The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [87]
“I think they aren't machines that empower malakim—I think they are a new sort of creature, created from malakim. I'm not sure.”
“Think. Think what else you might do, if you had that sort of power. Wonder what might also be created, what the malakim might fear enough to make them hesitate.” “Nothing comes immediately to mind.” “Not to mine, either.” “But will you be willing to help me? In the laboratory? So that when the time does come, we will have countermeasures?” Euler smiled faintly. “Mr. Franklin, I thought you would never ask.”
Adrienne rode sidesaddle on a muddy road, surrounded by brambled fields that rolled gently to the horizon. The air was perfumed with the acrid scent of gunpowder and horse dung. Behind her she heard the creak of wagons, the chattering of the sutlers and the whores, drums beating.
Nicolas d'Artagnan rode beside her, his rangy body swaying comfortably in rhythm with his horse, colichemarde slapping gently in time against his leg.
“How is it with you, beloved?” he asked.
She didn't know the answer. She couldn't remember. She closed her eyes and saw only colored clouds, shifting and breaking.
“Where are we, Nicolas?” she asked.
“Where are we?” He repeated her statement, frowning a little. “We are together, I think.”
“I l—” Her tongue clove thickly to her lips for a moment. “I love you,” she managed to finish.
“I know.”
“I have a son.”
“I know that, too. You named him for me. But he isn't mine.”
“I wanted to give you sons. If children could be born of hearts instead of bodies, he would be yours. I have never loved anyone as I loved you.”
He smiled gently, as if to himself. “One of the great benefits of dying in the first days of love, I think.”
“Please don't say that.”
“I always spoke what I felt with you, when I had the courage. Now courage and cowardice are equally absurd.” His saddle squeaked as he shifted to face her. “You are thinking of killing him, this child of our hearts.”
“No.”
“Yes. As you killed me.”
“Nicolas, no.”
“As you killed Hercule.”
“No,” she whispered, collecting herself. She looked at Nicolas again. He was a boy, a child. What did he know? “You killed yourself,” she accused. “You could have lived.”
“We could have gone away together, you and I,” Nicolas said. “I planned it. I offered it to you.”
Adrienne shook her head. “But I had to— You're trying to confuse me. Are you one of my enemies?”
“You're starting to remember.”
“Yes. Are you Nicolas? Or are you the one who came be fore? Lilith? Sophia?”
Nicolas smiled, that infrequent, cryptic, annoying smile of his. “Maybe I'm your son. Maybe I'm Hercule. Who else shall we add?”
“What do you want? Have you just come to torment me? To remind me that everyone I love dies? My skin is thickened to that.”
“Thick enough to kill your own son?”
“I do not know him. He does not know me except to hate me. How is he my son?”
Nicolas just chuckled at that.
“What do you want of me?” she demanded again.
“‘And God so loved the world …’ ” Nicolas began. He turned his byzantine eyes fully on her then. “God does love the world, Adrienne.”
“Last time we spoke, you said you were not sure God existed.”
He frowned almost imperceptibly. “Perhaps that was another, or perhaps my faith has returned. Or perhaps I love the world, and that is enough.”
“Real or not, God does not love me.”
“Maybe not, not as you mean. When you loved Nicolas, did you love each atom that composed him? Did you mourn each breath that was in him when he exhaled, cherish the new air as it entered his lungs? Did you weep when he lost a fingernail, grieve when his hair was cut? God's is a different sort of love, Adrienne. A more profound sort. It is a terrible sort of love, the love of the world. It is a love that requires, at times, bitter things.