Goat Foot, who is neither stupid nor uninformed, gathers her own defenses, which have been in motion for some time; her squadrons of caravan drivers operate like a guerrilla army. They strike a blow, then go up in smoke. They flit like butterflies, sting like mosquitoes, throw uppercuts and hide their fists. Their agility confounds the snail-paced league’s army. Goat Foot, the nomadic princess, pours her attention into defending her territory; she controls the roads, the access points, the straits, the maritime routes. She’s discovered uncharted regions where olibanum is as plentiful as in itsoriginal Hadhramaut, and now she’s diversified production, it’s decentralized. She divides the unique routes into a spider’s web of subsidiary paths and no longer transports cargo only by land on the backs of camels, but also by sea in merchant ships. She’s expanded commerce into new latitudes, conquering the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Mediterranean markets.
Her roving squadrons have powerful natural allies, such as the simoom, the sirocco, the rose of the winds, the earth’s tremors, floods, and fire itself. If the enemy tries a frontal attack, they come from behind; they surround and stun opponents. Goat Foot avoids pitched battle, focusing instead on the smaller scale, on lashings that surprise troops and sap their strength. She knows how to become invisible: During the day, light covers her, and at night she’s robed by the dark. She operates with an apparition’s lightness: She flashes, dazzles, strikes, and disappears. Ambushes, raids, and sabotage are her specialties. Her ongoing resistance against pirates, road bandits, and big clans has been her unparalleled school. There’s little the Axe League can do against Goat Foot’s phantom tactics and her unbeatable troops of guides, scouts, rear guards, camel drivers, mule drivers, horseback riders, shepherds, and water sellers, all of whom know the desert like the palm of their hand and are used to its rigors. Years of migration have taught them to be limber and unpredictable.
The scene is set. In the prologue to battle, before giving the order for attack, Atru, the Butcher, sacrifices a white stag in front of his army. The ritual death of this innocent creature evokes the blood that will run in the brutality of battle, the fall of soldiers in the whir of rage and panic, the horror of murderous frenzy.
Once the rite is done, war breaks out in full furor. Limits melt away, between life and death, order and chaos. No rules regulate the battlefield; the whole population, men and women, the elderly, youth, and children are thrust into barbarity and killing. Violence, once unleashed, needs no reason and won’t stay in one place: It runswild in unforeseen directions and spreads all over the desert, turning it into one great plain of flames and fury.
If Goat Foot hadn’t had a heart, they never would have defeated her.
“But she has a heart that made her vulnerable,” weep the alaleishos. “Her heart is her Achilles’ heel.”
“Oh, oh, oh! She has an Achilles’ heel that makes her extremely vulnerable!”
An old nursemaid slides through the lines of defense. Nobody is wary of the old woman, no one blocks her way, because she says she’s carrying a life-and-death message from Joy for Goat Foot, who immediately orders she be let through. Let the old nursemaid pass! Do not stop her! She brings news from Joy, her adored little sister, Alfarah, who’s managed to escape Mamlakat Aldam and her loathsome mother’s clutches, and now she sends this emissary to ask for help. According to the nursemaid, Alfarah is hiding in a deep cave and requests that her sister, the unconquered Goat Foot, come to her rescue as soon as possible. But she must come alone, without sound or commotion, without bodyguards or troops that might cause alarm, the meeting must be carried out with utmost stealth. The noble old nursemaid will guide Goat Foot along mountain paths to the place where Alfarah awaits her.
My sister, Joy, is in danger! Goat Foot’s heart aches at the mere thought. The old nursemaid, a trustworthy woman of good faith, approaches Goat Foot and puts an object in her hand, so she won’t doubt the truth of the message. It’s the amethyst scarab inscribed with a legend, the same one that Goat Foot gave her sister a long time ago, a secret and sacred thing, their pact of love. Proof enough.
Goat Foot agrees. She’ll go to the proposed meeting, of course she’ll go, even though it means disregarding her ministers’ warnings and her generals’ advice, for they have weighed the dangers and know she risks being ambushed. She ignores them. She’ll go to this meeting whatever it takes, and wherever it is, she decides withoutthinking twice, and in the instant she makes that decision, the coin of her fate shoots up into the air.
Let it be whatever it must be, to hell with caution or suspicions, it’s been so long since Goat Foot has seen her beloved sister, she’s heard no news of her during all these stormy and uncertain times, which has pained her deeply. The possibility of a reunion moves her hardened soul and revives a spark of happiness in her that had been dulled by war. What’s more, she’d always known that sooner or later Alfarah would seek her out and they’d be together from that moment on; the proof and confirmation that the moment had arrived was in the amethyst scarab the old woman just gave her. There’s no trick here. Alfarah has grown up, and she’s become a beautiful young woman with a brave, independent spirit who’s made a creed out of the scarab’s emblem and legend: Do not fear the universe. Her older sister has always been her fascination, her absent idol, her role model. Opposed to the traitorous conflagration of the Axe League, Alfarah now seeks Goat Foot to offer her company and unwavering support. Together, the sisters can vanquish whatever comes their way. Their embrace contains the Maiden’s defeat, and her accomplice’s as well. Goat Foot has no interest in resuming power, she doesn’t want it back, on the contrary, she scorns it as a burden, an unwanted chain. She hasn’t forgotten the words of the fourth Wise Man, known as the Heretic: A throne is a prison. She’ll go meet her sister, she’ll do it immediately, but only for love.
“She’s so wise, our Goat Foot, so well-traveled and experienced,” say the alaleishos with a sigh. “And she still doesn’t know how to measure the reach of her mother’s spite?”
Some of the nursemaid’s words are true: Joy really did flee Mamlakat Aldam to find her sister. Goat Foot’s constant premonition has a source. She’s right to trust that much, she correctly remembers the courage with which old women risked their hides to bring her little sister to visit her, she knows they’ve always been on her side as unconditional allies.
“Stop, Goat Foot!” beg the alaleishos. “Your next step could be fatal!”
Despite the warnings, Goat Foot’s reasoning continues on the wrong path, her intelligence is clouded, the consequences escape her. Wishful thinking, that’s what people call thoughts tinged by desire: Goat Foot longs for a reunion, therefore she believes it will take place. But the truth is something else, and it’s perverse, the truth is that the Maiden found out about her younger daughter’s escape attempt and ordered her chased and caught. In her mad race to flee, Joy is thrown from her horse and is killed by the fall.
The death of her little sister, that grief with no bottom and no name, did Goat Foot not yet feel it? She must have known since that time when her dreams filled with wild gallops. There had been premonitions of tragedy in the colt’s excess of beauty and spirit, the fiery sparks in its eyes. Goat Foot had been hearing its loud hooves like an insistent echo and feeling—almost in her own flesh—the sharp thud against earth like the shattering of a jug. Beforehand, she’d felt the head wound, the spinal cord’s crack, the death rattle of a body that was also her own, even though it was not. All of it, Goat Foot saw all of it in a slumbering flash that she forgot as soon as she awoke, chasing off the nightmare like someone getting rid of a black butterfly that had slunk in through an open window.
What Goat Foot has not guessed is that when the Maiden learns of her favorite daughter’s fatal accident, she immediately turns her sorrow into revenge: Joy’s death will become Goat Foot’s grave. That’s when she devises the lie about a meeting, weaves a web of deceit, and sends the despicable nursemaid with the amethyst scarab and the false message.
If the Maiden’s wickedness and cunning are well-known, and if a trick like this one was to be expected, what’s going on with Goat Foot’s reflexes? Have they gone to sleep? Why does she go blindly toward that disastrous meeting? Why does she expose herself so stupidly, she, the fox of the desert, the colt of the skies, the untamable?
“She does it to fulfill her destiny,” declare the alaleishos.
And what’s her destiny?
“That of all myths that become flesh.”
All myths that become flesh end up in sacrifice. Jesus on the cross, Prometheus chained for an eagle to devour his entrails, Odin hanging upside down from a tree branch, Osiris drowned in the Nile, Persephone trapped down in Hades, the Phoenix burned to a crisp.
And Goat Foot?
“Goat Foot falls to the ambush and is taken prisoner. Her two enemies celebrate her capture in loud, raucous voices and rush to prepare the gallows.”
Goat Foot will be the sacrificial lamb, the expiatory victim, and over her spilled blood the two factions will make peace. The conflict in the kingdom of Sheba will be over. The war’s end will be sealed with this ceremony, Goat Foot’s immolation on an altar on a knoll before the two armies in parallel formations, their standards held high, their weapons dropped. Violence floats over them, weightless and ethereal as a hymn, dispersing elegantly and abstractly through the air. Violence has already forgotten the war that had occupied its attentions, which now focus exclusively on the sacrificial victim.
Goat Foot is brought out tied up like Zurbarán’s little lamb. She’s been dressed in white, the color of innocence; she is the goat, the purifying creature. By express orders of the Maiden, who wants to conceal her daughter’s beauty, her face has been covered with a thick veil. Hiding her limp as much as possible to avoid seeming pitiful, Goat Foot moves forward, full of dignity, on the back of a great camel, surrounded by funeral chants, a hundred torches, and countless smoking censers. This takes place on the night of Safar—or on the thousand and one nights of Safar—under a sky tinged with the red glow of Antares, the star known as the Heart That Bleeds. The icy desert air condenses into incense clouds. Ritual incense, fragrant, intoxicating. Her own incense, the one from Hadhramaut, made from the olibanum that Goat Foot herself discovered, processed,and spread throughout the world. Is there not a saying, Sow winds, and you’ll reap storms? And also, Cultivate olibanum, and you’ll be sacrificed. So it was written, and so it comes to pass. Everything happens for something, nothing happens for nothing.
According to the alaleishos, Goat Foot walks toward the gallows as if her mind were elsewhere, in an ecstatic state, with a profound sense of meaning. The meaning of what? Of something, of everything, of nothing. She knows her time has come to an end, this time of the now, and she’ll have to plumb the depths to reemerge and begin again. She already knows the darkest center of the earth, she’s been there, she’s not intimidated. She holds the amethyst scarab tightly in her hand, and she embraces its mandate—do not fear the universe—and don’t fear death either, for it is part of everything, the other face of this same coin, peaceful old death, already familiar to her. Goat Foot is a pioneer ofars moriendi, the art of dying well, or the wisdom of surrendering elegantly to a departure that’s never terminal but merely transitory, an open door to somewhere else.
Yes, yes, all of this is clear, clearer than water, but what about the pain? The terror that takes over a soon-to-be-tormented body? How to withstand the pain, that baptism by fire, that sorrow corroding the bones, that slow invading drill? A quick death comes and goes. But what to do with the agony of pain? Goat Foot’s neck anticipates the blade’s caress, the axe’s cut, and for an instant she’s frozen by panic. Just an instant. She immediately pulls herself together and keeps moving forward, head held high in full view of all the people of the desert, those who revere her and those who despise her, those who persecute her and those who follow her, all mixed together in the expectant crowd covering the vast plains around the knoll.
So, is this the sad culmination of this long story, the myth’s ignoble end? No, it’s merely its repetition, cyclical, ad infinitum. Mythic creatures are eternal, just like gods, as long as they pay for it with alarge share of suffering: the repetition of death, over and over, year after year. Like Jesus on the cross. Like Persephone, forced to live in the depths of Hades. Like the Phoenix turned to ash, or Aeneas submitted to adescensus ad inferos. Osiris, drowned in the Nile. Odin, hanging from a tree upside down. So too with Goat Foot, Princess of Sheba, her throat slit by a butcher’s axe.
All myths burn.
