The Once and Future God

The only man on board who more or less believed in God even in calm weather was the only one well enough to walk on deck during the storm.  The rest of the ship,  apart from a skeleton crew, were down below being heartily sick or indulging in their new found faith in an omnipotent controller.  Strange how an enraged climate could sponsor a willingness to accept the Creator in a way which all his wasted preaching could never do.  But the priest, Rev. Plummer, was blessed with immunity to the severest weather and seemed to find in it a reassurance of his wavering faith.  It was in periods of calm (mental and physical) that true uncertainty manifested. At other times he could tell himself how ironic it was that his employment was perfect for a cleric who had thrown his faith overboard.  The professional sailors pretended to envy him his invulnerability to evil weather.  But some of the crew, who mostly came from the far-east, believed that he possessed a holy relic which protected him from sea sickness.

   ‘That may be true,’ he responded to the rumour.  ‘I do devotions to Poseidon every day.’  But the people he said this to failed to appreciate it.  Plummer only let loose his humour on the odd occasion and it always fell flat on its face.

   He prowled the tilting deck proudly, looking at the raging Mediterranean.  It gave him a feeling of primal isolation which he relished.  His duties on board were quite minimal; a priest on a cruise ship was a totem rather than a necessity and his lack of useful purpose disconcerted him at times.  There was a short service on Sunday mornings, during which the  captain and officers sat glazed and upright to make up for the paucity of passengers, most of whom he imagined were confined to their cabins by hangovers inherited from Saturday night.  He also felt compelled to stage a number of historical and cultural lectures.  The subject of St Paul’s peregrinations throughout the region seemed like a suitable subject on board a wandering cruise ship, but his educational delights did not attract full houses.  Those who did not fancy the disco or cabaret acts were apt to sneak in and settle down at the back for a quiet nap.  His battle against indifference continued with the Crusader legacy in Rhodes and the Rites of the Coptic Church, but ended up as a losing war. 

   After the previous cruise he had relayed his feelings of inadequacy to an executive of the company, who merely warned him against the dangers of talking himself out of a job, which he seemed to regard as somehow anti-Christian.  He was assaulted with a procession of stock phrases that could have been culled from an advert:  short hours, lack of responsibility, ample leisure time, exotic locations.  And behind this was the unspoken and undeniable truth:  an old priest like him should have been glad to secure such a bountiful number.  The only alternative for such as him was the spiritual damp rot of a dreary parish back in middle England.

   Early on this latest voyage Captain Christiansen caught a resurgence of this uncertainty and took him aside to tell him, ‘You may yet find your truth worth in the event of a real crisis.  I’ll be mindful to call on your services if we sink, God forbid.  Contacts with a higher authority are always worth maintaining.’

   But on nights like this, when the sea storm ruled, Plummer had no concerns of the captain or anyone else on board.  The detachment seemed a glorious, temporary gift that gift wrapped his crumbing faith.  He felt in a strange way connected to an escape route of some kind that was tantalisingly just out of reach.  Yet he was such a gentle soul that he was easily lulled and fooled by a fury of nature which he could not possibly understand.  Now, near the bows, he notices the odd phosphorescence of rising spray that occasionally happened at sea and he shuddered at its unnatural ghostly appearance.  Out in the darkness a blast of air, displaced by the manic force of surging water, struck him and deprived him of breath.  There was something in the odour of it that went beyond ozone and reeked of a deep, unclean animal.  He ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of his lips and the fearful salt of his own sweat bled though the mere taste of sea spray.

   Something uncalled for was happening.  The wind turned around and targeted him and he was physically shaken.  During the assault by this wild maelstrom he urgently wanted to know where exactly he was in this wild sea.  Somewhere vague between the Greek and Turkish islands, weaving between time and geography.  He knew they were due to disembark in two days time and he was panicked to discover he did not know their next port of call.  He stood rooted until the storm eventually began to fail and in its decline an odd transference occurred in his senses.  An exhilarating notion that the storm belonged to him vanished as he ego was besieged.  He felt that he now belonged to the dwindling storm, or perhaps something which the storm contained was fighting for possession of him. 

   It was such a strange realisation that he reeled against it, almost too late.  He staggered back from the rail and thudded into the cold wall behind.  The storm was over in a matter of minutes as he recovered, watching the waves decline and hearing the winds cease their howling.  Out in the dimness he saw a far off shape, deeply vague, which might have been land.  Overhead the clouds punctured in several places and offered crystalline stars, like icy jewels shown to tempt him into something ineffable.

   If he had not been able to lift himself up and stagger below decks he would have been lost in this lull between a storm and something worse.  By instinct he located his cabin in the warren of corridors, then locked the door behind him and kept the light strongly burning all night.  Next morning breakfast was sparsely attended and he was spared the burden of company until he was on his post muesli mug of black coffee.  A happy voice in his vicinity queried his wellness this morning as he looked rather ill.  The priest looked up suspiciously and saw a jovial young officer, whose name he could not remember. 

    Plummer muttered something about not sleeping well and hoped that the interloper would leave it at that.  He weakly replied that he suffered from a symphony of bad dreams all night, which admission had the desired effect of removing the man from his presence.  But he was replaced by something worse, because the Weird Sisters entered the dining room.  Their nickname was not his invention, but the name had lodged in his head and prevented their actual names being summoned up easily.

   Weird Sister One beamed as she flounced in, then cast a caustic eye around the room, deciding that there was no-one worth continuing her charisma for.  Then she dragged her smaller but equally horrible cohort to an isolated table which had a birds-eye view of all other diners.  She did examine him with a bleak glance (weighed and found wanting), before letting her companion pull out her chair in a chivalrous fashion and left her sit down in a very ladylike movement.   

    Plummer picked at his croissant in an un-appetised way, unwillingly drawn to the two women.  He had been told that they were actors in a soap opera in the U.K. and they had come on board as a respite from their punishing schedule, poor lambs.  The opinion among the crew was that they had come onto this budget cruise in error and they had really intended to go on a five star Caribbean odyssey.  They, or more likely a hapless personal assistant still getting their arse kicked, had made a booking error and all on board had to suffer the consequences.  Not only were the pair grander than Russian archduchesses, they made everyone aware of their importance and treated the Asian crew members in a shockingly racist manner.  His knowledge of soap operas was sketchy, but he knew their characters were supposed to be salt of the earth types, which made their non-fictional pretensions even more grotesque.

   He received a grudging half nod from the smaller actress when the other was not looking and reciprocated wanly with a wave.  They only paid full attention to him, or pretended to, when he was in the company of one of the senior officers.  It was a good thing they had not chosen to educate themselves because he wouldn’t have been able to withstand their dead eyes fixed on him during a lecture.  He watched with despairing amusement as a hapless Indonesian waiter delivered their Full English fry ups, and their disgusted expressions acted as magical x-rays, cutting through their caked make up and revealing, even at a distance, their true ages and dispositions.  After the man had gone they prodded the food around their plates and mouthed vindictive displeasure about it.

   For unknown reasons the sight conjured up in his mind the incident when Ulysses descended into the underworld and was surrounded by the clamouring dead who were demanding their libations of blood.  This in turn got him thinking about the prospects of his next meaningless lecture and he shuddered at the prospect.  The weather was sullen that day and the swell appeared like a cauldron of lead.  No one played any jovial games on deck and the uncovered swimming pool was lifeless except, he noticed, for one or two bizarrely incongruous frogs which must have been lifted by far off whirlwinds and deposited here as unwanted offerings.  When found they were fished out and dumped overboard.

    Sure enough, Poseiden was unhappy at the treatment of his protected creatures.  Just when all on board reverted to their natural smug atheism, the winds picked up and they entered another raging tempest, worse than the one the night before.  He leapt at the opportunity like an errant schoolboy, aware than he was deliciously damning himself by skipping out of his planned responsibilities.  He looked into his lecture room, saw that the only attendees were two old blokes asleep and nodding with the rollercoaster actions of the ship, then turned in his tracks and laughed out loud.

   The deck was like a dissolved skating rink where only lunatics would dare to linger.  Plummer happily tested it.  He was thrown in every direction, as if tossed by an unseen rodeo pony.  To his amusement he saw the two old actresses perilously ahead.  They seemed very drunk and the actions of wind and wave made them marionettes performing the strangest ballet, like dervishes or characters inhabited by arcane spirits in ancient mystery cults.  He approached them at an angle, not intentionally, but drawn and pushed there by elemental powers.

    They stopped dancing and clutched on to the rails.  Their eyes were wide as soup plates, reflecting the little light in the glimmering dark. They were saying something and pointing down at the boiling sea, as if he could do anything about it.  He struggled to hear what they were saying and when he did, could not believe he was hearing it.

    ‘Darkies,’ the older, awful woman was shouting.  (For one moment he thought she was drunkenly yelling darkness.  But no.)  ‘There’s loads and loads of bloody wogs down there in little boats.’

   Plummer peeped over the edge reluctantly, unwilling to give credence to their apparent hallucinations.  It seemed that they were speaking the truth.  He had heard something vague the other day about refugees taking to boats and perilously crossing the Mediterranean and the Aegean.  But he had paid little attention to the insipient disaster in the news headlines, God forgive him and bless them.   He ran, or rather staggered, to raise the alarm.  Behind him, the actresses were calling out useless condolences to the drifters, almost as if they were trying to recruit tem into their fan club.

   ‘You see,’ Captain Johannsen said later, after the floating detritus of humanity had been rescued and tended to.  ‘There was a specific purpose out there waiting for you here after all.’

   He wanted to say that he hardly thought so, but he had so little strength after the bout of pneumonia that he could not respond.  Everyone agreed that he had done wonders helping those survivors who came aboard, making sure they were all tended to with food and clothing and care.  He worked tirelessly for two days until the illness took him.

   ‘Mind you,’ the captain continued.  ‘You’ve come out of it rather roughly (supposing that you are going to pull through).  Our actress friends have done better.  A wonderful lot of publicity from the journalists they alerted.  We had paparazzi come aboard at Athens, until I threw them off two hours later.’

   He waited for the priest to speak, but nothing came.  Then he bit his lower lip, under the shadow of the steel moustache, unaccountably coy.  His large frame bent, tremulous, over the bed bound man and he whispered in his ear:

   ‘I heard it also.’

   Plummer closed his eyes and tried not to recall, but it was entwined through the roots of his mind, a permanent and ever growing vine, this memory.  Some time after the poor people had been fished out, and after their immediate needs had been attended to, hours later, perhaps days, he had crept out onto deck after dark.

    The bad weather had dissipated into unnatural beauty and stillness.  There was a moon out and he should have been able to see for miles.  Yet there was some obfuscation in the actual air, not mist, a veil of drunkenness or similar, heady and dizzying.  It made the light obscure, but did not stop the sole voice piercing through, which should have been heard by everyone in the world, but which was aimed directly at him.

   Plummer translated it chillingly even as the ancient Greek syllables sunk into his head:

   ‘Traveller in the path of Thamus, hear this.  Time has turned again.  The God of the Christians is gone into darkness.  Tell them when you reach Pallodes that he has come again, the Great God Pan is arisen.’

   It was a chilling reversal of the old legend told by Plutarch, of a blessed and cursed voyager in the time of the Emperor Tiberious, who heard the dead of Pan announced uncannily across the waves at the moment when Jesus Christ was born. 

    Christianssen grabbed his arm, like ice.

    ‘Funny, I didn’t know what was being said, but I knew exactly what it meant,’ he said.  ‘But what do you think it means to the world now?’