A Dream of Lions by M.P. Strayer

May King Darius live forever! The royal administrators, prefects, satraps, advisors and governors have all agreed that the king should issue an edict and enforce the decree that anyone who prays to any god or human being during the next thirty days, except to you, your Majesty, shall be thrown into the lions’ den.

Daniel 6:6-7

1.

If not for the king’s say the guards would just have thrown me

like any mad criminal down the chute of that foul enclosure,

and who knows what might’ve happened then—

the drop is steep, understand, and I am old, with an old man’s

brittleness.

Instead I was lowered by a braid of rope, bumping and scraping

my way along a slope of stained and dusty brick, scarred

here and there by the lashing hooves

of ruminants long since consumed. So I had plenty of time

to think about what awaited me in the pit below.

The king considered his rope a mercy, and probably he was right—

a cat is a cat is a cat, and no fund of faith or conviction

can balk the instinct of a starving lion

when a bird with a broken wing plunges suddenly in front of it—

but I tell you it didn’t feel like that, mercy,

as foot by foot I sank

down

and down

into the murky miasma of a savage stink. How it stank!

The air was a mingled mire of torrid

uprising

weltering odors of dung and putrescence,

carrion and corruption—and worse

that dry, tall-grass, somehow tawny smell of lion. It was dry, yes,

the smell was hot, the smell was ancient, reaching like dragon’s breath

all around me—I tell you

I had no thoughts of the king’s mercy then,

as that death stench clotted in my mouth and nostrils

and fear poured out of me like dark water

(though surely as I say had I simply been tossed

as so many others before me, gone

into the hole screaming for their lives,

I would not be here now to relate the tale).

I was lowered. How long

was that rank brick throat? Twenty feet? Thirty?

I didn’t know. I was lowered

and it felt interminable;

I went down

and when the soles of my feet touched the floor

I experienced such a rush of terror I forgot

my own name. If not for the king’s rope (mercy!)

I would have collapsed.

I was praying but was so afraid

no words comprised my prayer;

I wasn’t conscious of the act, wasn’t speaking

in any language I had ever heard or uttered

in all my eighty years.

Unconsciously I prayed, and vaguely the king’s voice

came down to me, and with numb fingers

I unknotted the rope.

I didn’t watch as it was hauled back up

into the sunshine of Babylon.

I was in a broad pen of mud bricks. Tall sheer walls.

The only light came from the aperture above.

Bones lay in scattered profusion about my feet.

That same atavistic prayer, beyond language,

continued murmuring from my spitless lips

and my stricken eyes peered round the gloom.

The king called something else I didn’t catch—

Your God will save you, he confessed later over drinks—

and then I heard the grating of the stone seal

sliding into place overhead

and in the instant before the light went dark

I saw the lions studying me, poised in gray-gold attitudes

of feline curiosity,

standing along the walls with their round ears pricked.

2.

I didn’t move.

When I could see again (or nearly)

I was in a spell of fetid darkness

and surrounding me in that false night were a number

of winking greenish glimmers: big cats’ eyes drawn close

without a sound.

Then I could hear them breathing.

I smelled their warmth,

felt myself enhaloed by an aura

of rank and matted fur,

claws

and yellow teeth.

I could feel their size.

I didn’t move.

No thoughts for the king now, nor his law,

nor the jealousy of his scheming advisors.

There was only God

and the selfsame lions,

the presence of the lions there in the dark, with me,

God,

watching with their silent spectral eyes.

I heard the mutter of a syncopated, whispery pleading,

repeating over and over “Omygodplease, please,

Omygodplease…” which I recognized with a shock

as my own frail voice.

I sat hard on the flagstones paving the floor.

The reality of the tiles—that some craftsman

had meticulously laid the base of this chthonian place

with bricks—

struck me with the quality of dream, and for the first

and only time of my ordeal

I thought I must be dreaming: any moment now

I would waken in my own humble quarters in the city,

cross to my window that faced the daybreak over distant Jerusalem

(it was my daily devotions there that landed me in this unholy predicament)

and give thanks to my Lord for my lionless existence.

I looked at those wan and avid eyes

staring back.

No dream.

And whether my predicament was unholy

or ultimately sanctimonious

I was in it, come what may.

I prayed. I kept myself very still

and the glint of the eyes swirled and prowled

like some minute yet heathen constellation

gyring with me at its nexus.

The eyes came and went

and

the killing fangs never sprang.

I prayed,

and as I did I felt my mind reel and fracture,

even now I can’t explain it,

I felt myself ascending

through such bleak heights of fear

that, breaking through (or out), I arrived

at a sphere of being wherein I no longer cared

what happened to me, or rather

that whatever I bore

was right

and when I came back to myself

I could not wholly recall that strange plane

where I had been: all I knew

was that the chamber was bright with daylight

and the lions, drowsing in the floor,

were lifting blinking sleep-squinted eyes toward the ceiling

and I understood that, impossibly,

I had been asleep.

More impossible still: I was alive.

3.

A familiar voice shouted down the sunny shaft above:

“Daniel! Daniel answer me old man! Are you safe?”

I yelled back in the affirmative, along with a slew

of vivid invective upon King Darius’s name—

such as no one else in the empire could have gotten away with,

I can tell you that.

A rope slapped down into the pen

and then a raw wet haunch of lamb.

The cats were on the meat in a flash

and I looped the rope about my waist

and was lifted into the sky.

***

I took a single breath of the morning air of Babylon

and began to weep.

Waiting for me next to the entrance to the enclosure

stood the king and his retinue of guards

and they had with them a group of other city officials,

bound up in gleaming shackles wrist to wrist

with their womenfolk. I tell you

it was the grimmest-looking bunch

I ever did see.

I later learned these captives

were the very conspirators whose report

had preempted my arrest,

and they were to be executed in the same manner

as they tried to have done unto me.

“Mayhap your God will protect them too,”

Darius said, motioning to the guards.

I walked away as the shrieking started.

The gnawed skulls of those unfortunates

yet leer from the tiles in the lions’ den

and I am a free man again—

but

(and no one knows this part)

I’ve been dreaming about lions ever since

and

I suspect I always will.