The Boatmaker (21 page)

The boatmaker looks at the package under Neck's arm, but he asks nothing. In the last few days, the world has moved even farther away. The barley gruel shrank to a spoonful in the bottom of a bowl. Then the bowl itself disappeared, and all that was left was a glass of water from the spring. At first, the boatmaker gulped it greedily. Then he measured it out, drinking a little at a time. Now he barely notices the glass when it arrives. Sometimes when the brother comes to him with the second tray, the first glass is still full.

With the package under his arm, Neck leads the boatmaker to a covered walkway outside his cell. It is the first time he has been out of his room in many days. He steps out, head feeling light. Even in the shade of the overhanging roof, the sun is blinding. He closes his eyes.

Neck takes him by the arm and guides him around a corner. He feels Neck let go. He stands there, eyes closed, hearing Neck's steps retreat, a door opening and closing, steps returning. Neck undoes the boatmaker's belt, lifts his robe, guides him forward until he feels something cool against his thighs.

“Lift up and climb in.”

The boatmaker lifts his left leg and puts his foot down into water that is between warm and hot. He lifts his right leg. Neck hands him in and down.

“Let me know if it's too hot.”

The boatmaker opens his eyes to see Neck standing over the metal tub with a bucket. He gives a sign that the water is fine.

Within the metal tub, his body seems long and white. His hands and arms are dark from working in the fields. There are few marks left from the beating by Crow and White. He closes his eyes, welcomes the hot water. It is the first hot bath he has had since coming to the New Land.

As tenderly as a woman, Neck bathes every inch of him. When they are done, the boatmaker steps out. Neck towels him off and walks to pick up the package wrapped in twine, which is sitting on the seat of an old green kitchen chair pushed up against the wall of the building. He cuts the twine and breaks the brown paper, bringing forth a new robe, even finer than the one the boatmaker has been wearing.

He unfolds the robe, shaking it out and pulling it over the boatmaker's head. His dark hair is wet from the bath, his bald spot larger than when he left Small Island. The new robe is snowy, immaculate. Over the left breast a heart engulfed in flames has been stitched in red thread. Inside the heart the Roman numeral IV has been worked in the same bright red.

Neck takes him by the arm and leads him, dripping, back to his cell, where he kneels in the corner. The waiting is over. Knees on the pine floorboards, he looks up at the crucifix and prays.

Two days later, Neck returns. Leaning on him, the boatmaker walks in his flaming-heart robe, feet bare, eyes closed, under the roof of the covered walkway. They pass the spot where Neck bathed him in the metal tub and arrayed him in his new finery. They turn another corner, cross grass and climb steps. At the top of the steps the boatmaker feels the presence of an open door and other people.

He lets go of Neck and opens his eyes to find that he is looking through the door of a one-room building set right at the edge of the woods. The room is simple and whitewashed, the floor covered in deep, fluffy cotton wool. On the cotton wool, sitting cross-legged, are three brothers of the New Land in the same kind of robe the boatmaker is wearing. In a low chair, holding a worn Bible, is Father Robert.

The boatmaker takes a tentative step into the room, feeling the softness of cotton wool on his feet. On the far wall is a large round window like the one in the chapel, with concentric lead strips intersected by lines radiating from the center that form a polar map overlooking the woods.

Father Robert motions for him to sit. He sees that the other three also have Roman numerals stitched within their flaming hearts. The boatmaker sits down facing I, with II on his left and III on his right. He doesn't recognize the others from his days on the New Land. Number I is tall and sinewy, with a dark beard and piercing eyes, his hair close-cropped. II and III are doughier, II dark, III a redhead with flaming hair and freckles, a type seen from time to time in the capital, displaying the blood of a tribe conquered long ago by the sea-warriors in their longships.

Each day for the next week, after praying all morning, I, II, III and IV in their flaming-heart robes are brought to sit on the cotton wool and listen to Father Robert read from the Gospels. He reads from all four accounts in turn, not starting at the beginning, but going immediately to the description each of the Gospels offers of the dark hours before the Crucifixion, when Jesus, betrayed and abandoned, wrestled with His fear, revealing that He was both human and divine.

The priest says each word loud and clear, stopping occasionally to see whether his meaning has penetrated the four men before him in their pristine robes. Between passages the priest neither explicates nor preaches. He lapses into silence and waits.

After days of living on springwater, the boatmaker's mind is aflame, his senses acute as a hare's. Beyond the wind in the trees he hears the bees in their hives. He concentrates on that low hum as he struggles to make out what the priest is trying to convey through his readings. When his brain can no longer make this effort, he looks sidelong at the brothers beside him in their flaming-heart finery. Number I is clearly the leader: vigorous and powerful, in command of himself. II and III are just as clearly followers: nervous and sweating, willing to do anything to avoid disappointing their leaders.

After a week, the boatmaker is led to the open door by Neck, feeling light not only in head but also in body. Father Robert is not present. The sun is behind the building, away from the great radial window; the room with its cotton-wool floor is in shadow. The boatmaker enters and takes his place across from I.

“Welcome, brothers,” says Number I, the boatmaker hearing the leader's voice for the first time. It is a reassuring voice but not one that invites discussion.

“We are all equal here,” Number I says. “Each of us is essential. The number you wear indicates no precedence. We are four-in-one, one-in-four. We shall live and die together for the New Land. Let us pray.”

Number I bows his head and leads them through the Lord's Prayer. The boatmaker no longer hears the bees even though the wind is now very soft.

When they finish their prayer, Number I raises his hand and looks at each of the others in turn. “By now, I think we all understand what is required of us. It will be a slow and painful end—like that of our brother Jesus, the First Christ—but when it is finished we will be on the right hand. And by the time we reach our appointed places, having sacrificed body and blood, the great transformation, with its unstoppable force, will have begun here below. Is anyone not ready? Speak now or forever be silent, brothers.” The boatmaker feels Number I looking straight at him, trying to read his Small Island heart.

“Then we are ready.” Number I reaches a strong arm behind him into the cotton wool, holding the other three in his gaze. He finds what he is looking for on the floor. His hand comes around in front of his chest holding a knife with a worn wooden handle and a long, highly polished blade. The boatmaker can see there is an inscription along the blade in the ancient spiky script of the Mainland.

“Our task will be long and slow, brothers, counted in days, not hours or minutes. Blood shall flow, and be taken up. In between, we will be in our cells, praying. Then
we shall return here for the next round. Toward the end, we will be carried, but we shall return as long as we draw breath.”

Outside the wind dies; the oak leaves hang in ripe green clusters.

“Finally, we shall leave our husks of bodies and be swept up in a great ascent, turning and turning until we join as one and are seated at the right hand of the Father.”

Number I takes the knife, holds it up before him in strong tanned hands. “I will go first.”

Their leader closes his eyes, lips moving. He opens his eyes and raises the knife. Holding his nose with his left hand, he uses his strong right arm to slice off the tip. The stub of pink flesh comes away in his left hand. He holds it up, showing it to the others, as blood washes down his face.

He wipes the blade and passes it to Number II, who takes it, his soft hand shaking. Number I buries the tip of his nose in the cotton wool. Red spreads around the spot. He pulls a tuft from the floor and holds it to his face. He pulls another tuft and applies it. His bleeding slows. Over the cotton held to the tip of his nose, he looks meaningfully at Number II.

Number II closes his eyes, reaches over and slices a small tip from his left earlobe, stifling a scream. Trembling,
he holds the flesh out for the others to see. He hands the blade across the circle to Number III, puts the nub of flesh into the cotton wool and pulls a tuft for his ear.

The boatmaker cannot see the wound, but he assumes it must be bleeding less than I's. III does the same to his own left earlobe. As III puts the flesh down and stanches the flow with cotton wool, the boatmaker sees that although the wound is not deep, it is bleeding heavily.

Number III hands the knife to the boatmaker, who hefts the blade and wipes it across the knee of his robe. The blade is just as he thought: a beauty, remarkable for its strength, sharpness and balance. He would like to take time to puzzle out the inscription on the blade, but he feels the eyes of the others on him, staring in anticipation, while each man presses cotton wool to his bleeding flesh.

He tests the blade with his finger; the slightest pressure draws blood. No one has explained the rules to him. What part should he cut? An earlobe, like II and III? They are followers. Presumably he should do as they did.

The boatmaker had sensed that their task might be a deep sacrifice—possibly the ultimate sacrifice. And he prayed for the strength to see it through. But now that the moment has come, it is not fear that makes him hesitate: It is the absurdity of it. What strikes him most is not the wounding or the sacrifice. It is the tiny details.
Something about the blood seeping through the cotton wool makes the room seem like something from an asylum for the insane. The boatmaker feels giddy, crazed from hunger and the scene before him. He has to stop himself from laughing or shrieking.

The urge to howl becomes almost too strong to resist. As he struggles to hold it in, the urge changes into something else: a rage like the buzzing of the bees on the New Land, growing louder and louder until it fills the sky.

Without intending to move, he finds himself standing, already moving. In two steps he is across the room, leaping over the three stunned brothers in their flaming-heart robes, dotted with blood, cotton wool falling from their hands in astonishment.

Without knowing how, he is crashing through the radial window. Glass showers around him as he hits the ground. He lands on his shoulder and rolls to his feet. Running into the woods in the fine white robe, his feet bare, is clumsy work. Blood flows from a cut on his nose, which feels as if it might have glass in it, but he does not stop to check. He is surprised that his legs carry him so well after weeks of fasting. He finds a fierce pleasure in the animal act of running away to save himself.

His bare feet slip and he falls, bruising and cutting his body, but he does not stop to inspect his wounds.
He had no idea how deeply imprisoned he felt until he crashed through the window and began running. He thought all he felt was gratitude. Number IV, he thinks. I am no one's Number IV—Father Robert's or anyone else's. He wants to rip the beautiful robe to shreds and tear out the flaming heart.

He runs until he reaches a stream at the edge of the woods. On the bank he stops and holds still, listening over the thudding of his heart. He knows Father Robert, Neck and the other brothers, with dogs and guns, will soon be after him. To his surprise, he finds the knife still in his hand.

He touches his nose, finds an open wound, probes gently with the tip of the knife and removes a shard of glass. Undoes his belt, pulls off the robe, cuts it into pieces, binds his nose with a long strip, winding it round and round his head. Wraps the knife and strips of fine white wool into a bundle he holds over his head.

As he reaches the muddy bank that leads to the stream, the crazed exhilaration that has carried him this far ebbs, and he feels pain and hunger surging in. Blackness begins to cover him, but he knows he cannot allow himself to pass out here. He holds on to a sapling as he steps carefully down the muddy incline to the stream. At first the stream is so shallow that he must use his free
hand and his feet to keep moving, but soon it deepens and widens.

In the deeper water the boatmaker turns on his back and floats, holding his bundle up to the sun with both hands while he allows the rippling water to carry him downstream toward the mighty brown tide named for the peasant boy who, led on by a flock of screeching blackbirds, converted the king of the Mainland to faith in Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER 16

A week later the boatmaker stands on one of the bridges that cross the Vashad and connect the two halves of the capital. On his way to the city he has stolen clothes from clotheslines outside farmhouses, and he looks something like his old self. The wound on his nose has closed. He is no longer wrapping it in strips of wool, but he will have a scar that looks like the letter
X
.

Standing on the bridge, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the knife from the little house at the edge of the woods. He looks down at the blade, which still has a crust of blood on it. In the ancient spiky script one side reads:
Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not, nor do they toil.
He turns the blade over. On the other side it says:
Yet Solomon in all his glory was ne'er arrayed like one of these.