Part 52 (1/2)

'Then what? Tell me.'

'You are dying,' said de l'Orme.

'But you're mistaken.' Santos laughed with relief. 'I'm perfectly well.'

'No,' said de l'Orme. 'I poisoned your wine.'

'What a terrible joke.'

'No joke.'

Just then Santos clutched his stomach. He stood, and his wooden stool cracked on the slabs. 'What have you done?' he gasped.

There was no drama to it. He did not fall to the floor. Gently he knelt on the stone and laid himself down. 'Is it true?' he asked.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'Ever since Bordubur I've suspected you of mischief.'

'What?'

'It was you who defaced the carving. And who killed that poor guard.'

'No.' Santos's protest was little more than a respiration.

'No? Who, then? Me? Thomas? There was no one else. But you.'

Santos groaned. His beloved white s.h.i.+rt would be soiled from the floor, de l'Orme imagined.

'It is you who have set about dismantling your image among man,' he continued.

The respiration threaded up from the floor.

'I can't explain how you were able to choose me so long ago,' said de l'Orme. 'All I know is that I was your pathway to Thomas. I led you to him.'

Santos rallied, for the s.p.a.ce of one breath. '...all wrong,' he whispered.

'What's your name?' asked de l'Orme.

But it was too late.

Santos, or Satan, was no more.

He had meant to keep his vigil over the body all night. Santos weighed too much for him to lift onto the cot, and so when the air grew cold and he could not stay awake any longer, de l'Orme wrapped the blanket around himself and lay on the floor beside the corpse. In the morning he would explain his murder to the monks. Beyond that, he didn't care.

And so he fell asleep, shoulder to shoulder with his victim.

The incision across his abdomen woke him.

The pain was so sudden and extreme, he registered it as a bad dream, nothing to panic about.

Then he felt the animal climb inside his chest wall, and realized it was no animal but a hand. It navigated upward with a surgeon's dexterity. He tried to flatten himself, palms against the stone, but his head arched back and his body could not retreat, could not, from that awful trespa.s.s.

'Santos!' he gasped with his one and only sac of air.

'No, not him,' murmured a voice he knew.

De l'Orme's eyes stared into the night.

They did it this way in Mongolia. The nomad makes a slit in the belly of his sheep and darts his hand inside and reaches high through all the slippery organs and drives straight to the beating heart. Done properly, it was considered an all but painless death.

It took a strong hand to squeeze the organ to stillness. This hand was strong.

De l'Orme did not fight. That was one other advantage to the method. By the time the hand was inside, there was nothing more to fight. The body itself cooperated, shocked by the unthinkable violation. No instinct could rehea.r.s.e a man for such a moment. To feel the fingers wrap around your heart... He waited while his slaughterer held the chalice of life.

It took less than a minute.

He rolled his head to the left and Santos was there beside him, as cold as wax, de l'Orme's own creation. His horror was complete. He had sinned against himself. In the name of goodness he had killed goodness. Year upon year he had received the young man's goodness, and he had rebuked and tested it and never believed such a thing could be real. And he had been wrong.

His mouth formed the name of love, but there was no air left to make the word.

To a stranger, it might have seemed de l'Orme now gave himself to the sacrifice. He gave a small heave, and it drove the arm deeper. Like a puppet, he reached for the hand that manipulated him, and it was a phantom within the bones of his chest. Gently he laid his own hands above his heart. His defenseless heart.

Lord have mercy.

The fist closed.

In his last instant, a song came to him. It surged upon his hearing, all but impossible, so beautiful. A child monk's pure voice? A tourist's radio, a bit of opera? He realized it was the parakeet caged in the courtyard. In his mind, he saw the moon rise full above the mountains. But of course the animals would wake to it. Of course they would offer their morning song to such a radiance. De l'Orme had never known such light, even in his imagination.

Beneath the Sinai Peninsula Through the wound, entrance.

Through the veins, retreat.

His quest was done.

In the nature of true searching, he had found himself. Now his people needed him as they gathered in their desolation. It was his destiny to lead them into a new land, for he was their savior.

Down he sped.

Down from the Egypt eye of the sun, in from the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all sh.e.l.l and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crus.h.i.+ng mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own human image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Their presence had become the world, and their presence was the presence of jackals that strip the muscle from your legs even as you try to outrun them.

The earth closed over him. With each twist and bend, it sealed shut behind him. It resurrected senses long buried.

Solitude! Quiet! Darkness was light.

Once again he could hear the planet's joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone. Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself.

He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of G.o.d. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth.

Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence.