However interesting they were and though he enjoyed their company, his main goal always remained to find the Walolang de Kgotia and learn from their religion and rites and what it was, precisely, that they actually did. At the end of each short stay with a tribe, or forest village, as he had come to think of them, he would ask after the whereabouts of the priests and their temple. While they had been forthcoming before this point, suddenly they would become quiet, glancing unsurely to one another or upon the ground. Eventually, he would get a loosely pointed arm and a change of mood to have done with this foreigner.
His efforts grew frustrated as he walked from tribe to tribe, following such loose directions and little else, but nevertheless he retained hope that he was, painstakingly, nearing his target. Five days previously he had entered a village where he had finally received what he took for directions to the temple itself. He had left excited and light of foot.
He had wandered unsure and lost for two days before finding the place, wondering if the deliberately vague directions were in the least bit accurate.
All of his travels had led him here, to the famed and feared priests of Daygo and their temple to the spirit of all, though he had been warned time and again to stay clear of the place as it was holy and should not be interfered with.
The temple itself was a series of caves, naturally appearing, in the side of what developed into a mountain, the forests along its side climbing spectacularly upwards. Leandro could see the inclining green through the parting of the trees above the clearing. He realised then how rarely it had been that he had seen the blue of the sky and felt the sun’s light. As a result, looking up into the blue above the clearing was strangely beautiful and awe-inspiring. He was accompanied by the feeling that the world, being the forest, was encased by the gentle blue glow of Daygo. In that moment, he realised how close to holy that place must seem to the tribesmen, with its clear, circular view of the sky, mostly naturally created in the dense forest. At its highest, the sun bathed the clearing in bright yellow light, causing Leandro’s eyes pain at the now unaccustomed brightness. How horrible it would be, he thought, to be denied the sun and the sky.
Their holy caverns were strange in appearance. The land of the forest seemed to drop suddenly downwards in one area, forming the gaping, dark and gloomy cavern entrance, encircled in hard, mostly bare, rock. It was as though half a hill was pushed against the side of the mountain. Grass and trees and the usual foliage of the forest grew all along the sides and up the hill, covering it as it would anywhere else. The cavern seemed to narrow within into a passageway of sorts. The ground before the cavern was mostly bare of life and sloping downwards into the gaping mouth; the small patches of foliage growing amidst the rocky floor trampled over time by the soft footsteps of the priests.
Ten steps clear of the entrance, at the top of the slope, was the first of the beehive-shaped huts of the priests. Eleven in all; they were barely long enough for the inhabitant to lie out fully within—certainly Leandro could not in any that he saw—and allowed for no rolling room. They were tall, curving constructions made from curved and warped wood, lashed together with the ropes and twines of the forest.
They were haphazardly spaced around a central area where the priests built a communal fire and did their cooking. Just outside the miniature settlement was a small garden patch that grew various different herbs and plants native to the forest. Leandro had learned that these were used for medicinal, religious and flavouring purposes. Some gave off a thick, pungent smoke when burned and when inhaled gave an uninhibited, light-headed experience that was frequently interjected by bursts of laughter and giggling. Others were used to eject and clear worms and other parasites from the body. Still more were simple flavourings. Beside this they grew vegetables and other food stuffs.
They rose and chanted in the mornings, staring up through the branches of the trees at the sky, sometimes shaking their arms up as though impeaching the sun to show or for the world to end, or for something to happen, or even their floundering arms might be asking their God the perpetual question of “why?” to some unexplained or misunderstood tragedy. Leandro would watch, fascinated, until the chanting would quieten down and eventually die out, signalling that it was time to eat.
Over the three days that he had been in their presence, he had observed their habits and routines with interest. They lived very simple and repetitive lives. They looked well fed, with some of the older priests showing paunches.
He questioned them about their lives and their beliefs. Mostly he simply received surface and vague answers. They generally deferred to their high priest, Obasi, as though unsure of what information they were allowed to part with. So Obasi answered most of his questions, a constant frown between his eyebrows.
They seemed confused over their purpose and their answers, yet they spent their whole lives dedicated to this cause that Leandro had not, as of yet, been able to fully ascertain. It was not at all what he had expected. In his experiences, when visiting extreme religious, cultish groups, their belief and purpose was fanatical, delusional in most cases. But he found that these priests seemed, if anything, to be suffering a crisis of faith.
While physically they looked healthy, their eyes looked tired and haggard, and their heads hung slightly, giving them a hounded look.
At one stage he wandered up to the hilltop that framed the entrance to the caves, where the earth was clearly disturbed. He stood, looking down at the upturned soil, wondering if this was their graveyard, when a woman priest stepped up to his side. She stood silently beside him for a moment, watching the soil where he had watched. She pointed two fingers at it.
“Two of us,” she said. “Two years.” She shook her head. Leandro looked across at her, at the deep sadness that lined her face, and he did not know what to say. He reached a hand out and placed it on her shoulder. What more could be said or done, for the grief of those who were lost? As a priest he had seen it often; sometimes it had seemed that he was the harbinger of death. He wondered if this was the cause of their distress. Was it the simplicity of death to crumble their faith, as it tested the faith of all? Had they thought themselves above such things, as servants to their Daygo? It seemed a lame explanation.
There were two priests that were set apart in his eyes. One was a man called Niisa, the other was a woman called Yejide. She had the most striking green eyes that he had ever seen. Green eyes that seemed to hold untold knowledge and wisdom. It felt as though she looked through him with those eyes, seeing deep into his soul. She was always still; even when moving through their complex morning routines, as they bent their bodies into impossible positions and showed a strength that conflicted with their appearance, she seemed still. She moved without ever moving at all. There was never a forced reaction, or so much as a twitch, everything was calm and slow. Sometimes her eyes were lightly closed, sometimes open as they passed over him, as though he were a feature of the forest, a leaf or a rock, or perhaps some unremarkable animal. Only from her did he get a sense of something holy, something divine. He felt strangely blessed in the silence of her company.
Niisa was a small man, even by their standards, standing just over five feet tall. Niisa’s quiet seemed loaded with action, it seemed ominous, oppressive, somehow forceful, as though behind his watchful eyes was a will that could make a man break. At first, he was too consumed by the man’s presence to notice, but as the first day passed to the second and the third, he started to realise that it was not just him who felt cowed by Niisa. The other priests, with the exception of Yejide, seemed in some way oppressed by his presence. He noticed their eyes linger on him at times, when they thought he was not looking, sometimes flicking quickly away as he shifted his seat or moved his head.
As he spent more time with them, he felt more and more that there was something under the surface that was not quite right.
He learned that the priests were tribespeople, taken from their families at the age of twelve or so when they had tested positive for this hypersensitivity
that they talked about. They then lived out the rest of their days in worship to their god, Daygo, in isolation from the tribes, the families and friends they had known.
Leandro asked only once if the children had a choice as to whether or not to join the priesthood. The response grew flustered, angry and threatening. Obasi became animated and Leandro could not follow the tide of words that spewed from his tongue. He did not ask again.
Daygo, as Leandro knew it, was not a god such as Levitas was revered as, not a single man-like entity. Daygo was instead all of life, the energy that infused and ran all things, and caused it to move and thus to be. The priests believed time was a man-made entity, that there was only movement and life could not exist in staying still. This was why all things must be born, live and die, then change state and alter. Daygo was the interflowing and interlocking force that ran all things, that was all things. It was the movement that allowed existence to exist. It was the flow of change. Life was movement, life was action. Daygo, life, movement, it was all more or less the same thing, according to the priests.
Like all things came from the Earth’s flow, all things returned to it. It was Daygo when the volcanoes exploded, when the Earth rumbled. Daygo was in the air, Daygo was in the clouds and everything that one could see with one’s eyes and even things that one could not. Daygo was divine intelligence.
They believed that there was a vast disruption to the flow of Daygo that caused the breaking of the world one hundred and eighty eight years earlier.
They put different credence to different events to that of the southern world. Their calendars did start anew with the changes in the world, but they started from the arrival of the new moon as opposed to the re-unification of man. This was the significant event to them. And, upon consideration, Leandro could not fault it, for there must surely have been some connection between the red moon and the breaking of the world, and everything that followed was of consequence. Perhaps the red moon’s arrival was the singular cause.
The priests disappeared through the caves every day for hours at a time. During all of his time, they had posted a guard outside of the caves to ensure he did not follow them in out of unrestrained curiosity. They were very particular about entrance to the caves and held little real trust of him. Leandro tried to spend this time in conversation with the guard, looking to soak up as much understanding and knowledge as he could before continuing on his adventures. The first day did not prove very fruitful as green-eyed Yejide sat guard. He had tried often to engage her in conversation, but she had not been forthcoming, her answers always had a strange reason to them, but also a finality that could not be questioned further, and a vagueness that made them no answers at all.
However, on the second day Niisa was on guard and was much more forthcoming, by far the most of any of the priests, and seemed at ease to answer all of Leandro’s questions. They quickly built into a rhythm of mutual learning, each taking turns to ask and answer a question. He seemed to have an endless curiosity about the southern world. Leandro understood that he had never ventured from his home forest. He could see an eagerness within him to do so.
He held some strange and individual theories. Leandro enjoyed their telling, finding them interesting but no more realistic than the rest. In each religious sect that he had visited, he had heard doomsday theories and professions from one or more of the practitioners there. He found them all quite enjoyable and illuminating to their cultures and mind-sets so long as he distanced himself from them.
Niisa believed that all magical capabilities stemmed from the arrival of the red moon. Before, he said that Daygo was communicable and sensible but tied off and restricted. One could know that it was there but not physically touch it. He said that since the arrival of the red moon, it has become accessible by hypersensitive people. It has changed the world, he said. Made it more unstable. He claimed that the accessibility of Daygo has been growing steadily since the moon’s existence, that Daygo is less tied to what holds it, whether that be an animal, the soil, the air, or people themselves. He claimed that this influence was growing, and more, he claimed that the red moon posed a threat to the very existence of Daygo on this planet. What did that mean? Leandro questioned and questioned him but could make no sense of his answers, as they were varied and vague.
When Leandro questioned him as to what this hypersensitiveness was, Niisa replied that some people had a heightened awareness within themselves that allowed them to connect with the Daygo that was in all living things, that allowed them to feel it, like a sixth sense. It was not something that could be described by the five senses that people possessed, for it was a sense of its own. It was separate, it was different. They believed there was some connection between all Daygo on Earth, and thus there could be feeling to those who were most sensitive to Daygo outside of the body. He said that the Daygo in air was the first and easiest to sense, because it had the least protection around it, it was the least closed off, the quickest to change, to die and be reborn again. However, Leandro felt a vagueness to his words, as though there were no set rules. Unsurprising, he thought, with something so made up and farfetched. Leandro remained very sceptical about these priests’ supposed importance and the reverence that the tribesmen held them in. It was a common trait, for religious representatives, to be held in far higher esteem than they deserved. Leandro knew all too well, being a former priest of Levitas.
Leandro asked him if there was anything more to it, other than sense. Niisa went quiet with this question and eventually fobbed it off, unwilling to answer. Next, Leandro asked him how could he prove that it existed? Nissa smiled and answered, no doubt a well-rehearsed one from this particular priesthood, “How do you prove to the blind that sight is real?” It was a fair response, yet Leandro had no more faith in its existence for it.
For Niisa’s part, he asked about the outside world, especially the world south of the great mountain ranges. He had a strange, haphazard understanding of the nations of Levitashand that was a collection of random and strange facts and folklore. Leandro knew that the tribespeople of these parts had been present before the breaking, in the world of old. Back then, they had no awareness of the wider world whatsoever. Since the breaking and the migration, there were sufficient travellers through the forests and disruption to their way of life for them to pick up a loose knowledge of other peoples. They tried to avoid contact with outsiders and were wary of them but not directly aggressive, as Leandro had learned.
Since Niisa’s understanding was so disjointed, Leandro decided to tell him a brief history of the new world. He told him that the lands of man had been vast, stretching five or six times larger than what now remained in Levitashand. He told quickly of the coming of the red moon and the breaking of the world, six days where the ground rumbled and broke apart, where the sea flooded inland in giant waves and red plumes of fire reached for the heavens, spreading, intoxicating and destroying. He told how millions died in those days and the lands were remade to be almost unrecognisable from what they used to be, that only here, in what was then known as the Woanaan lands, did the land mass stay mostly the same. Borders were no more, some people lay isolated from others, new mountain ranges and seas appeared as though from nowhere, the geography of the land changed beyond recognition and, though the terrible assault died down after those six horrendous days, the ground still rumbled and roiled, volcanoes still spewed ash and lava from their mouths and occasional giant waves still attacked seaside areas. Though one and all would have been huge events before the breaking, compared to the six days preceding, they were mild.
Then, three weeks later, when the nations of man were still picking themselves from the dirt, the beasts came from the new lands to the north. It is now believed by some learned men that a new continent, one not before known of, where these animals had resided, had joined with that of man’s during the breaking, opening up a passageway for the beasts to come south.
The survival wars came next. The southward moving tide of beasts seem
ed unstoppable until a man from the southern Woanaan province came north in aid, leading an army from his own nation, to unite the disassembled nations of the north under one banner in a cohesive defence of mankind. Still, it seemed doomed. The great migration was conceived as a desperate last attempt at survival, and mankind fought a fighting retreat south through the pass of the Woanaan mountains, millions dying along the way, where they built a giant wall across the only traversable pass of the mountains to keep out the hordes of beasts from the lands in the south, the fabled ten thousand charging forward to their deaths, led by Levitas himself, to allow time for its completion.
He told Niisa then of the dividing of the Woanaan lands between the surviving people. They formed what became known as the five continents and an independent state called Keisland. They were ruled over by the five great generals of Levitas’ army and the Woanaan king, Levitas’s uncle. Every year they were to meet as the council of six, with Keis head of the council as chief regent, and dictate policy for the world. They signed a pact that for any nation to war on another would draw the wrath of the other five. It was Levitas’s great plan for peace and continued co-operation between all of mankind for the future. He told Niisa that the Chewe region, where they now resided, was the only region that had not been divided and occupied in the Woanaan lands, as it was deemed too mountainous and forested to efficiently re-home any refugees. Niisa smiled with villainous humour upon hearing it, setting Leandro to smile hesitatingly in return.
The Histories were so thick from that point to where they were, from Illinois the Insane, to Gabbon the Incompetent, Haryana the Greedy and mad King Kelios most recently, the disintegration of the council of six and the dissembling of the five continents into sixteen separate nations, all intent on personal ambitions and separatism, of the failure of humankind to stay united once the common enemy was gone and the ultimate failure of Levitas’s plan and great hope for a united and peaceful mankind, that Leandro was forced to summarize swiftly, at the risk of his tale being so long that there would be no more time to extract further information from Niisa about the priests.
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