CHAPTER 55 #2
“So here’s my thought, about lust as a sin,” she said.
She was always precise—she was the kind of person who said about two hundred and seventeen—but sometimes she could put a weight behind it, until it wasn’t the precision of a microscope but of a tank’s gun tower ticking through degrees.
“Blokey, isn’t it? You perceive lust as dangerous for other people because it is—coming from men.
It’s dangerous for women, dangerous for other men too, in prison showers and . . . vestries.”
Father Li half laughed. “I don’t think you need to—”
“And as humans do,” she said over him, “when we get together in a group composed only of people exactly like ourselves, you assume that everyone experiences it in the same way: you assume that desire is always a downward punch. But that is a very specific kind of desire, and I’d suggest that the people grabbing waitresses and altar boys are a very specific sort of man.
Lust, the sin, is about power: it’s about treating people as objects whose destruction doesn’t matter.
It isn’t the same as desire. Any woman can tell you that. ”
“Yes, we agree,” Father Li said impatiently. “I do know the definition of the mortal sins.”
“I’m glad. Meanwhile you say that your god is love, but it’s astonishing how disgusted you are by love in the real world.
Almost as though you resent it; almost as though, not being allowed much of it, you see it as a privilege to be awarded to the chosen, cooperative few, and not a basic fact of humanity, and almost as though your imagination is so starved by your tortuous doctrine, you cannot see any kind of love that isn’t just lust in the end.
Which I imagine is enormously reassuring for you, because it allows you to imagine you aren’t amputating the best and most human part of yourself and calling it virtue.
You are, however, wrong, and what you just said is obscene. ”
Nobody ever said the rules were nice or fair, Rome Avelyn murmured from where he still sat propped by a dusty altar and one candle. But they are the rules.
“I didn’t make divine law,” Li said to her, quite gently now, the way he always spoke to people who had just fundamentally misunderstood. “They’re God’s laws.”
“And it’s God’s law that says millions of people should die.”
“I’m afraid so.”
There was no good person left at Sodom and Gomorrah, remember.
“Then your god is a genocidal maniac, and I’m going to ask you to take him with you as you leave.”
“Father,” Avelyn said. It was the first time he’d managed to pull together some real words instead of just a tumult of smoke and sorrow. “All the reports from Italy—they say Rome is terrible, and people are starving, and . . . and going mad, and dying. Everyone who makes it to the Wall is . . .”
“It’s only unbelievers, leaving for the Wall,” Li said, and Avelyn felt the air move as he waved his hand. “It’s very different if you have faith. It’s beautiful, Avelyn. Sapphire towers. Domes of . . . clear gold. It sounds impossible until you see it.”
“But the angels,” he tried.
“They sing to us, and we sing back,” Li said. There was love in his voice. “We can see them now. They’re beautiful. The song, Avelyn . . . it’s eternal adoration. Just like it was written. God is there.”
See? Rome Avelyn said without rancour. I told you there were no angels in Hreodwater.
“You touched one, didn’t you,” Tallis said abruptly. Her fingertips dug into Avelyn’s shoulder. She wanted him to listen. “That’s how you lost your arm. Your faith was enough for it not to just atomise you, but . . . nothing could stop your arm halifying.”
Avelyn’s head snapped up, even though he had no hope of seeing anything like that.
“His arm is missing to the elbow,” Tallis explained quietly. “The last inch or so is black halite.”
“What was it like?” he whispered.
In the background, he heard someone else come across, tall but quiet: that would be Sally, making sure that Tallis was all right.
“It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Li said, and Avelyn felt like he’d punched him in the chest. “I was wrong, wasn’t I? It wasn’t God who told me to save you. It was the Devil.”
“Okay, time to go,” Sally said, grim. He sounded like he wanted to hit someone. Time for the emergency cigarettes, Avelyn thought distantly.
“I’ll pray for you, lovely boy,” Li called back.
“Please do shut up,” Sally growled.
Avelyn sat exactly still, feeling the tears burn in his eyelashes and then go cool once they fell.
Tallis knelt down next to him. One of her knees always cracked when she did that, just like his.
“I don’t know who that was, but he wasn’t well, Avelyn.
The doctors are calling it ‘exaltation overdose’; have you heard that?
He’s been too close to angels for too long, it’s like a heroin addiction.
Whoever he was to you before—that wasn’t him, just now.
He’s sick. Very sick. If you could have seen him—he looked like a chemotherapy patient. ”
He nodded slightly, but he couldn’t tell if she was just saying that to make him believe her.
Tallis was a bulletproof atheist. The more of them he met, the more he noticed how, just like the faithful, they didn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.
It took just as much ferocious creativity not to believe as it did to believe.
He heard the rush and crackle as fire raced up his sleeve.
“Avelyn! Stop that right fucking now, don’t be ridiculous!” Tallis yelped. “It isn’t true, none of it is true, there is no Hell, for God’s sake!”
Of course there is. You chose wrong. Clack-clack, went the rosary in the candlelight.
He could feel her trying to disbelieve the fire away, but he was too strong now, after almost a year of maintaining Caer Halen despite her.
Someone clamped both arms around him, and then they weren’t in the hall anymore.
The snow was thick from the blizzard, and he fell into it backwards.
He heard the hiss, and the fire extinguished, and then almost instantly, he was freezing.
He let his head bump back. Ice formed in the roots of his hair.
He heard it clicking. They were up on the balcony of the north tower.
Far below, the wind whistled, and the mammoths sang to each other.
“Are you all right?” Jericho asked quietly, easing back. He had been holding Avelyn’s shoulders down with his whole weight.
“Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry.” He sat up and pushed his fingertips under his eyes, because the tear-tracks had frozen too, and it felt extraordinarily strange.
“God, that was stupid. I’m sorry,” he said again, shocked at himself now.
He had let that happen in a room full of people.
Tallis could have been hurt. He could have set the whole hall on fire.
A heavy cloak dropped around his shoulders, and Jericho held his knees with both hands. “Avelyn. That wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was. My whole function here is to control what I believe,” Avelyn said.
“What did he say to you?”
“He said Rome was Heaven on earth. I know it isn’t, I know . . .”
“Well, it is for those who believe that’s what Heaven is,” Jericho said. “I’m sure it is, to him.”
“Tallis said something about . . . exaltation overdose. People get . . . addicted to . . .?”
“It’s exactly what happens here. Witches become addicted to the ras and never come out from the deep.”
Avelyn nodded slightly. “Is that happening to me?”
“No,” Jericho said. He took Avelyn’s hands this time. “Because I generate no salt light while I’m like this, unless you let me. I’m not just in the shape of a person, it isn’t a mask, I am a person.” He touched their heads together. “Things can be two things.”
“I don’t think I know what’s real or not,” Avelyn said, very quiet, because it sounded so—so not how he meant it. It sounded crazy.
Jericho made a quiet sound that was full of sympathy pain, and put both hands around Avelyn’s throat. They were warm. “What’s real,” he whispered, “is that genocide is wrong even when angels are in the siege towers.”
Avelyn hugged him. Jericho had wings today for the ceremony, and when he put his hands under them, Jericho closed them tight over his knuckles, so that he was warmer straightaway.
“Shall we go down to the Lodge?” Jericho asked. “I’m cold.”
Not, It’s cold, or You must be cold. I’m cold. Avelyn loved him for that.
He let the warmth of the feeling and the black feathers fill him with thoughts of the Lodge, and its fire, and blankets, the heat of the salt light.
Only on the edge of his hearing at first, the fire crackled; but then it was there, and real, and they weren’t on the cold balcony high in the clouds, but on the hearthrug by the open stove.
He could just make out the light in the heart of the fire.
He could almost see Jericho, too—a tall shadow beside him, watching him, points of starlight showing in his eyes.
Not enough to see his face, though, only his posture.
He held himself differently now. The more people arrived at Hreodwater, desperate for the safety of Caer Halen and the protection of its legendary king, the more Jericho had to become the King, to make them feel safe.
The easily startled side of him was hidden away almost always.
He was still himself—the snail was still in its aquarium on the desk and winning all their arguments—but now he was himself under the appalling weight of the salt crown.
Sometimes, if they were alone, fragility showed through the weave of that regal stillness.
“Hot wine,” Jericho decided.
Avelyn tucked his head. “Oh, yes please.” He let the cloak slide off his shoulders and draped it over the back of one of the armchairs. He stayed close to it, so he had a reference point for the rest of the room. “Now that London is safe . . . what happens?”