There’s
not much you can’t find in Heaven if you look long enough, through the right
sort of eyes. Sometimes you’ll even find me. I keep an office there, over St.
Uncumber’s stables. Like most things in
Heaven, the stables are achingly clean, startlingly beautiful. The
horses, though, are bad to the bone, with bright red eyes and sharp teeth.
They’re bored too, and no wonder; they were specially bred to take men to Hell,
and nobody has ridden them there in years. When my rent gets too far behind, I
help out in the stable or exercise some of the nags.
For
a saint, Uncumber is a nice old gal. From the looks of her you’d never guess at
a scandalous, pagan past, nor that women with inconvenient husbands used to
pray to her, and their prayers were sometimes answered. I imagine the price
would be different now, but then it was a peck of oats, left at an altar. In
return for the oats, if Uncumber was in the mood, a horse would come trotting up to the
worshipper’s door one day, and ride off with a bewildered husband – and him
still carrying, maybe, his stick of no greater thickness than his thumb --on
its back.
