Dee cleared his throat. “As Christ himself said, ‘A new commandment I give you, love one another as I have loved you.’”
Tolf said in an anguished tone, “But why leave us instead of leading us?”
“Because Jesus’ public revelation is already quite clear on that point, and there’s nothing to add to it. No need at this point for more prophecy or, for that matter, prophets. Miss Carter felt she could be seen as competing with the Metropolitan’s authority, which is not what she wanted at all. And Judge Minos believed that you, Roshel, would be better suited to peacetime military leadership than he.”
No argument there, Roshel thought, but kept it to herself. The Metropolitan’s face also remained carefully blank.
“Minos, ah, did caution rather strongly against military adventurism. Such as mounting a crusade against the Hellguard, for example. Or, ah, any temptation to depose Melaret and take a position as military dictator of the Source.”
Roshel had to allow the smile out. Whatever Minos’ flaws as a general, he understood her well enough.
“But… I don’t…” Tolf didn’t seem to be capable of forming a coherent sentence. “What are we supposed to do without them?”
Dee smiled at the guardsman. “Ah. Proph - er, Miss Carter, did have some specific advice on that point.”
“What did she say?” Tolf demanded.
Dee’s smile widened. “Have faith.”
12. Epilogue
“It was nice of Losywa and Ram to wait for us. And then give us a ride,” Tess said. The wagon swayed gently as we rattled along up the road. The Paint wound by on our right. The wagon’s bed was nearly full of barrels of beer and flour shipped from the Source, bales of tobacco from the Shield, and a variety of stranger and more exotic goods whose provenance I couldn’t guess. There was room for Tess, Cat, and me to sit on the tobacco bales - but only just.
“Yeah,” I said. And it had been nice to see a pair of friendly faces when we’d finally returned to Seafields. The trip south had taken far longer than the journey north. Gurath had let us keep the horses, but they were nowhere near as fast as the truck had been.
Of course, I’d overheard more of Losywa’s conversation with Ram than Tess had.
“Why aren’t we just going home, Loo?” he’d complained. “We’ve got more than enough money to just quit while we’re ahead.”
“You heard what Judge Minos said,” she’d retorted. “The Source isn’t going to war against the Shield and the Darklands. The Hellguard aren’t in a position to try anything themselves, not with two possible fronts against the Source and the Green Heart. The Heart is sick of war. And Yoshana’s gone and her crusade with her. If the peace holds, there’s a lot of profit in trade. And with Legion’s money, we’ve got the capital to be right at the front of it. We just need to widen our circle of contacts. Find some folks we can trust, get our network set up. Goat Hill’s as good a place to start as any.”
So our friends weren’t taking us north entirely for altruistic reasons. I didn’t mind. Losywa might be more than a little bit calculating, but merchants like her could help bring back trade, and the progress that went with it.
I was more grateful to Tess. “Thanks again for agreeing to come this way.”
“I already told you I’m not in a hurry to get back to Our Lady. Frankly, all the attention always made me uncomfortable. And you’ve been worried about your parents as long as I’ve known you. Why wouldn’t we go look for them now?” She glanced at me sidelong. “Um… I suppose I should ask… how do you think they’re going to feel about you having a girlfriend who isn’t Select?”
I’d been wondering the same thing. After the Fall, the Select had formed a separate community that didn’t intermarry with others. We were, after all, genetically superior. And of course, there wasn’t really a long line of people beating down the door to mix with a race of gray-skinned, black-eyed aberrations. So the issue only rarely came up.
I didn’t know the answer to her question, so I gave her the only answer that mattered to me. “I don’t especially care. I really want to find my parents, but if they don’t like you… I don’t especially care.”
That wasn’t a question for me alone. “What about your folks? How are they going to feel about you and a Select?”
Her smile was radiant. “I don’t especially care either.”
Hesitantly, I added, “Well, I suppose Gurath gave us permission to get married, so who else’s opinion really matters?” I grinned.
“You really care about a Hellguard giving us his blessing?”
“Look who’s talking. You decided you were my girlfriend after Yoshana said it.”
“Hmm. Touché. It’s still hard to believe she’s gone. In the end, I can’t help but think that at least some of her intentions were good. Trying to bring humanity together. Even if she did go about it the wrong way.”
I thought a bit, choosing my words before I continued. “About that… why do you think God called you to stop Yoshana but not Gurath? Granted there’s a mix of good and evil in every human – and Hellguard. But isn’t Gurath the more evil of the two?”
She took even more time before she answered. “I’ve wondered the same thing. And I’ve wondered if I understood wrong. I suppose… I think Yoshana’s lies were more insidious because they were closer to the truth. She called people to a greater good, but it was a false good, and it had to be refuted. In the end, Gurath’s not calling anyone to anything but selfishness. That evil’s obvious.”
“And seductive,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d say it’s evil, exactly. The desire to define yourself is natural to humanity. It made me and my kind what we are. Surrender to God’s will doesn’t come easily, Tess. Not to me, and Lord knows not to our ancestors before the Fall.”
She nodded. “I know. But that’s a battle everyone has to fight inside their own soul. No one can fight it for us. Believing in ourselves as gods goes back to Adam.”
Father Roric had said the same thing, more than once. The front line between good and evil passed through every human heart, and that war was fought every minute of every day.
Cat yawned and stretched in the sun. The paleo was smart but had little use for philosophy. Sometimes I envied her.
“It does seem like a shame about Yoshana,” I said at last. “I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said the reformer is always right about what’s wrong - she’s just often wrong about what’s right.”
Tess glared at me. “I swear, the next person who quotes anyone is going to get slapped. Between you, and Dee, and Gurath, I can’t even begin to tell you how sick of it I am.”
I laughed. “I get it. As Machiavelli said, a man who uses other men’s words is no - Ow! Hey! I was just making that one up.”
She hadn’t slapped me, which I’d almost been expecting. She’d punched me in the stomach instead. She had a heck of an arm.
She glared. “You still had it coming.”
Cat grinned at me, laughing soundlessly. Cat could be a bit of a sadist. I stuck out my tongue at her.
I reached over and took Tess’ hand. “Safer this way,” I said. “Now you’ve only got one hand free to hit me.”
We sat in silence for a while watching the world roll by. The land was mostly given over to fields of cotton. Ranks on ranks of bright clouds stretched overhead, thinning the sunlight and making the afternoon pleasant and cool.
“Do you think Dee made it back to Our Lady?” Tess asked.
I’d wondered the same thing, not without some twinges of worry and guilt. If something happened to the occultist and Roshel concluded we’d all been killed, it could mean war. But I said, “If there’s one thing I’m confident of, it’s Dee’s survival skills. He made it.”
And I was sure of that. We had booked him passage on a boat back to Delta City, and I really was certain that the gangling windbag could make it through anything the journey might throw at him.
Tess nodded. “I feel that too. It seems strange… not having any
responsibilities.”
I stared out over the river.
“What’s wrong?” Tess asked after a time. “You’re a million miles away.”
“I was just thinking… speaking of responsibilities…” I was having trouble getting it out. “What do you think of what Gurath said?”
“About what?”
“About us.”
She squeezed my hand hard. “Minos, what exactly are you asking?”
“I’m a better person when I’m with you, Genia. You save me. I can’t get to heaven without you. And I can’t think of a better reason to want to be with someone forever. So… I guess… I’m… I’m asking you to marry me.”
She pulled her hand away and hit me again. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re doing a lousy job of it! You should at least be down on one knee!”
I laughed nervously. “What in all the time you’ve spent with me would make you think I’d be good at this? And my knee hurts, remember?”
But I struggled down onto one knee between the bales and barrels, wincing at the ache that Gurath’s Darkness hadn’t fully banished. I looked up into her gray eyes and asked, “Genia Carter, will you marry me?”
The tears ran down her cheeks. “I couldn’t be who I am without you. You make me a better person too. So yes, you unromantic gray jackass, I’ll marry you.”
And that’s how it was decided.
Acknowledgements
I started this series with the notion of a dialog between faith and reason. In Freedom and the Role of the Artist, Terry Teachout said:
The artist whose chief goal is not to make everything more beautiful but to enlist his audience in a cause - no matter what that cause may be - is rarely if ever prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He replaces the true complexity of the world with the false simplicity of the ideologue. He alters reality not to make everything more beautiful, but to stack the deck. This is what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that no artist ever tries to prove anything, though I’d put it another way. Great art doesn’t tell - it shows. And this act of showing is itself a moral act, a commitment to reality.
I tried to keep the action and dialog intellectually honest, but as Teachout says, there’s a danger any time you write fiction with the goal of making a point.
Pontius Pilate infamously asked “What is truth?” We can only look into our hearts and try to find the answer to that question. These five books reflect my attempt to do that as best I can, for myself if not for anyone else. The faith journey here is mine. Your mileage may vary. It took me seventeen years of intense exposure to Catholicism before I converted - so Minos was a much quicker study in that respect than I was. While I can’t imagine these novels have persuaded anybody one way or the other, maybe they’ve given a few readers something to think about.
For those already starting from a position of faith, I’d suggest that the best way to convince others of the truth of God is by example, as I was myself convinced - not by preaching, but by letting God’s light shine through your actions and interactions.
***
Emerging from the darkness of sin into the light of grace is an idea woven throughout Judeo-Christian thought. The series title was inspired by the design of the Dead Sea Scrolls museum in Jerusalem, which is reached through a tunnel so that you have to literally pass through darkness to reach the light.
When I looked for the specific phrase “passing through darkness,” I turned up Albert Pike (the lead quote for Book One). Pike was… let’s say “interesting.” He was an eminent Freemason who authored a guide to the Scottish Masonic Rite. He is the only Confederate soldier to have an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C. According to the Smithsonian Institute's Civil War studies program:
Carved at the base of Albert Pike's statue at Third and D Streets in Northwest Washington are the words, “philosopher, jurist, orator, author, poet, scholar, soldier.” Some of his contemporaries could accurately add, “libertine, traitor, glutton, incompetent, murderer.”
Pike fought for the Confederacy but sympathized with the Union. He wrote important treatises on morality but left his wife to have an affair with a woman forty years younger.
And for a series of novels about the moral ambiguities of the human condition, who could ask for a better muse?
***
Simone Weil was an early 20th century French philosopher, activist, and mystic. Born Jewish, she converted to Catholicism - sort of (she was never baptized). She believed that detachment from self was necessary to approach God. A better-elaborated version of the quote “Evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world” (lead quote for Book Two) might be:
Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.
Another wonderful quote is, “Bourgeois society is infected by monomania; the monomania of accounting.” I love that one because in my day job, I’m a certified public accountant. I think she means we only value what we can measure, which generally isn’t very valuable.
***
The philosophy of Edmund Burke (lead quote for Book Three), as articulated in Reflections on the Revolution in France, could perhaps be boiled down to, “You aren’t as smart as you think you are.” He was conservative in the deepest sense, and had a wicked, sarcastic tongue that I appreciate:
I do not deny that, among an infinite number of acts of violence and folly, some good may have been done. They who destroy everything certainly will remove some grievance.
Burke was skeptical of much of the Enlightenment philosophy coming from France. And yet, he was not a reflexive reactionary. A conservative English Protestant, he supported Irish Catholic emancipation. Deeply suspicious of democracy, he was sympathetic toward American independence.
He probably would have known better than to go messing around with the Darkness.
***
I took a social psychology class in college, many years ago. The class was given the MACH-IV test, which measures the respondents’ Machiavellianism. When the instructor asked for a show of hands as to how many people had scored in each category, mine was the only hand that went up for the highest. To which I responded, “Yeah, sure, because anyone who scored higher than me would lie about their results.”
The interesting thing about Machiavelli’s quote that all armed prophets are successful and all unarmed prophets are destroyed (Book Four) is that it’s wrong on its face. While Muhammad was certainly an armed prophet and founded the world’s second most successful religion (by number of adherents and geographic extent), Jesus was an unarmed prophet and founded the world’s most successful religion by the same criteria. Buddha was another unarmed prophet. And in the modern world we have the leadership examples of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. The example of Jesus would of course have been obvious to Machiavelli - so it’s interesting that such a clever man would have said something so obviously false.
On the other hand, we have the also self-evidently untrue aphorism that “violence never solved anything.” As Robert A. Heinlein famously responded, “I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that.”
The trick, I suppose, is navigating between those two untrue statements.
***
Much of the final book I imagined as a discussion between St. Thomas Aquinas and Nietzsche (the lead quote for Book Five). The main problem is that they were both a lot smarter than I am. So it’s really just an argument between my understanding of Aquinas and Nietzsche. The other problem with that debate is that Aquinas and Nietzsche start with opposite, unprovable propositions - God lives, or God is dead.
Alan Bloom seemed to think that without a belief in a higher power, philosophy tended inevitably toward the will to power in Nietzsche’s void, “beyond good and evil.” Bertrand Russell instead regarded Nietzsche as a nasty little
back alley of modern thought (although Russell was unable to refute Nietzsche, calling his philosophy “internally consistent”).
Through much of my early life, my world view was probably Nietzschean, although I’m not sure I would have framed it quite that way. As Minos said, it’s a pretty dark philosophy. I spent a fair amount of time reading Nietzsche while writing this book, and it perturbed me - largely because his views still resonate with me. My wife suggested that I should focus on reading Aquinas instead, and she was right.
***
Speaking of Aquinas, Books Four and Five refer extensively to his Summa Theologica. In fact, almost all references are from the more relevant (and much shorter) Summa Contra Gentiles. I choose to assume that the edition that Father Roric gave Minos combines both works. The Summa Contra Gentiles is a masterful work of philosophy, but it’s about 800 pages long. The Summa Theologica is almost four times that. They are both quite dense, and I have to admit that I did not finish the Summa Theologica. To quote Yoda, “page-turners they were not.”
Some notable fiction from which I’ve probably “borrowed” unconsciously, and which I’d whole-heartedly recommend: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz; Glen Cook’s Black Company series; C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy.
The phrase “radiant tide of light” is blatantly lifted from the name of a character in Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I. series. Glen, if you’re reading this, I just want to state for the record that no, Ken and I did not knock over a liquor store that time at ChamBanaCon twenty-five years ago.
All bad puns (generally put in Prophetess’ mouth without her knowledge) are entirely my fault. A particular apology to the United Negro College Fund - a mind is a terrible thing to waste. I’m not going to apologize to Blizzard for the Diablo III pun. They have enough bad puns in their games - they deserve it.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 90