"I'll be waiting," the monk replied.
"What's your name?"
"When I joined the Dearthers they called me Chicka Jackeen."
"Jackeen?"
"It means worthless fellow," the man replied.
"Then we've got much in common," Gentle said. He took the man's hand and shook it. "Remember me, Jackeen."
"You've never left my mind," the man replied.
There was some subtext here Gentle couldn't grasp, but this was no time to delve. He had two demanding and dangerous journeys ahead of him: the first to Yzordderrex, the second from that city back to the Retreat. Thanking Jackeen for his good offices, Gentle left him at the Erasure and picked his way back through the devastation towards the circle of Madonnas. Some of the survivors were leaving its shelter to begin a search of the site, presumably in the hope—vain, he suspected—of finding others alive. It was a scene of grief and bewilderment he'd witnessed too many times on his journey through the Dominions. Much as he would have liked to believe it was mere happenstance that these scenes of devastation coincided with his presence, he couldn't afford to indulge such self-delusion. He was as surely wedded to the storm as he was to Pie. More so now, perhaps, with the mystif gone."
Jackeen's observation that Athanasius was too purposeful a soul to have perished was confirmed as Gentle drew closer to the circle. The man was standing at the center of a knot of Dearthers, leading a prayer of thanks to the Holy Mother for their survival. As Gentle reached the perimeter, Athanasius raised his head. One eye was closed beneath a scab of blood and dirt, but there was enough hatred in the other to burn in a dozen eyes. Meeting its gaze, Gentle advanced no further, but the priest dropped the volume of his prayer to a whisper anyway, preventing the trespasser from hearing the terms of his devotion. Gentle's ears were not so dulled by the din he didn't catch a few of the phrases, however. Though the woman represented in so many modes around the circle was clearly the Virgin Mary, she appar—" ently went by other names here; or else had sisters. He heard her called Uma Umagammagi, Mother Imajica; and heard too the name Huzzah had first whispered to him in her cell beneath the maison de sante: Tishalull6. There was a third, though it took Gentle a little time to be certain he'd understood the naming aright, and that was Jokalaylau. Athanasius prayed that she'd keep a place for them at her side in the snows of paradise, which made Gentle wonder rather sourly if the man had ever trodden those wastes, that he could think them a heavenly place.
Though the names were strange, the inspiring spirit was not. Athanasius and his forlorn congregation were praying to the same loving Goddess at whose shrines in the Fifth countless candles were lit every day. Even Gentle at his most pagan had conceded the presence of that woman in his life and worshiped her the only way he'd known how: with the seduction and temporary possession of her sex. Had he known a mother or a loving sister he might have learned a better devotion than lust, but he hoped and believed the Holy Woman would forgive him his trespasses, even if Athanasius would not. The thought comforted him. He would need all the protection he could assemble in the battle that lay ahead, and it was no little solace to think that the Mother Imajica had her worshiping places in the Fifth, where that battle would be fought.
With the ad hoc service over, Athanasius let his congregation go about the business of searching the wreckage. For his part, he stayed in the middle of the circle, where a few survivors who'd made it that far, but perished, lay sprawled.
"Come here, Maestro," Athanasius said. "There's something you should see."
Gentle stepped into the circle, expecting Athanasius to show him the corpse of a child or some fragile beauty, broken. But the face at his feet was male, and far from innocent.
"You knew him, I think."
"Yes. His name was Estabrook."
Charlie's eyes were closed, his mouth too: sealed up in the moment of his passing. There was very little sign of physical damage. Perhaps his heart had simply given out in the excitement.
"Nikaetomaas said you brought him here because you thought he was me."
"We thought he was a Messiah," Athanasius said. "When we realized he wasn't we kept looking, expecting a miracle. Instead—"
"You got me. For what it's worth, you were right. I did bring all this destruction with me. I don't quite know why, and I don't expect you to forgive me for it, but I want you to understand that I take no pleasure in it. All I want to do is make good the damage I've done."
"And how will you do that, Maestro?" Athanasius said. His one good eye brimmed with tears as he surveyed the bodies. "How will you make this good? Can you resurrect them with what's between your legs? Is that the trick of it? Can you fuck them back into life?"
Gentle made a guttural sound of disgust.
"Well, that's what you Maestros think, isn't it? You don't want to suffer, you just want the glory. You lay your rod on the land, and the land bears fruit. That's what you think. But it doesn't work that way. It's your blood the land wants; it's your sacrifice. And as long as you deny that, others are going to die in your place. Believe me, I'd cut my throat now if I thought I could raise these people, but I've been played a wretched trick. I've the will to do it, but my blood's not worth a damn. Yours is.' I don't know why. I wish it weren't. But it is."
"Would Uma Umagammagi like to see me bleed?" Gentle said. "Or Tishalulte? Or Jokalaylau? Is that what your loving mothers want from this child?"
"You don't belong to them. I don't know who you belong to, but you didn't come from their sweet bodies."
"I must have come from somewhere," Gentle said, voicing that thought for the first time in his life. "I've got a purpose in me, and I think God put it there."
"Don't look too far, Maestro. Your ignorance may be the only defense the rest of us have got against you. Give up your ambition now, before you find out what you're really capable of."
"I can't."
"Oh, but it's easy," Athanasius said. "Kill yourself, Maestro. Let the land have your blood. That's the greatest service you could do the Dominions now."
There was the bitterest echo, in these words, of a letter he'd read months ago, in another kind of wilderness.
Do this for the women of the world, Vanessa had written. Slit your lying throat.
Had he really traveled the Dominions simply to have the advice he'd been given by a woman whom he'd cheated in love returned to him? After all this striving for comprehension, was he finally as injurious and fraudulent a Maestro as he was a lover?
Athanasius read the accuracy of this last dart off his target's face and with a feral grin hammered it home.
"Do it soon, Maestro," he said. "There are enough orphans in the Dominions already, without you indulging your ambitions for another day."
Gentle let these cruelties go. "You married me to the love of my life, Athanasius," he said. "I won't ever forget that kindness."
"Poor Pie 'oh' pah," the other man replied, grinding the point home. "Another of your victims. What a poison there must be in you, Maestro."
Gentle turned and left the circle without responding, with Athanasius repeating his earlier advice to usher him on his way.
"Kill yourself soon, Maestro," he said. "For you, for Pie, for all of us. Kill yourself soon."
It took Gentle a quarter of an hour to make his way through the ravagement to open ground, hoping as he went that he'd find some vehicle—Floccus', perhaps—that he could commandeer for the return journey to Yzordderrex. If he found nothing, it would be a long trek on foot, but that would have to be the way of it. What little illumination the fires behind him proffered soon dwindled, and he was obliged to search by starlight, which would most probably have failed to show him the vehicle had his path not been redirected by the squeals of Floccus Dado's porcine pet Sighshy^ who, along with her litter, was still inside. The car had been thrown over in the storm, and so he went to it simply to let the animals out, planning to go on to find another. But as he struggled with the handle a human face appeared at the steamed-up window. Floccus was inside and greeted Gentle's appearance with a clamor of relief almost as high-pitched as Sighshy's. Gentle clambered up onto the side of the car and after much swearing and sweating wrenched the door open with brute force.