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 party 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 in 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?"