The Wazir and the Witch

by Hugh Cook

  That night, Pelagius Zozimus, Ivan Pokrov and Artemis Ingalwa organized a special dinner to celebrate the escape of Dui Tin Char and the rapid spread of authenticating rumours which had followed that escape. Now all Injiltaprajura believed that the Crab ruled as wazir. On Tin Char’s authority, no less.

  The mature adults were immensely relieved, for the last few days had been tense indeed.

  But Chegory Guy and Olivia Qasaba felt no relief because they had felt no worry. While Untunchilamon lurched from one crisis to another, while panicked depositors mobbed the Narapatorpabarta Bank and agents of the Inland Revenue resorted to heavyweight tranquillizers, while spies and thieves fought to the death for possession of scraps of the mysterious Injiltaprajuradariski, while Juliet Idaho and Nadalastabstala Ban-raithanchumun Ek fumed with impatience (Idaho metaphorically and the chain-smoking Ek literally), Chegory and Olivia passed their days in what was almost another world entirely.

  Such are the ways of youth that the crisis in which Chegory and Olivia were so intimately involved was but a remote background to the true drama of their lives.

  For they were in love.

  This may lead some readers to throw up their arms and cry out in despair; but the historian records it with tolerant understanding. For, in a long and often bitter life, the historian has learnt that there are forms of folly which are far, far worse than the systematic delusions which accompany amation.

  One such folly, one of millions, is to—

  But I have come to the end of another sheet of fooskin; therefore I will call a halt to this chapter here, and launch into a disquisition upon certain forms of political folly (notably philosophical objection to the paying of taxes) at the start of the next.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek knew full well (as knows your historian) that taxes must be paid. Or else the State will wither away. The withering of the State would give great satisfaction to certain feckless political philosophers; but such a prospect is less than attractive to those who rely for their livelihood upon the roads and irrigation systems organized and protected by the State.

  One of the biggest problems associated with the withering of the State is the rise in thuggery which typically accompanies such withering. Solo muggers become organized bandits, among whom warlords in time come to power, eventually throwing up a master of murder who makes himself emperor and sets in place his own version of the State.

  The bottom line is this: those who wish to sleep safely in their beds had better be prepared to pay their taxes.

  Master Ek knew this full well.

  Nevertheless, while Ek was a financial realist, it would have been hard to gather this from the fiery speeches he made over the next few days. He preached to packed congregations, for a great many people had suddenly discovered a new or renewed faith in Zoz the Ancestral now that such loyalty could win them tax advantages equal to those offered by the Cult of the Holy Cockroach.

  What possessed Master Ek to pursue this folly?

  Was senility at last setting in?

  Justina sent her spies to audit Master Ek’s sermons, and the spies came back with the most alarming news. While Ek’s preaching did not deviate from the orthodox doctrines of his religion, it nevertheless carried the most alarming political overtones, and was being received with adulatory acclamation.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Master Ek was stirring up a lynch mob.

  The High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral was too afraid of the Crab to oppose it directly. Believing Justina to be under the Crab’s protection, Ek durst not order people to chop off her head. Dui Tin Char’s panic-stricken flight into the deserts of Zolabrik had convinced Ek of the wisdom of his long-pursued policies of caution; and, as many hot heads had been cooled by the Crab’s explicit intervention into the politics of Injiltaprajura, it was unlikely that Ek would have been obeyed had he ordered Justina’s death.

  However, a mob in its madness will do what no individual in its ranks would dare alone. Ek knew this. Justina knew this. And Ek knew (and Justina knew that he knew) that any overt move against the Temple of Zoz by Empress or Crab would not forestall a riot but instead would precipitate it immediately; for the Temple’s fall would mean financial ruin for a great many citizens of Injiltaprajura had already committed themselves to new mortgages and hire purchase agreements on the strength of the tax breaks so recently granted them by that Temple.

  Ek was in his element.

  When Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek preached in the Temple, a great weight of age seemed to slip from his shoulders; he seemed to gain height in fingerlengths and to grow broader across the shoulders. The pains of his arthritis eased, ebbed, then vanished entirely. His voice, slightly hoarse thanks to his incessant cigarette smoking, crooned and inveigled as he insinuated himself into the confidence of his congregation.

  ‘Power,’ he said. ‘We worship Zoz because Zoz is power. Power is the greatest good. The weak were made to kneel before power, because such is the nature of reality.’

  With such self-evident truths old Master Ek began.

  Then, when he had his people in his power, when his voice had replaced the function of thought, he worked on them with rhythms designed to lead to a destruction of the self in a climax close to orgasm.

  Sometimes he innovated his own speeches.

  Sometimes a mere recital of Holy Writ sufficed.

  Hear him.

  Hear Master Ek.

  Listen!

  ‘In the Beginning was the mire of the morass, the slime of the pulp.

  ‘In the Beginning was the darkness, and floods of filth moved back and forth within the darkness, void of face and without form.

  ‘And the floods were lustful and without continence.

  ‘And the name of the Beginning was Woman.

  ‘And she in her depths was dark and knew not of herself, and a great Abyss was she, with snakes within her substance.

  ‘This was the time of the lowest, for she was low, no height had she.

  ‘Nor did she yearn for height.

  ‘For her nature was to drag down and swallow, to swallow and submerge, to submerge and dissolve, to dissolve and ruin, and this to and with herself she did.

  ‘And the face and the skin of the Woman were clutching waters, and a great rain fell perpetually upon those waters.

  ‘Yet the waters were not cleansed thereby.

  ‘And the rain merged with the waters and became unclean.

  ‘And rain and water were one, and their taste was that of blood.

  ‘And the world which was Woman was weak and in its weakness knew not of itself. It was soft; it was liquid; a great streaming surged within its depths, and it was void of form and of boundary.

  ‘Then Zoz spake out of nothing, saying unto Woman: I am.

  ‘Thus the will.

  ‘Thus the first Act, and the first Act was of pure will.

  ‘Then Act became Man, and a great light was upon him and within him, and his first name was Order.

  ‘And Woman beheld the light and said unto it: Come, be with me and of me.

  ‘But Zoz said unto the temptations of this moist engulfment: I am Light, thou art Dark. I am Law, thou art Panic. Behold me in my glory, and obey.

  ‘Thus spoke Zoz.

  ‘But woman obeyed not. She laughed.

  ‘And Zoz the Ancestral saw that the laughter was a great wrong against the right, and did unto Woman what it was his will to do, and afterwards there was silence without laughter, and a great contentment was within the heart of Zoz.

  ‘Thus it was at the time of the Coming.

  ‘As it should be and will be here and hereafter. For Zoz is great, and we ourselves can be great in Zoz. Can be and will be. Affirm!’

  Thus Ek, and the affirmation of his congregation was like unto the rage of a great storm.

  Reports of these speeches reached Pelagius Zozimus on the island of Jod. Now Pelagius Zozimus was in some ways a consummate politician, and th
anks to his skills he had risen high in the ranks of Argan’s Confederation; but his politics were those of a bureaucrat. He was an accomplished tactician and a sly strategist who had won many triumphs in the realms of committees and commissions of enquiry; but he had no sense whatsoever of the passions of the mob.

  So, when Ek called for the people to worship the Powerful, Zozimus muttered that this was all nonsense.

  ‘It is sufficient to lead a moral life.’

  So said Zozimus to the fruit salad (coconut, mango, papaya, cassana, watermelon and sea-cucumbers) which he had prepared for the Crab’s latest lunch. (A fruit salad is what he called it, though some pedants will object that a coconut is not a fruit and that a sea-cucumber is actually an animal.)

  ‘It is pointless,’ said Zozimus, ‘to adore Power merely because it is Power. Not one person in a thousand will pay heed to such nonsense.’

  Thus Zozimus.

  Sadly underestimating the potency of Ek’s doctrines and the strength of their mob appeal.

  Why was a wizard as brilliant as Pelagius Zozimus so badly astray in his estimations of political reality? Perhaps his very intelligence limited his perceptions, for it kept him from empathizing with the inchoate yearnings of the mob. That and his possession of personal power.

  Though Pelagius Zozimus had long ago abandoned the control of corpses for the delights of cookery, occult power yet remained to him. He was and would always be a wizard of the order of Xluzu, a wizard holding power in his own right without reference to any of his fellows. He experienced power as a shaping fire, a living force, an actual presence; as do the poets, through whom there flow the energies of language itself. While Zozimus had played politics in the great castles of Drangsturm, ‘play’ is indeed the operative word; he delighted in bureaucratic manoeuvrings just as Ivan Pokrov delighted in pure mathematics.

  Here Zozimus displayed not a personal quirk but, rather, an attribute typical of his kind; and it is worth pursuing this matter at length, for it helps explain the curious incapacity of the territories ruled by Argan’s Confederation of Wizards; and to explain, too, the fact that the political influence of the sorcerers of Yestron is but modest though their individual powers be great.

  Doubtless not all will be entranced by explanation given in such a sober fashion, by the results of the researches of scholarship set down in a forthright manner without embroidery of blood or flame. Those thus impatient (a majority, one fears) are therefore invited to skip to the start of the next chapter of this chronicle, where it may be that the record will delight them with a rape; or with a plundering of gold; or a building flung aloft (a mote at a time) by the raging flames of arson; or by a tsunami mounting from Moana to sweep across the Outer Reef, to swamp the sand incarnadine of Scimitar, to wreck the white marble of the Analytical Institute from its stance on Jod, and then to despoil the city shore.

  Or perhaps at the start of that next chapter they will find the libidinous Princess Sabitha (Sabitha Winolathon Taskinjathura, scion of the great Ousompton Ling Ordway) in hot copulation with one of her seagoing friends; or the irresponsible Shabble, now a priest, accepting the priestly duty of marriage counselling, and thus engaged in dialoguing the intimacies of the sexual conduct of a beglamoured but embattled young couple.

  History, as one of the wise has had occasion to remark, is very largely a record of war, rape, murder, slaughter, torture, treason, revolution and riot; for which the historian is often blamed, as if history would cease to be enacted were all its chroniclers to be slaughtered (a remedy which has actually been essayed on at least three separate occasions, and which has proved to be singularly ineffective as a remedy for the woes of humanity). It is one of the frustrations of the chronologer’s task that most readers of annals such as these (these readers being few to start with, for history has never had popular appeal) are drawn to such pages by a positive lust for bloodshed; and, lacking any desire to join the ranks of the illuminati, have scant appetite for the scholarly conclusions which cast light on the Causes and the Processes of such disasters.

  Scholarly conclusions now follow.

  So:

  Fly! Away! Let youth depart and race by a flicker of pages to the start of the next chapter, there to be gratified (perhaps) by tsunami, blasphemy or blatant copulation (or, then again, perhaps not).

  And now, secure in the company of hoar age and toothless wisdom alone, let us proceed to show why Pelagius Zozimus was not constitutionally equipped to understand the temperament of the mob; and why, too, the political achievements of wizards and wonderworkers alike fall short of their potential.

  As poets in committed combination are rare, so too are wizards; and for similar reasons. Any one great poet would remain great - as would any one great wizard -were all his fellows to disappear from the world in a great disaster. Hence most poets (and a great many wizards) secretly yearn for such a catastrophe. Much would be lost, but personal power would be enhanced by the lack of competition.

  Compare this to the state of a soldier, be he of any rank from common muck-slugger to lordly general.

  What is he on his own?

  Nothing.

  Can he rape, rob and pillage on his own?

  Not effectively, for any washerwoman with a pitchfork in her hands can put him to flight.

  Can he storm towns, sack castles, beseige cities, dare his desires across the seas or fortify his possession of ill-gotten treasures on his own?

  The answer:

  No.

  Whereas wizard and poet alike can in solitude and with the self alone conspire to create instruments of temporal power (and in isolation consummate such conspiracy), no such ability is granted unto the ordinary run of mortals; wherefrom it follows that ordinary mortals must like the ants unite for cohesive action in the face of their individual impotence.

  Ants engrossed in the multitude of their fellows partake of a power which would be alien to their existence were they to live alone; and so it is with most humans. As the antheap to the ant, so stands the State to the common citizen; and so like an ant the citizen submits to the oppressions of laborious routine, of claustrophobic discipline, and of war.

  ‘Discipline is good,’ says your average citizen; meaning, in truth, ‘I love power, and cannot find it on my own, for on my own I am as nothing.’

  ‘The gods are great,’ he says; meaning, ‘the gods reward my worship by allotting to me the worship of my wife, a worship made a very law of piety.’

  ‘If you would have peace then prepare for war,’ he says; meaning, ‘the militarization of the state in peace as well as war is the best enforcement of that hierarchy of discipline which rewards obedience with power.’

  All this is true; yet unacknowledged. For it is a characteristic of humankind that the most bitter realities of their lives - the inevitability of death and the fatuosity of the periodic slaughters which so accelerate that death - are rarely conceded except by a small fraction of aberrant intellects most likely persecuted for such acknowledgement.

  Thus, as ants in their mindless millions go to war, so go men; and, while philosophers of biology declare the intellect of the average human to be greater than the corresponding resource of the ant, the differences in the ultimate outcome of their behaviour are so slight as to be unobservable.

  Such subordinations are alien to the intellects of wizard and poet alike; for, being possessed of powers won in solitary endeavour outside the antheap, they are disinclined to submit to those oppressions which the common citizen clamours to embrace.

  It follows from above that the most unkempt band of syphilitic bandits is apt to display more political cohesion than the inhabitants of a salon of imperial poets; and the most murderous brood of pirates, though its members be universally refugees from the law of ordered States, enforces among its own number a discipline of war which wizards of Argan’s Confederation could only look upon in outright envy; and warriors, who in their leisure time display a gross indiscipline of drink and lust, conform upon the battlef
ield in perfect regulation.

  In summary:

  As it is with the warrior, so it is with your common citizen. Unlike wizard or poet, your common citizen holds no power in his own right, and can win power only by joining an antheap of oppressions. He joins the State because the State is in many ways a conspiracy to give him power. Power over property; power over slaves; power over the women in his life; power over children and his economic inferiors.

  Thus so many applaud the State when the State is savage, and wrathful, and cruel; and thus a leader who kills, maims, tortures, imprisons and oppresses is often widely applauded as long as he is adroitly selective in his choice of victims. The poverty and suffering of the weak delight the strong, for thus they see their own power enhanced.

  He crushed: he was a great leader.

  He killed: he was a great leader.

  He destroyed: he was a great leader.

  He oppressed: he was a great leader.

  He warred: he was a great leader.

  Great, yes, and very holy.

  It happens that from time to time a ruler of a different sort arises.

  Justina was such a ruler.

  The Empress Justina believed no self-justifying rhetoric of power, least of all that rhetoric which claims the might of the State to be a good in its own right. Instead, she perceived the State through the eyes of common sense. She saw that humans living as thickly upon the ground as they do within the confines of Injiltaprajura must combine to manage the supply of their water and the disposal of their sewage; that a regulated coinage and a disciplined merchantry can enhance the collective prosperity; that the collective State can extend to the aged and the indigent great mercies of charity which would be beyond the patience or the means of the individual; and that a just system of law supplies the aggrieved with an orderly remedy of wrongs so great that they would otherwise threaten the common peace.

  The Empress Justina was good; and merciful; and wise; and therefore out of favour with most of her citizens. For an imperial disinclination to make the State an instrument of selective oppression thwarts the desires of those many citizens who wish to be lords of wrath in their own households and the neighbourhood streets.