by Anne Perry
Silence settled in the room, but it was softer now. A fountain played somewhere just beyond sight. The murmur of falling water drifted on the air.
“Did Alexius tell you why he came for you?” Eleni asked.
“No. There was too little opportunity.” Tathea hesitated, wondering for a moment if she should tell her of the higher law and Alexius’s breaking of it, and his mercy at the Flamens’ hands and how suddenly he had understood so much. And as soon as the question arose, she knew she should not. It was perhaps the greatest single moment in Alexius’s life, the vision of the love of God, not in the word but in the brilliant white light of reality. Tathea had been there, and Eleni had not. There was time in the future for her to learn. Now the moment was too fragile and grief too raw.
Eleni looked down at her hands. “A great deal has changed since you left. You didn’t even see it in the streets as you passed, did you?”
“No ...”
Eleni’s face shadowed. “Isadorus is dead. Did he not even tell you that?”
“No.” It was another grief, but she should not have been surprised. “Is Tiberian Emperor?”
“Yes. But that is not why we need you back.” Now Eleni’s voice was edged with harshness, a deeper, angrier pain than anything before. “The only way you will understand it is if I tell you from the beginning.” She stood up and went over to the table and poured wine from a turquoise and gold painted jug. She returned with two goblets and gave one to Tathea.
“After you left Shinabar, Ra-Nufis returned here with the Book ...”
Tathea had not even dared to ask where it was. She had made herself believe God would protect it and refused to torture herself further. Now relief flooded through her, and she found she was smiling.
Eleni put her hand up and pushed a strand of hair off her brow. It was a simple gesture, and yet there was soul weariness in it, as of the revisiting of some familiar tragedy.
“What is it?” Tathea demanded sharply.
Eleni sighed. “He brought it here, and within a few days—perhaps because he had been with you, more probably because he actually had the Book—he resumed leadership of all the believers. At first it strengthened us greatly. Just to have the Book itself in Camassia again was wonderful.” She smiled as she said it, but it pulled her lips at the corners as if she had tasted something that burned.
“It was very slow,” she went on, “so gradual nobody noticed. I didn’t myself, so I can blame no one else.”
Now Tathea was afraid. “Noticed what?”
“He was marvelous!” Eleni’s face was pinched. “He preached with such fire and passion, such a love of the beauty of it. His whole countenance used to be alight ...”
“Used to be?” Tathea said hoarsely, remembering with an ache of loss all that Ra-Nufis had been, his loyalty, his courage, his skill. He had loved the Book above all else. Nothing was too much for him to give in its service, no sacrifice too great. “Is he dead too?”
“Dead?” Eleni bit her lip, and this time it was she who reached to touch Tathea, holding her hand with all the old warmth, so gently Tathea felt a terror grip her.
Even so, it did not prepare her for what Eleni had to say.
“Dead? Only in a manner of speaking.”
“What do you mean?” She did not want to hear the answer, but there was no way to evade it.
Eleni leaned back and sipped the wine, her face shadowed with anger and pity. “He loved the beauty in it above everything,” she replied. “Even above the truth. On his lips, little by little, it grew softer in the telling. The hard edges of price became blurred and finally so dim as to be ignored.” Her voice was lower as the pain in her increased. “In time they disappeared altogether. Of course more and more people joined the faith, people who understood the teachings only a little, a fragment of an idea that was beautiful to them, but not the whole. We were so eager to welcome them we feared teaching them the pain of truth as well as the joy.” She was watching Tathea intently, her face lined with concentration.
“We twisted mercy into a softness of the soul that denied the existence of sin,” she said so quietly her words were barely audible. “We made too few demands. We did not want to exclude anyone or drive them away because we asked more than they wanted to give. We thought they would be unwilling to let go of their old pleasures, so we changed the faith to accommodate them.”
“Ra-Nufis wouldn’t do that!” Tathea said hotly. “What have they done to him? Who is it? Is he imprisoned?”
Eleni looked as if she were consumed by inner misery. She shook her head, a tiny movement. “Not in the way you mean. It was very slow, the relaxing of the law for a sin one understood and could have committed oneself; the lifting of a rule for a person whose potential we could see, only one weakness held them away. It was very slow. The followers grew. There are millions! Perhaps all are a little better for being members even in name. I have pondered that so long, and still I don’t know the answer. It is an argument used by many philosophers ... the saving of all the world. Surely God is not a respecter of persons, wanting only a few, casting out the many.”
“That is twisted thinking,” Tathea said angrily. “God loves us all, but to think He can alter the laws of light and darkness is to misunderstand everything. Your reward lies in what you are. If you do not become like Him, loving good above all else, if you cannot at the last touch holiness, He cannot give you the power and joy that are His, nor could you receive it. If you would have heaven there for everyone, whether they would climb or not, then you must lower heaven, and that would be the greatest of all tragedies. What more terrible could even the mind of hell conceive than to soil the ultimate light?”
Eleni stared at her with the beginning of a horror deeper than any grief she had felt before, as if a pit had opened in front of her. She did not need to say she understood; it was written in her eyes.
“Ra-Nufis has the mantle of leadership now.” She breathed the words in horror. “I don’t know how we can stop him. No one does. If we speak against him, we are made to seem as if we are condemning others to be shut out of a glory we want only for ourselves. He says he loves all men and would have the joys of heaven for all, and that that is the will of God. He has tasted a terrible power, greater even than that of Tiberian, and God knows that is great enough, but Ra-Nufis’s is greater because it is of the hearts and the minds, not the temporal laws. Nothing in the world is stronger than a dream people want to believe.”
“But Alexius was prepared to fight it?” Tathea said.
Eleni nodded fractionally. “When he heard word of where you were, yes. He believed if anyone could succeed, you could. And there is a small group who resist the new way, but they are very few, and it calls for much courage. Ra-Nufis has the Book itself. It is the symbol of the power of God. No one can defy that openly. It is seen as a blasphemy.” She leaned forward, her eyes searching, bright with the beginning of a thread of hope. “But together perhaps we can begin, and God will help us. I hesitate to use my power. Miracles and signs are publicized now and are used to whip up great storms of emotion.”
Tathea stood up slowly. She was shaking, and she felt dizzy and sick with misery. The darkness seemed to be closing all around her, as if the stars themselves were going out. Ra-Nufis! Only an hour ago she would have believed that impossible. Part of her still clung to a hope that somehow Eleni had made a mistake, misunderstood something—anything. Not Ra-Nufis! She had loved him as she might have loved Habi, had he lived. She had believed in him without shadow! How could it have happened?
And as she said it, she knew. The seduction of beauty, the rationalization, and then the greatest of all cancers of the soul, the whisper, as soft as hell, of power—the last temptation of man.
“I’m sorry,” Eleni said with tears in her voice. “Perhaps what I had to tell you was even harder than the news you brought me. Alexius won the light.”
“Yes, he did,” Tathea said with certainty. “But we must still battle in the darkn
ess.”
Eleni touched her. “How can I help?” she asked. “At least let me begin with the practical. You have nowhere to live, no means. Let me deal with that.”
“Thank you,” Tathea accepted with twisted laughter. “You are right. I have nothing ... less than when I first came.”
Eleni fulfilled her promise quickly and installed Tathea in quiet and elegant apartments in the old quarter of the city near the Imperial Hill, where Baradeus had lived before he became Emperor. Eleni had inherited the house, and it was still maintained and kept with servants. The loan of it was generous, and Tathea was profoundly grateful to find herself so well cared for and in such a discreet manner.
The day after she moved in she went walking in the city streets. She was dressed in a Camassian gown of comfort and grace but no obvious wealth. She was merely a woman alone, in her middle years, and unless one looked at her face carefully, there was nothing remarkable about her. If anyone noticed the great dignity in her bearing, there was no sign that they recognized an empress, let alone the bringer of the Book.
On the street of clockmakers she stopped an elderly merchant. “Excuse me, sir, where might I find the nearest meeting of believers in the Book?”
His benign face showed surprise. “You are a stranger in the city?”
“I have not been here for some years,” she replied truthfully.
“The Light Bearers meet every sixth day in halls all around. But the best, of course, is the Great Hall in the square beside the Hall of Archons. Do you know where that is?”
She smiled. “Yes, thank you. Every sixth day?”
“Yes, lady. That will be the day after tomorrow at noon.”
“Thank you.” She inclined her head in gratitude and went on her way.
On the appointed day she arrived at the Great Hall just before midday. The building was vast, like something transplanted from the deserts of Shinabar. It dwarfed the buildings around it, even the Hall of Archons. At first she thought it was newly built; then she realized it was the old library and justice courts, which had been given a new façade and a higher roof.
People were approaching from all directions, singly and in groups, talking together, smiling. Every now and then she heard a burst of laughter. There were hundreds of them. They were well dressed, as if they wore their best for the occasion. Many robes were trimmed with borders of vivid color, muslins fluttered in the slight breeze, jewels winked in the sun. The Empire had widened its borders. She noticed Tirilisi, mostly by their embroidered tunics and hot, earth shades with fringes of silk that swayed and rippled. There were men from the north with pale skins and hair, in cotton of cold greens, and Irria-Kanders with breeches and fine leather boots, and a few dark Shinabari. She even saw with a lurch of memory flashes of copper and blue.
She walked up the steps behind them and in through the vast portals.
The interior took her breath away. The huge vaulted ceiling was supported by pillars so vast a chariot and horses could have hidden behind each one. The whole interior was carved of golden Camassian stone and lit by bars of sunlight shining in brilliant colors through stained-glass circular windows fifty feet up, making the air above shimmer in a haze of blues and golds and rose-reds. It was a work of genius, dazzling the senses and filling the mind with awe. One could not help but look upward, and the glory of light caught the imagination and stilled all thought of the clamor outside, of the trivialities of daily life.
She had to force herself to look downwards. The floor was marbled in dark grays and greens, beautiful, intricate, but somber. One lifted the eyes again instinctively.
All around her people were pressing in, silent now, faces calm, attention on the platform at the far end, raised at least ten feet above the body of the hall. On it was a table spread with white linen embroidered with silks and decorated with pearls, their pale sheen visible even from where Tathea was, halfway towards the back.
Set upon golden plinths at either side of the table were two artifacts. To the left was a wheel whose radius was the height of a man. It was wrought in gold and set with hundreds of jewels along the spokes and round the rim. At the right was an abacus of similar size, and all the counting beads were gems: blue lapis, green malachite, red jasper, white and golden agate, rose crystals that caught the fire of light. Obviously they had some symbolic meaning to be set so, as if to decorate an altar, but they were not from the Book.
She thought of asking someone, then was suddenly wary of drawing attention to her ignorance. She felt a stranger here. She had seen no one she could remember from the past; there was no familiar sweetness here at all.
There was a hush. All talking ceased, and everyone stood gazing at the great beaten copper doors to the side of the platform. Slowly the doors swung wide and a procession wound its way out, traversing the width of the hall before climbing the steps of the platform. At the head was a man of magnificent aspect whose white robes drifted like silk as he walked. His mane of black hair was crowned with a triple circlet of gold and round his waist was a blood-red apron whose edges were encrusted with agate, crystal, and corundum.
Behind him came forty others, all moving with a strange, hesitant, rhythmic step. They were also clad in white, but less rich, and they had not the brilliant apron. They carried tall, bronze tapers of light in their hands, and they were singing in unison. As they crossed in front of the platform and mounted the steps, the singing changed to become harmony, exquisitely skilled, the bass voices resonant and rich, the tenors mounting the scale, the tempo increasing, and altos soaring above with brilliant descant.
There was a rising excitement in the huge hall. It was not a congregation, but an audience watching a choreographed ballet of movement and sound. Not one of those around Tathea stirred, and no one raised their own voice.
The music became subtler. The underlying rhythms altered and the volume increased. The complexity was almost more than the ear could hold. It was a glory of sound battering the walls, dizzying the senses, a wave of tumultuous beauty which when at last it faded left the hearers drained.
Tathea stared around her at the rapt, almost hypnotized faces and felt a cold hand of fear grasp her.
The leader in the crimson apron stepped forward and spoke to the assembly. His figure was superb, his voice smooth as warm honey.
“Let us give praise to God, who is above all worlds, all men, and all imaginings,” he cried. “Let us ponder God who is immortal, who governs the universe with almighty power. Let us think on our own unworthiness, our inferiority in every respect, our frailty, sin, and inherent weakness. Let us acknowledge that we, and all men, are dependent on God for life and breath, for grace to proceed from day to day, as we will be throughout time immeasurable.”
Around Tathea the people began to chant a slow, beautiful response, pulsating with the perfect diction and cadence of long familiarity.
“We worship Thee, O unimaginable, ineffable, omnipotent God, for whom nothing is impossible.”
She stared at them in amazement. This was not part of the Book. Did they even know what they were saying?
The leader spoke again, his voice ringing out in the silence of the huge hall above the heads of the multitude up into the swirling shafts of colored sunlight above.
“We give praise to Thee and acknowledge Thee beyond our comprehension, who are without form or passions and a mystery to our finite minds. Thy glory and power are boundless and without end.”
“Boundless and without end!” the crowd echoed. “We praise Thee, O infinite God.”
There was more music, and this time everyone sang and the volume of it filled the air, echoing back from the walls. It was a lovely, joyous sound, and when it was over, happiness washed around them like a tide. The leader stepped forward again, and a whisper went round. “Zulperion is going to speak to us! Hush for Zulperion.”
“My friends!” he began, raising his hands in the air as if in a blessing. “My fellow travelers on this journey of life! What can I say to you but
what I have already said—the words of the Book of God. Be just and obedient. Be humble and keep in the way of love, and you may pass through the veil of mortality without fear or pain.” His voice caressed the words and their faces stared back, lost in rapturous emotion.
“Walk meekly and righteously before God,” he continued, his voice intoning more than speaking, “and you will come to the end of your days unmarred by the stains of the world, and you will be acceptable to Him. Great will be your reward then, unimaginable in richness, peace beyond your dreams, the end of all toil and misery. God has prepared a place for you, and if you will but give up the sins of the world, it will be yours. That is His promise to you, in the name of His love, who cannot be denied and to whom all things are possible.”
Tathea was raging. She was hearing principles put forth which were such a distortion of the truth that she beheld the subtlety of darkness as never before. In a flash of terrible vision she remembered a vast concourse of people, infinitely larger than this, and a figure so nearly beautiful and yet with cruel eyes and twisted, hungry mouth, speaking of a plan wherein every soul should be kept to the narrow course of righteous acts, not for the love of good but because there was no other way. The growth of man stopped there. The glory of the love of good was murdered in a single blow. He would return every soul to its primal innocence, a thing stillborn, and he would possess the dominion and the kingdom and the glory forever.
She moved from her place, pushing forward between the crowds, permitting no one to bar her way until she stood on the platform before the startled Zulperion.