The Multitude, стр. 83
“I remembered something as I awoke,” he said.
Maynya’s eyes lit up. “A vision from the other dimension?”
“Maybe, but I wasn’t in prison. I think this happened earlier.”
“Tell me.”
“I found you dancing on a road, in a snowstorm. You beamed like a child on her name day, and you called me a beautiful man.”
Her smile spread wide as the sky. “Who was this beautiful man?”
“Booster?”
She ruffled his hair. “Sometimes I think you pretend to remember less than you do, just to get a charge out of me.”
Sometimes he did.
She stood, reached down, and tugged his hand until he came up beside her. “I have a surprise for you, Booster.”
Maynya led him to a ragged, makeshift tent pitched among the many others. Had he seen this one somewhere before? The recollection stirred his emotions as much as the dream he’d just had. He struggled to quell a leaping heart. His terrible act of negligence during his journey to the capital couldn’t possibly have gone undone.
Yet a woman reached her arm from within the tent to pull the flap open, and she did have a butterfly tattoo on her wrist, just like—
Adala stepped out of the tent.
“Look who wandered into our camp,” Maynya said.
Quintus gaped at the golden-haired, water-to-wine magician turned…ghost? He couldn’t find any words.
Adala brushed the back of his cheek with a warm, soft hand no wraith could ever possess. “Did you really think a simple highwayman could smite me down?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Adala winked. “If men would leave the thinking to our gender, we’d all be better off, eh, Maynya?”
Quintus motioned to the half-filled wicker basket visible through the open flap of her tent. “We think better with full stomachs. I see they’ve already recruited you to help with the scavenging.”
“Yes, but I’ve only managed to scrounge five loaves of bread and two fish,” Adala said, “hardly enough to feed so many. I’m sure you can come up with something, though, Maynya, can’t you?”
Maynya motioned toward one of the tents. “We have a store of food in there. Let’s not forget who is God and who isn’t.”
* * *
When the late-afternoon shadows grew long, and a thousand bellies swelled from a bountiful feast of fish and loaves, Maynya climbed a low hill to behold her following, a rabble of villagers, deserting soldiers, escaped brides, and some monks who’d seen the light. A pair of doves cut across the sky—a favorable sign. Then a swarm of monarch butterflies darted out of the shrubbery alongside the stream—even better.
She raised her arms until the horde of pilgrims grew silent.
“I want to share with you a sermon once preached by the Son of God.”
She motioned to the women her locusts had rescued, a small group of unwed brides who’d chosen to make new lives for themselves in the wilds of the prairie instead of scampering after their sisters to the forests of Sanctimonia. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”
She gestured toward a follower whose husband had drowned in a flood. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Then she turned her attention to Quintus.
Maynya, the Sanctimonia guardian-turned-prophet, and Carla, a simple shopkeeper killed by a train, gazed together at the man they loved. They swallowed. Tears stained their cheeks.
Each woman had found joy.
EPILOGUE
Hiroshima: April 12, 2020
Gabriella knelt at the edge of the azalea garden and busied herself with a planting. When she finished, she set her spade on the ground, wiped her hands in her apron, and looked up at the empty sky, praying to a voice she couldn’t remember ever hearing. After over seventy offerings, decades of visits, perhaps the gardeners would relent. Her tulip deserved to stand tall among the other flowers.
“I suppose it should.”
Such a familiar voice! She spun around to face a girl who hadn’t died after all. Somehow, history had refreshed itself in a wondrous way, as if a door opened to reveal long-absent colors, elusive sounds, shy fragrances. Amazement and joy combined to steal Gabriella’s breath away.
Asura, the girl who knew all the secrets, looked little different than on the day the pilgrims flocked to her garden from miles away and butterflies danced in the circular entranceway. She still kept her dark hair in a bun adorned with pins, she reflected the sky with her blue-and-white kimono, and she revealed nothing in her stoic smile. The enigmatic child had returned.
Gabriella grabbed Asura’s hands and gazed into deep, ambiguous eyes. “Why did you wait so long to come back?”
Asura pulled away. “How long would you hold a grudge over the premature death of an only son?”
Jesus had been her son? The implication nearly sent Gabriella to her knees in supplication. But perhaps she’d misheard. Self-absorption often compromised her senses, a flaw she’d come to believe might be as bad as her pride. “Are you… You can’t be God.”
“I might have been, for all you knew. But let’s not dwell on my definition. Consider me a girl in hot water, just like you. God isn’t happy with either one of us at the moment.”
Gabriella turned away to hide tears welling in her eyes. “My few mistakes were made with good intentions.”
In the stony silence that followed, the horseshoe-shaped white cenotaph in the near distance mocked her, a memorial lacking Asura’s name for good reason.
She choked back a sob. “You goaded me into going to Herod, with your talk about pebbles and boulders, the butterflies in the gateway, and the way you let your shadow burn into the bench. What could a proper angel do but read the signs and act accordingly?” Her voice shook. She’d spent many years considering iterations that wouldn’t have included betrayal of God’s only Son.
When an immediate response didn’t come, she turned to face Asura again, half fearing her guilty conscience had summoned a mere hallucination. During the early aftermath of the bomb, she’d seen Asura in crowds,