The plaza was already crowded with soldiers. He knew he was going in roughly the right direction, uphill and angling left, but he was trusting to instinct and luck. Hakeswill went with them up a long street that led to a small plaza. I've been preached at all my damned life and it didn't do neither me nor the preacher one damned bit of good. It could not have been real, all that, the ragged plague of predatory paupers that we were, singing of Satan in the rimy gloom. Many a night as I took my place alone in my velvet-curtained box, a gentleman of obvious means in the narrow trousers of the age, with fitted waistcoat of printed silk and close-cut coat of bright wool, my hair combed back beneath a black ribbon or finally trimmed above my high stiff white collar, I thought upon those lost centuries of rancid ritual and demonic dreams as one might think back on a long painful illness in a lightless room amid bitter medicines and pointless incantations. I found her in the stone room, sitting in the corner, collected and still, just as if she had been in the shrine, and as I knelt before her, she reached up and threw her arms about me. Out of the deep dark heavens I somehow returned to her. Saving a child? Priorities always supersede mere procedure.
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