Out of Exodia (19 page)

More blood gone, friend
soothes
. Instantly the puzzle solves
itself a second time when I see the idol they have made. The light
of dawn crackles along the back of the golden beast.

“
What have you done?” Two,
three, ten, twenty speak at once, their words a jumble of senseless
excuses and insincere apologies.

I hold the stone tablet up and wave it
in anger. “God spoke to me!”

They are silenced.

“
God spoke to
me!”

The smooth screen burns in my hand. I
turn its face to them and say, “Read the words.”

The first command centers,
glows gold and yellow:
I am your
God
.

The second command unfurls
in brighter bursts as the letters swirl into the message I just now
understood:
No other gods before me, no
idols
.

I am so angry that I throw the tablet
at the golden figure. It smashes hard. The soft gold folds in on
itself and the tablet breaks in two. I am horrified by my action,
but I stand rigid, quaking.

The sun finishes its red rising, the
sky loses the purplish tinge, and a single bird repeats its
two-note morning call, the only living sound. The Reds drop to the
ground, put their heads on dirt or forearms, and hug their silence.
They are bowing toward the golden statue which itself appears to
bow toward the tablet. I’m appalled.

A thousand words war upon my tongue;
I’m eager to punctuate the scene with profanities I learned when I
was a Blue. But now that I know I can speak I hold back. Something
more than exhaustion overtakes me and winds through my veins with
defiance; every muscle aches. A whispering breeze rustles the
leaves, a branch hits the metal roof of a nearby lodge, and that
lonely bird’s whistle pierces the air a final time.

I take four strides and reach for the
idol. Gold flakes spike up from where the tablet struck its back. I
pick it up and glare at its outrageous form, waiting for every eye
to watch. I spit on its head. With revulsion and shame I place it
in the melting pot, brush the flakes from my fingers, and motion to
Eugene to fuel the fire.

I’m sick to my stomach, every pore of
my body throbs, wounding bullets of revulsion ricochet off my
heart. I cannot look at Harmon.

Something plunks behind me. I turn and
see a loaf of bread within reach. Another strikes the ground near
Cleavon’s head, then another by the fire. A fourth loaf lands upon
the tablet. The irony does not escape me. I reach for the bread and
the broken tablet and throw them both into the fire. If I have to
journey back up the mountain to receive a new black slab of God’s
instructions then that’s what I’ll do.

I march back through the camp, pass
Lydia without a word, and head north again.

* * *

After Bram left the hush over the camp
was broken only by the soft thumps of more loaves hitting the
earth. People sat on the ground, plucking pieces of bread from what
fell near them, holding out loaves to their neighbors, but not
uttering a single word.

Harmon cast a guilty gaze at Eugene
before he rose up and took an armload of wood chips to the fire. A
quick glance at the idol allowed him to see his profane handiwork
had been reduced to a flaccid lump. Barrett’s father watched him
turn toward the north and take several steps. He called out to
him.

“
Harmon. Look. It’s
back.”

The unmistakable brilliance of the
guiding cloud hovered just west of them, then suddenly it moved
overhead and changed course northward, as if chasing Bram’s
retreat. Wisps of fogging trails left arrow shafts in the
sky.

“
And it’s following Bram. I
think we should follow him, too.”

Harmon bobbed his head in easy
agreement with Barrett’s father, a fellow judge who seemingly was
one of only a few to keep his head since they’d encountered the
Grays. As if to fortify an unspoken bond they briefly touched left
elbows.

“
Pack up! Pack everything …
except that wretched cider. We’re following the cloud.” Harmon’s
voice uprooted those nearest to him. They swapped their embarrassed
silence for hurried pandemonium, shouting at those they had to step
over. More Reds rose up in waves and scrambled in every
direction.

Despite the rushed frenzy it took
several hours before the last man and horse crossed the field, the
cloud a distant beacon nearer the mountain ahead.

The old and young Grays stayed behind.
Sabina lifted a stern and somber eye and sang a troubled song at
their backs.

* * *

The hours rush by me faster than the
speed at which the trail passes beneath my feet. Sand and gravel,
weeds and roots, black dirt, mud, slippery slopes, rocky paths,
treed passages and open fields. The pond. The hill. The mossy
bed.

The mountain looms before me nearly as
great and high as my anger which hasn’t ebbed at all.

This galling day is done, but I’ll
climb until it’s too dark to see.

* * *

The Reds walked and rode until they
reached the pond. The horses crowded around the banks and waded in
and drank their fill. Then the murmuring crowds shifted into twelve
pie-shaped groupings around the pond, obedient to their judge,
chastened and shamed.

The cloud dipped and swept clockwise
like a second hand over the heads and tents of every humbled person
as if counting off a census. Harmon’s group camped closest to the
base of the mountain. He stood with Mira and his wife, Marilyn, and
studied the face of the mountain, stark and gray against an
indifferent sky. Certain that a drift of movement on a high ledge
was his younger brother, he pointed out the distant figure to the
women, then turned to look for Malcolm. The hum of the box meant he
was near, but Harmon wasn’t sure the sound produced by the box
matched the tone he was used to. If he had to make a guess he
thought it was the same sound he heard right before they settled in
to a year’s stay in the underground city. He looked around and
wondered how many days they could camp beneath the mountain before
things would get ugly again.

Marilyn moved closer to Harmon. “I
don’t think I can travel anymore,” she said, patting her great
belly. “If the cloud moves us on we’re going to have to stay here
until the baby’s born.”

“
There’s a midwife in
Blake’s group. Should I find her?”

“
Not yet. I’m just saying
that you better figure out what to do if the cloud moves. We could
end up a week behind the rest. And lost.”

Harmon put his arms around her. “Don’t
worry. I’m pretty sure we’d be able to find the trail left by
thousands of Reds even after a month.”

“
A month? You’d consider
staying behind that long?” Marilyn’s face lifted in a hopeful
smile, the lines around her eyes crinkling.

“
I would. Besides,
something tells me we’re not moving from this valley for a while.”
His statement was met with a whistling rush of air as somewhere
nearby Malcolm’s box ceased its humming. The cloud, however, did
not evaporate above their heads. Instead it caught the colored rays
of sunset and gave itself a rainbow-like lining, thickening and
hardening into a protective canopy over the pond.

Marilyn’s laugh lines puckered as her
brow creased. “That’s strange.”

Harmon only nodded. He looked back up
the mountainside wall, but in the dimming light he could no longer
see Bram.

* * *

There’s firelight far below me. I’m
almost to the top. I pull my shoes off and finish the climb, my
toes and fingers gripping even harder in the dark, finding the
necessary outcroppings, the strongest ones, to heave my body
upward. The ledge I reach is wide and flat. A dustless wind whips
my clothes and burns my face even through my beard. I stretch out
long on this protective shelf and peer down. Tiny pinpricks of
light move about, new ones are lit, some blink out. Harmon has
brought the whole tribe to the base of the mountain. I stretch my
hand out over them and close my eyes, forget the angered curse I’d
repeated earlier and change it into an absolving pardon, a
blessing. My people. My family. My Lydia.

My eyes fly open at the first quake.
The lamps and candles below have vanished. More trembling belches
from the earth and I rise to press myself against a wall of rock.
Loose stones above shower past my head, gather others and make an
ominous rumble as they spill down the mountain side. It lasts only
a few seconds. I hear their final clunk and imagine them piling up
quite short of the valley as if a giant hand holds them back from
crushing the Reds that sleep.

The hairs on my body respond to the
electricity in the air. Like the first time on the mountain I feel
compelled to finish the climb. Blind trust. A rock, cold and shaped
like a step, meets my foot; perfect handholds find my fingers; I
finish the climb upright, but I bow to my knees immediately. The
furious sound of thunder and wind fills my ears, but a stillness
flattens the air. Just like the first time I came here the
reverberations rise into tremors that boom through every organ in
my body, then settle into words I understand. God’s words. God’s
voice.

With my head down and my eyes tightly
squeezed shut I rest in the heat and know that the brightest light
shines upon me. I savor the radiance. A sliver of fear pushes my
head closer against my knees as the thought, the memory, of my long
ago tutor’s voice rails beside God’s voice in my head and I
remember the stories of the nuclear war and the bright lights, the
burning flesh, the radiation.

But that’s the wrong fear. I stamp out
the old voice and listen only to God’s.

Chapter 14 Ten Puzzles

From the tenth page of the
third Ledger:

By dawn he found his people.
Three days and three nights he passed on the mountain. Thunder
followed lightning until the cloud was thick over the mountain. A
loud blast, like a trumpet, made the people tremble.

BRAM MET THE judges at the base of the
mountain. Their clothes were clean, beards shaven, faces red from
scrubbing.

“
What happened?” Blake
shouted.

“
What took you so long?”
Josh began, but his admonishment turned to silence when Bram lifted
his head. “Your face…” he whispered.

The reddened countenances of the twelve
judges flashed expressions of surprise and awe. Bram’s face glowed,
his cheeks shone with a golden hue and his forehead beamed with an
amber light. Luminous. Brilliant. Barrett’s father and Harmon and
six others turned away. The remaining four, Eugene, Korzon, Teague,
and Hamlin, dropped to their knees and began to weep.

“
Get up,” Bram said. The
four judges kept their faces averted and helped one another up. The
others turned forward again, but kept their eyes down. “Enlist the
younger men to build a barrier around the mountain here. No one is
to go up.” He lifted his eyes and arms and pointed to the highest
peak. A charcoal ring of smoke descended, settling several yards
above their heads. It completely hid the mountain. “The mountain is
holy. Don’t step foot on it. As soon as the barrier is built, bring
all the Reds here.” The twelve judges chanced a look, followed
Bram’s gaze upward, then one by one nodded or whispered their
consent.

Bram turned and walked through the
cloud of smoke, disappearing up the nearest mountain
path.

* * *

I’m scared. Scared to death. I hold the
new tablet and face the judges. I tell them to build a barrier. If
they fear God there’s a chance they will refrain from their
fighting and whoring, their lying and cheating, and from getting
drunk and making idols.

I stroke the smooth side of the tablet,
the new one I’ve been given. I’ve seen all ten of the anagrams that
loop across the screen. I’ve solved them all in my head. If my
tongue stumbles on any of them I won’t be able to speak these
truths to them:

I, YOUR DOGMA

MORE BLOOD GONE, FRIEND
SOOTHES

MANKIND TAME ONE
VANITY

BABY SPOKE HEALTH