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“They destroyed your city!” John interrupted.
“Oh, la, cities come and go. You’re too young to grasp the situation. Gog and Magog don’t destroy things, they change them. Thule is still here, it’s just different now. And the fog—well, we’re not stopped, just slow. They say stopped; they mean slow. They say impossible; they mean no one has. Everyone is so imprecise. When you live slow as slinking, you have so few words to call your own—you learn to be precise. Precise or pretty—you must at least choose one. Preferably both. You know, twenty years ago I broke through to a little kissing bridge over a spit of river, and two children had been caught there plaiting flowers. They’d managed six whole blooms in a thousand years! Not so quick as in the old days, but progress! And good for them, I say. They loved those flowers so. Because they spent so long plaiting them, they knew every single thing about each blossom, the smallest blemish on a petal. And when my bubble wrapped them up, they could even kiss, before the fog slid back in. Not so bad, to be able to concentrate on a kiss that way, for a thousand more years. Them on loving, me on digging. The queen on whatever queens do, which always seemed mostly sitting on thrones to me. And really, is it so different outside? I seem to remember, when Thule ran quick and bright, life still consisted mostly of waiting, moment by year, for fortune to turn my way. I lived a long time but it all seemed more or less the same. If I couldn’t do it one year, likely I wouldn’t do it the next. At least digging is consistent, and rewards effort more or less immediately. Isn’t it mostly like that everywhere: motionless, frozen, sad? Save that out there you move so fast that you don’t even know the value of a crooked arm, and what it means to struggle a decade and more to achieve a little red flower twined up in a vine.”
I started to explain about the Abir, how what you managed one year could be upended by the next, the thrill of it, the waiting, the not knowing. But Fortunatus spoke first, his wings drooping in the dim, stale air.
“It’s all inverted, outside Thule,” he said, as if afraid to agree or disagree with the shovel-keeper. “There, the elements stay separate, but people’s thoughts and dreams and fears are thick and syrupy, a congealed ether, and everyone digs in their spoon, coming up with a mouthful that they can call their own. There, everyone lives in the open air, but their hearts are shared, kept in the street for anyone to see. To turn in a barrel every several centuries, and mix together. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s harrowing, but so is Thule. And we only look fast. Some of us are slow, terribly slow, and move in our own mist, and forget, sometimes, which is a relief, but not other times, which is no relief at all.”
But John could not hear Knyz or Fortunatus. He could not let them speak.
“The church,” he said. “Who built the church? Give me your shovel, sir, and I will make my own way to it.”
“Didymus Tau’ma built it. I presume that was a long time ago now—oh, la, centuries and centuries. We told him he didn’t need to fool with boards and nails. Just break off a bit of the palace and bury it. It might take a couple of seasons to get it right, but eventually you’ll have a nice little spread. Stubborn as a pit Tau’ma was, though, and he put up his own wood and wealth for it, even for the cross. And when it was done, he opened its big doors up to all of Thule and said: Today is Sunday, which is the Sabbath. I still don’t know what a Sunday is, but he opened the doors and no one came, except to peek in and see what he’d been messing with all those months. But he smiled. He smiled a lot, Tau’ma.”
“He means Thomas,” John said to no one in particular, barely able to speak. “Didymus is Thomas. He was here, and he built churches.”
“And no one came,” I pointed out, but he did not hear it.
“You mean Thomas,” he said doggedly.
“One day,” Knyz said matter-of-factly, digging into another drift of elemental sludge and hefting, “he’ll come back.”
“Thomas is dead.”
“Oh, la, yes, but he’ll come back all the same. And change the world again, like Gog and Magog did.”
“Christ,” John said worriedly. “You mean Christ will come back, and change the world. In the Resurrection.”
“I never met a man named Christ.” Knyz shrugged his woolly shoulders. “But I met Thomas, and he gave me a ginger pie.”
“Thomas told you he would return, that he would come back from the dead?”
“Who can remember? He said it, or someone else. No matter. So much digging to do before he comes, la!”
John threw up his hands. “That’s heresy!” he cried helplessly. “We await Christ’s return! When the dead shall rise and the world shall be remade in the likeness of paradise!”
Knyz dug on placidly. The rest of us tried fervently to be somewhere else while John drew nearer to tears. “That sounds lovely,” Knyz said in a conciliatory fashion. “If you’re hungry while you wait, I can make a fair mist-pie, with some mist-tea, even a good roast mist.”
“Who is the queen you spoke of?” I said quietly, and John peered off in the direction of the chapel he could not reach, could not touch. “The world has gone by while Thule stood still. We do not remember a queen of this city.”
“I met her when I was a small beast, la,” smiled Knyz. “Great big hands, the biggest you ever saw. She could have squeezed me into milk and a scrap of fur if she’d had a please to. She knew just everything—when Magog first stumbled towards us she saw his shadow fall on the boulevards. She spent weeks practicing sitting still, so she’d be ready.”
John begged for the shovel. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, to hold him back, but he just kept babbling for it, grasping for it, and if we’d let him stay he’d have dug forever, I think, for the promise of a church at the other end of his digging. He dug furiously, sweat pouring off of him and drifting away, to become part of the mist.
“No,” Knyz kept saying, becoming more and more confused. “It’s mine. It’s all I have. If I didn’t have it, the fog would stop me, too. No, no.”
But John would not stop. He wanted the church, any church. More important than anything, that church. I stood behind him and it stood before him and he crawled like a child and never looked at me once.
We did nothing. We stood aside and let John break himself against the fog. With children, sometimes that is all you can do.
“Did he die here?” the priest asked finally, helplessly, his fists wet and ugly, clenched at his sides. “Is he buried here? God showed me this place, God led me here. He must be here.”
“He left us living—we kept his church. You don’t tear down churches. Oh, la, it’s just not done. He went back home with his wife, who sent word when he died. I think we must have disappointed him somehow.”
“Saint Thomas did not have a wife,” spat John, incredulous.
“If you say.” Knyz seemed quite done with our priest. Goats and fauns have a highly developed sense of propriety, and John had trampled all over it.
“We could take you with us,” I said to the faun. “Out into the world.”
