Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Then I looked and saw a blue bird. And its rider’s name was death and Hades followed him.”

“Have you ever seen a blue bird?”

Brother Joseph looked up from the book in his lap. “Nobody’s ever seen a blue bird,” he said. “If you were a blue bird would you live in a place like this?”

“I dunno. Maybe. It’s just… nevermind.”

“What is it?”

“Have you seen any bird that could carry a human rider?” The birds that scrabbled around the monastery were uniformly brown, some small, streaked and scrappy, others the size of a dinner plate, round and speckled and decent eating.

“It’s not a human rider though. It’s death.”

“It’s death in a human form.”

“Well, who’s to say death in a human form behaves by normal human physics?”

“I guess. It’s just weird, is all.”

Brother Joseph carefully closed the book, folding his finger inside it to keep his place. “These are the scriptures,” he said. Though unto this point he had been very patient, he added, “Novice.”

Quin turned toward the front of the room again. His face was hot. “Of course.”

“May I continue?” 

“Please. My apologies.”

Brother Joseph reopened the book and smoothed his hand gently down the spine. “The bird and its rider instructed humanity to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears,” he continued. He had a kind voice but when he read this stuff, the dark stuff, it got hushed and low. “This gave them the power to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. And the bird was transformed into a black sigil…”

Though Brother Joseph had said there was no such thing, Quin had indeed seen a blue bird, in the place where he had come from. There were several kinds of blue birds in that place. One was small and had a reddish belly. The other was much larger and capable of expressing a litany of strange noises. As a child he had frequently studied the habits of birds in the company of the other village children. As they got older some of the other kids started making slingshots and that was when Quin stopped looking for birds with them. At first he had tried to draw them away from the birds but they caught on to that pretty quickly, though not before beating him up. It was staggering when he eventually discovered that the larger and louder blue bird actually was not blue but merely reflected the shades of the sky.

His parents had by this point noticed his sensitivity, which his father was quick to blame on his mother. Forget how he was raised, she had to have done something to him in the womb by black magic. Talk was general when they thought he was asleep about what could possibly be done with him.

Much as it had done then he allowed his brain to sort of slide into the rhythmic cadence of what Brother Joseph was saying and not the words. What would have happened if a blue bird with a human rider was given power over humanity to kill it with death? How could they possibly travel far enough, quickly enough to do such a thing? He guessed it was a metaphor whose significance would become clear eventually to the sufficiently faithful. The bird’s transformation into the black sigil seemed to confirm this. Maybe the sigil was meant to be the cross. He almost said that aloud but Brother Joseph was reading on. He listened to the melody in the words as they blended and blurred.

Brother Joseph was meant to be teaching Quin to read and helping him prepare for the lenten vigil in the desert which would allow him to take his vows and become a member of the monastery for life. Instead they spent much of their time together becoming friends, something which was not necessarily discouraged but certainly viewed as strange. Brother Joseph was only a little older than Quin, and he had spent his whole life here. The furthest away he had been was a day’s ride on the horsecart with Father Kershaw to trade for healing herbs in Pecos. The result was that he knew the desert about as well as he knew the Bible and was very curious about the Massachusetts territory, a place about which he had only heard legend. To wit, it took Quin half an afternoon to describe the ocean in a way that Brother Joseph understood.

“It’s like the whole desert is reflecting the sky,” he tried. “But the sea is darker than sky.”

“The water’s blue?”

“Some days it’s gray or black. When you pick it up in your hands, it has no color, like any water.”

“But you can’t drink it.”

“No, it’ll kill you to drink it. It’s got salt in it.”

“How does the salt get in it?”

“That, I have no idea. God must have put it there.”

He was fairly new at the thinking of chalking everything up to god. There were of course people at home who believed in god but there was nowhere like this place where people were called to devote their entire lives to the study of god and his various cryptic behaviors and the various ways humanity had disappointed and betrayed him. The monastery, Brother Joseph explained, existed as a sort of reliquary of known evidence of the last time humanity had disappointed god, when the last continental civilization had collapsed several generations ago. The monks of this order understood their purpose was to prevent this from happening again, but they were still trying to figure out what exactly had happened at all. This was about as difficult for Brother Joseph to explain as it was difficult for Quin to explain the sea.

“That’s why you’re here,” Brother Joseph said once.

Quin wasn’t sure what to say except “Really?”

“People like you are called here to help us solve the mystery.”

All you could do was smile and nod when you heard something like that. The truth was he had been years on the road, hungry, tired, and afraid, carrying nothing, because anything he had would be stolen, everything he had had had been stolen, and else besides, things he didn’t even know he had had been stolen, he had been stolen, somebody had just carried off Quin from the Massachusetts territory over their shoulder like a sack of grain, not that he was worth anywhere near the value of a sack of grain in these times. This person who was sitting in the courtyard in the monastery in the desert had followed the spire of morning cookfire smoke across the desert to this place for a cup of cool wellwater and a hot meal and had found kind and gentle faces and had asked to stay. And they said, sure you can stay, you can stay forever, as long as you go back out into the desert alone for one month.

“It’s nothing to worry about at all,” said Joseph, which of course turned out to be hilariously untrue. “God’s watching over you.”

“God must have had a really good eye on you. Because you did it when you were just a kid, Brother Ray said!”

“Well, god made sure I was born in the desert so I know it like the back of my hand. And god made you a wanderer!”

Quin internally cringed. Maybe he shouldn’t have said it that way; it was giving people the picture of a robust and capable survivor instead of the correct image of a barely-person who had just doggedly managed to not die somehow.

“You survived out there for years,” Brother Joseph said with a little bit of healthy respect. “You can make it another month.”

“I’ll try.”

“God will help you,” said Joseph. He seemed pretty sure of that. And anyway, something like that happened.

--

Since time immemorial, every lenten season, each novice—there were only five that year—was assigned to upkeep and contemplation at one of the altars about a day’s walk from the monastery. They were meant to repair any damage done to the altar by weather, animals, or travelers over the interceding year, fast during daylight hours, and contemplate god, humanity, the scripture, the Collapse, the desert—anything to unfocus the mind from the sun and the hunger. Father Kershaw came around every three or four days with food and water, in case they were unable to find any on their own. After all, nobody actually wanted the novices to die. They were just meant to get close enough to evoke an understanding of the divine suffering of Christ. If they withstood the monthlong vigil, they were allowed to take the oath to become a brother of the monastery for life. Food, water, clothing, protection, a bed, work, healing, brotherhood, until the day you died. It was a pretty good deal.

Quin was assigned to do his lenten vigil at an altar high on an exposed hill to the west. From there, the monastery’s walls and tower were visible in the mornings and evenings when the haze was low. The hill was long and flattish and piled with scree and flat stones. Quin followed a goat track up and down the hill to the road when he saw the dust cloud of Father Kershaw’s wagon coming. Stepping off the path was like wading through mud, if rock was made of water.

The repairs to the altar itself were done by day three. Generations of novices and travelers had built a structure around the altar that would provide shade in the hotter half of the day. As soon as the shade hit the altar in the afternoon, Quin would nestle up into it and try to sleep. In the mornings he gathered water from his dew caches, hunted for snakes and lizards, and watched the wagon track for Father Kershaw’s dust. Each night he busied himself exploring the hillside for edible cactus, fortifying the shade structure, studying constellations, phases of the moon, and the movements of bats, watching and listening for the wolves and coyotes and mountain lions he knew were out there. He tried to meditate on god and the Collapse but didn’t really know enough about either.

“You’re smart,” said Father Kershaw at the end of the first week, handing off a bucket of the monastery’s fresh wellwater and an envelope of dehydrated gruel. “Nobody else has figured out sleeping in the afternoon yet.”

Quin felt about as smart as Father Kershaw had said he was, and dared to imagine maybe he had this whole sworn brother of the monastery thing in the bag, until ten days later just after dawn. The most consequential event of his life began when he simply picked up a choice flat rock to add to the shade structure and found curled up underneath it and very surprised to have been revealed a copperhead snake as thick as his arm. He quickly stepped back, uncareful about where he was putting his feet, floundered in the heavy scree, and fell. Suddenly he was tumbling down the hillside along with half the hillside.

The cloud of dust was large enough to be seen from the monastery’s latrine by Father Kershaw, who immediately hiked up his undergarments, got the horsecart on the donkey, and rode out to the west.

It was maybe only ninety seconds after he had started falling when Quin came around on a flat black scrape of exposed obsidian. All around him rock and scree was still sliding. Almost a waterfall sound… a pebbles on the beach in a storm sound, being drawn into the centrifugal eroding cycle of the waves. When he opened his eyes he saw through the gummy dust in his eyelashes that the rockslide had changed the shape of the hill. Between here and the altar at the crest was a divot in the piled rock and scree that had not been there before on his nightly investigations. At the base of the divot a cavern had opened up in the earth. Dust was rising out of it, and a cold saline smell, the smell of long-empty subterranean places. He could feel pain but not so much to chase away the excitement of discovery. Then he sat up. When he did he felt something so horrible it evaded the capability of human language.

When he looked down he saw he had been lying on top of a jagged upright piece of broken obsidian that was covered in his blood. The flat black slate he was lying on was covered in a layer of shattered glass and until seconds previous that piece had been inside his body. Indeed it was something outside human language that escaped him. He clapped a hand against his side and felt already warm lifeblood pulsing into his burlap habit. Thoughts were coming to him in quick, jagged fragments. Day’s walk. Brutal sun. Little water. And he knew enough to understand that a wound in the gut meant death by infection.

He stood up unsteadily, hardly noticing the glass shards that pierced his hands and feet. He had to get off the slate and out of the sun. It wasn’t necessarily true—hadn’t he just seen a copperhead snake?—but his panicked mind fixated on the idea that whatever was inside the cavern must be less dangerous than the rockfall and the sun and the glass that he knew was outside it. He stumbled across the glassy slate toward the cavern. Inside its dark mouth the cool milky blackness was a blessed relief in which he would happily have curled up and died until by some last little waterfall of scree or else the hand of god touched upon the scale—

The sudden blast of light was blinding. He fell to his knees and pressed his head to the floor and tried to supplicate as best he could though in doing so was obliged to peel the sealing hand away from the wound in his side. He recited the prayers they had taught him as quickly and precisely as he could. Our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done…

When he lifted his head again he wholly expected to see god. Instead beyond the burnt flare of vivid color in his eye were more of those strange obsidian-glass slates. The light was coming from them, from somewhere between the glass and the obsidian. The light was of a texture he had never before conceived—different from the sun, or the moon, or a candle, or a reflection of any of those lights on water or snow. This was a pale, cold light, and there was pale, cold color to it, first white, then a green-gray, then an eerie blue. The blue seemed to focus and congeal into a roundish shape which slowly featured. It took him a moment to recognize it for what it was. A bird, drawn by a child.

I looked and saw a blue bird and his rider’s name was death…

He thought his jaw might have dropped. His heart fell clean through him and through the floor. He tried some prayers again but on the light-slate words were coming out of the blue bird. Words were pouring in clumps out of the blue bird. There was nothing he wanted to do less than this, wasn’t even sure if he could, but again he struggled to his feet. There was blood all over his habit down the right side where the wound was and his feet were bloody and he knew logically that every step should hurt but somehow there was no pain. He stepped across the cool stone floor to the light-slates that showed the blue bird of the apocalypse. The words were coming far too quickly to be read by somebody who was only just learning to read at age twenty-three. He focused as hard as he could through the panic and the slamming heartbeat and the strange light that burned his eyes. The following words developed:

just setting

someone die

delete your

more red

be there

cocaine back

wood chipper

He did not exactly know how he got out of there. The sunlight outside seemed a pale imitation of the light from the slates. He stumbled barefoot backward through the shattered glass. Half ran half rolled down the endless hot scree toward the wagon track back to the monastery. Dimly he remembered he wasn’t supposed to abandon his post during the vigil. He looked up the slope again where a plume of dust was marking his stumbling passage down. Looked down the road toward the shimmering mirage beyond which was home. Looked down into the dusty track, where there was already a small burgundy pool of his own blood congealing. “Oh,” he said. Then he fainted.

--

One of the things that later struck Brother Joseph as being possibly divinely fated was the fact that he had been assigned to infirmary duty on the day that Father Kershaw brought Quin back from his vigil nearly dead. He had spent that morning administering to another novice who had come back early from his own vigil with painful burns and sores from the sun and the windblown sand. Brother Ray came down after matins looking for relief from his lumbago, and Abbot Loren himself dropped by later complaining of a sore throat. Joseph scraped some honey from the storeroom into a vial for him to stir into his hot lemon water, and politely did not speculate about the Abbot’s fire and brimstone sermon on the prior Sunday as a possible cause of the malady.

In the early afternoon he remade the beds in the sickrooms and swept the floors of dust and was doing inventory of the storeroom supplies when he saw in the corner window a thin plume of dust coming down the road from the west. By the time of day and direction he knew it was certainly Father Kershaw and wondered if he might have another depleted novice with him. After all, the dust plume was moving at a fairly quick clip. It had been remarkably windy that lenten season which created difficult survival conditions in the desert unless you were a lizard. Even the quail hid in the scrubby washes, so much so that even thinking of quail his stomach rumbled.

Joseph had gone through his own vigil and become a sworn brother of the monastery nearly ten years ago, when he was only fifteen. Some of the older brothers told him that, according to all the known records, he was one of the youngest to ever take the vows. He had been born in this place, which happened exceedingly rarely, and he had known when he was ready. It was different for people who had known places other than the desert and comforts other than god.

Counting the small jars of comfrey ointment, Joseph wondered if he ought to go out and meet Father Kershaw. A small voice was telling him to. Though he had long since learned that this small voice must not be god’s because not everything it said was godly, he was sure this time that he should heed it. He reminded himself that possibly somebody would come down in an emergency. But he would only be gone five minutes. He waited until he could distinguish in the window that the rider was indeed Father Kershaw on his rickety horsecart before he left the storeroom and headed toward the front gate.

When he got there Father Kershaw had already pulled the horsecart up to the door. He had been riding just about as fast as he could and the poor old donkey was in a lather. “Thank god,” said Father Kershaw, seeing him. The uncharacteristic panic in his face twisted something in Brother Joseph’s gut. He reached heavenward for steadiness. “Come help me with him, quickly,” said Father Kershaw.

Down in the bed of the horsecart was Quin. The twist in Brother Joseph’s gut twisted further. His face was so bloodless that at first Joseph thought he must be dead. All the blood that had left his face had come out of him through his side and through his hands and feet. Father Kershaw had torn his burlap habit here and there to create pressure bandages for the worst wounds so that his scabby knees were visible, pale as the strange fishes in the desert caves. Joseph called silently for the intercession of his favorite saint, Catherine, and her unflappable strength and wisdom. He reached into the horsecart and lifted Quin up. Probably because he was supposed to have been fasting he seemed to weigh almost nothing. He hardly felt heavier than the sack of bedsheets that had come up clean from the laundry earlier. Brother Joseph couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but his skin was feverishly warm.

“Let me help you, son,” said Father Kershaw.

“I’ve got him. Help me with the doors?”

Father Kershaw did. They went stumbling down the darkened halls toward the infirmary where the new clean sheets in the brightest sickroom were immediately stained with dust and blood. Father Kershaw wasted no time in stripping off Quin’s habit so he could tend to the wound in his side, which still bled sluggishly when he pulled away the makeshift bandage. In the heat and sunlight blood had dried dark and flaky all over his skin not entirely covering a cacophony of purplish bruises.

“Get the yarrow and the comfrey salve from the storeroom,” Father Kershaw said. “And clean bandages. Then go to the kitchens and get a flask of boiled water and moldy bread—I know they’ve got it. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Go. Hurry!”

Brother Joseph did. His heart was beating quickly. He brought the yarrow and comfrey and bandages first and by the time he got back from the kitchens with the water and the bread Father Kershaw had scraped together the standard salve they used in the monastery for wounds. He instructed Brother Joseph to pour the flask of warm water into a dish and clean away the blood he could so that was what Brother Joseph did. “What else can I do,” he asked.

Father Kershaw was smearing the yarrow and comfrey salve onto the moldiest piece of bread. “Pray,” he said.

Brother Joseph did. Catherine was his favorite saint because she had endured unimaginable torment in the name of the truth, and she was the patron of people who were dying. Because of that, it was the name that the older brothers who had been here when she had come had given his mother. At twenty-four years old, Joseph had probably now outlived her. He silently asked again for her intercession—Saint Catherine, and his mother, who he had decided to believe was in heaven though it was highly likely she had never been baptized. A simple phrase entered his mind which he played with there silently like the words were prayer beads. Please help him come to you or give him back to me.

He helped Father Kershaw bind the weird poultice tightly against the wound in Quin’s side. “Now what,” he said.

“His hands and feet are badly torn up,” Father Kershaw said. “Get started cleaning and binding them. The comfrey and yarrow salve should do. I’m going to speak to the Abbot and I’ll be back to help you.”

On the way out the door he squeezed Brother Joseph’s shoulder so that there was a bloody handprint there later. Joseph hardly felt the touch. He had turned over Quin’s nearest hand and seen the shard of glass embedded in his palm. He looked up but Father Kershaw was gone. The room was still. Dust motes filtering in the square of light through the south-facing window.

Joseph carefully removed the glass from Quin’s palm. There were smaller shards around the heel of the hand, so that he went and got from the storeroom the tweezers that they normally used to remove splinters and cactus spines and porcupine quills from one another and the animals. He cleaned the blood away and smeared the wounds with the yarrow and comfrey salve and gently bound Quin’s hand in a clean bandage. Then he started on the other; there was glass in this hand too, and in his feet when Joseph got there. He had not ever seen this much glass in one place. Glass was precious; it was in a few relics and the chalice they drank out of on Sundays. He had never imagined that it might be so perilous when shattered. Where had it come from?

He poured the filthy water they’d used to clean most of the wounds out the window and replaced it in the dish with the last of the boiled water. He then used a fresh cloth to gently clean the dust and blood from the rest of Quin’s body. His breathing was visible now, because his bare chest was rising and falling. Time in the desert changed people; Joseph had only before seen Quin with a shaven face. Certainly not out of his habit with only a corner of the sheet pulled over the middle of his body to preserve his modesty. They were all scrawny, even the Abbot, these were scrawny times, a scrawny place. And bodies were nothing new—they cleaned each other when they died—except sometimes they were. This one had warm skin, freckles, birthmarks, some old scars. Lean muscle from all the wandering he sometimes talked about. Fine, dark body hair. Bones.

Joseph reminded himself there was nothing untoward about cleaning his friend. People were made in god’s image and so to admire a person was to admire god. Besides, the Virgin and Mary Magdalene had done something like this for Christ. Shamefully it was not until then that he began to put two and two together. The palms, the feet, the side…

The sunset light was filtering lazily in through the window now, red and gold. Maybe in the chapel somebody had pressed a heavenly chord on the organ or otherwise that was just happening in the recesses of the mind.

“What happened to you,” Joseph whispered. If Quin heard he could make no sign.

--

When he woke up at first Quin again thought he was dead and this was heaven. There was just the most beautiful picture of desert and sky through the thin window at the foot of the bed. It was a geometric wound of blue, the shape of the fractal stigmata in Christ’s side that Saint Thomas was poking in the old books. Not a cloud out there. No haze, even, so on earth it would have been the very early morning. That was the blue that got into things like the sea and the feathers of birds and people’s eyes —

Something loomed into his field of view. It was the concerned head of Brother Joseph. A cool hand pressed against his forehead and then a cool cloth. Quin couldn’t find it in him to be very upset that he wasn’t dead and this was not the visage of our lord and savior. He couldn’t find it in him to be anything at all.

“Don’t try to move,” Brother Joseph said. “You’re hurt.”

He tried to speak and couldn’t so Joseph placed the cloth into the basin of cool wellwater on the side table again and wrung a few drops into his mouth.

“The blue bird,” Quin managed to say somehow. He was beginning to understand where he was hurt. The fire cooking him was being kindled in his side. He remembered the rockslide in the scree, now, and the obsidian pieces. The dark little room that suddenly was not dark anymore. “I saw,” he tried to tell Brother Joseph, so that Brother Joseph could tell the Abbot if he was really dying, “I saw the blue bird.”

“Father Kershaw found you on the side of the wagon track,” Joseph explained. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You’re lucky to be as barely alive as you are.”

“I saw the blue bird,” Quin said again. Every time he said it it sounded stronger and hurt more. Eschewing all formality, he said, “Joe, listen to me.”

Maybe he was shocked to hear the name he must not have heard since he was a child. His nostrils flared. The warm hazel eyes were wary and frightened when they met Quin’s.

“There was a room up there on the hill. Under the scree.”

“A room?”

“There were all these flat black rocks. Obsidian with a glass layer over it.”

“We found glass in your feet,” Joseph said. “And your hands…”

“When the rocks slid, they hit something. And light, you know. Fiat lux. Like the sun hit a mirror, and then, in the black glass…”

“I’m not following.”

“In the black glass was the blue bird,” Quin said. Speaking hurt very badly now. “And the name of his rider was death.”

“I know Revelations,” Joseph said. “How was the bird inside the glass?”

He tried to say it was only a picture of a bird inside the glass but he was drifting, falling away.

“Q?” He had not heard that name since he was a child either. “Don’t go too far now…”

--

It was dark; there were stars in the wound window. And cold, though they had piled furs on him. Candlelight licking up the walls showed shadows in the door so as he had when he was a child he closed his eyes again so that this could have been a dream.

“His fever’s broken,” Brother Joseph was saying softly. “I didn’t think he’d survive.”

“You took good care of him.” That was Father Kershaw. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

“He woke up earlier, and was saying all sorts of nonsensical things.”

“People do, when they’re very sick.”

“Did you happen to go take a look at where he was?”

“No. Should I?”

“He said he saw the blue bird from Revelations in an obsidian glass.”

Father Kershaw took one of his ponderous breaths. “He does say strange things sometimes,” he admitted. “He told Brother Morgan that his parents sold him to a fisherman who scraped giant insects off the floor of the ocean.”

Brother Joseph’s response was indignant. “Who among us can suggest we’ve seen all of god’s creation? Maybe there are giant insects on the floor of the ocean.”

“I’m not sure about that, Brother Joseph.”

“At the very least,” Joseph replied, thoughtfully changing the subject, “someone ought to go back to make sure the altar is safe. He said there was a rockslide.”

“I admit I have been wondering how somebody, even somebody so young and stupid, gets glass in their feet and hands from a rockslide.”

“Well maybe we ought to go find out.”

He knew he should get up and try to stop them. But the bed and the warmth and the pain were pulling him back down into oblivion.

--

Days later, uncountable drifting days, he still couldn’t move much yet and could barely eat. His fingers were behaving funny because the glass that had gotten stuck in his hand had severed some of the relevant internal machinery. Pissing was torture and shitting even more so. But he had an idea.

Brother Ray was assigned to duty in the infirmary that week. His was one of the smiling faces that had convinced Quin to try and stay here forever when he had lurched over the threshold in search of food and water a few months previous. When he came in with a cup of broth in the morning Quin made his voice as small as he could, which wasn’t hard these days. “Brother Ray,” he said, “would you please read to me from the Bible?”

Brother Ray was so pleased to have been asked that the smile threatened to split his face. “Of course, little brother,” he said. Quin was so pleased to be called that that the smile threatened to split his face too. “Any particular book?”

“Brother Joseph was reading to me about the apocalypse bird.”

“That’s a little bit frightening for you while you’re still getting better.”

“I know. But…” He wrestled with how to tell Brother Ray the truth without telling him the truth. “Brother Joseph said the apocalypse bird has the mystery of what happened to the world before. And our order is supposed to figure that out. And I just nearly killed myself trying to become part of the order. So I wonder…”

He watched the understanding pass over Brother Ray’s face. Brother Ray was old enough to be Quin’s grandfather, one of the oldest men he’d ever seen in a world not conducive to dotage. He had probably seen many, many novices pass through this place, seeking answers, or brotherhood.

“I understand, little brother,” said Brother Ray. “I’ll be back.” When he returned he had another cup of broth and a book with him, and he sat down with a blanket over his lap and read for many hours, until it was dark outside. Quin was desperately hungry and exhausted and everything hurt more than he had ever thought himself capable of enduring but he shoved all that toward the back of his mind and listened very carefully.

--

Joseph came back again in a few days’ time, and found him sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet tentatively resting on the floor. Brother Ray had given him some clean clothes to put on which was a great relief after many days of feeling very undressed. “Are you feeling better,” Joseph said brightly.

Quin wiggled his toes against the cool flagstones. “Mostly,” he said.

“Come take a look at something.”

Joseph had to help down the hall. His feet were still tender and every step on the smooth tiles twinged up from his heel into his ribs.

“Father Kershaw and I went up to the altar where you were on your vigil,” Brother Joseph explained as they descended into the basement. “You made an incredible discovery.”

“Really?”

“It seems like it was some kind of underground altar pre-Collapse.”

Several of the other young brothers were in the subterranean library, bustling around the tables of relics and shelves of books. Quin had never been down here before, even though one of the first things he had learned about this place was that it was an important repository of pre-Collapse information. Almost everything that had ever been written down in the world before had been erased in the Great Deletion. All the books in the basement were copies made from memory when it was clear that humanity’s information stores as they had been known were not coming back. Including the Bible itself, or so legend had it. The monastery would feed and water and shelter anybody who came along and always had novices who had not yet taken the vows but only sworn brothers were allowed into the subterranean library. Perhaps that was why when everybody saw Quin and Joseph on the stairs they froze. Somebody crossed himself. Then they seemed to remember that was rude and bustled on again. The thing they were bustling around was a display of pieces of the obsidian-glass slates on one of the tables of relics, carefully maneuvering them in the flickering candlelight.

“Is that—”

“That’s all the slates from the room you found,” Brother Joseph explained. “They’re working off a sketch I made. We got all the slates we could from outside, as well, but those were damaged in the rockfall. They’ll be harder to piece back together.”

Joseph and Father Kershaw had even salvaged some of the ribbons that had been draped between the slates and the walls of the little room, though the way they had arranged them was perhaps more decorative than Quin remembered.

“It looks beautiful,” said Quin. He didn’t want to hurt the feelings of Joseph and Father Kershaw who after all had gone through all the trouble to bring the relics here and to whom certainly they were far more significant than the things that had scared you out of your wits and nearly killed you. But beautiful was of course not what it was supposed to be. It had been a purely functional room, which of course did not preclude that it had been an altar. An altar of the apocalypse bird. A chill went up through him that Joseph must have felt because he was all but holding Quin on his feet. What would you do at an altar to the apocalypse bird? How would you pray? In the scripture Brother Ray had read to him, people pre-Collapse prayed to the apocalypse bird by killing for their perceived truth. Maybe this was a place where the warriors had gathered their strength to do such a thing.

“Does it look like you remember?”

Brother Joseph helped him get closer to the reliquary table. The slates were laid down flat roughly in the orientation they had been in in the altar-room, festooned with the ribbons. Somehow only one of the slates was cracked. Some people might have called that a miracle, what with the rockfall and the transit back to the monastery over the bumpy wagon road. Each slate was accompanied by a matching object that Quin had only roughly registered when he had been in the room itself. They were long shallow boxes containing tiny squares, each one printed with a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, or another unknown symbol.

“What do you think these are,” he asked Brother Joseph.

“It reminded Brother Armstrong of the printing press in the cloister in Denver,” Joseph said. “Working theory is, a meditative device for encoding prayer, like rosary beads.”

Quin remembered the words pouring out of the blue bird. “Huh,” he said.

“Something wrong?”

“May I touch the relics?”

“Seeing as you discovered them, of course you can. But I don’t know if you want to—your hands.”

They were still bandaged. People kept looking at them. At him. Mystified. For the first time he understood if he was down here at all he had to have passed the test. He was supposed to be their brother now.

“These were standing on their edge,” Quin told Joseph. “They were propped up, you know, the way Abbot Loren has the Bible on the lectern?”

Joseph motioned over Brother Paulus and they together lifted the smallest unbroken slate, not because it was heavy, but because it was precious, and carefully turned it vertically. “Steeper,” Quin said. “They were nearly vertical.” With care he knelt—a few days previous he had found an undiscovered piece of glass in his knee—and told them to stop when the slate was positioned correctly to his memory.

“We’re making stands for them now in the woodshop,” Brother Paulus explained as Joseph helped Quin up. “We’ll make sure they can prop them up at the right angle.”

The obsidian slates from outside the room were on a nearby table, mostly in pieces. Something twinged sympathetically in Quin’s hand at the sight of all the shattered glass. “We’re putting these back together as best we can,” Paulus said. “These are just… strange materials that we rarely ever see, even in relics. I’m trying to get dispensation from Abbot Loren to take apart the shattered altar-slate so we can see what’s inside it. But these—you can see the layers. Look at this.”

Carefully, because this was also precious though also because it was covered in jagged glass, Brother Paulus picked up one of the obsidian flakes and placed it in Quin’s bandaged hand. It was about the size of his palm. It would have looked like a blacker version of one of the flaky slates from the coast where he came from—warm, dark, speckled with mica—except that it was woven with threads of silver. It must have been carven by a master craftsman or mined from a heavenly quarry. This, unlike the functional altar room, was beautiful. He could almost forgive it for shattering and hurting him so badly.

Brother Joseph was observing the slate flake over Quin’s shoulder. “What do you think it is,” he asked Brother Paulus.

Quin was not sure how to feel about all these faces which had heretofore only been kind or patient suddenly turning toward him with awe. “We’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Brother Paulus.

--

When he was able to leave the infirmary, he was also able to move his meager things out of the dormitory where he had been sleeping and into his own cell. It was only big enough for a bed and a night table and a west-facing window with a small desk under it where he guessed he was meant to be studying the scriptures, but it was more space than he had ever had to himself in his life. Even in his family home he and his parents and siblings had slept on woven mats on the floor around the hearth, closer together in winter and further apart in summer.

He had almost nothing of his own to set up in the little room. Father Kershaw had given him a small jar of salve made from yarrow and calendula with which he was meant to be putting on the still-healing wounds; this he placed on the nightstand. His spare habit and undergarments he folded and tucked into one of the desk drawers. He had nothing left that he had carried with him from the Massachusetts but he did have the shard of black glass he had pulled out of his own knee. This he placed on the windowsill, where beyond it the distant haze-blue rise of the hill where it had happened could be seen. He also had a small picture of the apocalypse bird that he had drawn in the sickroom with paper and charcoal brought by Brother Ray. It was a sloppy sketch owing to his injured hands, but close enough to what he had seen. He was contemplating where to put the drawing when there was a knock behind him on the open door.

It was Abbot Loren. Quin swiftly bowed his head and pushed the charcoal drawing into his habit sleeve. “It’s very good to see you on your feet, my son,” said the Abbot.

“It’s good to be on my feet, Abbot,” said Quin. “Thank you.”

“May I come in?”

This was a rhetorical question, Quin understood. Leaders may have styled themselves differently—the chair of the village council in his coastal hometown, the Big Fish, the chiefs of the nomad tribes of the plains, the Mayor of Denver who surveyed his streets in a pre-Collapse rolling house pulled by a team of horses, even wolves—but all demanded similar deferences. “Be my guest,” he said, pulling out the chair from the desk. He sat himself on his new bed. Belatedly he realized he should have waited for the Abbot’s dispensation before he sat. At the look on the Abbot’s face he almost stood up again but wasn’t sure his knees could take it.

“Father Kershaw tells me,” said the Abbot, “that you have made a tremendous discovery.”

“It was an accident.”

“So I hear. I also understand it might be difficult for you to be grateful for your contributions to theology, as you were gravely wounded.”

“I’m very excited about it now that I feel better,” Quin said. That much was the truth. He had asked Brother Paulus if he could help in the woodshop with the construction of the stands for the altar-slates or the repair of the outside-slates. “When I came here I never thought… well, that I might actually have anything of value to give the order.”

“Everybody who comes here has something of value to give and that is himself,” said the Abbot.

“Right.”

“Father Kershaw tells me it is not only the altar room and the slates that you have found.” The Abbot’s voice was not unfriendly but had turned colder by a few degrees. “He said in the height of your fever you attested you had seen the blue bird of the apocalypse.”

Quin should have known this was what the Abbot wanted to speak about. Evocation of his eschatological symbols would do that to a man of faith. “Yes,” he said. “I told Brother Joseph so that he would tell you and Father Kershaw in case I died. After the rockfall, when I went into the room, I saw the blue bird inside the altar-slates.”

“You had already by then sustained the wound in your side?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain, Brother Quin, that this was not a hallucination?”

“I’m certain.”

“The sun is very powerful,” the Abbot went on as though he had not heard Quin’s last response. “Brothers of this monastery have had whole conversations with people who weren’t there. People have followed signs of animals and water for miles and found nothing.”

Quin nodded. “That happened to me before from cold and snowblindness, in the mountains north of here. I am certain that this was real. And I know, Abbot, that lying is a sin, a very serious sin in your faith…”

“In our faith,” said the Abbot. “You are a sworn brother of this monastery now.”

Quin’s face was hot. “Of course,” he said.

“Tell me exactly what you saw.”

Quin hesitated, but handed the Abbot the drawing of the apocalypse bird from inside his sleeve. “I don’t have colored paints,” he said, “and it was blue. And my hands aren’t quite healed yet. But this is the image that I saw.”

The Abbot traced his wizened fingers over the charcoal lines. He wore the only jewelry possessed by anybody in this place—a golden ring with a strange color-flecked black stone appended. “You have a gift for drawing,” the Abbot said. “Father Kershaw should apprentice you to the illuminators.”

“I would be honored by such a—”

“How did the bird appear on the slate?”

“It was glowing from inside,” Quin remembered. “The bird was glowing between the glass and the darkness.”

“Glowing?”

What clarification did he need on that word? “The slate had its own luminescent light,” he explained. “Where I come from, sometimes invisible fish in the water glow.”

“They have glowing invisible fish in the Massachusetts territory these days?”

Quin bit his tongue. Of course he knew he came from a provincial backwater but you got tired quickly of everybody making fun of it. “Maybe more like the glow of the moon,” he said. “But again, it was… not a color blue that is known to nature.” He tried to approximate. “Low-down in the sky at dusk or dawn, but colder.”

The Abbot nodded. Quin could not tell if he had heard what he wanted to or something else instead. He stood up from the small desk chair. Quin stood up from his bed; he had been right about what his knees would do. “May I have this,” the Abbot said, showing Quin the bird drawing.

This was also a rhetorical question. “Of course you can,” said Quin.

“Do not tell anybody else of this,” the Abbot said. He fixed Quin in the eye; his were as deep and light-changing as Brother Joseph’s but lacked their curious warmth. “Do you understand me? This is a very serious thing, more serious than you know.”

Quin bowed his buzzing head again. “I understand,” he said.

--

It turned out it was not Quin that Abbot Loren should have told to keep quiet. A few days later, after morning prayers, when Quin reported to the illuminators for his apprenticeship, he heard whispers from the back of the room hush when he stepped over the threshold. His hands were still too sore for the intricate work of illumination itself so Brother Morgan, who ran the shop, had assigned him to supply, keeping candles, matches, paper, paints, ink, gold leaf, and water flowing for the illuminators throughout the day. The illuminators had worked with the wood- and metalworkers of the monastery to develop mirrored chambersticks that brightened and focused the smoggy tallow candlelight so that it didn’t hurt your eyes so much to work on cloudy days or in the winter, but they had the side effect of making the workroom punishingly hot. Everybody had turned up the sleeves of their habits past the elbow. In the afternoon, Quin carried a bucket of water from the well toward the back of the room for Brothers Tyler and Brandon, who were working on illuminating abridged pocket Bibles that made for good trade at the market in Pecos.

Brother Tyler peeked toward the front of the room as Quin refilled his cup of water. “Draw the bird for us, Brother Quin,” he whispered.

Quin nearly sloshed water everywhere. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on,” whispered Brother Brandon. “Everybody knows you saw the apocalypse bird!”

“I didn’t—”

“What’s the fun of having a divine vision if you deny it?”

“Well it wasn’t a divine vision—”

“So you did see it!”

“But the Abbot said—”

“Ah,” said Brother Brandon archly. “A rite of passage for our little brother. Father is not always right, my boy.”

“What are you three chattering about back there,” called Brother Morgan, and that dispelled all whispers for a time. But the next day they pestered him again every time he refreshed their water so that while Brother Morgan had excused himself for the latrine as he did each day after lunch Quin grabbed Tyler’s blue paints and a piece of scrap paper and, struggling to hold the fine horsehair brush in his unruly hands, painted a quick rendition of the apocalypse bird.

“That’s it?” said Brother Brandon incredulously.

“You wanted to see the bird, didn’t you!”

“It’s just that I thought it would be… well… scarier.”

“It was scary,” Quin told them. “The way it was glowing. The light in the candlebox was in it, times a hundred.”

He brought the small painting of the apocalypse bird back to his room, rolled it up, and tucked it into a hole in his mattress with the itchy horsehair and hay. He hoped that Brandon and Tyler would finally shut up now, and they did, at least in his earshot. But a few days later Brother Edward sat down beside him at breakfast. Brother Edward was almost as old as Brother Ray was. “What did it feel like to die,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Brother Joseph said that you were dead when he lifted you out of Father Kershaw’s horsecart.”

Why was the normally quite sensible Joseph going around saying something like that? “How would I know if I was dead if I was dead?”

“Did you see heaven?”

Quin wracked his memory. He could tell why somebody as old as Brother Edward wanted the answer to this question. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Did you see hell?”

“I don’t think I saw anything. I fainted, and then it felt like five minutes later, I was looking out the window in the infirmary.”

Under the table Brother Edward snatched Quin’s right hand. He had a curiously strong grip for such an old man, but then again he had worked most of his life on the potters’ wheel. Quin had just within the last few days been able to stop wearing the bandages on his hands and feet. The wound in the palm of his right hand was worst, still sore and red and puckered and relentlessly itchy. Brother Edward’s callused thumb passed over it. His rheumy old eyes passed over Quin’s face. In most wistful tones he said, “Tell me about the bird…”

The days were getting longer and hotter, but they still only had about an hour of light between the workshops closing for the night and their evening prayers before dinner. They were supposed to spend this hour each day in private contemplation. Quin had taken to sitting in the back courtyard watching and listening to the desert animals, which he took for a form of prayer. There were occasional rainstorms this time of year that changed the smells and features of the entire desert, so that some of the cacti were flowering in shades of pink he had heretofore never even imagined. So many migrating birds passed overhead that they seemed to drag geometric black lines across the slowly sinking sun. As the endless flat turned from blinding whites and blues to deep rich sunset color foxes and wolves called from the distance.

Quin’s favorite were the snakes and lizards, who chased the heat and sun. Like him, they emerged from their shadowy hiding places to absorb energy and warmth from the insistent rays. They of course had far more stamina and tolerance for such exposure than did a person like Quin from distant cold places who god’s hand had shaped for long seasons of snow and ice and mist and rain, for the cold sea, for long hungry times: compact, furry, square-handed, pale-eyed. God’s hand had made snakes and lizards for the desert and so for the desert they were made.

As he watched the sun go down over the distant hill of his trial, he found himself wishing he was a snake or a lizard, the way sometimes as a child he had wished he was a lobster. Having worked on that godforsaken boat hauling up traps he would certainly be smart enough not to crawl into them like the other lobsters did. Sometimes they caught lobsters so unbelievably huge and old that all of them in the boat had to labor to pull the traps up. When they were that big and old they moved very slowly. He had thought perhaps they had gone into the trap because they wanted to die. The Big Fish had picked them up in his bare hands, because they were also slow with the pincers at that advanced age. “This old granddad was probably around before the Collapse,” the Big Fish said. Then he stabbed his knife through the back of its head.

Snakes and lizards didn’t have to worry about the foibles of the human cenobium. They didn’t have to worry about things like the truth, lies, faith, belief. They didn’t speak at all, so they didn’t have to worry about what they were or weren’t supposed to say or what other snakes and lizards thought of them. They only had to worry about finding food and finding the sun. From nomadic wanderers he had traveled with for a time, west of here, he had learned that snakes and lizards were easiest to kill for eating early in the morning, when their blood hadn’t warmed up enough to fully awaken them yet. That was why they sat in the sun: differently from people, whose blood the sun could easily cook, the sun gave snakes and lizards energy by warming their blood. God’s hand had even made them dark in color, all the better to absorb the heat that they needed.

Maybe in the illumination shop they could learn something from that, Quin imagined, for the candleboxes. Maybe they should try making them black and shiny…

He did not particularly want the idea which suddenly arrived in his brain but once it was there it couldn’t be unhad. The outside-slates he had fallen on had been black and shiny. What if they had absorbed heat and light from the sun like a snake or lizard, and used it to wake up the altar-slates and fill them with light?

There was not enough time before evening prayers. He knew from the position of the sun that the bells were about to ring. But he couldn’t go stand with all the other brothers and make Latin sounds he didn’t understand, knowing what he now knew. He practically ran, though it was more like hobbling on the sore feet and knees and in the constricting burlap habit, back across the courtyard and up the stairs and through the heavy door, down the hall, through more heavy doors, down the dark stairs into the subterranean library. Nobody was down there owing to the immediacy of evening prayers. He took a flickering tallow candle out of the sconce on the wall and brought it with him toward the tables of relics. A few days ago he had helped Brother Paulus and Brother Joseph set up the altar-slates on the new wooden stands. He had tried to get them to drape the ribbons properly, but Paulus and Joseph had asked why would an altar even be full of ribbons if they were barely visible? Knowing he was on thin ice with the Abbot, he had decided not to argue. But now he was alone.

He went around back of the altar-slates and knelt on the cold flagstones. Shut his eyes, tried to put himself back in the terror-smeared memory of the altar room. It was the red ribbons that had been going into the wall. He found the nearest one, and brought the candle close to the back of the cracked altar-slate. In case this didn’t work, he didn’t want to damage one of the intact ones. There were a few slots back there, like burls in wood, that he had seen when they were putting the slates in their stands. The red ribbon in his hand had two silver ends. One of them—he felt his face heat up in realization of the obvious sexual metaphor—slipped exactly into one of the slots in the back of the altar-slate.

In the tower above, shaking the building, the bells began to ring. He could feel his heart pounding in his ears and in the still-healing wounds in his hands and in his side. He stood up and went to the outside-slates. The workers in the metal shop had made some progress repairing the ones that had been broken, though of course they could do nothing about the glass. He knelt again with the guttering candle and carefully inspected the outside-slates for a similar slot for the other silver end of the red ribbon, but saw nothing.

“This is good,” he said aloud to himself. “This is good.” Yes, he would be disappointed if the theory was incorrect. But he would also be relieved—or, at least, he would know he should be relieved—if he was wrong. Being wrong would mean he could never prove he had been right. Maybe that would be for the best.

The outside-slates were connected by a ribbon of their own, a thick black ribbon, itself like a snake. This thick black ribbon flowed toward a small silver box. Brother Paulus had said he thought the outside-slates were sensors and the box was like a brain, which collated and interpreted sensation. Quin had squeaked, so you think this was a living thing? That had made everybody laugh.

Quin brought the candle over toward the silver brain. There were slots in the silver brain. He took a deep breath. He called on heaven for steadiness. He reminded himself that many years ago, in the dead of night in the late autumn, long after the first frost, he had jumped off the boat, swam to shore, and, soaking wet and shivering, started walking inland and forever out of the Massachusetts. But that was only himself. One boy may act bravely to preserve his own life. If you believed the Bible, this was the entire world. The entire human species. All of time itself. Do I even want to know, he thought.

He tested the free end of the red ribbon in each slot in the silver brain. It fit exactly into the last one. The candle in his hand guttered out. And there was a sudden voice from the doorway: “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing!”

--

The Abbot literally hauled Quin out of the basement by the ear. Back up the cool and well-worn stairs into the dusk light washing the grand hallway, past the great hall from whence exuded the low and soothing tones of two hundred men’s voices intoning holy words, past the kitchens deliciously fragrant with the smell of roasting quail for dinner, up another set of stairs to the residential level into which the heat of the day had risen, and through heretofore forbidden doors into what must have been the Abbot’s private study.

Quin was deposited on a three-legged stool across a desk from a chair about as tall and straight-backed and rigid as the Abbot himself. He had imagined finery but these rooms were nearly as spartan as his own, except for the moth-eaten tapestry behind the chair where the Abbot was indeed settling himself. The tapestry depicted a meeting in the desert between a man and a half-formed floating entity in a brilliant halo of lightning haze. Maybe an angel? Brother Joseph had told Quin that angels did not look like humans and could be terrifying when encountered. The angel was shaped like a maze of interlocking forms. A flower? Chains?

The Abbot saw where Quin was looking. “‘The Encounter with the Antichrist,’” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s the name of the tapestry. ‘The Encounter with the Antichrist.’ It was woven here by our founding brothers.”

“Is that the black sigil that the apocalypse bird turns into?”

“So you’ve been reading,” said the Abbot, nodding contemplatively. “That’s good. And, maybe. Nobody knows the answer to that question.”

Quin dared to ask another. “Do we know what the antichrist is?”

The Abbot’s stormy eyes met his. He shook his head. He seemed to carefully weigh the depth of information he should share. “Our closest understanding now is that it was a sort of tool.”

“A tool? Like a hammer?”

“Like a hammer in the abstract. But, Brother Quin, you are obfuscating. What were you doing in the library?”

“Abbot Loren, I’m sorry. I was… investigating a… a theological theory. I know I was late to evening prayers.”

“Brother Quin, that you were late to evening prayers is the last concern on my mind.”

“Right.”

“What did I tell you about keeping this to yourself?”

Quin tried to keep his voice calm, the way he would have with the Big Fish or the nomadic chiefs. You couldn’t let people like this know that you were frightened of their power. “I have been keeping it to myself,” he said.

“Then why is everybody in this monastery talking about the Venerable Brother Quin of the Massachusetts who saw the apocalypse bird and came back from the dead with the stigmata in his hands?”

Quin opened his mouth and closed it again. Opened it again: “People are saying that?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not playing,” Quin said. “I am dumb.”

“For god’s sake.” The Abbot stood up. He was already tall, and his chair was on a riser, and he towered great and terrible over Quin on the little three-legged stool. “Tell me that you lied.”

“But I didn’t lie! You’ve seen the relics. And tonight I found out that the ribbons connect the slates. Abbot, I think the outside-slates gather energy from the sun and that that energy produced the apocalypse bird in the altar-slates.”

“Why do you willfully want to reproduce the apocalypse bird, Brother Quin?”

“I don’t—because you think I’m lying. To reproduce it would be to prove I’m telling the truth.”

“No matter the cost of the truth?”

Quin was rapidly running out of words. “I—I don’t know,” he said. Shamefully he could feel the heat of frustrated tears pooling in his eyes and chin.

“Tell me that you lied,” said the Abbot again.

“But it’s a sin to lie.”

The Abbot opened a drawer in his desk and extracted an item which he placed on the burnished hardwood between himself and Quin. It was a short, thin piece of wood. Quin had not seen something like it in a long time, but his father had had a revolving and seemingly endless supply.

“Perhaps you ought to contemplate if there may be a sort of hierarchy of sins,” said the Abbot.

--

Quin limped downstairs. There had been all of two days between his feet feeling fully healed and this happening that he had been able to carry himself around the monastery and grounds without limping. What he should have done was gone to his cell, gathered his scant things, and left this place without saying goodbye to anyone, as he had done so many times before. Instead he went to the infirmary. Brother Joseph and Father Kershaw were in the storeroom, taking stock of the supplies in advance of the Pecos market next week.

“Brother Quin,” said Father Kershaw warmly. “More yarrow?”

“I think I’ve singlehandedly yarrowed you out of house and home, Father Kershaw.”

“Basically true,” said Brother Joseph from his checklist. He flashed Quin a toothy smile. When it was not returned he said, “Are you alright?”

His own voice was stupidly wobbly. “Not particularly.”

“What happened?”

Quin sniffled. “I had a, um, disagreement with Abbot Loren.”

Father Kershaw took one of his ponderous breaths. “Calendula will do it, Brother Joseph,” he said, “and a nip of the elixir.” He settled his gnarled hands gently on Quin’s shoulders. “I’ll go intercede with the Abbot.”

“Thank you, Father Kershaw.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve been unlucky. He’s… you know, sensitive, being privy to… the secrets of our order.”

Father Kershaw left. Brother Joseph had already poured and pressed into Quin’s hand a small terracotta cup containing a splash of the murky green herbal elixir brewed by the oldest and most esoteric brothers, including Edward and Ray. This also fetched high prices, Quin had heard, at the Pecos market. He had never tasted it before; he had never been much for alcohol, but he felt it burn some of the residual fear and embarrassment away.

“The calendula salve will help,” Brother Joseph said. “I know from experience, believe me. I broke a relic when I was twelve and got the same treatment.”

“I’m glad I’m not alone.”

“Far from it. There’s not a brother in this monastery who hasn’t seen that switch. Probably Father Kershaw has, too. Listen, do you want to do it yourself or want me to help?”

“I don’t know that I can reach it all,” Quin confessed. “It’s all… I mean. I thought he was never gonna stop.”

“I’ll help you,” said Brother Joseph. He sounded all too eager to do so. He escorted Quin into the same sickroom in which he had been very ill and bade him, same as Abbot Loren had, to take his habit off. Except then he said, “Go ahead and lie down,” instead of “Bend over the desk.” And then, not reassuringly at all, he winced painfully.

“Is it that bad?”

“Yeah…”

Quin buried his head under his arms. The elixir helped a little, but he didn’t like this, being so undressed, with his back to the door, fragile, hurting. That would bring stuff back into your brain that had long since been chased out and had no place there anymore. Brother Joseph was gently daubing a wet rag over his back. Why was this man always on him with a wet rag? And then there was his gentle finger, slippery with salve, patiently tracing the hot red line of each wound. His breathing was even and ponderous as Father Kershaw’s. When Quin winced, on the deeper ones, so did he.

“Do you know about Saint Catherine?” said Brother Joseph gently.

“Which one is she again?”

“The one who was broken on the wheel.”

“Oh, right. Yes, I’ve seen her in the manuscripts.”

“The emperor basically threw everything he had at Catherine, because nobody could talk her out of her faith. In fact, everybody that tried, she talked them into her faith. They literally tried all the torture they knew and she didn’t budge. Because she knew the truth.”

What were you supposed to say. She sounds cool? “I’ll pray for her intercession,” Quin said.

“I don’t think she can stop what’s happening to you,” said Brother Joseph, “but she can give you strength.” 

--

Abbot Loren was pacing back and forth under the tapestry in his chambers when Father Kershaw arrived, having fortified himself for the inevitable argument with his own slightly larger cup of elixir in his cell.

“Why are you being so cruel to the boy?”

Loren threw up his hands. His face was cranberry red as it always was when he was in one of his celebrated rages, whether in chapel or here in his private rooms. “Why are you being so kind to the little degenerate?”

“Well, as was set out in the founding documents delineating our respective positions, your job is to be our spiritual leader and mine is to keep everybody alive who passes through those doors.”

“I’m not trying to kill him.”

“Loren, there was blood dripping on the floor. He just narrowly avoided dying from sepsis. You can’t lose control like that. It’s not—you know as well as I do, when summer comes, we’ll be hanging onto morale by a thread.”

Abbot Loren collapsed dramatically into his special chair. Likewise, Kershaw sat himself down on the three-legged stool. “I would hope that you understand this,” said the Abbot. “If it is known that some idiot kid from the Massachusetts territory, a novice—stop that, he’s a novice to me, he didn’t make it the full month in the wilderness! If it is known that he is claiming he saw the apocalypse bird and most of this supposed house of learning believes him, nobody will ever take us seriously again. Our entire purpose as an order is to ensure that humanity remembers that it lost its way when it stopped being able to distinguish truth from fiction!”

“Isn’t our religion rooted in some kind of belief in the impossible?”

“But not every impossible. There has to be a line in the impossible.”

“Where is that line?”

“Where we can and can’t feel the hand of god. Kershaw, you can’t tell me you feel the hand of god in what that boy is saying.”

“You don’t? You’re the one who sent him up there to the altar on the hill for his vigil! How many people have you sent there over the years who didn’t find the hidden cave of relics—our best discovery in a generation?”

“I chose that vigil for him because I thought it would scare him off,” said the abbot. “I’ve thought he was trouble since he got here. You know what people mean when they say they were wanderers. Killers… hawkers… whores…”

“He was a fisherman, Loren,” Kershaw said. “What’s more godly than that. Besides, Christ forgave the killers and the hawkers and, famously, the whores. The boy’s innocent.”

“What if that in itself is a performance? Who knows why he really came here?”

“For shelter like anyone else—”

“Don’t tell me you believe that!”

Kershaw sighed. “Maybe we can figure this out without resorting to paranoia.”

“It’s not paranoia. The devil is still part of this world.”

“I’m not disputing that—”

The Abbot interrupted him with one of his favorite quotes from scripture. “‘People killed and died to prevent the coming of the Antichrist but he was already in this world. All people needed was the knowledge of him to bring about their own end.’ You know this! If he reveals the bird, what comes next? That’s all I’m asking.”

“The world is less connected now than it was then. Any theological discovery that implicates the Collapse could be confined to this monastery, studied here, and prevented from spreading. And, besides, he’s just a dumb kid.”

Abbot Loren’s red flush was fading. Now he just looked very tired. “Do you remember what the scripture says about the people who brought knowledge of the Antichrist into the world?”

“Christ Almighty, Loren, not this…”

“They were all dumb kids, Kershaw,” said the Abbot.

Father Kershaw sucked his teeth, gathered the last vestiges of his elixir-induced strength, and tried to draw a little more from heaven. “In your rigidity, Loren, you’re reproducing the very thing you claim to fear. Two camps, each with information that to the other is irreconcilable.”

The Abbot slammed his fist onto his desk. Grotesquely, it jostled the bloody switch, which fell to the floor at Kershaw’s feet. “But I have the truth,” he said.

--

The Quin of Brother Joseph’s dreams was distinct from the normal everyday Quin though of course they had undergone the same transformation. The Quin of dreams was blazing in the eye. He was an instrument of the divine. He was so overwhelmingly beautiful and real that Joseph was starting to forget the actual Quin was smaller than him and smelled weird more often than not. Quin of dreams swept in from the desert with a wash of light and wind that drove everybody to their knees. Real life Quin needed his help but struggled to trust him, or anyone really. Joseph could feel Quin’s heart racing while he gently applied the calendula salve. It only slowed by the time he had gotten to the last of the marks near the base of Quin’s ribcage. He was so narrow here that two of Joseph’s hands likely could more than span across him but he did not dare to test this theory. Lower down, just above the waistband of his undergarments, was more fine black hair, divots of muscle and bone.

Just act cool, Joseph reminded himself. He doesn’t know he’s god.

“You ought to just stay here tonight,” Joseph said when he was done. Quin sat up, wrapping his arms around himself. Joseph poured him another small glass of the herbal elixir and pressed it into his hand. “The beds are more comfortable here than in the cells.”

“Really?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep at all on my stomach.”

“Drink enough of this stuff and you’ll get to sleep no matter what.”

Quin smiled. “The people in my village were very against alcohol,” he said.

Joseph had felt for the last months that he lived like a starving man whose only sustenance was stories of Quin’s past. Maybe in there he could identify some clue to how this ordinary person had become saintly. “Were they,” he gently prompted.

“Yes. Well, they were very wary of anything that seemed to transform a person, make them something that they weren’t. Some of the nomad tribes, though, that’s… their entire religion is based on transformation and that… that there isn’t only one of us, in us…”

Joseph had never met anybody who knew all this stuff before—knew about the various peoples of the mountain and the plain, about the ocean, the old cities like mouths full of broken teeth, who had even seen a two headed fox once, or so he said. For the last months Joseph had been walking around in a daze imagining how people could live in tents they carried around with them and how they could eat insects from the sea or rocks from the sea, Quin had even said, rocks that had a flavorsome and sustaining goo inside; even things like what a boat looked like, or swimming, or snow, or trees, goats that could climb on cliffsides, a dust with deadly explosive properties ignited in ceremonial reeds by heathen cultists…

That someone so young had experienced all these things and survived seemed all the more proof of Quin’s saintliness. Maybe once a year, before, some old anchorite or windblown traveler would come to the monastery for a hot meal or a ladle of water from the well, and he or she (almost uniformly he) would have one such story to share with the brothers who thronged around him, eager for any whisper of the outside world. Once the traveler was gone they would sit around the dinner tables debating if anything he had said was true. After all outsiders were not held to the same standards of truth telling as the brothers of the monastery. But Quin had taken his vows now and Joseph had external evidence that the hand of god was on him. He did not doubt that everything Quin said was true, even as some of the other brothers rolled their eyes. He could feel his own mind expanding the more he talked to his friend. It was not unpainful and made him toss and turn more nights than not.

All he could think to say, though, was, pathetically, “Paganism is… highly interesting.”

“Even people at home who practice the same religion as you believe this,” Quin said. “They would be shocked that there are monks who make liquor.”

“We’ve made the elixir here since time immemorial,” said Joseph. “Brother Ray and Brother Edward follow a recipe from before Collapse.”

“I don’t believe that,” Quin smiled. So there was the smile that seemed to have gone away since his vigil.

“Well, it’s true.”

He was still smiling, but now he cocked an eyebrow. “So they say.”

“Ask them! They’ll show you.”

“Joseph, I’ll bet you they went to the illumination shop while everybody was asleep and made something up and then they used tea to make the paper look old.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Joseph said. “What are you wagering?”

Quin laughed. “I got nothing. Don’t you?”

They talked a while longer, until the moon was high in the window. It must have been very late. Quin asked for some privacy to use the chamber pot before bed, so Joseph went to the storeroom. Perhaps he had had too much elixir or else there was something else warming him deeply from the soul. He threw caution to the wind and fetched them each a spoonful of honey from the dwindling stores. After all, they would be refreshed in a week’s time at the Pecos market.

Quin came to the door of the sickroom when he knocked. “What’s this for,” he said.

“It’s antibacterial,” Joseph said. “And it tastes good.”

Quin’s eyes closed with pleasure when he licked the honey off the spoon. Even in the thin candlelight light the inside of his mouth was very pink.

Joseph tidied up the room while Quin tried impossibly to get comfortable on his stomach in the tiny bed. “Do you need anything else?”

“I’m good,” said Quin. “Do you?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alright, then,” said Joseph. “Goodnight.”

He tried to leave the room. It was very difficult for some reason, like walking through ankle-deep sand.

“Wait, Joe?”

Hovering on the threshold with the tallow candle in the chamberstick, looking back at his friend in the bed. White and brown and red. The pale, creased eye just visible in the nest of arms and hair. Joseph longed to return to his side and to hold him.

“Should I just leave,” Quin squeaked.

“What?”

“If I should just walk away tonight and leave here, you tell me, and I will.”

“Don’t leave,” Joseph said.

“Are you sure.”

“Positive. When you found the altar room, you proved this is where you’re supposed to be.”

“I’m starting to doubt that.”

“I’m not.” Joseph smiled. “I’m right next door if you need me.”

In the infirmary attendants’ room next door he laid awake for a while listening carefully into the silence for any sign that Quin needed him. A nightmare, perhaps, or renewed pain. From somewhere far off on the desert came the howling of a wolf. Joseph closed his eyes. He told himself that he fell into a dream, though it was a dream he was making up semi-consciously. In the dream there were soft light footsteps on the cold flagstones, and then a warmth which slipped in beside his under the thin blanket.

What did husbands and wives do together under the blankets at night? Those secrets had never necessitated revelation to Joseph, who had been born in a monastery and felt the call to join the order rather than depart for the secular world. Presumably there was a physical expression of adoration that could be kindled between two persons, akin to healing one another’s wounds. He dreamed of it sometimes, though it was an abstract thing: the sky was swallowing him, the earth, the sea. Perhaps Quin had learned in all his wanderings, and could show him.

--

To Brother Brandon, Brother Tyler, and Abbot Loren’s extreme chagrin, Brother Morgan deputized Quin to take the illuminated pocket Bibles to the Pecos market day for trade. On a Friday evening he, Father Kershaw, and Brother Joseph departed the monastery and took turns riding, walking alongside, and sleeping in the horsecart through the night until they arrived in town just past sunup on Saturday morning. The market did not get started until a few hours after dawn so Father Kershaw took them to a tavern for a breakfast of fresh tamales and a sublime brown liquid called coffee. Quin fell asleep with his head on the table and was shocked to find himself alone when he was roused by the waitress. He ran outside in terror only to find Joseph and Kershaw waiting by the horsecart in hysterics.

“You can’t do that,” said Quin. “I had the momentary panic that you guys were never real.”

They headed over toward the market, where the vendors were putting out their signs. Quin’s mission was to trade the Bibles to a bookseller for gold chits that he was then to take to an herbalist for infirmary and kitchen supplies. Kershaw and Joseph would be responsible for selling the monastery’s pottery, woodwork, metalware, and elixir and purchasing the raw materials they could not make or grow in house—grain, clay, paper, paints, citrus fruit, honey. Then they would meet up again at the tavern for some quick sustenance (and, Quin suspected, a glass of cold beer) before the long ride in the hot afternoon back to the monastery.

With the envelopes of herbs in his satchel and an hour or so to kill before the scheduled rendezvous, Quin wandered the market alone for a while. There were people selling all sorts of things: food, clothing, weapons, horseshoes, craftsmen’s supplies, medicinal tinctures actual and speculative, alleged relics of pre-Collapse times, devotional artwork significant to various religious traditions, taxidermied animals, all sorts of potent spirits including real mezcal with a mummified worm floating at the bottom of the bottle, opium, cannabis, coca, pornography of every stripe, themselves…

On the edge of the market raucous games of cards and dice had erupted and a stiff trade in barrels of crude oil looked like it was starting to get violent. Quin walked quickly away from all that and into a booth where a suntanned woman about ten years his senior had handicrafts, antiques, and relics on offer. He knew from his travels and his time at the monastery that most traders who claimed to sell relics were bullshitting or themselves had been bullshitted but some of these looked old enough and similar enough to the monastery’s relics to be real. There were even a few deep black objects that looked like smaller versions of the altar-slates. The blowing sand had stuck as a kind of red spiderweb across the cracks in their mirrory faces and in one he saw an image of himself.

“Some people use them as mirrors, little brother,” said the proprietor, noticing him. When he met her eye she smiled. “Legend has it that long ago they were a kind of mirror.”

It was comforting to be reminded that there were other kinds of people in the world than the other brothers in the monastery. “I don’t know that legend,” he said.

“People used to say that what happens in there is the worst version of yourself.”

“It just looks like me.”

“So does the worst version of yourself.”

Quin put the thing down with alacrity and stepped away from the relics toward the handicrafts. On the table closest to the proprietor she was displaying small hand-knit wall hangings about the size of a book. On a few of them, scattered among the cross venerated by the monastery and the star and crescent venerated by other religious orders, was a familiar sigil. The sight of it repelled him but not enough to keep him from leaning closer to confirm he was really seeing the thing he thought he saw. It was certainly the flower-like interwoven chains from the Abbot’s ‘Encounter with the Antichrist’ tapestry.

Quin picked up one of the soft fabric pieces that had the sigil rendered on it about the size of his own hand. “That’s a pretty one, isn’t it,” said the woman.

He tried to keep his voice warm and light. “What does it mean?”

“Well, I don’t know if you want to hear another legend after the one I just told you.”

“Try me.”

“It was the sigil of a people,” the woman said. “People who created an evil thing. There’s an old story that they lived on a hill not far from here.”

A twinge of pain cut through Quin’s side. “From here?”

“Yeah. Before the Collapse, lots of screen people lived here. Energy was cheap and the government were greedy fools.”

“What do you mean screen people?”

“You never heard that before? They must keep you under a rock out there at the monastery.” She was still smiling, until she began to interpret the expression on his face. Then he felt her eyes were slowly widening apace with his. “People before the Collapse worked on things inside those objects,” she said, indicating the small altar-slates. “We just can’t see them anymore.”

“Was one of them a bird,” said Quin with mounting dread.

Wild laughter was coming from the rough direction of the crude oil trading, and then there were shouts of pain. Wind stirred the tarps that lined the woman’s booth and lifted the thin parched soil. The woman had fixed him with her dust-reddened eyes. She was deadly serious when she said, “Where did you see the bird.”

Quin put the tapestry with the antichrist sigil back down on the table too. He wondered if it might be possible to regret something you had said so powerfully that you could send yourself back in time. He tried to leave but the woman was out from behind her table grasping his wrist with a grip as tight as Brother Edward’s. “I can see it in your face,” she said. “I can see the bird in your face.”

“No. I didn’t see—it’s in our scripture, you know, the blue bird of Revelation—”

“Little brother, if that’s true, how did you know it was inside the screen? I can tell you’ve seen it. How? Where is it?”

People passing by the booth were stopping now, curiously absorbed into the woman’s hushed intensity.

“How did you see it?” said the woman. Her voice was getting louder now. “Nobody has seen anything in a screen in centuries. Is there something on the hill?”

“There’s something on the hill?” said somebody from the crowd.

“Which hill?”

“The chain-flower hill,” said the woman. “Little brother has seen the sign of the blue bird on the chain-flower hill.”

The words were going through the growing crowd, warping and changing as they went. The chain-flower hill. The blue bird on the chain-flower hill. On the chain-flower hill, little brother saw the blue bird in a screen. Little brother saw the chain-flower in a screen on the blue hill. The blue flower saw his brother in a bird-chain on the little hill…

“I didn’t see anything,” said Quin. It was so easy to lie now. Or—maybe it wasn’t a lie at all. Had he seen anything in the first place? He had been blind with pain and sun, stabbed in the gut, dying. “I didn’t see anything—I swear I didn’t.”

The woman grasped his face in her hands. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s too late. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

He thought he should probably ask her why and tried but somebody had grasped his wrist again and then somebody else grasped the other; he took it for the crowd at first and was certain he was about to be torn to pieces but it was only Brother Joseph and Father Kershaw who hauled him out of there the way Quin and the Fish and the other boys had once pulled the lobster traps up into the boat, hand over hand, out of the seething sea.

--

“I thought they were going to eat you,” said Kershaw on the way back to the monastery. That was the first any of them had spoken in hours.

“Do they eat people?”

“I don’t know. You always hear some of ‘em do. And they looked hungry. They were looking at you like they were hungry.”

“They were hungry for something.” Quin bit his lip tightly. He felt like a rabbit; his heartbeat would not slow down. “How did you find me?”

“We followed the hysteria,” said Brother Joseph.

“Do you think any of them will go to the hill?”

“No, said Father Kershaw, “nobody’s going to the hill. Scripture tells us it is easier to say than do. And listen, even if they did, we took everything we found, remember?”

“I guess.”

“People in the outside world look for reasons too,” Father Kershaw explained. “They have different relics, different written records, and a lot of legend. That’s why our order is so important. We have the truth. Just don’t forget that.”

Hours later, the sun had gone down, the heat and fear were bleeding out of the day, Father Kershaw was asleep in the horsecart with the clay and grain, and Quin and Joseph walked beside the donkey, following the stars across the living night.

“How did you feel with all those people around you,” Joseph asked.

“Terrified.”

“You didn’t look terrified.”

“No?”

“No. You looked strong. You looked like you were about to say something.”

“I was about to ask her why.”

“Why what?”

“Why… why the truth didn’t matter.”

Joseph thought for a second. Then he said, “People flocked to you when they heard your truth, Quin.”

“It wasn’t…” He trailed off. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. How did this happen? How was he getting so tangled up?

“I think god gave you a vision that can heal the world,” Joseph whispered. “I think other people are starting to feel it.”

“Why in hell do you think that?”

They had stopped walking, so the donkey did too. In the horsecart Father Kershaw lightly snored. The moonlight drew strange shadows out of Joseph’s face. “I’ve seen it in my dreams,” he said.

--

The Abbot came down to Quin’s cell again that afternoon. He had just barely gotten back, handed off the herbs from the market, reported to Brother Morgan, and cleaned all the road dust off himself, but he was not entirely surprised by the visit. Father Kershaw would have already given Abbot Loren a full report on their excursion to the outside world. Quin braced himself and steeled his sunburnt face and indeed what he had expected came:

“I’m giving you one more chance to recant your story and swear you’ll never speak of it again,” Abbot Loren said. “You’re becoming a liability not only for our monastery and our order but for our entire species. The founding brothers of our order would have cut your head off on that block in the courtyard.”

A few days previous Quin had watched a pair of lizards mating on the random granite block in the yard during his after-work contemplative hour and had wondered about its intended purpose. “That’s what the block is for?”

“That’s what the block is for. It hasn’t been used for that in two hundred years or so, but you are certainly tempting me, Quin.”

Quin remembered the Scripture Brother Ray had read to him about how exactly one prayed to the apocalypse bird. He could not help but notice that the Abbot no longer even bothered to call him brother.

“I’m giving you until tomorrow morning at dawn to decide,” the Abbot went on. “And only because Father Kershaw asked me to be merciful. You will recant your story about seeing the apocalypse bird. You will sign your mark to a written attestation that you lied. And you will tell everybody in this monastery that you lied after the evening service, in a speech that I will pre-approve. And, I’ll be recommending that Father Kershaw immediately transfer you out of the illumination shop and put you on latrine duty for the foreseeable future. Or, you will leave this place tomorrow morning and never come back. Do you understand?”

Quin remembered what the woman in Pecos had said. It doesn’t matter anymore. It was too late now to take anything back. Judging by how red the Abbot’s face was he knew that too. Well, there was no making it any redder, probably. Again he reminded himself about the night he had jumped off the boat. “Abbot,” he said, “Did Father Kershaw tell you where I came from?”

“It is impossible not to distinguish from the way you speak that you are from the Massachusetts territory,” said the Abbot coldly.

“I was a lobsterman. It’s funny, everyone you say believes me about the bird, they don’t believe me about the lobsters. My parents sold me to the captain when I was thirteen. I don’t know how much I fetched them. Probably enough to buy half a sack of grain. I left when I was seventeen. Since then I’ve been walking here. I’ve met all sorts of people and stayed with some of them for a while. Everywhere I went I knew I’d have to leave eventually. I started feeling like maybe I’m not the kind of person who belongs anywhere, and that I was going to spend my whole life wandering. And then I came here. And I knew right away that I was wrong. Even when I was out in the desert on my vigil, I felt like I belonged. When I was back in my village, I was trying to gather the strength to leave even before my parents sold me. But now I know I want to spend the rest of my life here. I want to devote the rest of my life and everything I’ve learned so far to helping you solve the mystery of what happened to the world before. And I’m sorry that I did anything to make you believe that I’m not serious. And to make you think I’m trying to hurt you and the others and your important mission. I’d do anything to stay here, but I won’t tell a lie.”

The Abbot seemed to be mulling all this over for a long moment. The Fish would have had his hands on his hips and be intermittently spitting tobacco juice over the gunwale but the Abbot just stared. He didn’t even wring his hands. At last he said “Perhaps you should have heeded your earlier instinct.”

“Sorry?”

“Perhaps,” said the Abbot, “there is indeed nowhere that something like you belongs.”

He left with a whirl of his habit that stirred the windblown dust under the bed. Quin sat down heavily on the chair under the window. He felt his mind go over each of the Abbot’s words one by one like they were prayer beads, contemplating one then the other, then the meaning of them altogether, then each one individually again. Eventually he looked down at his own hands, which were resting palm-up on his knees. He reminded himself that it had all really happened. It had left its mark on him—it had to have really happened. Couldn’t it just be enough to know the truth for himself? Couldn’t it just be enough to ball it all up tight inside his chest and never say anything about it to anyone again? The Abbot would never like him, but perhaps after long enough the other brothers would forget. He would grow old here comfortably and decently liked with that shard embedded in his heart that nobody else could see. And here and all around them the world would go on without knowing.

He got up and went down the hall to the infirmary. Brother Joseph was in the storeroom, meticulously sorting the new herbs.

“Hi again, you,” said Brother Joseph. “Want to help me out?”

Quin did not beat around the burning bush. “You believe me,” he said, “don’t you?”

Brother Joseph froze. His eyes searched Quin’s face, though who could say what he saw there. He came to Quin’s side, looked up and down the hall, and closed the storeroom door. Then he got to his knees on the cold, worn flagstones. The afternoon light through the far window blazed across his face. It was the face of some poor hapless person in one of the illuminations in the basement or tapestries in the great hall, in the seconds before the angel says, be not afraid. Clear, stricken eyes, slack mouth, adoration, terror. Those people knew what was happening just as Joseph did. They were shocked to have been granted such a weighty responsibility. They shouldered it with effort.

Joseph took Quin’s right hand where the obsidian-glass had nearly gone through his palm. The wound was the thing that he kissed. “I live to serve you,” he said.

Quin looked out at the desert in the window. He bit his lip tightly inside his mouth until he tasted blood.

“Meet me in the basement at midnight,” he said to Brother Joseph. Then he went back to his cell and wept.

--

By candlelight in the subterranean library he and Joseph gently packed up a couple relics into a lemon crate from Pecos. The most well-repaired outside-slate and the lightest intact altar-slate, or “screen.” One of the small printing-boxes. The necessary connecting ribbons and snakes, plus a spare of each, and the silver brain. They also stowed in the lemon crate a skin of water and some bread and pemmican for the journey. All this they carried between them, though this was difficult owing to the non-negligible difference in their heights, out through the monastery halls, out the front door, and through the gate into the desert. They walked east down the rutted wagon-track toward dawn.

“Where are we going,” said Brother Joseph.

“We’re just going to walk until it gets light.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll set this up. And if I’m right… well, we’ll see. You might have to go back without me and tell them I was right. Because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stick my head in there again without Abbot Loren cutting it off.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” said Joseph, way too proudly.

The coming daylight was slowly setting about making the world its cool and dusky blue. Far off across the great flat a coyote chittered at the horned boat-moon. A thoughtful owl somewhere asked who was cooking for you, as though it would be any more helpful in the kitchen. The handle of the crate was cutting into the scar in Quin’s palm and his feet hurt and his side hurt and his back hurt but there was nothing to do now but keep walking.

“I really was a fisherman,” Quin said. “I know it’s hard for you to believe that lobsters are real.”

“I asked Brother Ray about it, and he said he’d seen them.”

“Brother Ray’s had too much of his own elixir.”

“Well,” said Joseph thoughtfully, “he has to test it to make sure it’s good.”

Bats overhead, chasing insects down their vertiginous centrifugal positions. The stiff breeze shifted loose scree somewhere with a high wind chime-ish sound. There was just a little pale orange now heralding the sun, down low in the endless bowl of the sky.

“Why are you doing this?” Quin asked.

“Doing what?”

“Helping me. This is your home, I mean… what is Abbot Loren going to do when he finds out?”

“He told me that I ought not to be blinded by my willingness to see the good in every living thing,” Joseph said. “I told him that that willingness comes from god.”

“You said that to him?”

“Well,” Joseph admitted, “no, but I was thinking it.”

“Right.”

They saw a landmark that the rabbit- and quail-hunting parties used for shelter coming from fairly far off, and stopped when they reached it. It was just a pre-Collapse structure by the side of the wagon track. It was intact enough that it would provide some shade for them while they waited for the outside-slate to absorb the enlivening energy of the sun. The whole world was shades of white and gray and silent in the generative silence unique to dawn. Sky, sand, scrub, scree, and the distant unfeatured hills, swimming out of the deep night shadow. Joseph and Quin unpacked the lemon crate, gentle with the fragile relics. Quin positioned the outside-slate in the dead sun and the altar-slate behind one of the old stanchions to protect it from the heat as it had earlier been hidden in the cool darkness of the altar-room. He instructed Joseph on how to gently insert the silver tooth at each end of the ribbons and snakes into its respective slot.

“Now what,” said Joseph.

“We wait.”

They sat in the thin strip of slowly moving shade. Watched the moon set. Watched the lizards emerge from the piled scree, flicking their black tongues. Watched anxiously, each badly pretending to the other that he was not watching, between the slates for clues and signs. When would they give up, and what would happen then? Quin didn’t want to think about that yet. The outside-slates on the chain-flower hill had been baking in the sun for centuries to produce the apocalypse bird before. He felt something perhaps akin to dread. Whatever happened next could  not be good. The thought flashed across his mind unbidden: Then why am I here?

“Do you ever think about the truth,” Quin asked Joseph. 

“All the time,” Joseph said. God help him but he didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s religion.”

“I don’t know if I ever did before.”

“Well, you were a heathen before. It makes sense.”

“Everybody thinks they have the one and only truth, you know?”

“And now you ended up at the place where we do have the one and only truth,” Joseph said happily. “The way, the truth, and the light!”

“But god’s telling you and the Abbot two different things.”

That gave him only a few seconds’ slack-jawed pause before he recovered. “The Abbot thinks he can see the hand of god but—”

“He’d say the same thing about you. He did! He said you were blinded by your kindness.”

“Maybe you both feel the hand of god,” Joseph said after a while. “Maybe the Abbot has been called to test you, to strengthen your resolve.”

“So god doesn’t want to make the truth easy.”

“If the truth was easy there would be no need for real faith. Real faith is… when you believe based on belief alone.”

“When you believe without the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

Joseph opened his mouth to agree, but then he recognized the line from Revelations and caught himself. His face was a little red, maybe from the insistent early sun. “Are you making fun of me,” he said.

“I’m only wondering if our order are the right people to do this,” said Quin. “This healing the world stuff. What if the bird came to show us that?”

Joseph got up. He was shaking his head as if to dislodge something from it. Quin felt something warm and ugly. Savage glee. I won. It was so malformed and hideous that it didn’t live every long, couldn’t, and anyway, Joseph was saying, “What d’you think that is?”

Quin got to his feet and looked where Joseph was pointing down the wagon track to the west. Drifting out from around one of the hills was a hovering cloud of dust. It was bigger than that which would be produced by just one man, bigger even than Father Kershaw with the horsecart. Far off beyond it moving over the desert swiftly was the long gray shadow of the late spring rain behind which would be flowers.

Joseph knew the desert better than anybody. Certainly he had already read the book true. One wondered what to say in a situation like this. Quin had faced imminent death many times before but never in another’s company. Possibly Joseph was under the impression that they would be greeted warmly by the incoming war party and joined for their vigil with cups of cool water and ripe cactus fruits thoughtfully selected en route. When his head was lying in the dust, a terrible thought, it would look surprised. But which was the better way to live?

Quin took Joseph’s hand. That was something the saints and the angels were always doing, even if they didn’t have hands. “Brother Joseph,” he said, “you need to stop this one way or the other.”

“But you couldn’t stop the rockslide, Quin.”

“I—listen, this is different. When they come, if…” He couldn’t say, if by some miracle they don’t kill you too. “Don’t lie for me. No matter what happens. Don’t say, aww, you just missed it. Tell them it didn’t work.”

Joseph studied him. Thoughtfully he removed his hand from Quin’s. He turned back toward the west.

They stood together in the shade of the old structure and waited as the dust and the rainshadow drifted closer on the high conjectural winds. Unseen strings levied the sun toward the top of the world. The thin, pale morning light reflected in the screen.

---

--

-