Chapter 52 Jude
Jude
Sun split the air above Jude’s head in a wash of gold-tinged light.
It glinted off the rose window, the gleaming organ pipes, the metallic sheen of buttons and hairpins and wretched, glazed eyes.
His body no longer belonged to him. He was the property of the masses, just as Ezra had promised.
He’d been reduced to the sum of his parts, and everyone wanted a piece.
A hand searched for purchase in his hair, and that, that, was the act that ruined him.
He snarled, wrenching back against the acolytes holding him aloft, kicking out with all his strength until he landed flat on his back. The stone was cold and unforgiving but blessedly still.
Of all the eyes searching for him, his focus locked onto one pair.
Fractal sunlight cast the man in triplicate.
A ruddy, gaunt face and a shock of reddish hair to match.
With a bellow, the man launched onto Jude’s chest, tearing and scratching at the fabric over his heart.
‘Fix me! Fix me,’ he screamed. Jude convulsed, trying and failing to push him off.
Wetness tracked down into his robes as the man sobbed into his neck. ‘Please.’
A potent mix of fear and pity curled up in his stomach. What had happened to this man to reach such a point of desperation that he’d look at a ruined saint and beg for absolution?
‘Who are you?’ Jude shouted. Every laboured breath was pure agony under his weight. For a fraught moment, only the two of them existed – a saint in name alone, and a man who still believed. ‘I can’t – I can’t help you,’ he choked.
The man pulled back far enough for something to dangle in the space between them.
Jude’s heart gave an unsteady jolt. A relic.
The man was an elder, down here amongst the rabble and not up in the balcony with the others.
He knew Jude couldn’t grant his prayers but yet here he was, desperate enough to ask.
Jude grabbed the relic and pulled it free. The elder howled in response, grasping his neck, but it was too late. The metal burned hot as Jude brought it down to the stone. The pain was irrelevant as it shattered against his palm. All that mattered was that it was destroyed.
Nails scratched against his forearm, digging deep furrows into his skin. Jude convulsed, trying to push the elder off him. His face was crimson, eyes glazed, not with hysteria like the acolytes and pilgrims, but with pain, with misery. ‘You, you little—’
Jude brought his knee up directly between the elder’s legs. He wrenched back with a bitten-off scream. Gasping, Jude rolled as far as he could onto his side and spat. The foamy transparency of stomach acid was tinged with bright, vivid red.
Next to the unsightly puddle was the relic. The metal was twisted, hinges broken beyond repair. A thin strand of reddish-brown stuck out from the broken resin.
Continuing to cough, Jude gazed up, momentarily disorientated.
The air was thick with sweat and screaming, underlaid with the unmistakable scent of smoke.
It wouldn’t take much for the writhing crush to trample him.
Already, his limbs had been trodden over so many times he no longer flinched at the smash of a boot or the jab of an elbow.
Unreality coated his mind in cotton. The view overhead – mouths open to scream, tendrils of smoke disappearing between bodies and, high above, a glorious cut of sunlight – doubled, tripled. He floated up towards the rafters.
How easy it would be to close his eyes and never reopen them.
The sickening, damp crunch of something snapping filled the air. The answering scream was blood-curdling. A shudder overtook Jude’s body from start to end.
He needed to get up.
With a shout between clenched teeth, he forced Maeve’s face to the forefront of his mind and fought back to his feet. An arm whirled in front of him, catching him on the side of the jaw before it moved, creating a sliver of space wide enough to force himself into.
He lurched forward, step after aching step.
Tears streamed in hot splashes down his cheeks.
If he could just break free of the epicentre, he bore a chance of escaping the basilica before smoke stole the remainder of his breath.
Bodies crushed in on all sides, so tightly he couldn’t discern where he ended, and they began, turning his torso into nothing but fire and fading air.
‘Move,’ Jude shouted. Desperation clawed his voice to shreds. ‘Move!’
No one looked at him, even as he sank back beneath the surface of panicked acolytes.
His fingers slid off clothing and limbs as he fell.
The fear dissolved into engulfing agony, boiling like sulphur beneath his skin.
There had been many times Jude had thought he was dying, but he’d never believed it with such certainty before.
This was how it would end.
The Abbey’s devotion had bred greed, and greed, where piety failed, had produced a violent focus on nothing but their self-interest. As Jude crumbled beneath the unseeing force of hundreds of acolytes, pilgrims, and elders, he realized Ezra was wrong.
It wasn’t the collective that would kill him – it was the individual.
Each person had chosen to pull him from the altar and crush him beneath their feet.
Each of them, in their own mind, had decided not to look down and offer a hand up.
And that selfishness would be the thing that damned him.
His head landed heavily upon the stone.
Pain sliced across his forehead, banding from ear to ear. He didn’t flinch as he floated along a plane where nothing – not pain, not fear, not hope – could touch him. Pressure built behind his eyes and against the roof of his mouth. Air filled his lungs in an acrid rush of smoke.
High above, the ceiling swirled. The crowd was gone.
A strange static chipped at his consciousness.
Jude closed his eyes.
Memories spilled out in an uncontrollable rush, like water in a basin, like flame into air. Jude cried out, banding his hands over his ears to keep his brain inside his body.
It didn’t help. Nothing helped.
His life flashed before his eyes in a series of rapidly clearing images.
Jude, kneeling at Ezra’s feet while his mentor sawed a length of twine across his palms until his blood stained the floor. Jude running, laughing, tilting his head back to face the sky as a hand landed on his shoulder, making him look back. A boy, familiar… Felix.
His friend. Oh, how he loved him.
Another face, a flash of blond curls—
Jude clawed at his face as the memories shifted forward onto the next.
A stifled bout of girlish laughter cut through the darkness.
A door opened, and her face shone between the gap.
Maeve, her long hair in twin braids, smiling at him with a space where one of her front teeth ought to be.
Later, years maybe, he placed a cup of steaming chocolate in front of her while she sat, twisting her fingers and wiping tears off her face.
She took a drink and smiled at him, a sunrise breaking through the storm.
Jude wasn’t alone.
He’d never been alone.
Ezra had stolen every happy memory. He’d stripped him of his friends and deprived him of any hand that had ever dared reach through the darkness to pull him to his feet.
The memories continued to come in neat bursts, one on top of the other. Pounding, pressing into his head like they were sewing themselves directly onto his brain with a molten needle.
As quickly as it had arrived, the pain ebbed away.
Jude sat up. Blinked against the sudden brightness.
He was kneeling, surrounded by others in similar positions.
With the pain gone, he felt like a stone plucked from river water.
Everything rough had been sloughed away, leaving him polished and clean.
It didn’t hurt to think, and, for once, he felt the truth of what it meant to have a mind entirely his own.
Slowly, he got to his feet. His legs trembled under him. Tears welled on his lash line as he scanned the room. Looking, with increasing desperation, for her.
And there—
Her head was bowed, and face turned away, but Jude knew her. He’d have recognized her anywhere. Soon, she’d turn and meet his eyes, finding him amidst the melee of pilgrims pushing to their feet and stumbling towards the exit.
She’d come for him.
Jude made his legs move. He’d go to her first. He needed to hold her, to reassure himself that she was whole and unharmed. To tell her that he was there, and he remembered her.
‘Jude.’
A voice rasped through the thickening cloud of smoke. A wet sound followed, a gasping squelch like a boot pulled from mud.
Jude stilled.
‘Please,’ the voice called, desperate. ‘Help.’
Several paces away, in a crumpled heap, lay Ezra.
His mouth gaped like a fish, eyes glazed and struggling to focus.
His purpling hand grasped weakly at his neck.
Blood flowed freely between his fingers.
His nose was a mangled lump of bone and cartilage.
It seemed somehow wrong that Ezra would bleed the same as him; the arterial redness vivid against the stone.
Jude drifted closer. He knelt, knees dipping into the pool of cooling liquid. The pale blue of his mentor’s irises was vivid against the grey of his skin. He didn’t have long for this world. Jude felt a flash of watered-down pity, the faint sting of satisfaction, and then, nothing.
‘Help me,’ Ezra gurgled. Fresh blood spilled from his mouth.
Jude furrowed his brow. ‘Why? I have my memories back. We all do. You have nothing over me anymore.’
While Ezra’s body and clothes were littered with scrapes and gashes from the stampeding crowd, his neck bore the brunt of it. It looked like a fractured candlestick had been driven straight into his artery. A painful way to go.
Jude couldn’t have helped him, even if he’d wanted to. The blood loss was too significant.
Ezra must have known that, but he still searched Jude’s face with muted desperation.
Jude watched the blood dribble from between his mentor’s fingers with detached interest. His gaze travelled down, over the ornate beading on his chasuble and stole. The sigil of the Abbey in gold and white embroidery, now stained red with blood.
Three relics hung from his neck, cradled in a fold of his cloak like eggs in a nest.
Jude breathed out, breathed in.
He collected the relics and stood, hesitating for less than a heartbeat before he smashed them beneath his boot. They crumpled into a mess of metal, resin, and hair. Maeve’s golden hair shone next to his own darker strands. Finally, a curl of darker blond. All crushed beneath his heel.
He brushed the remains away with the toe of his boot before returning his gaze to Ezra.
Fury shone in Ezra’s bloodshot eyes. ‘You… can try to fix me. You’re a saint.’ He heaved one, panting breath. ‘Please.’
‘You of all people should know that praying to me is meaningless.’
Ezra coughed, closing his eyes.
As Ezra bled out in front of him, thinking of his son, of Jude, of lives moulded and lost, he made his decision. He was done turning the other cheek.
Jude knelt back down. ‘Would your son like to watch you die too, I wonder?’ he asked.
He couldn’t decipher the look in his mentor’s eyes, couldn’t dissect the meaning of the emotions playing in his expression. Terror and regret, resignation and a curl of sorrow. His features settled, smoothing into blank unknowingness with one final breath.
Jude rose to his feet, turned his back to Ezra, and left.