The Shattered Mosaic

They walked all night and came down out of the hills at sunrise onto a wide flat plain. Inquirer took it for a paved road at first. Then he saw it was paved with pictures.

In every direction, as far as he could see, the ground was mosaic, millions on millions of tiny squares of colored stone and glass and gold set in mortar. Near his feet the tiles made a great river, blue and silver. A little further off they made a mountain with fire on top, and further still a garden, a city, a sea with a ship on it, a man on a cross. The pictures ran into one another and went on and on until the morning haze swallowed them.

But it was broken. Great patches all over the plain had been torn up. There were holes where tiles had been priced out and bare grey mortar where whole scenes had been, and loose tiles lay scattered everywhere. In places there were only one or two stones left of a picture and you couldn’t tell what it had been.

Plain-Sense stood at the edge with his hands in his pockets, looking out at it.

“The Shattered Mosaic. It’s the Book, laid out flat. Every picture’s a passage, and they all run into each other because that’s how it was written. Not in bits. In wholes that flow.” He crouched and touched a stone. “And this is what they’ve done to it.”

“Who?”

Plain-Sense nodded out across the plain. Far off, small figures were moving among the tiles, stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening. They were picking things up.

“The Snatchers.”

They hadn’t gone a mile into the Mosaic before they met the first one.

He was a cheerful little man pushing a cart heaped with small wooden boxes, painted in bright colors, with slots in their lids. The sign on the cart said: Promise-Boxes! A Word From God For Every Day! Pick One, Any One! Only A Penny!

“Morning, gents! Pilgrims, by the look of you. You’ll want a Promise-Box for the road. Look here.” He opened one. It was packed with tiny cards rolled up like scrolls. “Every card’s a verse, and every verse comes straight off the Mosaic. Picked ‘em myself! Pull one out each morning and there’s your word for the day. Go on, sir, have a go. No charge.”

Inquirer, curious, pulled one out. It said: I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

“There you go!” The little man was delighted. “Isn’t that grand? You can do anything! Climb any mountain, win any race, pass any exam, make your fortune! Christ’ll give you the strength!”

Plain-Sense held out his hand for the card. Then he walked a few steps off the road to a place where part of the Mosaic was still whole, a picture of a man in chains in a small dark room, writing a letter. He knelt and ran his finger along the tiles, reading.

“Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

He looked up. “Paul’s in prison. He’s thanking the church for a gift of money and telling them he’d have managed without it. He’s learned to be content hungry or full, poor or comfortable. That’s the all things. He can bear all of it, going without and having plenty, by Christ’s strength. It isn’t about winning races. It’s about being content when you lose them.”

The little man’s smile wobbled. “Well. Well, it’s close. Same sort of spirit.”

“It’s the opposite spirit,” said Plain-Sense. “Paul’s learning to be content without getting what he wants. Your card says Christ’ll help you get what you want. It’s the same tile, but you’ve taken it out of its picture and put it in another one, and now it’s showing something it was never part of.”

He handed the card back. The little man put it away in the box very slowly, and didn’t offer them another.

They went on, and the further in they got the worse the damage was and the more Snatchers there were.

They were small, quick, stooping creatures in grey smocks with chisels and little leather bags, and they went over the Mosaic like magpies. Whenever a bright tile caught their eye they pounced, chiseled it loose, popped it in the bag, and darted off to the next one. Not one of them ever looked at the picture the tile came from. They looked only at the tile.

Inquirer watched one working on a big picture of a prophet speaking to a crowd of captives. It priced loose a single gold tile and held it up to the light, cackling, and Inquirer could read it from where he stood: For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

“Mine!” it squealed. “Mine, mine! God’s got a plan for me! Peace for me! A lovely future for me!” And it stuffed the tile in its bag and scuttled away.

Plain-Sense went over to the hole it had left and looked at the picture round it.

“Read the tiles round the hole.”

Inquirer bent down and read. The picture was a letter, sent from Jerusalem to the Jews who had been carried off captive to Babylon. Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them… that ye may be increased there, and not diminished… For thus saith the Lord, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.

“Seventy years,” Inquirer said slowly. “He’s telling them they’re going to stay in exile. Seventy years of it. Most of them will die in Babylon. And then He’ll bring the nation home.”

“That’s right. It’s a promise to a whole people that God hasn’t forgotten them, even though they’ve a long time to suffer first. It’s a true promise, and it tells you something real about God’s faithfulness that you and I can lean on. But it doesn’t say, I’ll give you personally a pleasant life starting now. If anything it says the reverse. Settle in. It’ll be a long while. But I haven’t abandoned you. That creature took the comfort and left the seventy years lying on the ground.”

Further on they came to a place where the Mosaic hadn’t been torn up so much as cut. Somebody had taken a fine saw and run it through the pictures in dead straight lines, and every tile along each cut had been split neatly in two.

In the middle of the damage sat a lean, sour man on a camp-stool with a jeweler’s saw in his hand and a heap of half-tiles beside him, sawing away.

“That’s Half-Verse,” Plain-Sense muttered. “Worst of the lot. The Snatchers only take whole tiles. He cuts them in half.”

Half-Verse looked up with a sneer. “Pilgrims. Come to admire my work? Look at this one.” He held up a half-tile. It said: There is no God. “Straight out of the Book, that. Psalm fourteen, verse one. There is no God. The Book says so, so it must be true. Ha! What do you make of that?”

The other half had fallen face up next to the stool. Inquirer picked it up. It said: The fool hath said in his heart.

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,” he read. “You’ve cut off who’s saying it.”

“I’ve cut off what I don’t like,” said Half-Verse, and went back to sawing. “Everybody does. I’m just honest about it.”

He took up another tile and sawed it neatly. Touch not; taste not; handle not, it read. “There’s a command for you. Paul says touch not, taste not! Very strict man, Paul. No wine, no dancing, no nothing.”

Plain-Sense knelt and found the rest of that picture. “Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?”

He stood up. “Paul’s quoting the false teachers. He’s poking fun at their rules. He’s saying, why on earth would you live by that sort of thing? You’ve taken the words he was arguing against and put them in his mouth.”

Half-Verse shrugged. “Words are words, and they’re in the Book. I can quote the Book for anything. I can quote it for murder. Judas went and hanged himself. Go, and do thou likewise. Ha! See? Two tiles, side by side.”

He laughed, a dry rasping laugh like his saw, and bent over his work again.

Inquirer stood watching him a long time.

“He’s a joke,” he said to Plain-Sense as they walked away. “He’s so obviously wrong. Nobody would really believe him.”

“Nobody believes him, no. But he’s only doing on purpose what the Snatchers do by accident and the Promise-Box man does to be kind. The Snatcher with the Jeremiah tile didn’t mean any harm, and neither did the little man with the cart. It’s the same saw, that’s all. They’ve just got it in gentler hands.”

That evening they camped on a stretch of the Mosaic that was still whole, a long flowing picture of a man writing a letter by lamplight, and Plain-Sense got a small fire going on a bare patch of mortar.

While he was making tea Inquirer noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Here and there across the Mosaic ran thin lines of black stone that weren’t part of the pictures. They cut across them in odd places, sometimes slap through the middle of a scene, and every so often beside a line there was a little number set in plain grey tiles quite unlike the rest.

“What are those?”

“Ah,” said Plain-Sense, pleased. “I wondered if you’d spot them. Those are the Surveyor’s lines. Chapters and verses.”

“Aren’t they part of the Book?”

“No, and most pilgrims don’t know it. The men who wrote the Book didn’t write in chapters and verses. Paul wrote letters. Moses wrote long histories and law-codes. The prophets wrote poems and speeches. None of them put numbers in. The chapter lines went in long afterwards, more than a thousand years afterwards, put in by a bishop who wanted a way to find his place. The verse numbers came later still. A printer added them, and they say he marked some of them on horseback, riding between towns. You can tell. Some fall in very odd places.”

He pointed. Not far from their fire a black line ran straight across a picture of a man talking to a crowd, right between the two halves of what he was saying.

“That’s First Corinthians, end of twelve and start of thirteen. And yet shew I unto you a more excellent way. Then the line. Then Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity… People read the love chapter at weddings as if it stood on its own, a nice poem about romance. It’s not about romance at all. It’s the middle of an argument about spiritual gifts, in a church that was squabbling over who had the most impressive ones. Paul’s saying you can have every gift going, and if you don’t love each other you’re just making a racket. The line makes it look like a new subject. It isn’t. It’s the same subject getting to its point.”

“So the numbers are wrong?”

“They’re useful. I’d hate to have to find my way round the Book without them. But they’re signposts, not walls. The Snatchers think every numbered tile’s a little world of its own, and that’s half their trouble. You have to read across the lines. Paragraphs, arguments, stories, whole books. Read it the way the man wrote it.”

They slept by the fire. In the night Inquirer woke suddenly with the feeling that something was wrong.

The fire was down to embers, and in the last red glow he saw grey shapes all round them, dozens of Snatchers crouched in a ring with their eyes glinting. One of them had his pack open and was pulling his things out one at a time: the Charter, the clay lamp, the lexicons. As he watched, it drew out the old black-boarded Book from the cellar and held it up, chittering.

“No!” he shouted, and jumped up.

They were far too quick for him. The Snatcher tossed the Book to another, which tossed it to another, and before he could get his hands on any of them a dozen chisels flashed. The old binding was cut through and the pages were flying loose in the wind. Then, to his horror, they started cutting the pages themselves, slicing them into strips verse by verse, and each one grabbed a fistful of strips and ran.

He ran after them shouting, and Plain-Sense was up too with his surveyor’s chain, but the Snatchers scattered every which way across the dark Mosaic, giggling, and in a moment they were gone. All that was left was a litter of paper strips blowing over the tiles, each with one verse on it.

Inquirer went down on his knees and started gathering them up with shaking hands. That was a good copy, he kept thinking. That was how I started.

He picked up perhaps a hundred strips and laid them out on the mortar by the embers and tried to put them in order, and couldn’t. Without the pages round them he had no idea which came before which. One strip said Therefore. Just that: Therefore. He couldn’t tell what it was there for.

“You won’t do it like that,” said a voice. “Not in the dark, and not in a hurry.”

An old man had walked out of the night into the firelight. He was short and broad, with forearms like a blacksmith’s, in a mason’s apron white with mortar-dust, and a bag of tools hung at his belt: trowels, little hammers, pots of glue, a set of fine brushes. He knelt down next to Inquirer and looked at the strips.

“I’m Master Context. I restore the Mosaic. I was at it before the Snatchers came and I’ll be at it after they’ve gone. Now. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

He picked up the strip that said Therefore.

“That’s the most important word in the whole pile, and you don’t know where it goes, do you? Nor would anybody. A therefore always points back. It says, because of what I’ve just told you, here’s what follows. So you have to know what came before it, or it’s nothing. Romans twelve starts with one. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice. Therefore what? Therefore everything in chapters one to eleven. All the mercy and grace, all the wrath and justification and adoption and election, the whole lot of it is standing behind that one word. Snatch Romans twelve verse one on its own and you’ve got a command with no reason under it. Duty with no mercy. And that’ll kill a man.”

He set the Therefore strip down carefully at the head of the pile and began on the rest, sorting slowly and patiently by the light of the embers and Inquirer’s lantern.

“There’s an order to my work,” he said as he went. “Same every time. I start small and work outward in rings, like a stone dropped in a pond. First ring’s the sentence. What’s the verb? Who’s the subject? What’s it saying? Second ring’s the paragraph. What sentences are round it, and what’s the argument up to? Mind the little words, the joints: for, but, therefore, so that, because. They tell you how one thought hangs off another. Third ring’s the section. Where are we in the book, what’s the bigger movement? Fourth ring’s the whole book. What’s it about, why was it written, who wrote it and how does he think, in his other books too? There’s a fifth ring as well, the whole Mosaic, but that’s for later on your road. That’s for a friend you’ll meet in the Concordance Country.”

“How can you tell where each strip goes?”

“By the edges. Every strip fits the ones next to it. The thought runs on from one to the next, so you read the end of this one and look for the strip whose beginning answers it.” He held two up side by side. “See? Who is he that condemneth? And then It is Christ that died. The one asks and the next one answers. They belong together. A Snatcher can’t see that, because he only ever reads the tile in his hand. But the meaning’s not only in the tiles. It’s in how they join.”

The three of them worked the rest of the night. Plain-Sense was good at it, nearly as good as the old mason. Inquirer was slow at first, but as the hours went by he started to feel the edges of the thoughts, the way one clause leaned on another, the way an argument climbed. He found a strip beginning For and knew straight off it was giving the reason for the one before. He found one beginning But God and knew something hopeless had come before it and something wonderful was coming after.

By the time dawn came up grey over the Mosaic they had laid out a column of strips three feet long on the mortar beside the dead fire. It was the Letter to the Ephesians, the first three chapters, very nearly whole.

Inquirer sat back on his heels and read it straight through as one letter, without stopping.

He told me on the wall that he cried. He had known Ephesians all his life back home. He had polished every verse of it. He had heard by grace are ye saved through faith a thousand times as a tile on its own, a pleasant thought. He had never heard it as the peak of one long, soaring sentence that starts with men dead in trespasses and sins, or heard it come straight after the great hinge, But God, who is rich in mercy. He had never seen it run on into we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and from there into the pulling down of the wall between Jew and Gentile, and the whole thing rise to Paul’s prayer that they might know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge. It wasn’t a box of tiles. It was one great picture, and every tile in it meant far more in the picture than it had ever meant on its own.

“That’s context,” said Master Context, watching his face. “Not a rule. A way of reading. You read it the way it was written, in wholes, and then you find out the parts were never small.”

They hadn’t finished admiring it when the Snatchers came back.

They came at a run from three directions, a grey tide of them, chittering and waving chisels. They had seen the column of strips gleaming in the dawn and they wanted it. There were more of them than ever, and Half-Verse himself was running at the front with his jeweler’s saw.

“Get behind me,” said Master Context, quite calmly. He stood up and pulled a long, broad-bladed trowel from his belt.

The first Snatchers reached him and stooped to grab the strips. Master Context didn’t hit them. He did something odder. With quick sweeps of the trowel he laid a thin bed of fresh mortar over the strips and pressed them in, and wherever the mortar touched, the strips stuck fast. They weren’t loose pieces any more. They were part of the floor, part of the Mosaic, set into the picture round them.

The Snatchers clawed at them and couldn’t shift them. A strip set into its context couldn’t be priced out with any chisel they had. All they could do was pick at it and squeal.

Half-Verse went for the column with his saw. Plain-Sense stepped in front of him and swung the surveyor’s chain, not at Half-Verse but at the saw, and the chain wrapped round the blade and yanked it out of his hand. The saw went spinning off across the Mosaic and dropped into a crack in the mortar.

Half-Verse stood there empty-handed, glaring.

“You can’t keep it all mortared down,” he hissed. “There’s too much of it. Miles of it. We’ll still be here when you’ve gone. And every pilgrim after you is going to pick up a tile because it’s pretty and walk off with it and never look at the picture. You know they will.”

“Some will,” said Master Context. “Some won’t. The ones who won’t are the ones who’ll learn to read. That’s enough.”

Half-Verse spat on the tiles and turned and went off into the plain, and the grey Snatchers trailed after him.

They couldn’t save all of the old Book. The Snatchers had made off with too many strips. When they had done everything they could, they had Ephesians, most of the Psalms, about half of Mark, and a great many odd scraps. Master Context gathered it all up and tied it roughly with a strip of leather. The strips were mortared to one another along their edges, so each passage was one piece and couldn’t be cut again.

“There. It’s not what it was. But it’s yours, and what’s left of it is whole. And you’ve got the Book the copyists gave you. Read that one the way you read this last night. In wholes.”

Inquirer held the rough bundle a long while before he put it away in his pack.

“I’ll miss it. It was how I started.”

“It was how you started,” Master Context agreed. “But I’ll tell you something. You read more of it last night than you did in forty years of polishing.”

The old mason walked them to the eastern edge of the Mosaic, where the pictures stopped and the road went on over open grass.

“There’s a country ahead of you where the Book itself changes shape. Some of it sings. Some of it tells stories. Some gives laws, some writes letters, some sees visions. You’ve learned here to read a thing in its place in the picture. There you’ll learn the pictures aren’t all made the same way. Plain-Sense knows a bit about it.” He clapped the young man on the shoulder. “Keep an eye on him there, mind. He reads everything plainly, and that’s his strength. But not everything in the Book’s written plain, and he knows it. Don’t you, lad?”

Plain-Sense laughed. “I’m learning, Master.”

“Good. Keep at it.” He turned to Inquirer and put a broad, dusty hand on his shoulder. “And you. Remember the therefore. Always look back and see what it’s there for. That’s half of reading.”

Then he went back into the Shattered Mosaic with his trowel and his bag of glue, and the two pilgrims went on east.

Inquirer looked back once from the top of a little rise. Far off among the broken pictures he could see the old mason kneeling, patient as ever, laying fresh mortar round a single tile. And all round him, as far as the eye could reach, small grey figures were stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening, in the morning sun.