Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,44

yet laughed when he had finished, and hugged him, and broke into prayer.

All he was seeing, they assured him, were the sad remnants of a world which would soon be extinguished as the Kingdom of their Saviour spread. Their eldest son was fighting in the armies of Jesus the Christos, which they knew that he would be victorious, and they did not fear for his death. Even in a house as joyous as this, that last statement struck Balthasar as odd, but he kept his council as they sat down to eat on beautifully woven rugs, and the meal was the best he had ever tasted. Then, there was more song, and more prayer. When the man of the house finally beckoned Balthasar, he imagined it to show him the place where he would bed. Through a small doorway, and beyond a curtain there was, indeed, a raised cot, but a figure already occupied it; that of an elderly woman who lay smiling with hands clasped and eyes wide open as if gripped in eager prayer.

“Go on, my friend” Balthasar was urged. “This is my grandmother. You must touch her.”

Balthasar did. Her skin was cold and waxy. Her eyes, for all their shine, were unblinking. She was plainly dead.

“Now, you must tell me how long you think she’s been thus.”

Troubled, but using his not inconsiderable knowledge of physic, Balthasar muttered something about three to four hours, perhaps less, to judge by the absence of odour, or the onset of rigor in the limbs.

The man clapped his hands and laughed. “Almost two years! Yet look at her. She is happy, she is perfect. All she awaits is the Lord’s touch to bring about her final return in the eternal kingdom which will soon be established. That is why we Christians merrily do battle against all who oppose us, for we know that we will never have to fear death…”

That night, Balthasar laid uneasily in the softness of the rugs the family had prepared for him, and was slow to find sleep. This clear air, the happy lowing of the cattle, the endless brightness in the west…And now the family were singing again, as if out of their dreams, and joined with their voices came the softer croak of the old woman, happily calling with emptied lungs for her resurrection from undecayed death. In the morning, Balthasar felt refreshed for all his restlessness, and beast the family led from their stables was barely recognisable as the surly creature which had borne him all the way from Persia. The camel’s pelt was sleek as feathers. Its eyes were wise and brown and compassionate in the way of no beast of burden Balthasar had ever known. He almost expected creature to speak to him, or join with this family as they broke into song and they waved him on his way.

Thus, laden with sweetmeats and baked breads, astride a smooth, uncomplaining mount on a newly softened saddle, Balthasar completed the last leg of his strange second journey to Jerusalem. The brightness before him had now grown so intense that he would have feared for his sight, had that light come from the sun. But he could see clearly and without pain—see far more clearly than he had ever seen, even in the happiest memories of his youth.

The encampment of a vast army lay outside the greats city’s gleaming jasper walls. Angels of other kinds to the creature he had first witnessed—some were six-winged and flickered like lampflames and were known as the Seraphim; others known as the Principalities wore crowns and bore sceptres; stranger still were those called the Ophanim, which were shaped like spinning wheels set with thousands of eyes—supervised the mustering and training with the voices of lions. The soldiers themselves, Balthasar saw as he rode down among them, were like no soldiers he had ever seen. There were bowed and elderly men. There were cripples. There were scampering children. There were women heavy with child. Yet even the seemingly lowliest and most helpless possessed a flaming sword which could cut as cleanly through rock as it did though air, and a breastplate seemingly composed the same glowing substance which haloed the city itself. Seeing all these happy, savage faces, hearing their raucous song and laughter as they went about their everyday work, Balthasar knew that these Christian armies wouldn’t cease advancing once they had driven their old overlords back to Rome. They would turn east, and Syria would fall. So would