Sacrament

CHAPTER XIII

Now that he was in the House, Steep saw the perfection of the route that had brought him here. Perhaps, after all, he had not returned into the Domus Mundi to perish; at least not yet. Perhaps he had come into this place to do his ambition greater service. Rosa had been right when she accused him of loving the slaughter; he always had, always would. It was one of his appetites as a man; to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill came as naturally as voiding his bladder. And now, back in this House, he would have the opportunity to feed that appetite as never before. Once Will and Rosa were dead, and Rukenau too, he would sit at the heart of the Domus Mundi, and oh what he would do. He would show the merchants who raped the world from their boardrooms, and the popes who sanctioned harvests of hungry children, and the potentates who salved their loneliness with shows of destruction, sights that would astonish them. He would be chillier than an accountant's ledger; crueller than a general on the night of a coup d'etat.

Why hadn't he seen the ease of this before? Stupidity, was it? Or cowardice, more like, afraid to return into the presence of the man who'd wielded such power over him. Well, he wasn't afraid any longer. He would not waste any more time with knives hereafter (except for Rukenau, perhaps; Rukenau he would stab). In his dealings with the rest of the world, he would be far cleverer. He would poison the tree while it was still a seed, and let all who ate from it perish. He would warp the foetus in the womb and blight the harvest before it even showed itself. Nothing would survive this holocaust; nothing: it would, in time, be the end of everything, except for God and himself.

All his life had been, he realized, a preparation for this return; and the conspiracies mounted against him by the woman and the queer, even that kiss, that vile kiss, had been ways to bring him, all unknowing, to this threshold.

He was astonished when he stepped inside, to see how changed the place was. He went down on his haunches and scraped at the ground: it was covered with a layer of excrement; animal and human mingled. The walls the same; and the ceiling. The whole House, which had been so transcendent at its creation, so light, had been concealed behind layers of dirt. Rukenau's doing, no doubt. Steep wasn't surprised. For all his metaphysical pretensions, Rukenau had at heart been a foolish and frightened man. Hadn't he dispatched Jacob to bring Thomas home to the island, because he'd needed an artist's vision to understand what he'd wrought? In lieu of that comprehension, what had he done? Covered the glories of the Domus Mundi with clay and shit.

Poor Rukenau, Jacob thought; poor, human Rukenau. And then the thought became a shout, which echoed off the walls as he strode in search of his sometime master. 'Poor Rukenau! Oh, poor, poor Rukenau!'

'He's calling my name

'Ignore him,' Will said. 'I need to know what he is.'

'You already know,' Rukenau replied. 'You used the very word yourself. He's a Nilotic.'

'That's a location, not a description. I need to know details.'

'I know the legends. I know the prayers. But I don't know anything that could pass for the truth.'

'Just spit it out, whatever it is!'

Rukenau looked at him balefully, and for a moment it seemed he would say nothing; then the words came, and once begun there was no stopping them. No time for questions, or clarifications. Just an unburdening.

'I am the bastard son of a man who built churches,' he said. 'Great places of worship my father made, in his time. And when I was old enough, though I'd not been brought up in the bosom of his family, I sought him out and said: I think I have just a little of your genius in me. Let me walk in your footsteps; I'll be your apprentice. Of course, he'd have none of it. I was a bastard. I couldn't be there, in public view, embarrassing him in the eyes of his patrons. He drove me away. And when I went from his house I said: so be it. I'll find my own way in the world, and I'll make a place where God wants so much to come that He'll leave all my father's fine churches empty.

'I learned magic; I became quite a learned fellow. And quite admired, I fancy. I didn't care much. I'd had all the admiration I needed in a year or two. Then I went off around the world, in search of the secret geometries that make holy places holy. I went to Greece to look at the temples, and to India to see what the Hindoo had done. And on my way home, to Egypt, to see the pyramids. There I heard tell of a creature who had, according to legend, made temples from the altars of which a priest might see the Creator's labours at a single glance.

'It sounded preposterous, of course, but I journeyed up the Nile in search of this nameless angel, prepared to use whatever magical makings I possessed to bring it to my purpose. And in a cave near Luxor, I found the creature, which I dubbed a Nilotic. I brought it back here, and with Simeon's help I laid plans for the masterpiece it would build. A place so holy all my father's churches would fall into ruin, and his memory be despised.' He made a sour laugh at his own folly. 'But of course it was too much for us all. Simeon fled, and lost his mind. The Nilotic grew impatient, and left me, even though I had confounded its memories of itself, and without my help it would remain in ignorance. And I ... stayed here ... determined to master what I'd made.' He shook his head. 'But there's no mastering the world, is there?'

He was interrupted here by another shout from Steep.

'I think he'd disagree with you,' Will said.

'Why am I afraid?' Rukenau said. 'I've no desire to live.' He looked at Will with distressing rabidity in his eyes. 'Oh but Jesu, keep it from me.'

'You controlled it before,' Will pointed out. 'Do the same again.'

'How can I do to it what's already done?' Rukenau spat. 'You have to find persuasions of your own.'

With that he started to scramble back up the ropes, his panic making him nimble. He'd only got a few yards however, when Will heard Steep's footfall across the chamber, and looked round to see the man lurching into view. He looked far worse than he had in Donnelly's home. He was rain-sodden, and spattered with mud from brow to boots, the orbits of his eyes pressing brightly at his flesh, his body shaking. He looked like a man who would die very soon.

Even his voice, which at its most monotonal had still been persuasive, was scoured of charm. 'Has he told you the story of our lives, Will?' he said.

'Some of it.'

'But you'd like to know still more. And apparently you're willing to perish for the privilege.' He shook his head. 'You should have left me alone, both of you. Lived and died in ignorance.'

'You wanted to be touched,' Will said.

'Did I?' Steep replied, as though he was now quite ready to be persuaded on the subject. 'Maybe I did.'

There was a motion on the web overhead, and with almost theatrical slowness, Steep looked up. Rukenau had by now retreated to the heights.

'You can't hide up there,' Steep said to him. 'You're not a child. Don't make yourself ridiculous. Come down.' He took the knife out of his jacket. 'Don't make me crawl up there.'

'Let him be,' Will said.

'Please,' Jacob replied, a little pained. 'This isn't your business. Why don't you go and look at the pretty lights? Go on. Take a look, while you still can. I'll join you in a little while.' He spoke to Will as though to a child. 'Go on!' he yelled suddenly, reaching up to catch hold of the net. 'Rukenau! Come down!' He shook the net with astonishing violence. Clots and scabs of filth rained down on both his head and Will's; the ropes creaked, and in several places snapped; a chair was shaken free and fell, smashing on the ground.

Plainly no words of Will's were going to calm him, which left Will with only one option. He strode towards Jacob and caught hold of the man, laying his palm against the man's neck.

There was no intake of breath this time; no earth-moving tremor. There was only a sudden blinding dust, a bitter red, in which Will glimpsed, all in the same moment, a thousand geometries, vast as cathedrals, moving; opening, some of them, like rigorous flowers, while brightening glyphs - the language of Simeon's paintings and of Steep's journal - blazed from them. These weren't Jacob's memories, Will realized. They were the Nilotic's thoughts, or some portion thereof: an array of mathematical possibilities far more overwhelming than the wood, or the fox or the palace on the Neva.

Gasping, he let Jacob go and stumbled away from him. The assault of forms didn't leave his head immediately, however: they continued to move in his mind's eye for several seconds, blinding him. If Jacob had chosen to strike him down in that moment Will would have been as vulnerable as a sheep in a pen; but Steep had more pressing business. By the time Will had recovered his sight Jacob had given up shaking the web, and was climbing it. And as he climbed, he yelled to Rukenau: 'Don't be afraid. It has to happen to us all. Living and dying we feed the fire.'