CHAPTER 6 #2
Jericho picked up a block of beautiful red salt and grated a dusting of it with a tiny golden grater into the chocolate, which was rich and silky already.
For Avelyn, it looked like Jericho was grating a hot coal.
He hovered on the edge of explaining that he wouldn’t be able to taste it, but he left it too long.
Jericho poured out the chocolate into two glass cups and gave Avelyn the first one. Even though it was warm down here in the salt light and by the fire, the cold on the fen had soaked into him, and it was wonderful to hold something hot.
“Thanks.”
“Welcome,” Jericho said, and once he’d sat down too, he crossed his legs to balance his cup on his knee.
Close to, he was more like an old painting than ever.
He had feral black curls with a white shock through the front, the kind you got if someone smacked you in the head with the butt of a gun—the kind artists loved because it looked like it was symbolic of something.
“And second to last on my list of things to say . . .” He leaned over and took one of the silver-clad cameras from the line of hooks. He held it out.
Avelyn took it. It was heavy because of the silver, which was real silver.
It had a hallmark. Along its sides were etched incredible, complicated patterns: water dragons and stags, oak trees, all beautiful Hreod designs he hadn’t seen for twelve years except in the ghosts of his tattoos. “What’s this?”
“If you try to use a normal camera down here, salt light fogs the film; it will come out looking like you’ve exposed it to bright sunlight. But salt light doesn’t go through silver, and a few years ago, the smith in town started to make these. They should show more or less what you can see.”
“No,” Avelyn said, disbelieving.
It had been a source of endless frustration that he’d never been able to show Father Li what he was seeing down here.
Jericho held his hands out. “Proof-of-life picture for Father Li?” he asked.
Avelyn looked up properly from the camera. It would have been on the paperwork that someone called Cai Li had sent him here, but it wouldn’t have said that they were friends, or that Li absolutely would require proof of life sooner rather than later. “You know Father Li?”
“I wake up sometimes in the night and feel grateful that he isn’t here anymore,” Jericho said, and took a picture of Avelyn just as he laughed.
The shutter clucked, and then the cogs inside shushed as they sent out the photograph.
Jericho held it, but he was looking hauntedly into the middle distance.
“He once told me a joke about an octopus and some condensed milk. It was awful.”
Avelyn was guiltily pleased to find that Father Li sometimes terrorised people other than him. “I’m so sorry. He’s much reformed.”
“I don’t even slightly believe you,” Jericho said. He gave him the camera back, and the photograph, and already, Avelyn could see that the film had picked up far more than the dim light of the candles and the fire. The walls were all alight.
“I can’t believe you were here when he was,” Avelyn said. He’d thought Jericho was about his age. “You seem much too young.”
“No, I’m very old,” Jericho said, half laughing. His hand went to the white bolt in his hair.
“You’re one of those irritating people who are better at fifty than twenty, aren’t you. That’s vexing. You are a vexatious person.”
Jericho looked pleased and embarrassed, and Avelyn clenched his hand, annoyed with himself.
Because there was no chance whatsoever of any romance, it felt logical to flirt as a general marker of liking someone.
It wasn’t just him: it seemed to be a common side effect of holy orders.
Father Li and the theology tutor at the Venerable English College often promised to elope together for a weekend of cocaine and wild sex in Milan.
Avelyn loved it—it was freeing—but he was prone to forgetting that if you didn’t know what it was, it was just harassment.
“Thanks for this,” he said about the camera, again. He put the photograph on the arm of the chair to let it develop all the way. Tomorrow, he’d take it to the Outside and make it into a ransom note to send recorded delivery. “It’s a great idea.”
“It is,” Jericho said. He sipped his chocolate.
“Just one last thing to mention. The maximum stay at An El is forty days. It’s just what the Church will fund.
People will be rotating out all the time.
If you need to conduct a lot of interviews, it would be best to start with the people coming to the end of their stay, or you’ll lose them. ”
“No, that’s fine, I understand,” said Avelyn. “Thank you.”
Jericho’s black eyes ticked over him twice.
There was something wary about it, and Avelyn understood.
No matter how normally Avelyn had been talking, he was still an inquisitor sent from the Vatican to investigate something that was either miraculous or requiring an exorcist. It gave Avelyn a little snick of unhappiness.
Just for the last few minutes, he’d felt like maybe they could be friends; but that wasn’t what he was here for.
“Is there anything you want to ask me now,” Jericho said, “or do you want to wait for the morning?”
Avelyn fought the urge to wince. He wasn’t a detective.
He wasn’t even on the list of the hundred best people to deal with any of this.
This needed a real professional, but—this was what being a Jesuit was.
They dropped you in Beirut or Mexico with a map and five dollars and said, “Sorry, that’s what there is: have at it.
” You weren’t there because you were an international expert who had written papers about how to sort this out. You were there because nobody else was.
“So, just to explain how this works,” he said at last. “My job here is to investigate whether this is a miracle or not—and that doesn’t mean whether it’s real or not.
It can be real without being a miracle. A miracle has to fulfil some strict requirements.
The first requirement is that it must be doctrinally legitimate.
The Church’s position is that everything God has to say has already been said, mainly by Christ. That’s called divine revelation, which the Church assumes .
. . however problematically . . . to be true,4 and anything that contradicts it is nothing to do with God.
So, since we can all see it’s real already, there are only two conclusions I can make here.
One, it is a miracle. Two, it’s nothing to do with God. ”
An uneasy line etched itself between Jericho’s eyebrows. “You’re just assuming it’s real?”
“Assuming, no, but it is real. It isn’t AI, medical records confirm the cure, four witnesses and two separate sets of footage confirm the transformation, Matthew is missing, and there is something wrong with the halite standing where he was: I just looked at it,” Avelyn said. “Have I missed something?”
Jericho let his neck bend. “No,” he said, but he didn’t lose his frown. “I suppose I just thought . . . no. What do you think about it?”
Avelyn breathed in deep. “I’m here to ask what you think, and what everyone else thinks, that’s important. Another requirement for a miracle is moral certainty, which is the Church way of saying it’s beyond reasonable doubt. I only prove that by talking to everyone. What do you think?”
Jericho looked down into his hot chocolate.
“I think the curative effects of the mine have been stronger in the last couple of weeks than ever before, in any of our records—and the records go back to the tenth century, to Saint Hildegard.” He nodded to a set of bookshelves filled with ledgers, the top ones very old.
“Matthew was just the most extreme case, but I’ve got three cancer patients with marked improvements since last week, and someone who needed a heart transplant when she arrived is now doing laps around the abbey.
It’s extraordinary even for An El. Something’s different. ”
Avelyn set his hot chocolate aside to cool and leaned forward. “What is it?”