A Creed for the Third Millennium (52 page)

And even as she said those magical words
and watched their effect on the Christians, she felt a small thrill of pride in
her accomplishments.

But there was one more thing to do; she
looked across not at James but at Andrew, who seemed to have assumed the senior role in the
Christian family now that Joshua was
hors de combat.

'I
should tell the VIPs that
Joshua won't be leading the March this morning,' she said. 'Andrew, you'd better
come with me and talk to them as well.'

He moved to her side at once, but glanced
back to James and Miriam and Mama. 'It's better if Martha doesn't march,' he
said to them. 'Mary can take her back to Holloman on the train
today.'

James nodded sadly.

'If they can wait here for a couple of
hours, I can most likely set up a helicopter for them,' said Dr Carriol, anxious
to make what amends she could.

But Andrew shook his head positively.
'No, thank you, Judith. It's best they take the train. The last thing my wife
needs is to sit around for half a day nursing her grudges. And I might say the
same for my sister. Coping with the train will keep them occupied, and the long
ride home will cool them off. The only thing I'd ask is if they could have a car
to take them to the station.'

And that was obviously that.

Dr Carriol need not have worried. The
passenger strapped into the back seat gave no trouble to his fascinated escort,
or to Billy. Quietly he sat with his head hanging and his eyes closed, not as if
he slept, rather as if he waited in passive consent for something yet to
come.

The miles passed away, and gradually in
the pearly new sky the land below acquired features — little towns and villages,
many fields, roads bereft of traffic. Gradually salt marshes and swamps crept
into view, tossing seas of silvery plumes with arrow-straight tidal channels and
exposed mud flats between; the occasional sight of a fishing boat lying on its
side like a dying horse lent the scene an abandoned look, as if everything was
present except people.

They flew over Kitty Hawk, where the
Wright Brothers had made their pioneer flight, zoomed across the head of
Albemarle Sound with the long thin sandy thread of land out to their left that
held the Atlantic back, over a vast expanse of salt marsh and into the top
waters of Pamlico Sound. Just south of Oregon Inlet the island came into view, a
flat, lozenge-shaped piece of ground smothered in bald cypress.

Billy checked the chart spread out in his
lap, overflew the island to verify that it was the correct shape and size, then
did a run to locate the house. There it was, on the northern tip, in the middle
of a huge clearing. Bright green grass, domestic trees, a yellow rash of
daffodils someone must once have planted in the days when daffodils bloomed in
April, and a huge grey house.

An interesting-looking house, thought
Billy idly. Made of some grey stone, with a grey slate roof. And it had a big
grey courtyard in its front, enclosed by a high grey stone wall which embraced
and became contiguous with the walls of the house. He eyed the courtyard
curiously, wondering how it could possibly have a pattern to it, a crisscross
herringbone paving far too large and straight to be flagging. Well, the soldier
could tell him later. He dropped his bird as neat as you please about fifteen
feet from the double wooden doors that cut the courtyard wall in half, and
formed the only entrance to the house complex, as if in its early days it had
fortified itself against siege.

'Okay, this is it!' he shouted into the
back seat 'But make it snappy, will you, soldier? I'm awful low on
fuel.'

The private undid his belt and leaned
over Dr Christian, touching him gently.

'Sir! Dr Christian, sir! We're here! If I
get you out of this harness, do you think you can manage okay?'

Dr Christian opened his eyes, turned his
head to stare at the soldier, then nodded gravely. When his feet touched the
ground he stumbled and fell, but the soldier was out behind him in a flash,
scooping him up before his body actually made contact with the grass.

'Take it easy, sir. You just lean against
the old bird here for a minute while I open them gates, okay?'

The soldier ducked and loped over to the
gates, gave them an experimental push and stood back in satisfaction as they
swung easily inward. He returned to the helicopter and took Dr Christian's arm,
pressing down on it to force that too-tall body to stoop sufficiently clear of
the whipping rotors, then ushered his charge towards the gates.

'Get a move on, will ya?' screamed Billy
behind them. 'I don't dare stop this fuckin' thing, but we are just gonna make
it to Hatteras!'

So the soldier increased his pace, and Dr
Christian kept up with him obediently. Ahead of them across the courtyard loomed
a twelve-foot-high archway that receded in a short wide tunnel to what was
obviously the front door. Not breaking his pace, the soldier got Dr Christian to
the single step below the door, and pounded on it.

'Hey!' he shouted. 'Hey there inside,
we're here!' He put a hand on the big brass handle that jutted from the extreme
middle left of the door, and pushed it down. The door opened inward without a
sound to reveal a long wide hallway, very white and stark and unadorned, its
floor made of diamond-shaped black and white marble tiles with small red inlays
at all their angles. A real bare-looking place was the soldier's thought, for
classical simplicity was not familiar to him.

'Best of luck, Doc!' the soldier said,
and gave Dr Christian a friendly shove in the back that sent him stumbling up
the step and into the hall, where he stood facing away from the soldier, looking
around him in what seemed wonder.

'You just go on in, Doc,' the soldier
said. 'They're in there waitin' for ya!'

At top speed the soldier turned and ran
back across the courtyard, through the gates. A careful and properly trained
man, he paused to shut the gates firmly, then leaped into the helicopter, which
took off the moment Billy decided his only remaining passenger was far enough in
not to fall out again.

'Okay?' he yelled, but this time with a
fair chance of being heard, for the soldier had settled into the seat beside him
and was preparing to enjoy the rest of what might be his last as well as his
first helicopter flight; his unit was always moved by truck.

'I guess it's okay! I didn't see anyone,
but I sure didn't hang around either!'

'Hey, kid, the flagging in the
courtyard!' Billy yelled. 'What's it made of, huh?'

The soldier stared, then laughed. 'Shit,
man, I was in such a hurry I never looked!'

On thundered the helicopter, sou-sou-east
for Hatteras, scant miles away. Below them the pellucid waters of Pamlico Sound
shimmered, sliding and changing.

'Wow!' roared the soldier suddenly,
peering down, his face awed. 'Holy shits, will you look at them
fish?'

A school of large black streamlined
shapes was moving beneath the surface of the water, not as fast as the thing in
the sky above them, but very fast, as if even in their swimmy world they could
hear the thing above them, and it was a pterodactyl predator big enough to dive
snatching for them, gobble them up.

Billy and the soldier were so busy trying
to work out whether they were sharks or dolphins or mini-whales that they didn't
notice one of the great rotor blades shear itself off and scream at a thousand
miles an hour away from them and the fish, arcing its way down a flat trajectory
to the sea with the lethal efficiency of a discus. The bubble in the sky jerked,
shuddered enormously, and fell. It was only a short distance, perhaps two
hundred feet. A rotor blade tip hit the water first, flipped the little craft
upside down and spun it reeling along the surface like a skipping stone. When it
stopped, it didn't stop, it was still travelling far too fast in a downward
direction. So it merely cleaved its way cleanly beneath the water, ploughed up
and then burrowed into the sea bed, and settled amid a cloud of dust and sand
and weed, buried from all inquisitive eyes. Neither man emerged to pop to the
surface, which skittered in a little wind and kept its secrets, licking at
itself like a satisfied cat.

The hall was very cold, and so glaringly
white that Dr Christian shut his eyes for a moment before tilting his head to
look up. Above him the ceiling was not a ceiling but a great curving canopy of
milky glass that welcomed the entry of a pure pale light, sending bars of black
shadow to muddle the perfect geometry of the floor from its dark supporting rib
cage of steel. There was no staircase, only four arches down each long pristine
wall, their recesses sealed by huge wooden doors that seemed black with a
venerable age. At the very end of the hall was a white arched alcove, and in it
stood a seven-foot-tall bronze statue, a late-Victorian copy of the Praxiteles
'Hermes Holding the Infant Dionysos', the beautiful enigmatic face of the god
looking out at nothing because no one had painted in his eyes, and on his curved
arm there rode a sweet fat reaching baby, also blind. In front of them was a
small square pool of aquamarine water, on which floated one perfect deep-blue
water lily with a yellow throat and three serene green leaves.

'Pilate!' Dr Christian called, his voice
rolling and echoing. 'Pilate, I am here! Pilate!'

But no one came. No one answered. The
black doors stayed closed, the man-god and the baby-god stayed bronzely blind,
the water lily shivered in suddenly vibrating air.

'Pilate!'
he roared, and back
roared his own voice, '—ilate —ilate —ilate!', dying away.

'Why do you wash your hands behind my
back?' he sadly asked the statue, and turned and walked away through the
still-open front door.

In the arched tunnel he gazed about,
big-eyed, searching for the guards in mail and sandals and helmets, with pila at
the ready, but they too were evading him.

'You're hiiiiiiiiiiding!' he called
coyly, and stooped, and pranced a little. 'Come out, come out,
wherever you are!' he sang, then chuckled away to
himself, and capered clumsily.

Craven legionaries! They knew what was
coming, that was why they stayed in hiding. No one wanted to shoulder the blame,
not Jews, not Romans. That was the trouble. Always had been the trouble. No one
ever wanted to shoulder the blame. So in the end, as ever, it had been left to
him. He must shoulder it all, he must take the world on his back and carry it to
his cross, there to die of its awful weight.

He ceased his dancing and prancing and
walked unsteadily out into the courtyard, bare and drab and austere and grey.
Grey its walls, grey its floor, grey the sky above it. Various shades of grey.
Ah, but that was the
world!
He stood in the very centre of the world, and
it was grey in the end as it had been grey in the beginning, grey the colour of
no-colour, grey the colour of grief, grey the colour of desolation, grey the
colour of the whole world.

'I am grey!' he announced to the
greyness.

But being grey, it didn't answer. Grey
was speechless.

'Where are you, my persecutors?' he
cried.

But no one answered, and no one
came.

He walked shivering in his wispy silk
pyjamas, for no one in Washington had thought to provide him with a coat. And
the crusted blood between his thighs broke away against the fabric and let the
meat below bleed an androgynous ooze; his bare feet dragged across the grey
paving and left browning prints behind. The prints went first to one wall and
then to the other, back to the house walls and out again into the middle of the
courtyard, an aimless walk to an involuted Calvary that was nowhere save inside
the greyness of his broken mind.

'I am a man!' he shrieked, and wept
inconsolably. 'Why will no one believe me? I am only a man!'

He walked. This way and that, he walked.
And with every step he cried aloud, 'I am a man!'

But no one answered, and no one
came.

'My God, my God, why?' He tried to
remember the rest of it, but couldn't, and decided it would do very well as it
was, a simple simple question, the first question, the last question, the only
question.
'Why?'

But no one answered.

Against the wall where it joined the
house on one side there was a small stone shed, its wooden door closed. And in
there, he suddenly knew, they all were hiding. Every last one of them. Jews and
Romans, Romans and Jews. So he crept shuffling stealthily across to it,
noiselessly unlatched the door, and flung it inward with a cry of
triumph.

'I caught you, I caught you!'

But no one was inside hiding. The shed
was almost empty. It held some shelving on which rested a few tools, all
new-looking: several hammers, a big spike mallet, a set of chisels, two saws,
two short lengths of heavy chain, a single-bladed axe, some long iron rail-tie
spikes, some nails, a coil of stout rope, a big pocket knife left carelessly
open, another coil of rope, but much thinner, almost like twine. There were
gardening implements too, but these were much older than the tools, relics not
of the recent repairs but of the days when this house knew much laughter from
many children. And resting against the far end wall from the door were six or
seven wooden beams, each the same size and shape. About eight feet long, a foot
wide, and six inches deep.