Paradise for the Damned. - 14. Chapter 14

Claude still has a Sabrine problem.  Guy might help, but well, no. that leaves Claude on his own.  
Anyway, I have several issues with confusion. And well, things make perfect sense to me.  So if anything really trips you up, please, please let me know.  And I'll  and more ...

“Inasmuch as I esteem myself a blood drinker and you a catamite, you’re more damned than I. The Doctor explains that sodomites sin doubly. Against God and against nature. You’ll be lower than me in hell,” Guy interrupted Claude’s silent walk in the meadows with sudden companionship and a sudden book in his face.

Claude forced a nod through a shudder. “Your nature contravenes God’s order. You’re likewise twice-damned.”

“Would God have me hungry?”

“You don’t confess your sins.”

“Bless my cock, I tell ye, I’m Huguenot.”

“And I’m chaste and virtuous as St. Joseph.”

Guy conjured a black book from his ermine coat. “See here, the Bible I read to study to show myself approved unto God.”

Verily it was a Bible, the Latin Vulgate, sprawling with marked passages. ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins…’ Claude mouthed.

“Ah, the Songs of Solomon. The only good book in it,” Guy said.

Claude pushed the book back to him, craned his head left and right over the grey swathes of meadows and shrubbery, and squinted for something more pleasant than the crow cawing at his side.

“Bless my cock, I take my sins directly to God. Would the pig-nut Dennis have the way to salvation?” Guy said.

The frogs leaping from puddle to puddle suddenly held more interest to Claude than conceding Guy’s point. Dennis might be too chubby to be his emissary to heaven, but agreement with the tutor seemed a veiled surrender, and so he said, “Verily, you’re damned in denying the authority of the Pope.”

“Popery, icons, the pavilion of saints … Idolatry and sacrilege! Sola Scriptura, Sola fide, Sola gratia. Solo Christo. Soli Deo Gloria!” By which time, Guy’s hands were raised high as though he were seeking grace from the sky. Men and women inched up from stooped profiles in brimming fields of wheat and transfixed on the spectacle of holy heresy. Clouds gathered. Thunders pealed. There was but one God, and Guy Sewell was his prophet.

Claude felt his body wooden in awe; an anointed demon, who with the shine of ungodly bravery upon his countenance, would have him comingle human and demon in a carnal blur, hound him to abandon the Virgin, the sacraments, the litany of saints and be brave in his own way to salvation. Guy was more than a demon that would collect his bloody debt. Guy was the Tempter. Claude’s face broke into a furious perspiration. But it was just Guy, Claude chided himself, a tutor more lecherous than learned, not the horned Tempter.

Claude sighed deeper, shameful at his own sorry self, a pretender to learning, a mountebank of shallow wisdom. A year’s worth of Latin imaginations had not birthed in him the freedom in thought or spirit. He was indeed no scholar.

Claude marched angrily away from Guy as his desires reached for a faded image of Alphonse, the hard arms, the beard bolder now with the thrust of manhood—Alphonse in Sabrine’s damned company. He tensed and stifled a burst of exasperation.

Guy was abreast of him again, presumably to preach more heretical gospels. “You bend before God, you bend before Dennis, but you bend not unto me.”

“You’re neither priest nor God. Just a baboon of hot humor and indeterminate lust.”

“A baboon could be your God.”

Claude heaved a valiant breath. “You want my knee, you bend.”

Alas Guy’s attentions were elsewhere; his head was drifting after Yvette, maiden of seventeen, an unopened bud, gamboling along eastwards to church.

As if denying the chasteness of her sight, Guy said, eerily monotone, “What of you demands my knee? Your leaky tail? Your soul that strives for no one? The soul that stands idle when maidens cry for succor?” His lips peeled back thinly from a rack of dazzling teeth.

Claude strained to find the warmth in Guy’s grin. But the cheerful face condemned him still.

“You’re a thief of youth,” Claude said as his spirit began to peter and fail. The wide fields seemed to scrunch and squeeze into the size of a mustard seed. The rainy May was not that anxious August with its torrid auguries when Antoine could have demanded anything of him and he would have obeyed. The days when Antoine shivered between life and death on a soiled bed. The days when Antoine’s words were not the yoke of burden but the listless breaths of a tenuous meaning.

Claude smoothed over his face, its thin damp, and the present moment of Guy’s rakish stare slid into view. He surrendered sight to the runny clouds, nose to the smell of earth, and self to the refresh of rain. There was yet Virgil to read and Sabrine to restrain from her sure plan of massacre.