045 – Schism
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The battle between the salt caravan and the cattle farmers aggravated an already poor situation. The proud folk of North Bowbridge were not going to let some out-of-towners thrash some of their own, so they retaliated by coming over the river with staves and clubs. They fell on the drunken drivers and beat them bloody. They also smashed up some of the decorations for the coming festival. None of the hot-blooded young people of South Bowbridge could ignore a riot on their main street, so they came with rocks and bricks to pelt the invaders with. Finally the two sides retreated to their respective sides of the old stone bridge.
This incident infuriated the mayor. She summoned the town watch and ordered them to seal the door to the bridge, locking out the hoodlums from across the river. It turned out that the bridge gate had been open so long that its hinges rusted solid. The doors wouldn’t budge. So she then ordered the blacksmith to knock out the old pins and replace them. Then the doors closed. And the angry townsfolk barred the door, something that had never happened in living memory.
This new development greatly distressed the town priestess. She pleaded with the mayor in the street. “Mayor. Please reconsider this. Tonight is the star feast. It will ruin the ceremony.”
“Ruin? Those Stodges will ruin it. Savages like that don’t deserve to come to our feast,” she declared. The mayor was an incredibly proud and haughty woman. A noble, born and bred.
“But it’s not yours exclusively. I serve both sides of the river, and the festival is meant for everyone.”
“The temple is in our town, so the feast is too. It’s ours by rights.”
“Why don’t you try to make peace with the other side? Expel those salt peddlers who started this whole thing. That will show you’re willing to compromise.”
“Kick out the traders? What would we do without salt? All our bread would fall flat. All our soups would be insipid. And what would our town do without traveling merchants? They are the source of our wealth and prosperity, even if the Stodges don’t recognize that fact. My family, House Brelont, has traded inland and across the seas for generations. We are merchant-princes of the colonies. It would be unthinkable for one of my blood to betray a reliable trading partner, unless a profit was involved.”
“Mayor, please. We have to let the Northsiders participate in the feast. They donated half the sacrifices.”
“If you want to hold a separate festival for the barbarians across the river, you have every right to do so. But they will not come to our town. The gate will remain closed until they beg forgiveness. Let’s see how long they can go without salt before they crumble.”
The two women continued arguing as they went back to the lunar temple. Meanwhile, the people from the other town gathered on the bridge to shout and bang on the door. They were not happy to discover they had been locked out of the midyear ceremony. They said a lot of unpleasant things about the mayor, the noble house of Brelont, and the Fripps, and added a few comments about the king that bordered on treason.
“We have the makings for a nice distraction,” Zambulon said “but now the gate is closed to the other side of the river. Let’s wait until the festival is underway to heat things up.”
At sunset, the villagers and farmers from surrounding lands gathered in a crowd before the temple, although it was only half the size of previous years. They buzzed with talk about the recent events. When the sun disappeared below the horizon, the church attendants came out to light all the lanterns, and the crowd fell silent. The ceremony was about to begin. The priestess solemnly emerged from the temple door and took the stage in front of the altar.
We evil cultists watched from the very back of the crowd, half concealed in shadows. This woman, or at least the organization she belonged to, was the arch enemy of the Void Phantoms. More importantly, the Church of the Saints hated me specifically. They would see a resurrected ghost as little different than a daemonic possession. I was an abomination. Because of this group of moon-crazies, I had to take refuge with the Void Cult until the day I became strong enough to navigate the world on my own.
“All hail to the high ones. All hail to the ten who guide us. Hail to the one hundred who keep the fires and intercede on our behalves. Let us entreat the nine hundred to withhold their vengeful anger.”
I perked up at this. The priestess was praying to her moon gods, but did so in the language of the Ancients – my language. No one else in the crowd could understand her. I suspected that she might not know the language very well, because her pronunciation was terrible. But it was recognizable. Somehow the church used bits of my language for their ceremonies. I was curious as to what other knowledge they might have preserved.
“On this, the day of the Star Feast, we offer to the Lunar Deities a sacrifice of flesh. Our offerings here delay the anger of those gods who still wish to destroy mankind. The prideful Ancients built a tower to the sky, and for that great sin, we, their descendants, must forever pay the price.
“And we offer our prayers to the merciful one hundred gods who have already forgiven us for that ancient transgression. Those gods do not ask for sacrifices. They do not need the smoke of incense or the blood of freshly slain bulls. What they require from us are prayers and purity. They want us to cast out daemons. They want us to cleanse the continent of evil things. They want us to establish the sacred laws of the Saints here on earth.
“But destroying the monsters of the world is only part of that sacred law. We must also cleanse our own hearts. We must cast out the daemons of greed and hatred and lust. We must set aside our pride and willfulness to work together as a community of the holy…”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The priestess launched a long sermon about one’s ethical responsibilities to a larger community. Nothing she said struck me as particularly repulsive or engaging; it was mostly common sense. Be nice to your neighbors, and they will be nice to you. What seemed strange to me was how she interwove her ethical lessons with fantastic tales, legends of kings, the lives of Saints, battles with titans, conflicts between the gods, and scenes of the lunar paradise. The priestess indirectly admonished the South Bowbridgers for treating their neighbors so poorly. She also warned about angering the Lunar Deities and gave many examples of the punishments the gods dolled out on the unworthy.
The lunar religion described every natural occurrence as the will of the gods. When something bad happened—earthquakes, blights, hurricanes—it was the result of humans angering the nine hundred vengeful gods. This required giving more sacrifices to the church to ward off their displeasure. When something good happened, mainly averting disasters, it was through the intercession of the one hundred merciful gods. This required giving more sacrifices as thanks and to ensure more help in the future. A rather pat explanation of the natural world. No matter what happened, it evidenced the work of the gods. And no matter what happened, the answer was always to hand over more wealth to the church.
From what I could decipher from the priestess’s jumbled stories, the gods watched over the earth from their home on the moon. They could communicate through their idols, which seemed to be like radio receivers, but those miraculous public appearances were very rare. More often they chose a worthy human to be a Saint, who would then act as their representative on earth. The gods rewarded the Saints with an afterlife on the moon and a role as junior ranked gods. The Saints often appeared to people in visions and had their own talking idols.
I had no clue how much of this was made up nonsense and how much was true. Ghosts were real. I had seen them. And my own fate proved that something like an afterlife could happen. My mind survived my body. But the priestess’s sermon was meant to mollify the rowdy villagers, not give a plain description of hard facts.
At the climax of the ceremony, the long winded priestess recited more holy prayers that the crowd couldn’t understand. Then four attendants brought out a bull and slit the animal’s throat. Its blood gushed across the altar. The bull thrashed against its restraints, splashing some dark blood across the priestess’s violet robes. The crowd murmured, because they saw it as a bad omen. Then the priestess gave a final speech and prayer.
All in all, the ceremony mystified me. It seemed totally alien to someone of my Ancient culture. It wasn’t until after the ceremony that this event made a little more sense to me. The attendants butchered the animals, and placed the fat and bones in a large brazier. The rising smoke was the god’s share of the feast. The people, on the other hand, got to eat the fresh meat. The cattle were carved up and dolled out. Many of the attending crowd—farm hands, laborers, tradesmen—lived on the edge of malnutrition. They rarely got to eat meat. A feast let them fill their bellies with nutritious, bloody flesh.
The feast brought the local community together for a night and strengthened the social bonds. Farm families, who lived kilometers outside the town, could all meet for these holy day feasts and catch up on current events. It was a community bonding event.
All the people milled around the town square, eating the bull meat and drinking beer. Some sat at tables, others huddled in groups to talk. Children and dogs ran around being annoying. The mayor and the priestess came down to mingle on a more personal level with the townsfolk they ruled over. It would have been relaxing and fun, but for the looming anxiety over excluding the North Bowbridgers.
The cooks suspended a whole bull carcass over a fire pit and turned it on a spit. They sliced off pieces of cooked meat and passed them out in wooden bowls. I grabbed two bowls and looked around for my fellow cultists.
At the edge of the town square, I spotted Hwilla and Yurk sitting at a small table under the hanging lanterns and flowers. The star heart rose above the rooftops and dazzled with a thousand brilliant stars, orange, red, blue, and white. The gem encrusted sky bestowed a romantic atmosphere on the night, even at a dinky little town like this one. The power of the scene dispelled Hwilla’s gloomy mood. She laughed and smiled warmly at her fellow disciple. Even Yurk seemed to be having a good time, although it was hard to tell with him.
“The moon people have answered my prayers!” I said and raised my arms to the sky above. “Praise the moon people!”
What sweet relief. Hwilla’s broken heart had begun to mend. All it took was the salubrious effect of an incredibly handsome face. Had I known that to begin with, I would have unmasked Yurk and shoved him at Hwilla on my first day at the citadel. All that messy romance business could have been avoided. A shame it happened so late, but I wouldn’t complain about a miracle from the merciful gods of love.
Hwilla giggled at something Yurk said and touched his arm. I had a hard time imagining Yurk making a joke, but then again, love can do strange things to people. My appearance would spoil the mood, so I quietly crept away from the couple to the other side of the square.
Zambulon sat brooding in the shadows by himself. I guessed by his dour expression that he had witnessed the same thing I had. The lunar gods had not answered his prayers. As soon as I forcibly extricated myself from the youthful disciples’ love triangle, a new challenger took my place. Zambulon could hate me, because he saw me as an outsider who showed up and ruined all his plans. But he couldn’t blame Yurk, for the two of them had been friends for years. The quiet Yurk was not devious or malicious. Fate or the will of the gods or sheer chance was responsible for this turn of events.
“Zambulon. How’s your night so far?” I held out my extra bowl to him.
He glared at me with fiery eyes. Zambulon stood up and wrapped his cloak around himself. “I don’t want your pity.”
“Uh. Do you want some cow meat?”
“Get ready for action. This night’s not over yet.” Zambulon turned and marched off into the crowd.
“No meat then? No? Okay…”
I sat down in the spot he had just departed. Consoling a lovesick cultist did not fall in my area of expertise. I didn’t know what to say without making it worse for him. ‘Don’t feel bad. You didn’t really lose anything, because you never had a chance to begin with.’ Even if I knew what to say, Zambulon wouldn’t want to hear it from me. He would interpret my words as gloating, or worse, pity. Insults chipped away at his brittle pride, and every failure caused a new crack.
Alone, I ate my portion of the communal feast and observed the townsfolk. The stars blazed above us.
Not long later, another blaze lit the sky, an orange glow over the village of South Bowbridge. Dense smoke rose above the rooftops and mingled with the smoke from the sacrifice ascending to the heavens. The gods would have a bounteous meal tonight. Zambulon had set the church’s tithe barn on fire.