Orion and the Conqueror o-4 Page 17

  The illusion of worldly passion. That reminded me of what Aristotle had said about Plato’s belief in pure ideas as opposed to physical sensations. The passions of this world seemed real enough to me, though.

  “ ‘If these thirsts and illusions are traced to their source,’ ” Ketu intoned, “ ‘they are found to be rooted in the intense desires of physical instincts. Thus desire seeks that which it feels desirable, even if it sometimes causes death.’ ”

  “But these instincts are built into us,” I objected. “They are part of the human makeup.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ketu agreed. “That is why it is so difficult to overcome them.”

  “Can a person overcome them?”

  “The Buddha certainly did,” he answered. “So have others. It is very, very difficult, of course, but not totally impossible.” Then he fell back to his sing-song recitation, “ ‘If desire, which lies at the root of all human passion, can be removed, then passion will die out and all human suffering will be ended. This is called the Truth of the Termination of Suffering.’ ”

  It sounded impossible to me. Remove all desire: food, drink, love, companionship, power, respect, the yearning for glory, the instinct for self-preservation, the yearning for justice—how could a man live without any desire at all?

  As we rode to Kallipolis on the Chersonese, as we sailed across the narrow strait of the Hellespont into Asia, as we rode the dusty trails and rugged bare hills of Lydia toward Sardis where the Royal Road began, I begged Ketu for every scrap of information he knew about the Way.

  In turn, Ketu was fascinated by my vague recollection of earlier lives. Under his prodding each night, I began to remember more and more.

  “The whole world was covered with ice and snow,” I told him one night as we sat before our flickering camp fire. “Winter lasted all year long. There were giant beasts, like elephants except that they were bigger, and covered with shaggy fur.”

  Ketu’s eyes glowed in the firelight as he listened. We always kept apart from the other men while we spoke of these things. I had no desire to have them laugh at me or, worse, spend the night arguing and tossing their own ignorant opinions around the fire.

  “You remember Troy?” Ketu would ask.

  “I was there when Hector almost broke into the Achaian camp and wiped out the Greeks.”

  “And Helen? Was she as beautiful as the legends say?”

  “The most beautiful woman on earth,” I answered honestly. I remembered that Helen and I had been lovers, but I did not speak of it. For all his lectures to me about the Eightfold Path and the need to remove all desires from one’s soul, Ketu was far from desireless.

  Often we camped among shepherds with the tinkling bells of their sheep lulling us to sleep. Once we reached the Royal Road, we spent most nights in caravansaries, old weather-worn inns along the main road leading into the interior of the land. Most of them looked as if they had been there for centuries.

  In some places, though, the caravansaries were gutted, burned out, abandoned.

  “This is not good,” Ketu would mutter over and again. “This is not good. The power of the Great King must be weakening.”

  More than once we were forced to sleep alone in the dark wilderness with nothing but our guttering fire and the distant howling of wolves. But whether we slept in comfortable caravansaries or under the glittering stars, each night I gleaned more from Ketu.

  “ ‘This is the noble truth of sorrow,’ ” he recited. “ ‘Birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow. All the components of individuality are sorrow. And this is the noble truth of the arising of sorrow. It arises from craving, which leads to rebirth, which brings delight and passion.’ ”

  “But aren’t delight and passion good things?” I asked.

  “No, no, no!” Ketu exclaimed. “The noble truth of the stopping of sorrow is the complete stopping of craving, being emancipated from delight and passion. That is the noble truth of the Way which leads to the stopping of sorrow. That is the Eightfold Path.”

  Very, very difficult indeed, I thought.

  By day our little band rode through the hilly wastes of Phrygia, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanying long mule trains loaded with timber and hides and grain from the rich farmlands along the fringe of the Black Sea. We passed other caravans coming from the east, stately camels and sturdy oxen carrying ivory from Africa, silks from far Cathay and spices from Hindustan. More than once such caravans were attacked by bandits and we helped to fight them off. Strangely, when we rode by ourselves, just the twenty-six of us with our horses and spare mounts and pack mules, no bandits bothered us.

  “They can see that you are armed soldiers,” Ketu told me. “They know that there is very little in your packs worth stealing. The caravans are much more tempting to them. Or a few travelers straggling along the road who can be slain easily and despoiled. But soldiers—no, I do not think they will try to molest us.”

  Yet, more than once I spied lean, ragged men on horseback eyeing our little group from a distant hilltop as we rode along the Royal Road. Each time I heard Ketu chanting to himself:

  “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 I could ever achieve the state of desirelessness that Ketu promised would bring me the blessed oblivion o
f Nirvana. 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 gran
dest 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.”