“Stay away from her,” a man shouted from his cell.
“The caged bird sings,” the priest said. “But can do nothing.”
I’d lost sight of Moishe. He might have remained prone and invisible on the ground. Perhaps he was entering into strategic negotiations with the guards’ fists.
“Little bird,” the priest said. The lamplight crept over Sarah.
The priest put his key in the lock.
This was my chance. I leapt with my claws before me. I would turn his eyes to raspberries.
Sarah shrieked. The priest heaved open the cell door and I crashed into it and fell to the floor.
When I came to, I heard weeping and the prayers of those around me. I did not know what they were praying for.
For Sarah. For themselves. For the Messiah. For another world.
For the priest, may his beytsim be rat-chewed until the Messiah comes. Then may the Messiah continue with His teeth of broken wedding glass.
May his soul gnaw on itself through each of eternity’s endless nights as it thinks about what he has been and what he has done.
Sarah was on the floor of her cell. Sobbing.
I had been as powerful as a raspberry in her protection. I was bupkis as a hero, the protector of but a small patch of floor.
There was a draft from the end of the room: the priest had left the main door open and so I flew through the darkness, up the stairs, and into the church.
I had few ambitions: Find Moishe. Burn everything. Escape.
I entered the transept, the church’s stubby wing. A barely visible light glowed at the altar. A candle. Someone kneeling before a cross, praying. His clothing shone with dappled light, the sun on shallow water. The priest in his chainmail.
I landed in the open hand of a marble saint and waited, considering what to do. One thing occurred to me immediately: Here, Saint Chutzpenik. Let me fill your palm with grey-white dreck, an extruded offering in payment for your sacred chutzpah. Why did you not help us, you stone bystander?
Before the altar, the priest shifted in his genuflections and began mumbling a new prayer.
A sound in the other transept. The brief shine of metal from behind another unmoving saint’s back.
Moishe lowering the blade of a halberd slowly in the darkness, readying its sharp end.
He crept forward and hid behind a pillar, ten feet from the priest and his pin-cushion back.
So, an ethical question:
Boy. Back. Sharp stick.
A priest on his knees, praying.
Is it kosher to skewer one who is davening, maybe even repenting?
What should I do?
The priest was about to be caught on the horns of a dilemma.
And so I recalled that we are all birds, festooned with feathers, lifted equally by the breath of God. From the wren to the swan, we are a single flock. Whether we congregate and are called a brood, a brace, a murder, or a clutch. All of us, whether we gather into a wisp of snipes, a wisdom of owls, a wing of plovers, or remain like a single regretful priest on his knees before his God, we are one and it is not for us to decide another’s fate. Unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
Did I think this?
Of course.
Me, Yeshua, and Gandhi.
Really, I thought only, Give him a shtup he will not forget, my Maccabee. Stab your murderous blade into the hymen of his immortal soul until Sarah is revenged with robe-red blood.
And then Moishe charged. The priest, hearing footfalls on the stone floor, raised his bowed head and turned half around. A moment of intimacy: Moishe’s eyes and the priest’s connecting.
Moishe found a gap in his chainmail and penetrated the priest’s side.
Pork on a spit. His God would provide fire.
Moishe recoiled from the weapon as if it were already hot with flame. Moishe and the priest: the same horror-torqued face.
The priest was pinned to the cross.
Then Moishe turned and ran.
What had happened?
I can explain it while standing on one leg: Do unto others as they have done unto you.
So, nu, that’s not exactly it. An eye for an eye lacks foresight, but what about an eye for twenty eyes? For a hundred, a thousand, for as many had suffered?
Sha. That is visionary.
And what did we care that the priest had been praying?
The Inquisition had given Moishe his first letter of marque. His first murderous thrust at death.
I flew off to find his shoulder as blood pooled around the knees of the priest. There were no guards at the door. The priest must have excused these protectors of the church and possible witnesses.
It was already tomorrow. Nothing like hastening someone’s entry into the hereafter to make time pass quickly. Moishe and I stole through the streets, the pinks and reds of dawn seeping like a wound. The colours of regret, and of moving on.