me when I say that it was God’s will that you found me, child.' He let his hand linger above the birth canal. 'Of all the people you could have run to, He guided you to me. That in itself is a miracle.'
'Something's wrong,' she said. She felt stupid and helpless, repeating the words over and over. 'You have to make it stop.'
An agony of tears stained her face. 'Something’s wrong,' she barely got the words out the second time. 'I can feel it.'
'Have faith, Mariah,' The Deacon whispered. Her eyes flared open as she felt the heat of his touch sink deeper beneath the skin as though being absorbed by the dying child in her womb. It had to be the pain, making her crazy. She needed that pain to stop, but she knew that it wasn't going to happen. Not while she lived. Not while she bled.
He withdrew his hand and raised it to his lips, as though to taste the heat of her pain and the life of her child on his chapped lips, and then stood.
'Don’t leave me,' she pleaded, reaching up until another wave of hurt caused her to double up again. He didn’t seem to hear her. Between the tears the world blurred, all the colors swirled into a chiaroscuro wash of unrelenting pain. It looked to Mariah as though he reached inside his chest and pulled something – his heart? – out. She shook her head. For a full minute the world refused to focus, and then she saw his fingers fumbling with the drawstrings of a small pouch.
Chapter Ten
The Deacon loosened the rawhide thong that cinched the leather pouch. He felt the girl’s pain empathically, its hooks rooted deep down in the nerves beneath his flesh. He turned his head away and hawked up a wad of blood and phlegm. This was new and not altogether pleasant. He wiped beads of perspiration from his pocked brow, frowning as his concentration slipped. For a moment longer than he could bear, he allowed too much of her pain through. He had never felt the suffering of another quite so acutely. He gritted his teeth against it, driving the devils of agony out of his mind.
They refused to leave him.
He pressed his fingers to his temple, aware of the bitter irony that he could not do for himself what he could so easily do for others.
He was weak from the earlier healing, but he had opened himself up to greater hurts than this before and borne them with ease. Another lance of pain flashed behind his eyes, this time so sharp it caused his vision to fail. He did not panic or cry out but rather clutched the leather pouch, drawing strength from it.
'Hush now, Mariah,' he said, not to the wretched girl leaking her life into the ground at his feet, but to the pain itself. It pulsed like an infected canker deep inside him. Her child was dying. He had looked inside her and felt the life force failing. That was his gift; the ability to reach inside another with his senses and to understand the state of things. In the girl, Mariah, everything felt wrong. To mend her, he needed to be able to fight it, restoring a balance to the blood and bone, marrow and fat. But there was always a price owed for such a gift, like now, knowing that the child was choking to death on the cord that bound it to its mother. It was hard to believe in goodness when what gave life so mercilessly took it away from the most innocent of children. A holy man would have shuddered, but The Deacon served his own Lord, and this was his way.
His vision was clear on one thing. For either to survive The Deacon had to bring the babe out into the light.
He could not simply cut the child from her belly though, not if he wanted her to live. Not if he wanted to give the illusion to his followers that he had tried to save them both. Save the mother? Save the child? Save both or damn them?
The Deacon clasped the pouch tighter, as though seeking wisdom from the relic within. It responded to his touch with a brief surge of intense, fiery heat. Aloud, in case any might be near enough to witness what was happening, he concentrated his thoughts into questions, offering them as prayer.
'Can I save both? Do I have the strength to oppose your will and keep both mother and child in this mortal realm? Do I have the right?' Then, almost as an afterthought, the question, 'Or are they both to leave us now? Have you led them to my door to be harvested, Lord?'
He reached down and tore away the cloth from Mariah's breast with an urgency approaching anger. He laid the pouch against her bare skin and pressed his hands flat to her ribcage, riding gently with the rise and fall of her shallow breath.
The girl made a vague gurgling noise as her eyelids fluttered open. Her eyes rolled up into her head, leaving milky white orbs staring blindly to Heaven. The Deacon licked his lip and forced himself to wait a heartbeat, then another, before he touched a finger to her throat. The pulse was there, but little more than a weak flutter.
He closed his eyes and focused on the flow of the blood beneath his fingertips, the rhythm of it. Slowly, he let himself sink into that trickle of life. He fed his strength into her through that contact and felt the sharp draw on his vitality that he knew so well. It was not magic; not in the tribal or shamanic sense, it was God – or some other power equally compelling - moving through him, channelled through his flesh into the dying girl’s blood to make it stronger. That is the story he told, that the creator used him for repairs that he was only roadway for a higher power to walk. Sometimes, alone at night and staring into the heavens, he even believed it. He concentrated, and the outpouring of energy slowed, stilled, and then reversed. The Deacon closed his eyes, relishing the heat as it flowed back into him.
The laying on of hands drew almost as much from him as it gave to those in need of his talents. It was two sides to the silver coin that paid the Boatman, a blessing and a curse and all of those other truisms connected so virulently to the Lord to exemplify that He both gave and took away when divine whimsy struck. It never passed without leaving its mark, and it was an intricate dance.
'Not yet, child, not yet,' he murmured as the warmth spread out from his fingers, supplementing her pulse and passing the blood flowing to her brain.
He savoured her heart beat as it echoed within him, racing at first but then slowing to match his. She showed no sign of waking. Sometimes The Deacon liked to watch the fear and understanding spread across the face of a penitent as he performed a harrowing, but this time he sensed everything was different, and he was glad for the lack of distraction. He pulled the rest of her dress away from her shoulders and down to bare the glorious mound of her belly. He slid his hands down to rest on either side of her stomach, feeling the outline of the child beneath the protective sack of the mother’s flesh.
There was no life there.
The Deacon closed his eyes.
'Give me a sign, Lord. Guide my hand so that it might serve your will.'
As though in response, the winds around the tent gusted, churning the dust from the surface of the hard baked dirt into devils that blew along the pathways forming the wretched canvas settlement.
'Is this your will? Is this as you would have it?' He raised his hands and thrust them into the air above his head. The winds answered, the dry crack of thunder rumbled over the distant hills. The Deacon grew very still. His head cocked to the side, as if he discerned words in that dull roar. His voice shifted when next he spoke, dropping a full octave and becoming thick with gravel. 'Then so it shall be done.'
There was no rain.
The wind rose and tore at the flaps of the tents surrounding them. Guide ropes thrummed like plucked guitar string and tugged against the stakes anchoring them to the earth. The taut canvas walls beat a wretched cacophony to rival the wing beats of the hundreds upon hundreds of black winged birds that had descended upon the town the night before. The Deacon's hair whirled about him wildly. His jacket threatened to tear back and blow free of his shoulders. Still the noise rose, accentuated by the scratch and scrap of claws on the canvas of the tent roofs.
The crows had returned to carry the shriven soul away into the night. The Deacon thought for a moment
