Whenever I hear anyone who imagines him meek as a lamb, soft hands clasped in prayer, eyes tearfully raised to Heaven, I would retort: you should ask the Chief Shaman of Saimonhyo, what Musa did to him!
For verily, each one of us is made by the master potter himself, and as scriptures say: He saw that it was very good. It said so seven times. It would be unimaginative if one were to think if there was only one way to be good, and that Musa had to be broken into that mold, if he were to hold any hope of redemption.
The first year after Musa returned from the plateau was a year of disaster in Taimiria. For many centuries the river Khatanga had slowly turned from fresh to brackish, then salty, and expanded until it became a wide channel deep enough for small ships to pass through. Farmers who had up to that time lived by channeling water from this channel abandoned the main valley and moved upstream along the tributaries for fresher waters, but the ones leading up the north slopes of the plateau suffered the unpredictable flash floods and droughts caused by the torrid climes of the uplands. Saimonhyo was one such river.
The river Saimonhyo lies in the middle of a sizeable floodplain; the village with the same name is built on an escarpment overlooking it. River flow was unpredictable, and it was impossible to tell when the yearly flood would arrive to flush away any structure build on it. On some years the river dried to a trickle and the flood never came, and on other years the rains and meltwater so torrential that the entire stretch became a sea of foamy rapids which threatened to burst through the banks, engulf the houses, and sweep the entire village away into the sea channel.
They said of the river that the demon Saimonhyo lurked in the river, a demon as tempestuous as the river, who swung between the extremes of drought and wrathful torrent, who held the lives of the townsfolk in its stranglehold. His Chief Shaman is his deputy in the realm of men, a strange man who has held the position for as long as people remembered.
And who is the demon Saimonhyo?
Everyone was afraid to discuss it openly with Musa, but it was possible to derive some signal from the noise, if one bothered to decipher what they told through hushed voices, curt explanations, or innuendo.
Saimonhyo, a dictator, a corrupt petty official who abuses his power to enrich his own; he would skim off the top of his public coffers, and grew fat on this undeserved wealth with his mistresses.
Oh, his desire for the tender flesh of the virgin!
Many a daughter of a poor but virtuous family would come into his snares! He would tempt with his wealth both her and her family, but if they refused, he set the dogs on them. And, like so many unhappy and vengeful souls from yesteryear, souls like his survive his death and dot the landscape, some as trees, others as rocks, others as rivers like Saimonhyo, who swells every year or so with insatiable desire, crying through the voice of his prophet, the Shaman: Wed your daughters to me again, if you desire to live! And the people obeyed him, because they only desired their houses not to be swept away, and because they could hear no other voice above the roar of the river.
This year the two virgins were chosen among the people; picked, as it happened to be done, by drawing lots. It was said that Saimonhyo had an exquisite taste in women, and favoured those of most comely appearance who had just come of age; the Shaman himself assured them this was true. On a few occasion that some could recall, even a married woman was drafted as tribute to the lord of the river. In the ten days leading up to the sacrifice the two fiancées were first brought to a state of stupor by a mix of drink and special herb, moved to the Shaman's quarters for secret rituals for the rest of the duration, and finally led out to the bursting river for the consummation, whereupon the two unfortunate girls are cast into the waves and donated to the river god.
It was said that in the before-times, a holy man named Boniface converted the pagans of Germany by chopping down a sacred oak, where housed the soul of Þór. The pagans believed, with utmost sincerity, that no harm can possibly befall the oak, which was protected. But gentle Boniface felled the Oak and preached the living God from the tree stump, and used the wood to build the first church of the country. For each time the story was told, the bells of the new church chimed placidly, as if through time and space, from the meadows of the Rhine in times long past to the ears of children, and cloaked them in the protective blanket of peace.
But Musa was no Boniface, and did not have his astuteness: he was guided only by an intensely choleric personality. When the reality of the rituals finally came to him, on the day of the sacrifice, a fire burned in him as brightly as the flames in the abbey which had almost burned him into a crisp. He tore through the crowd observing the ceremony, sending people tripping and tumbling over one another, left and right. Then he advanced to the Chief Shaman, looming over his slight frame, which only came up as tall as his chest.
"You send these girls to plead Saimonhyo to hold back his flood, do you not?" he interrogated.
The Shaman was too taken by surprise to call out Musa for his impudence, and only nodded in affirmation. So Musa seized him by his collar and his belt, heaved him over his shoulder, and bellowed for all to hear:
"Then, why don't you go and ask him yourself?"
Without waiting for a reply, he hurled the Shaman bodily into the raging waters, whereupon the small man sank like a rock, and vanished without a trace.
The Shaman's squires protested loudly, denouncing Musa's rash actions. They declared that Musa had incurred total destruction on the village of Saimonhyo by disrespecting his only messenger. Musa ignored them at first. The following two hours felt like an eternity in the tension. When Musa found no change in the water level, he concluded that the Shaman had been tardy, and needed the squires to go and hurry him up. So, just as he sent the Shaman to pacify Saimonhyo, he disposed of the squires likewise, each boy disappearing beneath the waves screaming, squirming, and kicking.
In the following days, it became clear that Saimonhyo's lust was not limited to virgin girls, since the prophet obviously satisfied him as much as did any other sacrifice; the flood had subsided again, as floods tend to do, and the silty riverbed again rose above the surface again, ready for the new crop. The people of Saimonhyo agreed among themselves that some kind of thrall had only just been lifted from their minds; that they were no longer preoccupied with the thought that one day their daughters would be sent to the demon as brides, and, most importantly, that the malevolent presence that had once so haunted them had departed, spirited away by the gallantry of the Chief Shaman and all of his squires.
To repay the hospitality of the villagers, Musa joined a work detachment to set up floodgates and water-mill upstream. Some men from this group later left Saimonhyo and followed Musa to the Griadines, where they took to calling him Abbé and built the new Abbey next to a lake. One of the two virgin girls who had escaped sacrificed went to the Abbey as well, where, towards the end of her life, she would welcome Sister Ershebet to the community.
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| Scene from "Ximen Bao Governs the County of Ye"《西門豹治鄴》 [source] |
References
1. Galatians 1:17; Genesis 1:4,10,12,18,21,25,31
2. Zhu Shaosun 褚少孫 (Western Han 西漢 Dynasty, 1st Century B.C.): Ximen Bao Governs the County of Ye 《西門豹治鄴》. Addendum to the Records of the Grand Historian / Shiji 《史記》by Sima Qian 司馬遷
3. Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān أحمد بن فضلان (A.D. 922): On the Rus' merchants at Itil [summary video]
4. Pope Benedict XVI (11 March 2009): General Audience: Saint Boniface, the Apostle of the Germans
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