Bewildered, he looked at the charitable monk who once again pointed at the thing before them and said
“Ca-ho. Nit.”
“Live?” Cassien managed to ask.
“Yes. Live.” The monk replied with a small opening of his features.
“It is alive!” Cassien thought, “How can it be? And Aria?”
He extended a hesitating hand toward the beast and rested it lightly on its muzzle. He immediately felt the soft vibration of her presence. Hope raising its turbulent head in his mind, he turned to the monk.
“Mine. Love. In.” he said. “In. Ca-ho. Nit.”
The monk’s eyes narrowed. He gave him a long, inscrutable stare and after a bit he stepped to the scaly beast. He bowed and reverently touched the palm of his hand to the top of its snout. He stayed in that position for a moment, slightly bent at the waist, his eyes closed. Then, he removed his hand and bowed deeply to the beast and turned to Cassien.
“Learn. Ca-ho. Nit.” he told him.
“Learn. Ca-ho. Nit?” Cassien repeated, uncertain of what that meant.
The monk simply nodded and proceeded to snuff out the oil lamps one by one. He kept one lit and put the others back into their small compartment at the back of one of the short columns. Then, with the last alight oil lamp in hand, he headed out of the chamber.
Cassien reluctantly followed him. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Aria was here and he was loath to part from her. But what other choice did he have?
They exited the chamber and walked back through the cave in silence. Cassien ached for Aria in ways he had not in a long time and the myriad of questions that made the rounds in his head only deepened his longing for her.
When they emerged from the cave, the other monks were waiting for them. They stood by the edge of the ridge lost in contemplation of the vastness of the sky. The harsh brightness of the day was blinding but it did not seem to bother the charitable monk who went to his fellow brothers without breaking stride. Cassien stayed at the mouth of the cave to give his eyes a chance to get used to the snowy glare.
The monks exchanged a few words that Cassien did not grasp. Then the charitable monk returned to him. His blue eyes had a playful gleam that Cassien had not seen before.
“Come.” he said, smiling to him. “We. Teach. Ca-ho. Nit.”
Chapter Thirty Five
Come in, come in!” the small man said.
He was thin and short, almost delicate in appearance. His head was round but hollowed at the cheeks and his cheek bones stuck out sharply from his face. His skin was rugged and weathered and his white hair receded to the middle of his skull on either side of a more resilient tuft. His nose was long and thin. It supported a pair of round metal-rimmed glasses behind which brow eyes shone bright, if not mischievous.
“A late comer, the most intriguing kind!” the man continued as he retreated from the threshold to let the prince in.
The short hallway that led from the backdoor to the main room was narrow. The walls were covered with ancient-looking, dark-red wallpaper with gold floral arrangements streaked across it. Frames lined up the entire length of the hallway. Some were overly colorful esoteric mismatches of geometric shapes with floating eyes and too many layers of print strewn about the compositions. Others were black and white family portraits in which the subjects were invariably stiff and grim-looking.
‘This is no place of worship,” the prince thought.
He wondered if the old man he met in the forest had lied to him.
“Welcome to the house of knowledge!” the small man said as he led the prince inside. “I am Marc Laurel.”
He turned around and smiled at the prince.
“Channeler and Seer of the divine and the beyond.”
They stepped into a room that smelled old with accents of dust and stale incense. There was a round table in the middle of the room with two chairs on opposite sides. The furniture was sparse but cluttered. To the left was an imposing bookshelf that spanned the entirety of the wall with shelves that gave under the weight of the volumes stacked disorderedly on them. Against the opposite wall was a wood-and-glass cabinet with strange porcelain trinkets strewn on its shelves and a few incense holders and piles of ashy residues atop it. The walls of the room were covered with the same wallpaper as the hallway and had tapestries and drapes hung over them without rhyme or reason.
The room had a warm if not slightly claustrophobic feel to it. There was a closed door in the far wall and another next to the cabinet, one of which, the prince supposed, led to the seer’s living quarters.
“How can I be of help this fine evening?” the seer asked.
“I need a word,” the prince said.
The small man walked to the table and invited the prince to sit with the flick of a wrist.
“A word?” he pondered out loud.
“Yes. A word that has never been uttered,” the prince replied.
He dropped his pack under the table, pulled the chair closest to the bookshelf and sat down. The small man sat across the table and stared thoughtfully at him above the rim of his glasses. A large glass ball in a velvet-lined silver base was between them on the table. The seer saw the prince look at it.
“Do not worry, this is mostly for show,” he said with a smile. “I write; that’s what I do. I make physical contact with you, things come to me, and I write them down. But it is up to you to make sense of whatever comes out.”
“Writing to find a word,” the prince thought. “Why not.”
“I write until it stops coming and what comes out is what you get. Do we understand each other?”
The prince nodded and started rummaging in his pack.
“Now, my rates are-”
The prince dropped a few coins on the table and the seer’s face lit up. The prince had sensed him right; it did not bode well. In his experience whoever asked for coin in exchange for higher truths inevitably turned out to be a swindler.
“The word,” the prince said, a latent threat seeping into the last syllable. “It’s all I need.”
“Indeed, indeed,” the small man replied as he scooped up the coins.
He opened a small drawer, dropped them in and pulled out some sheets of paper and a pencil. He held the pencil in his right hand, pressed it against the paper and laid his left arm across the table.
“Now, if I may have your hand,” he said solemnly.
The prince slowly extended his right arm across the table while keeping his left on his lap, near the hilt of his sword. The small man held his hand lightly. His touch was cold and slightly unpleasant. The seer closed his eyes and seemed to focus for a while.
The prince stared at him intently. He perceived every twitch of the small man’s facial muscles, every single wavering of the thin wrinkles around his mouth, eyes, and forehead. He wanted to see true absorption on the man’s face, signs of his connecting to what lay beyond the flat plane of reality. But all he saw was a farcical attempt at feigning concentration.
The seer’s eyes fluttered semi-opened and fixed themselves somewhere beyond the prince’s left shoulder. He started mumbling incoherently and the pencil in his hand rushed across the sheet of paper. The small man scribbled for a while. Every so often he tightened or relaxed his grip on the prince’s hand. He would snort or sigh as if privy to some revelation he found either ironic or too heavy to shoulder alone.
The prince quickly grew bored of his pantomime. How many seers or self-professed men of knowledge had he met in his travels? Myriad. All claimed to know of what lay beyond the thin veil of life, self-proclaimed detainers of secrets. Most claimed to be bridges to the wills of deities and gods. Except for a few, each was more deluded than the next and had little more to offer than tales and their will to lie to themselves and to others.
The small man stopped babbling for the time it took him to set the top sheet of paper aside and apply his pencil to the one below. Then he went on scribbling and mumbling. The words dribbled out of his mouth in a
jerky fashion and spread on the paper as if he were tracing the path of a diseased bee.
The prince’s attention drifted back to the sea of sages, priests, monks, seers, and fools he had met over the eons of his journey. Most he had forgotten completely. Some were little more than a blur in his mind’s eye with flashes of vivid imagery attached to them. A few had marked him in a deeper way, although most remained distant figures in his stretched out and scattered memories.
As the sounds coming from the small man sitting in front of him became background noise, citadels, caves, market places, and temples flashed through his mind. A woman stood out from the mist of the hazy memories colliding in his head. Where was he when he met her? He could not recollect. She was old, he thought, but he could not remember her face clearly. It was sunny that day. He was in a street; the ground was paved with flat stones. Despite her small stature, her voice was strong and filled with certainty, as the voices of those claiming to know Truth usually are. She was perched on a chair. Had her hair been long and wild? He thought so, but he was not sure. The prince’s eyes glazed over the room and the small man’s voice receded to nothing as he was pulled toward that day, that voice, strong and assertive, and the words that his memory reluctantly released to him.
‘Fools.’
The word cracked in the prince’s mind like the tip of a whip.
“Fools,” the woman was saying, fire in her eyes as she stared down at the few people who had stopped to listen to her.
“Fools, those who seek existence beyond their own experience, reasons beyond their own senses. Fools, those who search for meaning outside of themselves. Fools, those who try to understand the world when they do not understand themselves; for we are our own world in truth. Does it not speak of their failure to comprehend the intricacies of the world, to acknowledge their own inner workings? There is no such thing as magic. No gods but in feeble man’s dreams.”
She pointed a bony finger at the thin crowd.
“YOU are the tool of your existence; its ephemerality the true degree of Man. To seek refuge out of one’s condition in fantasies is but cowardice, like a child hiding under his blanket from shadows on the wall; only because he dares not look at them and realize that they are nothing more than light and fear. And to face one’s fear unadulterated by false hopes and childish confections of days after death that is the stature of a true man.”
She paused and raised an authoritarian finger toward the sky.
“Hear me now!” she said.
Her eyes pierced through each of the bystanders with a ferocious intensity. When she went on her voice became a shrill admonition.
“To peer into the state of man, his physicality, the physiological reality of his experience - for there is nothing beyond that- and his ever approaching, ineluctable end, and find meaning for joy and fulfillment in it, that is what separates Man from his animal brother.”
Her voice was still echoing in the prince’s head when he felt a tap on his hand. The small man with the metal-rimmed glasses snapped back into focus in front of him.
The seer had stopped writing and was looking at the prince with a satisfied and pompous expression on his face.
“It is done,” he said smugly.
He withdrew his hand and stacked the sheets of papers in front of him carefully, as if they were slates of crystal.
“I will now read what the ether has willed upon you,” he said, straightening the glasses on his nose even though they were not crooked.
He sat up in his chair and cleared his throat.
“Traveler, poor and alone,” he began, “you seek that which your heart desires. You have lost much and you feel guilty about it. We, the spirits of beyond, see the emptiness in you, your quest for words. There are things you need said or saying and you shan’t find peace until it has been done.”
“More nonsense,” the prince thought, tuning out the small man again.
He did not know what he had expected. Why would that one man know more than the thousands he had met before him? He would not. He was just another charlatan.
As the self-proclaimed seer went on reading from the scribble-filled pages, the prince once more floated back to those he had, at one time or another, hoped would hold the object of his quest.
There was a girl, her face indistinct, her name forgotten, but in his memory she smelled fresh and warm of sun and sea. She died because of him; he remembered blood pooling on a white dress, thick between his fingers. The men had come for him yet again. He had been too slow.
“What was her name?” the prince wondered.
He unconsciously flicked his left hand as if to shake blood off it.
“‘There are three of you’ she said.”
He remembered flames, tall and putrid in an old monastery, a man’s face melting. A child had been there, a child and a friend.
“The word, one of them should have known the word.”
Beaches and caves, sunny plains and icy valleys flashed in his head.
“And the flames….”
He caressed the stone at his neck as he had done countless times.
The seer in front of him was talking about balance and elements, energies of nature and healing and redemption. There was a small lamp in the corner by the incense cabinet. Its static flame glowed mutedly behind a velvet lampshade and its light bounced off the glass ball on the table and split along its curvature into distinct bands of red, yellow, green and blue. He had not noticed the thin lines of light before. But now that he did, the green arc of light stuck out from the rest of them. It seemed to inflate and stretch beyond the glass ball as if calling for him. Flames wavered alive in his mind.
“The flames are always green, aren’t they?”
He thought of the Night that clawed at him after every sunset. Was it not green as well, he wondered?
The small man across the table flipped over the page he had just finished reading. Only one remained before him. He lifted it delicately, cleared his throat loudly as if to get the prince’s attention.
“You are many because you refuse to feel what you are,” he continued reading. “You do not speak with one voice because the scattered parts of you do not communicate. Your inner child…”
“I am many” echoed the seer’s words in the prince’s mind; an ancient thought that did not truly feel his own.
“As one I am the answer” followed.
An inkling of knowledge started blooming in his mind; something familiar and foreign at the same time, superimposed atop green flames and the notion that the Night was green.
“Is it ‘many as one is the answer’?” Did that even make sense?
It was right there, on the tip of his tongue, like a word he had known or knew but that refused to come to him. If only he could say it.
It was the flames; the flames and his love. Or was it the flames to his love? The Night, too, had something to do with it; the Night that might be green.
The thoughts bounced and raced in his head. He tried to track them all for fear that the one he should follow might escape him. It was like the light on the glass ball; each ray, each color, many from the one flame in the corner.
Many As One, he kept on coming back to that. The concept bore authority in his mind. It tasted of truth somehow.
“Am I many when the Night comes? Or am I one then?” he asked himself.
The small man finished reading. He let the last word -happiness- hang in the air for dramatic effect. Then he solemnly put the last sheet of paper on the table.
“Now,” he said loudly, disrupting the prince’s train of thoughts. “The ether does not share all its secrets at once. The knowledge of the spirits is too vast, too grand.”
He leaned forward, needlessly adjusting his glasses once again.
“It is not unusual for the answers one seeks not to be found in the first writing.”
He joined his hands in front of him, too slowly for it to be a natural gesture, and rested them on the table.
“
You see, the first writing establishes the connection to you so that during subsequent sessions the spirits may be channeled more strongly. If you feel the need, I would be more than happy to channel the beyond for you once more, but at a later time.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly and his face stretched out in a plaintive expression.
“Channeling is exhausting,” he continued, “so much energy, so much knowledge flows through me.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the prince said abruptly, angry at the seer for muddling his thoughts.
“Are you sure-” the seer started.
The prince stood up. He rested a hand on the hilt of his sword and gave a hard stare to the small man before picking up his pack.
“Very well, very well,” the seer said nervously.
He hesitated for a second, then started saying something but the prince glared down at him and he went quiet.
The prince needed to leave. He needed to go to a quiet place and retrace his thoughts, retrieve the end of the thread that would lead him to…
“To what?” he thought.
He did not know, but it felt important, it held answers. Or at least an answer, something that had been with him for a long time, which he had overlooked; something that extended throughout his vagrant life and beyond and connected it all in a simple thought. He turned around and left the seer’s house without another word.
The WorldMight Page 39