by Hugh Cook
Red and black, in shadows and blood -
To a grim purposes, sees yet sightless.
Thus it was that Asodo Hatch dueled with a demon inside the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash, and won a great victory over that demon. Inside of a month, the details of that duel were known to all of Dalar ken Halvar. Asodo Hatch - this is how the story was told, and nobody doubted it - had challenged Paraban Senk to a duel. Senk had accepted the challenge. In an arena generated by the machineries of the illusion tanks, Asodo Hatch had met with Senk, and the pair had fought it out to the red-blood finish, with the rule of the Combat College as the prize.
Also told in Dalar ken Halvar was the story of Hatch's climactic confrontation with the lockway's dorgi. It was told how the dorgi had growled and roared, how it had spat death with its zulzers - death which Hatch in his nimbleness had dodged and ducked - and how at last it had destroyed itself when in its frustration it attempted to use its most powerful weapons to destroy not just Hatch but the entire mountain which trapped and encumbered it.
On the strength of such tales, Asodo Hatch became not just Saint Hatch but Hero Hatch into the bargain, all of which was a great help to him as he attempted to make himself master of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga.
Even with such help, to secure his rule was no easy task. It required the most delicate of negotiations, coupled with a regrettable requirement for (on occasion) direct and ruthless action which need not here be detailed. For the management of an empire is a study in itself, and not to be lightly summed.
Suffice it to say that Asodo Hatch was for a time very busy, yet as the days went by his burdens eased. And so it was that he found the time for nights of peaceful privacy, and spent those nights in Pan Lay, a fine house on the heights of Cap Gargle. The owner of that house was the Lady Iro Murasaki, one of the grayskinned Janjuladoola people - and Hatch of course did not displace her from her residence when he chose to spend his nights in that residence.
It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral universe, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady Iro Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candy flossed to life by the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies. It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of the moralists.
But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself - why, then, let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this history be a message in itself.
And if something more still be demanded - a moral, perforce! - why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game played in the shadows with a dog and a ghost.
Consider by the light of that moral the life of Asodo Hatch.
In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did not rightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly of his own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, and in the direction of his choosing - but he was swimming in a river that was in flood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning toward the hot pit of its final embroilment.
And we too in our time may be plunged into such a flood; and therefore should not be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatch should have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, or should have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish.
Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy.
And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming or drowning, had no right to live when so many were dead - why then, know that it takes only a moment's courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetime's courage to live. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetime's courage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both a sharpened sword and the incentive to use it.
Therefore let us grant to Asodo Hatch at least the honor of his courage.
And if further excuse for his actions be needed, why then, remember only that Hatch was a barbarian monstrous in his purple, a true warrior of one of the Wild Tribes if ever there was one;
and, if someone must be blamed for his wrongdoing, then blame the cartoonists of the Nexus, who were surely the providers of his strongest role models. And with blame thus properly assigned in the best of moralizing fashion, it is proper to spare a moment to satisfy the curiosity of the ethnologists, and to detail the manner in which the Frangoni worship of the Great God Mokaragash was reconciled with the rise of Nu-chala-nuth.
Let it be recorded, then, that at the end of the first year of his rule, Asodo Hatch climbed to the Frangoni rock, and that Hatch there made his peace with Sesno Felvus, the High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash. In Temple Isherzan, there was only the priesthood left, and not much of that: for the Frangoni laity had converted as a whole to the worship of the Nu-chala, and hence had joined themselves to that great congregation known as the Nu-
chala-nuth.
To deprive a Great God of the worship of His people would be considered by many to be an unpardonable crime; but Sesno Felvus pardoned Asodo Hatch, for Sesno Felvus - when forced to the ultimate choice - valued his people more than his god.
Besides, the gods evolve, do they not? State it as a certainty: they do. For it is one of the lessons of history that the gods lack that stability of form which is given to the flesh;
and, in proof of this, it is difficult to find so much as a single god which has been stable in its form for as little time as a thousand years. Therefore it might well be thought that the Great God Mokaragash, when incarnated in an idol in the precincts of Temple Isherzan, had yet to evolve to His final form; and it might be thought that the Nu, the god worshipped by the Nu-chala, was simply a potential future form to which, in the fullness of time, the Great God Mokaragash would Evolve.
Therefore it could be argued that those who abandoned the worship of the Great God Mokaragash to make themselves members of the Nu-chala-nuth were simply giving slightly premature homage to a future form of the Great God Mokaragash. This at least was what Sesno Felvus told those priests who chose to stay with him in Temple Isherzan; and, if any chose to disbelieve this, not one of them was bold enough to say as much.
As for Asodo Hatch himself, when asked by the Lady Iro Murasaki what he truly believed, Hatch delivered himself of this simplest of doctrines:
"When a mantis flies, it's more of a leaf than a bird."
The End
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Table of Contents
Section 1
Table of Contents
Section 1
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Hugh Cook, The Worshippers and the Way