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got to get ourselves back to the garden
He's always looked, in some wise, a little fey, with his steady blue eyes and his lithe build, slight as a willow. He looks that way even now, long past the time God should have brought his life to a close. In the jostle of bar patrons -- a group of dockhands just off shift, a few regulars playing cards, a cadre of women flirting amongst themselves -- he's obscure until you get close to him, and then it seems as if he's somehow distinct from everyone else, in his soft leather tunic, his light hair unruly around his high cheekbones.
He's drinking, and that, at least, is different from the past. He sits with a shot glass and some small bottle of caramel-colored liquor, though his hand is steady.
(He doesn't believe, has never and will never believe, that God has forsaken him. Still, in his tireder moments he has wondered whether this is penance or some kind of lesson, whether he's supposed to be prophet, or an example. God has grown harder and harder to hear as the centuries wear on, and the inability to blend in well with the world, which in his youth was softened by Percivale and Heliabel and by his urgency to do his duty, has made it almost impossible to make real connections with the people who flicker in and out. No one else has ever understood him in the way those first friends did. No one else has ever brought him home in their presence.
The hardest part is growing used to the idea that God isn't there to guide his every step, the way it used to be. He has no instructions, no sword to find, no chair meant for him, no grail to attain -- just time. And time is hard to fill. He wanders a great deal. When he finds a holy place he goes to ground there, sometimes for years at a time, and for that while his sleep is soothing and his legs are always steady and the sun feels warm.
In between he moves without much purpose, and sometimes he drinks, and sometimes he weeps bitterly at night, because he's begun to believe he's Moses, and he'll never see the holy land.)
He's drinking, and that, at least, is different from the past. He sits with a shot glass and some small bottle of caramel-colored liquor, though his hand is steady.
(He doesn't believe, has never and will never believe, that God has forsaken him. Still, in his tireder moments he has wondered whether this is penance or some kind of lesson, whether he's supposed to be prophet, or an example. God has grown harder and harder to hear as the centuries wear on, and the inability to blend in well with the world, which in his youth was softened by Percivale and Heliabel and by his urgency to do his duty, has made it almost impossible to make real connections with the people who flicker in and out. No one else has ever understood him in the way those first friends did. No one else has ever brought him home in their presence.
The hardest part is growing used to the idea that God isn't there to guide his every step, the way it used to be. He has no instructions, no sword to find, no chair meant for him, no grail to attain -- just time. And time is hard to fill. He wanders a great deal. When he finds a holy place he goes to ground there, sometimes for years at a time, and for that while his sleep is soothing and his legs are always steady and the sun feels warm.
In between he moves without much purpose, and sometimes he drinks, and sometimes he weeps bitterly at night, because he's begun to believe he's Moses, and he'll never see the holy land.)
