The World Above the Sky (16 page)

Henry watched unmoved as the last of the round coracles were loaded aboard
Reclamation
. He was happy to be shed of the unwieldy “soup bowls,” as Keswalqw called them, which his men soon abandoned in favour of the canoe. In Henry's mind, the sleek vessels perfectly symbolized the power and efficiency of The People. The key to the visitor's very survival in this water-veined land, it became apparent, would be the lightweight, ash-ribbed, craft. The hide- or bark-skinned canoe's speed and efficiency, load-bearing capabilities, portability over rough terrain—and sheer elegance when seated on the water—erased any question as to its superiority.

Sir Athol returned still drowsy from his bee-buzzed bower. He sat nearby, silent, unable to judge his kinsman's mood.

Henry had no wish to be scrutinized. He turned his attention to the southern horizon. “Who could have imagined such a thing?” The question was directed not toward Athol, but inward to his own aggrieved heart.

Henry's darkening mood unsettled his cousin. The early attempt at filial chumminess had captured but failed to hold Henry's attention. Silence wasn't an option. At the best of times silence was a vacuum Athol abhorred more than thoughts of death itself. The notion of eternal peace distressed him. An opinion withheld when demanded by his vociferous father earned the young Athol Gunn, and his siblings, a swift backhand to the side of the head. Paradise to Sir Athol Gunn was a rollicking place filled with too many children and a great deal of noise. In the Gunn household, an opinion once proffered, in a house were all are prone to speak at once, was thought to benefit from immediate restatement. “Many children, I say, many children, from an indefinite number of wives. That's the ticket!” Athol's recently widowed heart yearned for the wide-hipped women and fantastic erotic adventures in tales he'd heard told and retold of exotic sultanates in wild Arabie. Hope faded as time passed. This New Arcadia seemed much subdued in comparison.

Since their boyhood days together, Athol was always bigger, and the stronger if not the more agile of the two. As time passed and power shifted, he learned to hold his peace, to place himself below his lord and cousin, not because he thought himself in any way inferior. Athol admired Henry's selfless capacity to lead, to serve and protect. Despite his cousin's skill at hiding his emotions, and his own respectful reluctance to pry, he knew how deeply Eugainia's flight had injured Henry. With the impending departure of
Reclamation
, Athol found himself at a loss and had no words of encouragement or comfort. Like Henry, Athol recognized that faith and action, harnessed in a pure heart, beckoned the sacred and sheltered grace. Both men agreed with St. Paul who, in his letter to the Hebrews, conceived faith to be “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Their faith would be tested today.

Faith required patience, and submission; Templar practice permitted both to bend, without compunction, a deferential knee to mysteries fluttering beyond the grasp of their understanding. They desired a better country, a heavenly county here on earth where Goddess and God, acknowledged as equals in the eyes of all men and all women, would walk freely and together so the world might see, follow with grace their example, despise the duplicitous lesson of the Garden, and learn to love each other, man and woman, woman and woman, man and man as equals in the eyes of God once again.

The proper course and the time to act would become evident, Athol counselled Henry after Eugainia had fled. He took the council to heart himself today. There was nothing to do but wait. Their Lady Goddess would return, Athol believed, for she loved them and knew it her duty to show the way.

One warm night aboard
Reclamation
, beyond the halfway mark of their trans-Atlantic voyage, Athol stood his watch on deck. Eugainia rose from troubled sleep and stood quiet beside him, at once distant and near. Despite a growing pallor, and the appearance of dark circles around her eyes, Eugainia emanated grace, as light shines from the purest of oils aflame on a silken wick. He felt it. He saw it. She gave him peace. He venerated Eugainia for what he most admired but lacked in himself: vision. Her great capacity for love elevated her, he knew, above the common. He wondered how it felt to be indentured to the divine, in Henry's case and, in Eugainia's, to be the embodiment of divinity itself. He waited quietly for her to speak, or return to her bed in
Reclamation
's aft-castle. He was not in the least surprised when she picked up the thread of his musings and put words to his unuttered thoughts. Since childhood, Eugainia's mind roamed freely through those of the people she loved. Nothing, she had discovered, is as private or jealously guarded as thought. She learned to withdraw at the first sign of discomfort. In Athol's often scrambled thoughts, Eugainia's cool council provided welcome relief.

“God and Goddess learn to love alone.”

“My Lady?”

“Agape lifts us to the realm of the scared. The sheer power required to love with such unrequited intensity terrifies women and men.”

“I'm afraid I'm lost.”

“Agape,” she confided, “is the greatest love of all: the divine love of God and Goddess for humankind, which humanity acknowledges, in Our names, and repays with acts of simple charity. Agape is manifest in brotherly, sisterly love, the love of one person for another with no thought for the self. Agape demands complete submission, not woman to man or man to woman but each to the other, the self to the self. In Our names. In the presence of the Sacred. In this way, human kind and the Divine become one—a state, I hasten to tell you, I'm inclined to resist in my fleshy desire-driven presence among you. I struggle with a human's pride which seems embedded in the very bones of my body.”

“Aye. As do I. A proud and willful creature....A willful villain am I.”

“Hush, Athol. I've known your heart since my childhood. It's a great strong thing of beauty, proud and free.”

“Freely assigned. I'm a man of duty above all.”

“Aye,” she admitted. “We're all bound together in this mortal coil. There are times the Sinclair blood makes me so willful I fear I will snap.”

“You were always a head-strong, energetic child.”

“My heart is tethered by a golden cord to both heaven and earth. I sometimes look at my body—strong and young and well formed though it be—and think my quicksilver soul has hitched a ride on a slow-witted donkey.”

“The world ambles along, lass. You are inclined to sprint.”

“Who on earth is more constrained by duty and expectation than me? These wretched clothes, this fleshy cell—anything which limits my freedom drives me to near madness. I wonder at the wisdom of this current incarnation. How long I'll last. Still, I'm not alone. Divine avatars all suffer their fated moment. Buddha. Lakshmi. Krishna. The Kumajri Devi. Muhammad, Peace be upon him. The Christ. Now me. Pouring the immensity of the divine into these frail human vessels? Well. It no longer serves to ask why we walk the earth infrequently. Too much is expected of us. Too little permitted. It's just too bloody damned difficult.”

Athol shifted uncomfortably.

“Henry winces when my language inclines toward the vulgar. He prefers it when I speak as though I'd just stepped out of the Bible!”

“I suppose it's what the folks want,” offered Sir Athol. “We like our God manly, and our Goddess gracious and demure.”

“Yes, well...one can't always get what one wants. It's extremely perilous, too, being confined—the ancient wine we are—in these brittle little bottles when we're sent down to earth,” she continued. “We forget and push beyond the poor thing's capabilities. We're always in danger of extinguishing our most exquisite creation—scorching the delicate human brain with too pure a celestial flame. Human consciousness continues to astonish us, nevertheless. Eclipsing the flesh and bone limitations the mortal body imposes—poor, doomed donkey that it is. The Creator had no idea the pain inflicted when mankind was made aware of the body's impermanence. The Creator told us it would bring you closer, that you'd become more godlike, less obscene. We'd flow through you, praying your peevish souls might come, like ours, to know a well-considered peace. You'd learn to love as we love you. You'd long to be free of the flesh, to become spirit once again and return to us fulfilled and refreshed. Instead, your fear of death makes you cruel. We erred. I know why now. To have the great river dammed in this...” she indicated her rib cage, specifically, her heart, “...well, one has the sensation of sinking to the stagnant depths of a weed-choked pond.”

From first waking consciousness, Eugainia knew instinctively that God and Goddess guide mankind not from some far distant realm, but from within. She learned to free herself from the mire, she told Athol, and to re-enter the garden by slowing the rhythm of her own beating heart.

“Prayer emerges from silence. Silence beckons prayer. The divine cycle revolves.”

“Ach, lass. They say silence is golden. Silence makes my arse itch and my blood boil.”

Eugainia stared at her friend as though he'd emerged from a crack in the deck below their feet.

“I beg your pardon...” he blithered, ashamed. He flushed an even deeper red, which hardly seemed possible—the big round face always glowed with such rude good health. Eugainia laughed aloud. “You should see the look on your face. As if you farted at a party. Relax, old friend. I came for conversation, not to preach. Though lately I hardly know the difference.”

“The horse leaves the stable the instant I remember I forgot, I say, the instant I forgot to remember to bolt the door,” Athol said gratefully, relief forestalling further shame. “Or words, I say, words to that effect.”

“It will comfort you to know we're all subject to folly. No one truth shapes and re-revises every mote and twitch of the living cosmos: nothing, small or large, is set in stone. Chaos rules. Order emerges, brief and impermanent. Revision is endless; certainty breeds contradiction; peace depends upon war; night exists not to counter the day alone, but to reveal the stars, which mimic the workings of the waking mind. We all move homeward. We—God's benevolent avatars—are no different from you in this. We're omnipresent, yes. Yes, we are indeed eternal. We're on the earth, yes, and absent from it. We existed before the universe, which we made, which we will destroy to rebuild when our understanding of what we have wrought, and where we have failed, is revealed to us in our time amongst you.”

“In the darkest days following the first inquisition, she confessed, the Goddess, exhausted by humankind's vindictive outrage against heaven and earth, slept a deep long sleep. While she slept, plague piled thousands of distraught souls on misery's overburdened cart. The Goddess woke. Mary, the Mother of Christ, the girlish untouched virgin appeared reimagined. The Great Mother emerged. Disease retreated. Abundance re-emerged in a land purged of pestilence; a time of peace, a woman's time, prevailed.”

Eugainia gathered her cloak close about her.

“Then a second bout of vengeful rage erupted. This time, women were targeted by the Roman inquisition in numbers rivalling men. The truth rose to heaven on the agonized prayers of innocent girls and matrons; women may live as figureheads, embodiments of the divine, but never rule. Poor exhausted Mother Mary fought awhile then slept. Now I emerge. Here I stand, trembling alone before...well, before Myself. I can't do what must be done alone. Nor could she. I seek my companion God. Two are doubly equipped to counter divine indifference and human cruelty. ”

Sir Athol lifted his gaze from the black of the midnight sea. “I'm guilty, guilty as any. What am I to make of this evil, this madness in myself? The men. The women. The children I've slaughtered in...”

“In Our name. When you speak to me you converse with God. Which is not to say you may not speak to God directly, yourself. I'm merely more efficient. There's no queue. What is it you struggle to say?”

“Surely evil wasn't invented on purpose? I mean to say, when you created us, you didn't, I say, surely you didn't—”

“Purposefully create evil? No, no. There was no need. Evil existed at the primal pulse. As did good. Evil is irrational. Dark and sudden as an unloved child. At each advance of the human heart, evil draws back its cloak. More of itself is revealed. Humans' natural desire for good fails, sometimes utterly. Evil poisons the weakened soil. Darkness descends. Time becomes undone. We returned to earth to rend the shadows.”

“I'll see this? In my lifetime?”

“Yes, Athol. Oh my yes. Together, He and I, when I find him, will drink from the Stone Grail. And be refreshed.”

“This God will walk the earth with You, m'am, in human form?”

“Yes, yes. I shall find Him. Or he Me. We'll rest and be refreshed. Then rule together for a while. Till one of us needs sleep.”

“I will actually see God on earth, walking beside—I say, walking beside the Goddess, beside you, My Lady.”

“You will.” Eugainia smiled and took his hand. “You have an important role, Athol. What it is I cannot say. I'm not being mysterious. I simply don't know. I do see you present at a crucial moment, holding a book, reading words that change the world forever. It shall be, Athol my friend. It is written. Up there. Clearly. In the stars...”