by Sam Meekings
‘It does not matter if you do not believe me. Follow the map, go to the hiding place and see for yourself. You are a master linguist, my friend, and I do not doubt that with your mastery of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic you are the perfect person to translate this most Holy of texts. You know as well as I how corrupt the Church has become, how evil kings can be. Why else do men like us become monks if not to escape the sin and corruption that has overtaken the world outside our cloisters? Let us have a just world, where all of us might live together as brothers. Let us have the City of God here upon the earth. The Last Gospel can give us that, and so much more. It will tell us the exact date that Christ shall return, that we might prepare for his coming. We will be free from doubt, forever.’
I feel a most bitter anger rising up within my blood.
‘Listen to me,’ I say. ‘Even if all this is true, then this is a book for scholars and bishops, not for laymen. Knowing the future would be a terrible thing for man. We need doubt. Without it, faith is impossible. Knowledge and belief are two different things. Faith is a choice, a daily struggle that we fight to keep on the right side of. Absolute certainty – of what will happen to us tomorrow, of when we will die, of Heaven and Hell – would destroy all need for faith, for that inner struggle that brings us closer to God, and so we would neglect our Holy duties. Without faith we would become like these Tartar barbarians, with no morals and no sense of right or wrong, and we would thus condemn ourselves to hellfire.’
Lovari struggles to rise during my speech, but I try to comfort him and keep him lying back in his blankets. His lips are like pewter.
‘You are wrong. It is doubt which is man’s greatest weakness. It is that terrible fog of doubt that drives him to steal, to murder, to war. It is doubt that leads to sin, doubt that leads to hatred, doubt that leads to sorrow and pain. Without doubt, all men would be good, for they would be sure that they would be rewarded in heaven. Everything is predetermined, everything is known. If the true words of Christ exist somewhere, then they must be given to the world, Rosso.’
‘Think what you are saying, brother. Moses was visited by God in the form of a burning bush, and when the prophet Ezekiel was visited by the Lord he saw fiery clouds and an obscure storm of strange and haunting images which left him bedridden and distressed for days. As you just mentioned, even Christ himself, His most Holy Son, saw only a bright cloud enfolding Him when He met His Holy Father and was transfigured upon the mountaintop. No man, however Holy and just, might look upon the Holy Father and live. No man can understand the mind of God. Tell me, if such a book does exist, then how has it remained hidden for a thousand years? The whole idea seems to be a test of our faith. We must not give in to our temptation, like Adam, and risk the wrath of the Lord by seeking knowledge that was not made for mortal minds.’
‘No, Rosso. You … you do not —’
Again he begins to wheeze and cough, sending blood spluttering out onto his chin and hands. I put my palm upon his brow. It is ice-cold.
‘Do not say any more. You are vexing yourself too much: you must rest.’
‘Mogao.’
‘Brother, I must be firm with you —’
‘Mogao. In the caves of the Thousand Buddhas you will find the one true Gospel. Within the many, you will find the one. Among the crowd of false gods and graven images there, find the idol with eyes set in the palms of her hands, burning as though they were nails. Dig beneath her feet, and find the chest that holds the book. Some of my contacts from Dadu promised to send regular scouts to monitor the progress of our caravan – when you make the detour to Mogao, they are sure to realise that I have worked out the map’s secret and follow. They will help you bear the book back to Christendom. Promise me, promise me, you will free mankind from the fetters of kings and churches, from the shackles of ignorance and doubt, from the chains of sin. Let us have a new future, a better future, brother.’
He retches, once, twice, but brings up nothing but a little more blood. His breaths are little sodden gasps, those of a drowning man struggling against great waves.
‘Promise me, promise me.’
I place my hand upon his own, and try to calm him.
‘I promise I shall do what needs be done,’ I whisper.
Lovari lets his head fall back upon the cushions and seems to smile, though his face is quickly twisted into a grimace. I retrieve the oils from beside me and anoint his damp head, thus beginning the Last Rites that might sew the seeds of eternal life. I bring my hands together and begin the final prayer, asking for mercy to be shown upon him despite everything, asking that he might suffer only a few centuries in Purgatory before being welcomed back into the Lord’s ever-loving embrace.
I say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, in as firm and steadfast a voice as I can muster, and when he does not rejoin with a hardy ‘Amen’ at the end, I know that his time on earth is over. Yet, for a second, my eyes remain closed, for I fear – ridiculously, heedlessly – that his death mask will be hardened into a look of reproach, of disappointment at the cheap trick I used to assail his fears. When I finally venture to look I see that his chest is still, his lips pursed as though on the verge of speech, his dark eyes mercifully hidden beneath the blistered lids.
There are preparations to be made. He shall be buried in a manner befitting a most distinguished prior and scholar, and then we may leave this accursed place and hurry on upon our journey.
While he was in the desert, the Devil tested the Lord with heresies, fallacies, paradoxes, hypotheses and false cosmologies, and between the skin-shrivelling sun spurring the sand and the buzzing in his ear, Our Saviour must have been driven to the brink of madness. This is how I feel, returning to my tent in the dim light of dusk as some of our men tend to Lovari’s corpse. My thoughts are so a-whirl that I barely notice Paul approaching. Fortunately, I am able to cut him off by raising my hand as he begins to speak.
‘Tell your men they have no reason to fear any longer, for we shall leave this place tomorrow morning, as soon as our noble brother is buried.’
He bows curtly. ‘I shall make arrangements.’
He seems nervous, his eyes flittering left, then right. He is no doubt troubled by the occurrence of yet another death in our camp, and may even harbour some pagan superstition about where the spirit travels after death. I try to put him at ease.
‘Do not worry. No one else is ill, at least at present. I pray that we have seen the last of this desert sickness. And you must trust that Prior Lovari’s soul is far from here now. He is in the hands of the Lord, who will judge him as He sees fit.’
He does not look at my face. Instead he shuffles upon his feet like some indolent mule. I am growing tired of this; I must retire, get some rest, give some space to my grief.
‘I wish to be left alone now. Ask one of the servants to bring some bread and pottage to my tent, for I shall take a little food before I retire. I must pray for our souls, that we will be ready to leave tomorrow morning.’
Paul bows once again. ‘I will ask. First you rest, then we go. You need more insects?’
‘No, as I told you this morning, I shall not be needing more of those beasts. They have served their purpose.’
Paul’s mouth opens but he does not speak, and I wonder for a moment whether he knows. However, I brush such concerns aside, for it is clear that Tartars have neither an understanding of morality nor the sense to grapple with such notions as sacrifice and the greater good, and so I leave him standing most befuddled in the sand and make my way back towards my tent. He calls to me just as I am grappling with the thick netting that keeps the insects out.
‘We leave with the light?’
‘Yes, we’ll go with the first rays of dawn. Make sure everything is ready for the next stage of the journey. Tell the scouts we’ll head north towards the outpost at Nami where we can replenish our supplies and where the men might have a day of leisure in reward for their hard work. Be sure to tell them that, so they might know I have been most grateful for thei
r labour and their loyalty.’
‘Then we don’t go to the caves of Mogao?’
‘As I told you earlier this very day, we shall not set foot in that place. We have wasted quite enough time already, and the godly among us would be much offended by such idols as they have there. Remember, the cartographers in our retinue are carefully mapping our path for future travellers, and I could not bear to think that our actions would lead any Christian man to that heathen place and thereby put the very safety of his immortal soul in peril. No, the risk is too great. We head to Nami.’
I slip inside the tent before he has the chance to raise another objection. Now that the party is under my charge, I shall make it a priority to teach the natives some respect for their betters, for it is clear that the common man would be lost to his baser instincts were it not for the firm and guiding hand of his superiors.
I take the frayed map and set it at the bottom of my chest, then sit down upon my makeshift bed. The sound of raised voices and hushed argument soon reaches me from outside. I take some comfort that Giovanni da Montecorvino may soon safely begin his mission and bring the light of true faith to this most desperate land – one does not need to be able to see the future to know that all shall one day bow low before the Lord. Even these barbarians might be saved, and guided along the righteous path. All shall have meat that their souls might feast upon the Word, and the Lord’s own emissary on earth, the most Holy Pope, shall be as a beacon to them, for it is the Church alone that may baptise man and so save him from the eternal fires of Hell.
For all his tales of predestination, it is a queer thing that Lovari never stopped to think that his own future was written long ago. Some are damned, and some are saved. Once he found the map, the final steps were unavoidable. Everyone could see how his foolish quest would end but him.
I must prepare myself to give the funeral mass this evening; I shall assuage the fears of our men by speaking of the strength and fortitude of unwavering faith, since it is well known that the common man may be made mad by the truth if it is not carefully administered by a wise and loving pastor. Then I shall to bed, and at dawn we shall away, that soon I might return to the monastery in Assisi and go once again to the infirmary to sit beside my dearest friend and mentor, the elderly burnt monk, Brother Alessio, and tell him that all is safe once more, for the Lord’s will hath been done, on earth as it is in Heaven, for ever and ever, Amen.
Rain at Night
PART 3 · NOVEMBER 815 CE
Yuan Chen,
My dearest friend, please accept my most profound apologies. The horseman brought your recent letters, one by one, and many of them have given me the greatest comfort. To the first – how many moons ago now? – I drafted a reply, complete with a copy of a poem I had been working on, but that was before my life was tipped upside down.
Everything has changed, and it cannot now go back to how it was before. There have been nights when the rain on the rooftop sounds louder than war drums and I cannot sleep, wondering how those poor and cold hundreds – huddled under a few bent stems of bamboo and weathered blankets – survive in the slums and tents near the city walls. There have been days when the shrill call to prayer from the Muslim quarter echoes out like the call of some exotic bird, and I feel suddenly scared by the sheer extent of the ideas in this world that I do not understand. There are even times when I catch myself wandering from room to room, and at those moments it seems as though I am trailing her – each time I enter a room it is as if she has just left, and I must therefore continue my search.
Over the last few days, as a respite from all the packing, I have managed to find a little time to take out my writing brushes. Yet where can I begin? My thoughts fly from me. Sometimes I think it is I myself who have become a ghost, out of time in this great city and dressed in ideas now either outdated or condemned to be forgotten. This thought – which should, by rights, further the depths to which my melancholy often tests me – in truth brings me a little comfort. For if I remain, though the world would forget me, then perhaps she too – somewhere, somehow – is still among us.
Yesterday evening my wife suggested I venture out, to take in the city for one last time, and without thinking I found myself in the officials’ gardens on the other side of the Big Goose Pagoda. Do you remember when we first sat there together, watching middle-aged men gather with their songbirds and listening to the trills and warbles of the fringilline orchestra? When I returned I was one of those older men, quite adrift from the world, while young couples and the new crop of mandarins fresh to the capital wandered past me, in thrall to the myriad delights of the gardens. Yet the evergreens, the rising rocks, the lotus ponds, all seemed dull to me now.
You will say I am dwelling too much in my melancholy, that I threaten to let it take hold again. Perhaps that is true. To dwell of course means to live in, to inhabit, and maybe I have lived too long in the shadows of my thoughts. It was a listless hour I spent in those gardens, looking for something I could not put my finger on. However, when I returned to the house I felt something stirring within me, and so, for the first time in many months, I sat with my scrolls and began to write by the light of a single candle. This is the poem that emerged from those sleepless hours:
The bloom is not a bloom, the mist not mist —
she is here, then gone.
Midnight comes, then dawn. Dreams linger, disappear.
Morning clouds wipe the night sky clear.
I shall not venture to explain it, for I trust you will understand it better if I leave it as it is, unadorned by excuses or expositions.
Yet this is not the letter I meant to write – my friend, you will by now have noticed that my thoughts are somewhat scattered. There is a reason for this: I have been sent away. There, I have written it (with shaking hand). After only two meetings with the crown prince, my time has been stolen from me. It was a few days ago that I was summoned to the Central Palace. That alone was enough to set my stomach on fire, and I was barely able to eat in the few days between receiving the fine scroll bearing the message and the date specified therein, even though I knew exactly what would happen once I arrived there.
The Central Palace. I had been in the presence of Emperor Xianzong twice before. Do you remember the first of those occasions? It was shortly after we first met. Though I was nowhere near as young and fresh-faced as you, my friend, I fear I was just as naïve and eager.
I had arrived in the capital only a few days before the imperial examination, and was sleeping on the dirty floor of a tiny house belonging to a man who had known my father. I spent all day and all night buried in books of history and poetry, preparing for the most important day of my life. By the time the morning of the exam arrived, I was overcome with a giddy sense of excitement and responsibility. I recall looking around on the way to the palace and wanting to shout out in glee as I spotted men of every conceivable tribe and nation, as I passed the towering outposts and bright pagodas, the soldiers and the merchants and the mandarins all marked out by their different-coloured livery, and I was beside myself with pride. What other country, I wondered, could boast such noble traditions as a government examination open to all men, regardless of wealth, geography or social standing? (Oh, my friend, see what the city has since done to that earnest young man.)
I recollect little of the exam – the hours passed in seconds. The wait for the results, however, was longer and much more excruciating. Each morning I hurried from the cold and splintered floor of the house in which I resided to the palace gates, hoping beyond hope that the results would be posted. I believe – though correct me if I my memory is mistaken – that it was on the day before the results appeared that we first met at those gates. You were carrying – the image is as clear as if it were branded into my brain – a few loose slips of bamboo on which you had copied a number of poems written by the great Du Fu. I remember you pinned them under your arm as you stood to catch your breath (like me, you had run to the palace gates as fast as you could), a
nd they fluttered mischievously in the spring breeze, as if they might escape at any second. Who spoke first? Can you remember? Was it I quoting from memory some of the poems you could not be parted from (for I was more than a little precocious in those days, was I not?) Or was it you enquiring whether I had composed pastoral or didactic verses for the last part of the examination? I cannot recall. Yet I know that by that same evening – after we had shared our life stories, our favourite poems, our dreams – we both knew we had found that most elusive of things: a true friend.
This reminiscing is perhaps getting in the way of my point; nostalgia, more than aching joints and flutters in the chest, is the true curse of aging. I meant only to remind you of the following day, after which we found we had both received exemplary results, when we assembled with all the other new mandarins in the main courtyard of the Central Palace. Though we were by no means near the front of the nervous group, I was afraid that my heart was beating so loudly the emperor might hear it when he passed by fleetingly to oversee us.
The second occasion on which I saw him was after I had been promoted in the Imperial Library and was cataloguing the collection of officially sanctioned histories of the previous dynasty to be printed using the new system of wood blocks – a labour which required no little amount of delicacy and tact. Once again, it was for a mere few seconds, and as I bowed down I caught sight only of the hem of the long-flowing yellow dragon robe as it swished majestically across the floor. The whole feeling of the room changed, as it might were someone to run in shouting ‘Fire!’ The great emperor stopped and spoke to one of the chief mandarins – some question about the life of a long-dead general loyal to one of his noble ancestors – and his thunderous vowels, though muted, echoed like temple bells. Then I heard the scuttling of the attendant eunuchs’ hurried steps, and the door hauled shut behind the departing group. When I dared look up again, I was sweating and my limbs were shaking.