If There Is a God

Elliot only blinked, dazed. As if he had expected as much, the priest gave a rumbling laugh and sank deep into the sofa.

“Not knowing is perfectly normal, so don’t fret over it. Saint Basolo was never officially recognized as a saint by the Central See.”

“Then what connection does he have with the Scavia Order?”

“The saint the Scavia Order venerates is Saint Basolo himself.”

Still buried in the cushions, the priest lifted only a hand, lightly.

“As you know, each order divides itself according to the saint it venerates. The Ante Order serves Saint Ante, who drove out the heretics, and the Maxellenda Order serves Saint Maxellenda, who ended the great famine. Among all the saints, Ante and Maxellenda are especially famous for the simple reason that the orders devoted to them are unusually powerful.”

“But the Scavia Order, of all things, serves an unofficial saint the Central See refuses to recognize. That is likely why the order did not take its saint’s name. Scavia is hardly a fitting name for a religious house in any case. In an old dead tongue, it means suffering.”

“I don’t quite understand. How can an order that venerates an unofficial saint receive the Central See’s leave to operate? Shouldn’t they have been branded heretics instead?”

“A sharp observation. The Central See does forbid indiscriminate worship of saints, after all…”

The priest, who had been drawing the words out, suddenly shrugged.

“But how should I know? As you can see, I am nothing more than a country priest who has been buried in Winsmore for a full thirty years.”

Faced with a man who only laughed, Elliot—who had been staring in blank bewilderment—could manage nothing in the end but a thin smile. True enough. Had the priest possessed any string that reached the Central See, he would hardly have remained sunk in obscurity until now.

“Even so, the Scavia Order is strange. Approval from the Central See would mean they have connections there, or that someone lobbied on their behalf. Wouldn’t it be more urgent to have Saint Basolo officially recognized? If he became an official saint, the Scavia Order would receive the See’s approval as a matter of course.”

“You’re right. But Elliot, the Central See is not the holy sanctuary of God that people imagine. It is closer to that clamorous parliament in Castleleigh.”

“Not that I have ever been to Castleleigh myself,” the priest added cheerfully.

“The Central See swarms with politicians and schemers wearing the masks of priests. And the recognition of a new saint always stirs controversy, because the appearance of a new saint foretells the rise of countless orders devoted to him.”

“The great factions that currently hold the Church would not welcome that.”

“A king always fears the usurper who has not yet come.”

The priest took a sip of tea gone lukewarm and quietly lifted his eyes to the high ceiling of the church.

“In truth, if one judges by deeds alone, Saint Basolo yields to no one. If Saint Ante drove out the heretics who crossed the desert, and Saint Maxellenda ended a thirty-year famine and saved the dying, then Saint Basolo proved the will of God in his own person.”

“…What?”

At the blank echo of the question, the priest smiled and pointed to the brilliant stained glass.

“Do you remember the story of Saint Bestia?”

Elliot frowned and let a long, uneasy breath slip out. For the first time, deep lines creased the priest’s languid face.

“Good heavens. Elliot, have you truly kept your distance from the faith all this time?”

“…I’m sorry.”

“You’ve no need to apologize to me. It will all come back upon your own head. Only—if you mean to go about claiming you don’t know Saint Bestia, kindly don’t mention that you were raised in Winsmore. How am I supposed to boast that I once taught a great hero of the war?”

Only then did Elliot remember that the priest belonged to the Bestia Order, which served Saint Bestia. The priest shot him a displeased glance, cleared his throat for no particular reason, and went on.

“In any case, Saint Bestia is famous for walking the battlefields and tending the wounded. But think. How could one so frail pass unharmed through ground as brutal as that?”

“She must have kept an escort.”

“Child. If that were the answer, would I have asked you?”

“Elliot. She was never wounded.”

As if honoring a saint of long ago, the priest laid both hands reverently upon his chest.

“More precisely, no wound could mar her for good. Saint Bestia took countless arrowheads and blades as she moved among the battlefields, yet not one wound lasted the night. The authority of heaven had bestowed upon her an infinite blessing of the flesh.”

Saint Basolo was much the same. The priest murmured it quietly and glanced once more at the stained glass adorning one wall of the church.

Elliot turned and looked up at the window wrought in Saint Bestia’s image. The gentle saint, wounded soldiers gathered in her arms, was rendered in glass of every color—and yet, like the God said to dwell somewhere beyond, she seemed infinitely far away.

Then clear sunlight fell. Light that had lingered only at the foot of the window spread in an instant across the whole dark floor of the church, over his head and into his eyes. Passing through the stained glass, it drank in ten thousand colors and poured down in dazzling beams. The saint who had wavered only in that unreachable height came at last to the earth, to her pitiable little lamb.

In that moment, Elliot felt God for the first time in his life.

What flowed beneath those brilliant beams was resentment, and sorrow.

—If there is a God in this world.

When had the seed of doubt first sprouted in a proposition that had once seemed perfectly self-evident? Was it when he watched a wingman fall—the fighter that follows its flight leader? Or when he saw the enemy blanketing the horizon at Léandre?

The memory that had reached him beside Major Keaton, laboring for his last breath, climbed a very long way back. Past the scowling faces of the academy instructors, past the bells tolling through a solemn boarding school, past the sobbing back of his father, until at last it arrived where his mother’s headstone stood alone.

Elliot.

Mother. What had you been trying to say to me?

Like a memory torn out by the roots, you vanished without a trace. Even now, when he closed his eyes, her airplane came back to him, dwindling beyond the sea—and you, who never returned, where are you wandering? Will the day ever come when that empty coffin can finally hold your weary body?

The day you, who had clawed so desperately just to live, turned your back on the world at last.

Perhaps that was the day he began to doubt God. If there were a God in this world, He would not have left you like that. He would not have cast you again into the pit you had only just crawled out of.

The seed of doubt he had kept in secret swelled day by day. The world was absurd, as if it had always been so. Those who died were, of all people, the good; those who grew fat were the wicked. See such sights often enough, and one would rather conclude that there is no God, and that the world was rotten from the start.

But if there truly is a God in this world.

The world has already come too far to turn the arrow of blame upon Him for failing to tighten the reins of a world gone mad. Even human beings turn their backs on the ugliness of other humans. How much more must He, dwelling so far away.

But what sin has that child committed?

Anna is special because of the blessing You bestowed. That Anna has a secret she must hide is also because of the blessing You bestowed. You cannot be ignorant of the human habit of refusing to acknowledge difference—so why did You drive that child onto a thorny road and call it a blessing?

Why did You not save Mother?

Why did You abandon Anna covered in blood?

Why did You send that pitiful child to me—of all people, to me?

Knowing he had no room left to look after anyone else. Knowing better than anyone that he was too busy licking his own wounds to tend another’s. Was it not You who left him to break like this?

Then why, of all places—why to me?

“Where have you been?”

The moment he came home, a sharp voice struck him, as if it had been waiting. Anna stood stock-still in the corridor, her face ghost-pale.

“I asked where you’ve been.”

The voice, as if she were forcing herself to hold it down, was anything but calm. But he was too exhausted to tend to each thing with care. He lowered his head, rubbed at his gritty eyes, and slowly started forward.

“Elliot.”

He wished she would stop calling his name. He wished the name would fade from the minds of the world, and his existence with it. He wanted to live where no one knew him, and where no one knew that he lived.

“I’m asking you where you’ve been!”

In the moment he passed her so listlessly, a roar like lightning came down.

Elliot stopped short and turned in alarm. A small hand had clamped around his wrist, fingers splayed and desperate. It was his wrist that was caught, and yet it was she who had gone deathly pale and was trembling.

“…Were you at the church?”

Anna, looking up at him with eyes flushed red, gasped the question out. Elliot, who had been watching her calmly, slowly parted his lips.

“I went into the village.”

“Which means the church. It was the church, wasn’t it.”

“Calm down first.”

“How am I supposed to calm down? You went to the church!”

Anna seized his collar savagely and suddenly ran into his arms. Rising onto her toes, her face came up and pressed into the hollow of his neck. Before surprise could give him time to push her away, she had already torn herself free.

“See? You smell foul.”

“You were going to sell me out, weren’t you? That’s why you went to the church. To that filthy place.”

“Anna.”

“Don’t say my name!”

Tears welled until they filled her blue eyes.

“Traitor. How could you do this to me?”