Academic Exercises (54 page)

And, I have to confess, I enjoyed preaching. At first, of course, it was horrendously scary and embarrassing. Nothing in my sheltered, privileged life had prepared me for opening my mouth in a public place and ranting at strangers. I managed to get over that by pretending I was doing something else; acting in a play, shouting to someone I knew on the far side of the square who happened to be invisible to everyone else. That worked surprisingly well; but the breakthrough came when I learned to convince myself that it wasn’t actually me doing this extraordinary thing. Instead (I pretended) some irresistible force had taken over my body and was using my lungs and lips. After that, it was no problem at all. And, as I said just now, I started to like it.

In fact, I was far and away our best preacher, which was probably just as well. The other four all had skills and talents that were invaluable to the project. All I could claim to justify my involvement, and my share of the take, was that it had been my idea in the first place. That was starting to wear a bit thin when I discovered my latent talent for religious oratory; and, since the others could do it but hated it, I quickly assumed the role of Chief Celebrant.

What skills and talents? Well, Accila was our scholar, though you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. Nevertheless, he actually did know his stuff. Before he was slung out of the Studium for gross moral turpitude, he’d been a rising star in the faculties of Literature and Logic, with four published dissertations on suitably obscure cruces in suitably obscure texts under his belt—not bad for a young man of twenty-four. Teuta was our scribe and copyist. He’d parted company from the Golden Spire after a spot inventory revealed the absence of some two dozen manuscripts. Teuta pointed out at the hearing that he’d had no intention of stealing them. He honestly and sincerely intended to put them back where he’d found them, once he’d finished making perfect copies to sell to wealthy Mezentines. That was a tactical error on his part, since theft is a civil crime, for which he could’ve claimed benefit of clergy, whereas forgery of sacred manuscripts is an ecclesiastical felony. Teuta accordingly spent two years in the penal monastery at Andrapoda, a section of his life he can never be induced to talk about. Razo was our poet; and before you say anything, yes, a poet is essential if you’re in the synthetic religion business. Religious poetry doesn’t have to be good, but it does have to be poetry, and the rest of us couldn’t scan a hendecasyllable or insert a caesura in a trochaic hexameter if our lives depended on it. So: Razo wrote the holy scriptures, with Accila telling him what sort of thing he ought to include, and Teuta wrote them out in impeccably authentic Fourth Century hieratic-demotic script on three hundred year old property title deeds, which he stole (from the law office where he did copying work) and scraped down with pumice. The end result of their labours was the Book of the Sun—a working title that got overtaken by events; we were expounding the damn thing in Cornmarket before we’d had a chance to think of a better one, and then of course it was too late; seventy closely-written, unimpeachably genuine pages of three-hundred-year old revelations of the divine that no scholar has ever been able to fault. Actually, that’s a terrible indictment of modern scholarship, since Teuta admitted he’d made a mistake—something to do with a shade of blue he used for an illuminated capital which wasn’t invented until fifty years later. Still, he was in a hurry, and the powdered oyster-shell he should have used was five tremisses for a tiny little jar, and at that stage we didn’t have five tremisses.

And Zanipulus; well, he was in fact our star performer. Zanipulus’ father was a seriously wealthy and respectable man; councilman for a fashionable City ward, followed by a seat in the House, followed by the tribunate and two terms as assistant prefect for roads and waterways. How he found time, with all that on his plate, to indulge in the study of arcane and forbidden arts, I simply don’t know; but he did, and they found him out, and that was the end of him and the family fortune, which was confiscated and awarded to the informer who nailed him. What he’d been doing, it turned out, was researching and inventing new medicines, building on the work of the Mezentines (it’s perfectly legal over there). Zanipulus didn’t get on very well with his father when he was young; it was the old man’s brilliant idea that they should work together on the research, so as to have something in common which would draw them closer together. It didn’t, as it happened; but Zanipulus found the alchemy stuff quite fascinating, and the fact that it was illegal appealed to the perverse side of his nature, so that when they carted the old man off to the scaffold, Zanipulus resolved to continue his work as a gesture of defiance against the authorities, and because he reckoned he was really close to some breakthrough or other, and couldn’t bear to see all that work go to waste.

Since we seem to be doing biographies, I might as well append mine. My great-grandfather was a shipowner on Scona. He made a good deal of money shipping tar and bitumen, which just sort of bubbles up out of the ground out there—you go along with barrels and just scoop it up, and suddenly you’ve got a valuable commodity for which foreigners will pay money. Anyway, his son, my grandfather, wasn’t keen on the bitumen trade—brought him out in a rash, my father told me—so he branched out into general trading, did so well at it that he moved here, to the City, and quickly became significantly rich. Sadly, my father had two unfortunate defects when it came to commerce; he was no good at it, and he didn’t realise he was no good at it. The truth only finally sank in when the bailiffs came round and took away our remaining furniture in a small cart, about six months before this story begins. My father died in debtors’ prison two months after the business failed. I have no idea where my mother is; when the bailiffs came she announced that she’d had enough and was going home to Scona. I imagine she’s still there, and good luck to her.

Anyway, that was us. Between us, we had what Teuta got paid by the lawyers, plus what we could get by begging and very small-scale confidence tricks. We hadn’t been caught yet, but we knew it was just a matter of time. Accordingly, when the Invincible Sun called us to His ministry, we had no hesitation. That or poverty and starvation, followed by a long career in rock-splitting in the slate quarries. Hallelujah.

I know it sounds really horrible, but the outbreak of mountain fever was a real slice of luck. Even back then, it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence. About four victims in ten made it—not wonderful odds, but good enough to keep you from simply turning your face to the wall as soon as the symptoms became unambiguous. At the time, though, we thought it was a damned nuisance, possibly enough to put us out of business if we couldn’t cure it, which of course we couldn’t.

The epidemic started when we’d been going for about six weeks, about a fortnight after the victory at Ciota got us noticed. By then we had premises; actually, a derelict lime kiln on the edge of town, where the North Road branches off from Underway. Not a bad place, in fact; the acoustics in a lime kiln are really rather good, and we got it for practically nothing. Anyway, the fever hadn’t been on for more than a day or two when people started turning up on our doorstep, visibly sick, expecting us to cure them. Razo took one look at them and bolted into the back room with his face muffled up in the hem of his cloak. Zanipulus told him not to be so stupid, you don’t catch mountain fever like that, but Razo wasn’t taking any chances. The pitiful moaning was starting to get on our nerves, so I went outside and did my best.

I felt awful. It’s one thing handing out imaginary absolution in return for a sprinkling of low-value copper; quite another confronting a dying man and pretending that you can make him well again. People knew us by then, so they had their money ready. They were lying there, where their families had left them, reaching out to me with hands clenched around fistfuls of coins. I couldn’t bring myself to take them. This surprised and annoyed the customers—sorry, the sick and the dying; not customers, not in that state—they wanted to know why I wasn’t prepared to intercede for them, as we were always promising to do. Some of them managed to struggle to their feet and lunge at me, trying to stuff money into my pockets or down my shirt. I managed not to panic. I said, of course I’ll intercede for you, and this time no payment is necessary. They didn’t like that. I guess I’d done my job too well. It was a fundamental tenet of the faith, as I’d been preaching it, that no prayer is audible to Him unless accompanied by clinking money. When I contradicted myself so blatantly, they didn’t believe me. Take the money, Father, please (I don’t know where
father
came from; they started calling me that at some point, and it sort of stuck)—what could I do? I had the feeling that if I didn’t take money off them, I’d be lucky to get out of there in one piece. What made it worse was the amounts. Typical. For their immortal souls, the most they were usually prepared to give was ten trachy, fifteen if they were being eaten alive by guilt and remorse. For their bodies, they were desperate to give me forty, fifty, sixty; fat pouches the size of cooking apples, and there was a terrified old woman who pleaded with me to accept a whole tremissis, your actual silver. I said the usual garbage—I have asked the Invincible Sun to consider your case; if you have truly repented and your sins have been forgiven, your prayers will be answered—then backed away, clanking slightly under the weight of all that coinage, and bolted.

“You aren’t taking money off them, are you?” Accila said. “That’s sick.”

“They’re insisting,” I tried to explain, but he just gave me that look.

“I guess we brought it on ourselves,” Teuta said, helping me with the money before it burst its banks and flooded the building. “We made the poor devils believe, so what did we expect?”

“I guess this is the end of the line,” Razo said gloomily. “Soon as they realise we can’t cure them, that’ll be it, we’ll be out of business. Just our bloody luck.”

I noticed that Zanipulus wasn’t there. “Anyway,” I said. “I’m not going out there again. It’s definitely someone else’s turn.”

Nobody was prepared to face the devoted mob, so we shot the bolts and hunkered down, from time to time peering out of the narrow slit of a street-front window to see if they were still there. Oh yes. In fact, the numbers grew, until the kettlehats came and moved them on for obstructing the traffic. An hour later they were back; in the meantime, I’d scribbled a note to the effect that we were engaged in holy rituals of intercession and were not to be disturbed, and nailed it to the door. I hoped that’d induce them to go away, but no chance. They settled down, in heartbreaking silence, and waited.

About mid-afternoon, Teuta went to peer through the slit and called out, “There’s someone out there, walking up and down.”

“There’s about six hundred people out there,” I told him. “Come away from the window before they see you.”

“It’s Zanipulus. He’s giving them soup.”

I shrugged. Guilt takes people different ways. “Fine,” I said. “So long as he’s paying for it, let him.”

“That’s a really bad precedent.” Accila was sorting the coins into little towers. “Give them soup once, they’ll come to expect it.”

“Those poor bastards will all be dead inside a week,” I growled. “Don’t worry about it.”

Accila was all set to give Zanipulus a piece of his mind when he saw him next, but Zan didn’t show up next morning. Probably just as well; we still hadn’t opened the door. When I peeked out just before dawn, there was a huge mob of them out there. Different ones, though; yesterday’s crowd had gone home and been replaced by an even larger one. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

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.