Pisces of Fate
Page 18
The Prophet Able, the self-declared voice of The One True God, had paused in his current sermon to drink some water. This momentary lapse in monologue left the floor open for his audience to interject with questions, comments, and offers of ways to make a massive income in a few minutes a day, working from home.
Arthur, who had thought long and hard during his time walking the courtyard, stood up. “Prophet Able, how do you know that your One True God is The One True God?” the boy asked.
The Prophet Able put down his cup and regarded the earnest-faced young man with a narrowed gaze.
“If The OTG was not The OTG, then the sun would not rise in the mornings,” he declared with absolute certainty.
Arthur thought for a moment. “That would make sense. But what if the sun rises anyway?”
A murmur went through the crowd. Actual questions instead of the usual mud-flinging were rare at these sermons.
“Of course the sun rises anyway, that is your proof that The OTG is The OTG.”
“I don’t think that is right.” Arthur’s voice almost cracked but he held the smouldering ember of an idea in his mind and he blew on it gently while adding some dry cynicism. “The Quagans told me yesterday that the sun is a golden egg laid by the Great Duck, and it cracks open every morning and slides across the skillet of the heavens. What if they are right?”
“Then the egg is laid and cracked and sent on its journey by the will of The One True God,” the Prophet Able replied.
“Then…why doesn’t the Great Duck tell his followers, who are few in number, but great in spirit, to worship The One True God instead?”
The Prophet Able nodded. He had the perfect answer for this one. “Because the garden of The One True God is only open to those who give their hearts to his glory.”
“And what happens to everyone else?”
“They spend eternity treading water in the bottomless cesspit.”
“Why?” Arthur asked, genuinely perplexed. “Did they do something wrong?”
“They did not heed the word of The One True God!” the Prophet Able shouted loud enough for the people at the back to hear him.
“What if they did not hear the word of The One True God?” Arthur asked.
“Then they shall live and die in ignorance. Doomed to repeat their lives until they do,” the Prophet Able announced, and many in the audience nodded, for it was so.
“That seems a bit unfair. What if they lived somewhere remote and never heard of The One True God? It’s hardly their fault that The OTG didn’t give them the chance to hear the truth.”
“The OTG is everywhere. His voice is in all things and to hear it, one must simply listen.”
The crowd nodded at this sound argument, a few juggling hot bare-nuts in their hands to cool them for eating between exchanges.
“If The OTG is everywhere and talking loud enough to be heard, then why do so many people either not hear it, or hear some other God?”
The Prophet Able’s grip on his stick grew white-knuckled. “Because they choose not to listen to The Truth.”
“But to avoid treading grey-water for all eternity, why not just accept your OTG as The OTG and cover your bets?” Arthur asked.
“Yeah,” a hot-bare-nut juggler called from the anonymity of the crowd. “Most of us just go to temples for festivals and don’t really pay much attention to the Gods till we need ‘em.”
“And what does God want with all that money you lot are always asking for?” another devotee called out.
“The donations go towards spreading the teachings of the One True God,” Able replied.
“Spreading the teachings? You’ve not left the square since the year of Black Cheese!” a woman in the audience snapped.
A chorus of angry murmurs rippled across the crowd.
“What’s he offering you that The OTG isn’t!?” Prophet Able pointed his Stick of Redemption at Arthur.
“He has a point,” a bare-nut vendor said through the shimmering heat above his tiny stove.
“Yeah, what’s your great revelation?”
The crowd turned and regarded Arthur with suspicion tinged with hope.
“I’m not a prophet. I’m not here to convince you to follow a religion. I’m just seeking answers, like the rest of you.”
“Well, you must have some answers—what are they?” the crowd demanded.
“I…” Arthur took a step back as the suddenly hostile audience made ready to throw their hot nuts at him.
“He’s a faker! Just like that guy we nutted last week!” the Prophet Able shouted.
“I can’t tell you what I know, because I’m really not sure what that is.” A salted bare-nut sailed past his ear. “But!” Arthur raised his hands in hasty defence. “I can tell you what I don’t know. Which is quite a lot and may help explain what you don’t know either.”
The crowd paused as they mentally worked through the contortions of the previous sentence.
“You what?” someone shouted.
“He says he knows what he doesn’t know,” a helpful voice explained.
“How can he know what he doesn’t know, because then…he would know it!?”
The crowd fell into a cacophony of loud debates on the paradox of knowing what was unknown.
Arthur tried to slip away unseen and found his way blocked by a wall of confused faces.
“Explain what you mean!” they demanded.
“I can’t!”
“Then why did you say anything?”
Arthur opened his mouth and then closed it again. The crowd ebbed into watchful silence.
He tried again. “What if we are just like goats?—No, wait!” Arthur added quickly as the crowd swelled with indignant fury. “A herd of goats looks like one living thing. It moves, eats, poops, has babies, and moves some more. Only when you look closely at a herd, you start seeing the smaller parts that make it up. Lots and lots of goats that from a distance look like one big animal. But they are all different.”
“How are people like goats then?” an audience member demanded.
“Each of us is one tiny thing in the middle of a whole lot of other things. But we are all looking for the same thing—just like the goats.”
Someone with a different opinion chose that moment to throw a bare-nut at Arthur. He ducked the missile and the crowd’s angry murmuring rose again.
Arthur worked on putting ideas that he could hardly comprehend himself, into words that the audience, who were one burning torch away from being a mob, could understand.
“You only know what you see, or feel, or hear, or taste.”
“What about smell?” a voice asked.
“Or smell. Those things, what we sense, those things are real. You can never know what someone else perceives. Their reality is unique.”
“The word of The One True God is real,” the Prophet Able declared.
“For you, yes,” Arthur agreed. “But for someone who has never heard of The OTG, it doesn’t exist. It’s not that they just don’t know about it.”
“Blasphemy!” the Prophet shouted.
“If ideas were real, then yes, everyone would know about your God. It would be real for all of us. Even if we hadn’t heard of it. But the idea doesn’t exist for people until you tell them it is real. That’s not blasphemy, that’s just you needing to get out more and meet new people.”
“He’s right about that!” the Year of the Black Cheese woman shouted.
“Do you know why goats don’t ask questions?” Arthur asked.
“They’re dumb?”
“They can’t talk?”
“They are in league with the evil cabal who rule us in secret from the shadows?!”
“Goats have all the answers they need,” Arthur said. “A goat’s entire existence is about eating grass and making more goats. Whe
n they eat grass they look far enough ahead to see the next mouthful. Then they walk to that and never give any thought to anything else, because that is all they want.”
“That’s not people, though,” a man queuing for bare-nuts called over his shoulder.
“Maybe it is,” Arthur replied. “You come to this square seeking easy answers the same way goats follow grass. As long as you are getting satisfying answers, why ask anything else? Everyone here who’s preaching their ideas about the truth has found enough answers they can accept. Now they want you to accept those answers, too.”
“The prophets want us to eat grass?” a puzzled voice called from the growing crowd.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Arthur replied.
“Bovinians eat grass. They say cows are sacred and wear helmets with horns on them,” another voice shouted.
“This isn’t about grass!” Arthur yelled to be heard over the sudden surge of arguments about the nutritional value of various pastures. “I’m saying, don’t accept the answers someone else gives you unless those answers create more questions.”
“Why?” the crowd asked.
“Exactly!” Arthur nodded.
“What did he say?” a voice at the back called.
“He said, if they tell you to stay off the grass, you should ask why.”
The audience started shouting.
“Maybe it’s just been sown?”
“What if it’s been raining? The grass could get muddy if everyone started walking across it.”
“What about other crops?”
“I grow potatoes, can I walk on them?”
“What if there are no roads?”
“What should we do if we see someone walking on the grass?”
The crowd turned inwards as the multitude offered their own interpretations of the goat-herder’s words.
Arthur took the opportunity to slip away unseen.
Present in the crowd that day were conjoined twins and later Arthurian scholars of the Palindrome Order, the Brothers Malayalam. They would go on to write the most widely accepted analysis of the First Revelation of Arthur. In their thesis they argued that the true purpose of the First Revelation was not to provide answers, but to provoke thought.
The Malayalams were renowned among their contemporaries as being notoriously argumentative with each other. We often find that the page on the left differs in argument and conclusion from the page on the right.†
“I think I should grow a beard,” Arthur declared, when he found Magnesia at a weavers’ stall.
“Good luck with that,” Magnesia replied, her attention on the soft white cloth draped across the table.
“As a disguise, of course. How long do you think it would take me to grow one?”
“Puberty, I should think.”
Arthur glanced over his shoulder for pursuers and wondered if he was far enough from the madding crowd to be safe from their quest for answers.
“I have found Donut Bleech,” Magnesia said.
“Good, where is he?”
“Donut Bleech is not a he—it’s a dye factory in the Weavers’ Eighth. I’ve been asking around and The Weavers’ is a neighbourhood of Errm where the makers of cloth of all kinds live and work. This area of the city used to be the Weavers’ Quarter, until in the reign of Administrator Doog, the all-powerful SHAMPOO Guild of Shearers, Harlots, Armourers, Magicians, Piemen, Osteopaths, and Obstetricians fragmented. In the chaos that followed that dark time, new guilds were established and existing shop space was divided up to make room.”
“It seems I left you on your own for longer than I realised,” Arthur said, when Magnesia paused to draw breath.
“Well, you insisted on spending your days listening to the weirdoes in the square arguing about the meaning of life.”
“That was important,” Arthur replied.
“Just because something is important, doesn’t make it necessary.”
The next day, Arthur and Magnesia visited Donut Bleech’s workshop on Tureen Street. The smell of ammonia and wet dog filled the air with a palpable fug that captured their attention the way avalanches capture chalets in alpine valleys.
Steam rose from stone vats where wool and cloth simmered in an alchemical mix of yourea, myrea, and etherea. Attendants in spotless white tunics stirred the brew with long-handled wooden paddles. Arthur had many questions; Magnesia only had one.
“We are looking for Donut Bleech,” she said to the nearest worker.
The man nodded and jerked his head to indicate they should follow him. At the top of a set of stairs was an office, a desk, and the man they were searching for.
“Donut Bleech?” Magnesia asked.
“Not quite,” the man replied. He had Magnesia’s pale hair and complexion, and a moustache so milk-white it made Arthur want to hand him a napkin.
“We are looking for Donut Bleech,” Magnesia insisted.
“Donut Bleech was the name my grandfather was known by. It’s a bit embarrassing, really, but it’s what they called my father, and now me.”
“We have this cloth with your name on it,” Arthur said.
The man gestured them forward and took the folded fabric Arthur held out.
With a practised flick of the wrist, Donut unfurled the cloth and spread it over his desk.
“Well,” he said after examining it closely. “This is a Donut Bleech towel.”
“I was wrapped in it as a baby,” Magnesia explained. “I’m trying to find out where my parents came from. We believe the cloth has clues woven into it.”
“This,” Donut replied with a calm certainty, “is a commemorative towel from the reign of Administrator Doog. In the dark times after he broke the SHAMPOO Guild’s monopoly on most services, many people left Errm. Some of them in a hurry. This towel shows the City, here.” Donut indicated a woven patch of colour. “The plains of Eastern Mumpsimus,” he waved his hand over the unmarked expanse around the edge of the towel, and then gestured to the space beyond the cloth.
“The plains are that big?” Arthur asked.
“I have no idea. No one who goes there has ever drawn a map. It’s enough to know that the grass goes on for a long way and the land is filled with goats and monsters.”
“What kind of monsters?” Arthur asked, disappointed that in his years of following his family’s herd, he had never seen any real monsters.
“The kind that eats people who ask unanswerable questions,” Donut replied with a certainty of ignorance that reminded Arthur of his father.
“Can you tell us who owned it?” Magnesia asked.
“The towel? Probably not. I mean, if it was a monogrammed handkerchief, then certainly.”
“Whatsa hangerchief?” Arthur asked, the fumes of the factory making his nose stuffy.
“If you can’t help us, who can?” Magnesia insisted.
“Try the gods,” Donut suggested.
“Any gods in particular?” Arthur looked up from wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“Take your pick,” Donut replied.
“Well…” Arthur thought for a moment and then started ticking candidates off his fingers. “There’s Queezycocktail, god of hangovers. His followers preach a philosophy of hedonism by night and silent contemplation by day. Or Varicose, goddess of roads and map-makers. Polysisticos, goddess of fertility, Al’Buhmin, god of omelettes…”
Arthur continued while Donut ushered them out to the street. “A Wizeman once said, there are as many deities in this city as there are fools who believe in them.”
“Which wise man said that?” Arthur asked with great interest.
“Tobias, I think. Tobias Wizeman. Good bye.” Donut closed the door on the pair and they waited for the steam to clear so they could see where they were walking.
Magnesia frowned. “I think he was hi
ding something.”
“In there? He could be hiding almost anything.” Arthur turned and looked at the squat building that appeared to have been built over an active geyser field.
“You didn’t notice it, did you?” Magnesia glared in a way that made Arthur feel nervous.
“Yes?” he hazarded.
“The white hair, the pale skin? He looks like me.”
Arthur nodded. “Oh, oh yes, I noticed that.”
Magnesia snorted, and lifted the hem of her dress as she strode away through the wafting steam.
Arthur hurried after the girl and caught up with her outside a decrepit-looking shop front.
“We don’t know that you are related,” Arthur said.
“I wonder if he didn’t want to admit that he knows who I am?” Magnesia replied.
“Why would he not want mention that? Do you think it is a cultural thing? Like, it would be rude to admit to knowing you?”
“I think he doesn’t want us to know that he knows me.”
“Or, maybe, he doesn’t know you?” Arthur said, a deep frown creasing his brow.
“I’d like to keep an eye on him. We need somewhere we can watch the factory.” Magnesia looked around and then marched towards a nearby store. Arthur followed her to see what would happen next.
Magnesia pushed open a door and the odour of fresh paint wafted into the street.
“I’m sorry,” a woman called from inside, “we aren’t open yet.”
“That’s fine, we aren’t here to buy anything,” Magnesia called back.
Arthur stepped inside the store and looked around. Inside the doorway he passed under an archway with a strange, feathered ceiling. It took him a moment to see the legs, but they reached all the way to the ground on either side of the doorway.
Turning and backing up, craning his neck to see the full scale of the bird, Arthur gave an impressed whistle.
“That is the biggest thing I have ever seen. When I say biggest thing, I mean biggest of this kind of thing. I have seen other things that were much larger, but they were more similar in size to other similar things.”
“We would like to wait here until a man from next door leaves his business premises,” Magnesia explained.