The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid

by L. Sprague De Camp

  Fredro puffed. “Tell him I am Polish citizen! I am good as him, and I don’t get off for . . .”

  “Oh, for Qarar’s sake stow it! Come along; we won’t fight these beggars over your precious Polish citizenship.” Fallon rose and held out a hand to the conductor, palm up.

  “Wherefore?” said the conductor.

  “You will kindly return our fares, my good man.”

  “But ye have already come at least ten blocks . . .”

  “Fastuk!” shouted Fallon, “I’ve had all the imposition from the city of Zanid today that I can put up with! Now will you . . .”

  The conductor shrank back at this outburst and hastily handed over the money.

  When they entered Fallon’s house and disposed of their burdens, Fredro asked: “Where is your—ah—jagaini?”

  “Away visiting,” said Fallon brusquely, not caring to air his domestic upheavals at this stage.

  “Most attractive female,” said Fredro. “Maybe I have been on Krishna so long that greeny coloring looks natural. But she had much charm. I am sorry not to see her again.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said Fallon. “Let’s lay out these robes and our clothes, and hope that most of the stench will disappear by the time we have to put them on again.”

  Fredro, unfolding the robes, sighed. “I have been widower thirty-four years. Have many descendants—children, grandchildren, and so on for six generation.”

  “I envy you, Dr. Fredro,” said Fallon sincerely.

  Fredro continued, “But no woman. Mr. Fallon, tell me, how does an Earthman go about getting the jagaini in Balhib?”

  Fallon glanced at his companion with a sardonic little smile. “The same way you get a woman on Earth. You ask.”

  “I see. You understand, I only wish information as scientific datum.”

  “At your age you might, at that.”

  They spent the rest of the day rehearsing the ritual and practicing the gliding walk of the Yeshtite priest. For the third meal of the Krishnan day they went out to Savaich’s.

  Then they returned to Fallon’s house. Fallon shaved off Fredro’s whiskers, despite the latter’s protests. A light dabbing of green face-powder gave their skins the correct chartreuse tinge. They gave their hair a green wash and glued to their heads the artificial ears and antennae that Mjipa had furnished.

  Lastly they both donned the purple-black sacerdotal robes over their regular clothes. They left the hoods hanging down and hitched the skirts up to knee-length through the belt-cords. Then over these they put on each a Zanidu rain cloak—Fallon his new one and Fredro the old patched one that Fallon had been meaning to get rid of.

  At last they set out for the Safq afoot. And soon the great enigmatic conical structure came into view against the darkening sky.

  XIII

  Fallon asked, “Are you sure you want to go ahead with this? It’s not too late to back out, you know.”

  “Of course am sure. How—how many ways in?”

  “Only one, so far as I know. There might be a tunnel over to the chapel, but that wouldn’t do us any good. Now remember, we shall first walk past, to see in as far as we can. I think they have a desk beside the entrance, where one has to identify oneself. But these robes ought to get us in. We watch until nobody’s looking, then nip around behind the bulletin board and shed these rain cloaks.”

  “I know, I know,” said Fredro impatiently.

  “Anybody’d think you couldn’t wait to have your throat cut.”

  “When I think of secrets inside, waiting for me to discover them, I do not care.”

  Fallon snorted, giving Fredro the withering look that he reserved for foolhardy idealists.

  Fredro continued, “You think I am damn fool, yes? Well, Mr. Consul Mjipa told me about you. Said you were just like that about getting back that place you were king of.”

  Fallon privately admitted that there was justice in this comparison. But, as they were now entering the park surrounding the Safq, he did not have time to pursue that line of thought.

  Fredro continued in a lower tone, “Krishna is archeologist’s paradise. Is ruins and relics representing at least thirty or forty thousand Terran years of history—eight or ten times as long as recorded history on Earth—but all mixed up, with huge lacunae, and never properly studied by Krishnans themselves. A man can be a Schliemann, a Champollion, and a Carnarvon all at same time . . .”

  “Hush, we’re getting close.”

  The main entrance to the Safq was lit by fires, fluttering in the breeze, in a pair of cressets flanking the great doors. These doors now stood open. There was a coming and going of Krishnans, both priests and laymen, in and out of these doors. Voices murmured and purple-black robes flapped in the wind.

  As Fallon and Fredro neared the entrance, the former could see over the heads of the Krishnans into the interior, lit by the light of many candles and oil lamps. At intervals, the crowd would thin; and then Fallon could glimpse the desk at which sat the priest checking the register of those who entered.

  Since the introduction of photography to Krishna, the priests of Yesht had taken to issuing to their trusted followers identification badges bearing small photographs of the wearers. Fifteen to twenty ingoing laymen stood in line, from the desk out through the doors and down the three stone steps to the street level.

  Fallon strolled up close to the portal, watching and listening. He was relieved to see that, as he had hoped, priests pushed through the traffic jam in the portal without bothering to identify themselves to the one at the desk. Evidently for a layman to wear the costume of such a priest was so unheard of, that no precautions had been taken against it.

  Nobody heeded Fallon and his companion as they sauntered over to the bulletin board and pretended to read it. A minute later, they popped out from behind the board, to all appearances third-grade priests of Yesht. The rain cloaks lay rolled up on the paving in the shadow behind the board. The hoods of the robes shadowed their faces.

  Fallon, heart pounding, strode towards the entrance. Laymen deferentially sidled out of his way so that he did not actually have to push through the crowd. Fredro followed so closely that he trod on Fallon’s well-scuffed heels. Through the scarred bronze valves of the great door they passed.

  Ahead of them, a partition wall jutted out from the left, leaving only a narrow space between itself and the doorkeeper’s desk on the right. On the left stood a couple of men in the armor of Civic Guards, leaning on halberds and scanning the faces of passersby. A priest fluttered just ahead of Fallon, who heard him mutter something that sounded like Rukhval as he passed between the watchers on the left and the identification desk on the right.

  Fallon lowered his head, hesitating before the plunge. Somewhere a bell tinkled. A whisper of movement ran through the crowd at the entrance. Fallon guessed that the bell meant to hurry up for the service. He stepped forward, muttering “Rukhval!” and feeling for the rapier hilt under his robe.

  The priest at the desk did not look up as Fallon and Fredro went past, being engrossed in a low-voiced colloquy with a layman. Fallon did not care to look at the guards, lest even in the certain light they discern his Terran features. His heart stopped as a growl came from one of them: “So’í! So’í hao!”

  So paralyzed was Fallon’s brain with fear that it took a second to realize that the fellow was merely urging somebody to hurry up. Whether he was speaking to Fallon and Fredro, or to the priest and layman at the desk, Fallon did not wait to find out, but plunged on. Other priests crowded after the Earthmen.

  Fallon let himself be carried along in the current. As he passed into the Safq, he became aware of the curious sound that he had noticed when he had inspected the structure four nights before. It sounded more loudly inside than outside, but it also turned out to be a more complicated and more enigmatic noise than he had thought. Not only was there the deep rhythmic banging, but lighter and more rapid sounds as of hammering, plus grating noises as of filing or grinding.

 
The spate of Krishnans swept across the rear of the cella of the temple of Yesht that formed part of, or had been built into, the Safq, and that appeared as the large room in Kordaq’s plan. Peering cautiously out from under the edge of his cowl to the left, Fallon could see the backs of the pews—three great blocks of them, about half-filled. Beyond, as he passed behind the aisles dividing the pews, he glimpsed the railing that separated the congregation from the hierarchy. To the left of center rose the pulpit, a cylindrical structure of gleaming silver. At the rear of the center stood something black and uncertainly shaped. This would be the great statue of Yesht that Panjaku of Ghulindé, himself a Yeshtite, according to a story in the Rashm, had come to Zanid to make.

  The lamplight glimmered on the gilding of the decorations and sparkled on the semi-precious stones set in the mosaics that ran around the upper parts of the walls. Fallon could not see these mosaics clearly from where he was, but he had an impression of a series of tableaux illustrating scenes from the myths of Yesht—a mythos notable even among the fanciful Krishnans for grotesquerie.

  The stream of Krishnans coming in through the entrance sorted itself out in this space behind the rearmost pews. The laymen trickled forward into the aisles between the pews to find their places, while the priests, much fewer in number, pressed forward into another doorway straight ahead.

  According to Liyará’s instructions, Fallon surmised that through this door he would find a robing room where the priests put on the over-vestments that they wore during the service. The lower grades, including the third, did not change their regular robes for this purpose. Only the highest grades, from the fifth up, donned complete special regalia.

  With a glance back to make sure that Fredro was still following, Fallon plunged ahead through this door. But when he had passed through, he did not find himself in at all the sort of place that he expected from the nondescript little square that corresponded to this room on Kordaq’s plan.

  He was in a medium-sized room, poorly lit, with another door straight ahead, through which the priests ahead of him were hastening. And then the clink of a chain made him turn his head to the left. What he saw made him recoil so sharply as to step on the toe of the following Fredro, who squeaked.

  Chained to the far wall of the room, but with plenty of slack to allow it to reach all parts of the chamber with its snaky neck, was a shan. While not so large as the ones that Fallon had seen in Kastambang’s arena and the zoo, it was quite large enough to eat a man in a few mouthfuls.

  At the moment the creature’s head lay upon the forward pair of its six clawed feet. Its big eyes steadily regarded Fallon and his companion, not two meters away. One lunge would have caught either of them.

  With a stifled gasp, Fallon pulled himself together and pressed forward, hoping that none of the Krishnans had observed his gaffe. He remembered the shower of aliyab juice that he and Fredro had received earlier at the zoo. No doubt the shan would refrain from attacking them for this, if for no other reason. Could it be that all the priests sprinkled the stuff on their robes, so that any odorless intruders—disguised as Fallon and Fredro were—would be gobbled by the shan? Fallon could not tell whether the genuine priests smelled of aliyab because he had become habituated to it. But if this was true, their impromptu bath at the zoo had been fortunate.

  The shan’s eyes followed them, but the beast did not raise its head from its paws. Fallon hurried through the next door.

  Ahead, the corridor extended in a long, gentle curve following the outer wall of the building. There were no windows; and although jadeite is translucent in thin sections, the outer walls were much too thick to admit any outside light. Lamps were fastened at intervals to wall brackets. The left side of the corridor was formed by another wall pierced by frequent doorways. Around the curve, where the bulge of the inner wall blocked more distant vistas, Fallon knew from the plan that there should be a flight of stairs leading up and another one down.

  To the immediate left, there branched off a large hallway or elongated chamber crowded with priests shuffling about before a long counter, on which were piled the outer vestments. The priests were picking these up, donning them, and straightening them before a series of mirrors affixed to the opposite wall. Though there was a murmur of talk, Fallon noticed that the priests were unusually quiet for a crowd of Krishnans.

  Having been briefed by Liyará, Fallon walked—with an air of confidence that he did not feel—down the counter until he came to a pile of the red capes which distinguished third-degree priests of Yesht. He picked up two, handed one to Fredro, and put on the other before one of the mirrors.

  No sooner had he done so when a bell jangled twice. With last-minute scurrying and primping, the priests formed a double file along the side of the hall where the mirrors were hung. Fallon dragged Fredro, still fumbling with the tie-strings of his cape, into the first vacant space that he spotted in the double line of priests of the third class. These followed those of the fourth class, who wore blue capes, and preceded those of the second, who wore yellow. Fortunately there did not seem to be any fixed order in which those of a given class took their places.

  Fallon and Fredro stood side by side, heads bowed to keep their faces hidden, when the bell rang three times. There was a shuffle of feet. Out of the corner of his eye, Fallon saw a heterogeneous group of Krishnans hurry by. One carried, swung from a chain, a thurible whence poured a cloud of fragrant smoke, the fragrance cutting through the pervasive aliyab stench and the strong Krishnan body odor. There was one with a kind of harp and another with a small copper gong. There were several laden with gold lace and jewels, carrying ornate staves with symbols of the cult on top.

  And Fallon could not repress a start as a couple passed towing between them, by a metal collar to which chains were linked fore and aft, a naked female Krishnan with her wrists bound behind her back.

  Though the light was uncertain, and Fredro did not get a good look, he thought that the female was one of the small, pale-skinned, short-tailed primitives from the great forest belt east of Katai-Jhogorai, beyond the Triple Seas. The westerly Krishnans had but a meager knowledge of these regions, save that the forest folk had long furnished the Varasto nations with most of their slaves. But most Krishnans were too proud, stubborn, and truculent to make good slaves. They were too likely to murder their masters, even at the cost of their own lives.

  But the timid little forest people from Jaega and Aurus were still kidnapped for sale in the western ports of the Triple Seas, though this traffic had declined since the suppression of the pirates of the Sunqar.

  Fallon had no time now to wonder what the Yeshtites meant to do with the forest female. For the bell rang again, and the dignitaries sorted themselves out into a formal procession at the head of the column. The harpist and the gong-carrier began to make musical noises. The mass moved forward in a stately march that contrasted with their previous informal haste. As they marched, they broke into a wailing and lugubrious hymn. Fallon could not understand the words because the priests sang in Varastou—a dead language that was the parent of Balhibouu, Gazashtandu, Qiribou, and the other tongues of the Varasto nations, who occupied the lands west of the Triple Seas.

  XIV

  Chanting dismally, the priests paraded down the robing hall and through a door that opened into the side of the chapel. Led by the hierarchs and the musicians, they passed down the right-side aisle to the rear of the chapel, across the rear, and to the front again. Fallon’s eyes swept over the decorations: rich and old and fantastically ornate, in which the safq shell, as the principal symbol of the god, occurred over and over. Around the capital of one of the pillars, a scaffolding showed where the priests were renewing some of the gilt.

  Around the upper third of the walls ran the great mosaic illustrating the myth of Yesht. Fallon could interpret the pictures from Liyará’s account. The god had been just an Earthgod on the Varasto pantheon, having been adopted by the Varasto nations from the Kalwmians when they overran and broke u
p the latter’s empire. In recent centuries, however, the priesthoods both of Yesht and of Bákh, the Varasto sky-god, had developed henotheistic tendencies in Balhib, each trying to seize a monopoly of religion instead of living and letting live as in the old days of Balhibou polytheism. To date the Bákhites had had the better of the struggle, enlisting the dynasty among their worshippers and asserting that Yesht was no god at all but a horrid cacodaemon worshipped with obscene rites by the tailed races who had roamed the lands of the Triple Seas before the tailless Krishnans had settled the country many thousands of years before.

  According to the current canonical myth of Yesht, the god had incarnated himself in a mortal man, Kharaj, in the days of the pre-Kalwm kingdom of Ruakh. In this form he had preached to the Krishnans.

  Yesht-Kharaj overcame monsters and evil spirits, exorcized ghosts, and raised the dead. Some of his adventures seemed surrealistically meaningless to the outsider, but to the devotee no doubt had a profound symbolic significance.

  At one time he was captured by a she-demon, and their offspring grew up to become the legendary King Myandé the Execrable of Ruakh. After a long and intricate struggle between the god and his demidemoniac son, Yesht-Kharaj was arrested by the king’s soldiers, tortured with great persistence and ingenuity, and at last allowed to die. The king’s men buried the remains, but the next day a volcano burst from the ground at the spot and overwhelmed the king and his city.

  The mosaic showed these events with exemplary candor and literalness. Fallon heard a low whistle from Fredro as the latter took in the tableau. Fallon trod on Fredro’s toe to silence him.

  The procession passed through a gate in the railing between the pews and the altar. There it split into groups. Fallon followed the other third-grade priests and squirmed into the rearmost rank of their section, hoping to be less conspicuous. He found himself on the left side of the altar as one faced it, with the cylindrical silver pulpit cutting off a good part of his view towards the congregation.