Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [69]
“Thank you,” I said.
“The Scriptures speak of one who'll lead them to independence and to triumph. And you know these Scriptures. You knew what it meant when you were a child—the words—Christ the Lord.”
“I did,” I said.
“You can help them. You can lead the armies. You can draw on all those far-flung cells of the devout waiting to come to your support. Why, there are Jews in Rome who would bring you and your army into the city; with you at the lead, they'd storm the Emperor's Palace, they'd put an end to every last man in the Senate, and the Praetorian Guard. Can you see this? Can you imagine what I'm trying to explain to you?”
“I do see it,” I said. “But it won't happen.”
“But don't you understand, I'm trying to make plain to you that it can! You can gather them all from the cities to which they've wandered; you can bring these out of the Holy Land like a great whirlwind that can sweep the coasts of the entire sea.”
“I follow you. I have from the start. It won't happen.”
“But why won't it happen? Will you disappoint them? Will you utter prayers and make speeches like your cousin in the water of the river up to his knees performing empty gestures, and let them fall back into hating you because you've broken their hearts?”
I didn't answer.
“I'm offering you a victory your people haven't had for four hundred years,” he said softly. “And if you do not do this thing, your people are finished. The world is swallowing them, Yeshua bar Joseph, the way that old man in Cana, that fool Hananel, said the world was swallowing you.”
I didn't answer.
“It was finished for your people long ago,” he went on intently, as if truly lost in his own thoughts. “It was finished when Alexander marched through this land and brought the Greek language with him and the Greek ways. It was smashed when the Romans overran this land, and they went into your very Temple, proving with a brutal fist that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, inside! If you don't give them this last chance, to come together around a mighty leader, your people will not die of hunger or thirst or by the sword or by the spear. They'll simply fade away. They're doing it already and they will go on doing it, forgetting their sacred language, mingling through wives and ambitious youths with Romans and Greeks and Egyptians until no one any longer remembers the Tongue of the Angels, until no one even remembers the name Jew. I give it what? A hundred years? Without a victory, it won't take that long. It will be finished. It will be as if it never was.”
“Ah, cursed and designing Spirit,” I said. “Do you remember nothing of Heaven? Surely you know that there are things unfolding in the womb of Time that are beyond your dreams, and sometimes beyond mine.”
“What, what is unfolding?” he said. “The world gets bigger with every passing year and you become smaller, you people of the One True God, you people of the Nameless God who would have no gods before Him. You haven't converted them to your ways, and they eat you alive. I'm holding out to you the one thing that can save them, don't you see? And once this map the Romans have drawn for you is under your control, then you can teach them all the Laws He gave you on the Holy Mountain. I'm willing to put this into your hands!”
“You? You want to help me? And help us? Why?”
“Pay heed to me, fool. I'm running out of patience. Nothing is done here without me. Nothing. Not the simplest victory is accomplished unless I'm part of it. And this is my world, and these are all my nations. Will you not get down on your knees and worship me?”
His face crumpled. His tears flowed.
Was this how I looked when I was sad? When I wept?
He shivered as if this wind of his own creating was making him cold. And he stared out over the whole world of his own envisioning with a desperate, sorrowful gaze.
For a moment I forgot him.
I forgot completely that he was there. I looked out, and I saw something, something I'd glimpsed before, in the study of Hananel in Cana, and something