It Was Your Mistake — 8
The moment Andrew drew away from Rebecca, the two Hieronymus had set to watch her came up. By any ordinary reckoning they would have come to seize whoever had approached their charge unbidden. Instead the two bowed their heads to Andrew, and he gave each of them a pat on the shoulder and turned to go. Those two were loyal to Andrew before they were loyal to Hieronymus.
They held the same station, warriors of the faith, and yet Andrew's own men had slipped in between them. That did not mean they had no faith in the Church of Future Hope. They believed in the same god, lived for the church, and would have done anything for it. Only the person they were loyal to was different. The way a firm has an A line and a B line, the one they trusted and followed was not the same.
In a cult that truly knew how to break people, a thing like this would have been difficult to allow. Hieronymus, moreover, had imported a system already tried and proven, exactly as it stood, so the system itself was not greatly at fault. But a perfect system still breeds trouble when the one using it is the trouble. Hieronymus had poured himself into swelling the cult called the Church of Future Hope and let its inner management go slack, and a gap had opened.
A fracture of that sort is meant to be pressed, over time, into a single voice and smothered. Hieronymus had no such time. To him the Church of Future Hope was nothing but a cult to use and throw away, and so he trusted no one. The man who slipped neatly into that gap was Andrew.
He, too, had once been a man who gathered believers in a god for the despairing, by an inborn wit and charisma, and made a religion of them. However completely such a faith is swallowed and remade into the Church of Future Hope, when has a believer ever changed all at once? Andrew had joined out of a hunger to hold a greater religion in his hands, and true to that hunger he had been moving, slowly, to take the swollen church for his own.
Then a monster named Rebecca appeared, and the whole board stood in danger of breaking. Had she been nothing but a monster of raw strength, it would not have been dangerous to this degree. But this monster gave tremendous power, under the name of blessing, to whoever followed her. One received proof of loyalty that could be seen with the eyes. That was exceedingly dangerous. If Rebecca were a being who answered to Hieronymus alone, Andrew's footing would shake badly enough that he would have to reach for some extreme measure. Andrew, who could give them nothing, set against Hieronymus, who handed blessings down—in the present circumstances, whom they would trust more was plain.
So he made contact with Rebecca in haste, and what he heard satisfied him greatly. Supply Sacrifices, and she would give blessings. Whoever it might be, she had said she would attach herself to whichever side gave her more of them. Thinking they had called up a rather frightening monster, he learned that he could drive Hieronymus out and inherit that seat intact. He even learned that, Hieronymus or no Hieronymus, he could kill the monster if the worst came. Or that, if he could not have her himself, he could kill her.
A person's body weakens, and so they take up exercise. Hearing Rebecca out, Andrew understood that she was no purely transcendent being, but a thing bound inside that body. If it came to it, she could be killed.
He set the case of taking Rebecca into his own hands beside the case of killing her, and laid his plans for winning the Church of Future Hope back from Hieronymus. The scales tipped toward keeping her. Her blessings were that attractive. Beyond that, he learned there was one more seat from which a blessing could be had without wresting Rebecca away from Hieronymus. Keeping account of every one of several thousand people would be difficult, so he thought that once a little more time had passed, and it grew hard to know who all the blessed were, he would have blessings given to his own subordinates as well. To his subordinates, and no one else.
Andrew himself, of course, had no thought of receiving a blessing. Take a blessing from a monster like that and become a monster in turn—was he in his right mind? At the root of it, he did not believe Rebecca had any connection to the god he worshipped. He thought her simply a monster Hieronymus had called up by some strange secret art. And yet it was true, at the root, that they had called that very god, and still Andrew had read it wrong.
But it was no one's fault.
No. To speak strictly, there was a being between them who had twisted the tale with malice. That being would say she had only ever spoken the facts. Knowing full well how her words would be heard, having deceived them all the same, she would say it just like that.
Lying and being lied to, the Church of Future Hope began, slowly, to roll down the slope. Until the moment it came to a stop. And on.
Meanwhile, after escaping the Church of Future Hope in the jungle southwest of the Cogni Kingdom, Tisha set his steps at once toward the southeast. He wanted to get as far from the church as he could, and so he fled without pause until he came to a small village.
Three days and three nights. He pressed on in a body that regenerated from any wound. Injuries and sicknesses that ought to have caught at his ankles could not overcome that regeneration, and vanished. Even the insects lost: the body mended faster than they could gnaw it. Blood-drinkers could not so much as work a proboscis into him, and if one did draw blood, its body melted at once into a blackish purple. With a body like that, he crossed the jungle without any great strain.
The thick jungle, which had seemed as though it might go on without end, slowly changed its face. The sweltering, breath-stealing humidity fell away by a great deal, and the trees changed their shape. Hard ground came often under his feet in place of that thick, clinging earth. The jungle had become a forest. No—to speak precisely, he had left the southern jungle of the Cogni Kingdom and reached the forest at the northern edge of the Anselus Kingdom.
And there he stood at a fork in the road. Up ahead were nine men loaded down with baggage, and a girl walking because they held her and would not let go. Anyone could see it. She had fallen into some unhappy business and was being hauled off by bandits.
Had Tisha been a man who stopped to think, he ought to have run then and there. Not because he could not beat the bandits. By now, purple hair was all but the banner of the Church of Future Hope. Hair gone purple after an Outer God's blessing was proof there was no talking one's way out of. But Tisha, by his very nature, could not bear to watch someone meet with a wretched fate. That was his misfortune.
Had he lacked that nature from the start, then even knowing how alien the Church of Future Hope was, he would have lived there and made use of it, so to call the thing a misfortune hardly meant anything at all. The reason he had come to think something was wrong was that a person who stood at his side had died, and they had called it for the god. And so Tisha moved, to save the person before his eyes.
Ordinary bandits were no match for him. His regeneration was so fierce that the moment a blade landed, flesh surged up to meet it, and they could not stab him cleanly at all. That was true of ability alone, and Tisha had learned how to fight in earnest from the time he was small. More than that, he was a man who had been through real battle again and again. So he drove the bandits off without much trouble. There was no particular need to kill them, and by the goodness he was born with, that is what he did. While he was at it, he took all of their things, and the plundered baggage with them.
Then, with the girl, he made for her village. Save the girl alone, and he would have had a word of thanks. But he had brought back every last piece of what had been stolen. Tisha became the hero of the village.
For exactly one week.
For a week he was permitted to taste an ordinary life he had never once known. A house of wood. A grown man and a grown woman. And the girl he had saved. He tasted a reality so nearly ideal that he found himself wondering whether he might become one family, just like this.
But he was unfortunate, as has been said, and the end of it was not a good one. That barely won daily life, the first human one he had ever felt, was shattered in an instant. The reason was nothing much. His hair was purple. And so, because a blessed person was here, the Church of Future Hope came to help.
As I said a moment ago, for all that there was a particular symbol, the emblem of the Church of Future Hope had long since become a person with purple hair. Unlike ordinary believers, who wore masks and wound their bodies in hoods, the superhuman few who wielded that special power called a blessing did not dress that way. They showed themselves. They hid nothing, and wore clothes of tremendous splendor. And one boy's influence fanned it hotter still.
Those possessed of outstanding ability bear special titles. It was what came of a desire every person has—to be acknowledged by others—meeting power and finding its expression. Of course, once the church's numbers began to swell exponentially, Hieronymus encouraged the fashion so that it would settle easily, the better to manage them. Rather than direct each one by hand, give the blessed only a broad heading, and the rest will move of their own accord. And so, at present, the Church of Future Hope moves with purple-haired people at its center.
Which is to say, purple hair had become the power of the Church of Future Hope. Looks and power were joined. Whereupon the faithful began to follow people of that appearance with still greater fervor, because to follow someone with purple hair was to have a great deal to gain.
I explained this once before. Do you remember that the Church of Future Hope liberated villages groaning under tyranny? That has now become a thing they are, of course, obliged to do. Cause and effect have even turned about, so that every heretic village has become a place the Church of Future Hope must liberate. For reference, liberation means inducting every person in the village into the Church of Future Hope, and smashing all the rest. As the Yellow Turbans became in their fall, in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, these people had turned into raiders who plundered whatever lay around them and did not pick and choose.
The result was obvious. Raiders armed with religious conviction came to that village. And how, you ask, did they know where to come? The bandits he had driven off at the start. They followed those men's story, and they came. The people of the Church of Future Hope plundered the village down to the ground.
If Tisha's hair had not been purple, misfortune would not have found him so quickly. But it was because his body had changed in just that way that he had been able to escape the Church of Future Hope at all. Fortune lay in his hands, and misfortune, like the price of it, came chasing at his heels.
Tisha fought with everything he had, but there was no saving the village from so many of the faithful. When he came back to himself, still in the middle of cutting them down, he understood that he had failed. Which is to say, everyone was dead.
Tisha took the hand of the girl who had become a corpse, and fed the flame of his revenge. He swore he would have his revenge on the Church of Future Hope. He, who had thought of nothing but flight from the church, had gained another aim. The boy buried every last one of the dead, and set his feet east once more.
But there was none of the joy of freedom he had felt when he first fled the Church of Future Hope. A hunger for revenge against the church sat in its place. And so he began to make for the heart of the Anselus Kingdom.
Hehe.
This is fun!
It's like watching the tale of a hero being made! Stories in which someone gains a special power in a dangerous place like this, and becomes a hero there, are common enough. I just never thought I would get to watch one happen. Stories usually sit a long way from the facts, you know. So when I saw it with my own eyes, it was enormously fun.
I lived through him from Tisha's own eyes. Of course, all I really know is the information of the flesh—how his expression changes, how his heart is beating, where it hurts and in what way. That doesn't mean I can't guess what he is thinking.
Yes. And so I know he is going forward for the sake of revenge. And as it happens, he is bound for the Anselus Kingdom.
The Church of Future Hope, led by Hieronymus. The Anselus Kingdom, the object of Hieronymus's revenge. And an enemy of the Church of Future Hope, walking straight into it.
Until the moment their hearts strike together and reality changes, I'll wait at my ease in a corner of this Church of Future Hope. But if it takes too long, Andrew may deal with Hieronymus and remake the church. However it all rolls, I mean to live like a pet without a care in the world, thinking hard all the while, so that I can lay hands on the art that called me into this world.
Heehee.