Adnihilo tore his attention from Cain to Jezebel, desperate that she was seeing something else. He needed to believe that his eyes were lying, that he was not witnessing this weakness—his hero backing down like a frightened bitch—and over what? But Jezebel wasn’t even looking at him, preferring instead to tend to her plate. It was then the half-blood saw for the first time the bruises on her arms and the shadow below her eyes, how thin she appeared seated amongst the assembly—seeming half as shapely as she did among the dwellers of the slum. He had never noticed it before, how hard she and Cain lived, and how coddled he had been; waking up in late morning to baskets of goods: clothes and fruit and millet, never needing to work, never wanting for anything because of the congregation’s gifts. “Tribute,” his mother called their charity, but as he watched his mentor trudge to the table, he finally recognized pity for what it was.
“So,” started Jezebel, “are you two going to eat, or should we throw your supper to the hounds?”
Cain slunk onto the bench next to his singer and tore himself a hunk of gravy-sodden bread. “Trying to fattening up the dogs? I never took you for someone who’d eat hound, but I guess anything’s better than goat again, right?” Adam forced a chuckle, though none of the others laughed. They could see the jab for what it was, and could see the retaliation perspiring on Jezebel’s tongue as the sacrifice cut her off. To Adam, he said, “Smile all you want, boy, but if your king thinks he can keep us suckling at his teat, you’re the one who’s going to be to his throat in slum dogs when his holy milk finally runs dry.”
“Then good thing Babylon’s got no dearth of goats,” said David. His son laughed, sincerely this time, and the singer joined him. “Truly though, there is no need to worry. It’s rare that the clergy would approve something like this.”
“It was a special reward,” Adam added, “for ‘keeping the Lord’s peace,’ and ‘cultivating the faith.’ That’s what Bishop Ba’al said in his letter. We’re the biggest parish outside the country. Father thinks we might even get enough tithes next year that we can start building chapels around the city.”
Jezebel leaned in and stuffed a cut of mutton into her lover’s open mouth. “What was it like, living in Pareo?”
“You’d have to ask Father. I was too little to remember.”
“He was still a babe when we left,” the pastor explained, “and we were only in the capital for a few months. We lived in the heartlands north before that.”
“It must be cold there.” She pointed to his clothes: ink-black boots, black woolen trousers, and an embroidered black half-cloak over a shirt scarlet red. “I’d be sweating under all that. Why don’t we strip you down some, let you cool off?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know if you’d would appreciate the view. It’s been years since I looked anything like your husband. As for my clothes, they’re meant to be travelling garments, but they’re all the vestments I have aside from my blacks.”
Jezebel leaned her elbows on the table. “They’re certainly more lively than your normal robes. I never understood why the church colors are so bleak.”
“It’s to symbolize humanity,” Adam answered, hardly able to contain his mirth. He glanced toward his father to be sure he had his attention. “We just talked about this in Catechism. The cassock represents the color of mankind’s soul, and the vestments get lighter as the spirit sheds its sin. A white sash for priesthood, and bishops get gold fringe.”
“Are you teaching the lessons now?” asked Jezebel. “I might have attended more often had my tutor been as handsome.”
Adam’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Handsome? I, I don’t know about that. I—wait! So you were a member once?”
“She used to go to the sermons with her mother,” Cain divulged.
Jezebel seethed, a single breath: short and deep and heavy as she sighed to the pastor’s son, “That was a long time ago. The parish hadn’t even been finished yet.”
“But what about your mother? What’s her name? Does she still come?” pressed Adam.
“Who knows,” Adnihilo hissed a little too loudly, “the bitch won’t talk to ‘dirty pagans’ like us.” He had hardly murmured the words when he saw the sacrifice rise out of the corner of his eye. He dared not look, sure punishment was coming. He clenched his teeth and his fingers and his eyes, yet seconds went by—and nothing. Warily, the half-blood loosened his eyelids. Cain stood with his armed raised, frozen—David glaring—half the assembly staring at them until the sacrifice returned to his place on the bench. Then silence. The pastor waved for his flock to carry on, but Adnihilo could feel the scorn, Cain’s anger, Jezebel’s disappointment.
He wished he were gone—as far away as he could imagine, south of Eemah and the Golden Sea, beyond the mountain passes where the savages still lived and breathed and died. They did not have to be a sacrifice or a Messah or an Impii. He rose without a word, ignoring Adam and Jezebel’s calls as he drifted toward the great portal: two huge slabs of foreign oak, banded and fitted with repurposed bronze for a massive crossbar that loomed in the corner. He took the door ring in hand and wrenched; it swung, faster than he counted on; and the half-blood bumped into a strange man who had been pushing from the other side. Ink-black boots, black woolen trousers, and an embroidered black half-cloak over a shirt scarlet red.
