Then the heavy door swung open, and the forty villagers, in white long shirts, their faces and hands translucent red in the light of the candles they carried, came out holding onto each other tightly, led by the priest with a beard to his waist, frowning and determined like an icon of the Father. His powerful hands emerged from large sleeves to grip a cross as long as a league, which, like the cross on each person’s chest, sparkled like gold. Stronger still, scintillating like a diamond with millions of fires, the tooth of the martyr glowed in its glass box, tied now to a girl’s forehead. The light shone over the valley. It turned the surrounding cliffs as transparent as gemstones, and, with an ever greater power, it rose in a single column of greatness to the sky, shattering the clouds, moving the stars aside, and revealing the endlessly gentle majesty of the Trinity. And through the field of light, flurries of angels began to fall, ablaze with bows and quivers, long spears in their hands, their golden wire locks fluttering in descent. A cry of victory broke out from the Badislav chests.
Touching the ground with their feet, the transparent heralds built of ideas and crystal partook of the power of the earth. Thin threads of blood grew in their feet, spreading quickly through their bodies of light, becoming systems of veins and arteries, visible inside like those in the translucent bodies of shrimp. A porphyry blood colored their lips and cheeks, and enormous wings, like swans’ wings, attached themselves to the naves of their chests with triangular, powerful muscles. The courageous alate, in gold-plated armor, formed a phalanx and drove their spears forward into the brazen band of the dead. A few moments later, the terrible subterranean host had turned into a pile of tibiae, vertebrae, mandibles, skulls, and pelvises, yellowed like old wax, their venom still steaming toward the sky. The demons ran down the sides of the church like thick swamp water, leaving it stained with saliva and excrement, and like a pack of rabid wolves they threw themselves onto the phalanx of angels. For they knew them, each in part — these were the Faithful, the ones who had stayed with the Lord during the great rebellion, the ones made million in glory, while the others descended into the subdivine, sub-human, sub-animal, and wrapped in the spiral of blood of the eternally damned. Deep in the being of each demon, behind the scales, claws, and dragon wings, lived an angel in tears.
The battle intensified, quaking the little valley, as flakes of silver snowed. Protected by icons and crosses, wrapped in veils of incense, the villagers watched the melee with wide eyes, arm in arm, with their beards on end and their flesh quivering. The angels skewered the cacodemons with arrows of steel, glass, and light. They hacked them with double-edged swords, spilling black blood in the snow. They flew up and strangled the winged demons with their wide hands. Dragons and werewolves, locusts with human heads and humans with fly heads opened their snouts, muzzles, and beaks and vomited jets of fire at the celestial legion. Some angels, their wings in multicolored flames like fireworks, like birds of paradise, fell down onto a shack or into a leafless path. Like fat dogs with bared teeth, three or four devils would pounce on the heavenly heralds, nauseating them with the breath of their bowels, spraying them with urine from the impressive hoses between their legs, and covering them with murderous curses more venomous than the fire they blew from their mouths, for the devastating speech of blasphemy filled the heavenly minds with terrible pain. Wave after wave of monsters attacked the spiky rectangular phalanx wearing it away, plucking soldiers out and throwing them into the dark. At every assault, devils also fell, writhing, into the snow.
But then, when the snowfall slowed toward dawn, the angels began to sing. They threw down their dripping swords and their lances with snuffed flames. They took off their transparent armor and stood in long, white robes, rings of golden hair falling from their shoulders to their waists. Cheek by cheek, their blue eyes trained on the sky, the angels sang. They lifted their girlish voices toward God, gentle and fresh as saplings or the stalks of carnations. They offered the crystal filigree of the psalms into the cold, hard air. The people cried like children, clutching their icons against their chests. The hill of bones began to rumble, and the skeletons assembled themselves again — the skulls found their bodies, the femurs joined to hips, and as though grown from the yeast of the unearthly song, new and tender flesh touched the cold bones again, muscle was wrapped in skin, and soon, naked and young again, all of them thirty years old, the dead rose to their feet. Waving one last time to their living kin, the group of unclothed men and women turned slowly toward the cemetery. One of them paused in front of the church to trace a wide circle of fire over the ground. The demons, petrified once the angelic psalms began, now scurried to the well of transparent earth. They dove inside, grabbing on to windpipes of light, trailing meters of intestines from their slit stomachs, and leaving behind mounds of vomit and blood before becoming smaller and smaller and disappearing into the dark.
A new cry of joy filled the air over the Badislavs. Carrying the song further, the heralds went among the villagers, embracing them one by one, putting their palms on their cheeks and marking their foreheads with their pomegranate lips. At the touch their brow bones turned to glass, like ice beneath a bonfire, until their skulls were entirely transparent and sparkling and revealed the folds and lobes of the rose of the brain. One child alone, the one with the most curls of all, with the largest and bluest eyes, did not hide delicate cerebral matter under his skull but an enormous spider with legs pulled up against its body. The vision lasted only a moment before a milky fog darkened the skull bones and brow again into aged pearl. Embracing a buxom congregant, one of the angels saw the lap of its vestment grow rigid, rising slowly, in unspeakable pain and sweetness, until it stuck straight up, until the gown of light, held by an unseen hair, gathered around its middle, revealing his chalcedony toenails. The song of praise halted in his throat, and instead a guttural cry, like that of a young wolf, trailed from his mouth. His eyes, clear since the world was made, clouded with tears, and the clouded angel, a grimace across his divine face, suddenly threw himself into the fountain of fire, his venomous claws grabbing the last devil’s tail. As he traveled the path to Hell, his skin grew sores and fistulas, his limbs scabies, his eyes grew glaucoma, his spine grew scales, and his mind filled with the hips and breasts of women. But the other angels, barely showing a twinge of pain for their fallen brother, took up their song again, and with a few vigorous pulses of their wings, they unstuck themselves from the earth, solemnly rising toward heaven on the wide beam of the martyr’s tooth, like a flock of human birds. Their blood, lymph, and black and yellow bile sprayed from the soles of their feet like a jet engine, until they were as clean and clear as the light of reckoning. Once they were among the stars, the skies opened, and the villagers saw the blinding, merciful face of the Divine again, where the angels dissolved into an air of gold.
And now the sleighs cut across the wide and sunny platter of the pathless field. The horses snorted ropes of mist out hot nostrils. Sometimes a woman, her hair completely gray after the frenzied night, turned her head back frightened, making a cross with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, but she saw only the lengthening tracks of the sleigh runners, narrowing like an arrow toward the village in the valley, the invisible origin of space and time. They traveled through the day, but at dusk, when the snow turned dark pink, the priest raised his hand and the sleighs circled into a small camp. In the center, the fire lifted thousands of brushes, in cobalt, saffron, and gold, and like a church painter it decorated a nervous tuft of horse hair, a coat with cotton embroidery, a wide face with tired eyes, a jug on worn leather straps, and a few steps from the camp, the raised fur on a wolf’s throat. At dawn, after a well-guarded sleep, they yoked the horses below the red, melted globe of the sun, and the flight began again. At night, no man touched his woman, and would not until they found a place to settle, with a hearth and church and gardens.