The Colors of Alemeth - Vol. 1

by V. Cobe

CHAPTER 24

  The Homecoming

  The mass of the end of the year was brief; it seemed as though the bishop had tried to hurry it along.

  Alem had the impression that his godfather’s eyes had welled with tears when, at the end, he looked in Alem’s direction and uttered the same final words he uttered every year, A part of you leaves, but a part will remain forever.

  The red and gold buses roared violently. The nuns smiled and waved to the students who said goodbye. Some nuns, at least.

  Alem sat by the window, next to Jaala, and looked out as the bus took off toward Dead King’s Square. He was leaving the sisters, the bishop, and his fellow students from the other years.

  Through a small opening at the top of the window, he stuck his head out of the bus. He looked forward. The warm wind blew in his face and took his breath, but it felt good to him. There’d be no more cloistering or exaggerated rules or the frequent memories of abduction whenever he passed through the forest. But there’d be other things….

  When the bus stopped at Dead King’s Square, everyone had already stood.

  “Do you see your parents? It’s better if they don’t see me with you, or you’ll hear from them for the rest of the week,” Alem said to Jaala.

  “As if I care….”

  They climbed off together, took out their bags and joined Hazael and Lael, forming a small circle.

  “This is just the beginning, right?” said Hazael.

  They all nodded. The beginning of true freedom.

  “Sure you don’t want me to go with you to your house?” Jaala asked Alem.

  “I’m sure. I’ll catch a taxi.”

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow, then.” He turned to the others and lowered his voice. “And then….”

  “Friday,” muttered Hazael.

  Lael made a slight nod.

  They shook hands and turned their backs. Alem watched them leave. It had been seven years since he felt that alone. The long-awaited freedom brought consequences.

  “Alem!” a voice called.

  He turned to her. She was a middle-aged woman, brunette, freckled, hair cut just above the shoulders. She was walking toward him with a smile. A man of the same age followed behind her.

  A name formed in his head.

  “Rhode?”

  His mother’s friend opened her arms and embraced him, too tightly perhaps, but at least someone was there.

  “You are so big!” said Ezekiel.

  “Do you still remember us?”

  The last time he had seen them he had just come out of some dark dungeon. They had been in the monastery to discuss his future with Zalmon, he knew it. Everything else was vague in his memory except Rhode’s embrace at the end of the visit and the assurance that she’d always be waiting for him if he ever needed her.

  “Sorry we didn’t warn you. Ezekiel here only remembered a while ago to tell me that today was the day you’d arrive.”

  He shrugged.

  “Well, but we couldn’t leave you here alone in this jungle.”

  Rhode took Alem’s hand and led him to a yellow car at one end of the square.

  He hesitated. After all, they had become two strangers.

  “You can come with us. It’s okay,” said Ezekiel.

  As the car traversed the city, his mother’s friends advised him: Sunday masses were mandatory, curfew began at eleven at night—here in Carmel the Brigades do not fool around!—women’s honor could not be broken – all things he already knew.

  They asked him to live with them, but Alem refused. He had a house, finally, and that’s where he would sleep.

  “Nobody’s gone there in years,” warned Rhode.

  “Don’t be frightened by what you find.”

  “It probably doesn’t even have water, or light, or food.”

  “I’ll take care of that later.”

  Rhode and Ezekiel looked at each other in the front seats.

  “You should let us help you arrange things. You stay at our house, just for tonight.”

  “I’ll stay in my house, don’t worry.”

  “Your mother had such little time to restore it after returning from the farm.”

  “And of course she wasn’t expecting to…,” he stopped.

  “No one was,” said Rhode.

  “The house is as she left it eight years ago.”

  “And what’s the problem with that?” asked Alem.

  Another exchange of glances between the two.

  “Are you afraid I might find something?”

  “No!” said Rhode. “Not at all.”

  An impulse led him to ask, “Did you talk to her the day she died?”

  “Yes.” It was as if Rhode already had the answer ready. “Alem, there is one thing we need to tell you.”

  Ezekiel kept his eyes straight ahead, concentrating on driving, but Rhode turned back in her seat.

  “Your mother… she thought she was being tracked.”

  “Persecuted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that why we fled to the farm?”

  Rhode nodded.

  It wasn’t a new idea for him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about it repeatedly, obsessively even, every day for several years.

  “And it was them who killed her probably,” he suggested.

  Another nod.

  “Pursued by whom?”

  Rhode looked at Ezekiel.

  “We don’t know,” he replied.

  “We don’t know. But there’s something else. She thought she was being chased for… because of you.”

  His heart sank. No, anything but that. He would never forgive himself.

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself for anything,” Ezekiel said immediately. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Your mother was convinced that they wanted you for something.”

  “Was it them who kidnapped me?”

  But it made no sense. He had been kidnapped because he had seen what he wasn’t supposed to that day in the forest. That was all.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Was that why my father died? The assault, did that have anything to do with it?”

  Rhode looked away to the side but soon turned to face him again.

  “We don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?!”

  “Your mother knew your father had something valuable in the safe. Something they wanted. She thought he had died for knowing too much.”

  “What was in the safe?” asked Alem.

  “She didn’t know. Your father was gone for one week, and when he returned, looking miserable as she said, he brought with him a mysterious wooden box.”

  “But we don’t know if this had anything to do with why they wanted you.”

  “Or still want,” Ezekiel said.

  “Or still want. That’s why we’re worried about you and we think you should spend some time with us. That’s why we’re telling you all this.”

  That was too much. There was a valuable object for which his father had died, and after that, his mother had fled, chased by someone. When the Institution found her, she died, and he was abducted. There was only one way to figure out if the kidnapping had also been related, if that symbol he saw on the cell bars was related.

  “Does this have anything to do with Umbra?”

  Ezekiel made an agonizing grunt.

  “No, no, no, Alem, not that. That’s a forbidden word,” said Rhode.

  “That’s a myth and cannot be discussed. Under any pretext.” Ezekiel was looking around the car.

  “Under any circumstances.”

  “But does it? It was them who kidnapped me. Was it them who killed my mother and chased her?”

  “No, it wasn’t them. They don’t exist, but assuming they do, it wasn’t them.”

  “We only told you this so you’d be careful. In case you notice anything strange.”

  “So that you’re alert.”

  “It’s probably all gone now.”

  Now is w
hen it’ll all start. The subject was awaking, his suspicions confirmed. And Umbra was involved, regardless of what Rhode and Ezekiel said.

  When they reached the Mansion of Frogs, Alem was more convinced than ever that he had to live there. He didn’t know whether they were after him or not, or why, but he wouldn’t run. He said goodbye, thanked them and watched the car turn a corner and disappear.

  He unlocked the rusty gates with a key and pushed them. They opened with a harrowing racket and revealed the small abandoned courtyard and the remains of a stone path that was now overrun by weeds, stray cats and creepy crawlies in front of doors and windows conquered by years of dust, rain, wind and insects.

  The mailbox was broken and dropped the mail like a waterfall to the ground. He picked up an envelope that was on top of the pile, the one that had ‘Order of the Hands United at Heaven’ written on it, and took it with him.

  At the doorstep, he took a deep breath and opened the lock with the key, ignoring the broken panel that was at some point the latest advancement in security technology but didn’t work now.

  Inside the house, everything was full of dust, but impeccably tidy. Nothing was familiar; he didn’t feel at home.

  He opened the letter from the Order:

   

  Convocation Letter

  The Order of the Hands United at Heaven summons the apprentice, Alemeth Ricardo Sá, to appear at the Tower of Good Fortune of the Fort of the Faith on July 16, 2084 at 9 a.m. for the Introduction Day.

  Learners should be attired in the cassocks of the Institution. Furthermore, wearing the Faithful Cross is recommended.

  Looking forward to the fellowship. We are the Faith.

  The Order of the Hands United at Heaven

  Little rain dries the seeds of the Lord; immoderate rain drowns them.

  He went to the back garden and, without realizing it, passed by the almost invisible traces of soot that the mask of Defectio had left on the porch when his mother burned it eight years before. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the tainted grass and turned his face to the sun, eyes closed.

  The heat and the light made him smile. He thought of his mother, Bithynia, Jaala, Hazael, Lael, Umbra and the Institution. But then, gradually, he forgot everything and allowed himself to sit with the sun on his skin, feeling his freedom, not thinking about anything at all.

  At six in the morning, hundreds of bells around the churches of Carmel tolled in the streets, announcing the end of curfew and wakening the city from the quiet nightly prayer.

  Alem pedaled through the more institutionalized streets of the capital, some old, some modern, but all in white and gray tones of stone, with red and golden trimmings, immaculate and well treated. The top of the skyscrapers peered ahead behind trees and lower buildings.

  When he arrived at the Fort of the Faith, he had to stop to be able to observe everything. The Square of God was round, huge and a place where no cars passed. The ground was paved gold and red from end to end, pierced only by a few tall pine trees and a large golden fountain in the center. Throughout the edge of the fountain flowed strong, continuous water jets up and to the center. The water clashed without interruption and drew in the air with the impact a huge suspended cross of water that splashed in every direction.

  The skyscrapers were to the north. There was no inlet zone; they were planted on the pavement of the square but outside the circle, so he couldn’t really tell where the square ended and where the monstrous headquarters of the Institution began. They had a hundred floors connected by bridges and tubes at different heights. Across the square and around the towers, hundreds of bishops and cardinals, with the habits of their orders, walked slowly, some alone, others in groups, as if that was their purpose.

  But it was in a megalomaniac statue in front of them where Alem’s gaze was fixed. A golden Jesus Christ, twenty feet high, kneeling and with arms raised above his head, was holding with both hands a Faithful Cross almost his size, the same image depicted in the stained glass window of the Cathedral.

  Alem jumped from his bike and locked it in a park at the edge of the square. He stopped in front of the statue and looked up at the golden face of Jesus Christ with the glass towers behind it.

  There was no place in the world where he could best serve God, and that made him happy. He took a deep breath, and with the beige cassock swirling behind him, circled the giant Christ on the way to the first tower of the Fort of the Faith.