Idolatry in Zalahar by Fermn Moreno Gonzlez

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Idolatry in Zalahar
Fermn Moreno Gonzlez

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People say that Zalahar, the Forgotten amidst the dunes, Shahir Empire last
embers, forgot for some time Yalaud's cult, favouring a new kinder-faced god.
Thus, Mnibo's acolytes entered Zalahar through the Merchant's Gate, among
oxcarts loaded with the ice of the Oruma mountains, hawkers and healers, when
the South road still existed, in the stormy season, water going through Oldulla and
Betella's sandy courses, the uadi which encircled the town and hardly vanished
three miles beyond, into the Thorny Desert.
Aldor the ceroferarius went in the temple, heading his doubtful paces towards the
black obsidian altar and the tall lean figure, which wearing the holy mitre always
gave the impression of being talking with the god Yalaud, in an ominous silence for
whoever present. Despite the trained cautiousness of his feet, whose lack was the
reason for many novice applicant's expulsion, and his padded dromedaryskin
sandals, Arunt the priest had noticed him; without turning back, he descended the
worn down flight of steps bowing down before the crude stone idol which
symbolized Zalahar's god. Only then he faced his intimidated disciple. His grey
pupils sheltered below ignorant of storm desert-coloured dense eyebrows looked
at him with grim expectancy, and Aldor found it easier strangely to say what he
had to say:

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"The heretics have taken away the virgins to their new dwelling in the Slave's
Stable, by people's consent. There there will be no sacrifice to Yalaud the next
waning moon, oh Yalaud's high servant."

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Arun's face didn't betray his thoughts, as an old roving fighter taking a punch
before his spectators. The fibrous sinews of his lean neck and his masticatory
muscles stood in an iron calm. He said naught. Only the corner of his mouth
seemed to shape an imperceptible grimace of fox-like smile briefly. He knew the
fennec god whom he served well; and knew what his answer was going to be.
The rainy season died as abruptly as it was born, and the scarce gardens to the
East were not flooded this time with Oldulla and Betella's accustomed overflowing.
The greens withered, and the date palms denied its opulent fruit, without, Aldor
noticed, that seeming to disturb too much Zalahar's denizens.
"My sweet Yoruna is the most beautiful of all. I tell you she will be chosen by
Mnibo as one of his priestesses. You ought to have seen her last night in Prodigies'
Temple, Aldor, my boy. She was weaving purest gold threaded fine brocades, as
ever she made with the coarse wool of my herd. Thanks to Mnibo's efforts,
undoubtedly," Melbos concluded, while he was gnawing the waste core of a
clingstone fruit enthusiastically.
The young Aldor concealed his surprise by keeping silent before answering his
uncle. He was fond of his cousin the same as he recognized both the sparingness of
her charms and her scanty handiness. She wouldn't be able to open an ostrich egg
without breaking the yolk, her neighbours said in an undertone as slyly as rightly.

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"Each new moon we are going to honour Mnibo's advent to Zalahar with a feast in
the large garden of the temple. You can come as well, their priest are
magnanimous."
Aldor nodded unenthusiastically and left Melbo's home upset, the not framed
question tasting bitter his tongue as a poisoned wine. The usual odour of smoked
meat pervading all the abode had disappeared, together with good part of the
content of the veined glassy jars, of which his uncle was proud, which presided the
room.
At sunset, Aldor stopped his prayers and went out of his novice cubicle, scratched

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in the very stone of Yalaud's temple by dim prehuman hands and set out for the
Slave's Stable, in the recondite Zalahar the Desert Pearl's inside, through twisted
alleys a crucified highwayman wide, wherein perpetual shadows' manure begat
patient killers and perverse secret meetings. He was grappling strongly between
both his hands his worship dun biretta, staving off any encounter, ready for
showing it. No normal thief would disturb a Yalaud's disciple's plots, but those
were weird times. Times of paganism and conflict. And he wasn't a youth
particularly hefty.

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His prayers stopped once arrived at the town's main square, at the same time as
his surprise sprouted. Making his way through the throng, he approached the
vanished Slave's Stable's location. Wherein the old coarse ashlar stone dais had
been, accesible only from the rear stairs, the so-called Bid's Place, the new God
Mnibo the lavish's magnificent effigy stood up proud now. Its gold-skinned body,
that of a ripe warrior with his sword sheathed four man's size irradiated the might
of a wise emperor, and his hamadryas silvery temples canine face smiled affable
before future years of prosperity. By its right side an immense three-storey spring
poured out generously its limpid water over the Merania's grained marble, wherein
first the platform for execution of runaway or too haughty slaves had been, to
which the inhabitants of Zalahar referred as the Chopping-Block Place. In a city so
sparing in water supplies, the fountain caught the eye as much as the god's statue,
and the water-diviners bowed ashamed. Crossing the long corridor sumptuously
carpeted with an intricate tapestry a lifetime worth, flanked by greening flower
beds of never seen blooms, Aldor followed the crowd as far as the former Slave's
Stable's gate, before a low structure of level roof and semisubterranean cells, and
now a vaulted temple of marmoreal and purest whiteness, shining brilliantly under
the desert sun, opened to worship. The vast inner chamber of the recitation-place,
open to starlight exhibited the Zalahar's nubile maids, arrayed in finest silken laces
which turned their movements as graceful as a dune gazelle's, while playing
zithers, harps and lutes around a table of veined alabaster which seemed to hold
enough food to furnish the entire town for several weeks. The idolatrous Zalahar's
offering to the new god. The Mnibo's immaculate white-robed officiants showed

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themselves to be friendly. Aldor left unwillingly, mumbling inwardly. Yalaud could

not compete with that. Perhaps the time had come to wonder wether his
devoutness made him worthy of the fennec god.
Arun did not turn a hair on hearing his apprentice's ill-fated news. Nor he did when
two moons later scrawny raving-eyed spectres started to turn the town
upside-down in search of foods for their heretical worship. They looted the
dwellings of the first dead, placed traps using his days ago neighbour's flesh to get
hold of gerbils and poisonous snake tongue lizards, and excavated like possessed in
broad daylight to disinter even the last toad and lungfish out of its viscous
seclusion. He and Aldor stood in the cool galleries of the sanctuary. It was said
Yalaud's priests owned dreadful defence mechanisms against the desecrators, of
which Aldor knew naught. Somehow, the famished puppets kept their distance
from the temple. Anyway, he did know about the existence of the underground
chamber below the altar, of which the entry had been revealed to him by Arun
once the mandatory seven nights and days fast passed. Arun had descended with
him to guide him with a rope through a crossroads labyrinth in the darkest
obscurity, walking with steadfast paces, amidst weird echoes like hissings until
both came to a low ceiling roof, where by candlelight lighted by Arun as if by
magic, the apprentice could see the fungi and the scum which grew clustered near
a dripping thin trickle of water
They ate fungi and drank frugally from the water of the cave for one, two weeks,
and Arun kept on celebrating his solitary divine service as if nothing were
happening, impassive in the face of both the shrieks coming from the outside and
the sacrilegious litanies which the wind seemed to carry from Mnibo's distant
temple. When Aldor was on the point of maddening of terror and cloistering, Arun
talked to him close to the sacrificial altar stone:
"Thou wilt go with the full moon to be witness of the apostates' celebration in
their enclosure. Thou wilt be my eyes and my ears."
The initial rebelliousness withered as soon as a desert flower, but fear was still

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there, gripping the apprentice.

"I I don't what can I do? How can I reach to there? The they are prowling round
the whole Zalahar. I have seen them through the thick bars above. They will catch
me!"
Arun stretched out unhurriedly his rawboned hand toward the salver of Immolation
wherein the Claw, the coarse four points knife seemed to yearn for the
olde-worlde hearts. With a seasoned gesture, he exposed to view Aldor's chest,
who jumped, and carved in his left side four deep marks which immediatly bled
profusely, soaking the rough weave of his robe.
"Yalaud is with thee. Here thou art, thou wilt have to carry this," the priest said,
almost chanting his words, and handing the most valuable relic of the temple to
Aldor.
Aldor seized with both fearful hands Yalaud's Fang, an enormous yellowish tusk
which a translucent rock crystal box contained, and sensed an unwonted tingling in
his recent wounds. The pain seemed not to cease, but to be in suspense, as though
it awaited a new receiver. He set off with the night.
The darkness stank of execrable smelliness. Zalahar was a vigorous corpse, and
their deceived dwellers the fleshworms. At that nightfall, after swarming in the
dusty alleys in search of offerings, they were heading for Mnibo's temple with their
tottering steps. They didn't look at Aldor. It was as if he wasn't there. In their
extenuated visage shone an expression of childlike and demented joy, perhaps
father's that comes to pay visit to his young and well-cared daughter. On turning a
bend he came across the spectre of his uncle Melbos. His former belly had allowed
him to survive, changed into prominent ribs and checkbones as sharp as a spur.
The most vivid fright made the box fall from his hands. Mnibo's serfs closer to him
turned brusquely their necks in an unnaturally wide shake, uttering horrid hungry
howls and made their way with their drunk gait to him. Melbos hurled himself at
him, grasped him sticking his cutting nails into his nephew's neck, and held his

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grasp until Aldor, crawling over the ground, could recover Yalaud's Fang. Melbos
fell back then, hissing and hitting with his paws at the cold nightly air, and
presently renewed his way to the temple beside the others.
As they came near the temple, the alleys looked more and more crammed with
dazzled pilgrims. Aldor was seizing the box in such a frantic way that his fingers of
whitish knuckles got numb. Ignoring his nausea, he bound himself to mingle with
the insane mob. Soon the impious sanctuary of the baboon god was within sight, its
white dome glaring haughty beneath the full moon. To his amazement, the
profane litanies which had heard in his haven together with Arun had turned into a
melody of caressing songs and harmonious notes when he had scarcely abandoned
it.
Aldor went again near both Mnibo's imposing statue and the prodigious fountain,
and crossed amid the skinny retinue through the corridor of adorned flooring, until
he transposed the threshold of the church. In the recitation-place, over the mass
altar, Mnibo's High Acolyte, flanked by the other brethren was chanting lovely
words which spoke of friendship and love, and of the contentment Mnibo the lavish
found in his sons. The maids were playing a harmonious tune, singing in a
captivating voice, and dancing a dance of sensual innocence. Between the altar
and the congregants of deep-set eye sockets was set an immense unusually
beautiful reddish wooden table, exquisitely served. Some men and women
approached it to give that which they had got to a diligent girl several scorpions,
two desert wasps' nests and a swollen rat.
Aldor was wondering whether he might eventually eat something substantial sitting
at such a refined table amidst of silvered olive-oil dishes and cutlery when a squall
of sudden pain transfixed his body making it bend. For an instant he heard the
horrific din of a thousand voices, distinct but still the same as his priest's
thundering Yalaud's prayer. Nobody else among those present seemed to hear that
inhuman yell. When it was over, and while Aldor was struggling to stand up on his
knee he sensed something which made his entire down curl.

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He was hearing once more the monotonous cracked-voiced profane litanies,

lifeless as a moribund one's. Presently a low buzz raised within the congregation.
They were hearing it as well. It hushed completely the High Acolyte's words, and
the very melody of the virgins.
Scarcely had he stood up a second numbing surge of agony made Aldor drop. His
whole being was tingling as if tortured by the hangman's iron. Through a blinding
eldritch mist he looked at Yalaud's high servant beside the altar stone of litatio.
Then the vision vanished together with the piercing suffering, as well as both
Mnibo's majestic sanctuary and his affable generosity, giving place to a scene of
Dantesque and sacrilegious depravation which was happening in the Slave's Stable's
ground yard.
The girls were in truth half-naked, unarmed slaves of Mnibo's minions' vilest keen
desires, crawling creatures of loathsome semihuman appearance which clustered
together round a rotten food mountain upon the worm-eaten scaffold of
executions. Almost all the maids were languid sickly skeletons; a few had been
cruelly fattened until they burst and left there squashed; on the altar the High
Acolyte was drooling his litany while he crammed putrid food into a tied young
lady's mouth with dilated eyes and grey-haired of horror whom in unison another of
those deformities was raping with raging morbidity. Another one of the girls, her
tears dead weeks back, had been buried up to her neck into the pile of maggoty
provisions to the monstrous diner's delight which echoed the inhuman canticle of
their leader. All the virgins of Zalahar had gone through the flagellation stake, and
so through tortures the human being shouldn't even be able to glimpse in his most
maddened dreams.
The cadaverous denizens witnessed together with Aldor that demonic frenzy, and
an unquenchable anger burned their emaciated bodies up even more. There were
those who died on the spot from sheer terror, there were those who surged
forward at the food heap, converted into an irreversible animality, and who later
would die of the mere surfeit, but the majority pounced on both altar and
platform, to apprehend the devils alive. They had won a slow death. Despite

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townsmen's faintness, Mnibo's acolytes, wanting in superhuman strength, were

cornered and rammed down by the madness-driven throng.
Aldor got back on the way to Yalaud's temple in order to give the good piece of
news to Arun. He traversed the gap between the Stable and the Bid's Place. Upon
the stony platform was erect a mocking figurine, a baboon of coarse terracotta
showing off its genitals. He climbed on to the dais and once he seized the infesting
idol he smashed it with a stamp against the rocks. There were only one God in
Zalahar.
On the right of the tier it would be heard again the agony of the flayings from the
Chopping-Block Place when the day arrived
Right away the darkness fell, and Aldor looked up towards the sky. Storm clouds
were clouding it over, hiding the moon. He sniffed in ecstasies the promise of rain.
How vast and powerful Yalaud's veiled influence was.
The sanctuary reached, he went down humbly and softly the doorway steps, until a
smell which conjured up past times to him made him stop before reaching the
space which preceded the altar. In the oscillating torchlight he could make out
something upon the salver of Immolation. On the altar, the stately figure wearing
a sacred mitre was worshiping his god. As usual, the priest sensed his disciple;
without turning back, he descended the steps, bowing down before the Zalahar's
god's effigy. Only then he faced his agitated disciple. Dried off uadi of blood were
flowing both from below his eyebrows and his ears soaking his rough ceremonial
robe. His lips were drawing a hardly perceptible fox-like smile.
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Last Modified: 27 September 2006
Date Added: 31 December 2000
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