The Gift of Fire, page 1
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
In honor of PKD
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Also by Walter Mosley
About the Author
Copyright
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
THE EAGLE HAD already gouged out his belly when lightning struck metal at early dawn and Prometheus—golden-skinned, curly-haired, brown-eyed son of the Mediterranean Spirit—slipped his chains, gathered his intestines up in his left hand, and made his way clambering down the mountain path; that long forgotten trail that once connected Gods and Men … and Titans. Behind him he could hear the ravenous eagle crying out for blood. Every day for three thousand years the hungry bird ate his liver, leaving him at night so that the organs and flesh and broken bones grew and knit back together befitting his immortal nature. In spring the hideous fowl brought his chicks to peck and pull at the cords of skin and meat. Every bite and tug sent agony through the beautiful Titan’s frame, racking him in agony, leaving him spent and yet unable to die.
Crying, he ran down in the shadow of overhanging rocks and trees. He ran, muttering to himself, “I have not yet finished. The gift of the gods is incomplete.”
His father, Iapetus, or his mother, Clymene, of the ocean, if they had seen their son, would have told him to forget his quest, to go to some peaceful place, maybe the Elysian Fields, and hide from the vengeance of the gods. Hiding was the only escape. Even his brother Atlas did not have the strength to defy Zeus and his heavenly host.
Prometheus sorely missed his mother and brother, his father and other siblings, but he had gone mad chained to that rock, tortured by the evil bird and the God King’s curse.
He wanted to hide, to be soothed from the suffering that had been brought down upon him. But he could not forget the job left undone: his misery and Man’s.
“Run away,” he said to himself. “Hide down under the earth where Pluto might protect you. Dive down under the ocean of the gods and beg Neptune to hide you.
“No,” he said then. “I will not cower and beg as I have done for all these centuries. I will not bend my knee, lower my head, or forget my mission. May the gods choke on the caprice of their actions, may they die upon their hallowed mount forgotten in the minds of their minions.”
And while the eagle wheeled in the sky the diminished Titan made his way under shadow of leaf and cover of night until he was away from the land of the gods, arriving where everything is mortal and anyone, even a god, can die.
* * *
HE FOUND HIMSELF upon a hilltop. To his right rolled the waves of a great ocean and to his left sprawled a mortal city with its temporary structures and its people who lived and died without suspicion of the knowledge that they partially comprehended but never knew. The smell of their smoke and feces filled his nostrils and burned his eyes. It was ever this way when gods and Titans mingled among humans. Mortals were like animals to those of the higher planes, snuffling and snorting and spraying urine to mark their domain.
Los Angeles was to Prometheus like a dung hill is to a swan—dirty and diseased, stinking of mortality—and yet these were the fallow grounds for the possibility of life.
ONE
HIS CLOTHES WERE BLOODY and dirty from talon and beak and the mad dash from heaven. No one would seek him on earth because there was no godhood here. Zeus could die as any housefly or beached mackerel or whale. Ares, god of war, could fall on a mortal battlefield. There was no reincarnation, no rising from the dead for the old gods. Time on earth was immutable and the stench was what life had to have before it could ascend …
* * *
“HEY, YOU,” a man’s voice called. The language was strange to the Titan but its meaning was clear.
The man who addressed him was in a horseless carriage that smelled sour and poisonous. The metal vehicle was black and white while the uniforms that both men wore were black alone.
“Yes?” Prometheus replied in the old tongue.
The soldiers, or maybe city guardsmen, climbed out of thick metal doors grasping long black sticks.
“You drunk, pal?” one of them said.
Gazing into the fire of the pale-skinned man’s mind the immortal saw the word for the grape and smiled. He nodded thinking that maybe they were offering him a bladder for drink.
“What happened to your clothes, buddy?” the other man, policeman, asked.
Looking down Prometheus saw that his tunic, hand sewn by his mother, was tattered, torn, and filthy. His manhood showed through the tears and the little men of earth seemed to be made shy by this.
“I bring you the gift of fire,” he said, still speaking the old tongue, the language of sand and sea.
“Cover yourself up,” the pale-skinned policeman on the left commanded.
Reaching into his soul with his mind as a mortal man might open his purse, Prometheus found the Second Fire, the flame that would connect the human mind with the realm above. He found the small, flickering, opalescent thing, tiny as a blade of grass that stood alone on a vast and desolate plane that had been a forest—now sundered and razed. This tiny fire was not matter or heat or anything that human senses had ever perceived. It was the fount of godly thought and not even many Olympians knew of it.
The flame was small and weak, leaping from the scorched firmament so as not to be doused by the devastation.
It was almost dead. All those years chained and tortured were designed to completely destroy the Titan Prometheus, not only his life but his ability to know.
The policemen had flanked him but the seven-foot giant of Mediterranean and African perfection did not heed their strange words. Instead he climbed into himself, in his mind, and hunkered down around the last wavering glimmer of what made him who he was and what he was. He sang the Psalm of Awakening taught to him by Chronos near the River Styx in his youth. It was the story of a ram named Iricles who, each day, climbed up from the depths of the world with a bell tied to his tail. The tinkling sound of the tin bell was what the sun needed to find her way back into the sky.
It was a deadly song. When the gods sang they put their souls into the music and the words. Lovers had died from godly music; wars had been waged for a hundred years over the immortal use of pipe and poem. And here on earth Prometheus risked the final death by singing to the last shimmering vestige of his godhood.
He was gone from the external world singing, exhorting the Gift to survive. He didn’t feel the policemen grapple him, trying to wrestle him to the ground. He didn’t hear their threats or feel the blows of their nightsticks. The song of Chronos was in him now. Inside his soul was a world that no human could comprehend—not yet. He squatted down on a plane made desolate by centuries of suffering at the hands of the gods. All that was left was this tiny sparkle like the last reflection of the sun before nightfall on one small rise in the sea.
As the policemen beat his body to the ground—he sang. As the sun in his mind seemed to be setting into a final night—he sang. And somewhere, impossibly far from Sunset Boulevard, a forest suddenly surged into being. Ancient trees and bold stags, great flat-faced bears and birds who took up the ancient Titan song were alive again. The Second Fire loomed in the air above the weary god’s head. It turned slowly, its flames like the facets of a delicate jewel eluding the eye, exulting in the place it held.
Prometheus opened his eyes and rose from the ground, throwing the men off of him like children. They brought out metal weapons from holsters in their belts.
“On your knees!” the brown-skinned policeman commanded.
“I bring you the second gift,” Prometheus said now in the English tongue.
“Down on your knees!” the pale-skinned man screamed.
They were frightened of his strength. It occurred to Prometheus that it had been many thousands of years since men had met their dreams.
At another time he would have killed these simple foot soldiers for the disrespect they showed him. He would have torn off their heads and roasted their flesh, raped their women and enslaved their children and their children’s children. He would have burned down their houses and filled an oaken tub with their blood.… But those days were gone. When Prometheus had given the First Flame to mankind he gave up the raging
Instead of destruction the immortal opened his arms wide. He was intent upon bestowing the gift of his inner fire onto mankind. These men would be the kindling and soon, within a decade, the world of humanity would be aflame with awareness.
Reaching into himself again Prometheus sought the memory of Gaea’s Song of Sharing. It was a potent song from deep in the earth, a music that could shake the soul out of a king. There were no words to this music, no instrument other than the voice of a god that could embody the melody.
Prometheus located the place where this song lived in his soul, but his torture, the stench of humanity, the Psalm of Awakening, and the beating he had taken were too much for him. He staggered forward and fell to the ground and for the first time in three thousand years Prometheus slept without pain or fear of the dawn.
TWO
THE STENCH BROUGHT him back to consciousness. It was a smell so foul that the Titan’s dreaming mind feared that he had somehow awakened in the darker half of Pluto’s realm. He jumped to his feet and saw that he was in a cage with a dozen mortal men. One of these was vomiting on the floor, another was sitting on a metal toilet defecating and groaning as if the act might kill him.
The smell was noxious enough to make a Titan cry.
“What the fuck kinda niggah is you, man?” someone asked.
It was a black-skinned man who addressed him. A man with beautiful dark eyes and a ravaged face. He was dying. Prometheus could see this clearly.
“I am…” Prometheus’s mind zipped into the ether, looking for a name that would somehow hold a meaning for him.
“Prospect,” he said. “Foreman Prospect.”
The Titan held out his hand to the man.
“You one big mothahfuckah,” the scrawny black man said. “I give ya that much.”
Prometheus perceived the wily look in his new friend’s eye. There was something he wanted.
“How are you called?” the Olympian asked.
“Nosome is the moniker my mama hung me wit’. Ain’t no beautiful name, but you won’t find nobody wit’ the same handle an’ you won’t find nobody else like me.”
Prometheus smiled at his new friend as they clasped hands.
Newly named Foreman Prospect saw that he was now clad in a shirt and pants that were a soft gray color. There was no flair or meaning to the clothes, no insignia or ranking. He wondered if the humans meant to make him their slave.
“I am new here, Sir Nosome,” he said. “I will need somebody to show me around the city.”
“I’m yo’ man, Brother Prospect. I know this gottdamned city like the back a my mothahfuckin’ hand. But they gonna let me out soon. I tell you what though, I sleep all ovah the place but I hang out at Crenshaw and Thirty-fifth. You come out there any day from sunup to sundown an’ I’ll be there.”
The stench of the world did not diminish the friendship and the resolve in the dying man’s eyes. Prometheus wondered if this old, diseased frame could take his gift of fire. So intent was he on this consideration he didn’t notice the young men that approached him from the other side of the cage.
“What you got, man?” a well-muscled black man asked.
“The gift of fire,” Prometheus responded without hesitation.
The man was surrounded by other dark-skinned young men. Some had gold on their teeth. All were tattooed with arcane symbols, sigils, and signs.
“What the fuck you say, man?”
The second fire was now strong in the meta-god’s soul. He reached out to bestow his treasure. Standing at least a head over the young leader Prometheus touched his bare neck with a finger.
For an instant the young man looked up in shock and surprise … then his eyes went white; he screamed and flung himself backward hitting two of his four followers, throwing them to the ground.
The man ran for the bars of the cell. When his friends tried to stop him he fought like some feral beast trapped and cornered. Blood and heavy blows attended the battle.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nosome asked. He had moved behind his tall friend.
“His soul has been tortured,” Foreman Prospect replied.
“Huh?”
“I have seen it before, in myself.”
The battle continued. Now the men were fighting back, still surprised by their leader’s sudden betrayal.
A bell sounded somewhere and uniformed guards came running down the slender, metal-floored corridor that separated the cages. Looking up through the metal grids Prometheus could see that this was a tower of caged men. Floor after floor separated by crisscrossed steel grating.
“Are we under attack?” he asked Nosome.
The elder man took the Ancient by the arm, led him to a cot, and made him sit down.
“They comin’ to break up the fight,” Nosome said. “If you don’t wanna get beat no mo’ an’ you wanna get outta here ’fore you grow a full beard then just sit wit’ yo’ hands on yo’ knees and let them do they job.”
Prometheus could hear the honesty in Nosome’s words and so he sat down and watched as a dozen men in black uniform descended on the fighting friends. The beating was harsh but not overly brutal in Olympian eyes. They used sticks and fists to subdue the men. They bound the one who had been touched by fire. He screamed and struggled.
“Let me outta here!” he shouted staring at Prometheus. “Help me!”
Nosome and his new friend Foreman Prospect sat plain-faced, hands upon their knees. The guards seemed to recognize and accept this behavior. They took the man away leaving the stink of the sweat and bowel movements, the scent of blood-stained metal and the fetid breath of slaves.
THREE
“NOSOME BLANE,” a man called.
“Yessir,” Prometheus’s first friend in three thousand years replied in military cadence.
“You’re outta here,” the man said.
“What about my friend?” Nosome said. “What about Mr. Prospect?”
“Worry about yourself, wino,” the policeman said. He was pink-skinned and paunchy, wearing spectacles but still squinting to make out the words written on a paper that was fastened to a thin fake-wood plank. “Take your skinny ass outta there before I haul you up in front’a the judge.”
Fear shot through Nosome’s weak frame. Prometheus could see it as a delicate network of iridescent blue and red lights flashing in the man’s chest and head. But still Nosome hesitated.
“Don’t give ’em no trouble, Prospect. I can tell you ain’t used to this shit. Just tell the man what he wanna hear and don’t lie ’bout nuthin’ he could catch you up on.”
“Are you coming?” the police warden said.
“They ain’t nuthin’, man,” Nosome hissed. “Don’t let ’em get to ya like they did with Luther.”
“All right,” the spectacled cop said. He started to move away from the door.
“I’m comin’,” Nosome cried. “I’m comin’.”
The frightened man ran to the cage door and went out, glancing at Foreman Prospect as he went.
The Greek deity smiled at his friend. He knew the love of this man in the few short hours that they had shared, imprisoned in a hell worthy of Pluto.
The man Nosome spoke of, Luther Unty, had been taken away and he did not return. Nosome thought Luther had broken under the pressure of having been in prison.
“Young men think they all strong an’ shit,” Nosome confided in his new friend, “but they don’t know how to bend in a storm. They don’t know how to grow out between the bars, and the laws and the men come down on ’em like boulders in a rockslide. They think ’cause they strong that they ain’t nobody evah been stronger, but one day they learn—an’ it’s a terrible lesson, too.”
Prometheus knew that it was his second gift of fire that had driven the, what Nosome called a, gangbanger insane. The firmament in the man’s soul had rotted in a world where the purity of the first fire had been tainted and diminished. It was the celestial’s touch that had brought to the surface the wreckage of Luther Unty’s mind.
But Nosome’s words went deeper. Prometheus was also once strong and sure, a fool. He had stood up against the gods and had paid a price as dear as Unty had. He had gone mad and rushed from heaven into the mortal realm where he could perish. He had almost lost the fount of godhood.
