The Sword of the Fifth Element

by Peter Harris

2

  The Cave of the Goddess

  Truth-obsessed, drunk with a new feeling of complete freedom from the lower world, climbing higher and higher in the sunlight, Calibur made for the peaks of the transcendent mountains.

  But he did not notice the weather closing in. Thick clouds were sweeping down the mountainside, and it became bitterly cold and dark. The path vanished in the gloom, and soon he knew he was lost. A strange shape loomed up before him, and he stopped, afraid that it was a bear or some other wild creature of the mountains. He waited for its attack, frozen to the spot. He thought of the bitter irony that he, a sword-smith, had no sword to defend himself. But the shape did not attack, or even move. He stepped closer. It was only an upright stone. He sighed with relief, but then he noticed the grim words inscribed on the stone:

  IN MEMORIAM

  Brushing a drift of snow from the lower part, he read:

  Here lieth Boghild,

  a pilgrim

  beloved of Anne

  until the World’s End.

  He felt a chill of fear in his heart, and a lump in his throat. ‘Is it a warning?’ he caught himself thinking. But he stumbled on past the grim sentinel, knowing he would freeze to death if he stopped, and unable in his heart to turn back.

  He was growing weaker. He knew he did not have long. But no matter which way he looked, his eyes stinging in the freezing wind, he could not see any sign of the hermitage, or find a way down. So he kept climbing up by lightning-blasted ledges into the blinding blizzard, and by great good luck he finally came to a high mountain pass. Near the very top, as he stood exhausted, wondering if he would die on his feet, he saw an overhang in the rock where the snow swirled and piled high. Stumbling blindly through the icy drift, he felt a recess in the overhang. It was not quite a cave, but the wind was much less and hardly any snow had fallen there. He had brought a bundle of woollen blankets and gloves, and a fur hat, and now he wrapped himself up in them all. Curling up in the recess beneath the overhang, he shivered, hugging his frozen hands, until he felt some warmth and life returning to his limbs. ‘I am free at last!’ he thought as he drifted off to sleep. ‘Tomorrow I will find the Writer of the Book, or die in the attempt.’

  But the next morning it was fine, and the view from the recess was so magnificent he felt he could look out and glimpse the Infinite. Also, looking about the overhang, he found to his amazement that it led into a proper cave, unseen by him in the night. He shivered at the thought. ‘What if some wild beast lives inside?’ he wondered. ‘Yet, in there I could be almost cosy, out of reach of the cursed wind.’ So, after eating some of the dried fruit from his pack, he cautiously felt his way inside.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw an alcove with the remains of a bed of heather. ‘Perhaps it was once used by some hermit; perhaps even the Writer himself’ he thought. ‘It is musty, but it looks warm and dry enough.’ Suddenly there was a loud rustling in the bed. He backed away in fear. But when he saw a little grey tail disappearing into the heather, he breathed again. It was only a rat. ‘Cursed animal,’ he muttered, recovering from the fright.

  Exploring further in, he found a well brimming with crystal-clear water. He drank from it thankfully. Then, finding a stick, he stirred up the bed with it and chased the rat out of the cave. And looking up at the boundless blue sky, he marvelled at this new provision from the One.

  So Calibur decided to stay at the cave awhile to read and meditate before setting out again to find the Writer of the Book. He had a good store of dried duck-meat and fruits from Rosa’s garden, apricots and raisins and nuts (and the rosehips), and there was dry wood in the ancient straggly firs that clung to the mountainsides.

  On the following day Calibur looked for the hermitage, but found no sign of it, so returned to the cave. He drank from the well, and propped the icon of the Perfect Woman against the rock in the alcove. ‘I will stay here until my food runs out, and live as an ascetic hermit, and read and practise the Book myself without the help of the Writer,’ he said to the icon, and he became elated at the thought. ‘My friends will be the truths in the Book, and the woman in the icon, and the fresh winds and sunlight.’ And he laughed aloud until the mountains echoed. He thought of Rosa. ‘She would think I was truly mad now,’ he muttered to the icon. ‘But we know better, don’t we? Soon I will be enlightened, and the truth of all things will be laid bare to me. Then you and I and The One will have the last laugh. How we will laugh!’ And he ate some dried fruits and nuts, and threw the seeds down the mountainside. He began to wonder how he would fare when the dried food ran out, but answered himself: ‘Now I am a holy man, the One will provide; has He not already provided a cave and a bed, and a well?’

  Calibur did not yet know it, but the cave was an ancient shrine to the Goddess of the Mountain, Queen of Heaven, source of the snow-fed torrents that flowed down to the valleys; and pilgrims passing over her would leave offerings of milk and honey and bread and red wine. Calibur hid deep in the cave the first time he saw someone coming up the pass, fearing that they were bandits. When he came out it was dark, and in the moonlight he saw the food and drink, and was amazed, and raising his eyes to the night sky, gave thanks to the One for His provision.

  But the truths of the Book still seemed to be veiled from him. The days rolled on, each sunrise and sunset a celebration, he felt, but of what or whom, and to what ultimate end, he still could not grasp. The snow on the mountains grew icier as winter began to bite, and the pilgrims grew fewer and the gifts of food inadequate to feed him. Also he had run out of rosehips, which (as Rosa had said) kept the colds at bay, and he caught a bad cold. Then the One seemed to be in hiding, while the icon of the woman in the Book haunted and tormented him with longing for a real woman and her warm comforting love.

  And sometimes the gales would blow outside the cave for days and nights on end, until one night he began to hear the voices of demons in the howling of the wind, as he covered his ears and tried to sleep. ‘Is there no getting away from you, you restless demonic wind?’ he cried at last. And he fell into an uneasy sleep, and the wind came to him, and stood over him and said, mockingly, ‘I am Life, and you are part of me. Why do you try to run from yourself?’ But Calibur could not embrace the restless energy that is life, and though he prayed for the apparition to go, all night it chased him in his dreams.

  The wind died down in the night, and the next morning Calibur awoke to a bright clear day. He set to his meditations as usual, but with more than the usual hope of gaining some insight. Then, at mid-morning, light-headed with hunger and lack of sleep, in a blinding flash he suddenly saw the central truth of the Book. ‘Aha!’ he cried, ‘So that is what the old man was trying to say in so many words! That the reality of the One is a necessary truth that could not be otherwise, just like the eternal truths of geometry which my father proved to me, scratching lines in the ephemeral sand! Or like the truths of arithmetic, that any trader knows, that one and one is always two, never three.

  ‘Of course the concept of the One is unlike the concept of a tree or a rock or even of the whole World! I can imagine these things not existing, but the One, the sum of all truths…! My mind can no more deny its reality than say that the laws of geometry or arithmetic are unreal. Now I perceive the One as the eternal matrix of all ephemeral being, the shifting sands and the very mountains which in time will be ground by glaciers into sand. Yet the One is immutable. And so too is my soul which perceives this truth.’

  And in that moment he knew he did not need the Book any more, or any of the propositions that it eked out from this central truth. It all seemed too clear for words. So he threw the Book down the mountainside, and laughed until he cried. Then he lay down in the cave and slept like a baby.

  When he awoke it was late afternoon, and the snowy peaks outside were golden in the sun, and to his horror he found that he had forgotten all the later propositions of the Book. Only the necessary existence of the One lingered in his memory like a fading coal ta
ken from the fire. He went out and looked in vain for the Book on the sheer mountainside. He regretted his rash deed and the irrevocable loss of the Book. ‘What do I know without the Book?’ he thought, and he felt giddy, and everything about him seemed strange and inscrutable, and looking within all he could see was the memory of a knowing that was gone, like the pale traces of a glorious sunset.

  At last he decided to humbly seek shelter and help in the hermitage — if he could find it. ‘Perhaps the Writer will teach me the Truth so clearly I will never forget it,’ he thought. But still he kept the icon of the Perfect Woman next to his heart.

  He climbed higher and higher into the mountains, and finally when all hope had left him and the thin air had muddled his thinking, he found the entrance to the hermitage, almost covered in a great snowdrift. Delirious from hunger and exhaustion and the cold, he thought he was returning home after a winter’s day at the smithy, and called out, ‘Rosa, I’m home! Let me in!’ and knocked feebly on the thick slab of oak that served as a door. Then he collapsed unconscious into the snowdrift and dreamed he was coming into the cottage, and Rosa was greeting him warmly, while in reality his limbs began to freeze and the deadly cold crept towards his heart.

  Back to top