Beneath Unwashed Robes
Being a Prophet: Noel's autobio­graphical novel

 

Front cover

Prologue: Awakening
1: Discovery
2: Adolescence
3: Submergence
4: Preparation
5: Escalation
6: Recreation
7: Inflation
8: Prophetry
9: Preachery
10: Diary
11: Trial

Chapter 9: Preachery

Rome was not built on one day, the saying goes. That is correct, actually. It took me close to four months.

Well, I admit, it was not Rome. It was a smaller version thereof, a new suburb to my sprawling city on Novaja Semlja. But it had everything the real Rome had: aquaducts, quaint little pizzerias and taverns, and a colosseum that actually beat the original one in size. My Rome was constructed around my temple, so that this building ended up in the exact same place where the real Rome had its Vatican. When he noticed that, Papa Tee actually asked me whether I, maybe, perhaps, might be overdoing it. I answered that I really failed to see any difference between me and the Pope of the Catholic Church anymore. True, I still had not as many followers as he did, but my disciples made up in fanatism for their lack in numbers. Papa Tee finally saw my points and rested his case. Ah, poor Papa Tlzotlicoatl! Always the soft-spoken, helpful kind of guy who is more often right than his loud-mouthed friends give him credit for.

I re-built Rome for a reason, of course. The morning after Morambar's spirit had ordered me to give my sermons in Latin, I thought that I needed an appropriate scenery around me, or I would just look ridiculously out of time. So I let my followers erect all those things, and because I have never been too much into gladiator stuff, I converted the new Colosseum into a giant terraced garden to grow my drugs in. I had been serious about never letting my supplies run out again, and the surplus weed - despite my increasingly extreme consumption, I occasionally did have a little surplus of a few kilotons - gave me a nice extra earning when I sold it to England as cattle fodder. Years after that I learned that cows did not tolerate my weed nearly as well as I did, and that I was responsible for some cases of irrational cattle behaviour that gained some fame as Mad Cow Disease. I feel a little sorry about that today, but in this case it was really an oversight on my part, in contrast to the wilful act when I invented Bird Flu by repeatedly sneezing on sparrows.

At this point, some of my readers may wonder how I could achieve so much in such short time and why so many people kept flocking to my banner - the population of Novaja Zemlja had shot into the six-digits realm in my very first year, and my city had long engulfed and swallowed the tiny hamlet Novaja Niznevartsk­neftejugansk­oblastskaja­severnaja­schtschpnipno­dnjetrpetrovsk­rabotschnigrad. By the time Rome was completed, the population was quickly heading towards the one-million mark. But then I would like to remind you of the great magnetic force that a new religion can develop in times of turmoil. Like Christianity in a crumbling Roman empire, like Islam amongst the warring tribes of Arabia, like Scientology amongst the confused and spoiled brats of Hollywood, my religion gave new hope to thousands and millions of believers. And who would dispute that my holy books, the works of Tolkien, were the most brilliant of all these religions' scriptures? As for the world-in-turmoil part, I hit a window of opportunity as well as the brittle balance of the Cold War came to an end. These were the times when the Soviet Union, now led by the friendly guy with the blueberry stain, started to disintegrate; when Thatcher - angered about communist orcs who repeatedly posed as her with their latex masks - dismantled Britain's welfare system and when the Faroe Islands' soccer team devastated Austria with 1:0. In short, a never-ending stream of uprooted, despaired, confused people in the search for moral guidance washed upon my shores. Morambar Udunvagor had been right. This, not the brute force of his jellyfish armies, was the key to world dominion.

I set up a few schools and taught Latin to my disciples, and when they showed basic signs of understanding, I started to switch the language of my sermons. My hand still trembles while I write this, as I recall the splendour and glory of these later sermons. My temple had been completed, and if the people who think so highly of the Taj Mahal today had seen it, they would have sneaked off with the tail between their legs. Tower upon tower rose into the grey arctic sky, and the shimmering walls of black volcanic obsidian were lined with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and Nef runes. Of course the floor heating had been repaired by now - and extended to the colosseum - and the jackhammer holes had been filled with rosewater, in which tiny goldfish swam. The huge open-air courtyard was fully equipped with floor heating so that exotic palm trees could grow there, and mighty statues overshadowed the crowd that gathered in this space every morning. I later sold some of these statues as movie props to a guy named Jack Peterson or similar.

And then I stepped out on a balcony, dressed in a robe so white that whenever my sermons were broadcast, televisions around the world exploded, unable to properly display the brilliance of my garb. I leaned on a staff that was a detailed, but oversized replica of Tolkien's pipe, and I started every morning's sermon with the recitation of a special hymn that had come to me in a dream.

"Tolkien, tu my guiding lux..." I boomed.

"Tolkien! Tu my guiding lux!" the crowd echoed.

And so I continued, line for line, and my disciples repeated it.
"... Ego lego tibi books
Every dies, tota noctes
Lego quod your mens concoctes!

Tolkien, tu es genius
Et I quote e pluribus
Volumes of Historia
Of Medium-terra! Gloria!

Non est semper truth in them?
Non sunt they so brilliantem?
O amicus, can't tu find
In them pacem for your mind?

Tolkien, tu es scriptor best
North to south et east to west
Cis et trans et hoc and hic
Noone scribit better fic!"

Then I talked at length in this unmodulated singing voice some priests adopt when they recite Latin prayers. I talked about why Balrogs did not have wings, why the Nazgul ran away at Weathertop, and I solved the puzzle of the origin of orcs once and for all. I only wish I could remember what that secret was. But to be completely honest, I was too drugged up most of the time to understand what I was saying myself. A few times I actually lost consciousness on that balcony, and the ghost of Tolkien took possession of my body and spoke through me. Those occasions were seen as wonders by my disciples, and in these minutes water in their drinking bottles turned into wine, sores and bruises from their hard labour for me healed, and the dead rose up and walked the earth. These were joyous moments, though they caused some annoying work afterwards when we had to hew down all those zombies. And every day, I finished my sermon with the last stanza of the hymn:

"So, amici, veni mecum
Follow mihi, the prophetum
Lege Tolkien every hora
Atque spread his vox in fora!"

And the entire courtyard erupted in applause and tears of joy.

I usually held court after the sermons, in the hall directly adjacent to the courtyard, where a massive throne had been built. It had the height of ten tall men and the width of Cindy, and of course nobody ever sat on it, for this was the throne of Tolkien. In front of it, a smaller and slightly less adorned seat had been put up, which had the height of three tall men and the width of Hecate Mensenlarger, and of course nobody ever sat on it, for this was the seat of Morambar. In front of it, a tiny wooden footstool had been erected, on which I sat.

The protocol for an audience with me started quite simple and became more elaborate as time passed. At first, people just walked to my stool and bowed low before they were allowed to speak. Later, I made them kneel for no apparent reason. Then, I amused myself by having them crawl all the way from the door. I finally settled on digging a trench filled with my own saliva, through which they had to rob right up to a bottomless pit, into which they jumped, and if they were lucky ot Tolkien blessed them, they could hold on to a very thorny root about three kilometres below the ground, and dangling there, they could shout up to me. Only a few people were excepted from that protocol - Papa Tee, of course; the babushkas; a young guy who could prove convincingly that he was allergic to thorny roots; and, last not least, my dad. He was not my biological father, of course. He was the last Freiherr von Schneiffel zu Kuhdung, a village in the Eifel uplands in rural Western Germany. After centuries of isolation and incest, all ninety-seven inhabitants of the twin hamlets Schneiffelbroich and Kuhdungkaffen were brothers, and so the Freiherr had been forced to remain childless until I proposed he adopted me. This way, his line would not die out, and I finally received my nobility title and became known as Noel von Schneiffel. As I recall, the protocol was only once violated by a living being not on that list, a guy from the Salvation Army who thought he could just walk in and rattle his collection box under my very nose. I spanked his behind so thoroughly that he later earned his living in a freak show, posing as Bluebum, the Half-Smurf; and nobody ever tried to intrude like that again.

***

Years passed, and then more years passed. They were followed by years, for a change. Time is not a very inventive force.

There is not much to tell about my later life on Novaja Zemlja - I had my daily routine of preaching and studying, and to that I adhered. The babushkas and the Buddhist monks from that yellow bus, my very first followers, took over most of the organisational tasks of running my cult. They were good at it - well, they were good at anything they did, and soon I developed complete confidence in them and stopped controlling things myself. Instead I concentrated on spiritual matters, and Papa Tee also did what he was best at. He opened another bar not far from the Colosseum, The Frozen Aztec, and the word spread through the city that his cocktails were the best north of the 70th degree of latitude, and if you drank six of them you could see Jamaica, and if you drank sixteen of them you could see Bob Marley.

In all this time, I never saw Baggy again. I was quite content with that, and I guess he was, too. I had less and less visions of Morambar and increasingly communicated with Tolkien himself - I had grown to a stage where I had no need of an intermediary anymore, or so I kept telling myself. One day I found the first grey hair on my head, something that pushed me into a melancholic state for several weeks. Also, though my natural haggard physique has always prevented me from putting on weight too easily, in these years I developed a little belly from all the good food and the frequent drinking parties over at The Frozen Aztec. It must have been close to ten years since Cindy had carried me to these shores when, finally, the signs started to appear. The first sign was a flaming inscription on my bedroom wall that appeared out of thin air when I staggered home from a seventeen-cocktail evening. It said "mene mene tekel upharsim".

Well, actually, it said that only for a very short time. Then it quickly disappeared and was replaced by "sry wrong copy'n'paste". That in turn disappeared within seconds and made room for "ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen".

Now of course I knew what that meant without looking it up. I knew it was the first line of Tolkien's farewell poem, printed in Lord of the Rings, that began with "ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees" and so on. But the meaning of this inscription completely escaped me, even more so because I had just proven in today's sermon that trees do not have wings. Was a farewell about to happen? Was a branch of a palm tree in the courtyard threatening to fall on my head and kill me? I called for the babushkas, but even they could not make any sense of it. At the end I had them cover the writing with thick black paint because the light disturbed my sleep.

The second sign was an invasion of locusts. That too did not cause much harm. Papa Tee even amused himself by smuggling locusts into his guest's drinks. The third sign was Horus Engels, who was on a tour through Siberia to read from his latest book and sent me a note in Egyptian hieroglyphs, saying he'd like to drop by for a chat. Unfortunately, I was busy that day and could not welcome him. Three days after that I walked back into the palace after my morning sermon and suddenly noticed the air had become very cold. I shivered, and every hair on my head started to rise. I had about two meters of hair at this time, so I started to look somewhat like a puffed, spherical hedgehog four meters in diameter.

"Stop that nonsense", whispered the hoary voice of Morambar's ghostly projection. "We have to talk."

I let my hair sink back to where it belonged. The floor and the walls showed signs of motion, and I wished I had not smoked that eighth pipe this morning. "Master", I croaked.

Udunvagor stood next to me, towering and brooding like always. Faint daylight from the high, narrow windows shone through him without illuminating him. He was not wearing his bunny suit, thank God. He looked around in the huge, dark hall with, that much was clear to see, displeasure. "What are you doing, Noel?" he asked.

"Um..." I said and cleared my throat. "What you ordered me to do. Convert the world to Tolkien. Yes."

"Really?" Morambar said dryly. "What is the current number of your followers?"

I started to feel like a schoolboy facing his teacher when he knows he has not done his homework. "Um, I don't know", I admitted. "Leo Tolstoi is taking care of that. That's the babushka with the red coat and the wart on her-"

"I know", Udunvagor cut me off. "I will tell you. The curve has been flattening. You are hardly recruiting new members anymore."

"I am?" I murmured.

"Do not get me wrong", the Master said. "You have done much - more than any other of my students ever accomplished. Your cult has to be numbered among the top ten world religions. But now it is not growing anymore. You have settled for a place amongst them, for peaceful coexistence. But I do not want peaceful coexistence. I want the world to bow down before Tolkien! Every single living being shall acknowledge His greatness!"

I looked to the floor unhappily. Suddenly I was feeling very sober. He was right, I knew that. The critique was devastating, but well earned.

"And look at you!" Udunvagor hissed into my ear. "You are becoming lazy. Weak. Fat."

Utterly humiliated I fell to my knees. Tears rolled down my face. "What shall I do, Master?" I sobbed. "How can I redeem myself? Command me!"

Suddenly, I felt a cold, ethereal hand patting my shoulder. I looked up and saw Morambar smiling. "Do not burden yourself with guilt", he said. "No harm has yet been done that cannot be rectified. But you must leave this temple. You must leave behind your life of luxury. You must not wait for the people here, you have to go and seek the people. You will be a wandering prophet, and the light of Tolkien shall show you the way. Do not worry, He will watch over you." With these words he faded and disappeared, and the daylight through the windows seemed to return to its normal brightness.

Papa Tee found me kneeling on the floor a few hours later, lost in deep thoughts. I told him of my vision, and this evening we had our plan ready. Papa Tee and the babushkas would stay and keep the cult running, while I would embark on my quest to deal the death blow to the other world religions. And I knew how I would do it. I would visit the leaders of those religions, one at a time - my fame was already great enough that I would have no trouble arranging private meetings - and then I would convert them to my belief in Tolkien. Once the Pope, the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Grand Ayatollah, John Rees, the High Shaman of Ayers Rock and Tom Cruise were safely in my camp, the rest of their believers would follow without hesitation. I would start with the Dalai Lama, because I suspected he was closest to my own views already. At least in his dress code.

***

The day of my departure from Novaja Zemlja brought the greatest and most awesome celebration this barren island had ever seen. My city was covered knee-deep in the most colourful confetti, and Papa Tee, in charge of the catering, made a fortune. I walked towards the shore in a robe so blindingly white that everyone had to wear sunglasses, for it had been bleached with the tears of sixty-six virgins who had wept all night over the beauty of Tolkien's poems. And I walked on, out into the sea, because I was still an underwater warrior and I figured a little hike on the seabed to the Dalai Lama's abode would benefit my waistline. Of course my beard had long since been restored to its full oxygen-storing capacity.

The waves washed over my head, and the water muffled the cheers of the crowd which had gathered on the shore to bid me farewell. I breathed a particularly big bubble and playfully caressed a shark baby that had swum to the coast to see what all the fuss was about. I gave its mother, a fine-looking shark lady, a kiss and an autograph on the dorsal fin and walked on. My mood was very cheerful; I had shed the apathy that had gotten hold of me lately and now I was back on track.

A few hundred meters beyond the shore I found a curious field of round somethings lying on the ground. They looked like pillow lava, though I was not aware of any volcanic activity in this area. I briefly wondered who would want to sleep on lava pillows - balrogs maybe? - then I shrugged and marched right through these things. Idly, I kicked one of it, whereupon I realized three different things in the fraction of a second. Firstly, the round things did not consist of stone as expected, but of rusted metal. Secondly, a little red light on top of that thing started to blink. Thirdly, I suddenly remembered the defense lines the nations of the world had created against Morambar's marine armies more than a decade ago. Much of this defense had consisted of vast fields of underwater mines.

The explosion triggered a chain reaction in the minefield, and it must have looked quite impressive from the shore. I, however, was not in the position to appreciate the show. The detonation threw me upwards, out of the water, and in a perfect parabola I fell back towards the ground just above the shore. There was a high crane towering above the crowd with a camera on top, to broadcast my departure to the world's TV stations from a bird's eye perspective. In falling, my underpants got caught on the topmost spike of the crane, and my descent stopped abruptly. There I dangled, half-naked, my torn and burnt robe gliding down to the shocked masses in several disconnected parts. To make things worse, I was wearing slightly embarassing underpants with little pink hearts and teddy bears on them. And my behind dangled right in front of the camera. The official footage of this event has long been destroyed, I took care of that, but I have been told that a video clip of my teddy-beared butt can still be downloaded from the more shadowy regions of the internet.

When the crane was finally lowered, Papa Tee came running towards me with some bandages and a hastily commandeered yellow raincoat. "What now?" he asked, out of breath.

"Call Joe's Rent-A-Fleet service", I hissed while I wrapped myself into the coat. "I need to hire a boat."

***

Back in the present, I slammed the door of my hospital room behind Smeagolurtz. It was the day before my trial, and he just had spent hours coaching me with legal terms and defensive tactics. No matter how optimistic Smeagolurtz tried to sound, I was deeply afraid by now. It was obvious that my fate hung on a very thin thread. If I emerged victorious, all was well. But if just the slightest flaw appeared in our defensive strategy, I could end up in jail for a very long time. The world never liked fallen cult leaders, no matter what had led to their downfall. It was obvious that a whole lot of my followers had emerged with severe emotional scars from their service on Novaja Zemlja, and they would try to blame me for everything that had happened on this island ever since my crash-landing in the babushkas' blueberry pot.

The air was filled with thick fumes from Smeagolurtz' constant smoking, and I opened the window to let some fresh air in. Immediately, a barrage of overripe tomatoes from the protesters below was hurled through it and stained the walls of my room, and I shut the window quickly. They were vigilant, these people out there.

What had led to my downfall? The question nearly drove me insane. The remaining white patches in my memory were very small now, but they covered important events. My temple had been standing in all its glory when I left it, and my followers had numbered millions. How was the final cataclysm triggered that I remembered so clearly, the scene of fire and destruction inside the great hall just next to the courtyard?

Bqggz interrupted my musing when he stuck his green orc-head through the door, serious concern on his face. "Hey, Noel", he said. "Just wanted to wish you luck with the trial. Whoah, it smells awful in here. Are you sure you want no membership in my communist party now? It can strengthen your mind in times of trouble when you have a belief to cling to."

"Tell me about it", I commented sourly.

Then I told Bqggz about the gaps in my memory, and he shrugged. "Well", he said, "it's good they appear in this timeframe, isn't it? Because that must be the time when you had this internet diary. You never were much of a diary-writer, but you kept that blog for a certain time. I read it with interest, you know, and commented quite a few-"

He had to stop talking, because I had jumped at him and was shaking his shoulders viciously. "Where?" I asked. "How? I need a computer. A laptop. Something. Now! What was the password?"

Bqggz brushed away my hand. "How should I know your password?" he said indignantly. "But it probably was 'Tolkien'. I doubt you could have come up with something else. If that doesn't work, try 'Pipeweed'."

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