Communication

And tha-thump, tha-thump—resounded on the earth from afar—tha-THUMP, tha-THUMP—like a heartbeat. Streaking like a shooting star, an ungulate beast galloped across the plateau; upon which was mounted a man. Blotted by sun-glare some miles off, a cloud of people and camels followed this sprinter, many times more slow. Louder grew the thudding, the quaking of the earth, and the jangling—of bells—looped by golden rings on the head of the staff, which bobbed horizontal misting smoke into the wind, of the rider, who crashed upon me.

“Down!” he commanded, slicing the staff vertical.

I dropped flat—on chin, ankles, palms.

“Disperse!” he ordered, sweeping out his staff. I scuttled out of the copse under an invisible beam of focus, separated now from Hejat.

The rider rounded the cloud of his own dust and interposed himself between me and the copse, high upon his snorting beast, a rhinoceros. Such an exclusive creature is rarely found even in the wild, certainly I’d never seen one before, much less one domesticated into an agreeable mount—hardly imaginable it could serve so, except as a poached slave beaten to gratify its owner’s ostentatiousness. This marvellous bull though was surely not such. With flawless, healthy plates and powerfully exercised muscles, in its wise eyes there eddied a proud intelligence, of exacting dignity, ribboned inside reins embroidered with ruby, lapis, carnelian, and gold. A gazelle’s agility met a stallion’s discipline, as it moved; and in the breeze on its flank swayed the red-and-white banner of the Church’s Czjeirphet.

Glaring from atop its back was the Bishop. He was one of those, individuals—who, regardless of outfit, teemed with blessing as raiment. My face mashed obesquiously into the sand. From him radiated glory like the threads of an iris, which simultaneously impressed me to stare as if magnetised and abashed me to not even look, as much as aphids do not look on eagles.

He wore an airy white sunshroud whose mild reflections, backlit, rimmed him in light. Fires of rose, platinum-gold and silver too flickered around his body, and blazed from his gaze like a crystal—but on the next glimpse, only an invisible echo, or was the effect always a hallucination?

Argent fervour. It wasn’t quite Czjeir’s heat, but of a similar ardour. Here, out in the middle of nowhere, far below what his station offered, was a Pontifex candidate.

What intimidated me most about him was that he barely looked a year older than me. He could’ve mingled into my undergrad, who would tell?

“Explain,” he said.

“I—” my throat croaked.

“Your fixation,” he continued, “with the altar in our old Gedjatsyi church.”

Oh—that. A Bishop would care about that, I thought, as the tickling heat of embarrassment marched up my neck. I perhaps understood the position of a shamed dragon when the knight needles his rapier into its scales’ one exposed chink. My contrarian mouth though broke a foul grin and spewed words.

“We’re colleagues.”

The Bishop tilted his head, then smiled amicably. “Cryptic. My assignment occupies me in the seminary.”

“I—well, I never went there,” I muttered.

“No; you studied witchcraft,” he concluded. “That baffles me.”

“O-only as a side...” I craned to peer between the legs of his rhinoceros, for the following party of palatines on camels had arrived, and beelined into the copse for Hejat.

The Bishop shook his staff, sharply jangling its bells.

“Focus,” he ordered.

Though his authority pricked me to comply with yearning, the disturbing meddling unfolding behind him with Hejat yanked me to lurch and to fidget, as though the Bishop’s hulk of a mount and overwhelming aura were permeable screens of frayed wool. They had dragged Hejat out of the copse.

“Hold,” he told me, steadying the staff horizontally level, as a vague partition between me and the group. Over his shoulder he called for Hejat’s condition, and the palatines answered, ‘alive.’ “Drop him, momentarily,” he ordered. “Otherwise I cannot work on this one, for his curses become greatly distempered. And you too,” he switched to me breezily. “Drop him, momentarily, also.”

Upon seeing that the palatines did back off, I obediently bowed my chest to the sand. Then balked at myself in irritation for being so strongly reactive.

“My and your service seem little aligned; mine does not tear bodies, as this. If not as fellows in arcanum, then, in which way are we colleagues?” the Bishop asked.

I hefted myself up to sit. Inside my chest over the volcanic wastes, hot plumes of smoke whorled alive, crested up by a deep vibration, in my diaphragm, of cruel, cackling laughter:

“Same employer.”

And the smoke eddied up between my teeth, spilling into the air, that if I did buckle to the maniacal urge to laugh and laugh and laugh, every particle in my fervid breath would combust into fire.

The Bishop bit his dainty lip, and paced his rhinoceros in a tight circle.

“Your sad little miracles are far too cheerful to pulp the scum out of this trash,” I snickered. “Our specimen today wears the skin of a human being, but underneath the congeniality’s a sparge of the Heresies’s fieriest diarrhoea—kueh, and sure, I’ll say it, I like that, it allures me.”

The Bishop’s staff lowered, limp.

“Not so much, the dishonesty, though,” I was prattling now. “Though ripping the pretence apart, that’s also magnificent. You should see it too, that sometimes your best efforts are useless. I mean, even Czjeir can’t stop every heart from freely failing—that’s the whole point of the Judgement, all but a handful are too worthless and die, and a handful of that handful will die with determination. I guess you wouldn’t know that, how joyful it is to ‘win’ by unorthodoxy. Um, yeah, I studied witchcraft. Hated every witch I met, so it’ll be fun to meet even more. Actually I’ve hated every person I’ve met, though, I mean, not... they’re not all wicked, I know that, or rancid, I know, just, very, unpleasant, to me... specifically. Anyway, so I guess you wouldn’t know that I’m actually perfect for this, and ‘this’ involves, mostly just, copious targeted anthropophagy, which is, well instinctively it is highly stimulating to it evidences that I enjoy—the assignment, but that’s not really about you, but it is... good that you’d know, for the future, that this is all, it is, in the Church’s workbox.”

His lips murmured along with my words as if to catch them. He closed his eyes.

Then he spoke softly. “I see. Brother in trials, you must understand, even if spurred by good motives, death is no offering the Church can accept.”

It’s not up to you/But I’m already here! My teeth clenched and knuckles balled in the sand.

“It is contrary. Czjeir desires not a single one who could come to Paradise be barred; when a life is ended, that is the cessation of its writ, and the finalisation of what will become for judgement. A poor heart in present may in time become righteous; and the righteous in present may falter by conceit. Premature cessation of the former, by the latter, does condemn greatly the latter. This is why we do not kill even the heinous, but separate them for healing by penitence, and exile them if they repent not. The measure of when and how to snip is known only, then, by Czjeir.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “By Czjeir.”

“Yes, by Czjeir.”

“Yes, by Czjeir!”

“Friend in woe, you are not Czjeir, as I am not Czjeir,” he explained as if to a child. “Not even the Pontifex Gedjatsyi in his greatest sublimation was Czjeir. This state,” he jangled his staff at me, “is not Czjeir.”

It occurred to me then a real frustration for my incompetence at communication. Strange tidal misery swept over me, not the familiar choking press of impotent despair, which compresses the body into a smudge, but an active sadness that precipitates sobbing and tantrums. “But I really saw him. I did!”

It was the whiniest I could remember myself sounding ever, as well as the least convincing, and if I could rewrite this spontaneously unfolding script to instead maul myself, that would be capital.

“Really!” I insisted. “I—I, hhhrrrgggin!” A wild trill convulsed me, an audible wrenching of gears. “You incompetent shits don’t seem to get it, advocates of Shien arete in reverse. The grand liars, and apostate revellers, who love everything that raises your megalomaniacal ‘all-be-well’ hackles—you don’t own them. These—an, infected cut, you would, you want to mend that. These are, already mended... by their own sublimation, into the infection. Equivalency... so it is healthy for them, to be infected. They want to be, more infected, and reproduce... more of themselves in others. When you bring the, antiseptic, they’ll screech because, you’re killing something they adore, which is, themselves. Even though they are, the ugliest, dripping, foul, malodorous, sickly, miserable, bloodthirsty, dejecting, clueless, paranoid, self-mutilating, gluttonous, most violent untempered extortionist pigs, they think that’s just, lovely.”

“And learned all such without the seminary,” the Bishop muttered. “Cursed, and rashly judgemental knowledge. Even so, the capacity of subjection is in all.”

“‘Capacity’, exposes a subset that don’t,” I said. “Ever. Never, ever! Fine so I am judgemental—because I hate them, I hate them so much! Do you realise how hideous? These reprobates are who see the capacity to kill themselves, and then don’t? So pleased with the filth that they already are, and raring to be even filthier,” I hissed. “At least I did! And I was so utterly useless—it took Czjeir to step in.”

“And it is my position,” he continued, “to divide these twisted conceptions, the sick from the health, the life from the death, the name from the rot, the one from the other.” With a light breath, he holstered his staff and hopped off his mount. Then he rubbed his hands briskly, like a surgeon freshly in gloves. “We will begin. Lay still.”

His order came in such a gentle voice that to comply incurred gratification, like animals must feel when praised. Palatines in the copse emerged to watch the nascent miracle, its breath thick in the glittering air. Holy licks of pale fire surrounded the Bishop, as he took a breath.

“For aeons we may face the trials of our adversary,” he began. “Through the fetters of a Long Night, a night so long and so wicked that we will scream the sun has left us forever, until the daybreak cracks across our face, burning us shamefully, and leaving welts like a whip. Damned as we are from the shah to the pauper in the chains of our heresy; the curse of our death, the rot of our soul and the venom we drink from the cup of the serpent, who has tested and judged, deviously, all our inclinations of heart. At each step, and at each moment, a new trial is offered; that it may be passed or failed, and that our imperfections shall slip us invariably into the maw of disgrace. Every one is damned; the kind, the valiant, the learned, the just, equally they all wilt to sludge. Not one escapes the coils; of the spiteful imperator of the Gates of Death, not one stands just before the great critic; who despisingly places the man beside the glory of his Architect, and mocks every flicker by which humanity’s soul is not Him—not a one will pass through this dark valley, not a one, not a one, on his own.”

Words lilted through the air as if laced with embers; a wind picked up, not striking upon my skin but upon a second iteration, inside the iteration, the goopy caterpillar inside the chrysalis. My hands clenched for a grip on the sand; astringent pain of a speared, howling monster whooped somewhere at my back, but peeled, painfully, as a knife peels off an adhesion, so distant it clouded the sting, and all I could see was an oncoming supercell.

“Saved are the ones who the Architect cups in His hand, and calls sternly: Mine. We draw close unto His heart; we burn ourselves alive to feel His ardour; we nip His ankles like dogs for a fleck of a blessing; that His flame may light in our chests, casting into the world through the facets of Us the thousand speckled refractions of His favourite hues, recognized each in body exalted by the name that He gave! Every brick shall be known in the castle He builds; every fine tree shall be known in His garden; every child shall be known in His family. Such is the bond of the promise to the ones that shall be lorded into the mansions of His Paradise!”

Gales of rose-pink and platinum buffeted me. I grappled harder, but in the face of the tempest there was nothing to hold, only the pressure of the gust. I was simultaneously being pushed down like a squished beetle and, in a coruscation of light that hollowed my head dizzy, swept away...

“Not by untempered passion, but by reciprocation of love; not by mastery over another, but mastery over ourselves; not by bonding to the flesh, but by faithful custodianship of it, until it is taken and its curses are shucked. To our God, to His beloved, to His crafts, to His arts of peace, victory, charity, perfection, and virtuous beauty, we are bonded together in excellent love, that is offered freely and copiously to the tender, the scorned, the unfulfilled, and the desperate, by the patient hand that until the darkest hour waits always to be, astoundingly, taken; as the lamb suckles at waters. Let it be! For the One who has called me, and to whom I am by all my will surrendered, who lifts me through my struggles, who guides me when I am lost, who chastises me in my pride, whose glories are of unceasing praise, as much as I am Yours, let this one be mine, and in being mine, be Yours...”

And his words melted into waves of visions that overpowered the chattering language. I braced my arm against a squall that never hit, and I was upright upon my feet, and a temperate light flickered alive inside my body, though this body also was not my corpse, as though I were now the scaffold of glass into and through which sunbeams poured smoothly, and gently, like water.

And my skeleton softened to butter; and a musical hum arose like vibrating crystals. I saw that I was standing in a field of golden wheat. Swaying stalks tickled against my chest, tousled in a zephyr, and their brush against me alarmed me to my own motionlessness; I gasped, a breath so sharp and of such fresh air that it stung as a newborn’s first breath stings, but without the consequent screaming, because a certain familiarity in the pastoral environment echoed less a new life and more a peaceful homecoming. My eyes opened in a way they had not before ever. It was like a glue, or a muck over them had fallen away.

And the sky above was a vibrant ultramarine, and all the colours of blue and gold and green and everything bore exceedingly bright, not in the garish way of a clangorous jester, but in the enticing way of a hummingbird’s crest or the skin of a bold ripe persimmon, yet keener and purer in quality than anything I had previously conceived as perfection. Verdant mountain peaks cloaked the end of the valley; though I sensed they were not that far off, and between them and the field was a region I could not see clearly but sensed had towns, or people, or the suggestion of such. And behind me I knew was an unpleasant grey place, so unpleasant I had no urge to face it; but by its coldness at my back I intuited had grey cracked earth and wilted black foliage, and fissures of tar over a stale long desert and was all-over so miserable that if I did look at it, it would kill me.

And in front of me in the centre of everything, at the end of the wheat field, was this massive archway. It radiated with light; both its insides and its structure were light, such that it was less like defined architecture and more like a mirage upon the air that boiled with solid presence. It roiled with activity inside it, for inside was a chaotic churning of alabaster-white clouds—I couldn’t clearly see for its brightness, and the noise that emerged was muffled—but there was speech and laughter and happiness of every pure stripe spearing about in radiant prisms, like how one light breaks into many differently hued beams when cast through a diamond, and each one was beautiful.

And there wasn’t any deliberation, or even presumption of contrarian spite, that I would do anything except march right in there. Every part of me wanted to go. More, by magnitudes, than toward the souls I had hunted these past few days, I wanted this; this archway attracted me.

And the pull of gravitation between me and it was not a frantic, or coerced pull, but the assured calm tract of a be-medalled homing pigeon; in fact no urgency to pursue the goal accost me at all, because I had an unwavering sense of peace, assurance, and confidence that both my internal guide and the destined pole would stay in their exact place and alignment. In that field I could not feel failure.

And in a paradoxical way that profluence of confidence contented me to go slowly. I knew that I would not lose the path to the arch. And I knew that I would not make it to the arch; that there was a certain closeness at which the light would sear against me, and unlace me, but equally I knew this was fine, provided I simply came as near as I could. When I crossed a certain distance, I would begin to become very sleepy—not in exhaustion, but in peaceful sleep—that would fall upon me like a blizzard, and I would collapse into it safely. This all came to me intuitively, but also instructionally, as though remembering the rules of a game that someone I vaguely figured I knew must have invented.

And so I was about to start my enlightened trek for the archway—when suddenly I thought of Czjeir.

And at the flash of him, this incredible—incredible sadness overtook me. My hand curled over my heart. And I remember thinking, some kind of sentiment—it went on for a while, and was extremely poignant—but I don’t remember the exact content or quality of it at all. By the end I was resolute about—something—as bizarre on me as the word is, and I turned around—

“...until the day of repose, that we will again meet in Heaven. Amen.”

“Amen,” the onlooking palatines echoed a hush.