The feather of a buzzard, not a dove.
Terrified, relieved, he was nevertheless grieving at a great loss—the loss of that connection, those truths, like the sudden damming of a great torrent. For a moment, he had been part of the timeless. Now, part of mastery and creation.
Once again, he was just a man, just mud and ash, no longer filled with lightning and sun.
But now he had things to do, and they lay before him in reasonably clear order, all decisions made. He turned back toward the boy. Rodrigo’s eye fell again on that slowly clasping hand, the skinny body pinned forever beneath the all-seeing dead Mongol.
Rodrigo now needed human company the way he needed air to breathe. To be alone would be to remember his loss, and that he could hardly bear. Ferenc was the only soul he knew still living in Mohi.
He reached a hand toward the boy. “My salvation,” he muttered, then looked away, face racked by a pained grimace, and tried to remember that this battlefield, these corpses, the boy himself, were all part of an extended dream, that he was not actually living it but merely being reminded of it—to sharpen his heretofore blunted purpose.
If he could look more closely at those wheels again, he might comprehend. But no matter. The wheels of vultures, the wheels of hungry swallows and bats, the fluttering, chanting wheels of angelic wings...
No different. No matter.
With all the empathy and sorrow and compassion and fury in the world printed on his soul, he understood how all of this must end. He understood, with a divine-wrought clarity that he thought was reserved only for saints, what needed to happen for this worldly evil to be stopped. He shuddered at the enormity of it. He wanted to hide from his own understanding. But there was no escape; he, Father Rodrigo Bendrito, a humble priest, he was the one assigned by the Lord to end this madness. He did not want this burden—his aversion to it was emotionally violent—but he had no choice but to surrender to it.
He would take the necessary wickedness, the awfulness, the blame, and the sin on his own shoulders, attempt however miserably to follow in the footsteps of the Lord; Rodrigo’s suffering would be great, but it would be nothing compared to the suffering of Christ, and ultimately, this would all be in service to Him, whose nature Rodrigo alone now truly understood. The world was ending in fire, and soon. He knew it in his soul; it was more vivid to him than waking life: he could feel the heat, smell the scorching, hear the roar of it. The world was ending in fire, and he, and only he, was responsible for what must happen.
He could never tell anyone else about his vision. They would mock him, imprison him, torture him for a heretic. The very thought of confessing this moment shifted his nightmare away from Mohi and turned it instead to an inquisitor’s dreaded chamber of smoke and heat and screws and steel. Implements of horrific construction surrounded him: some with ropes and pulleys, some with spikes, racks and presses and nooses and chains. A robed figure with long, bony hands reached for his arm, and as the stranger’s cold flesh touched his, he screamed fiercely.
Memory and the hideous nightmare of his past merged in a shuddering rush with a higher awareness, a waking awareness of life and being. Praise God. He raised his head painfully and looked around, awake and drenched in sweat, his breath loud and raspy. A scorpion scuttled across the empty bed on the far side of the room and vanished into a crack between stone wall and stone floor. There was only one bed in this room—whose was that?
He raised his head in confusion, blinking as sweat from his scalp dripped into his eyes. Yes, he was in his own room, but in the hectic, unconscious thrash of his nightmare, he had actually dragged himself off his bed and into this cooler corner of the chamber. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him as he realized that scorpion could have been scuttling over him as he thrashed, and he would now be dying from the sting. Perhaps he had been stung, and that explained the memory of his vision. Perversely, he wanted to pull aside the plaster and stone and find that scorpion, poke it, taunt it to arch its awful dun-colored tail; death was welcome compared to the dread responsibility he’d been given by the furious, wheeling angels watching over him at Mohi.
He laid his head back on the stone floor. The scorpion was far less terrifying than the burden of his nightmare. Were there more scorpions in this room? In another? Did a scorpion’s bite always mean death? Would a scorpion attack a human on instinct, or did it need to be provoked?
An older voice inside him—it sounded like the Archbishop, though Rodrigo knew that it wasn’t—rebuked him. Quoniam iniquitates meae supergressae sunt caput meum. The burden of one’s sins was a heavy weight to bear. Grave gravatae, he thought, remembering the next line of the Psalm. He had come to believe, over the course of the journey to Rome, that if he delivered his message, his prophecy, to the Pope, then he himself would be relieved of it, and he would have earned a peaceful death, in the city of his youth. All he wanted was rest. Surely the furious angels would let him rest once he had turned over his fearsome message to Christ’s representative on Earth.
But Gregory was dead, and no one had been chosen to replace him, and that required Rodrigo to remain alive, the only soul who knew the future, the only one who knew what had to happen, what had to be done. God had killed Gregory to keep Rodrigo on the hook. He should have been honored and humbled that he was singled out for this momentous job, but he felt none of those emotions. He only felt hollow, as if Rodrigo the man was steadily being devoured by the burden.
All that remained was the burning fervor of the message.
20
A Simple Plan