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.
The site of this Sign begins drawing pilgrims from many lands. It is hastily marked with a chapel built by order of the pope, a new Holy Sepulcher inscribed ECCLESIA NOVORUM INNOCENTIUM. Twelve prebends tend it with perpetual prayer. The shrine, drawn in time lapse, vanishes over the centuries, to be rediscovered half a millennium later by Grand Tourists struck with uncomprehending wonder.
Eighteen years after the mass departure, a man gnarled by torture-accelerated age returns to the Christian North, claiming to have been a child crusader. The flotilla has already passed into myth, and this wandering priest's story — picked up in Albericus, de Champré, Bacon, the era's Classics Illustrateds — is a curiosity at best. Well into the waning century, travelers returning from the Middle East tell of light-skinned Muslim slaves in Algeria and Alexandria who speak a strange pidgin of Arabic and Romance. This is the fabled end of that child cargo: traded on the international spot market, sold to the Saracens by creedless merchants, martyred to this round of teleology, but passing on to their own children the remembered vow "Our feet shall stand within thy walls, O Jerusalem."
An estimated hundred thousand innocents are lost, sold, killed, betrayed, evacuated from this world by faith. Nor do the picture portals leave off there. They open onto a few more spots of scattered continuance: the Erfurt exodus. A mass child migration to St.-Michel. The Kinderzeche. Dancing manias, disappearances, and sovereign successions over subsequent centuries are each given detailed treatment in a much-subdivided pane, as complex and effulgent as the best leaded glass, its Gothic model. But of the shepherd child, of Stephen himself, no more caption. He is shown, ghostly, staring leeward from a floating castle deck, looking out onto the last days that again circle overhead.
The final colored frame — the last, the very last — is a radical departure for the artist's pen. It leaps from archaic Treasure Chest style into UPI Wire Photo: boy soldiers in another epochal year once more marching through the Lion's Gate into God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. The mother of all battles. Above them, overhead, fly Armageddon's radar-evading Stealth engines of destruction, assembled by the same Angel City industries whose cost overruns buy their pauperized crusader state this little margin of imaginary time.
"Could it be," the text box asks a reader who has long since fallen asleep or started on something more vivid — say a Sergeant Shrapnel or his high-tech, laser-guided reincarnation—"could it be that the seed of the Thousand-Year Kingdom, that troubled dream toward which the world still falters, was sown in a place possessed long ago and lost, forgotten except to fable?" In comic boyhood, history's cartoon.
Well, yes it could, the once-boy concedes, his hands surgically returning the tract to the therapist's stack of night reading. It could. All predictions are perverted remembrance. They'll have to come back, after long wandering. No place else to go. They're here already, all around him. Every day, the law's brutal blue shock troops drag them into his hospital, those they haven't emptied their clips into. Disease coaxes them to him. He steps over them in their gutter-ambush just outside the tony retail Alhambras, the mushroom towers, the high-security parking garages, there being no more open places where innocence might encamp. Ad mare stultorum, Tendebat iter puerorum. The sea will part for them. It will have to. No other place large enough to hold them all.
Yes; how could he have failed to see it? The place is breaking up. Isn't that what has been flashing across all channels, pissing out of late-night talk radio rumblings, putting in cameo appearances on Showdown Tonight, left as live correspondents' reports on his answering machine while he was out? The narrow space he came from has already ended, been burned off, refined away. It capitulated in the same moment, in the time it has taken the boy to think this thought, to consume this illuminated manuscript, to page, to leaf through, to see, to believe, to receive the old list of infinitives, to lip-read the traditional closing, this one: Next Year in Angel City.
The boy grows manic, racing out of control. He wants everything, all at once. He demands a continuous barrage of mil-spec mayhem. When that's not forthcoming, he manufactures it. C'mon: new game. Scale-model Grand Prix down the emergency stairwell. Multiplayer stock market speculation with real quotes and Monopoly money. Murder in the dark, the hushed hysterics too soft for the night nurses to hear. Helicopter spotting on the roof, gawking at today's incoming wounded. He must live through those sixty years he has acquired without experiencing, all in the space of the next three weeks. He plunges the ward into a hopped-up nonstop campaign of chaos, and only the knowledge that it will all stop suddenly and soon prevents the pros from cuffing him.
Linda foresaw the whole reaction the day Nico checked in. Patently transparent-an old man's textbook love me, look past my rhinoceros hideomness. All the same, she finds herself locking horns with the little beast more and more frequently. Some days she just doesn't care what motivates his constant, vindictive disruption. She'd like to whack him one first and do the social worker stuff later. As for his wider subversion of hospital life—"You call this food? Lemme in that kitchen. Hey, how's about a movie theater in this dump? Casino. Dancing girls" — more power to him. But when he busts in on her Duchenne's support group, hysterically trying to shame them out of their progressive muscle wastage by threatening to use the four of them as a baseball diamond, she and Nicolino have their first shouting showdown.
Problem is, three of her four disintegrating dystrophy boys side with their tormentor. Leave him be. Nico's okay. He's our Main Mind, our man with a plan to take command. (We, after all, may live to see the extreme old age of thirty.) It's a sympathy vote for a kid picked off in a way even grimmer than their own. But there's something more than mere sympathy in this deference to Nico's new ward order. The others have been just waiting for a knee-high Boss Tweed to come along and tell them what to do next. Not just any newcomer; this one.