62.The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr
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NOW the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.
“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have been dead for so long now! And, just looking at it sensibly, it does seem such a waste of eternity!”
“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so friendlily and happily?”
Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the Ænseis were adored, had been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of theMan-God, Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the Ænseis desires must happen instantly, thus Ydalir knows but one endless day; and immeasurably beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the jumbled wreckage of time.
But it befell, too, after a great many of those æons which Ydalir ignores and men cannot imagine, that Donander saw one of his smaller brothers-in-law about a droll looking sport. Donander asked questions: and he learned this dark brisk little Koshchei was about a game at which the younger Ænseis were used to play.
“And how does one set about it?” Donander asked then.
“Why, thus and thus, my heart,” his wife replied. Fond Vanadis was glad enough to find for him some outdoor diversion which would woo him from that stuffy chapel and its depressing pictures of tortured persons and its unwholesome fogs of stifling incense.
Then Donander broke away a bough from the tree called Lærath, saying meanwhile the proper word ofpower. Sitting beside the fifth river of Ydalir, he cut strips of bark from this bough, with the green-handled knife which Vanadis had given him, and he cast these strips about at random. He found it perfectly true that those scraps of barks which touched the water became fish, those which he flung into the air became birds, and those which fell upon the ground became animals and men.
He almost instantly, indeed, had enough creatures to populate a world, but no world, of course, for them to animate and diversify. So Donander destroyed these creatures, and placed one of the lighter weirds upon the beetle Karu. That huge good-tempered insect fell at once to shaping a ball of mud, and to carving it with mountains and plains and valleys. Then Karu burrowed his way into the center of this ball of mud: and from the hole into which Karu had entered came all kinds of living beings needful for the animating and diversifying of a world; and these began to breed and to kill one another and to build their appropriate lairs, in nests and dens and cities.
This so excited another beetle, named Khypera, that he behaved in a fashion not at all convenient to record; but many living creatures were at once brought forth by his remarkable conduct, and plants and creeping things and men and women, too, came out of the tears which Khypera let fall.
That was the second demiurgy of Donander Veratyr.Then with a golden egg Donander made another world: and from the entrails of a spider he drew another; from the carrion of a dead cow he made a fifth world; and with the aid of a raven Donander made yet one more. Thereafter he went on, in turn attempting each method that any Ans had ever practiced.
These sports amused Donander for a long while and yet another while. And Vanadis, apart from her natural pleasure in the augmented vigor he got from so much open-air exercise, bright Vanadis smiled at his playing, in the way of any wife who finds her husband occupied upon the whole less reprehensibly than you would expect of the creature. And the sons of Sidvrar also were used, as yet, to smile not unfriendlily when they passed where Donander was busy with his toys. Even the sisters of Vanadis only said that really of all things, and that of course they had expected it from the very first. Thus everybody was content for a long while and yet another while.
And throughout both these whiles Donander was pottering with his worlds, keeping them bright with thunderbolts and volcanic eruptions, diligently cleansing them of parasites with one or another pestilence, scouring them with whirlwinds, and perpetually washing them with cloud-bursts and deluges. His toys had constantly such loving care to keep them in perfect condition. Meanwhile, his skill increased abreast with his indulgence in demiurgy, and Donander thought of littleelse. He needed now no aid from ravens and beetles. He had but, he found, to desire a world, and at once his desire took form: its light was divided from its darkness, the waters gathered into one place, the dry land appeared and pullulated with living creatures, all in one dexterous complacent moment of self-admiration.
His earlier made stars and comets and suns and asteroids Donander Veratyr began destroying one by one, half vexedly, half in real amusement at the archaic, bungling methods he had outgrown. In their places he would set spinning, and glittering, and popping, quite other planetary systems which, for the moment in any event, appeared to him remarkably adroit craftsmanship. And everywhere upon the worlds which he had made, and had not yet annihilated, men worshiped Donander Veratyr: and in his pleasant home at Reginlief, high over Lærath and every other heaven and paradise, Donander worshiped the god of the fathers and of all the reputable neighbors of Donander of Évre; and in such pagan surroundings as Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him, awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.