Lucifer took note of his surprise and explained that, of course, Leon and Celeste Jodeau were in Hell. ‘Where I spoke to them,’ he said.
Xas had known his lover’s brother only through Sobran’s stories about him—stories, worries, and a profound and puzzled grief. But, some ten years after he’d lost his wings, Xas had entered the Jodeau household as a tutor to Sobran’s younger sons. He’d lived under Sobran’s roof—though only shared a bed with his lover when Sobran was away overnight in his room at Château Vully. Xas had known Celeste Jodeau. He’d been careful with her, and kind to her. He hated to think of her soul in Hell and under interrogation, her thoughts and acts examined, all of them irredeemable, not in themselves, but by virtue of her damnation. Everything Celeste was had been thrown away whole—her cruelty, her selfishness, her duty, her generosity, a whole murderous, motherly person excised from the future, from God’s promised Kingdom, if not from the story of the world. Lucifer had questioned Celeste and, no doubt, had judged her as God had. Judged differently, for he was the Devil after all, but judged nevertheless. Xas imagined the interview. He imagined Celeste’s despair, and Lucifer’s cold, angelic certainty.
‘Why would you want to talk to them?’ Xas said. ‘Celeste and Leon?’
‘Well—I had time,’ Lucifer said. ‘I’m only letting you know what I already know so that you won’t leave anything out.’
Xas shut his mouth and remained stubbornly silent. He stared at his brother trying to make out his expression in the moonlight. Lucifer didn’t prompt him again, but neither did he lift his restraining hand.
Xas said, ‘I knew Celeste Jodeau. I keep wanting to ask after her, to say, “How did she look?”’
It wasn’t a real question, but Lucifer answered it. ‘She looked like her homeopathic self; like the memory of a remedy. She looked how damned souls look when they remember their mortal lives.’
This was apt and cruel, and Xas found himself saying, ‘There really isn’t any afterlife, is there?’
‘Are you asking the Governor of God’s prison whether he actually has any inmates?’
‘I don’t mean “actually”. Actually there is an afterlife. But there isn’t in the way that mortals suppose there is.’
‘Hell is Hell,’ said Lucifer.
‘You know what I mean. I don’t mean just that Hell is hopeless.’
‘I know that you have your own heresy. That God doesn’t after all save everything.’
‘Yes. But imagine—’ Xas began. He caught the haughty, quizzical expression on his brother’s face and turned away from it. ‘Imagine the atheists are right,’ he said.
‘Why would I bother to imagine what isn’t true?’
‘To discover what is—the spirit of the promise.’ In trying to explain himself, Xas came out with a parable. ‘Let’s say that human bodies are planes. The purpose of a plane is flight. A soul is a flight; it is the purpose of a body. But what is it that flies? I don’t think you can separate a thing and its purpose. But that’s what God does, He winnows things from purposes and keeps only purposes. Which makes me wonder—what was it God lacked that He called for light? And what kind of lack couldn’t be satisfied by all this?’ Xas gestured around him at the welcome mat of self-seeded garden flowers, and silver billows of moonlit lupin.
Lucifer said, musingly, ‘Although you now seem to believe once more that God made the world—called for light—I think you may still be more of a heretic than I am.’
Xas waved this away as an irrelevancy, then said, eager, ‘Okay—imagine the atheists are right. It’s easier to see how the world works for atheists when the world is bad. So—imagine the bad world.’
Lucifer laughed. ‘All right, I’ve got that, the bad world,’ he said. Then, ‘Go on.’
‘An atheist who lives through evil times must try to make sense of things without recourse to the idea of God, without a comforting authority, a fixture in the sky from which to suspend their final judgments. Without anyone to blame, history is the monster in their stories. History—immortal, capricious, remote, present everywhere. At best what they’re left with—those atheists—after their struggles with history, are their hopes. Their hopes like some cross between a coffin and a boat, a vessel to carry their treasure away somewhere. But if I say “coffin” it sounds as though I’m talking about the ceremonial afterlife of interment and memorial. I’m not. All the hopes are for is that moment of passing—to be there, singing something.’
‘Did you sing to Sobran when he was dying?’
‘No,’ Xas said. He felt tired and discouraged. He’d supposed his brother was paying attention, but Lucifer had only listened, alert for the appearance of a gap in his defences. Xas sighed, and patiently finished his thought. ‘We should imagine there’s no afterlife, because there is none for angels.’ Then, ‘I can’t trust God with my treasure.’
‘Because He let me cut off your wings?’ said Lucifer, sly and persistent.
When Xas didn’t respond, Lucifer made a sound of exasperation and got up. This startled O’Brien, who turned into a stiff, barbed fury, and sprinted away toward his basement bolthole. Lucifer’s hand, which had only weighed on Xas, and held him in place, closed into a pinching grip. The archangel picked him up, and clasped him close. Lucifer’s scent—clean sunlight, spicy apple and fennel—was extraordinary. It made Xas feel weak, and a little crazy.
The archangel took off. His wings were loud and his progress was a series of pauses and accelerations. Then he caught a current of air several thousand feet up, and began to glide.
They flew along above the paper road as far as it went, down toward Playa del Rey, then turned out to sea. The archangel swooped and plunged, and once he banked, leaning against gravity as though barrelling around a solid and nearly vertical wall made only of air.
The wind was blowing from the southeast. It was a dry wind, a dirty wind, even several thousand feet up. Xas saw that they were flying in a pinched patch of clear air under a thick, flat-bottomed thunderhead.
Lucifer began to climb toward the cloud. Closer to, it was less defined, its edge filmy. But still it seemed strangely inert, not an airy thing full of water and electricity, but only a shadow, like its own shadow.
Xas knew that Lucifer was climbing toward the cloud as a precaution. For, though it looked passive as they passed along underneath it, the cloud suddenly ruptured, not with lightning or rain, but with a spray of fine particles of ice. The ice burst out and dropped onto and around and past them, then, hundreds of feet below, it hit the hot, dirty wind and evaporated. Xas felt the temperature change and pressure fall below them. He also felt Lucifer’s lungs expand. The archangel sucked in an apparently endless breath, clasped Xas even closer to him and locked his six rowing wings into one. The hands on Lucifer’s two lower sets of wings seized the one above them, and closed like louvres to make two long instruments of coordinated muscle. Until that moment Xas had always thought the multiple wings were only for show—to make archangels look bigger and fiercer. But he learned then just how much redundant strength his brother actually possessed.
If Xas, back when he’d had wings, was hit by a downburst from a thunderhead, he would simply have resigned himself to being pushed into the sea. But Lucifer fought back. His wings locked, his wing beats slowed, but his wings described wider circles. He raised his face to the cloud and closed that final fifty or so feet to its underside, just in time to meet the blast of wind that erupted into the patch of lowered pressure directly beneath them. The wind hit them, and pushed them down. Lucifer’s wings laboured, locked, powerful, but the downdraught slammed them into a straight plunge toward the sea. The archangel tucked his head in so that his chin touched Xas’s crown. He was breathing hard, and his skin heated up, till it was hotter than human flesh, but still dry.
As they fell, Lucifer fought his way forward. Xas could see the sea below, rushing closer every second. A few further seconds went by, and the howling of the wind abated some. Then the sea was less than twenty feet below them, fl
ashing past, but not coming any closer. Xas looked back under the archangel’s wings and saw the blurred air below the cloud. The cloudburst was quite confined, and behind them now.
Lucifer headed in toward the coast, unlocked his wings, slowed almost to stall, and floated up on a thermal that rose against a bluff above the sea. He dropped Xas on to a grassy cliff top, landed beyond him, then whipped around and with a single soft wing beat was back beside Xas and pressing a foot on him.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t remember,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t make any more of your abortive parables. And don’t tell me again how things have come between you and the sky. I know you remember all our words for air, for weather, for the sensations of flight. Where are the human words? Do they have a name yet for that fall of fine ice?’
‘No,’ Xas said. Then, ‘Get your foot off me.’
‘Angels never forget anything,’ Lucifer said, vehement, then lifted his foot, sat down, and replaced the foot with a hand.
Xas had planned to slither off the cliff and perhaps that way escape. But he found himself caught again. The grass against his cheek was as dry as last year’s hay. Their scuffles had raised a cloud of dust, which hung around them, for there was very little wind on that headland, despite the downburst out to sea. There wasn’t a human habitation anywhere in sight, and they were in some place where the coast highway looped away from the sea, probably because the cliffs were subsiding. There was a stand of pines nearby, one tree with its roots bared and lying like glossy embroidery against the crumbling cliff face.
‘Shall we continue,’ Lucifer said, and gave Xas a good hard shake. ‘You went to Heaven to read the destroyed page of Leon Jodeau’s suicide letter. Someone objected to you being there, and injured you.’
‘Why do you want to tell me this?’
‘Perhaps I mean to tell God, not you.’
Xas shut his eyes for a moment, and gave in. ‘It was Michael who injured me,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the first time. In 1819 I stole into Heaven to see Sobran’s daughter, Nicolette. She was only seven when she died. I promised Sobran I’d visit her. Michael caught me when I was leaving; coming out of the crater lake of the volcano in Antarctica. He carried me down out of the sky and onto the icy granular dust of the dry valleys, where he battered my head on the ground till it bled, all the while promising that if I ever trespassed again he would break my skull open and eat anything he found there.’
Lucifer gave a faint chuckle, possibly amused by Michael’s use of ‘anything’ as a qualifier.
‘Michael tried to damage the signatures on my side, the entwined names, yours and God’s. I suppose he objected to the treaty. Anyway—when he caught me again in 1835 he did what he’d only tried to do the first time. He put his hand into my side.’
‘And you think that, in 1819, God stopped Michael because you were at that time still chaste?’
‘What makes you think I was still chaste in 1819?’
‘I’m only guessing.’
‘Then you must think it’s true that God let Michael half kill me in 1835 because I was unchaste.’
‘I think God can’t prevent His great archangels from murdering their brothers. He didn’t stop me. Or not soon enough. But even if God didn’t stop Michael from hurting you, He might easily have mended you, Xas.’
‘I know that.’
‘Once you were injured, why did you go to your lover?’
‘You mean, why did I go to Sobran rather than seeking help in Hell? I wanted to see him. I was dying and I wanted to see him once more.’
Lucifer nodded. Then he asked, again, ‘Why did I cut off your wings?’
‘God wanted me to live, but out of His presence. He grounded me. This is supposed to be my Purgatory. I’m supposed to repent. Repent loving Sobran.’
‘And Conrad Cole, and who knows how many others—since it’s chastity God requires from you, not that you withhold your heart.’
‘God asked you to cut off my wings.’
Lucifer said, ‘You think I’d do what God asked me to?’
Xas stared sullenly up at his brother.
Lucifer removed his hand and sat back. ‘Your lover did help you,’ he said. ‘Remember the book fountain?’
For the last two and a half millennia Hell had been getting a copy of any written document copied more than ten times. Xas had heard Lucifer describe the arrangement as, on God’s part, something like the prosecution letting the defence know what evidence it has—a courtesy, and a legal formality. In Hell there was a kind of spring where books and papers appeared. They appeared in one place and pushed away what was already lying there, so that it looked as if books were bubbling up out of the rock. Fallen angels were always at the spring, waiting for news and entertainment. They took turns looking at newspaper headlines and pamphlets and playbills and sheet music. They kept up with what was going on.
Lucifer said, ‘In September of 1835 one of my brothers brought me a sheet of paper, printed on one side only, a rush job. It read: “Father, Xas—once your servant—is sorely injured and will die, if he is not already dead. Father, all things are possible for you. Save him. If he has sinned or led me to sin let him at least live to make amends.” The message was signed “Sobran Jodeau”, and under it was an address: “Xas is at Château Vully near the village of Aluze, on the banks of the Saône.”
‘I gathered then that you had told your friend how human writings found their way to both Hell and Heaven, how what’s reproduced goes to Hell, while only destroyed originals go to Heaven. Because an address was included in the notice I reasoned that I was the intended recipient of the page. God wouldn’t require directions.
‘I’m sure Jodeau had prayed over your bleeding body. I’m sure he petitioned God, no matter what he must have believed about the sin of a man lying with an angel. And God didn’t respond. So Jodeau sent a letter to a printer in Chalon-sur-Saône, perhaps the person who made labels for the Château’s wine bottles. The printer’s name and address appeared in fine print—a single block in the composite—at the foot of the notice.
‘Jodeau knew enough about your history to know that you were as much mine as God’s, and that if God didn’t seem to want to help you, then perhaps I would.
‘When I got Jodeau’s message, several days after you were injured, I immediately went where I was directed, to Château Vully, near the village of Aluze.
‘The Château had many outbuildings, but the trees were dying around only one of them, a coach house with a long gallery above it, a perfect place for a man to wait for an angel to visit him. When I saw that room I understood that you had a life together—you and Jodeau. God must have been with you, seen, known, not interfered. But of course He wouldn’t interfere, for the first clause of our treaty says that you can “go freely”.
‘God hadn’t interfered, but nor had He mended you, for when I arrived you were lingering at the point of death and trying to live. You had a hole in your side. I could see that your attacker had pushed a hand in there, perhaps seeking to hold your heart, to hold it still. But you’re so small—for an angel—and your ribs are close together, and well knit. Perhaps Michael’s hand didn’t fit. Or perhaps his violence was half-hearted. I don’t know.
‘Your heart had stopped beating because you had no blood left to pump. But you weren’t yet dead, and you were struggling to live. That’s why the trees were dying. Jodeau had wrapped himself about you. He was semi-comatose with exhaustion and grief. Around the bed where you and he were lying I found a dozen dead and dying sheep and goats. The animals were tethered to the frame of the bed. There was a woman sitting on the stairs down to the coach house, a friend of Jodeau’s, a clearly intelligent woman who, observing how the life was draining out of everything around you, had supplied the sheep and goats hoping you’d drain them instead of her friend.’
‘Aurora de Valday,’ Xas said, ‘Sobran’s employer. She was extraordinary. She found her friend clasping a dying angel and acted intelligently and collectedly.’
‘That’s why I gave her my pearls,’ Lucifer said, then laughed and added, ‘Also to make her feel compromised and uneasy.’ He went on, ‘Aurora, though shaken, was helpful. When I asked her to, she brought me candles, and knives, and needles and thread. Jodeau was useless and irrational—though I confess I didn’t command him to be calm. I let him feel his natural terror. He seemed to think I meant to carry your corpse away with me.
‘Before I laid a finger on you, I had a word with God. The double doors of the gallery were ajar. They opened on to empty air about twenty feet above a pit of sand, and hot cobblestones, and young lindens with dying foliage. God was there, but because you were nearly dead there was a kind of cloud over God’s presence, like a cataract.
‘It was over a thousand years since I’d been in His presence. You see, I’d kept away from you. Even in Hell, where God wasn’t, I’d kept away. I was unused to God, and I—’ Lucifer broke off and shook his head. ‘I hurried. When I spoke to God I was in a hurry to get out of His presence again. I thought we were having a consultation, and failed to hear Him telling me what would happen. That’s what God deals in: What will happen.
‘I said, “Do you mean to let Xas die?” And God said, “I mean to have you save him.” And I imagined that it was a test. God hadn’t lifted a finger to save you, but I was to raise myself to the task. I’d have to sew up the wound in your side, tell you to live, and stay with you for a time to make sure the telling would take.
‘And that is what I did. But I believed that God meant to make me feel that if I kept you alive then that was proof I wanted to keep you near me—a table at which He and I could one day sit down together. And because I believed that, I cut off your wings so that you couldn’t come near me again. I crippled you. I left you in the world of surfaces with only the remainder of your body.’
Xas felt numb and stupid. He thought that Lucifer was lying, not about what had happened, but why he was telling the story. Lucifer had said ‘He’ of God and ‘you’ of him. Lucifer had been talking to him, not to God.