MONDAY: The Hagiopol

BY O. L. TRETHYN

Copyright is held by the author.

AFTER WE became gods, when time was still wet clay in our hands, humankind did what we do best: we ached for ages of lost mystery, and traditions long buried. It was in this fit of nostalgia that the Hagiopol was built. It stands as a monument to all we have left behind. At its peak it drew billions to this backwater of space, but even derelict its attraction is undeniable. I find myself questioning why I have come here. I suppose I am part archaeologist, part disaster tourist, part scandalized onlooker. I come because it is impossible to believe such a place is real, without having seen it.

Even now it is undoubtedly a miracle. On a nameless desert world, 12 cities shelter from the light of a poison sun. Rouen is here, and Rome. Canterbury borders Kolkata. Within each dome, martyrdom is immaculately recreated. In Rouen I taste piss and smoke on the air, in Canterbury sleet tick-ticks against the windows of the cathedral. Every detail is perfect. Pilgrimage is preserved forever; here, Christianity defies entropy.

Yet, though I walk from Alexandria to Aralvaimozhi, I never escape the hum of the engines that keep the place running. Once every three days they leap, snatching Jeanne from flames, Thomas from blood-soaked cobbles, Devasahayam from the point of a gun. I am reminded this is a place of death — 12 deaths restaged through millennia.

Jeanne d’Arc dies for the 24,000th time and I ask myself: what does she die for? The church that killed her, which later lovingly replicated her execution, has long since folded under the weight of its sins. Still her faith shines as in 1431, and on her pyre she feels ecstasy greater than I have ever known. Time judders, her memory dissipates and in three days her joy will return to her, undimmed by experience.

Am I wrong to envy her oblivion? Once I think I might have pitied her: a lab-grown facsimile of a long-dead woman, born for the sole purpose of dying a brutal death. Jeanne d’Arc — the real Jeanne d’Arc — only burned once. Thomas à Becket only once saw the communion wine ripped from his hands, cast down the church steps, Christ’s blood spilt in a red foreshadowing of his own. Yet there is no irony in the martyrdom of the simulacra; there is no sly wink to the pious and the tourists who gather to witness their faith. While the rest of us sink back through our own histories, dream of lost golden ages, exhume the ruins of dead empires, endlessly repeat their mistakes, only these 12 saints are free of the great joke of it all. Only they have escaped the horror of watching civilization slide into the same calamities time and time again. While the rest of us see doom writ across the stars, the 12 may be the last humans in all creation who live in the innocent certitude of heaven. Who can say we live better than they?

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O.L. Trethyn is a British teacher, writer, and Ursula Le Guin obsessive living in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Trethyn writes mainly about monstrosity and gender in fantastical settings that draw from Classical and Brythonic mythology. They have long abandoned Twitter but can be contacted through Instagram at @that.olly.