of Wrath Himself. But not a mekkis; not Macht, not power or might. It is more a— mystery. Hence, gnostic wisdom is involved, knowledge hidden behind a wall so fragile, so entrancing … but undoubtedly a fatal knowledge. Interesting, that truth could be a terminal possession. The woman knew the truth, lived with it, yet it did not kill her. But when she uttered it—he thought of Cassandra and of the female Oracle at Delphi. And felt afraid.
Once he had said to Lurine, in the evening after a few drinks, “You carry what Paul called the sting.”
“The sting of death,” Lurine had promptly recalled, “is sin.”
“Yes.” He had nodded. And she bore it, and it no more killed her than the viper’s poison killed it … or the H-warhead missiles menaced themselves. A knife, a sword, had two ends: one a handle, the other a blade; the gnosis of this woman was for her gripped by the safe end, the handle; but when she extended it—he saw, flashing, the light of the slight blade.
But what, for the Servants of Wrath, did sin consist of? The weapons of the war; one naturally thought of the psychotic and psychopathic cretins in high places in dead corporations and government agencies, now dead as individuals; the men at drafting boards, the idea men, the planners, the policy boys and P.R. infants—like grass, their flesh. Certainly that had been sin, what they had done, but that had been without knowledge. Christ, the God of the Old Sect, had said that about His murderers: they did not know what they were up to. Not knowledge but the lack of knowledge had made them into what they had been, frozen into history as they gambled for His garments or stuck His side with the spear. There was knowledge in the Christian Bible, in three places that he personally knew of—despite the rule within the Servants of Wrath hierarchy against reading the Christian sacred texts. One part lay in the Book of Job. One in Ecclesiastes. The last, the final note, had been Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and then it had ended, and Tertullian and Origen and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—even the divine Abelard; none had added an iota in two thousand years.
And now, he thought, we know. The Catharists had come bleakly close, had guessed one piece: that the world lay in the control of an evil Adversary and not the good god. What they had not guessed was contained in Job, that the “good god” was a god of wrath—was in fact evil.
“Like Shakespeare has Hamlet say to Ophelia,” McComas growled at Lurine. “‘Get thee to a nunnery,’”
Lurine, sipping coffee, said prettily, “Up yours.”
“See?” the Dominus McComas said to Father Handy.
“I see,” he said carefully, “that you can’t order people to be this or that; they have what used to be called an ontological nature.”
Scowling, McComas said, “Whazzat?”
“Their intrinsic nature,” Lurine said sweetly. “What they are. You ignorant rustic religious cranks.” To Father Handy she said, “I finally made up my mind. “I’m joining the Christian Church.”
Hoarsely guffawing, McComas shook, belly-wise, not Santa Claus belly but belly of hard, grinding animal. “Is there a Christian Church anymore? In this area?”
Lurine said, “They’re very gentle and kind, there.”
“They have to be,” McComas said. “They have to plead to get people to come in. We don’t need to plead; they come to us for protection. From Him.” He jerked his thumb upward. At the God of Wrath, not in his man-form, not as he had appeared on Earth as Carleton Lufteufel, but as the mekkis-spirit everywhere. Above, here, and ultimately below; in the grave, to which they all were dragged at last.
The final enemy which Paul had recognized—death—had had its victory after all; Paul had died for nothing.
And yet here sat Lurine Rae, sipping coffee, announcing calmly that she intended to join a discredited, withering, elderly sect. The husk of the former world, which had shown its chitinous shell, its wickedness; for it had been Christians who had designed the ter-weps, the terror weapons.
The descendants of those who had sung square-wrought, pious Lutheran hymns had designed, at German cartels, the evil instruments which had shown up the “God” of the Christian Church for what he was.
Death was not an antagonist, the last enemy, as Paul had thought; death was the release from bondage to the God of Life, the Deus Irae. In death one was free from Him—and only in death.
It was the God of Life who