by Adam Blake
Ber Lusim had been reading, but now he jumped to his feet and offered the bed to Shekolni – who declined it with a wave of the hand. Ber Lusim took his seat again, closed the book and set it to one side. It was the book, of course: the book that had become the focal point of their lives and their aspirations, their rock of salvation and their stern taskmaster.
‘Why so thoughtful, Ber Lusim?’ the prophet asked. ‘You’ve pulled the trigger, now, and the bullet has gone out into the world. You can’t alter its flight.’
Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Such things are my province rather than yours, Holy One. And I’m not sure I agree. With a bullet, as you say, all the thought and the care is taken before it’s fired. Afterwards, you can only watch and see what comes.’
‘So? Isn’t that what we’re doing?’
‘Your pardon, Holy One, but this thing that we do is more like torture. A series of careful and painstaking interventions to achieve a cumulative effect.’
Shekolni smiled. ‘And it’s this that creases your brow? Are you having second thoughts?’
‘Not at all!’ Ber Lusim was shocked at the implication. ‘Torture is something I’m very well versed in. I’m not taking issue with the plan, only trying to comprehend it.’
Ber Lusim stared at Shekolni, there in the darkness of the cell, which was unrelieved apart from the flames of three candles, burning in a niche beside the bed. The shadows covered the prophet’s face as if with a veil, so his expression could not be read.
‘Do you ever think of our childhood?’ he demanded at last. When you were only a man, he meant. When there were still mysteries you couldn’t pierce. But he didn’t say those things. Tact and humility were important, when dealing with the incarnate divine.
The prophet laughed. ‘I wasn’t even alive in those times. I don’t remember them at all. My life began on the day when I saw my first vision. Nothing before that has any meaning for me.’
Ber Lusim nodded as though he understood, although the statement showed how utterly different the two men were. Both of them by the violence of their natures and the force of their will had marked themselves out for peculiar destinies. But whereas Ber Lusim had embraced that violence and made it his garment, Shekolni had opened it like a door, passed through it into a place that was unknowable.
‘Children are cruel,’ Ber Lusim murmured. He was thinking of himself – his first experiments with the pain thresholds of others, that had permitted him to know himself.
‘All men are cruel,’ the prophet said. ‘And all women, too. If we were not, then we would not need God.’
He climbed to his feet again. His movements were uncannily like those of an old man, although there was not a month between his age and that of Ber Lusim. Perhaps the mantle of holiness was heavier than ordinary men imagined.
‘It’s important to comprehend,’ he said. ‘To have a mental model for one’s actions that takes everything into account and answers all objections. I’m about to preach to your comrades in arms. You should come and listen.’
‘I invite you to think of a miracle,’ the prophet said, his words rolling out across the vast hall almost like physical things, each cradled in a tangle of echoes. A hundred men watched him and listened to him, eager for revelation, immune to weakness and doubt. ‘The miracle of birth.’
‘None of you have wives or children. None of you ever will, now, not through any weakness or failing in you but because of the accident of history and the unalterable shape of the Plan.
‘But let me assure you that birth, seen from up close, is a very ugly thing. The mother, in her birth-agonies, fills the air with her screams – with animal bleats and bellows. Sometimes she loses control of her bowels. The newborn child, when he comes at last, is covered with the filth of his mother’s entrails, and more often than not with her blood. Scarcely human, he looks, as he’s held aloft. To be human, he has to be cleansed. To be human, he has to breathe. And to be human, he has to be separated from the womb that bore him and nourished him. Cut free with a knife.
‘Does the doctor who wields the knife see the glory or does he see the ruck and ruin of blood? Does he smell incense or excrement? Does he hear screams or angels singing?’
Avra Shekolni paused theatrically, for the answers that would not come.
‘You are that doctor. And the future, the thing that is waiting to be born, depends entirely on your readiness with the knife, your skill. It needs you to cut away what once was so very precious, so very much needed, and now is only dead weight. It needs you to see past the blood, however high it rises, to the light – the endless, endless light.’
He fell silent, and his arms, which had been thrown out as though to embrace them all, dropped to his sides. The followers of Ber Lusim fell to their knees as one. Most were weeping, and all were making the sign of the noose.
Ber Lusim knelt too, his heart singing, his blood drumming in his ears.
He had served heaven at one remove – God’s commandments trickling down through the minds and voices of fallible men.
Now he was a word that God spoke.
PART TWO
A SOLDIER
16
It had never occurred to the girl that she would be chosen. Once, perhaps, she had toyed with the possibility, back when she was still in the usual age range for such things. People she knew had been taken at twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
But she reached sixteen, and nobody came. And then there was the great upheaval, the y’siath, when the People left the place where they’d lived for seven generations and travelled to the new city.
Once there, they unpacked their things again and tried to make it be home. But it wasn’t home. The girl herself, along with all the People she knew (she didn’t know all that many; she was solitary by nature), felt restless and unsettled. Everything seemed to have ended and nothing seemed to have begun again. Life’s rhythms, which in the end are life itself, had been interrupted.
The girl had tried to express that feeling in the paintings and sculptures she made – and she’d waited for the normal sense of things, the unbroken skein of thoughts and associations and actions that made up her world, to heal her.
Chaos in the Sima, the council of elders. Voices raised in the Em Hadderek, the place of gathering. Normality circled at a distance, like a bird that has left its nest because of some perturbation and now can’t settle again.
The girl was armoured against the chaos around her, at least to some extent, but it was hard not to be troubled when wise man and fool shouted anger at each other and everyone voiced disdain for the elders. Love was both the foundation of society and its mortar: if that failed them, what would be left?
The dissenting voices said that the People shouldn’t have left Ginat’Dania, the Eden Garden that had been their home, that God hadn’t sanctioned it. This led on inexorably to debates about what exactly God had sanctioned, and about the failings of the Messengers, or rather of their supreme shepherd and commander, Kuutma-that-was. He had betrayed the People, the rumours went, by falling in love with a woman in his charge, and by mourning her too much when she was dead. His judgement had become infected. He had let the enemies of the People live and grow stronger, and ally with one another. Until finally he himself had fallen in battle against the strongest of those enemies, the out-father Leo Tillman and the rhaka, the she-wolf Heather Kennedy. It was because of these failures that the People had had to move, in a caravan of sealed trucks, from their old home beneath Mexico City to the present Ginat’Dania thousands of miles north and east of that place.
The new Kuutma stood aloof from such allegations, mindful of the dignity of his office.
But the rumblings of protest grew, and finally they split the Sima itself. One of the three council elders had voiced the most terrible of heresies, the abomination of abominations. His peers had had no choice but to expel him from the chamber, and later that day it was learned that he had left the city – had gone out into the world, unsanctioned, unaccompani
ed, without name or blessing or commission.
Whereupon the city rocked crazily, like a boat when someone has stepped from its belly onto the shore and left it too light, too high in the water. The People were frozen and breathless, listening to echoes from a sound no one had heard.
And then, inexplicably, long after she’d stopped thinking of such a thing as being possible, the girl was summoned. Not by the council of elders but by Kuutma himself, known as ‘the Brand’ – the leader and commander of the Elohim, who held all truth in his heart and all vengeance in his hand.
The summons came at a time when she was least prepared to answer it. She was working on a massive canvas, the largest she had ever attempted. Standing at the top of a ladder, spattered and splotched with paint from head to knees, she was painting an angel’s face when two angels appeared to her.
They were Alus and Taria, Kuutma’s own personal attendants, and bodyguards. Their sudden arrival in the girl’s studio almost made her fall off her ladder with shock.
‘You’re wanted,’ Alus said simply.
They waited in silence while she washed herself, nervous and a little ashamed to be naked before them.
Walking between the two women, through the busy streets around the Em Hadderek, and then down the massive stairway beyond, the girl looked shyly but yearningly first at one and then at the other.
‘See anything you fancy?’ Taria asked her brazenly.
The girl blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘I’d like to paint you,’ she said. ‘Your muscles are so beautiful.’
The angels thought that was hilarious, and said that they might consider sitting for the girl some day when they were free. But then in a more serious tone Alus reminded her that it was Kuutma she was going to see, and it would be better right now to keep her thoughts focused on that.
They took her to Kuutma’s quarters, on the city’s lowest level – which in the street argot of the People was sometimes called het retoyet, ‘the dregs’. Kuutma had a modest apartment there, far less than he was entitled to. But like his predecessor, he was a man of modest tastes.
He was, moreover, a warrior, who had lasted in the ranks of the Elohim longer than most, and had the scars to prove it. Not on his body: though this Kuutma had been called on to kill many in the world outside, he had never (so far as anyone knew) taken wound or hurt. The scars were on his soul and the girl could see them there when first she looked into his eyes.
He was a solid, compact man, a little under average height but broad across the shoulders and with a sense of massiveness about him that, like the wounds, was not purely or even primarily physical. True, his hands were huge, and his forearms roped with muscle: but his broad, flat face – unusual among the People, and perhaps suggesting a Slavic out-father somewhere in his ancestry – had about it the stillness of profound meditation. He was bald, as the last Kuutma had been, but what had seemed martial in his predecessor looked on this man like the askesis of a monk or a hermit: a humbling of bodily pride, a stripping down to basics.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said to the girl. His voice had a curious accent to it, the vowels forward and elongated – probably a survival from his last field posting, which would fade soon enough now that he was at home again among the People.
‘Of course,’ the girl said, blushing a little, caught unawares by Kuutma’s gentleness and consideration.
What he said next surprised her even more. ‘I owe you an apology.’
That seemed unlikely. He was Kuutma, after all. He was one of the names, and he held the fate of the People in his hands. Uncertain what to say, the girl simply shook her head.
‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I do. On behalf of the last Kuutma. You were assessed and the results were impressive. You should have been called into service, as your brothers were called. Your mind and temperament fit you well for it. You have the resilience to survive outside Ginat’Dania. To adapt, among the unchosen, without losing yourself to their ways. You also have, very obviously, a powerful imagination that will enable you to innovate in situations for which your training has not adequately prepared you. In any event, I called for you today to right the omission that has allowed you to languish here, unused.’
The girl’s heartbeat suddenly became perceptible to her, rising from unfelt background to a heavy hammering in her chest. It was hard to draw a breath. Not the Kelim, she prayed, to a God she seldom troubled. Please, please, not the Kelim. Don’t let my life go the way of my mother’s life.
‘I feel that what I do here is valuable,’ she said, in a voice that sounded in her own ears despicably weak, almost pleading.
‘Of course,’ Kuutma said, still gentle. ‘That’s in your nature. Wherever you are, and whatever you do, you will find a way to be useful. But there are places where you’re needed more than you’re needed here.’
Please.
‘And so I have decided that you will become one of my Elohim.’
Almost, the girl shuddered. Relief flooded her, and then joy. She was called – and to a vocation to which she could give herself without reservation. The Kelim served the People with their womb alone, and in the process were lessened (though everybody pretended otherwise). The Elohim served with hearts and minds and hands. A knife or a gun, she imagined, was only like any other tool – like the brushes she used when she painted, except that they were limited to the one effect, the one colour. She wasn’t afraid of violence. Painting was already violence. She was full of violence, as far as that went.
Her acceptance wasn’t required: she was being informed of a decision, not an offer. But still she said, ‘I accept, Kuutma. I accept with joy.’
‘I’m pleased,’ Kuutma said solemnly. ‘These are not joyful times. We are uncertain, and divided. But it may be, little sister, that you’ll be the one to raise us up again.’
‘Only tell me what I have to do,’ the girl said.
Kuutma smiled at the urgency in her tone, not a patronising smile, but a recognition – an acknowledgement – of the passion that filled her. ‘First, you must be taught,’ he said. ‘And that’s no small thing. Then … well, I have a plan, and you are a part of it. When you’re ready, I’ll explain it to you. And then I’ll send you out.’ He stood, and indicated that she should follow, but for a moment she couldn’t move.
‘If it please you, Kuutma,’ she asked him. ‘Send me where?’
He regarded her with a complex, unreadable expression. He took her two hands in his and pressed them together as though he were conferring a blessing, or else inviting her to join him in prayer.
‘To your ordeal, little sister,’ he said solemnly, even sadly. ‘To the task and the testing that is yours and yours alone.’
17
Kuutma had said that the training would be no small thing. In fact it was an ordeal that almost broke her.
The girl discovered, as she had expected, that neither the mechanics nor the ethics of killing were daunting. She’d always preferred a solitary life, with few and fleeting human attachments: she had the sense that not many things lasted, and that romantic and familial loves were either comforting illusions or self-consciously played games. So it was possible for her to learn – in exacting detail – a great many ways of ending lives, without her emotions or her conscience becoming engaged. It was all theory, so far, but it was theory to which she applied herself with guiltless enthusiasm.
The physical demands of the training were another matter. The girl had to endure seventeen-hour days of drilling and practice, of gym and exercise regimens, of classes in sabotage, use and maintenance of weapons, infiltration, unarmed combat systems, battlefield survival, tracking and surveillance.
Then these lessons would stop and another sequence would start: world history, politics, languages, psychology, sociology, non-verbal communications, even fashion. The girl knew the purpose of these soft and seemingly trivial disciplines, and she didn’t protest. When another of the students made some contemptuous comment, the trainer, Ushana, made him s
tand up in front of the other recruits and rebuked him mercilessly.
‘You might live among the unchosen for ten years,’ Ushana said, ‘and kill once. So tell me, child, how you would allocate time between combat and infiltration.’
The girl kept her head down and applied herself assiduously to the learning of things that seemed both foolish and impenetrable, the nonsense syllables of an alien language. And gradually the dead ground between the disparate facts filled up with more facts. Pathways of logic opened up through the mad hinterlands and she began to see the wider, Adamite world outside Ginat’Dania for what it was: a horrifically distorted reflection of the real world in which she lived.
Also – and this was the only thing that actually frightened her – she was brought to see the differences of scale. The People lived in a space a handful of miles across and many levels deep – a great city that for most of them was in effect the whole world. But they knew that there was another world, which God had gifted to the children of Adam, but had promised in the fullness of time to render to his true chosen.
What the girl had never appreciated up until then was just how much bigger that other world was than the world she knew. As she explored it in wide games that began in the immediate environs of Ginat’Dania and then took her further and further afield, she saw the truth of it. The world was so big that it seemed to go on for ever, country opening on country and then on further countries into a distance that her mind was, at least at first, simply unable to fathom.
Kuutma told her, later, that this was common and far from trivial. Many young men and women in Messenger training experienced a sort of conceptual paralysis when they first stepped out of Ginat’Dania into the immensity of the Adamite nations. Some never got over it, and therefore were never able to join the Elohim. Some seemed to adapt, but then descended into psychosis once they were outside. It was a problem that seemed, if anything, to become more acute with each generation – perhaps because the gulf between Ginat’Dania and the world of the unchosen became ever greater over time.
