Milo’s awakening antagonism once again found itself thwarted. He wanted to lash the woman with the accumulated horrors and tragedies of his life, but he could already tell she would bear it all with sorrowful nods and caring gazes. She would not refute his accusing proclamations or battle with him. He could try to craft a barb to scourge her faith, but the thought of it sickened him with its hateful pettiness.
“Many have hurt me, so many,” the magus said, his voice flat. “But those people are not why I hate him, not now, at least.”
She frowned curiously.
“If it isn’t the suffering, it is the squirming?”
A loud, long snarl of laughter tore from Milo’s throat.
“Fair enough,” he said and gave an approving nod before leaning forward. “It is the squirming. Bad enough He put us here, but then He puts us in a world where even our best intentions, our best efforts even, can make nothing but death and filth and suffering and failure. How dare He put us in such a world?”
The old woman’s gaze lowered in thought, and she seemed to notice Milo’s uniform for the first time.
“Did you ever think there might be something to learn from that?” she asked, somehow managing to keep the question from seeming coy or condescending. Perhaps it was how earnest her expression was.
“If He wanted to teach us something, He could have told us.” Milo shrugged. “This shadow play disguised as life seems a rather poor form of pedagogy.”
“Oh, I think He did tell us,” she said. “But if you are like me, and I find most people are in this respect, there is a lifetime's distance between my ears and my heart.
“I can hear something and know it up here,” she continued, tapping her temple with one yellowed fingernail before tapping her chest. “But it takes a long time to get it here.”
Milo shook his head as the light coming through the windows purpled and the light from the votive candles seemed to swell.
“So, what’s the lesson then?” He sneered. “I hope you know because if it hasn’t reached your heart, what hope is there for us non-fossils?”
The toxic barb flew off his tongue before he could snap it back down his throat, but once again, his words found no purchase. This fragile creature was proving to be harder to pierce than anyone he’d ever met. That only made his faltering attempts all the more pathetic and reproachable, but his guilt was pebbles compared to the Sisyphean stone resting between his shoulders.
“The lesson may be that we never can, never will succeed,” she said, her voice tender. “We weren’t meant to.”
Milo sniffed, his face curdling as though he smelled something rancid.
“Don’t you call him Father?” Milo asked. “What sort of man would you call a father who intentionally makes his children cripples? Who keeps them dependent?”
To his utter frustration, she again paused to consider the question. With flawless, despicable humility, she’d thwarted him from considering her response as some trite quip she’d memorized.
“We’d call such a man a monster because we’d say he was keeping so many good things from his children,” she acknowledged, but he saw her green eyes flash in the deepening shadows of her face. “But now imagine that all those good things, the best things, can only be had by being with the Father. Then we would call it compassion, not cruelty, wouldn’t we?”
Milo’s lips curled back from his teeth, and he twisted his head to the side to hide his snarl. A deep well of resentment threatened to gush forth, and in the wake of that torrent, he wasn’t certain what he might say or do.
“If He is so good, then why all this suffering?” he hissed between gritted teeth. “If He is such a good father, why put his children through so much?”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed, and she spent some time searching Milo’s face before answering.
“I suppose I could give you answers to that old question,” she said slowly, her gaze seeming to explore every contour of his face. “But I think the real question is why you have been allowed to suffer, and given what you said earlier, I imagine it has to do with something you did. Something that did not end as you’d hoped.”
She nodded meaningfully at his black coat.
“I…” Milo began hotly, but what almost came out would have been a confession, not a rebuttal. He forced back the outburst with a hard swallow and stared at the old woman. How had she managed to bring him here? Why was he now almost pouring his sorrow out rather than destroying her infantile beliefs?
He tried to speak, but again the words caught in his throat with a click. His mouth, his lips, and his tongue all seemed determined to betray him.
“War can be a heavy burden,” she said, her hand straying to her locket once more. “Intentions are cold comfort when lives are lost and the dead are counted.”
Milo felt the tightness in his throat harden into a lump. In his mind, he wanted to resume the fight, to find his rhetorical footing and engage her arguments, but something deeper refused. Batting aside his counter-arguments and protests, the thing he feared was his soul forced his body to nod slowly as something wet prickled in the corner of his eyes.
Thankful for the shadows of the twilit hall, Milo hung his head and fought to keep his breathing even. So intent was he on not sobbing that he didn’t hear the creak of venerable wood and older bones.
For the second time that day, he nearly fell out of his chair at the nearness of the old woman when one knotted hand rested lightly on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the elder standing over him, her eyes deep and glimmering wells of green.
“He knows our hearts,” she whispered. “And in His frightening mercy, He judges those before our actions or their consequences.”
Something
