CHAPTER 30 #3
Jericho lifted his jaw a tiny fraction. When he was serious, Avelyn was beginning to notice, the expressions didn’t quicksilver across him so brightly anymore; they turned so slight they were barely there.
“Only briefly.” He studied Avelyn. “Most people don’t believe in Hell so solidly.
Most people couldn’t actually set fire to something even with all the salt light in the world.
Do you really disapprove of me that much? ”
“No! No, it—of course I don’t disapprove, it’s just—I hate the rules, but they are the rules.”
Jericho turned unreadable again, and after a moment he took out a box of cigarettes and his silver lighter, clicked it once, and breathed smoke into the wind.
Avelyn couldn’t quite make that go through his head. “You smoke?”
“Not normally,” Jericho said.
Avelyn flooded with unease. “Are they your emergency don’t-punch-Avelyn cigarettes?”
Jericho was too Jericho-ish to say yes. “I’m glad you have your faith, I really am, but some of what you believe is penetratingly vile.”
It took Avelyn by surprise. They had been speaking so easily until now that he had forgotten they weren’t approaching the world from the same foundations.
“No, it—God is the source of all goodness. Reject Him, and of course it’s Hell.
Complaining about it is like saying that you hate light bulbs but then saying it’s unfair to have to sit in the dark.
God isn’t punishing anyone, it’s just . . . what happens.”
Jericho took a long drag and said nothing, letting Avelyn hear his own words—and that Avelyn had just opined that it was impossible for Jericho to be a good person without faith, despite having saved Avelyn’s life twice in two days.
Avelyn could hear the clash there as well as anyone, and he wanted badly to say that you could be good and do God’s work even if you didn’t call it that, but that was not doctrine: not if you were surrounded by people telling you what it was.
Knowing the Church well, like Jericho did, and rejecting it with full consent anyway: that was grave.
“Did something happen to you, to make you push the Church away, even though you work for her?” Avelyn asked. “Because God understands—”
“What,” said Jericho, with a sad twitch of a smile, “apart from all the genocides, pogroms, witch hunts, legions of tortured children, and let’s not forget the seven hundred or so skeletons of babies they found in a tank outside a mother and baby home in Tuam not so long ago?”
Avelyn was in pain. “No one’s saying we’re free of original sin, we’re not, the Church is broken because humans are broken. We’re not saying we’re better, just like scientists aren’t saying they’re better. We’re just saying that what we say is true. Gravity is real. Hell is . . . is real.”
“No, all right,” said Jericho, with the same soul-tiredness Avelyn had seen on him before in his office, when he had thought no one was watching. Avelyn actually saw him give up and decide it wasn’t worth the energy to argue, and that was worse than being shouted at.
Because he was himself, though, Jericho held the cigarette box out.
Avelyn had given up years ago, but he took one now.
They were both quiet. Not far away from them, some miners were singing again, a different hymn to the King, and so were plenty of other people, and Avelyn understood now.
If you were singing that unearthly harmony with its different parts for deep miners, for children, for surveyors, for witches, the song weaving around itself and echoing and incredibly, incredibly difficult—you weren’t thinking about anything else.
You weren’t thinking of how that shadow looked like a monster, or how those branches could be the antlers of a great stag.
Mind like a rock. Sing to the King, and nothing else.
Redspear and the Witan were still talking.
Groups of nuns and priests were clustered together too, but the tone was different.
They hadn’t seen what had happened—not the thing in the light, nor the lady.
All they had seen was a trader panic and then stop panicking after some prayers and an eerie Hreod song.
The conversations were interested and excited, but not urgent, and people were speculating about why the Hreoda were all so upset.
Avelyn could see some of them gearing up to come over here and ask him, and he felt completely unable to face that. What would he say?
“Why now?” Avelyn said. It felt like an artificial foray into normal conversation, brittle and run through with fractures.
He ploughed on anyway. “In the stories, the Salt King—whatever that really is—wakes up when something dangerous is here, Romans or Vikings or Norman knights, or whatever, but there’s nothing.
Why would it wake now? What’s different? ”
Jericho was looking at the sky again. He seemed content to ignore the argument they weren’t having, but Avelyn was building a good enough idea of him now to know he wouldn’t forget it.
He was an optimist, not an idiot. It was a miserable thought.
At last he said: “I think that suggests . . . something is coming.”