I remember nothing of the next week. In a deep fever, at one moment shivering with a deathly chill and the next burning with fire, I struggled through evil and wicked dreams of running, always running, seeking something but never finding it.
A pack of wolves, or dogs, or something more deadly I could not tell, charged from behind me– and nothing but the endless snow-covered expanse of a featureless plain that stretched before me. I ran and ran, and slowly they gained. I looked behind and screamed as hundreds of canine filled jaws launched at me. I fell, not to the snow to be ripped limb from limb, but rather back into the icy void. I gulped down mouthfuls of the torrid blackness and thrashed against the current– but there was no current. Instead I treaded water, warm water it seemed, in an endless sea. The stars shone above me and below me a beryl ambience smote the dark.
Suddenly the surface of the lake seemed a league above me but I did not fear for I beheld a magnificent castle, its ramparts and battlements suffused with a blinding turquoise light. I knew this then for the beneficent abode of Dangra Yumtsho– goddess of the lake. I did not question how I knew this, yet I knew it to be true with such an unswerving faith and sense of familiarity that I could not explain. I moved slowly, like duck-down upon the faintest of breezes, floating gently towards the yawning gate. I felt no fear initially but then had the strangest feeling that I shared these waters with some nameless horror.
I suddenly stood before a dais and it was as though I breathed air and could talk and walk normally though I saw the water around me as before. I looked up and felt naked and helpless before the gargantuan chthonian, the queen of the underworld. She condescended to observed me. I was to her in size as a gnat is to a hemimorph. Like an imaginary creature from a children’s fairy tale rose the Brobdingnagian. Her crown might have circled a mountain and her sparse raiment flailed gently as if in a light spring breeze revealing breasts that would crush towers and lay the world bare. I wanted to kneel but instead she laughed, if it can be called a laugh. If such a laugh were not confined to the madness of my fevered dreams but in reality reverberated against the bowels of Irth, we should all be thrown down in the cataclysm that would follow. I quailed in abject fear and turned to flee though I might have been killed with a word.
In turning from her I found I faced her paramour. And in my hands was suddenly a sword, a two-handed sword of exquisite beauty with a long handle and a wide, double-sided, finely shaped and etched blade, aesthetically perfect, with flowing script along both sides of the blade. Glorious carvings adorned her quillons, hilt and pommel. I turned it over in my hands. A magnificent phoenix adorned one side and an equally impressive dragon the other. In the darkling depths it looked black rather than the silver of a khadga or its smaller cousin, the dri. Such power and might emanated from it that I felt as if I commanded it, the Queen would kneel before me– but I would not have dared. An overwhelming sense of omnipotence flowed from it and I felt faint and giddy with knowledge and power. I felt I would fall into a swoon but then I beheld the man that floated thirty yards from me in the azure brilliance.
Before I could ask how any of this was possible, I no longer stood before the seeming of a man, but before a great black serpent. Instinctively I brandished the sword but the Goddess bade me be still. When she spoke it was the sound the Irth might make as plates shifted and volcanoes erupted and mountains were made. It was a most terrifying sound.
“You have an admirable courage, young one, but it would not do to mistake your friends for your enemies. My husband, Targo dwells now in the body of a black serpent until the time you have need of him in the kingdom of Shang Shung.”
She said no more but simply smiled – monstrous and terrifying, yet softened by a look of hope and expectation. Before her, blazing in brilliant emerald against her glowing raiment a symbol I thought at once was both a man and a bird with a spear behind it. Its name entered my mind but I will not utter that here.
I remember no more of those dreams but opaque visions, formless, horrific and always the calm ferocity of the black, watery void that told me of my death. Of what follows, pieces came from the Masters and from my friends, some epic in their descriptions but with little truth while others professed that their own truth was what mattered to them through the trials that followed. But it was much later, sitting in a cave on a hillside with machines of death levelling the mountainside around us, that Puk, then much older, described to me in kinder detail my ramblings which began this odyssey. He said I lay as one dead for days upon days and that after the seventh day, I sat bolt upright and spread my hands before me as though speaking to the gathered masses in a great convocation.
“Arise! Arise my brothers! Pain ceases! Arise strong souls! The one whose soul is above the pain is worthy– ad vitam aeternam! Arise!”
Master Panuaru and several other students and staff, gathered around me in prayer, looked across the infirmary to where I looked. In its niche in the wall above the main entrance, a statuette of the goddess, Tara, was now bathed in a fulgent radiance. They all fell to their knees around the pallet on which I now lay prone once more, white and near death. The statue moved and the avatar of Drölkar, the Mother Goddess who answers human supplication and brings the Wisdom of Compassion stood in the middle of the room, a wave of her hand bringing tears of healing to all who witnessed it.
When the Buddha Avaloketishwara witnessed the suffering of all the peoples of this realm he shed twenty-one tears of compassion from which were born the twenty-one drölma. Most of the idols spread throughout our ancient temple featured seven all-seeing eyes of compassion.
The shimmering figure Sita Tara swirled and danced. Waves of light and compassion poured from her seven eyes. There were three in her forehead and in her healing dance could be seen the eyes in her palms. It was only when she leaped high and kicked her feet that one could also discern the eyes in the soles of her feet. There before us glowed the avatar of the White Tara, the goddess of peace, the healer, ever the symbol long life and prosperity, gatekeeper between the now and the forever.
You have seen this world and the next…
“You were dying right in front of us.”
… but look further – for I see Jagadamba.
“What was that – Jagadoo…, Jagadaa –”
“Jagadamba my friend – the Ocean of Blood at the end of all things. That was indeed an evil portent. But look what befalls us now. The Goddess was right. Machines as high as a palace tear down this mountain around us. They will then tear downthe universe. We have seen too much death and despair.”
Seek thee the Key of Heaven. Morning shall be thy guide.
I smiled, remembering that fateful encounter. “Thank you, Puk.”
Had my path been different, many more lives might have been spared. But such is the will of the gods and a pity that so many sought to waylay me. But who can say that the fates chose for me a worse path and where we might be had my path been easier. I shuddered with a remembered pain, one of many that I would never forget.
Much later, it seemed that Puk’s story held true. While the legions of Cimmerii and their armies of preta-mechs reigned bloody fire down upon the entire galaxy in an unholy iconoclasm and planets were ripped apart and the hordes of siderii ravaged the cosmos, I remember sitting around a fire with the refugees of one of the inner worlds, now housed in the belly of one of the great intergalactic star ships off the azure coasts of St. Clair, telling the story of the Tara as an astral goddess who was the wife of Brihaspati.
While they lamented the loss of their world and tried to make comfortable the hold of the great metal beast which ferried us away from the carnage, I ate their bread, dipping it into a broken bowl of steaming broth and calmed the hundreds gathered around me with a story of the heavenly tragedy played out in the night sky when the bringer of night, Soma, later deposed by Kusunda, lusted after and abducted Tara, who was the pole star, from her husband Brihaspati, the Lord of the Jovian Storm Giants and Red Star of the southern sky.
> Soma made Tara a prisoner in his realm. He gave her the finest of everything and a magnificent palace and a people to rule over but he would not set her free. Brihaspati tried to save her and appealed for justice to the Jade Emperor. The gods rallied against Soma, who called on the Asuras to be their allies, and a mighty war erupted which raged over thousands of aeons. At the last battle, before the tattered remnants of each side clashed in that final dark hour that would have utterly destroyed the four kingdoms of Irth, Lord Krishna and his brave Queen again intervened, and in desperation to save all, created the fifth throne to rule over all the other four. Amidst death and ruination, and at the bidding of the Lord Krishna, the God-King Sududanghotani brought all his wrath and vengeance down upon the hapless kings. Upon His word, the foundations of the four kingdoms were shaken to their roots and the cities of Irth smited by the fury of the heavens.
Soma, fearing for His own peoples, yielded and freed his captive. She returned to her husband, but she was with child. Brihaspati refused to accept her back and resolved to cast her to the lowest of the six lower realms and her child would ever be enslaved in torment to Yama. At that moment, the child, hearing the ultimatum was born instantly. He was Buddha-yana, brimming with power and beauty, and both Soma and Brihaspati knelt before him in obeisance, and would each have claimed the child as his own son.
The boy, Amitabha ascended to the fifth throne and spoke to all the inhabitants of all the realms including Pretas, the realm of ghosts and Tiryakas, the realm of animals, and also to the legions of Asuras and the gods, his words the very essence of compassion and his eyes shedding tears of humility and healing to bring the worlds together. He gave back the rule of the universe to the four kings: to Indra, the Jade Emperor, the kingdom of Heaven; to the Sky-Lord and king of all eagles, Mithras, the realm of clouds and of blue skies; to the king of the lions, Vairochana, the realm of Irth and to the fell Dragon Lord, Kusunda the realm of the underworld. He bade Lords Soma and Brihaspati, now Bodhisattvas, to walk the realm of Manushyas and maintain balance and help the peoples follow the Noble Path to Enlightenment, until the time of ending, when the Universe will be unmade and four pillars will fall.
Regardless of Puk’s version of events of that afte rnoon in the infirmary, the image of the goddess of the lake, and of that magnificent sword stayed with me. Would that it had simply been a dream.
Chapter 3: Deliberations
A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.
Tibetan saying When I was well enough, I was summoned to speak with Lama Tomas. He was a gruff man and not given to flights of adolescent fancy, preferring the serenity and peace of a life devoted to prayer and meditation. He was equally feared and respected by young and old alike.
His looks were deceiving. He had a pale, almost sickly complexion, round eyes and a closed-cropped greying beard. And he was, by all accounts, quite advanced in years but looked no older than some of the middle-aged professors. A highly intelligent man and well-travelled, he would balk on questions of the exotic places he had seen, quoting from Vedic scripts;
Do not be tempted by visions of what may. For the grass is not always greener, The clouds are not always brighter The sun is not always warmer.
You will wander from the true path. And follow the path of darkness.
One leads to the path of never-returning The other returns to sorrow.
He suffered the secular devotions of principal, leader, teacher, administrator and governor because this ancient order, this collection of sanguine-cloaked monks was more than a school, more than a library, more than a bastion of devotion and spiritual repose. Intellectually, I knew it was also the last house of human learning and history on this most ancient of all the human worlds, and I knew much of the remarkable fighters that were produced by ourAgōgē, but only he knew the sum total of what this institution stood for and would defend with its dying breath.
I stood in front of the massive oaken door, ever symbolic of pain and torment for those acolytes unlucky enough to be ushered beyond it. Every story I had ever heard of anyone summoned to Lama Tomas’ office ended in either dire punishment or parsimonious reward. And I did not believe that having nearly died as a result of our ill-conceived, juvenile and utterly ill-fated escape from the monastery, that I would be eligible for a reward of any kind. Oh! what it cost me to reach up and knock on that door, such an insignificant and feeble sound against that mighty oaken frame.
The door creaked back and before me stood a grim Master Panuaru. He waved me inside and I heard the door thud shut behind me in a gesture of finality, all hope of resistance and strength gone. Lama Tomas stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out of the window, the morning sun illuminating the mountain cliffs across the valley.
“Young Tashigang, your Holiness”, said Master Panuaru. The Abbott continued to stare out across the valley. Looking from him to Master Panuaru was like looking at the absolute antithesis of all that Lama Tomas was. Panuaru was the strongest looking man I had ever, and perhaps will ever see. He was tall and dark of skin, being from a country far south and west of here
– a great land full of mountains, plains, grasslands and jungles but known more notably for the desert that spread from one coast to the other and wider than a hundred of the country we called home. More than any other Master in the entire monastery, he could cause the most physical harm if his skills were required– he was our combat and weapons teacher – but more importantly he performed the role of Combat and Weapons Master for the Sera Ngari– a powerful and intimidating man indeed. But we knew another side to him also. He was shown such respect and admiration by the students that a kind of inspired awe surrounded him and he had the loyalty of the both students and teachers. We could confide in him and along with an equal dose of brutal honesty and harsh manner, the value of his wisdom and advice were unquestionable.
Lama Tomas seemed lost in his thoughts as he stared out of his window, hands clasped behind his back, hardly aware that Master Panuaru had just admitted me or that I was even present. If Master Panuaru was seen to lack any level of sentimentality and youthful humour, Lama Tomas was entirely devoid of it. He could easily be the coldest, cruellest man any of us had ever known. Where Master Panuaru inspired awe and respect, Lama Thomas inspired fear and dread.
In a state bordering on anaphylaxis, I hardly noticed the room around me. The Abbot’s desk was piled high with holo-cubes, data plates, laz-reels and ancient papers, books, scrolls and other physical paraphernalia that he preferred, all marking this as the seat of government in this institution. I felt for a brief moment the overwhelming burden of responsibility on his shoulders and if I could have wound back the clock and saved him this moment I would have. But sadly, without power over time itself I knew I could not make any kind of apology or amendment that would suffice in this instance.
He seemed to be on the verge of settling some internal argument, the details known only to himself, and having come to terms with his warring opinions wheeled towards me. He looked older than I had ever seen him. Such care and sorrow were etched in his wizened face, but also such ill-concealed wrath that I could hardly meet his gaze without my knees failing beneath me. Master Panuaru remained stoic, as a statue of hardest granite would weather an aeon of floods and storms without flinching.
“I don’t know where to begin Tashigang! By the Bodhisattva’s infinite mercy I cannot begin to …” he trailed off, his face red and twisted in a torturous display of anger. Yet there was something else beneath the glaring visage, as if having delivered the same judgement (I then supposed) to Rogel, Puk and Yeshe, that he could not now bring himself to deliver the same verdict to me.
He had started again, “… were up to me, you’d be banished to some far away outpost to live your life in a cave, praying for the intercession and compassion of the Buddha– for all the boneheaded, idiotic and stupid …”
“Expulsion is too good for me, Venerable Abbott,” I interceded a
nd faced the floor. He took a deep breath and it was a moment before he spoke.
“I’m glad you feel that way. Master Panuaru and I have discussed your case. We have taken the other Masters into our confidence also. It was a slim vote indeed.”
“Can you tell me who voted in my favour?”
“Don’t presume to try my patience, boy. One of you is now dead because of your stupidity!” He quietened and returned to looking out the window.
“I have prayed deeply and searched my soul for some sign, some truth that will make me understand the reasons for things. Tell me how this came about and why you all suddenly thought this would be a great idea when you all know so wellthe dangers of the wilds.”
“Tell His Holiness what you remember of that night, Tashigang.” It wasn’t an invitation.
That night? It seemed a lifetime ago. And I could not rightly remember yesterday. Everything was a blur to me. I had not seen my friends but I had faint memories of them coming to sit by my bed while I languished in fever. What had they told the Masters? I did not know whether I would be telling them the same thing, or if I did, if my truth was going to be actual, or some verisimilitude given my frozen condition when they carried me back to keep?
I began by premising with some tentative facts, like how I had never been further from the keep than a few leagues in all my years there and how we were sick of being cloistered in these ancient halls throughout the whole of winter. I told them about our collective enthusiasm for Rogel’s plan and how it all seemed so easy. I told them, haltingly at first, but then without stopping, how our plan had come together and how somehow, the Fates chose that night that I, Tashi Jalen Rinpoche, novice monk of Galupka Monastery, should live and that my brother should be taken. I cannot help but think that had those mighty waters taken me that night, then my brothers might be saved from a disastrous fate. History, it seems, is not without a bitter sense of the sardonic, of the mordant – that those who work to preserve our past should be smited by the future.
The War of the Realms Page 4
