by Anne Perry
She knew him! Now at last memory returned: the skiff on the shore beyond Orimiasse, Parfyrion in its golden decay, Bal-Eeya and its storms, the lovely and barren Malgard, and Sardonaris, light on the water, and love, and death—and the palace above the sea, the Man of Holiness.
“Ishrafeli!”
He came to her and stood a moment in front of her. He lifted his hand and touched her cheek with his fingers, then her brow, then the hollow of her throat.
“It was a heavy burden,” he said gently. “But you have done well.”
Slowly, with hesitant hands, she lifted the great Book and let the cloak fall from it. It gleamed warm in the gold of the rising sun.
She held it out to him.
His mouth was more tender than the sky, and his eyes held such love as beggars’ dreams.
“No,” he answered her. “I cannot. You took the fire of truth from heaven. You must guard it until there comes again one who is pure enough in heart to open the seal and read what is written. It may be a hundred years, it may be a thousand, but God will preserve you until that time and the end of all things. In that day I shall come again, and we shall fight the last battle of the world, you and I together.”
She opened her lips to argue, to plead, and the words were silent even in her heart. It was the law of God, and it must be so.
He leaned and kissed her once, then turned and walked away towards the water and the broadening sun, leaving her motionless on the shore, the golden book in her arms and the fire and the light of God in her soul.
The Book
CHILD OF GOD, IF your hands have unloosed the hasp of this Book, then the intent of your heart is at last unmarred by cloud of vanity or deceit.
Know this, that in the beginning, through the dark reaches of infinity, was the law by which every intelligence has its being and fulfills the measure of its creation.
When God was yet a man like yourself, with all your frailties, your needs and your ignorance, walking a perilous land as you do, even then was the law irrevocable.
By obedience you may overcome all things, even the darkness within, which is the Great Enemy. The heart may be softened by pain and by yearning until love turns towards all creatures and nothing is cast away, nothing defiled by cruelty or indifference. The mind may be enlightened by understanding gained little by little through trial and labor and much hunger to perform great works. Courage will lift the fallen, make bearable the ache of many wounds, and guide your feet on the path when your eyes no longer see the light.
When your spirit is harrowed by despair and all else fails you, compassion will magnify your soul until no glory is impossible.
By such a path did God ascend unto holiness.
But the law is unalterable, and unto all, though the tears of heaven wash away the fixed and the moving stars for you, though God has shed His blood to lave you clean; each act without love, each indifference, each betrayal robs you of that which you might have been. Eternity looks on while you climb the ladder towards the light, but neither God nor devil takes you a step up or down, only your own act.
If it were not so, where would be your greatness at the last? Would God rob you of your soul’s joy? Of that day when you stand before Him in eternal life and say not as a stranger but as a citizen, “I have walked the long path. I have conquered all things. Thou has opened the door for me and I have come home.”
The conversation between Man of Holiness and Asmodeus, the Great Enemy:
Asmodeus: I have seen the plan and it will fail because your commandments are impossible. You ask perfection, and it is beyond man even to dream of it. The void echoes with laughter that you mock him and that, in his arrogance, he could believe you. He cannot do it. From the beginning he will fail. He is blind, and his journey is futile.
Man of Holiness: To be perfect is to do your best, without shadow of deceit or cowardice, without self-justification or dissembling. It is to strive with an honest mind and a pure heart and an eye single to the love of good. It is not to climb without falling, but each time you fall, to rise again and continue the journey, no matter how hard it may be, discounting the bruises and the pain, the grief and the hope deferred. It is to face the light with courage, and never to deny it. It requires all that a man has, to the height and breadth and depth of his soul, but it does not require more. I give no commandments except I make a way that they may be accomplished.
Asmodeus: Man will not believe that! He is shortsighted and full of fears. He will drown in the enormity of it. If you were just, you would ask for less. You would make the path easier.
Man of Holiness: Then he would not grow to the measure of his fullness, but be stunted and forever less than his spirit’s dream, a bird without wings, a song unsung. I know the joy and the pain of every step, as I know the scars of My own feet. He can do it, if he will.
Asmodeus: That you did it is to him a sound without meaning, a burnt paper in the wind. That journey is not for him. He will burn his soul in the fire of it and then wander lost in the dark.
Man of Holiness: He is My child. Where I have gone, he can follow, and My glory may become his. It is My purpose and My joy that in time beyond thought he may become even as I am, and together we shall walk the stars, and there shall be no end.
Asmodeus: He is weak and will despair at the first discouragement. But if you were to set lanterns to his path of rewards and punishments, then he would see the good from the evil, and his choices would be just.
Man of Holiness: They would also be without virtue because he would do good for the reward it would bring him, not for the love of good, and eschew evil because it would hurt him, not because he understood its ugliness and his soul was sickened by it. The path of life would divide only the foolish from the clever, not the righteous from the wicked. At the end, when judgment dawns white in the everlasting day, we would see what a man has done, but not what he is. And before I give him his place in the houses of eternity, it is not his acts in the noonday nor in the secrecy of the night that I must prove, but the desires of his soul, because that is what he will fulfill when he holds My power in his hands to create worlds and dominions and peoples without end.
Asmodeus: He will never do that! The dream is a travesty! Give him knowledge, a sure path. He will never be god, but he will be saved from the darkness within him.
Man of Holiness: If I save him from the darkness, then I also make the light impossible. An unknown path will test his faith. If he will begin, I shall be a guide to his feet. My arm will protect him and My spirit will go before him. As he seeks, I will give him a gift, a portion at a time. I shall bless him and cause miracles in the bright wake of his belief in My word.
Asmodeus: After! Cause them before, and you will create his belief!
Man of Holiness: Miracles to the unbelieving create awe, and sometimes obedience for a little space; then they are forgotten. They are reasoned away and man forgets Me, or else he becomes superstitious and seeks after signs to prove and to test Me. That is not faith, nor is it honor, nor yet love. It is not the courage to walk the untrodden path and face the terrors of the night, because his heart has heard My voice and will follow it forever. If he will show that trust in Me and live by every word of My mouth, then nothing within the law of heaven is impossible. No lovely or joyous thing is beyond My power or will to give him.
Asmodeus: And beyond the laws of heaven? What then is outside your gift?
Man of Holiness: Man of Holiness is My name. I am the Beginning and the End. I am God, not for My power or dominion, but because I have walked the long path and I have kept the law, which is from everlasting to everlasting. Were I to break it, creation would rise up in anger and dismay, and I should cease to be God. You think it is power. You have walked and talked with Me, watched My work, seen My face, as I have seen yours, and still you do not understand. It is love ... it has always been love.
I will not rob man of his agency to choose for himself, as I have chosen in eternities past, what he will do and
who he will become. Wickedness can never be joy. Even I cannot make it so.
Asmodeus: He will not understand that, and if you tell him, he will not believe it. He is frail, selfish, racked with terrors and delusion, easily discouraged, deceived, and diverted by the moment. He cannot see further than a few days, a few years. He will always sacrifice the future for the present, the bliss of eternity for a little pleasure today. He is brief of remembrance and fragile of understanding. The weaknesses of the flesh afflict him, disease and weariness, appetites that ruin and make dark.
You have given him a body in your own image, but he will defile it! If you give him no hunger, then he will wither and die. Give him desire and he will indulge it until it governs him. It will consume all other good in him. That which should sustain his life or heal his ills will become his master. He will coarsen and become gross, devouring for sensation, consuming without need. He will misuse herbs to give himself illusion so that he may escape the realities you have put there to teach him patience, endurance, and compassion. He will use them to deny the pain you have put in his path so that he may learn truth and understanding.
Man of Holiness: It is part of the soul of man to hunger, as it is the greatest of his lessons to master himself. If he would become as I am, and know My joy, which has no boundary in time or space, then the first and greatest step on that journey is to harness the passions within himself and use their force for good. Without that he has no life but only a semblance of it, a fire-shadow in the darkness.
Asmodeus: Life? The power to beget life he will abuse above all the other powers you give him. He will make of that desire a dark and twisted thing to ruin and torture, to feed his hunger of the flesh and the lust for dominion which corrodes his mind. He will corrupt and pervert, distort its very nature until it grows hideous. He will call dependence, pity, even the exercise of tyranny, by the name of love. Torture of mind and body, destruction and despotism will be justified by that one word alone. More abominations will be committed in your name than in any other.
Man of Holiness: I know it, and My soul weeps. But it must be. The more sublime the good, the deeper the evil that is possible from its debasement. The corruption of love will lose more souls than any other force, and the realization of it will redeem more, even that which had seemed lost into darkness beyond recall.
Asmodeus: It will not be. Man is riddled with doubt and ingratitude. In his ignorance and impatience he destroys what he holds. Despair walks beside him and whispers to him in the hollows of the night.
Man of Holiness: I give him weakness that he might learn humility, and out of his own failures might find gentleness and pity for others who also stumble. And in that pity he will help and find a greater love. In his frailties, if he will look to Me, I will make him a giant, and My grace shall be sufficient for all things. I shall consecrate his griefs and his trials to him, that at the last he will know even the depth of the abyss and the heights of heaven which have no end. He will love all the workmanship of My hands because he has walked beside it, labored with it, laughed and wept with it, and he will cherish it, that his joy may be full even as Mine is full.
Asmodeus: But what you give is arbitrary and unjust! You favor one above another. For some there is happiness, health of body, an abundance of treasures; for others only misery, affliction, and the burden of loneliness. How can an unjust God command respect, far less love? I have heard the prayers, even of the righteous, echo unanswered in the empty caverns of the night.
Man of Holiness: No prayers are unanswered, but many answers are unheard because man’s spirit listens only to its own voice and has not learned to hear Mine. And sometimes the answer is “no” or “not yet” because what is asked for will not bring the happiness he imagines. I know him better than he knows himself. I give to every soul that which is necessary for it to reach the fullness of its nature, to know the bitter from the sweet, which is the purpose of this separation from Me of his mortal life. It is a brief span for an eternal need, for some too brief for happiness also. But to each is given the opportunity to learn what is needful for that soul, to strengthen what is weak, to hallow and make beautiful that which is ugly, to give time to winnow out the chaff of doubt and impatience, and fire to burn away the dross of selfishness. The chances come in many forms and ofttimes more than once.
Asmodeus: He will see it as capricious and unfair, that you love one and hate another.
Man of Holiness: Too often he sees but a short space, and cries in the night because he is a child. He does not see as I see, who understand him and love him and know the end from the beginning. It has been decreed from the birth of all things that I cannot and would not withhold any blessing when a man has fitted himself to receive it by obedience to the law upon which it rests. If I give it to him too soon, he will not understand and he will break it, or let it slip from his grasp at the moment of earning, and virtue will be swallowed up in self-interest and the treasure will not bless, but corrupt.
Without waiting, and cost, there would no longer be the sublime gift of sacrifice, which is the greatest love. There would be only payment, the certainty of an even more precious return. It would end not in holiness, but in destitution of heart.
Asmodeus: Will you tell him of this promise? If you do, he may not believe you. If he does, he will still give, in hope of gain. And if you do not tell him, then you lie, by withholding.
Man of Holiness: I will tell him, as I tell him all things pertaining to his joy. Some will believe, and some will not. Some will give with cold hearts, conscious of their own rectitude and with an eye to reward, and their payment is dust. But some will give because they themselves know need and have felt hunger and what it is to walk alone, and they would spare another. They understand ways of love, and I shall keep them in the hollow of My hands forever. Their names shall be upon My lips.
And others will not believe that I am, but in love they have walked My path and I have been beside them though they knew Me not. Their deeds have spoken My name, and when they see My face they shall know Me, and I shall bless them with a great blessing.
Asmodeus: You see man as you wish him to be, not as he is. Give him a religion and he will become a fanatic, a rule keeper, a guardian of his own soul who preserves the letter of the law and waits for the reward with open hands and a closed heart. He will persecute others in the name of the law, understand nothing, and your name will be an excuse for lies and corruption and torture. Hypocrites will whisper it with a smile, and murder faith and hope as they do it.
Man of Holiness: I know. And if they do not repent and learn to understand what it is they do, and if they will not then change, their path will lead to the last aloneness, where I cannot follow, and the gulf between us will become everlasting. But if there is not the choice to take the downward road, then the road upward has no meaning.
Asmodeus: You know all that he needs better than he knows himself. Why do you compel him to ask you daily?
Man of Holiness: I teach a step at a time because that is how he learns. There is a season for all things. If I gave him the greater knowledge at once he could not grasp it. Like you and like Me, he must hunger for it, and seek it, and learn by experience in order to understand not only the nature of its beauty, but also its price. What he gains too easily he will not value, and too often he cannot hold. Time and ease seep it away from him, the first bitter wind freezes his fingers, and his treasure is let go and he cannot call it back.
I do not seek gratitude for My sake, but for his. It enlarges his soul who feels it. It is a thing of joy, unclouded by arrogance or triumph. It is a bond between the giver and the given. Its sweetness lingers in the heart long after the gift is forgotten.
Asmodeus: His words are dead leaves in the wind. Gratitude writes nothing on his heart.
Man of Holiness: There are gifts which are labored for and earned, and those which are given of grace. All men are responsible for the burden to magnify them with wisdom and humility, and to share their fruits
with all, both the loved and the unloved.
The greatest gifts of the spirit are the hardest to bear well: the gift of knowledge, of healing, of prophecy, the power to lead others and share the light. Such gifts define the path for him, and he must pick them up or lay them down. There is no middle way. Once offered, there is no choice but to accept, with all the weight he can bear, or to refuse, and close the door on the journey forward and sit alone in the night, having set aside forever what he might have been. All knowledge places on him the right and the responsibility of choice. Then he must walk the path to its final step.
Asmodeus: You speak as if knowledge were there for all. It is not! Some have intelligence, keenness of mind and swiftness of understanding. Others are slow and muddled in thought. Some are tormented by unreason. Millions, like the sands of the sea, labor all their days merely to survive. Philosophy is not in their world. Again you are unjust, a respecter of persons.
Man of Holiness: Each man takes with him into life what he has chosen and labored for here, in the creation before life. Some have already learned much and need only take the flesh upon them and stay but briefly, even an instant, and return to Me. Some have limitations on them, disorders of the mortal flesh which dull and confuse the mind. Others call them simple, or deranged. They need no more learning, and they are not answerable for their weakness. They too need no probation, but they live in order to test the patience and the compassion of others. But it is each man’s choice whether he will grow or wither, take up My burden, or pass it by.
He will teach others, but before he teaches he must learn. If he lives worthily and seeks My way, I will give him words for the questioner and answers for those who seek. He will tell in response more than he knows, even hidden things, and both will be touched by the light.
Asmodeus: You place an intolerable burden upon those to whom you answer with truth! What if it is too great for them and they cannot bear it? What if they turn aside and seek a softer path?