CHAPTER 32 #3
Avelyn exchanged a glance with Annunciata.
He had assumed Jericho was English, on no evidence except geography.
He was still terrible at telling apart Outside voices and even Outside faces.
Everyone looked the same. Father Li still mocked him ruthlessly about the Brother Titus incident, but Avelyn still did not understand—given that Father Li and Brother Titus were both tiny benign men with black clothes and a homicidal attitude towards the English—how everybody else could tell them apart just because Brother Titus was a blond Scottish person.
“Where from?” Annunciata asked gently.
“I honestly couldn’t say,” Jericho said, with one of his quick smiles that meant he wasn’t really smiling. “Patch of desert somewhere these days. The name changes. I don’t think . . . I ever knew exactly where it was.”
“Unacceptable. You can’t be from an anonymous patch of desert and just expect us to ball past it,” Annunciata said.
Jericho looked torn, and Avelyn had time to think: God, he’s Israeli. Did he think they would start shouting at him about the war, and blaming him for everything? “Oh—well, it was nothing really. We just had to run away when the militia came. The bodies were nothing to do with me.”
“Really!” Avelyn said, overjoyed.
“No,” said Jericho, dropping his voice low.
Annunciata and Avelyn both burst out laughing, and their laughter rang sharp in the fog.
Avelyn had never met anyone who could do such a good caricature of themselves.
Jericho smiled too, a slower, smaller smile; his real one.
Avelyn thought of saints in paintings again.
There were often other paintings hidden underneath that final layer of colour.
You could see them under the right kind of light, those deeper iterations where the saint was not smiling, or where instead of cotton, they wore armour.
The more time he spent with Jericho, the more he saw flashes of armour.
“Oh . . . hang on,” Annunciata said, slowing down. “Sorry. Queasy.”
Avelyn stopped.
“Give it a second, it will pass,” Jericho said, but he slipped his hand away from Avelyn’s.
She was losing her colour. Her hair looked dulled down where it showed under her veil.
“Can I have your hands? There are pressure points on your wrists that can . . .” Jericho stopped. “You’re hot. Can you feel that?”
She nodded. “Really warm. Have been all day.”
Avelyn could feel she was hot from two feet away. The salt light was much warmer around her than the frozen air.
There was nowhere for her to sit down except on a half-buried Northman stone. Jericho guided her down onto it, and Avelyn tried not to think about whether, a thousand years ago, a sailor from Scandinavia had lain down in the snow too, and never stood again.
The salt light was powering into the invisible barrier around Jericho, then ricocheting away, back towards Annunciata. Brighter and brighter. There was some reaction that was speeding up.
Annunciata looked wrong. By salt light, things were always different. The marsh hares were red, not white, crows were like tiny peacocks, and Avelyn could see sun damage on people’s skin, but now, there was a terrible marbling pattern moving across her; something was molten.
The set of her spine looked as though she wouldn’t be able to stand up again now even if she had felt well enough to. She put her hand to her head, hardly any faster than a plant could move. “Jericho, I feel strange . . .” Her voice sounded odd and distant.
Jericho didn’t say anything. He only took her other hand and held it.
There was nobody else around them anymore. Everyone was too far ahead or too far behind to see in the fog. The silence was so deep that Avelyn could hear the hiss of the snow as it touched the blazing salt light above Annunciata’s head.
Annunciata looked at Avelyn, and he saw that she knew.
He made the sign of the cross over her and said, “May holy Mary, the angels, and all the saints come to meet you as you go forth from this life.” He had said those words before, over many people—perhaps dozens during the pandemic, when every priest and training priest in Rome had gone into the hospitals—but he had never so much hoped that Mary really would come.
The change was quick, but there was no single moment of it where anything was suddenly different.
Across perhaps five seconds, Annunciata went from being clearly a person sitting down, to a shape of salt that only looked like a person, the halite blooming vicious red, while something a little like a hand was still closed around Jericho’s.
When you said a prayer often, it became noise, and you could forget the meaning. The Ave Maria was one of those for Avelyn, but when he said it now, he heard it.
Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death; amen.
“Amen,” Jericho echoed, to the snow.
Hating that he had the kind of mind that remembered to, Avelyn held up the silver camera and took a picture. The whirr of the film rolling out was loud.
Jericho eased his hand away from the halite, which was still pulsing a deep salt light, but far less than before.
They both sat exactly still. Neither of them spoke. After a while, some of the people who had been walking more slowly passed them by and didn’t look twice, because they were just a mismatched pair of men sitting on either side of a standing stone.