Iain Banks - Whit

'Wait,' I said. 'Yes; I think my friend Mr Warriston might have told me something about it. Wasn't that in Texas?'

'Town called Waco,' my grandmother confirmed. 'About a hundred miles south from Dallas. Drove down there the day it happened. Day it ended. Saw the embers. Made me mad as hell, goddamn government doing that… not that it was right to bomb Oklahoma City, mind… But the point was Koresh,' she said, wagging one finger at me. 'They showed film of him from before, holding a Bible and leading his followers in some marathon worship session and said he wanted to be a rock star; tried to be one, in fact, but didn't get anywhere. Became a prophet instead. And how did he end up living? Worshipped, that's how, in a place where he could have any woman he wanted and smoke dope and drink all night with his buddies. Hog heaven. He got the rock-star life without having to become one; he got what he really wanted: sex and drugs and worship. He was no more holy than, I don't know, Frank Zappa or somebody, but he got to pretend he was, got his own farm, all the guns he could play with and at the end he even got to become some sort of dumb martyr, thanks to the Feds and that fat dick Clinton. Frankly I didn't care Koresh died, or care very much that his followers did, though I probably should; you like to think they knew the choice they were making and were just plain stupid, and if you'd somehow gotten into the same situation you'd have been smarter… No, it was the children that made me cry, Isis; it was knowing they died, knowing they suffered, and weren't old enough to have made up their own minds about whatever insane fucking power-trip that egotistical asshole Koresh was taking his people on.'

I stared at my grandmother. She nodded as she looked ahead. 'That's my thoughts on the subject, Grand-daughter. Seems to me women have been falling for this holy-man shit down through all the centuries and we ain't stopped falling for it yet. Jesus. The KKK: Koresh, Khomeini, Kahane; well, to hell with the lot of them, all the fundamentalists, and that Aum Shitface gang from Japan, too.' Yolanda shook her head angrily. 'World's more like a goddamn comic-book every fuckin' day.'

I nodded, and thought the better of asking my grandmother exactly what she was talking about. She took a deep breath and seemed to calm herself somewhat. She smiled briefly at me. 'All I'm saying is, Isis, don't be in too big a hurry to join up too. You get your head sorted out, but remember: men are a bit crazy and a bit dangerous, and they're jealous as hell, too. Don't sacrifice yourself for them, because they sure as shit won't do it for you; fact is they'll try and sacrifice you .'

I watched her drive for a while. Eventually I said, 'So, are you apostate too, Grandmother?'

'Hell,' Yolanda said, looking annoyed. 'I was never really part of your Order in the first place, Is. I just went along with it. Jerome was interested in trying to save his soul. I found Salvador… charismatic at first, then later I just got to know all the people at the farm, and then Alice married Christopher; that tied me in tight.' She glanced over at me again. 'Then you came along.' She shrugged, looked back at the road. 'I'd have taken you from them if I could, Is.' She looked at me again, and for the first time ever, I thought, she looked uncertain. 'If you hadn't been born the day you were… well, I might have been allowed to take you; they might have let me, after the fire. However.' She shrugged once more and concentrated on the road again.

I turned to watch the road unwind towards us, the traffic like little purposeful packets of metal, glass and rubber, containing their fragile cargoes of humanity.

High Easter Offerance was beautiful that day; the breeze was warm, the air was clear and filled with the sound of fresh young leaves rustling; sunlight made each leaf a green mirror. We parked the car at the semicircle of pitted, weed-strewn tarmac in front of the rusted gates. Sophi's Morris was not there so I guessed she was at work. Yolanda and I walked down the curving drive, its crumbling, mossy surface a long carpet of shadow and restless, flickering light beneath the over-arching trees. My leather trousers squeaked. The long black jacket Yolanda had bought me felt light and elegant, especially over the silk shirt. The closer to the farm I got the more overdressed I felt, and the more contaminated by the Sybaritic antics of the previous night. I fingered the little black bead that was the head of the hat-pin Yolanda had given me years before and which I had remembered to remove from my old jacket and insert into the lapel of my new one (I had taken great delight in the fact that the police had not discovered it). I rubbed its smooth black head between my fingers like something talismanic. I briefly considered dirtying my jacket, but that would have been ridiculous. I was glad I'd kept my old boots, though I was starting to regret I'd cleaned both them and my old hat.

'Jeez; you make all your roads so narrow ,' Yolanda said, stepping round a bramble bush that pushed itself out into the middle of the road.

'It's just overgrown,' I told her, shifting my kit-bag over my other shoulder. I felt a mix of emotions: elation at returning home and trepidation at the prospect of what Yolanda had hinted might be a frosty welcome.

'Yeah, but you do, anyway,' Yolanda insisted. 'Some of those roads up north… I mean, don't you like tarmacadam? I thought the Scots invented the damn stuff.'

The Woodbeans' house stood sentinel at the steep river bank, in front of the old iron bridge. I looked up at the quiet house, Yolanda stood shaking her head at the holes in the bridge's deck and the narrow pathway of odd assorted planks that led across it. Thirty feet below, the river swirled slowly.

'Hold my hand,' she said, putting her hand out behind her. I stepped forward and took her hand as she set one tentative foot on the first of the planks. 'Gettin' so you have to be Indiana fuckin' Jones just to git to your place…'

The drive left the trees and rose a little, heading between the wall of the apple orchard to the left and the lawn in front of the greenhouses to the right. A couple of the goats looked up from their tethered munching on the lawn to watch us approach. We saw the primary children, filing out of the greenhouse in an orderly fashion; one of them noticed Grandma Yolanda and me, and shouted. In a moment they had broken ranks and started running towards us. Brother Calum appeared at the end of the line of running children, looking at first concerned, then pleased, then concerned again.

Yolanda and I were surrounded by a small field of crop-headed children, all jabbering and smiling and raising up their arms to be lifted and held, while others pinched and stroked my leather trousers, and made ooing and ahing noises over my jacket and shirt. Calum stood by the open door of the greenhouse, waved once and nodded cautiously, then disappeared through the gateway into the farm courtyard. Yolanda and I followed, each holding hands with half a dozen children and trying to answer a whirlwind of questions.

We met Brother Pablo as we entered the courtyard, standing holding the bridle of Otie, the donkey, while sister Cassie brushed her. Several of the children left our sides to go and pat and stroke the donkey, which blinked placidly.

'Sister Isis,' Pablo said, lowering his eyes as he returned my Sign. Pablo is a couple of years younger than me, a tall, stooped, quietly spoken Spaniard who has been with us for a year. He usually had a smile for me, but not today, it seemed.

'Hi, Isis,' Sister Cassie said, nodding. She left the brush hanging in Otie's coat and let her hands rest on the heads of a couple of the children. 'Hey; you look… really elegant.'