Nicked

by M.T. Anderson

“I do not know the dream was inspired,” said Nicephorus unhappily. “Ask the saint what we can do to lift this sickness.” “I simply received a dream.” “Ask him on our behalf.” Nicephorus insisted: “I have no reliable avenue of communication with the undead Bishop of Myra.”

“He looks so severe in his icons.” “Not severe,” said Nicephorus. “Just balding.”

“I called out like a lamb in a ravine,” said the Duke, “and you, great shepherd, have come.” “When the dearest of God’s servants bleats,” said the Archbishop, “I cannot refuse.” The Duke grimaced. “I of course do not bleat.”

I penetrated the fortress, slipped the hands out of the vault without detection, and delivered them to the Church of Saint George in Fraxinetum. Within three months, Fraxinetum was drawing five hundred pilgrims a day. Ships arriving from all over the world. Caravans coming over the Alps, paying imposts. The city has repaired its walls and built a shrine. This is the power of a holy relic.”

An unscrupulous priest of Soissons stole a pint and a half of Saint Marcellinus.”

“These rough features may speak of the eastern steppe,” he declared, touching his chest, “but Christ is engraved within my heart—a Christ as white as oyster shells and blond as wheat.” He closed his eyes in reverence. “God has shown His favor by bringing thousands of pilgrims and their riches to all my clients.”

“Musarat can’t cook worth shit,” Tyun said, chewing hard. “But she killed someone for me when it mattered.”

He thought about the word “founder,” and how it refers both to the man who begins an endeavor and to the cataclysm that capsizes it for good.

“The Benedictine, he is good with piss bucket,” she said in an accent of fir-tree and slush. “Every noble band of companions must have its specialists,” Tyun said.

“We’re walking without any guide through the Land of Darkness. We don’t know where we’re going to end up. But we’ve got to have faith to pick things up along the way. One day we’ll realize some of it’s treasure.”

“You’ve never seen a mountain? Ever, in your life?” “Once we visited my aunt,” said Nicephorus, proud Apulian. “She had a hill. I saw that.” “A whole hill.”

“I am insignificant,” said the saint hunter, “and always will be. Some day, inshallah, I shall be insignificant and rich.”

He was arguing with history itself, which once had been wind upon a plain, and now was fallen stone.

He argued this way, Nicephorus realized, and did not speak of his own experiences—the saddle, the arrows, the glint, the swords of the enemy—because in this battle, there at Manzikert, must have been where Akritis, his beloved horse, had died. Never mentioned, always present.

God’s mercy is infinite—an infinite eye—which, seeing all, favors none, and makes no particular distinction in quality between those who eat and those who starve.

It is our duty, he thought, to imagine the suffering of all; for God is outside of time, and so should we be in weeping for the sorrows of others; as on a church wall, Jonah stands upon the ship and lies within the belly of the whale and dances under his woodbine all at the same instant, standing next to himself. The world is never young and never old.

“The rich do not need miracles,” said the holy man. “The accrual of rent from those who can’t pay it is miracle enough.”

Never forget that your life is a wonder. You were dead, and now you live. Never forget that there are miracles everywhere, and you are only present in this world to see them once.”

“Remember,” she said, “you will be behind the monastery walls. But do not shut the gate on life. You have being in this place, a body to move like a puppet, for only so long, and I have seen it lie limp and cold as a doll. While you inhabit it, watch for the glories, my son. My son.” Weeping. “My son in this life.”

“There is no deal,” the Factor announced to them all. “I will not collaborate with this cunt.” Reprobus folded his paws together neatly and bowed to both parties. “There is a moment in any noble parlay when the two negotiators must turn half-away from the table and whisper. It appears we have reached that moment.

“Ah,” said the cynocephale, “so after all, one can teach an old Doge new tricks!” He regretted it even as he said it.

Remember, when you are trapped in this life, that often whatever liberates you, whatever transports you, must drag you by the hair to yank you free.

I guess this is what it’s like to be a god, he thought. Airborne, but the little bastards on the ground won’t stop raising their hands in need.

I wanted to go in at midnight with ropes, pulleys, a ladder, a bag of sand, a small turtle, a candle, a brass hand, and the sticky wood of the dihq tree.”

Yellow smoke. Gouts spewed out as the wick hissed. There was great confusion in the courtyard: men running, men coughing, men choking, women shouting orders, weekend barbarians slamming into the city militia. Nuns grabbing swords. Mourners with javelins. The eunuch valet laughing crying.

“I did not say it in judgment. We all want to sin. It is the only way we have of knowing the full measure of creation.”

Our plan was that Reprobus, through a window, lowered in a hollow piece of straw so I could sip some water…But here was the trick: To keep my weight constant, I had to piss at exactly the same rate as I drank…” “That’s a lie, right?” They both started to laugh.

Now warm hands grasp again at the fragments in the greasy murk. Once again, the bone is pressed with flesh. A figure is laid out and assembled. This scaffolding, upon which we climb up out of the earth just long enough to see the pear trees catch on fire.

“When two thieves fight,” said Taptuk, “that does not make one of them a chief justice.”

Relics are treated as stand-ins for saints, though once they were the saints themselves. We each own a skull that identifies us, an attribute we carry. We are all our own icon, our own avatar; an idol made in our shape, haunted by a spirit longing to intervene in the calamities we witness.

“Thank you for coming,” said Tyun. Reprobus said, “I hear a riot, and I know you’re nearby.”

“The Sufis say that all the world is a precious artifact, and every place is holy. Every single object in the world is a reliquary.”

A raised hand can be a slap, a greeting, or a blessing. Yet you stand, and you too raise your hand.