Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [65]
It was inside me.
I'd always known who I really was. I was God. And I'd chosen not to know it. Well, now I knew just what it meant to be the man who knew he was God.
22
FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS. That's how long Moses remained on Sinai. That's how long Elijah fasted before the Lord spoke to him.
“Lord, I have done it,” I whispered. “I know, too, what they expect of me. Only too well, do I know.”
My sandals were falling to pieces. I'd retied the thongs more times than I could count. The sight of my sunburnt hands unsettled me, but I only laughed under my breath. I was headed home.
Down the mountains, towards the bright shimmering desert that lay between me and the river I couldn't see.
“Alone, alone, alone,” I sang. I had never felt such hunger. I had never felt such thirst. They rose as if in answer to my own pronouncement. “Oh, yes, so many times did I devoutly wish for it,” I sang to myself. “To be alone.” And now I was alone, with no bread, no water, no place to rest my head.
“Alone?”
It was a voice. It was a familiar voice, a man's voice familiar in timbre and pitch.
I turned around.
The sun was behind me, and so the light was painless and clear.
He was about my height, and beautifully garbed, more beautifully and richly even than Reuben of Cana or Jason—more like the figure of the King. He wore a linen tunic, embroidered with a border of green leaves and red flowers, each little floret glistening with gold thread. The border of his white mantle was even thicker, richer, woven as the mantles of the Priests are woven, and hung even with tiny gold bells. His sandals were covered with gleaming buckles. And around his waist he wore a thick leather girdle studded with bronze points, as a soldier might wear. Indeed a sword in a jeweled scabbard hung at his side.
His hair was long and lustrous, a deep rich brown. And so were his soft eyes.
“My little joke does not amuse you,” he said gently with a graceful bow.
“Your joke?”
“You don't ever look into a mirror. Don't you recognize the image of yourself?”
A shock spread over my face, and then all of my skin. He was my duplicate, except I'd never seen myself in such attire.
He made a small circle in the sand so that I might better see the picture he made. I was fascinated at the expression—or lack of it—in his large puckering eyes.
“You might say,” he began, “that I feel some obligation to remind you of what you are? You see, I'm aware of your particular delusion. You don't hold yourself to be a mere prophet or a holy man, like your cousin John. You think you're the Lord Himself.”
I didn't reply.
“Oh, I know. You wanted to keep it a secret, and you do indeed often veil your mind quite well, or so it seems to me, but out here in this wilderness? Well, too often, you've murmured aloud.”
He drew closer, lifting the edge of his sleeve so that he himself might admire the embroidery, the sharply pointed leaves, the flowers exploding in crimson thread.
“Of course you're not going to talk to me, are you?” he said with a faint sneer. I looked like that when I sneered. If I ever had.
“But I know you're hungry, dreadfully hungry. So hungry you'd do almost anything to have something to eat. You're devouring your own flesh and blood.”
I turned and started to walk away.
“Now, if you are a holy man of God,” he said, catching up with me, and walking alongside me, staring at me eye to eye when I glanced at him, “and we'll forget the delusion for the moment that you're the Creator of the Universe, then you can surely turn these stones, any of them here, into warm bread.”
I stopped. I was overcome with the scent of it, warm bread. I could feel it in my mouth.
“This would be no problem for Elijah,” he said, “or for Moses for that matter. And you do claim to be a holy one of God, don't you? Son of God? Beloved Son? Do it. Make the stones bread.”
I stared down at the stones, and then I started walking again.
“Very well then,” he said, keeping pace with me,