1No one now can say for certain when Zarathustra lived, or in which valley. His own people have kept his songs for three thousand years and more, and they keep them still, but the songs do not give a year. The tellers say this much: that he was of the house of Spitama, that his father was Pourushaspa, a keeper of horses, and his mother was Dughdova. They say he was given to the priests to be taught when he was seven years old.
2This book tells his story as a story. Where the old tellers speak, it follows them. Where they are silent, it imagines, and you will know the imagining by its plainness.
3In that country, in those days, the priests were called karapans, the murmurers, and the lords were called kavis. Each needed the other. A kavi had young men and chariots. A karapan had the old words that made the gods lean close. When a kavi wished to raid, he sent cattle to the karapans, and the karapans killed a bull and read the signs and sang, and the signs said that the gods were pleased.
4The boy learned quickly. He had a voice that carried, and a memory that let nothing fall. By fifteen he could sing the long praises without a fault, and he was made a zaotar, one who pours the offering and leads the song. His teacher was an old karapan named Vaza, a soft, clever man, who loved the boy as much as he loved anyone.
5But the boy had a fault, and Vaza saw it early. He asked what the words meant.
6"We sing that the gods give victory to the just," the boy said once. "Last spring we sang it for the kavi of the lower valley. This spring we sang it for his enemy. Which of them is the just one?"
7"The one who brings the bull," said Vaza, and he smiled, for it was a joke among the priests.
8The boy did not smile. Vaza marked that, and was a little afraid for him.
9Now in the boy's twentieth year there was a kavi named Vandar who held the upper pastures. He was not a cruel man by the measure of that time. He had sixty young men who had grown up being told that a man is counted by the cattle he takes, and he had to feed them and keep them busy, or they would turn on him. So each autumn he raided.
10That autumn he chose a village at the foot of the hills. It was a poor place of settled people, who kept a few cows each and grew barley on the stream. They had no chariots. They had done Vandar no harm at all.
11He sent six fat cows to the karapans, and Vaza made the sacrifice. Zarathustra stood at the fire as zaotar, and poured, and sang. He had done it thirty times. But this time he watched the old man's hands as they turned over the liver of the bull, and he watched the old man's face, and he saw that Vaza did not look at the liver at all. He looked at the kavi, to see what was wanted.
12"The signs are fair," said Vaza. "The gods give the village into your hand."
13The young men shouted and beat their shields. They rode at dusk.
14Zarathustra did not sleep. Before light he went out of the camp alone and walked down toward the foot of the hills. He could not have said why. He only knew he had sung over a thing, and had not seen the thing, and that this was the wrong way round.
15He met the raid coming home. First the chariots, with the young men laughing and drunk on what they had done. Then the cattle, two hundred head, driven hard, their eyes rolling. A cow with a torn flank fell behind and was beaten forward. Her calf had been left in the village because it was too slow, and she kept turning her head back toward it and crying out, and each time she turned she was struck.
16He stood aside to let them pass. Then he went on down.
17The village was still smoking. The barley stores were burned, for raiders burn what they cannot carry. Some of the people sat in the lane without moving. Others were already at work, lifting and carrying, for work must be done whatever has happened. Four men lay under a cloth by the well. They were the ones who had stood in the gate of the cattle-pen with hoes.
18An old woman was sitting by an empty byre with the left-behind calf across her knees. It was too young to live without its mother, and she knew it, and she was stroking it anyway. She looked up at the young man in his priest's white.
19"Have you come to sing?" she said.
20He had no answer. He had not known until then that a question could be a blow.
21"They always send one to sing," she said. "Before, so the gods will help. After, so the gods will be thanked. I have lived through three raids. I have never yet heard what the cows did, that the gods should be so set against them."
22He stayed in that village all the day. He was strong, and he lifted beams. He carried water. He helped dig, and no one asked him to sing over what was dug, and he did not offer. Toward evening he tried to get milk into the calf from a rag, as herders do, and it would not take it. He had grown up among his father's horses and had never been able to see a beast suffer and walk on. The tellers say this of him from his boyhood, that in a hungry year he carried his father's fodder to other men's starving animals. Whether or not it is so, it is the kind of thing that was told.
23He walked back up to the kavi's camp in the dark. And as he walked, one thing came clear to him. He turned it over and tried to make it less, and it would not be less.
24The signs had not been fair. There had been no signs. An old man he loved had looked at a lord's face and said what the lord wished to hear, and had put the gods' name on it. Sixty young men had ridden out believing the sky itself was with them. Would they have done it otherwise? Some would. But not so gladly, and not all. The song had made it easy. The song was a part of the raid, as much as the chariots were. And he had sung it.
25In the camp they were making the feast of thanks. The stolen bull-calves had been cut out of the herd for the fire. The young men were boasting, and Vandar sat in the high seat, and Vaza came hurrying to meet his student with his hands out.
26"Where have you been? Wash. You are to lead the praise. The kavi has asked for you by name; he likes your voice. There will be a horse in it for you, and for your father a pair of oxen."
27"I went down to the village," said Zarathustra.
28The old man's face changed, only a little. "That was foolish. What is there to see in a village? Go and wash."
29"Teacher. What did you see in the liver?"
30Vaza looked about them. No one was near. He spoke low and fast, the way a man speaks to a child at the edge of a cliff. "I saw what every karapan before me has seen. I saw that a kavi who is told no finds a priest who will tell him yes, and that the first priest goes hungry. The raid would have gone with or without my word. The village would have burned the same. I changed nothing. I only ate. So will you. Now wash your hands, and sing, and tomorrow this will be smaller."
31"If your word changes nothing," said the young man, "why does he pay six cows for it?"
32Vaza had no answer to that. In forty years no one had asked him.
33They brought Zarathustra before the fire. The whole camp was there. The bull-calves stood roped, and beyond them the stolen herd shifted in the dark, and somewhere in it one cow was still crying for her calf. The kavi lifted his cup. The young men fell quiet for the song.
34He stood with the pouring-bowl in his hands, and he did not sing.
35The quiet went on. Someone laughed, thinking he had forgotten the words. Vaza, behind him, breathed the first line to help him.
36"I know the words," Zarathustra said. He did not shout, but he had a voice that carried. "The words say that the gods gave this herd to the just. I walked to the village today. I saw whose herd it was. I helped to bury four men who had hoes in their hands. I will not tell the gods a thing that I know is false. And I will not tell it to you."
37No priest had ever done this. The young men did not at first understand what had been done. Vandar understood. He put down his cup.
38"Priest," he said, quite gently, "you ate my bread this morning."
39"I did, lord. I ask your pardon for it."
40"I am not asking for your pardon. I am asking for a song. It is a small thing. It is breath. You have sung it thirty times."
41"Then I have thirty things to be sorry for," said Zarathustra.
42A captain of the young men came off his bench and struck him across the face with the back of his hand, and he went down beside the fire with the bowl under him. He got up. The captain looked to the kavi, to know whether to draw. It was that near.
43It was old Vaza who saved him. He came forward wringing his hands, and he lied. "Lord, the boy has a fever! He has walked all day in the sun without food. I have seen this before; they see things, they say wild words. Let me take him away. I will sing the praise myself. I have a better voice for it, an older voice, the gods know my voice." And he began the song at once, loudly, before the kavi could answer, and the young men, who wanted their feast, took it up.
44Vandar let it pass. But he looked at the young priest over the heads of the singers, a long cold look, and Zarathustra knew that he could not come to that fire again, nor to any fire where Vandar's word ran.
45Vaza came to him afterward in the dark. The old man was shaking. "I have saved your life with a lie," he said. "Do you see now what they are for?"
46"I see that you love me," said Zarathustra. "I see that too. And tomorrow the kavi will send to another village, and you will read the liver, and it will be fair."
47"And if I say it is not fair? He will find another to say it."
48"Then he will have to look for him," said Zarathustra. "That is one day. And the other may say no also. That is two days. Teacher, I do not know how many days a village needs."
49He went home to his father's house. Pourushaspa had already heard, for such news runs on four legs. He was a plain man with a living to make among the kavis, and he was more frightened than angry. "It is only words," he said. "You are asked to say words. A wise man gives the lords their words and keeps his thoughts for himself."
50"Father, I have tried. I cannot find the place where the word stops and the deed begins. I sang, and they rode. Which was it?"
51His mother Dughdova said nothing through all this. But she packed bread for a journey that no one had spoken of yet.
52The tellers say he left his father's house in his twentieth year, and that for ten years he wandered and asked. They do not say where. This book imagines that he went as a poor priest goes, from camp to village, singing at births and at graves, for at those he could sing with a whole heart. It imagines that at every fire he asked the old ones what he had asked Vaza: why does the wrong man win? Who made the order of things, the sun's road and the turning stars and the seasons that do not fail, and if he made it well, where does the crooked come from?
53He got many answers. The crooked comes from the gods' anger. From a bad sacrifice. From the stars. From fate, which no one can turn. Each answer put the cause somewhere far off, where no man's hand could reach it. He weighed each one against four men with hoes, and sixty young men riding, and one old man looking at a lord's face, and none of the answers was heavy enough.
54Long afterward he made a song about the cattle. His people sing it still. In it the soul of the ox cries out to the powers above, and the words, as one scholar has turned them into our tongue, are these: "For whom did ye fashion me? Who created me? Violence and rapine (and) savagery hath oppressed me, and outrage and might."
55The old woman by the byre would have known that song. It was her question. He carried it ten years before he found what he took to be the answer, and he found it at a river, at dawn, with a water jar in his hands.