Winter's Tales by Lari Don

Author:Lari Don
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Mot responded with an invitation of his own: “How dare you invite me to a feast of bread and wine? I am not an ox or a stag, I am a lion in the desert, so I hunger for flesh and I thirst for blood. Yet you insult me by offering me bread and wine. So now the flesh and blood I yearn for is your flesh and your blood, Baal. I demand that you come to my land and feast at my table. If you do not attend, then I will send my servants to drag you down.”

When he heard this message, Baal shivered. He’d beaten a sea monster and built a palace, but that didn’t make him the most powerful god after all.

So Baal cancelled the feast and left his palace by the back door. He found a dead calf in a field, dressed the calf in his robes and enchanted it to look like a god, hoping Mot would be fooled.

But when Mot’s servants took the calf to his feasting table, Mot chewed on its legs and spluttered in disgust. “This is not the flesh of a god, this is the flesh of a beast. Bring me Baal!”

So Baal hid from Mot’s servants.

He hid in his boat of snow-clouds. But the servants of death found him. He hid in the rocks at the end of the sun’s journey in the west. But the servants of death found him. He hid in the ruined palace of Yam, his old enemy. But the servants of death found him.

Eventually Baal realised that no-one can hide from death forever and that hiding in corners would not look good in the legend of his life.

So Baal stood up, dressed himself splendidly in lightning and snow, and walked down to the underworld.

Baal said to Mot, “How kind of you to invite me to your home.” He sat at Mot’s table and he smiled as Mot offered him a dish of mud. Baal knew mud was the food of the dead.

Then, like a polite guest, Baal ate the food in front of him. After three mouthfuls, he choked on it and fell to the filthy floor of Mot’s throne room.

When Mot stopped laughing, he ordered the sun to shine longer and brighter and hotter.

Without Baal in his palace, there was no-one to bring cooling winds or soothing rain. So the land suffered under the harsh summer. The earth was dry and dusty, the sky was burning thin.

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