Paradise - Chapter 2: Exodus (4652) [DRAFT 2]

 

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.