Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  “There’s nothing good about greed for money.”

  “Tell that to Peregrinus, who discovered the north-east passage to Ceugra, bringing cheap food and full employment to Mezentia. On the other hand, consider Artabazus, who sailed from Perimadeia to the Anoge with a quarter million sacks of grain to feed the famine victims, and carried the plague with him. Outcomes are good or bad. Motive is irrelevant. This,” he added, “is the word of the Lord. It’s not open to debate.”

  “You can’t just say—”

  “Of course I can. Now wake up and believe.”

  The Temple was a great success. We had full congregations every day, tremendous enthusiasm, full offertory-boxes. Three weeks after we held our first Intercessionary Mass for Peace, the Herulians surrendered unconditionally and the war was finally over. We held a special service of thanksgiving; we couldn’t fit them all in the Temple, so we borrowed the Artillery Fields. Almost all the Cabinet attended, along with most of the City nobility and every-one who was anyone from society, commerce and the arts. The take for that service alone was 16,000 stamina.

  Winning the war was the last straw, as far as I was concerned. I had to do something. But I didn’t want to rush into it blindly and screw everything up; so I suggested to the others, quite casually at the end of a routine meeting, that it’d save on accountancy time and paperwork if the Church gave me a discretionary budget, so I could pay for everyday maintenance and procurements without having to bother anyone else. Fine, they said, how much do you need? Not quite sure yet, I said; just give me a drawing facility on Number Two account for now, and when I know how it pans out, we can establish a figure.

  With unlimited access to Church funds—a licence to embezzle, if you prefer to look at it in those terms—I really got going. I funnelled out money into fake corporations, lost fortunes in imaginary fires and shipwrecks, filtered vast sums through four sets of books, and used it all to feed the war refugees at Blachissa. There were something like a hundred thousand of the poor devils stranded there, fugitives from three major cities burnt down by the enemy during the war, and since their cities no longer existed, they had no governors, therefore there was nobody to petition the government for relief on their behalf, therefore they were nobody’s problem, therefore they were left to starve. I bought grain from the farmers in the Mesoge—when Taraconissa was destroyed they lost their principal market and had no one to sell to, so they were in pretty dire straits—and employed discharged veterans to cart and distribute the supplies. I made a special effort to ensure that at every stage in the process, I was helping someone who badly needed help. I was so pleased with myself.

  There was so much money, of course, that for a long time nobody noticed. It was, though, simply a matter of time. When, sooner or later, my colleagues realised what I was up to, I anticipated harsh words, bitter accusations and a great deal of bad feeling. What I didn’t expect—

  “You can’t do this,” I roared.

  They looked at me.

  “You can’t,” I repeated. “I invented this religion, it was my idea, I created it. I’m the high priest. You can’t excommunicate me.”

  “Actually,” Accila said quietly, “we can. It says so in the constitution.”

  “What constitution?”

  “The one we just made up,” Accila replied. “And submitted to a general synod for ratification, passed unanimously. And it says, the ecumenical council—that’s the four of us—can dismiss the high priest on grounds of heresy or gross moral turpitude. We’re going with heresy as an act of kindness, so we don’t have to go public with the news that you’ve been stealing from the Church. That’s provided you go quietly and don’t make trouble.”

  “You can’t adopt a constitution without my agreement.”

  “Yes we can,” Accila said. “Retrospectively. Since there is currently no high priest, you having been dismissed, the ecumenical council is us. And we can do anything we like.”

  The others just sat there, grim-faced, hiding behind Accila. “I’ll have the lot of you for this,” I shouted. “I’ll expose you. I’ll tell everything. I’ll tell them it’s all a fraud.”

  Accila sighed. “Please don’t,” he said. “You’ll just embarrass yourself. After all, nobody’s going to believe you, are they? They’ve seen us curing the sick, they saw the miracle of the reborn sun, they saw us end the war. They’ll just think, here’s a man who lost a power struggle and wants to make trouble. Politics. The people understand about politics. And then,” he added with a sad smile, “we’ll tell them how you defrauded the Church of a quarter of a million stamina. Or we can do it our way. Up to you entirely.”

  I was breathing rapidly, and my palms were sweating. “Heresy,” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Razo cleared his throat. “We’ll put out a statement saying that you object to the doctrine of vicarious absolution. The doctrine having been upheld by the ecumenical council, you’re a heretic.”

  I blinked. “What,” I demanded, “is the doctrine of—?”

  “Vicarious absolution.” Teuta steepled his fingers. “My idea. In exchange for a substantial offering, you can ensure the salvation of someone else’s soul, even if he’s not actually a believer himself. He doesn’t have to know about it, if that’s what you want. For double the money, you can even save someone’s soul against his will. We think it’ll be very popular.”

  I tried. I went to the magistrates and swore a complaint, but the chief justice was a believer and threw the case out for lack of evidence. I went to the chief archimandrite of the Fire Temple, who told me that the last thing he wanted to do, in the present circumstances, was pick a fight with a much bigger, richer church. I tried to see the emperor, but the chamberlain wouldn’t even take my money. There are more important things, he said, with a sanctimonious scowl, and sent me away.

  I preached in the market-place. The first time, I drew a good crowd. I hadn’t lost my touch. I told them; the Gospel of the Invincible Sun is a fake, written by five poor rich boys to make money. The so-called ancient scrolls dug up in the Temple foundations were fakes, made by a skilled forger with a criminal record for falsifying religious texts. The miracle of the Reborn Sun was no miracle at all; my former colleagues had started with Anaximander, carefully studied the other records, and accurately predicted a natural phenomenon that would have happened anyway. The cure for the mountain fever was just mouldy bread beaten up in garlic juice—a wonderful thing, granted, but no miracle. The other cures could all be explained by the scientifically-documented phenomenon of mass hysteria; it was all there in the Mezentine books, I told them, all we did was read and repeat. The Herulian war was almost over anyway, so we hadn’t ended that. As for the Church, it was nothing more than a mechanism for sucking in unearned wealth, which the five of us had always intended from the start to keep for ourselves.

  My second street corner sermon drew about a dozen people, five of whom jeered and threw apples. On the third occasion, I was arrested by the kettlehats for disturbing the peace.

  They kept me in for a week, in a dark, tiny cell along with two thieves, a wife-killer and a rapist. I preached to them, expounding the doctrine of right and wrong that I’d been given in my dream. I think the rapist was interested, but on the fourth day the wife-killer, a believer, hit me so hard I passed out, and when I came round, a lot of the evangelical zeal seemed to have faded.

  On the seventh day, two kettlehats came and pulled me out of there. I was being transferred, they said, to the ecclesiastical courts. What ecclesiastical courts, I asked.

  “They’re new,” Accila explained. He’d come to see me in my cell. “Very new.”

  “How new?”

  “Actually, we got the whole thing set up in six days. Soon as we heard you’d been arrested.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “In your honour,” he said grimly. “On account of, there wasn’t really anything in ordinary criminal law we could get you for, apart from disturbing th
e peace and criminal slander, maybe just possibly incitement to riot. At best, those would get you put away for two years. So, we created an entirely new jurisdiction, just for you. They had to rush an emergency enabling bill through the House; quickest piece of legislation this century, apparently. The emperor signed it yesterday, so it’s now the law. And of course it’s—”

  “Let me guess. Retrospective.”

  He grinned. “Not much point otherwise.” He sighed, a reasonable man brought to the limits of his patience. “Eps, you bloody fool, why can’t you just drop it and shut your face? You’ve lost, accept it, move on.” He hesitated, then added, “They’ve authorised me to make you an offer. One million stamina, provided you leave the country and never come back. That’s for old time’s sake, we don’t have to pay you anything. Well? What about it?”

  “And if I won’t?”

  He looked very sad and grave. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see where you leave us much choice. But for pity’s sake, Eps, you’re a sensible man, there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t sort this out in a reasonable, businesslike fashion. Damn it, we used to be friends.”

  I just looked at him. “You’re the ones who had me locked up,” I said. “You threw me out of my own Church. I’m sorry, but I can’t see how it’s my fault.”

  He shrugged. “You don’t want money,” he said. “You don’t want a quiet, prosperous life. For crying out loud, Eps, what do you want? A martyr’s crown?”

  So they were going to kill me. Oh, I thought. “If the crown fits,” I heard myself say.

  “You bloody idiot,” Accila said, and left.

  The trial was short and, as I understand, very orderly and efficient. I wasn’t actually there, having been ejected for gross contempt about ten seconds after they put me in the dock. They sent some clerk down to the cells to tell me the verdict. Guilty of blasphemy, twelve counts, fraud and embezzlement, ninety-six counts, other offences, a hundred and four counts. Sentence: death by fire. I’d pleaded guilty, apparently.

  “Death by fire?” I asked.

  The clerk nodded briskly. “Only the refining power of flame,” he told me, “can purge the taint of blasphemy, which would otherwise form a miasma and lead to plague.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s what it says here,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, at dawn. Sorry,” he added, which was nice of him.

  “I’d like to see a priest,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  I spent the night on my knees, in prayer. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, but you do that sort of thing in a condemned cell. After all, why not? Not as if there’s anything better to do, sleeping would be a sinful waste, and—well. If it was true, and I really had invented God, brought him in to existence—I thought about that. Why not? There are innumerable examples of sons who turn out to be a thousand, a million times better, cleverer, stronger than their fathers. If I really had invented God, then I reckoned he owed me; a vision, a visitation, a sign or portent at the very least. No dice. I fell asleep kneeling.

  I woke up, and it was still dark. The floor was shaking.

  We don’t get earthquakes in the City. If you want to experience that sort of thing, you have to go to Permia, or up North. It’s the weirdest feeling. It’s like being on a ship in a storm. You have to keep moving your feet just to stand still, and the vibration goes right down and through you, till you can feel your bones moving. Everything blurs, as though you’ve just had a bang on the head, and there’s this noise like nothing else, a sort of deep rumbling purr, as though you’re a flea on the back of a cat the size of Scheria. I jumped up, promptly fell over, got up again; I was trying to learn how to stand upright on a moving surface when the floor split, right between my feet, and a huge gap appeared—a great big slice of nothing, with a foot on either side of it. I yelped like a dog, and then a chunk of the roof came down, missing me by a whisker. I could feel pee running down the inside of my leg. Then there was this extraordinary singing, moaning noise, which later on I was able to rationalise as the sound of steel under intolerable tension, and the doorframe burst. The cell door actually flew open—it swished past me, if I’d been a hand’s breadth closer, it’d have swatted me like a fly. A head-sized chunk of roof bashed me on the shoulder; it hurt like buggery, I staggered and nearly went down the hole in the floor. The hell with this, I thought, and I did a sort of standing jump through the open doorway.

  I landed on my bruised shoulder, which really didn’t improve matters, and sat up. One end of the corridor was blocked with chunks and slabs of fallen roof. The other end was clear. I scrambled to my feet and ran. The floor played funny games with me; I ended up flat on my back three times before I reached the stairs. They’d pulled away from the wall on one side, but I was in no mood to be fussy. When I was a few steps from the top, I felt the whole lot give way under the pressure of my heel; I sprang, like a cat, as the staircase just sort of fell away, and landed in a ball on something relatively solid.

  It was a miracle that I got out of there. About ten seconds after I burst out through a shattered window into fresh air, the whole prison sort of folded in on itself and subsided into a heap of stones. How come I wasn’t squashed by any of the huge slabs of flying rubbish, I simply don’t know. All I remember was how hard it was to breathe, because I couldn’t stop running, even though my legs were jelly and my lungs stabbed like knives; I ran, dodging falling trees and collapsing buildings, jumping over dead people and people trapped under things, I ran and ran until a particularly violent tremor swept me off my feet and I fell down and no effort on my part could make me get up again. Then, I guess, I went to sleep, or something like that.

  I woke up in a weird landscape; masonry trash, blocks of stone, as far as the eye can see; I remember thinking, whatever possessed me to spend the night in a quarry? But then I caught sight of a building I knew; the Integrity Rewarded, in Sheep Street, except that Sheep Street wasn’t there; just the Integrity, taken out of context, floating serenely on a sea of rubble.

  I limped over and banged on the door, but it was bolted shut. Pity. I could really have done with a drink (except I had no money, and they don’t do credit at the Integrity). I wandered away and just sort of drifted for a while. It was a very long time before I saw anyone, but when I did, it was a patrol of kettlehats. They looked at me and shouted, You there, stop where you are. So, naturally, I ran.

  The great earthquake of AUC 552 was exceptionally violent but extremely localised. It shook down the whole of the Potteries district, so that only a handful of buildings were left standing, but was hardly felt at all in Cornmarket, East Hill or the Grand Crescent. Remarkably, given the scope of the destruction, only about two dozen people were killed, and eight of those were prisoners in the gaol awaiting execution.

  I holed up in the Charity & Austerity in Pigmarket; a haunt of my youth, where nobody ever asks you anything so long as you have at least ninety trachy. I had considerably more than that, courtesy of some poor dead man whose pocket I picked on my way out of the ruins. I could have afforded enough of the house red to kill a regiment of dragoons, but oddly enough I didn’t touch a drop; I had a bowl of soup and half a loaf of grindstone bread, and that was all I wanted. I think I coped really rather well with the realisation—it came up on me like a sunrise—that the earthquake had been for me—an intervention by my God, the Invincible Sun, to get me out of prison and save me from the flames. Well? What other possible explanation can you think of?

  I could have been horrified, torn apart by guilt at the thought of the deaths and the damage. Or I could’ve been really, really, really smug; God loves me so much, He shook down a quarter of the City just for me. I was neither. I accepted what had happened; not my fault, not a victory or a vindication. He knows best, I told myself; if that’s what He felt needed to be done, who am I to question?

  Have you ever been to Eremia? I thought not. If you were thinking of making the trip, take my advice, don’t bother. There’s nothing there e
xcept sand, rocks, murderous heat, biting winds, freezing cold at night. I can only think of one man in the history of the world who wanted to go there, and I have a shrewd suspicion that at the time, he wasn’t quite right in the head.

  Looking back, I can’t understand how I survived. I was out in the desert, just walking. I had nothing, no shoes, not even a water-bottle. On the third, or was it the fourth day, I stumbled across an oasis. I call it that; there was this brown puddle, fringed with tall, thin trees. There was a rock with a sort of ledge, you couldn’t call it a cave; under the ledge, I found a dead man. He must’ve been there for a long time. His skin was brown and hard, like rawhide. His eyes had gone, but his hair was mostly still there; thin, wispy, like the strands of wool you find caught on brambles. He was curled up, asleep. When I moved him, he was as light as a log of rotten wood.

  We had many long conversations, the dead man and me. He told me he was a pilgrim, on his way to the celebrated desert oracle at Cocona. He’d gone there to get the answer to a very important question which had subsequently slipped his mind; the answer, though, was, Yes, but it will not end well. Looks like they were right, I told him. Well, of course, he said, it’s a very reliable oracle.

  I did most of the talking. I told him my story; how I’d created God, how He’d outgrown me, moved away from me, how He’d rescued me from prison and fire; but these days he never comes to see me, he doesn’t even write—that’s how it is, the dead man said, they have lives of their own, what do you expect? Of course, I said, and I know how busy He is, but it’d be nice if he could spare me just five minutes once in a while.