"No, you don't," said God sadly and gently. He reached out and He touched Memnoch's face and the imprint of His angry hand vanished off the angelic skin. God Incarnate leant forward and kissed Memnoch on the mouth.
"I love you, my brave adversary!" He said. "It is good that I made you, as good as all else I've made. Bring souls to me. You are only part of the cycle, part of Nature, as wondrous as a bolt of lightning or the eruption of a great volcano, as a star exploding suddenly, miles and miles out in the galaxies so that thousands of years pass before those on earth see its light. "
"You're a merciless God," Memnoch said, refusing to give an inch. "I shall teach them to forgive you what you are¡ªMajestic, Infinitely Creative, and Imperfect. "
God Incarnate laughed softly and kissed Memnoch again on the forehead.
"I am a wise God and a patient God," He said. "I am the One who made you. "
The images vanished. They did not even fade. They simply disappeared.
I lay on the battlefield alone.
The stench was a layer of gases hanging over me, poisoning every breath I drew.
For as far as I could see were dead men.
A noise startled me. The thin, panting figure of a wolf drew near to me, bearing down on me with its lowered head. I stiffened. I saw its narrow uptilted eyes as it pushed its snout arrogantly at me. I smelt its hot, rank breath. I turned my face away. I heard it sniff at my ear, my hair. I heard a deep growl come out of it. I just shut my eyes and with my right hand in my coat, I felt the veil.
Its teeth grazed my neck. Instantly, I turned, rose and knocked the wolf backwards, and sent it tumbling and yelping and finally scuttling away from me. Off it ran over the bodies of the dead.
I took a deep breath. I realized the sky overhead was the daytime sky of Earth and I looked at the white clouds, the simple white clouds and the dim faraway horizon beneath them, and I listened to the storm of the insects¡ªthe gnats and the flies rising and swirling here and there over the bodies¡ªand the big humpish ugly vultures, tiptoeing through the feast.
From far away came the sound of human weeping.
But the sky was magnificently clear. The clouds moved so that they released the sun in all its power, and down came the warmth on my hands and face, on the gaseous and exploding bodies around me.
I think I must have lost consciousness. I wanted to. I wanted to fall backwards again on the earth and roll over and lie with my forehead against it, and slip my hand into my coat and feel that the veil was there.
Chapter 20
2O
THE GARDEN of Waiting. The tranquil and radiant place before the Heavenly Gates. A place from which souls return from time to time, when death brings them into it, and they are then told that it is not the moment, and they can go home again.
In the distance, beneath the shining cobalt sky, I saw the Newly Dead greet the Older Dead. Gathering after gathering. I saw the
embraces, heard the exclamations. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the dizzyingly high walls of Heaven, and Heaven's gates. This time I saw the angels, less solid than all the rest, chorus after chorus, moving through the skies, unbound and dipping down at will into the little crowds of mortals crossing the bridge. Shifting between visibility and invisibility, the angels moved, watched, drifted upwards to fade into the inexhaustible blue of the sky.
The sounds of Heaven were faint and achingly seductive as they came from beyond the walls. I could close my eyes and almost see the sapphirine colors! All songs sang the same refrain: "Come in, come here, come inside, be with us. Chaos is no more. This is Heaven. "
But I was far from all this, in a little valley. I sat amid wildflowers, tiny white and yellow wildflowers, on the grass bank of the stream which all souls cross to get into Heaven, only here it seemed no more than any magnificent rushing stream. Or rather, it sang a song that said¡ªafter smoke and war, after soot and blood, after stench and pain¡ªAll streams are as magnificent as this stream.
Water sings in multiple voices as it slides over rocks and down through tiny gullies and rushes abruptly over rises in the earth so that it may again tumble in a mingling of fugue and canon. While the grass bends its head to watch.
I rested against the trunk of a tree, what the peach tree might be if she bloomed forever, both blossoms and fruit, so that she was never bare of either, and her limbs hung down not in submission, but with this richness, this fragrance, this offering, this fusion of two cycles into one eternal abundance. Above, amid fluttering petals, the supply of which seemed inexhaustible and never alarming, I saw the fleeting movement of tiny birds. And beyond that, angels, and angels, and angels, as if they were made of air, the light luminous glittering spirits so faint as to vanish at times in one brilliant breath of the sky.
The Paradise of murals; the Paradise of mosaics. Only no form of art can touch this. Question those who have come and gone. Those whose hearts have stopped on an operating table, so that their souls flew to this garden, and then were brought back down into articulate flesh. Nothing can touch it.
The cool, sweet air surrounded me, slowly removing, layer by layer, the soot and filth that clung to my coat and my shirt.
Suddenly, as if waking to life again from nightmare, I reached inside my shirt and drew out the veil. I unfolded it and held it by its two edges.
The face burned in it, the dark eyes staring at me, the blood as brilliantly red as before, the skin the perfect hue, the depth almost holographic, though the whole expression moved very faintly as the veil moved on the breeze. Nothing had been smeared, torn, or lost.
I felt myself gasp, and my heart speeded dangerously. The heat flooded to my own face.
The brown eyes were steady in their gaze as they had been at that moment, not closing for the soft finely woven fabric. I drew the whole veil close to me, then folded it up again, almost in a panic, and shoved it tight against my skin this time, inside my shirt. I struggled to restore all the buttons to their proper holes. My shirt was all right. My coat was filthy though intact, but all its buttons were gone, even the buttons that had graced the sleeves and had been no longer of any use and were merely decorative. I looked down at my shoes; they were broken and tattered and barely held together anymore. How strange they looked, how unlike anything I had seen of late, made as they were of such fancy leather.