Exit Kingdom

middle of the desert. Dry, skeletal rattle, man shaking his bones.
    I have a job for you, Ignatius says, if you could find terms on which to take it.
    What’s the job?
    Tomorrow we’ll talk. I want to show you something. But tomorrow.
    *
    Talk, Moses says to the caravaners. All we’ve got is talk.
    He pauses in hisstory as if to show how great a vacuum is left in the world by the absence of speech. He gazes into the bonfire, and the others gaze with him. It is late, and the sky
overhead is lightless, the stars hidden behind the blinding screen of smoke from the fire.
    Talk, Moses says again. There ain’t nothin good or bad in the universe that can’t be turned the other way by talkin it around. The world,it’s all palaver. You might think
different – I did too, then. But break bone and tear flesh, those are just actions that a man might do, just ways of killing time between the questions we ask ourselves in the dark. Me,
I’ve built and broken in equal share – and the earth ain’t any more or any less, on the balance, as a result of my doings. But you could just sit still like we’re all doinright here and talk your way the entire journey from heaven to hell and whatever purgatory’s between.
    He pauses again. No one speaks. Miles are travelled, perhaps, in their minds.
    I’ve wielded thousands of weapons in my half-century of livin, Moses continues. Everything from rifle to tree branch. And I’m tellin you there’s no artillery more powerful
than words. Those spoken and thoseun – it makes no difference.
    The mute who travels with him, the one he calls Maury, suddenly howls up at the sky, an extended, inchoate keen like that of a coyote – representing not hunger nor loneliness nor
anything else but some arcane and inscrutable desire cried to the unanswering heavens. One-eyed Moses turns to look at his companion with brief but solicitous care. But the mute hushesagain and
begins to play with his fingers quietly.
    Words, Moses goes on, spoken or un, comprehensible or in, it makes no difference. I used to be one kind of man, and then I became another. And then another. And still another after that.
Moses Todd, the painted man. Maybe all of us are painted, all of us circus clowns – and the act moves from ring to ring. I used to be one kind of man,and then I spoke to a monk and I became
someone else. And then there was a girl, and the two of us talked, and I became someone else.
    He goes silent for a moment, his eyes lost in contemplation of his own past, but then he shakes himself back into the present.
    But no, that’s something else – the girl, I mean – that’s a different story. See, words are dangerous for how they proliferate.The plague of the dead ain’t
nothin to the plague of language, for it works insidious at your memory and your perception of all things. This story – the one I’m speaking to you right now – it’s about
holy things. But the tellin of what’s holy and what’s not – well, that’s a beautiful magic of parlance, ain’t it?
    He pauses again, lowering a stick into the fire until it catches and thenbringing the flaming end up to his cigar. He puffs three times to bring the weed alight, lets the smoke spill out
between his lips and over his beard, and then continues his story.
    *
    The brothers sleep in a crib of the horse stables on mounds of dry hay. It looks as though there have not been any horses in the stable for many years. Instead, much of the
space is taken withthe storage of provisions – barrels of water in anticipation of the dry months, jars of food in anticipation of famine.
    They were offered beds in one of the bunkhouses, but Moses declined for the both of them. They have slept in worse than a stable crib, and there is a sour pleasure in sleeping as beasts among
these good and righteous people. Moses bites down upon the selfsubjugation, asyou would upon a rotten tooth to feel the flare of pious pain.
    In the morning when Moses wakes, coughing the dust from his lungs and picking dry hay from his beard, he discovers that his brother Abraham is gone from the crib. He rushes from the stable and
through the courtyard where the faces of the acolytes question him without words. Ignoring their expressions, he continues the searchfor his brother near the picnic tables, by the kitchen house,
in the vegetable garden.
    He eventually discovers Abraham in the church itself. He holds in his hands a fragment of cloth that has painted on it in