Chapter 21
Forty-four days have passed since I was moved into a room with a view.
Every day, three people come to give me warmth.
Of course, the warmth each person carries is different. Some days I take all three and still end up with less than a single person's worth. But cafeteria food goes bland for a day or two now and then, doesn't it? I can let that pass. A little of something is better than nothing at all.
If you have never shaken with cold, you will not understand. The chill rides the flesh and seeps into the bone, and from there it sinks one layer deeper still. Even the slightest warmth is such a joy. So for now, I am living content.
I am shut in this room, of course. Aside from the times I go out to bestow blessings, sitting still is the whole of my work. But I am not bored. I can look over every one of them — a little more than a hundred.
It has been over forty days, and I bestow a blessing on three people a day. Why isn't it a hundred and twenty, you ask?
They died.
Some were killed fighting among the blessed. Others went out to plunder a nearby city and were murdered in turn. Isn't it a loss, you say, if the people I blessed die fighting one another?
No.
Even if they kill each other, the warmth still comes to me. And giving of myself is not something that diminishes my strength. So every day I gain warmth, and more of it flows in on top of that. Wide and Isla, for instance, are killing people on the front lines. They send me a great deal of warmth. I like it very much.
As the numbers grew, I could gather information and take in the world around us. At present, the Church of Future Hope sits in a place called the Skard Rock Desert, at the center of three nations. With the desert as the middle: the Kingdom of Lasbe to the west, the Kingdom of Cogni to the northeast, and the Kingdom of Anselus to the southeast. Three kingdoms.
There are smaller countries besides, but these three wield the most influence in the region, and they are also where the Church of Future Hope is most actively at work. People come into the Church each carrying their own grudge, and those grudges pool, rot, and look for a place to burst. These three nations first of all — the three where resentment has piled highest.
Perhaps that is why, in less than fifty days, the missions of those who receive my blessing and go back out have changed. At first they moved by preaching and persuasion. Little by little, though, people began to be drenched in blood.
What set it off? I cannot say for certain. Was it the pressure that came as the Church's momentum grew? Or was it that, faced with such pressure, they would once have bowed their heads and slipped aside — only this time they had power?
It began in self-defense. After that, it was to protect someone in the Church. Once you swing a weapon to keep a person alive, the next step is easy. Swing it once and save someone, and it becomes a method you are allowed to use.
Someone who has received my blessing leads the Church in a raid on the lands of some tyrant lord. When the people there are liberated, they rejoice and enter the Church of Future Hope. Not all of them rejoice, of course. But it is the only way. The ones who survived are people who struck down a lord and tried to make a better world. Who would want someone with that experience walking into their own domain?
From the outside, they are enemies. Enemies holding a wicked creed. So even the wise have no choice but to place themselves in the Church's hands.
A famous novel has a group much like the Church of Future Hope. The Yellow Turbans. Yes — there, too, people rose around a cult. Commoners worn out by tyranny and plunder joined them, but far from building a splendid world, they became exploiters with a more local touch. All that changed was who got paid: the government, or the thugs. Is this what Mexico is like, the one said to be ruled by gangs?
For the moment, though, the mood is full of hope. The people who tormented them are dead, and the Church has given them a great deal. An atmosphere has settled in where it would be strange not to like the Church of Future Hope. Those who call them a cult, or heretics, gradually fall silent. Believe in the old religion all you like — it will not put food in front of you, or keep you safe, today.
Religion is a deep spiritual bond, and so it answers with violent rejection anyone who will not come inside its own side. A merely material tie stops deepening the moment interests no longer align. Religion is different. Fail to enter a deep bond, and you become an apostate. You could simply never join in the first place — but that, too, takes the right circumstances. If there is nowhere to live unless you enter the Church of Future Hope, can you really choose not to?
The faction grows, little by little. That is the sight I have seen.
What I find especially amusing is that they have started killing more people in order to grow. Before long, once the Church of Future Hope becomes an organization as vast as the Yellow Turbans, an age of chaos will begin. More dying, and more killing. The fields where warmth can be harvested will multiply. Then the harvesters will use their strength, and those who want strength will come to me and ask me to give it.
More harvesters!
Already the harvesters are fighting people who look like soldiers, people who look like generals. Bodies beyond the human are the baseline, and a great many of them have special abilities besides — from the obvious elements, fire and water and ice and lightning, all the way to mental arts like brainwashing and sleep. The color is purple through and through. There are small differences from person to person, but seen roughly, it is all one purple. They send their warmth to me.
I would like to raise the number of harvesters further, but I still have no thought of taking more than three a day. Scarcity matters. I would not have considered it before, but now, among those who receive the blessing, people of fairly high standing have begun to appear. It grew especially frequent when an old man received the blessing and was transfigured into a young one.
Hehe.
Youth is what everyone wants. Whether they can truly live a long time, though, I do not know. The light turned black. I still do not know what it means for the light to turn black. No matter how trash-like a life someone has lived, the light always shines white. Patricide, cannibalism, mass slaughter — none of it can dye the light another color.
Light that fell into the cold sea gave me its warmth and vanished. The sea is me. So the moment it fell, if I licked the light, I could take the memories along with the warmth. Beneath the surface there was no one but me. There was no bottom. Only above. The light always shone.
A time will come when I need to understand this, but it seems that time is not yet. So I turned my gaze from the far place where I had been watching so many people, and fixed it on Rebecca Rolfe. Even sunk deep in her, it is not as if I cannot watch what the others are doing. Still, the harder I immerse myself, the more there is that I see and let slip.
I stood up. Perhaps because I do not walk, I have the sense that Rebecca Rolfe's body is growing subtly weaker. Aside from the brief movement when I go to bestow blessings, I have always been sitting in a chair or on the bed.
"What? You going somewhere?"
Hyungkesuni, who had made a little space of her own in one corner of the room, lifted her head from the sofa where she had been lying and asked. A long sofa, a table, and a single small bookcase. At first Joanna had hated it fiercely, but once Hyungkesuni started pressing this and that into her hands, the two of them got along soon enough. Whether Hyungkesuni is the shrewd one, or Joanna the generous one.
In any case, I pointed at myself.
"If a person doesn't move, the body grows weak."
And so, as always, I spoke the way something that is not a person speaks through a person's eyes. Nothing but the facts. By now, everyone simply takes it as how things are.
"Right. Sit still and a person gets fat and weak. If you're going to walk, you thinking of looking around here?"
"Yes."
At that, Hyungkesuni glanced around. Joanna was not there. A little earlier she had said she was doing the laundry and gone out with the bedding and the covers from the bed. Hyungkesuni scratched hard at her white hair, nearly gray, and got to her feet.
"Clothes — what do we do about clothes. Where did Joanna put them?"
She went over to my wardrobe at one side of the room.
"Won't these do?"
What I was wearing was little more than sleepwear. I knew perfectly well it would not do, but I asked once. The persona matters, doesn't it?
"No. Rebecca. You're an important apostle of the god in this Church of Future Hope, you know? Clothes make half a person. Dress shows station so clearly that even I go around in this scrap of rags. Walk out in something like that and they'll think some heretic escaped."
Heretic. A word that takes in every religion other than the Church of Future Hope. From another faith's point of view, this place would be the heretics. Hyungkesuni had offered a reason I could more or less accept.
So I pressed myself into the body, worked the dark-violet mist spilling out of it, and drew forth the pure white dress I used to wear. Only the hem a little shorter. Easier to move that way.
"I changed."
"You knew how to do that, too?"
She asked it lightly enough. But contrary to the words, a faint smile clung to the corner of her mouth, and I could see she was still afraid of me. Living together in this room, I had stayed as still as a pet. At first she reacted violently to the slightest movement, but after exactly two weeks that behavior disappeared. Now, a little past four weeks, I had wondered whether the wariness was gone entirely. Not yet.
Difficult. If I could, I would give her a blessing and take the knowledge she holds. But there is plenty of time. Rush, and you only spoil the work. So I mean to grow close slowly — until she wants me to give her the blessing.
"Were you surprised?"
"Clothes change all of a sudden, of course you're surprised. That was you? How'd you do it?"
Watching Hyungkesuni ask so innocently, I considered how to answer. Explain this, and the lead passes to her. Better to cut it here.
"You can't?"
Nothing more needed saying. At the question, Hyungkesuni's face creased, just a little.
Ah. That got under her skin. Hehe.
"Ordinary people can't do that."
"I'm not an ordinary person."
I swallowed the rest — though I was, once — opened the door, and stepped outside.
My first outing of my own will.