| The Myth of the God Incarnate |
|---|
History |
| Copyright (c) Simon Brooke 1992-1995 |
| describing the early history of the Great Place |
Following this, the conference of chief priests appointed incarnations
of the God. Because they wanted to wield effective power themselves,
they tended to appoint young children, whom they would educate not to
mess. This practice went on for some hundreds of years, but gradually
the House of the Eye gained ascendency, and
for hundreds more years the incarnation of the day was more or less a
puppet of the Eye.
This is not to say that the other Houses were suppressed, or that they
ceased to have a vote in the appointment of incarnations; merely, the
Eye ruled by such an effective reign of terror that the other Houses
did what they were told.
This was the period during which the City at Her Gates took its present
form, and most of the monumental ceremonial buildings were
constructed, using effectively slave labour. It explains why the House
of the Eye is twice the size of any of the other houses, and occupies
the central position. Successive high priests of the House of the Eye
poured forth the enormous wealth of the stable economy of the place
into these vast ceremonial works, and used elaborate ceremonial,
together with a ruthlessly efficient secret police system, to keep the
population under control.
Now, for the one and only time in its history, politics outside the
Place impinged upon it. The enormous outer cliffs of the rim, together
with the difficult passes, the dragons, and a very small number of
border guards, had always before (and since) contrived to render the
Place invulnerable to invasion.
But at this time a clan of the Iachaorachaorusduadh were hard pressed by
enemy tribes against the eastern wall of the Place. Under an extremely
able and dynamic female war leader, Kiar, who was also a priestess of
the goddess, they retreated, in force, across the Dawn Pass in the
dead of winter, and found themselves unannounced on the sparsely
inhabited eastern heathlands of the Place. Kiar chose a sheltered,
well watered valley away from the pass, set up a defensive cordon
across the mouth of it, and settled down to let her people recover
from their ordeal and await developments. When midsummer came, and no
developments had taken place, she led a reconaissance in force to
discover the political lay of the land. She found that hers was
enormously the most powerful military force there was in the Place.
The House of the Eye had proclaimed that the God would drive her
people out with dragons and thunderbolts. When these failed to
materialise, the prestige of the Eye was weakened. Kiar now
established her people on the heathlands, and invited fellow tribesman
over the Dawn Pass to reinforce them.
The following year she pressed home her advantage. Her aim was to
establish her people irreversibly in the comfortable surroundings they
had found. Up until that point all incarnations of the God had been
male, and all the chief priests of all the Houses had been. Kiar
agreed that her religion would join the others in worshiping the
incarnate God, but in the God's female
aspect. In return for this concession, her people were to be
treated just like any other people of the Place, and in particular
were to have the eastern heathlands to breed their horses on in
perpetuity.
The House of the Eye willingly accepted this compromise, thinking that
by bringing the newcomers into the accepted structures they would be
able to control them. They were wrong for two reasons. Firstly, the
secret police network which the power of the Eye chiefly rested on
didn't extend into the new population - the Eye was effectively blind
to what they were planning. Secondly, the new house of the Cunt teamed
up with the previously backward, rural fertility religion represented
by the Houses of the Cock and the Stomach, to institute a series of new,
orgiastic rites which were powerfully appealing to large sectors of
the population.
The House of the Eye was now weakened and isolated. It responded in
the only way it knew - by assassinating Kiar. But her people, instead
of being intimidated, responded by putting up an almost equally
effective new chief priestess; and she, in defiance of established
practice, laid a complaint against the Eye before the Ear. The Ear, strengthened by the feeling in
the population, made a report which clearly showed that the Eye was
guilty not only of the assassination of Kiar, but of a number of other
nasty and unpopular deeds. The report was sent to the God; and there,
the Eye should have been able to squash it. For only thing left to the
Eye was its continuing hold on the God; and at this inconvenient
moment, the incarnation inconveniently died.
A new incarnation was elected in by the committee; but this time the
committee followed the lead of the Cunt, and elected yet another
powerful woman - the first woman incarnation.
No spokesman from the House of the Eye was summoned across the river
for the next seventy years. The spies of the Eye were sought by the
Ear, denounced by the Mouth, and apprehended by the Hand. Meantime,
the Great Houses, jealously watching for further bids for power from
the Cunt, missed what was in fact going on - and they missed it,
because the Cunt wasn't expecting it either.
What happened was that the incarnation gradually over time invited a
small number of rural people from both communities over the river to
join her. None of the other Houses realized quite how many had
gone. It was assumed, when someone was sent for, that they were chosen
for the God's sexual pleasure - the incarnation was known to be a
lusty woman. In fact, what she was doing was farming the plateau.
Her next move, equally unexpected, was to send for a guard from her tribe's traditional enemies from
beyond the rim. They arrived in the guise of the crew of a merchant
ship, and stayed. When the Great houses discovered that the
incarnation had a small but effective army under her own control, they
collaborated by trying to starve the High Place out again. This time
they didn't succeed. Furthermore, the incarnation made it clear that
if there was anymore messing about, she would close the river to
trade. There was a period of standoff; but because the Houses had to
conduct this standoff while pretending to the population that they
were still the loyal servants of the God, it didn't last very long.
After that, the Great Houses settled down to wait the incarnation out.
It wasn't until very many years had passed that, one after another,
separately, they realised that that incarnation must have died; but
the institution of the God went on. At first the Houses assumed that
the new Guard were appointing new incarnations from among their
number. But the Houses (separately) watched the Guard extremely
carefully over a very long period, and concluded that, what with those
who came, those who left, and those who could be proved to have died,
there were none left over. Whoever the incarnation was, it could not
be one of the Guard.
At the time of the story, the Shutting of the Eye is more than a
thousand years history - longer ago than the Battle of Hastings.
Since that date, no-one outside the High Place has ever known for
certain the identity of any of the incarnations; and only rarely have
some of the Houses been able to guess when incarnations change. The
institution of the God has been extremely stable, and has provided
extremely stable and benevolent rule over the Place ever since.
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The Ascendency of the Eye
Ultimately, all succesful systems decay, and the original clan of the
God incarnate became decadent and weak. For a time members of the
family and their retainers warred over who was to be God. This was to
a large extent hidden from the ordinary people, as there was only one
Great Place, and what went on inside it could not be overlooked; and
there was no Avignon for a rival incarnation to set up in. However,
the situation threatened to undermine the positions of all the various
priesthoods, so that eventually a conference of all the religions
(already forming into the Great Houses of the historic period) decided
to starve the High Place out. This didn't take long. There's actually
quite a lot of good land on the plateau of the High Place, but it
wasn't farmed then (and isn't now).
The coming of the Yachorach
The 'Shutting of the Eye'