More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  There was an old rumor in the islands that Finnegan had not died unconditionally on the Mariano Coast of Cuba. The story was that he lived on a French island as a poor (and therefore mostly invisible) man, and that he came back once a year to lie awhile in that sea-cave on the Cuban Coast. He had married on the French Island and had had family there, this is the story. Could he not have done that at another time, before his death for instance? Men do have posthumous children, but to have children five and seven years posthumous is excessive.

  Each year, it was said, Finnegan would swim into that underwater cave and lie there for three days. At fourth dawn he would ask “Is it yet?” and someone would answer “No, not yet.” Then Finnegan would swim out of the cave and find a boat somewhere and make his way back to his own island. And so he would be there for another year. When the answer should finally come “Yes, it is time now”, that answer would be from a fissuring earthquake.

  The island wife, Angela, had hinted that Finnegan was most times in his proper flesh, but that sometimes he was in ghost flesh, and at still other times he was in a leprous flesh which is akin to both the ghost flesh and the death flesh. Yes, the stench was leprous. It is the stench, at the same time sweet and horrifying, that most of the world has forgotten.

  At the time of the awakening, there was a man standing on the flat shore above to kill the Count Finnegan when he should come up out of the fissured cave onto that rocky shore in the sunlight. This man, now grown much older and much more wicked, had known Count Finnegan long before this, had known him when he was called Count Finnegan only in fun and not officially. The man had not been wakened from a thirty year sleep to complete an unfinished murder on Finnegan. He had been doing many other evil things during that thirty years: and yet he had been doing them in a fractured sort of dream even if not in actual sleep. He did intend to complete an unfinished murder of Count Finnegan now.

  And, thirty feet off the rock shelf, was a preternatural white shark that brought its own aura of electrical green water with it wherever it went. This shark intended to kill Count Finnegan if he should attempt to escape his human hunter by an underwater way. This shark also remembered Finnegan from more than thirty years back. They were old enemies. By one account, this shark had permitted Finnegan to pass in and out, once a year for thirty years, and had ground his shark's teeth in fury at it. Now he needn't permit anything to the Finnegan, surely not life.

  Three hundred yards off the shore-shelf there was a boat with two riflemen in it. There were a lot of hunters here for a single prey. But the prey, the Count Finnegan, had a lot of drollery left in him as well as warping pain. He sang out loud now with no attempt to hide his location:

  ”The hunters have the fish on gaff!

  Hi! Ho!

  The hunters have a hollow laugh.

  They do not know their fish by half!

  Hi Ho! The gollie wol!”

  How did the Count Finnegan happen to know the Gadarene swine song? Well, according to one version, Count Finnegan was the son of Giulio the Gadarene swine himself. And the Count talked out loud, to himself and to his circling enemies:

  “It's a role to challenge my talents,” he said. “A man might wait a thousand years and not come onto so challenging a role as this. I am a masquerader, I am a spy, I am a sudden and mysterious person in a portentous flesh-and-soul drama. I will not spoil it all by letting myself be killed by such second-rate killers as these. I will break out of this and will play the double to the only transcendent man in the world for this time. Or it may be that the transcendent man will play the double to me.”

  The Count covered others of his bones with other pieces and strips of his flesh that had fallen away. He set the pieces carefully in place with his hands that were even more intricate and talented than when he was the great artist thirty years, or perhaps three hundred years, before. Then he made his move.

  The shark struck in a white blur. The man on the stone shore above flung a grenade which exploded just under the surface. And then he flung a second and a third. There was a globbing of red blood up to the surface. It could have been either shark's blood or man's blood. There were chunks of torn-loose flesh coming to the shoaly surface, white flesh that was either ghost-shark flesh or leprous-man's flesh.

  The riflemen in the boat three hundred yards off the shore shelf were firing. The grenade man dropped a heavier depth-charge, and then he slipped and followed it into the rioting water. And the water was stunned, and for a moment flattened, by the depth-charge. Then, as a secondary effect of the charge, it spouted. And a man spouted up with it. The riflemen in the boat, which had now moved in to less than fifty yards off the shore, riddled the man with shot. Another man, or the same man again, spouted up out of the spewing water, and was riddled with rifle shot again, and so he fell back.

  And still it was possible that a man, making his move very swiftly and with his luck running like the shore-shelf water itself, could have gone under the surging shark when it was blinded by the whiteness of the depth-charged water, and could have gone under the motor-launch a moment later when it moved in through the bucking foam, and he might have been a quarter of a mile away and left two of his enemy dead.

  It wasn't possible for very many men, but it was possible for one.

  This little action took place on the Mariano Coast not far from Havana, Cuba.

  The other man in the picture of a few decades before, had simultaneous experience half a world away. He wasn't put in immediate physical danger of his life, and he hadn't just recovered his life. But he received announcement that he was to become the only transcendent man in the world for his time, and that he could refuse this only on peril of his own damnation. This was Joseph Cardinal Hedayat, the look-alike of the reanimated Count Finnegan.

  2

  The second unusual thing to happen that day was a bell being set to ringing on the North Coast of the small country of San Simeon. There hadn't been a bell there before ever, so far as anyone could remember. Then there had come an executive order stating that, on pain of death, no bell should be rung on that north coast. The order was inexplicable. No bell had ever rung there. There had been no bell to ring. But, within an hour of the publication of the executive order, a bell did begin to ring there, loudly and clearly. San Simeon was a small country that was almost bereft of real resources. There was some maize culture and some fruit. The beans were good and the squash was fair. Goats were kept and a few pigs. No large cattle. The people dressed and were shod with woven grass. It was woven with fine style, and it was more sturdy than you might suppose.

  There were stone houses, there were wooden houses, there were grass houses. Really the only shelter needed was roof from the rain (it rained torrentially but infrequently in most of San Simeon), and rock-hewn granaries for the beans and the maize to keep them from the rats.

  San Simeon was the nesting ground for the giant bird named ‘huracan’ or ‘hurricane’. The birds (some said that there was only one of them that flies again and again; some say that there are a half-dozen of them hatched new every year) came out of certain limestone crags of central San Simeon where they nested, and flew over the Ocean of Mexico spreading destruction.

  San Simeon had been a much larger country once. Pieces of it, large and small, are taken up by the hurricane bird every time it flies and are dropped into that water or onto other land by the storm bird in its twisting flight. At least thirteen islands of the Antilles are made out of these pieces of San Simeon that were dropped out of the twisting sky.

  San Simeon was the richest country per capita in the world. Its wealth didn't lie in its maize or its beans or its grass-weaving industry, nor in its fowling or fishing, nor in its henequen or chicle growing; not in its mahogany or dye-wood, not in its vanilla or rubber or sugar cane (all three of these were inferior), and not in its limestone quarries. Its wealth was in gold coins and in uncoined masses of gold. It was not in gold mining (there is none of that there, though all the neighboring countries
have some gold mining), but only in the gold itself. The wealth isn't in the production but only in the possession.

  There is only one gold coin in San Simeon. It is the San Simeon duro or fifty dollar gold piece. Once the world was flooded, for a very brief while, by these fifty dollar gold pieces. Now most of them are found only in San Simeon itself; and every man, woman, and child there has hundreds of them. A few more of them are stamped every year, at the Mad King's mint, and given to whatever people need them, mostly to infants born within the year just past. No one knows where the gold itself originally came from. If asked, the people of San Simeon wink and say ‘de la estrellas’, ‘from the stars’. This is a sort of joke-legend, but the existence of a great amount of gold is a fact.

  The intersection of the two diagonals of the imperfect square whose four corners are New Orleans, Havana, Tegucigalpa, and Mexico City will come to a point right off the North shore of San Simeon. But, as the country is so small, this is a rough means of locating the country itself. San Simeon was also called Babylon. Nobody remembered the reason for this its ancient name.

  San Simeon was ruled by a dynasty of Mad Kings, the Balbos. This line shines with clusters of geniuses, nor do the persons lose their genius when they lose their balance; they simply become mad geniuses. A prince of the line will grow up with his madness held in subjection, like a wild and powerful horse controlled by a strong hand. When the prince is nineteen years old, his father will become Mad King, and the prince will fare into the world to cut a swath there. He will immediately marry a princess of one of the seven acceptable families, and they will have a son.

  The wife of the acceptable family will always die in childbirth, and the prince will not remarry. For that reason, there has never been a Queen in San Simeon.

  With the aid of San Simeon gold duros, the prince will win high position in the intellectual world and in the glittering international community. He will set up foundations for the support of scientific and artistic activities and programs. He will be one of the dozen persons in the world to give it tone and style for two decades. Then the madness will take him over.

  He will return to San Simeon to become the new Mad King. His father will become the Mad King Emeritus. His grandfather, who had been the Mad King Emeritus, will die. And his son the new prince will fare into the world to cut a great swath there.

  So it had been with the Mad Kings Gaetano I, II, III, IV, V, VI. So it apparently would not be with him who had been born to become Mad King Gaetano VII. Instead of going mad when he reached the age of thirty-nine, the current Gaetano had become a high churchman (which some considered an act of another sort of madness), and he did not come home.

  His father fretted at being forced to remain on as Mad King after his term should have run out, and his grandfather fretted at not being allowed to die until he could be relieved by another Mad King Emeritus.

  San Simeon was surrounded by larger and more powerful neighboring countries, Campeche, Peten, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Yucatan Antigua. San Simeon survived as an independent country by paying gold tribute to these five powerful neighbors.

  The poorest part of San Simeon was its North Coast. It was dry and scorched and stony land. Off North from the dry stony land were salt water swamps, and these merged with shoal water still further north. There was intermittent shoal water all the way from the North Coast of San Simeon to what are called the Campeche Banks  —  more than one hundred kilometers. There was an inconsistency about these shoal waters in that much of their shoaling was from ghost shoals. There might be clear water many fathoms deep for league after league and day after day. And then those clear deep waters would turn into churning, shallow shoals.

  With the rock shores and the salt swamps and the shoal waters, there were many desolate places in those northern regions that could hardly be reached at all by land or sea or air.

  The governor of the northern province received a signed order from Mad King Gaetano VI forbidding, under pain of death for all concerned, any bells to be rung along that north shore.

  “That is easily complied with,” the governor said. “No bell has ever rung here. There has been no bell to ring.”

  Then he heard a bell off north between the salt water swamps and the ghost shoals, in one of those places that would be very hard to come to from any direction and by any means.

  “I had forgot about that bell, or rather I didn't believe in it,” the governor said, “but the tone is just how my grandmother used to describe it. It is named the ‘Sea-Bell’. I will get soldiers and go and extinguish it: I'll be extinguished myself if I don't do so.”

  Both police and soldiers were sent with orders to stop the ringing and destroy the ringers. But these armed legal men could not, for a while, come up to the bell either by land or by sea. It was in a rough waste place. Shoal water appeared where it had never shoaled before. The coast guard cutters could not go through such shallows. Strong men went in rowboats that could float on even a thin dew, but fogs came and deceived both the eyes and the ears. It seemed that the bells were behind them, and then that they were in front. That first bell, the Sea Bell, was on a ship, and the ship was harried out of there for a while. It went through clear deep water, and there was always shoal water before and behind it. And it shoaled in the clear deep water as soon as the ship had passed through.

  Two days after it had begun to sound, the first bell, the ‘Sea Bell’, was joined by another clanging, booming bell (called the ‘Martyr-Bell’). Two weeks later it was joined by a third bell (called the ‘Peter-Bell’).

  In spite of all their efforts, the police and soldiers were never able to silence all three of these bells at one time. The bells were summoning bells, they were summoning certain persons to assemble. If everything went right with the bells, if everything went wrong with the police and soldiers, the assembly would be brought to be before the bells were silenced. One of the bells, or two of them, and much of the time all three of them, continued to clang and boom for a full three years. And every few months, another person would join the hidden assembly.

  3

  The third unusual thing that happened that day was the declaration of the termination, extinguishing, and dismantling of an institution that had lasted for about two thousand years. This institution was now called simply the ‘Crowd’ (Ekklesia, an Assembly, a Crowd), and it might no longer exist. The Last Conclave was being held in Babylonia Bagascia, a town that had once been mistress of the world under another name. It had been a holy-unholy town that was almost without equal in its contrasts. Now the unholy element was in power, backed by a massive unholiness from outside. Whatever had been holy about the town was now either in hiding or in flight.

  But sometimes there is a verve and variety in unholiness, and there were many sparkling people in town at the time of the Conclave. The Princes of the Crowd were popularly known as ‘Gates’ (Cardines, Hinges, Swingers) or ‘Stones’; they were assembling to disorganize and dismantle themselves for the last time. They had the votes to do it, but votes were an anachronism now. They had the power to do it, and power was still in contemporary use.

  The mood of the Big Stones was a truculent one.

  “Animosity?” said Efram Gate Gratz. “You're damned right we have animosity, total animosity. We've come to bury Peter, not to praise him. We will kill him and we will ritually defecate on his grave, and we will be certain that nothing like this ever happens again.”

  “Certainly we intended the building to fall when we removed the cap-stone,” Howard Stone Ostwald said. (Some of the Princes used the ‘Gate’ and some used the ‘Stone’ in their names, but after today neither would be used as patents of nobility. But the titles and crests would still be used by some of them when working with their bands or doing their Talk Shows.) “We intend to remove every sort of cap-stone, and we intend for every building to fall down. Buildings divide people, and we have had enough of division.”

  Every effort had been made to save the Ekklesia, the Ass
embly, the Crowd, even to changing the name many times, but the weight of history was all against it. It had built-in structure, and the true crowd must be unstructured. After the nations were gone, it was felt that the Crowd still might be saved, as a sort of museum piece, if only it could be given a broad enough base. New Princes, Gates, Stones were created to represent various broad bases. There were Gates and Stones of Labor and of the Media. There were Gates of the various rites of Freemasonry and Jewry. There were Gates of the Pentecostals and Roarers and Teilhardians, of the Gays and the Hot Brains and the Levelers. There were Gates of the various instrumentalists: Hornmen and Drummers had special Gates to represent them, and the electric guitarists had five Gates of their own. There were special Stones for the Trippers and the Dippers, for the Mushroomers and Hash-Bashers, for the old time Drunkards and for the Fundamentalist Drunkards. There were thirteen Stones for the Media groups, and sixteen for the Labor people. The Zero Growth lobby was represented. Everything was represented. It hadn't worked. The Crowd, the Assembly was finished, but it wouldn't die with dignity. Well, maybe it would die if it had its head cut off.

  The decapitating had happened the day before the opening of the conclave. Conclaves have never been called for any reason other than to treat of the condition of headlessness, to erect a new Cap-Stone for one that has fallen, or (as in this case) to declare a Cap-Stone suppressed.

  The Cap-Stone himself (He was Paul the Eleventh in the listing of the Cap-Stones) had been decapitated the day before. Then his head had been put up on a pike at the Spanish Stairs where people could see it as they came and went. The head was not dead for quite a while. It could talk and answer questions, though in a tortured tone. Several times it cried in a miserable and snuffling sort of way. People came and stood on the little ladder there and pulled all the hair out of the head in bloody gouts.