Chương 126: 116. Exomológisis

I have watched them build for nine thousand years, and the tallest thing in every settlement is still the one they raised to a god none of them can show me. I find I envy the steadiness of a people who will kneel to what they cannot measure. — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Arthur had the courtyard door off its hinges before anyone else was awake. The gate had dropped far enough on its lower hinge to score a bright arc into the flags each time it swung. Eleni had been kicking it shut for weeks.

He laid it flat across two chairs and crouched to read the pin. The lower hinge was worn oval where it should have worn round, which meant the load had stopped sitting properly, which meant the post had racked, which meant the ground under the post had gone. The tools sat under the lemon tree in a wooden box. A block plane with a worn handle, a folding rule marked in inches, a chisel kept sharp by Petros. He packed the hinge mortice with a shim cut from a scrap of the same wood and set the pin back true.

He tested the swing and it swung free and stopped where a door should stop, flush against the frame with a finger's width of clearance above the flagstone. He was testing the swing the third time when Petros came through the inner door at a speed that Arthur had learned to associate with trouble.

"He is coming here," Petros said.

"To the house. This morning. Po po po."

"Who," Arthur said.

"The Despóta. The archbishop." Petros said and ran straight to the kitchen.

"Nikephoros. He is coming to the house." Arthur pushed the gate closed. It sat true and closed without a sound, and he took a moment to be pleased with that, because he suspected it was the last simple thing that would happen all day. • • Eleni cleaned as though the archbishop would run a finger along the shelves and report her to God.

She had the good coffee out, and she had put Maria's children into their best clothes and then delivered them to a neighbour with instructions Arthur could not follow but whose urgency needed no translation. Yiayia sat in her chair by the window and let all of it happen around her without moving, a stone in a fast stream, watching the door. Sarah came down and sat at the table.

"Nikephoros? Here?"

"Po po po," Eleni said, smoothing her apron and touching her hair. Steve looked up from his notebook.

"Should we be worried?"

"He comes to the neighbourhood sometimes," Sarah said, but she was watching her mother.

"Visits the sick. Blesses the children. He knew Dad well, but I don't think he has ever come to the house."

"Until now," Donna said.

"Agápi mou, go change, wear the yellow dress," Eleni said, looking at Sarah. Sarah looked at Donna to see her smirk, then huffed and went back upstairs to wear the yellow dress. Word had gone up the street ahead of the man. Arthur understood that much from the courtyard. Doors that had stayed shut since they arrived came open. Women he had never seen appeared at the low wall with their hair covered. People arranged themselves to be near the house without admitting they had come for that.

"This is a big thing," Sarah said, at his shoulder, wearing a yellow dress.

"You understand. There is no television now, no phone, no government that anyone believes. The Church is the one voice that still reaches everybody. When the Despóta comes to your door, the whole street knows by nightfall whose side God is on."

"And whose side is that," Donna said. She had placed herself where the courtyard gate met the wall. Sarah opened her mouth, and then the archbishop was down the street, and she closed it again. The archbishop walked with two men in dark clothing, both young and both staying a pace behind. The three women on the pavement crossed themselves as he passed. An older man bowed his head. Nikephoros touched each of them on the shoulder and every person he touched stood differently afterward.

The street rearranged itself around him, everything finding its place in relation to his fixed point. The Baron had done the same thing in the customs house, but the Baron's gravity had been contractual, built on what he controlled and what you owed. This was older. This was the gravity of a man whose authority came from holding together a room in which people wept. Nikephoros filled the gateway without hurrying. He was a broad old man in black, with a chest like a door and a grey beard.

Eleni went down over his hand and kissed the ring. She came up wet-eyed, saying something fast and low with Panagía mou in it more than once.

"Eleni," Nikephoros said. He took both her hands and held them. The warmth in his voice was genuine and practised at the same time, the two things so tightly braided that Arthur could not have pulled them apart with pliers.

"It has been too long. Your mother, she is well?"

"She is well, Despóta. She is here. Sit, sit. There is coffee." Yiayia rose, which Arthur noted, because he had not seen her rise for anyone. She took the blessing with her chin level and gave the old man a long look. Then Nikephoros crossed the courtyard to Sarah, and the street held its breath with him.

"Sarah," he said, his voice rising slightly. He was speaking for the room now, for the two young men behind him and for Eleni and for the neighbours who were still visible through the open doorway. He took her hand in both of his.

"I have heard what you did in the market. The boy with the leg. His mother came to the church and knelt and wept and thanked God for the doctor who put her son back together on the stones." He paused.

"I told her God's hands are busy, and sometimes he sends a woman with steadier ones." He held Sarah's shoulder, shifting her gently to give the street a clear view.

"They light candles for you at the Aghía Triáda. Did you know this? A doctor who came out of nowhere in the worst month this coast has known. Saved two lives and asked for nothing. The people have decided what that is. I have not argued with them." Sarah looked as though she wanted to be anywhere else in Piraeus.

"I did my job, Despóta."

"You did your job on your knees in a crowd of strangers, and asked for nothing." Nikephoros let her go.

"I came to thank you. The Church remembers kindness done freely." Sarah had found something to look at on the flagstones.

"I had bandages and a clean pair of hands," she said.

"That's all it was."

"Yes," Nikephoros said, pleased, as though she had proved his point.

"That is exactly all it was." Note the phrasing, Archie said in their heads. He agreed with her and took the opposite meaning from the words. He is very good at it. Eleni's face held pride and worry stacked on each other, two loads on the same column, and Arthur could see both. Sarah could not see either. She was looking at the floor. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. • • The coffee arrived with Petros setting out the good cups.

Eleni followed with loukoumades and kourabiedes. The archbishop submitted to it with the grace of a man who understood that to refuse the coffee and the biscuits would have been a wound she carried for a year. For a few minutes the talk was of the city, the health of people Arthur did not know, the price of oil, the boats. The archbishop was easy and graceful, no doubt having done this in many, many kitchens.

"You are Sarah's friends, from England," Nikephoros said, turning to the rest of them. His English was careful, accented and measured.

"Arthur, Donna, Steven. Yes, I know. The stories reach the parishes before they reach the Council." He touched the rim of his cup.

"People tell me things. They have always told me things. Before the sky changed, they told me their sins and I gave them God's forgiveness. Now they tell me their fears, and I give them what I can."

"And what can you give them?" Donna asked. It was a direct question without a challenge in it. Nikephoros looked at her for a long moment and did not appear offended.

"Less than I would like," he said. Nikephoros looked at the two young men by the door.

"Yorgos, Kosmas. Wait for me outside, please." They left without question, and Petros closed the front door behind them.

"I did not come only to thank your daughter, Eleni." Nikephoros pushed his cup to one side.

"There is another reason, and it is the harder one to speak." Eleni's hands went still on the table.

"I say this here because I have known this family for thirty years. I baptised you, Petro. I buried your father. I know what this house keeps and what it does not keep. So I will trust the rest of you by trusting them." He looked at Eleni, then at Petros, then at the rest of them.

"What I say now does not leave this room. Not the neighbours, not the harbour, not anyone. This is between us and God. Do you understand?"

"Ne, Despóta," Eleni said quietly.

"I hear you are going across the water," he said, turning to Arthur.

"To Aegina. With Spyros, if Antoniou signs the paper. And that the price of the paper is the hill at Kastella."

"Antoniou told you that," Arthur asked. Nikephoros turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer, and Arthur recognised the gesture from Antoniou yesterday, the same small motion of a man buying himself a breath.

"Antoniou tells me nothing." Nikephoros smiled.

"No. His clerk has a mother, and the mother has a fear. She brought the fear to me, as people do, because they have to give it to someone and the priest is free." He turned the cup another quarter-turn on the saucer without lifting it.

"People need something to hold on to, so they come, and they unburden. I take confessions where I can, give advice when it is asked. It is the last thing I have that the Council cannot requisition."

"And what did the clerk's mother tell you," Donna said, from the wall.

"That four strangers and Petros Vassilou had promised to clear the wolves off Kastella." His eyes came round to Donna and stayed on her.

"Which is a brave thing, and a kind thing, and I have come to tell you that you do not know fully what is on that hill. There is something about Kastella that Antoniou does not know." Nobody moved to fill the pause. Arthur had learned in the customs house that the man who breaks a silence pays for it, and he was content to let this one cost the archbishop. Nikephoros paid.

"There are wolves. I do not doubt your wolves in Kastella. But there are also men on that hill."

"I have lost clergy," Nikephoros said, looking up from his cup.

"Young men. Some older. Seven that I know by name, and I suspect there are more. They left the parishes over the last months. I believed they had lost their faith, because faith is easy to lose now and hard to keep, and I did not blame them for it." He stopped and folded his hands on the table.

"They went south and are preaching from there. A place where the desperate go and are promised that the System is divine, that the suffering has a purpose, that there is a way to be lifted up."

"The congregation is of the frightened, the destitute and the grieving. Ones with nothing left. They walk out to the coast and they do not walk back."

"A cult," Steve said, reaching for the pencil in his pocket and thinking better of it.

"Call it what you like. I have called it worse, in the dark, to myself." Nikephoros spread one heavy hand.

"I know they exist. I know they take the desperate. I know there is a house here in Athens, where they find the lost ones and sort them before they take them out to the hill." Nikephoros let his revelation sit with the people at the table for a long while before he continued.

"What I do not know is how. Or where the house is. Or which of the men I ordained is standing at the front of that congregation now, telling my people to give their children to a hill." He is asking for the one thing he cannot say aloud in his house, Archie observed. Your species has built its largest institutions on claims it cannot check, and kept them standing for eleven thousand years. I have not before watched one of these come to armed strangers and beg. Arthur did not need it spelled out.

He could see the ask taking shape. • •"So you want us to find it for you," Donna said matter-of-factly.

"This new cult or whatever it is. Why not tell the Council?" Nikephoros met her without flinching and Arthur admired that.

"I will be direct. I sit on the Council because the Church speaks for the people, and the people trust the Church because the Church holds the line between them and the dark. If I stand before the Council and tell them that my own clergy have broken away to worship a Wolf-god, the Church is finished in Piraeus inside a week." It was a remarkable show of trust, and Arthur saw Eleni cross herself.

"In a city of frightened men with new power in their hands, the thing between them and each other is that they still, most of them, believe someone is watching and keeping the account. Take that away this year, of all years, and you will not need a cult to end this coast. The coast will do it to itself."

"So you need someone outside the Church to handle it," Arthur said.

"I need someone who owes the Church nothing. Who can look at this and end it quietly." Nikephoros held Arthur's gaze.

"You are already going to Kastella for Antoniou. I am asking you to look further. Find the house. Find what they are doing. And end it."

"Clear the hill, if you can. But I wanted you to know the whole truth before you go up. And I'm hoping that the kind doctor has kind friends. That is all I came to say." He stood, and the room stood with him, because that was the effect this man had on a room. He took Eleni's hands again and thanked her for the coffee and told Yiayia that the church had candles burning for her husband's memory. Yiayia accepted this with the same nod she had given at his arrival.

Her accounting with God predated this archbishop and would outlast him. Eleni pressed a cloth of biscuits in his hands at the gate that he did not want and could not refuse. He blessed her, and blessed the house, and went back out into the street to be the archbishop again. The crowd closed around him, and Sarah let out a breath she had been holding since he took her hand.

"That one is frightened," Yiayia said, looking at the gate, then went back to her cup. He is not losing the people to doubt. He is losing them to a competitor. Your species does not abandon the need. It replaces the provider. He had told them a thing that would break him if it left the courtyard, and he had chosen to tell it to the four people in Athens with the least reason to repeat it and the shortest time left in the city.

He was protecting his seat from his allies, and the cult was the crack he could not let them see.

"He came with praise and left with a request," Donna said.

"The request was the reason for the praise."

"Admitting his own people defected to a System-worship outfit would hand every other faction a reason to push the Church out. He would lose his seat, and the crowd goes with it." Arthur leaned back in his seat.

"He needs it cleaned up quietly, and we happen to be going to Kastella anyway. We're the contractor again." • •"The question is whether it changes anything," Donna said, looking over a map of the coast.

"We are already tied to clearing the dungeon. If there are people around it, we need to know what is happening before we go underground." Steve tapped the pencil once on the table.

"Walking into a dungeon without understanding the mechanics is how parties die in dungeons."

"Agreed," Arthur said.

"We clear Kastella. That has not changed. What has changed is that there may be people connected to it, and if we walk in without knowing who they are and what they are doing, we are fighting half a problem." He looked around the table.

"We find the recruitment house first. We find out how it connects to the dungeon. Then we clear the whole thing."

"And how do four people who don't speak Greek find a hidden cult house?" Steve said.

"We can't exactly walk into a Piraeus kafeneío and ask which way to the death cult."

"You could not walk into a Piraeus kafeneío and ask the time," Petros said, laughing. He had been quiet since the archbishop, quieter than Arthur had ever known him.

"He was chewing his words, the Despóta," Petros said.

"The whole time. Chewing them like a bad piece of bread he did not want to swallow in front of us."

"I will find the house," he said, nodding, as if he had made some agreement with himself. Sarah's head came up, and Petros lifted a hand to her before she could speak, still watching Arthur instead of his sister.

"Re, listen to me before you make the face. I know this coast. I know the men who move people and the men who move goods and the men who pretend to do the first while they do the second. A quiet house in Athens does not stay quiet from the harbour. Somebody drives them. Somebody feeds them. Somebody has a cousin who saw." He looked at Sarah.

"You cannot do this, Re. But I walk into a room and I am Petros from the boatyard, Petros who fixed the winch, Petros who buys a round. People talk to me. It is what I am good at." He straightened up, picked up his coffee and finished it in one gulp and set it back on the table.

"Petro," Sarah said, worry plain in her voice.

"I sit in a room and I listen. It is not dangerous to sit," he said with a smile.

"Give me two days. I will find you the door."