In Beijing, the Tiananmen Gate, its structure weakened in some way that defies analysis, disaggregates into several massive blocks of stone, which crush a party of German tourists and three students cycling to college. The pulped bodies are removed in buckets, prompting protests from relatives about the insensitive handling of their loved ones’ remains.
Seven young cavers in Auckland enter a beginners’ cave with a maximum depth of seven metres. All are found dead from severe decompression sickness and arterial gas embolisms, consistent with a dive to a thousand metres and an almost instantaneous return to the surface.
Across the world, the ripples were spreading. But that is precisely the wrong metaphor, Ber Lusim thought. Ripples get weaker and weaker, the further they get from their source. This — he observed with a certain pleasure — was more like a tsunami building, or like a riptide dragging more and more unwary swimmers into its invisible, deadly channels.
It was not that he relished pain and degradation for their own sake. Once, perhaps. A little. But he was no longer that man, no longer purely and simply the Demon. The prophet’s words had changed him in his essence, without altering his trajectory by the smallest fraction. He did all the things that he had always done, mortifying flesh and spirit, but different meanings now attached to his actions. That was Shekolni’s miracle, and proof enough that he was touched with the divine.
The prophet found his old friend sitting on the cot bed in his sleeping quarters. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell, so in fact there was nowhere else to sit. Easily and unselfconsciously, Shekolni seated himself on the stone floor in front of Ber Lusim.
Ber Lusim had been reading, but now he jumped to his feet and offered the bed to Shekolni — who declined it with a wave of the hand. Ber Lusim took his seat again, closed the book and set it to one side. It was the book, of course: the book that had become the focal point of their lives and their aspirations, their rock of salvation and their stern taskmaster.
‘Why so thoughtful, Ber Lusim?’ the prophet asked. ‘You’ve pulled the trigger, now, and the bullet has gone out into the world. You can’t alter its flight.’
Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Such things are my province rather than yours, Holy One. And I’m not sure I agree. With a bullet, as you say, all the thought and the care is taken before it’s fired. Afterwards, you can only watch and see what comes.’
‘So? Isn’t that what we’re doing?’
‘Your pardon, Holy One, but this thing that we do is more like torture. A series of careful and painstaking interventions to achieve a cumulative effect.’
Shekolni smiled. ‘And it’s this that creases your brow? Are you having second thoughts?’
‘Not at all!’ Ber Lusim was shocked at the implication. ‘Torture is something I’m very well versed in. I’m not taking issue with the plan, only trying to comprehend it.’
Ber Lusim stared at Shekolni, there in the darkness of the cell, which was unrelieved apart from the flames of three candles, burning in a niche beside the bed. The shadows covered the prophet’s face as if with a veil, so his expression could not be read.
‘Do you ever think of our childhood?’ he demanded at last. When you were only a man, he meant. When there were still mysteries you couldn’t pierce. But he didn’t say those things. Tact and humility were important, when dealing with the incarnate divine.
The prophet laughed. ‘I wasn’t even alive in those times. I don’t remember them at all. My life began on the day when I saw my first vision. Nothing before that has any meaning for me.’
Ber Lusim nodded as though he understood, although the statement showed how utterly different the two men were. Both of them by the violence of their natures and the force of their will had marked themselves out for peculiar destinies. But whereas Ber Lusim had embraced that violence and made it his garment, Shekolni had opened it like a door, passed through it into a place that was unknowable.
‘Children are cruel,’ Ber Lusim murmured. He was thinking of himself — his first experiments with the pain thresholds of others, that had permitted him to know himself.
‘All men are cruel,’ the prophet said. ‘And all women, too. If we were not, then we would not need God.’
He climbed to his feet again. His movements were uncannily like those of an old man, although there was not a month between his age and that of Ber Lusim. Perhaps the mantle of holiness was heavier than ordinary men imagined.
‘It’s important to comprehend,’ he said. ‘To have a mental model for one’s actions that takes everything into account and answers all objections. I’m about to preach to your comrades in arms. You should come and listen.’
‘I invite you to think of a miracle,’ the prophet said, his words rolling out across the vast hall almost like physical things, each cradled in a tangle of echoes. A hundred men watched him and listened to him, eager for revelation, immune to weakness and doubt. ‘The miracle of birth.’
‘None of you have wives or children. None of you ever will, now, not through any weakness or failing in you but because of the accident of history and the unalterable shape of the Plan.
‘But let me assure you that birth, seen from up close, is a very ugly thing. The mother, in her birth-agonies, fills the air with her screams — with animal bleats and bellows. Sometimes she loses control of her bowels. The newborn child, when he comes at last, is covered with the filth of his mother’s entrails, and more often than not with her blood. Scarcely human, he looks, as he’s held aloft. To be human, he has to be cleansed. To be human, he has to breathe. And to be human, he has to be separated from the womb that bore him and nourished him. Cut free with a knife.
‘Does the doctor who wields the knife see the glory or does he see the ruck and ruin of blood? Does he smell incense or excrement? Does he hear screams or angels singing?’
Avra Shekolni paused theatrically, for the answers that would not come.
‘You are that doctor. And the future, the thing that is waiting to be born, depends entirely on your readiness with the knife, your skill. It needs you to cut away what once was so very precious, so very much needed, and now is only dead weight. It needs you to see past the blood, however high it rises, to the light — the endless, endless light.’
He fell silent, and his arms, which had been thrown out as though to embrace them all, dropped to his sides. The followers of Ber Lusim fell to their knees as one. Most were weeping, and all were making the sign of the noose.
Ber Lusim knelt too, his heart singing, his blood drumming in his ears.
He had served heaven at one remove — God’s commandments trickling down through the minds and voices of fallible men.
Now he was a word that God spoke.
PART TWO
A SOLDIER
16
It had never occurred to the girl that she would be chosen. Once, perhaps, she had toyed with the possibility, back when she was still in the usual age range for such things. People she knew had been taken at twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
But she reached sixteen, and nobody came. And then there was the great upheaval, the y’siath, when the People left the place where they’d lived for seven generations and travelled to the new city.
Once there, they unpacked their things again and tried to make it be home. But it wasn’t home. The girl herself, along with all the People she knew (she didn’t know all that many; she was solitary by nature), felt restless and unsettled. Everything seemed to have ended and nothing seemed to have begun again. Life’s rhythms, which in the end are life itself, had been interrupted.