Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"What does the letter say, Stephen?"

Stephen smiles inwardly and recites the passage the Pilgrim told him. The whole band knows the message by heart, and the runaway novitiate asks for it much the way that the youngest asks for the same story about the cock, the hare, and the cow each night before she can fall asleep.

"Is it in French?"

"How should I know?" Stephen shrugs. "Is that important?"

"The words allude to those of Saint John, describing his vision on the island of Patmos."

"A-allude?" Stephen stutters suspiciously.

"Do you know what the note means? It means our parents have failed us."

Stephen rubs the back of his head, still smarting from the punishment his mother never suspected would be his send-off.

"And not just our own parents." The older boy employs all the rhetorical skill the monks imparted to him. "The entire older generation. They have lost sight of God's desires." In quick pastel flashback, he tells Stephen of the four great campaigns to retrieve the Holy City, narrating the sad degradation of the blessed quest over a century and a quarter — from the first inspired flame to the sack of the Church's Eastern capital.

A change works its way over Stephen as he considers the message he has been entrusted with. Suddenly, its import is clear. The king they must serve as messenger is not the corrupted, human one. They, this band of a few dozen children, are meant to satisfy the Creator's will all by themselves. They will succeed where their parents failed. They must convert the unbeliever, recover the Holy Sepulcher, besiege the city of Jerusalem by love, doing what force of arms could not.

Yes — this was the Pilgrim's intention from the start. I choose one who follows my profession. By morning, Stephen finds a new strength and gentleness. He addresses his collected charges after breakfast with a mix of love and fervor. "We are not on our way to Paris after all." Not? Where then?

To the sea, by the most expedient route. Over the water to the towers of Civitas Dei. Let anyone who cannot aspire to reach there in perfect love turn back now, to France, to the world of things.

Not a child does. The band reconnoiters momentarily at St.-Denis, where a flaming sermon by the boy contrasts the conditions of the two sepulchers, this one flourishing, while the Lord's decays in pagan hands. The ranks of infant infantry swell with all those young enough to hear. Parents cannot reduce the stream of volunteers. The French king, as Stephen feared, bans the crusade, and professors at the earthly university declare it satanic. This is all the confirmation he needs: they must brave this alone.

Aching with resolution, Stephen turns away all petitioners over sixteen. The cause must be pure this time, untainted by anything past the first stages of innocence. The angel, his first recruit, infected by his seriousness, shaves her radiant hair and takes up walking in the rear, with the baggage train. Stephen continues to think of her at night, despite fasting, flagellation, and prayer.

They walk along in immense double file, a thread so long the middle can't see the end. A mélange of dialects fills the air, translated by magic. Here and there, children adopt a uniform — gray shift, palmer's staff, scraps of cloth sewn into a cross on the breast. Nights are steeped in fireside telling: fables, tales, legends, gests, sparked inventions to link each life to the great contour. But none of these asides can match the allegory they make now. By days, marching, they sing, several thousand voices in monodic unison, "O Lord, restore us to the True Cross."

The year is strange beyond interpreting. Overland reports tell of epochal animal convocations — fish, fowl, frogs, insects — massing for deciding diets. Dogs from all France and beyond assemble to fight their civil war. The beasts, in their spotlessness, know.

Deeper into Burgundy, on the road, in the brightness of midsummer, a voice near Stephen calls out a surprised "Hello!" Stephen spins around to greet it, but the caller is nowhere.

He has walked too far; he's begun hearing things. But he must walk many times farther still, before reaching home. "Hello?" Stephen murmurs, more to himself than to the phantom.

"That's the way!" The voice comes back, no more than twelve inches from Stephen's ears. "That's it. It's working!"

A close-up catches the alarm on Stephen's features. But his skin, in its silver youth, still proclaims the blessedness of those who believe without yet having seen. "Who are you? Where are you?"

A burst of giggle betrays that the hidden speaker is even younger than Stephen, ten years old at the most. "My name is Nicolas. I come from Cologne." (An insert shows the spire-line of the city, with a blowup of its greatest treasure — the fabulous golden Magi reliquary, containing Barbarossa's three crusade-booty skeletons, one a milk-toothed boy.) "At the moment we're camped outside Koblenz." As Nicolas speaks, his visage shimmers, solidifying in the air above the French band's vanguard.

"Cologne?" Stephen throws his tunic-draped arms up in provincial panic. "But I speak no German!"

"Don't let that worry you," Nicolas giggles. "I don't know a lick of French, neither."

The colored drawings clarify, in wonderful split-framing: a ghostly Nicolas hovering above the Rhône Valley, a disembodied Stephen, inverse fata morgana, over the Rhine. The children who walk nearest Stephen in the snaking column can neither see nor hear anything; their road to Provence is brilliantly Mediterranean, vacant. In half an hour, word ripples through the French ranks that their leader has begun to traffic in miracles.

The boys feel one another out, unsure whether to wrestle for top spot or swear blood brotherhood. At last Nicolas pouts, "We heard of what you are doing over there, and we want to meet you in the Middle East."

"We? How many are you?"

The German has been waiting for this question. "At present, eleven thousand three hundred and forty-seven. But the lieutenant in cadre six is still counting. We form a six-and-a-half-mile file when flat out." A little proudly, the kid challenges, "How many are you? "

Stephen shrugs Gallically over the private, invisible airways. Nicolas mutters the Low German equivalent of 'Vive la différence. " Stephen can hear, in the murmuring background, several thousand treble voices raising the chorale "Schönster Herr Jesu, Herrscher aller Erden."

The boys stay in constant contact, tying in at least once each evening. Nicolas enjoys charging into Stephen's ear throughout the day, issuing communiqués about his swelling numbers. Stephen, his own force growing absurdly, gently cautions the boy from time to time. "Remember, if we win the day at Acre and beyond, it will be through love and love only."

This sweet upbraiding always results in grumbles. "All right. But love can use a bit of muscle, can't it?"

Stephen comes to love the younger boy, however impetuous. They have wonderful theological arguments over whether the kingdom they are preparing will arise, at last, on this earth or on the far side of the heavenly bridge. Stephen encourages Nicolas to try his hand at healing the sick in his company, rather than leaving them along the route. Nicolas in turn endlessly suggests ways that Stephen might coordinate the movements of a migrating band now beyond all counting.

Nicolas becomes Stephen's confidant, the repository of hopes and the bulwark against night's doubt. "How am I to ferry an army of tens of thousands of children safely across the Mediterranean?" Stephen whispers to the ten-year-old, late, from a campsite a week away from

that shore.

"Ha! That'll be easy. The waters will part in front of our faith, like the sea in front of Moses." This answer passes confidently up and down Stephen's column. "I, on the other hand," counters Nicolas, "have real problems. How am I supposed to port twenty thousand children over the Alps?"