The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven

by Robert Boyczuk

  I thought back to my first months at San Savio, the raw wound of my own father’s death, my unrelenting memory keeping it as sharp as the moment I’d witnessed it. And better understood Ali’s sullen demeanour. Nevertheless, I watched him more closely the next two days, as we camped just off the road under crude canvas tents during the night showers (“Noways like the real rain we used to get,” Lark said, nodding sagely, a brown stalk of grass hanging from the corner of his mouth), and then stayed in a brothel’s stable the following night. On both days I observed Ali surreptitiously darting into cover as he had done before, then reappearing moments later. The only other thing that caught my attention was that Ali seemed to have developed an affection for Cross and now walked with her as much as he lagged behind.

  The next morning, as Lark was stumbling over the first new Mass Ignatius was attempting to teach him, and Ali drifted listlessly behind me, I mulled over everything I could recall of Ali’s time with us. You might think it easy for a person gifted with perfect recollection to see patterns in his memories, but it’s not. Often it’s the opposite. To apprehend a pattern, one must sift through recollections, selecting only those that are relevant and arranging them into a meaningful pattern—not unlike building a puzzle. But when one has an almost limitless store of memories, the puzzle goes from a few pieces to thousands of pieces, and the possible combinations of those pieces, as well as all their possible arrangements, is vast beyond measure. The task becomes, well, daunting. Indeed, I was so lost in mulling over the possibilities that I jumped when a hand closed on my shoulder and spun me around.

  “Yesterday,” Ali said, his face a hands-width away, his grip tightening, “you made me look a fool.”

  I shrugged off his grip. “No,” I said. “You did that yourself.”

  He surprised me, then, nodding curtly, but without rancour. “Sing it,” he said.

  So I did. I sang the arpeggio he’d stumbled over the day before. And he repeated it, only this time without trying to out-sing me. His effort was much improved, and it was my turn to nod.

  “Again,” he said.

  We went back and forth in this manner for the balance of that morning. At the end of our session, Ali didn’t glower at me, as he had almost incessantly since he’d joined us, which I took for a rough expression of gratitude.

  The next two mornings, I continued tutoring Ali. Ignatius glanced back from time to time, but without comment. The afternoon of the third day, Ignatius told us he’d require extra time with Lark, and so we found ourselves together the entire day. I think both of us worked harder that day than we had on any other. I was exhausted by the time we reached our brothel for the evening. After we finished eating, Ali put his half-finished bowl on the ground beside his makeshift straw bed, then turned his back. I was so tired that the significance of his action didn’t register. But Lark, coming back from taking a piss, didn’t miss a beat. As soon as he saw the half-full bowl, his face lit up like it was Christmas morning.

  In the next few days, two important things happened.

  The first was that Ignatius had the three of us sing together. We had not done so before. It was after another fruitless audition, this time in the massive stone Church of Saint Isidore at Los Cruces. With the travel ban, Ignatius had been the only buyer in attendance; Lark, Ali, and I sat quietly in a pew behind him. He had us wait until the Parish priest ushered out his boys, then Ignatius bade us take their place in the choir stall and sing a Mass he’d taught us. He cocked his head and listened closely.

  At first we were tentative, cowed, perhaps, by the gloomy resonance of the Church. But after a few false starts, we sang together for the first time. I was so surprised at what emerged, at how it was far better than anything I could have imagined, that I almost faltered. With an effort of will, I blocked my mundane concerns, and settled into the task, losing myself utterly in the joyous song. We sang praise to God’s glory, our voices twining, transcending our meagre individual talents, rising above this poor benighted Sphere, groping upwards towards Heaven. I felt rapturous. Awed to be part of such a glorious endeavour. Even now, as I sit here writing this, after having traversed more Spheres of the Apostles than any living man and witnessing their countless marvels, after having served as the very agent of the Angels of Lower Heaven, I still mark that moment as the one in which I came closest to God.

  The Mass ended and our voices fell away.

  Ignatius nodded, then hustled us out the door and back to our brothel.

  That night, laying in the stable, I finally understood the extent of Ignatius’s gift: not only was he an exceptional teacher, he also had a divinely inspired ear, one that could discern, in unschooled voices of disparate children, the possibility of the sublime.

  The second important thing happened the next morning as we were preparing to depart Los Cruces. “Yesterday,” Ignatius said, “I was very pleased with your performance. If I searched to the ends of this Sphere I don’t believe I could find boys with more suitable talent.” He smiled at each of us. “So, this morning, we strike out for Rome.”

  I felt a flush of pride.

  Lark fairly beamed, while a short-lived smile—but a smile nevertheless—flickered across Ali’s thin lips. I supposed neither had ever seen an Assumption, let alone been out of their own wretched Sphere. For them, it would be a grand adventure.

  What immodest pride I felt soured almost immediately, for I knew Ignatius lied. I could see it in his face, in the set of his shoulders, in the manner in which he wouldn’t hold any of our gazes for more than a second. I had always been good at that sort of thing—figuring if people were lying or not. The more time I spent with someone, the better able I was to read them. At first I’d thought I’d been blessed with a marvellous intuition, until I realized it was just another aspect of my other gift: I had been subconsciously drawing on my store of memories to correlate the small ticks of the liar—their facial expressions, their gestures, the ways in which they held themselves—with their lies. As long as I spent enough time with someone to catalogue a few lies, it became easy. The only people this didn’t seem to work with were those addicted to the truth and, of course, Angels. I put them in separate categories, for it turns out that Angels are not wholly truthful.

  In Ignatius’s case, there was also other evidence that confirmed the lie.

  His praise notwithstanding, I knew there had to be boys in this Sphere with voices equal or better. And, from what he’d told me, it was his habit to wander six months to a year in an impoverished Sphere, collecting upwards of ten boys. Yet he’d been in this Sphere for only a few months and had only three boys. So why so soon? As we’d passed more and more gibbets at the roadside, as we’d watched ominous black smoke slouch across the horizon, I’d also watched Ignatius grow increasingly anxious. It was fear that was making him impatient to depart—fear that the troubles of the Sphere might overtake him.

  If I needed any further evidence, it came the next morning in the form of a tall, sinewy man named Kite, who joined us as we were loading Cross in the stable-yard. He appeared as a ghost might, materializing without so much as a breath of sound, observing us from a few paces away. Ignatius stepped over and greeted him jovially. He explained to us that he’d met Kite the previous evening over a cup of ale. When they’d discovered they were journeying the same road, they’d decided to throw in with each other. It was clearly another lie.

  Kite was like no other traveller I’d seen. He carried a small pack slung across his shoulder and resting on his hip. Although his clothes were threadbare and faded, they were still recognizable as the blue and yellow striped doublet and breeches of the renown Cent Suisse, the Papal Guard; on his head he wore the traditional morion, it’s red plume gone save for a few tattered and grimed ostrich feathers. Over his shoulder he bore their weapon of choice, the halberd—but with its ceremonial ring cut away, so that it didn’t make a loud clinking sound with each step he took. Unlike his uniform, his weapon was in good repair, oiled and looking sharp enoug
h to cleave a hair. His arms were roped with long strands of muscle—the sort you would need to swing a halberd effectively. (If you’ve never seen a halberd in use, I can attest it is a long and potentially awkward weapon—really three weapons, to be precise: an axe, a spike and a hook—and it takes a man with the right kind of strength and agility to wield it proficiently, and not kill himself in the process.) Kite’s uniform fit too well for him to have taken it off another man, which meant he was either a deserter or had been turned out of the Cent Suisse in disgrace. The fact that he still possessed his halberd (of which he would have been stripped in a court-martial) led me to believe it was the former. In either case, he was here now, a long, hard fall from Rome. And like Ignatius, he’d found a place where he might still profitably ply his trade.

  “In these troubled times,” Ignatius said, clapping Kite ostentatiously on the shoulder, “it is heartening to meet trustworthy fellow travellers.”

  Kite’s eyes flickered at the hand on his shoulder so quickly it would have been easy to believe I imagined it. But Ignatius pulled his hand away as if it had been scalded. Then he laughed, a nervous fluttering thing.

  Kite said nothing; he just continued to look at us as a vulture might eye carrion.

  Ignatius had been, in my limited experience, a good judge of character; he had always handled the people we’d encountered adroitly, including the Guardia. I suppose you would have to have good instincts if you spent all your time travelling dangerous Spheres, as Ignatius did. In this case, however, I questioned his wisdom.

  I wondered how trustworthy Kite really was, and if that trust had been purchased with Ignatius’s coin. If so, I wondered whether the amount Ignatius had agreed to pay him up front was both large and small enough to keep him from relieving us of everything else we had of value before we reached our destination, including our lives. Mostly, though, it worried me that Ignatius had been worried enough to engage him in the first place. What did he fear on the road so much that he felt it necessary to put his trust in a man like Kite?

  I didn’t have to wait long for my answer.

  The Captain

  We were set upon in the middle of the night. It was dark, as dark as it gets, and my mind was still cloudy from sleep. All around me confusion reigned. There were shouts and thudding footsteps. My feet were pointed towards the embers of our fire, as was my habit, and as I levered myself up onto my elbows I made out two men grappling, one of whom had Ignatius’s telltale girth. Then my view was eclipsed as someone tripped over my feet and fell full on top of me, knocking me back and crushing the air from my lungs. It felt like a sack of grain had been tossed on me. Before I could catch my breath, the person was up and gone, fleeing into the forest on whose periphery we’d made our camp. Two dark figures, clutching what looked like cudgels, bolted past me in pursuit. They didn’t seem to see me—in the dark, lying flat on my back as I was, I probably made an inconsequential lump.

  Without willing it, I found myself on hands and knees, scrambling for the tree line, too. I threw myself headlong into the undergrowth; branches whipped me. I dove into a clutch of blackberry bushes, and bit my tongue to keep from screaming as thorns raked my face. On my belly now, I wormed deeper into the bushes, until I was certain I couldn’t be seen, then lay as still as I could.

  The sounds of the scuffle had ceased. I heard muted voices, and a man’s groans, pitched too high to be Ignatius’s basso. I listened hard and, with a slight sense of relief, thought I could pick out the distinctive sound of Ignatius’s wheezing, but it was impossible to say for certain. At the campsite, one of the brigands now spoke distinctly enough for me to hear: “What should we do with the big one, Cap’n? Finish him?”

  “We will show him the same courtesy he’d have shown us.” A cold, quiet voice. The sort that believed unequivocally in its own authority. “Let him have the balance of the night to think on his sins. If he’s alive in the morning, we’ll decide then.”

  From deeper within the forest, where the two men with cudgels had been thrashing about, I heard a squeal, and a shouted, “Got ’im!”, followed immediately by a man’s screech.

  “Well?” The cool voice again, projected over me.

  “The son of a whore bit me hand, Cap’n.”

  I heard what could only have been a vigorous slap, and a high-pitched cry of pain. Laughter from the brigands by the fire.

  “Shut it,” the Captain said, and the mirth fell off abruptly. “Paolo, fetch the lantern. Dermot, bring him here.”

  “But he bit me hand, Cap’n—”

  “I asked you to bring him here.”

  “He’s the fat one, Cap’n. It ain’t him . . .”

  There was a moment’s silence, and if the Captain’s voice was cold before, it was ice now. “Bring him here.” The last three words were delivered staccato, like three hammer blows that would seal the coffin of the man who didn’t heed them.

  I heard the two men crunch their way quickly out of the forest, twigs snapping beneath their boots, passing so close I could have reached out and touched them. Between them they dragged a whimpering Lark. I heard him grunt as they dumped him unceremoniously on the ground. A lantern sputtered to life, and blades of light cut through the bushes. I turned my head and stuck my hands under my belly, trying to hide any flesh that might give me away.

  “Lash him to the other one,” the Captain barked.

  “It don’t matter, Cap’n, if he gets to the Assumption, The Meek’ll do for him anyhow.”

  “Dermot, you’re a loud-mouthed fool.” There was the sound of a blow, then a grunt, and what was probably a body crumpling to the ground.

  “Well, boy,” the Captain’s voice was suddenly so loud it seemed to shake the bushes in which I was hiding, “now that Dermot’s let you know that we know you’re out there, I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that we don’t know. You’re lying quiet, hoping we won’t find you. Maybe thinking you’ll wait until we get bored and leave, then somehow manage to get to the Assumption on your own. But I’ll tell you why it’s a vain hope if ever there was one. First, we aren’t going anywhere. Peter and Damian here are fine trackers. We will find you, and if not this night, when sun-on comes. Second, Dermot, despite his general stupidity, has it right: should you manage to elude us, should you somehow manage to find your way to the Assumption, The Meek will eat you alive. Literally. They number fifty thousand now, I’ve heard, and are so desperate for sustenance they have taken to cannibalism. Third, in the unlikely event that you do persuade The Meek to let you pass, without your escort and the fine vellum I hold in my hand, the monks at the Assumption will never believe you.” I heard him take a few steps closer; the slashes of light moved in such a way that I knew he was lifting the lantern high and scanning the depths of the shadows. “I have a proposal for you. If you come out of hiding right now, and save us the time and trouble of the hunt, I will treat you fairly and with honour, and your friends, too. I will even do what I can for your master, though he’s taken the kind of wound from which few recover. I tell you this not to scare you, but so you know I am being truthful with you. You should also know there is no help coming from other quarters. Your other man seems to have forgotten his halberd in his haste to run off.” I heard the chunk of a weapon being driven into the ground. “So what’s it to be, boy? Will you accept my terms?”

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “I’ll give you five minutes to think on it. But be warned—if I have to send my men into the woods to smoke you out, then our bargain is forfeit, and I’ll give both those boys to Dermot to do with as he pleases.”

  Until now I had been buffeted by circumstance and events not of my own making, dragged along by the whim of others. For the first time in my life I would have to make a decision that would be utterly and irrevocably my own. One whose consequences would dog me until the day I died. My stomach knotted. What should I do? The question whirled in my mind, over and over. What should I do? My legs began shaking.

  I knew I must calm m
yself.

  So I quietly performed a breathing exercise Ignatius had taught me. It did the trick. I stopped shaking and my mind cleared. The first thing I realized was that my chances of escape were not quite so bleak as the Captain would have me believe. Clearly, none of them had seen me dive into these blackberry bushes, or they’d have already pulled me out. The canopy was so thick here that within a few metres of the tree line a perpetual gloom enveloped everything, and in the dark it would be extraordinarily difficult to see the signs necessary to track me. I also knew that as soon as they started stumbling around looking for me they would make enough racket to cover any sounds I might make. If I made a dash for it now, while there were several hours of darkness left, I was fairly confident I could elude capture. Once away, the forest was immense, and the undergrowth thick, providing endless opportunity for concealment. No doubt the Captain knew all of this, too—and that’s why he’d proposed his bargain.

  What then? What would I do after, without food or money or Ignatius’s letter from the Vatican? Even if I could evade the patrols, I’d find no succour in communities struggling to feed their own children. Nor did I entertain the faintest of hopes of reaching the Assumption on my own. And there was still Lark, Ali, and Ignatius. Without my surrender, all three would likely die. With my surrender, all three might live—but only if the Captain was as good as his word.

  I hesitated not because the decision was difficult, but because I first had to convince myself there was no other way. I played out the alternatives in my mind, hoping against hope to see something. But I came up blank: there was simply no way to escape the relentless guilt that would follow me if I abandoned my companions. So, when I judged five minutes had elapsed, and no other solution had presented itself, I pushed myself onto my elbows, and said in a clear voice, “I acc—”