CHAPTER 16 #2
“Oh, I see,” Jericho said, and relaxed.
“Sorry, you mean there exists somebody you don’t like?” Avelyn said, because this was revelatory information and never mind any other crises.
Jericho stiffened, caught out. “No. He’s perfectly lovely.”
“He surely is,” Avelyn said, on the scent now.
Jericho looked like he was having some internal moral clashes. “Did he, er . . .”
“Give me a detailed lecture about why there shouldn’t be any women allowed in the priesthood? Yes, he did.”
“Because the apostles—”
“Because the apostles were all men,” Avelyn joined in, aware that the only reason Jericho had brought this up was so that he could sit still and get used to the idea of the stitching before it began again. “You’ve heard it too. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘But wouldn’t first-century socioeconomic factors mean the broad majority of women weren’t free to give up everything to wander around after a carpenter,’ and he said, ‘It was the Lord’s choice,’ and then I made him sit next to Annunciata for a week,” Jericho said.
“People . . . are allowed to have their opinions, though.” It was cracking around the edges.
Avelyn was starting to feel less terrible. “I’m going to start cornering him in corridors and asking him about abortion. As you say, he’s great. I’m sure he’ll say completely reasonable things.”
Jericho broke. “I will stab you with this.”
“Ah, you’re a normal person really,” Avelyn said, victorious. It was a brittle kind of cheer, but it was better than nothing.
“For God’s sake, you’re like a cat with a—no! Never mind,” Jericho cut himself off. Avelyn must have been emanating triumph. “Never mind. I’m not encouraging you. Shall I try this again?” he asked, about the stitching.
Avelyn nodded. It had to be done one way or another. His shoulders tacked when Jericho began again, but it wasn’t as dramatic as before.
“Tell me about Caer Halen.”
Avelyn watched him sew, thinking how neatly he could do it, so that he wouldn’t think about anything else.
“It’s . . . not different stories. The King is supposed to sleep down in the deep, but at the same time, he’s inside Caer Halen.
It’s one place.” He mimed worlds overlapping with his hands.
“The miners say that if you go down deep enough, you find columns and castle halls and daylight, and you come out onto the fen, even though you should be two thousand feet underground.”
Jericho was tying a knot. Avelyn hoped that meant he was almost finished.
He was. When he sat back, he rested his wrists on his knees and gave Avelyn another of his long studies. When he was talking, he was animated, but when he did this, it made him unreadable.
“Thank you,” said Avelyn, to make it stop. The tear tracks were stiff under his eyes.
“Right,” Jericho said. “I’m going to run a bath and you’re going to get in it and wash off the fen, and meanwhile I’m going to go up to your room and bring you some dry clothes. Then we’ll get a bandage over that. Yes?”
“Yes,” Avelyn said.
It was a relief to be clean again, and warm, and dry, all at the same time.
By the time he was, Jericho had brought back his spare jeans and a soft grey top with long sleeves.
Avelyn found his rosary tucked into the jeans’ pocket.
Gratitude fissured all his other thinking, and he cast a look at the door, wondering how many people would have thought to do that.
On his little cross, Christ did not, as usual, have anything to say.
He could feel the King, though; the ras was soaking through him as much as the heat of the bath had done.
He tried to persuade himself that it wasn’t the ras, just the contentment that came of being in the nicest bathroom he’d ever seen.
It had its own stained salt window, as tall as he was; it showed a contingent of Roman legionaries who had been lost in the mine, and the red of their cloaks spilled pretty red light across the flagstones and across the room’s central column.
That column supported the arches and vaults of the ceiling, carved with tiny saints and stags.
The bath, with its polished brass taps, was plumbed in just beside it, and somebody had put up a shelf just at sitting-down eye level so you could read without getting the book wet.
In the corner burned a tall iron sconce of candles, beside a green velvet armchair.
It was the ras, though. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the King close by.
“Is there any chance you can talk me through the bandage so I can do it?” he asked through the door.
He heard Jericho come to the other side, and for the next few minutes, it was instructions and questions.
If the King could see them somehow, they must have looked odd, both sitting facing the bathroom door.
Once he had finished, Jericho passed him a silver camera so Avelyn could take a picture and he could check the knot was all right.
In the reflection in the silver casing, Avelyn saw that Jericho was sitting on the floor just outside like a mermaid, leaning on one hand, his head angled away, so that he wouldn’t see Avelyn.
The light skimmed the long tendon in his throat and pooled between his collarbones.
“That’s good,” Jericho said, after Avelyn had posted the picture under the door.
Avelyn set the camera aside and dug his fingernails into the back of his hand so he’d feel something other than humiliated. “I know, by the way. That I shouldn’t care about seeing a doctor.”
“Shouldn’t you?” Jericho said. “It’s unreasonable to say you have to live a life where no one touches you and then say you shouldn’t mind when someone has to.
That isn’t how humans work.” He paused. “Why do priests have to be celibate? I mean I understand why very devoted people might choose to be, but why is it . . . required?”
That was an unusual question. People asked about celibacy all the time—it was the first thing some people said to him—but they always asked what it was like; not why it was.
“Entering the priesthood is the same as a marriage. You should be faithful to that marriage.” Avelyn was easing into the new jeans, trying not to dislodge the knot on the bandage.
“To seek out that kind of relationship with another human is a violation of what you’ve promised to God.
You promise soul and body, not just soul. ”
“I understand, but—why? Protestant ministers can marry, rabbis can marry . . .”
Avelyn was quiet at first, thinking of all the things he could say.
Because especially for young men, sex was often not about affection but power, and celibacy was a way to crush that rancid way of thinking.
Because if all that just wasn’t part of your life, and never would be, then you formed deep, intense friendships and you maintained an ironclad loyalty to more or less everyone you knew in the way most people only did with family.
Because if you had the kind of faith Father Li did, that ideally you should, then .
. . you just wouldn’t want that kind of relationship with another person, just like you didn’t in a good marriage.
He didn’t want to say any of that though. Those were all excellent reasons to choose it, but not to enforce it across the entire Church.
“It guarantees cheap labour,” he said at last. “If you say nobody can have any other commitments but work, then all you have to do is pay one person’s bed and board.
You don’t need to worry about paying anyone a salary that could support a family, or about anyone wanting parental leave or being torn between children and the job and all the rest. People in holy orders aren’t paid—I get two hundred euros a month for coffee and things, but that’s it.
The Church houses us and provides meals, and whatever we need for our missions.
I think if big companies could demand it, they would. ”
“But you do it anyway?”
Avelyn nodded to his own buttons. “Of course. When I left Hreodwater, I was sixteen. That’s too late to learn everything you need to, to be independent in the Outside.
If I tried to live by myself, I’d die on the street in forty-eight hours.
I’m not joking. The Church will educate you for free, give you work with real purpose, and look after you for life.
A condition of having that is being part of an institution where about one in twenty priests is guilty of the worst thing in the world.
Another condition is celibacy. I can either live with it, or die without it. ”
There was quiet on the other side of the door.
“I’m not trying to be depressing,” Avelyn said. “Anyway, I’m brilliant at it. I fall in love all the time but never with anyone who wouldn’t be horrified, so it’s not like I ever have an opportunity to break any vows. Clever, right?”
“No, that’s much worse,” Jericho said, sounding shaken.
“You’re married then,” said Avelyn. He slightly lost interest. He had a particular dislike of the way married people tended to talk to him, which was often as though he had amputated a leg, when in fact he had a brilliant life that was a thousand times better than being shackled to some awful desk job just to support three obnoxious children who hated you.
In all honesty, the idea of living with someone who might at any moment change their mind and decide they didn’t like you anymore before asserting their legal rights to half your stuff, even—and maybe, especially to annoy you—the hand-painted Converse from the little shop near the Piazza Navona, sounded hellish.
But Jericho snorted. “Of course I’m not married. I live in a hole in the ground surrounded by professionally unavailable people.”
Avelyn was re-interested. “Why do you?”
“Raging agoraphobia,” Jericho said.
A survey of the available facts didn’t seem to support that. “But you were outside just now.”
“Mm.” It was a viola thrum from deep in his chest. “First time for about a year.”
“What?” Avelyn said, shocked. “Are you all right?”