Wonders of a Godless World (16 page)

A moment, and the vision was gone. Then the orphan remembered she was naked, and was scrabbling to get dressed again.

The foreigner, it turned out, had suffered a seizure. It had happened while the orphan was up at the lookout, calling to the wind. A nurse had entered his cell and discovered him in convulsions, his whole body taut and vibrating. The episode hadn’t lasted long, but they’d moved him to the front wards for tests and then observation overnight. Hence his empty bed. It wasn’t until the next morning that he was returned to his own room, and the orphan could finally be with him again.

You mustn’t worry
, he told her, as she stared gratefully at his body lying in its familiar position.
A seizure is a good sign
.

The orphan wasn’t convinced. She’d seen enough seizures in the wards to know that they were never a good sign.

Trust me. It just means that my body is getting closer to functioning again. The nerves are re-forming and beginning to twitch.

So he would be awake soon? For real?

Soon. Be patient. For now, we have more pressing business. Tell me—you suffered no harm from your encounter last night?

No! And the night nurse had not dared show his ugly face again, either. Then she was suddenly alarmed. The foreigner wasn’t planning to deal with the night nurse on her behalf, was he? To punish him?

Why not? He deserves it.

Oh, he was just a stupid boy.

He’ll hold a grudge, that one.

Even so, there was no need to do anything to him.

Well, if that’s what you want
.
Nevertheless, it was an incident we can’t dismiss. Have you considered, my orphan, why that boy was creeping about after you in the first place?

Considered it how? She didn’t understand.

You haven’t wondered, for instance, why it is that after so many years of either demeaning you or ignoring you he suddenly showed up last night with his pathetic gift and his fake apology and his sad little erection?

The orphan frowned. She hadn’t had a chance to think about it—she’d been too worried about the foreigner. And now that she did think, well, it must have been just another of the night nurse’s cruel tricks, as she’d first suspected…

It was no trick. The boy desired you.

Desired her? No one ever
desired
her!

Laughter.
You haven’t seen yourself these last few days, orphan. The way you move, the way you glow. It’s no surprise the boy noticed the change.

The orphan strove to contain a strange joy. So it was real. What she had been feeling on the inside wasn’t just an illusion. Her sense of energy, of lightness, of being honed to a fine point—it was visible on the outside too.

Oh yes, you’re growing up, little one
.

Little one! But she was all grown up already!

In body, yes. But in many ways you still live the life of a child. Don’t get angry—it’s no fault of yours. But I know, for example, that no man has approached you before as that fool night nurse did last night. Isn’t that true?

The orphan felt her face grow hot. It was true. That had been her first experience. And it had been ludicrous…

A boy like that is capable of little else. But he’s a timely enough reminder—you will have to deal with that sort of thing now.

She did not want to talk about this.

We must. It won’t go away. Have you ever been taught how it can be? Has anyone tried? The doctors? The nurses?

No…she had never been taught exactly. Oh, when she was younger the nurses had taken her aside and explained about the bleeding every month, but that wasn’t what the foreigner meant. He meant
sex.

I mean even more than that. I can’t explain it completely now, but the fact that you’re female is not incidental to the special abilities you possess. As compared to my own talents, for instance, which are more in the male domain.

Being a
girl
had something to do with her abilities?

A woman, not a girl. It’s a question of maturity too. And the problem is that at the moment you’re a woman in age only. An important part of you is dormant. Again, it’s not your fault. You haven’t been allowed to develop it. But I watched you on the hill yesterday as you tried to summon the breeze, and I can tell you—that’s why you failed. Your powers won’t ever evolve fully—your kind of powers in particular, so linked to the natural world—if such a potent organic force at your centre is denied to you.

Did he mean—?

You can’t ignore your sexuality forever
.

She flushed again. But that wasn’t fair. She was retarded. She was mad. She was ugly. People like her didn’t have sex.

Nonsense. You’ve dreamt of it, haven’t you? Of better lovers than the night nurse? In the privacy of your bed at night?

The orphan squirmed with shame. Yes, she had dreamt. (But could he see her deepest secret? That she dreamt of
him
in that way? He mustn’t find out. She had to show him someone else, anyone else, other than himself.)

Ah. I see. The one you call the archangel.

The orphan sighed in relief. Yes. The handsome archangel. Once, she had indeed wondered about him. In vain, of course…

Go to him now.

What?!

More laughter.
Don’t worry. I mean nothing like that. As you’ll see soon enough, it’s quite impossible with him anyway.

Then what
did
he want with the archangel?

Call it your next lesson.

The orphan rose from the foreigner’s bedside, but she couldn’t hide her deep foreboding. It was just as she had feared. The duke, the witch—the foreigner had used them both in his lessons, to their destruction, and now she had drawn his attention precisely where she hadn’t wanted it to go…

You’re concerned that I’ll hurt him?

Oh, not intentionally, but…

And hence your silly attempt to have me moved from here.

She hung her head. So he did know about that.

I’m not angry. You have a kind heart, that’s all
.

She didn’t want anyone to suffer! Even so, she would accept the foreigner’s instructions, whatever they might be, he could be sure of that. Her loyalties were no longer divided. She had sworn to be of use to him.

Go to the archangel then. I promise that no harm will come to him because of anything I do. In fact, I won’t even enter his mind.

The orphan went. She did not have to go far. The archangel was in the little dayroom, sitting on his usual chair. The virgin was there too, as oblivious as ever, her faraway eyes lost in the colours of the TV screen.

The orphan stood before the youth expectantly.

You hear his prayer?

She heard. The archangel was bent over his book, a finger tracing the page, his lips muttering in low tones. Unintelligible.

The words themselves aren’t important. It’s the noise of them that matters. They fill his head, and drown out the other sounds.

What other sounds?

As I said, I will not enter his mind. But there is no need. You can enter, and see all you need to see, on your own.

On her own? But—

You know you have this ability. You’ve used it already. And this way, you need not fear that I will somehow exploit or damage the boy.

She should have felt reassured, but all she felt was doubt. What was she to do? And how was she to do it?

Just take his hand. The contact will help.

The orphan sat on the floor. The archangel had so far shown no sign that he was aware of her presence. His right hand moved back and forth across the paper, but his left lay passive against his leg. She took hold of it.

Now, simply open yourself and flow into him.

Eyes closed, she opened her mind—as if there was a door in the front of her skull—and then, so easily after all, she flowed through it…

And found silence.

She felt removed from the hospital and its background clatter of activity. The dayroom seemed to have been taken away. No—she was no longer
in
the dayroom. She opened her eyes. She stood in a cool, shadowy chamber. Through wide windows dark clouds were visible, moving slowly. And in the centre of the room, the archangel sat alone in his chair.

He stared at nothing. Calm. Remote.

The orphan looked about. What was there to see here? What was there to learn? But the foreigner did not answer. She was alone in the archangel’s head. She walked to the windows. The chamber was high above the ground, she saw, so high that the land below was a formless blur. She was at the top of a tall tower. And all around, the clouds hung, barely moving. And yet they
did
move. And there was something familiar about their shape, something suggestively curved, and coloured…

The room trembled, a tremor that came from below, as if a huge weight had shifted, and suddenly the orphan knew that the tower had been built to protect the archangel from something on the ground. There was a horrible thing down there. And it was that horrible thing that the foreigner wanted her to see.

With that thought, she sank through the floor and began to descend. She saw many rooms and levels on her way down, and in some of the rooms she glimpsed the archangel again, only he was younger. She was descending into his memory. And then, abruptly, she was on the ground floor. She was in a little room, simple and plain; far too tiny, it seemed, to support the tower above. It was a child’s bedroom.

And there was the archangel. Not a gaunt young man anymore, but only a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, round-faced still with the last of his baby fat. It was night and it was hot and he was sleeping under a thin sheet. He rolled restlessly, and the orphan
could well see why. The sheet was tented enormously over his waist. The orphan smiled. How the nurses would laugh. She knew, somehow, what this moment was. In his dreams, the boy was experiencing his first erection.

Indeed, even as she watched, he woke. He sat up sleepily and looked down at himself, puzzled. Then the sleep left his eyes. He threw off the sheet and stared in amazement. But then the orphan’s smile died. The boy wasn’t merely amazed by what he saw, he was horrified. He backed away, up against his pillow. And suddenly she saw what
he
saw, there in his groin—nothing natural, but something monstrous, something hideously outsized, as if his penis had become swollen and bloated with poison.

He didn’t know what was happening to him, she realised. He had no conception, he had received no warning from anyone about this. And it was so
big
. It seemed impossible to him that his little body could produce something so huge without draining itself of life. And when he tentatively touched the bulbous tip, a pain shot all through him, quivering and twitching, and a white fluid like pus burst forth from within.

It burnt, and the world spun, and he almost fainted. When he recovered, he was appalled to see the mess he had made. He felt sick with embarrassment. It was as bad as wetting the bed. He bunched the sheets up furtively, looking for somewhere to hide them. No one must know the dirty thing he had done…

The orphan’s heart was wrung. The poor child!

And then she was rising again, through the lower rooms of the tower, and at each level there flickered other scenes, like foundations for the levels above. She saw a crowd of young boys in a dressing shed somewhere, pointing and laughing at the naked archangel as they held his clothes out of his reach. And she saw him in a schoolroom, hunched over his desk, desperately trying to hide the
awful bulge in his pants as the teacher waited for him to stand and the rest of the class stared curiously.

And worst of all, she saw a moment when three girls crept into his bedroom one night—they were a few years older than him, one of them his sister—and held him immobile while they hauled his pyjamas down and giggled in disgust at the thing between his legs. The orphan felt his shame as the thing grew and grew when they pinched and pulled at it, no matter how he willed it to stop. And then the girls were shrieking in fury as it spurted out its noxious contents, making a mess of their hands.

Then higher levels of the tower were skimming by, and the orphan watched as the boy slowly withdrew from the world, hiding away from his friends and from his family. His parents did not know what to do. They called in a doctor to examine him, but the doctor found nothing wrong. Not physically. At the sight of the archangel’s giant penis dangling long and limp and innocent, the man only winked and laughed, and the boy was too mortified to speak of the terrible things it did.

But he wasn’t, the orphan thought, actually mad. He was just confused, and scared, and lonely. If someone had simply explained…

But then one day he discovered the book.

She did not see how he came across it, whether someone gave it to him or whether he found it on his own. It was just there suddenly, in his hands, and he was devouring it. And—a marvel!—the orphan could devour it too. The black lines and squiggles, they were transformed through the archangel’s mind and entered hers as voices that boomed like thunder and images that blazed like lightning.

So this was what reading was like!

The boy—and the orphan with him—was transfixed. Battles he saw, and blood spilling, and stern-faced men suffering and dying and seeking vengeance, and there were lists of rules and proscriptions and punishments unending, and there were visions of peace and of paradise, presided over by a mighty god.

But as dazzling as all this was, what really captivated him was the recognition he found there of his own condition. For the book spoke too of the evils of the body. In particular, of the evil that dwelt at the core of all men, aroused by the evil that dwelt at the core of all women. It spoke of a
snake
. And at last the boy understood what was wrong with him.

Up through the tower the orphan rose, and now she saw that the walls were made of paper, they were made from the pages of the book, thousands upon thousands of them, read over and over and all stuck together by the moisture of licked fingers. They were a constant warning to the boy to reject the weakness of his flesh, to loathe the baseness of his own desires, and to seek for the purity of the mind and the soul.