“Then Kurchuk, and I might add that the kingdom of Zurb was the hardest hit by the famine, ordered his army mobilized and started an invasion of the Jumdun country, south of the Carpathians, to get grain. He got his army chopped up, and only about a quarter of them got back, with no grain. You ask me, I’d say that Labdurg framed it to happen that way. He advised Kurchuk to invade, in the first place, and I mentioned my suspicion that Chombrog, the Chuldun Emperor, is planning to move in on the Hulgun kingdoms. Well, what would be smarter than to get Kurchuk’s army smashed in advance?”
“How did the defeat occur?” Verkan Vall asked. “Any suspicion of treachery?”
“Nothing you could put your finger on, except that the Jumduns seemed to have pretty good intelligence about Kurchuk’s invasion route and battle plans. It could have been nothing worse than stupid tactics on Kurchuk’s part. See, these Hulguns, and particularly the Zurb Hulguns, are spearmen. They fight in a fairly thin line, with heavy-armed infantry in front and light infantry with throwing-spears behind. The nobles fight in light chariots, usually at the center of the line, and that’s where they were at this Battle of Jorm. Kurchuk himself was at the center, with his Chuldun archers massed around him.
“The Jumduns use a lot of cavalry, with long swords and lances, and a lot of big chariots with two javelin men and a driver. Well, instead of ramming into Kurchuk’s center, where he had his archers, they hit the extreme left and folded it up, and then swung around behind and hit the right from the rear. All the Chuldun archers did was stand fast around the king and shoot anybody who came close to them: they were left pretty much alone. But the Hulgun spearmen were cut to pieces. The battle ended with Kurchuk and his nobles and his archers making a fighting retreat, while the Jumdun cavalry were chasing the spearmen every which way and cutting them down or lancing them as they ran.
“Well, whether it was Labdurg’s treachery or Kurchuk’s stupidity, in either case, it was natural for the archers to come off easiest and the Hulgun spearmen to pay the butcher’s bill. But try and tell these knuckleheads anything like that! Muz-Azin protected the Chulduns, and Yat-Zar let the Hulguns down, and that was all there was to it. The Zurb temple started losing worshipers, particularly the families of the men who didn’t make it back from Jorm.
“If that had been all there’d been to it, though, it still wouldn’t have hurt the mining operations, and we could have got by. But what really tore it was when the rabbits started to die.” Stranor Sleth picked up a cigar from his desk and bit the end, spitting it out disgustedly. “Tularemia, of course,” he said, touching his lighter to the tip. “When that hit, they started going over to Muz-Azin in droves, not only at Zurb but all over the Six Kingdoms. You ought to have seen the house we had for Sunset Sacrifice, this evening! About two hundred, and we used to get two thousand. It used to be all two men could do to lift the offering box at the door, afterward, and all the money we took in tonight I could put in one pocket!” The high priest used language that would have been considered unclerical even among the Hulguns.
Verkan Vall nodded. Even without the quickie hypno-mech he had taken for this sector, he knew that the rabbit was domesticated among the Proto-Aryan Hulguns and was their chief meat animal. Hulgun rabbits were even a minor import on the First Level, and could be had at all the better restaurants in cities like Dhergabar. He mentioned that.
“That’s not the worst of it,” Stranor Sleth told him. “See, the rabbit’s sacred to Yat-Zar. Not taboo; just sacred. They have to use a specially consecrated knife to kill them—consecrating rabbit knives has always been an item of temple revenue—and they must say a special prayer before eating them. We could have got around the rest of it, even the Battle of Jorm—punishment by Yat-Zar for the sin of apostasy—but Yat-Zar just wouldn’t make rabbits sick. Yat-Zar thinks too well of rabbits to do that, and it’d not been any use claiming he would. So there you are.”
“Well, I take the attitude that this situation is the result of your incompetence,” Brannad Klav began, in a bullyragging tone. “You’re not only the high priest of this temple, you’re the acknowledged head of the religion in all the Hulgun kingdoms. You should have had more hold on the people than to allow anything like this to happen.”
“Hold on the people!” Stranor Sleth fairly howled, appealing to Verkan Vall. “What does he think a religion is, on this sector, anyhow? You think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there, to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize their moral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifices: when they can’t put out, they have to get out. How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in the Caucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow? Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley. They had a god, once, something basically like a
