There is a message on my desk, scribbled on a
piece of thick paper. A boy has brought it to me, saying that it had been left,
he does not know by whom. I have read it, and I will read it again.
But first I look
towards the window, and the years melt away, as I let the memories play out
again before me.
**************************************************
The Lord Kalkar turned back from the window and
looked at me. “The beast marches,” he said.
I noticed that he did
not use the official term. “The Godmonster, my Lord?” I said, to remind him.
He snorted. “The beast. Call it what you will, it’s still a beast. I’ll
grant you the monster part, though.”
I suppressed the urge
to look over my shoulder. Even the Lord’s castle undoubtedly crawled with
spies, and he must have known it as well as I did. I could only imagine that he
thought it no longer mattered. “You were saying?” I murmured.
“You heard me,” he
said, glancing at me sharply. “I have just received a message from....a source.
The beast is on the march.”
“And it’s coming this
way,” I said. If the Godmonster – I could not risk even thinking of it
otherwise, because thoughts could be dangerous – if the Godmonster had been
going in any other direction, the Lord would never have mentioned it. “How fast
is it moving?”
“Not very fast, of
course. Something that size can’t move very fast. It will take a few weeks to
get here. But get here it will.” The Lord laughed, a short harsh bark. “It
seems as though adopting the One True Faith of the Godmonster has not done a
thing to protect us.”
“The priests...” I
began.
“Have the priests ever
achieved anything?” the Lord demanded. “Tell me that. Have they ever done a
single damned thing that helped anyone but themselves?”
I kept prudently
silent. The Lord came back to the table and picked up the goblet, looked into
it, and seemed surprised to find it empty. I realised that he was more than a
little tipsy. “So, can you guess what I want you to do?”
“Organise the
evacuation?” I hazarded. “Where do you plan to evacuate, Lord? Your estates to
the south have been taken over by the priests. The Western farmland has been
fallow for years, and...”
“Evacuation?” Kalkar
almost spat. He threw down the goblet on the floor. It bounced. “Look at that,”
he said, with grim satisfaction. “I can’t even break a goblet anymore.”
“The floor’s wood,” I
pointed out, “and what’s more, you’ve got a carpet on it.”
He glared at me. “I
was saying,” he replied, biting off the words with his teeth, “that there won’t
be any evacuation. We aren’t going
anywhere.”
“But the Godmonster
will be here in a few weeks,” I pointed out, “and then there won’t be a thing
to be done. If we don’t evacuate we’ll be...”
He didn’t let me
finish. “We won’t let it get here, then,” he snapped. “We’ll stop it. Somehow.”
I had a sudden
lurching feeling inside me, as though my intestines had been removed. “Who is
this we, Lord?”
“You and I.” He glared
at me so fiercely I almost felt my eyebrows turning into ash and smelly smoke.
“Who else?”
I looked around. There
was nobody else. Everyone else had prudently kept out of sight. “Er...”
“Er, what?” His hand
moved over the table, looking for something else to throw. The only thing on the
table was a heavy jewelled dagger. His fingers twitched towards it. “Er, what?”
“I was going to say,
of course, Lord,” I said, trying not to gabble. “When do we start?”
“Now, of course.” The
Lord thrust his beard at me. “Any objections?”
There were so many
that my mind jammed trying to sort them out. “No, Lord,” my mouth said, for no
reason I could think of. “None at all.”
**************************************************
The new metal studded leather armour that is all
the rage these days may be tough, but it’s rigid and immensely uncomfortable.
I’d have much preferred the old chain mail, but the Lord waved away my
objections.
“The beast will cook you in chain mail,” he’d said,
thrusting the immense helmet into my hands. The weight made my shoulders slump.
“Put that on.”
The Godmonster would
cook us anyway, but I knew enough not to say that. Without wasting any further
breath, I’d put it on.
Now the sweat was
trickling down my back and stinging salt in my eyes; and the helmet seemed
determined to tilt forward over my face until it rested on my chest. Wearily, I
pushed it up again. “Lord?”
“Yes?” he was riding just
to my right, but I couldn’t see far enough to the side out of the vision slit
of the helmet to catch sight of anything more than the tip of his horse’s nose.
It made it easier to talk though I couldn’t watch his reactions. “What is it?”
“You know the priests
said the Godmonster’s will can’t be defied, and it’s heresy and death to do
so,” I said. “So, even if we succeed, we still aren’t out of trouble. In fact,
we’re deeper in it.”
He snorted, as loudly
as the horses. “The priests will change their tune as soon as they see who’s
got the upper hand. The God...the beast
is just a way for them to cow people into submission. Once we beat it, nobody
will be afraid of it anymore...or of the priests.”
And that was precisely
why they’d do anything to stop that happening, I thought, but knew well enough
not to say anything.
“Lord,” I ventured,
instead. “What is the
Godmonster?”
“What is...” he repeated,
his voice so filled with astonishment that I heard the surprise over the noise
of our horses’ hooves. “Oh, of course, you have never seen the beast, or even
heard of it from any source other than the tales of the priests. It’s only a
few of us who have ever laid eyes on it, and fewer still who have read the old
archives. I am perhaps the only one still alive, outside the priesthood, who
has done both. And,” he added with
gloomy satisfaction, “nobody can do that anymore. The High Priest Kandar ordered
all the archives destroyed, ten years ago.”
I didn’t care about
the archives. “You’ve seen the
Godmonster?” I asked. “Actually seen it?”
“Once,” he said, “and
long ago, when I was only a little older than a boy. I accompanied the Lord Pachar’s
Army of Heretics in its expedition against the beast. You know what happened to
that army?”
“They say,” I
swallowed. “They say the Godmonster ate it.”
“Ate it?” He had drawn
ahead a little, enough so that I could see him cock his head to one side in the
familiar gesture whenever he was giving something thought. “Yes, I suppose you
could say it ate the army, in a manner of speaking. Actually, what happened to
the army we never knew, because it just vanished into the beast’s flame and
smoke, and never came out again. Only the rearguard was left...and I was part
of that rearguard.”
“I thought the
rearguard was eaten, too.”
“Oh yes, the fool who
was the Captain of the Guard ordered it into battle, to rescue the army he
said. Fortunately, a few of us right at the back had enough sense to realise
that if the beast had destroyed the main force, the rearguard couldn’t do a
thing. So we just...failed to charge along with them.”
We rode for a while
longer before I spoke next. “What is the Godmonster like? Is it as terrible as
they say?”
“Worse. Much, much
worse.” He turned his heavy helmet enough to look round at me. “That’s why I’m
not raising an army to fight the beast. It would just be wiped out, again.”
“Then what are the two
of us going to do, Lord?” I asked.
“I have ideas,” he
said. “Don’t forget, I’ve three advantages over anyone else. First, I’ve seen the
beast with my own eyes. Secondly, I’ve read the archives, and I know more about
it than most people do. And the third advantage I have is the most important of
all.”
He waited for the
question. I waited longer. He waited some more. Through the vision slit of the
helmet I saw a substantial town in the distance. He turned his horse towards
it.
“That’s Mankhlar,” he
said. “I’ve got some work to do there, so I might as well get it over with. Meanwhile,
keep your ears open, but make sure you don’t believe anything anyone says that
comes from the priests.”
I gave in. “What’s the
third advantage, Lord?”
“I just told you.
Unlike you, and everyone else, I don’t believe a word the priests tell me. Not
one single, solitary word.”
I watched the walls of
the town come closer. “Should we use false names, Lord? In case the priests try
to stop us?”
“Why would they?” he
flung back over his shoulder, urging his horse into a gallop. “They’ll be happy
if we get roasted to a cinder. It’ll make an example of us. So why should the priests bother?”
On that cheery note,
we drew to the city gates, so I said nothing more.
**************************************************
“There
are rumours, that’s all,” I said the next morning, leaning forward in the
saddle to ease my aching back. The mattress on which I’d had the misfortune to
spend the night seemed to have been stuffed with several large and craggy
rocks. I don’t know where Kalkar had spent the night; he’d met me as I was just
finishing the inn’s inadequate breakfast, with a satisfied expression on his
face. “People have heard that the Godmonster is moving, but they don’t know
which way, and the priests are telling them...”
“...that it won’t come
this way if they visit the temple and donate money and gold,” the Lord said.
“Just as they always do. And when the beast appears on the horizon, heading
towards the town, they’ll say the people need to pray harder...and pay harder,
too.”
“Lord,” I said, “about
those archives. You said they had information about the Godmonster.”
“So I did.” The Lord
had been riding slightly ahead, but he slowed down enough so that we were side
by side. Today I’d prevailed on him enough to be allowed to not wear the heavy
helmet, which now hung from the back of the saddle. His was slung over his back
by leather thongs. “You know the standard dogma of the priests about the beast,
I imagine?
“That it’s the High
God himself, who has always lived among us, and punishes those who transgress
his laws? Of course.”
“Would it surprise you
to learn that the beast only appeared a little more than a thousand years ago?
And that the tale the priests tell now is something they decided among
themselves, a few hundred years after that. The Priesthood itself was built out
of several competing priesthoods, each of which had its own story.”
“And what was the real
story?” I asked.
He shrugged so his shoulder
plates clanked. “You know those ruins we keep digging up, and which the priests
demand we cover up again? The world was a different place then. There was no
priesthood to rule over everything. Instead, there were competing tribal
entities, called nations and kingdoms, which kept quarrelling over resources
and territory.”
“That sounds fairly
primitive,” I said.
“Primitive?” He
considered the idea. “No, not really. Not in the way you mean. In some ways it
was a far more advanced society than ours, with much greater weapons. And they
had tremendous wars, of a ferocity we can’t even imagine now.
“From what I read, their
weapons had advanced to the point where they had the ability to destroy
everything. And the two biggest nations of the time were in a confrontation,
heading steadily towards a war that everyone knew was coming but seemed to be
unable to prevent.
“And then it was that
the Godmonster appeared. There was a gap in the archives at that point – I rather
think some earlier priest had decided that something needed to be removed – so
I don’t know exactly how it appeared. There are hints that it fell from the sky
in a storm of fire and darkness. And as it fell, it totally destroyed one of
those two nations in its fall.”
“Didn’t the other...”
I began.
“Oh of course it did.
Of course it tried to turn the beast
into a weapon. And when that failed, it attacked the thing. With all those world destroying weapons, you know.”
“What happened, Lord?”
“What do you think
happened? The beast is still here, but that country
isn’t.”
“And the priesthood
sprung up then? I mean, the priesthoods?”
“Not at once, no. What
happened was a period of warfare among all the other nations. The beast started
walking across the world, destroying everything...well, you know that...and
those countries that lay in its path attacked countries that didn’t, so as to
take over their territories and become countries that the beast wouldn’t
destroy. The beast walked a lot more back then, and faster than it does now. So
in not very long most of the countries were at war, and the amount of weapons
being used meant that though the big two weren’t around anymore, the rest could
still easily eradicate the world among themselves.
“And now I’m going to
tell you where the idea that the beast is a god first came up. There was a man
then, who was a little cleverer than the rest and also perhaps also spoke with
a little louder voice. He declared that the beast was a judge, which had found
the nations wanting, and was merely delivering verdict and punishment. And it
would, of course, merely destroy the evil and help the good.” He laughed so
loudly that his horse cocked its head uneasily. “Just like gods have always chosen
the good over the evil throughout history. Anyone who wins was helped by a god,
and the god helped him because he was good and the other one was evil, right?”
I wisely chose not to
say anything.
“This man’s name was
Mzibanga. I’ve seen a picture of him; he was past middle age, and quite thin
and small. You wouldn’t expect someone as insignificant looking as that to come
up with such an idea, still less get anyone else to accept it.
“This is what Mzibanga
said. If the beast continued its rampage across the world, it would inevitably
destroy it all, even if it did not mean to, because of the constant warfare
that broke out before and around it. Even the good would suffer and die, not
just the bad. There was only one way to solve the problem.” He glanced at me
from the corner of his eye. “Guess.”
When Lord Kalkar asked
you to guess, he was issuing an order and you were not at liberty to take it
lightly. “If I were this Mzibanga,” I said, wheels spinning hard in my head, “I’d
try to get everyone to stop fighting. And if they wouldn’t...”
“They wouldn’t.”
“No, they wouldn’t,
would they. Because the Godmonster would destroy their countries as it kept
marching.” I risked a couple of moments for thought. “Then, I suppose, there is
only one solution. But he must have been a truly remarkable man if he could
have got them to agree.”
“And that solution is?”
“To bring their armies
to the Godmonster, of course.” He grinned and nodded encouragingly, and I
breathed a sigh of relief. “If the Godmonster destroyed one army, that would
have been the evil side, and the other would have won. If both armies were
destroyed, then both sides were evil. But if neither was...”
“Never, not once, did
the beast leave both armies alone. Generally it wiped out both, but usually a
few stragglers from one or the other army survived. And those few would be
declared the good side, and that was all.” He snorted. “And now that its food
was coming to it, it didn’t need to waste its energies moving around, so it
hardly moved at all. Mzibanga had foreseen that, too.”
“And he was the first
High Priest, of course?” I asked.
“No, he wasn’t. They
lynched him.”
“Huh?”
“He was stupid. Once
the beast had stopped moving, he dared say that the evil had gone from the
world and that the remaining countries, such as were left, were all good and
should try to live with each other.” The Lord snorted so loudly that his beard
shook. “Not so clever after all.”
“And after that the
priests started?”
“And after that the
priests started. Some of them began cementing their hold on power by feeding
anyone they didn’t like to the beast.”
“You mean, heretics?”
“So called heretics.
Anyone whose property the priests wanted was a heretic. If you knew what was good
for you, you’d give the priests what they wanted at once, before they took it
by force.”
I didn’t look at him.
We both knew he was talking about his southern estates. “What do you think the
Godmonster really is, Lord? A real beast?”
“If it is, it certainly
is a long-lived one, and one of a kind.” He laughed. “Not to speak of being
bigger than a mountain range. What do you
think it is?”
I chose not to answer
that. “But if weapons that could destroy the world failed, how can the two of
us stop it?”
“I told you, I have
ideas. Think about what I told you about the archives, and you’ll understand.”
For the rest of the
day I thought about it, and still I did not understand.
**************************************************
The town of Sutank was in turmoil. We’d arrived
after dark, but even before we’d entered we’d known things were not as usual.
There was the noise of shouting crowds, and flickering lights on the walls of
the buildings lining the mean streets. Kalkar reined in his horse and sat
watching for a while before accosting someone.
“You. What’s going on?”
The man was weedy and
small, but laden down with a huge bundle, and at first didn’t even deign to
look up. The Lord was having none of that.
“I asked you, fellow,
what is going on,” he said sharply. “Answer me.”
He still looked as
though he might refuse, and then he noticed the Lord’s red-and-black colours.
His face filled with alarm. “Pardon me,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“You didn’t, that’s
all right. But answer my question.”
“They say...” The man’s
larynx bobbed up and down in his throat. “They say the Godmonster will be here by
tomorrow. And then everything will be burnt.”
“Who says...” I began,
but the Lord raised a hand, and I snapped my mouth shut, as one does when the
Lord raises his hand. But he continued raising his hand, and pointed up over
the roofs of the city. I followed the pointing finger.
The sky was red. For a
moment I thought it was the torches and lamps in the streets, but then I
noticed that it came from beyond the city, from past the hills we’d seen in the
last light, twilight-shrouded in the distance. The Lord glanced at me. “It
marches,” he said. “It marches much faster than I’d expected.”
“How far is it, Lord?”
My mouth had gone very dry.
The Lord shrugged. The
man whom he’d been interrogating had taken advantage of his distraction to
disappear, and he didn’t seem inclined to stop anyone else. “It’s not close
enough to be here by tomorrow,” he said, “but it’ll be here in a day or two
after that. Well, come on, let’s go.”
“Lord? Go where?”
“To this Godmonster of
yours, of course. Do you really think we’re going to find any shelter here? If
we ride all night, we can reach it by midmorning.”
We turned our horses
away from the city. On the way back out we saw a priest surrounded by a throng
of people. Some were imploring him to do something, while others looked as
though they’d love to tear him to pieces.
The Lord took no
notice of any of them at all.
**************************************************
The morning came with skies so grey that I
thought they were thick with cloud. But the rain that fell from them was black
and grainy. I picked a piece off my armour and looked at it. It was a charred
leaf, wisps of smoke still drifting from the edges.
“Lord,” I asked, “why
is the Godmonster marching? Hasn’t it been standing in one place for a long
time? Isn’t it being fed enough?”
His answer was brief. “I
told you, think about it.”
We had been climbing
the slopes since the early hours of the morning. The horses, tired, could not
go faster than a walk, and the Lord didn’t force them to. The smoke in the sky
ahead of us was sullen with red, and once or twice it parted to show the slopes
of yet more rocky mountains beyond, higher and far more daunting. I wondered
how the Lord expected the horses to climb those.
There was something
else, a noise, like the wind rubbing sand grains together. At first it was so
faint that I thought I was merely imagining it, but it grew louder and louder
until it seemed to fill the world.
“What is that sound?”
I asked at last.
Kalkar didn’t bother
to look round at me. “The beast’s breathing,” he said shortly.
Then we came to the
crest of the ridge, and I saw the mountain beyond for the first time. Only, it
wasn’t a mountain.
It was the Godmonster.
It loomed from out of
the smoke like a wall of rock that touched the sky, pierced it, cut it into
pieces, and set the pieces on fire. It breathed, and the breath was a roar, and
the roar was a current of flame that licked the ground to incandescent rock. It
moved, and the world seemed to tilt and the sky break into a million splinters around
its flanks. It raised one tremendous leg, and the leg was a pillar of rock,
which ended in a scythe, and where it fell, the earth parted like water. Its
face was an eyeless expanse, and yet it looked at us, and it saw us, and in its
sight, I knew, there was neither pity nor mercy.
“Lord...” I did not
know whether I spoke to Kalkar or the Godmonster. My companion did not even
glance around, so I tried again.
“What are we going to
do?” I asked. “It could put down one of its legs and split this hill in two!”
“It can, of course. In
fact, it most certainly intends to do so. But I’m going to stop it. Are you
with me?”
“Lord...” I licked my
lips. “Yes, Lord.”
“I didn’t expect
anything else.” He motioned towards my helmet and pulled his on. We urged the
horses forward and down the slope, the Lord leading us towards the side, to one
of the immense legs.
As we came closer, the
air became thick, as though we were pushing our way through water, and so hot
that each breath felt as though it would burn our nostrils. The Godmonster
loomed above us, closer now, its fire breath turning trees and glass to
cinders. The horses slowed and stumbled.
“Leave them,” the Lord
said, dismounting. “We’ll go on foot from here.”
I looked up. Through
the vision slit of my helmet the front edge of the Godmonster’s head was a boulder that filled the sky, poised
to come smashing down. “What are we going to do, Lord?”
“Follow me.” The Lord
paused long enough to watch the horses cantering to safety, and beckoned.
“We can’t fight it,” I
said. It was so obvious that it barely needed saying. “There is no way it can
be fought.”
“Fight it? Did I ever
say I would fight it?”
“What is it, Lord?” We
were almost at the leg. Close to, it was extremely rough and craggy. “What is
this thing?”
“It’s a machine, of
course.” Kalkar’s voice was filled with excitement. “Didn’t you realise it yet?
It’s a machine that someone unleashed to stop the nations from wrecking the
world. Whoever built it, this is a machine – and I intend to take control of
it.”
“You are?”
“How else do you
suppose I can turn it aside? Of course I’m going to take control of it. And
once that’s done...” He said something more, but I could not hear it.
“How are you going to...”
I began.
He was already running
towards the leg. “Help me,” he shouted. “Push me up.”
I did. He scrambled up
the rough, stony surface, his fingers clutching at crevices, his boots striking
sparks. Clambering up to the first joint, he turned and motioned down at me to
follow.
I was still
hesitating, and I hesitated just too long.
Slowly, slowly, the
leg rose. It tore out of the ground in a cloud of earth and broken stone. It
rose and rose, ponderous and inevitable as doom, the great claw at the end
sweeping towards me. It was hypnotic, inevitable, a scythe that would remove my
head from my shoulders as surely as an axe. I watched it come, unable to move
until the very last moment when a shout from above broke through my paralysis.
Then I threw myself aside, but the tip struck my helmet. It was just a breath of
a touch, but everything disappeared into a black pit.
When I regained
consciousness, I was looking up at a patch of blue sky. The smoke still eddied,
but above me had begun to clear. My helmet had been ripped off my head. I did
not look for it.
Away to the left, I
could see the Godmonster. It was moving, but not towards the hills. It was
moving away from me.
**************************************************
I have never seen the Lord Kalkar again, but I
don’t need to.
Word comes in from all
over. The acolytes at the temples whisper of it, the merchants speak about it while looking over their shoulders,
careful of who might hear. In the markets, in between deals, the shopkeepers and
their customers huddle to discuss the latest rumours. The priesthood’s men at
arms do not try to break them up; there is nothing they can do.
The priesthood, too,
is a shattered shell. Its landholdings tremble, its temples are now deserted.
The Lord Kalkar had spread his gold wide and well, as at Mankhlar; when the
Godmonster had turned aside, everyone knew whom to praise, and it was not the
priests.
And I now know what
Kalkar had said, the last words he’d spoken as he’d scrambled up the Godmonster’s
rocky hide. He’d said that when one god was overthrown, another would take his
place. He’d known which god that would be.
And he’d wanted to
share it with me.
I sit at my window,
and I listen to the reports of the Godmonster. And I wonder if I’d gone up with
him, if I’d have tried to stop him.
**************************************************
I turn back to the paper on my desk. The writing
is familiar. I’d spent many years reading it.
“Time passes,” it says,
“and absolute power is lonely. I think I will pay you a visit. If you join me,
I will be pleased. If you do not, I have no great interest in what once
mattered to me. I will be there soon.
“Chances normally come
only once, and for you this is the second time. It will not come again.”
There is no salutation
or signature. There does not need to be.
I turn and look out of
the window again, at the estate with its gardens and its fields, the place I
have grown to think almost as my own. It does not mean anything now, not
anymore.
So he will come, and I
will be given the chance to be a god again. Or I will be destroyed, and all
this along with it.
I look out of the
window, and I remember the Godmonster, and what it felt like to look up at it,
and be terrified. Will I, can I, become a god? Do I even want to?
The worst of it is, I have
no answer. I simply do not know.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2017
