The day that Revel killed a god, he woke early. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and a pain in his ear where somebody'd hit him during a shebeen brawl the night before. He rolled over on his back. The bed was a hollowed place in the earth floor, filled with leaves and dried grass and spread with yellow-brown mink skins sewn into a big blanket; he'd slept on it every night of his twenty-eight years, but this morning it felt hard and uncomfortable.
With the impious brain at the center of his skull—Revel had long before decided that he had a number of brains, one obedient, one rebellious, one dull, one keen and inquisitive, and so on—with the impious brain he now cursed the gods and the gentry and the priests, and everyone above the ruck who preyed on them and made their lives so stinking awful. If he had thought then of killing a god, the idea would have seemed pleasant indeed. But quite impossible, of course, for a man of the ruck did not touch a god, much less slay one.
Revel was a man of the ruck. The ruck was millions and millions of souls, faceless, without rights; Revel had some little protection, more than most others, being a miner and therefore important to the gentry. The gentry numbered thousands, and they had many rights—owning great estates, lighting their homes with candles, drinking wine legally, keeping fierce dogs and going where they pleased on big wild horses. No man of the ruck could touch one of the gentry and live. The gentry, the squires who owned guns and hunted men three times a week, men called "foxes"—it was whispered in the illegal drinking huts, the shebeens, that the squires had once been members of the ruck. Above there were the priests, who had always from the dawn of time been of the priestcraft, being born a notch lower than the gods themselves, who were the golden globes.
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar