CHAPTER 14
Avelyn took the samples of the transformed bread and wine and made the walk to the surface, his phone an infuriatingly dead weight in his pocket.
If he could catch the first ferry and then take a horse and ride fast, he could be in the Outside in an hour, and on a video call to Father Li the second he was in signal range.
And then he was going to have to sit in a café somewhere with about eight shots of espresso and stare into space until he could get to grips with the world again.
He walked with half the congregation from An El, all keen to go up and tell friends and relatives and probably newspapers about what had happened, everyone jubilant, some still singing.
Avelyn had never seen a group of clergy so electrified.
Some nuns had lit sparklers, drawing crosses in the air and laughing, filling the air with the lovely festival smell of gunpowder.
He should have been too.
He wasn’t. He didn’t feel any of the fizzy happiness that was bubbling all around him now.
He knew exactly what Father Li would say about that. Father Li would say that Avelyn had a deep wariness of anything wonderful happening, because he had trained himself to expect horrors so that he wouldn’t be so shocked when they inevitably arrived.
But it wasn’t that.
He kept thinking about the way the membrane of the not-bread had torn, how the blood had pinpricked and then welled in the tiny broken veins, how there had even been a layer of subcutaneous fat just beneath that crust. It hadn’t looked miraculous.
It had looked appalling. And he kept thinking how glad he was he hadn’t been the person at the front, the one who’d got a mouthful of blood.
He spent his whole life translating. Latin, English, Italian, Hreod—if someone visited the Jesuit Curia who didn’t speak any of the usual languages, it was Avelyn who ended up called down to sit with them, not because he was fluent in anything useful or any better with translation apps, but because he knew how to be incoherent.
It was a skill on its own, the ability not to be embarrassed when you didn’t know things, to communicate with no understanding of nuance or context.
He’d learned to translate tone even if he couldn’t understand the words, he had a whole lifetime of gauging general gists and the difference between an insult and a mistake, culture and malice, all the rest. He knew how to think about information he couldn’t understand.
Every instinct said that whatever this was all for, it had not been intended to make anybody happy.
“Oh my gosh, imagine if they could clone Christ,” someone said next to him, ebullient. “Do you think they should?”
The man was Avelyn’s age, in a Franciscan habit. Avelyn looked at him twice, because he had a halo almost as strong as Annunciata’s.
“Fabian,” the man said. “I’ve come from Dresden. I’ve just been cured of bone cancer.”
He said it as though it was becoming a standard part of a person’s introduction at An El. Name, origin, cure.
“Have you,” said Avelyn, studying the halo, which was strong enough to light the way up the passage. The steep path was darker and darker the closer you went to the surface. The salt in the walls was no brighter than a silvery midnight now.
“So do you think they should?” Fabian asked.
Avelyn glanced back, because he had a trail of people who were angling to touch the silver cases he had the miracle samples in, and he was beginning to feel like he was at school again and trapped in a slow game of It. “No,” he said. “He suffered enough the first time around.”
“Well, but you see, imagine if we’re supposed to, imagine if this is the Second Coming—”
“When did you notice your symptoms improving?” said Avelyn.
Fabian blinked at him. “Are you, like, neurodiverse?”
“No, I’m a Jesuit.”
“You surely are. You do you!”
Avelyn wondered if he would be in trouble if he accidentally lost Fabian in the lake, and Fabian was eaten by eels. “Lately, or as soon as you arrived, do you think?”
“I was here for maybe two weeks. It was after Matthew,” Fabian said, warming to it.
“I’d been praying for a cure already, but after I saw Matthew get up out of that chair .
. . it was like I truly understood it could happen.
Something changed in me then, in my prayers, you know?
It was like I’d opened a doorway, and God walked right on through it. ”
Avelyn thought: I bet you’re in a band that plays songs called things like “Jesus Is My Bestie.”
“Congratulations,” he said, looking back through the people around them.
The ones with the halos were like lanterns in the gloom.
So Fabian had been cured, and he had the halo.
Was that a coincidence, or would the others have seen some improvement too?
Had Annunciata arrived with a heart condition she didn’t have anymore?
He’d have to start the interviews the second he was back in Hreodwater.
“Thanks, man,” Fabian said, and segued smoothly into a lecture on how he was extra-confident now, given that he was the recipient of God’s personal grace, about the paper he was writing against the inclusion of women in the priesthood.
They were almost at the surface. Avelyn could see daylight, misty and grey. He wasn’t sure of the time, but it must have been around eight. “I’m going to find the ferryman,” he said, hoping Fabian would take the hint.
The moment they were in the open air, the cold smacked into him like a cargo train.
The snow was thick on the ground now, creaking under every step, pristine.
Where salt light hung in mist-bands, it tinted the white land its eerie purple-amber.
Avelyn pulled his coat around him tighter, not to much avail.
All his clothes were good for Italy, where it was never cold.
He hadn’t had time to buy anything that would help against all this.
He hadn’t thought to. The climate of southern England in December was brown and wet and miserable.
He’d thought the days of snow and frozen rivers were as long lost as Queen Victoria.
Still, Hreodwater thought English was newfangled.
Of course it hadn’t bothered with climate change.
“The point is,” Fabian said, following him, “that priests are modern apostles, which means teacher, right? And the original apostles were all men, so we’re just trying to stick as closely to Christ’s own choices as we can.”
“You’ve forgotten about Mary Magdalene,” Avelyn said, scanning the shore. Yes: there was the ferry, and thank Christ, there were already people clustered around it, so the first sailing must be soon.
“No, no, she never preached, she never spread the Word—”
“Apostle of the Apostles. She saw the resurrection and told the others.”
“Yes, but that’s hardly teaching, and it’s only in John.”
“John’s the only one who quotes Christ himself saying he is the literal son of God too. In the rest only other people say it and according to Jesus himself, he’s just some bloke.”12
“That’s heresy,” Fabian said knowingly.
“Fabian, I mean this in the most brotherly possible way, but fuck off before I shove you in the fucking fen.”
As Avelyn crossed the green in front of the minehead, the way was busy.
People were setting up stalls by the light of salt torches, hanging up garlands of holly and wreaths made of mistletoe and bright berries, and building a mammoth—life-sized—from willow twigs.
There was a wolf and a bear too, all enormous.
Yes: the fire festival. God. Yule. He’d forgotten. It would be . . . when? Three days. But the festival would start tonight.
He knew something odd was happening when he reached the dock and the jetties, because it was crowded, and not in a patient way.
The Outsiders, all tourists who had stayed overnight, were talking uneasily amongst themselves, and a few were trying to argue with someone towards the front.
He overheard snatches of conversations about trying to find somewhere to stay overnight again, and how expensive it was, and whether there would be anyone who spoke English . . .
“What’s going on?” Avelyn asked a lady with a little boy when he couldn’t edge any further through.
“The woman who does the ferry says she can’t take anyone across today.
Something about the snow.” Her eyes caught on his collar, and he saw her wonder if she should move her little boy well away from him.
It gave him a familiar needle of shame-fury, the one that made him want to march up to the Pope and demand that any priest found to have done that wasn’t only dismissed, as if he’d just made some tone-deaf comment online, but hurled into a volcano.
There were precedents. That was how the Japanese had dealt with particularly irksome priests for some time, and if you looked at it from a reoffending point of view, it was markedly effective.
“The snow?” he said instead. The snow was heavy, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the ferry. The Flood wasn’t frozen.
“Wait, are you Hreod?” she asked, looking at him more closely. “Can you speak Hreod?”
“Yes—”
“Can you—”
“Yes,” he said. “Redspear! Grandmother—what’s going on?”
People heard Hreod and let him by, and eyes followed him hopefully as he slipped through.
Redspear was standing on the dockside beside a sign that said in English, Mandarin, and Hreod that the ferry was suspended until tomorrow. “I’ve been telling them,” she said, unbothered by all the agitated people. “I can’t take them across in this snow. Too much now.”
“What’s wrong with snow?”
“Look,” she told him, pointing across the Flood. “This isn’t our snow.”
He had a terrible feeling he was coming up to an impassable glacier of Hreod Thinking. “Why do you say?”
“You’re the witch; you tell me what’s wrong over there.”