Chapter 56 Aleys #2
What? She is still dazed by the enormity of the space behind him.
What is he saying? His eyes are frantic, at odds with his smile.
As he lowers his hood, she can smell spirits on his breath.
He tosses the torch into her hearth, where it smolders.
He opens his arms to her. She steps back until she feels the stone wall brace her spine.
“For the glory of God, in his name, let us join in communion.” He raises his hand in benediction.
“No.” She is shaking her head.
He keeps talking. “Aleys, we will form a trinity.” His eyes glisten with tears. “Sister, in his name, we will make a God between us.”
“You’re mad.”
His head jerks back in shock. “Aleys, are we not wed to Christ? This is the path he has shown me.”
“Leave, now.” She has to talk sense into him. “Your vows,” she says. “Lukas, you would never break your pledge to God.” As she says it, she wonders if this is Lukas. He’s like a man possessed.
“Don’t you see? We’ve mastered our vows.” He steps toward her, takes her forearms. She flinches. His touch is hot, scaled. “It’s time we discard the servant.”
“Lukas, no.” She attempts a voice of authority.
His grip tightens to claws in her flesh. “You disobey?”
“I don’t want . . .”
He laughs. “No, no, you misunderstand. This has nothing to do with desire. This is sacrament.” He pulls on her arms.
“No.” Aleys yanks herself away.
He looks, for a moment, like a hurt boy.
Then anger stiffens his features, and he grabs her shoulders.
She feels herself small, a rag doll in the hand of a mad child.
He pushes her in front of the door. “Go then,” he commands.
“Leave this cell. Ignore his signs, everything you’ve been shown.
Just throw it away. The door is open. Try to find him out there. ”
She imagines stepping into the church, fleeing down the aisle, pushing open the double doors into the square outside. There would be moon, and revelers. She could run to the bonfire.
He reads her thoughts. “Go to the devil, if you won’t have God.”
One step, just one step, and she could run free.
“Make your choice,” he says.
She feels her heart stop; she can’t breathe.
Time shrinks, becomes layered, thick as the six-pointed star—every choice she has ever made, ever will make, collapsed into this moment.
The space outside looms like a dark abyss.
There’s no salvation for those who leave the hold, who step knowingly from grace.
She promised God she would never leave. What would happen if she did?
She imagines herself plummeting, falling forever through a cold hell, an angel stripped of wings.
Aleys grips the doorframe and gulps air, her head swimming.
The smell of incense engulfs her. Stained windows fleck the cathedral with flashes of ruby and sapphire, citrine and emerald.
Into the bejeweled space, she feels her vows, sharp-beaked things, take flight.
Enclosure. Chastity. Obedience. They circle her head, pinning her to the precipice.
The vows shriek with fury and attack each other with beak and claw, until she cannot tell one from the other, her beautiful intentions at war.
Blue and red feathers rain to the floor. She cannot save them if they fight.
“When the Godhead enters us,” he whispers, “we shall be the church, the heaven, the soil, the river. We shall wash ourselves with snow water.” He twists the words of Job, sacred words. From his mouth, they seem crazed, a vein of silver lost in rock.
She glances back at the table. Genesis lies open, her knife pressing flat the pages.
“Aleys, look at me.” He moves to block the door, the church looming behind him. “Have your prayers been answered?” He knows they have not. “Has he not hidden himself, so that we may seek?”
She cannot answer.
“Do you understand all? It is written: His will is as high as heaven and deeper than hell.”
She doesn’t know his will. Not anymore.
“Aleys, I am your advisor, your confessor, your Father. It is no sin.” She feels the weight of the church behind him, pressing. “Deck thyself now with majesty and array thyself with glory!”
The door is still open.
“You consent, then?” He rotates her, places his hands on her shoulders, presses down, as if willing her to root. She flinches. “Obedience,” he says, “is faith. It is trust.”
Trust even in madness? Aleys sees the wild conviction in his eyes, burning and cold.
“He showed me the way. As he once showed you. Did I call you mad when you spoke of waves and stars?”
“No.”
“No, I did not. I called you holy. Do you not want him back?”
Desperately. She remembers her own words, spoken into this cell. I will do anything.
“Kneel,” he says, “while I bless you.”
She shudders as he anoints a cross of oil on her forehead, perhaps blessing, perhaps curse. There’s no doubt in his gesture; his righteous hand does not shake. What if he’s had a real showing? She’s so confused. Down is up and up is down and the devil quotes scripture while God looks on.
Are you watching? Are you even there?
She is angry. At all of them. She is angry when he removes his belt. She is angry when he raises her and guides her to her cot, as if he is being gentle, as if this is a wedding night. As if he is giving her a gift.
“Stop,” she says. “This is wrong.”
“No. This is sacred.”
Aleys twists away and loses her balance, hitting her hip, hard, against the corner of her table.
The knife clatters to the floor, and she stumbles to one knee.
Then Lukas is upon her, pinning her down, his acid breath in her face, and she understands that she is the offering to his God.
Cold fear sweeps her. She is Isaac, the choiceless, bound to the slab in a game that is suddenly no game, watching his father unsheathe the blade he uses to gut sheep.
There must be an angel who will come to stop this. For a moment, she imagines a being of light, descended through the roof, muscled wings back-beating to slow itself. The voice: “Do not lay your hand on her.” The voice should ring, it should say, “Do not do the least thing to her.”
Her eyes find her knife on the floor. Her blade that shaves parchment, that sharpens quills. That fits so easily in her hand.
The understanding breaks over her like a wave. She’s not Isaac; she’s not Abraham. She’s the angel.
Lukas sees her glance toward the blade. He hesitates.
And in his hesitation, she feels his fear.
Not just of the knife, but of her, of her body, of the flesh cave and passage between her thighs.
The dark mystery of pillow and bone, of maiden and crone, midwife, blood.
Anger. Hunger. Anything could emerge from her womb, anything.
Snake or bat, milk or blood, wolves. A holy child.
With her cheek pressed to the floor, Aleys feels herself become a new thing, a night thing, a creature of teeth and talon.
She is bird-foot and pinion, feather and muscle.
A breath of air comes down the chimney and ash flies upward like snow.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of wilderness.
In his voice is fear, of chaos, of the woman Lilith and other monsters.
She shall become an abode for jackals. Beasts stir in her belly, raise their heads and sniff the wind.
Wildcats will meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call one to the other.
The tambourine shivers and the hag and the maiden join hands and know themselves one.
There shall she repose and find for herself a place to rest. Aleys is the owl within the tree, hidden in the hold.
With his hands he marks off their shares of her.
They shall possess her forever. But what Isaiah did not name is the share she keeps—the untouchable, unpossessable share.
God is not coming. Not for this.
She grabs the knife and plunges it into Lukas’s side. He rolls off.
When she rises, she bears the wings of a nighthawk.
She flies to the door.
One step. Another step.
Nothing.
The cathedral does not crash upon her. The soaring arches hold their points, the glass panes cling to their holdings. No ribs crack, no windows shatter. She doesn’t fall.
Aleys moves into the aisle. Everything is strangely slowed. She looks back. The hold is full of dancing bits of amber. The squint is limned with the colors of the cross, gray, blue, silver, black.
Then Lukas appears at the threshold, gripping his side, shouting words that are, somehow, inaudible. She sees them form on his lips: You’ve broken our covenant.
No. She remembers Mary. The priests are blind, the pillars crumble. Her covenant is with God, not men.
She runs.