Creation (6 page)

  
thy salvation?

How should I
not
think him the wicked one?”

Zoroaster dropped to his knees.

For nearly seventy years I have told the story of what happened next so often that there are times when I think that I am like a child in school, simply repeating endlessly by rote a half-understood text.

But other times, in dreams, I do see that fire again, smell the smoke, observe the Turanian warrior’s fat arm hold high the ax which suddenly falls hard on the neck of Zoroaster. As the golden blood foams and sprays, the old man’s lips continue to move in prayer and the barbarian looks at him in stupid wonder. Then Zoroaster raises his voice, and I hear every word that he says. Usually Zoroaster put ritual questions to the Wise Lord. But now the Wise Lord himself speaks with the tongue of his dying prophet: “Because Zoroaster Spitama has renounced the glories of eternal life until the end of infinite time, as I shall give this same blessing to all who follow Truth.”

The Turanian’s ax struck again. As Zoroaster fell forward upon the altar, he deliberately gathered to his breast what remained of the Wise Lord’s son, the embers of the fire.

I would have been butchered too, had not a Magian carried me to safety. Fortunately for me, he had arrived too late to drink haoma, and so, thanks to his clear head, I was saved. We spent the night together in the smoking ruins of the central market.

Shortly before dawn the barbarians left, taking with them what plunder they could. Everything else was burned except for the town’s citadel, where my mother and several members of our family had taken refuge.

I remember very little of the next few days. Our satrap Hystaspes hurried back to the city. On the way he captured a number of Turanians. My mother tells me that I was asked to look at the prisoners to see if I could identify the murderer of Zoroaster. I was not able to. In any case, I remember none of this with any clarity. At the time, I was still in a half-world between waking and dreaming, the haoma state. I do remember watching the Turanian captives as they were impaled on sharpened stakes outside the ruins of the city gate.

A few weeks later Hystaspes personally brought my mother and me up to the imperial court at Susa, where my mother and I were not exactly welcome. In fact, if it had not been for Hystaspes, I very much doubt if I would still be alive, enjoying every moment of a glorious old age in this jewel of a city that I never for one moment contemplated visiting, much less living in.

Democritus thinks that Athens is marvelous. But you have not seen the civilized world. I hope that one day you will travel, and transcend your Greekness. Democritus has been with me three months. I try to educate him. He tries to educate me. But he agrees that when I’m dead—very soon, I should think—he must go to the east. Meanwhile, he is altogether too Greek, too Athenian. Write that down.

I liked old Hystaspes. Even when I was a child he treated me as if I were an adult. He also treated me as if I were in some way a holy man—at the age of seven! True, I was the last person to hear Zoroaster’s final words, which were the first words ever spoken through a man’s lips by the Wise Lord himself. As a result, to this day, I am regarded as not quite earthly by those Magians who follow the way of Truth as opposed to that of the Lie. On the other hand, I am not, in any true sense, the heir of Zoroaster despite a number of well-meaning—also ill-meaning—attempts to install me as the chief of the order.

Democritus reminds me that I have still not explained what a Magian is. Certainly, Herodotus got it all wrong during that interminable recitation at the Odeon.

The Magians are the hereditary priests of the Medes and the Persians, just as the Brahmans are the hereditary priests of India. Except for the Greeks, every Aryan tribe has a priestly caste. Although the Greeks retain the Aryan pantheon of gods and rituals, they have lost the hereditary priests. I don’t know how this happened but, for once, the Greeks are wiser or luckier than we.

Persian custom requires that
all
religious ceremonies be conducted by Magians. This makes for enormous tension. Although most Magians are not Zoroastrians, they are obliged by custom to assist in our sacred rites. My grandfather did his best to convert the whole lot of them from devil-worship to mono-theism. But his best has proved so far to be not good enough. Perhaps every tenth Magian follows the Truth; the rest celebrate, exuberantly, the Lie.

My father was Zoroaster’s third and youngest son. As a cavalry commander, he fought beside the Great King Darius during the Scythian campaign. In a skirmish near the Danube River, my father was wounded. He came home to Bactra; and died. I was too young to remember him. I am told that he was dark—very much a Spitama, with the onyx-bright eyes and magical voice of the prophet, or so my mother, Lais, tells me. She is Greek ...

Democritus is surprised that I use the present tense. So am I. But there it is. Lais is now living on the island of Thasos, just opposite the coastal city of Abdera, where she was born to an Ionian Greek family.

Lais’ father was a loyal subject of the Great King—the disgusting word medizer had not yet been coined largely because all the Greek cities of Asia Minor and most of those along the Hellespont and the Thracian coast happily paid tribute to the Great King. The troubles came later, thanks to the Athenians.

Democritus wants to know how old Lais is, and how she happened to marry my father. To start with the last question first, they met shortly after Darius came to the throne. This was a time of turmoil. There were rebellions in Babylon, Persia, Armenia. Darius needed money, soldiers, alliances. To that end, he sent my father as ambassador to the brilliant court of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos.

For many years Polycrates had been an ally of the Egyptian pharaoh against Persia. But when he saw that Egypt was no longer able to withstand our armies, he took—or pretended to take—our side.

My father’s task was to get money and ships from Polycrates. The negotiations were long and unpleasant. Whenever there was a rumor that Darius had lost a battle, my father would be ordered to leave Samos. Then just as he was about to set sail, a messenger would come from the palace. Please return. The tyrant has just consulted the oracle and ... In other words, Darius had not lost but won a battle.

During this arduous negotiation my father was much helped by Megacreon of Abdera, the owner of numerous silver mines in Thrace. Megacreon was a good friend to Persia, and a wise councilor to the slippery Polycrates. He was also father of the eleven-year-old Lais. When my father asked to marry her, Megacreon was most agreeable. Darius was not. He disapproved of mixed marriages even though he himself had made several, for political reasons.

Finally Darius consented to the marriage on condition that my father promptly take at least one Persian wife. As it turned out, my father never did marry a Persian lady or anyone else. The month that I was born, my father died. Lais was then thirteen ... which now makes her about eighty-eight. That answers your first question.

Lais lives contentedly on Thasos in a house that faces Abdera. This means that the north wind constantly blows her way. But she never feels the cold. She is like a Scythian. She even looks like one. She has—or had—fair hair; and her blue eyes are like mine. Or the way mine were before the blue turned to white.

For once I have been diverted in my narrative not by a new thought but by you, Democritus.

Where was I? Midway between Bactra and Susa. Between an old life and a new life.

It is night. I remember this scene vividly. I have just entered the tent of Hystaspes, satrap of Bactria and Parthia. At the time I looked on Hystaspes as being as ancient as my grandfather, yet he must not have been more than fifty-five. Hystaspes was a short, broad vigorous man with a useless left arm; in his youth, the muscles had been cut to the bone in battle.

Hystaspes was seated on a traveling chest. Torches flared on either side of him. As I started to fall onto my belly before him, he reached down with his good arm and set me on a stool.

“What do you want to be?” He spoke to children—or at least to me—in the same straightforward way that he spoke to everyone else, including his son the Great King.

“A soldier, I think.” I had given the matter no real thought. I did know that I wanted never to be a priest. A priest, mind you, not a Magian. Although all Magians are born priests, not all priests are Magians. Certainly, we Spitamas are not Magians. I should also make the point that from childhood on, religious ceremonies have bored me, and the constant memorizing of sacred texts used to make my head ache. In fact, there were times when I felt that my head was like a jar being filled to overflowing with my grandfather’s hymns. The Cathayans, by the way, believe that the soul or mind of a man is located not in the head but in the stomach. Doubtless this explains why they fret so much about the preparation and the serving of food. It may also explain why their memories are so much better than ours. Information is stored not in the finite head but in the expandable stomach.

“A soldier? Well, why not? You’ll be put to school in the palace with the other boys your age. And if you show promise at archery, and so on ...” Hystaspes’ voice trailed off. He used very easily to lose his train of thought. I was accustomed to his unfinished speeches, long silences.

As I waited for him to continue, I stared idly into the flame of one of the torches. Hystaspes took this as a sort of omen. “See? You can’t keep your eyes from the son of the Wise Lord. That’s natural.”

I quickly looked away. Even at the age of seven, I could see what was coming next. And it came. “You are the grandson of the greatest man ever to walk the earth. Don’t you want to follow him?”

“Yes. I’d like to. I try to.” I knew how to play the boy-priest; and did. “But I would also like to serve the Great King.”

“There is no higher task for anyone on earth—except for you. You are different. You were there. In the temple.
You
heard the voice of the Wise Lord.” Although my good fortune—if that is the phrase—in being present at the murder of Zoroaster has made me of permanent interest to all who follow the Truth and renounce the Lie, I sometimes think that my life might have been a good deal less complicated had I been born an ordinary Persian noble, unmarked by deity. Certainly, I have always felt an impostor whenever one of our Magians kisses my hand and asks me to tell, yet again, what it was that the Wise Lord said. I am a believer, of course. But I am not a zealot. Also, I was never satisfied by Zoroaster’s explanation—or nonexplanation—of how the Wise Lord was created. What existed
before
the Wise Lord? I have traveled the whole earth in search of an answer to that all-important question. Democritus wants to know if I found it. Wait.

I suppose that my share of Lais’ Ionian blood has made me more skeptical in religious matters than is usual for a Persian, much less a member of the holy family of Spitama. Yet of all Ionians, those from Abdera are the least inclined to skepticism. In fact, there is an old saying that it is not humanly possible to be stupider than an Abderan. Apparently Thracian air has had a dulling effect on the wits of those Grecian colonists from whom Democritus and I descend.

Democritus reminds me that the most brilliant of the Greek sophists is an Abderan—and our cousin. Abdera can also claim the greatest living painter, Polygnotus, who painted the long porch in the market-place, or Agora, here. I shall never see it.

Hystaspes told me yet again of his veneration for my grandfather. As he talked he kneaded his useless arm. “I was the one who saved him from the Magians. Well, no. That’s not strictly true. The Wise Lord saved Zoroaster. I was simply the instrument used.” Hystaspes was now launched on a story that he never tired of and that I never listened to. “The Great King Cyrus had just made me satrap of Bactria. I was young. I believed everything that the Magians had taught me. I worshiped all the devas, particularly Anahita and Mithras. I often drank haoma for pleasure and not for holiness, and I never once gave the right portions of the sacrifice to the Wise Lord because I did not know who he was. Then Zoroaster came to Bactra.

“He had been driven out of his native Rages. He had traveled east, from city to city. But whenever he preached the Truth, the Magians would force him to move on. Finally he came to Bactra. The Magians begged me to expel him. But I was curious. I made them argue with Zoroaster in my presence. For seven days he spoke. One by one, he confounded their arguments. He exposed their gods as devils, as agents of the Lie. He proved that there is only one creator, the Wise Lord. But with this one creator, there is also Ahriman, the spirit of evil. He is the Lie that Truth must ever contend with ...”

Looking back, I realize that in temperament Hystaspes was a born Magian, or priest.
He
should have been Zoroaster’s grandson or son. But then, spiritually, he was. When Hystaspes accepted my grandfather’s teachings, he commanded the Magians of Bactria to do so, too. Officially they have complied. Privately, to this day, most of them continue, as they always have, to worship devils.

Zoroaster’s appearance on the scene was like the earthquake that recently leveled Sparta. He told the Magians that the gods they prayed to were really devils. He also found their conduct of the various rituals—particularly, the ones of sacrifice—not only impious but scandalous. He accused them of conducting orgies in the name of religion. For instance, the Magians used to hack up a
living
ox while guzzling sacred haoma. They then kept for themselves to eat those parts of the ox that belong, rightfully, to the Wise Lord. Needless to say, the Magians bitterly resented Zoroaster. But thanks to Hystaspes, the Bactrian Magians were obliged to revise many of their rituals.

As I recollect that scene in the tent with Hystaspes, I begin to understand what hopes as well as fears that he had for me at the court of his son the Great King.

A few years earlier, with much fanfare, Darius had accepted the Wise Lord and his prophet Zoroaster. When my grandfather was murdered, Hystaspes decided to send me to Darius, as a permanent and visible reminder of Zoroaster. I would be educated as if I were a member of one of the six noble families that had helped Darius to ascend the throne.