Lord of Order

by Brett Riley

  Troy rubbed sweat from his eyes. He had soaked through his shirt. His behind felt damp. But if the heat bothered Sister Sarah, she gave no sign. Against her habit’s black cloth and with the sanctuary’s greater darkness, her face and hands seemed to float, disembodied, spectral. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But what? If Stransky were right, the Crusade had condemned New Orleans. Troy’s people could never live inside the walls with the prisoners. It would mean fighting for their lives every moment of every day. And walled up in the city without supervision, the Troublers would drag the buildings down, set fire to the river, rip open the very sky. Their nature was destructive, their hearts vindictive.

  If Stransky were lying, her fiction had taken root in the hearts of the Troublers themselves, so deeply that they lied to Sister Sarah with words that sounded like truth. Either way, the situation was as bad as he had ever seen.

  Why didn’t you tell me when you first heard? he asked.

  I figured you already knew. And I had no proof. Besides, would you have believed me? You didn’t believe Stransky.

  I’ve always believed you. Some warnin would have been nice. Now I got no time to prepare.

  Prepare for what? If you believe your cause is just, why are you worried? Sister Sarah stood, leaving the lantern on the altar. She patted him on the shoulder. He tried to ignore how his skin tingled beneath her hand. If all this comes to pass, these prisoners and their guards will trample your life’s work to dust. Can you sit back and watch that happen? she asked.

  The first words that came to Troy’s mind would constitute treason: no, he could not watch it happen, would not let it happen, would die trying to stop it. He would ask Hobbes and the rest to stand with him, and if they would not, then he would fortify a position on the causeway and fight until the guards shot him dead or the marchers walked him down. He wanted to say he could not bear to see New Orleans ruined and forgotten, as if none of them had ever acted, loved, or died. But he could not say any of that. He had always served the Crusade, always believed. When he was with Sister Sarah, he often wished their lives had been different. But they had to live the lives God had given them. Those lives and no other.

  I don’t know what to say, he confessed.

  Sister Sarah patted him again. You shouldn’t be ashamed of strugglin. It only means you’re human. You should only hang your head if you choose the wrong side.

  And I reckon you think your side’s the right one.

  Sister Sarah picked up the lamp, shadows rolling in and retreating like tidewater. You’ve known me for twenty years. I’m happy here, at peace with my decisions. When everything’s finished, I hope you can say the same.

  She glided away as if she were standing on a moving track. For all Troy knew, she might have had wheels under those garments instead of legs. She passed beyond the door without looking back and shut it behind her.

  Troy sat for a while, his thoughts following half a dozen paths through the history he shared with his companions. Before the boys could mark their ages in two numbers, Troubler ambushes had slaughtered Troy’s and Hobbes’s parents only weeks apart. They had been Crusaders, not Catholics, but the Troys had died on the steps of this very church, the same spot where, when he was twenty-two, Gabriel met Sister Sarah Gonzales. All part of God’s design. Troy and Hobbes had apprenticed themselves to the office of order before they could understand what the word would mean in their lives, what it meant to New Orleans. Other orphans had, each in their own time, bound themselves to the principality and the Bright Crusade. They were tutored by citizens who spent their lives rearing and training future leaders—those who would keep order, those who would lead the hunts and coordinate the harvests. Ford and LaShanda Long apprenticed two or three years after Troy and Hobbes, Ford’s parents and two siblings shot to pieces during a Troubler raid, Long’s mother dead of disease. Her father fell from a roof and shattered himself on the road. Boudreaux joined much later, when Troy and Hobbes were deputies under Ernie Tetweiller.

  Without this city, who are we? Guardians of a cesspool. I reckon that’s what prisons are. The places we dump our turds. The Troublers will defile everything we love. They’ll stink and stain and offend.

  Troy stood and left the sanctuary, his head throbbing. Twilight had come, the buildings casting long, deep shadows over the streets. The tallest structures looked like great claws reaching for the moon. Most of the higher levels were empty and rotting, the city’s population too small to need the living space, the stairs too old and dangerous to make the places useful for storage. If the city survived, those floors would need to be repaired or imploded. Already, debris sometimes fell, threatening to crush people on the streets. Why had no one ever fixed them? Why did it fall to Troy? And would there ever be time now, with the future bearing down on the city? In the darkness of a world without the fantastic machines of old, night made everything strange. You could stumble into the great river or collide with a building you passed every day of your life. Even the Bright Crusade’s familiar shape had been distorted. Troy rubbed his eyes, wishing his headache gone. Perhaps he could find some medicine before he slept.

  In his dreams, the history Troy had learned often came alive. You must know the seed to understand the tree, his teachers had said. This is what we strive to preserve. With words, they showed him the Crusade’s genesis. He had never seen the kinds of machines he learned about; he had seen the ancient people only in paintings. But, slumbering, he floated backward through time, a ghost with eyes and ears but no voice.

  It always started with a God’s-eye view, the continent in all its vastness spreading before him. Then the distance narrowed until he stood on the streets of Washington, part of a crowd the scale of which he had never seen. Behind him, a rectangular pool stretched back and back. Despite the cold, many people stood knee-deep in its waters; to the pool’s rear, a great monument pointed toward the sky like an arrow with its fletching buried in the planet. Far ahead, Jonas Strickland stood on a stage, his sand-colored hair blowing in the wind, his strange clothes formfitting. He shouted, red-faced, spittle flying, one fisted hand smacking into the other’s open palm. Sometimes he raised both hands to the sky, and the people surrounding Troy would do likewise, moaning and lowing like cows in need of milking. Troy could never make out the words, but he had read the transcripts. Strickland spoke of a great country called the United States and how it had turned its back on Jesus Christ. Of how its people had devolved into gluttons who hoarded and strutted and fought each other over children’s trinkets. Of how they coddled the slothful. Of how their nation’s leaders had drifted from God’s teachings, had even allowed worshippers of other deities to prosper—blasphemy masked as freedom. Of how their love of personal choice and legal equality amounted to nothing but hubris, a revision of God’s true creation. Of how the nation needed a strong, godly hand to wipe away all that sin.

  The scene changed. Strickland stood on another stage behind a lectern. Only feet away, another man behind another podium trembled with rage, shaking his head, his fists, as Strickland pointed a finger at him and preached. The winner of their argument would lead the nation. The words were muffled, but Troy had read these transcripts too. Strickland painted his opponent as a heathen who would bring more shame down on God’s city on a hill. The Supremor’s cadence peaked at just the right time, for Strickland was, at heart, a preacher. The opponent, whose name had been lost in history, could only weep. Troy had never been taught much about the people in those crowds, but in these dreams, some dressed in finery and wore precious jewels and scowled at the faceless masses supporting Strickland’s opponent. Some hung on Strickland’s every word, clutching their Bibles and weeping. And some were as red-faced as Strickland himself, screaming in triumph as he spoke.

  And it came to pass that they chose Strickland as their leader, then called the president. He resided in the grand white mansion the Crusade’s leaders had occupied ever since.
r />   When Strickland stepped inside its doors, the building became a pale horse on which he rode, hair blowing in the wind, eyes blazing.

  The horse faded, and Strickland stood in the great house’s yard, watching a red-and-white-striped flag descend its pole. Two men wearing robes of crimson and white cast it on the ground and set it aflame. In its place, they raised the standard of the Bright Crusade, a simple white cross on a crimson field. When the new flag reached the pole’s zenith, a great rumbling shook the earth. Strickland fell to his knees, head bowed, hands steepled together. From behind the mansion, long white tubes shot into the air, trailing fire, arcing across the sky, their screaming thunderous enough to rend the very air. The image came from one of the Bright Crusade’s most famous paintings, titled The Purge Begins. The ancients had harnessed the unthinkable power of disease, the worst humanity had ever encountered, gases that melted organs and invisible creatures that ate flesh, sicknesses that cooked a person’s brains or expelled blood through the eyes and nose and pores. Troy dreamed those tubes fell on the ancients’ greatest cities and burst open, pestilence spilling from them and flowing over everything like black water. The fleeing hordes carried those illnesses into the countryside. Bodies fell everywhere. Pockets of survivors managed to escape and hide; some of these became the world’s first Troublers. Strickland and his upper echelon watched it all from shelters secured against contagion. In every major city, handpicked Crusaders had somehow been protected, and in the wake of all that death, they swept over the lucky and the naturally immune, killing every potential Troubler they could find.

  This was the Purge.

  Then, as the last of the dying closed their eyes, one final tube shot skyward. It was bigger than the others, faster, and it did not arc over a city. It traveled far above Earth, into the darkness of space, and there it fired its payload, an energy wave that rippled through the nothingness and saturated the planet. The continents grew dark as all the ancients’ mighty machines, all their sources of power, failed. Troy’s teachers called this force the Godwave, and though none of them understood what it was or how it worked, every Crusader knew the result—the permanent crippling of technology, humanity’s greatest affront to God’s will. Flying carriages fell from the sky and burned, taking whole swaths of cities with them. In New Orleans, some struck the highest buildings and razed them, while others gouged enormous holes in the street, crushing people and animals and structures, burning and burning and burning. Strange smaller vehicles died on the roads. Ships on the oceans drifted until they capsized and disappeared or struck land.

  The dead lay where they fell—families collapsed around their last meal, lone pedestrians sprawled on sidewalks—and rotted, their skin bloating and bursting or desiccating in the sun and collapsing, organs and blood spilling out or turning to dust. A motivated builder could have cobbled together great edifices from their bleached bones. The vermin came and feasted, the insects, the carrion creatures, bringing their own diseases to the scattered and desperate survivors who fought them tooth and claw, scrabbling out a life among the ruins.

  But in their lairs, Strickland and his first Crusaders thrived, using their stores and whatever they wanted from the still and silent world they had made. They celebrated and sang and worshipped, so rapturous they lost track of the months and years, so even now, no one could have said when the Purge occurred or exactly how much time had passed since then.

  Next came the emissaries, whom Strickland sent forth to preach the gospel of the Lord and the will of the Bright Crusade. They traveled to every city, every hamlet on the continent. They braved the wide and rolling oceans, bringing answers and certainty and the promise of order. The peoples of Earth flocked to them. Those who did not—those who saw Strickland as the architect of their misery or the prophet of a faith they would not, could not share—crept away to wring their subsistence from the land or conglomerated in hidden places, striking at the Crusaders with every available weapon. In Troy’s dreams, they had always been faceless, but tonight they converged and collapsed into one body, a woman with stringy black hair and a smile born not of humor or happiness but sardonic hatred. Against this threat rose a tall and sturdy figure, androgynous, faceless, and shifting in hue and shape, wearing holstered guns and riding at the head of a small cadre. A lord of order, his deputies.

  Here, as always, the dream faded. Troy lived the rest of the story every day. How the Crusade sliced the globe into principalities, each under a lord of order’s rule. How each principality’s rule of law functioned—the lords, their deputies, their chiefs who oversaw some vital profession, those chiefs’ lieutenants, all the way down to the lowliest apprentice. How Strickland, upon his death, named a new supreme Crusader, and how that person followed suit. And so it went, all the way down to Matthew Rook.

  Troy did not dream this progression. Instead, his sleeping mind turned to Sister Sarah Gonzales. Together, they sat on the Riverwalk, watching the water and talking of things he could not remember.

  Troy awoke more enervated than if he had not slept at all. He lay in bed longer than he should have and thought about his office—how, by rights, he should still be Ernie Tetweiller’s deputy, how the bitter cup Matthew Rook might be serving New Orleans should have passed to the old man with both more experience and more wisdom. But in his last days on duty, Tetweiller had grown disillusioned with the Crusade, with his job, with how nothing ever ended and no one ever won. Tetweiller had used his increasingly stiff leg as his reason for resigning. I ain’t in no shape to ride every day, much less jump outta the saddle and fight hand to hand, he had said when he broke the news to Troy. Only the old man himself knew how much of that was truth and how much convenience. But it mattered little. New Orleans and its outlying areas fell to Troy now. So whatever came belonged to him too.

  He sighed and got out of bed. The coming day would not dissipate just because he had no wish to face it.

  That Sunday, Troy sat in the first row of the Temple’s right-hand pews, listening to Jerold Babb preach. To Troy’s right, Jack Hobbes flipped through his Bible to find the correct passages. Beside him sat Gordon Boudreaux, Santonio Ford, and LaShanda Long. No one occupied the pew across the aisle to their left; it was reserved for Babb himself, in the event of guest speakers, and outlander Crusader officials, none of whom were present in the city. Every other pew was jammed full of honored Temple workers and their families, along with high-ranking workers in the trades sitting with their kin and apprentices. They had sung and prayed together, and now they sat, mesmerized or half asleep, as Babb spoke in his old man’s quaver, his text 1 Peter 3:12–17.

  Wonder what all my folks would think if they were privy to the title Peter held when he wrote it, Troy thought. Or that a high minister of the world’s only sanctioned religion is preachin about persecution, like we’re the ones confined to one building or a swamp.

  Still, the passages were beautiful, poetic, and, if you ignored the context, eerily prescient. For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, Babb intoned, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil. And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled. Here, Peter assures every Crusader that our incomparable Father in heaven watches over us even in our darkest hours, when we feel most alone. When the temptations of the serpent himself hiss in our ears like the wind in the evening, and we are sorely tempted to listen. The Most High stands between us and the Troublers, between us and Satan, between us and utter destruction. And even when our pain seems unbearable, Peter says, we should rejoice. Suffering in God’s name is no suffering at all. It is our pleasure, our purpose, the very meat that nourishes us.

  Hobbes grunted. Troy could relate; it seemed pretty easy for a man like Babb, swaddled in the robes of his privilege and living a life under heavy guard, to call pain and sufferin
g a kind of pleasure. To speak of suffering as virtue as long as the pain fell on somebody else. And would those words still hold true when he that will harm you referred to your own superiors, in whom you had been taught to trust without question or hesitation?

  Troy glanced down the row. Boudreaux nodded along, rapt. Santonio Ford muttered amens as Babb spoke of the Lord’s favor. LaShanda Long picked at a loose thread on her go-to-meeting blouse. Was she humming a nearly inaudible tune? What might she be thinking of?

  The lord of order wondered where Willa McClure might be—fishing with a cane pole on the riverbank? Requisitioning vegetables from the fields? And Tetweiller—the old man likely lay under his backyard shade trees, sipping whiskey. Both of them probably felt little of the creeping uncertainty, the dread that weighed down Troy’s soul that morning. He envied them, and then his face reddened with shame. Sinning on the front row, while Babb reminded them of the Lord’s largesse.

  In verse 17, Babb continued, Paul writes of our duty to the Most High. For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing. Therefore, my friends, never lose heart. Always have faith. The worst moments of our short lives represent less than a passing instant to the eternal Father. Those moments have been decreed by Him from the beginning of time. Our smallest step on His unfathomable path. Even if we should fall into Troubler hands and find visited upon us the tortures of the damned, we go thence for His sake. His unblinking eye is ever on us. On the Bright Crusade. His face is our face. His strength, our strength. And though we sin and come short of the glory, He takes us in the palms of His hands and keeps us close. No darkness can quench the light of His love.