Deus Irae (3 page)

And yet this had ended the war; there was, after the toxic rain had ended, insufficient personnel to continue.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
, he thought: Of the dead only say good things, such as—well, he thought, perhaps this: You died because of the idiots whom you hired to rule you and protect you and collect terrible taxes from you. Therefore, who was the ultimate cretin, you or they? Anyhow, both had perished. The Pentagon had long ago gone; the White House, the VIP shelters …
de mortuis nil nisi malum
, he thought, correcting the old saying to make it come out the more wisely: Of the dead only speak evil. Because they were that stupid; it was cretinism carried to the dimension of the satanic.

—Carried to the point of supinely reading the ’papes and watching the TV and doing nothing when Carleton Lufteufel had given his speech in 1983 at Cheyenne, the so-called Numerical Fallacy speech in which he had made the inspired, brilliant point, much head-nodded at, that it was not so that a nation needed a certain number of survivors to function; a nation, Lufteufel had explained, does not reside in its people at all but in its
know-how
. As long as the data-repositories are safe, the time capsules of microspools buried miles under—if they remained, then (as he had phrased it, equal, many in Washington said, to the “blood-sweat-tears” speech of Churchill’s, decades before) “our patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic patterns survive because they can be learned by any replacement generation.”

The replacement generation, however, had not had the wherewithal to dig up the data-repositories, because they had a more important task, one overlooked by Lufteufel: that of growing food to keep themselves alive. The same problems which had lashed the Pilgrims, those of clearing land, planting, protecting crops and livestock. Pigs, cows, and sheep, corn and wheat, beets and carrots: those became the vital patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic preoccupations, not the aural text of some great American epic poetic stupidity such as Whittier’s
Snowbound
.

“I say,” McComas rumbled, “don’t send your inc; don’t have him do the mural at all; get a Complete. He’ll roll along on that
cow-cart for a hundred or so miles and then he’ll come to a place where there’s no road, and he’ll go into a ditch and that’ll be that. It’s no favor to him, Handy. It just means you’re killing some poor limbless fart who admittedly paints well—”

“Paints,” Father Handy said, “better than any artist that SOW knows of.” He pronounced the initials as a word, as “sow”—the female pig—so as to plague McComas, who insisted it always be spoken as three initials or at least as “sow” to rhyme with mow.

McComas’s short-circuited red eyes focused malignly on him, and he searched for a cutting, tearing, oral return remark; while he did so, Ely said all at once, “Here comes Miss Rae.”

“Oh,” Father Handy said, and blinked. Because it was Lurine Rae who made into fact the dots, jots, and tittles of Servants of Wrath dogma; at least as far as he personally was concerned.

Here she came now, red-haired and so small-boned that he always imagined that she could fly … the idea of witches entered his mind when he saw Lurine Rae unexpectedly, because of this lightness. She rode horseback constantly, and this was the “real” reason for her springiness—but it was not merely the lithe motion of an athletic woman; nor was it ethereal either. Hollow-boned, he had decided, like a bird. And that connected once more in his mind women and birds; hence once more Papagano, the bird-catcher’s, song: He would make a net for birds and then he would make, someday, a net for a little wife or a little lady who would sleep by his side, and Father Handy, seeing Lurine, felt the wicked old ram-animal within him awake; the evil of substantiality itself manifested its insidious being at the heart of his nature.

Distressing. But he was used to it; in fact he enjoyed it—enjoyed, really, her.

“Morning,” Lurine said to him, then saw the Dominus McComas, whom she did not like; she wrinkled her nose and her freckles writhed: all the pale red, that of her hair, her skin, her lips, all twisted in aversion, and she, too, bared her teeth, back at him. Only her teeth were tiny and regular, and made not to grind—as for instance the prehistoric uncooked seeds—but to neatly sever.

Lurine had
biting
teeth. Not the massive chewing kind.

She, he knew, nipped. Knew? Guessed, rather. Because he had not really ever come near her; he kept a distance between them.

The ideology of the Servants of Wrath connected with the Augustinian view of women; there was fear involved, and then of course the dogma got entangled with the old cult of Mani, the Albigensian Heresy of Provinçal France, the Catharists. To them, flesh and the world had been evil; they had abstained. But their poets and knights had worshiped women, had deified them; the
domina
, so enticing, so vital … even the mad ones, the
dominae
of Carcassonne who had carried their dead lovers’ hearts in small jeweled boxes. And the—was it merely insane, or rather more perverted?—Catharist knights who had actually carried in enameled boxes their mistresses’ dried dung … it had been a cult ruthlessly wiped out by Innocent III, and perhaps rightly so. But—

For all its excesses, the Albigensian knight-poets had known the worth of women; she was not man’s servant and not even merely his “weak rib,” the side of him who had been so readily tempted. She was—well, a good question; as he got a chair for Lurine and poured her coffee, he thought: Some supreme value lies in this slight, freckled, pale, red-haired, horse-riding girl of twenty. Supreme as is the mekkis of the God of Wrath Himself. But not a mekkis; not Macht, not power or might. It is more a— mystery. Hence, gnostic wisdom is involved, knowledge hidden behind a wall so fragile, so entrancing … but undoubtedly a fatal knowledge. Interesting, that truth could be a terminal possession. The woman knew the truth, lived with it, yet it did not kill her. But when she uttered it—he thought of Cassandra and of the female Oracle at Delphi. And felt afraid.

Once he had said to Lurine, in the evening after a few drinks, “You carry what Paul called the
sting.
”

“The sting of death,” Lurine had promptly recalled, “is sin.”

“Yes.” He had nodded. And she bore it, and it no more killed her than the viper’s poison killed it … or the H-warhead missiles menaced themselves. A knife, a sword, had two ends: one a handle, the other a blade; the gnosis of this woman was for her gripped by the safe end, the handle; but when she extended it—he saw, flashing, the light of the slight blade.

But what, for the Servants of Wrath, did sin consist of? The weapons of the war; one naturally thought of the psychotic and psychopathic cretins in high places in dead corporations and government agencies, now dead as individuals; the men at drafting boards, the idea men, the planners, the policy boys and P.R. infants—like grass, their flesh. Certainly that had been sin, what they had done, but that had been without knowledge. Christ, the God of the Old Sect, had said that about His murderers: they did not know what they were up to. Not knowledge
but the lack of knowledge
had made them into what they had been, frozen into history as they gambled for His garments or stuck His side with the spear. There was knowledge in the Christian Bible, in three places that he personally knew of—despite the rule within the Servants of Wrath hierarchy against reading the Christian sacred texts. One part lay in the Book of Job. One in Ecclesiastes. The last, the final note, had been Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and then it had ended, and Tertullian and Origen and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—even the divine Abelard; none had added an iota in two thousand years.

And now, he thought,
we know
. The Catharists had come bleakly close, had guessed one piece: that the world lay in the control of an evil Adversary and not the good god. What they had not guessed was contained in Job, that the “good god” was a god of wrath—was in fact evil.

“Like Shakespeare has Hamlet say to Ophelia,” McComas growled at Lurine. “‘Get thee to a nunnery,’”

Lurine, sipping coffee, said prettily, “Up yours.”

“See?” the Dominus McComas said to Father Handy.

“I see,” he said carefully, “that you can’t order people to be this or that; they have what used to be called an ontological nature.”

Scowling, McComas said, “Whazzat?”

“Their intrinsic nature,” Lurine said sweetly. “What they
are
. You ignorant rustic religious cranks.” To Father Handy she said, “I finally made up my mind. “I’m joining the Christian Church.”

Hoarsely guffawing, McComas shook, belly-wise, not Santa Claus belly but belly of hard, grinding animal. “
Is
there a Christian Church anymore? In this area?”

Lurine said, “They’re very gentle and kind, there.”

“They have to be,” McComas said. “They have to plead to get people to come in. We don’t need to plead; they come to us for protection. From Him.” He jerked his thumb upward. At the God of Wrath, not in his man-form, not as he had appeared on Earth as Carleton Lufteufel, but as the mekkis-spirit everywhere. Above, here, and ultimately below; in the grave, to which they all were dragged at last.

The final enemy which Paul had recognized—death—had had its victory after all; Paul had died for nothing.

And yet here sat Lurine Rae, sipping coffee, announcing calmly that she intended to join a discredited, withering, elderly sect. The husk of the former world, which had shown its chitinous shell, its wickedness; for it had been
Christians
who had designed the ter-weps, the terror weapons.

The descendants of those who had sung square-wrought, pious Lutheran hymns had designed, at German cartels, the evil instruments which had shown up the “God” of the Christian Church for what he was.

Death was not an antagonist, the last enemy, as Paul had thought; death was the release from bondage to the God of Life, the Deus Irae. In death one was free from Him—and only in death.

It was the God of Life who was the evil god. And in fact the only God. And Earth, this world, was the only kingdom. And they, all of them; they constituted his servants, in that they carried out, had always done so, over the thousands of years, his commands. And his reward had been in keeping both with his nature and with his commands: it had been the Ira. The Wrath.

And yet here sat Lurine. So it made no sense.

  Later, when the Dominus McComas had ambled, trudged off on foot to see about his business, Father Handy sat with Lurine.

“Why?” he said.

Shrugging, Lurine said, “I like kindly people. I like Dr. Abernathy.”

He stared at her. Jim Abernathy, the local Christian priest in
Charlottesville; he detested the man—if Abernathy was really a man; he seemed more a castrato, fit, as put in
Tom Jones
, for entry in the gelding races. “He gives you exactly what?” he demanded. “Self-help. The ‘think pleasant thoughts and all will be—’”

“No,” Lurine said.

Ely said dryly, “She’s sleeping with that acolyte. That Pete Sands. You know; the bald young man with acne.”

“Ringworm,” Lurine corrected.

“At least,” Ely said, “get him a fungicide ointment to rub on his scalp. So you don’t catch it.”

“Mercury,” Father Handy said. “From a peddler, itinerant; you can buy for about five U.S. silver half-dollars—”

“Okay!” Lurine said angrily.

“See?” Ely said to her husband.

He saw; it was true and he knew it.

“So he’s not a
gesunt
,” Lurine said. Gesunt—a healthy person. Not made sick or maimed by the war, as the incompletes had been. Pete Sands was a kranker, a sick one; it showed on his marred head, hairless, his pocked and pitted face. Back to the Anglo-Saxon peasant with his pox, he thought with surprising venom. Was it jealousy? He amazed himself.

Nodding toward Father Handy, Ely said, speaking to Lurine, “Why not sleep with him? He’s a gesunt.”

“Aw, come on,” Lurine said in her small, quiet, but deadly boiling-hot angry voice; when she became really terribly furious her entire face flushed, and she sat as stiffly as if calcified.

“I mean it,” Ely said, in a sort of loud, high screech.

“Please,” Father Handy said, trying to calm his wife.

“But why come here?” Ely asked Lurine. “To announce you’re going to revert, is that it? Who cares? Revert. In fact, sleep with Abernathy; a lot of good it’ll do you.” She made it meaningful; she put over the significance of her words by the wild tone alone. Women had such great ability at that; they possessed such a range. Men, in contrast, grunted, as with McComas; they resorted, as in his case, to an ugly chuckle. That was little enough.

Trying to sound wise, Father Handy said to Lurine, “Have you thought it over carefully? There’s a stigma attached; after
all, you do live by sewing and weaving and spinning—you depend on goodwill in this community, and if you join Abernathy’s church—”

“Freedom of conscience,” Lurine said.

“Oh god,” Ely moaned.

“Listen,” Father Handy said. Reaching out, he took hold of both of Lurine’s hands, held them with his own. He explained, then, patiently. “Just because you’re sleeping with Sands, that doesn’t force you to accept their religious teachings. ‘Freedom of conscience’ also means freedom
not
to accept dogma; do you see? Now look, dear.” She was twenty; he was forty-two, and felt sixty; he felt, holding her hands, like a tottering old ram, some defanged creature mumbling and drooling, and he cringed at his self-image. But he continued anyhow. “They believed for two thousand years in a good god. And now we know it’s not true. There is a god, but he is—you know as well as I do; you were a kid during the war, but you remember and you can see; you’ve seen the miles of dust that once were bodies … I don’t understand how you can in all honesty, intellectually or morally, accept an ideology that teaches that
good
played a decisive role in what happened. See?”

She did not disengage her hands. But she remained inert, so passive that he felt as if he held deceased organisms; the physical sensation repelled him and he voluntarily released her. She then picked up her coffee cup once more, with tranquility. And she said, “All right; we know that a Carleton Lufteufel, Chairman of the ERDA of the United States Government, existed. But he was a man. Not a god.”