We skinned the elder for refusing, which was true, and for fleeing, which was trumped in the face of the enemy, who swore vengeance should we skin a sitting goat--which is to say, the elder. Many a time! oh, many! had we skinned the fleeing wrong, the warlock aroused and stumbling wildly along our porcupine streets to the imagined safety of his mother's breast, his mother's breast in Anatolia... many a time! So that now, skinning no fleeing duck but rather an angry goat, we felt vindicated, in our feelings of vindication, by the momentum of our righteous skinnings, which had been so many.
But subtleties to theology, to the heavy among us who list to the side of ultimacy. It was all very simple, really, our skinning of this elder, this elder for refusing, and it followed our wrath:
Our wrath at the burial! One mumkins had been buried, one gentle Inanna, one mother of three saintly cubs--but buried, and this is the rub, too soon. For claw her way out she did, up out of the ground on that third day of the year, on that damned day of this world. And out of the grave, her vengeance was vast: vast upon the innocent. Enough of details:
We skinned the refusing elder. He refused our pleas, he refused our warnings of the obvious, which was that Inanna was loose, that mumkins was riveted by thoughts of vengeance. Oh, she was! For eighty of useful ties did she claw, full thirty of certain lineage she devoured, and ten of godly descent she did powder--to the silence of tears. For no one could speak, the questions were so subtle, of such doubtful quality even, so hazy were our ideas about this, so absent the precedents. A rampage, a mother, a mother on a rampage: too soon!
We skinned the elder for his silence, which was no silence of the noble in pain and confusion, no nonplussed oarsman was he. His was the silence of petty immuring, knuckleheaded flight from the chargingly clear; and soon did he learn that we, the nobly indignant, were in our hunching, in our fury, the appanage of one elder's evil; and that we, in our fury, were vents for a cosmic fury too large to behold but in death; and that we were the waves of death.
So far.
"There is no false gospel," he said. "But there is a wrong way to be," he said. "And that way is the way of hesitancy, of not trusting one's instincts but plunging instead into ways at best insincere, at worst disastrous, as, I am sorry to say, I judge this presentation of anger to be." That was not the worst of it.
"I say." He died, suffering none too much for the ineptitude of his quarrels, alone among his oarsmen. His dainty oarsmen, owing much, paid little but this elder's skin to Inanna.
But that, we know, was quite enough