Aleys regards Christ’s hanging head, his seeping wounds, and feels—what? Reverence, yes. Always. But mostly fear. She hardly recognizes him. This is not the playful God, the divinity in dust motes and birdsong. She’s wary of this Jesus, imagines him raising his head and fixing her with disappointed eyes.Why can you not gaze upon my wounds?She turns her head away from the gory thorned Christ. He frightens her, and she’s ashamed of that. She knows he sees her cowardice. Just as a horse will buck a frightened rider, she is sure that Christ sees into her heart and feels her shrink from his agony. She presses her hands into her ribs. She cannot bear to look at him. It’s too big, his sacrifice, incomprehensible. It’s too much to witness.
A whisper seeps into her head, Sophia’s voice:If you cannot comprehend, imagine.
But what should she imagine?
His last night.
So she shuts her eyes and pictures him at the end of the meal, his last with the apostles. Christ knows that he will be arrested in the morning. He has already given them bread and wine in remembrance, has initiated them into the rite of his bodily sacrifice, has named his betrayer. Judas has slunk from the house. What does Jesus feel? She doesn’t know. She searches inside, finds nothing.
You are an apostle. Follow.
Aleys trails them through the streets of Jerusalem, back to Gethsemane, where they have their camp outside the grove. Some of them, the younger ones, are giddy after the good supper. They throw their arms about each other as they go up the hill. The older disciples are sober, they have understood his meaning, and they turn inward in contemplation, ignoring the shouts of the youth. The evening air bears the kiss of spring. Crickets call softly.
She waits outside the camp until she sees him emerge alone. From the darkening shadow of olives, Aleys follows Jesus, sees he is barefoot, has left his sandals behind, is stepping out with naked sole over flinted ground. She looks back, sees Peter, James, and Paul settling against gnarled trunks, where sleep will take them soon. She wants to slap them awake but knows she cannot. Jesus looks back at them, hesitates, then moves on. He is sad. She can feel this much. She will walk with him.
The stones are sharp as barbs, they lie hard upon the ground and pierce his feet. He does not flinch. And then she understands. He knows what is coming, and it’s not only scourge, thorns, lance, nails. These are the least of his sorrows. It’s the eyes of Judas. What are these bodily pains compared to the betrayal to come at dawn?
Aleys follows him deeper into the grove as the heavens glow indigo and ink. He stumbles, then grasps a tree, and he goes like that, from branch to branch, tree to tree, the olives his last companions, until he passes even them, at the edge of the grove, overlooking the valley. And there he calls out a single word: “Abba.” It rings over the valley, his anguish drifts down upon sleeping creatures, the cry of the child whose father is fearsome and far. “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”
His fear, she feels it now. It’s the fear of any mortal creature, the love of self and life and body, the love of heartbeat and breath, the love of tongue against roof, of sweetness of sleep, of warmth of the fire, of cricket song. She presses her hands to her face and loves the soft grab of flesh to flesh and finds that tears have made her cheekbones slippery. How could God ask this of his son? God asks too much. More than she has.
Then from Christ’s mouth, a soft cry: “Thy will be done.”
How?she asks him.Why?
Draw near, he says.I will show you.
He looks at her then, her Christ, with his wounded eyes, and she sees what she had not seen before. He is in love. He is in love with her, he is in love with the sparrow and the river, he is in love with the root and trunk and flower of it all, the entire creation, and his fear and his love are inseparable. He has love even for the fear, and it is through the vulnerable door, the portal of fear, the spear in his side that will come tomorrow, that Aleys glimpses, for a fleeting moment, the unutterable vastness of her beloved.
She returns to the dormitory, shaken. She had no idea who she loved.
23
Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas walks to the shore and stares at the ocean with unseeing eyes. Seagulls squabble over shells on the rocks but he doesn’t hear them. He has come to contemplate Jan’s request. One heretic. He wants to reject it outright, but if he does, he will abandon both women to his brother. Sacrifice one, save the other, his brother said. Sophia or Aleys. It’s not a real choice. Both are impossible. The waves creep up the shingle, recede. Each comes closer. If he stands here, just stands here and does nothing, he will drown.
Jan is a wolf. A wolf with a pope nipping at his heels. Only a king dares defy a pope.
The gray water mirrors a flat sky. Lukas tastes salt on his lips. The choice wraps like a vise around his chest, so that it is hard to draw breath, even in this open air. He is thinking of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, how the purse would have weighed in his fist, the coins stamped with the head of a Phoenician god. Thirty shekels from the high priests to name Christ in the garden, to kiss Christ in the garden, so that he could be stopped. So that his radical truth would be silenced. After, when Judas saw what he had set in motion, that Christ was condemned, he returned to the high priests. “I have sinned,” he said to them. “I have betrayed innocent blood.” But they did not take back their coins. Blood money, they said. Your responsibility, they said. So Judas cast the coins to the temple floor, where they rolled and fell to stone while the priests and elders watched with cold eyes.
The bishop doesn’t care who he names.
The betrayal of Judas had been foretold. God had whispered the plot to the prophets. Zechariah, buried before Judas was born, had already predicted the price: thirty pieces of silver. Christ knew it was coming. The betrayal was necessary. And so Lukas wonders, what choice did Judas really have?
24
Aleys
They brought him to the hospital in the night, a boy with a wound to his head, leaking pus. Fever like a hot iron. The senior beguinetsks her disapproval. “If they’d come in sooner, we’d have bled him. It’s too late now.”
Aleys bends over the boy, sees his downy fuzz of new moustache, barely visible against his skin, which is an indeterminate gray, blending into the shadows. Though it is morning, the light barely reaches the back of the ward. The boy’s wound has seeped into the bedsheet so that a yellow crescent blooms beneath him, edged with brown, like a halo. The smell is putrid, a mix of sick and stool, and Aleys knows from this that the boy will die today. She puts her ear to his mouth. His breath is barely audible. His open eyes fix on the ceiling, as if the gateway to purgatory opens above them. He is half in the next world.
“Not a thing we can do for this one but pray. Sister Aleys, stay with him. I’ll get the priest.”
Aleys hitches her dress to kneel beside the boy. She can feel the fever rise from him as she leans her elbows on the edge of his cot. His limbs are already stiffening, fingers rigid on the blanket like he’s seeking his maker in a blind man’s bluff. He doesn’t know she’s there. He’s already far away, alone in his passage. She thinks of running after him, of grabbing his elbow and saying, turn around, you’re too young to go, turn back, let’s play. Come chase me back to life. But he is far down a corridor she can’t enter. She presses her ear to his chest and recoils, because his body is light and dry as a husk. He still breathes, but barely. There’s not much time. She doesn’t know what to do. She thinks of Sophia. Of Ida. They’d appeal to the saints to illuminate his path. They’d call on Mary.
Aleys bows her head upon folded hands and begins theAve Maria. The words are starched and stiff in her throat. She feels like a fraud. She has no gift. Who is she to summon a saint? “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.” She looks up. The boy shows no response to her voice. He is inert as the lead in the windows. Can he even hear her? She screws her eyes shut and finishes. “Now and at the hour of our death.” It’s not enough. She knows it’s not enough. What else does she have? “Ave Maria...” Aleys utters the syllables over and over, again and again, until repetition renders them supple and the prayer grows tender and round. She sees the boy’s eyelids flicker. Aleys abandons herself to the graceful coiling words, and ribbons of prayer curl into the air. Gradually, she feels the boy’s breath, the infinitesimal rise of his chest fall in tandem with the verse. She slows to make it easier.Lonely boy, child of God, peace be upon you. The smell of his death is ripe and sweet in her nose, too much, so she sips the air, tiny sips of death and prayer. She does not stop when her vision grows murky, her hands begin to tingle. She sinks further into the prayer and the edges begin to blur and she bleeds into the boy and he bleeds into the prayer, and the prayer beats with his heart and she breathes the prayer. The spiraling words draw them together, deeper, into a space that is blue and gray, bound and unbound. “Ave Maria...” Aleys feels a swimming in her head and grips the edge of the cot to steady herself. She sways as she grinds her fingers into the coarse weave of the linen.
