I thought it odd that God would share this with the Angels, yet be silent on what I was to do to staunch His Wound. “I have a good memory. Why is this important?”
Zeracheil motioned with his hands for a time, and the world collapsed until Lower Heaven once again appeared just inside the walls of the room. “There are no maps of the lower Spheres, where men live short, violent, and Godless lives. And in those Spheres above, where the Church holds sway, you would be jailed or crucified if you carried such maps. Even if it were possible, sufficient detail of all the Spheres would require volumes, and be impossible to conceal. However, you might safely carry a map of all the world in your memory.”
“To get there I will have to pass through the Assumptions.”
“Not everyone in the Church opposes the Angels.”
The Jesuits. They controlled the Assumptions—at least those in the Catholic Spheres. Unlike the rest of the Clergy, who made it a virtue not to question the nature of the world, the Jesuits believed in an explicable order, which God did not jealously guard. For them, a virtuous life was one in which they were obliged to study the laws of Nature. After all, had God not ordained the laws of Nature? And had he also not given us the faculties to unravel their mysteries? At times, this approach had set the Jesuits against the main body of the Church. “The Society of Jesus aids you?”
“They would not act against the Holy See, but have misgivings about the war on Lower Heaven. They will help us in what small ways they can, and hinder the Church in the same fashion.”
“And in Spheres below where there are no Jesuits?”
“Discontent grows there, as it does in the Catholic Spheres. Everywhere men look up with envy, though some not so far as Heaven.”
“The Fallists?” They had been wiped out—or so the Addenda told us. But I’d learned that not everything in the Holy Books could be trusted.
“Yes. And others in the Lower Spheres.”
“You’ve struck bargains with your enemy’s enemy.”
“We are above, they are below. The Church is conveniently between.”
I considered this for a moment, then said, “That’s all the more reason for Rome to move quickly to take Lower Heaven. Don’t you fear an attack?”
“We expect an attack, but do not fear it. Its success or failure is of no consequence.”
Ali had said as much, though I hadn’t credited it at the time: the Angels seemed indifferent to the Church’s ambitions, or to their fate. “How can you not care about the Kingdom of Heaven? How can you allow men to enter, and so commit a sin that would consign them to Hell?”
“God has given men free will. They make choices, just as you.”
“The Church will come.”
Zeracheil shrugged. “The Angels have little time left in this Sphere. Men will have less.”
Little time? “I see no drought here.”
“No more or less than below,” Zeracheil said. “The Waters Above do more than slake the thirst of God’s creatures, David. They wrap all the Spheres, protecting them from God’s radiance. As Glorious as it is, such radiance is too much for men—and even Angels—to bear.” Zeracheil then did a strange thing: it placed a hand on the diseased side of its face, and dragged a finger down; necrotic skin sloughed away under its fingertip and dangled from its cheek. In its place glistened a new lesion. “In your lifetime, it is likely Angels will no longer abide in Lower Heaven. Nor any of God’s other creatures.” The Angel held out its fingertip; on it was a pinkish smear. “In Lower Heaven, God’s presence is muted by the firmament. But you were in the Waters Above, David. Did you not feel His radiance?”
I had—in my heart and my soul. But I hadn’t thought about my body. Raising my hand I touched my cheek, an echo of what the Angel had done to itself; I felt a faint tingle, the sort you might after sitting too close to a fire.
“You’ve felt God’s touch,” Zeracheil said, triumphantly. Until now I’d seen no semblance of emotion on the face of an Angel. But Zeracheil’s expression was rapturous. “The flesh knows it. And knowing its imperfection, longs to wither away, leaving nothing that might thwart communion with God.”
I believe the Angel wanted me to feel the same joy at having experienced God’s touch, and I suppose I did to some degree; but I was uneasy, too, for it seemed Zeracheil’s joy was occasioned as much by the touch of God as by the mortification of its flesh. The Angels would die—or at least the poor vessels that contained them—in an ecstasy of pain. I hid my revulsion as best as I could. “If this is your wish, why would you staunch the flow of God’s Blood?”
“To save man, as God has adjured us.”
To save man? An unsettling notion occurred to me then. “Will God’s radiance spread past Lower Heaven?”
“If you do not staunch the flow of God’s Blood, all Spheres will, in time, be as Lower Heaven, and the flesh of men will wither, too.”
My throat went dry. “When?”
The Angel quoted Matthew speaking of the end of the world: “But as for that day and hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, no one but the Father alone.”
I suppose I should have been more concerned with the fate of the Spheres, and the millions of souls that would suffer. Instead, I asked, “What of Ali?”
“If you choose to do God’s bidding, she will accompany you.”
Upon hearing this, my spirits rose. I was grateful, even, for if we did not have this to bind us, we had nothing; I’d no doubt she’d abandon me the moment we departed Lower Heaven. “If I choose not to go, what will happen to her?”
“She will make her way to God’s Wound as best she can, to do what she might. This is her covenant with God, through her father’s oath, and hers.”
So there it was. If my faith was not enough to compel me, nor the world’s demise, Ali’s presence would. The Angels, I thought, know my heart better than I know it myself.
I gazed upon the ghostly outlines of all the Spheres of the world, and worried anew, for it would take days, at the least, to commit what I must to memory. “I would begin now,” I said, filled with a sense of urgency, and wondering again how far and fast the Archangel Raphael might fly.
Avenged
Each day for the next four days, I came to the map room (as I’d come to think of it) to look through God’s Eye at the world. It responded to my touch in the same way it had to Zeracheil’s, and I turned it this way and that, examining Sphere after Sphere. I quickly discovered that the map was not accurate in some respects: it showed forests in places where I knew there to be only fields, and vice versa; the streets and outlines of buildings matched, more or less, what I’d seen in the heart of larger cities, like Los Angeles Nuevo and Rome, but the ramshackle sprawl of houses on their outskirts was missing. Indeed, entire towns through which we’d passed did not even appear on the map. When I asked, Zeracheil told me this was the world as it had been when God created it, and though I could trust the hills and valleys to be largely unchanged, I could not be certain when it came to the works of men.
Here and there were coloured symbols on the map, more often than not in or nearby cities, and these, Zeracheil said, marked the homes of believers—by which I took him to mean partisans of the Angels—and if I magnified these points sufficiently I might see their names. I also noted that the Assumptions through which Ali and I had passed were white, but many others, including the one now buried within the Babel tower, appeared grey. I asked the Angel about these, too, and Zeracheil told me that only the white Assumptions still functioned.
So I committed to memory the general topography of each Sphere in its entirety, including all its white Assumptions, mapping countless routes between Heaven and God’s Wound. Then I studied the roads along which we might travel between Assumptions, choosing those that spanned the shortest distances, and marking alternatives in case we had need of them. As I did all this, I weighed our possible routes against what I knew of the Spheres we’d been in (and what I’d learned of other places f
rom Ignatius, Kite, and Meussin), considering those things that might disrupt or hasten our progress, and then modified the routes in my head accordingly. My best guess was that the journey would take about a year—if all went well.
During this time I slept no more than five hours a night, and worked each day until exhaustion blurred my thoughts, making it impossible to focus. Only then would I climb onto the palanquin and descend. When I woke, no matter how early, there was always fruit and a freshly drawn bucket of water waiting. I saw little of Ali, and spoke not at all to her, for she was always asleep when I returned to the room Zeracheil had given us, and gone before I woke. Sometimes I caught glimpses of her in the garden, practising her sword work on large dummies she’d contrived from fruit and leaves and vines, and was distressed to note they were either the same size and shape as a wingless Angel—or as me.
In the few minutes I was not closeted in the map room or asleep, I observed the workings of Zeracheil’s house. Angels came and went, and I did my best to sort them out, but at a distance they all looked alike. Often they would arrive in twos and threes, landing on the middle floors. For the most part they treated me as if I were invisible. With dread, I watched for an Angel with a growth under its eye. Once, when the palanquin was lifting me to the map room, I passed a floor on which a group of Angels had just landed, and I thought one might be Raphael, for it had a growth beneath its eye, but when it turned, fully exposing its face, I saw its tumour had progressed much further, and had already taken its eye and crossed the bridge of its nose.
Toward the end of the fifth day, when I could think of no more I might learn with God’s Eye, I used the palanquin to return to the ground floor and sought out Zeracheil. I found it in the room with the table and stools, where it often sat with other Angels when they communed in silence. On this occasion the Archangel sat alone, its head bowed and hands folded in its lap, perhaps lost in prayer.
Zeracheil raised its head as I entered, and I was taken aback; the skin on the side of the Angel’s face sagged, where the neoplasm had been. Its tumour had been neatly excised, yet I could not see any traces of the incisions such an operation would have required.
“You would leave,” Zeracheil said.
“Ali and I, yes.”
“As we have promised,” Zeracheil said, “two days hence at sun-on.”
“Two days?” I’d observed an increase in comings and goings of Angels the previous day, which had only fuelled my impatience. “We would leave now.”
“Ali will not be ready.”
The previous night, when I’d returned to the room to sleep for a few fitful hours, she hadn’t been there. “Has she been sent elsewhere?”
“She is where you sleep.”
“Then why must we wait two days?”
“She is with her Possessor, Raphael, who—”
I spun, and loped from the room. In two great strides I crossed the Atrium, and on the third caught at the curtain covering the door to our room to arrest my progress—only my momentum ripped the fabric off the rings that held it, and I careened into the door frame, my right forearm taking the impact. I fell to the ground in searing agony, the curtain twisting around me. But, for an instant, I had a clear view of a horrific scene: Ali, face down, legs and arms bound, pinioned to the ground. Atop her, the Archangel Raphael grunted with an unholy pleasure.
I staggered to my feet; jarring pain knifed through my right arm, and my vision bleared. Yet the madness that possessed me must have impelled me, for the next thing I clearly remember was my one useful hand gripping the delicate edge of a wing where it met the Angel’s back, and yanking Raphael off Ali and flinging it with such force that when the Angel smashed, face first, into the wall behind, I heard two loud cracks, like the sound of dry kindling snapping. Then I found myself standing over it. One wing was at an impossible angle, and a terrible wound had opened on its head from which spilled anaemic blood, pinkish and thin, with the consistency of water. Where genitals would have been, I expected to see a disfigured, tumescent penis, or even something like Meussin’s wooden phallus, but there was nothing but that ambiguous flap of skin. However, on its lips and dribbling down its chin was blood, not of an Angel, but thick and crimson like a man’s. “You asked it of us,” Raphael said, between wheezing breaths.
I turned, and saw that Ali lay insensible on the floor; on the side of her head, a circular wound the size of a silver bishop oozed blood. Her sword leaned against the wall beside the door, and I walked over and picked it up, shaking it free from its scabbard. Turning to the wounded Angel, I felt nothing but a preternatural calm. “That day at the river, she could have stopped me,” I said. “If you’d let her.”
With that I plunged the sword into the chest of the Archangel Raphael where its heart would have been—had it been a man—driving it down until its tip bit into the floor with the ring of metal on stone. The Angel spasmed, and let out a keening wail that shivered through my bones. It tired to rise, one great wing thrashing, the other, blood-flecked and useless, flopping piteously. I held the sword firm, pinning the Angel for perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, until it stilled.
Whatever reserve of energy animated me, it fled, and my legs gave out.
I stared up at a blank ceiling, the room reeling around me. Waves of pain, more intense than any I’d ever experienced, spiked my forearm. Through gritted teeth, I managed to gasp out, “I think my arm is broken,” though I wasn’t quite sure to whom I was speaking.
And that’s all I remember.
Purgatorium
When consciousness returned, I found myself lying on a cool, smooth surface. It was dark, and a damp, slow-churning mist enveloped me, obscuring anything more than a few centimetres from my nose. My arms were crossed over my chest, and it felt like a shroud had been wrapped around me. In that moment, I believed myself dead and awaiting judgement. I took comfort in this notion and, for the first time in a long time, I relaxed, content to lose myself in the nothingness.
“David?”
The whisper cut through my torpor, shattering the illusion. An invisible weight settled on my chest and limbs. I tried to unfold my arms and move away the shroud so that I might push myself into a sitting position—and gasped as jagged pain surged from my right arm through my body in excruciating waves.
“Lie still.” Ali’s words cut through my agony.
I drew ragged breaths as the pain ebbed, each wave diminishing until my arm was merely the nexus of a dull, persistent throb.
“Open your eyes.”
The ubiquitous mist seemed to have worked itself into my brain, gumming its works; my body was infinitely heavy and movement an impossibility. I didn’t want to open my eyes. All I wanted to do was lie there, veiled. I felt the world slipping away. . . .
A sharp rap on my shoulder jolted me awake again. “You must stay conscious!”
I groaned, and screwed my eyes shut even tighter.
“Your arm is wrapped to your chest—don’t try to move it.”
My left arm lay below my right and, lifting it, I gently probed my broken limb. What she said was true. My right arm had been immobilized, secured by strips of broad cloth wound around my torso; beneath this I felt a makeshift splint on my forearm, formed of two pieces of rough wood, and packed with moss.
“Here.”
Something dribbled into my mouth and seemed to scorch the back of my throat, shocking my eyes open—and precipitating a fit of coughing.
“More?”
I shook my pounding head—and felt that I might retch, or faint, or both. Swallowing back the bile, I blinked. The fog no longer seemed so impenetrable, or perhaps my eyes had adjusted, but I saw Ali’s shadowy outline sitting next to me, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins, one hand clutching an unstoppered wineskin. I tried to ask her a question, but my voice was an incomprehensible croak. I swallowed once, twice, to lubricate my vocal cords, then managed to rasp out, “Where?”
“On the back of a sun in the Sphere below Lower Heaven
.”
My muddled brain took a moment to grasp this; when it did, I realized the fog that rolled around us was, in fact, a cloud. I’d seen wispy ones as a child, but none for years.
“Can you sit up?”
The binding had been wound under my left arm, leaving it free. So I used my good arm to slowly, carefully, push myself up. My other arm ached profoundly with each pulse of blood, and I felt woozy, but managed.
“Here.” Ali extended the wineskin. “A gift from the Angels. It will dull the pain.”
Taking the skin from her, I tried an experimental sip. It tasted good. I drank again, and the wine burned down my throat and coursed through my chest and into my limbs. After taking another swig, I tried to hand it back to her. She waved it away.
“Keep it.”
The cloud was on the wane, and I could see her more clearly now. A white bandage, with a dark stain at the temple, had been wrapped around her head. She looked at me, but her face held none of the anger or resentment to which I’d become accustomed; instead, it was strangely blank, as if I didn’t matter in the least to her. And perhaps I didn’t, now that we were out of Heaven. “How long?”
“You’ve been out for three days.”
As if in answer, my stomach grumbled loudly.
“We’ve no food.”
“I’m not hungry,” I lied. “What . . . what happened?”
“The Church breached Lower Heaven. This is a way out that’s not watched.” Ali frowned. “The Angels told me you killed Raphael. Is this true?”
I took a good swig this time, wanting to dull the memory. “Yes.”
Ali stared off into the fog, saying nothing.
I hadn’t expected gratitude; neither had I expected to experience a twinge of guilt for what I’d done. Yet I did. “It attacked you.”
She shook her head slowly.
“Raphael wounded you—”
“You petitioned the Angels to stop speaking to me. That is what Raphael was doing when you killed it.” She touched her bandage lightly, then looked at me. “They did this to me to please you, David.”
The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven Page 26
