Chapter 2: Exodus (4652)
Bishop Thomas Thorman was called down to the burning rooms.
This usually only happened when there was trouble, so that was what he was
expecting when he got there.
The smell of burning meat was
everywhere in the temple at Merric College, but strongest on the floor of the
building where the burnt offerings were burnt and offered. He walked from the
butchery tables where the meat came in, past the blood-drenched altar, to the
waste bins where the charred remains were left for later removal and finally
where cuts of excess meat were left for the priests. Over the last year, the
rituals had become streamlined, out of the necessity for speed. More acolytes
had been assigned to the task, more braziers and extractor fans installed. What
once had been a place where parking permits and bus passes had been issued, was
now halfway between an abattoir and a steakhouse. Bishop Thorman preferred the
smell of it to the sight of it, the odours reminding him of summer barbecues
from back before the reditus.
His wife always complained that
the smell of him made her hungry when he came home. There was nothing that
could be done about it though, all clergymen smelled of grilled meat now.
Thorman entered the cordoned-off
area where the industrial-sized refrigerators stored the priest-portions, the
thick leather curtains pulled aside for him by laymen and stalked to the far
end where there was an altercation in progress.
Shadwell, the sin-eater, his hand
resting on the handle of one of the fridges, was arguing with an acolyte.
When they saw him approach, they
bowed their heads and mumbled, ‘Your Grace’.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
Bishop Thorman was a tall man and towered over the other two men.
‘He’s at it again, Your Grace,’
said the acolyte, a middle-aged man called Acton, who had been a councilman
before the reditus. In the time before, Acton had been no more religious
than anyone else, going to church, no doubt, for funerals and weddings only. Now
he was one of the altar servers, ordained acolytes that assisted the priests in
the running of the temple, specifically in Acton’s case the burning of the
offerings, one of the most prestigious assignments available to those of his
station.
This was a council building or had
been before Evermarch had splintered. A tall gothic edifice built in the 1830s,
now consecrated as holy ground and the largest structure of its kind in the
city, the old cathedral having been almost laughably small. Acton, and many
other of the functionaries that inhabited the place had come with the building.
‘I’m just here to take what I
need, Your Grace,’ retorted Shadwell, the stocky Welshman.
‘Nothing for you down in the
morgue?’ enquired the bishop.
‘Not a morsel, not a nibble of
anything, Your Grace!’ moaned Shadwell. ‘They’re behind in their deliveries is
what I say. I can’t do the vegans, as you know Your Grace, if there has been no
fruit or veg delivered. In keepings with the families wishes as you understand.
But for the rest there is meat to he had, Your Grace. A bit of bacon, or a
little bit of steak? Where’s the harm? It’s just going in the bin anyways.’
Shadwell was wrong, this was a
priest refrigerator he was raiding and Thorman held up his hands to stop the
scatter-gun rambling of the sin-eater.
‘Now, Shadwell…’ he began but was
interrupted by Acton.
‘He wants to eat it himself!’
cried the acolyte. ‘He’s lying. He just wants it for himself!’
‘Oh, oh, oh!’ said Shadwell,
almost howling. ‘Of course, I’m going to eat it myself! I’m a sin-eater aren’t
I? I’ve ten down there I could get sent
on their way to their graves right now if I could only gets me hands on some
bacon, or a bit of rib eye, or some chops. They are stacked up down there, Your
Grace, stacked up! It’s a mortal shame, Your Grace, a sin, to leave them like
that, for want of a bit of bacon.’
‘He’ll have it in between two
slices of bread and covered in brown sauce,’ yelled Acton before Thorman could
speak. ‘And take the rest to the pub to sell to his mates. You’re a rogue,
Shadwell, always skulking around in here, on the mooch!’
Irritated at being interrupted
twice by the acolyte Thorman put his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘Have as much
meat as he desires wrapped up and sent down, Mr Acton.’
Acton looked like he was going to
say something, but then thought better of it.
‘Shadwell,’ went on the bishop,
addressing the sin-eater. ‘Go back to the chapel. If you have any further
delays in your deliveries then you should raise them with Reverend Father Simpson,
as you well know.’
Thorman nodded to show the matter
was closed. ‘Gentleman.’
With that last word he turned and
left the altar room, both men bowing and muttering ‘Your Grace’ as he left.
Thorman wished all his problems could be resolved so easily, but he had a
feeling that Shadwell was going to cause more trouble in the future. The
sin-eater was a left-over man, sent by the archbishop (wanting to get rid of
him, in all likelihood) just a few months ago. A left-over man, like millions
of others, who had been away from home during the reditus, but a cunning
fellow who had quickly found one of the safest places to put himself, namely,
the church. Thorman had no idea where Wales was now.
Later that day four members of the
Committee brought a sinner to Merric College, a man that had allegedly been
working on a Sunday, demanding that he be punished to the full extent allowed
under the rules of the temple.
He had the man taken down to the
cells and sent the four zealots away, thanking them as he always did, for their
vigilance, but secretly, in his inner-most thoughts, cursing them for the
bloodthirsty fools that they were.
He then returned to his chambers
and attempted to a long overdue letter to the archbishop in Strake. When he
tried to put pen to paper though, his mind returned to the sour expression on
Acton’s face when he had sided with Shadwell. Acton would see him dead; he was
in no doubt of that. The acolyte would happily light the fire that burnt him,
he’d roast Thorman on the altar itself if he could. The reditus has
bought out the best in some people and the worst in others and it didn’t take
much to get yourself killed these days. Who would have thought it, that when
the Lord finally came again, that the world would turn to shit?
Thorman found that he was stuffing
the sleeve of his vestment into his mouth and biting down hard on it. He was
stifling a scream, or something blasphemous, or who knew what? He had been
doing this a lot lately, but thankfully only when he was alone.
Nervous and unbidden as this habit
was, he was sure that he was not insane. It was amazing, he reflected, a
blindfold had been removed from his eyes. A miracle, he supposed. Before the reditus
he had been a different man. The coming of the Lord had really changed him, and
not particularly for the better. As he often thought, when he had had faith, he
had been sure of himself. Now there was no need of faith, he was sure of
nothing, least of all himself.
Slowly he pulled the surprising
large amount of damp cloth out of his mouth. He examined it thoughtfully. He
wondered if he would ever make sense of anything ever again. At least things
had settled down a little since this time last year. Last year he had been in
fear of his life.
His life was safe now, but small.
He went from home to the temple, back to home, with nothing in between. He was
a bishop, but had no real power, as all the important decisions were made by
his superior, the archbishop. Before the reditus his life had been small
too, but in a different way.
He had been crazy, although like
all crazy people of course, he had not realised it at the time. He wasn’t now,
it was like he had become sane, but the whole world had gone crazy. Turned on
its head.
Before the reditus he had
been driven, the power and purity of his faith was a shining example within the
church, but it had taken him away from his family, causing irreparable damage.
He missed his sons terribly and was eaten up with guilt. A guilt made all the
worse for its post-reditus arrival, a backdated delivery of pain all
arriving at once.
He had felt none of it at the
time, or if he had, it had been deeply buried. All that had been in him then
had been an unbending righteousness, the steel rod of his faith more certain to
him than anything else. Compared to his faith everything, his family, his
children, himself even, were phantoms, mere wisps of dust on the air.
His greatest guilt was that his
former zealotry had driven his eldest son Luke first away from their family
home and then a year later from life itself. He felt guilt over the loss of
Mathew, his younger son, still alive he hoped, but gone since the Splintering,
and he felt constant gnawing guilt for what he had turned his wife into, a
twisted reflection of himself, of what he used to be.
That person, that version of
Thomas Thorman was gone now. Now that God was here (and if he ever doubted it,
he just had to look up at the sky on a clear night) there was no need for faith
anymore. A year and a half in and a bishop had the same function now as a
bricklayer or a car mechanic. It was a job that needed doing, that was all.
The seventh seal had been broken,
there was no need of faith. The righteous madness that had once gripped him was
gone, but it was there in so many others now. If anyone had thought that the
coming of the Lord was going to simplify things, they were sorely mistaken.
With the loss of faith, religion had lost its goodness, or so Bishop Thorman
thought, and with God as a solid stone-cold fact, like the Sun or Mount
Everest, everyone seemed to be taking turns to persecute everyone else, safe in
the knowledge, supposedly, that if they were doing something wrong, God would
step in and stop them.
‘God forgive me,’ whispered Thorman
as he bit into his sleeve.
***
Over the next few days, encouraged
by his favourable encounter with the bishop in the burning rooms Shadwell had
started visiting Thorman after his shift had ended. It had started with
discussions on scripture, something the bishop could hardly discourage, but
soon ranged onto other topics, gossip mainly, but also long rambling stories of
Shadwell’s days before. It was not something that Thorman had encouraged, but
the sin-eater was a law unto himself, like most others of his vocation, he was
not afraid to speak his mind or barge into places he had no right to be in.
And so, it was not unusual when, a
week later, as the evening descended into darkness there was a knock at the
door and the sin-eater came barging in. Bishop Thorman had been chewing on his
sleeve again, so he quickly hid it under his desk.
‘Shadwell. What is it?’ he asked
softly.
‘Home time, Your Grace,’ smiled
the sin-eater as he sat on the edge of the desk.
‘What’s the plan for Charlie in
the cells, Your Grace?’ asked Shadwell.
‘Who?’
‘The man the muta brought
in last week.’
‘You shouldn’t call them that,’
chided Thomas mildly. ‘I’ll hear his confession. Write to the archbishop.’
‘You’ll not kill him, surely?’
‘Of course, I’d rather not Shadwell,
but you know what they’re like.’
‘Kill them all and let God sort
them out, Your Grace?’
‘I’ll do everything in my power to
help him, Shadwell,’ said Thorman placing his hands on the desk, then pulling
them back again when he saw the state of his sleeve.
‘Can’t ask for more than that,’
said the sin-eater as he got up to leave. ‘See you tomorrow, Your Grace.’
‘Remember to read the those verses
I…’ began Thorman, but by then the other man had gone.
The next morning Bishop Thorman
went to the cell of Charles Jett and heard his confession. In truth he’d
forgotten about this man and felt rather bad that it had taken the sin-eater to
remind him. Jett looked and smelled like an alcoholic. He was in his late
fifties, fat, bald and dull witted. Easy prey for the Committee. Thorman had
heard a great many confessions since the reditus, this was not much
different from the others.
After he had confessed his sins
and pleaded his case, however uselessly to Thorman, and Thorman had explained
that nothing was up to him at all, but that sentence would be passed by
Archbishop Sinclair and then another half an hour or so of tear-filled begging
and wheedling, and once the tears had stopped and there was nothing, really nothing,
else to be said on the subject, Jett’s mind seemed to free-wheel for a while
and not wanting the bishop to leave him alone to his own deliberations he began
a discussion on how the world had…
‘… got into this mess? I owned a
garage, man. I had a house, two cars, I had six people working for me. The kids
had all left home, we were happy though, ken? My wife was visiting her sister
in Canada when it happened. I lost her, the kids, the garage, everything. I ask
ye, where is the sense in any of it?’
‘It was God’s will.’
‘Aye maybe, but come on. There
were no warnings at all. You’re a bishop, didn’t you guys’ plan for anything
like, like… this?’ said the condemned man waving his hands around in circles to
encompass the world.
‘Of course not,’ admitted Thorman.
‘Do you think the Scottish church spent much time worrying about the Book of
Revelations? We were all raffles, tombolas, collections for the roof,’ said
Thomas who tended to be less guarded when talking to people who would most
likely be dead within a day or two. Rik – this is an English thing.
‘Aren’t you afraid he’s not
listening?’ hissed Jett, leaning in conspiratorially.
‘I’d rather he did, because quite
frankly, I’ve some questions,’ stated Bishop Thorman and meant it.
‘But it’s all real, aye, Bishop?
All of it?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘So where will I go?’
Thorman didn’t want to answer that
question so changed the subject.
‘You never found your wife?’ he
ventured. ‘No word through the DP agencies?’
‘Not a word, Bishop,’ sighed Jett,
lapsing back into tears. ‘They said that that part of Canada just vanished.
Maybe at the bottom of the sea, I don’t know. I gave up asking. I don’t want to
die, Your Grace.’
Thorman had been through this
cycle of self-pity with Jett twice already today.
‘You have nothing to fear,
Charles,’ he said standing up and smoothing down his vestments. ‘We are all in
this together now.’
‘Pray for me, bishop, will ye? And
for my family?’
‘I will do that Charles, I will do
that,’ repeated Thorman as he bowed out of the room. As he walked away, one of
the cell laymen closed and locked the cell door behind him. The bishop rubbed
his eyes as he waited for the lift. He thought about going home early tonight.
He had no desire to talk to the sin-eater today.
***
‘Surely a bloody husband art thou
to me,’ said Bishop Thomas Thorman’s wife as he crossed the threshold of his
house. It was a large six bedroomed sandstone house in Evermarch’s suburbs. The
Splintering had placed it close to an area of Delta slums which had since been
removed. Now their west facing upper windows looked out on recently planted
park land that lay on the other side of the Zone.
‘What is it?’ he grunted at her.
He went to the kitchen and started to make himself a sandwich. As he did so he
drank from a large glass of red wine. He had already deduced there would be no
dinner made for him tonight and he was taking matters into his own hands.
She was talking about Committee
matters, but he wasn’t listening. As always when he got home his thoughts had
turned to trying to figure out how to get himself out of the mess he was in. He
took the cheese sandwich, the glass, and the bottle through to the living room
and switched on the TV.
‘Are you even listening to me?’
she demanded as she followed him through.
He raised his eyes up to look at
her as he bit into the bread. Here she was, five feet two in her stocking-feet,
a slim and still attractive woman in her late forties. You would not think it
to look at her, the number of people she had sent to their death. How he wished
she would die. Or someone would kill her. Someone out for revenge for a
relative killed by the Committee, it was not unheard of.
Besides all the usual
bloodletting, there was a big drive about circumcision. It had been building
since the summer. He had no idea how they came to these decisions, or why they
thought this particular thing was important when balanced against everything
else, but there it was.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What’s
happening at the temple? What’s going on? Elder Ritchie has had no answer to
his e-mails and he’s coming to me to ask you directly.’
‘Ask me what?’
‘What I’ve just been talking about
for the last ten minutes! About what the church is going to do about the
uncircumcised. You can’t expect the Committee to handle everything.’
‘It’s not up to me, it’s up to
Sinclair. You know I have no power over these things.’
She grimaced at him and shouted,
‘then what bloody use are you?’ before turning on her heals and leaving him
alone in the large room.
‘None at all,’ he muttered to
himself and glugged down half a glass of wine in one go.
There was a leaflet from the
Committee on the table beside the sofa. He picked it up and read the front
page. It had the usual circular Committee logo of a desert and cross-swords on
it, then a subheading that read “Cohabitation - If you live with another as man
and wife but are not married – it is a sin!”
There was a picture of a man and a
woman hugging and kissing together while the man rested his back against a
door, as if holding it shut.
It looked like they were starting another campaign, going
after unmarried couples. As bad as it is now, he realised, as bad as it had
been in the past, it’s going to get much worse. They were regularly stoning
people now; they had been stoning people for working on Sundays for a while
now. People were terrified to leave their houses, and it was only a matter of
time before the Committee were in there too, rooting out the sins that went on
behind closed doors.
He poured another glass of wine
and watched the news. More plagues in Egypt, a country largely untouched by the
Splintering and as it had suffered in the Old Testament, it suffered now. There
was a no-fly zone, enforced by angels, or so it was reported. He didn’t know
what to believe in the news these days, there was so much of it that was fake
it was hardly worth watching.
The reporter went back to local
news and regretted to inform the viewers that up to fifty percent of men in the
Delta area were still uncircumcised. He interviewed a Committee spokesperson
that chastised all those that had not gone to a clinic to have it done yet and
threatened them with hellfire if they did not. He switched off the TV, he had
seen this all before.
His wife was in the kitchen,
talking to another Committee member on the phone. She’d be there all night.
Thorman drunk himself into a stupor, then went to bed.
***
The next day, Shadwell came to
talk to Bishop Thorman once more. His recent reading of the first chapters of
the Bible (for the first time suspected the bishop) were leading him into the
dangerous territory of near blasphemy.
‘I mean,’ rumbled on the portly
Welshman. ‘I’m maybe being picky here right, but why did Moses and God wait
until everyone was thirsty and moaning about it until they actually did
something? I mean, this was what God wanted after all, aye? March six hundred
thousand people into the desert. Didn't he realise they'd get thirsty? Very
poor organisational skills and he doesn't even apologise for it, instead makes
a big show of how great he is by providing them magic food and water and
infantilising them even more.’
‘For God’s sake, Shadwell,’ hissed
Bishop Thorman.
‘I mean,’ carried on the sin-eater
regardless. ‘You can organise food and water for people without magic if you
think ahead enough. Those poor buggers marching around in the desert for forty
years, continually being told off and continually acting up. Did I tell ye I
had four brothers? It was just like that with my da. He never got tired of
thrashing us!’
‘Please be quiet, Shadwell!’
demanded Thorman.
‘Sorry, Your Grace,’ replied
Shadwell.
Bishop Thorman looked down at his
desk, he could never finish anything. All of his work lay undone. He had had a
secretary at some point, but he had mysteriously disappeared, probably lying
dead out in the Delta somewhere, assassinated by a muta death squad. The
archbishop had not seen fit to assign him another one. He was trying to deal
with Charles Jett, still languishing down in the cells, wondering if today
would be his last. He really needed to talk to the Sinclair at some point
today. He started shuffling through his papers, looking for something that had
happened last year that was tickling his memory.
Shadwell was not quiet for long.
‘But God speaks to you right?’
‘Yes, of course,’ lied the bishop.
It was a lie he told so often he no longer noticed he was doing it.
‘I wish he’d talk to me,’ sighed
Shadwell. ‘And explain it all to me. I can’t believe… you know, back when
things were normal, you have your life, and it’s under control, more or less,
but then... This must have been what World War Two felt like to our
grandparents, on an even larger scale. An incomprehensible upheaval. Everything
changing. What were you before all this?’
‘I was a bishop.’
‘I was a singer,’ a fact that
Bishop Thorman was very well aware of as Shadwell had told him many times. ‘Who
would have thought it, eh? My family had a sin eater in it from two hundred
years ago, or so my grannie told me. It was crusts of bread and ale back in
those days of course…’
Thorman sighed, put down the
papers he was trying to read and looked up at Shadwell.
‘Sorry Your Grace,’ said the
Welshman. ‘I’d better leave you to it.’
The sin eater got up to leave, the
bishop’s desk creaking and groaning as the Welshman’s considerable backside was
removed from it.
‘Oh, and Shadwell,’ sighed
Thorman. ‘It’s obviously good that you read the Bible so closely, but there is
no need to question every verse.’
Thorman waved his hand at Shadwell
to leave and shut the door behind him. The bishop then had a mild panic attack,
stuffing his sleeve into his mouth, biting down hard to stifle his moaning. I
can’t take any more of this, he thought to himself, but realising he evidently
could. I’m going to go insane. But again, that wasn’t true, the problem was
quite the opposite in fact. The problem was that he had gone sane.
‘Just focus on small things,’ he
muttered to himself as he unspooled his sleeve out of his mouth. ‘Do one task,
then when that’s done, do another. Push everything else out of your mind.’
Suddenly his eyes found the bit of
paper he had been looking for. He clutched it in both hands like a drowning man
finding a life-raft. Perhaps if he saved Jett, then that would be enough for
now?
***
Thorman resisted the temptation to
go and talk to Jett before he was set free. The man’s gratitude would have been
too much for him, and not a good thing to have talked about amongst his enemies
in the temple.
He contented himself with getting
it second hand from Shadwell. He made light of his contribution, telling the
sin-eater it had not taken much to release Jett, when in reality he had stuck
his neck out quite a lot in order to attain it.
Last year Archbishop Sinclair had
granted a reprieve to one of his friends, a former judge that had been accused
of the usual sort of thing and was due to be stoned to death. Sinclair had
intervened and the man had walked free, it was corruption, certainly,
considering how many other people the Committee were persecuting that the
archbishop hadn’t been interested in helping. He had used the New Testament to
do it, claiming the rights of Pontius Pilot, although his justification owed
more to The Master and Margaretta than to the Bible, not that those
ignoramuses on the Committee would have known that, but anyway, it was decided
that once a year any bishop could free any one condemned man or woman.
At the time Thorman had filed away
this decree, hoping that he would be able to use it, should the need ever
arise, to save someone from the Committee. A Get Out of Jail Free card
in effect. But a year had passed, and the world had changed a lot. Thorman ran
out of people that he cared enough about to save, and the decree sat in his
desk’s bottom draw, forgotten.
Now he had used it to rescue Jett,
an act he knew in his heart was nothing more than vanity. He had wanted to show
off to Shadwell, and he had wanted to show to his wife that he wasn’t utterly
impotent.
It hadn’t been easy; it had taken
days to wheedle the pardon out of the archbishop.
‘You realise if you use it now,
it’s gone? For at least a year anyway?’ Sinclair had said.
‘The only person I have left in my
life is my wife,’ Thorman had replied. ‘And she’s Committee.’
The archbishop hadn’t even asked,
why this man? Why Jett? He hadn’t been interested enough to find out. Thorman
would have struggled to find a sensible answer, as the truth was that Jett was
no one, hardly even worthy of salvation at all. Just a man who had been in the
wrong place at the wrong time and had ended up in a cell, just like countless
thousands everywhere where the
Committee had influence.
Now though, as he sat at his desk,
his sodden sleeve falling limp across his lap, he wondered why this one act of
mercy didn’t make him feel any better. Before, it had felt like Jett’s
salvation would somehow hasten his own, but in the end, he was left with the
feeling that he had made a terrible mistake.
