The greatest power comes with wearing the Three Corner Crown. From one reincarnation to the next desire for its uncomfortable presence is an animal desire in my soul.
And here, in this rebirth, the glory is close to hand.
The Staff of the Re-United One is passed into my pudgy grip. Can I feel the warmth I've left on the thin wand? The priest, more a mortician with fancy clothes, brought it straight from my dead grasp to my living one. And, as I clutch it, the memories I daren't pass consciousness-to-consciousness flood through my head.
I've been six, I've been a hundred-and-six. Now I'm nine, just after my fifty-first birthday. And I've told myself a secret.
The time for me to rule is now, or it will be, in just a few more years.
"Your Eminence," the priest said, "we should move to the temple."
"Yes!" My eyes are wide open, excited. The once-born always fail to understand what passes between the reborn. It’s easy to gull them with naive innocence.
The Temple is as opulent as I remember from yesterday. For countless generations I've been doing this, rebirth, after rebirth. I've been a God for generations, living with gilded marble halls, silk hangings, slaves.
Slaves.
I've been a slave. I've been many slaves. The reason I last lived to fifty-one was being a slave for the first fifteen years of my life. Fifteen years in a swamp, dredging mineral rich mud from warm, insect infested waters. My mother, father, sisters, aunts, brothers, all died before I was reincarnated. I got another thirty-six years, with lungrot kept at bay by the best medicine in the land.
This time I'm healthy. Born of wealth, raised to know linen, cotton, and silk. I could live to be a hundred, maybe even take the record, a hundred-and-six.
For the next few years I need to be the Re-United One, Binder of the Kingdoms, Holder of the Reins... There are a hundred names for me, for all of me, the me that stretched back to a history I don't remember.
You think that strange? That I know this life, and the last, that dates from a millennia ago are pin-prick sharp, and countless lives beyond that are easily retrieved. Yet, I can't remember my first life. There's a veil which drifts across my memories, revealing some and concealing others, showing deserts and forests around the same mound which rises from the valley plain like a pimple on a teenagers face. I’m told the once-born cannot remember being babies either, and most forget much of the single life they lead.
"The people are ready to see you," the priest says. At sixteen I'm ready in law to become God. Until now I've been the Holder of the Staff, the Remembered One, the Glory to Come. Now my subjects are ready to receive their deity. They will prostrate themselves, and genuflect. Their obeisance will bind the land together, bring surety, security.
It will bring nothing new. From a temple I am not allowed to leave power is filtered through dozens of functionaries, flunkeys, who last generation-to-generation. While I live on, unchanging, they survive unchanged by the way they pass duty from parent to child. Every one of them becomes the same. Change is an enemy, the enemy, an unending idea of what is true, where truth alters like the wind flowing through a forest.
I've had many ideas over the millennia, but they've held one single idea for the same length of time. And there's so few of them. I'm a god. A single, powerful, reborn god that remembers everything from one life to the next, mostly. They are in the dozens, maybe hundreds, with a grip so tight on what is truth that they could be a locust army, swarming everywhere, devouring everything, knowing all there is to know.
But I told myself a secret.
A secret I've held for the years since I gave it to me.
The Three Cornered Crown can be mine again.
I may be a god, but I'm no ruler, no leader. My role is a sinecure, keeping me safe for the decades between my deaths, and allowing me nothing in the way of power. A long time ago some one figured out that having me alive, and worshipped, was a great way to keep me powerless.
But they forgot, they forget while I remember. For a long time, for years beyond counting, I also forgot: I remember again.
I think it was the fifteen years in the swamp which allowed it. A lifetime of despair crammed into a few short years, years which could easily have ended before I began again, but by the grace of a God I don't believe I am, didn't.
With the Three Corner Crown in my hands things will change. They're already changing, but no-one understands it yet.
They will.
We've had the long summer of oppression, the winter of despair. Now, now we approach spring. Spring is the season of hope, of anticipation, of regeneration, where what is past is gone, and the future calls us on.
On the balcony I look out at a sea of people. They call the name of their God. Once that was me. It's not anymore. I'm a deity in denial, renouncing my godship in favor of the people who worship me, recusing myself from obeisance in favor of freedom for everyone to make the mistakes they accuse me of making for them.
The priest is at my side, invoking my power, whipping up a frenzy of devotion. I step forward to an ululation of recognizance. The Staff is in my hand, and I imbue it with the knowledge of my freedom.
Looking forward, drinking in the praise, I lift the Three Corner Crown to symbolise my nominal power over temporal powers. Amidst
gasps around me, I place it on my head.
"Now," I cry to the slaves thronged before me, "we are free."
And the burn of a blade slides into my liver. I have lived long enough to pass the crown to myself.
text by stuartcturnbull, picture by Grimnona from Pixabay
