Hugh Cook - The Worshippers and the Way

"Greetings, my lord," said Hatch. "Greetings to the lord who serves the Greater Lord."

Hatch made ritual obeisance; Felvus recited the Five Blessings; then the two retired to Felvus's private quarters.

Though the shutters were open, the generous overhang of the eaves meant that the room was cool and shadowy. Coming in out of the sun, Hatch felt almost cold, and was reminded of the eternal chill of the Combat College.

The High Priest's quarters consisted of a single room only, but this was large, and made to seem enormous by height of ceiling and sparceness of furnishings. Only a single table and three chairs of woven bamboo stood on the bare flagstones of the floor.

Against one wall stood a broom, a water urn, and – this last a product of the Combat College – a rolled up spongefoam sleeping mat. Such were the High Priest's possessions.

On the table was a stoneware dish heaped with cubes of sundried scorpion bread. Sesno Felvus ate a piece, as ritual required. He offered no food to Hatch, for the bread was consecrated to the priesthood's service. Besides, this was "a ritual of setting apart", as the Book of Ethnology has it; it demonstrated and reinforced the gulf between priest and worshipper. Hatch – Hatch was unsettled by the unexpected renewal of the dislocating perspective of ethnology. To his dismay, he found himself again seeing all as a stranger, a visitor, an analyst from the Nexus. He fought to be Frangoni, Frangoni in crutch and fundament, in liver and lungs. But instead he was Hatch of the Combat College. Hatch of the Stormforce. Startrooper Hatch.

Deepspace warrior. Transcosmic citizen.

To such a person – What could an unwashed savage of the Frangoni rock have to offer such a person?

"Sit," said Sesno Felvus, in a way which made it clear he had said as much already. "Sit, Hatch. Is anything wrong? Something's wrong. What is it?"

This was a very difficult question to answer. One does not lie to a High Priest. That would be blasphemy – and, besides, Sesno Felvus was far too acute to swallow an idle deceit. So Hatch had to express his condition in words which would carry the truth yet remain palatable.

"I, ah… the mind plays tricks," said Hatch. "It happens, sometimes. When things go wrong, I… they teach us the Nexus, so sometimes… sometimes it's as if I wasn't of this world, not quite, but rather… I suppose it's a distancing strategy. When things get too hard I… one devalues the present. What is."

"The Combat College is a different world," said Sesno Felvus, as if he knew it well. "I think of the Combat College as a cave.

The cave of the Nexus, where shadows posture as reality. If we accept the very shadows as reality – well, if you live in a cave too long, the very sun must seem a madness. But I don't think you as yet so deeply sunk in strangeness. Or are you? Tell me, Hatch – are we so strange to each other?"

Seated side by side, the two men were marked by superficial similarities – skin likewise purple and robes similarly styled, albeit of different colors. But Hatch – Hatch was tall and strong by the standards of his people, a warrior in the prime of life, washed, deodorized, depilated and very faintly perfumed by the miraculous machineries of the Nexus, whereas Sesno Felvus – In extreme old age, the Frangoni purple of the High Priest's skin was tinged with brown. His eyes had faded from violet to gray. The lean and bony ancient had long, long ago abandoned the golden ear-rings of virile manhood, piercing his earlobes instead with the iron rings which denoted "a man in the service of death", as the ritual phrase has it. The ancient had not bathed for several years, a fact which Hatch – to his shame – found shameful.

It was all too easy to see Sesno Felvus as a tourist from the Nexus might have seen him. As a sample of a type. Barbarian Priest, type A-7, old; subtype B-4, rancid. For a moment, Hatch saw the man exactly thus – which was a measure of his estrangement.

"The heart is a labyrinth," said Sesno Felvus, deducing deep inner conflict's from Hatch's silence. "The best of us get lost in that labyrinth from time to time. Tell me, Hatch – how old are you?"

"Thirty-four," said Hatch.

"Thirty-four!" said Sesno Felvus, as if amazed. "Why, I've lost a year! I thought you were thirty-three, because your sister – well, enough of that. Thirty-four. A good age. Still graced with the last of youth yet mature enough to appreciate its sweetness."

"I don't feel young," said Hatch.

"One doesn't," said Sesno Felvus, betraying slight amusement.

"Yet when you reach my age – oh, but I could talk all day of age if you let me. You're thirty-four. A man."

"For what it's worth," said Hatch.

Though his ears did not bear the gold, it was nevertheless true that he had attained a man's estate. He had been through the rites of passage, winning wisdom and self-knowledge. His confidence was that which comes from danger and hardship met, faced then overcome. Yet – yet sometimes – "Sometimes," said Sesno Felvus, as if picking up Hatch's thoughts, "sometimes manhood is a puzzlement even to the best of us. I've known you since – why, since you were born."

True. Sesno Felvus had been on hand when Hatch was still squirming in his birth-blood. Had initiated him into the outer stages of the worship of the Great God Mokaragash when he was aged but nine. Had married him to the woman of his parents' choice when he was 14. Had blessed his daughters. And had consoled him after his father's death, even though that death had been both sinful and shameful, an unpardonable abomination.

"It is a puzzlement," said Hatch, in that single sentence admitting the intolerable stress he was under.

With this act of admission, Hatch felt – Hatch felt as if a bubble which had been protecting him from the world had suddenly burst. The intolerable months of training, tension, examination, uncertainty, debt, harassment, pain – it was all too much for him.

His mouth opened and closed, and without warning the tears screwed themselves out of his eyes, and he could not see or breathe or speak.

Such emotion made introspective analysis impossible, though analysis would have served only to confirm that such a crisis was the inevitable result of unrelieved pressure and the long denial of all carefree reward.

Hatch wept. Openly, shamelessly. In complete default of all self-control. Sesno Felvus reached out and took his hand. The High Priest's hands were dry, and bon-hard, and firm in the assurance of their comfort, their acceptance. The comfort remained as Hatch's weeping eased, pure pain turned to a deep-felt grief at the mere fact of loss of self-control.

Then, when Hatch had cleansed himself by weeping – his body calm, relaxed and pliable, as if the collapse of self-control had answered some deep-seated biological need, massaging the tensions from his muscles and from the very linkages of his bones – Sesno Felvus began to deal with him in earnest.

Counseled by Sesno Felvus, Hatch talked his way through his problems, step by step. The pressures and uncertainties surrounding his struggle for the instructorship of the Combat College. The illness of his wife, the illness which had come upon her with full force in the last six months, and which seemed certain to kill her. His sister's delinquencies. His pressing requirements for money.

"Asodo," said Sesno Felvus, who had never before called Hatch by his given name. "You have never been happy in the Combat College, have you?"

"No," said Hatch.

"I remember you as a child. Your father came to me for guidance. You were… you had nightmares which woke the house, and when it was time to go back… "

"I remember," said Hatch.

In the early years of his training in the Combat College, in the years when he had still been a boy, there were times when he had fled from its cold and cream-colored corridors. His family had several times been forced to hunt for him in Spara Slank and Childa Go, by the swamps of the Vomlush or in the streets of Bon Tray. He remembered sitting out one night on the red dust flatlands south of Cap Foz Para Lash, the night being lit by Yon Yo, the high and cold and inexplicable beacon which had ever ruled the heights of Dalar ken Halvar's southernmost minor mountain.