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By Root 1257 0

me to scold her, like the nurse I was, so she could have a moment under my rule. Only the most tenuous thread of law keeps them from doing it. I am not the only one—do you think Queen Abir, who began all this, is dead? No one dies—or hardly anyone. Everyone keeps going, forever and ever. But you—” she spread her hands beseechingly, “you’ve never heard of Imtithal. You could love me as Hajji, just as a no one who knew her way through the mountains, you could love me and never ask me to tell you a story in all of your days. You could love me like Didymus did, while he lived, and I could rest.”

“Saint Thomas didn’t have a wife,” I said, only half understanding her.

“Perhaps not,” the beautiful tree laughed. “But I did.”

“You understand, somewhere,” insisted Hajji. “Because you love Tau’ma that way—Thomas. You want to be in his story, to be in the book you read and loved. And he is dead, so there is room in his story. You need him to be a father to you. He could take that burden, and then you could just eat with me, and talk with me, and I could tell you that I knew already about your Christ—knew very much about him. And you would be so pleased. And we would talk about the separation of flesh and spirit and you could feel at home.”

“John is your name,” the tree said, and it was not exactly a question. His voice was rough and full, as though it sounded in an oak barrel. The birds in his beard rustled. “And you are a Christian, I presume.”

“Yes, yes,” I breathed, and crept closer—but they did not seem to mind. Hajji, or Imtithal, sat quietly cross-legged at the foot of the great Thomas-banyan. “I have come so far, to find your tomb, for the honor of my teacher Nestorius, whose teachings are now outlawed in Christendom. I thought that if I were worthy, God would show me this secret thing, this lost place, and I could return triumphant, having been blessed.”

The face of Saint Thomas considered for a moment. “Do you believe now you are not blessed, that you were not worthy?”

“I…” I felt my face crumble into ugly tears. “I have sinned here,” I choked. “I have sinned.” I could not say more, my throat closed up my speech.

“Ah, my son, so did I, so did I,” the tree chuckled, and his smile was radiant as candles lit in the black—oh, how my heart hurt. “It’s not so bad. Poor child, how you torture yourself. You cannot be the master of all. If you have sinned, there is forgiveness. There is always forgiveness. Nothing is as we expect, not in the whole world. I thought I would live beyond death at the right hand of my brother on the sea of glass where the throne of Our Father glides forever—instead I live forever here, in a glen near the stars, and it is not so bad, not so bad. I lived well, I loved a wife, and if not for her I would not know what it was to drink rain with my skin. I do miss my brother—I do miss him.”

“You speak metaphorically,” I said carefully, a dread growing in me. I could not hear any more inversions of the world. I could not.

“I speak literally, my son. What do you call me—Didymus Thomas, Thomas Judas, Thomas the Twin? Who did you think was my twin?”

“No, no, Christ was born alone, to Mary, in Bethlehem!”

The Thomas-tree pursed his moist lips. “What is it your teacher Nestorius preaches?”

I reeled within myself, pouring over every Scripture I could recall by heart, to refute the tree, and cling to what I knew to be true: the Logos, the light, the mystery of Christ. “That Christ possessed two natures.” I whispered faintly, my stomach sinking as I began to understand, though I did not wish to. “The Word and the Flesh, the Logos, the Light of God, and the Human, the man, and these natures dwelt within him, but were not joined as one. They call this heresy, that it denies His divinity, that it makes of Mary but a clay jar and God a poor foster father.”

“John, if you listen to me I will tell you how it was, then, with us, before anyone thought to fancy it all up with Greek diagrams. You may believe the word of a tree in the dark, or you may continue splitting Christ down the middle over and over until he ceases