Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [68]
He reached out for me as if he'd take hold of me, and his face was twisted with malevolence.
“What have you known of time these dreary years you've spent in Nazareth? What is time in which you grind your aching muscles to dust, all of you? Why do you bear it? Why does He bear it? You claim to know His Will. Tell me, why doesn't He shut it down?”
“Shut down Time?” I asked in a small voice. “The gift of Time?”
“The gift? It's a gift to be lost in this miserable world of His, lost to the pitiless ignorance of others, in Time?”
“Ah, you do know one thing and that is misery,” I said.
“I? I know misery? What misery do they know, day in and day out, and what misery have you known with them? Do you think this life and time was a gift to that boy Yitra, whom your villagers stoned? You know he was innocent, don't you? Oh, he was tempted, but he was innocent. And the Orphan? That child didn't even know why he died. Do you know what was in their hearts when they saw the stones coming at them? What do you think is in the heart of Yitra's mother, where she weeps, at this very time?”
“I would ask you where hope comes from, if not out of time? I would ask you that and give you that answer, but you've made your decision, whole and complete and forever, and for you there is no time.”
“I should throw you down from here!” he whispered. He held up his hands to clutch at me, but they didn't close on my throat. “I should smash you on those stones. I have no qualms about tempting the Lord your God. I never have.”
He stepped back, too furious for a moment to speak. Then he took a breath.
“Maybe you are some phantasm, made up out of His impassable and merciless Mind. How else could you not feel for Avigail when she stood terrified among those children, awaiting the very same death the village had given Yitra and the Orphan? Do you have mercy on any of them anywhere ever?”
The light changed. Then the air began to move.
The entire vision of the Temple and its daily multitude shifted, crumpled, as if it were pictures painted on silk.
I was in the whirlwind, and I reached out.
Suddenly we were standing together, the beautifully garbed one and me, on the crest of a mountain, perhaps the highest mountain in the land. Only it was in no certain land.
Beneath us stretched what appeared to be a map but was no map—rather the patterns of mountains and rivers and valleys and oceans that made up the entire world.
“That's right,” he said over the faint wind. “The world. You see it as I see it. Beautiful to behold.”
He stood for a moment as though earnestly contemplating this majestic perspective, and indeed I did look out on what he claimed to reveal, and then I looked at him.
He was in profile, my profile, his dark hair blown back away from his cheekbones, and his eyes were softened as mine often were, and he held his mantle rather gracefully and easily at his sides.
“Do you really want to help them?” he asked me. He lifted his finger. “I say truly—do you want to help them? Truly? Or do you really mean to frighten them and leave them far for the worse that another prophet has come cursing and denouncing and proclaiming what will never come to pass?”
He turned to me and his eyes filled with tears. No doubt too very like the tears he'd seen me shed only a while before. He pressed his hands together before his face and then he looked up at me through this dramatic and glittering mist.
“You have indeed come amid signs and wonders,” he said thoughtfully, as though the words were pulled out of a soul. “And these are remarkable times. There are Jews in every city of the Empire. The Scripture of your God is in Greek for them to read no matter where they live or what their schooling. The name of your nameless God is spoken perhaps in the farthest reaches of the north. Who knows? And you, a filthy carpenter, yes, but you