CHAPTER 36
Rome, Italy
Cai had seen the election of five popes.
St Peter’s Square filled with people from all over the world, waving flags and banners, reporting to hundreds of different news agencies, and at night, when people lit candles or held up the lights on their phones, the Vatican looked as though an interested galaxy had come to witness the conclave.
Though people could be impassioned about the candidate they wanted to win, it always felt like a festival.
People brought their kids. The trestle tables set up by the pizza trucks filled with nuns from Brazil, Nigeria, Singapore.
Jesuits known all their lives for severity could be discovered being taught to skateboard in the grounds of colleges hosting youth groups from the States.
But as he struggled along the Borgo Sant’Angelo, the long avenue that led from Rome into the Vatican, the crowd made everything he’d seen here before seem like a village fair.
People were camping in the street. Groups huddled in circles were praying.
There were crates and baskets of food everywhere: something had happened to the banks, Steve had said, and a haphazard barter system was taking over.
He saw a commotion as four or five people slung a frightened man out of their barricaded cluster of tents, yelling something about how covetousness was a sin.
At least forty nuns were making their way through the packed space, handing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil.
Bonfires strung smoke into the twilight.
Sometimes the owners of the restaurants came out to yell at people to stop using the restaurant chairs for fuel, but it was a losing battle.
Usually a taxi could take you right to the Vatican walls.
Now the roads were too full of people. Steve had to leave him near the Castel Sant’Angelo, and it took an hour to walk what should have taken ten minutes.
Very soon he noticed eyes following him, assessing how easy it would be to take his phone.
It was the first time he had ever felt unsafe here.
Closer to St Peter’s, technicians were putting up enormous screens so that the crowd could see .
. . something. A papal address, most likely.
He wondered what in God’s name the Pope was supposed to say.
Soldiers lined the piazza, watching the crowd with their hands resting on their rifles, and press drones whined overhead.
Someone snatched him into a side alley.
“Give me your wallet, or I’ll cut you,” a rough voice said in Italian.
“I’m a Jesuit! I’m a Jesuit, we’re not paid!” Cai gasped. “Look, you can have my bank card, but there’s only twenty euros on it . . .”
The man let him go and burst into tears. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry . . .”
Cai patted him ineffectually. “It’s all right. I’m sorry, I have to go . . .”
He was barely inside the office when the Secretary appeared and seized his arm. “There you are! Come with me, come with me.”
“My friend at the Observatory managed to get some pictures of the movement in the salt light. It’s all—wait, where are we going?” The Secretary wasn’t taking him into his own office, but along the corridor, up the marble stairs.
“To see His Holiness. He wants to talk to you.”
“Sorry, I thought for a second you said the Pope wanted to talk to me,” Cai said, half laughing.
The Secretary looked grave, and Cai realized with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going deaf.
Cai had never been in the same room as the Holy Father, except perhaps for Midnight Mass inside the basilica—but being inside St Peter’s Basilica at the same time as someone else was like being in Wales at the same time.
He had never been into the papal apartments.
The Secretary opened the door for him, though, and there he was: a small figure in bright white, surrounded by cardinals in red.
“Father Li,” said His Holiness, in that precise Nigerian accent famous across the world from Korea to Argentina, the one Li had only ever heard magnified across loudspeakers or on the television before.
In real life, it was very quiet; so quiet that everyone else had to fall silent to hear him.
“I’m glad you’re here. You are the spiritual adviser of the young man we sent to investigate the occurrences in England, I believe? ”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” Cai managed. He looked around the other faces, hoping for some clues. People were giving him an unreadable mixture of stares. Some seemed angry. Some were shaken up. Some were taking great care not to meet his eye.
“I wonder if you could explain to us what he might have meant by this.” The Holy Father nodded to someone with a remote control, and a screen on the wall came on.
It showed a newsreel from the BBC. The caption underneath read:
VATICAN REPRESENTATIVE CLAIMS WIELICZKA DISASTER THE WORK OF ANGELS.
Cai pressed his hands over his mouth and thought: You look like an idiot. You look like an actor pretending to look surprised. But he really did have an urge to make sure not a single sound escaped him, because what if he said Oh fuck in front of Christ’s representative on Earth?
The footage must have been taken just now, probably while he was wading through the crowds outside.
It was dark in England, and the cameras and reporters had clearly mobbed Avelyn on his way out of Hreodwater.
He was wearing Hreod clothes, not the Jesuit black, and even though Cai had never seen him without them for twelve years, he wasn’t wearing his dark contact lenses.
The light of the cameras shone in his eyes.
They had changed from their Outside gold to uncanny violet.
Beside him was a tall man who looked like a saint, vaguely familiar, watching Avelyn as though he was ready to get in the reporters’ way and pull him to safety.
Cai didn’t blame him. Avelyn was terrifying, and he carried himself as if he were tall, but surrounded by people, all crowding in on him, there was no avoiding it: he was small and willowy, hardly any broader than he had been as a boy.
Avelyn looked taut, like anyone would if they were confronted by twenty yelling reporters, but as they shouted questions at him, Cai saw that hard Jesuit calm come down over him. The one that drove aid trucks through gunfire, and sometimes started fights with American conservatives for fun.
He was explaining something he had seen in the mine, showing them photographs.
A hammer from outside Hreodwater, blasted to salt. A silver hammer from there, perfectly whole. He was showing them the silver-clad camera he had used to take the pictures.
Nobody was really listening to him. It was what happened—Cai had felt it again and again when he spoke to atheists—when people thought you were just talking nonsense because you were some sad mixture of stupid and brainwashed, having devoted your life to your imaginary friend.
Someone asked him if it was angels.
Avelyn frowned, but the man who looked like a saint leaned down to him and whispered something, and Cai saw Avelyn change his mind about what he was going to say.
“Yes,” Avelyn said.
There was an uproar, and the reel cut back to the studio, where the slate-faced newsreader added, in the tone of and while we’re enjoying that typical bout of Catholic lunacy . . . , “The BBC has approached Vatican sources for comment, but there has been no reply.”
The screen switched off.
“I wonder if you could explain what he was talking about,” the Holy Father said. “We cannot reach him for clarification.”
Cai took a deep, slow breath. He had always struggled to tell what Avelyn would or wouldn’t believe.
When Cai first brought him to Rome, Avelyn accepted the idea of prophets and the Fall readily, he loved reading about the lives of saints, but for years he had point-blank refused to countenance that Christ was the son of God.
He’d said, what do you mean, there are three gods but they’re all the same thing and one of them is its own son?
Wholly God and wholly man, what? A holy mystery, you say?
You can’t yell holy mystery to excuse every nonsensical piece of twattery you can’t be bothered to think about properly.
Take your Trinity and shove it up your arse.
Cai wasn’t sure Avelyn was wholly convinced even now. The older Avelyn grew, the more difficult it became to know what was going on behind the dark contact lenses. Outside gold, or Hreod violet?
But Avelyn had been certain that whatever was in the mine was nothing good. That was only three days ago.
“I’ve been trying to call him,” Cai said lamely, “but I can’t get through. Electronics don’t work in Hreodwater.”
“He was outside it ten minutes ago. Try him again, would you please?” the Holy Father said in his endlessly mild way.
At least thirty people watched Cai negotiate with his phone. He put it on speaker.
The odd tzz, tzz of the English ringtone buzzed around the office.
The call connected.
“Father!” Avelyn’s voice exclaimed, magnified around the office. “Oh, my God, I’ve only just got my phone working, I’ve got eighteen missed calls from the Secretary’s office—”
“Yes, it is what happens when, in your capacity as a Vatican representative, you claim an international disaster is caused by angels, you see,” the Secretary put in, quite polite, as always, but looking as though he might reconsider starting the Spanish Inquisition again, only this time it wouldn’t be aimed at heretics but at annoying young men who found ways to derail international politics from a muddy island that everybody had naively assumed was too busy sinking itself into the Atlantic to do anything inconvenient.
“You’re on speaker,” Cai said bleakly. “I’m here with . . . well, with quite a lot of people. Including the Holy Father. We’d all like to know what made you say—what you just said on international news, which more than a billion Catholics will have seen by the end of the night.”