Angels in the Architecture Read Free Page A

a pain that lasted as a bitter parting.
    Perhaps today he will learn something. A connection.
    The sun had long risen in the Warriners’ tiny hamlet, and farmers, the Warriners included, were readying their tradable goods to take to town. The elder Warriner boys were loading their family’s cart for the market.
    There had already been several hours of work and activity, as there would have been in all the peasant households. The Warriners were lucky to have so many sons to tend their land; it gave them time to create some other industry, such as the pelts they dried, some furniture made to be sold or traded, walls mended for themselves, and others. But then it also gave them more hungry mouths to feed. Mostly the boys would have said they were hungry most of the time, mostly their whole lives. It was a long-reaching memory of their childhood and youth.
    ‘Get tha’ mute on the cart, Dem.’
    ‘God what’s he lookin’ at, idjit. Some pretty picture in eez noggin, eh.’
    ‘Mus’ be ’e’s dreamin’ of tha’ Elspeth Draper showin’ ’im ’er ankle in the back pew, loik she did you, Dem.’
    Laughter ! Elbows! Thumping!
    ‘Ow, ya ,’
    ‘Tha’s enough! Ger’ away ta ye Ma, ya pickle!’ The biggest voice.
    Laughter again.
    ‘Yay, ye pickle!’ Teasing.
    Some boys jumped on to the cart and some jumped off. Each knew where it was supposed to be.
    ‘Pickle, pickle, pic-kle,’ singing.
    ‘Hyup!’ A whip and a horse gee’d up.
    The cart’s wheels winced and groaned and the bodies aboard it jostled, their sweaty stink wafting; the day was hot early. Thomas grinned at the faces left behind on the dirt road – Alard and David and Michael, their names – but they didn’t hold much light, and he looked away. Thomas knew these hulking moving beasts sitting about him. They didn’t move with the light like he did, but they were like a row of simple houses neighboured together, and knowing them was some sort of protection, even if neighbourliness was not a much known about thing among them..
    Light flowed through the corridors, gateways , and river beds of his body. His body became not a body at all but a part of the bodies next to him and a part of their smells. He became the air that he breathed in through his own nostrils, and he was the spark and the crack of the whip, and the flow of it all was warm. The light rewarded his stream of happiness and sent more light, and then he could easily melt completely – first into the space between the planks of the cart and then even into the wood itself and the hard metal nail. And he understood from this the nail’s task, and that it had to stay together with the wood. Some part of Thomas knew this is the way things were, that things had a reason. And then he flew way over the cart and was high, high above it, but a bump in the road carried him back to the space between the others and the light moved out of him. He looked to the very corner of his eye and stayed looking to the furthermost corner of his eye because that’s where the light sometimes came back, and he waited like that. It didn’t hurt his eyes to look like this. He knew just to wait.
    Thomas , a calm, gentle voice coming from the light, the joy is just one part, Thomas. You can’t just be in the light. There is a message too. Listen for the message, Thomas. What is the light telling you?
    ‘Ah , look, ’e’s doin’ ’eez madman look again.’
    ‘Don’ i’ hur’ eez oiz doin’ tha’?’
    ‘Aye, look, Oi couldn’ do tha’ for long.’ The third boy turned his eyeballs to the corner of head and demonstrated. ‘Ugh.’
    ‘Stop it, Thom, ya freak. Ye’ll ’ave all ’em ladies in the tarn crossin’ t’other soid of road. Ey, kick ’em, Geoffrey, make ’im stop it, willya?’
    ‘ Ugh.’ Sharp, from one side.
    ‘ Oi, Tommy, look ’ere! O’er this way! Tha’s be’er.’
    ‘Leave ’im be!’ The big voice, deep and loudest. Always loud. Only loud. No light. No quiet spaces