by Ted Dekker
He could not look them in the eye. He could not meet the hard gazes of the zealots, their jaws clenched tight beneath the bright sun. The Keeper’s lost stare.
“We mourn him, and we celebrate him. We do both, because he did what he came to do, even if not in a way we understood. He taught us what it was to live. Not for an idea or for an Order, but for the sake of life itself. He taught us to love. And now his legacy lives in our veins. We will remember Jonathan always—not as a boy, or as a man who spilled his blood, but as our true Sovereign. We will remember and honor him forever as the embodiment of life, of love, of beauty.”
He hesitated, but there were no more words. He could not tell them any more, because there was no more that he knew.
Why, Jonathan?
Nine years. So many lives. So much hope.
Rom nodded at Roland, mounted beside him. The prince lifted his chin.
“Today we stand as a race of the living!” His voice carried over the field. “We are broken in number, but victorious. A race that will live forever.”
A few nods among the zealots.
“We will live! We will protect our life, zealously, to the death. Never again will any harm come to the pure of blood. Today we send the bodies of those who have fallen to the sky. Today we who yet live will rise, determined, never again to court death. I say to all those who would rob us of life, ‘Die in your own grave. Our blood knows no end!’ ”
Rom glanced at the stark lines of his face, as hard and resolute as his words. He returned Rom’s look without a hint of conciliation. He doubted he would ever again look the same to Roland’s eyes.
So be it.
They swung down from their horses. Together they lifted Jonathan’s body off the cart. Jordin hovered near, holding the ceramic jars containing Jonathan’s blood close to her chest.
They lowered his body into the ground. Too pale, too light, drained of its blood. Too lifeless to be the boy Rom had known. They Keeper lowered himself into the grave, took the jars one by one from Jordin, and set them in a bed of straw next to the body. When he tried to climb out, his strength suddenly failed and Roland had to help him.
Rom lifted a handful of earth and willed his fingers to release it into the grave.
Anathema. Blasphemy, to see it fall upon that supine body.
He released the dirt onto Jonathan’s torso, then stepped to one side. Roland came forward and did the same. Jordin dropped only an armful of flowers atop the smatterings of dirt, sobbing all the while. One by one the rest of the procession came, the children last of all tossing anemones into the grave. And then the Keepers were there with their spades.
Rom turned away, looking toward the west, squinting at the sun.
They buried the rest of the Keepers in the long burrow beyond Jonathan’s grave.
By the time they’d placed the Nomads upon the pyre and set the fires, the sun had begun to set in splendid amber on the horizon.
The fires roared and crackled, lighting up the northern sky.
There were no songs. No stories of exploits of the fallen. None of the usual celebration could find footing amidst the flames of so many burning bodies.
The mass funeral consumed the day. Family members hovered over graves and smoking pyres until dusk, some feeding small meals to children beneath the first stars, others refusing or unable to eat. The embers would continue to burn into the night and morning.
Rom stood staring at the waning fire, aware only of the lone grave apart from the others. Jonathan had always been apart, alone. But there was Jordin, beside him even now in the twilight, watering his grave with her tears.
A terrible loneliness settled over him. He felt utterly lost. Abandoned in the middle of the battlefield where… where what? A victory had been won? History had been changed? Love had conquered?
Was this victory or the making of history? Was this love?
A step at his side. He hadn’t noticed Roland’s approach until the prince was at his shoulder. For a moment neither spoke.
“And now?” Rom said, without turning.
Roland quietly exhaled. “We continue as we have for centuries.”
“To what end?”
At last, the prince turned toward him in the darkness. “I know this is a hard day for you, but you must remember what the boy left us. We live as Mortals, full of his life. This was his purpose.”
“To die? I can’t believe that.”
“Believe as you will. As for me, I believe he lived to give life, and when that life left his blood, he willingly died. Now my people will take the power he gave us and fulfill our destiny. We, not Jonathan, will rule the world. Perhaps this was always the way it was to be.”
Could he have been so wrong? If Roland was right, this was only the beginning. But they didn’t rule. And there were fewer Mortals alive now than before. But even as the questions warred within him, he knew one thing for certain.
“We will honor his death forever,” he said.
Roland turned toward the smoking pyres. “We will honor his death by living forever.”
This new preoccupation seemed seared into Roland. Just as he had fused his people with their identity as Nomads, he would now draw them into his new mission: to live as a superior race that answered to no one but their prince.
How was that so different from the mission of the Dark Bloods?
“What will you do?”
“I will take my people north. We will regroup and grow stronger. When the day comes, we will do what is necessary.”
“What day?”
“The day we overcome all oppression and rule.”
Rule how? Rom wanted to ask. But instead, he only nodded.
The prince dipped his head and walked away.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
FOR TWO DAYS, the Seyala Valley lay under the gloom of shattered hope and mangled dreams. Under Rom’s orders the ruin’s stone courtyard had been washed clean of blood and the inner sanctum left vacant. Some of the yurts had been erected, but many slept in temporary shelters made of canvas flaps. Night fires burned, but the songs and dancing that had once filled the valley were not to be seen or heard except on the north end, where some of the Nomads raged about their exploits in war and spoke of coming days of glory.
Triphon’s dead body served as a constant and macabre reminder of defeat. Rom resisted questions as to the sanity of leaving a dead body exposed and defied mounting pressure to give Triphon a proper burial. Instead, he agreed to move the post with Triphon’s body to the side of the ruins where it was not so flagrantly visible.
The greater question confronting them all was far more urgent: what about those who still lived?
There was no Mortal Sovereign to take the seat of power. No new kingdom to waken the world to life. No miraculous and fanatical boy to inspire hope. No promise of life beyond that which already ran, rampant but aimless, in their own veins.
Only a broken valley with ruins bathed in the memory of blood.
Nothing made sense.
The council had met twice in an attempt to find consensus, but no clear path could be agreed upon. Rom and the Keepers were too distraught with the inequity of Jonathan’s death to even consider direction, let alone the future. How could the one who’d promised them a new kingdom have removed that possibility by offering up his own life? In his slaughter of the Dark Bloods, he’d displayed more skill and strength than any Mortal might have expected of him. Why, then, had he bared his chest and given up the sword to Saric? Why?
The sky might have cleared, but the valley was shrouded in the thick fog of confusion and grief.
Even Roland, so steadfast in his resolve to see their new race of Nomads rise in power, offered few particulars as to how they should proceed.
North, yes. With full life, yes. But what of the expectation for freedom and autonomy embraced by his people during Jonathan’s life? What now?
Jordin was rarely seen in the valley, preferring instead the company of Jonathan’s grave. Rom had
gone to the plateau on the eve of the second night to meditate and found her curled up next to the freshly disturbed earth, asleep. He’d sat down and watched the steady rise and fall of her breathing, trying for the hundredth time to make sense of the questions that flooded his mind.
He had never known Jonathan to speak untruth or to mislead. Then what had he meant in saying on the day of his death that he was bringing a new realm of Sovereignty? And how could he, when his blood had lost its potency?
Was it possible Jonathan had simply succumbed to the pressure of expectation that he would deliver them all? To the years of being bled, viewed less and less as a boy and more as a vessel of power?
Was it their own fault that they had pushed a fragile boy to grow into a leader that he had not owned the strength to become?
What could it mean to follow him as he’d urged in his last days? How did one follow the dead?
What of the storm and earthquake? Some called it the Maker’s Hand. Others said it was nothing more than a terrible storm.
For that matter, did the Maker even exist? Some said no—how could He, given all that had happened? What had happened in Jonathan’s blood was a matter of genetics, of science, and not mystery. Two days earlier, Rom would have derided them as blind and ungrateful, but how could he today? Why would a Maker allow the one source of true life to die?
Everything he’d believed had been thrown into doubt.
And Feyn… what of her? What had they agreed to at their summit? Why had she fled after delivering him to Saric, never once looking back?
As for Saric… His slaying of Jonathan was clearly a victory, but what of his apparent breakdown before Jonathan? And where had he gone?
The questions refused to abate as he returned to camp, leaving Jordin to her exhausted sleep as day turned to night, and night to day.
The evening before, Roland announced that he and twenty Immortals were journeying north the next day. They would find a new valley in which to rebuild. There was no longer a reason to remain close to the city. He had no more clear direction than that, only that it was time for his people to embrace their new life and to consider the centuries before them.
It would mean a split between those Keepers and Nomads who wished to remain close to Byzantium with Rom and those forsaking any further notion of bringing life to the world’s capital city.
That night, sleep came hard, and then only in confused snatches. Rom tossed, writhing with the same questions, reliving again and again every encounter with Jonathan the last days of his life until his dreams became a jumbled collage.
“Jonathan?” he whispered once, into the darkness. Feeling foolish, he closed his eyes. Finally, he slept.
Rom.
A whisper from the ether of sleep.
Rom.
I know the way.
But there was no way. He’d known it once with the surety of his every conviction, and it had failed him.
Rom.
Something nudged him.
No, not something, but someone.
“Rom. Rom!”
His eyes snapped wide and he stared up into a face in the darkness. Round eyes peered at him from a smudged, tearstained face. Her hair was a knotted mess.
Rom sat up. “Jordin?”
She stood with her arms limp at her side, looking half crazed.
So it was catching.
“Jordin. What is it?”
Had Saric returned? Feyn? Was Roland leaving under cover of the night?
“I know what he meant,” she whispered. “I know what we need to do.”
“What who meant, Jordin?”
“Jonathan told us to follow him. He told me. He made me promise. I know what he meant.”
The poor girl was breaking, undone by grief and her refusal to eat.
He sighed and ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Please, Jordin… You have to get some rest.”
“I know how to follow him,” she said.
“He’s dead, Jordin! You have to accept that.”
She merely stared at him.
He sighed, closed his eyes and opened them again, willing himself to patience.
“All right. Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how to follow a dead man.”
“We have to take his blood.”
He returned her stare, not sure whether to be horrified or laugh at her.
“We already have his blood.”
“We have his old blood.”
“We have the blood he gave us when he was alive!”
“It’s in his blood.”
She said it all as if were obvious, so simple.
“Jordin. He’s in the earth. His blood is that of a corpse—literally.”
“It’s in the blood. There are three vessels of blood in his grave.”
“What are you saying? That we dig him up and drink a corpse’s blood?” The thought curdled his stomach.
“No, we inject it into our veins, as we did before.”
“Jordin, he’s dead! The blood is probably congealed by now.”
“Then we die, too, with his blood in our veins. He said to follow him. He said it to me, he said it to you, he said it to all of us. We have to dig his body up and take his blood. We have to follow him.”
He fell back down onto an elbow. “You can’t be serious.”
“Will you help me?”
The words Jonathan had shouted to Corpse and Mortal alike from the temple steps whispered through his mind. Find life and know that the realm of Sovereigns is upon you.
The demand had haunted him. What could find mean? Not you have found, but find.
In any case, Jonathan surely hadn’t meant for them to dig up his grave.
“Jordin, please… The Keeper tested Jonathan’s blood and found no properties of—”
“He said to follow him.”
“Yes, but not by dying!”
“He said his blood was being spilled for the world.”
Spill my blood and drain it for this world. He’d taken the words to be the desperate cry of one about to die.
“Yes. He said that. But if he wanted us to dig up his body and take his blood, he would’ve made it clear.”
“Jonathan always hid the truth for those who would find it,” she said. “I’m going, whether you help me or not.”
She actually meant to do this.
What if she’s right?
He got to his feet and paced, suddenly seized by the notion, however unlikely. Why had they assumed that Jonathan’s blood would mature by becoming a stronger version of what it had been rather than something new altogether? And yet, assuming the boy knew, why hadn’t he said anything to that effect?
Or had he?
“I’m getting a shovel,” Jordin said, spinning around to leave.
“Wait!”
She turned back.
“Hold on. We can’t just desecrate his grave by digging up his body! It’s revered by a thousand Mortals!”
“By me more than any of them,” she said. “I’m getting a shovel.”
“And then what?”
“Then I follow him in his death. I take the blood he spilled when he died. That’s what he meant. That’s what I’ll do.”
“We should ask the Keeper.”
“No. If you won’t help me, I’ll go alone.”
He thought a moment longer, then grabbed his boots and tugged them on. “We leave his body in the ground.”
“Of course. Do I look like a savage?”
Yes.
He grabbed his jacket. “Get the shovel.”
It took Rom and Jordin twenty minutes to find a shovel and ride up to Jonathan’s grave. The night was still, long past the hour of insect song—a good two hours before the first birds came to life. Before them, the slightly rounded mound of dirt looked as dormant and lifeless as the body they’d buried beneath it.
To Rom’s right lay the long burial mound of those other Keepers, a raised scar on the surface of the earth. It still smelled of earth, fresh as
upturned grass and rain over the flesh decaying beneath. A sacred monument of death for those who lived to remember life.
And now they were about to desecrate the monument cherished most of all. For a moment he gave in to misgiving.
“We’re doing this based on pure conjecture,” he said.
“We’re doing this because I saw it in his eyes.”
“The eyes are easily misread, Jordin.”
“His eyes promised me love. Does love kill hope?”
Rom looked up at the round moon, a bright beacon in the star-speckled heavens. They had remained cloudless in the days since Jonathan’s death—rare, though not unheard of. The storm that had accompanied his death, on the other hand, had been singular.
The Maker’s Hand. If it was true—if it was possible—that it had bent toward earth in that moment, did its touch linger still?
Rom considered Jordin, looking so expectantly at him, her last question lingering in the air. And then he picked up the shovel and pressed it into the earth. A few seconds later, he tossed the first heap of soil aside.
They took turns at the shovel, heaping the dirt carefully to one side so it could be easily replaced as the grave slowly yawned opened beneath them.
There. The first glimpse of a dirty shroud.
Sweating from the work, hands raw as his emotions, Rom dropped the shovel behind him. He dropped into the grave and carefully scooped the remaining earth away from the top of the body, unable to staunch the image of that sword impossibly flashing beneath the darkened sky. Twice, he turned his face into his arm, seemingly at the smell of the corpse, already decomposing, but mostly against the memory of Jonathan falling forward on the temple steps.
And then he carefully continued clearing the dirt away from the three ceramic vessels set around his head. Red. The color of ochre and earth and blood.
He glanced up at Jordin, who looked as pale as a ghost in the moonlight, her eyes struck wide, fixed on the body. Tears shone in her eyes, broke down her cheek. But she did not turn away.
She dropped to her knees, reached down for each container as he handed it to her, handling it as gingerly as though it were made of eggshell.
