We Will All Go Down Together (37 page)

As Saracen would’ve been quick to point out, nine
was
a magic number—a powerful charm. And Mac knew better than almost anybody how it might piss off better men than him to have the Stairway to Heaven rolled back up in front of their faces.

God’s not the Church, boy,
Fr. Gowther once told Mac,
no more’n the Church is God. Take away God, the Church is nothin’; take away the Church, and God . . . He’s the exact damn same. Keep that always in the back of your mind, you should be all right.

Within a year of Friday the 13
th
, one way or the other, both the King who had authorized the Templars’ doom and the “Pope” who had let him do it were dead. In places like England, the Templars disappeared into other orders, living out their lives, untouched; in Germany and Malta, they waged open war against their oppressors, refusing outright to accept Avignon’s verdict. They survived and prospered, built and defended more castles, made and hid more money. And when they finally went underground forever, it was on
their
terms . . . taking the original Nine with them, no doubt.

Them, and their mummified human head, too.

Later, Mac lay in his bed back at Saul of Tarsus with eyes wide open, checking the ceiling for cracks and listening to the former priest in the next room rave against God . . . some shambling cliché of a drunken Irishman named Frye, younger than Mac, his blowtorch eyes wrung red by a steady diet of betrayal-flavoured booze. Word around the breakfast table was he’d fucked up pretty good fighting demons, only to be left in the lurch—yesterday’s tabloid headline, a pariah barely solvent enough to keep drunk. If Mac had still been in the prayer business himself, he might have felt like sending up thanks that
he’d
never had some sufferer’s immortal soul placed in his hands, only to fumble the world’s most precious ball on the ten-yard line. . . . 

(Not unless you counted what he’d done to Fr. Gowther, that was. Who’d still had his soul, last Mac had checked, if not much else.)

Le dernier grand-maître. Covered in gold and jewels.

He’d told Le Prof he was in, of course. Why not? Down low as he was, things probably couldn’t get all
that
much worse, not really. Not in some way he couldn’t eventually handle if he put his whole divided self to it. . . .

Mac hoped. Knowing full well, in his heart of hearts, just what that sort of hope—that
faith
—was usually worth.

By 1984, when Mac turned twelve, he was already on his fifth foster family—Catholics, yet again (this
was
Nova Scotia), but surprisingly observant ones. His fake siblings dragged him along to a Bible Study group in the local church’s basement every Wednesday, using much the same set-up as Saturday night bingo, and tried to convert him from what they assumed was his deadbeat hippie parents’ atheist influence by quizzing him on this or that permutation of Old or New Testament lore, ’til he eventually shocked the congregation by winning first prize in a Scripture-quoting competition.

This “victory” hadn’t actually required much to achieve on his part, beyond three days of heavy reading followed by a joyless spasm of rote memorization—but it got them off his back, and for that Mac would always be eternally grateful, though to whom he wasn’t exactly sure.

Enzemblance was never far away, throughout these years; she smiled at him through mirrors, watched him through the walls. Dragged him suddenly sideways through cracks to attend various familial routs, only letting him re-emerge hours or days later, covered in mud. That alone kept him bouncing from home to home in the beginning, before he knew enough to lie about it:
I was under the bed
, he soon learned, was an excuse which—however accurate—never quite seemed to cut the mustard.

His therapists thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder, which it sort of was. But none of this “lost time” was ever gone completely. If he strained hard enough he had dim visions of dancing wild, partnerless reels in massive caverns lit by glowing lichen; huge hurling battles fought with suborned humans used as cannon fodder on either side; feasts that were sublime when seen through one eye, foul and dreadful when seen through the other.

Lady Glauce even took him back through time in a smoky, mirrored way; showed him Callistor and Grisell, the Three Betrayed burning, Juleyan Roke’s body swinging in the wind while his shadow slid away beneath, like dirty black water.
Yuir heritage, grandson.
These things stayed with him always, colouring his dayside interactions like a horrid filter, a supernatural depth perception.

Mac remembered hearing in Science class how every cell in the body replaced itself if you only waited long enough, following a strict seven-year cycle—and seven was a magic number too, just as much as nine. A fairy number.

This much he knew, however: it didn’t matter how many times
his
cells regrew, the harvest reaped would always be the same. A hybrid legacy, lost between worlds, like having superpowers, only far less sexy. And far less convenient.

But that same year was also when he met Fr. Gowther—loitering in full cassock and back-tipped Homburg out back of the church, smoking a surreptitious cig and going over the scribbled notes for his homily before revving himself up for Sunday night Mass.

(
Cops drink, son, in the main; priests smoke. Gets you to Heaven just a tad quicker—and better yet, it’s cheap.
)

Mac stood, watching him for a moment, getting up his nerve. Then:

“Mind if I ask you something, Father?”

Fr. Gowther didn’t look up. “Be surprised if you didn’t, son, considering how long you’ve been waiting. Is it a Bible question?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Fire away.”

Mac crossed his arms. “Well—you know that part, right after Moses gets the Ten Commandments? And there’s this whole chunk of it just goes on and on about all the different kinds of nakedness you can’t uncover—”

“
Leviticus
, 1-27. ‘The nakedness of thy sister, even her nakedness thou shalt not uncover for hers is thine own nakedness’; ‘I
am
the Lord.’ Just in case you forgot who you were talking to there, for a minute.”

“Yeah. So what’s all that about?”

“People ask; believe me, they ask. You need to be specific. Which isn’t to say there aren’t inconsistencies. . . .”

“Like the part where ‘a man may not lie with another man as with a woman, because that is abomination,’ but ‘a woman may not lie with an animal, because that is
confusion
?’ Must really suck, trying to explain
that
particular distinction to a bunch of Catechism cram-class eight-year-olds.”

And now Fr. Gowther
did
look at him—straight on, through kind but tired eyes, the colour of well-faded denim. “What’s your name again, son?” he wanted to know.

“Maccabee Roke.”

“Well, and why am I not surprised.” Fr. Gowther pinched the end of his cigarette out between two callused fingertips, a straight-up Steve McQueen move, and stowed it carefully away inside his inner coat pocket. “All right, then, come on in—there’s still some time yet ’til the big show. Let’s discuss this a bit further.”

Inside, the church had its usual smell: stale incense, wood lacquer, a faint tang of old B.O. Mac had been in and out half a thousand times by now, and it still made him nervous; he’d already discovered (much to his joy) that the otherwise undistinguished, ugly, 1970s-poured-concrete cocoon really did seem to project enough spiritual force to keep the rest of his relatives securely off-campus, but kept half-consciously bracing himself for the day somebody decided
Mac
wasn’t fit for entry any more, either. He watched Fr. Gowther negotiate the Stations of the Cross with surprising grace, born of either familiarity or a genuine respect for his job, unlikely as
that
might seem.

Saying, as he checked the Formica-tiled floor for spent mousetraps and puddles—“The Levitican verses . . . they’re pure practicality for the most part, aside from the truly out-of-date ones like suffering not a witch to live, and all. First off, let me ask you this: do you
want
to lie with another man?”

“Not hugely.”

“Think any of the gals you know want to lie with animals? And no, young Hugo Chance doesn’t count.” As Mac smiled: “Ah, now you’re gettin’ it. Then it doesn’t much matter, does it? Except for purposes of argument, and purely for the sake
of
arguing.”

He fixed Mac with a hard stare, at that last part, then grinned when he saw Mac nod, ever-so-slightly.

“Is this what you do all day, Father?” Mac asked him. “Read the Bible, answer stupid questions?”

“Usually, though they’re not always
as
stupid. Why?”

“And . . . you get to stay in here.”

“Well, sometimes, I do get invited to dinner at parishioners’ houses, which can be a bit dicey if you don’t keep a close watch on how the wine in your glass might be affectin’ your tongue.”

“But then you come back, after.”

“Oh yes, I have to. I sleep here.”

“In the Rectory?” Fr. Gowther nodded. “That’s part of the Church too, then. Right?”

“Technically, yes.”

“In fact, pretty much everywhere you
go
is part of the Church. Technically.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re after with this, son.”

“Mac. I was just thinking . . . I mean,
I
could do all that.”

“Probably; anybody could, and that’s the sad fact. But could you
care
about what you were doin’? Or more importantly—care about the people you were doin’ it
for
?”

Mac took a breath. “. . . I think so, probably,” he said, at last. “Event-ually.”

“Then you might have a vocation, is what this is about.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that does bear further examination. Sit down, son—Mac. Let’s talk it out.”

Fifteen years of preparation on, meanwhile—finally hovering on the brink of ordination, with a Connaught Trust internship in his metaphorical back pocket—he found himself back at Fr. Gowther’s side, still trying to fake it ’til he made it. Not knowing why he should care if the old man actually believed in his . . . 
belief
or not, aside from the fact that, if the same man who’d once championed his plans to profess suddenly withdrew his recommendation, the likelihood of Mac ending up anywhere but some crap-hole war-zone posting—or back out on the street, where any shadow held the possibility of Enzemblance’s grip suddenly tightening on his arm and yanking—would shoot through the roof.

“I can’t write that letter, son, and that’s the plain truth.”

“It’s a formality, Henry. Monsignor Chu’s already given me the stamp, just not on paper.”

“Sounds like you don’t need me anyhow, then.” Fr. Gowther busied himself with milking his tea, eyes kept scruplously elsewhere. “Good for you on all your hard work, Maccabee.”

But Mac refused to look away, arms automatically crossing, well aware how pugnacious it probably made him look. “You don’t think I should
get
this job, do you?” he demanded.

Fr. Gowther sighed. “Not for me to say. It’s God you’re swearin’ yourself over to—my opinion doesn’t mean much, long as He lets you. Be honest, though, son . . . you don’t even know for certain He actually will, your ownself.”

A stopped breath hung between them: the phouka in the room, visible at last. Mac’s heritage, hitherto kept carefully unmentionable, ability and disability, all in one.

“Is that what you believe,” Mac asked, finally, “after all this time? That I have no soul?”

“Now, how can
I
possibly know? How can—”

(—
either of us?
)

“I can’t change what I am, Henry.”

“Which,
some
might say, makes a plenty good enough argument for stayin’ as far away from the Trust and them sisters who keep it as you possibly can,” Fr. Gowther shot back; Mac snorted.

“So you
do
care,” he said, sarcastically.

At this, Fr. Gowther flushed bright red. “And why would I bother to say anything at all, if I
didn’t
?”

Around Mac, the room lurched and dimmed, and he spent the next minute giving some random point on the wall minute attention, unable to trust himself with any other sort of response. Because what he
felt
was the urge to curse, to overlook, to
blast
Fr. Gowther (his one human friend, his father-of-choice) to a God-damned pillar of salt, pricking at the roots of his optic nerves like a static-charged, double paper cut.

“Listen,” Fr. Gowther began again, voice softening. “It’s a sad fact to admit, but you’re just
not
priest material, Maccabee. Sure, you know your Bible—better’n me, probably. You even believe in God. But you don’t love Him; you fear Him. Only part of bein’ a priest you’d like is tellin’ other people what t’do—and believe me, that particular joy gets old a lot faster than you’d think it would.”

Like the whole world was shrinking and thinning, becoming that same membrane which flicked itself across his sight. Mac’s head swum with the rageful unfairness of it all: so much time
wasted
. And for nothing.

“As long as I’m in the Church, Henry—
any
church—I’m safe,” Mac told his uncomfortable shoes, still shiny from this morning’s 4:00
A.M.
polish. “Does that sound like God doesn’t want me here?”

“Mac, God wants every—”

“That’s
not what you just said
, and you know it.”

And—oh Lord, he had to force himself to think clearly, remembering: had
this
been when he felt the glamer begin to boil out of him? The same moment he heard himself think “words” formed from ice, cold enough to cut and freeze, simultaneously—

LOOK at me. Do NOT look away.

—with no shame at all, no breath of regret, only the vicious sodium-bulb flare of victory as he watched Fr. Gowther
do
it.

“You’re gonna write me the letter,” Mac heard himself tell him, deliberately. “You won’t contest my appointment, and then . . . well, after that, I guess we’ll just have to see.”