by Daniel Caet
The woman seemed to give up and finally spoke very serious, almost angry.
“In the image I saw, the woman said she called herself in an unusual way. Her name was Suriath.”
That name brought me back to reality. The name of the woman who had saved my life many centuries ago was unusual and men had not used it for a long time. Could it be that Sadith was now using her mother's name? If so, that opened the door to find her.
“What else have you seen? Do you know exactly where she is?” I asked, grabbing the woman by the arm.
“No, my lord, I'm sorry, all I know is that the man found her in the great city of the north, their big capital.”
“Rome,” I said, as if in a whisper, and I immediately turned ready to transport myself to the city and destroy it to the foundations if necessary to find Sadith, but the creature stopped me.
“Wait my lord, I have more things to tell you!”
“Talk, what else have you seen?” I asked waiting for her to tell me something else about Sadith's whereabouts.
“It's about that other assignment you gave me,” she said as the fisherman who throws his net knowing that the river is crammed with fish. “That place you wanted me to find for you.”
“You found it?”
“I think so, yes. But I better show you,” she replied as she put her warm, soft hand on my face. Immediately the images began to flow in my head, images that I knew very well and that another woman had put there many years before with the same gesture. A great mountain emerged in my field of vision and in it a small and almost collapsed temple. Suddenly, the image moved away to show me the same scene from much farther away, this time I could see the entire mountain and its surroundings and an instant later, even further, I could see that the mountain was on a large rocky island in middle of the sea. At that moment, finding Sadith was no longer my first priority because Kashna had given me something I wanted and needed even more. Now I knew where to find Enoch.
The first thing I felt was the cold sea air that filtered through the pine forest that surrounded me and carried a delicious smell of saltpetre. I was on a hillside on some path that climbed through the forest to the entrance of a cave pierced in the rock wall. The road had been created without a doubt due to the constant flow of people ascending to deposit their offerings in the temple that was inside the mountain. To mark the place, a couple of small stone columns had been placed on both sides of the cave entrance. I headed towards the entrance when the sun began to set, and the thicket of the pines no longer allowed the light of the sunset to reach the place. When I reached the columns, I saw that someone had hung an oil lamp on the stone wall, not so much to indicate the way, but to mark that it was a place of veneration. From the entrance I could see the cave, huge, full of many more oil lamps spread throughout its interior, and on the back wall I could see a small altar. From there I could not distinguish the figure that had been placed on it, but, it did not matter because it was the enormity of the cave lit by the lamps and shining as if it was gold that stole all the attention making it irrelevant which god was the one to be worshiped there. I prepared to enter the cave, beginning to suspect that Kashna's vision was wrong and that there was nothing for me when a voice surprised me.
“You're a little late, boy, I'm leaving. You would have better come tomorrow, the way down in the dark is dangerous.”
When I turned around, I found a woman as old as time, wrinkled and shrunken, who was holding a kind of small piece of wood and dressed in little more than rags.
“Excuse me, good mother, but I didn't know that you could only access the temple at certain times.”
“Oh no! Don't worry, the temple is always open, but people usually come in the morning, the climb is tiring and the descent complicated, nobody wants to do it at night. I suspect it's the first time you come, right?” she answered.
“That's right, relatives told me that this was a good place to pray for a miracle,” I said, “but the truth is that I'm not sure even what god I should pray to here.”
“That's funny,” said the woman, smiling and showing the holes where her teeth should have been. “This is the place where Zeus himself was born, this is where his mother Rhea put her tit in his mouth for the first time. Only that!” she responded as she winked at me. “But I recommend that you do not tell him that you did not know, the fucking god of Olympus is especially vain, I do not think he will find funny that you do not know where you are.” That light way of taking religion that contrasted so much with what I had seen among men in my many years of life made me smile. "Whatever it is, boy, if the advice of an old crow is worth something, do not entertain yourself asking for your miracle or the miracle will be that you manage to get out of this mountain at night.” And she parted.
I turned back to the cave and prepared to enter, but as soon as my body crossed the threshold marked by the columns, everything around me changed and I found myself inside a large stone room as I expected, only that it had nothing to do with the cave. The ceiling was rising beyond what the view could reach, the extension of the room I was in was larger than I had ever seen built by the hand of man, and around me the same image was repeated over and over time. Hundreds of wooden shelves full of scrolls lined up like soldiers fragmenting the hall into corridors illuminated by a light whose origin I could not identify.
“You've been looking for me for centuries, Helel! It is not time to be shy. Come in please!” said a man's voice in an absolutely friendly tone. My eyes and ears tried to identify where the sound came from, but it was impossible. “If you follow any of the corridors until the end, you will reach me,” he continued.
My feet responded immediately and headed down the gap between the two shelves in front of me. It seemed as if that corridor never ended until, suddenly, the shelves on both sides disappeared leaving room for a kind of chamber illuminated by the same light. In the centre of the room was a fountain, and sitting on it, playing with water, a man in his sixties, tall, strong and muscular for his age, with grey hair and skin tanned by age. The man must have felt my presence and turned to ask me to approach him extending his hand. I approached slowly and upon reaching him I saw that his eyes were completely veiled, the man was blind.
“Sit next to me, please, there is nothing you should fear in this house.” I sat next to him and realised that the fountain was full of small coloured fishes that played with his fingers without fear. “I guess you don't need me to introduce myself,” he suggested with a smile.
“Only if your name is not Enoch,” I said, making it clear that I knew who I was coming to see.
“Yes, that's my name,” he laughed, “or at least it was a long time ago. Since I live here I have not had many chances to use it, Helel.”
“Do you know my name?” I asked, not quite surprised by his familiarity.
“Yes, of course! I know your name the same way I know why you are here. In fact, I've been waiting for you for a long time. But I suppose your responsibilities as ruler have kept you busy, am I wrong?”
“If you know why I am here,” I continued ignoring his question, “you will know that it was one of your descendants who told me how to find you.”
“Yes, little Miriam, I know. I asked her to do it myself,” he said, removing his hand from the water. “Ah, Miriam! I don't know if you'll like to know that she became a very beautiful woman and had a very happy life. She was always a sweet soul, my little Miriam. The same cannot be said of that unruly Moses although, after all, he did great things for his people.”
“I know, I'm aware of how he managed to free the Hebrews. His name has gone down in history. If I were you I would be proud.”
“Helel, I haven't felt what men call pride for a long time,” he replied, laughing at my comment. “When you get to live as much as I do and see everything I see, it ends up losing its value. You end up realising how small you are compared to our father's work. Besides, I think that Moses would be prouder of what he achieved than the fact that it has remained
in history. The problem with history, Helel, is that it always depends on who writes it, and for that reason, it ends up being irrelevant.”
“I find it surprising that you tell me that,” I said, looking around at the huge number of scrolls in the room and I knew that even in his blindness he knew what I meant.
“Let us say then that it is only important for an old bookkeeper like me,” he replied, smiling, “or for someone in need of guidance like you.”
“Can you help me? Can you tell me how to get back to heaven?” I snapped, cutting off all the preambles. The man stared at me with his lifeless eyes and something made me think he could see me perfectly, even if it wasn't with his physical eyes. He took a moment to respond.
“Do you know why I went blind, Helel?” he asked. “It wasn't because of an accident, nor because of my age. My eyes stopped seeing what was around me, so I could see everything else. The day our father granted me eternal life he did it with a purpose, like everything he has always done. The purpose was that I could see everything that happened in his creation and I could write it, that I would become the guardian of history. He made me the witness of everything.” Slowly he got up from the fountain and reaching out for me to help him, he made me walk with him between the shelves. “Everything that has happened in this world and in others has had me as a silent guest and everything I have witnessed has been faithfully written and kept forever. That is my legacy to the world, Helel,” he said as we reached the end of a row of shelves. Suddenly, he beat his palms and the sound echoed in a deafening noise followed by another whispering sound that seemed to rapidly approach us. The sound of thousands of torches igniting at the same time projecting their light on a spectacular image, thousands of shelves like the ones we had just left behind extended as far as the eye could see and all of them were full of scrolls. “Welcome to the history of the world, Helel!”
My eyes could not assume everything they were seeing, and as if I could see the disbelief reflected in my face, the old man smiled.
“I don't know what to say,” I said, babbling. “The amount of accumulated knowledge here is overwhelming.”
“In fact, it is all the knowledge that exists and has existed since the moment of my ascent. This is my life, Helel. But, unfortunately,” he continued, “it is also a very dangerous weapon and therefore must be hidden from the world.”
“I understand,” I replied as my hands grabbed one of the scrolls within my reach and opened it. “Whoever has access to this information would have access to a source of immense power. He would have no enemies, no one who could stand in his way, he would be a god.” My hands unrolled the parchment and my eyes hungrily searched for the text I expected to fill its surface, but none of that happened. “It is blank!”
“Do you really think I would risk this knowledge falling into the hands of someone who could use it to quench their cravings for power?” He said, and I knew he meant me. “The text on the scroll is only revealed to my eyes. No one else in this world can read it.”
I returned the parchment with restrained rage and had to breathe so as not to shout at that old man, but even with my effort to contain myself my next words came out with excessive acrimony.
“And then, why did you make me come here? Why did you make Miriam disclose your whereabouts to me if you knew that, even if I came to you, you wouldn't have anything for me? Were you only interested in having visitors in your own jail?”
“I asked you to come because I firmly believe that you are the only one who can help our father, Helel.”
Those words stopped me in my tracks and I turned to look at him without knowing what he meant. What could my father need from me? And if so, why didn't he speak to me himself? What did that man know?
“Come with me, we better sit down,” he said, and I turned to follow him. He led me to an area away from the shelves where there was an old cot, a table full of scrolls like those I had seen before and two chairs.
“Sorry for the frugality, but I am not a person of great needs, and as you have suggested, I do not usually receive many visits. Please, sit. You see, when our father turned me into an angel, many things changed for me. I left my family, locked myself in this sanctuary and began to look at the world as nobody had ever done before, but what was strangest of all in my new situation was the fact that I could hear our father speak directly to me, all the time. Can you imagine what that means to someone like me? As a man I was used to praying, to talk to our father, but it was always one-way conversations in which there was no way of knowing if there would be an answer or if the message even reached its destination. And, suddenly, our father was there, speaking with tenderness or seriousness, listening to my concerns and attending to the demands that, as a small child, I made out of ignorance of what I had become.”
The terribly sweet way in which that old man described his communication with my father made me realise how much I missed his voice, his warmth and the emptiness he had left in me.
“And suddenly one day, his voice disappeared, and he never returned. Do you find it familiar?” he asked.
“Sure, none of that is new. The entire angelic court suffered the same, and none of us could explain why.”
“What would you think if I told you that maybe I can?”
“I would think that you are taking too many detours and that you better get to the point,” I said, using the little patience I had left.
“Very well,” he continued. “After the disappearance of our father, every effort was made so that his work continued in the same way he did when he was among us. There was a group of our brothers who, as expected, took the reins of their work to ensure that continuity, and we all accepted their guidance in the hope that nothing would change until the return of our father.”
“The archangels,” I said in a whisper.
“Exact. Gabriel and the others humbly assumed the role of leaders to calm the instability that the absence of the father figure had caused. But, as you well know, that leadership soon became tyranny. Their guide became a dictatorship, and those dissonant voices that faced their decisions began to be discreetly eliminated.”
“We both know that's exactly what happened to me, but I still don't see where you want to go.”
“There are two ways to reach power, Helel. One is naturally filling the gap left by another leader, the other is creating that gap. Our father granted me a wonderful gift that he defined as God's vision, and that was our brother’s mistake. They forgot about me, the poor human eternally condemned to realise what is happening everywhere. But my vision allowed me to find out the truth, Helel. Our father never left us voluntarily. I don't know how, but the archangels managed to kidnap our father and lock him up somewhere where he can't talk to us anymore.”
Those words horrified me, not only because of what they implied regarding my brothers' attitude, but because of what they suggested about my father.
“That's ridiculous!” I said raising my voice. “Our father is almighty, no one could lock him up against his will.”
“That is exactly what they want us to believe. I'm afraid you'll soon discover that there are many lies in heaven, boy,” he said, and an awkward silence filled everything for an instant. “No one would think that our father's absence is anything other than voluntary. And that idea of abandoning his offspring, fed conveniently, is what made the angelic court accept the government of the archangels as necessary and fair, without questioning a single one of their decisions, including condemning its opponents to death.”
The images of my fall came back to me and I was not able to articulate an answer.
“But if our brothers thought everything was tied and well tied, they were wrong, and you are proof of that, Helel.”
“I don't understand what you mean,” I said.
“During your fall, something happened that nobody had anticipated. A light came from nowhere, reached you and, as you well know, the result was that you became human. And the pain it has brought you is what saved yo
ur life because it made your persecutors take you for dead and that from that day none of our brothers could feel you. It made you literally invisible to all of them, although not for me.”
I knew he was right. As much as being human had brought me pain, anguish and suffering, it had also been the only thing that had kept me alive. What that old man did not see was that I was willing to do anything to be able to be what I once was.
“I know what you're thinking. Perhaps it would have been better to die than to be doomed to this existence, but I trust that one day you will understand how wrong you are. This existence is a gift, a present delivered so you could continue your way. A gift to ensure that you could move on and one day return the heavens to their natural order. I firmly believe that this was our father's last act of love, to save the only one who can save us. And that's why I think it's essential that you go back to heaven, Helel.”
The faith that this man placed in me was inspiring, and for a moment his words made me forget about everything that I had become and see myself as the saviour he described. If all he told was true, my brothers had committed the worst of sins and had to be punished; a punishment that I was more than happy to apply, but for that, there was something that had to happen.
“Very well, suppose all of that is true, how do I get back to heaven?” I asked bluntly.
“I have no idea!” he spat at me without compassion and my hands twitched with the urge to hit him.
“Is that a joke, old man?” I shouted, rising from the chair that fell to the floor. “All this to waste my time?”
“Calm down! I said I don't know how, Helel, but I know what” he continued. “There are only two things necessary for you to enter heaven again, your blood and your sword. Don't ask me what this means because I don't know more than I can see, but your sword is the key that can open the doors of heaven again and your blood is the only thing that can make the key work.”
I noticed how my legs wanted to stop holding me. After all that time, of all the energy invested in finding him, in feeding the flame of hope until the last breath of my being, the key to my return to heaven was absolutely lost. My laughter echoed throughout the cave.