Our Lady of the Islands

A century and a half after the island nation of Alizar had freed itself from continental rule, in the seventeenth year of Viktor Morrentian Alkattha’s troubled reign as Factor, a giant corpse washed up onto the eastern shore of Cutter’s, at the island cluster’s very center. The greatest typhoon in generations had blown spume for three days over the walls of even the mightiest houses on the highest hills, swamping the rotting, coastal boat-towns altogether, drowning legions of the poor, and flushing every darkest alleyway and sewer tunnel with a boil of cold, salty rage.

On the storm’s fourth day, dawn was accompanied by a peculiar pearlescence to the east, as if the clouds were loathe to release their clammy grip. Those first few to venture out onto the streets of Cutter’s — guards, priests, looters, the desperate — found on the shingles of Pembo’s Beach a body so large and long that all agreed it couldn’t possibly have been a man. And yet, it had the form of one.

Its pale complexion was, by then at least, the color of a Smagadine, that unhealthy tone indicative of life lived underground, or solely under moonlight, far from any sunlight’s benediction. Its wrinkled fingers were the size of longboats. Its gelid, unseeing eyes as large as the wine tuns stored beneath the Factorate House. The cock across its thigh, a toppled watchtower.

The corpse was an instant nine-days’ wonder, and a panic. Nearly two hundred years earlier, gods had returned to faraway Copper Downs. Had they at last come to Alizar? The nation’s streets were flooded for the second time in days, this time with rumor, prophecy, and hushed prognostication. Had the storm birthed this monster or slain it? Would it rise to lay waste to the city, vanish back into sea like a dream half-remembered, or just putrefy, poisoning Cutter’s scenic bay and vast commercial port as it rotted on the beach? Might it be an omen of some even greater calamity in store?

While the Mishrah-Khote, Alizar’s ancient priesthood of physicians, maintained a careful silence in regard to their position on the corpse, the nation’s Factor did not find the unexpected arrival of a
‘dead god’
convenient in the least. Already struggling to navigate his country’s growing pains, he had no need of ominous portents inciting the poor and ignorant to erratic imaginings and potentially volatile assessments of his governance. He just wanted the great body gone! Though not in any manner that might make him look defensive or afraid, of course.

Fortunately for him, Alizar was virtually swimming in very poor and hungry citizens after such a devastating storm. His advisors assured him that the giant carcass was still at least as sound as many others hanging in that tropic nation’s butcher shops on any given day. Why not address two problems with a single cure? Thus, the Factor demonstrated his consideration for the city’s starving masses by ordering the inconvenient corpse butchered quickly, before it started rotting, and distributed — for free — to all and any wishing to fill their bellies with its meat. Since animals alone — never people, much less
gods
— were ever butchered and consumed, he asserted dubiously, the corpse’s fate must somehow prove its nature. Whatever superficial form it might have borne, this creature had been “nothing but a great sea monster of some sort.”

Huge crowds rushed to Cutter’s bloody shingle to accept their portion of this windfall, by which their desperate families were kept fed for some weeks after. Despite this fact — or perhaps because of it — memory of the giant corpse did not fade as hoped. If anything, the common folks’ awe of this
dead god
increased. New tales began to circulate, of teeth and bones extracted, giant fingernails pared, and god-meat scraped from long, pale flanks not just to feed the desperate, but to bless and heal them as well. From the furtive repetition of these stories, a new cult emerged around the
Butchered God
, if at first just in cautious whispers and anonymous graffiti.

After a while, as no other evidence of returning gods appeared, the wealthy and the comfortable middle class put the event aside. Life went on. New urgencies seized attention — new wonders, scandals, and attendant gossip.

Old storms are eventually forgotten. Old flotsam always drifts back out to sea.

As long as what is buried stays that way, and its memory is left unstirred.