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 thanks 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
