Children of God by Mary Doria Russel Read Free Book Online Page B

remember her in prayer?"
    He could, but only barely, almost without sound. "Askama, Your Holiness."
    There was silence for a time and then Kalingemala Lopore reached across the small table, lifting Emilio’s bowed head with blunt, strong fingers, and smoothing away the tears. Vincenzo Giuliani had always thought of Emilio as dark, but with those powerful brown hands cupping his face, he looked ghostly, and then Giuliani realized that Sandoz had nearly fainted. Emilio hated being touched, loathed unexpected contact. Lopore could not have known this and Giuliani took a step forward, about to explain, when he realized that the Pope was speaking.
    Emilio listened, stone-faced, with the quick shallow movement of the chest that sometimes betrayed him. Giuliani could not hear their words, but he saw Sandoz freeze, and pull away, and stand and begin to pace. "I made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul, Your Holiness. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar," Emilio said in the soft, musical Latin that a young Vince Giuliani had admired and envied when they were in formation together. "Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me." Sandoz turned away, trembling. "God filled me, and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls, Your Holiness. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was in love with God, and all the children were mine."
    Giuliani, stunned, felt his eyes fill. Yes, he thought. Yes.
    But when Emilio turned again and faced Kalingemala Lopore, he was not weeping. He came back to the table and placed his ruined hands on its battered wood, face rigid with rage. "And now the garden is laid waste," he whispered. "The wives and the husbands and the children are all dead. And there is nothing left but ash and bone. Where was our Protector? Where was God, Your Holiness? Where is God now?"
    The answer was immediate, certain. "In the ashes. In the bones. In the souls of the dead, and in the children who live because of you—"
    "Nothing lives because of me!"
    "You’re wrong. I live. And there are others."
    "I am a blight. I carried death to Rakhat like syphilis, and God laughed while I was raped."
    "God wept for you. You have paid a terrible price for His plan, and God wept when He asked it of you—"
    Sandoz cried out and backed away, shaking his head. "That is the most terrible lie of all! God does not ask. I gave no consent. The dead gave no consent. God is not innocent."
    The blasphemy hung in the room like smoke, but it was joined seconds later by Jeremiah’s. "He hath led me and brought me into darkness, and not into light. He hath set me in dark places as those who are dead forever. And when I cry and I entreat," Gelasius III recited, eyes knowing and full of compassion, "He hath shut out my prayer! He hath filled me with bitterness. He hath fed me ashes. He hath caused me disgrace and contempt."
    Sandoz stood still and stared at nothing they could see. "I am damned," he said finally, tired to his soul, "and I don’t know why."
    Kalingemala Lopore sat back in his chair, the long, strong fingers folded loosely in his lap, his faith in hidden meaning, and in God’s work in God’s time, granitic. "You are beloved of God," he said. "And you will live to see what you have made possible when you return to Rakhat."
    Sandoz’s head snapped up. "I won’t go back."
    "And if you are asked to do so by your superior?" Lopore asked, brows up, glancing at Giuliani.
    Vincenzo Giuliani, forgotten until now in his corner, found himself looking into Emilio Sandoz’s eyes and was, for the first time in some fifty-five years, utterly