Paradise [Draft 1]

Chapter 5: Deuteronomy (5912)

Chapter 5: Deuteronomy (5912)

Thorman watched as Sinclair lit a cigarette and flicked the match over the parapet of Grayfriars Tower. As the old man took the first few draws, Thorman tried to compose himself. He had known Sinclair before the reditus, and like Thorman the Archbishop had changed a great deal in the last year and a half. While Thorman had retreated into the strange world of sanity, Sinclair had embraced the chaos, and was a dangerous man because of it.

Sinclair had been unremarkable, as men of his kind went. He was the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at the time of the reditus, six months into his twelve-month post before the world turned upside down. In the months that followed, while Thorman had been doing his best to stay alive Sinclair had flourished and he'd made sure, through various forms of skulduggery, that he had become the Archbishop of Strake.

Thorman suspected it is because Sinclair was a sociopath, or there was something else even more wrong with this red-faced corpulent man that meant he had no great issue with religious persecution and church sanction executions. Like Thorman's wife, he had the blood of multitudes on his hands.

'You know what they are calling Strake now, Thomas?' asked Sinclair as he puffed away.

'I've no idea, Your Grace,' replied Thorman.

'Riverseafingal,' snorted the archbishop, 'Do ye get it? No? From that kids show. A made-up city. It was filmed in North Berwick, Glasgow, Edinburgh. What else? Aye, Newcastle, Manchester, anyway, all the bits that Strake is made of.'

'Oh yes,' said Thorman with a slightly forced laugh. 'I see.'

'Anyway...' said the archbishop with a sigh. 'I've been hearing about your new little project, Thomas. Still trying to save people? Aiming to be a saint?'

'Not at all, Your Grace,' Thorman feeling a knot of tension grow in his stomach. He reminded himself that Sinclair would usually go along with his requests if they involved no effort or comeback on his part.

Sinclair grunted and returned to his cigarette and did not speak again until he had finished it. The butt also went over the rail, to sizzle out in a rain filled street gutter below.

'Most saints were martyred, think on that Thomas,' chuckled Sinclair, but he was already bored of the subject, as he always did when speaking about anyone except himself.

He lit another cigarette and changed the conversation. 'I'm so late because of all those bloody checkpoints. Even Church plates can't get you through an army blockade any quicker. It's getting wild up north again. I'll re-arrange all my meetings in the morning, I'm just here for three days. I've still the Provost to see and a meeting of the secular council. If you do your bit here, then everything is in place.'

'Yes, Your Grace.' Thorman was wearing a quilted jacket to keep out the cold and had turned his back against the chill wind. The icy breeze whistle across the slate roofs, whipping up droplets from the puddles of rainwater.

Sinclair went on, going over all the things he planned to say to the people that he planned to meet the next day. Thorman barely listen as he had heard it before on the telephone many many times before and he was getting the words straight in his head in preparation of the archbishop mentioning Goldengreens again.

After a while, the archbishop's monologue moved on to his pet project, the building of a Tabernacle in Evermarch. This was a topic that Thorman was cynical about, confident that the reason for its construction was to increase the importance of the archdiocese and thus the Archbishop's standing, and had little to do with the glory of God. There was already one in Kirkland, just fifteen miles away, and Thomas thought he could be forgiven for thinking another one so close was pointless.