September

Issue 48

“...sine sanguinis effusione non fit remissio."

         Hebræos ix.22


The monk with irises green as olives looked down at the corpse in the valley below. If the Nile River had been healthy, its swollen banks would have lifted the body by now and carried it gently north toward the Mediterranean. But the riverbed was barren beneath the dark, splotchy sky that covered the heavens like a birthmark. No kind current could bear that body to the sea.

Nor was he being carried to a grave, where his fleshly form might find repose. The men and women slaving away in the valley had not yet noticed the dead man. They were bleeding in the fields for a harvest it seemed would never come, weeping tears into the ashes of dried out husks in the dust, their groans carrying like a hoarse chorus to the deaf and silent heavens. So the corpse lay where it had fallen, unseen by any save the monk and God Himself…if God could even see through the tainted, tinted sky. Who could say?

        

Initio tu Domine terram fundasti, thought Brother Thaddeus, looking up, et opera manuum tuarum sunt cœli.

And the heavens are the work of your hands. The phrase circulated through his mind over and over, like a day that would not end, because it could not be allowed to. That thought was his light, his only light in these darkest of times, and he refused to meditate on anything else, allowing the words to repeat, an infinite succession of dawns to keep his spirit illumined.

Above him loomed a sky red as new blood—not dried and scabbing blood, but blood the moment it bursts free from behind the pale ramparts of flesh restraining it. It was the color that graces a whip after only its first lash, or the blade of a well-crafted sword after its inaugural kill. It was martyr’s blood from the instant of martyrdom, from that transient moment when spear or claw tear through ribs and perishable eyes first glimpse a distant triune throne.

There was a sun in that sky, and the clouds it shone through caused it to throb, to pulsate, ever pumping more blood-light into the expanse, its supply inexhaustible. The clouds themselves were so thick and so ubiquitous that they were scarcely visible individually, except as faint outlines, like imminent clots. Did they promise to stanch the bleeding at last? Thaddeus shook his head. He did not know.

“That is us up there,” Thaddeus heard a hoarse voice say. He turned to see who had spoken and found that it had been Brother Ignatius, a fellow monk.