A Creed for the Third Millennium Read online

  'It's none of my concern,' said Dr Carriol feebly, and tried her coffee again to find it cooled enough to drink. 'I'm just terribly glad you've all taken this so well, and that goes for Martha too. I can't blame her. It must look as if I've usurped family authority in dealing with Joshua.'

  'Nonsense!' said James, his arm about Miriam, who didn't bounce or say much these days. 'We've just expected that when all of this is over, you and Joshua will marry. Which does give you many rights.'

  It didn't seem worthwhile to disillusion them, so she merely nodded and smiled her thanks.

  'What about me?' wailed Mama. 'I can't march! And I don't feel right, sneaking in on the last day in a car!'

  'Then how about if I set up a ride for you in one of the television vans?' asked Dr Carriol. 'That way you'll be at the speaker's platform first. So you can take your seat next to the King of Australia and New Zealand and look him right in the eye.'

  This suggestion appealed, but couldn't console her. 'Oh, Judith, why can't I go to Joshua? I wouldn't be in the way, I promise I wouldn't! Haven't I been good all these months, just as you told me? Please! Oh, please!'

  'The moment he's well enough to be moved to some place less security-mad than where he is now, you'll see him and you'll be with him, I promise. Be patient, Mama. I know you're very worried, but, honestly, he couldn't be in better hands.'

  Major Withers saved them a lot more of the same from Mama when he poked his head around the tent entrance flap. 'Dr Carriol, your chopper is waiting.'

  Dr Carriol dragged herself to her feet, anxious to be anywhere except where she was. 'I have to go. The President wants to see me urgently.'

  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.

  12

  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!'

&nbs
p; 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.

  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.