Savages: A Triptych

By Brendan Ball

This triptych of stylistically diverse stories - on the unifying theme of the occult, mysticism and primitive religion - features three equally diverse protagonists: a revered tribal chief whose life depends on concealing signs of age, a debonair daemon suffering professional ennui in a staff training role without prospects, and a visionary moon colonist on the run from unrequited love who is blackmailed into sham psychotherapy and drawn into a bloody labour dispute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookPartnership
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783018154

Book preview

SAVAGES: A TRIPTYCH

(c) Brendan Ball, 2015.

All rights reserved.

Table of contents

LONG LIVE THE KING

THE DEPOSITION

LUNAR SEAS

Acknowledgements

LONG LIVE THE KING

‘Now primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one of these god-men...  What catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death?  The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.’

Frazer, The Golden Bough.

The King of Men stood naked before the Eye of Vision.  He listened for footfall on the sand outside his house, but in the heat of morning heard only mosquitoes under the roof, flies on the wall among the hanging skulls of his enemies, and upon the floor the spiders and lizards and crawling things of the earth.  In the Eye of Vision was the King of Men, and in the King of Men was Fear.

Of a devil came the Eye, a devil on a throne on the shoulders of men, carried flat from the sunset forest with fever in its bloodless skin.  Half a moon it lay so, raving in tongues of its kind.  And its men waited and watched, guarding (not it, but its burdens), saying only that it came for trade, no devil but a man, from a land across great water.

In that same moon went the King his father to rest as the King his father’s father before him, his father after the fall of a tooth, his father’s father after the coming of a white hair one morning in the days of the rain.  In rightness carried they the King-Spirit, and in rightness gave it: the rainmakers brought the eggs of the rainbow-bird, and the first wives the Draught of Passing.  And with the King his father still between worlds, lo, from fever rose the devil.

Of gain were its thoughts and for women its goods - for hair, ears, arms, fingers - and before the eyes of his people the King gave of them to his wives.  And the devil asked, speaking with its white hands, to see the King alone.  Unto the King’s house went the King and the devil, the King his father new asleep in the next.  By the door waited Dancing Flame and Mighty Lion, and tall with his spear stood the King of Men.

On the devil’s white face were no markings of kind. In the house of the King it bared its head; and the colour of its hair was as men’s, but as ploughed with ashes.  With its hands it told its sickness, its rising and its thanks.

And the King made no reply.

The devil took from its shoulder a stitched skin, and from the skin a jar and a comb.  The jar was of a rock that let through light, and in it was a blackness not as water nor as sap.  The devil opened it and took of the blackness, and through its own hair ploughed it with the comb.  And lo, the ashes were no more, and the hair black as a child’s.  The devil looked into the eyes of the King of Men.

The King made no reply.

And the devil took from the skin a squared light as of hard water, and bade the King look upon it.  The King looked; and lo, it captured his spirit.

With a shout as of war the King raised his spear; with the scream of a woman the devil fell, a crawling thing, beneath the skulls.  Its hand let go the trap, and free was the King’s spirit.  The King held his spear to the throat of the devil, and called unto him Dancing Flame and Mighty Lion.

From the earth of his house the King raised the spirit trap.  Cut into its handle of wood were markings of the devil’s kind.  It captured the roof; then across its face of hard water fell the skulls, then Mighty Lion’s arm and club, then again the head of the King.  He drew back and was free, looked again, and again drew back.  For in the spirit trap was an Eye of Vision.

And the King was as one understanding.

He spake unto Dancing Flame:

Father of Full Harvest, is thy heart true unto me?

And Dancing