THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#47)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

Always, always he came back to the Great Miasma. What happened? Why can’t we remember it?
Each time Giver sent me the picture of an enormous blank wall high as the eye could see.
Why this wall? I asked, hoping in this way to get a peek around it.
Giver was silent, but Chickie’s admonition echoed faintly in my ears. Was it possible we were barking up the wrong tree?
After a while the Duke stopped asking.
One day he wanted to know what his legacy would be. Giver immediately sent me the image of a fiery woman with bright blonde hair that stood out from her head like a halo. “Your granddaughter will be a great Duchess who will unite all the western lands,” I told him.
“And me?”
“You’ll be famous as her grandfather.”
This answer was hardly pleasing to the Duke. I could see him worrying it in his mind like a dog gnawing an old bone. A few days later he asked suddenly, “By which son?” After dispensing in whatever fashion with the elder two, he had five remaining.
“Jonathan.”
“Will he overthrow me?”
“No.”
The Duke relaxed a little, then returned to his main obsession. Was the Great Miasma a war or a disease, he wanted to know. Was it true sunspots had caused it? Why were there so few of us compared to the many millions who inhabited these lands before us? Were they our ancestors, or had our great-great grandparents—for that was where the cutoff with the past began—come from somewhere else? If the latter were true, how had we learned their language? Where were the documents that could tell us how to run the great machines they’d left scattered over the land by some means other than these absurd little EverReds, our supplies of which were rapidly running out?
Giver wouldn’t supply an answer.
When I told the Duke that, he stuck his face inches away from mine and glared. “I don’t believe that! You know and you won’t tell me.”
I didn’t even try to answer. By now I was used to his outbursts. Belinda and I had grown close in the Lady House and she’d kept sharing her wisdom about the Duke with me. “The temper passes quickly, like a thundershower,” she said. “Just hold still and make sure he doesn’t take action while he’s in the middle of it.”

(to be continued tomorrow)