The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (41 page)

"Not sure about that," said Zanipulus; his first contribution to the discussion, since he'd been clipping his toenails and had needed to concentrate. "You walk around telling people that Bong just appeared to you in a dream. They give you a funny look and say, 'Who's Bong when he's at home?'" He sniffed; he had a cold. "There's no point of immediate engagement, is what I'm saying. You need that instant of irresistible connection –"

"Of course." A tiny sunrise in the back of my head produced enough light for me suddenly to see clearly. "That's why this idea of mine is so absolutely bloody inspired. Of course we can't expect customers to believe in some nebulous entity that nobody's ever heard of. We need to create a deity that everyone can see, plain as the noses on their faces, every day of their lives."

Silence, which I allowed to continue for a moment or so, during which Razo dribbled the last few drops out of the jar into his cup; drip-dripdrip. "Well?" Accila said.

"Simple," I told him. "We worship the sun."

Razo yawned. "Been done," he said. "To death, in fact. If you'd been to Cartimagus's lectures on recurring motifs in late Mannerist epic, you'd know that practically every hero in legend is your basic solar metaphor."

"Sure," I said. He was starting to annoy me. "But not the big shiny yellow disc
per se
. I'm talking about the Sun with a capital S. One single supreme deity; no pantheon, no bureaucracy, no waiting. Someone you can look in the eye and talk to directly, man to God –"

"Wouldn't do that if I were you," Zanipulus said with his mouth full. Apparently the treacherous bastard had a private reserve of cashew nuts he hadn't seen fit to declare to the rest of the Commonwealth. "Makes you go blind."

"Metaphorically speaking. Come on, you know I'm right. That's why the old religions fell apart, too many gods, too damn
fussy
. The old thing about government by committee. One god, it's like monarchy, it's the only way to get things done."

"The Divine Sun," Accila said thoughtfully. "You know, he might just have something."

"Not the Divine Sun," Teuta said. "No buzz. No snap. Also, there's the redundancy. What's the leading characteristic of our god? That he's divine. Yawn."

"All right," Accila said. "So, right now, what do people really want? Apart," he added, "from money."

"Peace," said Zanipulus. "An end to the war. That's a no-brainer."

The word sort of catapulted itself into my mouth. "The Invincible Sun," I said. "Well, how about it?"

Razo wiped his mouth. "Actually," he said, "that's not bad."

"It's magnificent," I said. "Implied promise of victory followed by a sustained peace."

"Which isn't going to happen any time soon," Zanipulus pointed out.

"No," I rounded on him, "because Mankind is sinful and refuses to follow the path laid out for it by the Invincible Sun. As disclosed," I went on, "by His true prophets. Us."

Another silence. Then Razo said, "We'll need a list of thou-shalt-nots. People like those."

"And observances," said Accila. "Top of the list, I would suggest, should be giving generously to the poor. Instant merit for doing that."

Pause. They were looking at Zanipulus, which offended me rather. Just because he doesn't say much, people think he's smart. Whereas I talk all the time, and you just have to listen to me for two seconds to realise how very clever I am. "Well," Zanipulus said, "it's got to be better than war veterans. For a start, there's too many of the real thing."

At that moment, in the brief silence after those words were spoken, I believe that the Invincible Sun was born. And why not? After all, everything has to start somewhere.

I
t was a real stroke of luck that General Mardonius contrived to wipe out the whole of the Herulian Fifth Army at the battle of Ciota ten days after we took to the streets to preach the gospel of the Invincible Sun. I'm not inclined to give Mardonius all the credit for our success. Obviously we'd made some impression over the preceding nine days, or nobody at all would've known who we were, and nobody would've made the association between the latest street religion and the entirely unexpected, heaven-sent victory. We were helped enormously by the coincidence that one of us – I think it was me, but it's so long ago I can't be sure – had been predicting a mighty victory for the forces of light on the ninth day of Feralia, which just happened to be the day when the news of Ciota reached the city. Not, please note, the day of the battle itself; fortunately, nobody pointed that out at the time. Anyhow, that was our breakout moment. We were the crazy street preachers who'd predicted Ciota; and there's a weird sort of pseudo-logic that operates in people's minds. If you predict something, in some way or another you're responsible for it, you made it happen. Suddenly, out of (no pun intended) a clear blue sky, the Invincible Sun was a contender.

* * *

F
orgive me, I'm forgetting my manners. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eps. At least, that's what it was then, before we started the whole names-in-religion thing, which we did basically so as to protect our real identities in the event that we made ourselves unpopular with the authorities and had to retire prematurely from the theology business. Of course, if you're a cleric or come from a clerical family, the irony of the name I was born with won't have been lost on you;
eps
is now, has become, the recognised shortening for
episcopus
, which is the word for high priest in Old Aelian, which we chose, more or less at random, as the language in which we were going to write our holy scriptures. Which would've made me Eps
eps
on official documents; quite, except that I adopted the name-in-religion Deodatus (yes,
the
Deodatus; that's me) some time before we decided on Old Aelian. For what it's worth, Eps is a traditional and not uncommon name on Scona, where my family originally came from. It means, so I'm told,
the chosen one.

A
nd, 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 twentyfour. 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's 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.