Orion and the Conqueror Page 17

  "I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the Doctrine. I go for refuge to the Order."

  His prayers must have worked. We were not attacked.

  As we inched toward the Zagros Mountains that bordered the Iranian plateau we saw the Great King's soldiers here and there along the road, usually near the wells or caravansaries. Their task was to protect travelers, but the roads were too long and the soldiers too few for such protection to be more than a token. Besides, they always demanded "tax" money in return for the little protection they gave.

  "They're worse than the bandits," said one of my men as we rode past a checkpoint on the outskirts of a small town. I had just paid the captain of the local soldiers a few coins' "tax."

  "Paying them is easier than fighting them," I said. "Besides, they are satisfied with very little."

  Ketu bobbed his head as he rode on my other side. "Accept what cannot be avoided," he said. "That is part of the Eightfold Path."

  Yes, I thought. But still, it rankles.

  Ketu seemed more worried than angry. "Only a year ago I passed this way, heading for Athens. There were almost no bandits and all the inns were flourishing. The king's soldiers were plentiful. But now—the new Great King is not being obeyed. His power has diminished very quickly, very quickly indeed."

  I wondered if his empire's internal problems would lead the Great King to agree to Philip's terms, so that he would not have to fight the Greeks with his diminished army. Or would he, like Philip, use a foreign foe to weld his people together in newfound unity?

  My sleep was becoming more uneasy each night, more restless. I did not really dream; at least, I remembered nothing in the morning except vague stirrings, blurred images, as if seen through a rain-streaked window. I did not visit the Creators' domain, nor was I visited by Hera or any of the others. Yet my sleep was disturbed, as if I sensed a threat lurking in the darkness nearby.

  We posted guards, even when we camped with caravans that had their own troops with them. I took my share of guard duty. I needed little sleep, and I especially liked to be up to watch the dawn rising. Whether in the cold and windswept mountains or out on the bare baking desert, it pleased me deep in my soul to watch the stars slowly fade away and see the sky turn milky gray, then delicate gossamer pink, and finally to see the sun rise, huge and powerful and too bright to look at directly.

  "They worship me," I remembered the Golden One saying, "in the form of the sun. I am Aten, the sun-god, the giver of life, the Creator of humankind."

  I had given up all hope of reaching Anya, the goddess whom I loved. Those troubling half dreams tormented my sleep, dim indistinct visions blurring my unconscious mind, stirring forgotten memories within me. I wondered if Could ever achieve the state of desirelessness that Ketu promised would bring me the blessed oblivion of Nirvana. I The thought of getting off this endless wheel of suffering, of putting a final end to life, appealed to me more and more.

  And then one night she came to me.

  It was no dream. I was translated to a different place, a different time. It was not even Earth, but a strange world of molten, bubbling lava and stars crowding the sky so thickly that there was no night. It was like being inside an infinitely-faceted jewel—with boiling lava at your feet.

  Somehow I hung suspended above the molten rock. I felt no heat. And when I put out my arms, they were blocked by an invisible web of energy.

  Then Anya appeared before me, in a glittering uniform of silver mesh, its high collar buttoned at her throat, polished silver boots halfway up her calves. Like me, she hovered unharmed above the roiling sea of seething lava.

  "Orion," she said, urgency in her voice, "everything is changing very rapidly. I only have a few moments."

  I gazed on her incredibly beautiful face the way a man dying of thirst in the desert must look at a spring of clear, fresh water.

  "Where are we?" I asked. "Why can't I be with you?"

  "The continuum is in danger of being totally disrupted. The forces arrayed against us are gaining strength with every microsecond."

  "How can I help? What can I do?"

  "You must help Hera! Do you understand? It's imperative that you help Hera!"

  "But she wants to kill Philip," I protested.

  "There's no time for argument, Orion. No time for discussion. Hera has a crucial role to play and she needs you to help her!"

  I had never seen Anya look so pained, so wide-eyed with fright.

  "You must!" she repeated.

  "When can we be together?" I asked.

  "Orion, I can't bargain with you! You must do as you are commanded!"

  I looked deep into Anya's gray eyes. They had always been so calm before, so wise and soothing. Now they were close to panic.

  And they were not gray, but yellow as a snake's.

  "Stop this masquerade," I said.

  Anya stared at me, open-mouthed. Then her face shifted, flowed like the boiling lava below me, and turned into Hera's laughing features.

  "Very good, Orion! Very perceptive of you!"

  "You are a witch," I said. "A demon sorceress."

  Her laughter was cold, brittle. "If you could have seen the expression on your face when you thought your precious Anya had deigned to appear to you!"

  "Then all of this is an illusion, isn't it?"

  The seething ocean of magma disappeared. The jewel cluster of stars winked out. We were standing on a barren plain in Anatolia in the dark of a moonless night. I could see my camp, where Ketu and the soldiers slept. Two guards shuffled near the dying fire, their cloaks pulled tight around them. But they did not see us.

  The metallic silver uniform Anya had been wearing had turned to copper red on Hera. Her flaming hair tumbled past her shoulders.

  "Most of it was an illusion, Orion," Hera said to me. "But there was one point of truth in it. You must help me. If you don't, you will never see your beloved Anya again."

  "What did you mean about the continuum being in danger of disruption?"

  "That doesn't concern you, creature. You are here in this time and place to do my bidding. And don't think that just because Philip has sent you far from Pella that I can't reach out and pluck you whenever I choose to."

  "Is Anya in danger?"

  "We all are," she snapped. "But you are in the most danger of all, if you don't obey me."

  I lowered my eyes. "What must I do?"

  "When the time comes I will let you know," she said haughtily.

  "But how—"

  She was gone. I was standing alone in the cold night. Far in the distance a wolf bayed at the newly-risen moon.

  The more I learned from Ketu about the Way the more I was attracted to it. And repelled, at the same time.

  "The key to Nirvana is desirelessness," he told me over and again. "Give up all desire. Ask for nothing, accept everything."

  The world is an endless round of suffering—that I knew. The Buddha taught that we endure life after life, constantly reborn to go through the whole pain-wracked cycle again, endlessly, unless we learn how to find oblivion.

  "Meditate upon these truths," Ketu instructed me. "See everything around you as Nirvana. See all beings as Buddha. Hear all sounds as sacred mantras."

  I was no good at all at meditation. And much of what seemed perfectly clear and obvious to Ketu was darkly obscure to my mind. The thought of final nothingness, the chance to escape the agony of life, was tempting, I admit. Yet, at the same time, oblivion frightened me. I did not want to cease to exist; I only wanted an end to my suffering.

  Ketu would shake his head when I told him this. "The two are inextricably bound together, my friend, intertwined like the strands of a rope. To live is to suffer, to feel pain is to be alive. You cannot end one without ending the other."

  "But I don't want an end to all sensation," I confessed to him. "In my heart of hearts I don't want complete oblivion.

  "Nirvana is not oblivion," Ketu told me eagerly. "No, no! Nirvana is not a total extinguishing.
All that is extinguished is the self-centered life to which the unenlightened cling. The truly real is not extinguished; indeed, only in Nirvana can the truly real be attained."

  I could not understand his abstractions.

  "Think of Nirvana as a boundless expansion of your spirit. Through Nirvana you will enter into communion with the entire universe! It is not as if a drop of water is added to the ocean; it is as if all the oceans of the world enter a single drop of water."

  He was completely convinced of it and happy in his conviction. I could not overcome the doubts that assailed me. If I achieved nothingness, I would never see Anya again. Never know her love, her touch. If I found the final oblivion I would never be able to help her, and from all that I had gleaned from Hera, she needed my help desperately. Yet Hera was keeping me from her. How could I break through Hera's control and—

  I realized that I was far, very far, from being without desire.

  On his part, Ketu remained fascinated by my claim to remember my earlier lives; at least, parts of some of them. For all I could remember were isolated fragments, a brief moment here, a snatch of a soldier's song, the great dust clouds of the Mongol Horde on the march, the burning fury of a nuclear reactor running wild.

  One sunrise, after another troubled, tossing night of obscure fears and blurred memories, I sniffed the crisp breeze blowing from the northwest as the men prepared their morning meal. We had camped in the open, along the shoulder of the long, wagon-rutted Royal Road in the middle of flat brown scrublands.

  "Lake Van is in that direction," I said to Ketu, pointing into the wind. "And beyond it is Ararat."

  His big soulful eyes widened at me. "You know the sacred mountain?"

  "I lived near it once, with a hunting tribe . . ." My words dwindled away because that was all I could remember: the snow-capped mountain, steam issuing from one of its twin peaks, shrouding the heights in clouds.

  "A hunting tribe?" he urged.

  "It was a long time ago." I tried all day to recall more, but the memories were locked away from me. I knew that Anya had been in that tribe with me, but there had been someone else. A man, the tribe's leader. And Ahriman! I remembered the dark, brooding danger that he threatened. I remembered the cave bear that killed me for him.

  A week later a new memory assailed me. We were near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, where the temples of Ishtar and Shamash once rose in glory. And mighty Sennacherib, who claimed that he himself had invented crucifixion as the most agonizing way to put his enemies to death. I remembered the rows of crosses lining the road as we marched back toward his palace—the grandest that had ever been built, he believed.

  These were the memories that assailed my sleep. I had been in this ancient tortured land before, many times, many lives ago. The memories seemed to rise up from the blood- soaked ground like ancient ghosts, shifting, indistinct, tantalizing and almost frightening in a way. Anya was at the core of all these half-remembered lives. The goddess had taken on human form time and again, for my sake, to be with me, because she loved me. Was she trying to reach me now? Was she trying to break down the walls in my mind that separated us?

  "I will never achieve Nirvana," I confessed to Ketu one night as we took our supper at a well-guarded caravansary. We were almost at Susa, at the end of the Royal Road. The Great King obviously had a firmer grip on the land here.

  "It takes time," Ketu said gently, sitting across the table from me. We had been given a private booth since Ketu had told the innkeeper that he was an envoy of the Great King. "It takes many lifetimes to reach the state of blessedness."

  I shook my head. "I don't think I'll ever get there. I don't even think I want to."

  "Then you will continue to endure life after life. Continue to suffer."

  "Maybe that's what we're supposed to do."

  Ketu would not argue. "Perhaps," was all he said, keeping his convictions to himself.

  But he was curious. "Two weeks' journey to the southwest is the mighty city of Babylon. What memories do you have of it?"

  I concentrated, but nothing came forth.

  "The hanging gardens?" Ketu prompted hopefully. "The great ziggurat?"

  Something stirred at that. "Uruk," I heard myself say. "Gilgamesh the king and his friend Enkidu."

  "You knew them?" His voice went hollow with awe.

  I nodded, wishing that the memories would become clear to me. "I think I was Enkidu," I said. "I know that Gilgamesh was my friend."

  "That was at the very beginning of time," Ketu whispered.

  "No," I said. "It was long ago, but not at the beginning."

  "Ah, if only you could remember more."

  I had to smile at him. "You are not entirely desireless yourself, my friend."

  Chapter 20

  We arrived in Susa at last, and a mighty city it was, but I saw almost none of it. We "Greeks" were told to camp outside the capital's looming walls, while Ketu was escorted to the palace by a squad of the king's soldiers.

  He came back a few hours later, looking unhappy.

  "The Great King and his court have already moved to Parsa. We must go there."

  Parsa was the springtime capital, a city unknown to Philip or even Aristotle. In time, Alexandros would call it Persepolis. We started out for Parsa, this time escorted by a troop of Persian cavalry, their horses glittering with gold-decorated helmets and silver-studded harnesses that jingled as we rode even farther east through gray-brown desert and hot, sand-laden winds.

  When we finally arrived there, I saw that Parsa was magnificent, but it was not truly a city. The old Dareios, the one who had first invaded Greece nearly two centuries earlier, had built Parsa to be his personal monument. Laid out in the sun-baked brown hills on a flat terrace at the foot of a massive granite promontory, Parsa looked as if it had been carved out of the living rock itself. Indeed, the tombs of Artaxerxes and other Great Kings were cut deep into the cliff face.

  Parsa was not a true city. It had no private homes, no market place, no existence at all except as a residence for the king and court for a few months each spring. Oh, a scattering of people lived there all year long, but they were merely caretakers to keep the place from falling into ruin from one royal visit to the next.

  Yet it was magnificent: far bigger than Pella, far grander than Athens. The king's palace was enormous; it had to be, to house his extensive harem. The meeting hall, where the court convened and the king sat to hear petitions, held a single room so large that fully a hundred pillars supported the vast expanse of the roof. Everywhere I looked I saw statues leafed in gold, gigantic reliefs on the walls of winged bulls, lions with men's heads on them, or human forms with animals' heads atop them. Among Philip's Macedonians the lion was a common symbol; in Athens all the statues I had seen had been of men or women—humans, even when they were representing gods and goddesses.

  To me, this Persian architecture seemed heavy, ponderous, almost ugly in comparison to the fluted grace of the Parthenon. These massive, gigantic buildings were meant to dwarf mortal men, to awe them and impress them with the power of the Great King, much like the colossal palaces of the Pharaoh in his cities along the Nile. The cities and temples of the Greeks were much more human in dimension. Here the buildings were gigantic, decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, with ivory from Hindustan and carnelian from the mountains that were called the Roof of the World.

  Yet despite all this display of wealth and splendor—or perhaps because of it—the palace seemed to me more pompous than majestic.

  What was impressive was the fantastic variety of peoples at the court; a thousand different nationalities were bound up in this vast empire. To reach Parsa we had already traveled through Phrygia, Cappadocia, Syria and the ancient land of Sumer between the Twin Rivers, over the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plain. Now I saw that there were even more lands and more peoples in the empire: swarthy Elamites and turbaned Parthians, olive-skinned Medes and dour lean Bactrians, dark men from dist
ant Kush and eagle-eyed mountain dwellers from the Roof of the World. The Persians themselves were only a small minority among all these mixtures of peoples. The palace hummed with a hundred different languages, and buzzed with constant intrigues that made the machinations back at Pella seem like children's games.

  Dareios had only recently come to the throne, after the assassination of the previous Great King. The empire was in turmoil as the new king struggled to bring its far-flung peoples under his central control. We had seen the signs of chaos as we had traveled on the Royal Road. Here in the magnificent palace at Parsa I saw that Dareios was working hard to solidify his hold on the throne.

  We were given a small house in the section of the city where the army was quartered, not far from the palace. The men quickly learned about the king's harem and joked about how they would relieve the loneliness of so many women who had to wait upon the pleasure of one man.

  "You mean he has a couple of hundred wives?" asked one of my men at dinner our first night there.

  "They are concubines," explained Ketu. "Not true wives."

  "But they're his?"

  "Oh yes, they are certainly his."

  "All those women for the king alone?"

  "It is death for them even to see another man."

  Another shouted across our dining table, "Can we get them to keep their eyes closed?"

  "If a man is found among them," Ketu said, very seriously, "he is dismembered, a little at a time, over many, many days. They start by cutting off his testicles."

  That silenced their jokes, but only for a few moments.

  "Might be worth it," one of the men muttered, "if you can work your way through forty or fifty of 'em before they catch you."

  "Yah," said another. "By then your balls would be all worn out anyway."

  To my surprise, Ketu asked me to come with him when he was granted his audience with the Great King.

  "I want Dareios to see the kind of men that Philip has serving him," he told me. Then his face relaxed into a warm smile. "Besides, my friend, I think you are burning with desire to see the man who rules this mighty empire."