Consider Phlebas (20 page)

‘This the way you treat all your guests?’ Horza said, trying not to cough until the end of his sentence. He cleared his throat. Fwi-Song’s smile vanished.

‘Guest you are not, sea-wanton, salt-gift. Prize: ours to keep, mine to use. Bounty from the sea and the sun and the wind, brought to us by Fate. Hee-hee.’ Fwi-Song’s smile returned with a girlish giggle, and one of the huge hands went to cover the pale lips, ‘Fate recognises its prophet, sends him tasty treats! Just when some of my flock were having second thoughts, too! Eh, Mr First?’ The turret-head turned to the thin figure of the paler man, standing with arms folded, by the giant’s side. Mr First nodded:

‘Fate is our gardener, and our wolf. It weeds out the weak to honour the strong. So the prophet has spoken.’

‘And the word which dies in the mouth lives in the ear,’ Fwi-Song said, turning the huge head back to look at Horza. At least, Horza thought, now I know it’s a male. For whatever that’s worth.

‘Mighty Prophet,’ Mr First said. Fwi-Song smiled wider but continued looking at Horza. Mr First went on, ‘The sea-gift should see the fate that awaits him. Perhaps the treacherous coward Twenty-seventh - ‘

‘Oh, yes!’ Fwi-Song clapped his huge hands together and a smile lit up his whole face. For a second Horza thought he saw small white eyes beyond the slits staring at him. ‘Oh let’s, yes! Bring the coward, let us do what must be done.’

Mr First spoke in ringing tones to the emaciated humans gathered around the fire. A few stood up and walked off behind Horza, towards the forest. The rest started singing and chanting.

After a few minutes Horza heard a scream, then a series of yells and screams, gradually coming closer. At last the people who had left came back, carrying a short, thick log, much like the one Horza was held by. Swinging on the pole was a young man, screaming, shouting in the language Horza didn’t understand, and struggling. Horza saw drops of sweat and saliva fall from the young man’s face and spot the sand. The log was sharpened at one end; that point was driven into the sand on the opposite side of the fire from Horza, so that the young man faced the Changer.

‘This, my libation from the seas,’ Fwi-Song said to Horza, pointing at the young man, who was quivering and moaning, his eyes rolling about in their sockets and his lips dribbling, ‘this is my naughty boy; called Twenty-seventh, since his rebirth. This was one of our respected, much loved sons, one of our anointed, one of our fellow morsels, one of our brotherly taste buds on the great tongue of life.’ Fwi-Song’s voice chortled with laughter as he spoke, as though he knew the absurdity of the part he was playing and couldn’t resist hamming it up. ‘This splinter from our tree, this grain from our beach, this reprobate dared to run towards the seven-times-cursed vehicle of the Vacuum. He spurned the gift of burden with which we honoured him; he chose to abandon us and flee across the sands when the alien enemy passed over us yesterday. He did not trust our salving grace, but turned instead to an instrument of darkness and nothingness, towards the soaking shade of the soulless ones, the Anathematics.’ Fwi-Song looked at the man, still shaking on the post across the fire from Horza. The prophet’s face went stern with reproach. ‘By the workings of Fate the traitor who ran from our side and put his prophet’s life at risk was caught - so that he might learn his sad mistake, and make good his terrible crime.’ Fwi-Song’s arm dropped. The vast head shook.

Mr First shouted to the people round the fire. They faced the young man called Twenty-seventh and chanted. The ghastly smells Horza had sensed earlier came back, making his eyes mist and his nose tingle.

While the people chanted and Fwi-Song watched, Mr First and two of the women followers dug up small sacks from the sand. Out of them they brought some thin lengths of cloth which they proceeded to wrap round their bodies. As Mr First put his vestments on, Horza saw a large, cumbersome-looking projectile pistol, held in a string holster beneath the man’s grubby tunic. Horza presumed that was the gun fired at the shuttle the day before, when he and Mipp had overflown the island.

The young man opened his eyes, saw the three people in their cloths and started screaming.

‘Hear how the stricken soul cries out for its lesson, pleads for its bounty of regret, its solace of refreshing suffering,’ Fwi-Song smiled, looking at Horza. ‘Our child Twenty-seventh knows what awaits him, and while his body, already proved so weak, breaks before the storm, his soul cries out, “Yes! Yes! Mighty Prophet! Succour me! Make me part of you! Give me your strength! Come to me!” Is it not a sweet and uplifting sound?’

Horza looked into the prophet’s eyes and said nothing. The young man went on screaming and trying to tear himself away from the stump. Mr First was crouched before him, on his knees, his head bowed, muttering to himself. The two women dressed in the dull cloth were preparing bowls of steaming liquid from the vats and pots around the fire, warming some over the flames. The smells came to Horza, turning his stomach.

Fwi-Song switched to the other language and spoke to the two women. They looked at Horza, then came up to him with the bowls. Horza drew his head away as they shoved the containers under his nose. He wrinkled his face up in disgust at what looked and smelled like fish entrails in a sauce of excrement. The women took the awful stuff away; it left a stink in his nose. He tried breathing through his mouth.

The young man’s mouth had been wedged open with blocks of wood, and his choking screams altered in pitch. While Mr First held him, the women ladled the liquids from the bowls into his mouth. The young man spluttered and wailed, choked and tried to spit. He moaned, then threw up.

‘Let me show you my armoury, my benefaction,’ Fwi-Song said to Horza, and reached behind his vast body. He brought back a large bundle of rags, which he startled to unfold. Glittering in the sunlight, metal devices like tiny man-traps were revealed. Fwi-Song put one finger to his lips while he surveyed the collection, then picked up one of the small metal contraptions. He put it into his mouth, fitting both pans over the pins Horza had seen earlier. ‘Zhare,’ Fwi-Song said, raising his mouth in a broad smile towards the Changer. ‘What’oo you shink of zhat?’ The artificial teeth sparkled in his mouth; rows of sharp, serrated points. ‘Or zhese?’ Fwi-Song swapped them for another set, full of tiny fangs like needles, then another, with angled teeth like hooks with barbs, then another, with holes set in them. ‘Goo’, eh?’ He smiled at Horza, leaving the last pair in. He turned to Mr First. ‘Wha’ you shink, Nishtur Shursht? Ehs? Or . . . ‘ Fwi-Song took out the set with the holes, put in another set, like long, blade-like spades. ‘Zheze? A ‘ink eeg a rar ah nishe. Esh, rert ush zhtart wish eez. Ret’s punish zhoze naughty tootsiesh.’

Twenty-seventh’s voice was becoming hoarse. One of his legs was lifted out in front of him and held by four kneeling men. Fwi-Song was lifted and carried on the liner to just in front of the young man; he bared the blade-teeth, then leaned forward and with a quick; nodding motion, bit off one of Twenty-seventh’s toes.

Horza looked away.

In the next half-hour or so of leisurely paced eating, the enormous prophet nibbled at various bits of Twenty-seventh’s body, attacking the extremities and the few remaining fat deposits with his various sets of teeth. The young man gained fresh breath with each new site of butchery.

Horza watched and didn’t watch, sometimes trying to think himself into a kind of defiance that would let him work out a way to get back at this grotesque distortion of a human being, at other times just wanting the whole awful business to be over and done with. Fwi-Song left his ex-disciple’s fingers until last, then used the teeth with the holes in like wire-strippers. ‘ ‘Ery ‘asty,’ he said, wiping his blood-stained face with one gigantic forearm.

Twenty-seventh was cut down, moaning, covered in streaks of blood, and only semi-conscious. He was gagged with a length of rag, then pinned down flat, face up, on the sand, wooden spikes through the palms of his mangled hands and a huge boulder crushing his feet. He started screaming weakly again through the gag when he saw the prophet Fwi-Song on his litter being carried over towards him. Fwi-Song was lowered almost on top of the moaning form, then he struggled with some cords at the side of his litter until a small flap under his great bulk flopped open, over the face of the gagged, blood-spattered human on the sand beneath. The prophet gave a sign, and he was lowered on top of the man, quieting the sound of moaning. The prophet smiled, and settled himself with little movements of his huge body, like a bird nestling down over its eggs. His vast bulk obliterating all trace or shape of the human under him, Fwi-Song hummed to himself while the emaciated crowd looked on, singing very slowly and quietly, swaying together as they stood. Fwi-Song started to rock backwards and forwards softly, very slowly at first, then faster as sweat appeared in beads on the golden dome of his face. He panted, and made a rough gesture towards the crowd; the two women dressed in the lengths of cloth came forward and started to lick at the trickles of blood which had spilled from the prophet’s mouth, over the folds of his chins and down the expanse of his chest and breasts like red milk. Fwi-Song gasped, seemed to sag and stay still for a moment, and then, with a surprisingly fast and fierce motion, clouted both the lapping women across the head with his mighty arms. The women scurried off, rejoining the crowd. Mr First started a louder chant, which the others took up.

At last Fwi-Song ordered himself to be lifted again. The litter bearers hauled his massive frame into the air, to reveal the crushed body of Twenty-seventh, his moaning silenced for ever.

They lifted him out, beheaded the corpse and removed the top of the skull. They ate his brains, and it was only then that Horza threw up.

‘And now we are become each other,’ Fwi-Song intoned solemnly to the youth’s hollow head, then threw its bloody bowl over his shoulder into the fire. The rest of the body was taken down to the sea and thrown in.

‘Only ceremony and the love of Fate distinguish us from the beasts, o mark of Fate’s devotion,’ Fwi-Song warbled to Horza as the prophet’s vast body was cleaned and perfumed by the attendant women. Tied to his post, stuck in the ground, his mouth fouled, Horza breathed carefully and deliberately, and did not try to reply.

Twenty-seventh’s body floated slowly out to sea. Fwi-Song was towelled down. The skinny humans sat about listlessly, or tended the awful-smelling liquid in the bubbling vats. Mr First and his two women helpers took off their lengths of cloth, leaving the man in his grimy but whole tunic and the women in their tattered rags. Fwi-Song had his litter placed on the sand in front of Horza.

‘See, bounty from the waves, harvest from the rolling ocean, my people prepare to break their fast.’ The prophet swept one fat-wobbling arm about to indicate the people tending the fires and cauldrons. The smell of rotting food filled the air.

‘They eat what others leave, what others will not touch, because they want to be closer to the fabric of Fate. They eat the bark from the trees and the grass from the ground and the moss from the rocks; they eat the sand and the leaves and the roots and the earth; they eat the shells and the entrails of sea-animals and the carrion of the land and the ocean; they eat their bodily products and share mine. I am the fount. I am the well-spring, the taste on their tongues.

‘You, bubble of froth on the ocean of life, are a sign. Crop of the ocean, you will come to see, before the time of your unmaking, that you are all you have eaten, and that food is merely undigested excrement. This I have seen; this you will see.’

One of the attendant women came back from the sea with Fwi-Song’s freshly cleaned sets of teeth. He took them from her and put them in the rags somewhere behind him. ‘All shall fall but we, all go to their deaths, their unmakings. We alone will be made in our unmaking, brought into the glory of our ultimate consummation.’

The prophet sat smiling at Horza, while around him - as the long afternoon’s shadows drew out across the sands - the emaciated, ill-looking people sat down to their foul meals. Horza watched them try to eat. Some did, encouraged by Mr First, but most could keep nothing down. They gasped for breath and gulped at the liquids, but often as not they vomited up what they had just forced down. Fwi-Song looked on them sadly, shaking his head.

‘You see, even my closest children are not ready yet. We must pray and entreat that they are ready when the time comes, as it must, in a few days’ time. We must hope that their bodies’ lack of grasp, of sympathy with all things, will not make them despised in the eyes and mouth of God.’

You fat bastard. You’re within range, if you only knew. I could blind you from here; spit in your little eyes and maybe . . .

But, Horza thought, maybe not. The giant’s eyes were set so deep within the flabby skin of his brows and cheeks that even the venomous spittle with which Horza could have hit the golden monster might not find its way to the membranes of the eye. But it was all Horza could find to give him solace in his situation. He could spit at the prophet, and that was it. Perhaps there would come a point when it might make some difference, but to do it now would be stupid. A blind, enraged Fwi-Song struck Horza as something to try to avoid even more than a sighted, tittering one.

Fwi-Song talked on to Horza, never questioning, never really stopping, repeating himself more and more often. He told him about his revelations and his past life; as a circus freak, then as a palace pet for some alien satrap on a Megaship, then as a convert to a fashionable religion on another Megaship, his revelation occurring there, when he persuaded a few converts to join him on an island to await the End of All Things. More followers had arrived when the Culture announced what the fate of the Vavatch Orbital was going to be. Horza was only half listening, his mind racing as he tried to think of a way out.

‘ . . . We await the end of all things, the last day. We prepare ourselves for our final consummation by mixing the fruits of earth and sea and death with our fragile bodies of flesh and blood and bone. You are our sign, our aperitif, our scent. You must feel honoured.’