Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Chinma laughed. "Ground never hurt me, either!"

It took a monkey's sneeze to destroy your world, thought Cecily. "You have the climbing experience to be safe in the trees. Mark doesn't. It's sensible for him to be afraid of climbing trees—especially climbing as high as you do, where the branches are so small. But he's brave about other things, you'll see."

Chinma looked at Mark coolly, as if sizing him up. Mark turned to his mother, keeping his expression calm, but obviously saying to her, Can you please get him off the subject of we?

"Is he a soldier?" asked Chinma.

"He's only thirteen years old!" said Cecily.

"In Liberia and Sierra Leone, they made them soldiers. Ten years old. Eight years old."

"And that was a monstrous crime," said Cecily. "Those men who forced little children to fight and kill, God has seen what they did and condemns the evil in their hearts."

"God sees but he does nothing," said Chinma.

"He forgives those soldier children for doing things they didn't understand." But Cecily knew as she said it that she wasn't answering what he was really saying.

"God is weak," said Chinma. "God is afraid."

He sounded so angry and contemptuous that at first Cecily wanted to cry out an affirmation of her faith: No, God is good! But how could she say that to this boy, after all he had suffered through?

Mark did cry out, "God is not afraid!" When he himself had felt under attack, Mark had said nothing; but when it was God being attacked, he could not keep his silence. Both responses said good things about Mark.

"Sometimes," said Cecily, "I hear my children quarreling, but I don't stop them, I keep doing my work, and after a while I hear them make peace with each other. If I stepped in every time they quarreled, then they would never learn how to make peace by themselves."

Chinma nodded—which Babe had warned Cecily did not mean agreement, but rather comprehension; or not even that: Nodding could simply mean, "I understand that you are through talking and I will pretend that I understood so you don't go to the trouble of saying it again."

"God lets us do terrible things to one another," said Cecily. "And he lets nature do terrible things, like this sneezing flu."

"The doctors said it isn't flu," said Chinma.

"The nictovirus. Monkey sickness. Does the name matter?" asked Cecily.

Chinma kept his face solemn when he said, "It mattered to the doctors. They made everybody stop saying 'sneezing flu.'"

Had she caught a twinkle in his eye? Was Chinma mocking the doctors?

Mark spoke up. "They can't cure it, so all they can do is make everybody call it by the name they chose." God, apparently, Mark would defend; the doctors were on their own.

"Let me tell you something," said Cecily. "Back in the days of the Roman Empire, Christians were still a small minority when a plague struck. Very much like the sneezing monkey flu." Which won a brief smile from Chinma—and an eye-roll from Mark, as if to say, What are you doing, joking about this disease that he brought back from the jungle and that killed half his family?

"The plague was very bad," Cecily went on. "About a third of the people who caught it died. It terrified everybody. The rich fled the cities and went to their country estates. Even the doctors ran away, because they couldn't cure it. If a family member got sick, the family would lock them in a room, or throw them out of the house, or run away from the house so they wouldn't all catch the disease."

"Come on," said Mark.

"Families in the Roman Empire weren't as close as ours are," said Cecily. "Husbands were often twenty years older than their wives. They practiced infanticide, they treated daughters as if they had no value, husbands could order their wives to have an abortion even though they knew it might well kill her. They didn't value the kind of family loyalty we have."

Mark still looked skeptical. Cecily figured that was a good thing, that he had a hard time believing families could be as uncaring as they were in the days of the Roman Empire.

Chinma, for his part, had no trouble believing this. He was nodding, more to himself than to her.

"But among the Christians," said Cecily, "things were different. Women were valued. Infanticide and abortion were forbidden. And when a family member got sick, the rest of the family took care of him, even though they knew they might easily catch the disease themselves and die from it."

Now it was Chinma's turn to look skeptical, while Mark was reassured.

"They really did—the Roman writers of the time, even the ones who hated Christians, commented on the fact that not only did Christians nurse one another through the plague, they even went and took care of sick pagans, not just their pagan friends, but total strangers."

"And God protected them, right?" said Mark.