Grace

by Calvin Baker

  In the morning all the priests were found slaughtered. The boys were forced from the grounds, and scattered before the wind like seeds. “We are natural men, who have been spirited into an unnatural world, let us live as we were meant to again and forever. Return to your villages and bear witness to what happened here,” he declared in his sermon that morning at Mass, before setting the campus ablaze.

  When the fire was high enough that it glowed in the black of his eyes, he saw inside at the windows three novices who had not evacuated, but hidden in the dorms for fear they were dead to their people and would not be accepted back.

  They escaped the inferno in time. Shadrach, Mesach, Abednego, as he called them when he enlisted them under his command, and set out with his army of ninth-graders to cleanse the world.

  First they set out to rid the country of churches. Next they set upon government, then schools, jails, corporations, institutions of any sort.

  Those who did not question on this first campaign, who did not buck, did not break, did not die, were elevated to be Achilles’ lieutenants, as he himself was God’s lieutenant on earth, holding court in lieu of the Almighty.

  “Under what authority do you serve?” A new recruit once asked, challenging their leader’s command, after his own village had been put to sword.

  “The Society of the Virgin,” answered Achilles. “She came to me in a vision, and revealed that I am the son of Christ. The Holy Spirit, it works through me.”

  “Which Virgin?”

  “The Black Virgin. Mother of the Blessed. Protector of the Lost.”

  Sometime after that they were on maneuvers in the mountains, and he was pinned down by enemy fire, and Achilles knew he had been betrayed. They had just passed through the village of another of his lieutenants, and that man-child had sold out his brothers-in-arms in favor of the mother who first birthed him.

  They fought through the night, outgunned and losing soldiers by the score, then the hundreds, between the edge of the jungle and the mountain’s sheer rock cliff. He was a leader who, since he first understood his call, had known no doubt, but he meditated all that night on the fault of his ways, and made a vow before sunrise. If he emerged from that deluge he would purify and rededicate himself to his cause.

  By miracle, they claimed, they lived to see the next day. His entire regiment had been decimated, save five others, four who were loyal and the one who sold him from weakness. They gave thanks nonetheless that morning, and in observance he bestowed on each survivor a new name, as the sun sprang its first pink knuckle from its nighttime grave, and the dew of first day seeped through their gear, chilling their skin.

  Isaac he rechristened Jeremiah. Who was Esau became Obadiah. An albino boy, also called Isaac, he baptized as Isaac once more, and Isaac went after that by the name II Isaac. The fourth and most faithful he blessed with Daniel. These were the prophets of suffering, and the leaders of the First Army of Innocence, as they were then called.

  The child called Chausiku at home and Uriah at school, he sprinkled with water from the lake, kissed him on the mouth, and called him brother. When he administered the sacrament he gave to him the new name Jude. The outfit that before had been the Army of Innocents was innocent no longer, and became thereafter the Army of Revelation. He himself he crowned Job, because he was come to suffer. Where they had been confused before, they knew exactly what they did now. They set out to reveal.

  “Jesus forgives your sins, Jude, my brother,” Job said softly. “They were caused because you love your mother and are a mamma’s son. You thought the village mothers could save you from the wrath of the Father. Only repent and renounce Satan, who misled you, and all his Works, once again, and from this day forward.”

  “I renounce them,” Jude said. “Satan, and all his works.”

  “Amen. But before you can sin again you must leave the earth for the kingdom.” He dispatched him then, sending his friend to meet his Maker in a state of purity. “Here on earth I alone make peace. I alone create evil. I am judge of men, and judge of judges, and judge of kings. You I deny.”

  He no longer trusted those local to the region after that, and put out the call for recruits and comrades in all parts of the world, who would come into that jungle Eden with him, and reclaim it from wickedness. “The earth has become unnatural, and it is time for us to live again according to the laws of nature, and not Satan in the halls of power.”

  They heard his call, and came to him from all over the world. And he looked through the clarity of each eye, down until he could see the silver mark on every translucent heart; read the prayer engraved on each numinous, golden soul. Some he enlisted and others he sent away. Those he drew to him were culled from every war zone and every refugee camp and every ghetto, every occupied land and every crippled way of life. Whosoever was put upon. Whosoever was misunderstood. Whoever was wretched, and whose idols had been smashed, clung to him, to help pull down their oppressors in a cataclysm they said would equal the first fall.

  They were all young as he, all veterans of other wars, and all saw visions of a new world, perfect and pure, to which they were devoted even beyond life.

  In the most lawless stretch of the interior they laid hold to a city-state the size of Acadia, protected by the jungle, that in turn grew into a country the size of the Louisiana Purchase, in which they destroyed all roads, all telephone lines, all power cables, tax collection, any instrument of the modern world, to cut off contamination.

  In the new land they fashioned fishhooks from bones, and medicine from tree barks and herbs native to the soil. They wove their own clothing, cooked their food in stone pots they carved from the mountain. There was no science beyond warfare, which they waged without cease on the corrupt world beyond their borders. Inside the republic they lived free and unstained.

  From the center Job sent deacons south, west, and north to cleanse all corruption, while he himself held the eastern country absolute as the sun. “I am the sun,” he would declare one day, as the rebellion began to unravel from within. “I will bring light to evil, and wash away sin with perfection.”

  He was thirty-two then, and had never known a woman’s embrace, and made virginity a requisite for all his soldiers. Only those who were not stained by sins of the flesh could be pure, and those who were not pure existed to be cleansed.

  He put his stone knife through those who were not pure, one by one, so they could die pure in the jungle Eden. “You go to heaven now,” he proclaimed, in a madness so broken and scrambled it began to make a new sense. “Here I am ruler, and will commit this crime so that the next generation will abide no impurity.”

  Only the children were granted reprieve, to become the base of his new army and his new world. The adults he captured were put to work in mines, toiling ceaselessly by day to harvest ore, iron, copper, gold, coltan, and by night to produce soldiers.

  “All good is built upon wickedness. From the broken world we forge a whole one.” From the fertilizer of death sprang the new crop of purity.

  To his army of orphans he gave the steel of arms to defend the new world, promising none should ever lord over them again. He was their Lord, permanent as the sun.

  Five years more they raged through the jungle under his command. The more they succeeded, the greater the resistance from the outside became, until he needed stronger guns to defend against stronger enemies. These he acquired from what he could pay in gold from the mines, and all were eager to deal with him.

  “Colonel,” asked one of his lieutenants, who would become the head of the first breakaway faction, “does this mean we have come to accept the tenets of capitalism? Is it not an unnatural way to be?”

  “War costs. We are only trading rocks from the ground that have no meaning to us, for guns that do. This one thing to Caesar, until he too can be cleansed. As for the capitalists, they are only babes, suckling in their nannies’ arms, who would not survive a season here in the mountains.”

  “Are we in that case with the
Communists?” A new recruit asked, bewildered.

  “We are free, and beyond isms. To show how free I will baptize the souls of a thousand slavers, and we will have a feast to celebrate their ascension.”

  He could afford his magnanimity. By then he commanded a world larger than Charlemagne’s Reich, and there was not an army on the continent the equal of his. He was thirty-seven then, the age we will all be in heaven, and he was at the height of his power.

  When he died in that jungle his commanders found his plague-stricken body, and eulogized him, realizing how little they had known him. They did not even know what name to write on his grave. Some argued for Achilles Asha, others for Job, and another faction argued that though he had changed his name and changed it again, these were merely the fictions he had lived by in the world, and he also possessed a secret name. This died with him. And in death, as in life, he was powerless to change it. His true name.

  While he lived the army went undefeated, but two generations after independence, what remained of the three armies that succeeded him was a single regiment, scattered piecemeal through the jungle, oblivious to borders, but reunited on the mountain where Achilles had made his first miraculous stand, and where they would make their last if need be—supported by a single mine, of copper not gold, and whence they would set forth again to claim and purify the earth.

  They were virgins, and so long as they knew not the sins of the flesh God would be on their side, and their struggle was permanent as the blood red sun.

  These were our captors.

  “How do you live with yourselves?” Effie asked, as we neared their mountain in the late afternoon light. “Why do you hate so much?”

  Their officer looked out over the receding jungle with the disquieting calm and self-command of those inured to death. “I do not have to answer this insolence, sister. But I will share with you a secret. Death is natural. Yours, mine, everyone’s. I do not hate you, or anyone, even those I kill. All must die. Perhaps our enemies hate us, but to our view, the missionaries and colonizers—who came and stole the land from the old generation and then stole a new generation from the land—acted according to nothing but the perfection of their own purpose. To the extent they succeeded at that we salute them. They were excellent slavers, and excellent missionaries, doing whatever they thought was required of them to further their own way of life. We intend the same, according to a new purpose, to unwind history by our own thread. It is not personal. In another context I would be the implement of your desire—you would order me as you willed, Lord I Peter, stop blaspheming and fetch me a Tusker—so it is a question of subject and object. Who and Whom. ”

  The truck bounded over the broken road as our guards fixed their ears on their leader and their hardened stares on us. We continued up the mountainside, powerless, toward their camp.

  “Why are you with the missionaries, eh?” their leader asked, picking me out from the others.

  “I am not with them,” I said calmly. He was nothing more than another sociopath, and I did not want to give him anything to seize on. “I am only with her.”

  “She is a nun,” he laughed, looking at Sylvie with his red-rimmed eyes. He had spotted the bracelet on her wrist, which he now took in his battered hands, as a look of abject terror inched across her face.

  “Why is she wearing the rosary?”

  “It is from me,” I said.

  “A present must be of gold,” he laughed. “It is a rosary.” His voice contained a preternatural calmness. He was in his element, and it was nothing for him to kill. He only needed a reason, and he would take a life as simply as blowing out a match. Or no reason at all.

  “It is just a bracelet.” I feigned indifference, which I had for myself, but not for her.

  “You are not a Christ bride, sister?” he asked.

  “No. She is mine.”

  “You are a race-mixer, my brother,” he grinned a demented grimace.

  I did not want to give him fodder for his lunacy and stared straight ahead.

  “The chief spoke to you. Answer him,” one of his minions threatened.

  “What you call race is a lie,” I said.

  “Ah. You are a white man.”

  “I am black as you.”

  “You are impure.”

  “Purity is a worse lie.”

  I did not want to debate the eighteenth century, and especially not with an armed madman. To my relief, though, he let go of her wrist for the moment, but as he turned away his eye caught mine in a different way. I saw him registering something as a flickering passed behind his thoughts. He saw me then, and that I was not afraid of him. I knew we were marked. He had released her wrist and the bracelet, though, for the time being, as we continued up the mountain, ascending to their base.

  35

  We were at the base of the mountain inside the damp clouds. Above us the lights from their camp were visible as a diffuse glow, refracted by the water vapor. The buzz of activity reached our ears from the camp, filling us with alternating currents of fear of the strange voices and fear of an unknown fate, as they forced us from the truck and started marching us upslope.

  Sylvie was shaking as we climbed down from the truck, and I offered my hand to steady her in the condensed stillness, where all was quiet except the spray of pebbles from our boots as we ascended a narrow trail through the cloud forest.

  When we had climbed more than an hour the path began thinning out even further, forcing us to scramble in single file up the steepest part of the slope, searching in the thickening darkness for handholds to help pull ourselves up when the ground fell away uncertainly.

  We were slowed to a near halt, as the boots of the person in front cleated the dust down onto whoever was next, so that the line was stretched out forty feet against the face of the mountain. Two of the guards stood up ahead. To intimidate us, two were on either side of the group hectoring to speed us up, and another in the rear. Sylvie and I were near the last in line and the darkness was almost palpable by then, as we shivered from sweat and exertion.

  The guards were growing agitated, visibly eager to get to the light and warmth of their camp, which could be seen clearly now, casting its steady glow out into the ravines opening below us.

  “Whatever happens keep your head,” I said, as we neared the two soldiers at the midpoint of the slope.

  “Quiet,” their shouts rained down on us from above. “No talking.” They climbed like rams, and our slow-going was keeping them in the cold, away from their cooking fires, which we had started to smell. When we looked up we saw the front of our line had started to disappear into the mouth of the cave, and I grasped Sylvie’s wrist to hold her there.

  “Wait here.”

  The Aussie, who was ahead of us, looked back with annoyance, knowing we would only incite the guard’s anger again, and that they would have plenty of time to take it out on all of us. He was right, but I waved him off, as the guard in back started yelling, scrambling angrily up the loose sides of the mountain to vent his rage. When he had closed the distance, and his hand raised to strike me, I threw myself hard down the slope at him, spiking my feet into his legs. My boot landed at his knee joint, and he tumbled over. Sylvie had already started scrambling down in a bolt of adrenaline as I grappled in the dust with the guard.

  “Harper,” she yelled.

  I shouted for her to keep running and not to stop. I had caught the guard by surprise, but he was recovering from the initial shock, and searching with his hand for his holstered pistol. I managed to pin him briefly, but he freed himself, and we started to crash down the mountain as we fought and struggled, until we smashed brutally against a ledge. I managed to grab hold of a loose stone, and pounded it down as hard as I could to his head. He was stunned into stillness, and I claimed the pistol from his dazed hand, and scrambled to get away before his comrades could capture me and claim their revenge.

  High above the others heard the commotion, and the soldiers began throwing themselves down the mou
ntain in a rush to get to us before we were out of their grasp. I could see their silhouettes, but was uncertain if they had a bead on me, only that they were making steady progress. I threw myself off the ledge, diving headlong into one of the ravines below, where I crashed hard into the rocks and thorny underbrush.

  The noise had let them know my location, and they began aiming their flashlights to track me down in the darkness. I aimed a shot right into the light, which went black and held them off for a time.

  Sylvie was a good way down the mountain by then, and I began after her as another flashlight started to play over the ground. I heard shots ring from their guns and ricochet against the stones around me. I took careful aim, then fired again, trying to hold them back at least until I could no longer see Sylvie below.

  The pistol was a forty-caliber Sig, and held a dozen shots. I only fired when I saw something moving, to make them consider how much it was worth it, and to know that if they caught me, it would not be with rounds left in the gun.

  The darkness was gathering quickly; as I reached the cloud layer it grew near impossible to see, but I kept an eye trained for the soldiers and the other trained below to make out Sylvie’s silhouette until she was out of range.

  Around me several shots rang from above as I inched my way forward, but I had the cover of a boulder in the ravine and the shots struck some distance away, telling me they did not have a clear line of sight. I pressed myself against the ravine floor, and began picking my way down on my haunches. The spiny burrs stung my legs, and the rocks began to slide unstably down the trail with me.

  The dust rose and rose as I slid, until all of a sudden I sensed myself falling straight down a gap in the pitch darkness, and it was then the shots burst closer. I suddenly felt something strangely warm pin me to the ground violently, and reached my hand out in the darkness to investigate, as the warmth turned fiery hot and began circulating through my body.