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THE FERAL DISCIPLES

1908

When it happens, Josiah is kneeling on the stone floor of the chapel, his forehead pressed to the great slab beneath him. He is cold and alone, and then the air around him is warm and smells of animal, and when he looks up the creature nods to him like a king and calls him by name.

“Josiah,” the creature breathes out. The voice is somehow rusty, like air in a tomb meeting the sun for the first time. Like the air when God rolled back the stone for the Messiah. “Josiah.”

Josiah trembles. He has been scrubbing the stones of the chapel for hours in the dark, marking his progress by the changing of the stones beneath his fingertips. This stone heavy with grime—and then the same stone, free and clear of dirt, released by his dogged labour in the service of God.

He is so tired. Outside, the sky is lightening, the sun about to rise. The smell of animal gets stronger. He is without his spectacles because Father Josip believes they are unnecessary. God, he says, will let Josiah see everything he needs to see. If Josiah cannot see the dirt on the stones, he must allow God to be his eyes. He must believe.

“You rely on your spectacles,” Father Josip says, “when you should rely on God. To be a disciple of the Lord means to know what is needed and when.”

Josiah squints up at the animal in front of him. The light has shifted and the creature is in shadow. A tiger, perhaps? But as far as Josiah can tell, the creature doesn’t have stripes, and tigers have stripes. Josiah knows this because of the book in Father Josip’s study, the encyclopedia Father Josip lugged across the wasteland when they came to Kezhemskoe. The encyclopedia is not forbidden to him, but Josiah is only allowed to read it on Saturdays, after prayer and his chores are all complete. He reads the encyclopedia too much and the Bible too little. This is what Papa told Father Josip in the fall of last year, when the priest came calling about the expedition.

“Josiah can go,” Papa said as they sat in the parlour after dinner. “I would be proud to see my son read Scripture to the unsaved in far-away lands.”

Josiah had not wanted to go. But a few short days later, Father Josip came back for him in a covered wagon, along with three other men— Brother Luca, Brother Benjamin, and a young man named Marcus.

Marcus was touched by God. He’d spoken all his life and then, three months earlier, his voice had disappeared. Now he was mute. When Josiah climbed into the wagon, Marcus smiled at him, then reached out and squeezed his shoulder.

“May God be with you, always,” Papa called after the wagon. “May God show you beautiful things, Josiah. May He make a work of your new life.”

His father did not expect him to come home, Josiah realized. His father didn’t want him to.

“May God make a work of my new life,” Josiah repeated. As the wagon moved away, he watched his father recede until he was a fuzzy shape blurring into the landscape. He imagined that his father raised his hand to wave a last goodbye, and then turned and went into the house and forgot him. All that Papa had would go to Obadiah now—the obedient eldest son who spoke only to people and not to animals, just as God had intended.

Except that God is speaking back to Josiah now, right here. God, who has never said his name before.

—

When Josiah was five years old, he’d followed a goat down to the river.
Come, it had said, let us go down to the water and play.

His father had not believed this no matter how many times Josiah tried to explain.
God does not speak to us through animals, his father had bellowed. The slap of his belt red-hot against Josiah’s buttocks and thighs.
But the goat did, he’d sobbed, his face sticky with tears and grief and snot. It did speak to me, Papa. They all do.
Your mother is dead! his father had raged. Trapped in the barn fire that only the goat had escaped. She was looking for you! And you sit here and snivel about animals that speak? You make up stories! You hide the truth of your wrongdoing from God!

Even at five, he’d wondered about that. Hadn’t the snake itself spoken to Eve? But he didn’t say this. Instead, after the last blow fell and his father turned from him in disgust, he crept up to his bed and wept for his mother, alone. By the time his father drowned the goat that had spoken to Josiah—cloven-hoofed, Josiah’s father said, and with eyes just like the Devil—he had no tears left to give it.

No tears, either, when his father kept beating him in the years that followed, or when the red-hot slap of the Brothers’ belts and the sting of their wooden paddles came at school.
Animals do not speak, Josiah. God gave man dominion over animals. God did not give animals dominion over—or communion with—man.

But who was he to deny the birds that sang to him, the squirrels that ate from his hands? So much of what the animals said to him was nonsense—Can you feel your heart deep down in the ground, just like the trees?—but it was inescapable. The babble of crickets at night, the shrill cries of squirrels that fought in the trees. Their voices were unrelenting, no matter how his father or the Brothers raged.
If I say they do not speak, Papa, then I am lying. Do you want me to lie?

Each time Josiah stepped into the world outside it was an onslaught. Teeming cries, unintelligible chirps, howls of desire. Pleas for mercy as unseen animals fell to a predator in the forest. Helphelphelphelp.

School was worse; school and the town, the uncomfortable eyes of the people of Middween turning away from Josiah when he and Papa went into a store, into church. The taunts of other boys on the school-yard. Strange widower, stranger boy. Only Obadiah seemed to move smoothly among the townsfolk, whenever he came home from Glasgow to visit. Josiah felt the silence of Papa’s shame choke him like a serpent.

Years passed like this. He grew tall, like Obadiah. He grew tall enough that the Brothers could not beat him anymore, strong enough to grab Papa’s wrist the last time his father had raised a hand to strike him and turn it away.
No, Papa, he said.

For this—lying in wait for his moment, like the serpent in the garden—his father sent Josiah into exile, to a land untouched by God. A land where the animals fled from him, where the days and nights were nothing but long stretches of silence, until now.

—

“Josiah,” the creature says. “You should not be here.”

This creature is not speaking nonsense. It does not have stripes, but perhaps it is some new kind of tiger, some kind that no one else has ever seen. “Father Josip told me to clean the chapel.”

“This place is not for you.” The creature bends and places a thick, furred paw on Josiah’s shoulder. “You must come—away—from here.”

At the touch, Josiah feels a warm rush of sunlight—the wet warmth of jungle green, the dry warmth of the savannah. He has never been to those places.

“This place is not for you,” the creature says again, the words rumbling from deep within its chest and spreading into Josiah’s shoulder so that the very world shakes.

He stands up, the stone of the chapel floor also suddenly warm beneath his feet. “I don’t have my spectacles,” he says.

The creature blinks. “What are . . . spectacles?”

Josiah spreads his hands. “They help me to . . . see.”

“You do not need spectacles,” the creature says. “You have eyes. And so do I.”

“Yes,” Josiah says. “But my eyes work much better when I have my spectacles on.”

The creature stares at him. In the shaft of greyish almost-light that now filters in from the doorway, Josiah can see that it is tall—taller than Josiah—and covered in orangey-brown fur with mottled dark spots. It is standing on its hind legs like a human. It looks like a cat but is not a cat. Like a dog, but not a dog.

“You are not for here,” the creature insists.

“I really need my spectacles.”

The creature sighs, then rumbles, “Very well. We shall get your . . . spectacles.” It steps out of the chapel and Josiah follows.

The sun is never hot in Siberia, not even in these early days of summer. In these moments before dawn, Josiah’s breath mists in the chill air, yet he is surprisingly warm. As they walk toward the camp, where his spectacles lie waiting in Father Josip’s study, he realizes that the heat is coming from the creature.

The creature glances at him—impatient, he can tell, from the flick of its circular ears. It has long front arms, he realizes. Almost like one of the apes he’s read about in the encyclopedia. Orangutans.

But it is most definitely not an ape. He can tell this even in the faint light of dawn.

“We must move faster,” the creature says. It drops to all fours, prowling around him to hurry him along. The rumbling hasn’t stopped. Is it purring?

The heat and smell of the creature—not unpleasant, exactly, just so very strange—make Josiah dizzy.

“Go to the camp,” the creature says, chomping down hard on the word’s end. “You must hurry. You must hurry now.”

Josiah nods and begins to climb the hill.

—

He had not expected to love the loneliness of the vast European sky, but he did. As the months crawled by and the caravan of priests and postulants made its way east from Scotland and across the continent, Marcus became his unexpected friend, the two of them sitting in the back of the wagon and writing messages in a notebook that they passed back and forth, mindful of the Brothers’ ears. Their friendship blossomed with words but no speech, loud and silent as the sun.

In those first few days of their journey, he asked Marcus, What happened to you?
God happened, Marcus wrote.

Josiah thought back to his years under Papa’s belt, under the Brothers at school. Then he thought of the Brothers they were travelling with, stern at the front of the wagon. Are you sure? He wrote the words so fiercely the pen tore through the page.

Marcus laughed, silently. No one expects anything of me now, he wrote. I am freer than I have ever been.

Josiah sat with that for a moment, stunned. To be free of all things, including expectation. He’d never quite seen it like that.

At night, the vast wilderness of stars spilled above them as the Brothers slept. Without enough light to see, ever mindful of the sleeping men around them, they traced letters on each others’ palms and spoke almost until dawn. The goat. The fire. The long, incessant years of Papa and of school. Marcus did not turn away from him, his eyes alight with interest.
I should like to speak to animals, Marcus traced into Josiah’s hand. I imagine they’d have more to say than humans ever could.

When God took his voice away, Marcus had been engaged to be married. God took my soon-to-be-wife and gave me—everything, he wrote. And then he laughed and laughed, silently under the stars.

Josiah was confused. You do not miss her? he wrote. You did not love her?
I cared for her, Marcus replied. But was it love? No.
How did you know?
How did you know you could speak to animals?
I didn’t know, Josiah traced, frowning. I just did it.
Yes. When he smiled, Marcus’s face became a whole different set of shadows. So you see.
But that isn’t the same, Josiah protested.

Marcus laughed at him again. His hand in Josiah’s felt like the goat leading him away from the fire.

—

Josiah creeps into the study, careful about the creak of the hinges and waiting for Father Josip’s hulking form to appear in the doorway.

Usually the priest keeps Josiah’s spectacles on his desk, but they are not there. Josiah feels around, brushing sheets of paper and the worn edges of the Bible that Father Josip reads from on Sunday evenings.

The priest used to keep the Bible locked away, but then one day the infidels ransacked the camp. They stole very little—Josiah suspects their real purpose was to frighten—but now Father Josip leaves the Bible out in the open in the hope that if they come again, they’ll steal it and save their immortal souls.

He brushes his hands over the desk again and still comes up empty. Then he hears the priest call.

“Josiah, is that you?”

Josiah straightens. “Yes, Father.”

Father Josip looms in the doorway, lit by the lamp he carries. “Are you finished in the chapel?” he asks. “Why are you not at prayer?”

“I have come for my spectacles, Father.”

“You do not need your spectacles to pray, Josiah.”

“I do not need them for prayer, Father.” Josiah clears his throat and raises his voice. “I need them because I am leaving.” The last word expands in his chest. Yes. He is leaving. He is not for this place anymore.

Father Josip enters the study now. “Josiah, don’t be preposterous. You can’t leave.”

“God has come to me.” Josiah feels both divine and strange. “He has told me to leave.” He glances in the direction of the window, feeling the presence of the creature.

“Josiah,” Father Josip says, fiercely, “you do not abandon God. You cannot leave.”

Josiah clenches his fists. “I am not abandoning God. God is calling me elsewhere. I would like to find my spectacles and go. Please.”

Father Josip deposits the lamp on the small table just to the right of the door. He makes the sign of the Cross and bows his head. “Lord,” he intones, “I call upon you now to be with your son Josiah in this, his hour of need. Infuse his heart with righteousness, O Lord, so he will see the error of his ways. Forgive him, as you continue to forgive all of—”

The creature’s rumbling becomes a steady furry drumbeat in Josiah’s ears. “Father Josip,” he demands, “please give me my spectacles.”

No one has interrupted the priest in years. The older man gapes at him, a tall, blurry, broad-shouldered fish.

“Father,” Josiah insists, “God has called me, and I will go.”

Father Josip recovers himself. “If you go,” he hisses, his voice vicious and small, “you take nothing with you. This camp—and everything in it—belongs to God.”

“I also belong to God,” Josiah says. He has never truly understood this before.

Something clinks on the floor in front of the priest, and then Josiah hears a crunch of wire beneath Father Josip’s boot.

“May God have mercy on your soul,” the priest says.

Josiah comes from behind the desk and squats to retrieve the broken spectacles. He straightens and edges past the priest, out into the hallway and then out the door of the building without looking back.

“Marcus?” he calls, keeping his hand on the wall to guide him outside. “Marcus?”

There is no answer, not at first.

“Josiah,” and suddenly the creature is with him.

“Marcus cannot go with you,” Father Josip snarls, coming out into the early morning light. He stops short, his gasp so sharp Josiah can feel its impact in his own ribs.

The creature regards Father Josip for a long moment, then asks Josiah, “Your spectacles?”

Father Josip whimpers and falls to his knees.

A blurry, broad-shouldered fish, Josiah thinks, and the rumble in his chest becomes something hot, something that spills out of him, a sudden rage of exultant power. He turns away from the priest and hears the unmistakable slosh of water, a wet body flopping down onto the ground.

“My spectacles are—broken,” he tells the creature.

The creature nods. “We will be your eyes.”

Josiah swallows. “We?”

The creature beckons and Josiah obeys. On the other side of the yard, he sees something flicker in the shadows.

Another one.

God puts a furry hand on his shoulder. “Come now, and do not look back.”