The Sparrow

32 NAPLES: AUGUST 2060

"I think perhaps that I was a disappointment to Supaari," Sandoz told them the next day. "Anne was a delight to work with, and they had enjoyed each other a great deal. I was not nearly so amusing."

"You were grieving and terrified and half-dead," Voelker told him flatly. And John nodded, in agreement at last with something Johannes Voelker had said.

"Yes! A poor dinner companion." Sandoz had a bright and brittle sound to him this afternoon. Giuliani was openly disapproving of this strange glittery mood; Sandoz ignored him. "I'm not sure Supaari really thought through the idea of formally accepting me as a dependent. It might have been a sort of spontaneous gesture of interplanetary goodwill. Maybe he wished he'd let the government have me after all." San­doz shrugged. "In any case, he seemed primarily interested in the trade aspects of the situation, and I was not much good to him as an economic adviser. He asked me if I thought that there might be other parties coming from Earth. I told him that we had radioed news of our situation back to our home planet and that it was possible others might come. We had no way of knowing when. He decided to learn English from me because it is our lingua franca. He had already started to pick it up from Anne."

"So. You had work as a linguist," Giuliani said lightly. "For a time, at least."

"Yes. Supaari was making the best of things, I think. We had many conversations, once I was well enough to sort out which language I was supposed to use. It was good English practice for him, and he explained many things to me. You should be grateful to him. Most of what I understand about what happened came from him. He was very helpful."

"How long were you with him?" Giuliani asked.

"I'm not really sure. Six to eight months, perhaps? I learned K'San during that time. Appalling language. The hardest I've ever learned. Part of the joke, I suppose," he said, inexplicably. He stood up and began to walk around the room, jumpy and distractible.

"Did you hear anything of the violence that Wu and Isley reported?" Giuliani asked, watching him move from place to place.

"No. I was quite isolated, I assure you. I imagine, however, that with characteristic creativity, the Runa were beginning to expand on Sofia's suggestion that they were many and the Jana'ata were few."

"Wu and Isley asked after you as soon as Askama brought them to Supaari's compound," Giuliani said, pausing when he saw Sandoz flinch. "Supaari told them that he had made other arrangements for you. What was the phrase he used? Ah. Here: 'more suited to his nature.' Can you tell us why you were removed from the household?"

There was an ugly laugh. "Do you know what I said to Anne Edwards once? God is in the why." He would not look at anyone now. He stood with his back to them and stared out the window, holding the gauzy curtain aside, careful with the hardware of his brace, so as not to snag the fabric. Finally, they heard him say, "No. I don't know what he meant by that, except that somehow he believed he was justified in what he did."

"In what he did," Giuliani repeated quietly. "You did nothing to cause your removal?"

"Oh, Christ!" Sandoz spun to face him. "Even now? After all this?"

He walked to his place at the table and sat down, shaking with anger. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft, but he was obvi­ously fighting rage, braced hands rigid in his lap, eyes on the table. "My position in the household of Supaari VaGayjur was that of a crippled dependent. Supaari was not a flighty person, but I believe he must have tired of me. Or perhaps he simply felt that I had fulfilled my role as a language tutor when he became competent in English and that it was time for me to take up another position, so to speak." He looked directly at Giuliani then. "My residential and occupational preferences were not inquired into at any time. How explicit am I required to be?"

He was asleep when they came for him, just past dawn. Caught in the web of a dream, he was at first unsure if the hands were real or imagined, and by the time he knew, their grip was unbreakable. Later on, when he asked himself if there might have been some way to escape, he knew the question was folly. Where could he have gone? What shelter would he have found? Equally pointless: the struggle, the demands for an explanation. The first blow drove the air from his lungs, the second knocked him nearly senseless. Efficient, they wasted no additional time in beating him. Half-dragged, half-carried, he tried to memorize the streets and had an impression that the route was fairly consistently uphill. By the time they arrived at Galatna Palace, his head was clear and he was able to breathe without pain.

Arms pinioned, he was escorted past the fountains he'd seen from Supaari's compound and taken through a side entrance to the palace, down hallways bright with colored tiles and floored with marble and jasper, past internal courtyards, under vaulted, ribbed ceilings. The simplest aspects of the interior were gilded, walls overlaid by silver-wire trellis, each diagonal defined and sparkling with a jewel: emerald and ruby and amethyst and diamond. He saw, in passing, a formal room of ecclesiastical proportions fitted out with a wide indoor canopy in a yellow silken fabric figured and embroidered in turquoise and carmine and spring green, tasseled and fringed with gold thread, its richness echoed by the piles of cushions, ivory and red and blue, their plush fabric creased and divided by braid and costly welting.

Room after room: there was nothing straight that could be made curved, nothing plain that could be given a pattern, nothing white that could be brilliant. The very air was embellished! Everywhere, there was scent: a hundred fragrances and odors he could not name or recognize.

It was, he thought crazily, the most spectacularly vulgar place he'd ever been in. It looked and smelled like a cheap whorehouse, except the jewels were real and each dram of perfume probably cost a village corporation's yearly earnings.

He tried both Ruanja and K'San each time they encountered someone new, but no one would respond and he thought at first that all the servants were mutes. As the day wore on, he was given short orders in a form of K'San that was unfamiliar to him, as High German might be unfamiliar to someone who spoke Low. Go there. Sit here. Wait. He did his best to comply; he was cuffed when he got something wrong. It was he who became mute.

In the days that followed, he was held with an odd mixture of freedom and constraint. There were others kept, as he was, in subtle but ef­fective cages. They were able to move from cage to cage but not inside the palace proper. A zoo, he thought, trying to make sense of all this. I am in some kind of private zoo.

The others were a bizarre but beautiful group of Runa and some Jana'ata, and there were a few individuals whose species he was unsure of. The Runa who shared his cushioned captivity came to his assistance when he needed help because of his hands. They were extraordinarily affectionate and friendly and tried to make him feel a part of whatever odd society existed within the ornate and costly walls of Galatna Palace. In their way, they were kind, but they seemed almost stupid, as though bred for looks alone, with coats of unusual color, brindled or pied, one striped like a zebra. Most had fine-boned and overbred faces, a few had manes, several even approached taillessness. None spoke the dialect of Ruanja he'd learned in Kashan.

The captive Jana'ata were kept in a separate enclosure and paid him no attention, even though he could not detect any difference in their status within the zoo. They were heavily robed, with headdresses that covered their faces, smaller than Supaari. Later he found out they were females, and still later he realized that they must be the kind of sterile partners Supaari had told him about. He called to them in K'San, asked them to explain to him what this place was, but they kept to themselves. He was never able to get them to speak to him in any language.

He had been fed irregularly but well in Supaari's household, like the pet of a small child who'd wanted a puppy but then lost interest. Here the food was provided ad libitum because, he supposed, so many of the others were Runa, who required more constant meals. It was an improvement in theory, but he had no appetite. The Runa always seemed touchingly pleased when he accepted food from them. So he ate, to repay their kindness.

It came to him that he was now perfectly useless, probably kept as a curiosity, as unique and odd as the gaudy trinkets he'd seen stuffing the alcoves and jamming the shelves of Galatna that first day. And then he was fitted with a jeweled collar, and his humiliation seemed complete. He was, he thought, the exact counterpart of a capuchin monkey kept on a golden chain by some sixteenth-century European aristocrat.

Supaari, however cool and perplexing, had at least been an intellectual companion. Now he tried to steel himself for the predictable effects of utter loneliness, to be patient with the hollow unreality he felt. He did sums and sang songs in his head and tried to pray but stopped when he realized that he was mixing the languages up. He was no longer certain of the differences between Spanish and Ruanja, and that frightened him as much as anything that had happened to him so far. The worst moment came when he realized that he couldn't remember the name of his neighborhood back in Puerto Rico. I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.

He was confused and vaguely frightened all of the time, but he forced himself to keep some kind of schedule, to exercise. This amused his Runa colleagues, but he did it anyway. There were scented baths, as elaborate and horrible as the rest of the place. As no one gave him orders about this, he chose the water with the least offensive perfume and did his best to keep himself clean.

"Tell us," he heard the Father General say.

"I thought that I had been sold as a zoological specimen," Emilio Sandoz said, trembling violently now, staring at the table, each soft word a separate act of self-control. "I believed, for a while, that I was in a menagerie owned by the Reshtar of Galatna. An aristocrat. A great poet. The author of many songs, yes? A gentleman of catholic tastes. It was, in fact, a kind of harem. Like Clytemnestra, I was compelled to master submission."

It was perhaps three weeks or a month later when one of the guards came to the cageside and spoke to the others, who huffed and twitched and crowded around him. He had no idea what anyone was saying, had made no effort to learn anything beyond the most rudimen­tary phrases of the language spoken here. It was a form of denial, he supposed. If he didn't learn the language, he wouldn't have to stay. Stupid, of course. For reasons he could not have articulated, he was suddenly afraid, but he calmed himself with thoughts that would, very soon, shatter his soul. He said to himself: I am in God's hands. Whatever happens now to me is God's will.

He was given a robe, obviously made specially for him, cut down to his size. It was staggeringly heavy and hot but preferable to parading around naked. He was taken, arms held firmly, to a plain and empty white room, unscented and unfurnished. It was astonishing. He was so relieved to be out of the welter, the visual and olfactory and auditory confusion, that he very nearly sank to his knees. Then he heard Supaari's voice and, heart racing, felt a rush of hope, thinking that he would surely be released. Supaari will take me home now, he thought. It's all been some mistake, he thought, and forgave Supaari for not coming sooner.

He tried to speak when Supaari entered the room but the guard cuffed him in the back of the head and he stumbled forward and fell, thrown off balance by the unfamiliar weight of the robe. He was long past anger at the abuse and felt only shame at falling. Pushing himself to his feet, he looked again for Supaari and found him, but saw then a Jana'ata of medium stature and vast dignity, with violet eyes of surpassing beauty that met and held his own with a gaze so direct and searching that he had to look away. The Reshtar, he realized. A man of learning and artistry, he knew. Supaari had told him of the Reshtar: a great poet. The author of the sublime songs that had brought Emilio Sandoz and his companions to Rakhat—

And then, suddenly, everything made sense to him, and the joy of that moment took his breath away. He had been brought here, step by step, to meet this man: Hlavin Kitheri, a poet—perhaps even a prophet—who of all his kind might know the God whom Emilio Sandoz served. It was a moment of redemption so profound he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded by the inchoate fear and the isolation. He tried to pull himself together, wishing he'd been stronger, more durable, a better instrument for his God's design. And yet he felt purified somehow, stripped of all other purpose.

There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life—moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness—times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth.

He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you—

He would tell the Reshtar: I am here to learn your poetry and perhaps to teach you ours.

That is why I am alive, he told himself, and he thanked God with all his soul for allowing him to be here at this moment, to understand all this at last…

Intent on his own rushing thoughts, and by the certainty and rightness that he felt, he made little effort to follow the conversation that went on around him, although it took place in Supaari's own K'San dialect. He was not shocked when the robe was removed. Nudity was normal to him now. He knew that he was alien, that his body held as much interest for a man of learning as his mind. What educated man would not be curious, seeing a new sentient species for the first time? Who could fail to comment on the oddity of nearly complete hairlessness, the undeveloped nose? The strange dark eyes…the astonishing lack of tail…

"…but a pleasing proportion, an elegant muscularity," the Reshtar was saying. Admiring its neat and graceful compactness, he moved thoughtfully around the exotic body, one hand trailing, his fine claws leaving on the hairless chest thin lines that quickly seeped red beads. He passed his hand around the shoulder and, regarding the curve of the neck, encircled it with his hands, noting its delicacy: why, one could snap the spine with a single gesture. His hands moved again, lightly caressing the hairless back, moved lower, to the bizarre void, the fascinating stillness and vulnerability of taillessness.

Standing back, he saw that the foreigner had begun to tremble. Surprised at the rapidity of response, the Reshtar now moved to test readiness, lifting the foreigner's chin and staring directly into the dark unreadable eyes. His own eyes narrowed at the reaction: the head turned quickly in submission, eyes closed, the whole body quaking. Pathetic, in a way, and untutored, but with great appeal.

"Lord?" It was the merchant. "It is acceptable? You are pleased?"

"Yes," the Reshtar said, distracted. He looked at Supaari and spoke then with impatience. "Yes. My secretary has the legal work in hand. You may contract the binding with my sister on whatever date seems propitious. Brother: may you have children." His gaze returned to the foreigner. "Leave me now," he said, and Supaari VaGayjur, rendered Founder of a new lineage for his service to the Reshtar of Galatna, in company with the guard who had escorted Sandoz from the seraglio, backed out of the room.

Alone, the Reshtar circled once more but came to rest behind the foreigner. He dropped his own robe then and stood, concentrating, eyes closed, on the fresh outpouring of scent, more intense, more complex than before. A powerful, stirring fragrance, unparalleled and irresistible. A musk redolent of unfamiliar amines, of strange butyric and caprylic carbon chains, misted by the simple chaste dioxides of shuddering breath and stirred by waves of iron bloodscent.

Hlavin Kitheri, Reshtar of Galatna Palace, the greatest poet of his age, who had ennobled the despised, exalted the ordinary, immortalized the fleeting, a singularity whose artistry was first concentrated and then released, magnified, by the incomparable and unprecedented, inhaled deeply. We shall sing of this for generations, he thought.

Language, his life's work and his delight, which had failed Emilio Sandoz word by word, now deserted him utterly. Shuddering in violent moronic waves, he could smell the nauseating glandular reek of his own terror. Mute, he was unable even to think the word for the un­speakable joyless rite that was coming, not even when his arms were seized from behind. But when the powerful prehensile feet locked over his ankles and the belly settled in behind him and the probing began, he went rigid with panic and fathomless horror, understanding finally what was about to happen. The penetration, when it came, made him scream. Things became very much worse after that.

Perhaps ten minutes later he was pulled to an unfamiliar room, bleeding and sobbing. Left alone, he vomited until he was exhausted. He did not think for a long while but only rested, eyes open in the deepening darkness. Eventually, a servant came to take him to the baths. By that time, his life was irrevocably divided, into before and after.

In the quiet of the Father General's office, only Johannes Voelker spoke. "I don't understand. What did the Reshtar want with you?"

My God, Giuliani was thinking, genius may have its limits but stupidity is not thus handicapped. How could I have believed—Eyes closed, he heard Emilio's voice, soft and musical and empty, saying, "What did he want with me? Why, the same thing a pederast wants with a little boy, I imagine. A nice, tight fit."

In the shocked silence, Giuliani's head came up. Romanita, he thought. Know the act and move ruthlessly when the time is right. "You are many things, but you are not a coward," the Father General said to Emilio Sandoz. "Face it. Tell us."

"I have told you."

"Make us understand."

"I don't care what you understand. It won't change anything. Believe what you like."

Giuliani tried to remember the name of a painting by El Greco: a study of a Spanish nobleman in death. Romanita excludes emotion, doubt. It has to be now, here. "For your own soul, say it."

"I did not sell myself," Sandoz said in a fierce whisper, looking at no one. "I was sold."

"Not good enough. Say it!"

Sandoz was still, his eyes unfocused, each breath coming with mechanical regularity as though carefully planned and executed, until the moment came when he leaned away from the table, put a foot on its edge and sent it crashing over, splintering in the volcanic explosion of rage, scattering the other men to the edges of the room. Only the Father General remained where he was, and all the sounds of the world were reduced to the ticking of an ancient clock and the harsh, laboring breath of the man standing alone in the center of the room, whose lips formed words they could hardly hear. "I gave no consent."

"Say it," Giuliani repeated, unrelenting. "Make us hear it."

"I was not a prostitute."

"No. You weren't. What were you then? Say it, Emilio."

Each word separate, the threadbare voice breaking on the last: "I was raped."

They could see the cost to him, the price of saying this. He stood swaying slightly, the armature of his face demolished by the work of thin, fine muscles. John Candotti breathed: "My God," and somewhere Emilio Sandoz found, inside himself, the black and brittle iron required to turn his head and endure, unflinching, the compassion in John's eyes.

"Do you think so, John? Was it your God?" he asked with terrifying gentleness. "You see, that is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, then the rest of it was God's will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn't it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God."

Looking from face to face, he watched comprehension working its way into their minds. What could any of them say? He almost laughed. "Can you guess what I thought just before I was used the first time?" he asked them as he began to pace. "This is rich. This is very funny! You see, I was scared but I didn't understand what was going on. I never imagined—who could have imagined such a thing? I am in God's hands, I thought. I loved God and I trusted in His love. Amusing, isn't it? I laid down all my defenses. I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped. I was naked before God and I was raped."

The agitated pacing halted as he heard his own words, his voice almost normal until the end, when it fell away into uncomprehending grief, when he knew at last his own devastation fully. But he did not die, and when he could move again, and breathe once more, he looked at Vincenzo Giuliani, who said nothing, who met his eyes and would not look away.

"Tell us." Two words. It was, Vincenzo Giuliani thought, the hardest thing he had ever done.

"You want more?" Sandoz asked, incredulous. Then he was moving again, unable to keep still or silent a moment longer. "I can provide endless detail," he offered, theatrically expansive, merciless now. "It went on for—I don't know how long. Months. It seemed like eternity. He shared me with his friends. I became rather fashionable. A number of exquisite individuals came to use me. It was a form of connoisseurship, I think. Sometimes," he said, stopping and looking at each of them, hating them for their witness, "sometimes, there was an audience."

John Candotti closed his eyes and turned his head away, and Edward Behr wept silently.

"Distressing, isn't it. It gets worse," he assured them with savage cheer, moving blindly. "Extemporaneous poetry was recited. Songs were written, describing the experience. And the concerts were broadcast, of course, just like the songs we heard—is Arecibo still collecting the songs? You must have heard some of the ones about me by now." Not prayer. Christ! Not prayer—pornography. "They were very beautiful," he admitted, scrupulously accurate. "I was required to listen, although I was perhaps inadequately appreciative of the artistry."

He looked at them one by one, each of them pale and speechless. "Have you heard enough? How about this: the smell of my fear and my blood excited them. Do you want more? Would you like to know precisely how dark the night of the soul can get?" he asked, goading them now. "There was a moment when it occurred to me to wonder if bestiality is a sin for the beast, for that was certainly my role in the festivities."

Voelker suddenly moved to the door. "Does it make you want to vomit?" Sandoz asked with thin solicitude, watching as Voelker left the room. "Don't be ashamed," he called. "It happens to me all the time."

Sandoz spun back to face the rest of them. "He wanted it to be my fault somehow," he said informatively, looking at each of them, eyes lingering on Candotti's. "He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business, gentlemen, or it was a God I cannot worship."

He waited, shaking, daring them to speak. "No questions? No argument? No comfort for the afflicted?" he asked with acrid gaiety. "I warned you. I told you that you didn't want to know. Now it's in your minds. Now you have to live with knowing. But it was my body. It was my blood," he said, choking with fury. "And it was my love."

He stopped suddenly then and turned away from them at last. No one moved, and they listened to the ragged breathing stop and hold and then go on in defiance. "John stays," he said finally. "Everyone else: get out."

Trembling, he faced John Candotti, waiting for the room to clear, Giuliani gracefully sidestepping the wreckage on the floor, Brother Ed­ward hesitating by the door, waiting for Felipe Reyes, white-lipped, to pass, but leaving finally and pulling the door shut with a quiet click. John wanted more than anything to look away, to leave with the others, but he knew why he was there and so he stayed and tried to be ready for what he had to hear next.

When they were alone, Sandoz began again to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.

"After a while, the novelty wore off and it was mostly the guards who came. By that time they were keeping me in a little stone-walled room without lights. I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then the door would open and I would see a flare of light beyond it." He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. "I never knew if they were bringing food or if—if…They kept me isolated because the screaming disturbed the others. My colleagues. The ones in the drawing you saw, back in Rome, do you remember? Someone from the harem must have drawn it. I found it in with my food one day. You can't imagine what that meant to me. God left me, but someone remembered where I was."

He stopped then and looked directly at John Candotti, who stood paralyzed, a bird caught by the cobra's gaze.

"I decided finally that I would kill the next person to come through the door, the next one who…touched me." And then he was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make John understand. "I—There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, If I'm too dangerous, they'll leave me alone. They'll kill me. I thought, The next time someone comes in here, one of us is going to die, I don't care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. They used me hard, John. They used me hard. I wanted to die."

He stopped again and looked helplessly at Candotti. "I wanted to die, but God took her instead. Why, John?"

John wasn't following this. But it was a question he'd had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and he was able to say, "Because, I suppose, souls are not interchangeable. You can't tell God: Take me instead."

Sandoz wasn't listening. "I didn't sleep, for a long time. I waited for the door to open and I thought about how I could kill someone without my hands…" He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing John Candotti. "So I waited. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open. And then I could hear footsteps outside my cell, and I got up and stood in the far corner, so I could use the momentum, and the door opened, and I saw a silhouette, and it was so strange. My eyes already knew but my body was so primed. It was like—the nerves fired without my telling them to. I crashed into her so hard…I could hear the bones in her chest snap, John."

He tried desperately to take the force against his ruined hands, to cushion the shock, but before he could make his arms come up, they'd both cannoned into the stone wall and Askama was crushed by the impact.

He found himself on the floor, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms, with Askama crumpled beneath him, her face so close to his that he could hear her whisper. She smiled at him, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth and seeping from a nostril. "You see, Meelo? Your family came for you. I found you for them."

He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Askama's corpse half-blinded by the brilliant light of second dawn pouring through the door. Saw their eyes, single-irised, as frightening to him now as his own eyes must have been to Askama when she first met him. Recognized the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.

"My God, you killed her," the older man said. And then he fell silent, taking in the jeweled necklace, the naked body decorated with scented ribbons, the dried and bloody evidence of the priest's most recent employment. "My God," he repeated.

The younger man was coughing and holding his sleeve over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat and perfumes. "I am Wu Xing-Ren, and this is my colleague, Trevor Isley. United Nations, External Affairs Committee," he said at last. He was almost but not quite able to keep the contempt out of his voice as he added, "You must be Father Sandoz."

There was a sound that began as laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.

"Why, John? Why did it all happen like that, unless God wanted it that way? I thought I understood…" His voice trailed off, and Candotti waited, not sure what to say or do. "How long has it been for you, John?"

John, the sudden shift taking him by surprise, frowned at Sandoz and shook his head, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.

"I figured it out once. Twenty-nine years. I get confused about the time, but I was fifteen and I'm supposed to be forty-five now, I think." The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. John went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Emilio wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. "See, I know a lot of men make accommodations. They find someone—someone…to help them. But, the thing about this is: I didn't. And I—I thought I understood. It was a path to God, and I thought I understood. There are moments, John, when your soul is like a ball of fire, and it reaches out to everything and everyone equally. I thought I understood."

And then suddenly, Emilio wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired and, for that reason, sadder than anything John Candotti had heard before. "So, anyway, I was about forty-four, I guess, when it—when…it happened, so it must have been about twenty-nine years." His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. "John, if God did this, it is a hell of a trick to pull on a celibate. And if God didn't do it, what does that make me?" He shrugged helplessly. "An unemployed linguist, with a lot of dead friends."

His face hardly moved, but the tears began again. "So many dead, because I believed. John, they're all dead. I've tried so hard to under­stand," he whispered. "Who can forgive me? So many dead…"

John Candotti pulled the smaller man to him and took Sandoz in his arms and held him, rocking, while they both cried. After a time, John whispered, "I forgive you," and began the ancient absolution, "Absolvo te—absolvo te…" but that had to be enough, because he couldn't say the rest.

"That was an abuse of power," Felipe Reyes hissed. "You had no right—My God, how could you do that to him?"

"It was necessary." The Father General had left the building, walking swiftly from his office down the long echoing hallway, throwing open the French doors and passing outside to the garden, hoping to pull his thoughts together in sunshine and in quiet. But Reyes had followed him, furious, outraged that Emilio Sandoz had been made to speak with so many witnesses.

"How could you do that to him?" Reyes persisted, implacable. "Did you get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to—"

Giuliani rounded on him and silenced the other priest with a look that froze the words on his lips. "It was necessary. If he were an artist, I'd have ordered him to paint it. If he were a poet, I'd have ordered him to write it. Because he is who he is, I made him speak of it. It was necessary. And it was necessary for us to hear it."

Felipe Reyes looked at his superior for a moment longer and then sank abruptly onto the cool stone of a garden bench, surrounded by summer blossoms in dazzling sunlight, shaken and sickened and unconvinced that any of it was necessary. There were sunflowers and brilliant yellow daylilies, delphinium and liatris and gladioli, and the scent of roses from somewhere nearby. The swallows were out now, as the evening approached, and the insect noise was changing. The Father General sat down beside him.

"Have you ever been to Florence, Reyes?"

Felipe sat back, open-mouthed with disgusted incomprehension. "No," he said acidly. "I haven't felt much like touring. Sir."

"You should go. There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. Broken and damaged as he is, Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all."

It took Felipe Reyes, blinking, several moments to hear what he'd been told, and if he was too stiff-necked to look at Giuliani for the time being, he was able at least to admit that he understood. "And by listening, we help him."

"Yes. We help him. He will have to tell it again and again, and we will have to hear more and more, until he finds the meaning." In that in­stant, a lifetime of reason and moderation and common sense and balance left Vincenzo Giuliani feeling as weightless and insubstantial as ash. "He's the genuine article, Reyes. He has been all along. He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he's closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life. And I don't even have the courage to envy him."

They sat there for a long while, in the late August afternoon, the light golden and the air soft, the small near sounds of the garden punctuated by a dog's barking in the distance. John Candotti joined them after a time. He sat heavily on the ground across the garden walk­way from their bench and put his head in his hands.

"It was hard," the Father General said.

"Yes. It was hard."

"The child?"

"The closest legal term might be involuntary manslaughter." John lay back, flattening some ground cover, unable to stay upright any longer. "No," he amended after a time. "It wasn't an accident. He meant to kill, but in self-defense. That Askama was the one who died—that was an accident."

"Where is he now?"

Candotti, drained, looked up at them. "I carried him up to his room, sleeping like the dead. That's an awful phrase. Anyway, asleep. Ed's with him." There was a pause. "I think it did him good. It sure as hell didn't do me any good to hear it, but I really think he's better now." John put his hands over his eyes. "To dream of all that. And the children…Now we know."

"Now we know," Giuliani agreed. "I'm sitting here trying to understand why it seemed less awful when I thought it was prostitution. It's the same physical act." He wasn't the Father General. He was just plain Vince Giuliani, with no answers. Unknowing, he trod the path of reason that Sofia Mendes had traveled all those years before. "I suppose a prostitute has at least an illusion of control. It's a transaction. There is some element of consent."

"There is," Felipe Reyes suggested wanly, "more dignity in prostitution than in gang rape. Even by poets."

Giuliani suddenly put his hands to his mouth. "What a wilderness, to believe you have been seduced and raped by God." And then to come home to our tender mercies, he thought bleakly.

John sat up and glared red-eyed at the Father General. "I'll tell you something. If it's a choice between despising Emilio or hating God—"

Surprisingly, Felipe Reyes broke in, before John could say something he'd regret. "Emilio is not despicable. But God didn't rape him, even if that's how Emilio understands it now." He sat back in the bench and stared at the ancient olive trees defining the edge of the garden. "There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

"So God just leaves?" John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!"

"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

"Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. " 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' "

"But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.

They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

"You know, he was always a good priest," Felipe told them, remembering, "but it must have been about the time that they were plan­ning the mission, something changed in him. It was like, I don't know, sometimes he would just—ignite." Felipe's hands moved, making a shape like fireworks. "There was something in his face, so beautiful. And I thought, if that's what it's like to be a priest…It was like he fell in love with God."

"Offhand," said the Father General wearily, in a voice dry as August grass, "I'd say the honeymoon is over."

The sun was already fairly high when Edward Behr awoke to the sound of a coffee cup rattling on a saucer. Blinking, he sat up in the wooden chair where he'd spent the night and groaned. He saw Emilio Sandoz standing by the night table, carefully setting the coffee down, the servos releasing his grip almost as quickly as natural movement might have.

"What time is it?" Ed asked, rubbing his neck.

"A little after eight," Sandoz told him. Wearing a T-shirt and a pair of baggy pants, he sat on the edge of his bed and watched Brother Edward stretch and scrub at his eyes with his pudgy hands. "Thank you. For staying with me."

Brother Edward looked at him, sizing things up. "How do you feel?"

"Okay," Emilio said simply. "I feel okay."

Emilio stood and stepped over to the window, holding the curtain aside, but couldn't see much: just the garage and a little bit of hillside. "I used to be a pretty fair middle-distance runner," he said conversationally. "I did about half a kilometer this morning. Had to walk most of it." He shrugged. "It's a start."

"It's a start," Edward Behr agreed. "You did well with the coffee, too."

"Yeah. Didn't crush the cup. Only spilled a little." He let the curtain fall. "I'm going to go get cleaned up."

"Need any help?"

"No. Thanks. I can manage."

No anger, Brother Edward noticed. He watched Emilio open the drawer and pull out clean clothes. It took a while, but he did fine. As Sandoz moved toward the door, Brother Edward spoke again. "It's not over, you know," he warned. "You don't get over something like that all at once."

Emilio stared at the floor for a while and then looked up. "Yes. I know." He stood still a few moments and then asked, "What were you, before? A nurse? A therapist?"

Edward Behr snorted and reached for the coffee. "Not even close. I was a stockbroker. I specialized in undervalued companies." He didn't expect Sandoz to understand. The generality of priests, vowed to poverty, were hopelessly ignorant of finance. "It involved recognizing the worth of things that other people discounted."

Sandoz didn't see the connection. "Were you good at it?"

"Oh, yes. I was very good at it." Brother Edward held up his cup and said, "Thanks for the coffee."

He watched Sandoz go and then, sitting very still, in silence, Edward Behr began his morning prayers.

At ten, there was a metallic rap at the Father General's door, and when he called out, "Come in," he was not surprised to see Emilio Sandoz enter the office, managing the lever without any hesitation and shutting the door behind him.

Giuliani started to stand, but Emilio said, "No, please. Sit down. I just wanted—I wanted to thank you. That couldn't have been easy for you to do."

"It was brutal," Vince Giuliani admitted. "And all I had to do was listen."

"No. You did more than that." Sandoz looked around the office, which seemed oddly empty. Unexpectedly, he gave a short laugh and his hands went to his hair, as if to run his fingers through it, an old nervous habit, now likely to tangle the joint mechanisms of the braces. He let his hands fall. "Sorry about the table. Was it valuable?"

"Priceless."

"Figures."

"Forget it." Giuliani sat back in his chair. "So. You seem better."

"Yeah. I slept well. I'll bet poor John Candotti didn't, but I did." Emilio smiled but added, "John was great. Thank you for bringing him here. And Ed. And Felipe. Even Voelker. I couldn't have—" He grimaced and turned away for a moment but came back almost immediately. "It was like—like vomiting poison, I suppose." Giuliani said nothing, and Emilio continued, with only a little irony, "Seems to me I heard somewhere that confession is good for the soul."

The corners of Giuliani's mouth twitched. "That, certainly, was the principle upon which I was operating."

Emilio went to the windows. The view was better from this office than from his room. Rank hath its privileges. "I had a dream last night," he said quietly. "I was on a road and there was no one with me. And in the dream I said, 'I don't understand but I can learn if you will teach me.' Do you suppose anyone was listening?" He didn't turn from the windows.

Without answering, Giuliani got up and went to a bookcase. Selecting a small volume with a cracked leather binding, he paged through it until he found what he wanted and held it out.

Sandoz turned and accepted the book, looking at the spine. "Aeschylus?"

Wordlessly, Giuliani pointed out the passage, and Emilio studied it a while, slowly translating the Greek in his mind. Finally, he said, " 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.' "

"Show-off."

Sandoz laughed but, turning toward the window again, he read the passage over. Giuliani walked back to his desk and sat down, waiting for Sandoz to speak again.

"I was wondering if I could stay here a while longer," Emilio said. He had no idea he was going to ask this. He'd meant to leave. "You've been very patient. I don't mean to impose."

"Not at all."

Sandoz didn't turn back to look at the Father General, but Giuliani heard his tone change. "I don't know if I'm a priest. I don't know if—I don't know…anything at all with certainty. I don't even know if certainty is what I should want."

"Stay as long as you like."

"Thank you. You've been very patient," Emilio repeated. He moved to the door and the braced fingers closed neatly over the lever.

"Emilio," the Father General called out to him, voice pitched low, carrying easily in this quiet room. "I'm sending another group out. To Rakhat. I thought you ought to know that. We could use your help. With the languages."

Sandoz went motionless. "It's too soon, Vince. I can't think about that. It's too soon."

"Of course. I just thought you should know."

He watched Sandoz leave. Unaware of his own movement, schooled by old habit, Vincenzo Giuliani rose and went to the windows, and stood looking, for how long he had no idea, across a grassy open courtyard to a complex panorama of medieval masonry and jumbled rock, formal garden and gnarled trees: a scene of great and beautiful antiquity.