1Zarathustra had a cousin, the son of his father's brother, and the cousin's name was Maidyoimanha. The old tellers name him, and they say one thing of him above all: that he was the first to listen. This is his chapter. The words he speaks in it are imagined, for no one wrote them down; what he did is told as the tellers tell it.
2He was not a priest. He was a herdsman with forty cows, a wife, two small sons and a sound opinion of himself. He had loved his cousin when they were boys, and he had thought him a fool when he threw away a good place at the kavi's fire. Ten years he had not seen him.
3Then, in the spring of Zarathustra's thirtieth year, the wanderer came home for the festival of the new grass. He was thin and burned dark by the sun. He ate at Maidyoimanha's hearth and played with the boys, and he was easier to be with than he had been. But he was still asking his questions, and the questions had not grown smaller. Maidyoimanha listened with half an ear and thought about a lame heifer.
4On the morning of the festival the priests needed water for the rite, drawn from the middle of the river where it runs clean. It was a cold task and Zarathustra took it. Maidyoimanha went down with him to hold his cloak, grumbling, for it was not yet light.
5The river was the Daitya, and it ran high and grey with snow water. Zarathustra waded in with the jar. The water came to his knees, then his waist, and the current pulled at him. In the middle he stopped.
6Maidyoimanha waited on the bank. He saw his cousin stand in the river with the jar held against his chest. He saw the sky go from grey to white. Then the sun came over the eastern hills all at once, as it does in that country, and the whole river turned to light, and the man in it was a dark shape with brightness running round him. He did not move. He stood so long that Maidyoimanha called his name, twice, afraid that the cold had taken his legs.
7What came to Zarathustra in that river, his own people tell in their own words. They say that Good Thought came to him there, shining, and led him before the Wise Lord. They have told it so for a hundred generations, and it is theirs to tell. This book tells only what the man on the bank could see. He saw his cousin stand in cold water until the sun was a hand's breadth high, and then come wading back with the jar full, and his face was not the face he had gone in with.
8"You are blue," said Maidyoimanha, and put the cloak round him. "What were you doing? Counting fish?"
9Zarathustra sat down on the stones. His teeth knocked together. When he could speak he said, "I have been asking the wrong way round. For ten years."
10"I could have told you that."
11"I asked where the crooked comes from. The stars, the gods, fate. I looked for it far off. Cousin, look at the river. It keeps its bed. The sun came up where it came up yesterday. The grass is coming, as it came last year. Everything out there keeps faith. There is an order in it and it does not lie. A wise one made it so; I can call him nothing but that. Mazda. The Wise Lord."
12"The priests have fifty gods. You have found a fifty-first."
13"No. Listen. Only one creature I know of can say the thing that is not. The river cannot. The ox cannot. A man can. A man can look at the liver of a bull and see nothing and say, the signs are fair. That is where the crooked comes in. It does not fall on us from the stars. It comes in at the mouth. It comes in before that, at the thought. Two ways stand in front of every man, every day, the true and the false, and he picks. No god picks for him. No fate. Vaza picked. Vandar picked. I picked, thirty times, with a pouring-bowl in my hand."
14Maidyoimanha was a herdsman, and he said what a herdsman would say. "And when you have picked right, do the cows come back?"
15"No," said Zarathustra. "But they are not taken the next time. Or one fewer village is. I do not know. I only know which side I am to stand on, and that I must tell the others they are standing somewhere too, whether they know it or not."
16He took the water up to the priests. And that day, at the festival, before all his kin, he began to say it.
17It went badly. Hear how badly.
18He told the karapans that the gods of the raiders were no gods to be praised, for they were praised with lies. He told the kavis that a herd taken by the spear was a wrong, though every father had done it. He told the common people that each of them, man and woman, chose between the true way and the false, each for himself, and that no priest could do the choosing for them with a bull. He asked them to think well, to speak well, to do well, and he said that this was the whole of the offering.
19The priests heard that they were not needed. The lords heard that they were thieves. The people heard that the fault was their own. There was no one at that festival to whom he had brought good news.
20They laughed first. Then they stopped laughing. For ten years he went up and down his own country saying it, and the tellers say that in ten years he gained no one. Doors were shut on him. Children were called indoors. His father's house was shamed. He was not struck often, for he was a priest of good family, but he was not fed often either.
21Maidyoimanha fed him. He did not agree with him. He thought the thing about the Wise Lord might be so and might not, and that either way a man with forty cows had no business with it. But Zarathustra was his cousin, and his sons liked him, and he sang well at the hearth in the evenings, strange new songs that stayed in the ear.
22One of them Maidyoimanha heard so often that he had it by heart without wishing to. His people sing it still, and a scholar of our own time has turned part of it into our speech in this way: "Hear with your ears the best things; look upon them with clear-seeing thought, for decision between the two Beliefs, each man for himself." And of the two ways that stand before each one, the same song says: "And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so."
23"Each man for himself," Maidyoimanha would say. "That is your trouble. People do not want it for themselves. They want it done for them, by someone in white, and to be told it went well."
24"I know," said Zarathustra. "I was the one in white."
25Now in the tenth year a sickness came on the cattle of that valley. It began in the low pastures and came up. Cows stood with their heads down and would not eat, and in three days they were dead. Men burned their own herds to stop it and it did not stop.
26The karapans made sacrifice, and it did not stop. They made a greater sacrifice. Then, since the gods had been paid and had not answered, the fault had to lie with someone, and the priests knew with whom. For ten years a man had gone about that valley saying their gods were no gods. Was it a wonder the gods had turned their faces away?
27The chief karapan of the valley was a hard old man named Bendar. He did not want a killing on his own hands. He wanted the clan to do it, by its own law, so that it would be clean. And for that he needed a witness.
28He came to Maidyoimanha's house with six elders. They were men Maidyoimanha had known all his life. They sat and took milk, and they were kind.
29"You have housed him," said Bendar. "No one blames you. He is your blood. But you have heard him at your hearth, night after night. You have heard him curse the herds."
30"I have not."
31"Think. He has said the cattle offerings are an evil. He has said it at your fire. A man who speaks against the offering of cattle speaks against the cattle. That is a curse, in law. We ask only that you say before the clan what you heard."
32"I heard him say the offerings were wrong. I never heard him wish harm on a cow. He cannot pass a lame dog."
33Bendar put down his bowl. "Maidyoimanha. You have nineteen cows left of forty. So have we all. The people are frightened and they will have someone. It can be the man who brought this on us. Or it can be the house that sheltered him. You have two sons. I am an old man and I say this in friendship. Stand before the clan tomorrow and say: I heard him curse the herds. Seven words. Then you are clear of it. You will keep your pasture and your name, and when the sickness passes we will remember who stood with us."
34They left him to think.
35He sat by his fire most of that night. His wife sat across from him. She had never liked Zarathustra much; he ate their bread and brought trouble. She said, "It is seven words."
36"It is."
37"You do not even believe what he teaches."
38"I do not know what I believe. I know what I heard. If I stand up tomorrow and say I heard a thing I did not hear, they will stone him at the river. With my seven words. The priests will have asked, and the clan will have thrown, but I will have done it."
39"And if you do not say it, they will take the pasture. They may do worse."
40"Yes."
41She looked at the two boys asleep under one hide. He looked at them too. Do not think this was easy for him because the tellers call him the first. He had lived his whole life in that valley. Every man who would turn from him tomorrow had helped him raise his roof.
42He thought: Bendar does not believe my cousin killed the cows. Bendar has seen cattle sickness before. He needs the people to have an answer, and a false answer will do as well as a true one for that. Better, for a true one he does not have. And tomorrow they will burn my cousin's memory and feel safe, and the cows will go on dying, and no one will look for why, because they will think they know.
43That was what turned him, in the end. He was a herdsman. He wanted to know why the cows were dying. And he saw that the lie would not only kill a man. It would stop the looking.
44In the morning he stood before the clan at the meeting stone. Bendar asked him, in the old form, what he had heard at his hearth.
45"I have heard my cousin say many things I do not understand," said Maidyoimanha. "I have heard him say the bull offerings are wrong. I have never heard him curse a living beast, and I do not believe he has. The sickness began in the low pastures a month before he came back from the south. Every man here knows that. I was asked to say otherwise. I will not."
46There was a great noise. Bendar let it rise, and then he said, coldly, that a man who shields a blasphemer shares his guilt, and that the house of Maidyoimanha should have no share in the common pasture from that day. The elders agreed, one by one. Not one of them met his eyes.
47He went home and told his wife to load the cart. She wept and called him a fool, and she loaded it.
48Zarathustra came to him while he was yoking the oxen. He had heard. He stood with his hands hanging, and for once he had no words ready.
49"You have lost everything for me," he said at last.
50"Not for you," said Maidyoimanha. He pulled a strap tight. "Do not flatter yourself. I am a plain man. They asked me to say a thing was so when it was not. I found I could not do it. I had not known that about myself. A man should know what he cannot do."
51He worked at the strap a while longer. Then he said, not looking up, "Tell me again about the two ways. Slowly. It seems I have picked one, and I would like to know what it is called."
52So Zarathustra told him, there by the cart, and that was the first time in ten years that anyone had asked to hear it. The tellers count Maidyoimanha as the first of all who followed him. He would have said that he only declined to say seven words.
53They left the valley together before noon, two men, one woman, two boys, nineteen cows and a cart. The sickness, as it happened, burned itself out by midsummer, as such things do. By then no one in that valley was left to say who had been right. That is often the way of it. The one who tells the truth is seldom there to see it proved.
54They had no place to go. And it was already late in the year.