The Sixth Station(137)

Alazais climbed down. And you’re impelled to climb up. Why? Go back down—not up!

I began to hear cries from somewhere on the mountain, but I had no idea from where exactly, and still I climbed upward. I could barely see in front of me, let alone see anything in my peripheral vision.

The cuts I’d sustained climbing through the broken window—which hadn’t even registered at the time—were now bleeding quite heavily. Still, I kept climbing, crawling, climbing up. To what, I had no idea.

When I was perhaps one-quarter of the way up, I heard a woman’s voice. “Sorella, vieni, vieni con noi. Qui è la sicurezza che cercate.”

I saw nothing but felt a wet hand reach out and pull me in. I instinctively jumped back but was stopped by someone immediately behind me on the muddy trail.

Another hand reached out and handed me a cup of water. “Sorella, vieni, vieni con noi. Qui è la sicurezza che cercate,” the woman said once again.

I was led inside a small cave on the mountainside, in which perhaps fifty survivors sat huddled around a fire. Torches and flashlights lit up the interior, and I was taken aback at how odd it was to see fashionably dressed Italians huddled around a campfire in a cave. Jaded New Yorker to the end, I guess.

When I’d finished my water and had been given a blanket to wrap around myself, a woman in a veiled burqa approached. She took both of my hands in hers as she knelt down beside me, weeping softly. I could see her bright blue eyes blazing in the firelight.

The woman unhooked her veil and I saw the face. Il Vettore, the middle-aged face of little Theotokos Bienheureux. Clearly she had been expecting me.

“They killed my boy today,” she groaned, waving her hands around to indicate the destruction. “Did they think it wouldn’t happen? Did they think they could kill the seed of Jesus with no consequences?”

She put her head in my lap and I stroked her. “But what happened? I thought he was going to go free or at least be retried because of the testimony of Judge Bagayoko.”

“Yes. That was supposed to be, but it never came to be. I knew at His birth that I would witness His death.”

“How did he die? I know nothing about it.”

“They brought Him shackled into the General Assembly room. Again,” she said, disgust filling her voice. “When the new chief judge, Alberto Sant’Angelo, brought the court to order, Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe rose from his wheelchair in the front row, rushed my son, and shot Him dead!”

She too began softly keening that “ululu” sound. “I knew He would die, but I watched Him die; it was broadcast all over the world. My son. My little brown baby. The kindest, gentlest, finest man I have ever known.”

I was astounded. “He managed to sneak a gun through the tightest security in the world?”

She looked at me. Even though we were only a few years apart, she seemed so much older—even with her Ralph Lauren WASP-ish freckled face.

“How is that possible?”

“Because they wanted it to happen. All the power in the world was frightened of one small man who preached goodness.”

“And Bill Teddy? Is he in prison?”

“Rioters outside the United Nations gates somehow—mysteriously, they want us to believe—were able to break through all barricades, all the heavily armed security forces, all of it. These so-called rioters rushed the chamber and whisked the reverend away. Just before the earthquake, we saw it on a laptop—the son of Satan, killing the Son of the Son of God. He was uplifted on the shoulders of his liberators. ‘The slayer of Satan,’ these ignoramuses cried out. He is being saluted as the hero.”

“I am so sorry.”

“So am I. I somehow, even though I knew He would end as His Father ended—executed—I naively always thought somewhere in my heart that my love could save Him. And then when you surfaced, when He kissed you, I thought you would be the one.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your son,” I answered and pulled the tattered Veil from my pocket, handing it back to its rightful owner.

She stared at it. A nearly two-thousand-year-old portrait of her Son. She cradled the cloth to her chest as if it were a living thing.

Then: “Thank you for this.”

“I know it’s not much.…”

“Today you were in a war against evil. Nobody won. But this,” she said, lifting the cloth and kissing it, “means we can continue to bring the light—”

“You mean, the proof?”

“No, that I’m afraid even you couldn’t bring us. You see, what we needed was my son’s DNA in order to prove that He was indeed the Son of the Son.”