Simon Toyne - Sanctus

‘Do not worry, Brother,’ the Abbot said, misreading his tears. ‘All your wounds will soon heal.’

He raised the glowing tip of the iron and Cornelius felt the dry heat approaching the skin of his upper arm. He looked away and remembered the bloom of the explosion that had burned him once before. Felt the searing agony again as the branding iron pressed against him. He gritted his teeth, clamping down on a scream, willing himself to endure it as the smell of his burning flesh corrupted the air.

The iron was removed, but the pain remained, and Cornelius forced a look at it to convince himself it was over. He sipped shallow breaths, looking down at the charred and blistered patch of flesh that marked him now as one of the chosen. Then he saw the flesh start to harden, knit together and heal.

A grinding sound scraped through the flickering darkness, dragging his eyes away. The guard was heaving against the wooden stakes in the huge circular stone, rolling it along channels worn smooth by millennia to reveal a chamber beyond. At first glance it appeared to be empty. Then, as Cornelius’s eyes sank into the blackness, he saw candlelight flickering inside.

‘Come,’ said the Abbot, taking his arm and leading him towards it. ‘See for yourself. You are one of us now.’

Athanasius scanned the swirling darkness in the Chamber of Philosophy; looking past the edges of his own contained light for the glow of others.

There were none.

He hurried over to the bookshelf halfway down the room and reached over the collected works of Kierkegaard where his fingers closed round the slim volume of Nietzsche. He withdrew it and slipped it under his sleeve, not daring to look at it as he hurried away from the central corridor towards the reading tables stationed at the quiet and private edges of the chamber. He found one against a wall, buried amongst the most obscure and unsought titles, checked the darkness once more, then laid the book gently down on the desk top.

He stared at it for a moment, as if it was a mousetrap about to spring. It looked suspiciously isolated on the bare desk so he reached across to the nearest shelf, took down a few more volumes and laid them beside it, opening some at random. Satisfied with the makeshift camouflage of study he had created, he sat down, checked the darkness one last time, then opened the volume to where the folded sheets of paper lay. He removed the first one, carefully unfolded it and pressed it flat against the desk.

The page was blank.

He reached into the pocket of his cassock and removed a small stick of charcoal he had rescued earlier from the Abbot’s fire. He ground it against the desktop until he had a small pile of fine, black powder then, very gently, he dipped the tip of his finger into it and began to rub it back and forth across the greasy surface of the paper. As the dust found the gaps in the wax, small black symbols began to rise from the creamy blankness, until two dense columns of text filled the page.

Athanasius looked down at what the dust had revealed. He had never seen so much of the forbidden language of Malan collected into one document before. He held his breath as he leaned forward, as if the merest gasp might blow the words from the page, and started to read, translating in his head as he went.

In the beginning was the World

And the World was God, and the World was good.

And the World was the wife of the Sun

And the creator of everything.

In the beginning the World was wild,

A garden teeming with life.

And a being appeared, an embodiment of Earth,

One to bring order to the garden.

And where the One walked, the land blossomed,

And plants grew where there had been none,

And creatures nested and prospered,

And each was given a name by the One

And took what it needed from the Earth and no more.

And each gave itself back to the Earth

When its life was done.

And so it was through the time of the great ferns,

And the time of the great lizards,

Even to the dawn of the first age of ice.

Then one day man appeared — the greatest of all animals.

Close to being a god — but not close enough for him.

And he began to see not the great gifts he possessed

But only those he lacked.

He began to covet that which was not his.

And this made an emptiness inside him.

And the more he yearned for that which he had not,

The greater this emptiness became.

He tried to fill it with things he could possess:

Land, chattels, power over animals, power over others.

He saw his fellow man and desired more than his share,

He wanted more food, more water, more shelter.

But none of these things could fill the vast emptiness.

And above all else he wanted more life.

He did not want his time on Earth

To be measured by the rise and fall of the sun,

But by the rise and fall of mountains.

He wanted his time to be immeasurable.

He wanted to be immortal.

And he saw the One. Walking the Earth.

Never ageing. Never withering.

And he became jealous.

Gabriel climbed into the cockpit of the cargo plane and looked through the windshield. In the distance the van’s brake lights flared red as it slipped past the guardhouse and pulled out on to the road. He figured it would take his mother about thirty minutes to drive to the Citadel and get into position. Once he was airborne it would take him less than ten.

He sat in the left-hand pilot seat and scanned the controls. He had flown second seat several times, but not for a while, and never solo. The C-123 was not designed for a one-man crew. When fully laden it weighed sixty thousand pounds and needed two strong men hauling on both sticks to shift it through the air. Landing was the hardest part, especially with a full load in a cross-wind: at least that wasn’t going to be a problem.

He raced through the pre-flight checks, dredging his memory for the procedures drummed into him during his military training, then heaved on the flaps and rudder to remind himself of their weight. They were heavier than he remembered. He engaged the brake, pumped the fuel and pushed the starter button. The stick shuddered in his hand as the starboard Double-Wasp engine juddered then coughed into life with a spluttering roar. The port engine followed with a belt of black smoke and he felt the braced power of the props straining against the stick, impatient to push the plane forward. He feathered the throttle down a little then slipped on a headset, hit the comms and hailed the tower. He gave his call-sign and heading and requested clearance for immediate takeoff.

Then he waited.

There were only two runways at the airport. Fortunately the cargo flights mainly came and went on runway two, the one closest to the hangar. If the wind was in the wrong place, however, he would have to taxi the long way round to the other strip. The seconds ticked by.

He saw movement, over to his right, two sets of blue lamps spinning lazily above the bouncing beam of oncoming headlights. It was a patrol truck, skimming across the blacktop, parallel to the perimeter fence, heading towards the guardhouse. Gabriel saw it starting to slow.

Time to go.

He pushed the twin throttle levers forward, eased off the brake and felt the plane lurch as the twin props caught the cold night air and pull him forward across the tarmac. Over to his left a big passenger jet was waiting at the end of the main runway. It was pointing in the same direction. This meant the wind was ahead of him, so if he did have to take off without proper clearance he’d at least be heading in the same direction as the rest of the traffic.