Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Stephen taps his staff against the dog’s flank, to keep her from snarling. “It’s in code?” The traveler grubs about in his sack. He withdraws a moldy crust, which he shares with the boy. The man’s poverty boosts Stephen’s confidence. Thanking the man for the food, he asks, “Where should I deliver the letter?” He adds hopefully, “The village is just that way.”

  The Pilgrim places a parchment, heavy under its seal, in the child’s hands. “You will bring this to the king of France.”

  At the touch of the man’s hand, Stephen falls to his knees and begins crying. Sucking air, he manages to gasp, “Why me?”

  The Pilgrim, already halfway down the rise, calls out the answer that Stephen most dreads. “I choose one who follows my profession.” The innocent sheep kneel as one beast across the field, praying for absolution.

  At night, after bringing his flock in, as his family gathers noisily around its late meal, Stephen announces into his soup, “I must go to the city.”

  His father bats him across the head with an elbow, automatic, businesslike. The younger ones snicker, and receive similar treatment.

  Comic interlude turns into clamor when Stephen clarifies. He doesn’t mean Vendôme or even Orléans, an already-impossible fifty miles away. “I must go to Paris.” Father looks wearily at mother to discipline the outrage. She brains the boy and washes his mouth out with scalding lard. Dinner breaks up early.

  He could tell them of the message and the man who set it in his hands. One word, and his family would fall at his feet and beg forgiveness. Instead, for reasons left undrawn, he chooses to slip out early, before daybreak, stealing the best pair of trekking shoes and some stale rinds destined for the feed bin. He ties the letter firmly to his forearm. He runs from the farm in the dark, choosing a random direction, running anywhere, so long as it is away and unseen.

  When it grows light, Stephen stumbles upon a village and orients himself. He points himself northeast and keeps walking. It will take weeks to reach the goal he’s been given. He wanders alone at a time when the average adult traveler would not last an afternoon against human ingenuity. “The Pilgrim would not have sent me off without providing for my safety.” He puts up for the night in a hayrick, his belly nagging like a scythe wound.

  An angel wakes him at daylight. Graphic match: a beautiful girl, perhaps a year younger than he, shakes his shoulder, calling, “Wake up! What do you think you’re doing here?”

  He begs some milk and a bit of bread, which his angel supplies with scorn. Then he tells her, whispering, that the Savior has sent him to the king of France, bearing a message about the end of the world. She hisses at him until he pulls up his sleeve and shows her the letter fastened there. She touches him gingerly on the muscle, and a delicious pain shoots through him, a change he can’t understand. She studies him, amazed, and begs to be allowed to come along.

  “Go on, then. Collect provisions, as much as you can carry. Then meet me down by the stile.” She returns with a sister, also inflamed by the cause, carrying food, clothing, even a blanket. By midmorning, they are five, having met and bragged of the goal to two of the girls’ village friends along the road. They sleep in an open field, together, happy as they have never been, singing religious tunes until they pass unconscious.

  They travel in greater safety now, occasionally stealing an egg or two for the Lord’s breakfast. To the rare adult who stops and challenges the little band upon the route, the girl lies sweetly, “We are cleaning the weeds off roadside crosses.” Stephen cannot help noticing: her face grows beautiful, flushes rose with excitement when she invents the truth. They are joined by a boy named Luc, richer than all of them combined, and another named Henri, who has a dog that knows the useful trick of digging up carrots. They share all things among them, as needed. At night, they trade off standing watch.

  Before the week is out, they number twenty. Stephen finds it steadily harder to keep track of this swelling flock. They can no longer move without attracting attention. But something astonishing happens as they reach this critical mass. A family of farmers offers them shelter inside a basse-cour and sends them off the next morning laden with goods. The same implausible transaction repeats itself the following evening. People ask for nothing but to be remembered along the pilgrimage route.

  They lie in such a courtyard one night, four dozen children from eight to sixteen, decked out happily amid the animal stalls. They have already reached the woods that ring the royal domains. They will enter the capital in just days. Stephen lies quietly in the stall next to his angel girl. One of the older boys, a monastery runaway, finds him there.

  “What does the letter say, Stephen?”

  Stephen smiles inwardly and recites the passage the Pilgrim told him. The whole band knows the message by heart, and the runaway novitiate asks for it much the way that the youngest asks for the same story about the cock, the hare, and the cow each night before she can fall asleep.

  “Is it in French?”

  “How should I know?” Stephen shrugs. “Is that important?”

  “The words allude to those of Saint John, describing his vision on the island of Patmos.”

  “A-allude?” Stephen stutters suspiciously.

  “Do you know what the note means? It means our parents have failed us.”

  Stephen rubs the back of his head, still smarting from the punishment his mother never suspected would be his send-off.

  “And not just our own parents.” The older boy employs all the rhetorical skill the monks imparted to him. “The entire older generation. They have lost sight of God’s desires.” In quick pastel flashback, he tells Stephen of the four great campaigns to retrieve the Holy City, narrating the sad degradation of the blessed quest over a century and a quarter—from the first inspired flame to the sack of the Church’s Eastern capital.

  A change works its way over Stephen as he considers the message he has been entrusted with. Suddenly, its import is clear. The king they must serve as messenger is not the corrupted, human one. They, this band of a few dozen children, are meant to satisfy the Creator’s will all by themselves. They will succeed where their parents failed. They must convert the unbeliever, recover the Holy Sepulcher, besiege the city of Jerusalem by love, doing what force of arms could not.

  Yes—this was the Pilgrim’s intention from the start. I choose one who follows my profession. By morning, Stephen finds a new strength and gentleness. He addresses his collected charges after breakfast with a mix of love and fervor. “We are not on our way to Paris after all.”

  Not? Where then?

  To the sea, by the most expedient route. Over the water to the towers of Civitas Dei. Let anyone who cannot aspire to reach there in perfect love turn back now, to France, to the world of things.

  Not a child does. The band reconnoiters momentarily at St.-Denis, where a flaming sermon by the boy contrasts the conditions of the two sepulchers, this one flourishing, while the Lord’s decays in pagan hands. The ranks of infant infantry swell with all those young enough to hear. Parents cannot reduce the stream of volunteers. The French king, as Stephen feared, bans the crusade, and professors at the earthly university declare it satanic. This is all the confirmation he needs: they must brave this alone.

  The children swing south, where their cascading march gains a grip on the rural mind. By the time they reach Dijon, where they muster at the basilica, they number in the thousands. “And yet,” the text interlude asks, “can even ten thousand children go against the warriors of Islam? One child would suffice to succeed where the compromise of adulthood failed. One little child once did far more.”

  Aching with resolution, Stephen turns away all petitioners over sixteen. The cause must be pure this time, untainted by anything past the first stages of innocence. The angel, his first recruit, infected by his seriousness, shaves her radiant hair and takes up walking in the rear, with the baggage train. Stephen continues to think of her at night, despite fasting, flagellation, and prayer.

 
They walk along in immense double file, a thread so long the middle can’t see the end. A mélange of dialects fills the air, translated by magic. Here and there, children adopt a uniform—gray shift, palmer’s staff, scraps of cloth sewn into a cross on the breast. Nights are steeped in fireside telling: fables, tales, legends, gests, sparked inventions to link each life to the great contour. But none of these asides can match the allegory they make now. By days, marching, they sing, several thousand voices in monodic unison, “O Lord, restore us to the True Cross.”

  The year is strange beyond interpreting. Overland reports tell of epochal animal convocations—fish, fowl, frogs, insects—massing for deciding diets. Dogs from all France and beyond assemble to fight their civil war. The beasts, in their spotlessness, know.

  Deeper into Burgundy, on the road, in the brightness of midsummer, a voice near Stephen calls out a surprised “Hello!” Stephen spins around to greet it, but the caller is nowhere.

  He has walked too far; he’s begun hearing things. But he must walk many times farther still, before reaching home. “Hello?” Stephen murmurs, more to himself than to the phantom.

  “That’s the way!” The voice comes back, no more than twelve inches from Stephen’s ears. “That’s it. It’s working!”

  A close-up catches the alarm on Stephen’s features. But his skin, in its silver youth, still proclaims the blessedness of those who believe without yet having seen. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  A burst of giggle betrays that the hidden speaker is even younger than Stephen, ten years old at the most. “My name is Nicolas. I come from Cologne.” (An insert shows the spire-line of the city, with a blowup of its greatest treasure—the fabulous golden Magi reliquary, containing Barbarossa’s three crusade-booty skeletons, one a milk-toothed boy.) “At the moment we’re camped outside Koblenz.” As Nicolas speaks, his visage shimmers, solidifying in the air above the French band’s vanguard.

  “Cologne?” Stephen throws his tunic-draped arms up in provincial panic. “But I speak no German!”

  “Don’t let that worry you,” Nicolas giggles. “I don’t know a lick of French, neither.”

  The colored drawings clarify, in wonderful split-framing: a ghostly Nicolas hovering above the Rhône Valley, a disembodied Stephen, inverse fata morgana, over the Rhine. The children who walk nearest Stephen in the snaking column can neither see nor hear anything; their road to Provence is brilliantly Mediterranean, vacant. In half an hour, word ripples through the French ranks that their leader has begun to traffic in miracles.

  The boys feel one another out, unsure whether to wrestle for top spot or swear blood brotherhood. At last Nicolas pouts, “We heard of what you are doing over there, and we want to meet you in the Middle East.”

  “We? How many are you?”

  The German has been waiting for this question. “At present, eleven thousand three hundred and forty-seven. But the lieutenant in cadre six is still counting. We form a six-and-a-half-mile file when flat out.” A little proudly, the kid challenges, “How many are you?”

  Stephen shrugs Gallically over the private, invisible airways. Nicolas mutters the Low German equivalent of “Vive la différence.” Stephen can hear, in the murmuring background, several thousand treble voices raising the chorale “Schönster Herr Jesu, Herrscher aller Erden.”

  The boys stay in constant contact, tying in at least once each evening. Nicolas enjoys charging into Stephen’s ear throughout the day, issuing communiqués about his swelling numbers. Stephen, his own force growing absurdly, gently cautions the boy from time to time. “Remember, if we win the day at Acre and beyond, it will be through love and love only.”

  This sweet upbraiding always results in grumbles. “All right. But love can use a bit of muscle, can’t it?”

  Stephen comes to love the younger boy, however impetuous. They have wonderful theological arguments over whether the kingdom they are preparing will arise, at last, on this earth or on the far side of the heavenly bridge. Stephen encourages Nicolas to try his hand at healing the sick in his company, rather than leaving them along the route. Nicolas in turn endlessly suggests ways that Stephen might coordinate the movements of a migrating band now beyond all counting.

  Nicolas becomes Stephen’s confidant, the repository of hopes and the bulwark against night’s doubt. “How am I to ferry an army of tens of thousands of children safely across the Mediterranean?” Stephen whispers to the ten-year-old, late, from a campsite a week away from that shore.

  “Ha! That’ll be easy. The waters will part in front of our faith, like the sea in front of Moses.” This answer passes confidently up and down Stephen’s column. “I, on the other hand,” counters Nicolas, “have real problems. How am I supposed to port twenty thousand children over the Alps?”

  Nicolas’s logistical difficulties are soon taken out of his hands. He brings his immaculate enterprise as far as Mont Cenis monastery pass. There, Revelation’s field trip begins to break up. His angelically impatient first and second cadres head by shortest route to the sea, via the Ampezzo Valley. Cadres three through five choose less devastating terrain, following the Adige River via Trento and Verona. Nicolas convinces the others that they must cross Lombardy and head toward Genoa to rendezvous with Saint Stephen and the French.

  By the time Stephen reaches Marseilles, all Europe knows what is happening. The continental passage of guiltless children in pursuit of the millennium inflames imaginations from England to Hungary. People throng the roads to meet the crusade, walking for days just to see the battalions pass. Faith renews the dying world with a storming force of naïveté, a little child leading them.

  As they approach the sea, the columns openly chant faith’s refrain. The waters will part, make a land bridge for us to pass. God has taken us this far. All the earth’s oceans will dry; the world will be one, without divisions.

  They parade in confidence up to the shore. But the sea, it stuns them to discover, stays sadistically the sea. Callous water stretching to the limits of vision makes the youngest in the vanguard break down in bitter tears. “It cannot be!” Foretaste of failure fills thirty thousand mouths, failure on a scale humankind can neither know nor survive.

  But a miracle awaits Stephen’s crusaders in the harbor. A whole fleet assembles there, as if divinely arranged. Merchants stand ready to take the holy army to its history-ending destination. Causa Dei, absque pretio. (No! the flashlight reader shouts. Look out! These men are evil; you can tell by their finery, the folds of their faces. But the view from above—prophetic periscope of two mirrors tilting a perpendicular to everything—fails to inform pilgrim level.)

  Stephen oversees the delicate boarding. A steady, incredulous joy spreads through him to see the force distributed among the dromonds, buzas, gulafres, cats—the agent vessels of an expanding world. One day he catches sight of the girl, in all her head-shaved beauty, high up in one galleon’s perilous castle poop deck. He calls to her, forgetting himself, their cub chastity. “We will meet in front of the Dome of the Rock,” she calls back, beaming at her saint.

  Keeping Nicolas abreast of the boarding, Stephen knows that his thousands cannot wait for the arrival of the Germans on the coast. Nicolas, beside himself trying to keep track of his forces now scattering themselves through Lombard towns, waves his joint commander on ahead. “Carry on. We’re right behind you. Just leave us a dusky brute or two to baptize.”

  Stephen boards the last ship out of safe haven. Overjoyed, he looks back on the disappearing continent. All around him, the child-manned fleet sings “Veni Creator Spiritus.” He tries to contact Nicolas to let him listen in. But for the first time, no apparition appears on the empty air.

  The German child at that moment stumbles lost through the Po Valley. His splinter group has been whittled by attrition to a few thousands. Rumor—in vague watercolor washes—drifts in from the other factions: stories of children robbed by peasants, their various virgin orifices despoiled by Tuscan aristocrats. Weary ten-year-olds give i
n to acquired vices, then take to them willingly in quick addiction. The pursuit of the True Cross becomes a struggle to ward off utter chaos.

  Nicolas’s western cadres struggle on. A few thousand assemble in Genoa. Some stay to found famous patrician families, in a brief flash-forward. Others press on to the Holy See. Every set of walls and towers, every pathetic handyman’s castle even on this, the wrong side of the divided world, touches off the excited cry “Is that Jerusalem? Is that Jerusalem?”

  In Rome, much later, the pope welcomes them, shaming Christian Europe by pronouncing, “See how these innocents busy themselves with preparations for recovery while we drowse?” Taking pity on pink limbs that have seen more than a life’s worth of sacrifice, he absolves them of their vows. He promises that each has already achieved a foothold in paradise. He tells them to return as adults if they still desire to be pilgrims. But he forbids the expedition to proceed.

  The way back is colder, more harrowing, less likely, darker than can be painted. Each one of them travels alone. The innocents that do reach North come back corrupted beyond recovery. And the land they return to is not home. Nothing more is heard from the boy Nicolas, who preached the end of history. He is stranded somewhere between Genoa and St. Gotthard, Gog and Magog.

  Europe waits anxiously for word of Stephen’s venture. The crusade has been so long under way it seems to have existed from the very launch of time. The home front half expects that any month must bring the account of conquest. They grill all travelers for word of the promised conflagration, this time bloodless and pure, the one that will transform threadbare creation.

  But word fails to come. Waiting shades seamlessly into neglect. Some months after everyone has given up on hearing, an account works its way back to the mainland. Two child ships were caught in a freak storm and cracked open on the rocks off of San Pietro, southwest of Sardinia. The thousand children’s bodies, washed up on the surf, collected in a modest crypt, miraculously fail to decompose.