The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

Croft frowned. "What one expects and what one meets are not always one and the same, friend Murray," he rejoined. "As a matter of fact, I returned to Palos after my conversation with you, to encounter a situation of which I had never thought."

"You mean that it interfered with your marriage to the princess?" I exclaimed.

He made a grimace. "I mean exactly that, both on the part of Naia herself and because of something else. You remember Zud, the high priest of Zitra, the imperial city of which I told you—who sponsored me with Tamhys before the Zollarian war. And you recall no doubt that I mentioned the fact that I left the body of Jasor of Nodhur, which I had made my own, in Zud's apartments in the pyramid of Zitra when I came back here for the last time, and that Naia was quartered during my absence in the rooms set apart for the Gayana—the Vestals of Ga the Virgin in the pyramid, too. Murray, when I got back there, fully expecting to take things up where I had left them, I found that Zud had proclaimed me the Mouthpiece of Zitu himself."

"The Mouthpiece of Zitu!" I drew a chair close to the bed and sat down. The thing affected me oddly.

I cast back in my mind for what Croft had told me concerning the religion of Tamarizia, which was the nation in whose affairs he had taken an active part on the distant star. Zitu was God in their belief. Ga was the woman—a virgin. Azil was her son—known as the Giver of Life. And if Croft had been proclaimed by the high priest of the central state of the empire, the head of the clerical college, as the Mouthpiece of Zitu I began to sense dimly the position in which he must have found himself on his return—just what it might have meant.

If Zud had proclaimed Croft anything of the sort, it was just about the same as naming him the representative of the Divinity in the flesh—and from what Croft had told me of his claiming while in Tamarizia to do all that he did by the grace of Zitu—-which was, of course, no more than the truth in a sense—I could see how his very words might have laid the foundation for the high priest's act.

Yet, Croft at our former conversation had said that he had induced the Tamarizians to adopt a republican way of government rather than their system of allied principalities, and had declared that when he went back he expected to be elected president. All that flashed through my mind, and then, "Rather changed your plans, I suppose," I said.

"Changed them?" he returned, with an almost whimsical expression. "Murray, it almost wrecked them at the start—the most important part of them, that is. Remember why I did what I did do really—that all I had done up until that time was in order to win the woman who meant more to me than anything else in life—and then picture if you can my mental condition when I found myself trapped, as it were, by my own acts."

"Your own?" I queried.

He nodded. "Oh, certainly yes—my own, of course—my acts and my overthought—my failing to take into account what a terrible impression I had managed to make on the high priest. I—hang it all, Murray—I knew so entirely what I was up to that I didn't give proper consideration to the effect of my words and acts must have on less well-informed minds. I failed to put myself in the place of Zud, and Magur, the head of the church in Aphur, whom I first enlisted in my aid at Himyra, as I told you before.