CHAPTER 6 #3
Jericho shook his head. He still looked uncomfortable.
“Anyone whose prayers seem to be especially effective?” Avelyn asked, because if someone particular had been praying and that prayer had worked, then the Church would love it.
There was a chronic shortage of saints in the twenty-first century.
People did all sorts of good things, but you had to drum up a miracle to beatify someone, which was, even with the most open-minded approach, a right faff.
Gone were the days when you could say, Look, someone cleared this field of geese, it’s a miracle, or My cheese was stolen, but lo, it hath miraculously reappeared. 5
“Well, everyone prays, but . . . I’m not clergy. I’m not even Catholic. They wouldn’t necessarily have told me.”
“You’re not Catholic?” Avelyn said, taken with the novelty.
Jericho shook his head. “Not anything.”
Not wanting to seem as though he was flirting again, Avelyn didn’t say how exotic and fascinating that was.
“Okay,” he said instead, “I’ll start asking in the morning. Thanks.” He looked into space, thinking. More cures. Even Lourdes wasn’t like that. He sipped the hot chocolate, and then forgot about everything else.
There were different kinds of salt in Hreodwater, dozens: some were only good to grit roads with, some were worth more than diamonds.
Whatever this one was, it tasted of caramel and gunpowder, like Yule Night fireworks from their little boats on the Flood.
It really tasted of that. Like nothing had tasted of anything, for twelve years.
“This is . . .” He didn’t want to say revelatory. He would sound like the sort of person who thought they could manifest world peace.
“I know,” Jericho said. “Once you’ve had Hreod salt, nothing tastes of anything ever again.”
“No,” Avelyn said, shocked. He tried it again to make sure.
Yes. God. God.
Twelve years.
Twelve years of all food tasting of nothing: he’d thought there was something wrong with him. He tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing.
Why hadn’t anyone told him it was the salt? Well. It wasn’t as though he had given anyone a chance to mention it. He had left with Father Li and never looked back. Not even to find out if the bodies had been retrieved.
He would have to ask about that, too. Suddenly he felt like he had an anvil strapped to his back.
Jericho watched him for a long time. He was sitting very still now, far more still than people with his quicksilver energy ever usually could, and in his eyes there were points of light that weren’t from the candles, nor the salt.
Avelyn couldn’t tell what that was, but now he had noticed it, he noticed something else too.
Jericho seemed like he was more in shadow than the rest of the room.
The salt light was everywhere, glowing from the masonry, from the block of salt by the stove, from tiny wisps in the air, but it didn’t quite .
. . reach Jericho in the way it was reaching Avelyn, who was lit starkly by comparison.
Only nothing was casting the shadow, and those bright points in his eyes—they looked like the stars would if you saw them from deep underwater.
Avelyn looked down, aware he had been staring.
“Shall I take you over to the kitchen?”
“What?” said Avelyn, because it didn’t make sense to hear something so ordinary. “Oh—yes, please.”
4 Avelyn’s main problem with all this was that Christ’s disciples were sometimes not very bright.
His favourite example was the curing of the blind man.
In a typical bout of random prejudice, the disciples ask what sin a blind man or his parents committed in order to bring on the blindness; Christ, being a normal, functioning person, says, Don’t be silly, of course he hasn’t committed any sin, look, I’ve cured him.
Then the local officials object to him going around curing people on the Sabbath like a heathen.
You could all but see him going subtextually home to bash his head against a wall.
The blindness-means-sin people were the people who had told all the gospel stories: Avelyn always said told, not written, because he wasn’t convinced a bunch of first-century fishermen would have been able to read and write, and even if they had, it seemed unlikely they would have been able to do it in rather elegant Greek, which was how the New Testament arrived.
His tutor at the English College disagreed vehemently and said that the idea that the disciples were illiterate peasants was just Protestant propaganda, and certainly they could have written their own stories—they owned businesses, of course they could write—and Avelyn sympathised with this urge to assume the best about people, but he did think there was a big difference between being able to write weights of fish and being able to write the Gospel of Mark.
Mostly he thought that because he had grown up surrounded by Hreod fishermen.
If you asked them if they could read, they asked you if you could fly.
5 Genuine miracles.