“Stand at ease,” said a short priest, emerging from behind their rank, his voice commanding despite his stature. He wore the black cassock and collar favoured by Jesuits. The Gardes relaxed marginally, widening their stances.
I threw myself on the ground and tore off my boots. Pulling out the cloths that had been stuffed in them, I made strips to wipe away the viscous, pink fluid first, then to bind the open blisters on my feet. As I did so, Kite proffered his vellum again, and the priest accepted it; there was no coin inside this time. He read it and furrowed his brow. “Ignatius?” the priest asked, looking up.
Kite shook his head.
I rose and took a few tentative steps. The pain, as bad as it was, seemed manageable.
“I warned him,” the priest said, returning the scroll. “I shall pray for his soul.” He bowed his head and clasped his hands, as if he was going to pray then and there. But if he did, it was a very short supplication. “Come,” he said, and moved off into the gloom behind the Gardes.
We followed him—me limping behind—into a room illuminated by candles in sconces. In its centre was what looked like a large trap door set into the floor; behind it was an inverted T of metal arms. The horizontal arm at the top was adorned with cylinders. The priest had us stand on the trap door. It shifted slightly downward as we did so, and I couldn’t help shooting a nervous glance at Kite. He looked unperturbed. So I tried to dismiss my fear. The priest began moving the cylinders that were not fixed to the arms, and I realized what he was doing: we stood upon a large scale, which he was using to weigh us. When he balanced the arm, he moved over to a small writing desk and scrawled some figures in a ledger.
“Come,” he said again, and we followed him into a short corridor. At its end, the priest touched a single finger to what I thought was the wall of a dead end and stepped back; a door swung inward, revealing night.
Only it wasn’t night. It was the heart of the Assumption.
There was nothing save a round, wrought-iron cage set in the centre of a fuligin plane. Inside the cage, the face of another Jesuit floated, the outline of his cassock nearly impossible to distinguish from the background. The inner walls of the atrium were composed of the same material as the floor and, without windows or doors save the one through which we entered, they formed the interior of a featureless ebon cube, open at its top. As far as I could tell, there were no joints anywhere, which meant that each of the five planes had to have been moved in place as a piece, but by what extraordinary means I couldn’t conceive. The material itself was like nothing I had ever seen, improbably smooth. Although it was now full sun-on, the material didn’t reflect the light, but rather seemed to absorb and refract it down to impenetrable depths, leaving me with the disorienting feeling I was staring into a bottomless abyss.
A long, worn carpet led from the door to the cage, and the priest stood aside and bade us follow it with a curt wave of his hand.
Ali took the lead and I followed—and immediately understood the reason for the runner. Without it, I would have been overwhelmed by the vertiginous sensation of walking over a void. I swayed, but managed to maintain my balance, fixing my eyes rigidly on the cage. Ahead of me Ali stumbled and would have fallen had I not caught him by the shoulders and steadied him. He glanced back at me, eyes wide, disoriented and near panic.
“Fix your eyes on the cage. Don’t look down or sideways or beyond.”
Ali regained a semblance of self-control and nodded; thus we moved forward, my hands on his shoulders, until we passed the Jesuit who stood just inside the cage. Ali immediately seized the bars to steady himself. I thought he’d be grateful but the look he gave me was withering, and I realized in helping him I had inadvertently stoked his resentment.
Lark hadn’t fared as well as Ali, for Kite entered the cage carrying him under one arm, much as he had carried me the night we’d run from the Captain. The poor boy had his hands pressed tightly over his eyes; he shook uncontrollably and his face had taken on an ashen pallor. Kite did not look at all unsettled, but then he’d given me the impression he’d travelled in several Spheres of the Apostles. At the minimum, he’d been through three Assumptions: the Cent Suisse were in Rome, three Spheres above this one, one above the Sphere in which I’d been born. Kite had to pry Lark’s hands free as he set him down next to Ali, then he, too, grasped a bar. I don’t know why, but this made me feel better.
The Jesuit latched the gate behind them. The small priest who had followed us now walked backwards on the carpet, rolling it up as he went. When he reached the door, he touched it in the same spot a second time, and stepped inside. The door swung shut soundlessly and disappeared into the featureless wall as if it had never been there.
I had thought I would feel better at making it to cage, but this wasn’t the case. Being in the centre seemed to make everything worse. I could feel my equilibrium slipping away; I began swaying.
“It’s always hard on you the first time,” the Jesuit said. “Best if you do as your friends are doing and close your eyes.”
I’d paid him no heed until now, but his voice brought me up short. Even though I had only heard him speak Latin through the gunny sack over my head, I recognized his raspy voice.
“This isn’t my first time.”
He looked at me with what might have been curiosity, but said nothing. Then, in silence, he positioned us within the cage and bid us not move. Stepping to the centre, he stood astride what I had taken to be a wooden Crucifix embedded in the floor. But the lengths of the arms were equal, and when I looked closer, I realized it was two carpenter’s levels fixed perpendicularly, small glass cylinders with spirit bubbles on each end. Directly above them a silver bell had been suspended from the roof of the cage. The Jesuit pulled the rope attached to the clapper so a loud, clear note rang out. Then he bowed his head and began to pray in Latin, the same prayer I remembered him uttering at the start of my descent. A moment later, I heard the note returned, but muffled, as if from some distance; I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to emanate from beneath us. There was another distant sound, only this was like stone being dragged over stone. It vibrated through my soles, and into the broken blisters on my feet, and I ground my teeth and swallowed back the pain.
Then my stomach lurched as we began to rise.
The Jesuit’s prayer broke off, and he peered intently at the levels, his hand on the rope. As we ascended, he rang the bell—each time he’d pull the rope from one to four times in quick succession, reminding me of the Sanctus bell rung during Mass.
On my descent, I’d had no way to gauge our speed, unable to see the distances; but now, unhooded, I determined we were rising a metre every few seconds. Within a minute we had crested the walls of the Assumption. The edges of the platform that bore us were now distinct, and were far enough away from us that they hid the postulants’ camp below. However, I could see the great curving reaches of the Sphere in every direction. Here and there rose black plumes of smoke, like those we had passed on our journey, and around them the grey smear of rain God had sent to douse the fires. A moment later, the structures of a distant city hove into view; inside its wall were many benign threads of smoke rising from chimneys. But at its heart a massive column of smoke bellied upwards. At its base I could see the tiny, yellow flicker of flames. The size of the fire must have been enormous to be evident at this distance. Yet there was no rain to quell it. I watched in horror, wondering why this, of all the fires, God had left unquenched.
“His will is beyond our ken.”
I turned to find the Jesuit regarding me, keeping half an eye on the levels, and one hand on the bell rope.
A few days ago I would not have essayed a response. “I . . . I came from such a city.”
He shook his head sadly. “For a want of ten righteous men. . . .”
God had agreed to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham could find fifty righteous citizens. When this proved impossible, God, in His mercy, lowered the number to forty-five, then forty, thirty, twenty, a
nd finally to ten. To no avail.
The burning city soon passed from view as the edges of the platform obscured the ground in every direction. Only the gentle curve of the sky remained.
Intermittently, the Jesuit rang the bell. With nothing else to see, I watched him.
“You are sending instructions on how to keep us level,” I said.
He smiled, and it occurred to me he had a kindly face. “Yes.”
“The number of bells indicate adjustments to make.”
He nodded.
“It must be difficult, to keep it in balance.”
I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. “Right now, the plate at our feet weighs less than you might think, and that makes it difficult to balance.” He tapped a red line on one of the levels with the toe of his sandal. “If the edge of the bubble passes this line, it will flip, and the Assumption will be lost.” There were only a few millimetres clearance on either side of each bubble. “The plate upon which we stand, and those directly below, work in opposition to one another.” He was warming to the explanation; I imagine very few Clergy ever asked about his work. Except, perhaps, for fellow Jesuits. Their order seemed to have a natural curiosity; they were renown for studying the natural world avidly—sometimes to the dismay of the Church. “There are damping plates, too, that ameliorate the vertical acceleration caused by gravity.” My puzzlement must have been evident, for he asked, “What do you know about gravity?”
“Only what I’ve been taught: that gravity weighs us down while we live, pulling us towards the inferno. And when we die—well, if our soul is heavy with sin, it plummets to Hell. But if it is light enough, it escapes the pull and ascends to Heaven.”
Kite, who held his peace until now, snorted derisively.
The Jesuit took it in stride. “Indeed,” he said, smiling tolerantly. “That teaching is more in the nature of, ah, metaphor. Gravity is not punitive—it is a natural force, and behaves as all such forces do, in a predictable fashion, just as God has willed. Certainly gravity draws us down towards Hell, but that does not make gravity malign. Weight is merely the force exerted on the body by gravitation. And Hell is an unimaginably dense mass. So massive, that if you were to move close enough to it, you would never be able to escape.” The priest threw Kite a look. “This gives rise to some of the more fanciful explanations.”
“You said right now the plate at our feet weighs less than we might think. Do you mean it weighs more at other times?”
“Weight varies depending on the magnitude of the local gravitational acceleration. At the centre of our platform you weigh roughly the same as you did below. But if you were to step beyond the edges of this cage, your weight would be, well, negative. You would be pulled up. Above and below us are plates that damp or enhance the effect of the gravitational acceleration of the Sphere. By moving them just so, you ameliorate the effect of gravitational acceleration from below, and increase it from above. Since the pull down on the area of the cage is less than the pull up on the rest of the plate, we rise.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Why not make the middle as light as the rest? Then there would be nothing holding the platform down.”
“True. But if you were to step outside this cage you would, at the very least, lose consciousness. The transition is too pronounced. Your body has grown in the context of a certain gravitational acceleration, and so its systems depend on this to move your fluids. Changing the gravity too quickly would disrupt the flow of these fluids and cause you to lose consciousness—or worse.”
“You said we weigh roughly the same. Not exactly the same.”
He nodded.
“It’s hard to tell, but I think I feel lighter.”
“Yes.”
“And I felt heavier as we went down Spheres.” Until now, I had attributed the heaviness I’d felt to my state of mind rather than a natural force.
“As you get closer to Hell, your weight increases. In the lowest Spheres, the crush of weight is such that men cannot survive there for long.”
“So that means gravitational acceleration increases as we descend Spheres.”
“Or becomes weaker as you rise, yes.”
Kite, who I’d thought had lost interest in the conversation, said, “And so Angels fly.”
I expected the Jesuit to get angry, but he didn’t. “Angels can fly because God gave them wings.”
Kite turned to me. “It’s why they can’t leave Lower Heaven, boy. Those flimsy wings of theirs would be worse than useless below Heaven. A few Spheres down and they’d be pulling themselves on the ground like crippled beggars.”
I wasn’t surprised so much by Kite’s blasphemy, as I was by his boldness. The Jesuit looked as if he’d been slapped.
“Is it true Angels can fly anywhere in Lower Heaven?” I asked him quickly, hoping my inquisitiveness would soften Kite’s goading. “And they can’t in lower Spheres?”
“That’s likely,” he said, collecting himself. “But we don’t know for certain, because they never leave Lower Heaven.”
“Then the stuff of which the Spheres are made, the earth itself, must also work like these plates.”
“Precisely!” the Jesuit said with enthusiasm, obviously glad to focus on my interest, and skirt Kite’s provocation. “The effect is greatly reduced, but their masses are vastly larger than the plate upon which we stand.” It was clear he was excited that the natural world exhibited an explicable order, and that he had an audience with which to share his beliefs. “It’s the application of the same principles that allows the Assumption to move, and that keeps our Spheres equidistant from one another, so that earth doesn’t crash into sky.” It had never occurred to me such a disaster was possible; I shuddered at the thought. “God made the Spheres to lessen the pull of Hell,” he continued. “Thirteen Spheres of the Apostles, all contained within another, each diminishing the pull of Hell, until it is barely noticeable in the highest Sphere of Lower Heaven. So God keeps the Spheres of the world in harmony. In balance. Like the balance of this plate.”
Kite said, “So you are God of this plate?”
“No, no, no. That’s not what I meant!” The Jesuit’s face turned red. “We . . . we, are humbled by his works. Our understanding is small. Less than a single leaf in a vast forest. Just enough so that we might use God’s gifts as he intended. His ways, as mysterious as they are, have meaning and order. But to grasp them, even a small part of them, one must apply reason to the natural order.”
“Or perhaps,” Kite said, releasing the bar and taking a step towards the Jesuit, his halberd loose in his hand, “the Church bends reason to fit circumstance.”
The bubbles in the levels edged slightly towards the red lines. The Jesuit blanched. “Please,” he said, “you must stand still.” As he spoke, he rang the bell sharply three times, paused, then rang it twice more. The bubbles moved marginally towards the centre. “No more talk! I must attend to my work.”
“Father,” I said. “One more question and I promise we won’t disturb you again.”
“We?” the Jesuit asked, shooting a look at Kite.
I looked at Kite, too, and to my relief he essayed a curt nod.
“Ask, then,” said the Jesuit. “But no more moving!”
“Why can’t the Meek be assumed?”
He said nothing for a moment, eyeing his levels intently. “Their numbers are too great,” he said, turning his back to us. “They would disturb the balance.”
Kite caught my eye, but said nothing, as he’d promised.
In silence, we rose.
I looked to see how soon we would reach the zenith. But the colour above was uniform in all directions, making it impossible to gauge distance. I could see no opening and was seized by the irrational fear that we’d be crushed against the sky—until my ears popped and I felt a slight lurch in my stomach. And by that I knew that we had passed from one Sphere into another. Looking around, I realized we were in a cube identical to the one below, save that its interior wa
s the colour of the sky, thus making the opening virtually invisible from below. The Jesuit rang his bell and a door, matching the one below, appeared in the wall. A rolled carpet was heaved onto the plate.
Five minutes later, the portcullis of the upper Assumption clattered down behind us. We stood in a glade. A well-maintained brick road cut through flower-speckled grass to a wooden bridge and thence over a brook. Birdsong rose from the surrounding wood. An altogether idyllic scene—in contrast to what lay only a few hundred metres below. A huge sense of relief, and an equally profound guilt, stirred uneasily within me.
“Where now?” Ali asked.
“To the next Assumption,” Kite said. He pointed. “Two months march.” When I’d been taken, we descended two Spheres in five days before reaching the Black Friars’ monastery. I was certain this was the second Assumption we’d used, but a two month’s journey meant that the next Assumption, the one back into the Sphere where I was born, was a different one—and that much more distant from my boyhood home. Though I knew there could be nothing there for me, it still made me sad all the same that we wouldn’t be passing near on our journey to the Vatican.
Lark, who Kite had had to carry out of the Assumption, wobbled unsteadily behind us, took two steps away into the deep grass, went to his knees, and vomited. I waited until he wiped the back of his dirty sleeve across his mouth, and offered him my water bottle. He turned away with a small shake of his head, spurning my offering. In our passage through the Meek, Ali and Lark’s resentment had been forgotten, but now that we were no longer facing imminent danger together it seemed to have resurfaced.
“The Jesuit lied.” Kite’s voice startled me. “There is no reason the Meek cannot be Assumed—if the Church wished it.” I’d thought so, too, but when I said nothing, Kite continued. “Balancing the Spheres would be more about the distribution of mass and not the relative amounts in each Sphere.”
“Maybe he believes it.”
“So much the worse if he does,” Kite said. “If he believes it, then he is deceiving himself and betraying the faculty of reason the Jesuits claim to hold in such high esteem. And if he doesn’t believe, he is betraying his humanity in letting the Meek suffer.”
The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven Page 9
