Trembling With Fear 11/15/20

The Haruspex by Harris Coverley

It was decided that the only means left to see off the advance of Vile Rome was to adopt some of their methods and merge them with our own, and we would have to hope that Tannit and Ḥammon would not punish us for any sacrilege.

Ten infant boys were offered up before the two Suffets and the Council of Elders. One amongst them was chosen by the highest priest, in communion with the goddess, and delegated to me, for I was regarded as the supreme of my profession in all of the remaining realms of Qart-Hadasht.

The others were returned to their families, grateful for such mercy, and I took my charge outside the city, away from any impure influence, where I raised him in relative solitude. The Suffets sent their servants with the finest of food to nourish us, and an Elder even volunteered to come and teach the boy how to play the nebel.

I studied him as I studied the ways of prophecy in Vile Rome, and prepared myself for that ultimate day, the boy not knowing what greatness he would be the conduit of. Even as I understood what was to come, I grew to love him almost like he was my own progeny, and I do believe still he loved me also, even saw me like his own father. We had such pleasurable days together, and he seldom disobeyed, although he knew punishment by my hand was harsh.

When he reached the age of ten, and we were both summoned by the Council to the Tophat, I admit that I had the insolent thought of absconding with the boy to the sandy lands of the interior, but I swallowed my impudence and did as commanded.

I met the assembled Council, headed by the two newly elected Suffets, in the court of the Tophat, underneath the icons of the Lady and the Lord. They were accompanied by the general Azrubaal and several of his men, who looked upon me and the boy with great repugnance for they did not care for Romish ways, even if undertaken by their own people.

They all gathered in a circle, and I instructed the boy to follow me to the centre. Two priests of the lower caste came forward and held him to the floor by the shoulders. As he struggled and pleaded for an explanation, I drew the knife, given to me by the former Suffets ten years earlier, and, giving thanks to the Lady and the Lord, thrust it into his abdomen, and ripped it down to his groin, his screams piercing me in return.

The lower priests then rolled him onto his side, the boy now silent but cursing me with his eyes as the last of life drained out. I threw away any sentiment, and began to remove his bowels for scrutiny.

Years of Romish learning had taught me how to read the signs within the viscera of the chosen sacrifice, whereas we descendants of the Kana‘an had always killed our charges and then deposited them in the sacred pyres since the times of the ancestor god Malcam.

I spread his hot entrails out across the floor of the court, and began my studies. As time went on, Azrubaal and his men became restless and demanded a revelation, but the Suffets managed to calm them as the Elders looked on in distaste.

I checked my readings myriad times, but I was ashamed to report what I had found amongst the guts of the boy: the coming war with the Romish was not to be in our favour. Indeed, it was to mean the destruction of Qart-Hadasht regardless of what we did.

Azrubaal and his men took this with the worst bluster, and insisted that Vile Rome could not dare bring defeat to our empire. Some Elders were fast however to remind the general of how much our great empire had withered within our very lifetimes, and asked me what we should do. I said that the only option was our immediate and absolute surrender, with the Romish receiving it benevolently if chance be ours.

To most of the Elders, the two Suffets, and of course Azrubaal, such an idea was utterly unspeakable. They could not go before the Assembly of the People with such news, as in the face of continued defeat and decline the oligarchs had weakened their grip over the public, and were reduced to little more than demagoguery.

The Tophat guards held back Azrubaal’s men as the Suffets agreed that I was to be exiled without delay from the city and its domains until my death, so as not to poison popular opinion. The boy’s body and his innards were to be offered to the pyre in the hope that the Lady and the Lord would not see our invocation of Vile Rome’s practices as insult foul enough to deny us victory and rainfall.

I did not resist my deportation, going west into the lands of the wilder Numidians. I lived there for ten years as a teacher, before getting a premonition that I should return to Qart-Hadasht, and would not be harassed for doing so.

As I arrived on the hill above the city, I saw the methodically burnt ruins that I once loyally called my home. I recall walking through the city’s shattered gates, seeing the piles upon piles of skeletons, their flesh long peeled away by the unforgiving sun, and feeling the alien salt between my bare toes.

Nothing for me there, I returned to my new home in the west, where I now wait to re-join the boy and the rest of my fellow citizenry in the next life, and dream that such a catastrophe will befoul Vile Rome.