‘You’re never alone. You’re the Bearer of Light. I will give you your time, but in three days be ready.’
And Sam was facing empty air. Or perhaps that was all there’d been anyway. He sunk to the ground and lay back, staring at the ceiling with wide open eyes, while in his mind a thousand voices whispered to him, and he was entirely alone.
THIRTEEN
Remission
S
am found Jehovah sitting on a ledge, alone, smoking. He sat down next to him. ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘It’s a new and bad habit. It means that every twenty or so years I contract lung cancer and end up in a regenerative trance.’
‘How often have you had lung cancer so far?’
‘Three times. But though it means spending several weeks in a trance I find the the habit’ – he twisted the cigarette through his fingers – ‘strangely appealing.’
‘I want to leave.’
‘I know. Father told me.’
‘He moves fast.’
‘Of course. He demands that you take protection. So do I.’
‘I’m not going seeking danger, if that’s what you think. I just need time to work a few things out.’
‘What deal have you made with him? Your soul? As first he wanted?’
‘Is that what he was after?’ Sam gave a little snort of laughter. ‘No, I haven’t. He didn’t even ask. I think he realises there are other ways to get to me.’
‘So what is the deal?’
‘Two lives for one.’
‘Whose lives?’
‘Mine is one. Another is Cronus’s, if he can be said to live.’
‘And the third?’
Sam didn’t answer.
Jehovah looked away and said in a slightly pained voice, ‘Ah.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Around.’
‘Did Gabriel know?’
Jehovah looked back at him, eyebrows raised. Sam smiled uneasily, raising his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘She served Freya, when she left you. Did Freya tell her the scheme?’
‘I did, after I joined the Ashen’ia. It was quite embarrassing, to follow in a servant’s footsteps. Gabriel had left me for my sins, and when I realised what those sins were, I had no choice but to ask her forgiveness.’
‘What about the rest? Michael, Uriel, what happened to them? Michael shot me, but only with lead, where he could have killed me with silver. Did they know whose side you were really on?’
‘Michael spared your life under my orders. But I haven’t told them why. I think it best that as few people as possible know the truth. You are one. Gabriel another. Freya the last.’
‘You must have hated having to admit Gabriel was right.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘No worse than having to admit you were right about Christianity.’
‘You never admitted anything of the kind.’
‘I admitted it to myself.’
‘When?’
‘At the time of the crusades. I tried to build something Heavenly on Earth. I tried to make a religion that would inspire mortals to do great deeds, to love each other and live by good rules. You told me it would go wrong.’
Sam stared across the desert, swinging his legs where he sat on the rim of the ledge. The storm had passed, and the desert was a sea of dark brown mud, every feature destroyed that he’d noted before from his room. In the distance he could hear the rumble of thunder and see black anvil-shaped clouds, but nearby all was quiet. ‘Where you went wrong was in allowing the Crucifixion. A religion born of blood will die in blood; you should have known that.’
‘I admit it. Christianity could have been beautiful. But mortals twist everything, and I am not the miracle-maker.’
‘And I am. Which is why, though you admit I was right, you’ll never forgive me.’
Jehovah’s voice was calm and matter of fact as he replied. ‘Yes.’
Sam went on watching his own feet swing back and forth over the huge drop below. At the foot of the cliff the muddy sand was pocked with raindrops, to make the impression of a galaxy of tiny stars in a brown void. ‘Because the right kind of miracle might have prevented all those holy wars, all those prejudices, all that blood. But your grand design didn’t receive that miracle, did it? Because I was banished and you had helped banish me.’
‘It was entirely your own fault that the Way of Eden was closed,’ said Jehovah, stabbing the cigarette butt in Sam’s direction accusingly. ‘No one asked you to do it. You disapproved of our methods and decided to take it all in hand yourself. Typically, I might add.’
‘Well, it’s done and can’t be undone, so there’s no point biting your nails over it.’
‘Where will you go?’ asked Jehovah.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You could go to Heaven,’ he said, watching for Sam’s reaction. ‘I control Heaven, you see. And I certainly won’t harm you. Not now.’
‘You’ll keep Seth and Odin away?’
‘They’re entirely focused on Hell.’
‘What about Thor? He must still be seeking me.’
‘That’s why you’re taking protection, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, Tinkerbell – I mean Brian Hunter. Eshu’s grandson.’
Jehovah’s face was a mask of incomprehension. ‘Hunter isn’t Eshu’s descendant. His grandfather was a Son of Night. His grandmother was a sorceress, but she never told her children who their father was. Hunter sold his soul to Night, and Night is in his blood. At no point is he a relative of Eshu’s.’
‘Why did he lie to me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He said he wants revenge against a Waywalker.’
‘Did he give an indication who that might be?’
‘No. He said I’d approve, though.’
‘Be careful of him . He has a large following within the Ashen’ia. In seniority he’s barely under Gabriel.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
They watched the desert. The sun, in all defiance of probability, refused to go down. ‘I hate waiting,’ said Jehovah finally. ‘I’ve been waiting for so long, now that the end seems to be drawing near it seems slightly pointless.’
‘You think you have a problem?’
Jehovah gave him a look out of the corner of his eye, a half-smile twisting his face as though not sure what it wanted to be. ‘I have done you wrong.’
‘Really.’
‘And I have, in my time, plotted against my brothers and sisters. I helped free a Pandora spirit, I put my name down to an enterprise that I knew at the time would lead to conflict within Heaven. I have not been punished for any of these yet.’
‘You repented. You gave your soul to Time.’
‘Yes, but I doubt if it will end with Tartarus.’
‘I know for a fact that it will for me unless a miracle happens.’
‘You can’t make miracles when you’re dead, brother.’
‘You neither,’ he pointed out mildly.
‘I never could.’
‘But I’ll bet you tried.’
‘Yes. I expect everyone does.’
‘Including Freya?’
‘I don’t doubt it. Go on and find out, Sam.’
Sam looked warily at Jehovah, and more or less smiled. ‘Maybe another time soon. While there is time, that is.’
*
There was a Portal in the desert, Tinkerbell assured him.
‘Going on a trip, are we?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Any idea where?’
‘I’m seeing what takes my fancy.’
‘Sure, no problem,’ Tinkerbell replied, swinging his crossbow into a more comfortable position. ‘Oh, and I was told to give you this.’ He tossed Sam’s bag at him. Inside was the sword, dagger and crown, along with what remained of his explosive arsenal. ‘I gather you’ve made a deal with the powers that be.’
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ Sam replied, slipping the dagger into its sheath on his arm.
‘Somehow I imagined you would be.’
Tinkerbell led the way down rough-cut stone steps, through natural caverns and bored-out corridors of red stone, and down a wooden ladder through a claustrophobic tunnel that ended with a squelch under Sam’s boots. He looked at what he’d trodden in. Hell’s equivalent of bats had a wingspan of five feet or more, and hugely bloated necks to store precious water seeping down through the rock, and they liked to use giant natural caves as toilets.
‘Ugh,’ said Sam. The smell was something extraordinary, but Tinkerbell didn’t seem to mind. ‘I spent a lot of time near this biogas factory in India. You don’t know anything until you’ve seen what goes into that,’ he said cheerfully, picking his way across the slippery floor towards a patch of light in the distance. Sam half expected to see cave paintings of giant stalagmites; but even here the sand had blasted everything clean.
They stepped from the cave mouth on to sand already dry in the blazing sunlight. Tinkerbell squinted across the endless yellow sea and pulled on a pair of sunglasses that seemed to match everything about him; they made him look like the hero of a particularly gory American thriller with a garage soundtrack.
Sam cast his mind about, and sensed the Portal nearby.
He also sensed something else, standing just beyond the next dune. ‘Uh, Tinkerbell?’
‘You want something, Hook?’
‘A few minutes with someone.’
Tinkerbell frowned and squinted across the desert, and Sam could sense him casting about. Then he shrugged. ‘Hell, your senses are better than mine. I can’t feel a thing.’
‘She’s shielding. It’s kind of an instinct in a Waywalker.’
‘You want me back in five minutes?’
‘Please.’
Sam picked his way up the nearest dune, feet sliding under him as miniature yellow avalanches marked his passage. He reached the top and looked down at her. She smiled, leaning lightly on her staff, the crown of living green ivy around her head. He marvelled at how unchanged she was: how she still smiled even when sad, at how she instinctively placed herself to catch the sunlight, not out of any great vanity, but because she liked to feel its warmth on her face.
But then, Freya had never pretended to be anything but herself. He’d just neglected to ask her whether that self was an agent of Time, on a mission to manipulate the future to Time’s grand design. He stared, not minding that he did so.
She stared back at him, her eyes narrowing in contemplation. At length, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He took his time to answer, not moving to join her, looking down from on high. ‘Time, in his infinite wisdom, seems to think I still love you.’
‘Is he right?’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘So.’ She nodded thoughtfully. ‘You gave your soul to him after all. I didn’t think you would.’
‘No, actually, I didn’t.’
‘He said to trust you. He said you and he had reached an understanding.’
‘Yes, we have. But I’m still free. Still me. The question is, are you still you?’
She walked a few paces towards him, craning her neck to see him against the burning sun, climbing up the dune to get level. Closer now, she studied his face, looking for signs of age or despair, and finding none. ‘I am more me than you are you,’ she replied. ‘For I only have one being sharing my heart. You have thousands.’
‘Did you ever feel like telling me?’
‘At first, no. You were just the next assignment. I am a Daughter of Love, it’s my blessing and my curse to have many love me. You were no different from the rest.’
‘There’s a word for that, and it isn’t pretty.’
‘I know, but the Sebastian I love knew that anyway, when we first met, even if he didn’t understand the real reasons.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, as the days went by I began to like you more than I had the others. And I began to like you more and more. Until one day I woke up and realised that I had fallen subject to my own trap, and not only did you love me as I intended, but I loved you.’
‘It sounds like a fairytale story of the unconvincing kind, with talking bunnies, occasional bouts of song and dance and happy ever after.’
‘My favourite kind.’
He frowned at her. ‘I… don’t believe in all that any more. You’ve succeeded in taming the Bearer of Light to your cause. But you went too far. He just doesn’t believe.’
‘Then what is he fighting for?’
‘I…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Time knows,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘I love you, Sebastian.’
‘You say it so well. How many times have you said those words to a hundred other waiting ears? And was the performance always so consummate?’
‘If you came here not to believe, why did you trouble to find me?’ she asked, slipping her hand into his.
He turned her hand over, looking at it from every angle. At length he hung his head, and murmured, ‘I have no idea.’
‘Do you want to believe?’
‘I’m too old. I’ve seen too much.’
‘There may be a miracle. You may believe.’
‘Miracles aren’t two a penny. And even if they were, I’ve no coin left to spend in that particular department. I’m hoping for a miracle to strike in three days’ time. I don’t believe it will.’
‘You are the maker of miracles, Sebastian.’
He stared down at her, and wondered what he should say. I do not love you, yet soon I’ll be dying like a knight errant for his lady. And this is hardly the action of a practical survivor, Prince of Darkness. There must be a motive for this mad course. And love is as good a cause as any.
‘I can’t make miracles when I’m dead.’
‘Whoever said anything about dying?’
He stared at her for a long time, wondering. ‘You haven’t changed, have you? You’re just like you were. Only now I realise that what you were isn’t what I thought you were. Strange, that. I’ve seen so many minds, and at some stage in my life I know I’ve touched yours. But I never saw. Perhaps I wasn’t looking properly.
‘Perhaps not.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. He felt somehow too large for his own body, was aware of his arms hanging loose, of the way his left foot stuck out to one side in the sand while his right pointed straight forwards, of how his eyebrows tried to compete for space on his face, of how his mouth was dry and his fingers limp at the ends of his heavy hands. Finally he couldn’t help himself. ‘Miss me?’ he asked.
She made a show of considering, sucking in her cheeks and pursing her lips. ‘Not the cooking,’ she admitted. ‘You were always a dire cook.’
‘What’s the point of having the world at your feet if you can’t go to restaurants?’
‘That’s a decadent attitude and you know it.’
‘There are thousands of restaurants in New York alone. We could have gone to a new restaurant every night in any city and any country we pleased. And what did we do?’
‘I offered to cook.’
‘Freya, now that the end of the world is coming I can safely say that your duck in orange sauce was possibly the most repulsive meal I’ve eaten in all my life. We have both spent too much time learning the languages of the three worlds and studying the art of survival to learn how to cook anything more challenging than baked beans on toast or bacon and egg sandwiches.’
She laughed, but not very much, eyes never leaving his. When the silence returned again, it poured across the desert like a sandstorm.
He wasn’t entirely sure whether he kissed her or she kissed him, or whether it was something mutual. It was nothing spectacular: no choruses of sobbing violins or choir of angels marked the event. Just the silent wind and the trickling of sand.
‘Am I interrupting something?’ asked a voice.
Freya immediately pulled away from Sam, raising illusion to cover herself. He watched the air around her
distort, hiding her features from him.
Tinkerbell clambered over the dune and peered at Freya like a blind mouse trying to spot the cat. ‘Uh… do I know you, love?’
‘I’m no one special.’
‘You two were kissing.’
Timekeepers: Number 2 in Series Page 17