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When the great wars began, hundreds of clans held dominion over portions of the enormous land, each with their own gods and culture, totems, legends, marriage laws and excuses for combat. For hundreds of years the battles raged, until the forty most ruthless clans had stained the land with the blood of the less ruthless, whose gods simultaneously perished, along with legions of warriors slain and civilians starved and broken. Belief systems were trod into the dust, ground to powder like the small bones of the martyrs underfoot. Gods who had commanded awe for centuries ceased to exist. As part of the living spirit of a people, they expired with the last breaths of the last believers. As fragments of history, they perished with the burning of the holy parchments, the toppling of the holy stones. We only think they might once have existed. With the expansion of the conquering clans, the influence of the victorious gods grew, always in fulfillment of a prophesy that the vengeful gods of the most rapacious warriors would prosper throughout the land. Forty clans, even belligerent clans, might have shared the vast terrain in suspended hostility, but forty gods—fickle, indifferent, arrogant, vindictive—could not. Most had to be killed, but it was not necessary to eliminate the more pragmatic believers, who adopted the conquering gods as a cost of living. Every battlefield victory confirmed the faith of the true worshipers in the power of their gods to deliver them from danger. Each skirmish they survived convinced them, as they took up arms against another god, that they could not die. Now the pretenders lie in waste and the conquerors, rich in spoils, survive to spread the good news of the one true god to lands about which madmen and mystics have dreamt.

Copyright © December 19, 2006