up with a drink of water.
Whoever Mr. Fell was, he knew enough to ask excellent questions that required the grad student to think and speak about things they knew from angles they had never considered before. The answers ferreted out of the site and lab reports rose like stepping stones in the morass the their mind had become, and seemed to lead them toward a more solid ground. The quarry the bloodstone was from - the fact that the felted wool lining the box was originally an expensive shade of red - which scripts were on parchment and which papyrus - the odd formation of some of the Latin letters - these things came out from behind the words that had eclipsed them and made a backdrop. A vague, hazy, highly speculative, tantalizingly possible but wholly unexpected backdrop. But one that did, in fact, give rise to a thesis they began to feel they might be able to defend.
At some point Mr. Fell made more tea. All the baked goods, some of which had probably been intended for breakfast the next day, got eaten. Their nest of boxes, napkins, cups, laptop, and books was an island in gathering dusk, lit by a table lamp with a fringed shade. The hipster returned from the dusty depths of the stacks and dropped a bound journal in front of Mr. Fell. “I knew I’d seen it,” he said. “Bring that picture of the lid back. See - right here. Angel, snake. Snake, angel.”
“I...have been thinking of those marks as a serpent,” admitted the grad student, looking at the picture in the journal. It was, by their standards, ridiculously late, a round painted panel showing an angel with a snake twined up its arm and circling its shoulders. “But they could as easily be meant to be a scarf. Or a tattoo. Or - ”
“It’s a snake,” insisted the hipster. “Check over the lid in real life with a magnifying glass sometime - bet you’ll find its head right here where the shadows make it hard to see in the photo.” He tapped the jpeg in the narrow gap between the humanoid’s head and its wing. “There’s a snake in the words, there’s a scale pattern all around the angel - of course it’s a snake! And this is another picture of the same thing - angel hugging a serpent. It’s bloody obvious.”
“It looks like a serpent hugging an angel to me,” said Mr. Fell in a dry voice.
The grad student noticed for the first time that the hipster had a tattoo of a writhing snake near one ear, and reminded themself that we all see what we want to see. “This carving’s first century at the very latest,” they said, avoiding the issue. “And I don’t know anything about post-Roman art, but the painting looks Medieval to me.”
“Eleventh century Belgian, at a guess,” said Mr. Fell. “It’s an interesting coincidence but you can’t use it as a connection without a great deal more research. Which might, of course, be fruitful, but it’s outside the purview of the work you’ve been doing. Still, it doesn’t hurt to make a note of it.”
He relinquished the journal to the grad student, who skimmed the text and examined the picture. Apparently it depicted an obscure angel named Ezirafael, who - “Oh, my, gawd. There’s an Angel of Queer Identity? Who decides these things?”
The hipster barked a laugh. “It’s a religious tradition. No one decides them; they just happen.”
“I don’t believe that’s the official designation,” said Mr. Fell, twinkling with suppressed mirth, presumably at some private joke. “Not up on my angelology, I’m afraid. It would be very pleasing if the Ezirafael tradition could be traced as far back as the first century, but without something more explicit it wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions. Especially since there’s no trace of any Christian, as opposed to Judaic, tradition in the box or its contents. Bringing in Ezirafael at this stage would be a dangerous leap.”
“The kind that could scupper the whole thesis,” agreed the grad student, making a note of the article’s publication information so they could look it up later. “It’ll be hard enough convincing anybody of a Hebrew tradition in Trier at that time, though the presence of actual Hebrew script in the case will be hard to refute. If I go dragging in Medieval gay angels with pet snakes I’ll be dismissed as a fantasist out of hand.”
The hipster sneered. “C’mon, you only have to look at it! We’re not making it up - it’s the same thing!”
“I’m afraid that’s not how academia works, dearest,” said Mr. Fell. “You’ll just have to be satisfied with knowing better than the experts on this point.”
“It was a good catch,” said the grad student, giving the journal back. The hipster had, after all, spent hours scouring dim and dusty shelves for it. “It’s not your fault I can’t officially use it even if I find it personally intriguing. I owe you big time for bringing me here. Everything seems much more possible now.”
Mr. Fell beamed. The grad student had never understood what that word, applied to an expression, meant before. “I’m so glad we could be of help. It’s a very interesting problem and I hope those judging your thesis are impressed by your solution to it.”
The grad student began shutting down windows on their laptop, and held their phone out to Mr. Fell. “Put in your contact information, so I can list you in the acknowledgments and let you know how it goes.”
“Oh, no, my dear, that won’t do,” said Mr. Fell. “We only acted as a sounding board to help you remember and make use of what you already knew. And neither of us is anything in academia. Our names would do you no good at all.”
“That’s not the only reason to acknowledge someone,” the grad student pointed out. “If it weren’t for you two, I’d probably be at home despairing and eating leftover curry right now.”
“And I would be eating all these baked goods myself and sulking my way through a binge read of mid-twentieth-century genre fiction in a vain attempt to escape the news,” said Mr. Fell. “I was spiraling, and your problem deflected me nicely. So the benefit goes both ways.”
So the grad student left without contact information but with a fruitfully buzzing brain. They went straight home, drafting an e-mail to their advisor before tumbling into bed and sleeping soundly for the first time in months. Their dreams were surprisingly cheerful for being as full of snakes as they were.
They tried going back several times, but the bookshop was never open, and when they asked the servers in the café about Mr. Fell and his husband, they could never find out anything useful. But a year later they had the right to put Ph.D. after their name; and when their thesis was published in a major journal, to great interest and some controversy, they acknowledged “Mr. Fell and his hipster husband, for use of their back room, baked goods, and excellent questions” at the end of the long list of academic names.
3.
On the Translation of the Contents of the Trier Box
Viewed as a whole, the assemblage inevitably calls to mind the Hebrew tradition - wholly foreign to pre-Roman Europe so far as we have hitherto known - of the Garden of Eden, with explicit references to a despoiled garden, a transgressive male-female pair, at least one supernatural being, and, most strikingly, a serpent, viewed in a negative manner unusual in preChristian Europe, and referred to with phrases similar to those used in Genesis for the Serpent of Eden. In light of this, and the diversity of elements in both the box and the scroll fragments, we are forced to some startling and intriguing conclusions.
The simplest explanation that fits all the facts is, the existence of a multi-century-long scholarly tradition, perhaps cult- or clan-based, with both Mediterranean and Transalpine connections, for which both literacy and a rare variant on the story of the Garden of Eden held particular importance. The story was transcribed several times, in several scripts and languages, for unknowable reasons. Based on the script utilized in the oldest fragments, this tradition may even have had roots in the Jewish diaspora after the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. How such a tradition ever reached Trier there is insufficient evidence to address. The box would be easily portable; and the known geographical distribution of the scripts and the languages transcribed in them supports the notion that the tradition was mobile in the long term, however sedentary its individual keepers might have been at any given time.
That the box’s contents were organized around a single story or motif is indicated by the consistency of the content of each individual fragment, so that it is easy to arrange all of them into a coherent order by ignoring the dates, but nearly impossible to sort them into different languages or eras by content. Serpent, Garden, and transgressive couple are present in each script and language combination; the storm is absent only in the smallest sample; a different supernatural being is referenced as performing the same function in different languages, possibly due to the absence of the concept of “angel” in those languages; and one key concept, here translated as “lovely,” occurs multiple times in all languages. We cannot hope to have the entire story; that at root there is only one, and that its various iterations were gathered into this box deliberately, seem to be inescapable conclusions.
What the story which was important enough to be preserved in this way, through the vicissitudes of language, geography, and time, actually meant to those preserving it is beyond the scope of this paper. Our interpretation is subject first of all to our comprehension, and stands or falls on the soundness of the translation, which presents a number of problems...
4.
“It was very naughty of you to bring my iconography into it, dearest,” said Aziraphale, pouring Crowley a nightcap.
“Thanks, but I don’t see how. It’s exactly the same iconography, anybody can see that.”
“Yes, but you very nearly threw them back off track onto the ‘I’m imagining all this’ panic.”
“Nearly. Didn’t. Results, that’s where to put your focus.” Crowley took the whiskey glass from him and settled on the couch with his head on a cushion and his feet propped on the back. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your embarrassment about the way artists insist on depicting you with abs?”
“Certainly not!” Aziraphale, balancing his own glass, picked Crowley’s head up enough to slide under it and take it in his lap. “Much, anyway. I really don’t think there’s a connection, you know. I commissioned that box specially, and picked the coziest and most stylized sketch the artist produced. Only there’s only so many ways to depict an angel and a serpent getting along peaceably.”
“Give yourself some credit! The image got into the human creative stream and stayed there. You inspired it every bit as much as I inspired the song. Inspiration’s part of your job.”
“Well, yes, but...I never meant my inspirations to be as, as personal as that. However, that’s neither here nor there. The important thing is that they’ve got enough confidence back to push on through and get their translation published. Isn’t it a wonderful coincidence, that they should be working on it so close to us, so far from their usual haunts? Almost as if someone had deliberately put out a call to draw things to us that might cheer me up.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, angel.”
Aziraphale stroked his hair and beamed down at him. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Because you would never do anything so nice, so sweet, so thoughtful, so - my, what lovely shades of pink you’re capable of, dearest!”
“Hchpsckl,” said Crowley, clearly and intelligently.
Satisfied with this response, Aziraphale sipped his whiskey before setting it down on the occasional table, freeing both hands for his husband. “Oh, I can’t believe it’s going to be out there again! After all this time! And it was such a mess, too - those pictures of what was left of all my copies were enough to make me weep, if I’d seen them before knowing how much they’d be able to recover. And I can’t tell you what a thrill it was, seeing my box!”
“About the same as the one I got, seeing my song spread out all over the table like that. And once I realized what you’d done - why’d you never tell me you collected it?”
“There wasn’t anything to tell, not really. We were avoiding each other so carefully in those days - that was one reason I particularly wanted to preserve the song. I was so lonely, and - well, I know the humans made it, but - I talked to them, you know. You remember them? A singer and a mute flautist. You inspired them, which was almost as if you’d written it, and I found it a great comfort to reflect on, and highly satisfying to come across a new version.”
“I, um, I did try,” admitted Crowley, fixing his bare eyes on the ceiling as Aziraphale continued stroking his hair with one hand and rested the other on top of Crowley’s free hand. “To, to write it. Make it up. The words and the notes - nothing would come together, I couldn’t make it work, and the humans make music look so easy. Especially in those days, when everybody and their dog routinely sang as they did their work. That’s the problem with recordings, you know. People don’t have to make their own music and get self-conscious about it, as if it’s some special separate thing only people good enough to get record deals are entitled to do in public, instead of the common heritage of the world. But anyway, I got frustrated. So I got drunk. And chased some arseholes away from that little flautist. And she and her brother listened to me rant on and on about the angel that thought everything was lovely and wouldn’t talk to me anymore - and they went and made the song I wanted to make. I don’t think I put a compulsion on them. That’s finesse work, and I’m pretty sure I was too drunk. They did it on their own.” He took another sip of whiskey. It should have spilled, but didn’t. “Humans, eh? But seriously, angel, why didn’t you ever tell me you collected them?”
“Well, by the time we got together in Rome nobody was singing it anymore. And when Sandalphon yanked me out of Trier for the Messiah Project, he didn’t give me time to pack any of my things, so I had nothing to show you. If I hadn’t actually been reading Sappho over breakfast and had the scrolls in my hand, I would have lost that collection then, too, instead of in the Great Fire. I was very disappointed, when I finally got back, to find that my old place had burned down and that villa built on top of it; but - now it’s back. Your song for me. Humanity has it back.” He wiggled. “We have it back.”
“We never lost it,” Crowley pointed out. “Not really. Too bad humans don’t have the tune.” He hummed the opening bar, watching Aziraphale’s face as it bloomed into ever more brilliant smiles above him. He drew a breath down deep into his chest and sang, in the original language and a voice like smoke:
The angel looked upon the Garden and said:
Aziraphale did not bother to flatten his voice when he joined in on the next line, clear and full and accompanied by an ethereal flute:
Behold! The Garden is lovely.
Their voices melded, rough and smooth together in a peculiar harmony as alien to Heaven as it was to Hell, in a tune that wouldn’t have worked with the English version anyway:
And the garden, which knew itself bereft,
knew itself abandoned,
its fruit despoiled,
knew also that it was lovely.
The angel looked upon the man and woman,
the bringers of hardship into the world, and said:
Behold! These sinners are lovely!
And the man and woman, who were ashamed,
saw each that the other was lovely, was loving.
The angel looked upon the storm and said:
Behold! The sky and all its airs,
the rain and the wind and the lightning,
the rumble of thunder, are lovely!
And the storm that men cowered from knew that it was lovely.
The angel looked upon the Serpent and said:
Behold, this creature, crawling upon the earth,
which eats the dust, is lovely!
And the Serpent, knowing itself wretched,
knew also that it was worthy to be loved.
Behold, said the Garden;
Behold, said the sinners;
Behold, said the storm;
Behold, said the Serpent, crawling upon the earth;
Behold, the angel is loving and therefore is lovely.
And the angel was silent amid the sands of time.
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