Tales of Midbar: Religious Intolerance

The door led into a small foyer with several doors leading off it. Dad knocked on the one marked MASTER.

“Come in!” said a deep voice.

We went in. The room was small with a fat, bearded, faharni man with a tattoo of Jurdat, the god of discipline and art, on his forehead, sitting behind a desc. “I’m Mudar, the master of this school. Won’t you take chairs?”

There were only two chairs so I sat on Mum’s lap.

Mudar, looked at me as if I was some bloody diarrhea he was going to have to pick up without gloves and started looking through the papers on his desc and tapping at a computer. “Now, you’re Ulderas and Renisho and you want to enroll your daughter Eleprin in this school.”

“That’s right,” said Dad.

“I’m afraid I can’t find any records from your last school.”

“The Nuharas probably erased them,” said Dad, “it’s one of the ways they try to make things difficult for Winemakers.”

Mudar gave us another hard stare.

“Are you a mind reader?” I asked.

“No. I understand that’s a problem. We’ll just throw Eleprin in with the other children her age. That class already has two Winemakers in it. Anything we should know?”

“I’m important,” I said.

“We think it’s good for her to have high self esteem,” said Mum.

This wasn’t right. I knew that I was important and would do great things.

“I meant health problems, allergies?”

“No, she’s very healthy,” said Mum.

“Just bad a sports,” said Dad.

“But good at everything else,” I said. “That’s why other kids don’t like me but I don’t think that’s fair.”

Mudar gave me another look as if he was horrified.

“It’s worship today,” said Mum.

“It’s the second day of the light cycle,” I said.

“Winemakers worship every seven days,” said Dad, “not on the first day of every second light cycle, like Trulists do.”

“Fortunately the hotel has pamphlets about Winemaker worship,” said Mum, waving a brightly colored bit of glossy paper. “It says that Winemakers don’t put on special clothing or make up for worship, which I suppose simplifies things. Apparently those pre-Cataclysm outfits the Haprihagfen wear are mostly for the benefit of tourists, most Winemakers, even Haprihagfen, dress normally most the time.”

“Yes I know,” I said.

We went to the Vineyard for worship, it was in the evening and already black night. By “we” I mean, me, Mum, Dad and Criadria. Between the bridge and the Vineyard entrance, there was a man holding a banner with luminous writing (it was black night) saying, WINEMAKERS ARE ORIENTATIONIST. A policeman was standing near him, looking rather bored.

“Winemakers say that homosexuals molest children,” the man with the sign said looking at me, “but most pedophilia victims are girls!”

“Almost all pedophiles are men and most men are heterosexual,” said Dad, “so that doesn’t prove much.”

“Isn’t this religionist?” asked Mum.

I got it, they were doing their best to pretend to be Winemakers.

“The Winemakers have filed a lawsuit saying this is religionist,” said the cop. “There’s a legal snafu so it’s in legal limbo and the pro-homosexual protesters aren’t allowed to get nearer to the Vineyard than this.”

This was strange.

Yes this was at the shrine!

This is a bit uphill from the Mokom Goyai, that’s the bit with the car park, the shops and the visitor information. I’d been wondering where they held the worship as I knew that there was nothing on the Vineyard resembling an ornate Trulist temple with lots of pillars and things. There was a place where part of the mountainside seemed to have been cut away. There was a clearing here with rocks arranged in circles around a slightly raised, stone pavement, a bit like the witness dias in a court. To the east of this, there was the alter; a mound of dirt, about two meters high, with rocks around the bottom and crude stone steps leading up to the top. To the south of this, there were two big doors in the cliff, with strange writing on them.

I’d been surprised by the number of people who’d come but Breeze told me that most of them were Trulists from the town who were too lazy to go to Taunbrit. This would explain why many of them were dressed in Trulist ritual robes. The fact it was black night made me feel rather strange. Tianamet had taken up residence in our apartment in the hotel basement but Yoho was still very much here. There were a few mage lights but I couldn’t see anybody very clearly. Breeze read part of the scripture, in Semic! Then they took the kids off to have a class in the refractory.

“Last seventh day we learnt about the cave of ancestors,” said River. “Can anybody tell me what they found in there?”

The cave of ancestors rang a bell with me so I put my hand up, as did Breeze, Cloud and Irvis.

“Eleprin!” said River.

I didn’t know very much about this cave. I think it had been back on Earth and was important. “Bones of dead people.”

“And what did these bones tell us?” asked River.

I put my hand up again thinking that there was an obvious answer, that a lot of people had died, but I wasn’t sure if this was what River was looking for.

“Irvis,” said River.

“The early ones had DNA showing that they were hipsickim but the later ones had more nibeyim.”

“Anything else?” asked River.

This time only Breeze put her hand up.

“Breeze?” asked River.

“The oldest skeletons were from before the Great Leap Forward and seem to have died in the cave or have been dumped there, that’s when humans suddenly started burying our dead, painting on cave walls, wearing jewelry, making better tools and things. The tools remained the same until there were enough nibeyim for them to marry each other, which they knew they did from the DNA, but after that things got more complicated showing that the Great Leap Forward was caused by there being sufficient nibeyim for them to marry each other and have nibey children who they could teach their knowledge to.”

I thought that psychics weren’t allowed to marry each other but didn’t say anything.

“At the moment we’re reading the Book of Walls. Do we know who copied the writing from the walls onto papyrus?”

[Translator’s note: Uncertain if the word “papyrus” means the same as English but it was clearly some sort of easily transported material which could be written on.]

Breeze, Cloud and Irvis put their hands up but I had no idea.

“Cloud.”

“The prophetess Gweldrian.”

They proceeded to talk about Gweldrian’s story. I’d never heard of her. She’d lived on Earth long before space travel was invented. She’d been an acolyte and had been given the job of copying the histories, which were written in hieroglyphs on the palace walls, after which she’d be allowed to get married. Unfortunately this task would take many years and she wanted to get married while she was still young enough to bare children (in those days people had short lives and women became barren when fairly young, no having children when you were a hundred and living to be a hundred and seventy). Then she had a dream in which she had twenty four children who made different sounds and could combine their sounds to say the names of the hieroglyphs. Instead of copying the complicated hieroglyphics onto papyrus, she wrote combinations of twenty four, easy to draw, symbols and completed her task within a few months. After that, everybody started writing the way Gweldrian did and her symbols developed into the Semic alphabet.

It was clear most the kids weren’t taking it very seriously. Breeze was answering most the questions. I remembered what the woman in the barn had told me and tried thinking how to get out of this situation. That really meant finding the secret. I realized that I should pay attention and learn. If I was stuck in Minris for any length of time, I’d eventually know as much as Breeze. I was glad that Winemakers worship every seven days, and not every six like Trulists.