Divine Madness

by Harmon Cooper

  “Trust me,” he called from the other side, “I’m not here to serve you breakfast in bed. Mama lion sent me up to get you guys. We’re supposed to be at the temple, Nick, not that we don’t have somewhere important to go and all…”

  “Crap,” I said, pulling Saruul closer to me for just a moment.

  “You should go,” she said firmly.

  “What? You don’t want to come to the temple with me?”

  “I don’t know when I will see you again. I want to remember you here, with me,” she said, sitting up a little, and bringing her lips to my cheek. “Like this. So no, I’m not going to go bid you farewell, or anything like that. This is the last moment I want to remember, just in case…”

  “I’m coming back. Mark my words, I will be back for you. And then…” I grinned at her. “Then you can go on our next adventure with us.”

  “How about you work on getting back first?”

  After getting dressed, I met Roger outside of the bedroom, the bird hopping around on the stone floor, excited.

  “What’s got you so worked up?” I asked him.

  “Don’t you feel it?” he asked, lifting into the air to do a spiral. “We are finally, finally, getting out of the lion village. I thought this day would never come!”

  “It hasn’t been that bad.”

  “It also hasn’t been that great, aside from my fur vest.” He hopped into the air and did another spin.

  “Easy, easy. Don’t you have a white bird or two to say goodbye to?”

  Roger flew up to my shoulder. “Real funny, Nick.”

  We greeted Dohna downstairs, who already had a breakfast of porridge and berries laid out for us. She didn’t say anything about her daughter not coming downstairs, and once I was done eating, she wished me luck, reminding me that my training wasn’t over yet.

  “I’m aware,” I told her.

  “It will only be harder when you come back,” Dohna reminded me.

  “Hopefully, I’ll come back stronger.”

  “One could only wish.”

  And that was it.

  Roger and I left Saruul’s home, turning toward the temple.

  Dornod was the quietest I’d ever seen it, most of the citizens sleeping off the chung they’d consumed the previous night. We reached the temple without issue, aside from a gust of wind that nearly blew my robes open, forcing me to tighten the belt that kept everything intact.

  We saw Lhandon at the top of the steps, Tashi next to him, and Jigme standing off to the right, his hands behind his back.

  “I was about to come to you,” Lhandon said, concern in his eyes.

  “No worries, I just felt like sleeping in.”

  “Well, I hope you feel rested.”

  “Sort of. What about Bobby?” I asked, looking up at the temple. “Is he awake?”

  Lhandon shook his head. “He was awake earlier, a bit lucid too, but he has since fallen back to sleep. You should still try to see him, though.”

  “Good call.”

  Roger transferred to Lhandon’s shoulder, the portly monk turning his attention back to Jigme, to a conversation that they were having on trance-walking. I entered the temple and headed upstairs, straight through a cloud of incense, where I found Altan sitting next to Bobby’s bed.

  “He will be better by the time you come back,” Altan assured me. “As long as he continues to get his rest, he will recover from this. I have faith in him. I believe I’ll have one of the lion shamans come in the next few days too. Perhaps the lion people have a more spiritual remedy to aid your friend.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There is nothing to thank me for, Nick.”

  I walked over to Bobby and placed my hand on his arm. “I don’t know if you can hear me, buddy, but I am rooting for you. It might be a couple months before I get back, but when I do, I expect you to help me figure out a way for us to get out of this place.”

  I paused, considering what I’d just said.

  Did I really want to leave?

  It would be something I would have to meditate on during our journey.

  There would come a time in the future, especially if Bobby was as smart as he seemed to be, that I would have to make a hard decision. And after the night I’d spent with Saruul, I was starting to really second guess leaving this world...

  I smiled down at my friend again, all the time we had spent together flashing before my mind's eye.

  “I’ll be back,” I assured Bobby.

  After speaking with Altan for another minute or two, I returned to the steps of the Temple of Eternal Sky to find Lhandon with a large pack on his back. I saw my pack and put it on as well, the weight instantly bearing down on my shoulders.

  “I wish you all the best of luck,” Jigme said, bowing to us, his ears flattening. “I have instructed Tashi and Lhandon on the easiest ways to get to the Great Plateau from here. The trip down won’t be very difficult, but when you reach the Plateau, things will become much harder. Be very careful out there, and be wary of letting anyone join with you. There are generations of thieves that live on the Plateau, and they can be quite clever. Our desire for compassion,” he told Lhandon, “only allows them to deceive us more. If you see vultures circling, try to go around them because it could be a trap. There are some water sources along the way, but just be aware that they generally freeze at night, and they won’t melt until the afternoon. Which means the afternoon is when you should fill up on water.”

  “Yes, and we have discussed a way for us to do that,” Tashi said with a firm nod.

  “We certainly have,” Jigme bowed his head at us again. “Now, good luck, and I expect to see you back in Dornod when you return to the Kingdom of Lhasa. For your return, you will each find a copy of the map that should serve as a guide through the eastern part of Lhasa in your packs. You could theoretically go all the way from there to here, but as I have previously suggested, I think it is best to go to the Forbidden City of Trongsa and hire a cat guide from there.”

  “Thank you,” Lhandon said, bowing, Tashi doing the same.

  “It has been a true pleasure,” I told Jigme.

  “Remember to stick together. And Roger…”

  “Yes?” the bird asked the lion monk.

  “Keep an eye on all of them.”

  Chapter Twenty: Sand

  Jigme was right.

  The trek down from the village of Dornod wasn’t too arduous, and the lower altitude made it a bit easier to breathe.

  It took us the rest of the day to get down, mostly because our packs were heavy and that Lhandon and I chose to stop for meditation breaks every hour or so. The path was nothing like what lay ahead.

  The Great Plateau stretched as far as the eye could see, no mountains in the distance, an endless horizon that reminded me of the surface of the moon. Jigme hadn’t mentioned the Great Plateau was sandy, a few dunes visible from our current location. It was going to make a long walk even harder.

  “How many days do we have ahead of us?” I asked, realizing that no one had mentioned this detail earlier.

  “I’d say three or four,” Tashi said. “But it really depends on how quickly we move.”

  The fire spirit floated off to my right, Roger on my shoulder, and Lhandon to my left, all of us staring out at the Great Plateau, mesmerized by its barren vastness.

  “Then we better get moving,” I said as I took the first step.

  “It truly is a blessing to see something like this,” Lhandon said as we started walking. “There are so many poems written about the Great Plateau, especially from the nalropa Drukpa Kunley, but to actually see it with your own eyes... I wouldn’t be surprised if we came across some gravestones, so be on the lookout for them. Hopefully, they aren’t buried in the sand.”

  “Why would we be looking for gravestones again?” I asked Lhandon.

  “I suppose I should clarify. The Great Plateau is a popular place for hermits and higher-level monks to die. Some, especially those who have reached certai
n stages on the path, actually know when they are on their deathbed, and come here to die through meditation, offering their dead bodies to the animals. Others request that their bodies be transported here, once they have died in their monasteries and hermitages, for the animals to consume them.”

  “Why would they want to die here?” Roger asked.

  “He’s asking why they want to die here, correct?” asked Lhandon.

  “Yes,” I told him. “You’re getting better at translating bird talk.”

  Lhandon laughed. “I look forward to the day that I can have a conversation with you, Roger,” he said, smiling fondly at the bird.

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” Roger said. “I can be a little chatty.”

  “Yes, you can,” I told him.

  “Anyway,” Lhandon said, as we moved onto a pathway filled with sand, both of us having to work overtime considering the packs we were carrying. “The reason they want to die here is because of an old belief that dying in the Great Plateau can lead to a variety of boons, from an auspicious rebirth to the creation of a double.”

  “A double?” I asked.

  “I’ve never seen one myself, but the Exonerated One claimed to have seen one during his time in prison. It is exactly what it sounds like, a transparent copy of a person. We have to be careful out here,” Lhandon said, a look of fear coming across his face, “this is said to be the place they come from, and while they are intangible, the more powerful ones can actually communicate in certain ways.”

  “Because that’s not scary,” Roger said. “So to recap, we’re going into a barren wasteland that has ghosts walking around, thieves, and killer temperatures. Great. Why am I suddenly not as excited as I was earlier?”

  “It won’t be as bad as it sounds,” Tashi assured him. “I’ve crossed it before, remember?”

  “How many years ago was that? A thousand?”

  Tashi smiled, a lick of flame swirling around his head. “I suppose it was a thousand years ago.”

  “Who knows how much this place has changed since then,” Roger grumbled.

  I noticed that the sand beneath us was getting thicker. After trudging through it for a moment, we switched to a new path with less sand, able to walk with ease again. “So what did the double that visited the Exonerated One do?”

  “He claimed that the double was there to see another person, the Exonerated One simply watching it pass through his cell. He ran to the bars and saw it stop in another man’s cell, and stand before him.” Lhandon shivered. “The double just glared down at the man until he woke up. Something like that. It gave the man a heart attack, you know. He died.”

  Roger lifted off my shoulder and rose into the air, doing a circle around us.

  “Anything up there?”

  “Nope, no doubles or bird doubles, um…” Roger returned to my shoulder. “Good news! There seems to be some water ahead.”

  “Perhaps we should fill up there,” Tashi suggested.

  The fire spirit dropped his hands into the sand, a swirl of glass starting to take shape. He continued what he was doing until he formed a gourd. Lhandon joined him and lowered his hands near the gourd, the sand instantly cooling through his crackling ice ability.

  “I can also form something we can use to latch the gourds to your belts.” Tashi lowered his fingers in the sand and lifted up a curl of melted glass. He smoothed it onto the side of the gourd, forming a little loop, which Lhandon then cooled down.

  He made another one for Lhandon’s belt, and then two more for the hooks onto our packs.

  “We had better get there fast,” Roger said, shivering. “It seems like the place is about to turn cold very quickly.”

  We hurried toward the body of water that Roger had spotted, which turned out to be a fairly decent-sized pond. The sun was completely set now, yet the sky was still light, the pond reflecting pink and purple tones, the water crystal clear, polished rocks beneath its surface.

  “Maybe we can fish in here tomorrow…” Roger said.

  “But it’ll freeze over,” I reminded him.

  “I can easily burn a hole through the top,” Tashi said.

  “Good plan,” I told him as we filled the gourds, which were going to freeze tonight unless we kept them near Tashi.

  This would be an ongoing issue we ran into: Tashi was going to have to stay in one place to keep us warm, but that would also limit his ability to protect us.

  This could also draw attention to our small group.

  Looking around, and realizing yet again just how far out we were, actually made my limbs tingle for a moment.

  I instantly imagined what the place looked like at night, how dark it would be aside from the stars in the sky, which naturally made me think of the doubles that Lhandon had mentioned.

  Part of me believed him, the other part of me hoping that it was just a folk superstition.

  But if they couldn’t do anything to us…

  I shook my head.

  Considering the things that I had already been through in Lhasa, running into a few spirits was the least of my concerns.

  I smiled at my own thoughts, glad to have talked myself down from the edge of the cliff.

  Once my pack was off, I took the blanket out of it and wrapped it around my shoulders, clipping it just as Lhandon had shown me to do. I also wrapped the scarf Jigme had given me around my head, in a way that I could tighten it if I wanted to.

  We shared dried meats and berries, and once we were finished, we found a few larger rocks to use for a fire pit.

  “Do not worry,” Tashi assured us, his arms now crossed over his chest as he floated above the fire pit. “I will keep you warm, and I will make sure no one approaches us. If someone dares disturb us, I will engage him to the best of my abilities, giving both of you time to wake up and help.”

  “I’ll have my sword with me as well,” I told Tashi, placing my sheathed blade at my side.

  I laid down on one side of the fire pit, Lhandon on the other. The sky above was dark now, the stars sparkling as a cold breeze blew over the sand dunes.

  Roger got under my blankets, mumbling something about how he couldn’t wait for our journey to take us to warmer climates.

  “In due time,” I told him.

  I looked over at Lhandon to see him meditating.

  I had the urge to the same, but I could tell that Roger was cold, so I decided to do my meditating in the morning.

  As I lay there, staring up at a star-filled sky, I recalled the time that I went camping in the Berkshires. There really was nothing like Western Massachusetts, especially during the fall and the spring, the times of seasonal change, the leaves orange and rustic like an abandoned mining town, the spring bringing beautiful flowers, the trees turning green after a long winter.

  I remembered the smells, the awe-inspiring drive along the Mohawk Trail, the silver morning mist making the place look otherworldly.

  I should have stayed out there, rather than move closer to Boston, to Worcester, replacing mountains and beautiful forests with red brick buildings, blight, and the hope of urban revival always at a fingers distance.

  Yet here I was, in what was essentially the desert of another world.

  I got the urge to meditate again, but I could tell that Roger was warm, so I simply laid there until I fell asleep, thinking of Massachusetts, going over the things that had happened since arriving in the Kingdom of Lhasa, and wondering what the true endgame was here, what this was all building up to.

  While I had my suspicions, there really was no telling.

  Morning came, and it was only when I slipped out of my blanket that I realized just how cold it had become.

  “Where are you going?” Tashi asked me.

  “Just to take a piss,” I told him as I walked a few steps away, the coldness radiating from the soles of my feet up to my shoulders.

  I focused yet again on my inner warmth, sparking the fire in my gut.

  My piss didn’t freeze up or anything as it h
it the sand, but it definitely caused some steam, a testament to how frigid the Great Plateau had become.

  I sensed some movement to my left and I looked there, realizing I didn’t have my sword with me.

  All I saw were a few small sand dunes, nothing of interest aside from the beauty of the arid scenery.

  With a couple more deep breaths in, I started to feel warmer, curious.

  I hadn’t been in an environment like this before, sandy plateaus not part of the landscape of New England. There was something cinematic about my current environment, the life that had been stripped from it, its boundless desolate vastness.

  I returned to Tashi, and still feeling warm, I walked toward the frozen pond and took a seat before it. I fixed my scarf around my head and dropped my hands onto my knees, focusing on the inner warmth that was circulating, ignoring the cold sand.

  I started to close my eyes, but then I found the scenery so beautiful that I decided to keep them open, watching over the next forty minutes as the sun came up, its reflection spreading in chromatic arcs across the surface of the frozen pond.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Roger asked as he landed on my shoulder.

  I parted the top of my robes, allowing him to shift onto my shoulder to keep warm, the tropical bird shivering even though he was wearing a scarf and a fur vest.

  “It’s definitely something worth observing.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to be practicing turning your power on and off?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, I was, but I just got lost in the beauty of this wonderful pond, and this crazy landscape.”

  “It happens. I won’t tell anyone.”

  The four of us did some prostrations after Lhandon was up.

  The portly monk then cast his modified Rune of Inquiry checking all of our numbers. I was about halfway to a thousand, Roger far behind me, and Lhandon between me and Tashi, who had the best numbers.

  It was a slow way to cultivate karma and advance along the Path of the Divine, but it had been designed that way, so there was no instant gratification. Sure, one could do the prostrations over a couple days, but then there was the meditation series and basics that were also necessary to advance to the cultivator, Wheel with a Rusty Axle, stage.