Edgar Pangborn

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

Malachi never shunted off the children and their questions, nor did he madden them by promising they’d understand when they were older. He even asked them questions in return. If they giggled or squirmed or ran away it was not, he thought, in rejection, but because there was crisis in his inquiries: - What do YOU think is on the other side of the hill? - Where does the music go when the sound stops? - Was there really a world before you were born? They lacked the language to deal with this sort of thing, except Jesse Lodson, the six-toed boy, who read books and had a mind of his own and was old enough to be allowed to sit on the steps of The Store and listen to men’s talk. Maybe the other kids hoped to find words by running off to search for them in green pastures; but Malachi would still be ahead of them, ready with new questions when they came running back.

Who does have patience for long labor over anything so slippery and ungentle as a question? Malachi’s, and he knew it, often raised thunder out of a past that hung like a midnight shadow over himself and his people. We may scold the most appalling future into quiet by proving it doesn’t exist, but the past did, once. The challenges of doubt or denial reverberate, though the cheeks that flushed and lips that curled in the passions of argument are with the leaf mold.

Born among the flailing ideologies of what we call the late 20th Century, Malachi Peters never admitted that children should be spared the peril of using their brains.

The red plague followed the twenty-minute war; the Children’s Crusade happened some thirty years after that. Malachi’s people were calling it the Year 30; one might as well go along with their chronology, for they weren’t stupid, and many could remember the 20th Century.

Most of them also recalled the existence of a religion named Christianity. Hardly any two could have agreed about its doctrines and practice, but in this time when a technological culture was so recently self-slain, religion had come to seem important again. Among the children fantastic sparrow-arguments broke out from time to time about God and the Devil, heaven and hell and all that bit. And you could hear endless adult exegesis, logomachy, and heart-burning on the front porch of The Store, or around the stove in winter. How do you ever define ‘religion’ itself in terms that will meet the dry thorny jabs of the rebel five percent - or three percent, or whatever the minority amounts to? Up on the northeastern shore of the Hudson Sea, that minority presents an irreducible factor of serene cussedness: they’re Vermonters.

(Even three percent may be too big. It doesn’t imply that the remaining ninety-seven percent are too dumb or too bland to enjoy the thrills of theoretical squabblings; but they are apt to devote their energies to timely, important problems, such as the distinction between Homoiousian and Homoousian, or immorality among the heathen, or the Only Decent Way to Make Clam Chowder.)

Malachi Peters of Melton Village sometimes laid it out openly for his cronies along about these lines: Say a village of one hundred heavenbound sons of bitches like you supports a population of one sound atheist like Mr Goudy over there; then you’ll find about four who’ll venture to agree with him out loud in a half-ass kind of way, in some place where nobody happens to be listening; makes a good five percent rebellion, don’t it? Of course, even if you add in us agnostics the rebellion still can’t so much as elect a town clerk, but we make noise. By the way, did you know it was T. H. Huxley himself who invented the word ‘agnostic’ for crackpots like me who’d rather be truthful than sanctified?

And sometimes he went Socratic, though with caution:

What is God? Well - oh, a Supreme Being.

What is the nature of Being? Supreme over what? Why, hell, everybody knows what being is.

All but me. I’m ignorant. Supreme means infinite? Sure.

Jesus Christ was the son of God? Ayah, don’t the Book say so?

God is infinite? Well, sure.

Therefore Christ was the son of Infinity? Ayah.

How does Infinity beget a son? It’s got balls? You trying to make aman look stupid?

(Hearing it reach this point, old Mr Goudy chuckles, scratches his desiccated crotch, and spits a bollop over the porch rail. Fifty-five, oldest man in town; has a patch of Connecticut tobacco and does some business in the fall blending marijuana with the chaws, packing the mixture on his back through the neighbouring towns. Malachi often addressed him as Messenger of Light, which caused Mr Goudy to cackle like one of Jud Hobart’s guinea hens; Jesse Lodson wasn’t quite old enough to figure that one out.)

I’m just trying to find out the sex of Infinity. Man your age could get his mind off sex, seems like.

Why? …

Melton Village was typical of those shrunken communities on the northeastern coast of what people were beginning to call the Hudson Sea. The villages maintained a tenuous, suspicious communication with each other along the mountain trails and the disintegrating grandeur of Old-Time roads. The people did cherish a faith in a few things, but not in the dollar anymore, with no central government to create one, and not in the ancient air-castle fantasy of squeezing an income out of the goddamn summer people. Weren’t any.

At fifty Malachi Peters was typical of himself. So increasingly, was his friend Jesse Lodson at fourteen, who had the run of Malachi’s library and who loved him.

Melton Village sprawls in the foothills of a green range looking down, yes, on the Hudson Sea, that long arm of ocean extending now from the Lorenta Sea all the long way to a confused tangle of islets and inlets several hundred miles south, where the Black Rocks mark the site of New York City. That tragic place was stricken by the peripheral blast of a fusion toy that annihilated the western end of Long Island, including Brooklyn and a tree that is said to have grown there. Then New York’s ruins were engulfed in the rising waters, the noisy history done. West of Melton Village, the opposite shore is occasionally visible on those days of clear atmosphere that seem to be coming more frequently. Out there under windy water and skittish tides lies the bed of what was Lake Champlain. The lake was beautiful, history says, until the Age of Progress shat in it and made it, like so many others, a desolation and a stink. The waters climbed; years of earthquake, cloudburst, landslide crumbled the narrow watersheds. The ocean, itself a universe in torment, perhaps renews itself in long labor, healing the worst afflictions of the human visitation.

Malachi Peters was in the habit of sprawling on his own elderly front porch, when he wasn’t tending his garden and chickens or doing his fastidious bachelor housekeeping, or mending a kite for the kids, or describing the universe to Jesse who had (Malachi thought) a rather too dewy-eyed view of it even for fourteen. Or arguing, of course, down at the venerable shanty that retained the name of The Store.

Trading was negligible: all the nearby communities were in the same fix as Melton Village. There was in theory a sort of state government still at Montpelier but you never heard from it - sometimes an excellent thing in governments. The overland trails into Massachusetts or New Hampshire got more snarled up each year as the rise in mean temperature transformed temperate zone forest into subtropical - a few degrees are enough. A visit to New York meant a sea voyage through tough waters by a people who had scant taste for recovering the art of sailing ships. Bud Maxon maintained The Store as a public service; he couldn’t support himself and his family with it, but managed like everyone else with a knee-scrabble garden, chickens and goats and pigs, and hunting. He owned the town bull; his brother ran a bit of a dairy. Bud learned archery, but kept his old rifle oiled just as if he thought there’d be cartridges for it again some day. The Store’s front steps and porch in summer, its stove in the softening winters, drew the lonely in their hunger for talk, that limping substitute for love.

Malachi could also watch the sea from his own front porch. To older generations of his family Lake Champlain had gleamed more distantly, where the Lamoille River ran into it. In that time a group of islands stood out there. Mr Goudy remembered hunting and camping on Grand Isle when he was a boy. Watching the ocean, Malachi could let his thoughts ride free, as he might have if a world had not ended.

Fifty now, he had been twenty, with two years experience of Harvard, when civilization encountered the Bang, and presently the red plague that made the 14th Century Black Death look like a cold in the head. Destroying civilization, always a task for fools, was relatively easy with the tools constructed for the purpose in the 20th Century. To recreate one you need something stronger than divine guidance.

In the Year 30 the residents of Melton Village numbered about a hundred adults (the red plague having wiped out the old as you wipe chalk squiggles off a slate) and eighteen teenagers and children. The population before the war and the plague had been three thousand.

Malachi Peters numbered precisely one. Six-feet-two, weighed 160 pounds. Standing erect he resembled a weedy figure One, with wind-wavering hair already ice-white.

Of the children, thirteen were physically normal except perhaps in their genes. The village had no statistical information on the incidence of radiation-induced birth deformities, fetal deaths, and stillbirths. Many good souls were inclined to blame the trouble on the infinite wisdom of God (after all, it’s been blamed for everything else ever since we invented it). The village did try to cherish the children. Some of the mues, as they began to be called about that time, were hard to cherish, especially the brain-mues who could only sit where they were put, smile and drool when they were fed, cry when they were cleaned. Others, like Jesse who had no physical oddity except his six-toed feet, were not yet regarded with superstitious terror. As for Jesse’s peculiarity, as Malachi told him more than once, such things weren’t too uncommon long before technology started monkeying with the sunfire - except that his extra toes were functional. They gave a special buoyancy to his walking and running. Jesse was slim like a marsh reed, dark-haired and faun-eyed. At fourteen he could outrun anyone in the village and not even be winded.

Most of the adults could read, but books were few - some volumes that had been in the tiny public library in the Year Zero, as many more privately owned in houses that survived flood, fire, night-raiders, and abandonment in the worst of the bad years, and Malachi’s library of maybe three thousand at the Old Peters Place where he had lived most of his years alone since the crash. Except for Malachi’s lot, a high proportion of the surviving books were less than useful to a society that might have liked to recreate civilization, or anyhow Vermont, if it had known how. But to understand that one shall see no more new books, ever, is a horror even to some of the illiterate, like smashing blind into a stone wall.

A little school limped along under good Miss Seton, whose resources were near to nothing. The greatest difference the old lady noted after the death of American culture was that in the new age she was treated with some respect even by the children. Especially by the children.

Malachi knew (but seldom said to his neighbors except for Tad Doremus the blacksmith) that the rise of waters was engulfing the dry land because of the determined blundering of expert technological man in the recent past. What else but man-made fumes, particularly those of humanity’s dearest buzztoy, had heated the atmospheric greenhouse the critical few degrees that hastened the melting of polar ice? And choking on atmospheric garbage meant Progress: so choke. All toward what conclusion - who tried to know? Not the engineers - it wasn’t their job. They were earnest and righteous about that: it was never their job to forsee anything beyond the immediate achievement and immediate profit. They could only build and grow - one says that of cancer. ‘We climbed Mount Everest because it was there!’ - that was the Golden Cliché of the 20th Century, mock-modest bombast quite as banal and unthinking as any 19th Century godsaking, and like most popular swashbuckling it went unchallenged.

It was an exhausted world - beaten, raped, robbed, mutilated by industrial greed and political stupidity, and left for dead. Malachi himself knew exhaustion, hours when his head could hold little except despair at human folly. He looked then on Jesse, the boy’s uncalculating goodness, simplicity, power to love and to wonder, and could only think: This is the world they left you. The rain itself as it falls on your head is poisoned. Sometimes instead of they he said we; but Malachi was not given to wallowing in unearned guilt. A yeasty college student at the age of twenty, there wasn’t much he could have done to prevent the idiot from pushing the button. If burning himself with gasoline in front of the White House would have had that effect, he was the sort of ardent youth who might have done it; plain reason told him it wouldn’t: the Juggernaut is mindless. The danger would remain simply because those in power had not the intelligence nor the good will to remove it, and what had been representative government had given way to the corporate state. To say these things in the 20th Century usually seemed like hooting down a rain-barrel. In the pig-scramble to be good consumers for the blessed state, honor and virtue and reason could not be heard; it was natural to assume that they had died.

In the Year 30 it seemed to Malachi that not enough survivors existed to renew the species. Within a generation or two there would be a lights-out, somewhere a last man perishing. Hadn’t a critical moment arrived when the dinosaurs became dry bones without issue? He could see his contemporaries as like insects crowded to the high end of a piece of driftwood and going out on the flood. He would have been happy, if only for Jesse, to invent God and a heaven, but he couldn’t do it. For a mind once honestly wedded to reason there is no divorce.

And yet, mercilessly comparing grown-ups, the children said of Malachi: ‘Tshee, he never acts bored!’

Jesse’s father had been a veterinary who somehow retained the conscience of a specialized profession through years when the complex drugs, antiseptics, antibiotics, all that, were no longer obtainable. No immunology, no anesthetics, nothing that depended on the vanished 20th Century laboratories and the huge complex of supporting industries. Lost or broken instruments could not be replaced. No more scientific journals - no more science. For the blunder, the incomparable brass-bound goof, is one thing that homo quasi-sapiens can carry off magnificently: out goes the baby with the bath-water, and what’s left (if anything is left) is an astonished and very naked primate.

Dr Lodson did what he could, with herbs, observation, common sense, memory, and that mixture of hunch and sympathy which is justly called ‘a feeling for animals,’ through years when probably no one understood his difficulties except Dr Stern, who was in the same fix with his human patients, and Malachi Peters who liked to play chess with Dr Lodson and who was inclined to take all Melton Village troubles as his own - for no good reason except that this was Malachi’s way. It was not meddlesome, nor particularly aristocratic, this concern of Malachi’s for his own people. The village had an exasperated, partly loving name for it. They called it Malachi’s Thing.

In the Year 24, when his son Jesse was eight years old (this was the same year Dr Stern died of intestinal cancer with none to succeed him), Dr Lodson got momentarily careless while treating Bud Maxon’s priceless Jersey bull for a leg ulcer. With the lightning-flash of an act of God, the brute wheeled and gored him to death.

In that year Jesse began to see that love and mercy, like hate, are man-made. He had adored his cheerful, unexacting father. He was there when it happened, though Bud got him out quickly. The death was a hurricane smashing a door inward - maybe the house can’t take it. He learned later that the world is also beautiful - ‘sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,’ as two-faced Caliban murmured to him in the peace of Malachi’s library - but on your life, expect no conscious mercy except from merciful people! The bull can turn.

God’s will, said Jesse’s meek mother. Jesse wished at eight - and at nine, and ten - that he could discover what she meant. Couldn’t God have stopped the bull? At eight he was only beginning to learn he could ask questions of Malachi, and this one was too difficult. By the time he was ten Jesse had acquired a stepfather, and Malachi’s library was not only a haven but a necessity.

The stepfather, a hardworking religious man who took over Dr Lodson’s haphazard little farm and improved it, didn’t like to have Jesse go barefoot. Knowing a little about leather-work, he cobbled a pair of shoes that fitted Jesse’s broad feet, more or less. He said it looked tacky for the boy to go barefoot, as if his family was no better than the heathen mountain folk. Even Jesse’s mother could hardly look at his feet without her eyes brimming. Jesse wore the painful shoes except when he visited the Old Peters Place. There he slipped them off at the door, and walked with his friend.

His earliest memory of Malachi dated back to a time when he had been small enough for Malachi to take him up in his lap. He remember a long hand curving over his bare feet, and some remark - he did not retain the words - that made it seem a potent distinction to possess twelve working toes.

Love is a wordless thing in childhood and maybe ought to be. Grown-ups forget this at their peril.

Mr Goudy brought the first word of Preacher Abraham to Melton Village, a casual profane mention of one more end-of-the-world preacher spouting hellfire and resurrection - only this guy, he said, is appealing to the kids for God’s sake. Stuff about a pilgrimage to found the New Jerusalem. Them golden streets, said Mr Goudy, spitting over the rail. All our troubles over, or some shit like that.

Abraham was a great tall man with flame-colored hair and a voice of thunder, said a traveling tinker who hadn’t seen him - heard about him, though, from an old woman at Pittsfield Ruins who told fortunes. Abraham was come, she says, to prophesy the Messiar just like John the Baptist. The tinker hemself didn’t buy it, much.

Later came another man through Melton Village, a burly gentleman leading a caravan - three wagons which once had been half-ton pickups and pulled easy on the rims if you knew how to get the work out of the mules. This gentleman, Homer Hobson, and his henchmen were heading for the open country north of the St Lawrence - might start a colony, he thought. They were foreigners from the south - New Haven. That’s in Connecticut. There he had seen Preacher Abraham, talked to him and shaken him by the hand.

No, he said, the fella wasn’t nine feet tall, just average or a mite under. Big voice though, that part was true, and you could say his beard was reddish like. No Goddamn hippie, talked like a gentleman. Peaceful-looking, said Hobson, thinking back over it - peaceful till you stared him straight in the eye, and then you felt maybe a wildness. Blue eyes, and Hobson admitted he generally couldn’t remember the color of a person’s eyes. Bright blue - stuck in his mind, sort of.

‘What does he say, about the New Jerusalem?’

That was Jesse Lodson, talking out of turn and annoying his stepfather, but Hobson gazed down on him without reproach, knitting his brows and trying to remember. ‘Well, boy, he says the New Jerusalem will be - be a place where the earth is so cherished that God will return and live among men.’ Then Hobson seemed surprised, and added: ‘Why - don’t sound so bad, you say it right out like that.’

At the time Hobson saw Abraham the Crusade must have been barely started. Hobson saw no large crowd with him, only a couple of dozen children between ten and fifteen - yes, quite a few mues among them - who might have merely gathered there in the New Haven street out of curiosity to hear the red-bearded man talk.

Time passed, and word came that Preacher Abraham was healing the sick with prayer and laying on of hands. Word came that in New Providence he raised from the dead a poor man who had perished of smallpox and lain two days without life. Elsewhere the Preacher blessed a woman afflicted by an evil spirit, and the devil passed out of her.

Word came that a thousand children followed Preacher Abraham, foraging, taking care of their prophet with certain miracles.

These tales lit fires. Until even Jesse Lodson, fourteen and never foolish, began to wonder: Can God after all exist? Mother believes in him. Not all-benevolent, or the bull - but Mother says we aren’t wise enough to understand … Should I place so much faith in my own power of reason? Can there be miracles? Then what becomes of the natural order? A New Jerusalem, ‘where the earth is so cherished’ — but the books, the books! Or have I (and Malachi) been mistaken all this time? I pray, and it’s all silence.

He hungered to believe in the marvelous. (Who doesn’t?) For most of existence in Melton Village had a flatness, a sourness partly generated by adult despair, and he was lonely in spite of Malachi. The other children had little to do with him, put off by the strangeness of an original mind that is not willing to hide itself or has not learned how. He was aching and changing with the needs of puberty. There was a coolness in Malachi, a steadiness that Jesse Lodson sometimes felt as a chill because he could not yet share it.

His mother and stepfather of course distrusted the love of an old man. Still, they did not forbid him those many hours with Malachi. Miss Seton herself said there was nothing more she was capable of teaching him, and Malachi was, in a way, important to Melton Village, like a monument or a natural force.

On his side, perhaps Malachi expected too much. He needed the freshness of youth with the companionship of maturity.

And word came that when Preacher Abraham entered a village and preached and asked who would help him found the New Jerusalem, the mue-children were first to forget their afflictions and follow him.

He was coming from the north. People talked now not only of Preacher Abraham but of ‘Abraham’s Army.’ Or ‘the Crusaders.’

They had gone north, rumor said, through the Maine and New Hampshire wilderness. Most of this had already returned to the rude health of nature, but it was still possible to follow the roads of the old industrial culture, the skeletal remains that demonstrate the articulation of the original monster, and its indifference to the welfare and beauty of the planet that endured it for so long a century. The Crusaders had taken one of the highways into Canada, and soon headed south again, but instead of coming by the Connecticut River they marched north of Lake Memphremagog to the Hudson Sea. They were at Richford. They were at St Albans.

A thousand were coming, said rumor - uprooted, exalted, dangerous. Whatever was not freely given, these children took, rumor said. Melton Village stood next in their line of march.

On the porch of The Store - it was summer and robins were nesting in their wonderfully increasing numbers - Bud Maxon grumbled: ‘By God, them Crusaders better not come this-away! We got to feed ‘em when we a’n’t got a pot to piss in ourself?’

Malachi asked: ‘You about to stop ‘em, Bud?’

Maxon looked old and frightened, a 20th Century man hating every other way of life. Big Tad Doremus, who made out as a blacksmith in what had once been his father’s filling station near the Old Peters Place, sat on the top step whittling applewood. He was always at some bit of art work that would have a woman’s buttocks in it, though he might not be up to sculpting the rest of her. Mr Goudy spat over the rail. Jesse Lodson sat on the bottom step and kept his young mouth shut and his young ears open.

‘Eating up the Goddamn country!’ said Maxon. ‘Grasshoppers!’

‘Hippies is what they be,’ said Lucas Hackstraw. His face was like a worm-chewed windfall, and he was married to the saddest woman in town. ‘Boys and girls jumbled up together.’

‘How else would they travel?’ Tad Doremus asked.

‘And some of ‘em pretty well growed,’ said Mr Goudy, who liked to keep Hackstraw mentally goosed. ‘Exceedingly well growed and also sprightly, I’m told. Lively times in the hay-pile.’

‘They got no moral sense,’ said Hackstraw.

‘I’ve always taken a great personal interest in the moral sense,’ said Malachi. ‘By the way, does anybody know what it is, to relieve my ignorance? Would you define the moral sense, Brother Maxon?’

‘Up yours too, Malachi,’ said Bud, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Tad said to his sculpture: ‘Anyway we got Malachi going.’

‘I don’t suppose I’m going anywhere, Tad,’ said Malachi. ‘Doubt Preacher Abraham is either.’ Jesse looked up at him, unhappy, both remembering a recent conversation. ‘He’s just traveling.’

‘Malachi,’ said Bud Maxon, ‘sometimes you don’t make sense.’

Tad said to his wooden woman’s rump: ‘He’s making sense.’

Jesse heard, before the others, a high murmuring as though a thousand starlings had settled up the road on the far side of Maxon’s woodlot. He thought at first it might be that, a gathering of little birds. But Malachi said: ‘Ready or not, gentlemen, here they come!’

Jesse watched the road. Yesterday in Malachi’s library the talk had turned to Preacher Abraham, and Malachi had dropped some casual sarcasm. Driven by swift unexpected impulse, Jesse had stumbled into an awkward defense of the preacher as startling to himself as to Malachi. Maybe in making his remark Malachi had taken the boy’s agreement too much for granted. Unused to anything resembling antagonism in their relation, both had been wary, puzzled and hurt. ‘You know evangelists have promised to save the world before, Jesse. All they do is drum up faith in magic. This one’s no different.’

Supported by nothing much but his own unease, Jesse had demanded with too much passion: ‘How do you know he isn’t?’

‘Ah - ‘scuse it, I suppose I don’t. I went off half-cocked. We wait until he shows up and see who’s right, okay?’

Now from afternoon shadow Malachi watched Jesse’s intently listening face. Some airy voices up there beyond the woodlot were singing, and with sweetness. Malachi had felt no such fear since a long-ago morning when he discovered ten-year-old Jesse walking cheerfully along the ridgepole of this house, arms out, six-toed feet proudly sure of themselves, miserable death or injury waiting on either side, and Malachi had not even dared to yell. Who will deliver him from evil?

The holy man came around the turn of the road with one of his disciples on either side of him. These were scarcely older than Jesse but almost as tall as the Preacher. Both were graceful, slim, yellow-haired, gray-eyed. They were twins, Jesse would learn later - Lucia and John. The Crusaders rejected last names, to signify they had given up home, family, everything, to follow the Lord.

Preacher Abraham advanced slowly, a smallish man with shoulderlength sandy hair, straggle of reddish beard, lowered head of thoughtfulness. Like his followers, he wore grass sandals and a shapeless knee-length white smock; his bony legs were muscular, toughened with journeying. Malachi saw in him the simplicity of a man prepared to walk through a stone wall in the trust that the Lord would turn it to vapor and let him through. By such singlehearted fantastics are the legends made; the Red Sea divides at Moses’ command. How am I to contend with this for the life of a boy?

The Crusaders marched four abreast. They had ceased singing. The watchers could study the symbol they wore on the fronts of the shapeless, sexless white smocks, done big in crude red paint on the unbleached linen - a spoked wheel crossed out with two zigzag lines. Rumor had explained this symbol - the wheel stood for industry, mechanism, the things of the marketplace, all the Crusaders conceived the old civilization to have been; and God had crossed it out, utterly abolished it. Henceforth God’s people were to live by the labor of their hands without machines, without enslaving animals or hunting: no meat, no money, no trade. Greed and cruelty would end forever in the kingdom of heaven; God and the angels would return.

The children matched the slow pace of Preacher Abraham, even the little ones and the lame keeping orderly in the ranks. When the Preacher was in speaking distance of The Store, the last ones had marched into sight. Malachi estimated there were not more than two hundred of them: the rumors of a thousand were like most rumors. He noticed a few considerably older men and women in their twenties - a dozen of them perhaps. There was no one older than the Preacher, who looked about thirty-five.

And Malachi brooded on Melton Village, a lonely society from which all the old had vanished, in which many of the children were stillborn, sickly, deformed. There had been serious talk of stockading the village; Malachi favored it - maybe it ought to become a part of Malachi’s Thing. A few years ago the people had suffered brutal raids by the mountain people on their shaggy ponies. These had ceased after a party of young men, skilled at archery and equipped with swords contrived by Tad Doremus, had pursued a band of marauders and wiped them out - an unpredictable fury that might not have happened if Malachi had gone along. They had strung up the bodies on the trees and come home not quite the same youths they had been, having tasted the style of a world that was bound to come. For this reason Malachi had not condemned their action too severely: in a world going back to violence perhaps the village could not survive without violent responses. Turn back the clock and run the bloody course again! - if there’s no help for it. The mountain people might forget the lesson. And other creatures prowled the encroaching forest that had not been known there in the old time - black wolves, giant bear. A great tawny cat had been glimpsed twice, with faint tiger markings of dark yellow, no puma certainly, maybe something escaped from an old-time zoo, or the descendant of such an escape. Melton Village was beset with strangeness within and without, full of trouble, and tired, and excited, and afraid.

Preacher Abraham stopped in the sunny warmth of the road with his two beautiful disciples. He said: ‘God keep all here. We’re come to promise you the founding of the New Jerusalem.’

Malachi unfolded his spidery legs and went down the porch steps, squeezing Jesse’s shoulder in passing. He stepped forward alone to greet the Preacher. ‘We can’t do much except wish you well.’

‘Why, that’s a great deal,’ said Preacher Abraham. It was a great voice to come from such a common-seeming, middle-sized man. ‘Your good will, something to feed the children, opportunity to give you our good news - that’s all we ask. We’ll be gone tomorrow.’

‘There’s been a scarcity of good news lately,’ said Malachi, and Jesse sat in amazement: Malachi the one to give the Preacher friendly greeting, while the rest including himself sat mute like lunkheads? ‘Little news of any kind. We did learn that a civilization died.’

The Preacher’s gaze was level - searching for his soul, Malachi supposed. ‘Are you the mayor, sir?’

‘Why,’ said Malachi, ‘we haven’t rightly got one of those, unless it’d be Bud Maxon over there. How about that, Bud?’ He tried with a backward glance to pry Bud off his butt and fetch him down to share the chores; Bud wasn’t moving. Jesse’s face was inaccessible; the Preacher had possession of Jesse’s troubled eyes. ‘About all we have in that line is a Board of Selectmen, and they don’t meet too regular. I’m just Malachi Peters, been around since the flood. We’re a sort of Sleepy Hollow, Preacher, a wide place in the road.’

‘It doesn’t matter. My children can camp here, I suppose? And I hope they may go about among your houses to ask bread, flour, a few vegetables, whatever can be spared.’

‘This man is a scoffer,’ said the girl, the beautiful disciple.

‘Why, I don’t think I am, my dear,’ said Malachi. ‘History has done the scoffing. If you need a camp site, Preacher, you can use the field below my house. Over there - you can see my roof from here. There’s a stream, a pool where the children could bathe.’

‘Lucia,’ said the Preacher kindly, ‘maybe you are too quick to judge.’ The girl flushed and looked away. ‘I thank you, Mr Peters, in the name of all of us. We are happy to accept’

Hackstraw rasped: ‘Them kids got anything on under them smocks?’

‘Why, yes,’ said the Preacher, ‘they have.’ One of the shining young who had gathered close pulled up his smock, showing a trim loin-cloth. The flirt of the cloth and jerk of the boy’s hips amounted to more than an answer to the question; he even tossed a wink toward Jesse. ‘No need of that, Simon,’ the Preacher said.

‘Well, it didn’t look like they had,’ said Hackstraw, but he was routed, and subsided into dithering and grumbling.

Mr Goudy sighed, saying to the air: ‘Malachi’s Thing.’

‘I’ll show you the path, Preacher,’ Malachi said. ‘It’s been getting overgrown with the munificence of nature since the old lady foreclosed the mortgage on her most heedless borrower.’

‘You have an odd way of expressing yourself,’ said Preacher Abraham, ‘but I understand you. You say nature when you mean God.’

‘Or you may be saying God when you mean nature. If we don’t understand each other now we might arrive at it. This way, please.’

And Jesse went along.

So did Tad Doremus, who hadn’t spoken. He tucked his sculpture in his hip pocket and slouched down the single file path behind Jesse, followed by the multitude; he could hear them breathing, and the brush of young feet in the grass. It occurred to Tad that the back of Jesse’s neck looked thin and lonesome. Tad too was a friend of Malachi Peters, and wondered whether the old man was slipping from grace, if it’s possible for an agnostic to do that.

Jesse stepped to one side when the path entered the meadow. He usually came this way when going to Malachi; his home was in the village on the dull Main Street and it made a short cut; his feet had done more than any others to keep the path trodden. Countless times he had entered the meadow and seen Malachi, white hair and raggedy gray-brown clothes on the porch two hundred yards away, and waved, and made a game of his progress across the field where now and then a dip of the surface would hide him. In such a hollow he’d pause, for the obscure thrill of teasing the old man, and then when amusement reached bursting point, bounce over the crest and run like a whirlwind, arriving flushed, queer-in-the-head, wondering what to say.

Paths move in time. This was not the old one, now that these strangers were filing past on it curious-eyed. He stood apart, letting them fill the meadow. The wave of them was murmuring, breaking up into separate faces, bodies, voices curiously soft. It dazed Jesse to remember that they came from everywhere - Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, even Maine. Maybe they didn’t all speak English. In a thirty-second daydream he taught one of the girls English, and how she loved him!

Malachi looked back, finding him for a long gaze, then walking on, matching his stride to the Preacher’s as a taller man should.

The countries of love and terror border each other here and there. Jesse became a small boy alone in a crowd.

Most of these people were older, taller. They were following a pattern familiar to themselves. Every third Crusader carried a rolled strip of heavy cloth; these were being joined in pairs and pegged into long pup tents, big enough to hold three at each end with some snuggling. Within ten minutes the meadow had blossomed into a camp. Some of the Crusaders brought water from the pond, others searched under the bordering trees for fallen wood; a young woman with flint and steel went about lighting small campfires. Never a whine or argument or quarrelsome voice. Jesse shuffled off those shoes, tying them together at his neck. He worked his feet in the grass, swallowing something bitter, not panic exactly. Not merely loneliness.

He was the only one not bound for the New Jerusalem. The only one wearing brown instead of white. Shirt and loin-cloth, no tunic.

He walked up the meadow toward Malachi’s house in a dark passion of aloneness - touch me not, touch me not, take heed of loving me! - silently passing these friendly souls, some of whom would have spoken to him but for that blind, unhealing look. He was thinking: I could outrun every single one of you. Then one of them did speak, a girl with a warm voice, a mouth like a geranium. ‘Hello - aren’t you the son of the man who’s letting us have this field?’

Jesse fell in love. ‘No, I’m not his son.’ He was lost for more to say. She did not press for more, just waited, smiling without mockery. ‘I’m his friend.’

‘Oh,’ she said, interested in him, not in Malachi. ‘I’m Philippa.’

‘My name’s Jesse Lodson.’

‘If you come with us you’ll be just Jesse. We give up family, and home, and all things, for to follow our Preacher to the New Jerusalem.’ And she was so happy about it - that afternoon anyway, in that place and time, the sun choosing gold lights in her brown hair and blessing the freckles on her honestly chubby cheeks - that her speech was a singing and her innocence like fresh cream.

If you come with us - but of course! They expected it, took it for granted; that was supposed to be the purpose of their pilgrimage. And Jesse longed to say: ‘I’ll go with you.’ He could not, quite.

The town hall bell rang five o’clock. Almost time to go home for heaven’s sake, lend a hand with the chores, wash up for supper. To be home not later than half past five was the understood price of being allowed to tag around after Malachi.

Malachi had found that bell three years ago in the ruins of a back-country church. Its village had been emptied - a raid by mountain people, or pestilence, or both; forest was reclaiming everything; bones were whitened, scattered, gnawed by wolves. As Malachi had told the story to Jesse, the bronze bell lay there among charred timbers and rubbish, gleaming like a great open mouth of suffering. Malachi and Tad Doremus had brought the bell home and installed it in the town hall. Then Malachi had persuaded the Board of Selectmen - there really was one, Malachi was sometimes president of it, and it did provide about as much local government as well-behaved people ought to need - to employ half-witted Jem Thorpe to ring that bell every hour through the days. In return for this and a bit of easy janitor work, Jem got enough to eat, a place to sleep, and something to worship. He adored the bell, and the wonderful clock which he had been taught to wind and which told him when to pull the rope. He would have happily died to protect the bell, or the ritual, or Malachi. Just another part of that complex of the unpredictable that followed Malachi Peters like a leitmotif through the orchestration of these years of sadness and perplexity. Malachi’s Thing.

‘I have to go home.’

Philippa nodded sweetly. ‘But the only real home is the New Jerusalem, Jesse.’

He knew her words came from Preacher Abraham, yet her sincerity made them hers too. She had a warm strange smell; her breasts were big enough to push out against the formless smock, and she carried them with no slouch. Jesse realized he was staring, and flushed. But she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek, bumping against his dangling shoes. ‘We want you with us,’ she said. He knew she had glanced down at his bare feet. ‘Our Preacher says, Let all who are strange and lonely come with us, for we go to build a place where none shall be lonely or strange.’

Part of Jesse’s mind protested that without loneliness and strangeness this world would not be this world at all and maybe not worth having; but it was a formless protest: he knew he would have grass sandals and a white tunic, and go with Philippa to the New Jerusalem.

Malachi felt silence around him as he climbed the slope to his house. The children’s voices had fallen behind them. The Preacher had sent off those attending him on various errands, all but two young men in their early twenties whom he called Andrew and Jude. Andrew seemed cheerful - thoughtful too, plainfaced and kind. Jude’s young face was already cut with worry lines and the start of a chronic frown.

Tad Doremus kept quiet - a natural occupation, almost a life-work.

Malachi asked: ‘Where will you found the New Jerusalem?’

‘I think I shall know the place when I see it,’ said Preacher Abraham. ‘We turned south in Canada because Andrew here brought me word of a place called Nuber on the west shore of the Hudson Sea. I must go there - it may be the place.’

‘Nuber? There was a town, Newburgh,’ said Malachi. ‘I drove through it the summer I was eighteen. But that area of the Hudson Valley was destroyed, you know, in the floods and earthquakes.’

‘This place is on higher ground, ten or fifteen miles inland.’

‘You’re a New Yorker, sir?’

‘I was born in Maryland. I have almost no memory of the old time. Barely five, the year of the war, and I spent my youth in witless sin and folly until I was given light. Andrew is my right hand,’ he said, and smiled at the young man as they climbed the steps of Malachi’s porch. ‘We separated a few months ago so that he could explore western New York while we went through New England. Then he rejoined us in the north. Tell Mr Peters about Nuber, Andrew.’

They settled on the porch, for the Preacher wanted to watch the preparation of the camp site in the meadow. Andrew spoke almost bookishly. ‘What they call Nuber is an area fifteen miles by twenty - say three hundred square miles - where there were wealthy estates in the old time, and some arable land too. not spoiled by commercial agriculture. Long before the last buildup of political tensions in 1993 the rich people of that region were running a private oligarchy, nominally within the American political framework. They had a little bit of foresight, enough intelligence to see that the commercial-technological rat race couldn’t keep up much longer - raw materials were running out for one thing - and they may have been wise enough to fear the end result of political insanity in a world with atomic power. At any rate they were much concerned with survival - their own, that is. According to their cult, so far as they had any beliefs, altruism was a bad word, and they had always considered their society as not much more than a source of loot and personal power. They dug in against the storm. They built underground refuges, hoarded enormous quantities of food, fuel, arms, ammunition. They couldn’t make new guns, but even now, I understand, there’s a miniature subterranean factory in Nuber that turns out gunpowder, and usable cartridges for the old weapons.’

‘Nice people,’ said Malachi.

‘It is after all,’ said Andrew sententiously, ‘a primary preoccupation of any dictatorial state.’

‘Yes,’ said Malachi. The Preacher watched the meadow.

‘They shall be humbled,’ said Jude, his voice sudden and harsh. His white hands knotted in front of him. ‘It is in Ezekiel: Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman. Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and their idols wherewith they had polluted it.,

‘Amen,’ said Andrew mildly. He might even have a sense of humor, Malachi thought, but his devotion was complete and obvious. Intelligence and literacy he possessed, both wholly at the service of Preacher Abraham. He continued: ‘They hired a lot of laborers, technicians, and a police force. Also a great many more personal servants than was usual among the rich at that time, paying high for them. Mostly they seem to have been following the advice of a man named Bridgeman, one of history’s little Hitlers. Before the world blew up the police were called security guards - I suppose nobody asked, security for what? Then the world did blow up, they did survive, the police force was an army, some of the technicians were a palace elite, Bridgeman was king in everything but name, and the blue-collar people and servants were slaves. Specifically, Mr Peters. Nuber today makes no secret of being a slave-holding state. Bridgeman had a mint, turning out pretty gold and silver and copper money: trust him to think of that and grab control of it, among people who had thought all their lives that money was a paper fairy-tale told by themselves.’

‘He must have known a little history.’

‘Yes, Mr Peters, but not enough to do him any good. His official title, by the way, assumed right after the twenty-minute war, was -’ Andrew smiled, his young face pleasantly professorial. ‘Guess.’

‘Couldn’t.’

‘Secretary,’ said Andrew. ‘Secretary of the Nuber Historical Society. Well, in a year or so he began hankering after something more like imperial purple, the name as well as the game, and somebody eager for his job stuck a ten-inch knife in his back, taking the job and the name of king. Bridgeman should have expected it: it was the kind of political operation Nuber was built to understand.’

Malachi asked: ‘Preacher Abraham, do you propose to advance on a vicious military state, with a horde of defenseless children? How? How and why?’

‘I will first explain the why,’ said Preacher Abraham. ‘Because it does seem impossible. Mr Peters, the world cannot be saved unless we show God’s power in us by doing the seemingly impossible.’

‘Oh,’ said Malachi. ‘The world is sickened of attempts to save it. The world is saving itself now in the only way it has or ever can - by small, brave individual efforts at recovery now that the storm’s over. It will take centuries. Institutions have never done it and never will. Well, I see you don’t agree, you’re not hearing me.’

‘To God nothing is impossible,’ said the Preacher, as if he truly had not heard. ‘As to the how, Mr Peters, we go there under God’s guidance. As I have been assured by his very voice.’ His face was glowing. ‘Do not tell me this is a subjective experience - those wise little words! I know, Mr Peters, I know! If we fail, then the failure itself is God’s will: we can only die in the Lord a little sooner than the natural time.’

‘Have the children asked to die young?’

‘You seem angry. The children understand, as perhaps you do not yet, the meaning of eternal life.’ The Preacher rose. ‘Thank you for the meadow, Mr Peters, and for this little time of rest.’

But Malachi had risen too and grasped his arm. The Preacher gazed back unmoving. ‘Preacher Abraham, will you allow me to come with you? Will you give me your light, as you see it, and perhaps - perhaps -’

‘No one who wishes to follow me is refused,’ said Preacher Abraham.

‘I think he has no faith,’ said Jude.

‘If some follow me for the wrong reasons,’ said Preacher Abraham mildly, ‘perhaps right reason will come later. We shall break camp early in the morning. Come to me then if you will.’

‘Will you - stop in now and have something to eat?’

‘Thank you, sir, but I see you keep goats and chickens. We must no longer exploit the captivity of living things. But thank you for the offer, which was kindly meant.’

Malachi sagged, watching the Preacher depart with Andrew and Jude. Tad sighed harshly. ‘I don’t think you sold him, Malachi.’

‘Come inside, Tad. The elderberry’s near-about the best I’ve got. I distilled her some, see, and exploited her captivity in a bottle, sort of. Maybe she ain’t a living thing, though.’

‘Seemed like one, time I sampled her last.’ Tad reached for the glass, drank, and nibbled his lips. ‘She’s living.’ Malachi dropped in his big armchair by the hearth, the armchair where Jesse discovered Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Melville. ‘You look a mite bushed, Malachi.’

‘Am.’

‘I a’n’t exactly making you out.’

‘Could you look after this place a while, Tad? Feed the stock - and help yourself naturally. Keep an eye out the public doesn’t go off with the books for luck charms?’

‘Could of course, Malachi.’

‘Place’d be yours, come to that, I’m not back in a reasonable time. I’ll write that in the form of a will, tonight.’

‘Jesus, Malachi, I don’t see you in one of them fucking nightgowns.’

‘Maybe I’ll be let to keep my pants.’ Malachi refilled his glass. ‘Jesse,’ he said. ‘I believe Jesse is hooked on the New Jerusalem.’

Tad reached down a blacksmith’s hand to Malachi’s bowed scrawny shoulder. ‘Ayah. Uhha.’

‘Why do we love?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tad. ‘I’ll mind the house. No trouble.’

‘Jesse,’ said Malachi, and drank his glass empty, and flung it against the fireplace stones.

There are many new islands. Wherever the land was low to the west of the Green Mountains the climbing water intervened, carving them into new solitude. Little islands, maybe good for a family and a farm if anyone chose to come; larger islands, where deer could breed, and bear, and the new-come coyotes, and wildcat. The toiling waters were fresh in the first few years except for flood rubbish and other pollution, then brackish as the vastly expanding Sea of St Lawrence (but it was becoming easier to speak of the Lawrent Sea, or sometimes just the Lorenta) swallowed the Richelieu River, and the earthquake that destroyed St Jean, Rouses Point, Plattsburg, a hundred other towns, brought southward the taste of ocean. In a few years another earthquake, another adjustment to the fearful stresses of the new weight of water on the land, flung together Lake George, Sacandaga, the upper tributaries of the Hudson, in a muddy boiling confusion. The Ontario Sea breaks through along the country that once knew Lake Oneida and the Mohawk River; some now call that passage Moha Water. Where the Lorenta and Hudson and Ontario Seas come together at the southeastern corner of the great Adirondack Island, outrageous complex tides tear about in a crazy Sabbat of the elements, and scour an unknown bottom. In the Year 9, they say, steam hung for six months over four hundred square miles of that tidal country; there was no one to go in under it and search for the cause. No volcano - none known, that is, not yet; but today there are hot springs along the southeastern coast of Adirondack that certainly did not exist in the old days.

At a place called Ticonderoga small sailing vessels can often make fair passage to and from Adirondack Island, passing out of sight of land for hardly more than an hour if the wind is right. Where the sea is narrower up in the north there’s too much jungle and, they say, malaria or something like it; the Ticonderoga crossing is the best. Then, if you must go south, there are several places - Herkimer, Fonda, Amsterdam - where Moha Water can be crossed with not much danger except from pirates. Amsterdam, to be sure, is a little too near the tidal country and its frequent mists, which the pirates are apt to understand better than the ferry captains do. The devils come nipping out from the heavily wooded shores in their canoe fleets - true savages, reversions to the Stone Age, many of whose grandfathers must have sold insurance, real estate, and advertising just like anybody.

As for crossing the Hudson Sea in the far south, that’s for professional heroes. Those tidal waves are treacherous and frightful. The pirates there have all the advantages, and they can do things with a lateen rig and a shallow craft that no decent sailor would think of doing unless he’d sold his soul to Shaitan. There, in fact, modern piracy may have developed; the canoe operators up north are imitators, amateurs. That corner of the world south of the Catskills needs more earthquakes. ‘The Crusaders will have rough travel, if they mean to go as far as Nuber.’

‘Yes,’ said Jesse, who had come to Malachi dragging his feet after Tad Doremus went home. Malachi was back on his porch; bats were darting in the cool air; at the far end of the meadow some of the children were singing. ‘But Andrew came north by way of Fonda, and he didn’t have any trouble. Malachi …’

‘Get it off your mind.’ Malachi patted the step beside him, and Jesse sat there. Malachi could feel his warmth. Wisdom, or fear, or that dismal blend of the two called caution prevented Malachi from putting an arm over the boy’s shoulder as he would have done an evening or two earlier.

‘What does it mean when - when all of a sudden everything changes, like upside down - I mean, you start believing one or two things different, or even just try to think how it would be if you did believe those things, and then a hundred other things change, and - and -’

‘Your syntax is slipping.’

‘I know. I got excited.’

‘Like turning the kaleidoscope?’

‘Man, yes - it is like that, sort of.’

‘I guess,’ said Malachi presently, ‘it means you have to look at the new pattern … Do your folks know you’re thinking of leaving with the Preacher?’

‘I haven’t been home,’ said Jesse almost sullenly. ‘Gah, you always know everything. If I told ‘em they’d lock me up till he’s gone, you know they would … Are you going to tell them?’

Malachi brooded. ‘If I intended to, I would tell you first. I don’t think of you as a child these days, Jesse.’

And Jesse thought in panic and misery: But I’m not ready - not ready to be anything else. Oh, it’s easy for YOU to be wise, Malachi! ‘Malachi, I - oh, I wish to God my old man - the bull -’

Jesse was lost in a sudden agony of weeping such as Malachi had never seen. It was easy then to take hold of him and cherish him as if he were still a child. ‘I know,’ said Malachi, rocking him lightly. ‘I loved him too, your father. We used to play chess. He was a wonderful man, Jesse. Everybody knew it.’

‘So how can you believe he’s dead? There has to be a - a -the Preacher - yes, I talked to the Preacher for a minute, and he blessed me. Don’t say anything, Malachi, just don’t say anything for a while.’ He gasped and blew his nose. ‘I’m not going back to the house tonight. I’m to sleep in John’s tent. They’re going to have sandals for me.’ He took the leather shoes from his neck, and set them inside the porch rail, his hands saying: So much for my stepfather. ‘Can I leave them there, Malachi?’

‘Yes.’

‘I guess you’re pretty disappointed with me.’

‘No … Jesse, I am considering going with Preacher Abraham myself, for my own sake. I even spoke to him about it.’

Jesse started and turned his wet face to Malachi in the dusk. ‘You! Why?’

‘Oh, let us say that sometimes I too find Melton Village to be a kind of dead end. I have worked for the town, and you might say loved it - an ugly duckling - ai-yah, Malachi’s Thing. But I need to learn what’s happening in a bigger world. I’ve got in a rut. Why, man, for more than your lifetime I’ve had no news of the world except what’s trickled in as gossip from the occasional traveler or tramp, most of it worthless. I expect. It’s shameful. I needed something to fetch me loose. Besides, Preacher Abraham interests me, and he said that no one who elected to follow him was refused. He has his own kind of wisdom. It’s not my kind, Jesse - I won’t pretend. But perhaps I can be of some use to him, who knows?’

Jesse’s stare would not let him go. ‘You’ve got other reasons. You’re not quite leveling with me, Malachi.’

‘Maybe not. Not crooked either. Some things I find hard to explain, even to you. Suppose we just let it work out.’

Jesse relaxed. ‘All right.’ One of the natural surges of affection that made him what he was brought him back to Malachi, warm and close. He sat still with his head resting over Malachi’s heart, and said at last: ‘Well, I’m glad you’re coming along.’ Then he was gone, walking down the meadow to the little campfires.

Malachi carried the shoes indoors and put them away in an old trunk already loaded with history - the ancient kaleidoscope for instance, given to Malachi by his grandmother long before the Year Zero and still miraculously unbroken for Jesse’s brief pleasure and amusement; and his father’s diary that ended in the old year 1972, when the extinction of the Republic was obvious; and a photograph of a girl who had died with so many others in 1993.

The company of two hundred started in the early morning, marched east two or three miles to reach the old mountain road, and followed it south. They camped for the night where they could look toward distant Burlington Ruins, an old wound of flood and earthquake never healed. Malachi slept alone that night under the big dark. He had brought on his back a rolled blanket and change of clothing. He contributed a sack of potatoes to the general supply and whatever else he could find that seemed innocent in the Crusaders’ terms. He also wore at his belt his old hunting knife, which Preacher Abraham deplored. ‘I cut my food with it,’ said Malachi, ‘and sometimes I whittle. And no, sir, I’ll decline the tunic for the present and just wear these.’ They studied each other, antagonists not too unfriendly; Malachi perhaps had an advantage in knowing where the true conflict lay. ‘Now if you can persuade me of the existence of God, Preacher, I will wear the tunic and throw away my knife. But don’t rush it, sir. I’m inclined to make up my mind on my own time. Meanwhile let me be the oddity among you. I wash and I don’t eat little girls.’ The Preacher brooded and then smiled, and surprisingly patted Malachi’s arm before he turned away to more important matters.

At home Malachi had often slept outdoors, in his back yard or out in the meadow. He knew the Pleiades, and the wandering of the planets and the stars. He had found his strength more than equal to the day’s march, and was healthily tired. The campfires burned low; Malachi noticed Jude and one or two others taking up sentry duty out at the fringes of the light. Then someone - Malachi could not see him in the dark - sounded on a bugle the ancient army music of Taps. How did it happen the Preacher had resurrected that, and did he have any idea of the far-off associations of ideas? After the music died slowly - no one can hear it unmoved - there was a rhythmic murmuring all through the camp; it ended all in the same moment, and Malachi understood it was the sound of the children praying. Somewhere among them, Jesse, snug in a tent with the disciple John and three or four others. It would take Jesse no time to learn the words and rituals: he was always a quick study. Malachi sighed, and after less pain than he had feared, he slept.

In hilly country Preacher Abraham did not demand of his children more than twelve to fifteen miles of marching in a day. A majority of them, Malachi guessed as the march resumed in the morning, would have been delighted to exceed that. But an army, and sometimes a civilization, must proceed at the pace of its weakest marcher. Some were very young. The mue-girl Dinah, twelve years old, slight and small with the patient look of sainthood, had a defect in her knee-structure that made her stiff-legged and slow. Whenever she tired Jude carried her. These were the only times when his haggard face lost its frown and became tender; but with that frail burden he could make no speed himself.

On the second and third days Malachi stayed most of the time in the rear, knowing that to all of them, even to the Preacher and Jesse, he must seem monstrously old. But the rear was a good vantage point. He could see whatever happened. He could watch Jesse’s dark head, and know at least who his new friends were, and read whatever was told by the set of the boy’s shoulders. And sometimes Jesse dropped back to walk with him; though in a too exalted, precarious way, Jesse did seem happy, and full of a natural interest in the new country.

Reading history, Malachi had noted that throughout most of the past the counsel of the old had been valued, even sought for; it was not until the 20th Century that old people were declared obsolete and swept under the rug; and the 20th Century itself was now merely one more lump in the record.

On the third night out the company reached the settlement of Shorum, where the ferry sails for Ticonderoga now and then if the captain considers it worth his while. He has been known to stir his stumps for one old woman with her cat in a basket who wanted to get over to Chilson Landing and see a new grandchild; and once he made the mayor of Shorum wait a week on account of a few cross words. About transporting two hundred kids from here to nowhere to found the New Jerusalem, he was not pleased, pointing out that it would take four trips, two days’ work considering the tides, and even with four trips the crowding would be somewhat much. ‘We are patient,’ said Preacher Abraham, ‘and used to material difficulties.’

‘It’ll cost you a dime a head,’ said Captain Gibbleson.

‘Dependence on money is the death of the spirit. What can you buy with it?’ asked the Preacher. ‘The old system’s gone, Captain.’

‘State gov’ment says the old coinage is still money. Naturally I wouldn’t take no paper.’

‘I’ve hardly been aware you had a state government.’

Very much the wrong thing to say. Malachi intervened deprecatingly: ‘We sort of invoke it, Preacher. Some claim to’ve seen it.’ But his wink at the Captain did not restore the peace.

‘Got no money,’ said Captain Gibbleson, ‘you can swim.’

Andrew took over. ‘Captain, I see you have quite a miscellaneous log pile, there along the bank.’

‘Ayah, driftwood, some of it.’ Captain chewed on his plug and eyed him unhopefully; the plug smelled as if it had been sold him by Mr Goudy. ‘You wouldn’t believe what high water fetches in sometimes. Got a whole cabin one day, with a dead man in it. Blowed up like a punkin he was, you should’ve seen.’

‘I offer you two alternatives,’ said Andrew. ‘We will stack that wood for you, and split any that’s worth splitting, in return for our passage. Or, overriding your wishes as it were, we will simply take whatever wood we need to build a raft.’ Behind Andrew’s back the disciple Simon explained further by sticking out his tongue.

‘Why, you’d drown,’ said Captain Gibbleson, chewing. ‘Like bugs. I can’t have that on my conscience. Stack the Goddamn wood and it’s a deal.’ Later, hunkered on the pier and watching Andrew oversee the labor, he confided to Malachi: ‘Sometimes I almost half-way like a man that don’t mind being a damn fool.’ His back turned to the Crusaders, Malachi slipped him five bucks in 1984 quarters.

The gray-blue reach of the Hudson Sea proved not unkind. Preacher Abraham and Andrew went with the first group on the ferry, a flat-bottomed barge with a crude square sail. Her name was Pug, after Gibbleson’s third wife, and he claimed she was too squat and wide to turn over - in a hurricane she might go straight up or straight down, but she wouldn’t tip. Jude was in charge of the group that would go on the fourth sailing; Jesse lingered for the transparent reason that this group included Philippa. Malachi observed that he won no profit from it beyond a staring and a few choked attempts at conversation. Philippa, Malachi thought, was managing Jesse’s compulsive adoration rather well. Malachi had also seen the look that Philippa had for Andrew only: an ancient story, one who loves and one who is loved; maybe a constant in the human pattern, the exceptions shining only for a most fortunate few. But it seemed to Malachi that Philippa might be not without the rudiments of compassion. Before Shorum, Jesse had brought her to Malachi, saying with glazed casualness: ‘This is Philippa.’

‘How do you do?’ said Malachi. The freckles were appealing.

‘We are sure to do well in the Lord’s grace,’ said Philippa.

Now Malachi, loafing in the stern with Captain Gibbleson (almost a friend), watched the clumsiness and grace of youth. The scow crept torpidly across a placid sea toward a gray excrescence of rock on a hillside; there’s water all around it now, a few people and goats inhabit the island, and it is still overlooked by that mountain which General Burgoyne’s artillery found so convenient once upon a time. Malachi heard Jesse offering some news, up forward: ‘They restored the old fort in 1909 -’ What’s he done, memorized the Britannica? — ‘but it probably isn’t true that Ethan Allen demanded its surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the continental Congress.’ Except for a passing uneasiness Philippa looked quite blank.

Then up on the wharf and goodbye to Gibbleson, and on into the perilous world of Adirondack Island. There would be nearly a hundred miles of it as the trail winds from Ticonderoga to Fonda, following the roads of the old time whenever they seem practical. Nature is trying not unsuccessfully to heal those scars. The busy vine spreads across with sucker rootlets, the innocent seed reaches down through any crack in the dreary concrete or asphalt and is sustained.

Already at many places the easiest route will be a new earthen road with no decaying metal hulks or broken slabs of rubbish. (But the automobile corpses that held their shape so persistently, when overgrown with cool Virginia creeper are of benefit to rabbits, weasels, ground-birds, and such folk, who know how to make honest use of them.) In this Adirondack Island country you are better off with a guide, if you find one you can trust.

There is for instance the matter of bandits and large wild animals. If one of the outlaw or savage groups does come after you on those burr-shaggy mountain ponies, bent on loot or women or violence for its own sake, the guide isn’t much help, and whatever happens will be soon over; but the guide is expected to know the latest rumors about those devils, and find you the safest routes. Guiding is an honorable profession, at least in theory. A guide must know the animals too, and steer you right if you need to hunt. Some of them of course are no damn good.

A long day’s march from Fort Ti brought the Crusaders to Brant Lake, and they camped beside it. Here in the morning a guide offered his services, a small brown smiling man in the skimpy G-string of a savage. (We already begin to hear something of the Cayugas in the central part of what used to be New York; they are a difficult people, with old grievances rooted deep.) He wore a more civilized belt above his hips to hold a steel hunting knife, and he carried at his shoulder a quiver of brass-tipped arrows and a short bow unpleasing to Preacher Abraham. Andrew tried the man with sign-language and grunts, transmitting the message that he apparently wanted no money in return for showing them a safe way southward, but just their company as far as Moha Water and a roll of the linsey cloth their tunics were cut from.

‘The knife and bow will be his living, Preacher,’ said Malachi. ‘No one has taught him any better.’

Preacher Abraham sighed and said: ‘I know. Grace does not come unsought, nor overnight unless the Lord wills.’ Then he looked deep in the guide’s squirrely brown eyes and inquired in simple English whether he believed in God. The guide nodded with solemn reverence.

A few hours later, when the brown man had led them down a wood-road that became a pleasant sun-speckled green trail, Malachi ranged ahead to walk beside him. Jesse came too, evidently wanting just then to reestablish closeness. Speaking too softly for those behind to hear, Malachi asked the guide whether he believed in Satan and the ideological solidarity of the capitalist class. The little man nodded again several times, delightedly.

Jesse smiled too, but the smile wiped itself out. ‘Malachi,’ he said, ‘why do people always make such a tremendous thing about words?’

Malachi worried over it for him, and presently said: ‘They are clumsy, and often unnecessary. But I think they may be the best means we have for probing certain kinds of darkness. As for communication, Jesse, we might survive for a while without it, but I’m not sure the survival would be worth having. Words weren’t invented only to conceal thoughts as the old wheeze has it. They create thoughts, give thoughts, and are thoughts. People live by honest words and die by the other kind.’

Frowning and still bothered, Jesse said after a while: ‘Yes, I guess that makes sense.’

There was no denying the guide’s usefulness. When they camped beside the Sacandaga River he found early mushrooms for them and showed them edible marsh plants, so that the grim diet of cornmeal mush and potatoes and soggy wheat cakes could be a little varied. It puzzled Malachi that he should have apparently known the Crusader’s vegetarian principles without being told, but no one commented on it. At the music of Taps the little guide bowed his face to the ground.

All the following day he led his charges along firm earth through a region of brackish swamp where the Sacandaga once comfortably paralleled a 20th Century road. Dark country here, too close to that outrageous great tidal pocket of the Hudson Sea. Mists float unexpected through the more open reaches of the woods. It is quiet. No snowmobiles nor snarling chain saws nor bulldozer flatbeds shuddering uphill. Wind sometimes or the other sounds of storm, or of a deer dying to feed panther or wolf or brown tiger. You may hear a coyote desolately howling, or a loon in the marsh. No transistors.

On the morning of the ninth day after leaving Melton Village, an inquiry from Andrew about Fonda drew from the guide the gestured response that the place was two sleeps away, meaning perhaps anywhere from twenty-five to forty miles. The black flies that day were a torment. The Crusaders marched four abreast, a cloud of needling misery all about them. It was one of the old highways, in fair condition. Forest stood oppressively deep on either side; imagination provided glimpses of motion in the heavy green, hints of pathways not to be followed. But the march was bringing them into open country, and shortly after the second rest of the morning -scant rest it was with the tiny black demons whining and settling, nothing to do but slap and suffer - they came out into it.

The deep woods lay a few hundred yards behind them when Malachi saw another road up ahead, a simple line of reddish dirt emerging from thick tree cover and snaking down a long slope to meet their highway. The guide flung up his hand. The company halted as Andrew dutifully repeated the motion, and stood raggedly, slapping at the flies, two hundred children wondering, murmuring. Preacher Abraham called out: ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ Andrew shook his head don’t-know.

The guide was running forward bent over as one might do to evade a stone or arrow from behind; in his stooping haste Malachi saw a thing turned suddenly feral and vicious. At the end of his long rush he flung up his arms and sent to that wooden summit a sharp yell, the word ‘Here!’ His mission achieved, he crouched then, smiling and ugly, holding an arrow leveled toward Andrew as the horsemen plunged out from under the trees.

Andrew shouted: ‘Scatter! Back to the woods!’ Malachi shouted it too, and he saw Andrew crumple and fall, the guide’s arrow in his chest. Jude had already snatched up Dinah in his arms and was running with her. John too shrilled at the company: ‘To the woods! Hide!’

Too many of the children were slow to grasp it, and stood in a sick daze until the Preacher added his urgent voice. Then they began to go, stragglingly and late, staring over their shoulders, maybe not quite believing any of it until they saw Lucia snatched up and flung across a pony’s back, and John leaping at the rider’s leg, falling back with blood spurting from his throat.

The riders were not more than a dozen, and strangely silent except for a gurgle of excited laughter. Naked but for loin-rags and moccasins, they rode bareback as if they had spent half their lives that way, and they were men of any breed, all breeds. They did not trouble to draw their small bows, seeing (or knowing in advance) that the victims were unarmed - their servant might do as he pleased. They wanted women, but young girls would do very well. They rode their fiery little horses in and out among the fleeing, now terrified children, and picked them off as they chose, each man as soon as he had secured his captive riding back up the long hill. It was over in minutes. Europe’s 5th Century would have been proud of them.

Malachi looked at the knife in his hand. He could have used it, if there had been time, and anything in reach. Maybe the sight of it was what had made the riders circle clear of him and Jesse. Philippa had been with them when the storm went by; now she had run to where Andrew was lying and flung herself down. Malachi saw the last rider disappear up the hill and into the woods, and behind him scampered the busy small figure of their smiling guide.

The Preacher was saying: ‘Resist not evil. This was the word of Christ: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.’ Was the Preacher counseling himself? The disciple John was dead, Lucia and eleven others gone; Andrew whom he had called his right hand could no longer serve or hear him, though Philippa with her clutching hands and crying voice was trying to make him live.

‘For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth the rain on the just and the unjust.’

‘Philippa.’ Malachi knelt by her. ‘You must come away.’

‘Come away,’ said Jesse. ‘Come away, Philippa.’

‘Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.’

Philippa rose and brushed past them. She stood before Preacher Abraham and said: ‘You did this.’

‘Forgive me then,’ said the Preacher.

Philippa stared at Andrew’s blood on her hands. ‘We were going to marry, in the New Jerusalem.’ She turned her face to the woods, and Malachi felt Jesse tense with readiness to run after her, bring her back from that suicide. She took a few sleepwalking steps that way and halted, looking about her, saying: ‘But I have no place to go.’

‘Philippa,’ said the Preacher, ‘there is the New Jerusalem.’

She did not answer.

They carried the bodies of Andrew and John down the road, and made a burial place in the open country; that wooded hilltop stood vague in the north. The day was still, no sounds but those of peace, and the Preacher spoke to them. ‘I will go to Nuber,’ he said, ‘and preach there the founding of the New Jerusalem as I am commanded to do by my Father which is in Heaven. I will wear on my breast this image of the conquered wheel, and I will testify.’

Malachi wondered: Does he know who he is, in his own mind at least and in the minds of many of us? Would he have us know?

‘But I am weak in the vessel of the flesh, and do not always see my way clearly, and at times I may have been deceived and unwise.’

Well, Christ would not have said that.

‘It may be, my children, that it is not for us to build that city, in Nuber or anywhere, by the labor or our hands, though I still hope it will be so. Therefore I do release from the vows any of you who for any reason no longer hear the call of God to follow me. There are other ways you may serve his purpose, many honorable ways. From our beloved disciple Andrew, I learned more about the sorry kingdom of Nuber than I have told you. Perhaps I understand why it is that God plainly directs me to that place, but I will not try to explain it. Nuber is a city of the damned, a place of greed and cruelty, smallness of the spirit, evildoing and blindness. So it may be that I go there to my death, and God’s purpose in this may not be understood for a long time to come. I will demand nothing of you that is not freely given, and so God be with you.’

He said no more that day, and he did not preach at Fonda.

Sympathy and friendliness were strong in that lonely village, but cooled somewhat at Malachi’s suggestion of an armed search party to rescue the ravished girls. He was talking to the mayor of the town, and the good man said nothing about resisting not evil, but pointed out that those bloody bandits would now be fifty or a hundred miles away in their own kind of country, by trails nobody knew. They were a familiar plague; it had happened before. Who could deal with it except the kind of police force no town nowadays can support? Be reasonable, man. Shortly thereafter the townfolk took up a collection to pay for the transport of Abraham’s Army over Moha Water.

Here a maternally minded citizen intervened, protesting the exposure of these children to the perils of such a journey. Others before her had felt it, but this was a sensible woman with tact. She talked long and amiably with the Preacher while the two ferry captains were waiting on the tide, and then with his permission spoke to the children, praising their devotion, their hope of the New Jerusalem (a hope she shared), adding almost like an afterthought that if any of them felt unequal to the task, or wanted more time to think about it, why, she and some of her neighbors were prepared to give them shelter, or help for a journey back home if that was what they wanted.

Sitting on the pier with Malachi, Jesse heard him murmur: ‘Bravo!’ But he noticed the old man was gazing at the Preacher, not at this good Samaritan who looked as if she wanted to cuddle the whole company in her lap. ‘We ought to stay with him, Malachi?’ And Jesse studied the Preacher, trying to find what Malachi had been observing with surprise and respect.

‘This woman is blessed,’ said Preacher Abraham. ‘Again I say, you who wish to remain with her are released from your vows.’ And when he asked for a sign from those who elected to leave him, more than half the company raised their hands, Philippa among them.

‘He believes it,’ said Malachi, ‘even to the cup that will not pass. Yes, I think I ought to stay with him, Jesse, in what time he has left before death or disillusion. I have heard about Nuber too. Once or twice he has found it possible to talk with me. But you yourself are first with me: that is how I’ve always loved you.’

Jesse looked down at his feet. The grass sandals had never fitted; he carried them, like the old shoes, at his neck. ‘It was to have been a city for the mues, among the rest.’

‘You’re not even a mue.’ Malachi shook his shoulder. ‘God, Jesse, I hope you’ll marry some time and replenish the bloody earth with a pack of six-toed children. Think what it would do to the ski industry!’

‘The what?’ Jesse was bewildered.

‘Never mind,’ said Malachi, and kissed the top of his head.

Nuber, a city of wealth (which is always relative) and poverty (which is basic hell) surrounded by a dutifully toiling countryside with plantations of slave labor, felt in those years no foreign threat. Life could be a little relaxed. To enter the borders you had only to convince the commandant of the post that you nourished no pernicious design against the stability of the realm, and to convince him might cost no more than ten dollars. Malachi still had a mite more than that; or the band of Abraham’s followers, less than fifty now, might even be admitted free.

The very location of the border posts was subject to the commandant’s caprice. He might move his little establishment a mile or so down the road if something that way caught his fancy - a juicy melon patch, or a farm family with a good-looking daughter who might be more contented as a citizen of the Republic. (It is after all something of a distinction, Malachi remarked to Jesse; not every republic has a king for a dictator. And Jesse had been laughing some that day, a kind of half-choked outbreak, maybe a new Jesse trying to crack the chrysalis of a very solemn boy.)

To the camp at Trempa, a day’s march from the nearest border post of Nuber, came an old peddler - at least he was dressed like one, and gnarled like a fellow often exposed to the seasons, but he never opened his shoulder-sack, nor paid much heed to anyone but the Preacher himself, beyond a few puzzled glances at Malachi. ‘You ought to go back, Preacher,’ he said. ‘Oh, you ought to go back, let it pass from you. I come from Nuber and I know.’

‘Who are you?’ asked the Preacher.

‘A tinker, an old man, a nobody. I come and go. I’ve been called Ahasuerus - in jest I suppose, for never did I despise Christ and his kindred; the old and slightly wise become used to jesting at their expense, it’s only natural. You ought to go back. Oh, they are saying in Nuber, there’s a wheel for you, you that condemn the wheel and wear that handsome symbol over your heart. Why, they’ve found a great steelbound wooden wheel, something maybe from an old-time farm wagon, I don’t know.’ He muttered and flexed his arthritic hands, tired from carrying the sack and from age. ‘They are saying that if you come to preach your sedition at Nuber you shall carry the wheel on your back to the market place, and it shall be set up there for the multitude; and they speak of nailing your palms to the spokes. And oh, Abraham, there will be one to betray you and one to deny you, and one to judge you and wash his hands.’

‘Why do they hate me?’ asked Preacher Abraham.

‘Because you speak of the good that all men dream of as if it could be real.’

At these words the Preacher was troubled, and when the peddler had received his blessing and gone away up the north road he came to Malachi and asked him: ‘Why have you remained with me?’ He shook back the hair from his shoulders, a young man’s motion, but looked tired and old as he rubbed his fingertips over the frown that would not leave his forehead. The painted wheel on his tunic bore the dark appearance of blood. ‘You have not faith, Malachi, yet you are faithful to promises, and have served me and my poor children with devotion. I watched you helping Jude care for Dinah at Coble, when she was dying. And in the weeks at Gran Gor, where the smallpox was, where so many died, you were tireless in caring for the sick, those of the town as well as our own. If only for these things I’m bound to love and respect you. And now it seems you are prepared to go with me, though I cannot ask it, even to the end of the journey.’

‘Or perhaps I will deny you,’ said Malachi Peters, smiling, and the Preacher presently smiled, in his own fashion. ‘It’s my belief that human beings choose their own ends, Preacher Abraham. There is no purpose under the heaven until living creatures on earth create it. And there must be few indeed who don’t cherish a faith in some things, because all knowledge remains incomplete; even though faith is only the fantasy of things hoped for, the invention of things not seen. I have faith in the good will of myself and certain others, faith in the rightness of love and virtue and mercy. That faith will sustain me as it has in the past, while I live.’

The long weeks lay behind Jesse like a year of difficult growth. This was beginning autumn. The border post at Nuber stood only a few steps down the road. Tomorrow they would pass it, and that would happen which was to happen. Tomorrow would be the day that Nuber celebrated as the Day of Coming Forth, the day when according to their history and legend they came out from underground after the twenty-minute war and found that the Earth still lived. Jesse’s memory brought him like a remote music the Gospel of Matthew: Ye know that after two days is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified.

Still and sleepless under his half of Malachi’s blanket, Jesse gazed toward the south horizon where a few strong stars cut through the haze of the night. Malachi had said it would rain before daylight. A huge roadside oak spread over them, big enough to shelter most of the Preacher’s little company, and Malachi had pegged a strip of canvas over their heads.

How did one learn the ways of earth and sun and sky as the old man knew them? It was more than observation. Observing the natural world, but also continually knowing himself a part of it. He could speak like Saint Francis (though he doesn’t) of ‘my brother the sun.’ Here am I, says he for is it myself speaking for him?), a unique pattern briefly arranged on this earth for my only time to think and feel and see. So may it not be that what I do to and for myself and others is more important than what I believe? Belief governs what I do — yes, partly. Well, I can be mistaken about many things and still be happy if there is happiness, I can even be good. But I can never do evil without evil consequences, no matter how pure my intentions. Who taught me this? - I’ve discovered only a little bit of it just now. Why, Malachi. Malachi and the books …

Tad will be taking good care of the books. He’d better!

He shut away the southern stars beyond his eyelids, and tried to measure the time since he had last attempted to pray as Preacher Abraham had told him it ought to be done: ‘Relax, Jesse, and think of nothing directly, it’s not a matter of words. Open your mind and give yourself to God.’ He could not measure it - a long time, he knew. Maybe he had not attempted it since Dinah’s death.

Senseless. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods -they kill us for their sport.’ Lear, said Jesse’s complex, accurate, toiling mind - the Fourth Act, and spoken by Gloster after his blinding. I have no way, therefore I want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw …’ But the true religious will have us believe God is merciful.

A senseless death. Some hidden lethal thing, perhaps in Dinah’s deformed bones, had stricken her with a sudden paralysis. For two days she could not lift herself, nor relieve her bladder, nor even breathe unless supported. Her twelve-year-old face remained sternly patient, asking no favors, but she could not hide the evidence of a racking pain. Then a fever when she no longer knew even Jude, and death. When it was over, the thing in Jude’s face was not the appalled misery that Jesse had seen in Philippa, but hate, a hate that brooded and grieved and would not declare itself.

And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.

Jesse sighed, in need of sleep. The Preacher’s advice concerning prayer gave him nothing. At the last came two false witnesses, and said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.

And Jesse remembered the talk of Malachi, recent talk and that from long ago, when the first rumors of Preacher Abraham came to Melton Village. ‘How often, Jesse, how often has Christ been crucified! The old grim story so many times enacted - for the poor human race has always longed for a Redeemer to take up the burdens that human people themselves alone must carry. Once he was a dying god on a spattered altar. This Preacher Abraham will make it plain that he must be crucified, and there will be those to do it as blindly as the rabble and the Roman soldiers. And maybe we learn a little, century by century; or sometimes we forget too much.’

Nevertheless tomorrow they would go into Nuber, the end already known, carrying the dream of the New Jerusalem, ‘where the earth is so cherished that God will return

No, thought Jesse - No. I have no wish to give myself to God, even if God lives. Human love is greater than divine love, for divine love - he looked for the southern stars again but the rain had taken them, and was falling in light haste up there on the October leaves; with care he shifted the weight of his head on Malachi’s arm - divine love is at worst an illusion, at best a dream for some imaginary future time. Human love is here and now.

Table of Contents

Start