Sacrament

CHAPTER XI

It was a sudden spring. The breath out of the earth came and went, and when it passed took winter with it. The trees were miraculously clothed in leaf and blossom, the frosted earth gave way to blades of summer grass, to bluebells and wood anemone and melancholy thistle; sunlight danced everywhere. In the branches birds courted and nested, and from the quickened thicket a red fox appeared, regarding Will with a fearless gaze before trotting off about his business, his whiskers and coat gleaming.

'Jacob?' said a reedy voice off to Will's left. 'I thought not to see you again so soon.'

Will turned to the speaker, and found a man standing a few yards off, leaning against a graceful ash. The tree was better dressed than he, his stained shirt, coarse trousers and ill-made sandals far less flattering than the flickering leaves. Otherwise, man and tree had much in common. Both slender in body and limb, yet finely made. The man, however, boasted something the tree could not: eyes of such a flawless blue it seemed the sky had found its way into his head.

'I must tell you, my friend,' he said, staring not at Jacob but at Will, 'if you still hope to persuade me to go with you, you're wasting your breath.'

Will looked around at Jacob in the hope of some explanation, but Jacob had gone.

'I told you the truth yesterday. I have nothing left to give Rukenau. And I will not be seduced with tales of the Domus Mundi

Stepping away from the tree, he walked towards Will, and to add to the sum of the mysteries here, Will realized that, though the stranger was several years his senior, and lankily tall, they were looking at one another eye to eye, which meant that he had somehow sprung up a foot and a half in height.

'I don't want to know the world that way, Jacob,' the man was saying. 'I want to see it through my own eyes.'

Jacob? Will thought. He's looking straight at me and he's calling me Jacob. That means I'm in Steep's body. I'm looking out through his eyes! The idea didn't frighten him; quite the reverse. He stretched a little, and it seemed to him he could feel the muscle of the man enveloping him,

heavy and strong. He inhaled and smelt his own sweat. He raised his hand and fingered the silken curls of his beard. It was the most extraordinary feeling. Though he was the possessor here, he felt possessed, as though being in Steep had put Steep in his being.

There were appetites in his hips and head he'd never felt before. He wanted to be off, away from this melancholic youth; out under the sky testing this borrowed flesh; running until his lungs were furnaces, stretching until his joints cracked. To go naked in this glorious anatomy; yes! Wouldn't that be fine? To eat in it, piss from it, stroke its long limbs.

But he was not the master here; memory was. He had sufficient freedom to scratch his beard or his groin, but he couldn't leave the business that had brought Steep back to this place. All he could do was sit behind Jacob's gilded eyes and listen to what had been said this sunlit day. He had conjured this encounter against Steep's will, it had seemed - I don't want this, Jacob had said, over and over again - yet now that it was here, it had a momentum all of its own, and he wasn't about to contest its authority, for fear he lose the simple joy of standing in the man, flesh in flesh.

'Sometimes, Thomas,' Jacob was saying, 'you look at me as though I were the very Devil.'

The other man shook his head, his greasy hair falling across his forehead. He pushed it back with a long-fingered hand, stained red and blue. 'If you were the Devil, you wouldn't be Rukenau's creature now, would you?' he said. 'You wouldn't let him dispatch you off to bring home runaway painters. And if you came for me, I wouldn't be able to resist you. And I can, Jacob. It's hard, but I can.' He lifted his hand up above his head and drew down a blossom-laden branch to sniff. 'I had a dream last night, after you'd gone. I dreamed I was up in the heavens, higher than the highest cloud, looking down at the earth, and there was somebody close to me, whispering in my ear. A soft voice, neither a woman nor a man.'

'Saying what?'

'That in all the universe, there was only one planet so perfect, one so blue and bright as this. One so prodigious in its creations. And that this glory was God's very being.'

'God's delusion, Thom. That's what it is.'

'No, listen to me! You've spent too much time with Rukenau. All this around us right now isn't some trick God's playing on us.' He let the branch he'd been holding go, and it sprang back into place, dropping petals down on Thomas's head and shoulders. He didn't notice. He was too inflamed by his dream and the telling of it. 'God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service. And at night, He looks out through our eyes, out into the

immensity, and names the stars, so that in time we'll sail to them.' He dropped his head. 'That's what I dreamt.'

'You should tell it to Rukenau. He loves to read the meaning in dreams.'

'But there's nothing to decipher,' Thomas replied, grinning at the ground. 'That's the genius of it, don't you see?' He looked up at Will again, the sky in his head pristine. 'Poor Rukenau. He's been reciting his liturgies for so long, he's more in love with them than with the true sacrament.'

'And what's that, pray tell?'

'This,' Thomas said, plucking one of the petals off his shoulder. 'I have the Holy of Holies here, the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself, right here on the tip of my little finger. Look!' He proffered the petal, balanced on his digit. 'If I could paint this perfection ...' he stared at the petal as he spoke, as though mesmerized by the sight'... put it on a sheet of paper so that it showed its true glory, every painting in every chapel in Rome, every illumination of every Book of Hours, every picture I ever made for every one of Rukenau's damned invocations would be ...' he paused for the word '... superfluous.' He blew the petal from his finger, and it rose up a little way before starting its descent. 'But I cannot make such a painting. I labour and I labour, and I make only failures. Jesus. Sometimes, Jacob, I wish I'd been born without fingers.'

'Well, if you have so little use for their skills, then lend your fingers to me,' Jacob said. 'Let me use them to make pictures half as fine as yours, and I will be the happiest man in creation.'

Thomas grinned, regarding Jacob quizzically. 'You say the strangest things.'

'I say strange things,' Jacob replied. 'You should hear yourself, today or any day.' He laughed and Thomas laughed along with him, his defeat momentarily forgotten.

'Come back to the island with me,' Jacob said, approaching Thomas cautiously, as though afraid of startling him. 'I'll make sure Rukenau doesn't make a workhorse out of you.'

'That's not the point.'

'I know how he always wants things his way, how he badgers you. I won't let it happen, Thom, I swear.'

'Since when did you have that much authority?'

'Since I told him Rosa and I'd go off and leave him if he didn't let us play a little. You wouldn't dare leave me, he said. I know your nature and you don't. If you desert me, you'll never know what you are or how you came to be.'

'And what did you say to that?'

'Oh, you'll be proud of me. I said: It's true, I don't know what made me. Yet was I made and made with love. And that may be knowledge enough to live in bliss.'

'Oh Lord, I wish I'd been there to see his face.'

'He wasn't happy,' Jacob chuckled. 'But what could he say? It was the truth.'

'So prettily put, too. You should be a poet.'

'No, I want to paint like you. I want us to work side by side, and you teach me how to see the flow in things, the way you do. The island's so beautiful, and there's just a few fishermen who live there, too cowed to say boo to the likes of us. We can live as though we were in Eden: you, me and Rosa.'

'Let me think about it,' Thomas said.

'One more persuasion.'

'Leave it alone now.'

'No. Hear me out. I know you don't trust Rukenau's gnostics, and a lot of the time, in truth, they confound me too - but the Domus Mundi isn't an illusion. It's glorious, Thomas. You'll be astonished when you move in it and feel it move in you. Rukenau says it's a vision of the world from the inside out-'

'And how much laudanum does he have you imbibe before you see this vision?'

'None. I swear. I wouldn't lie to you, Thom. If I thought this was just another delirium, I'd tell you to stay here and paint petals. But it isn't. It's something divine, something we're allowed to know if our hearts are strong enough. Lord, Thom, just imagine the petals you could paint if you studied them first in the seed. Or in the shoot. Or in the sap that made a bud come from a twig.'

'That's what the Domus Mundi shows you?'

'Well, to be honest, I haven't dared go very far inside. But yes, that's what Rukenau says. And if we were together, we could go deep, deep inside. We could see the seed of the seed, I swear.'

Thomas shook his head. 'I don't know whether to be excited or afraid,' he said. 'If what you're telling me's true, then Rukenau has a way to God.'

'I think he has,' Jacob said softly. He studied Thomas, who could no longer look at him. 'I won't press you for an answer now,' he said. 'But I have to know yea or nay by noon tomorrow. I've already lingered here longer than I intended.'

'I'll have made up my mind by tomorrow.'

'Don't look so melancholy, Thom,' Jacob said. 'I meant to inspire you.'

'Maybe I'm not ready for the revelation.'

'You're ready,' Jacob said. 'More than me, certainly. More than Rukenau, probably. He's brought into being something he doesn't understand, Thom. You could help him, I dare say. Well, we'll say no more about it today. Just promise me you won't get drunk and maudlin think

ing about all of this. I fear for you when you get into those villainous moods of yours.'

'I won't,' Thomas replied. 'I'll be merry thinking of you and me and Rosa going naked all day.'

'Good,' said Jacob, leaning over to touch Thomas's unshaven cheek. 'Tomorrow, you'll wake up and wonder why you waited so long.'

With that, he turned his back on Thomas and started to stride away. If this was the end of the memory, Will thought, it was hard to see why Jacob had been so troubled at the prospect of reliving it. But the past was not done with its unravelling yet. On the third stride, Will felt the world inhale again, and the sunlight suddenly dimmed. He looked up through the blossomed branches. In an instant, the perfect sky had been blinded by clouds and the wind brought rain against his face.

'Thomas?' he said, and turning on his heel, looked back towards the place where the painter had been standing. He was nowhere to be seen.

This is tomorrow, Will thought. He's come for his answer.

'Thomas?' Jacob called again. 'Where are you?' There was dry dread in his voice and a churning in his bowels, as though he already knew something was amiss.

The thicket ahead of him shook, and the red fox walked into view, redder today than he'd been the day before. He licked his chops as he went, his long grey tongue curling up around his snout. Then he slunk away.

Jacob's gaze didn't follow him, but went instead to the clump of wild rose and hazel from which the animal had emerged.

Oh Jesus, a voice murmured. Look away. You hear me?

Will heard, but his eyes continued to scrutinize the thicket. There was something on the ground beyond the tangle; he couldn't yet see what.

Look away, damn you! Steep raged. Are you listening to me, boy?

He means me, Will thought; the boy he's talking to is me.

Quickly! Steep said. There's still time! His rage mellowed into a plea. There's no need for us to see this, he said. Just let it go, boy. Let it go.

Perhaps the pleading was a distraction intended to conceal an attempt to take control, because the next moment Will's head was filled with a rushing sound, and the scene in front of him gasped, then flickered out.

The next instant, he was back in the winter wood, his teeth chattering, the taste of salt blood in his mouth from a bitten lip. Jacob was still in front of him, his eyes streaming with tears.

'Enough-' he said. But the distraction, whether intentional or no, only kept the memory at bay a moment. Then the world shook again, and Will was back in Jacob's trembling body, standing in the rain.

The last of Jacob's resistance seemed to have melted away. Though the man's gaze had flitted from the blossom during their brief departure, all

Will had to do was call it back to the rose thicket and it dutifully went. There was one last, exhausted sound from the man which might have been a word of protest. If it was, Will failed to catch it, and would not have acted upon the objection anyway. He was the master of this anatomy now: eyes, feet and all that lay between. He could do what he wished with it, and right now, he didn't want to run or eat or piss: he wanted to see. He commanded Steep's feet to move, and they carried him forward, until he had sight of what the thicket had concealed.

It was Thomas the painter, of course. Who else? He was lying face up in the wet grass, his sandals and his trousers and his stained shirt strewn about him, his corpse become a palette arrayed with colours of its own. Where the painter had exposed his skin to the sun over the years - his face and neck, his arms and feet - he was tanned a ruddy sienna. Where he had been covered, which was to say every other place, he was a sickly white. Here and there, in the bony clefts of his chest and the groove of his abdomen, and at his armpits, he had gingery hair. But there were upon him colours far more shocking than these. A patch of vivid scarlet on his groin where the fox had dined on his penis and testicles. And pooling in the paint-pots of his eyes the same bright hue, where birds had taken his tender sight. And along the flank of his body a flap of livid fat exposed by the teeth or beak of a creature wanting to partake of his liver and lights. It was a more radiant yellow than a buttercup. Happy now? Jacob murmured.

Whether this question was meant for his occupant or the corpse before them, Will did not dare enquire. He'd dragged Jacob to revisit this appalling vision against the man's wishes, and now he felt shame at what he'd done. Sickened too. Not at the sight of the body. That didn't bother him particularly; it was no more horrible than the meat hanging up in a butcher's window. What made him want to look away was the thought that this thing before him was probably the way Nathaniel had looked, give or take a wound. Will had always imagined Nathaniel somehow perfected in death; his injuries erased by kindly hands, so that his mother could remember him immaculate. Now he knew differently. Nathaniel had been thrown through a shoe-shop window. There was no concealing wounds so deep. No wonder Eleanor had wept for months and locked herself away; no wonder she'd taken to eating pills instead of bread and eggs. He hadn't understood how terrible it must have been for her, sitting beside Nathaniel's bed, while he slipped away. But he understood now. And understanding, he blushed with shame at his cruelty.

He'd had enough. It was time to do as Steep had wanted all along, and look away. But now the shoe was on the other foot, and Steep knew it.

Do you want to take a closer look? Will heard him say, and the next moment Steep was going down on his haunches beside Thomas's corpse, scrutinizing it wound by wound. It was Will who flinched now, his

curiosity more than sated. But Jacob would not give him release. Look at him, Steep murmured, his gaze going to Thomas' mutilated groin. That fox made a meal of him, eh? There was a phony jocularity in Steep's tone. He felt this as deeply as Will; perhaps more so. Serves him right. He should have got some pleasure from his prick while he still had it to wave around. Poor, pathetic Thomas. Rosa tried to seduce him more than once but he could never get it up. I told him: if you don't want Rosa, who has everything a man could want in a woman, then you can't want a woman at all. You're a sodomite, Thom. He said I was too simple.

Steep leaned over and peered more closely at the wound. The fox's needle teeth had done a neat job. If not for the blood and a few remnants of tissue, the man could have been born unsexed. 'Well, you look like the simple one now, Thomas,' Steep said, taking his gaze from gelded groin to blinded head.

There was another colour here, which Will had not noticed until now. On the inner surfaces of the painter's lips, and on his teeth and tongue, a bluish tinge.

'You poisoned yourself, didn't you?' Steep said. He leaned closer to Thomas's face. 'Why did you do a damn fool thing like that? Not because of Rukenau, surely. I would have protected you from him. Didn't I promise?' He reached out and brushed the back of his fingers across the man's cheek, the way he had as they parted the day before. 'Didn't I tell you you'd be safe with Rosa and me? Oh Lord, Thom. I would not have seen you suffer.' He leaned back from the body, and in a louder voice than he'd used hitherto, as though making a formal declaration, said, 'Rukenau's to blame. You gave him your genius; he paid you in lunacy. That makes him a thief, at very least. I won't serve him after this. And I will never forgive him. He can stay in his wretched house forever, but he won't have me for company. Nor Rosa, either.' He got to his feet. 'Goodbye, Thom,' he said, more softly. 'You would have liked the island.' Then he turned his back on the body, the way he'd turned his back on the living man the day before, and strode away.

As he did so, the scene began to flicker out, the pattering rain, the roses and the body that lay under both, dimming in a heartbeat. But as they went, Will caught a glimpse of the fox, standing at the limit of the trees, gazing back at him. A shaft of sun had pierced the rain clouds and found the animal, etching its lean flanks and keen head and flickering brush in gold. In the instant before his vision fled, Will met the beast's unblinking stare. There was nothing contrite in its look, no shame that it had fed on pudenda today. I'm a beast, its stare seemed to say, don't you dare judge me.

Then they were both gone - the fox and the sun that blessed it - and Will was back in the dark copse above Burnt Yarley. In front of him stood Jacob, his hand still caught in Will's grip.

'Had enough?' Steep said.

By way of reply, Will simply let go of the man's hand. Yes, it was enough. More than enough. He looked all around him, to be certain nothing of what he'd witnessed had lingered, reassured by what he saw. The trees were once again leafless, the ground frosted; and the only corpses upon it two birds, one broken, one stabbed. In fact, he was by no means certain that this was even the same wood.

'Did it ... happen here?' he asked, looking back at Jacob.

The man's tear-stained face was slack, his eyes glazed. It took a few moments for him to focus his attention upon the question. 'No,' he said, finally. 'Simeon lived in Oxfordshire that year-'

'Who's Simeon?'

'Thomas Simeon, the man you just met.'

Will tried the name for himself, 'Thomas Simeon...'

'It was the July of 1730. He was twenty-three years old. He poisoned himself with his pigments, which he mixed himself. Arsenic and sky-blue.'

'If it happened in some other place,' Will said, 'why did you remember it?'

'Because of you,' Jacob replied, softly. 'You brought him to mind, in more ways than one.' He looked away from Will, out through the trees towards the valley. 'I'd known him since he was about your age. He was like my own to me. Too gentle for this world of illusions. It made him mad, trying to find his way through this profligate Creation.' He glanced back at Will, his eyes as sharp as his blade. 'God's a coward and show-off, Will. You will come to understand this, as the years go by. He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are. But Thomas had it right. Even in his wretched state, he was wiser than God.' Jacob raised his hand palm up in front of his face, his little finger extended. The significance of the gesture was perfectly clear. All that was missing was the petal. 'If the world were a simpler place, we would not be lost in it,' he said. 'We wouldn't be greedy for novelty. We wouldn't always want something new, always something new! We'd live the way Thomas wanted to live, in awe of the mysteries of a petal.' Even as he spoke, Steep seemed to hear the yearning in his own voice, and turned it to ice. 'Yon made a mistake, boy,' he said, his hand closing into a fist. 'You drank where it wasn't wise to drink. My memories are in your head now. So's Thomas. And the fox. And the madness.'

Will didn't like the sound of this at all. 'What madness?' he said.

'You can't see all that you've seen, you can't know what we now both know, without something souring.' He put his thumb to the middle of his skull. 'You've supped from here, wunderkind, and neither of us can ever be the same. Don't look so frightened. You were brave enough to come with me this far-'

'But only because you were with me-'

'What makes you think we can ever be apart after this?'

'You mean we can still go away together?'

'No, that won't be possible. I'll have to keep you at a distance - a great distance - for both our sakes.' 'But you just said-'

'That we'd never be apart. Nor will we. But that doesn't mean you'll be at my side. There would be too much pain for both of us, and I don't wish that for you any more than you wish it for me.'

He was talking the way he would to an adult, Will knew, and it soothed a little of the disappointment. This talk of pain between them, of places where Jacob didn't want to look: this was the vocabulary one man would use talking to another. He would diminish himself in Jacob's eyes if he answered like a petulant child. And what was the use? Plainly, Jacob wasn't going to change his mind.

'So ... where will you go now?' Will said, attempting to be casual. 'I'll go about my work.'

'And what's that?' Will said. Jacob had spoken of his work several times, but he'd never been specific about it. 'You already know more than's best for either of us,' Jacob replied. 'I can keep a secret.'

'Then keep what you know,' Jacob said. 'There-' he put his fist to his chest '-where only you can touch it.' Will made a fist of his numb fingers and echoed Jacob's gesture. It earned him a wan smile. 'Good,' he said. 'Good. Now ... go home.'

Those were the words Will had hoped so hard not to hear. Hearing them now, he felt tears pricking his eyes. But he told himself he wasn't to cry - not here, not now - and they receded. Perhaps Jacob saw the effort he'd made, because his face, which had been stern, softened.

'Maybe we'll find each other again, somewhere down the road.'

'You think so?'

'It's possible,' he said. 'Now, go off home. Leave me to meditate on what I've lost.' He sighed. 'First the book. Then Rosa. Now you.' He raised his voice a little. 'I said go!'

'You lost a book?' Will said. 'Sherwood's got it.' Will waited, daring to hope the information might give him a reprieve. Another hour in Jacob's company, at least.

'Are you sure?'

'I'm sure!' Will said. 'Don't worry, I'll go get it from him. I know where he lives. It'll be easy.'

'Now don't be lying to me,' Jacob warned.

'I wouldn't do that,' Will said, offended at the accusation, 'I swear.'

Jacob nodded. 'I believe you,' he said. 'You would be of great service to me if you put the book back in my hand.'

Will grinned. 'That's all I want to do. I want to be of service.'