The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

  The man nodded, again satisfied. “Emmanuel.”

  Glogauer realised belatedly that the choice of name had been an unfortunate one in the circumstances, for Emmanuel meant in Hebrew “God with us” and doubtless had a mystic significance for his questioner.

  “And what is your name?” he asked.

  The man straightened up, looking broodingly down on Glogauer. “You do not know me? You have not heard of John, called the Baptist?”

  Glogauer tried to hide his surprise, but evidently John the Baptist saw that his name was familiar. He nodded his shaggy head. “You do know of me, I see. Well, magus, now I must decide, eh?”

  “What must you decide?” Glogauer asked nervously.

  “If you be the friend of the prophecies or the false one we have been warned against by Adonai. The Romans would deliver me into the hands of mine enemies, the children of Herod.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You must know why, for I speak against the Romans who enslave Judaea, and I speak against the unlawful things that Herod does, and I prophesy the time when all those who are not righteous shall be destroyed and Adonai’s kingdom will be restored on Earth as the old prophets said it would be. I say to the people ‘Be ready for that day when ye shall take up the sword to do Adonai’s will.’ The unrighteous know that they will perish on this day, and they would destroy me.”

  Despite the intensity of his words, John’s tone was matter-of-fact. There was no hint of insanity or fanaticism in his face or bearing. He sounded most of all like an Anglican vicar reading a sermon whose meaning for him had lost its edge.

  The essence of what he said, Karl Glogauer realised, was that he was arousing the people to throw out the Romans and their puppet Herod and establish a more “righteous” régime. The attributing of this plan to “Adonai” (one of the spoken names of Jahweh and meaning The Lord) seemed, as many scholars had guessed in the twentieth century, a means of giving the plan extra weight. In a world where politics and religion, even in the West, were inextricably bound together, it was necessary to ascribe a supernatural origin to the plan.

  Indeed, Glogauer thought, it was more than likely that John believed his idea had been inspired by God, for the Greeks on the other side of the Mediterranean had not yet stopped arguing about the origins of inspiration—whether it originated in a man’s head or was placed there by the gods. That John accepted him as an Egyptian magician of some kind did not surprise Glogauer particularly, either. The circumstances of his arrival must have seemed extraordinarily miraculous and at the same time acceptable, particularly to a sect like the Essenes who practised self-mortification and starvation and must be quite used to seeing visions in this hot wilderness. There was no doubt now that these people were the neurotic Essenes, whose ritual washing—baptism—and self-deprivation, coupled with the almost paranoiac mysticism that led them to invent secret languages and the like, was a sure indication of their mentally unbalanced condition. All this occurred to Glogauer the psychiatrist manqué, but Glogauer the man was torn between the poles of extreme rationalism and the desire to be convinced by the mysticism itself.

  “I must meditate,” John said, turning towards the cave entrance. “I must pray. You will remain here until guidance is sent to me.”

  He left the cave, striding rapidly away.

  Glogauer sank back on the wet straw. He was without doubt in a limestone cave, and the atmosphere in the cave was surprisingly humid. It must be very hot outside. He felt drowsy.

  2

  Five years in the past. Nearly two thousand in the future. Lying in the hot, sweaty bed with Monica. Once again, another attempt to make normal love had metamorphosed into the performance of minor aberrations which seemed to satisfy her better than anything else.

  Their real courtship and fulfilment was yet to come. As usual, it would be verbal. As usual, it would find its climax in argumentative anger.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not satisfied again.” She accepted the lighted cigarette he handed to her in the darkness.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  There was silence for a while as they smoked.

  Eventually, and in spite of knowing what the result would be if he did so, he found himself talking.

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he began.

  He waited for her reply. She would delay for a little while yet.

  “What is?” she said at last.

  “All this. You spend all day trying to help sexual neurotics to become normal. You spend your nights doing what they do.”

  “Not to the same extent. You know it’s all a matter of degree.”

  “So you say.”

  He turned his head and looked at her face in the starlight from the window. She was a gaunt-featured redhead, with the calm, professional seducer’s voice of the psychiatric social worker that she was. It was a voice that was soft, reasonable and insincere. Only occasionally, when she became particularly agitated, did her voice begin to indicate her real character. Her features never seemed to be in repose, even when she slept. Her eyes were forever wary, her movements rarely spontaneous. Every inch of her was protected, which was probably why she got so little pleasure from ordinary love-making.

  “You just can’t let yourself go, can you?” he said.

  “Oh, shut up, Karl. Have a look at yourself if you’re looking for a neurotic mess.”

  Both were amateur psychiatrists—she a psychiatric social worker, he merely a reader, a dabbler, though he had done a year’s study some time ago when he had planned to become a psychiatrist. They used the terminology of psychiatry freely. They felt happier if they could name something.

  He rolled away from her, groping for the ashtray on the bedside table, catching a glance of himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was a sallow, intense, moody Jewish bookseller, with a head full of images and unresolved obsessions, a body full of emotions. He always lost these arguments with Monica. Verbally, she was the dominant one. This kind of exchange often seemed to him more perverse than their love-making, where usually at least his rôle was masculine. Essentially, he realised, he was passive, masochistic, indecisive. Even his anger, which came frequently, was impotent. Monica was ten years older than he was, ten years more bitter. As an individual, of course, she had far more dynamism than he had; but as a psychiatric social worker she had had just as many failures. She plugged on, becoming increasingly cynical on the surface but still, perhaps, hoping for a few spectacular successes with patients. They tried to do too much, that was the trouble, he thought. The priests in the confessional supplied a panacea; the psychiatrists tried to cure, and most of the time they failed. But at least they tried, he thought, and then wondered if that was, after all, a virtue.

  “I did look at myself,” he said.

  Was she sleeping? He turned. Her wary eyes were still open, looking out of the window.

  “I did look at myself,” he repeated. “The way Jung did. ‘How can I help those persons if I am myself a fugitive and perhaps also suffer from the morbus sacer of a neurosis?’ That’s what Jung asked himself . . .”

  “That old sensationalist. That old rationaliser of his own mysticism. No wonder you never became a psychiatrist.”

  “I wouldn’t have been any good. It was nothing to do with Jung . . .”

  “Don’t take it out on me . . .”

  “You’ve told me yourself that you feel the same—you think it’s useless . . .”

  “After a hard week’s work, I might say that. Give me another fag.”

  He opened the packet on the bedside table and put two cigarettes in his mouth, lighting them and handing one to her.

  Almost abstractedly, he noticed that the tension was increasing. The argument was, as ever, pointless. But it was not the argument that was the important thing; it was simply the expression of the essential relationship. He wondered if that was in any way important, either.

  “You’re not telling the truth.” He realised that there w
as no stopping now that the ritual was in full swing.

  “I’m telling the practical truth. I’ve no compulsion to give up my work. I’ve no wish to be a failure . . .”

  “Failure? You’re more melodramatic than I am.”

  “You’re too earnest, Karl. You want to get out of yourself a bit.”

  He sneered. “If I were you, I’d give up my work, Monica. You’re no more suited for it than I was.”

  She shrugged. “You’re a petty bastard.”

  “I’m not jealous of you, if that’s what you think. You’ll never understand what I’m looking for.”

  Her laugh was artificial, brittle. “Modern man in search of a soul, eh? Modern man in search of a crutch, I’d say. And you can take that any way you like.”

  “We’re destroying the myths that make the world go round.”

  “Now you say ‘And what are we putting in their place?’ You’re stale and stupid, Karl. You’ve never looked rationally at anything—including yourself.”

  “What of it? You say the myth is unimportant.”

  “The reality that creates it is important.”

  “Jung knew that the myth can also create the reality.”

  “Which shows what a muddled old fool he was.”

  He stretched his legs. In doing so, he touched hers and he recoiled. He scratched his head. She still lay there smoking, but she was smiling now.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s have some stuff about Christ.”

  He said nothing. She handed him the stub of her cigarette and he put it in the ashtray. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning.

  “Why do we do it?” he said.

  “Because we must.” She put her hand to the back of his head and pulled it towards her breast. “What else can we do?”

  We Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the “imitation of Christ” in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would . . . be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified . . . A neurosis is a dissociation of personality.

  (Jung: Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

  For a month, John the Baptist was away and Glogauer lived with the Essenes, finding it surprisingly easy, as his ribs mended, to join in their daily life. The Essenes’ township consisted of a mixture of single-storey houses, built of limestone and clay brick, and the caves that were to be found on both sides of the shallow valley. The Essenes shared their goods in common and this particular sect had wives, though many Essenes led completely monastic lives. The Essenes were also pacifists, refusing to own or to make weapons—yet this sect plainly tolerated the warlike Baptist. Perhaps their hatred of the Romans overcame their principles. Perhaps they were not sure of John’s entire intention. Whatever the reason for their toleration, there was little doubt that John the Baptist was virtually their leader.

  The life of the Essenes consisted of ritual bathing three times a day, of prayer and of work. The work was not difficult. Sometimes Glogauer guided a plough pulled by two other members of the sect; sometimes he looked after the goats that were allowed to graze on the hillsides. It was a peaceful, ordered life, and even the unhealthy aspects were so much a matter of routine that Glogauer hardly noticed them for anything else after a while.

  Tending the goats, he would lie on a hilltop, looking out over the wilderness which was not a desert, but rocky scrubland sufficient to feed animals like goats or sheep. The scrubland was broken by low-lying bushes and a few small trees growing along the banks of the river that doubtless ran into the Dead Sea. It was uneven ground. In outline, it had the appearance of a stormy lake, frozen and turned yellow and brown. Beyond the Dead Sea lay Jerusalem. Obviously Christ had not entered the city for the last time yet. John the Baptist would have to die before that happened.

  The Essenes’ way of life was comfortable enough, for all its simplicity. They had given him a goatskin loincloth and a staff and, except for the fact that he was watched by day and night, he appeared to be accepted as a kind of lay member of the sect.

  Sometimes they questioned him casually about his chariot—the time machine they intended soon to bring in from the desert—and he told them that it had borne him from Egypt to Syria and then to here. They accepted the miracle calmly. As he had suspected, they were used to miracles.

  The Essenes had seen stranger things than his time machine. They had seen men walk on water and angels descend to and from heaven; they had heard the voice of God and his archangels as well as the tempting voice of Satan and his minions. They wrote all these things down in their vellum scrolls. They were merely a record of the supernatural as their other scrolls were records of their daily lives and of the news that travelling members of their sect brought to them.

  They lived constantly in the presence of God and spoke to God and were answered by God when they had sufficiently mortified their flesh and starved themselves and chanted their prayers beneath the blazing sun of Judaea.

  Karl Glogauer grew his hair long and let his beard come unchecked. He mortified his flesh and starved himself and chanted his prayers beneath the sun, as they did. But he rarely heard God and only once thought he saw an archangel with wings of fire.

  In spite of his willingness to experience the Essenes’ hallucinations, Glogauer was disappointed, but he was surprised that he felt so well considering all the self-inflicted hardships he had to undergo, and he also felt relaxed in the company of these men and women who were undoubtedly insane. Perhaps it was because their insanity was not so very different from his own that after a while he stopped wondering about it.

  John the Baptist returned one evening, striding over the hills followed by twenty or so of his closest disciples. Glogauer saw him as he prepared to drive the goats into their cave for the night. He waited for John to get closer.

  The Baptist’s face was grim, but his expression softened as he saw Glogauer. He smiled and grasped him by the upper arm in the Roman fashion.

  “Well, Emmanuel, you are our friend, as I thought you were. Sent by Adonai to help us accomplish his will. You shall baptise me on the morrow, to show all the people that He is with us.”

  Glogauer was tired. He had eaten very little and had spent most of the day in the sun, tending the goats. He yawned, finding it hard to reply. However, he was relieved. John had plainly been in Jerusalem trying to discover if the Romans had sent him as a spy. John now seemed reassured and trusted him.

  He was worried, however, by the Baptist’s faith in his powers.

  “John,” he began. “I’m no seer . . .”

  The Baptist’s face clouded for a moment, then he laughed awkwardly. “Say nothing. Eat with me tonight. I have wild honey and locusts.”

  Glogauer had not yet eaten this food, which was the staple of travellers who did not carry provisions but lived off the food they could find on the journey. Some regarded it as a delicacy.

  He tried it later, as he sat in John’s house. There were only two rooms in the house. One was for eating in, the other for sleeping in. The honey-and-locusts was too sweet for his taste, but it was a welcome change from barley or goat-meat.

  He sat cross-legged, opposite John the Baptist, who ate with relish. Night had fallen. From outside came low murmurs and the moans and cries of those at prayer.

  Glogauer dipped another locust into the bowl of honey that rested between them. “Do you plan to lead the people of Judaea in revolt against the Romans?” he asked.

  The Baptist seemed disturbed by the direct question. It was the first of its nature that Glogauer had put to him.

  “If it be Adonai’s will,” he said, not looking up as he leaned towards the bowl of honey.

  “The Romans know this?”<
br />
  “I do not know, Emmanuel, but Herod the incestuous has doubtless told them I speak against the unrighteous.”

  “Yet the Romans do not arrest you.”

  “Pilate dare not—not since the petition was sent to the Emperor Tiberius.”

  “Petition?”

  “Aye, the one that Herod and the Pharisees signed when Pilate the procurator did place votive shields in the palace at Jerusalem and seek to violate the Temple. Tiberius rebuked Pilate and since then, though he still hates the Jews, the procurator is more careful in his treatment of us.”

  “Tell me, John, do you know how long Tiberius has ruled in Rome?” He had not had the chance to ask that question again until now.

  “Fourteen years.”

  It was 28 A.D.; something less than a year before the crucifixion would take place, and his time machine was smashed.

  Now John the Baptist planned armed rebellion against the occupying Romans, but, if the Gospels were to be believed, would soon be decapitated by Herod. Certainly no large-scale rebellion had taken place at this time. Even those who claimed that the entry of Jesus and his disciples into Jerusalem and the invasion of the Temple were plainly the actions of armed rebels had found no records to suggest that John had led a similar revolt.

  Glogauer had come to like the Baptist very much. The man was plainly a hardened revolutionary who had been planning revolt against the Romans for years and had slowly been building up enough followers to make the attempt successful. He reminded Glogauer strongly of the resistance leaders of the Second World War. He had a similar toughness and understanding of the realities of his position. He knew that he would only have one chance to smash the cohorts garrisoned in the country. If the revolt became protracted, Rome would have ample time to send more troops to Jerusalem.

  “When do you think Adonai intends to destroy the unrighteous through your agency?” Glogauer said tactfully.

  John glanced at him with some amusement. He smiled. “The Passover is a time when the people are restless and resent the strangers most,” he said.