Only everything: prophets, poets, soldiers, dogs, birds, fishes, lovers, potentates, beggars, ghosts. Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities, and show you the loveliness of filth.

Wait! What am I saying? There's a kind of madness in my pen; promising all this. It's suicidal. I'm bound to fail. But it's what I want to do. Even if I make a wretched fool of myself in the process, it's what I want to do.

I want to show you bliss; my own, amongst others. And I will most certainly show you despair. That I promise you without the least hesitation. Despair so deep it will lighten your heart to discover that others suffer so much more than you do.

And how will it all end? This showing, this failing. Honestly? I don't have the slightest idea.

Sitting here, looking out across the lawn, I wonder how far from the borders of our strange little domain the invading world is. Weeks away? Months away? A year? I don't believe any of us here know the answer to that question. Even Cesaria, with all her powers of prophecy, couldn't tell me how fast the enemy will be upon us. All I know is that they will come. Must come, indeed, for everybody's sake. I no longer cling to the idea of this house as a blessed refuge for enchantment. Perhaps it was once that. But it has fallen into decadence; its fine ambitions rotted. Better it be taken apart, hopefully with some measure of dignity; but if not, not.

All I want now is the time to enchant you. After that, I suppose I'm history, just as this house is history. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't both end up at the bottom of the swamp together. And truth to tell, that prospect doesn't entirely distress me, as long as I've done all I need to do before I go. Which is only everything.

And so at last I come to the beginning.

What place is that? Should I start, perhaps, with Rachel Pallenberg, who was lately married to one of the most handsome and powerful men in America, Mitchell Monroe Geary? Shall I describe her in her sudden desolation, driving around a little town in Ohio, utterly lost, even though this is the place where she was born and raised? Poor Rachel. She has not only left her husband, but several houses and apartments, along with a life that would be considered enviable by all but perhaps one percent of the populace (which percentage already lives that life, and knows it to be largely joyless). Now she has come home only to discover that she doesn't belong here either, which leaves her asking herself: where do I belong?

It's a tempting place to begin. Rachel's so human; her confusions and contradictions are easy to comprehend. But if I begin with her I'm afraid I'm going to get distracted by modernity. I need first to strike a mythic note; to show you something from the distant past, when the world was a living fable.

So, it can't be Rachel I begin with. She'll come into these pages soon enough, but not yet.

It must be Galilee. Of course, it must be Galilee. My Galilee, who has been, and is, so many things: adored boy-child, lover of innumerable women (and a goodly number of men), shipwright, sailor, cowboy, stevedore, pool player and pimp; coward, deceiver and innocent. My Galilee.

I won't begin with one of his great voyages, or one of his notorious romances. I will begin with what happened the day of his baptism. I would not have known any of this before I entered the room beneath the dome. But I know it now, as dearly as my own life. More dearly perhaps, because it's only a day since I walked out of that chamber, and these memories seem to me but a few hours old.

PART TWO. The Holy Family

Two souls as old as heaven came down to the shore that ancient noon. They wandered, accompanied by a harmonious baying of wolves, out of the forest which in those days still spread to the very fringes of the Caspian Sea, its thicket so dense and its reputation so dire that no sane individual ventured into it more than a stone's throw. It was not the wolves that people feared meeting between the trees, nor was it bears, nor snakes. It was another order of being entirely; one not made by God; some unforgivable thing that stood to the Creator as a shadow stands to the light.

The locals had legends aplenty about this unholy tribe, though they told them only in whispers, and behind closed doors. Tales of creatures that perched in the branches devouring children they'd tempted out of the sun; or squatted in foetid pools between the trees, adorning themselves with the entrails of murdered lovers. No story-teller along that shore worth his place at the fire failed to invent some new abomination to enrich the stew. Tales begot tales, bred upon one another in ever more perverted form, so that the men, women and children who passed their brief lives in the space between the sea and trees did so in a constant state of tearfulness.

Even at noon, on a day such as this, with the air so clear it rang, and the sky as polished as the flanks of a great fish; even today, in a light so bright no demon would dare show its snout, there was fear.

As proof, let me take you into the company of the four men who were working down at the water's edge that day, mending their nets in preparation for the evening's fishing. All were in a state of unrest; this even before the wolves began their chorus.

The oldest of the fishermen was one Kekmet, a man of nearly forty, though he looked half that again. If he had ever known joy there was no sign of it on his furrowed, leathery face. His warmest expression was a scowl, which he presently wore.

"You're talking through your shithole," he remarked to the youngest of this quartet, a youth called Zelim, who at the tender age of sixteen had already lost his cousin to a miscarriage. Zelim had earned Kekmet's scorn by suggesting that as their lives were so hard here on the shore, perhaps everyone in the village should pack up their belongings, and find a better place to live.

"There's nowhere for us to go," Kekmet told the young man.

"My father saw the city of Samarkand," Zelim replied. "He told me it was like a dream."

"That's exactly what it was," the man working alongside Kekmet said. "If your father saw Samarkand it was in his sleep. Or when he'd had too much wine…"

The speaker, whose name was Hassan, raised his own jug of what passed for liquor in this place, a foul-smelling fermented milk he drank from dawn to dusk. He put the jug to his mouth, and tipped it. The filthy stuff overran his lips and dribbled into his greasy beard. He passed the jug to the fourth member of the group, one Baru, a man uncommonly fat by the standards of his peers, and uncommonly ill-tempered. He drank from the jug noisily, then set it down at his side. Hassan made no attempt to reclaim it. He knew better.

"My father…" Zelim began again.

"Never went to Samarkand," old Kekmet said, with the weary tone of one who doesn't want to hear the subject at hand spoken of again.

Zelim, however, was not about to allow his dead father's reputation to be impugned this way. He had doted on Old Zelim, who had drowned four springs before, when his boat had capsized in a sudden squall. There was no question, as far as the son was concerned, that if his father claimed he'd seen the numberless glories of Samarkand, then he had.

"One day I'll just get up and go," Zelim said. "And leave you all to rot here."

"In the name of God go!" fat Baru replied. "You make my ears ache the way you chatter. You're like a woman."

He'd no sooner spat this insult out than Zelim was on him, pounding Baru's round red face with his fists. There were some insults he was prepared to take from his elders, but this was too much. "I'm no woman!" he yelped, beating his target until blood gushed from Baru's nose.