A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER SIX

Two Years Earlier

Once, the Rainbow Lady had told Asher Rook, in dreams, a human ball-player was enticed by owls to pit his skills against the lords of death, and made a descent into what was then called Xibalba. He swam the river of blood, yet did not become drunk with it. He reached the crossroads, the Place of All Winds, where he took not the red road, nor the white, nor the yellow, but the black. He entered the bone canoe, piloted by spiders and bats. He sank downwards, through cold water, to the whole world’s bottom.

Xibalba, as it was called then. Mictlan, as it became. Mictlan-Xibalba, as it is now, and will be, forever more.

When he arrived, however, he was met only with mockery and betrayal. The Sunken Ball-Court’s kings set him impossible tasks, then cheated the rules to make sure he would fail, and sent him to be executed, decreeing that his severed head should be set in a tree by the wayside, as a warning to other travellers.

Promptly, the tree flowered all over, producing a hundred succulent calabash melons that attracted the attention of Blood Maiden, the Blood Gatherer’s beautiful daughter. She reached up to pick one, only to discover she held the ball-player’s skull instead. The skull spat in her hand, and told her: Though my face is gone, it will soon return, in the face of my son. And she found herself pregnant.

Because this is how things begin, always, little king: in darkness, in chaos. In blood.

The world we know, a child conceived in death, a saviour made from bones. The flower from the skull.

This is what I want you to understand, as you already should. You died in my way, after all — a valid sacrifice, whether ordained or not. And ignorance is no excuse.

Think of it, now, she had ordered him, the black rainbow snapping around her like storm-clouds across a nervish, lowering sky. When the rope tightened around your neck. That moment of flowering, when your skull cracked open, the seed inside you began to bloom. . . .

Her words in his ears, ringing. Followed closely, as dream gave way to memory, by God Almighty’s:

. . . and they four had one likeness: and their appearance . . . was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. . . .

As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful. And their rings were full of eyes . . . and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. . . .

The verses were so familiar through long study — and equally long hours spent quoting them out loud, to prove one point or another — that he could no longer recall if he’d screamed them, moaned them, whispered them, in his hour of ultimate need. Only that they’d been on his lips when the rope finally snapped taut and the trap beneath him opened, plummeting him feet-first into night —

The drop wasn’t long enough: inexperience on his killers’ part, or maybe a sublimated urge to punish him further. So he slammed up hard against gravity itself, every inch of him instantly bruised, drowning in air. His heart stuttered, his own body’s weight a millstone, spirits violently pressing upwards ’til they forced their way to his head. Where he saw a glaring light which seemed to vomit from his eyes with a flash so bright, so deep, it scarred the entire universe —

— and then, exactly as sudden, he’d lost all sense of pain. A glacial calm descended.

Rook looked up, saw planks and dust, the gallows’ underside. A square of blue sky through the trap. His former brothers on the field of war looking down, some faces frowning, some blank. Some even, in a bitter way, amused.

Bastards, he thought. You know not the day, nor the hour. . . .

Then over further, to where Chess Pargeter still fought with his captors, next in line for the noose. Which somehow rubbed Rook rawer than the sight of his own death approaching — the idea of Chess pissing himself at the end of some rope, all that energy gone, without a final chance to redeem itself.

Chess, who was burning up with fever ever since he took that ball in the shoulder — probably turning gangrenous, not that that’d matter, in a minute or so. Chess, who snarled, and spat: “You motherless bitches! The Rev’s worth a hundred of you, you slugs! He’s worth ten thousand!”

“Goddamn queerboy camp-follower sure got a mouth on him, dirty as one of Hooker’s gals,” the soldier with Chess’s right arm pinned back told his partner, who had Chess in a headlock. To which the other soldier just grinned, and tightened up his grip.

“He didn’t even do it, either!” Chess screamed, twisting and kicking. “I was the one killed the Lieut, you morons! Good Christ, no wonder we lost the Goddamn war!”

Turned out there really was a bone in the throat, just as Chess had always claimed. Rook felt it go, and felt all the darkness inside him snap shut again, percolating, a stoppered steam-kettle. Heard his thunderous preach-voice shrink and grind, as everything went red.

And thought — prayed, though he no longer quite knew who to — Oh, give me strength. Strength enough. Give me . . .

But nothing answered save himself, or maybe the wind. And then, at last —

— her.

Save him, little king. As you know you can.

Kicking, turning. No voice now to scream.

And the blue sky, shrinking. The clouds, rushing in. Fat grey drops of rain falling, to slick his fevered face. As she spoke on, that impossible voice, only underlined by the thin, gnawing whine issuing from his own throat, endless and terrible and raw.

Saying, gently: Save him, save them. Punish your enemies, reward your friends. Do as your God does. Become as your God is.

Save yourself.

No breath left to speak with, not even to beg. Yet the words flew up anyhow, spilled from his mouth and swam in front of his eyes like sparks from cinder, molten-silver hot, and burned whatever they touched, until the whole world howled out in unison —

Therefore saith the Lord GOD. Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations.

And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations.

Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers. And I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.

The funnel, that moving finger, swept in on a slather of whipped dust, a froth of stones and swirling brick-bats. To either side, the sky remained clear — grey-blue with a messy touch of pink to it, frostbit flesh turned inside-out. But inside the twister was only rain and darkness, so cold it tore skin wherever it touched. And yet the wavering path of its eye swept over Rook’s fellow prisoners entirely, while pivoting to tweeze the rest of Captain Coulson’s company out of Heaven’s reach. They scatter-shot in all directions, spread so far that the only sign that the camp had ever been inhabited was a single torn grey sleeve full of shattered bone and red muck poking up through the debris, its buttons still a-glint, intact.

Then the rope finally snapped, and Rook dropped to his hands and knees as the scaffold broke apart around him, watching through blood-dimmed eyes as the pieces flew up and away, into the whirling sky. Blood and spirits forced themselves into their former channels, a flash flood through a needle’s eye, nerves pin-pricking so intolerably he spent a breathless moment cursing himself, paralyzed with pain — wishing himself hanged again, a thousand times over, for the unforgivable crime of cutting himself down too soon.

The twister spent itself in an outward rush and dissipated, slung clouds and rain across the horizon, leaving only wet dusk behind.

All around, nothing still stood except the things he’d allowed to survive. The rest was laid waste, sure as Gideon left Jezreel. Like Chorazin and Bethsaida, whose smoke goes up forever.

Which made him . . . one of them.

Exodus, 22:18. Fit only to be weeded out, burned and buried, their graves sown with salt. Just like that poor boy with the one goat’s eye, trembling in fear with his sidelong pupil opening squarish, as he stared headfirst down into the flames.

Back in Missouri, in Rook’s first parish, “good” people had tied a sick child to a ladder and cooked him over a flaming stack of hay, for the grand crime of being born a witch’s get — while Rook had done nothing but watch and pray, because they were his, and he theirs. Which was why he’d left under cover of night soon after, fled as far as the stage-ticket bought with his flock’s money would take him, then got roaring drunk enough to join up. Fleeing from what he’d seen, and done, by not arguing other parts of the Good Book, for fear of suffering similar excision and execution. Matthew, 7:3 to 7:5, for example. 1 Corinthians 13.

Born different, that boy — and through nobody’s fault, not even his own. Same as Chess, always flaunting his slick little occasion-for-sin self around, with what he refused to pretend not to be writ large on every inch of him. Or Rook, too, with his doubts and deficiencies, the Bible leaping in his breast-pocket every time he heard something he felt he couldn’t speak out against for himself, without using Jesus’, Moses’ or Ezekiel’s words as back-up. Rook, washed white as snow with God’s word, then damned black as night with the discovery of his own power.

“Whah . . . happen . . . ?” Rook rasped at last, shaking his head to flick wet hair from his eyes, down on his hands and knees in the wet black muck. Then looked up to meet Hosteen’s horrified eyes — for between them lay Chess, his crumpled face pallid, wounded arm crooked behind him in a very unnatural fashion.

You could save him, that voice in Rook’s head suggested.

At almost the same time, like he’d somehow heard her, Hosteen grabbed Chess up and dropped him almost in Rook’s lap, intent plain, if impossible: Here, you fix this! Rook looked down, one palm cupping each side of Chess’s slack skull — and God damn, but his hands were either far bigger than he’d ever thought, or Chess’s face was far smaller. Or maybe it was just that he’d so rarely seen Chess Pargeter this still or silent, before.

I don’t know what comes next, he thought — and knew he must be lying, because . . . well, shit, take a look around.

Rook shut his own eyes, squinched them hard and cleared his mind, swiping an elbow ’cross a spectral blackboard. Then leaned down, kissed Chess for the first time, on his own hook — deep and probing and tender — and whispered a Bible verse into his mouth, as he did it: “Psalms, 51-7 to 51-10. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice . . . .”

The rain fell, a booming drum. Rook sat surrounded by his own words, glittering letters turning in the air, a slow cascade of evil stars.

While the colour came seeping back into Chess’s face by degrees, Rook moved his broken shoulder back into place, as gently as he could, and felt the bone pop together once more, whole as though never split. Felt the sinews blossom beneath his fingers.

Eventually, Chess opened his eyes anew, pupils tiny, as though contracted against a bright, wild light. He grinned back up at Rook, happily, teeth sharp as some snapping dog’s in the storm’s half-darkness.

“It was you,” he said. “I knew it. Oh, I knew it. Goddamn! You killed them all, them sons of bitches, didn’t you? But good.”

A sliver of ice pierced Rook’s chest, then, encircling his heart so quick he wondered whether it would ever melt away again. Or whether he ever wanted it to.

“Yes,” he agreed, unable to deny it. “Yes. I did.”