Wherein some small thing is brought to a close. (Ch. 16)

“An outstretched arm. Twelve vines twine around the wall of tears. But only two of them are star studded, the rest wilt. A wave unbroken goes unchallenged and a nail unhammered cracks. But this has already passed, no? No, only two vines remain, and not a one studded with stars.”

Excerpt from the incomprehensibilities of Ella, The litany of days to come, second standard edition.

 

“It can’t be a coincidence! Burn in a thousand flames and tell me that anything about this was a coincidence!”

One who’d been there would’ve said that Gracchus was complaining rather loudly. One could suppose he was complaining to someone and not just to the air. One would be somewhat correct in this assertion. In anger, he gathered himself just enough to brush a tassel of the tapestry, which had begun to fray.

“There was a plague twenty-three years ago, a plague for sheep. It came from the south and ended in the south.”

“Does that help you calm down?”

Wicker’s comment had had some intent behind it. Gracchus cared not a mite for what that intention might have been, for anger impatience and every other base emotion warred within for dominance. A more contemplative man would let this battle rage so long that anger would diffuse and wither. Being a boy of thirteen, Gracchus found his voice much too fast for the process to reach this stage.

“It’s something! I’m trying to do something Wicker! I’m a guardian! And what are you, a reject? Something the Pontiac spit out?”

This acerbity out of him, Gracchus turned back to the tapestry laid out under them. The rocks were an uncomfortable place to make camp, but the grass ran the risk of being chewed by livestock and those humans that tended them.

“It’s been so miserable it feels like years. The heat is unbearable, and there’s still been no sign of pilgrims!”

Only faint light pierced the thick cloud cover that perpetually clung to the Island of the Point like an ill-fitting cloak. The clouds swirled and crashed against the almost spire-like structure of the Point’s mountain. Wicker may have known enough to explain just how this state of affairs had come to pass, but Gracchus was in no mood to hear it. In any case, Wicker never explained anything very well to him, not since her haphazard explanation that day that his life was in danger. He may still have doubted the truth of her prediction had it not been for that one affirmation: there were no pilgrims.

“There are good people up there. There are good people up there.”

Wicker was mumbling to herself. Gracchus found himself angered by this. He seemed to be finding himself angry with everything Wicker did. From the way she ate to the way she talked, to the way she let her hair hang in loose messy strands of disgusting auburn. All of it got on his nerves, and he found himself often questioning just why he’d agreed to such an ad hoc journey.

And again he remembered there had been no pilgrims. The Pontiac’s summer address was a week away and there had been no pilgrims.

“There are good people up there Gracchus. There are good people down here too.”

She didn’t seem angry at him, no matter how angry he himself got at her. Disgusted even. For some reason Gracchus couldn’t begin to comprehend, the lack of reciprocity only made him hate Wicker that much more.

“There are no good people down here. The people here are small and petty and mean and evil and I hate them.”

Wicker only lay back on the tapestry as if it were the luxurious blankets and cushions that adorned the Point. At first, she’d briefly bemoaned the state of her dress and the state of their accommodations until she’d noticed the fire in Gracchus’s eyes each time she made such remarks; She’d stuck to quiet platitudes since their first disastrous attempt at leaving the island.

“That can’t be our attitude towards our fellow worshippers, can it? They’re uncertain, that’s all Gracchus. We’re uncertain too.”

Despite himself, the ever-present threat of uncertainty wormed its way into his mind. He wanted to scream and rave that the whole thing was ridiculous and that Eato and Featherstone and every other great theologian was madly naïve for thinking that uncertainty was enough of a force to move one to belief and study.

“I don’t care! Nothing’s certain, you hear me? Nothing’s ever certain! Prophecy itself is uncertain! Did you know that before you came to me with your certainty of doom? Here!”

He thrust his finger at what seemed to be a smudge of green and purple lines adorning a flower petal. It was a part of the tapestry he seldom nudged, though not for any reason other than the other parts being immediately more interesting. These lines though, when poked just so, revealed that which could startle the most learned of scholars of the Point.

“For almost a century, prophecy was irregular. Well it’s still irregular, I mean that there was no summer and winter prophecy. It’s only after the third Pontiac that we start getting these regularities! Coincidentally, it’s just about when the first books of standard prophecy began being recorded. And there’s no connection! None the tapestry can find, and that means there’s none. What do you have to say to that!”

Wicker had no answer as far as Gracchus could tell. He concluded he’d won the argument or whatever point he imagined he was making.

The Pontiac’s address was six days away. Gracchus and Wicker, hungry and beyond wits ends, trudged back to the small port.

The port was it had always been: hot, salty, and most unwholesome in the olfactory department. The faces had become familiar to the pair, though familiarity and acceptance were rather far apart.

A growling belly was the second to last straw. The last straw was the empty bay. Somehow, during the night, the last of the ships embarked. Just the day before, Wicker and Gracchus had been kicked out of a boat in embarrassing fashion. The port had been full then, and now it was empty. Gracchus was sure it was no coincidence. He thought that Wicker might agree, but the thought of agreeing with her repulsed him for some reason he couldn’t quite grasp.

It was the last straw. As the pair stared at the empty street and the hostile people, they knew it would come to this. Gracchus was almost sick at the thought, not just for the degradation, but for Wicker’s victory.

It was finally time to use the Tapestry to earn their bread. It wasn’t hard, the two knew. A quick glance at someone, maybe fell the palm, then trace the right line in the tapestry. There, now you can tell them why their husband left or who broke the cookie jar.

Gracchus despaired as the two silently walked towards what functioned as tavern and inn. No doubt suspicion and hostility would meet them, but just one or two salient facts of the past would get them in the good graces of the owner. From there, there would be no more sleeping on rocks. There would also be no escape from whatever the point wished to inflict on them, but the two were tired.

They cared very little about the strange happenings at the top of the world.