Budach’s lips began to twitch, but he managed to control himself. Rumata, tactfully turning away, nodded. I understand, he thought. I understand everything. The king wouldn’t have even taken a pickle from his minister’s hands. So the scoundrel snuck in some charlatan to the king, promising him the title of healer for curing the king. And I understand why Reba was so thrilled when I exposed him in the king’s bedchamber: it’s hard to think of a more convenient way to sneak in the false Budach to the king. All the responsibility fell on Rumata of Estor, the Irukanian spy and conspirator. We’re babes in arms, he thought. The Institute should introduce a course dealing specifically with feudal intrigue. And proficiency should be measured in rebas. Better yet, in decirebas. Although even that’s too much.
Apparently, Doctor Budach was very hungry. However, he gently but firmly refused animal products and devoted his attention only to the salads and the tarts with jam. He drank a glass of the Estorian wine; his eyes brightened and a healthy glow appeared on his cheeks. Rumata couldn’t eat. Crimson torches crackled and smoked in front of his eyes, everything smelled of burnt meat, and there was a lump in his throat the size of a fist. So while he waited for his guest to eat his fill, he stood by the window, keeping the conversation polite, quiet, and unhurried, so as not to interfere with his guest’s chewing.
The city was gradually coming to life. People appeared on the street, voices became louder and louder, hammers were pounding and wood was cracking—pagan images were being knocked off the roofs and walls. A bald, fat shopkeeper was pushing a cart with a barrel, off to sell beer at the square for two coins a cup. The residents were adapting. In the entrance across the way, the little spy-bodyguard was picking his nose and chatting with the skinny mistress of the house. Then wagons filled all the way up to the second story drove by the windows. At first, Rumata didn’t understand what these wagons were, then he saw the blue and black arms and legs sticking out from beneath the burlap and hurriedly walked over to the table.
“The essence of man,” Budach said, chewing slowly, “lies in his astonishing ability to get used to anything. There’s nothing in nature that man could not learn to live with. Neither horse nor dog nor mouse has this property. Probably God, as he was creating man, guessed the torments he was condemning him to and gave him an enormous reserve of strength and patience. It is difficult to say whether this is good or bad. If man didn’t have such patience and endurance, all good people would have long since perished, and only the wicked and soulless would be left in this world. On the other hand, the habit of enduring and adapting turns people into dumb beasts, who differ from the animals in nothing except anatomy, and who only exceed them in helplessness. And each new day gives rise to a new horror of evil and violence.”
Rumata looked over at Kira. She sat across from Budach and listened without looking away, propping up her cheek on her little fist. Her eyes were sad; she was clearly very sorry for humankind. “You’re probably right, honorable Budach,” said Rumata. “But take me, for example. Here I am, a simple noble don.” Budach’s high forehead creased, his eyes opened wide with surprise and merriment. “I have tremendous love for learned men—that is, gentility of the soul. And I cannot figure out why you, the keepers and only holders of high knowledge, are so hopelessly passive. Why do you meekly allow yourself to be despised, thrown in jails, burned at the stake? Why do you separate the meaning of your life, the pursuit of knowledge—from the practical requirements of life, the struggle against evil?”
Budach pushed away the empty plate of tarts. “You ask strange questions, Don Rumata,” he said. “It’s funny, I was asked the same questions by Don Gug, the chamberlain of our duke. Are you acquainted with him? I thought so. The struggle against evil! But what is evil? Everyone is free to understand this in his own way. For us scholars, evil is in ignorance, but the church teaches that ignorance is a blessing and that all evil comes from knowledge. For the plowman evil is taxes and drought, and for the bread-seller droughts are good. For a slave, evil is a drunk and cruel master; for a craftsman, a greedy moneylender. So what is this evil against which we must struggle, Don Rumata?” He looked sadly at his listeners. “Evil is ineradicable. No man is able to decrease its quantity in the world. He can improve his own fate somewhat, but it is always at the expense of the fate of others. And there will always be kings, some more cruel and some less, and barons, some more violent and some less, and there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are, Don Rumata, and that’s how our world is.”
“The world is constantly changing, Doctor Budach,” said Rumata. “We know of a time when there were no kings.”
“The world cannot keep changing forever,” Budach disagreed, “for nothing lasts forever, even change. We don’t know the laws of perfection, but perfection will be achieved sooner or later. Consider, for example, the order of our society. How pleasing to the eye is this precise, geometrically correct system! At the bottom are the peasants and artisans, above them is the gentry, then comes the clergy, and then, finally, the king. What careful planning, what stability, what harmonious order! Why would we want to change this polished crystal, made by the hands of the jeweler in the sky? No structure is more stable than the pyramid—any knowledgeable architect will tell you that.” He raised a lecturing finger. “Grain spilled from a sack doesn’t settle in an even layer, but forms a so-called conical pyramid. Each seed clings to the next, in an effort not to roll down. So it is with humanity. If it wants to be an entity of its own, people must cling to one another, inevitably forming a pyramid.”
“Do you sincerely consider this world perfect?” Rumata asked with surprise. “After meeting Don Reba, after prison …”
“My young friend, yes, of course! There’s much I don’t like in the world, much I would like to be different. But what can one do? Perfection looks different in the eyes of a higher power than in mine. There is no sense in a tree lamenting that it cannot move, though it would probably be glad to flee from the lumberjack’s ax.”
“And what if you could change the divine decrees?”
“Only a higher power is capable of this.”
“But still, imagine that you’re God …”
Budach laughed. “If I could imagine myself as God, I’d become him!”
“Well, what if you had the chance to advise God?”
“You have a rich imagination,” Budach said with pleasure. “That’s good! Are you literate? Wonderful! I would enjoy working with you.”
“You flatter me … Still, what advice would you give to the Almighty? What, in your opinion, should the Almighty do, in order for you to say, ‘Now the world is good and kind’?”
Budach, smiling approvingly, leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach. Kira was looking at him eagerly. “All right,” he said, “if you wish. I’d tell the Almighty: ‘Creator, I don’t know your plans. Maybe you never intended to make people kind and happy. Then start wishing it! It would be so easy to achieve. Give people plenty of bread, meat, and wine, give them clothing and shelter. Let hunger and need disappear, and with them, all that divides people would be gone too.’”
“Is that it?” Rumata asked.
“You think that is not enough?”
Rumata shook his head. “God would answer you: ‘This would not benefit man. For the strong of your world would take from the weak that which I have given them, and the weak would still remain poor.’”
“I would ask God to shield the weak. ‘Enlighten the cruel princes,’ I would say.”
“Cruelty is power. Having lost their cruelty, the princes would lose their power, and other cruel men would replace them.”
Budach stopped smiling. “Punish the cruel,” he said firm
ly, “so that it would become unseemly for the strong to be cruel to the weak.”
“Man is born weak. He becomes strong when there’s no one stronger around him. When the cruel of the strong will be punished, their place will be taken by the strongest of the weak. Who will also be cruel. Then everyone will have to be chastised, and this I do not desire.”
“You know best, Almighty. Then just make it so that people have all they need, and do not take away from each other that which you gave them.”
“Even this will not benefit people,” Rumata sighed, “for when they get everything for free, without working for it, from my hands, they will forget how to work, lose their zest for life, and will become my pets, whom I will henceforth be forced to feed and clothe for all eternity.”
“Don’t give it all at once!” Budach said fervently. “Give it to them gradually, little by little!”
“People will gradually take what they need themselves.”
Budach gave an awkward laugh. “Yes, I see, it’s not that simple,” he said. “Somehow I’ve never thought about these things before. We seem to have considered everything. Although,” he leaned forward, “here’s another possibility. Make it so that people love work and knowledge more than anything, so that work and knowledge are the only meanings of their existence!”
Yes, that’s another thing we were planning to try, thought Rumata. Mass hypnoinduction, positive remoralization. Hypnoemitters on three equatorial satellites. “I could do this, too,” he said. “But should we deprive mankind of its history? Should we exchange one mankind for another? Would it not be the same thing as wiping mankind off the face of the planet and creating a new mankind in its place?”
Budach, crinkling his brow, pondered silently. Rumata waited. The melancholy sound of creaking wagons sounded outside the window again. Budach said quietly, “Then, Lord, wipe us off the face of the planet and create us anew in a more perfect form … Or, even better, leave us be and let us go our own way.”
“My heart is full of pity,” Rumata said slowly. “I cannot do that.”
And then he saw Kira’s eyes. She was looking at him with horror and hope.
Chapter 9
having put Budach down to sleep before his long journey, Rumata headed to his study. The effects of the sporamin were wearing off; he again felt tired and shattered, his bruises ached, and his rope-mangled wrists were swelling again. I should get some sleep, he thought. I should definitely get some sleep. And I should contact Don Condor. And I should contact the patrol airship, let them report to the Base. And I need to think about what we should do next, and whether we can do anything, and how to act if there’s nothing else to do.
A black-robed monk with his hood pulled low over his eyes was sitting in the study behind the desk, hunching in the chair, hands resting on the high armrests. Clever, thought Rumata. “Who are you?” he asked wearily. “Who let you in?”
“Good afternoon, noble Don Rumata,” the monk said, throwing back his hood.
Rumata shook his head. “Clever!” he said. “Good afternoon, worthy Arata. Why are you here? What happened?”
“Everything is as usual,” said Arata. “The army has dispersed, they are all dividing up the land, no one wants to go south. The duke is rounding up the ones he hasn’t killed yet and will soon hang my peasants upside down along the Estorian tract. Everything is as usual,” he repeated.
“I understand,” Rumata said.
He collapsed onto the couch, put his hands behind his head, and started looking at Arata. Twenty years ago, when Anton was building model weapons and playing William Tell, this man was called Arata the Beautiful, and he was then probably completely different from how he was now.
The magnificent high forehead of Arata the Beautiful didn’t have that ugly purple brand—it got there after the revolt of the Soanian shipwrights, when three thousand naked slave craftsmen, who had been driven to the Soanian shipyards from all parts of the empire and tormented until they had almost lost their instinct of self-preservation, had broken out of the port one stormy night. They rolled through Soan, leaving corpses and fires behind them, and were met in the outlying districts by the imperial infantry, encased in armor.
And of course, Arata the Beautiful had both his eyes. His right eye had popped out of its socket after a heavy strike by a baronial mace when the peasant army, twenty thousand strong, that had been chasing the baronial militias across the metropole collided in an open field with an Imperial Guard regiment five thousand strong and was cut in half with lightning speed, surrounded, and trampled under the spiked hooves of the military camels.
And Arata the Beautiful had probably been as straight as a pillar. He earned the hump and the new nickname after the Villanian War in the Duchy of Uban two seas from here. This was when, after seven years of plague and drought, four hundred thousand living skeletons massacred the noblemen with their pitchforks and poles and laid siege to the Duke of Uban—and the duke, whose weak mind had been sharpened by unbearable terror, pardoned his subjects, lowered the price of alcoholic beverages fivefold, and promised to free them all. And Arata, already seeing that everything was finished, pleaded, demanded, and implored them not to succumb to the deception but was captured by the leaders, who wanted to leave well enough alone, then beaten with iron rods and left for dead in a cesspool.
The massive iron ring on his right wrist, on the other hand, was probably already there when he was still called Beautiful. The ring had been chained to an oar of a pirate galley, but Arata broke the chain, hit Captain Egu the Seducer in the temple with it, commandeered the ship and then the entire pirate armada, and tried to create a free republic on the water. And this undertaking ended as a bloody drunken disgrace, because Arata had been young, didn’t know how to hate, and believed that freedom alone would be enough to turn a slave into a god.
This was a professional rebel, an avenger by divine grace, a figure quite rare in medieval societies. Such pikes are occasionally produced by historical evolution and released into social deep waters, so that the fat carps feeding on the bottom plankton can’t doze … Arata was the only person here for whom Rumata felt neither hatred nor pity, and in his earthling’s dreams—the feverish dreams of a man who had lived for five years surrounded by stench and blood—he often imagined himself as such an Arata, having received the high right to murder the murderers, torture the torturers, and betray the traitors for having passed through all the hells of the universe.
“Sometimes I think,” said Arata, “that we’re all powerless. I’m the eternal rebel leader, and I know that my power comes from my extraordinary survivability. But this power doesn’t change my powerlessness. My victories magically turn into defeats. My friends in battle turn to enemies—the most courageous ones flee, the most loyal ones turn traitor or die. And I have nothing but my bare hands, and I can’t reach the gilded idols behind fortified walls with my bare hands.”
“How did you get to Arkanar?” Rumata asked.
“I sailed with the monks.”
“Have you gone insane? You’re so recognizable.”
“But not in a crowd of monks. Half of the officers of the Order are simpleminded, or maimed like me. Cripples are pleasing to the Lord.” He chuckled, looking Rumata in the face.
“And what do you intend to do?” Rumata asked, lowering his eyes.
“The usual. I know what the Holy Order is; in less than a year, the people of Arkanar will start pouring out of their holes with axes to fight in the street. And I will lead them, so that they fight those they should, instead of each other and everyone around them.”
“Will you need money?” Rumata asked.
“Yes, as usual. And weapons.” He paused, then said silkily, “Don Rumata, do you remember how disappointed I was when I found out who you are? I hate priests, and it was very bitter to me that their false fairy tales turned out to be true. But a poor rebel must draw benefit from whatever circumstances he encounters. The priests say that the gods have lightning. Don Rumat
a, I really need lightning to break down the fortified walls.”
Rumata gave a deep sigh. After the miraculous helicopter rescue, Arata had insisted on an explanation. Rumata tried to explain about himself; he even pointed out Earth’s sun in the night sky—a tiny, barely visible star. But the rebel only understood one thing: the damned priests were right and there were gods living behind the firmament who were all-good and all-powerful. And since then, he steered each of his conversations with Rumata to one thing: God, since you exist, give me your power, for it is the best thing that you can do.
And each time Rumata kept quiet or changed the subject.
“Don Rumata,” the rebel asked, “why don’t you want to help us?”
“Wait a minute,” Rumata said. “I beg your pardon, but I would like to know how you got into the house.”
“That doesn’t matter. No one but me knows the way. Don’t try to evade the question, Don Rumata. Why don’t you want to give us your power?”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“No, we will talk about it. I didn’t summon you. I’ve never prayed to anyone. You came to me yourself. Or did you just decide to have some fun?”