Jack Andrews is a student training to be a Catholic missionary in Equestria. With Lyra's help, he's going to introduce the ponies to the joys of Christmas, or at least to the joys of eggnog.
Jack Andrews is a student training to be a Catholic missionary in Equestria. Lyra Heartstrings is a starving artist trying to make it in Canterlot's music scene. With Lyra's help, Jack is going to introduce the ponies to the joys of Christmas.
Or, if that doesn't work, he'll at least introduce them to the joys of eggnog.
“Mister Andrews,” said Bishop Van de Velde to me as he elbowed his way into his seat at the crowded breakfast table, “you are going to host a Christmas pageant for the ponies.”
My coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. I stared at him across my cereal and tried, in spite of the early-morning sluggishness of my mind, to parse the words that His Excellency had just spoken in his thick Belgian accent.
“I’m going to what now?”
“A pageant. A Christmas pageant. I expect you to organize it.” He glanced at his watch. “You have a week.”
I carefully lowered my spoonful of milk and mush, which had begun trembling. “And why me, exactly—?”
“Because I notice you are getting along well with some of the ponies.”
“Ah—”
“And you seem to have a lot of free time.”
“Ah—”
“See what you can do to incorporate the local customs, would you? Talk to that pony friend of yours, what’s her name—?”
“Lyra Heartstrings.”
“Yes, quite.”
“But she’s not a convert.”
“All the better.” And just like that, he dug into his plate of eggs and toast.
I gazed for a moment at his skullcap, which floated in the midst of his mass of unruly white hair like a tiny desert island in a storm-whipped sea. “Why don’t you ask Sire August? Since he is a pony—”
To silence me, the bishop raised one hand, which still gripped an egg-stained fork. “Mister Andrews”—the added emphasis on the mister meant trouble—“I would not assign you such a task if I did not have full confidence that you could complete it. You can consider this a lesson in the spiritual discipline of obedience.”
There it was: he had played the obedience card, and thus my hands were tied. “Ah, dammit. Er, darn it. Er, I mean, yes, Your Excellency, of course. I will get on that right away.”
He bestowed upon me a warm smile and once again set forth to demolish his breakfast.
To make a long story short, I was a seminarian, a student training to be a Catholic priest, and I was currently in the middle of a yearlong immersion program in the newly established Diocese of Canterlot. Because the ponies spoke a language strikingly like American English, the Church had hand-picked purportedly promising American seminarians for this job, and someone, probably as a result of temporary insanity, had picked me. The idea was that, if I didn’t go crazy after a year here, I must be fit to be a priest for ponies and would thenceforth get stuck in some fledgling church in a remote equine village where I would in all likelihood never see another human being for the rest of my life. It was good times.
A few hours after my morning conversation with the bishop, I skipped class and made my way up and down innumerable stairs in Canterlot’s low-class, low-rent north end, The Crags. The Crags were a maze of winding paths and narrow staircases linking together an endless series of stilt-propped brownstones that looked ready to tumble from the cliff. Now that the pegasus ponies had unleashed the full brunt of winter on Equestria, these passageways were especially hazardous, coated as they were with slush and ice.
To arm myself against the cold, I had replaced my usual biretta with a felt fedora, added a cloak to my woolen winter cassock, and wrapped a red scarf about my throat. Tall, gangly, and dressed head-to-toe in black, I’ve little doubt that I presented an intimidating figure to all the four-legged creatures I met; a few cows, donkeys, and ponies indicated as much when they scurried out of my path upon glimpsing me staggering down the shadowed and snow-coated alleyways.
At last, after a few false turns and dead-ends, I made my way to a complex called the Dales, climbed a rickety external wooden staircase to the fifth floor, and pounded on door 502.
I could hear the melancholy strains of a harp wafting from inside. They continued for a minute more after my knock, but then came the alternating clop-squeak of hooves against floorboards. The door flew open and enveloped me in warm air that smelled of freshly baked bread and stable leavings.
I swept the fedora from my head and bowed at the waist. “Milady.”
Lyra Heartstrings, looking shaggy in her winter coat, leaned against the doorframe and sighed. “Oh, it’s you, Jack. I thought so. Don’t you have class?”
“I’m ditching.”
“Can you afford it?”
“Princess Twilight will be angry at me for skipping her lecture on Equestrian history, but the wrath of the princess is both quick to rise and quick to dissipate. I have learned to take advantage of that.”
“I’m practicing for a recital, I’ll have you know.” She harrumphed and tipped her nose into the air, but I could tell the stuffiness was feigned.
“Ah,” I said, moving into the doorway, “but I am a missionary, which means I am here to lure you over to my way of thinking and my way of doing things, and that includes all my faults and vices, such as procrastination.”
She shook her head, but I could see a smile creeping its way onto her mouth, and she finally burst into a giggle. “Oh, fine. Come here.”
Many years ago, childhood trauma had bestowed upon me a fear of large animals; it was hard to believe that, seven months prior, the prospect of walking around a world full of ponies had frightened me nearly out of my wits, but now I was comfortable here, and I owed that mostly to the kindhearted mare standing in front of me. I had even picked up a few of the ponies’ cultural niceties, which I had come to think of as normal, so when Lyra raised her head toward me, I without hesitation bent down, and we sniffed each other’s faces.
“Cereal for breakfast again?” she asked. She enjoyed showing off her superior sense of smell with comments like that. To me, she always smelled the same—like a cross between a horse and crème de menthe.
“Mm hm. I’m trying to eat healthy.” I straightened and planted my hat on my head. “Are you free? I’d like to go out. We need to talk about a pageant.”
She huffed. “I should practice . . . oh, but Canterlot is so pretty this time of year.”
That meant I had her. She galloped back into the apartment and reappeared shortly with her neck enwrapped in a woolen scarf striped red and white like a candy cane. With her green coat, it made her look like a life-sized Christmas ornament. “Where are we going?”
“How about our usual byre?” I asked, and her face brightened.
Canterlot bustled all year long, but now it bustled with extra vigor. We strolled through the commercial district, where every shop was decked with lights, holly, and evergreen boughs. All the stores had tinsel-covered trees in their windows, and the many sweet shops displayed gingerbread villages, some complete with electric train sets or ice-skating rinks. All the ponies wore hats and scarves. A few had fuzzy winter coats, but most of Canterlot’s elite had clipped their fur and now shivered from the cold. Other animals were also out in numbers: cows lowed as they processed slowly down the roads with their heavy udders waving from side to side, and centaurs and minotaurs pushed aside lesser creatures as they made their way up and down the streets like great ships cutting through ice floes. The tourist season was long past, so I spotted only a few humans in the midst of the crowd. Over everything floated the savory scent of wintertime treats baking in the shops’ many ovens.
What still amazed me about the city was what I didn’t hear: I didn’t hear the roar of a motor, the honk of a horn, or the exasperated cursing of a driver. As packed as the streets were, Lyra and I could talk without raising our voices; and because this was Equestria, even in the closest press I didn’t worry about having my pocket picked.
More than once, we passed a pony or other creature, surrounded by a knot of onlookers, shouting from a soapbox. The ponies had no modern forms of mass communication, and they still regarded film reels and telegrams as novelties, so street preaching remained a popular way to broadcast philosophical or political ideas. Princess Celestia looked on human activity with suspicion—I, and most of the other missionaries, had been at least once to Canterlot Castle for “tea,” that is, a severe grilling—but she usually left the ponies to their own devices when it came to the press and public speech.
In fact, somewhere in this market district would be a soapbox with a Roman Catholic, usually but not always a pony convert, mounted on it. With permission from the castle, I had even manned that soapbox myself from time to time, but today I wanted to give it a wide berth, lest I be spotted and word get back to the bishop that I was absent from class. Word would get back to the bishop anyway, but I didn’t want it to get back now.
“Explain this pageant of yours to me,” said Lyra.
I lifted my hat and rubbed my forehead. “Ah, yes. Our dear bishop, you see, is always getting funny ideas. As it happens, your Hearth’s Warming Eve shares a day with our Christmas, and, as usual, there is a strange correspondence between our two worlds, so the holidays not only have the same date, but look superficially similar: in fact, all of Canterlot right now resembles a strip mall dressed up for the season.”
“What’s a strip mall?”
“An evil institution of which ponies should remain ignorant. Suffice to say, because the two holidays fall on the same day, the bishop has given me the unenviable task of melding them together, of producing perfect harmony—”
Lyra stopped for a moment to gaze into the window of a bakery. As she examined a rack of pumpkin pies, she said, “But if you already have a holiday on that day, why don’t you just do whatever you usually do? Nopony’s going to stop you.”
“We will, but you don’t quite understand the dilemma. See, if you celebrated Hearth’s Warming Eve by ripping open pregnant mothers or something like that, we would of course try to replace your nasty holiday with our more innocent one, but since it’s simply your founders’ day, we don’t have any business messing with it or telling our converts not to participate.”
She scowled sidelong at me and continued up the street. “You can be really gross sometimes, Jack.”
“Yes . . . sorry.” I jogged to catch up with her. “My point is, you can’t move your holiday, and we can’t move ours, so I have to find some way for the two to get along like old friends. We have to figure out how to have two holidays on one day.”
“Hm.” She paused in the middle of the street and tapped her chin. “Can’t you just celebrate one and then celebrate the other? Can’t you just go to a Hearth’s Warming Eve play and then after that do whatever it is you guys do?”
I tugged at my scarf. “That would be sensible, but the bishop is not sensible. He wants things ‘blended.’ He thinks that’s ‘enriching.’ This isn’t the worst of his ideas, admittedly; at the very least, it will produce less fallout than his attempt to canonize Bucephalus and Trigger. And let’s not forget the pony crucifix debacle.”
Lyra shuddered.
While Lyra described for me a typical Hearth’s Warming Eve celebration, we made our way to Canterlot’s east end and hiked a steep but well-maintained trail up to Byre Pierre, our favorite hangout. Nestled in one of the many small, fertile valleys that glaciers had ages ago scooped from the mountainside above Canterlot, the byre consisted of a small, cozy shop, a patio with outdoor tables, and a long, low barn containing several spacious stalls for the cows.
Ponies were avid milk drinkers, and they could talk about milk the way a man from Earth might talk about fine wine, so these byres, or cow barns, stood all over Equestria to cater to the ponies’ insatiable appetite for dairy products. The cows who lived in them often practiced rigorous diets and exercise routines to ensure that their milk had a certain flavor; in fact, the most coveted milk in all of Equestria, White Lightning, originated in the very byre toward which Lyra and I now climbed, where it sold for fifty bits per glass. It came from a mysterious and reclusive cow named Bossy, who, according to rumor, created its curious aroma and succulent flavor by eating nothing but sweet potatoes and habanero peppers.
Normally, Lyra and I liked to sit outside, but the weather no longer permitted, so we pushed our way into the warm shop, which smelled of sweet cream and cheese. The interior was cramped, and decorating every patch of wall or spot of counter were brackets holding fine china. The western wall of the shop was glass, so we had a wonderful view of the spires of Canterlot sprawling below. It was still beautiful even though the sky overhead was slate gray and the banners on the spires hung slack.
Lyra and I moved to a wrought-iron corner table, where I began divesting myself of my winter gear. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said as I pulled off my scarf. “See, we’ll have a Christmas play that starts off as usual, but then halfway through there’s a twist: it turns out that Smart Cookie, Pansy, and Clover are the same as the three wise men—”
I was interrupted when the bull in this china shop, Pierre himself, arrived with our menus. He was enormous, with a gold ring in his nose, dark brown fur, and long horns that protruded three feet from either side of his head. He hailed from Prance, one of Equestria’s innumerable vassal states, and he was also a louche fellow, at least by fastidious pony standards.
“Oh ho ho ho,” Pierre said with a wink as he slid the milk list in front of us, “if it is not my favorite mismatched lovebirds. And how are you today, monsieur and mademoiselle?”
“We’re just friends,” said Lyra.
“And I’m studying to be a priest,” I added.
Pierre ducked his great head low so that the curve of his horns enclosed our shoulders, and he stage-whispered, “Ah, but Lulu claims she has seen zuh two of you playing zuh hoofsie under zuh table, no? Oh ho ho ho!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, but I said, “The tip gets smaller with every comment, Pierre.”
He quickly lifted his head and snorted. “Ah, zuh customer is always right! Lulu must be mistaken. And what can I get zuh two of you zis morning? We have ice cream, malts, and cheese year round of course, but right now, zuh mint hot cocoa is most populaire. We make it with zuh sweetest milk and top it with zuh beaten heavy cream.” He lifted a hoof to his mouth and kissed it. “Ah! Magnifique!”
“Start us with a couple of samplers,” I said, “and we’ll move from there.”
“Oui, monsieur.” Pierre gave Lyra another wink and walked away. As he turned, he nearly cold-cocked me with one of his horns, but I ducked in time.
After he left, I looked over the milk list. Beside each milk was a picture of the cow who produced it, and under each picture was a short biography followed by a taster’s note. My eye fell upon the milk of Clarabelle, whose note read, “A full, heady drink with a light hint of strawberry and chestnut, with a chocolaty finish.”
Above that, I was unsurprised to read, “Clarabelle is a Jersey cow who enjoys snacking on strawberries, chestnuts, and chocolate.”
“You know,” I mused as I perused the list, “I’m suddenly in the mood for eggnog. ’Tis the season, after all. Do you think they have any?”
Lyra stared blankly across the table at me. “Egg what?”
“You’re kidding. You have candy canes, gingerbread houses, even Christmas trees—”
“You mean Hearth’s Warming trees?”
“Whatever. I mean you have all the superficial trappings of a commercialized American Christmas, so surely you have eggnog. You cannot have Christmas without eggnog.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“This is impossible. Pierre!” I thumped the table with my fist, and Lyra jumped.
Pierre, with frightening speed, appeared at our table with two wooden racks of miniature milk glasses hanging from the ends of his long horns. Lyra and I each took a rack and set it on the table. Lyra immediately started savoring the milk, but I scooted my chair closer to Pierre and said, “Please tell me you have eggnog.”
He replied with a deep frown. “Egg what, monsieur?”
“You have cream, ice cream, butter, cheese, milkshakes, and even hot cocoa, but you dare to tell me you have no eggnog?”
With his big brow deeply furrowed, he slowly shook his massive head, and I again had to duck one of his horns. “We serve milk, not eggs, monsieur. Perhaps—”
I slammed my fist on the table again, making the milk samples rattle.
“Jack!” Lyra hissed, but I ignored her.
“This is blasphemy!” I cried. “Heresy! As a future priest, or actually as a guy who’s one more disciplinary action away from getting kicked out of the seminary, I cannot bear to witness this kind of lewdness amongst the infidels!”
Pierre looked genuinely frightened. “If monsieur will calm down, perhaps I could—”
Lyra paused in her milk consumption long enough to glare at me and say, “He’s joking, Pierre.”
“Pierre.” I leaned on one of his horns and whispered confidentially into his ear. “What would you say if I told you I could introduce you to a milk drink from my world—a thick, sweet, delicious milk drink—which we consider an excellent beverage for exactly this time of year?”
A grin spread across Pierre’s muzzle, and I could almost see little dollar signs appearing in his widening eyes. “Ah, monsieur! If it is as you say, zuh ponies would line up for miles to taste zis unique drink, no? Oh ho ho ho!”
“Ho ho ho indeed, Pierre.” I gave his neck a friendly slap and turned to Lyra, who had already drunk half her rack of milk samples, and whose upper lip now sported a creamy band of white. “Lyra, are you any good in a kitchen?”
She hiccoughed. “Fair.”
“Great, because I’m lousy. Come with me. I’m no good at introducing ponies to Christianity, but I’ll introduce them to eggnog, by gum.”
The byre had an impressive kitchen where Pierre and his several cows transformed their premium milk into various delectable concoctions. When we walked in, six cows, all wearing aprons and with their heads wrapped in hairnets for some reason I couldn’t fathom, looked up from their work and gave us warm smiles. Lyra grabbed an apron of her own from a rack near the door and then joined my side as I, under the close supervision of Pierre, set about making a mess on one of the industrial-sized wooden countertops.
“Lyra,” I said, “you can’t make eggnog without breaking a few eggs. Separate us some yolks, would you?”
“But exactly what are we doing?” she asked.
“Ah! The recipe is simple.” I hauled down random ingredients from nearby shelves in the hopes of looking like I knew what I was doing and in the hopes of finding something useful. “It consists of egg, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and booze . . . I just wish I knew the proportions.”
“What are zees ‘boos’ of which you speak?” Pierre asked.
“Liquor, Pierre.”
“I do not think mademoiselle would appreciate it if I did that.”
“No! I mean alcohol. Uh, ethanol.”
“Ethanol?” cried Lyra, throwing her front hooves onto the countertop and pulling herself upright. “Isn’t that a cleaning liquid?”
“Ah,” said Pierre with a great nod. “It also forms in zuh barrels of preserved juice. Perhaps you want cider with zis eggnog, monsieur?”
I shook my head. “No, no, not cider. There’s a concentrated kind of cider, isn’t there? Somebody mentioned it to me—”
“Applejack?” Pierre asked. “But zis is only for cooking sauces or for use as a preservative.”
“Yes! Applejack! That would work. I think.”
Pierre made a face, but walked away to the far end of the kitchen and came back shortly with a large bottle full of brown liquid. When I pulled the cork, I could smell a faint hint of apples and a strong whiff of alcohol.
“Enough of that, monsieur,” Pierre warned me, “and you will go blind.”
“Perfect. That’s exactly the way I like it.”
“Humans eat some gross stuff,” said Lyra as she began cracking eggs over a bowl, “but maybe it would be good if we left out the applejack and added some sarsaparilla syrup.”
“Ah, I was thinking zuh same thing, mademoiselle!” Pierre cried.
“I knew it,” I muttered as I put the cork back on the bottle. “I knew you were going to ruin my eggnog with that stuff.”
The applejack was harsh on the throat, but when used sparingly, it wasn’t too bad with eggnog. After we went through several versions that were too sweet, too thick, or too thin, we at last designed a beverage that Pierre considered worthy of his byre, and he declared that he would put it on the menu the very next day. The eggnog with applejack he promised to call “Jack’s Special,” and Lyra’s disgusting version with sassafras he promised to call “Lyra’s Delight.”
“My two favorite customers are now my two favorite drinks,” he told us with tears in his big eyes. “You will be immortalized forever in zuh cuisine of Byre Pierre, your faces pictured together, eternally linked by a little pink heart—”
“If you do that,” I said, “I will kill you.”
Lyra only rolled her eyes, but Pierre reacted with shock, and I had to explain that I was joking.
Now once again bundled against the weather, Lyra and I marched back down the hill into Canterlot. It was early afternoon, and the crowds had grown even thicker. The noise in the street, though still muted compared to that of an American city, had risen to a low din.
“I better get back to the seminary,” I told Lyra. “If I make my afternoon classes, maybe the bishop will go easy.”
By “seminary,” I actually meant the School for Gifted Unicorns: when Bishop Van de Velde had asked permission to train priests in Canterlot, Princess Celestia had let him temporarily take over an unused wing of her private academy. It might have been an act of generosity, but it was more likely that she wanted to keep a close eye on us.
We cut our way through the broad market square, marking the center of which was a large fountain topped by an image of Princess Celestia rearing with her wings spread wide. The fountain was off for the winter, but gathered around its base was a crowd of ponies and other creatures listening to yet another of Canterlot’s street preachers.
I usually paid the preachers little mind, so I didn’t notice the stream of words coming from this one, but as we passed close, I distinctly heard “Jesus” and “Bethlehem,” and my stomach sank.
“Oh dammit,” I said. “I forgot I needed to avoid—”
“And here’s one of them now!” the preacher called. “One of our young human brethren who’s training to be one of our priests.”
I slumped. “I’m caught.”
Lyra laughed, but the pained look on her face bespoke sympathy.
The crowd turned to me and parted so that I could see the preacher himself: standing in the shadow of Celestia’s looming statue, he was a big-bodied, orange earth stallion with a cutie mark depicting a sun peeking from behind clouds. This was Sire August, one of our first pony converts and now a priest. Normally, he wore a Roman collar around his neck, but today he had it hidden under a scarf.
With head held high and mouth set in a firm line, Sire August stepped down from his soapbox and marched through the parted crowd like Moses walking through the Red Sea.
“Are you in trouble?” Lyra murmured out of the side of her mouth.
“Yes,” I murmured back. “But I knew that anyway.”
“Jack,” said Sire August as he approached me, “I was unaware that you had no morning classes this term.”
“Sire,” I said, clasping my hands together, “fancy meeting you here.”
He gave me a sharp glare before turning to Lyra, nickering, and dipping his head. “Miss Heartstrings, how are you?”
“I’m fine, August. And you?”
“Fine.” Sire August sniffed Lyra’s nose. Then he turned back to me and said, “Now, Jack—”
“Hey, what about me?” I pointed to my own nose.
He glared again, but nonetheless lifted his muzzle toward me. Because Sire August had spent several years on Earth where he’d learned human customs, he never tried to nuzzle humans or sniff their noses, but he couldn’t refuse a seminarian eager to adapt to the ponies’ ways.
I bent at the waist, put my nose to his, and inhaled. He smelled like any other horse.
“Jack, you’ve been drinking,” he said.
“Oh, crud. I forgot you could smell that.”
“Both of you have. Lyra smells like sarsaparilla, and you smell like alcohol. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?”
“We have been up at Byre Pierre, where I have been enriching Equestrian culture by introducing the cows to eggnog.”
Sire August closed his eyes and took a deep breath before pointing a hoof at me. “You ditched Princess Twilight’s history class.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“No buts. How many times does this make, Jack? Are you serious about your vocation or aren’t you?”
It was obvious both that Sire August had spent time on Earth and that he had been Catholic for a while. Ponies didn’t normally use words like vocation.
I looked away and mumbled, “I’m serious, but—”
“You are going to go home, and you are going to write a letter of apology to Princess Twilight. She’s a princess, Jack, and she has many important things to do, but she takes time out of her busy schedule to introduce foreigners like yourself to our kingdom and our culture. And here’s another thing.”
He reared, placed his front hooves on my shoulders, and got in my face. “You forget where you are. This is not the United States. This is not the United Kingdom. This is Equestria. There is no constitution, and there are no guaranteed liberties. Anything you can do, you can do only because the princesses say so. Catholic missionaries can operate here because Princess Celestia allowed it on my recommendation. When you disrespect a princess, such as by skipping her class, you make the bishop look bad, you make the Church look bad, and you make me look bad. Am I clear?”
I swallowed. “Yes, Sire.”
“What?”
“Yes, Sire.”
He dropped to all fours and turned away, but looked back over his shoulder to add, “Don’t forget the letter. I’ll ask Princess Twilight tomorrow if she received it.” And with that, he returned to his soapbox.
The crowd was silent, and everypony stared at Lyra and me.
I tipped my fedora and said, “You folks have a nice day.”
I walked Lyra back to her low-rent flat in The Crags. Equestria’s cities were safe, so I had never been able to make clear to Lyra why it was important for a male to walk a female all the way back to her door even though it meant I had to go about three miles out of my way, but this was one of the many eccentricities she allowed me.
“I am so, so sorry,” Lyra said for the fifth time. “I did not mean to get you in—”
“Hush. You didn’t get me in any trouble. I came to your place this morning, remember?”
“I should have told you to go home and go to class.” She looked away, frowning.
We were walking through a narrow alley flanked by shadowed doorways covered with low awnings, so I idly reached up and broke off a large icicle. “It’s not your fault. I should apologize for dragging you away from your harp.”
“I can’t believe August Vision told you off in front of everypony like that.”
“Ah, that was for show. Don’t worry about it. The bishop is a kindly, doddering old man, but he’s not without his cunning. He and Celestia are playing a long-term, slow-motion chess game. He wants the Church to have free rein, but she wants us under her thumb—er, hoof. She’s been very generous, but every favor she bestows means more power she has and less freedom we have. So when Princess Celestia calls up Princess Twilight to teach a history class to seminarians, the bishop has no excuse to refuse, but it causes him a problem because it puts him in debt to two princesses, see?”
“What does that have to do with August yelling at you?”
“Among the seminarians, I am, in spite of playing hooky, one of the best students, but I’m also a loose cannon. The bishop wants to keep me here because my psych profile says I rate high in ‘psychopathic deviancy,’ but not high enough to be a madman. That means I can think outside the box and adapt to new situations.”
“So you can learn our culture and get along with us, hm?”
“Exactly.”
“Then why do I find you so difficult?”
“Hush. It’s because, in addition to adapting, I can also make trouble. Sire August is the bishop’s right-hand stallion. When he disciplines me in public, word gets back to the palace, and when word gets back to the palace, Celestia knows that the bishop and the priests aren’t going to let someone like me run wild. Then she can’t use me as an excuse to clamp down on us. So it looks like he lost control, but he actually smoothed things over.”
Lyra tipped her head back and laughed. “You made most of that up.”
“Maybe I did, but Sire August is next in line to be bishop of Canterlot, so he probably wants to rein me in now to prevent me from causing him headaches later. Bishop Van de Velde wants the next bishop to be a pony, and so does Archbishop Maes back in Brussels, and so does, probably, the pope. Sire August is the natural pick.”
She nudged my hip with her shoulder. “Why does it matter?”
“Ah, there’s the rub.” I patted her withers and tossed the icicle down the alleyway to watch it shatter. “You don’t think it matters because you’re a pony. You’re sensible. You only care if someone can do his job. But we’re human, so we care about silly things like race. If the bishop of Canterlot is a pony, we get to congratulate ourselves for being accepting and open-minded and, most importantly, not racist.”
“What’s a ‘racist’?”
“Something else it’s best you don’t know about. Remember the uproar over the pony crucifix?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather not—”
“The bishop thought he was being ‘inclusive,’ but you and the other ponies didn’t know what the image meant, so all you saw was a bunch of black-robed men carrying a pony who’d been tortured to death—”
She winced. “Let’s not talk about that. I don’t see why you need to represent something like that anyway, pony or human.”
I froze in place. Lyra walked a few steps past me, but then turned and looked over her shoulder. “Jack?”
“What did you just say?” I asked.
“What? I said, pony or human, you don’t—”
“Pony or human!” I snapped my fingers. “I’ve got an idea!”
Her eyebrows slowly rose, and a grin spread over her muzzle. “Really? Good idea or bad?”
“Maybe both. The bishop’ll love it. It’s right up his alley.” I laughed, rubbed my hands together, and skipped in a circle. “Ah ha ha! Why didn’t I think of this before?”
“Jack?”
“Jesus was born in a barn!” I shouted. “A barn! Or maybe a cave. Or a room for animals attached to a house. One way or the other, he was born surrounded by animals! Well, presumably . . .”
“Jack?”
I cracked my knuckles, walked to Lyra, dropped to my knees, and grabbed her cheeks. “Lyra, it’s a stupid, wonderful idea that will please the bishop, and I owe it all to you. I could kiss you.”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t. But I could. Oh, Lyra, we are going to have a Christmas pageant with the roles reversed!”
She giggled and backed out of my grip. “What has gotten into you? All at once, you’re giddy as a schoolcolt!”
“I need ponies, cows, donkeys, and mules to play Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the three wise men. In fact, let’s get some sheep to play the shepherds. That would be great.”
“Play who?”
“Never mind. I’ll explain later. I need you to help me recruit. Will you?”
“I guess, but—”
“As for the other part, leave that to me.” I jumped to my feet, thrust my chest out, and put my hands to my hips. “The humans are going to play the farm animals. This is my decision, and I’m in charge, so there. Also, we’ll serve eggnog.”
Lyra started laughing again, and she didn’t stop. She fell over backwards laughing. I nodded and said to myself, “Yes. Yes, this has been a productive day.”
It had been only six in the morning when Aaron, my uptight, stick-in-the-mud bunkmate, had rolled me out of bed and told me I had guests. By that hour, of course, he was dressed, groomed, grinning from ear to ear, and cheery as could be. He had probably even prayed Lauds already, the bastard.
Me, I preferred to climb out of bed around noon, but since that wasn’t possible in my line of work, I got up at six-fifty, which gave me enough time to scramble into my cassock and make daily Mass with a minute to spare. I didn’t actually wake up, however, until about eight-twenty, which was when I was usually starting my third cup of coffee in the rec room.
So I was bleary-eyed and grumpy when I stepped into the hall and uttered my first dismayed sentence of the day, the first of many. Had I been more fully awake, I might have added some epithets.
Standing outside my door was Lyra Heartstrings, just as bright-eyed and cheerful as my obnoxious roommate, and with her were seven ponies I had hoped never to see again. Ever.
“Well,” said Lyra with a giggle, “you wanted me to recruit, right? I wrote straight to Ponyville, and they all came to Canterlot on the overnight train.”
Dumbstruck, I marveled at the speed of the Pony Express, which had taken mail to Ponyville in only a few hours, and at the inefficiency of Equestria’s train system, which had taken a full night to bring Lyra’s gaggle of friends the short distance from Ponyville to Canterlot.
The previous summer, by means of a bald-faced lie, I had convinced the bishop to let me travel with Lyra to Ponyville, where she had introduced me to these friends of hers. I had spent three days in torment before finally dragging myself back into a train car to contemplate the dire consequences of lying to bishops.
These so-called friends were a bundle of extremes, and their favorite pastime was bickering with one another. There was Berry Punch, who was as disreputable as ponies came, and beside her was Carrot Top, who in a kingdom full of prudes took prudery to new heights and made it an art form. Next to them stood Bon Bon, Lyra’s Pony Friend Forever, whose claim to fame was a perpetually bad attitude.
Beside Bon Bon, much to my shock, was Equestria’s unlikeliest family. There was the walleyed Derpy, a flying disaster area, who had come with her daughter Dinky and husband Time Turner.
Last of all was Minuette, Time Turner’s apprentice and the only pony out of this bunch whom I could get along with.
After my first utterance, the whole lot of them merely stared at me, blinking. Bon Bon’s lip curled up in a sneer.
“I am speechless,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s a first,” said Bon Bon.
“Hey,” said Berry Punch, who walked to me and nuzzled the back of my hand. “Your special somepony said you found a new way to mix sassy. Izzat true?”
“Berry!” Lyra cried. “We’re just friends!”
“Honestly, Berry Punch,” muttered Carrot Top with a sniff, “that’s not quite decent.”
“If we could get started, please,” said Time Turner as he checked his heavy pocket watch, “I suggest we do so. We are being most inefficient.”
And so it had begun.
I certainly wasn’t on Earth anymore. Back in my homeland, if a group of pretty girls had made their way into the dormitory of a seminary, it probably would have sparked a new Inquisition. Here, it was Tuesday.
Of course, the “seminary” was in a wing of Princess Celestia’s school, so there was simply no way of keeping girls from coming and going as they pleased. Besides that, all but three of the seminarians were human, and every last one of the girls was a pony, so the bishop had apparently elected not to fret about the remote possibility of scandal.
With my herd trailing behind, I made my way into our rec hall, which was the only room in the seminary large enough to accommodate us comfortably. I passed a few early risers on the way. I waved, and they stared, but they didn’t ask questions. They probably just thought to themselves, Jack is up to something again.
When we moved into the rec hall, we found Bishop Van de Velde himself, clad in his bishop’s cassock, pectoral cross, and pellegrina, sitting at a table and muttering over his breviary. He looked up over his reading glasses and gave all of us a grandfatherly smile.
“Jack?” he said. Legions, multitudes were in that word. Most everyone who had ever been in charge of me in any capacity had sooner or later learned to freight that one syllable in manifold ways, with suspicion or condemnation or threat or frustration or everything at once. The bishop, with his thick accent and mild voice, had that syllable fully loaded. I shuddered involuntarily.
Of course, the bishop would keep his cool. He always did. He never chewed anyone out, because that’s what he had Sire August for.
But today, I had an alibi. “Early morning rehearsal,” I said. “For the pageant.”
His face brightened as he answered, “Don’t let me distract you.” Then, with many sighs and wheezes, he made his way to his feet, tucked his breviary under his arm, and headed for the door. He had to pass my row of ponies on the way out, so he dutifully sniffed noses with each of them as he went. They didn’t bother to exchange names, for this was Equestria, where names were secondary to scent.
After the bishop left, I did the polite thing and sniffed noses myself. Usually, I couldn’t tell one pony from another, except perhaps by her perfume, but each pony in this crowd was distinct. Even at the butt-crack of dawn, Berry Punch carried the pungent, spicy aroma of sassafras. Carrot Top smelled like carrots. Bon Bon had a sweet smell to contrast with her sour personality. Derpy smelled like baked goods. Time Turner and Minuette both smelled of machine oil. And Dinky . . . well, Dinky was the one pony in this crowd who basically just smelled like a horse.
After the greetings were finished, I faced the ponies, clasped my hands behind my back, and paced. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here,” I said.
“You didn’t,” said Berry Punch. “Your girlfriend did. To help with your play.”
“Berry!” cried Lyra.
“Can we get on with it?” said Time Turner. “I estimate that everything we’ve done in the last ten minutes could have been done in three.”
I stopped pacing, sat down on the corner of a table, raised a finger, and said, “I have called you here for a Christmas pageant.”
“Criss moss?” Carrot Top asked. “Is that the kind that drapes off the branches?”
With an impatient whinny, Lyra jumped to my side and said, “Listen, everypony, Jack and his little club have a prince, and the prince is having a birthday. We’re going to help out.”
Berry Punch scratched herself and belched. “It’s a birthday? You don’t celebrate birthdays with pageants. You celebrate with cake.”
“Berry is right for once,” said Carrot Top. “I’m not sure this is decent.”
Time Turner, who had been staring at his stopwatch all this time, now shut it with a loud snap. “I must say, I remain uncertain if I wish to aid and abet an organization well known for advocating sedition. I fail to understand why Princess Celestia tolerates it.”
Dinky, who was nestled against Derpy, looked up at her mother and whispered loudly, “What’s sedition, mama?”
“That’s where you sit too much and don’t get your exercise, sugar muffin,” Derpy whispered back just as loudly.
At that, Time Turner released a decidedly longsuffering sigh.
Once again, I found myself unexpectedly speechless, and Lyra was no help, since Derpy’s comment had sent her into a fresh fit of giggles. But then Minuette came to my rescue: she coughed into her hoof and said in a flat, brusque voice, “Chronomaster, I have studied the teachings of this club, and they do escape the charge of sedition on a technicality. Although the club’s members consider themselves citizens of another kingdom, they believe they won’t enter it until their deaths. At any rate, they instruct their adherents to obey Celestia, but to refrain from taking her name in oaths. In that, their doctrines are not altogether different from those of our own Order.”
Time Turner snorted and flipped open his watch again. “Oh, very well, Minuette.” He glanced at his wife, and a smile briefly flitted across his face. “Derpy was set on coming anyway. She wants to be in a play.”
With a whoop, Derpy flew up into the air. Without even a change in his expression, Time Turner merely wrapped a fetlock around Dinky and slid her out of the way before Derpy crashed back into the floor.
Not knowing what else to do, I tugged at my Roman collar and said, “All right, let me give you the lowdown. Your standard Christmas pageant takes two stories of the birth of Christ and blends them together—”
Bon Bon pounded a hoof against the floor. “Who’s Christ? I thought this was about somepony named Jesus.”
“I know!” Lyra cried, raising a hoof and dancing back and forth as if she were in class and asking to go to the bathroom. “Christ is his second name. Jesus Christ. It’s like Razzle Dazzle or Banana Fizzy.” She stuck out her chin and closed her eyes with a smug smile.
I tugged on my collar again. “Lyra, sweetheart, ‘Christ’ is a title.”
“Like ‘princess’?” asked Berry Punch.
“If you like.”
“Ridiculous,” said Bon Bon. “Then it should be Christ Jesus. You don’t say ‘Celestia Princess.’”
“Good grief, will you ponies shut up? If you don’t stop talking, I’m never going to get through this.” I jumped off the edge of the table and, with hands clasped behind my back, began pacing again. “Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. There was a woman named Mary. She was a virgin, but she was pregnant—”
I immediately slapped a hand over my mouth, but it was too late. This was what I got for trying to do anything important before I’d had my morning coffee.
Berry Punch burst into loud guffaws. Bon Bon dropped her jaw. Derpy’s cheeks turned pink. Even Time Turner and Minuette raised their eyebrows.
But Carrot Top turned bright red from the base of her neck right up to her forelock, and she clapped her front hooves over little Dinky’s ears. “This,” she hissed, her voice coming out like steam from a kettle, “is not decent! I did not come all the way here to be spoken to in this manner!”
This was Equestria, where there were two subjects that nopony spoke about in public. Ever. And I had a bad habit of casually mentioning both of them on a regular basis.
I glanced at Lyra. She looked disgusted, but by now she was used to me. She shrugged.
I sat down on the corner of the table again, gazed up at the arched ceiling, and reflected. It was not easy to spread Christianity in a kingdom where everyone considered it the lowest depth of depravity ever to mention anything having to do with sex or death.
And now I had to consider how to put on a Christmas play in which I couldn’t use words like virgin or pregnant.
I was able to escape the tensions temporarily because I had to excuse myself to go to Mass. I invited the ponies to come along, but most of them declined. Lyra refused with a few swift jerks of her head and the words, “I’m never going back in there.”
I couldn’t blame her. The first time I invited her to Mass happened to be the day when Bishop Van de Velde unveiled the pony crucifix.
Only Time Turner and Minuette, as a matter of intellectual interest, wanted to join me, so I escorted them out through one of the school’s side doors, and we walked together through the chilly air across the broad square to the cathedral.
The cathedral was called Mary Queen of Peace, and it was yet another of the many innocent blunders the bishop had committed since coming to Equestria. He had dedicated the cathedral to Our Lady before learning that the word queen had peculiar connotations to the ponies: it was a title they used to refer to the rulers of their enemies, to the winners of popularity contests in their academies, and to the first ancestress of their race. By calling Mary the Queen of Peace, Bishop Van de Velde had inadvertently implied that she was wicked, that she was not to be taken seriously, or that she was usurping the place of the ponies’ first ruler.
Because the ponies had no concept of religion, even though they had several organizations that appeared quasi-religious to the human observer, they could not think of the Catholic Church as anything other than a political organization. Thus, royal titles were potentially dangerous, as they could be taken to mean that we wanted to dethrone the princesses. However, Princess Celestia, having spoken extensively both with our bishop and with the pope, knew better, so she allowed our activities even though she repeatedly attempted to defang the Church by making it dependent on her government, much as she had already done with the Order of Timekeepers and the Fellowship of Geldings, two of the more obstreperous equine philosophical societies.
The cathedral was a simple structure, a long hall built with heavy wooden beams. It was in the rustic Victorian style that was popular in rural Equestria, but unusual in Canterlot, where marble and white limestone were the preferred building materials, and where roofs were typically copper instead of thatch. Celestia had offered to construct a grand cathedral at the expense of her treasury, but the bishop had declined, so we had a small, simple church with narrow windows and a dark interior. It had a cold tile floor with no pews, but cushions and seats of various shapes and sizes stood in stacks against one wall.
The sanctuary was nothing but a raised platform at the east end. Like the rest of the cathedral, the altar was of roughly cut and unadorned wood, above which hung a large crucifix, now with a proper human figure on it. The crucifix was of polished pine and dark mahogany, meticulously carved in grotesque detail. A single spotlight from the ceiling shone on it, but failed to illuminate the wall behind, so it appeared to hover in midair.
When I entered with Time Turner and Minuette, the other seminarians had already assembled, as had several pony neophytes and the friars from our small Franciscan abbey. With my guests, I sat on the floor near the back.
Being a Mass on a Tuesday morning, the ceremony was brief. Sire August, the main celebrant for the day, began the Mass with the approved Ponese formula, “In the name of the Sire, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” My roommate Aaron read from the Equestrian lectionary, after which Sire August read the Gospel and preached a homily on the virtue of friendship. When he consecrated the Eucharist, he leaned his chest against the altar and elevated the Host in his front hooves.
Throughout the Mass, Time Turner and Minuette mimicked my motions whenever I sat or stood. Only the humans in the room knelt during the consecration, since they were the only ones who could.
After Mass, as we again fought the cold on our way back to the school, Time Turner spoke from under the heavy scarf around his face.
“I didn’t understand a word of it,” he said, “but I suppose that’s to be expected. What was that large piece of statuary in the back?”
“A torture device,” I replied.
He snorted, perhaps in contempt or disgust, but, unlike most ponies, he showed no signs of horror. “I thought as much. Is it a warning to your enemies?”
“No.”
“Who’s depicted hanging on it?”
“Jesus.”
He paused a moment before asking, “The fellow whose birthday we’re celebrating?”
“Yes.”
He asked me nothing else after that.
We had breakfast with Celestia’s students in the school’s cavernous refectory. By the time we entered, the room already roared with a steady din of animated conversation. Plates and cups rattled, and red light angled sharply in through the high, broken-arched windows, making all the dishes glow like burnished brass. Lyra and the others were already there; now surrounded by young ponies who chortled at their antics, they made a ruckus at one of the long tables. Lyra, possessed of a strong sweet tooth, dug her way through a mound of pastries. Carrot Top, with back ramrod straight, eyes lowered, and an expression of distaste affixed to her muzzle, grazed at a healthier meal of oatmeal and green salad. Berry Punch guzzled coffee, and I saw her, after furtive glances at her neighbors, lace it with the contents of a hip flask.
Just as I stepped in with Time Turner and Minuette, Derpy, who was walking from the buffet table carrying a tray loaded with several kinds of muffin, took a spill. Tripping over her hooves, she tumbled face-first into the marble floor. When her tray crashed down, her carefully arranged pile of muffins burst, and its constituent parts rolled in several directions. All the students, as they would whenever anyone dropped anything in the refectory, cheered, whistled, hooted, and stomped their hooves.
With her pale golden eyes tilted at odd angles, Derpy raised her head and grinned vacantly, apparently thinking she was being congratulated rather than mocked. Time Turner sighed, mumbled something unintelligible, and, with many clicks of his tongue, cantered to her side to help her up.
A faint smile darted swiftly across Minuette’s muzzle as she watched Time Turner lift Derpy to her hooves and bend down to pick up the muffins she’d dropped. “Doctor Time Turner has become decidedly less intolerable since his marriage,” she said.
I glanced at Minuette, but couldn’t read her face. “They don’t really seem suited to each other.”
“They don’t, but they are.” Her smile appeared again, but this time it stayed. “She’d been sweet on him for quite a while. As for him, well, I don’t think he’d loved anypony before. I don’t think he knew how. Having a wife and daughter has been good for him.”
With that, she walked to the buffet table, levitated a tray with her horn, and picked her way through what remained of the food. I followed close behind.
At last, having acquired my bowl of oatmeal and my coffee, I made my way to the long table. I had hoped to sit next to Lyra, but Berry Punch and Bon Bon already flanked her. Berry, who was laughing boisterously, had a foreleg thrown across Lyra’s shoulders, and Bon Bon glared daggers at me, so I took a seat on the other side of the table beside the Time Turner family, where I soon found Dinky trying to climb into my lap.
With another sigh and another cluck, Time Turner grabbed Dinky and pulled her between himself and Derpy. “No, no, Dinky,” he said. “You’re too big to sit on a human. They’re delicate.”
After a few gulps of coffee, I was finally feeling like myself. I looked up to find I had sat directly across from Carrot Top, whose glare was almost as fierce as Bon Bon’s. Even as she grazed at her salad, her narrowed eyes never left my face.
When in Ponyville, I had learned three things about Carrot Top. She was painfully prissy, and she could hold a grudge probably longer than any other pony in Equestria. But she was also capable of startling acts of compassion, and I was still trying to figure out how that third trait fit in with the first two.
I ate a spoonful of oatmeal, neatly patted my mouth with my napkin, set down my spoon, looked Carrot Top in the eyes, and said, “Euphemisms.”
She raised her head. “Excuse me?”
“Euphemisms. Give me some euphemisms. You don’t like my straight talk, so tell me—”
“I would never accuse you of ‘straight talk,’ Jack.”
I had a retort on the tip of my tongue, and I nearly choked as I swallowed it. I was not good at swallowing retorts, but the last thing I wanted to do right now was rouse more ire from Carrot Top. “Fine. But I have to figure out a way to do this Christmas pageant, so tell me how to talk the pony way. How do I say a mare is—?”
She cringed, and her eyes slid toward Dinky.
Tapping my spoon on my bowl, I thought a moment and then asked, “How about ‘with child’?”
She slammed a hoof on the tabletop, making all of us jump. “No! Not decent!”
“‘In a delicate condition’?”
“Absoulutely not!”
“‘Got a bun in the oven’?”
“Jack!”
“C’mon, Carrots, help me out here!”
She closed her eyes and wrinkled her nose as if she could smell something foul. She lifted her head high and said stiffly, as if the words pained her, “If you must refer to such things, you would say, ‘There is going to be a happy event soon,’ and you would toss the words into the air, casually, without referring to anypony in particular.”
Slowly, I set my spoon down and clasped my hands in my lap. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I most certainly am not.”
“How does anyone know who you mean if—?”
“Everypony knows, Jack! That’s why we don’t need to talk about it!”
I frowned. Pregnant ponies didn’t show much until late in their terms. I glanced at Lyra, who was giggling with Bon Bon while simultaneously trying to keep a chortling Berry Punch from stealing her food. She looked at me and swiftly tapped her nose.
Ah. Of course. The ponies would know if a mare was pregnant because they could smell it, for every pony’s body radiated information to any other pony nearby. They were more delicate in speech than we, but that didn’t mean they had more privacy: just as people living in a traditional Japanese house, where the rooms were separated by sheets of paper, maintained propriety without privacy by pretending to be unaware of anything happening in another room, the ponies maintained propriety by refraining from mentioning anything private that they could detect by means of their highly attuned senses of smell or hearing.
Minuette, who sat on the other side of Derpy, leaned over the table so she could speak to me, and said, “Jack, is this absolutely necessary to the theatrical production in question?”
“It is,” I answered. “It’s the whole point.”
“In the timeframe of the story, is the happy event soon or in the distant future?”
“It happens during the story.” Carrot Top, with lips spread and teeth clenched, gave me a sharp glare, so I quickly added, “Offstage.”
“This is really not so difficult,” said Minuette. “We could represent it with makeup.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but once again found I had no words, mostly because I didn’t understand what she was saying.
“That’s true,” said Lyra, who had been whispering to Bon Bon but now joined the conversation. “What would you use?”
“Wax, I suppose,” answered Minuette.
Carrot Top appeared gratified. With a silent sigh and a relaxing of her shoulders, she finally took her eyes off me and finished the food on her plate.
Apparently noticing my confusion, Lyra said, “Don’t worry, Jack. I’ll explain later. In private.”
She did explain later, right after breakfast, in a quiet corner of the hallway. A mare close to foaling would develop a waxy substance over her teats and would soon after begin leaking colostrum, which would run down the insides of her back legs. Although ponies usually took their baths very seriously, a mare getting ready to give birth would avoid washing her udders in order to preserve the waxy seal on her teats and lose as little colostrum as possible, since it contained the immune cells vital to a young foal’s health.
Although I hadn’t made the connection during the conversation at breakfast, I was already halfway aware of this stuff: the cows up at Byre Pierre, when they calved, sometimes created one of their most expensive delicacies, a sweet cheese made of colostrum. Supposedly, though the claim was dubious, eating this cheese could prevent humans from contracting some nasty zoonotic diseases against which we had no natural immunities, such as pony pox, or any of the various infections that caused dysentery, here known as the trots. Every human visitor got pony pox and the trots eventually.
I hadn’t had either. Yet.
While Lyra, with her cheeks burning red, explained all this to me with many awkward pauses and nervous giggles, I rubbed my chin and ruminated. It was yet another example of how ponies thought differently: what could not be said could still, at least in some cases, be shown. Minuette had been suggesting that the pony playing the Virgin Mary could be represented as pregnant by painting her hind legs with simulated colostrum. Just as nopony would openly mention that he could smell the stages of a mare’s reproductive cycle, nopony would mention that a mare’s udders were leaking, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see and know what it meant.
Instead of defiantly skipping class for the afternoon, I begged it off by pointing out to the bishop that I had guests who had come all the way from Ponyville.
He merely waved a hand at me and said, “Your instructors hardly expect you in class anyway, Mister Andrews. If you showed up regularly, they’d think something was wrong.”
That was why I went to the bishop first. It was his job to be kindly and understanding, because he had others to be authoritarian on his behalf. At any rate, it didn’t matter if I went to class or not; one way or the other, I would do what I always did: I would cram the night before my tests and get straight A’s the next day.
So, while the other seminarians were hearing a lecture on Thomistic metaphysics, I again sat on the corner of a table in the rec room and faced Lyra and her group of unruly friends.
“Well,” I said, “you’re probably wondering why I called—”
“You said that already,” said Carrot Top. “Get on with it.”
“I’m waiting for the quiet,” I replied, and I directed the comment at Lyra and Bon Bon, who whispered and giggled like a couple of schoolgirls.
“Sorry,” said Lyra, and she tried to wipe the grin from her face, but then burst into giggles again.
I merely shook my head and returned to the topic, though a part of me burned to know what they were laughing about. “Okay, ponies, here’s what I’m thinking. Time Turner is our only stallion here, so he’s a natural pick for Saint Joseph. Dinky’s our only foal—”
“I’m not a foal!” Dinky yelled. “I’m seven!”
“Right. But you’re the youngest, so you get to be the Christ child. Er, that’s a fancy term for baby Jesus.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carrot Top, “I thought this was a birthday party for this Jesus. Isn’t he coming himself?”
“That’s an interesting theological question, which I will happily address at another time. But right now, I’d rather cast roles—”
“This fellow I’m playing,” said Time Turner, “who is he exactly?”
“Ah. Well, as I was trying to explain before, he’s engaged to marry when he discovers, to his shock, that . . . er, there’s going to be a happy event soon—”
Carrot Top turned red again, but she bit into her lip and stayed quiet.
Time Turner pulled his head back as his eyebrows rose. He said, very slowly and quietly, “Are you mocking me, Mister Andrews?”
I blinked a few times as I tried to figure out what he meant.
And then I realized.
Dammit.
Lyra had filled me in on some of Time Turner’s story, though I only knew hazy details. Eight years ago, a disreputable stallion had, on his way through Ponyville, seduced Derpy, gotten her pregnant, and skipped town, instantly turning the naïve mare into Ponyville’s pariah. Carrot Top had taken Derpy in to make sure she and her new daughter had a roof over their heads. Time Turner had later married Derpy, apparently after having a decidedly harrowing adventure with her, and thus shared in her shame.
It reminded me again of how different Equestria was from my homeland: here, having a child out of wedlock was a major scandal. Back home, it was Tuesday.
And, yet again, I had inadvertently blundered into touchy territory. I had just cast Time Turner in the role of a man set to marry a woman having a child who wasn’t his, a role with which he was already familiar.
So I ran with it.
“Not at all, Time Turner,” I said. “You’re Saint Joseph. That’s a great honor. Little Dinky is playing Jesus. Derpy, you get to be Mary.” Then, just to make sure the scandal was complete, I looked straight at Carrot Top and added, “That’s the Virgin Mary, by the by.”
Carrot Top’s face turned so red, I was afraid her head might burst.
With a frown, Time Turner said, “But I thought—”
“Another interesting theological question,” I replied, “and also one I will address later.”
I clapped my hands and jumped off the table. “All right. Now for the three wise mares. Bon Bon, you seem like a Balthasar to me. Minuette should be Melchior, and Berry Punch is definitely Kaspar. Yes.”
Clasping my hands behind my back, I paced. “Lyra, would you be willing to play harp? I mean the small, portable one—”
She said, “It’s a lyre, Jack.”
“Exactly. Will you play it?”
“Sure.”
“Great. You can be an angel.”
Berry Punch chuckled, but I ignored her. “Now, we should have a narrator—”
“That should be Bon Bon,” said Lyra. “She’s the best storyteller.”
“Hm? Oh, okay. Well, then, Carrot Top can be—”
Carrot Top finally released her lower lip from her teeth. “I do not think I am still interested in participating in this . . . this . . .”
She shuddered as her eyes roved around the room, apparently in search of the right word.
“This indecency,” she finally said. Dipping her head, she glanced at Derpy and whispered, “I am going back to Ponyville.”
Then, with head still hanging low, she turned her back on us, stepped through the door, and closed it quietly behind her.
And, for the next few minutes, none of us said anything.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Lyra said. “If I just explain—”
“No,” I said, “I’ll go talk to her.”
I marched toward the door, but Lyra quickly leapt in front of me. “Jack—”
“Lyra—”
“You don’t know her like I do, Jack. I can explain—”
I bent down so I could look her in the eyes. “No you can’t.” Thrusting a thumb at my chest, I added, “I can. And I can also give her a piece of my mind, because, quite frankly, I am sick of walking on eggshells around her.”
“Doing what? Why are you stepping on eggs?”
“It’s an expression.”
“Can’t you see that you two just misunderstand each other? If you let me—”
I waved a hand at the other ponies. “They don’t get on my case because I don’t understand Equestrian culture. Only Carrot Top does! This is between me and her, and I say it’s time we had it out.”
Lyra’s eyelids narrowed and her ears tipped back. Through clenched teeth, she hissed, “Maybe she’s too hard on you, Jack, but she’s right about one thing: you are an insensitive clod!”
“Yeah? Well, you’re a . . . a horse. So there.”
“Ooh, my feelings are sooo hurt! At least I’m not an ugly, scrawny ape. So there!”
“Yeah? Well, at least I’m not green!”
“Says the guy in a dress.”
“It’s a cassock, and have I told you that it looks gross when you don’t clip your ear hair?”
“I grew it out to match the hair in your nostrils.”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
“That’s great,” said Berry Punch. “Now kiss.”
I realized that my nose was only an inch from Lyra’s muzzle. We looked over at the others, who huddled together in a group and stared at us. Berry Punch had a wide grin on her face.
“Berry,” Lyra and I both said at once, “shut up.”
I straightened, swept my hands down the front of my cassock, stepped around Lyra, and marched out the door. “You can be so frustrating, Jack!” Lyra yelled from behind me.
Carrot Top hadn’t made it very far. I found her slinking down the hallway like a fugitive.
“Hold up, Carrots,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Jack!”
“You’re gonna do it anyway.”
She paused near a potted fern. She didn’t turn my way, but she didn’t run from me, either.
I threw myself down on the floor beside her and said, “Sit.”
Wordlessly, but with her back still toward me, she sidled toward the wall and lowered her haunches to the floor.
“I know what you want to say,” she said.
“Do you? I come from a different world. Maybe you haven’t got a clue how I think.”
Her shoulders slumped. “You’re not really all that different—”
“And that’s what upsets you. If I were more outlandish, you could pass off everything that rankles you as a peculiarity of my race, because it’s easy to be ‘tolerant’ of exotic people. Your neighbors are the ones who really test your patience.”
She finally turned her face to me. Her brow was furrowed, but her expression bespoke more of sorrow than frustration. “Jack, I only came here because I was worried about Lyra, and because I didn’t want your disgusting behavior to infect my friends. But I realize now that I can’t control you, and I can’t control them, either. It’s best if I just leave.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need you here.”
She bit her lip, and the furrows in her forehead grew deeper.
“I don’t mean I need you in the pageant.” I tilted my head back toward the rec room. “I have enough actresses already. I mean I need you because you alone, out of this particular group, really care about Equestrian sensibilities. Lyra puts up with me. Bon Bon dislikes me no matter what. I’m not sure Derpy even knows what’s going on. Berry Punch is as bad as I am. And Time Turner and Minuette can stoically take any indignity except time-wasting. You’re the only one here who can teach me how to act like a proper pony.” I reached a hand toward her. “So help me out.”
She shook her head. “I really do not understand you.”
“Then let me explain.” I rubbed my fingers through my hair, cleared my throat, and said, “Carrot Top, I am well aware that I’m a jerk. You’re not revealing anything new to me there. The truth is, I only became a Catholic in the first place because I knew it was the one thing that would most irritate my parents. But I didn’t stay that way. I changed. I wasn’t sincere then, but I am now.”
As it always did when I was nervous, my Roman collar felt tight, and I could feel my pulse beating against it. I tugged at it, trying to pull it away from my throat. “And the truth is, I used to hate ponies—well, no, that’s not true. I was afraid of ponies. I was afraid of most anything with four legs and fur. But I changed. I’m not afraid anymore, and I care about the ponies, and that’s why I’m still here.”
I tapped my fingers on the floor for a moment. “And I didn’t want to come to Equestria. I hated the place, and I never imagined I’d accept a permanent placement here. I only came to get away from trouble back home, and I always figured I’d turn Bishop Van de Velde down eventually and go back to my old diocese later. Good gravy, coming to this place felt like getting strapped to a gurney and injected with estrogen—”
“Jack.”
“Sorry. What I mean is, I changed. I love it here now, and I want to stay. Do you understand what I’m saying? I may be a jerk, Carrot Top, but I can change. Don’t run out on me.”
After a moment, Carrot Top got to her feet, walked toward me, and sniffed my nose. “You haven’t changed at all, Jack.”
“But—”
“You are very good at telling stories. I suspect you even believe them. But you aren’t still here because you care about ponies or because you love Equestria.”
“But—”
“You’re here for Lyra.”
I opened my mouth, but could find nothing to say, so I closed it again.
“Everypony has a destiny, Jack, and everypony has to discover that destiny for herself. You need to discover yours—”
“I don’t have a cutie mark, Carrot Top, and, so help me, I will raise my cassock and drop my pants to prove it if I have to.”
I thought that would turn her red again and shut her up, but she merely shook her head. “Jack, nopony has a cutie mark except a pony. Cows don’t have them, elves don’t have them, goats don’t have them. But they still have destinies, and so do you. Don’t you have a word for that in this club of yours?”
I looked away from her and nodded. “Vocation.” I didn’t mean it to sound harsh, but the word came out like a curse.
“You need to figure out your vocation, Jack. This thing you’re doing, if you’re only doing it so you can stay here with Lyra—”
“I’m not.”
“Are you sure? What happens if you decide you don’t want to be one of these priests?”
I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared at the marble floor. “I . . . well, they send me home. I mean, I don’t have any skills to market here. About the only people Celestia lets in permanently are missionaries and farriers, so—”
She put a hoof to my shoulder. “Jack, if Lyra is the only reason you’re doing this, then, hard as it might be, you need to go home. If this isn’t your destiny, it will make you miserable for the rest of your life.”
I felt one side of my mouth turn upward in a smile. “You sound like Sire August.”
“August Vision is a wise pony. Eccentric, maybe, but wise. If I were you, I’d listen to him.” She turned from me and walked to the door. “Goodbye, Jack. I know I am not easy to get along with sometimes, so I appreciate you for coming after me and trying to make amends.”
“One question before you go, Carrot Top.”
With a hoof on the doorknob, she stopped and looked over her shoulder at me.
“Why did you take Derpy in?”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and smiled. “You are not the first to ask that. Several ponies have asked, so humans aren’t the only ones who don’t understand me. It’s simply this: Derpy needed help, and that ought to be enough. When somepony needs help, when somepony needs a leg up, you give it. That’s the decent thing to do.”
From where I sat on the floor, with my knees tucked under one arm, I again reached out to her.
For half a minute, she stared at my outstretched hand. “Oh . . . oh, Celestia blast it.”
“Help,” I said.
“Yes, I get it, Jack. Yes, I’ll stay.” She chewed her lower lip for a moment before adding, “How did you do that?”
“Easy. I am many things, Carrot Top. And one of them is a low-down, self-serving, manipulative son of a bitch.”
First it was embarrassing, and then it was depressing. Another day in the life.
I had grown accustomed to walking places with a pony by my side. The average pony thought nothing of walking several miles every day as she went about her business, so most travel in Canterlot was on foot, and whenever I left our small “campus,” which consisted of one wing of Celestia’s school and our cathedral across the way, I almost always went with Lyra.
And that’s why I just wasn’t thinking when, as Carrot Top and I walked back toward the rec room where the other ponies were waiting, I gave her a friendly pat on the withers.
I realized my mistake as soon as she turned her head to me and gave me a sharp glare. I swiftly snatched my hand back.
The door of the rec room was open a crack. I leaned my shoulder against it, and just as I did, I heard Bon Bon’s distinctly surly voice say, “Lyra, if he bothers you so much, why don’t you just tell him to take a long walk off a short airdock?”
Lyra’s voice replied, “Bon Bon—”
I immediately froze, but the door was already swinging open, and Lyra stopped speaking. Inside, all the ponies looked over toward us with wide eyes.
For a few beats, none of us spoke, but then I gestured toward Carrot Top and said, “Uh, hey. Carrots is back.”
“Oh, good,” said Berry, who was sprawled across one of the tables. “Everything’s twice as fun when we can watch her face change colors.”
Carrot Top cleared her throat. “I’ve decided to help Mister Andrews with this production. That’s all there is to it.”
“Well.” I clapped my hands together. “Since we didn’t get through it before, I’d really like to explain to all of you what this is about so you know what you’re getting into. I think it would be best if we headed over to the cathedral, where I can—”
“No,” said Lyra.
I paused, lowered my hands, and met her eyes.
She didn’t look away from me, and she didn’t look embarrassed. She looked right at me, but I couldn’t read her expression.
“Lyra, honey, the cathedral’s the only place we have to perform this in. You’ll have to—”
“No.”
I paused again.
“I’m not going back in there. I already told you that.”
“But—”
“No.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. With a knit brow, Time Turner checked his pocket watch.
“I’ll stay too,” said Bon Bon as she placed a foreleg over Lyra’s shoulders. She gave me her usual sneer, and Lyra at last dropped her gaze from my face.
“Bon Bon,” I said, “it would be really helpful if—”
“You’ve told all this to Lyra before, right? She can fill me in.”
Lyra mumbled, “That’s true. I can. I think I remember most of it.”
“What we do,” said Time Turner, “let’s do quickly. We are wasting time.”
Minuette glared at him, put a hoof to her muzzle, and cleared her throat loudly.
For a moment, he looked at her with eyes wide and mouth slack, but then he raised his eyebrows, sucked in his breath slightly, and said, “Oh. Oh! Never mind, take as much time as you need.”
Minuette rolled her eyes and muttered, “At least he’s getting better.”
“I’ve taken all the time I need,” I said. “Let’s go. Lyra, Bon Bon, we’ll see you later.”
Lyra nodded. Bon Bon smirked. I turned around and marched out with the others in tow.
As we made our way across the courtyard, I thought of what I might have done to upset Lyra. We’d just had a fight and called each other names, of course, but we did that all the time. The words I’d heard Bon Bon say before I opened the door gnawed at me: did Lyra really find me that annoying? Did she only hang out with me because she was being nice?
We pushed our way into the cathedral, which was nearly empty except for an elderly mare praying a rosary in front of the tabernacle. The church was never empty when I needed it to be.
I held the heavy door open for the others, blessed myself from the holy water font, and shut the door quietly.
Like many modern church buildings, the cathedral had a baptistery large enough for baptisms by immersion. Ours was a cross-shaped pool, lined with tile and inset into the floor just in front of the vestibule. It had a brass railing to keep anyone from falling in, and beside it was a holy water font connected to the pool by a fountain that usually babbled quietly during services, though now it was off. After I shut the door, I turned around to find Derpy hovering in the air near the baptistery. She was gazing at the big Easter candle, studded with incense beads, which stood next to the fountain on a tall, brass candlestick.
“What’s this?” she asked as, with a hoof, she knocked the candle over.
I ran forward, but was too far away. Time Turner tried to grab the candlestick, but missed. Derpy reached out for it, but caught a hoof on the top of the railing, tripped, and fell straight down into the pool with a loud splash that sent water cascading across the floor. The candle tipped, broke into two pieces, and fell in after her. The candlestick hit the floor with a bang.
Derpy lifted her sodden head out of the water, blinked her crooked eyes, and said, “Oopsie. My bad.”
Leaning her front hooves on the railing, Dinky giggled. “You’re funny, mama.”
“Congratulations, Derpy,” I said as I righted the now empty candlestick, “you’re a Christian.”
Time Turner frowned at me, so I added, “I’m kidding.”
Carrot Top rattled the rail. “How do you get this open?”
I pointed her to the little gate on one end, and she quickly ran in to help Derpy out of the water.
“I’ll pay for everything, of course,” said Time Turner as he adjusted his tie. “I’m terribly sorry, and—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I answered.
“But you must let me—”
“No, really. Don’t worry about it. The bishop wouldn’t hear of you paying for anything. Believe me, I know him. Let me just take the candle back to the sacristy, and I think maybe we have some towels back there or something.”
Carrot Top had pulled Derpy out, and just as I stepped through the railing and bent over the baptistery to pick up the broken candle, I heard Carrot Top shout, “No, Derpy!”
Derpy shook like a dog, sending a deluge of ice-cold holy water over me.
After I crossed myself, I stood up with the candle’s fragments in hand and said, “Thanks. I probably needed that.” Dripping and muttering, I marched up the aisle toward the sanctuary. On the way, I had to pass the elderly mare with the rosary, so I bowed to her and said, “Just don’t mind us, ma’am.”
She replied with an ornery glare, so I quickly stepped through a narrow door beside the altar and into the small, cluttered room wherein we kept all the little knickknacks we needed throughout the year. Unsure what to do with it, I set the candle on a counter and began rifling through drawers in the dressers and cabinets. I found altar cloths, chasubles, and lots and lots of surplices, cut for both humans and ponies, but I didn’t come up with a single towel.
I considered for a moment whether it would be sacrilegious to wipe off a wet mare with purificators, but in the end I decided to let charity outweigh rubrical niceties, so I grabbed several of the small, white cloths, each stitched with a red cross and used to clean chalices, patens, and ciboria. I walked back into the sanctuary with them in hand, only to find Derpy, still dripping wet, trying to pry the tabernacle off the wall.
She hovered in the air above the altar and had the golden chest between her front hooves. Time Turner tugged in vain on one of her back legs.
“What’s in here?” she asked as I walked in.
“Good grief, Derpy, stop that. Please.” I dropped the purificators, ran to her, and tried to pull her hooves off the tabernacle.
“What’s in it?” she repeated.
“Jesus. Look, just sit down—”
Minuette walked to Time Turner’s side and frowned at me. “Mister Andrews, are you saying you have an adult human stuffed in this box? But they opened this during your ceremony, and all I saw was a bowl of little crackers.”
“Yes, exactly. Why don’t we step out of the sanctuary and back into the nave, please?”
“The what?” Minuette asked.
“Down there.” I pointing past the altar and out into the room.
With a vacant grin, Derpy let go of the tabernacle and flew away. As she did, she passed over the altar, and though she gave no sign that she was aware of it, her hind hooves caught on the white altar cloth and pulled it from the mensa. The cloth crumpled on the floor as Derpy obliviously settled on the tiles in front of the sanctuary. The others followed her.
I glanced at the altar. It was mostly of wood, but a slab of polished marble, now revealed, was inlaid in its east end.
The mare who’d been trying to say her rosary was still glaring at me, but I ignored her. I walked to the ambo and leaned on it as if about to deliver a homily.
“Ponies,” I said, “we are gathered here today to get down to the business of me finally telling you, without interruption, what the hell we’re doing.”
The elderly mare stood up in a huff and marched toward the vestibule. Carrot Top, with an obviously sympathetic look in her eyes, gazed after her.
I pointed toward the enormous wreath, almost six feet wide, which stood on a stand on the opposite side of the sanctuary from the ambo. It was, so far, the only Christmas decoration in the room, but come Christmas Eve, every seminarian would have the task of scurrying over this place and dressing it up for the season. “See that?” I said. “You’ll notice it’s got three purple candles and one pink one, except we call it ‘rose,’ and if you say pink, some priest’ll get pissed off. We light one of those candles every Sunday in the weeks leading up to the twenty-fifth of December. We call that time ‘Advent,’ and we are supposed to spend it fasting and afflicting ourselves, but we usually eat cookies and drink eggnog instead.”
Minuette cleared her throat and called out, as if asking a question in a lecture hall, “And why is one of the candles pink? What is the significance of the colors?”
“I have no idea,” I replied. “But on the Sunday when the pink candle is lit, the priest wears pink clothes. I assume it’s to keep him humble.”
“And what’s eggnog?” asked Time Turner.
“That,” I said, wagging a finger at him, “you will learn in due time.”
Derpy raised a hoof like a kid in class. “And what’s in the big, shiny box?”
“It’s called a tabernacle,” I said. “And—”
Derpy nodded as if that satisfied her even before I’d explained what the tabernacle was for, and Dinky whispered loudly, “What’s a tabernacle, mama?”
“That’s like a barnacle,” Derpy whispered back, “except it attaches to a tavern instead of a barn.”
Time Turner slapped a hoof to his face.
With a grunt of annoyance, I slammed my fist down on the top of the ambo. “Enough! Enough! I said no interruptions this time! Criminey, I thought ponies were supposed to have manners!”
“You’ll have to excuse them,” said Carrot Top. “I’m afraid they’re not quite decent.”
“I’m beginning to agree with you.” I walked out from behind the ambo and paced with my hands behind my back. “Reader’s Digest version, as I said.” I glanced at Carrot Top. Her eyes followed me, but I couldn’t read her face. “I don’t mean to offend you, but—”
“Just go ahead, Jack,” said Carrot Top quietly. “It’s your traditions and your world, after all, and I suppose I wouldn’t appreciate you getting upset if I told you about the One Queen and the princesses.”
I stopped pacing. “Oh. Well, in that case, it’s like this: there were people who called themselves Israel, and for a long time they were slaves. They worshiped, er I mean they honored, one God. A ruler of sorts, you might say. A king. Their God freed them, and they went to the homeland he’d promised them, but they had nothing but trouble—”
“What kind of trouble?” Berry Punch called.
“All kinds. Invaders, in-fighting, bad kings—”
“I thought they only had this one king,” said Minuette.
“Uh . . . yes, well, he delegates. Let’s put it that way. Anyway, they had a rough time of it, and most of them were even dragged out of their land by some of the worst invaders, but a few made it back and set up their kingdom again. Then another empire conquered them, and they fought that empire off only to get conquered yet again. This last empire to take them over was the biggest and most powerful our world had ever seen, but the people of this Israel had a prophecy that a new king would rise up and free them—”
“Well, he tells it badly,” said Berry Punch as she threw herself on her side and rested her cheek against a hoof, “but it sounds like it might be a fine story. Like a novel.”
I cleared my throat. “So while the empire is ruling, this man Joseph, to be played by our Time Turner here, finds out that the woman he’s planning to marry, to be played by our Derpy, is . . . er, going to have a happy event. But that’s not his doing, and in fact it’s a . . . miracle? Do you guys have that word?”
I looked at the ponies and met blank faces.
“What’s a miracle, mama?” Dinky whispered.
“That’s like a tabernacle,” Derpy whispered back, “except it attaches to a mirror.”
Time Turner, with lips tight, made a strangled noise deep in his throat.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s call it magic, and we’ll work out the details later. It was magic.”
“Oh!” cried Carrot Top with a start. She looked around at the others. “Like the One Queen! She made ponies with magic.”
“Allegedly,” said Minuette as she raised a hoof for emphasis.
I tugged at my collar. “Uh, no, that’s not quite—”
The ponies, however, nodded as if they understood.
I sighed. “Hey, you know what? Like I said, let’s work out the details later. Now, an angel appears to Joseph . . . do you know what an angel is?”
Dinky, resting between Derpy’s hooves, turned her eyes up to her mother’s face, and Derpy whispered, “It’s a big metal thing a blacksmith makes shoes on.”
Time Turner rolled his eyes. “Is it a kind of spirit?” he asked.
“Yes, actually,” I answered. “How did you—? No, never mind.”
“Well, I like spirits,” said Berry Punch with a grin.
Time Turner rolled his eyes again.
I shook my head. “Anyway, an angel appears to Joseph and tells him to go ahead and marry Derpy—I mean Mary—because the upcoming happy event is all magical and stuff.”
I paused again and again saw the ponies nodding. Here was when I expected some sort of objection, but the idea of magical babies apparently didn’t faze them in the slightest.
“You know, back on Earth, this is where I get laughed out of the room. Time Turner? Minuette? Aren’t Timekeepers supposed to be skeptics?”
“We are,” Time Turner answered, “and that’s why we don’t draw conclusions until we have sufficient data. I know next to nothing of your world, so how should I know what conditions obtain there? I’m frankly unsure why you’re asking me this, as nothing you’ve said thus far sounds particularly improbable, even if it is not commonplace.”
“Really? Huh. Well, anyway, the ruler of the empire decided it was time for a census, so he ordered everyone to go back to the town his family came from—”
“What an awful way to take a census,” said Carrot Top. “Sounds like a nightmare. Wouldn’t it be better just to know where everypony is living now?”
“It must have been a nightmare,” I replied. “But this Joseph, having recently married Mary, had to pack up and leave his hometown and head down to a tiny little place called Bethlehem. The name means ‘house of bread.’”
“Was there a bakery there?” Berry Punch asked.
“There wasn’t much of anything there. But Joseph had to go, and he had to take his family with him, because he was actually descended from what used to be the royal family, though they’d been out of power for some time, and that royal family came from Bethlehem.”
I walked back to the ambo and leaned on it. “There must have been other people crowding into the place, because the only spot Mary and Joseph could find was in a barn. It might have actually been a cave, or it might have been a room off a house. One way or the other, there must have been animals kept there, because the happy event happened, and Mary put the new baby in a manger. Do you all know—?”
I expected Derpy to unleash another malapropism, but instead all the ponies snorted.
“Everypony knows what a manger is,” said Berry Punch, waving a hoof. “What else do you keep your hay in?”
“Right. Of course. But Mary put a baby in, and surely you think that’s a strange—”
“It sounds practical to me,” said Minuette, “if she didn’t have a proper crib available.”
“It might even be rather cozy for a baby,” said Carrot Top.
“Fine. Fine. Ponies ruin everything.” I tugged at my collar. “There were shepherds in the hills nearby, out with their sheep—”
“What’s a shepherd?” called Berry Punch.
Dinky looked up at Derpy, who scratched her head and said, “I got nothin’.”
After banging my forehead a few times on the ambo, I shouted, “Really? C’mon, it’s somebody who watches sheep! Sheep who can’t talk! Look, an angel told the shepherds about the new baby—”
“For our production,” said Time Turner after clearing his throat, “where do you propose to get—?”
“I’m going to call in a few favors. Don’t worry about it. Now, the shepherds came to see the baby, right? After that, probably some time after, came a group of astrologers who claimed they’d seen a star telling them of a new king being born.”
Carrot Top lifted her head, frowned, turned toward the others, and said, “Astrology? Isn’t that a zebra thing?”
I paused. “Wait, you have that here—?”
“Were they zebras?” Berry Punch called.
“Uh, no. Probably Persians.”
“Ah,” said Time Turner. “They were cats.”
I slapped my face.
“So the cats on this world talk, but the sheep don’t,” muttered Minuette. “Is that what we’re to understand?”
“It would seem so,” Time Turner answered.
“A strange world indeed,” Minuette whispered.
I closed my eyes, gripped the corners of the ambo, and took a series of deep breaths. “If you are all finished speculating, I was trying to say—”
“Is this the extent of the narrative we are to enact?” Time Turner asked.
I paused again. “Well, yes. I suppose it is.”
He nodded. “A reenactment of an unusual nativity. It is not a typical birthday celebration, of course, but, as we can see, it is not an especially outlandish custom once we have the facts in order.” He leaned over to look at Carrot Top. “Miss Top? Any objection? You are usually the most sensitive of our little coterie.”
A small smile flitted across Carrot Top’s mouth. “None, Doctor Turner. But thank you for asking. I believe Mister Andrews and I have reached an understanding.”
Minuette, with brow furrowed, took to her hooves. “This baby, was she—?”
“He,” I said.
“Ah, beg pardon. Was he the fulfillment of the prophecy, then?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And he fought off the empire?”
“No.”
Time Turner tipped his head back and gazed at the ceiling. “That is not especially strange, either. The Long Count records at least eighty-two prophecies I can recall off-hoof. About seventeen are fulfilled, fifty-three are still pending—as one might say—and twelve were unfulfilled and cannot be fulfilled because of the changes in historical circumstances. Prophecy is an exceedingly rare magic, after all, and it is by no means an exact science.”
“This was a bit different,” I said. “They were looking for one kind of salvation, but he brought another.”
“Ooh, a twist,” said Berry. “It is like a novel. So what happened to this guy?”
Still leaning one elbow on the ambo, I turned and pointed up at the crucifix hovering over the altar.
“They did that to a baby?” Derpy cried.
“He was grown up at the time. But it was the same guy, yes.” Stepping behind the altar and under the crucifix, I added, “When a man’s hung up this way, all the weight is on forelimbs, you see, which are pulled out of their sockets, placing pressure on the chest so he can’t breathe except by pushing against the nail in his—”
“Utterly barbaric,” Carrot Top hissed as she looked away.
“Yes it is.”
“Who put him up there?” Minuette asked.
“I did.” I walked up to the bare altar and placed my hands on it. “All of you, come up here.”
None of the ponies moved.
“No, I’m serious. Come here.”
Time Turner and Minuette looked at each other. Minuette shrugged and said, “I have two vials, Chronomaster, and humans are physically weak.”
Time Turner nodded and walked up to me. “What is it?”
I ran a hand over the smooth marble of the altar stone. “The people of Israel had a ritual of blood sacrifice. Do you know what that is?”
“I’ve an inkling,” Time Turner answered.
“They’d take animals—the non-talking kind, of course—and kill them on top of a stone somewhat like this one.”
“So you continue the practice. What blood do you offer on this stone?”
I turned and pointed at the crucifix again. “His.”
“And you said before that he’s in your gold box. You have a chunk of him in there?”
“Yes and no. All of him is in there, but not quite the way you’re thinking. There’s a chunk of a person under this stone, though. We call that a relic. Sometimes altars like this are built over whole tombs.”
“Carrot Top is right. Most barbaric.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“You have some obsession with death, then?”
“Of a sort.”
“I’ve surmised that the events you narrated are not recent, yet you identified yourself as responsible for them. The ceremony Minuette and I attended, is it a sort of ritual participation in murder?”
“Yes.”
“And we witnessed the way this altar is used?”
“The only way it’s used, yes.”
“I see.” He smiled faintly, turned away from me, and stepped back down into the nave. “This little club is disgusting but harmless. I see no reason not to assist them if they want the assistance.”
“How do you suppose, Doctor?” Minuette asked as he stepped past her. “Before, I would have agreed, but now it sounds pernicious.”
He inclined his head back toward me and replied, “You and I were here. We saw what they did. They brought out crackers and preserved grape juice and called it a body and blood. This poor fellow got himself murdered, and they’ve somehow or other identified that event with a primitive blood ritual. Who knows? If eating wafers can slake their bloodlust, perhaps this little game they play even has a sort of pacifistic effect on them. It may be vulgar and savage, but it’s harmless.”
He looked over his shoulder at me. “I’ll be your—what was the name?—Joseph. The others can decide for themselves.”
Derpy, now clutching Dinky in her hooves, sniffled and began to cry. “Wasn’t there anypony to help him?” she asked.
I bent down, picked up the altar cloth, and laid it back over the mensa. “They all ran away.”
“But—”
“His mother stayed, though. That’s who I’d like you to play, if you’re willing.”
With tears making dark branches down her face, Derpy, still sobbing, pulled Dinky off the ground and pressed a cheek to hers. “I’m gonna keep you safe, sugar muffin! I promise!”
“Aw, Mom!” Dinky cried. She squirmed in Derpy’s forelimbs, but didn’t look as if she were struggling very hard.
“Let’s go back,” said Time Turner. “If you’re finished, I think we could use a little fresh air.”
I genuflected toward the tabernacle, walked through the cluster of ponies, and headed for the vestibule. The sound of hooves echoing through the room told me the others were close behind.
