Familiarisation

The Bishop sighed. Men and their camels trotted about the plateau, loosed from spellbound observance into imminent work, but stuck still in the wafting savour of the sanctified air, which nobody wished to be the one to shatter.

The Bishop stroked his rhinoceros’ cheek. The animal nuzzled into the touch. He stretched to glance over its head toward the copse where Hejat laid. Some palatines embarked on the signal towards there. The Bishop’s focus, with hand absently indulging his beast, returned to the front.

His uneasy frown drew some looks.

“Still hasn’t departed,” he muttered.

The rhinoceros huffed.

“Calm, calm,” he stroked it.

At the copse, the palatines lifted Hejat.

And like a discarded paper, my body uncrinkled. Dislocated bones popped knuckle to knuckle back into link, met weakly at unstrapped ligaments then screwed tight to dessicate muscle, soon again flush by renewed hydraulics pumped fat into dry veins and arteries. Nerves fizzed slowly. The vehicle reconnected with crimson sparks crackling at each hooking of cable. I was heaving myself up—the weight in my bones and my spine dragged relentless, as though marrow were laced with granite magnetized toward the core of the earth—and I stood, and my guts putrefied, and my heart pruned into an empty black wolfberry, and claws ripped at the void in my stomach and screams wailed through the void in my skull. My footsteps slogged like mud. Between my inner viscera and epidermis there squelched a matryoshka of filth and fur, that on the outside compacted into a pale crust, and on the underside abraded against me tickling with wet fuzz. It felt I had been stitched into the stinking, damp, velvety carcass of ill-preserved roadkill, like a costume, embedded under my skin and wired into my muscles that I couldn’t tear off.

“Stop,” the Bishop urged.

I had been trudging around the vague partition of the Bishop and his mount towards Hejat. The rhinoceros snorted and pawed the ground. If the stupid beast charged at me I would gut it from nose to tail.

“By Czjeir, do stop,” the Bishop ordered, palms out, more frantically.

I did stop, and sneered.

“Sit down,” the Bishop continued in relief.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t actually need to take orders.”

“Sit down, by Czjeir.”

Fury burned in my molars, and hatred sharpened in my eyes so visceral I hoped my glare alone would shred him apart. What suitable counterblow would yet preserve my dignity? Spitting? Hissing? Cursing? None jumped to mind. Though, what did I care about him? This stupid Bishop’s whoever. I cared about Hejat. And that’s what he should know, and have to acknowledge – I don’t care a fleck about you, that’s how much I hate you. Silently my legs bent beneath me and I did sit.

The Bishop mounted his rhinoceros and repositioned himself between me and the mark, dumbly. I’ll shoot through you if I really want, idiot! But remember, I won’t say that, because I don’t care about you, Nope, I won’t react to this provocation at all.

His face quivered like a boil.

“Just how anointed were you!?” The Bishop exclaimed, for the first time sounding his age.

From atop that stupid creature – looking down at me. A tight angry thornbush gnarled in my chest thicker and thicker as a mindless scribble, as an angry bur that I had to spit out. But no voice and no words came; my mouth was a reedless flute, surprisingly empty, and my throat ground against a black stone cube in my larynx—which cracked, a fissure, and shattered apart, spilling a cascade of refreshing waters, into the sepsis and into the wastes, when suddenly my behaviour struck me as impudent. The discomfort between myself and the rotting roadkill dissipated for the rotting roadkill was me, and suddenly I remembered that I hated myself, and suddenly I felt very sorry.

My body slammed forward in a bow of reverence, so pasted to the dirt that the rhinoceros’ proud snort feathered the mat of my hair.

“Chhn-yh-kyj-mi?” weepy syllables leaked into sand.

“Tah? If you are incanting, by Czjeir, do it not,” the Bishop warned.

I lifted my face. “Can you kill me?”

IDIOT, Mephi! That’s an incredibly cruel thing to ask of someone else. But if he could I would have stoned myself for not asking. But equally it had been a brainless, reflexive request—

The Bishop chewed his lip and looked away, (See! See what you do?), in a wince of discomfort, not inability—I hated how cleanly I saw this distinction, how smoothly a reptilian tongue licked over smirking teeth.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t, have asked that—I don’t, I just don’t, know what else you can do, um, except maybe give me...” I pointed toward the copse, blocked by the rhinoceros’ belly. Then shrugged my chin into my palm and traced circles in the sand with my finger. “I’ve put you in, kind of, a really hard position, actually—sorry.”

By doing nothing, I snickered. Stupendous work actually. No no, I did do some things, like, walk, and, stand, rather, it’s not like I made consequential choices, that manoeuvred him towards a corner, so much as, the constitution I have is innately... rather unmanageable, for an outsider, and anyone else in my condition would execute the same pressure even more effortlessly. Well, it really speaks to the innate state, I impose on others, being one of smothering inefficacy, which is, ahm, not greatly laudable.

The Bishop bowed his head in thought. Mockery grinning in my black tongue, and guilt bleeding out a coward’s apologies: which one will you sate? Or is there another way? Indeed, what will you do?

And a light rippled, all up my spine shuddering, that in its passage and lingering afterwards hovered over me as a crimson aurora. The last disjointed pieces of me clicked into alignment, smoothed as cloth beneath iron. The Bishop grabbed his staff and jangled its bells. The light and sound resonated: the bells echoed purer, and light bloomed brighter, when either wave met the other. Cascading, a lustrous crimson garden spread skyward in grand efflorescence, by the resonance cheering on its own prolification, of candescent blossoms budding and blooming more and more boldly, higher and higher, each a loving star, and a loving sun, more delicately beautiful in their softness and arrangement than the reliefs of Amsherrat’s temple ever could have iconized, not by generations of artists who sweat their whole lives to catch this very image. Their work was butchery. I understood suddenly that Czjeir adored our conceptions of beauty, even devotionally His beauty, only in the same way that parents adored earnest doodles of ‘mommy & daddy’.

The Bishop sat wide-eyed and speechless. His rhinoceros knelt to the light, and he scrambled to catch himself on the back of its bowed head as not to tumble off, teetered, and failed. Small puffs of sand arose with a ‘floomph’.

Hurriedly he flurried to sweep his sunshroud out of his face, not composed and not at all radiating the suretude of an experienced clergyman. My teeth grit and fingers clenched on my arms as I rose to my feet.

Legitimate servants of the Church, if I’d flirt as one of their signatories—well—then stop terrorizing them with your self-serving spit. What’s that fossil buried at the bottom of your vocabulary? Ah yes, ‘responsibility’. Accept its torture, coward, and dredge it up, though no, this isn’t quite torture, much as a fresh camel’s haunch under the whip, the execution of a holy word, discipline.

The lights of the miracle smeared away, with the fading of bells, on the wind.

Now, you vole in my shadow, what if I kick in your guts? What if I throw you off a cliff? Stupid fantasies so automatic at the sight of anyone’s tenderness. Inter every ash as always into the pit, my own sweeper...

I offered the Bishop my hand, to raise him back up. For a motion rehearsed today over one thousand times, my arm’s own easy spring, and not rigidity, for this one time, startled me.

The Bishop gasped and accepted and as he reached out he looked up and our gazes connected.

He had always been since his youth a devoted and a kind person – an orphan, actually, raised from earliest memory in the outreach grounds of an abbey. Gratitude for ‘community support’ then naturally, did germinate strong in his heart, but his attraction into the Church and into night upon nights of liturgical study had shot from the ethos, resonant with his own yearnings, of an intrinsic sanctity held in the life of all things, that if tended could floresce beautifully into a state of heavenly peace. In his scabbard pacifism reigned by its efficacy; onto arrowpoints of his tongue he dipped fervid compassion. But against me he would strain. His critiquable blots, insofar as there were any, amounted to boyish foibles and childhood cheekiness, but even these to me made no tally, warded were they present behind walls of splendid pink fire. As expected of genuine Pontifex candidates, the ones who didn’t explode into bonfires or lunacy on their third or fourth anointing, he was about as close as you could reasonably get (even I had to admit this) to a dictionary specimen of, a ‘good person’. His name was also Madjea, but nobody in Rajj called him that.

On his feet, he flinched his palm out of my grasp with a shiver. “Freezing,” he muttered, cupping his fingers, then glanced aside. “I can’t quite condone that anyone be subject to that.”

Crossing my arms, with a shrug, I turned to face Rajj.

A light blue mist of distance covered the city’s panorama.

“If indeed you are mandated by Czjeir,” the Bishop’s voice wafted. “You will not begrudge a recitation of the paeans.”

I stomped my foot and scowled at the sky.

“Don’t—don’t you get the conditions, that you are speaking to, a voracious... fine, I’ve forgotten them all. Fine, I’m not of the Church, because the Church is reciting paeans. I guess you are too communal and I guess if the covens have politics, the churches will have them too. It was all just, an experiment of crazy magic that blew up on me in an exciting fashion, and I’m just this crazy menace that you need to manage—well, good. Good... I, I...” my throat choked.

“...Study of the paeans does balm the heart, though as you say, it stings first like alcohol. I would be happy to serve, if you would like an aide in confronting them.”

“I—I—if I—ssssshn—they’re hardly, a textbook. Um, um, look, if we have, to do scripture study—tcah, that isn’t, the point—shut!—please—sorry, I was trying to—talk but—that’s, that’s, just fucking shut up! Tcah! Why can’t I say a single, fucking thing, that might be important, without, well it just doesn’t matter. Okay look just whatever, whatever. Um so, um, lis—lis, listen, okay, sorry I really need to forget you exist for a second. What’s really, insane about this is, that I’m not even... mmm, wow—this is the kind of detritus I would’ve still done six years ago. Wow, I forgot that I hated it. Anyway, so what I’m trying to say, is... yeah, things have, kind of changed a little, in that it’s more literal, so, ahmm...”

“I apologize, please finish,” the Bishop interjected.

Weirdly I did relax. “In about a week, I’m going to... just to, elucidate this, because, insofar as I’m going to do anything, this is, unpreventable... but in a week or so, somebody will be dead and hopefully it is that, child molester, and if it isn’t him it should be me—that’s, all I’m trying to say.” I took a breath. “That there is, some mutual exclusivity, on the level of fates and—I don’t know, I guess you’ll have some brilliant comment on how it won’t actually work out that way. But I think you’ll have to decide between him and me. And it’s a pretty unfair decision, if... if you can even make it. That’s all...”

I ended my spiel with my hands spread out in a light shrug. So dramatic. It must have looked stupid. The Bishop’s sunshroud rustled quietly. My flashback into the noxious mentality that had murdered me throughout all my existence, (shockingly distant although that was my dwelling-place all up to this week), faded into recognition of myself renewed into inhumanity; a fine separation between now and then; specialised for one task; given to me by Czjeir; that they honeyed warmth radiating from the copse tickled me brightly intoxicated. It occurred to me again that what Czjeir had done was a blessing, and that were I returned to the night I killed Tjan, I would do it again with proper enthusiasm.

“To speak principally, the issue is that you experience these urges at all,” the Bishop’s voice rang. “Without them there is no ultimatum; and without them the wound is stitched shut.” He paused. “I find you do not truly need the flesh to live, for the beast I saw is so ravenous I cannot think that its issue is sustenance. It desires something else,” he muttered. “That being, I see parallels in many who have passed through the penitentiary.”

Head bowed, I curled my palm over my heart.

He got me.

He fucking got me.

“You know it’s souls,” I blurted.

“Have you fasted?”

“It hurts...”

“This I don’t doubt. Here, as the Primarch of Rajj I’ll allow you this space above the city, but an unsanctioned incursion into the streets or an aggression onto my citizens, I’ll respond to in kind. Let something momentous not be done too hastily. ...The man is also wounded, and we are under a harsh sun for some while... so tomorrow, let us resume this.”