A Creed for the Third Millennium (53 page)

He had stumbled on the place where indeed
in days gone by the gardener had kept his treasures, and where too the owners of
the house had stored a few spare wooden beams, in case the peculiar flagging of
the courtyard ever needed to be repaired. For the courtyard was paved with
ancient wooden railroad ties, laid with their narrow sides down in a
perfect herringbone pattern. It was wonderful
flagging, for the wood was so hard it was not susceptible to rot during its
useful life on the rail bed; when the seas threatened to overrun the island in
the great king-tide storms which happened once or twice in every lifetime, this
flagging would endure. And the salt had soaked into the fibre of the wood and
helped to petrify it, so that never had it actually been necessary during the
tenanted years of the house to use any of the spare ties. These spare ties,
nearly two hundred years old, had not fared so well, sheltered from the
annealing salt spray by the dim little shed; they had softened, and at last were
beginning to decay.

Dr Christian gazed at the beams, and
understood. Not for him the solace of companionship, not for him a stout,
Roman-made, well-engineered cross, and a helping hand onto it. He was doomed to
do it all alone. The silent absent accusing crowd had sentenced him to crucify
himself.

The ties were dreadfully heavy, but he
could manage to move them. First he dragged one out into the courtyard, then
another, and laid them down on the selfsame wooden paving to form a T. He
returned to the shed and took the spikes, the iron spike mallet, the hammers,
the axe, the chisel and two saws. His idea was to weld the ties together at the
junction of the T by driving several spikes through at an angle from one tie to
the other. But it couldn't be done. The moment he positioned his spike and drove
down with the mallet, the recoil from the blow pushed the two beams
apart.

For five minutes after he gave up this
plan he just stood howling and wailing, plucking at his spiky hair, his ears,
his runny nose, his gaping mouth.

Then he set out to cut one beam down at
its top end, halving its thickness there in a rabbet, from six inches down to
three inches. Using the bigger of the two saws, he cut a narrow groove through
the top three inches of wood a foot below the end
of the beam. Then he took hammer and chisel and split the wood away between the
groove he had made with his saw and the end of the tie. It worked, for the grain
of the wood was with him, but it was so slow, and it hurt. The axe might do the
job better and faster. He picked it up and swung it. The head snapped off the
handle immediately, flying to land with a huge clang some feet away, where it
sat with its hollow handle-less mouth laughing at him. No short cuts; for him,
the hard way. Back he went to hammer and chisel, striking the broad flat end of
the chisel with the hammer again and again, chipping long slivers of wood away.
And so he fashioned a thinner end to that tie, a foot long and three inches
deep.

The second beam was more difficult, for
in this one he had to gouge a foot-wide rabbet midway down its length, in which
he could lock the thinned end of the first beam, rabbet into rabbet. And he was
in pain, he was in pain. It lanced through his armpits and his groin every time
he drove down with the hammer on the chisel. The sweat ran down into his eyes
and it stung and it burned, he bled from his poor split fingers into the
fresh-hewn wood, and his toes where they braced his feet against the ground as
he knelt stuck to it, and he knew if he looked he would see their bones. He
didn't look. He wouldn't look.

But it was like all work. Work the great
healer, work the panacea. Work took the mind off more ephemeral pain, it made
dwelling upon one's wrongs impossible, it gave direction to confusion and it
answered purpose. Work had true integrity. Work the curse was the greatest of
all blessings.

He laboured on, whimpering, sobbing,
wandering an abyssal ocean of pain.

And in the end he had two beams, one with
its middle section halved in thickness, the other with an end section halved in
thickness. He laid the one with the middle rabbet on the ground and
lifted the one with the thin end over it, and joined the two rabbets together
simply by resting one tie on top of the other. He fixed them permanently
together with two spikes, though swinging the mallet was one long curve of agony
that pinned him on an axis of time eternal. And he brought the mallet down so
hard and strong and true on the splayed ends of the spikes that when he was done
he found he had nailed his cross to the paving beneath it. He wept then,
kneeling and rocking back and forth, but after a little while he grew calmer,
and applied the same will to this new horror that he had to walking through the
depths of winter. He fetched the axe head, wedged it underneath his cross and
hit its flat hollow rear with the mallet. The cross came away, shifting a few
inches sideways with the force of the blow.

But now that he had made his cross he
found that there was nowhere to take it, no convenient hole in the ground dug by
a KP legionary with his Marius-issue shovel. No secure place where he could prop
it against a wall and be sure it would not tumble over under his weight when he
mounted it. Somewhere, somewhere… If he had made his own cross — and he had made
his own cross — there had to be somewhere he could fix it upright.

He found his answer at the beginning of
the arched tunnel which led to the front door. In the middle of the top curve
there was a great iron hook, where maybe in the old halcyon days of tobacco and
tobacco kings they might perhaps have hung a brazier or a beacon.

Back he went to his cross, picked up the
axe head, wedged its blade deep into the join of his two interlocking rabbets
midway between the two spikes holding the ties together. One blow from the
mallet, and the axe head was embedded in the join so deeply even his weight plus the weight of all
that wood could never budge it.

The thicker rope he cut with the pocket
knife, making himself a loop by threading it through the handle hole in the axe
head. He knotted it and reknotted it and knotted it again, then used the ten
feet of rope still dangling from the knot to drag his cross over to the arch.
The hemp bit into his shoulder like a dull blade, his back humped itself, his
legs and his feet and his toes pushed, pushed, pushed, all to pull.

A chair. He couldn't go any further
without a chair. Into the house, through one of the black wooden doors. Here was
a dining room, with a black wooden table like a monks' refectory table, along
each side of it a backless wooden bench. They were too heavy and too long; he
could not manage to drag a bench through the doorway and turn it within the hall
on his own, not now that his purpose was nearing its end, and his fevered burst
of strength was dying too.

In the fifth room he entered he finally
found what he was looking for, a low backless stool, very big and square of
seat, but only about fifteen inches high; a good height for the doing, a bad
height to reach the iron hook. Getting the stool outside was so hard, took a
long time considering the amount of time he had devoted to making his cross, a
far harder task. His strength was running away. But he couldn't let himself be
beaten now. Babbling and swaying, he called on all his last reserves, drumming
his fists against his skinny sides in anguish, the tears running to join the
sweat seeping into his writhing mouth.

Finally he positioned the stool beneath
the hook in the tunnel entrance. And climbed upon it, and threw his rope's end
through the curve of iron above.

The cross moved when he pulled on the
rope, it came up off
the ground at its top end where the T-junction was,
and the buried axe head held without moving. Hauling on the rope, he stopped
the upward progression of his cross while it still lay at an angle, knotted the
rope to hold it there, and went to climb down from the stool. He fell, grabbing
at the long vertical of the cross as it flashed by, then lay beneath it looking
up at it, rocking uneasily.

'I am a man!' he said fretfully, levering
himself slowly upright again.

In the shed he took the coil of thin
twinelike rope and some of the nails and the pocket knife, still sprung from its
sheath. Back to the cross. He drove two nails into each end of the horizontal
top beam, first measuring the length of his arm against each side to ensure that
the nails would sit on each side of a wrist. He bent the nails over outward, and
fixed a loop of twine between them.

One last task, and all would be ready.
Done the way it had surely been done in reality two thousand years before,
almost to the day. No man's weight could be held by mere nails, his flesh and
small bones would tear apart; the Romans didn't make simple physical mistakes
like that. The occasional nail they might have used to immobilize, but they tied
their condemned to their crosses. As he would tie himself.

He removed both top and bottom of the
flimsy pyjamas, humming a little under his breath in happy pain-racked triumph,
for he had shown the hidden watchers how a man could do the impossible. Yes, he
had shown them, Pilate and his tiny army of practical Roman clerks, the high
priests and the synod, the people. Let them watch now! Let them see how a mortal
man with no more god in him than any other man could make and go to his
dying!

Standing on the ground, he finished
hauling up his cross, and when it was fully upright the end of its vertical beam
was neatly balanced on the wooden paving with which it was by nature one. He
held the rope in his hand and clambered upon the stool; the cross was indeed so perfectly balanced
that he didn't even need to steady it while he edged to stand on the stool,
muscles groaning. The nether ends of the horizontal crosspiece just cleared the
archway on either side. He hadn't considered the possibility that they might be
too long, so finding now that they weren't was a confirmation of this most
perfect of all patterns. Pulling the rope just taut, he wound it round and round
itself in a hangman's noose, and knotted it securely. But he didn't cut off the
surplus six feet of rope that still dangled from the end of the noose holding
his cross to the iron hook.

He had positioned his stool this time so
that it just brushed the front of the vertical upright. Facing his cross, he
brought the spare rope down behind the left-hand arm, pulled it through beneath
the arm to the front of the cross, linked it very loosely over the front surface
of the upright, pushed it back under the right-hand arm, and tied it with many
knots to the left-hand side of the same rope. His cross now had a sagging piece
of rope along its front just below the junction of the T.

He turned around to place his back
against the wood and look out across the courtyard, then bent his knees and
worked his head inside the loop of rope, tucking it securely under his chin
before straightening up. With arms outstretched he slid his hands beneath the
twine at each end of the crosspiece; these loops were far too loose to hold his
arms without their sliding out the moment they had to take any weight. But he
had reasoned that also in this most insanely logical of all madnesses. His
fingers groped for and closed over the excess twine, and tightened it until it
bit into the skin cladding his wrists.

'Into Thy hands I commend my spirit!' he
cried out in a huge brazen voice, and kicked the stool away.

The whole weight of his body dragged down
immediately upon those three pieces of rope, the one across his throat and the two at his
wrists, and he let his body feel its weight. Oh the pain was not so bad! No
worse than pressing his arms down on top of the massive lumps of pus at their
roots. No worse than Judas Carriol's kiss. No worse than all those endless miles
of walking, walking, walking. And oh so much easier to bear than the pain of the
burden, the grief of his calling, the long sorrow his mortality had been. No the
pain was not nearly so intolerable as that!

'I am a man!' he tried to declare, but
man that he was, he could not for the rope which cut off speech and let only the
thinnest trickle of air go down into his heaving labouring bursting
lungs.

And in his tormented mind the courtyard
filled with people. His mother was there, so beautiful, kneeling looking up at
him with the marmoreal restraint of perfect sorrow. James and Andrew, Miriam and
Martha. Mary. Poor, poor Mary. Tibor Reece and a fat man he knew was Harold
Magnus. Senator Hillier and Mayor O'Connor and governors all. And Judas Carriol,
smiling as she trickled a silver stream of perks and promotions from one
serpentine hand to the other. The gates he looked directly at flew open with a
clap of thunder, and there beyond stood all the men and women and pitifully few
children of the world with their hands stretched out to him, crying for him to
save them.

'But I cannot save you!' he said to them
within his slow, greying mind. 'No one can save you! I am only one of you. I am
a man. I am only a man. Save yourselves! Do that and you will survive. Do that
and the race of Man will live forever!' And the last word he knew was
'forever'.

He died not from the rope around his neck
but from the weight of his body dragging down so heavily as he wandered closer
and closer to death and farther and farther away from consciousness of his
burden, dragging down so heavily that he could not lift the webbed tissues on the bottom of his chest
against this intolerable weight of himself, and so could not push the used-up
air out of his lungs. He died gently asleep, a grey man on a grey cross in a
little grey corner of the big grey world.