The War of the Realms

by C Steven Meldrum

  “This happens to us every year, Master. We go back into the aether and

  then come back once everything has settled down. We like your Irth. It is much

  more alive and less … mmmmm… dangerous than some other abodes. There

  are many different types of spirits, Master and this magic is not directed at us,

  although it annoys us enough to displace us. The daemon-kind will slink back

  to their realm for longer and some darker creatures will move away. This Irth

  is a nicer place than the aether.”

  They started to fade but I called “Wait! Can you hear me call if I need

  you?”

  I fancied I almost heard a “yes”, but they were gone.

  The next morning, I awoke feeling the effects of the changkol. My mouth was pasty, I had a heavy head and I felt like I could sleep for a year longer. Thankfully it was much quieter than the day before, for us at least. The fourth day of Losar involved local people making butter lamps to be sacrificed, along with grain, to the gods. In time-honoured tradition, they donned their best clothes, visited relatives and proposed toasts with chang to neighbours and exchanging good wishes for the coming New Year. The thought of more chang made my head reel and I pulled the blanket up and willed myself back to sleep.

  I laid low for most of the day, as did all my friends. The celebrations continued apace without us. This festive event would last until the end of the Great Prayer Festival held in the middle of the first month, after which time I would leave this place, perhaps never to return.

  Chapter 8: Lingkhor

  Who can say with certainty that he will live to see the morrow?

  Tibetan saying We readied ourselves to leave. Monks and retainers moved hither and thither packing supplies, tightening bundles, calming the mounts. The morning was calm, promising a bright spring day and easy travelling. I added my small bundle of belongings to the saddle bag of a disgruntled yak, well, a synth that for our purposes was as good as the creature it copied, extinct now for millennia. It was tethered to my mount, a beautiful but spirited mequus that stood a full sixteen hands high. Its chromium hide was almost frosty in the early morning. It stamped and snorted as if eager to depart. The promise of good weather and a cloudless sky beyond the gates was a good omen for the journey. The other members of the team were readying their own mounts and I turned to see Abbot Tomas, Master Panuaru, Master Jai, Yeshe, Pasang and a few others coming to talk to me.

  “Your Holiness,” said Lama Tomas and bowed to me.

  “Please, Abbott Tomas”, I pleaded. “I am Tashigang. I was your student before any of this …” I waived my arms around searching for a way of describing this madness.

  “At least it has not gone to your head then. I wanted only to say that I am not sure what this quest holds for you or for me or for any of us. It may be that you simply return to us in somemonths’ time, wiser for your journey, and finish your training– for never has a lama also been a proponent of the Sera Ngari, which Master Panuaru is keen for you to pursue. Or it may be that you take your place in the capital alongside His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, as a champion for the work we do herein maintaining Irth’s storehouse of knowledge and in training the famed black-robes.”

  He paused and then said, “Are you still sure you want to journey to the HolyMountain?”

  When planning the start of the trip, one of the first questions Abbott Tomas had asked was, “Which way will you go?” I did not have any idea initially but a week before we were due to leave, I had a dream, a very vivid dream of steaming jungles and the ruins of ancient temples. I followed a woman who was not a woman along paths where branches led off into the jungle, some going up, some disappearing into dark crevices and some circling back to the main path. I woke in a cold sweat as she turned fearsome eyes towards me. But falling back to sleep, I quickly fell back into the same dream and, in some kind of oppressive darkness found an ancient city of the dead, largely in ruins, that seemed to cover half the globe and no matter which direction I headed in, I would come to its main gate. Then the air was on fire around me and some nameless horror pursued me through deep tunnels while the city crumbled about me. I ran on but then I lost my footing and plunged into icy water. Thrashing and drowning in the pallid darkness I awoke in a cold sweat, gasping for breath and clutching the sodden blanket to me. The nightmare ended but the last image that remained indelibly etched upon my mind was that of the snow-covered peak of the Holy Mountain.

  Its actual name was Mt Kailash that we called Gangs Rinpoche, meaning “precious jewel of snows”, called also Ashtapada by some peoples. In our faith Mt Kailash is the home of the Buddha Demchok or Chakrasamvara, who represents supreme bliss. The city of Tisé lay not far from the base of the mountain. It was a magnet for pilgrims from all over the universe that flocked to the Holy Mountain every year, following a tradition going back thousands of years. People who had never even seen the Irth would come in droves around the time of the Great Prayer festival to stand at the spiritual centre of the universe and the ultimate destination of souls. It was believed that circumambulating Mt Kailash on foot would bring good fortune from the god of wealth, Namtseh, who resides on the mountain. Some faiths make the peregrination around the base of mountain in a clockwise direction and others in an anticlockwise direction. Either way, the journey was over ten leagues and it was believed that the journey must be completed in a single day to have meaning and earn the favour of the gods.

  I decided that after coming to the Holy Mountain I would continue southeast, still on the northern boundaries of the mighty Himal ranges, highest on Irth, for forty days until we had found the ancient paths through the mountains and thence into the poisonous jungles of the southern countries, away from the heartland of our holy fathers. I felt then that the other part of the dream vision would be fulfilled and the “Holy City of Victory” would be thus revealed.

  “Either way, you’ve a good head on your shoulders , Tashi and I feel that if anyone will find the answer, it is you. Go with the prayers of us all and with the gods’ speed and protection. I pray you find the Path of Milarepa.”

  I have already said that I cannot remember smiling since the Lord Regent’s visit. But I smiled then, at least inwardly. There is a legend from ancient times that Master Jai used to tell us where two powerful magicians engaged in a terrifying sorcerers' battle that reached such heights and called upon such energies that even the gods came to witness the duel.

  After what seemed an eternity, neither was able to gain any kind of decisive advantage. So, the two magicians, both being holy men and both convinced of their own abilities, looked into the distance from the valley in which they stood and saw the Holy Mountain reaching towards the heavens. They agreed that whoever could reach the summit of Mt Kailash first would be the victor. One of the magicians, Naro Bön-chung sat upon a magic drum and upon his command it became as a flyer and he soared up the sheer, snowcovered slopes. He laughed as he looked behind him and saw Milarepa still at the base of the mountain, sitting completely still and meditating.

  “Victory is mine!” laughed Naro Bön -chung. But just as he was about to reach the summit, Milarepa suddenly rushed by him and appeared upon the summit, having ridden the rays of the sun, thus winning the contest.

  “If I do alight to the summit of the Holy Mountain using Milarepa’s path, Abbot Tomas, it won’t be because I am the Panchen Lama– it will be because I am dead, and my soul speeds to Nirvana! Farewell! Hyyaah!” I dug my heels into the mount and wheeled towards the gate.

  Dorje mounted the beast next to me and bade farewell to the assembled masters, monks and students.

  Amidst churning dust and the clamour of the suddenly mobile caravan we urged our mounts towards the gate but at that moment I heard a familiar voice calling and turned to see Puk running through the crowd.

  I reined in before reaching the gate and he ran up to me and panted hard, trying to catch his breath. “Tashi, I wanted to … give you this
… before you went.” I leaned down from the saddle and took the small package he offered me. As the others moved out of the front gates, I paused for a moment to unwrap it. It was a necklace and bound within the leather thong was something I had not thought of, or more accurately not thought to see again in this life– the large curved fang that had been lodged in my cudgel that came from the leader of the met’y wolves, the one that had given me the scars I would always wear in memory of that night. He also handed me my staff. I marvelled to see a large hole in one end where Puk had extracted the tooth.

  “Thank you Puk.” I shook his outstretched hand and ruffled his hair. “I will wear this always. Take care, my friend.” He walked back to where Yeshe and Pasang stood.

  “Look after each other. We will meet again,” I said, trying to convince myself of that as I brandished to the staff in farewell and then turned my back on the only home and the only family I had ever known.

  I urged the mount forward to catch the others, securing the staff and placing the necklace around my neck and felt the cold steel of themet’aegis tooth against my chest. It was an unusual feeling, not only having a part of the great beast that nearly took my life close to my heart, but also the feeling that I carried a living piece of it with me. For met’aegis is the living metal that is the basis of most non-human sentient life throughout the universe. From my studies on the ancient wonders of Irth it came from the lost fathers of the mech races, called in some texts the Feraegis, a corruption of the derivative for “metal” or “iron skin”. In a story out of Irth’s forgotten past, one of the Gigantes, Pallas was killed by the goddess Atheneus during the Gigantomachy, a mighty battle where giants rose up against the gods. Atheneus turnedPallas’ skin into a golden shield; the Aegis.

  My imagination peaked, I would spend hours at a time in the deep tunnels of the Master Archivist’s labyrinth that he called a library, and bury myself in books for weeks during the longest and coldest parts of the winter. I read about the Stellaperians, the off-world descendants of the children of man, more commonly referred to in modern times as mechs and synths, or more properly the Pestasii or Sidus. But this reference itself was a corruption of Stahliparein, from another of thedead languages from Irth’s ancient past that translated roughly to “living steel”.

  Even the mount I rode was of this type, as it seemed were all of the animals that trod the globe, immune to the mephitic atmosphere, the acidic seas, toxic waterways and pestilential lands of this ancient and doomed homeworld of both man and mech. In fact, any land below an altitude of about four hundred leagues was deadly to organic life, and had been for many thousands of years.

  While animals were prevalent as beasts of burden or for tilling the land, there were many creatures such as the wolves that we would meet upon the road that, rather than imitate farm animals from Irth’s forgotten past, were instead horrific copies of the flora and fauna of thousands of diverse worlds throughout the universe, creatures that should have no place on this Irth but over the years had promulgated here anyway, taking territories for themselves and feeding off those that crossed their path. The mountains and planes held many terrors and we would often hear tales from merchants or pilgrims of sightings and disappearances, when a farmer or sometimes an entire family would go missing, their nomadic camp decimated. As for the sentient Sidus, it was very rare indeed for us to see one of these creatures. More commonly we heard stories of neo-human mutant raiders that ruled the poisonous lowlands, eidolons most probably, stories, because we had never seen any.

  Interestingly, the blood of these creatures, unlike the sanguineous stuff of life that flowed through my veins, was a type of hydrapalladium (a kind of liquid white gold with amazing properties for sustaining silicon-based life) which we called pallasieum. From the ancient texts, it was named again for Pallas, who was born of the blood which spilled onto Mother Irth when Cronus castrated his father Ouranos. Historically it was linked to the poisonous silvergold lakes that filled the bomb craters and depressions on the battlefields; the stuff that gushed from the first of the giant sentient warrior creatures that fell during the Great War of a hundred centuries ago when man and mech battled for possession of the cosmos; the Humanity Wars.

  I felt the life in it while my mount moved tirelessly and without effort along the road. I made my way to the front of the caravan and saw ahead of us the wide bridge crossing the half-mile over the valley of the Beyul Khenbalung.

  We clattered across the bridge, the trail moved upwards towards the mountain pass that would then lead us towards Kyichu and then on towards the plateau of the Chang Tang. During summer it should be a fairly easy journey across the plateau and then down into the lowlands on the northside of the Great Range that separated the northern and southern continents.

  I breathed the clean mountain air. It was a perfect day and here I was, entering a new life, crossing the boundary between all that had been and all that was yet to come.

  We made camp within the walled enclosure of a small village on that first evening, the sun sinking low in the Western sky, the villagers and their children crowding about to help if they could and excited to see some strangers in this little corner of the wilderness. Before lying down to sleep on the thin mat in the courtyard of this small village, I thought, this is the first time in my whole life I have slept beyond the walls of the monastery. For all my short life I had dreamed of adventure, wishing with all my heart that I could be transported to some faraway place where danger and death stalked me. But in those dreams, I was a Master of the Black Robes and all the wolves in the world could charge me and I would defeat them all. But now that I was finally outside of those walls, I could think of nothing I wanted more than to return to them.

  The following morning we readied ourselves early and left before dawn. There were so many people that were part of the entourage that I had not had the opportunity to really speak to anybody apart from Dorje and one of the black robes. There were a number of retainers but one specifically assigned to me was a middle-aged farmer Nimu, who had been forced from his farm because his penchant for gambling and drinking strong liquor had eventually got the better of him. He thought salvation was his when asked to look after the Panchen Lama’s needs.

  He trotted behind me on his own mount. We talked about the weather, about his family, about the evils that had beset him and about his attempts to make amends and set the world to right.

  “But you know, your Holiness, that this is how the gods test the mettle of men. I have seen the darkness and I have risen above it. In the past, I have always taken the easy way, the path of least resistance, some call it. But now, to get out in the fresh air and to endure the open wilds, that is something I should very much look forward to.”

  The main road that we had followed through Kyichu and then onward through various villages and small townships continued onwards towards the capital. Our path, however, lay south. We left the main highway and travelled along a lesser, rougher roadway. We made numerous stops to check our position including one for a short meal break during the middle part of the day, not because we were overly tired or hungry, but to witness one of the greatest sights I was to see on that journey; a heard of giant apatosynths, at least forty of them, casually wending their way across the plain, the young protected at the centre of the herd and the large bull male at the lead It brought some gladness to my heart to see such gentle and majestic creatures working their way to the breeding grounds in the south before the onset of winter.

  There was a sadness that dawned on me at that moment also, thinking about these magnificent creatures and about the natural creatures these were but hideous replicas of, creatures that had once thundered unfettered and unshod through these same valleys in coats of black, brown, white and grey. I had seen pictures in history classes of creatures that trod this globe and might still be here but for man’s casual and perfunctory decimation of this orb.

  We passed quickly through Kyichu and various other towns on our way along main highway.
The black-robes were unrelenting, setting a furious pace that our untiring mounts had no trouble in maintaining. As the crimson disc again rushed to hide beneath the western horizon, we looked for a place to make camp, feeling that such a large caravan would easily fend off any roving wolves, but happily, we came upon a village in the last watch before the it became too dark to see where we were going.

  They welcomed us and we hurriedly set about building tents and organising food. Unlike previous townships we had ridden through, this village was very poor, so much so that we fed the children from our own supplies, even though we could not have carried enough for our own needs. But what kind of men would we be to eat ourselves and see children go hungry?

  With the rickety gates shut for the evening and fires burning, we sang songs with the villagers and played games with the children. Dorje performed magic tricks and Pemba, who I had still not really spoken to, carried them round on his massive shoulders two at a time like a lumbering giant. The warrior-priests quietly took up position on the small narrow wooden catwalk that ran around the inner perimeter of the village wall. After seeing wolves trying to jump at the breach in the curtain wall of the monastery, this wall, which was just over a fathom in height and made of a single layer of mud bricks, did not fill me with confidence.

  We lead the townspeople in prayer and sang songs. I then sat in council with the hetman of the village. Blind, and for the most part deaf, he was able to describe in meticulous detail the hills and valleys we would pass through. It was a good discussion and I hoped that the leader of each village or nomadic encampment we encountered would be as sharing as this one had.

  Before turning in, I toured around the village with him, holding his arm as we walked. As his request I shrove him and his councillors and blessed their little village.

  In the days that followed we continued south, now many leagues into the wilds of the Chang Tang, the Great Northern Plateau. As it was still summer there was generally warmth, sunlight and a freshening breeze that cut across the alluvial campestral, turning cold when clouds covered the sun above us. I was glad this wasn’t winter. The ferocity of the blizzards that cut across the flatness of the plateau would flay a man alive if he was caught without shelter.