“What did it matter to you?” I scooped couscous onto my fork.
“It galled me, the way people treated him—not because I wanted to see him welcomed or worshipped, certainly, but for the sheer fact of who I knew him to be.”
Like so much of Lucian’s account, it was something I had not thought about. The story of Christ was such a cultural fixture, such a central theme throughout history that I had never dwelled on these details.
“He had more coming. I simply didn’t see it yet.” He lowered his chin, studied the zipper dangling from the neck of his polar fleece. “He performed a few miracles at least. It was something. Still, I came away disappointed, waiting for more. This was Elohim, the Alpha and Omega!”
“More, such as?”
“A mass-healing. Something.” He lifted his head and rubbed his goatee, his mouth slack. “Even your televangelists purport to do that much. But this was El. He could have reshaped the earth, restored Eden, shown even a portion of that terrible power that had spoken the green and wild earth into existence. He could have restored the humans to their original state. Hadn’t he come to save them, after all? They were uninspiring creatures to begin with, but at least he could have done that much.”
“Why do you think he didn’t?”
Lucian’s face went blank, “He seemed more interested in restoring individuals. I didn’t understand it. Why mend one vessel when the rest are cracking all around you? Why mend one when the rest don’t even like you?” He laughed. “But it got stranger: The priests of El himself called him a blasphemer and claimed he derived his powers from us.”
I wondered where I had missed all of this, growing up. How pale, how superficial and ritualistic, had been my early experience with the church and their packaged God.
“As though our powers could compare. It was too ridiculous. El was humiliating himself and getting spat on for his efforts. And I came to think that now, at last, he would experience firsthand the misery of this mud race, and that in this way he deserved it. Still, as I look back on the hatred, the scoffing, the pointed fingers, I don’t know how he stood it.”
“Why did they do it?”
“Because he went against the religious establishment!” He laughed, the chords dancing in his thick neck, the sound of it arcing up now beyond his earlier chuckles to an octave it should not have reached, rankling. The man in the apron behind the café counter glanced our way. I was prepared for the instant composition of the demon’s features but not for the haunted look that crept into them.
“Lucifer, for his part, wasn’t happy about having this walking testament of his failure roaming the earth, embarrassing him. And something began to happen with him. His luminescent eyes turned shifty. He raged as he had not since the new Eden. We avoided him, entertaining ourselves with all the usual things—the running of his earthly government, temptation of the faithful—in hopes of raising his spirits. But he paced and stalked, and followed this Jesus wherever he went. He was obsessed, filled with loathing yet unable to stay away from him.”
I piled crumpled napkin and plastic silverware on my plate. “How long did that go on?”
“Several years. Then, in the space of one night, everything changed.
“It was Passover, and though Jews knew it as the saving of the firstborn by the lamb’s blood upon the doorframe, it will always be, to my mind, the thwarting of a perfectly good mass killing.”
I stared at him.
“That night the God-man did a strange thing. He broke bread with his followers, saying it was his body, and he gave it to them. He gave them wine, saying it was his blood. But then he said something that chilled my immortal heart—now mark me well—he said it was spilled for them in a new covenant for the forgiveness of sins. Do you hear this? Do you understand it?” He leapt to his feet, pacing several steps away and back, not waiting for my answer. “Pardon my human reaction: my skin crawled.”
He sat down again and leaned over the table, closer to my face than I liked. “We had waited an epoch for El to do away with these people, to, in the very least, give them their due condemnation. If we, glorious creatures, had fallen so far from favor, then we would never stand by and willingly allow these clay people—these humans—to replace us in his affections. Never.”
The hairs along my neck stood on end.
“But those words spoken over the Passover table sounded with the hollow echo of a vault, sealing for eternity. As the first words of your creation had been full and pregnant, these rang now with the harsh sentence of exclusion, finality, and damnation.”
“Maybe the forgiveness was for you, too.”
He laughed, and this time the sound was low like thunder tumbling beyond the horizon.
“You are so blind, Clay.”
For a long moment we stared at one another, and I felt the gulf between us as I had never felt it before, as one breed considers the other, and his own mortality with it, knowing that he will be surpassed and survived by the other, that the other has unwittingly succeeded him.
“With sickened sense I saw it all,” he said softly, his expression expansive, eyes slightly widened. “They were going to kill him. It didn’t matter that he was innocent. It didn’t matter that his trial wasn’t even legal. It was a fiasco, politics and government being the twin playgrounds of Satan. It didn’t even matter that he was God. It was an appalling thought, the created killing the Creator. It went against every natural law.”
The tinge to his voice was not sympathy or horror but a strange brand of wonder.
“But Satan was out of control. The danger ran off his back like so much rainwater on slick and well-oiled feathers. El would not bend to the temptation of his flesh. Well then, let him suffer in it! More, the God-man would suffer by the hands of the people he insisted on submitting to, these miserable clay creatures that he loved so dearly—and he would suffer greatly. Our prince rose up with a glamour to blot out the sun and roared, Let him see how they love him in return!”
“Are you saying you didn’t want that, too?”
“Oh, I did. But this was error, this was folly. I saw too clearly the God-man’s refusal of temptation, the immaculate life, saw in him the image of the Passover lamb. I raised my arms, my voice, took to wing, frantic for it to stop. I understood what was happening, and it had to stop—abruptly, violently, by any means, any force. But there was no one to hear me in the roar of voices both human and angelic. Lucifer and all my blind sibling minions were mad, frenzied as berserkers before a battle, intent on hauling this Jesus to the cross like a child before a runaway train.” He rubbed his forehead. “I saw it,” he said faintly. “I saw it coming. But I was only one being. I could do nothing.”
“You didn’t want to kill him,” I said, incredulous.
“Oh”—and now his lips glistened—“a part of me wanted him laid open, flayed apart, rent in ways that humans were not meant to suffer and survive. And I reveled in the sight of his suffering. I wanted it, I lusted for it. But even then I knew it for seduction. And as I saw the blood running from his back and his arms and down his legs and into the ground . . . ”
It was unsettling, seeing him like this. He was normally so cocksure, so arrogant. “What? What was it?”
He pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead. “I wished I had no foresight. For the first time in my life, ignorance would have been a mercy to me. Then I might have enjoyed our triumph, the sweetness of that moment.” He rubbed his brows, pinched the bridge of his nose. “But El bore it all. As he had borne the ruin of Eden and the faithlessness of the humans before, with the same suffering with which he had wept down the skies onto the mud race he loved, he bore it. It was awful to me, the submission of Elohim to the murderous hands of his creatures.”