Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

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 mйlange 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 Rhфne 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.

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