The Healer (15 page)

He was now in his late fifties, but he looked like an older man. His face was deeply lined, his eyes tired, his shoulders slumped and drawn. He looked sad, though not incapable of warmth. Despite his misfortunes, he had managed to save some money, and this job, he promised himself, would be his last. He had no business—no right and no desire—to work longer.

He was one of only two applicants for the position and the third minister to be hired in as many years. The church's Council of Deacons was tired of the turnover. They were tired of just about everything in connection with the church: how it looked, the people it attracted, the money it was hemorrhaging, the neighborhood. They needed someone to shepherd it for a year or two while they solidified their plans for its demolition.

The Reverend's life experience had taught him lessons that would help, the council believed, with this transition. He knew firsthand, for example, how it felt to be on the losing end of things. He could communicate with people who expected to be deprived, uprooted and displaced, people like the current members of his congregation. He had been all these things himself, and he knew about resignation. These people would understand another loss. They were malleable, if for no other reason than they had to be.

The Reverend understood his role. If any in the congregation happened to have forgotten that the world was unfair, he would remind them. He would do so gently, of course. He would be gentle in every
way possible. Until the day the church was razed, if that day did truly come, whatever small amount of comfort and solace he could offer would be theirs.

It was in this spirit that he welcomed Payne into the fold. He welcomed everyone and made a point of saying so from the pulpit every week. Initially, Payne got some narrow looks from people who weren't crazy to be sharing their church with a tesque. There was a pecking order, and he was at the bottom. But once that was settled, he was accepted well enough. In truth, most of the motley group that made up the congregation had enough to worry about without worrying about him.

They were poor (all of them materially, and many, spiritually as well) and they were downtrodden. A large portion complained about their fate and their lot. Some were ungrateful, but others gave thanks for what little they had, including their church.

It had seen better days without a doubt, but the Church For Giveness still retained a vestige of its glory. In a certain light, and with a certain generosity of spirit, one could not help but glimpse its grandeur. It was there in the lovely vaulted ceiling (now water-stained). It was there in what remained of the triptych of stained glass. The church boasted two dozen painstakingly hand-carved wooden pews. And a dais made of marble. And a pulpit that, while a handsome piece of furniture in its own right, was elevated to another level entirely by its striking face.

From top to bottom it was covered by a thick sheet of burnished copper, embossed on which were various religious figures and symbols of the faith. The metal, Payne learned, came from the early days of the Pannus lode, when the ore was rich and plentiful. It had a natural resistance to verdigris, but even so, received a weekly polish. This was a task reserved for the Reverend, one of the few he took to with zeal and delight.

Opposite the pulpit, high in the wall above the entrance to the
church, was an oval window, and for a few minutes every day the sun and the pulpit would be in line. And then the sunbeams would reflect off the pulpit's polished surface, filling the sanctuary with a fierce, coppery light. A clever orator could time his sermon to coincide with this moment, and further, that point in it that deserved illumination, for it created a wonderfully theatrical effect. The Reverend Meeks had been schooled in theatrics and at one time was a great practitioner of the art, but he had lost his penchant and his taste for it. Now, as often as not, he missed the sun completely, or else it arrived unexpectedly, at an inopportune time. This seemed in keeping with his character, for in some ways he was a man at odds with himself, both craving the spotlight but also wary of it, or of what it might reveal. Or maybe, Payne sometimes thought, it was the message he was at odds with, which was in itself odd, for it was a plain and time-honored one.

Work hard, it went. Show mercy. Practice forgiveness. For temptation was inherent in life. Temptation was ubiquitous. The Creator and Supreme Authority, whom the Reverend called the Author, had created it as surely as he had created redemption. No man or woman was beyond its reach.

No one in the congregation doubted this, and they were happy to have a man who knew his doctrine. The Reverend had clearly lived a life with firsthand knowledge of what he preached. He spoke of it sometimes, his life, mostly in metaphor, in the form of parables and stories (which, he was fond of observing, the Author was perpetually in the process of writing). One of his favorites was from a section of the Song of Stilton, which charted the Rebellion of the Angels and the Sundering of the Palace, and the fall from grace of the Highest Angel, and the creation of the Abyss. The lesson revolved around the sin of pride, and the terrible cost of becoming a slave to it.

The sermons were announced a week ahead of time, and for this particular one, rumored to be among his best, Payne made sure he had a front-row seat. The Reverend entered from the wing, took his place
behind the pulpit, then waited for the coughs and murmurs and shuffling feet to die down. Bowing his head and clasping his hands, he opened the service with an unaccompanied prayer, then led the congregation in another. A hymn followed, anchored by the Reverend's solid baritone, another prayer and finally, the sermon.

It was a powerful and moving story, and in the end Payne was surprised to find himself feeling sympathy and compassion for the Fallen Angel. His transgression, to challenge the will of the Author and the unity of His palace and His vision, seemed incommensurate with his punishment and fate. He sensed that the Reverend felt the same, or at least questioned the finality of the Author's sentence. Pride indeed was a heinous sin and could lead to much suffering, but what of mercy? What of forgiveness? The Reverend posed these questions rather casually, but then he paused, and his voice rose, which happened rarely, and which caused Payne to sit up in his seat. If there was no room in a person's heart for grace, he asked, what chance was there for any decent kind of life? What chance for peace? What chance for salvation?

“Amen,” came a voice, and other amens followed. The Reverend concluded the lesson with an amen of his own, then led the congregation in a prayer of worship, then ended the service with a benediction. As was his habit, he made his way down the central aisle to the church's front door, which he opened, receiving his flock, such as it was, as it filed out. Payne hung back, waiting until the last of them had gone, then approached the Reverend and asked to have a word with him.

The Reverend looked tired. The sermon, which he'd probably given a hundred times, was one, it seemed, that wearied him. But this was his job, and he rose to the occasion.

“Yes, my son? What is it you wish to talk about?”

Faced with his moment of truth, Payne suddenly got cold feet. He dropped his voice and eyes, mumbled something beneath his breath, then apologized and asked to be excused.

Had Payne been a human, the Reverend might have allowed this, for human confidences and confessions were nothing new to him, were, in fact, as plentiful as they were predictable. A human he could trust to come back later. But this was a tesque, and in all his travels the Reverend Meeks had known only a few of them, and none well. So he prodded this one a little.

“We haven't spoken privately yet. I blame myself. But you'll find I have an avid ear. You were right to take the initiative and come to me.”

“I've done wrong, Reverend.”

“So have we all,” he answered kindly. Then, more probing, “What exactly have you done?”

“What you talked about in your sermon? That.”

“What? You've committed the sin of pride?”

“Yes.”

“It's a common one.”

“Mine was very bad.”

The Reverend had heard this many times from humans, how bad they'd behaved, and had often wondered at their eagerness not only to proclaim but to exaggerate their failings. It was a way, he supposed, to feel self-important. He wasn't particularly surprised to hear the same thing from a tesque.

“Shall we sit, my son?”

Payne was willing and followed the Reverend to a rear pew, where they sat facing forward. The Reverend bowed his head and turned it slightly to the side, for which Payne was grateful, for it meant he would not have to meet the Reverend's eyes. It freed his tongue to sit beside a man who seemed to understand the importance of this small accommodation.

After another false start he told his story. All of it. He opened up his heart completely for the first time. The Reverend listened solemnly without interrupting, and when Payne was done, but before the silence grew uncomfortable, he responded.

“A horrible series of events. And you were punished?”

“Yes,” said Payne.

“And then absolved. Released.”

“Yes.”

“But still, you punish yourself.” The Reverend turned to him. “Have you asked for forgiveness?”

“Asked who? Vecque? Yes. I did. A thousand times.”

The Reverend allowed himself a small smile. “The Supreme One. The Author of the world and everything in it. Every thought and every soul and every substance. Every sin and every act of grace. Every horror and every delight. Have you asked forgiveness of Him?”

“I will,” said Payne. “Gladly. But how should I ask? What words should I use?”

“Humble ones,” suggested the Reverend. He paused a moment, then added, “We all have our weaknesses. Sometimes they strike us without warning. Sometimes we nurture them, and then they strike us all the harder. My advice, don't nurture them. Let them out before they fester and grow.”

It was solid advice, and gravely spoken. And enough, he seemed to feel, for the present. Standing and gathering his robe, he thanked Payne for opening his heart and mind. It was a virtue, he observed, that balanced many sins.

He slid out of the pew, then paused in the aisle, as if forgetting something. “Oh yes,” he said at length. “While you're asking Him for forgiveness, you might ask yourself as well. It can be painful, but that, I believe, is the point . Pain teaches us to avoid those things that hurt.”

Few among the current congregation had much of value to part with when the plate was passed, and in lieu of this, some volunteered to work and do chores. There was sweeping and there was mopping, there was dusting and there was scrubbing, there was trapping vermin and fixing pipes and repairing broken furniture. Payne took on the job of putting out the bread and water, which he did first thing every morning, legging it to church and back before work.

One drizzly morning, he arrived to find a bedraggled man beside the table, his hands about to clutch the day-old, stale loaf. At the sight of Payne he snatched them back and declared his innocence. Payne assured him there was nothing wrong. The bread was meant to be eaten, and as proof, he tore off a piece of the fresh loaf he'd brought and offered it to him. The man eyed it suspiciously but at length accepted it and put it in his pocket. Payne pressed the rest of the loaf into his arms and invited him to come back for that week's service.
The man shrank at this and retreated down the stairs. A few days later he was back for bread again, and a couple of weeks after that Payne noticed him at church. He was sitting all alone in the rearmost pew, doing his best to pay attention, nervously shifting his eyes between his lap, the pulpit, and the door.

After the service Payne shared a word with him and in time made other friends, people who greeted him when he came to church. He had learned that the quickest way to make a friend was to listen when that person talked, and since many, if not most, of the people who made their way to the Church For Giveness seemed to prefer talking to listening, he had ample opportunity to practice. There were tales of misfortune he could scarcely believe, and no lack of storytellers to spin them. When someone arrived with a willing ear, they exploited that ear, and as a healer, Payne's ear was trained to be open. The only person who rivaled him as a listener was Reverend Meeks, who, despite a growing indifference, could still be moved to curiosity when it came to matters of the psyche and the soul. Payne could talk to him, and the two of them spoke at least briefly every week.

It was a time of reflection for Payne, a healing time, and gradually, he mended. He stopped beating himself up so much about Vecque and slowly came out of his shell. He didn't know how thick the shell had been until he saw how different everything began to look and feel. His depression and self-recrimination had colored the world, and now that same world was altered.

He noticed the change in every facet of his life, from work to leisure, from healing to simply being out in the city. Before, he'd often found the street experience jarring and oppressive: the crowds of tourists, the crush of bodies, the stares, the veiled and unveiled scorn. But there was another way to take it, another world alongside the one that assaulted him. It was a matter, he discovered, of perspective. The streets around the gaming houses, where he lived and worked, were packed and noisy, yes, and the people on them were in the grip of a
barely suppressed hysteria, yes, that too. But they were also festive, the press of bodies heady, the atmosphere dynamic and exciting. And the gambling, which often seemed so horribly obsessive to him, had another, carefree quality to it. A kind of goofy optimism. The people were hungry, some of them desperate, and for something they would never have; this was undeniable. But they were also having bales of fun.

He brought this new perspective to work. Healing was dependably a source of pleasure to him, but there was always room to make it better. There were tools like the Boomine synthesizer he had yet to fully take advantage of. And nuances of diseases and their treatment to explore and understand, marvels of the body and its remarkable pliancy and adaptability—unlooked-for, unexpected, astounding things.

There was the man he saw, for example, who spoke solely in epithets. A high-placed spokesman for the Authorities, a master of the euphemism and the fib, his brain had been damaged in an accident. And there was a woman who gave birth to triplets, only two of whom had normal skin. The third, fully human in every other respect, bore a coat of feathers. And another woman who died, clearly died, after winning at the winking jacks of opportunity, then snapped back to life an hour later. Her brain, remarkably, was undamaged, save for the loss of a depressive streak that had dogged her for years. And a man who became infected by a mutant strain of the bald soprano virus that made his hair fall out. When it grew back, it came in willy-nilly, in tufts and whorls and tangled patches, and three months later, and then every three months after that like clockwork, it fell out again.

Miracles of science, miracles of life: Payne was inspired even as he grappled to understand. He felt tremendous gratitude to be who he was, a healer, for what passed through his door was truly a feast. It fed him mentally and materially, and the trust that people put in him, people who under other circumstances would not have given him the time of day, this fed him, too. He worked hard, and was rewarded with a measure of success. He gained something of a reputation, although
not everybody came to him. Unlike Pannus not everybody had to. There were other healers in Aksagetta, which was fortunate, for between the city's permanent residents and its many visitors there was a steady flow of humans looking to be healed of one thing or another. Some of these other healers also had reputations; a few of them Payne knew by sight. He often wished he knew them better—wished, that is, that he wasn't so outside the healer group. He was as much to blame for this as anyone. Initially, he'd kept his distance, and now, with his newfound family at church, he had the friends he wanted. Still, there could be no harm in having more.

One of the pleasures of going to church was crossing the bridge that knit the two halves of the city. It was an ancient structure, built at a time when labor was cheap and materials like the milk-white marble of which its walkway was constructed were plentiful. It was the first bridge built in Aksagetta and had a proper name, but no one used it. It was simply called First Bridge, or, more commonly, the Bridge. Up and down the gorge there were other bridges, imitators, originals, beauties of form and function, but none that rivaled the first.

It was cantilevered below and open to the air above, with an arch at either end. The arches were tall, perhaps forty feet high, and half again as thick. They spanned the width of the Bridge and were held aloft on the heads and uplifted palms of two pairs of epicene statues. Each pair was joined at the back, one facing inward, the other outward. The spandrels of the arches were inscribed with tributes and encomiums to the Bridge's builders and the city's early luminaries, although few now could read them, for the language was a cryptic one and also dead. In the rainy season, which in Aksagetta was a brief period between the end of winter and the middle of spring, the arches provided shelter from unexpected cloudbursts. In the height of summer they offered shade. In
fall they were often shrouded by fog. At other times of the year they most approached what the builders intended: something simply to look at and pass through, monuments, memorials.

Payne had arrived in Aksagetta in summer, and now it was early spring. The weather was predictably unpredictable, cloudy, rainy days alternating with cloudy, dry ones. The sun was creeping north and had reached that point in the year when its trajectory paralleled the gorge. At dawn, when Payne was usually on the Bridge, its long, slanting light painted the sheer rock cliffs a brilliant orange. If it had rained, and it often had, and the air was crisp and clear, a person could see deep into the canyon. Payne liked to stop at the midpoint of the Bridge and peer over the chest-high wall that ran its length on either side, and one morning on his way to church he did just that. The air was cool on his face, the bread of charity warm in his arms. At his back the low sun was fat and yolky. The upper reaches of the gorge were bathed in light, but farther down remained dark and murky. Payne had a vision of the Angel's Fall into the Abyss. The gorge was said to be four miles deep, though no one knew exactly. Even when the sun was directly overhead, Payne had never been able to see the bottom. But he'd heard stories about it, and he became aware that he was hearing one now. A family on its way to worship had stopped within earshot to admire the view, and the father was speaking to the son. He held him up to look over the side, then put him down and told him how the Devil lived in a pit of icy fire at the very bottom. And he was always looking upward toward the sky, longing for the home he'd lost. He could see who crossed the Bridge, and if he happened to catch a glimpse of someone, a boy for example, who'd done something naughty, he would spread his wings and flex his talons, then fly up and snatch that boy away. And what happened after that, in his pit, well, one hated to imagine. The father made a scary face, and his son's eyes widened. Then the father smiled to show it was just a joke, and reached out to comfort his son. But the boy, his lower lip now quivering, backed away from him into the arms of his waiting mother.

All at once, it started raining. In drips and drabs at first, but rapidly the drips became fat droplets. There was a thick black cloud above the Bridge. There was lightning, then thunder, and then the drops became a downpour.

Payne pulled his coat around the loaf of bread and hurried to the arch. He was joined there by others, including the mother, son and father. The boy was now crying, and on impulse Payne offered him a piece of bread. The boy shrank back at the strange man but stopped his whimpering. His mother refused on his behalf and gently scolded him for not using his words.

The cloudburst lasted twenty minutes, and as a result Payne was late for church. People were already in their seats when he arrived, several of whom were new to him. There was a well-dressed man and woman in one of the middle pews. The man was cleanly shaven, and the woman wore a picture hat and earrings. There was another similarly well-groomed woman sitting near the back. There was an empty seat beside her, and Payne took it, sliding noiselessly in.

The reading that week was from the Book of Moh and told the story of the outcast brother, who for various offenses, some real but most imagined, was exiled by his family and his tribe. Years later, now a wealthy and powerful potentate, he returned to find the tribe enslaved and persecuted. Shamelessly, they begged his help, and putting the past aside, he granted it, using his wealth and influence to buy them their freedom.

Part of the lesson was, of course, about forgiveness. But another part, and the one the Reverend chose to focus on, was about tolerance. The tribe was punished for its treatment of the brother, and even though the story ended well, many suffered gravely—and needlessly—before it did. This was what came of intolerance; it was the Author's hand at work. For in His eyes every man and woman was precious. Rich or poor, saintly or fallen, He loved them all. And so, therefore, should they love each other.

As the Reverend pursued his exegesis, the woman beside Payne cleared her throat with a little cough and tugged down the hem of her skirt, which remained well below her knee. She threw a furtive glance at Payne, then took another moment to rearrange herself, subtly increasing the distance between her thigh and his.

Payne saw the woman again the following week, and this time she had a man and a young boy with her. He introduced himself, discovered the man's name was Trotter, Elv Trotter, hers was Elsa, and the boy's was El. This was all he discovered, as the two males were disinclined to speak, and the woman, inclined to speak to them alone. They had a haughty air about them, and their presence, along with the other couple, who had also returned, changed the atmosphere in the church. It stifled it a little, making some of the regulars self-conscious. After the service a few of them dropped hints that these newcomers weren't welcome, prompting Payne to rise to their defense. Tolerance meant tolerance for everyone. It was not an arrow to be aimed. How many of them, for example, had been driven out of one place or another because of prejudice? It was just this sort of thing, this fear, that stood in the way of harmony and progress.