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here’s the thing, Faulkner realizes, much later, after the dust has settled and his blisters are starting to scab. The worst thing that ever could have happen to my faith was becoming a prophet.
- well, maybe that wasn’t precisely true. The prophet gig wasn’t so bad. It was the Katabasian’s seat that really fucked him over.
- it started with his homecoming - the triumphal entrance into the chapel in Paraclete’s Gulch, his victorious return to the Parish, battered, bruised, and travel-worn, but with revelation dancing on his tongue and the Withertide burned into the back of his eyelids. It was the moment he’d been imagining since before he and Carpenter ever set foot in Bellwethers, before they even knew the Mark had been revealed at last.
- (even as a child, before the water-tower, before the Trawler-man called him to a life devoted to the service of his brackish river’s ways, Faulkner retreated into fantasies wherein he played the role of the leading man, the prophet, the hero, the messiah. the savior.
- At the time, he hadn’t known the shape of his calling, or who exactly he’d been saving. It hadn’t been made known to him yet. At the time, it hadn’t been that important.
- All he’d needed to know was that the eyes of the people were upon him, their breath stolen from their lungs in anticipation of what he might reveal to them, and every tongue would cry out in glad hosannas when he had spoken.)
- (even as a child, before the water-tower, before the Trawler-man called him to a life devoted to the service of his brackish river’s ways, Faulkner retreated into fantasies wherein he played the role of the leading man, the prophet, the hero, the messiah. the savior.
- for one shining moment, there in the grotto of the Gulch, Faulkner was exactly who his god had been called to be.
- the problem had been the moment after that one, when Mason had bundled him into his office, shook him down for information, threatened him in one breath and bribed him with unthinkable luxuries in another.
- Faulkner knew that he had always been a bit of an idealist, a zealot - maybe even a little puritanical at times - but he had never been naive. He knew there was more to the Katabasians’ council than a the fellowship of the brethren of like-minded believers. He knew it meant playing politics, and projecting strength, and not being afraid to get your hands dirty. He never thought that believing in a god meant being credulous when it came to said god’s servants.
- but he hadn’t known how easy it would be to fall into their degenerate and faithless ways. He hadn’t known how good it would feel to be heeded, catered to, appeased, appreciated. He hadn’t known how hard it would be to hold himself to a higher standard.
- (I did hold myself to a higher standard, he found him telling Carpenter’s ghost when she dropped by his chambers after hours. She liked showing up when he was sick at heart — in the middle of a good cry, or chewing over a setback, or when he was coming out of a bender and surrounded by the detritus of ecstasy, both religious and material (an indulgence he allowed himself to blot out the guilt when it rose up in his throat late at night, sick and hot and thick). I’m not like the other Katabasians. I still do hold myself to a higher standard, I swear. I’m going to make a difference. I’m a prophet. A reformer. I have to be on the inside so that I can change things for better, reshape the church in the Trawler-man’s image. You just have to give me some credit, Carpenter. It doesn’t happen overnight. Give me some time.
- Carpenter’s ghost never speaks to him, when she deigns to appear to him in the witching hours. Nor does her appearance conform to what the Silt Verses teach about the river’s treasured dead. Those who rise from the garden below are meant to have been changed, flesh transformed to be like unto that of the Trawler-man’s angels, but Carpenter is a stubborn bastard, and she looks the same as she always had. Dressed in a blue-collar Peninsulan uniform of nondescript flannel and worn duck canvas, with her updelta features arranged in a flat scowl. She didn’t even have the courtesy to have turned ashen or something. Her face was the same brownclay sepia as always.
- (it was the scowl that got on his nerves, the skepticism she had towards him that was never far off from contempt. It wasn’t something like there was something wrong with her face. Carpenter was perfectly capable of smiling pleasantly like a normal person, he’d noticed during their pilgrimage. She made normal expressions when she was talking to civilians, when they were in public, undercover. She just hadn’t bothered to wear the mask of polite society in front of him.)
- he knows much better than to mention any of this in public, of course. He speaks her name with the reverence due to a martyr, and he murmurs ‘may she know rest in the garden below’ at appropriate intervals.
- he’s drowning before he realizes he’s in way over his head.
- after his trials and tribulations in the wilderness, he comes back to the Gulch with a clutch of loyalist disciples, young and hungry and rabid and ready to turn the church inside out at his word, and an auxiliary contingent of new converts, perhaps less schooled in the ways of the Parish’s teachings (though Faulkner has seen fit to teach them what he thinks they most need to know), unlearned, but eager, and numerous, and absolute in their allegiance to the prophet who had seen fit to missionize to them, to bring them the good news. They arrive at Katabasian Mason’s doorstep not as occupiers, exactly, but the message is clear enough to anyone: the tides have shifted, and it’s Faulkner’s tide that’s rising.
- fool that Faulkner is, in this moment, he thinks he’s won.
- Carpenter would have been on the lookout for something like this. He wanted to be the reformer, the prophet, the miracle-worker, the mouth that speaks. But it was Carpenter — it had always been Carpenter, who learned the arts of river crossings and church politics alike at her grandmother’s knee — who knew how to read the tides best, and listen.
- At their worship service that evening, Katabasian Poole announces that a new scripture has been added to the Verses. A prophecy. It’s unorthodox, perhaps, but the council is convicted of its veracity, and wish to share this revelation with all the Children of the Water forthwith.
- Faulkner is sure it will be his gospel, and he is more than half-right.
- The lector stands in front of the congregation and reads out his testimony, how he and the martyred Sister Carpenter bore witness to the miracle of the Withertide, and uncovered the Withermark, and how he brought it back to their people.
- But it doesn’t end there. The lector drones on, and Faulkner realizes with mounting horror that these are no longer his words, the words he’d chosen so carefully, that had been revealed to him by their god.
- these words must have either been revealed by their god to somebody else — or, even worse, the Katabasians just made it up, and the Trawler-man was powerless to stop them from defiling his own holy script with their self-dealing.
- the lector tells them that the Prophet Faulkner went out into the world, and made disciples of the wayward faiths, and when he was done, he returned in power and might, and sat among the brethren in their refuge.
- the lector tells them that though the Prophet’s heart had been afflicted and his mind had been clouded, as though by sand floating in thick water, the Trawler-man in his great mercy had stilled the waters of the Prophet’s soul, and allowed the knowledge of the Withermark to return to him.
- the lector tell the crowd that the Prophet Faulkner had realized that his soul was in need of purification, and so he turned his face away from the river, and walked alone into the desert, that he might learn true deliverance and repentance from the drylands, and take wisdom from the scarcity of the river’s wellspring, rather than its abundance.
- the lector tells them that then, after a certain period of wandering, the Prophet Faulkner went to the council of the Katabasians, and, in private, gave the High Katabasian Mason the true marks of the Withertide, and once he had done this worthy deed, he rested, and walked with the Trawler-man, and then he walked no more, and the church was whole once more, and grew in power, majesty, and bounty.
- the lector tells them, ‘no creature nor child of the water shall know the day or hour that this prophecy shall come to pass, but it shall come to pass, and the river’s rise will see it accomplished. So it is written.’
- the congregation intones, ‘so shall it be. Hosanna.’
- Barely, just barely, Faulkner says it along with them.
- after his trials and tribulations in the wilderness, he comes back to the Gulch with a clutch of loyalist disciples, young and hungry and rabid and ready to turn the church inside out at his word, and an auxiliary contingent of new converts, perhaps less schooled in the ways of the Parish’s teachings (though Faulkner has seen fit to teach them what he thinks they most need to know), unlearned, but eager, and numerous, and absolute in their allegiance to the prophet who had seen fit to missionize to them, to bring them the good news. They arrive at Katabasian Mason’s doorstep not as occupiers, exactly, but the message is clear enough to anyone: the tides have shifted, and it’s Faulkner’s tide that’s rising.
- With weeping, and gnashing of teeth, Faulkner leaves the Gulch and sets out into the wilderness that very night.
- As he trudges all unwilling into the desert, the sound of the White Gull River winding through the canyon gets fainter, fainter, fainter, until it’s gone.