Dominion (18 page)

He wished for the woman who had run away from him, after they were there last, and tried to channel that desire into a game of tarok, but the cards were unable to siphon his mood and he eyed the door expectantly whenever someone entered.

Magnus, surveying the crowd, began to think Purchase had only gotten himself wound up over something he was not to have. Still, as the night wore on he sat there in order to watch over his brother if he could.

When he had lost as much at the cards as he could stand, Purchase rose from the table, walked around the room, picked up one of the girls' hand, and let her lead him to the back. She was not an attractive woman, and he had looked past her a hundred nights without seeing her. Tonight he wanted her in the ambiguous manner of wanting everything and nothing specific at all.

In the back room a lantern burned very low at the wick and he pulled his pants down, and pushed the woman to the mattress. He mounted on top of her without ceremony, letting her guide him inside, then began thrusting until he had finished.

The woman she lay there neither damning nor redeeming him but simply giving off a few moans for surprise and pleasure and doing what she had been paid for, which was to bear his weight in the darkness for a spell.

It was very quick satisfaction, and when he finished he pulled his pants back up and left the room with the feeling of having done a low thing. His sex and wanting, though, were sated, no longer gnawing at the inside of his brain like a untamed animal.

For the first time he noticed just how dingy the entire establishment was, and wondered how many hours of his life had passed there without finding the satisfaction he came in search of. What he also asked himself, and did not know, was whether it was more satisfaction than he would otherwise have known.

As they rode back home he felt a whistling emptiness and did not know whether it was caused by missing the one he sought or lying down with one he ought not have had. He was surprised that this last thing
should occur to him, for it was something he had gotten away with a hundred times in the past.

Magnus rode alongside Purchase with a half smile on his face but tried hard to suppress it when he saw how the other was feeling. “If she is a preacher now, you'll be hard pressed to find her in a place like that,” he said finally.

“You might be right, but I wish you had said something before,” Purchase replied.

“Don't throw salt on me,” Magnus returned. “It was your notion.”

“Do you think I'm mean for what I did?”

“It is a funny sort of reckoning that takes one woman to get over another. It might work, but no one will ever explain how.”

“Well, it seemed like the natural place to look.”

“To look for a preacher?”

“That is where they were before. Where else do you think we should have gone?”

“You might have tried the church.”

In the end they did find her in church, though not the one in town but rather in an outdoor tent that had been set up in a field outside of Berkeley, on the road that ran past Stonehouses. It was Sanne who suggested they go, saying it would do them all good to hear some new voices mixed in with the old ones they had been hearing their whole lives. As she grew older she had become increasingly concerned with the keep of her family's salvation, and she liked to believe that praying for people made up part of the way for them who did not pray enough themselves. Still, she knew this only made a small difference, so if she could get Merian and Purchase to pray any kind of way she would be happy. As for Magnus, she had no idea what condition his soul was in but would bet it needed upkeep as well.

On top of these other reasons she had never heard of a woman preacher before and was keen to know what she would have to say that might be different from what the other preachers promised and claimed about the state of the world.

Merian had never had much use for any of them and told her it would be the same as the rest, only set in a woman's mouth instead of a man's. “You might think its something different on account of the novelty, but I wager there won't be anything new in it.”

“Since when have you been listening to so many preachers as to be an expert?” Sanne challenged. “Anyway, what's different is that it is a woman. That itself is something new, in my mouth anyhow.”

In the end it was this that compelled all of them to get out of bed before the sun that Sunday, to get good seats under the tent, which had been pitched in the middle of a muddy field for what had been promoted in the area as a Revival and Awakening.

As the four Merians looked around, they were surprised both by the number of people who had come out for the event and the general number that lived within walking or riding distance of Stonehouses. It was perhaps a hundred fifty souls, but all gathered together they seemed legion. Their own seats were midway back, and they could see very clearly when the first preacher, the Englishman Magnus and Purchase had played cards with at the roadhouse, came onstage. He was dressed smartly in a purple robe, with golden thread at the sleeves and a red sash he wore over his neck, along with a great golden cross.

“I want to talk to all of you today about the Knowledge and Love of God,” he said, “and how it belongs to all of us in equal measure. It is a message that will not be popular with some, so let me first give you my background and how I came to be here today.”

The tent was silent as they listened, for he spoke with intense care for his words, but also with a strange accent.

“I am what is known as an Episcopi Vagantes, which means I have been fully invested with the sacraments of the one original church. I received my ordination first as a priest, while still in my youth, and was raised still young to bishop—I was twenty-six at the time—by no less a vassal of God than the Pope of Antioch.

“None can undo what a Pope has done without undoing the ancient communion of the church itself, so I remain now a high bishop but have had an argument with the other churches on your behalf.

“I can see some of you are saying, He is still the Pope's man, and what do you mean with this lowercase and uppercase pope business? Isn't there only one? The truth is there are five popes, all equally entitled to the claim, and the Roman pope is little more than a bishop who has gotten pretensions to be master of the world. The more haughty he has got, the more he has separated all of us from the works of Jesus and His apostles.

“Why he does this is because there are things in the Gospels that the Church in Rome would rather bar all of us from knowing. But all of it belongs ever to the flock of the faithful.

“‘Now what is this Knowledge he keeps talking about?' I can see you asking. ‘Isn't Jesus the perfection of Love and all of Love?' Yes, He is, but also other things besides.

“You see, the seventh seal has long been breeched, and it is silent in Heaven as They watch.”

The residents of the town were baffled by much that the preacher was saying, but he put up such a show with that great purple robe billowing out on the wind under the perfect cerulean autumn sky, along with the red coronation stole, that they decided to let him finish his sermon before making up their minds.

“Today I wish to read to you from one of the Hidden Books of Christ, which the popes and high bishops have all conspired among themselves to keep out of your knowing, certain Knowledge they would like to keep hidden in order to elevate their own earthly kingdom. I am here to tell you that you can know the True Heart of Christ, as intimately as those apostles who sat down with Him in Communion, and not go supplicating to any interdicting authority other than your own hearts.”

He opened a gigantic old tome, turned to a well-marked page, and began reading.

“Mary Magdalene said to Him, ‘Lord, then how will we know that?'

“The perfect Savior said, ‘Come you from invisible things to the end of those that are visible, and the very emanation of Thought will reveal to you how faith in those things that are not visible was found in those that are visible, that belong to the unbegotten Father. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!'”

“What Jesus means by this,” the preacher went on, “is that God's bounty is available to us all without interference. He will create each of you a prince of your own Destiny, but you must first sabbitise your belief, and the joy that comes from knowing, and the sharing of Bread with the College of the Faithful. You must be born and weep in the jubilation that is Christ and, through Him, receive the Hidden Knowledge that will sanctify all your works. For only then will He reveal to you the Truth.

“As proof of this I offer my assistant minister, Mary Josepha, who has been ordained by God with the power of healing, even though she was nothing but a common maid before He sought her out as His servant.”

The woman whom Purchase had met earlier that summer then took the podium, and she was as beautiful as he remembered her, even a in her vestments of office, which were a purple robe like the other preacher's and, in place of the stole, a garter of different-colored glass beads, which caught the light as she moved to the lectern.

“When I first met her she prayed to strange gods and spoke of an oracle called the Aro Chukwu and places with untamed names, where the weaker of her people took shelter from the stronger because they did not have God's knowledge to protect them. But since she found Christ she hides from no one and needs no other strength. As proof I invite any of you with an ailment, any seeking relief, to come up here and let Sister Mary Josepha put her hands on you so that you might be healed. You must hurry, though, because there is, as John teaches, but half an hour left.”

There was a great clamoring among the audience and many people stood to receive her blessing, even some who were devout in the normal church. The Merians sitting there all felt something stir in them as well, as the Englishman began a chanting behind the woman.

When the preacher spoke, Merian thought he could remember things he did not remember and closed his eyes, seeking to pin down those elusive flickerings. He was also reminded of the stranger he had met that dark winter day years ago, who prophesied the end of unions when it was still barren woodlands around him.

Magnus remembered then how he was once called something else, and that there was a truth about him he could no longer possess but had died with his African mother.

Sanne, when she saw the woman standing there in the office of preacher and healer, felt a great pride that all but the church fathers were going to get blessed by her, and that she had in her the power to make them defer, and that she very obviously did not wear the yoke of the household. It was an affirmation for her that was not religious but was powerful all the same.

Purchase, when he saw her standing before the crowd with the girdle, which accentuated her shape and the length of her limbs to an effect of
great beauty, was moved mysteriously into standing from his seat and walking forth to get a better look at her. He soon found that he kept moving closer, as though hypnotized by the glass beads.

“You see,” the preacher said, as people streamed forth in a great throng under the tent to receive blessings, “there is but one original of each thing: one slave and one master; one church and one believer; one convert and one righteous heathen; one husband and one wife; one king, one subject; one father, one son; one Wisdom and one great Lie.

“All marched forth from the Original Element in the Beginning in pairs, to either stay with their original other or else get lost from it; either remembering their purpose or forgetting it. The farther they get from the Beginning the less they know, unless those binds are renewed, and if they are not, eventually they will lose all their original way and purpose. Such was the fate of Sophia, and of preacher and believer. We are here today to remember and to redeem that mission.

“I want the Seeker to come forth now to rejoin with the Sought After; and the Pursued and Persecuted to come forth and know again Original Freedom.”

“They will have you all burning in hell,” a man from the crowd called as the preacher went on. “He is a charlatan and preaches original heresy. If you ask him how he found himself among you he will tell you a fantastic story about being waylaid by pirates off the coast. It is not true, and his deaconess is no religious woman but his common married wife, though what kind of marriage it is only the devil can tell. Probe about Antioch and you will find it is a pub in central London, and he was ordained there, all right. My Jesus, how he was ordained!”

The Englishman defended himself. “He is an agent of the pope.”

“It does not take an agent of the pope to know God would never hide His wisdom from us,” the other countered. “And if not for theology then for the sake of philosophy, but he is illiterate and ignorant as dirt. If he were not, he would not so disregard the doctrine of Telos, as described by Aristotle in his thesis of metaphysics. Sophia is no more lost than a bird in winter, but fulfilling her function according to divine plan, which is mysterious. Anyone who claims to know it is a bigger blasphemer than Satan himself.”

In all this the crowd began taking sides, arguing either from religious, superstitious, or philosophical views about who was right and who was wrong, as others ignored both men and kept moving toward the woman, some shouting as she touched them, others falling down in the aisle and weeping. The most profound feeling among all of them that morning belonged to Purchase Merian.

After the last congregant had finished wailing he walked up to the healing chair and sat down. Somewhere inside himself he knew what he did amounted to bad faith where God Himself might have been concerned, but the religiousness of his feelings was undeniable. He had made his way to that chair with a palpitating heart that quickened when Mary Josepha put her hands on him. As he sat there under her hand, every desire within him was to join with her. If she were truly a vessel for the spirit, he would accept conversion and serve her God. If she were vessel for some other concern that stood unseen behind her, he would serve that instead, so long as he could keep her hands on him. He held his eyes closed and allowed what she offered to course through him. He knew there were unknown forces in the world that he had felt, unbidden or else in deep moments of contemplation. When she touched him he did not know what it was that she offered, and it reminded him not of the energy of creation, as he had known it before, but something just as white hot in his breast. When he opened his eyes he thought he knew what it was and shivered. To his surprise he also felt her hand trembling as she held it there on his forehead. He knew not only what it was then, but that it was also experiencing out of the ordinary for either her church or any other. In that instant he almost pulled her down into his lap, but he stayed still and rigid in the chair, receiving her touch.