Thorns of Glory, page 50
“The son of Moroni told us to ignore those words. He said to dismiss anything we heard. I have done so.”
“Have you? Then, you have . . . greater self-discipline than me. A higher mastery of your thoughts. Some of what entered my head . . . I cannot easily dismiss.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my voice unsteady.
Jesse swallowed. A painful sound leeched from his throat as he worked up the nerve to answer my question. My own nerves went on alert. I brought a palm to my forehead, then quickly dropped it. My skin felt clammy and fevered at the same time.
Jesse said, “The voice said . . . you love me.”
I arose abruptly to touch the fronds of the leaves overhead at a place where the covering seemed precariously thin. I contemplated rearranging them to better conceal us, but if an enemy had been standing close, such a move, however subtle, might have brought death upon us. I simply needed to occupy my hands with some task. I could no longer sit still. I fought the unsteadiness of my tongue as I replied, “Of course I love you. You are like a brother to me. An adopted son to my father, the Bishop of Pella.”
Jesse shook his head. “That’s . . . not . . . what the voice meant.”
Still facing away, I shut my eyes tightly. My hands trembled. I tightened them into balls. I gathered my thoughts. Even so, my words sounded weak and fragile, even to myself. “What . . . did you think it meant?”
“I think it meant what it said. It wanted me to know . . . that my own feelings were not in vain.”
I turned and held his eyes with a penetrating glare. “And what did this voice tell you of my betrothed?”
“He’s not your betrothed. Not officially—”
“What did it say about Harry?” I insisted.
We were both suddenly cognizant of how loudly we were conversing, loud enough to be heard from a radius extending to any edge of our little clearing. I planted myself down again but not directly beside Jesse. The separation was enough that I pressed my balled fist into the soil to steady it. My last question did not exactly echo, except in my mind, where it resonated mercilessly.
When Jesse finally spoke again, his tone was more soft and controlled. “It said . . . It said he is not . . . not right for you. Not right to be your husband.”
I responded quickly. “That is not what the voice whispered to me.”
Jesse cocked his head, waiting for me to reveal what it had whispered. The more I thought about it, the more I hesitated. I realized the actual words I’d heard in the slot were more direct—and damning—than those that Jesse had heard.
He said humbly but bitterly, “You do not want to tell me. You are afraid to admit the message you heard.”
“Lies, Jesse,” I said. “I heard lies. Lies meant to tear us all apart. Lies carefully designed to drive a wedge between me and the man I will marry.”
“A man you no longer love?”
What an arrogant, inappropriate, accusing tone! It took all my restraint not to raise my voice to its highest pitch.
“I do love Harry. These are rash, idle words, Jesse.”
“But not as you once did. You would prefer a man of your own experiences. From your own world.”
“What gives you the audacity to say such things? You speak of the man who saved your life. Who still fights to save it at this instant! Harry is your friend. Perhaps the best friend you’ve ever had. Are you so eager and willing to betray your friend?”
“Jacobah said Harry wanted to leave me. Leave me at Mormon’s headquarters—”
“That part was a lie. I know. I was there. Harry expressed no such sentiment. He was as determined to get you out of Zenephi as the rest of us. Jacobah may have been the first to carry you, but after Jacobah, no one else expended more effort—”
“What about you?”
“No. One. Else,” I repeated.
Jesse shut his eyes guiltily. “All right. You must not misunderstand. I, too, love Harry. I acknowledge my debt to him. I accept that Jacobah spoke falsely. However, the forces of evil will often whisper nine truths to entrench one corrosive falsehood. Its objective this afternoon was to sow division. Fracture our camaraderie. I have watched you, Mary, since we departed the slot. I have watched Harry. That voice carefully selected its words because it knew the spirit of enmity could be most effectively provoked if it couched into its message a seed of truth. Indeed, if any part of what it said is remotely true . . . you must tell me. Otherwise, I shall speak of it no more.”
“Then, speak of it no more,” I said. “Harry and I . . . we are meant to be. We are destined. We have been destined since the time of . . . since the day we met in . . .” I realized tears were streaming down my face.
Jesse raised his uninjured arm. His index finger caught one of those tears and pushed it up, as if to return it to my eye. For a moment, I accepted his gentle gesture. Then I sniffled and seized his hand, prepared to toss it aside. I hesitated, worried, I think, that such a forceful action might elicit pain in his opposite shoulder. I continued holding it. At some point, it was clear that he was holding my hand more determinedly than I was holding his, but I did not withdraw.
“You and I met that day too,” he reminded me.
“You were a child. A little boy.”
He leaned slightly closer. “Am I still a little boy to you?”
I shook my head. I looked into his eyes, then looked away and shook it more vigorously. “No. But you are still very young.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Five—perhaps six—years younger than me.”
“Didn’t you once say that your mother was five years older than your father?”
“That’s different. They married when they were older. My father said he would sometimes watch her. He watched patiently from afar until the time when . . .” As the meaning of these words settled in, I met his eyes with a start.
He was smiling warmly. “‘Watched patiently from afar.’ I am more familiar with that concept than you know.”
“I never sensed this.”
“You had eyes for him. I was invisible. Except for our time together when we journeyed to Greece and lived in Athens. You must have sensed . . . something from me.”
“You were a child. I was old enough to be married. Many times, my father suggested that he and I ought to arrange for a suitor, but I . . . I refused, convinced my heart belonged someplace else.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Someplace . . . else.”
His voice ebbed away. I realized he’d fainted. I set one palm against his forehead and the other to his cheek. “Jesse? Jesse!”
His skin was hot. I was sure his fever had spiked. What idiocy! I shouldn’t have allowed this conversation to carry on so long. All nonsense! It had drained him of any semblance of remaining strength. Foolishness!
Such . . . foolishness.
* * *
Pagag
Father tried to warn me, but the breadth of his warning was unclear, so I inquired directly: “Have you seen a vision of what will happen if I go?”
His features withdrew and darkened. “I have seen much, Pagag. I have seen the fate of our nation. The fate of our people. I have heard the cries of our sons and daughters. I have watched them fall by the thousands, their corpses decaying upon the face of the land where you seek to go.”
It was an answer without really answering.
I pressed further. “It is my understanding that my search will take place in an era a half millennium after the destruction of our nation.”
Immediately, I felt irrational. It was not necessary to tell Father such things. There was little of the future of this world that he did not already grasp. He’d seen in vision the breadth and history of every epoch. Like the unfurling of a hundred papyrus leaves, he’d witnessed the passing of generations from the days of Grandfather Adam until the death and resurrection of Gaia, or Earth, herself. He’d written this vision in a book. A book that even I was forbidden to read.
He shook his head solemnly. “The era wherein this woman dwells, and the nation who inhabits the land, will meet the same fate as our own descendants. They will die in the same cruel, violent manner, upon the slopes of the very same hill.”
“I love her,” I said stubbornly. “You promised me, Father. You made me a promise me on the shores of the Great Sea, on the day of our reunion. You promised me by every miracle and blessing that a father could give his eldest son that you would help me to find her. Do you not re—?”
“I remember my words,” he interrupted. “I said them, yes. I said them as a father overjoyed, after four long years, to be reunited with his son.”
“Do you mean your promise was false?”
“No,” he said. “Pagag, I . . . I spoke on impulse. I did not ponder my words carefully. The ramifications. I spoke, my eldest son, without consulting . . .”
He did not finish. I understood. He meant he’d uttered his promise before he had sought a revelation. Before he had sought the enlightenment of Father God’s Spirit.
I was stricken by successive emotions. First, the anger of a child denied a sweet treat. The frustration of a broken man. And finally, a greater rebirth of stubbornness. Whatever its flaws, a promise was a promise.
“If I am doomed to failure, if you have come to learn since that day, by the whisperings of revelation, that my desires are in opposition to the will of God, tell me now. Otherwise, Father . . . I will go.” I straightened. A rock, an altar, a mountain of intractability. But inside my soul was withering.
Father wept. He broke down in my presence. Mother wept too. The sight was too much, as if my heart was stripped from its cavity. I knew with certainty that if I did not search for Steffanie, if I did not find her, I would be grief-stricken for the rest of my days. But I could not endure my father and mother’s display of passion. In spite of it all, I was about to relent. I was on the precipice of abandoning my own desires, placing their grief above my own. Before I could open my mouth, Mother opened hers.
“If your will is so strong, Pagag,” she said, “if you love her so much, it cannot be in opposition to the will of Father God.”
The brows above Father’s tear-stained eyes arched high. “Yes, it can, my bride,” he declared. “Our will—the things we most desire—are quite often in opposition to the will of Father God.” He suspired long and deep and turned back to me. “But . . . He also loves us. His love is greater than any love we are capable of summoning for one another. Greater even than the love you feel for Staffini.”
“Steffanie.”
“Steffanie,” he corrected. “And so, in His infinite mercy, He lets us pursue our agency—even our follies—to learn whatever it is that we must learn as we sojourn behind the veil of mortality. For that is the reason we came. It’s why we inhabit this tabernacle of flesh. But, oh, son, the turmoil we have the power to avoid—the time we can spare—if only we will accede to His whisperings from the beginning.”
“So I ask again,” I said, my spirit more humble, “what are the whisperings of the Lord? What is His will?”
He pondered this. Then shook his head. “It is difficult, son, despite all that I know, all that I have seen, to separate inside my heart the will of God from the love I feel for you. You must know His will for yourself. You, Pagag, must decide.”
“But . . . you are my father. My pride has softened. My ears are open. I will receive your counsel.”
He smiled, an expression of sorrow combined with love. “You are a man, Pagag. In truth, I have not been shown your destiny and fate.” The smile ran away. “This is also my fear. Because if you go . . . when you go . . .” Fresh tears pooled. ”I do not know if I will ever see you again.”
Two days later I departed. I was accompanied by my eldest sister, Setra; two of my brothers, Ethem and Ramah; and three of my cousins, Jacom, Mahah, and Orihah. The journey required almost a month. There was not a cycle of the sun wherein I did not hear the echo of Father’s words. I shook them away. What else could I do? I shook them off like a canine shaking off rain. For just as Father’s words would not fade, neither would the visage—the memory—of Steffanie Hawkins.
It felt as though these things had loomed in my mind from infancy. I could not remember when they were not present. Perhaps I exaggerate. It may be that I am fanciful and maudlin when it comes to love. I was certainly aware of the power I held over women, for they had never made much of an effort to hide their feelings from me. To my shame, I had betimes exercised that power to my advantage. Not immorally or indecently, but I was not above manipulating their thoughts. Their hopes. Why did I judge myself so harshly? Often enough, my feelings for them had been wholly sincere, such as my infatuation with Mary Symeon.
Still, Steffanie . . . Steffanie was . . . My feelings for Steffanie were . . . I am tempted to say sacred, but I fear this might be overstated. At the very least it was premature. All I knew was that her visage was there all the while that I had assisted my family to complete the vessels that would carry us across the Great Deep. Her image hovered above my bed mat during those lonely hours in the belly of the barge as we were swept to and fro by the waves, our only illumination the stone Father had prepared on Mount Shelem, touched by the finger of the Lord. Even after arriving at the shores of the Promised Land, Steffanie’s visage had lingered all throughout those long months as I helped my family construct a settlement and prepare for all things that would sustain us in our new home.
The light of these sixteen white stones had started to dim shortly after our emergence from the barges. Within a few weeks it faded altogether. My Uncle Jared believed they’d never shine again. They had served their purpose, he explained. Now they were like any other stones. Pleasant to the eye and to the touch but perfectly ordinary.
Father did not disagree with him, but he advised each of his sons and the sons of Jared to retain one of the stones, if for no other reason, I think, than that they would serve as a memento, an heirloom, a reminder to us and our descendants of the Lord’s miracles and mercies.
On the morning we arrived at the foothills of Ramah—which I named for my second-youngest brother—Steffanie and I had been apart for nearly two years. Ramah, Ethem, Setra, and I, along with my cousins, crisscrossed the slopes of Ramah for eight ceaseless days. Our search began on a Sabbath, right after we completed our prayers and oblations. The search continued until the following Sabbath, not long before it concluded with the setting sun.
In my zeal, we had postponed, on that Sabbath day, our oblations until it was nearly too late. My companions did not question my wisdom. Well, not aloud. They looked upon me as their leader. Their future king. To my siblings and cousins, not only had we set out in search of the woman I loved, we searched for the woman who would one day become their queen.
Only moments before the simmering sun descended behind the hill, my sister, Setra spoke up. “Tell us again,” she said, eyes fixed toward the west. “What are we expecting to find?”
I’d tried to explain this several times already, but plainly not to their satisfaction.
“A rupture,” I replied. “A tear in the element of time.”
“Time is an element?” asked Mahah. “Like stone or fire? Water or wind?”
His words had a mocking edge. I ignored this. He immediately seemed to regret it. He was weary. We were all weary.
Setra, however, persisted. “Tell us again how this ‘rupture’ will appear.”
Like her, I peered eastward toward the sinking sun. “It has been different every time I’ve encountered it. The throat of a cave. The foam of an ocean wave. The fury of combat.”
“Fury of combat?” repeated Jacom, eldest son of Uncle Jared. “You’ve never employed that description. It is not a place.”
I tried to correct myself. “This combat . . . It occurred in the interior of a tent. This tent stood very near the place where we slept last night.”
“This tent,” said Orihah, “was the place where you fought the servants of the Black One?”
I nodded.
“Was it the place itself,” Setra inquired, “or the dark servants who . . . caused . . . this rupture in time?”
I struggled to recall that night. The wretched odor of the persons—or “presences”—I slew in the darkness. The scream of . . . No, not screaming. I still could not decide if what I’d heard was a yell or a grunt. That sound had done something to the air. The atmosphere had constricted around my flesh, hot and then cold and then hot again. It was as if the wind of life was sucked from the space around us. Afterward, a blinding flash, the coolness of the sea, and the distant figure of Father coming toward me up the beach.
I stuttered in my response. “I think . . . I’m not . . .”
Orihah rescued me from my stupor. “The problem may be our neglect. The Sabbath ends within the hour. If we lack answers, let’s try obedience. If we lack wisdom, let’s try faith.”
He was the youngest son of Jared. The youngest of all of us. His sagacity seemed to revive us all.
We took advantage of the time that remained and dedicated ourselves to prayer and oblation. As for me, I attempted to sling the ruminations of my heart upward to Father God. My thoughts were among the most humble and self-effacing that I can remember. What might seem surprising was how few of those words referenced the thing I most desired. I don’t recall if these thoughts remotely addressed my immediate needs: the precise purpose, as it would appear, that I’d knelt to pray in the first place. I did not whine and beg. I did not remind Father God, as I’d already done countless times, how keenly, how poignantly I desired to find and be with Steffanie. Most of my prayer, as I recall, was devoted to glorifying Him, acknowledging His matchless power, my own insignificance before Him, and the gratitude I felt for my companions, my family, and His creations and blessings.
