Scorpion Soup (6 page)

Down in the village, the farmers and their families heard about Opee, and they all wanted to see him. But the clergy barred the doors and insisted that the Divine One was tired after his long descent from the clouds.

‘But we want to know all about him,’ said the people speaking with one voice.

‘How dare you wish to disturb a divine being?’ snapped the head priest.

The farmers went off, back to their fields, but their minds were on the Divine One.

And the head priest was thinking about him too.

Having spent a little time with the stranger – a man with whom he shared no common language at all – he soon realised that the visitor’s appearance was unpleasing to the eye. All warty and fat, Grotesque would surely have put fear into the people.

With time, the head priest came to see that he would have much more use as a myth. After all, he might well have come as a scout for an invading army, or might even have been diseased.

A full week passed.

Then, one night, the farmers turned up at the mountaintop with pitchforks and fiery torches, and ordered the clergy to show them the man who fell from the sky. Fearing that he was about to lose control of the situation, the head priest slipped into the room where Grotesque was sleeping, and he stabbed him cleanly through the heart.

Solemnly, he stepped out from the monastery, and broke the news to the farmers and their families.

‘I regret to inform you all, that our beloved Opee has expired,’ he said.

The farmers beat their chests, as their wives and children howled at the news.

‘We want to see his body!’ demanded the growing crowd.

The head priest felt a pang of apprehension in his gut. Showing off the blood-drenched body – and such an ugly body – was the last thing he could do.

So he said:

‘How dare you expect the body of a god to be exhibited in death to mere mortals? He must be buried in a grand funeral, a devotion to the land in which we live.’

And so it was that Grotesque was given the kind of send-off that was more usually reserved for potentates and kings.

Carved from jade, his coffin was rolled through the streets in a special carriage fashioned from silver and from gold. With every step, the community threw flowers down, and pulled out their hair in remorse. Some of the farmers went so far as to crawl behind the hearse on hands and knees – each of them chanting a single word over and over:

‘Opee! Opee! Opee!’

A master of showmanship, the head priest had a massive granite mausoleum constructed in the capital. The religious elite interred Grotesque, and lit a sacred flame – which was to burn for eternity.

Day and night a snaking line of ordinary folk wended its way up to the tomb, with pilgrims arriving from far and wide – all eager to pay their respects to the Divine One.

As the days went on, the head priest understood that more could be made of the mortal who had descended into their world. He devised a new faith called ‘Opee’ around the Divine One’s existence and, very soon, the new splinter religion had been embraced by much of the known world.

The numbers of converts surged into the millions and, as the power of the new faith increased, the head priest sat down to write the
Sacred Book of Opee
, a tool by which the myth of religion could be spread.

Dipping his quill in ink he had prepared himself from dry acorns, the priest began to write:

Long before the earth was hard, or before the seas were wet, there was an immense temple in which the gods of the universe lived.

Reclining on great golden sofas, they would dispense wisdom to one another, through the days and the long nights. And they would act with purity – a purity of spirit never to be known in the mortal world, a world that was to come.

In the centre of the temple was a sacred altar, on which was kept a single volume. Bound in flaming red cloth, this book had been written before the Conquest of Nepsis, at a time when good was bad and bad was good. Along the spine of the volume were inscribed the words: ‘The Book of Pure Thoughts’. It was by this teaching that the gods lived, and by which they were in turn to counsel the rogue legions of Mankind.

The Book of Pure Thoughts explained that, one day, long into the future, one of the gods would descend, and he would be known as ‘Opee’, the Divine One. Until that day, the earth would be in a state of limbo. And the era before this celestial arrival was to be known as the Time of Solitude.

In this age, there was nothing that we know now – none of the trappings of civilisation, and no fragments of the natural world.

The only exception was a fish.

A beautiful rainbow-coloured fish.

But because there was still no water, the fish floated through the universe, sucking its cheeks in and out. Waiting.

It waited and waited, and waited and waited, for another form of life to join it, or for the seas to be created, so that it might take a swim.

More millennia passed than were ever recorded. And the fish found himself to be very bored by his predicament. He longed for a river, a sea or an ocean to explore, and he sang a song of solitude to the empty space around him.

Each moment that passed, the fish became a little sadder, and a little more forlorn, his song desolate beyond words. And this went on for an eternity, until the Protector of All Things could stand it no longer. Summoning his power, he sent the great rainbow fish a gift.

The gift of imagination.

All of a sudden, the rainbow-coloured fish could conjure exotic dreams. He found that by clearing his mind he could create entire seascapes, populated with other fish and sea creatures, and that he could imagine the smallest details of each one.

As the centuries slipped by, the fish learned to hone and control his imagination, and he became expert at summoning the most amazing things to mind. He no longer needed a world, or friends, or water, and felt quite content by being entertained through the limits of his mind.

One day, although there still were no days, the fish woke up with a start. He was floating in emptiness as he had always done, but something was making him feel warm inside.

A dream.

A dream he had just had.

A dream that he remembered.

There was a miser in Persia who was so greedy that he never spent any money at all.

He grew all the food he needed on a patch of bare ground behind his ramshackle home, and he wore clothes he found in dustbins. He had no use for a horse because he pulled the cart that he had built with his own calloused hands. People thereabouts used to shun him because he smelled so bad, and they would run away when he drew near.

As time went on, the miser became mute or, rather, he didn’t speak, because he was so tight-fisted that he regarded talking to others as an extravagance he simply couldn’t afford.

The miser would make sculptures out of scraps of wood he collected in a nearby forest, and he would sell them in the market. Feeling pity on him and, assuming he was mute, strangers sometimes bought his pieces.

One day the king of Persia was visiting the market in disguise.

Pointing to one of the sculptures, he asked how much it was. The miser acted out a number with his hands.

‘I will give you a quarter of that,’ said the king.

The miser shook his head, jumped up and down, and chased the customer away.

A few days passed and the king was sitting in his counting house, when he thought of the miser. Interested in why people behaved as they did, he sent his vizier to ask about the miser who made sculptures out of wood.

‘He’s the meanest man that ever lived,’ said one man.

‘He would sell his own mother for a penny,’ said another.

‘He has such greed,’ said a third, ‘that he would do anything for a purse of gold.’

The vizier’s report came back that evening, while the king was seated in his throne room.

‘Would do
anything
for a purse of gold?’ echoed the monarch. ‘Could that really be true?’

Wiping a hand over his mouth in reflection, the king had an idea.

He ordered the vizier to go to the treasure vaults and ask the treasurer for a small bag of gold.

‘Bring it here,’ he said, ‘and bring me the miser as well.’

An hour later, the miser was escorted into the throne room, his eyes wide from being dazzled with opulence for the first time in his life. He pinched himself, wondering whether he was dreaming. But he wasn’t, and he knew he wasn’t because the king was standing before him, and he was holding a purse filled with golden sovereigns.

‘Hello,’ said the king graciously.

The miser squinted a smile. He couldn’t bring himself to speak, not even for his king.

‘Do you recognise me?’ asked the monarch.

The miser nodded and the king jingled the purse.

‘Can you hear what this is?’

The miser, who was salivating, nodded all the more.

‘Well, I will give it to you,’ said the king. ‘On one condition.’

The miser shrugged his shoulders expectantly.

‘On the condition that you can turn from the meanest, to the most generous man in the kingdom.’

The king stepped forward and placed a gold sovereign on the miser’s palm.

‘Feel it,’ he said, ‘enjoy the sense of having pure gold on your skin.’

The miser closed his eyes, his short fingers cupped around the coin. He breathed in deep, perspiration beading on his brow.

‘You have one week,’ said the king. ‘After which time I will myself judge whether the leopard has changed his spots.’

The gold coin was wrested from the miser’s grasp, put back in the purse, and returned to the treasure vault. The next thing the miser knew, he was back home in his hovel.

But all he could think about was the piece of gold, and the king’s offer.

At first he spat at the thought of it – of becoming generous.
Pah!
But then, as the afternoon wore into evening, and into night, the miser felt his toes tingle.

And tingling toes meant only one thing – that he had to do anything and everything to get his hands on the gold.

The next day, long before the sun had risen, the miser set off for the market with his sculptures carved from scraps of wood. Arranging his pieces on the stall, he stepped back and waited.

Very soon a wealthy-looking man approached him, and asked the price of the largest of the sculptures.

The miser did as he always did. He acted out a high price, then stuck his nose in the air when the customer attempted to bargain.

But, remembering the gold sovereigns, the miser agreed grudgingly to the customer’s price with a taut, angry flick of the head.

Another buyer arrived a little later, and another, and a fourth.

Each one of them was sold the sculptures at a discount.

That night, as the miser was counting and recounting gold sovereigns in his head, there was a knock at his door.

It was his neighbour asking to borrow a quilt.

The miser screwed up his face and slammed the door shut. Then, remembering the gold coin, he unbolted the door, and called out through gritted teeth:

‘Neighbour, dear neighbour! Do come back!’

The quilt was handed over and the miser went to bed vexed at having to be generous. Surprised that the miserly neighbour had agreed to lend him anything at all, the neighbour dropped in the next day with a plan.

‘Where’s my quilt?’ snapped the miser.

‘Oh,’ the neighbour replied, ‘I will get it back to you later in the day. But my guest is using it and he still hasn’t woken up.’

The miser gritted his teeth once again. He was about to grunt an obscenity, when the neighbour said:

‘Our guests are staying longer than expected. Could we borrow your dining-table and chairs?’

Remembering the gold sovereigns, the miser had no choice but to agree.

And then, another neighbour caught wind of the miser’s change of heart, and dropped in as well.

‘Dear friend,’ he said, ‘could I borrow your bed because my in-laws have just arrived. You know how it is…’

The miser was again going to snarl, when the thought of the coins dazzled him.

‘Take it away,’ he winced.

For an entire week, the miser struggled to prove he was as generous as anyone else. He had lost most of his few possessions, and was the brunt of a hundred local jokes.

After seven days, the king’s guard arrived at his home, and dragged him to the palace. Finding himself in the throne room once again, the miser dusted himself down and dabbed a kerchief to his brow, hoping to quell the stream of perspiration.

The king arrived.

He was in a foul mood, and had forgotten about the appointment with the miser.

‘Who are you?’ he growled.

‘I am the man who was just a week ago regarded as thrifty,’ he said.

The king frowned, scratched a set of manicured nails through his hair, and remembered.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘The meanest man in all the land.’

The miser held up a finger.

‘
Formerly
the meanest,’ he corrected, ‘but now the most generous man that there is, except for you, Majesty.’

‘How can you prove it?’ asked the monarch.

‘Well, Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘I sold my sculptures for next to nothing, and lent one neighbour a quilt and my table and chairs, and another borrowed my bed for his mother-in-law. I have actually spoken to people as well, just as I am speaking to you now – surely a reflection of my change of heart.’

The king thought for a moment.

‘What can you give
me
?’ he asked.

The miser froze.

He was shabby at best, and nothing he owned was even remotely suitable for royalty. Gulping, he fell to his knees, and kissed the monarch’s signet ring.

‘I give you myself, Your Majesty,’ he said.

The ruler considered the situation, then he grinned.

‘That is indeed an act of supreme generosity,’ he said. ‘But how will you know what I plan for you?’

Sensing a pain in his gut, the miser shook his head.

‘I would never hope or expect to know,’ he replied meekly.