The War of the Realms

by C Steven Meldrum

  “I don’t expect either of you to know who wrote that or how long ago. But I thought it fitting.”

  He continued, but as if to someone unseen.

  “Is this what we who have believed so deeply and for so long have so sorely yearned?” Master Panuaru looked at the Abbott with a questioning look on his face. “There is a heretical antinomy to this life that simultaneously bemuses and enlightens me– annoyingly so.”

  He looked at each of us in turn as if on the verge of some epiphany. “I have formed a belief that the apparent dysteleology of existence is perhaps not quite so. The seemingly purposeless and random paths we each take through this life are perhaps not as chaotic or as aleatory as we believe, but moreso an unwilling and nescient assimilation in omnipotent intrigues.”

  He continued to look from Master Panuaru back to me, almost with an air of a teacher quoting scripture to his students. He then crossed his arms and spun around, staring back out of the window again and continued his dissertation, seeming to speak more to himself than to anyone else.

  “It seems more than possible to me that at times of great and universal need we might see the intercession of the devine. The very gods themselves, whose minds we are not to know, casually interpose their designs and no matter our impotent illusions of autonomy and freedom or the self-serving importance we place on our short and largely otiose individual meanderings, pluck us away from this singular and lineal existence as easily as that farmer out there … “ (he waved his hand towards the world beyond), “ … fills his winter stores from his uberous orchards, and then immerse us inexorably in their exalted designs.

  “But what is the ‘great and universal need’ they need our help with and why…” he looked at me– his eyes boring into me as if some truth lay concealed within me that escaped him,“… you?”

  He looked sadly disappointed with the vacant look he received in return and let out a slow sigh of resignation. “Would that I was there also I would not have let word out. Tashi, listen to me. Whether what is to come is the gods will or merely a continuation of our own convoluted path though this turn of the wheel, I must now see how this plays out. They are coming for you and I don’t know if we’ll be able to keep you.”

  “Who’s coming?” I asked, without adding Lama Tomas’ correct title which earned me an angry glare from Master Panuaru.

  “We need to be sure”, said Lama Thomas, ignoring me. Master Panuaru answered me instead.

  “Lama Tomas means, young Tashigang, that word of your brush with the infinite has reached the capital. It may be that you are destined for greater things.”

  “Mmmm, questions. Questions that need answers ….” Abbot Tomas mused to himself, lost in thought. Master Panuaru spoke. “I need to consult now with Abbott Tomas, young Tashigang. Return to the dormitory but say nothing of any of this to the other students. Understand?”

  “Yes, Master.” I got up, bowed to Abbott Tomas and turned to leave. I reached for the handle and then paused.

  “You have a question,Tashigang?”

  “Two questions, Master. Who’s coming? And, what about the others?”

  “We will speak more of this later. However, for now, since you will no doubt learn from the others anyway, and to answer your second question first, Rogel has been sent away and Yeshe is working off her punishment with Master Chumbling. You will see Pandit when you return to the dormitory. And as for your first question– I don’t know.”

  Master Panuaru opened the door for me. I walked across the threshold, an unmistakable air of relief, but also loss about me. I paused and looked back over my shoulder. “Master, I am truly sorry.”

  “I know, Tashigang. But have you given thought to anything Abbott Tomas has said? Yours may have been the trial by which you have been in some fashion‘chosen’. Lhapka’s life may have been the price paid for all our lives in some hitherto unknown darkness that is to come. Your fevered ramblings spoke of the end of all things on many occasions before you were healed by the Mother Goddess.”

  “There is one more thing I remember from those dreams, Master – Nagara Jaya Sri. I don’t know if that helps.”

  The heavy oaken door closed firmly behind me. As if in a daze I walked the corridors and turnings back to the dormitory. Monks passed me, staring as if in wonder. Quickening my pace, I descended the great staircase that marked the entrance to the secular offices and official meeting rooms of the castellum and crossed the ornately decorated foyer to the grand doors that opened onto the main courtyard. From here it was a short walk to the building that held the monks’ dormitories, prayer rooms and refectory. Further on past the quadrangle where we would assemble were other buildings that formed part of the school including classrooms, chapels, halls and combat training facilities.

  It happened that Puk was coming out of the dormitory as I was climbing the stairs toward it. He saw me and, too late, tried to turn and run.

  “Puk!” I called and chased him. In no time I had tackled him on the rough stone floor. He kicked and struggled so I pinned him and sat atop him. “Stop this nonsense!”

  He struggled some more and then went flaccid, great sobs erupting from him. He was young, but wiry and strong and not to be underestimated, as many older monks had made the mistake of doing in combat training. Being smaller and younger than us, he had had a much harder road, taking the harder knocks with the maturity and wisdom of someone twice his age. He had proved himself at every turn. Yet here was a new kind of terror that he had yet to deal with. I estimated he had not yet seen his thirteenth or fourteenth summer and had survived an horrendous ordeal, seeing one of his friends die and another bloodied and halfdrowned. I’d known him for his fortitude and knew the depth of his loyalty. To lift his spirits, I resolved before the day was out to show him the hiding place I had found a few months ago under an ancient tope at the eastern end of the Dragon Tower.

  He looked up at me but not into my eyes. I released his arms and felt my face where he stared at me. Three deep lines ran vertically down my face, two on the left and one on the right. I had not felt them until now and suddenly felt the gravity of my situation. Not many people came that close to a met’y wolf and lived. I rolled off him and lay upon my back, staring up at the curved ceiling of the corridor.

  “What happened out there, Puk?”

  He made no attempt to flee and instead lay quietly beside me, the tears gone for the moment. He spoke as one removed, distant, “I don’t know. You were dead. The river took you both. And then you were on the ice. You should be dead.”

  Chapter 5: Guild of the Golden Dragon “Mi drupa midu, Pokyi shitsa sim go.”

  There is nothing that cannot be done [so long as you] hold firm to your roots.

  Ancient buddhist saying I sat brooding in my hiding place beneath the crumpling tope at the eastern end of the keep, before me the much-recognised snow-covered training area and beyond that the intimidating might of the Dragon Tower. Puk had come with me but had stayed for less than a watch. He seemed happy at first that I trusted him with my hiding place but he quickly grew sullen when talk shifted to Lhapka and I could see his anxiety building sitting in a tomb discussing the dead, and no doubt in his mind talking to someone who should also be dead.

  A frigid breeze stirred through the cracks in the walls around me and whipped up the fine layer of ice dust that covered everything.

  I sat at the edge of the sarcophagus with arms wrapped around my knees and my chin resting between them. I cherished the isolated stillness in which to sit and ponder the dramatic turn of events that had changed my life so much lately. I stared out over the whiteness of the courtyard through my window upon the world (actually, what I took to be a window was nothing more than a small broken section of the base of the stupa– not big enough to crawl through but enough to see the courtyard beyond and base of the tower).

  I knew this space so well now. The ruptured tomb stood a cubit above ground. There was a dais raised in the centre of the cell with a carved relief of a r
obed figure in repose atop the sarcophagus. He lay with hands clasped together holding the marble replica of a decoratively carved pike across him as if even in death he must defend himself from the evils that would otherwise beset him. The only inscription on the tomb was a few words in one of the dead languages;

  TU FUI EGO ERIS I was initially intrigued by this and had gone looking through the library for a translation. When I finally found him, the Master Archivist laughed and wanted to know where I read it. I said I was doing some research for my class on languages.

  “Well ,young Tashigang,” he mused and prodded me in the chest with a gnarled and bony finger as he over-emphasized each word. “It is a reminder to the living reader that he will one day be in the same predicament as the subject of the inscription.”

  When I looked askance at him, he laughed again.

  “I take it that inscription came from an ossuarium? As you are, he was. As he is, so you will be!” He mused silently to himself again and then, laughing, patted me on the head. “But let us hope not too quickly!” He turned and disappeared between rows of ancient tomes.

  What a strange inscription, I thought. I never forgot it though, and it was not until many years later that the literal meaning of the phase would have any relevance to me, in Irth’s darkest season.

  I silently congratulated the mason who had built this mausoleum. Such fine detail existed in the carvings on both the stone interior of this stupa and the marble representation of the man who no doubt lay beneath it. It seemed extremely ancient to me but the fine marble looked as new as if it had only been placed here recently.

  I had always thought the existence of this crypt strange as monks who die are not interred in a tomb nor buried in the ground where the souls of the dead remain trapped forever, as I had read the ancients practised, but are given to the sky where they can quickly fly upon the world’s winds on their journey to Heaven. When I had first found this place my curiosity had initially overpowered my respect for the incumbent and I had tried to move the carven lid, bearing the marble likeness atop it, so that I could see inside the cairn. After minutes of fruitless exertion, I came to realise that nothing short of half a dozen burly monks would be needed, in a space that had little more room than for two.

  His face was hidden for the most part in shadow but it was strikingly familiar to me, as familiar as my own face but I couldn’t for the life of me think who. For one thing he had obviously been taller than me, unless the artisan had embellished the true height of the incumbent, and I was by no means short, being already taller than most of the journeymen.

  In the stillness and the depths of my own thoughts I spoke to him as I sometimes did. He was a good listener. I talked about my trials and the unknown ahead of me when it seemed that I might be taken away to the capital to whatever end.

  I received no sympathy for my predicament and instead stared out of my viewing hole while he continued to stare blankly at the ceiling three feet above him. Unlike that impressive and life-giving sunset of a few weeks ago, looking through the break in the wall before me now, all I could see was a dreary darkness and the threat of the last of the great winter storms before the onset of spring and then the summer we longed for– with treks to the long lake and swimming and the usual activities that we loved. I don’t know whether it was an assumption born of prescience or more of a grim awakening to the realty of my position, but I knew then that those carefree summers we had shared together were gone forever.

  I have always berated myself for being overly sentimental – a quality born perhaps of a life of prayer and meditation, but I think more possibly because I had never known a family outside of the friends and students and masters that made up this monastery.

  I was not unnecessarily averse to change but equally lamented the passing of any period of my life– in whichever form that might be. Even now, knowing that due to our failed adventure that had left Lhapka dead and the survivors changed in some form, the fact that Rogel was gone and Yeshe and Puk were distant from me, I felt that Dorje might be my only ally. How I longed to turn back the clock, never to relive that journey home where a ravenous pack of howling beasts sought to rend us limb from bloody limb. We were trained from veritable babes to be warriors and I chastised myself for my weakness and sentimentality– but it is one thing to merely study death and another thing totally to experience it.

  My injuries were on the mend although the scars on my face were a constant reminder to teachers and students alike of the ordeal that I had been through, and also that the rumours of our excursion that had left Lhapka dead were largely true. I was reminded daily that I had survived, if only barely, and it left me humbled and pensive. I could not remember anything with any clarity of the supposed “brush with the infinite” that Master Panuaru referred to, but I resolved to go into the trials ahead and do what I needed to do to live and to return here, to my home, as quickly and as safely as I could.

  I laugh now when I read this, thinking how simple and naïve the wants of youth– a want for hearth and home, for family and friendship, for belonging. I now have the entire race to keep me company.

  I could not tell, as I worked my way here along the promenades and covered halls, how the Masters and acolytes who looked up at me in passing and saw my scarred face judged me. All I could think though was that there is an intangible that separates those who have survived a deadly encounter with those who seek to understand it from a distance. I could see the question in their eyes – why are you so special to have conversed with the gods? Our harshest critics are usually those that feel they are more deserving, and in my experience I have found they are the least likely to be able to endure the suffering that goes with it.

  The dull grey of the afternoon was steadily getting darker although the setting sun on the far side of the Dragon Tower cast it into a darker silhouette. It gave me a special feeling of accomplishment to be in this part of the monastery, where no-one outside the Guild of the Golden Dragon had ever been.

  At every opportunity I would steal away to the safety and ignominy of my own private ossuarium beneath the decaying tope at the eastern end of the courtyard below the Dragon Tower. From there I would sit for hours upon hours, espying the steady inculcation of the elite, memorising their training regime, copying their style and building a formidable fighting advantage for myself.

  I have mentioned already that my newfound education had begun to show in my own performances in weapons and combat classes and had been noticed. I have mentioned my bout with Pumi, one of Master Panuaru’s best students, which left him with a broken collar-bone and shattered nose. I did tone down my excesses but not before Master Panuaru bade me to see him and questioned me on my techniques and training. I told him that Dorje had shown me many moves and we had practiced often which was true in itself, but I would not tell him the whole truth knowing that I risked much worse if they knew of the full tale of my erudition in the martial arts. This satisfied him but I caught a wince at my mention of Dorje’s name before I was allowed to go.

  I too remembered that one eventful lesson, the winter before last. Dorje, even now, stands frozen in my mind’s eye, a brutal look of wrath and victory upon his face, bathed in sweat and blood, in each hand the jagged ends of a broken cudgel, standing astride Master Panuaru who lay on his back, raised on one elbow, his other hand held up in submission: the only student to ever better the Weapons Master in any generation yet recorded. We all knew that Dorje, the strongest and most skilful warrior any of the Masters could ever remember would be prenticed to the Guild on return from his travels.

  I don’t know if you, my ultimate reader, will t hink the less of me, or think me in some way fraudulent for being able to learn what I have ahead of more deserving people like Rogel and especially Dorje. But I am thankful because it has saved my life on countless occasions and I have in turn been able to save the lives of others.

  I would not have thought to include the story of how I came upon this place if I did not think that b
y describing it, I might somehow be expiated for my sins. There is a propensity to judge as being “lucky” the gambler who puts his last aeris on a game of chance and wins all, never to go hungry again, or a farmer who would have fallen through the ice if he had pursued the mount that broke free of him, or the acolyte from a small abandoned outpost that is found to be a reincarnated lama, and so propelled in favour through the ranks to sit upon the dais. You might even think that it was by pure chance and had a less forgiving deity condescended to observe that same farmer and instead caused the farmer’s clothing to become caught in his mount’s harness so that both plunged through the ice to their deaths, then you might say that this occurrence was no different from the chance of it being a beautiful sun-filled day as opposed to a cold and dreary afternoon (as it was now).

  As it is, I have never thought that on the morning of the day I found this place that I was “meant” to try and steal some food from the refectory and that Brother Chumbling was “meant” to catch me red-handed and that he “meant” that I should be sent to clean that blocked drain– for we are not meant to know the thoughts of the gods. The story of how I happened upon this stupa is to me one of happy chance, although who can tell if I had not come across it, where the universe would stand now?

  Brother Chumbling, a large, bald man of few words marched me out of the main gate, a mop and bucket in my hands. He pointed out towards the wilderness and with a snort, turned on his heels and headed back inside. With any luck I would have it done in less time than it took to walk there and have some free time in the afternoon. However, by the time I got there and found the cylindrical metal access point, the pale autumn sun was already high above me. It was partially hidden by snow and low-lying bushes on a convoluted and overgrown track away from the main path.