XII

Happiness had always sharpened Jacob’s appetite for its contraries. Blithe from some successful slaughter he would invariably make straightaway for a cultured city where he could seek out a tragic play, better still an opera, even a great painting, that would stir up the rich mud of feelings he kept settled most of the time. Then he would indulge his passions like a reformed drunkard left among the brandy barrels, imbibing until he sickened on the stuff.

Unlike happiness, however, despair only wanted its like. When he was in its thrall, as he was now, his nature drove him to discover more of the very feelings that pained him. Others sought out palliatives for their wounds. He looked only for a harsher grade of salt.

Until now, he’d always had a cure for this sickness. When the despair became too much for him to bear, Rosa would be there to coax him from the brink of total collapse and restore his equilibrium. Sex had more often than not been her means; a little hide the sausage, as she’d been fond of calling it in her more bumptious moods. Today, however, Rosa was the cause of his despair, not its cure. Today she was dying, by his hand, her hurt too deep to be mended. He had laid her down in the murk of their shuttered house and, at her instruction, left her there.

“I don’t want you anywhere near me,” she’d said. “Just get out of my sight.”

So he’d gone. Out of the village and up the slope of the fell, looking for a place where his despair might be amplified. His feet knew where to take him: to the wood where the damnable child had shown him visions. He would find plenty of fuel for his wretchedness there, he knew. There was nowhere on the planet he regretted setting foot more than that arbor. In hindsight he’d made his first error offering the knife to Will. His second? Not killing the boy as soon as he’d realized he was a conduit. What strange sympathy had been upon him that night, that he’d let the brat go, knowing that Will’s mind was filled with filched memories?

Even that stupidity might not have cost him so dearly if the boy had not grown up queer. But he had. And undisturbed by the call to fecundity he’d become a far more powerful enemy—no, not enemy; something more elaborate—than he would have been if he’d married and fathered children. Steep had never been comfortable in the company of queers, but he’d felt, almost against his will, a kind of empathy with their condition. Like him, they were obliged to be self-invented; like him, they looked in at the rest of the tribe from its perimeters. But he would have gladly visited a holocaust on the entire clan if it would have kept this one, this Will, from crossing his path.

Fifty yards from the wood, he halted and, looking up from his boots, surveyed the panorama. Autumn was close; he could smell its bruising touch in the air. It was a time of the year he’d often set out walking, taking a week or two off from his labors to explore the backwaters of England. Despite the calamities of commerce, the country still possessed its sacred places if a traveler looked hard and carefully enough. Communing with the ghosts of heretics and poets he had strode the country from end to end over the years: walked the straight roads where the Behemists had gone and heard them call the very earth the face of God; idled in the Malvern Hills, where Langland had dreamed of Piers Plowman; strode the flanks of barrows where pagan lords lay in beds of dirt and bronze. Not all these sites had noble histories. Some were lamentable places, fields and copses where believers had died for their Christ. At Aldham Common, where Rowland Taylor, the good rector of Hadleigh, had been burned at the stake, his fire fueled from the hedgerows that still grew green about the spot; and Colchester, where a dozen souls or more had been cremated in a single fire for a sin of prayer. Then to more obscure spots still, places he’d found only because he listened like a fly at a dying man’s mouth. Places where unhallowed men and women had perished for love or faith or both. He envied the dead, very often. Standing in a plowed field some September, crows cawing in the fleshless trees, he thought of the simplicity of those whose dust was churned in the dirt on his boots, and wished he had been born with a plainer heart.

He would not visit these places again, not this autumn, nor ever. His life, which had been in its curious way a model of stability, was changing: by the day, by the hour. Though he would certainly silence Rabjohns, the deed would not repair the damage that had been done. Rosa would still die, and he would be left alone in his despair, spiraling down and down. Given that there would be nobody to check his descent, he would keep going until he could fall no further. Then he would perish, most likely by his own hand, and his vision of a naked earth would be left in other, less honorable, hands.

No matter, he thought, as he resumed his trek toward the wood. There were plenty of men who were in unwitting service of the same ideal. He’d had the questionable pleasure of meeting a brace of them in his time: crazed military men, in a few cases, many of these psychotics; a few who knew precisely the name of their evil, and simply pleasure in it; but most—these the most interesting to speak with—men who were not personally inhumane, but who sat in their offices like bland accountants, orchestrating pogroms and ethnic cleansing for fiscal and political reasons. Whatever their natures, they were his allies to a man, as likely to wipe out a species as he, in their pursuit of ambition.

Some did so in the name of profit, some in the name of freedom, some simply because they could. The reasons didn’t really matter to him. What mattered was the consequences. He wanted to see Creation dwindle, family by family, tribe by tribe, from the vast to the infinitesimal, and he’d always needed the autocrats and the technocrats to help him achieve his goal. But whereas they were indiscriminate and crude, often unaware of the damage they’d done, he had always plotted against life with the greatest precision—researching his victims like an assassin, so as to be familiar with their habits and their hideaways. Once marked for death, few had escaped him. He knew of no finer feeling than to sit with one of the dead and record its details in his journal, knowing that when corruption had claimed the corpse he and only he possessed a record of how and when this line had passed into history.

This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this . . .

He had reached the border of the wood now. A gust of wind moved through the trees, overturning the coins of sun on the ground. He stepped among them, gingerly, while the wind came again, shaking down a few early leaves. He went directly to the place where the birds had sat that distant winter. A spring nest sat in the fork of the branches, forsaken now that it had served its function as a nursery, but still intact. Standing at the spot where the birds had fallen, he remembered the vision Rabjohns had made him endure with vile ease—

Simeon in the sunlight, a day from death, refusing the call of his patron, eloquent, even in his despair. And then the same scene, a day and a moment later. Simeon dead, under the trees, his body already carrion—

Steep let out a little moan, working the heels of his hands against his eyes to press the sight from his head. But it wouldn’t go. It pulsed behind his lids, as though he were seeing it now for the first time in all its cruel particulars: the claw marks upon Thomas’s cheek and brow, where the birds had skipped as they pecked out his eyes; the dung spattered on his thigh, where some animal had voided itself while sniffing around; the curl of hair at his groin, miraculously untouched though the manhood that had nestled there had been ripped away and left the place all blood, but for this golden tuft.

He did not imagine that killing the conduit would heal his deepening anguish. He was in its thrall now, and would be swallowed utterly. But when he finally succumbed to it, he would do so with his wits his own. There would be no trespasser among his thoughts, treading where his griefs lay tenderest. He would die alone, in the belly of his despair, and nobody would know what last thoughts visited him there.

It was time to go. He had put off the moment long enough, fearful of his own weakness. He would have liked to have his knife in his hands as he strode down the hill—it knew the business of slaughter more intimately than even he. But no matter.

Murder was an old art; older than the beating of blades. He would find some means by which to do the deed before the moment was upon him: a rope, a hammer, a pillow. And if all else. failed, he had his hands. Yes, perhaps that was best, to do it with his hands. It was honest, and simple, and like the error that would be connected with the deed, the work of flesh and flesh. The neatness of this pleased him and, in his present state a little pleasure, however it was won, was not to be despised.