Calvin Baker - Grace

There were no birth records and Achilles, second of twelve, was home while his brother was at pasture with the herds. His parents put him forth for sacrifice instead.

The children they abducted were then dealt out in the capital like playing cards, and Achilles ended with a group of Jesuit missionaries, where he was trained to someday return to help convert the others. By eighteen he had accepted this fate, until one night, as he read in the library, he found a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum , and it was like speaking to like; self communing with self without interdiction. Corpus and spiritus joined. Song of his own song. What was boy became warrior.

In the morning all the priests were found slaughtered. The boys were forced from the grounds, and scattered before the wind like seeds. “We are natural men, who have been spirited into an unnatural world, let us live as we were meant to again and forever. Return to your villages and bear witness to what happened here,” he declared in his sermon that morning at Mass, before setting the campus ablaze.

When the fire was high enough that it glowed in the black of his eyes, he saw inside at the windows three novices who had not evacuated, but hidden in the dorms for fear they were dead to their people and would not be accepted back.

They escaped the inferno in time. Shadrach, Mesach, Abednego, as he called them when he enlisted them under his command, and set out with his army of ninth-graders to cleanse the world.

First they set out to rid the country of churches. Next they set upon government, then schools, jails, corporations, institutions of any sort.

Those who did not question on this first campaign, who did not buck, did not break, did not die, were elevated to be Achilles’ lieutenants, as he himself was God’s lieutenant on earth, holding court in lieu of the Almighty.

“Under what authority do you serve?” A new recruit once asked, challenging their leader’s command, after his own village had been put to sword.

“The Society of the Virgin,” answered Achilles. “She came to me in a vision, and revealed that I am the son of Christ. The Holy Spirit, it works through me.”

“Which Virgin?”

“The Black Virgin. Mother of the Blessed. Protector of the Lost.”

Sometime after that they were on maneuvers in the mountains, and he was pinned down by enemy fire, and Achilles knew he had been betrayed. They had just passed through the village of another of his lieutenants, and that man-child had sold out his brothers-in-arms in favor of the mother who first birthed him.

They fought through the night, outgunned and losing soldiers by the score, then the hundreds, between the edge of the jungle and the mountain’s sheer rock cliff. He was a leader who, since he first understood his call, had known no doubt, but he meditated all that night on the fault of his ways, and made a vow before sunrise. If he emerged from that deluge he would purify and rededicate himself to his cause.

By miracle, they claimed, they lived to see the next day. His entire regiment had been decimated, save five others, four who were loyal and the one who sold him from weakness. They gave thanks nonetheless that morning, and in observance he bestowed on each survivor a new name, as the sun sprang its first pink knuckle from its nighttime grave, and the dew of first day seeped through their gear, chilling their skin.

Isaac he rechristened Jeremiah. Who was Esau became Obadiah. An albino boy, also called Isaac, he baptized as Isaac once more, and Isaac went after that by the name II Isaac. The fourth and most faithful he blessed with Daniel. These were the prophets of suffering, and the leaders of the First Army of Innocence, as they were then called.

The child called Chausiku at home and Uriah at school, he sprinkled with water from the lake, kissed him on the mouth, and called him brother. When he administered the sacrament he gave to him the new name Jude. The outfit that before had been the Army of Innocents was innocent no longer, and became thereafter the Army of Revelation. He himself he crowned Job, because he was come to suffer. Where they had been confused before, they knew exactly what they did now. They set out to reveal.

“Jesus forgives your sins, Jude, my brother,” Job said softly. “They were caused because you love your mother and are a mamma’s son. You thought the village mothers could save you from the wrath of the Father. Only repent and renounce Satan, who misled you, and all his Works, once again, and from this day forward.”

“I renounce them,” Jude said. “Satan, and all his works.”

“Amen. But before you can sin again you must leave the earth for the kingdom.” He dispatched him then, sending his friend to meet his Maker in a state of purity. “Here on earth I alone make peace. I alone create evil. I am judge of men, and judge of judges, and judge of kings. You I deny.”

He no longer trusted those local to the region after that, and put out the call for recruits and comrades in all parts of the world, who would come into that jungle Eden with him, and reclaim it from wickedness. “The earth has become unnatural, and it is time for us to live again according to the laws of nature, and not Satan in the halls of power.”

They heard his call, and came to him from all over the world. And he looked through the clarity of each eye, down until he could see the silver mark on every translucent heart; read the prayer engraved on each numinous, golden soul. Some he enlisted and others he sent away. Those he drew to him were culled from every war zone and every refugee camp and every ghetto, every occupied land and every crippled way of life. Whosoever was put upon. Whosoever was misunderstood. Whoever was wretched, and whose idols had been smashed, clung to him, to help pull down their oppressors in a cataclysm they said would equal the first fall.

They were all young as he, all veterans of other wars, and all saw visions of a new world, perfect and pure, to which they were devoted even beyond life.

In the most lawless stretch of the interior they laid hold to a city-state the size of Acadia, protected by the jungle, that in turn grew into a country the size of the Louisiana Purchase, in which they destroyed all roads, all telephone lines, all power cables, tax collection, any instrument of the modern world, to cut off contamination.

In the new land they fashioned fishhooks from bones, and medicine from tree barks and herbs native to the soil. They wove their own clothing, cooked their food in stone pots they carved from the mountain. There was no science beyond warfare, which they waged without cease on the corrupt world beyond their borders. Inside the republic they lived free and unstained.

From the center Job sent deacons south, west, and north to cleanse all corruption, while he himself held the eastern country absolute as the sun. “I am the sun,” he would declare one day, as the rebellion began to unravel from within. “I will bring light to evil, and wash away sin with perfection.”

He was thirty-two then, and had never known a woman’s embrace, and made virginity a requisite for all his soldiers. Only those who were not stained by sins of the flesh could be pure, and those who were not pure existed to be cleansed.

He put his stone knife through those who were not pure, one by one, so they could die pure in the jungle Eden. “You go to heaven now,” he proclaimed, in a madness so broken and scrambled it began to make a new sense. “Here I am ruler, and will commit this crime so that the next generation will abide no impurity.”

Only the children were granted reprieve, to become the base of his new army and his new world. The adults he captured were put to work in mines, toiling ceaselessly by day to harvest ore, iron, copper, gold, coltan, and by night to produce soldiers.