Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Nicolas's logistical difficulties are soon taken out of his hands. He brings his immaculate enterprise as far as Mont Cenis monastery pass. There, Revelation's field trip begins to break up. His angelically impatient first and second cadres head by shortest route to the sea, via the Ampezzo Valley. Cadres three through five choose less devastating terrain, following the Adige River via Trento and Verona. Nicolas convinces the others that they must cross Lombardy and head toward Genoa to rendezvous with Saint Stephen and the French.

By the time Stephen reaches Marseilles, all Europe knows what is happening. The continental passage of guiltless children in pursuit of the millennium inflames imaginations from England to Hungary. People throng the roads to meet the crusade, walking for days just to see the battalions pass. Faith renews the dying world with a storming force of naïveté, a little child leading them.

As they approach the sea, the columns openly chant faith's refrain. The waters will party make a land bridge for us to pass. God has taken us this far. All the earth's oceans will dry; the world will be one, without divisions.

They parade in confidence up to the shore. But the sea, it stuns them to discover, stays sadistically the sea. Callous water stretching to the limits of vision makes the youngest in the vanguard break down in bitter tears. "It cannot be!" Foretaste of failure fills thirty thousand mouths, failure on a scale humankind can neither know nor survive. But a miracle awaits Stephen's crusaders in the harbor. A whole fleet assembles there, as if divinely arranged. Merchants stand ready to take the holy army to its history-ending destination. Causa Dei, absque pretio. (No! the flashlight reader shouts. Look out! These men are evil;you can tell by their finery, the folds of their faces. But the view from above— prophetic periscope of two mirrors tilting a perpendicular to everything — fails to inform pilgrim level.)

Stephen oversees the delicate boarding. A steady, incredulous joy spreads through him to see the force distributed among the dromonds, buzas, gulafres, cats — the agent vessels of an expanding world. One day he catches sight of the girl, in all her head-shaved beauty, high up in one galleon's perilous castle poop deck. He calls to her, forgetting himself, their cub chastity. "We will meet in front of the Dome of the Rock," she calls back, beaming at her saint.

Keeping Nicolas abreast of the boarding, Stephen knows that his thousands cannot wait for the arrival of the Germans on the coast. Nicolas, beside himself trying to keep track of his forces now scattering themselves through Lombard towns, waves his joint commander on ahead. "Carry on. We're right behind you. Just leave us a dusky brute or two to baptize."

Stephen boards the last ship out of safe haven. Overjoyed, he looks back on the disappearing continent. All around him, the child-manned fleet sings "Veni Creator Spiritus." He tries to contact Nicolas to let him listen in. But for the first time, no apparition appears on the empty air.

The German child at that moment stumbles lost through the Po Valley. His splinter group has been whittled by attrition to a few thousands. Rumor — in vague watercolor washes — drifts in from the other factions: stories of children robbed by peasants, their various virgin orifices despoiled by Tuscan aristocrats. Weary ten-year-olds give in to acquired vices, then take to them willingly in quick addiction. The pursuit of the True Cross becomes a struggle to ward off utter chaos.

Nicolas's western cadres struggle on. A few thousand assemble in Genoa. Some stay to found famous patrician families, in a brief flash-forward. Others press on to the Holy See. Every set of walls and towers, every pathetic handyman's castle even on this, the wrong side of the divided world, touches off the excited cry "Is that Jerusalem? Is that Jerusalem?"

In Rome, much later, the pope welcomes them, shaming Christian Europe by pronouncing, "See how these innocents busy themselves with preparations for recovery while we drowse?" Taking pity on pink limbs that have seen more than a life's worth of sacrifice, he absolves them of their vows. He promises that each has already achieved a foothold in paradise. He tells them to return as adults if they still desire to be pilgrims. But he forbids the expedition to proceed.

The way back is colder, more harrowing, less likely, darker than can be painted. Each one of them travels alone. The innocents that do reach North come back corrupted beyond recovery. And the land they return to is not home. Nothing more is heard from the boy Nicolas, who preached the end of history. He is stranded somewhere between Genoa and St. Gotthard, Gog and Magog.

Europe waits anxiously for word of Stephen's venture. The crusade has been so long under way it seems to have existed from the very launch of time. The home front half expects that any month must bring the account of conquest. They grill all travelers for word of the promised conflagration, this time bloodless and pure, the one that will transform threadbare creation.

But word fails to come. Waiting shades seamlessly into neglect. Some months after everyone has given up on hearing, an account works its way back to the mainland. Two child ships were caught in a freak storm and cracked open on the rocks off of San Pietro, southwest of Sardinia. The thousand children's bodies, washed up on the surf, collected in a modest crypt, miraculously fail to decompose.

The site of this Sign begins drawing pilgrims from many lands. It is hastily marked with a chapel built by order of the pope, a new Holy Sepulcher inscribed ECCLESIA NOVORUM INNOCENTIUM. Twelve prebends tend it with perpetual prayer. The shrine, drawn in time lapse, vanishes over the centuries, to be rediscovered half a millennium later by Grand Tourists struck with uncomprehending wonder.

Eighteen years after the mass departure, a man gnarled by torture-accelerated age returns to the Christian North, claiming to have been a child crusader. The flotilla has already passed into myth, and this wandering priest's story — picked up in Albericus, de Champré, Bacon, the era's Classics Illustrated s — is a curiosity at best. Well into the waning century, travelers returning from the Middle East tell of light-skinned Muslim slaves in Algeria and Alexandria who speak a strange pidgin of Arabic and Romance. This is the fabled end of that child cargo: traded on the international spot market, sold to the Saracens by creedless merchants, martyred to this round of teleology, but passing on to their own children the remembered vow "Our feet shall stand within thy walls, O Jerusalem."

An estimated hundred thousand innocents are lost, sold, killed, betrayed, evacuated from this world by faith. Nor do the picture portals leave off there. They open onto a few more spots of scattered continuance: the Erfurt exodus. A mass child migration to St.-Michel. The Kinderzeche. Dancing manias, disappearances, and sovereign successions over subsequent centuries are each given detailed treatment in a much-subdivided pane, as complex and effulgent as the best leaded glass, its Gothic model. But of the shepherd child, of Stephen himself, no more caption. He is shown, ghostly, staring leeward from a floating castle deck, looking out onto the last days that again circle overhead.

The final colored frame — the last, the very last — is a radical departure for the artist's pen. It leaps from archaic Treasure Chest style into UPI Wire Photo: boy soldiers in another epochal year once more marching through the Lion's Gate into God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. The mother of all battles. Above them, overhead, fly Armageddon's radar-evading Stealth engines of destruction, assembled by the same Angel City industries whose cost overruns buy their pauperized crusader state this little margin of imaginary time.