Just before midday, Zanipulus arrived and started doling out yet more soup. I watched him carefully. He had a big copper basin and a brass ladle, and everybody got two mouthfuls. If that was supposed to be a meal, it was a pretty sparse one. Then I realised. Not soup; medicine.
Teuta was livid. “He can’t go trying out his stupid potions on real people,” he said, “even if they are sick. Suppose he poisons someone and they die. That could mean our necks.”
I was watching the crowd. “Fine,” I said. “You go out there and tell him.”
“You go. You’re the figurehead.”
“No chance. They’d tear me to pieces. Whatever Zan thinks he’s doing, it’s going down really well.”
There was, it turned out, a reason for that. The stuff he gave them worked. Later he explained that mountain fever was one of the family of diseases his father had been studying; as soon as he saw a crowd of victims assembled in one place, he’d scooted home, cooked up a big batch of the recipe (he had all the ingredients—mouldy bread, for crying out loud, and garlic juice—ready for just such an eventuality) and rushed over to try it out. He’d told them it was a gift from the Invincible Sun that would purge away their sins and leave them whole, and they swallowed it, literally and figuratively. And, would you believe, it actually worked. Twelve hours later, the symptoms started to fade; six doses of the stuff and you were right as ninepence. It was, Razo said, a miracle.
“No it bloody well wasn’t,” Zanipulus replied angrily. “It was thirty years of painstaking research by a better man than you’ll ever be, so shut your face before I shut it for you.”
Accila cleared his throat meaningfully—he’s six feet six and built like a carthorse, so he was our Justice of the Peace. “Actually, Zan,” he said, “you want to be a bit careful, bearing in mind what happened to your dad. If word gets about that his son’s handing out miracle cures for the fever, you’ll have the kettlehats after you. One martyr in the family is quite enough, I’ve always thought. Two in two generations is just showing off.”
I guess that must’ve sunk in, because after a medium-length sulk, Zanipulus came sidling round us and asked if we wouldn’t mind handing out the rest of the magic goo, spiced up with some religious stuff to distract attention from the medicine side of things. Well, we couldn’t refuse, because there were thousands of the poor devils out there by then; so we let him out the back way, to go down to the bakers’ scrounging for mouldy bread, while we knocked up a quick liturgy for the healing of the sick.
Muggins here got elected to perform it. Luckily I’m a quick learner. I was word perfect by the time we opened the door and processed out in our vestments (three tremisses for a big wicker hamper of surplus costumes from the Theatre; stank of moth and mildew, but washed up well). I did the words, the other three did the soup. We ran out twice, but fortunately Zan was back with all the stale bread he could carry, and was cooking up a storm in the back room. By nightfall we were all absolutely shattered, and we’d burnt a month’s charcoal in a day. We also took three hundred tremisses, nearly all in small change—we had to take it to the moneychangers in herring-barrels. Oh, and we cured the fever epidemic and saved something like two thousand lives. Just us.
#
And pretty smug about it we were too, as you can imagine. It was the ascent to the next level we’d been praying for (so to speak), it was handed to us on a plate and it worked better than we could possibly have hoped for. Because of it, we made the jump from just-another-street-cult to serious mainstream religion in the course of a week. And, let’s not forget, we took a great deal of money. Vast amounts of money. Almost enough.
Almost. None of us had said anything out loud, but the unspoken agreement had been; if this thing really takes off, we’ll run it until we’ve each got enough for a stake, the money we’d need to buy into some good, solid, reliable business, retire and be comfortable for life. That moment had very nearly come, but not quite. We counted it, and counted it again, and once more for luck. Split five ways, three hundred and twenty tremisses each. For which, in those days, you could buy a small farm or an established trade (but none of us wanted to be a cooper or a bootmaker) or four carts or a sixteenth share in a ship—a living, in other words, but lower middle class at the very best. That wasn’t quite enough, as far as we were concerned. We’d rather set our hearts on being gentlemen, for which we needed another one-seven-five each, minimum. We counted the fever takings one more time, and decide we were still in the faith business.
#
We expected that, once the mountain fever was over, things would quieten down. Not so. We were now established as the go-to faith for healing the sick, and that was a real headache. Mountain fever was one thing; we had the recipe for that, but not for the million-and-one other horrible things that people waste away and die from. No way, of course, that we could explain that to the faithful; so we had to carry on, do the three services a day, and hope that in due course we’d become discredited and forgotten about (but not, hopefully, before we’d scooped in that extra one-seven-five a head).
And wasn’t that the weirdest thing. We sang our psalms and intoned our meaningless prayers to our home-made god and ladled out our thin gruel of flour, water and rock salt, guaranteed no medicinal value whatsoever; and still they came, and still they got better. It was embarrassing. Recovered patients turned up, completely unsolicited, and told the crowd at our door that the Invincible Sun had cured them of this or that revolting disease, and that they should all have faith, give generously and believe. If I hadn’t known the truth, I’d have been convinced the whole thing was a fix and the happy beneficiaries of divine clemency were out-of-work actors we’d hired for thirty trachy a day in the Horsefair. Thousands of my fellow-citizens, however, weren’t so sceptical. They came, limping and groaning and seeping pus; they listened, they prayed; they got better.
Zanipulus told us that such things had been known. Some Mezentine once did an experiment with a load of sick people; he gave half of them proper medicine and the rest of them some old rubbish, told them all it was the real stuff; of the half who got the rubbish, something like a fifth of them got well anyway. Well, fine; goes to show how gullible people really are. The thing was, the number of sick people apparently cured by us—by me, since the other four just handed out the wallpaper paste—was far more than in the Mezentine’s experiment. Furthermore, I’m not just talking about coughs and snuffles here. Genuine serious illnesses, the sort that kill you dead; we were curing those, with a success ratio of something like two-to-one.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Razo announced. It was the day after he’d cured a leper. The experience had left him badly shaken. “It’s getting crazy and out of hand. I vote that we quit the business, divide up the proceeds and go our separate ways.”
Two days previously, Accila, in his capacity as treasurer, had announced that he was switching his basis of account from silver to gold. That was when there were a hundred and six silver tremisses to the gold stamen. The net, he then informed us, stood at four hundred and ninety stamina; just ten more to go and the arithmetic would be really straightforward.
“We can’t,” Teuta replied with his mouth full. “It’s gone too far. They know our names. We’re respectable. For crying out loud, we had the Secretary of War in here yesterday.”
“We wouldn’t be able to stay in the City, agreed,” Razo said. “So what? The world’s a big place, especially if you’ve got a hundred stamina in your pocket. We could go anywhere.”
“I’m not sure I want to give up, “ Teuta said. “Whatever the hell it is we’re doing, it seems like it’s working. And I like having Cabinet ministers calling me your Grace. It sort of makes up for some of the other stuff, if you see what I mean.” He yawned, and swung round in his chair. “Zan? What do you think?”
Zanipulus shrugged. “I agree, it makes a pleasant change being respectable, and the money’s nice. And I don’t think for one moment it’ll last forever. Sooner or later this
weird run of luck’s going to peter out, people will stop curing themselves and saying it was us, and the whole thing will grind to a halt. Until then, I say we carry on milking it for everything we can. You only get something like this once in a lifetime. And it’s not like any of us have any other means of making a living.”
Nobody, please note, seemed interested in what I’d got to say. My own fault, I guess. I’d spoken inadvisably a couple of times, and my opinion was no longer welcome. I gave it anyway.
“I vote we carry on,” I said. “Yes, we’re making money. We’re also healing the sick. Don’t pull faces, Razo, you’ll stick like it. We’re healing the sick, or they’re healing themselves because of us, makes no real difference. What matters is, it’s happening. If we give up now—”
“Don’t start,” Teuta said ominously.
“Too late,” I shouted, and they all looked at me. “For pity’s sake,” I said, “can’t you see it? We’ve started something here. People believe in us. They believe so strongly that they’re curing themselves, like in that Mezentine’s experiment. Zan, you’re a scientist, aren’t you just the tiniest bit curious? It’s an extraordinary thing.”
“No kidding,” Zanipulus said. “For one thing, it’s not possible. Therefore, it scares me. However—”
“Impossible’s just a way of saying we haven’t figured out how it works yet,” I snapped at him. “You should be ashamed of yourself. For crying out loud, Zan, you cured the mountain fever, you saved hundreds, thousands of lives. It’s what your father died for. Doesn’t that mean more to you than just money?”
“I proved that dad’s idea worked,” Zanipulus said. “That’s all I wanted to do. Other people’s problems are not my concern.”
“You know what,” Teuta said. “He’s got religion. He’s starting to believe his own bullshit.”
“You’re all mad,” Razo said. “We should pack it in now, before we get ourselves in deep trouble.”
“One against four,” Accila said. “We keep going. After all,” he added, in a soothing voice that made me want to scream, “it’s not going to last for ever.”
#
Razo’s attempt to kill the new religion was completely stupid and half-baked, exactly what anyone who knew him as well as we did would have expected. Three days later, at the end of morning prayers, he suddenly turned round, faced the crowd and called out, “The world will end at noon on the fourth of Vectigalia. You have been warned. Goodbye.” Then he walked past us very quickly into the Temple, ran upstairs and locked himself in the strongroom.
We only just made it back inside ourselves—we’d moved, by the way, from the old lime kiln to what’s now the Silver Star in Westponds—and bolted the door and put the bars up. There was total chaos outside. Teuta was all for bashing the strongroom door down and cutting Razo’s throat; he and Zanipulus got hold of the long oak table in the exchequer room and tried to use it as a battering ram, but our strongroom was strong—we kept huge sums of money in there—and after a few minutes they gave up. Razo came out eventually. We just ignored him.
The kettlehats came and broke up the riot. We were given an armed guard, two companies of regulars in shiny breastplates. Once the streets were quiet and they’d dragged away the bodies (three dead, fourteen badly injured) the guard captain came inside to tell us it was all right and his men would be staying there for the next three days, until the fourth.
“Is it true?” he asked, in a quiet, terrified voice. “Is the world really about to end?”
I took charge. “Bless you, my son,” I said. He was at least ten years older than me. The father thing is something I’ll never get used to. “Are you a member of our congregation?”
The captain hesitated, then nodded shyly.
“Have faith,” I said. “The world as we know it will end. The new world will begin. For those who have faith, this is a time of joy.”
I’d said the right thing. He gave me a huge, childlike smile, saluted and went away. “Nicely done,” Zanipulus said, with grudging admiration. “We may get out of this after all.”
#
There had, of course, been total eclipses of the sun before. Anaximander records one, in dry, impersonal detail, back in the second century; he watched the whole thing, making careful notes, and the last line of his account—thereafter, I became blind—is one of the most poignant lines in scientific literature. There have been others, though the only trace they’ve left is their imprint in various mythologies, vague and unsatisfactory. They’re rare, though; rare enough that by the time the next one comes along, the previous one’s become overgrown with legend and dumped in the place where facts go when people no longer really believe in them.
So, except for the quarter-percent of the population who’d read Anaximander, the total eclipse that took place on the fourth Vectigalia, AUC 552, wasn’t a rare and fascinating scientific phenomenon. It was what I’d said it would be. They saw the Invincible Sun die and instantly be reborn, in fire and glory, beyond a shadow of a doubt the beginning of a whole new world.
Oh boy, was that ever good for business. When we finally got the temple cleared and the gates shut, well after midnight, we had a very quick and perfunctory extraordinary general meeting, at which it was resolved that we needed to start hiring some staff, since there was no way in hell we’d be able to carry on running things at that pace all on our own. Razo—somehow in the confusion of that day he’d been completely forgiven and elevated to the status of hero—proposed the hierarchy that prevails in the Church to this day. I was to be the first High Priest; the other four were to be isangels (a term Razo coined on the spot, would you believe), and we’d hire ten full-time priests and fifty minimum-wage part-timers to do pastoral and missionary work, along with three clerks to help out with the books.
Filling the vacancies wasn’t a problem. Actually, it was; we were deluged with applicants, ninety-nine per cent of whom we rejected out of hand on the grounds of excessive zeal. The candidates we finally chose were all, in fact, renegade priests from other religions. We wanted men who knew the score and understood the business, and I venture to suggest that we chose well, since of the original ten, eight are still in post and the other two died in harness. As for the part-timers, we went the opposite way and hired the frothing-at-the-mouthest zealots, in the interests of diversity and balance.
#
The next phase began with our first purpose-built temple. You’ll know it as the Silent Rock, on the corner of Old Guard and Tanneries; we just called it The Temple, fondly believing that it’d be the only one. Note the location: We could have gone further into New Town, in pursuit of the carriage trade, but we decided the frontier between upmarket and the slums was a strategically better choice. Yes, the rich gave more, but there are an awful lot of the poor, and handfuls of trachy soon add up, so we weren’t inclined to turn our backs on the devoted unwashed. That was the mistake the Ephraists made, and the Poldarnians. They made it clear they weren’t interested in the common people, and where are they now? Nor did we want to go the way of the Blachernicans or the Ranting Friars and get closed down by the government as subversive and antisocial. A middle course, was what we decided on. A universal church, with every man contributing according to his means.
The explosion in our income since the eclipse meant that we could hire the very best architect. It’s an indication of how our luck was running that when we approached Thalles with the commission, he turned round and told us he’d be delighted to do the job for free, as his personal offering to the Invincible Sun. Accila tried to insist on paying him—if you hire them, he said, you can also fire them if needs be, but volunteers can be a real pain to get rid of—but he simply wouldn’t hear of it; if we gave him money, he’d simply give it all back in the offertory, so where was the point? You can’t argue with that, or at least, we didn’t try.
It was the same story when it came to buying building materials and hiring labour. If it was for the Temple, nobody wanted paying. That didn’t st
op contributions to the building fund flooding in, although we made no secret of the fact that we were getting all this free stuff. We decided we had to spend some of the Fund or it’d look really bad, so we sent to Perimadeia for gold offertory plate and embroidered vestments. By the time the order was completed and delivered, there was already a small but thriving Church of the Invincible Sun in Perimadeia—what’s all this stuff for, the merchants there asked; gosh, that sounds like a good idea, let’s worship Him too. The same in Aelia and the Vesani Republic. I’m not making this up. It really was happening that fast. For example; the first we knew about the Church in Scona was when a ship’s captain arrived with three hundred stamina in a goatskin bag; offerings from the faithful to the Mother Church. Honestly, we didn’t know what to say.
#
The night before we broke ground on the Temple foundations, I had a dream. Well, of course you did, I hear you say, what sort of a high priest would you be if you didn’t? Indeed; : but I did actually have a dream, and unlike most of my dreams, which I forget within a few heartbeats of opening my eyes, this one’s stayed with me ever since.
I was inside the Temple—I recognised it, even though I’d only seen it as straight lines on a sheet of parchment—and it was beautiful. The walls were a kind of dark red marble, and the ceiling was a vast golden mosaic of the ascent of the Invincible Sun, surrounded on all sides by saints, angels, apostles and other glorious beings—I recognised them all, though I couldn’t remember all their names. In the chancel a choir was singing (and I remember thinking; that’s a point, we ought to get some religious music written, it goes down really well) and the air smelt wonderful; roses and lavender and some deep, rich scent I couldn’t identify. I was on my knees, wearing vestments of plain black wool, and I think my feet were bare.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 376
