42. The Machine
As Dughall made his way back to human civilization, he was amazed at how little the humans around him saw. Macha was with him all the time, her wings now slightly less grey and the color coming back to her skin. But there were no looks of surprise or awe, no questions from the humans he encountered about his magical pixie companion. How is it that they cannot see this diminutive yet strong presence beside me at all times?
The more time Dughall spent among modern humans the more he knew the answer to this perplexing observation. The humans were so busy with those things they called ‘cell phones’, with the tiny pads of letters, and looking at their small glass windows with moving pictures and words printed on them. These modern humans were constantly moving and talking and thinking. Dughall doubted they would notice a fire-breathing dragon scorching their arse until it was too late.
All the better for him. A distracted mind is an easily fooled mind. He only hoped the humans at CERN were as distracted and easily befuddled as the humans he had encountered so far along his way.
In a matter of just a few weeks, Dughall hoodwinked, swindled and downright stole food, clothing, money and all that he required not only to survive, but also to fund his way to the French/Swiss border. With a sharp mind wizened by the extraordinary amount of time he had been alive and without a conscience to deflect his attention, Dughall easily worked his will on any he encountered.
It wasn’t long until he found himself in Merino, Switzerland, site of CERN and the Large Hadron Supercollider, the LHC for short. All was working according to plan.
Between his own formidable powers of persuasion and the help of Macha’s pixie magic, Dughall easily usurped the persona and credentials of the lead scientist on one of the collider experiments. Now he was in charge, calling the shots for this wondrous piece of equipment.
Even Dughall had to admit that the humans had achieved something quite remarkable here. The sheer size alone was commendable. There was no hint above the ground of what was happening below.
Dughall delighted in the idea of the deceptive nature of the machine. Above, farmland and rolling hills. A mile below, a machine so powerful that it would force beams of particles to travel to within a fraction of the speed of light, smashing into each other in violent collisions.
The human scientists said that they wanted to look into the ‘face of God’ – to see the beginning of the universe. Billions upon billions of their dollars spent to build a twenty-seven kilometer tube of superconducting magnets, some five stories tall, all for a hope to see back in time.
Dughall laughed within himself at the thought. Humans, always so preoccupied with their past and their own existence. ‘Who are we?’ What a stupid question to ask, Dughall thought.
As Dughall’s eyes swept over the computer screen in front of him, all numbers and formulas, he couldn’t help but have a smirk come over him. They are so focused on questions of their past and their existential nature, they are missing out on the opportunity that lay right under their noses. If only they knew what will soon happen, he thought. So wrapped up in their computers and charts and formulas and self-importance, they may not even believe it when they see it!
As Dughall waited for the computer to catch up its calculations to where he wanted it to be, his mind wandered. Wandered as it had done so often in the thousand-plus years he spent in the Umbra Nihili. Plenty of time then, and now, to remember his own history and the reason he risked his very soul to go to the Umbra Nihili – his soul’s most fervent desire.
It won’t be long now, my dearest one, he thought to himself as he recalled in an instant all the suffering he had endured that brought him to that place of the deepest of human longing, a longing large enough to cause a person to commit the most despicable acts in the name of love.
43. Dughall’s Story
Dughall was back in his own small boy body, peering out of deep brown eyes watching his mother gather water from the town’s well. To say that he was close to her would be an understatement. He felt he was a part of her, and she a part of him. The slave’s life of abject misery can do that to two people who find themselves suffering through it together.
Dughall was born into nobility in a small town in the beautiful Mediterranean countryside. His people grew grapes and olives and made wine known to all as a most excellent elixir. He was born into what could have become a relatively blissful existence, but such was not his destiny.
One fateful day a marauding band of soldiers came intent on taking what did not belong to them. Dughall’s father died protecting his family, cut down by a blade to his unarmored chest. Dughall’s mother wielded a small dagger and hid her boy behind her as two marauders approached her. Dughall never knew that his life was spared only because no soldier could bring himself to end the life of such a beautiful creature, Dughall’s own mother.
A quick death may have been preferable to the life that followed. Dughall and his mother were sold to a middling merchant and into a life of slavery. In those days, slavery was rampant. It was not confined to a particular color, creed or town. There were only the conquerors and the conquered. If you were not the conqueror, you were as likely to be sold into slavery as to be killed.
Many slaves toiled in fields or worked in a wealthy merchant’s home doing domestic chores. Still others endured a life far worse than any field hand or household slave. Such was the life of Dughall’s mother whose beauty was sold for the pleasure and use of the highest bidder.
There were many nights that Dughall’s mother lay there, enduring the basest form of indignity and defilement, wishing for death to come rescue her from her horrid existence. The only thing that prevented her from taking the dagger of her nightly ‘companion’ and doing herself in was the knowledge that her son – her only ray of light – laid in the next room.
Her son. He needed her, and that alone kept her alive from day to day.
For Dughall’s part, his heart slowly hardened, day after day, week after week, seeing the suffering endured by his beloved mother at the hands of her master and those he so callously sold her to. She tried to stifle her own tears around Dughall, but he knew that her heart was dying inside her.
The only pleasure of their day was in the quiet moments when no one else was around. Alone in their small quarters, she taught him. They both knew that it was strictly forbidden for her to teach her slave son how to read or write or to provide him any education. But Dughall’s mother used her waning energy to impart to Dughall all that she knew. She would not let her son, born of noble and educated parents, go through life an ignorant.
She also taught Dughall about survival and patience. Even though he had learned to speak in the way of nobles and kings – and surely knew as much about writing and mathematics and astrology as any of them – he spoke to his master and to all others save his mother in the guttural language of peasants and slaves. He followed orders and endured the lash, given frequently not because he disobeyed but merely because it pleased his master to know that he could.
“Bide your time, my dear son. You will rise above this place, I know that you will. You will grab upon the opportunity when the time is right,” his mother said one day.
“How do you know dear mother?” asked Dughall. “How do you know I will ever be anything but a slave?”
She took Dughall’s hands in hers and looked deep into the dark brown eyes of the only one she loved. “When I look in your eyes my son, I do not see the soul of a slave. I see in you a fearsome fire, not one easily extinguished by the lash of a slave master.”
It made Dughall’s heart soar to hear such powerful and hopeful words from his dearest one. He believed in his mother with all his being and so when she stated with such conviction that she believed in him, he instantly believed in himself too.
From that day forward, his spirits were lifted a little higher for he believed wholeheartedly in his mother’s prophetic words. “Bide your time, Dughall,” he would say to himself when times got tough.
As the years passed, it became more and more difficult though to endure what was surely his largest torture. Each night he lay on his small cot beside the hearth while in the next room, he heard brutes use and abuse his mother. The anger welled and his heart blackened. He swore to himself vengeance most cruel on his master – the one who he held responsible for his mother’s daily suffering. And as he grew closer to manhood, he felt the time was coming that he would have his vengeance and he and his mother would escape their brutal bonds.
“Bide your time, Dughall,” he said to himself in the dark. “Bide your time.”
44. A Promise
It was a day like most of the others that lay behind him. As usual he went to his master’s main grounds and cared for all the livestock and repaired the buildings. It could be worse, he well knew. Mainly he was left alone to do his work in outside areas, away from others. Left on his own to ponder and think all day and plan his escape.
He had decided: today was the day. He quickly finished his assigned tasks in record time. He could go home early. He planned to find his mother in their small quarters, through with her morning chores of gathering water and food and readying their evening meal. She did all this before she went to her own ‘work’.
When he had left that morning at the first light of dawn, his mother’s ‘work’ was still with her, loudly snoring in the small room his mother slept in. This happened occasionally, the lousy oafs, too lazy to get up and out when they were supposed to.
That day as he approached the door to their small apartment, he felt coldness come over him, his guts tightened and seized up. With a huge feeling of foreboding, he ran to his home.
The door to their dwelling was wide open. He stopped in the small doorway and instinctively listened. He dared not call out to his mother. He was small and quiet on his feet. If an attacker were still there, he would have the element of surprise.
The abode was so small that it took but three steps to move from the entryway to the doorway of his mother’s room. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he peered inside. He quickly surveyed the situation and found no one in the room. He was about to turn around and leave to look for his mother when he heard a small whimper.
He spun back around and quietly walked the two steps that it took to go to the other side of the small bed in the room. For all the years since that day – and there have been many – Dughall wished that he could excise from his brain the memory of what he saw.
There, a mass of human flesh. Its face so black, blue and swollen it was barely recognizable as human. One arm dangling lifeless from the body. The other bent at an odd angle, surely broken in two. And there, a pool of blood, oozing it seemed from underneath the pile of flesh.
A part of him wanted to back away and to run – run as fast as he could from the horrible sight. Run until he was sure that it was a nightmare and he’d come back to find his dear mother cooking their evening meal as always.
But then he again heard a whimper and he knew it was real. The pile of broken and oozing flesh was his own mother, his only love, the flesh of his flesh. His reason to live. She was beaten and tortured beyond the capacity to rise again.
Then a tiny voice, rasping and choking and trying to speak. He bent down nearer what used to be his mother’s face, nearer to hear what may be her final words.
The power of his touch on her arm as he bent in close seemed to give her the strength to speak. “My dearest son,” she choked out. “Remember all I taught you.” She coughed and stopped. Dughall thought she had stopped breathing.
But then she started again. “Your time is now my son. You will walk a path of greatness, my love.” Her breathing labored, gasping for air.
“You must do something for me now, my son. Honor your mother,” she rasped.
“Of course my most beloved,” he said through the tears now blinding him. “Anything you ask my mother.”
“Take your small knife, my son, the one you use to cut rope. Use it now, my love, and plunge it deep into your mother’s heart. Use it, dear son, to end my pain.”
Dughall felt he could do anything – kill their master with his bare hands, smash the skulls of all the slave owners in this whole province – anything but this one task she asked of him. How could he end the beating of the one heart that loved him? How could he hasten the death of the only being in all of creation that he cared to look upon?
“Please,” she croaked. “Please. . . ”
As he looked at the rasping heap of flesh that was once his mother, he knew that he had to release the one he loved from her broken shell. Dughall grabbed the small, dull knife from the pack around his waist. They didn’t allow a slave to own a dagger, sword or weapon of any kind. This small knife was so dull it would barely cut bread. But it was all he had. He knew that it would be the power of the force of the thrust not the sharpness of the blade that would complete his task.
With that thought he summoned all the strength – and love – that he had. With a powerful thrust, he slammed that small knife into the still beating heart of his only mother. From the sound of her shallow breaths he knew that his knife had swung true. Within seconds, she drew her last breath then laid still, her glassy eyes still open.
Dughall’s hand was still clenched around the knife handle while, with his other hand, he closed the lids of his mother’s eyes, never again to look upon her loving countenance. There, in that moment, his hand still on the hilt of the weapon that had taken the life force from his mother’s body, in that time and place, any love or compassion that Dughall may have had died. In that moment, the Dughall that would fight his way to the top ranks of the Norman army was born. The Dughall that would lay waste to entire villages on his quest for power was born. The Dughall that would one day risk his soul to bide his time in the Umbra Nihili was born. On that day, the Dughall that now sits at the control panel of the most powerful machine humans have ever built was born.
And on that day, in that moment, kneeling beside the dead body of his only love Dughall made a pledge. Perhaps never before or since has one made such a fervent promise, a promise that would ring through the ages. A promise that would bind a person to risk their own immortal soul. A promise that had the power to bring one from the horror of utter nothingness to this time and place. A promise so strong, the desire to fulfill it blinds its maker to the risk of death to those around him, even to the whole of the planet, perhaps to the whole of the solar system in which this beautiful blue planet swirls.
“Hear me now, any gods there be. Hear me now as I pledge this solemn oath, with all my heart, with all my soul. From the depths of my being, hear my promise. I will find you, my beloved, and we will be together again. I will find a way to bring you back to my side and together, my mother, my queen, we will rule over all those who have had a hand in our suffering, and over their kin for all generations to come. This I promise to you, my love.”
Having made his oath, Dughall rose and swiftly left the small dwelling where he had lived since he was an infant. He considered himself free and would no longer live the life of a slave.
It was payback time.
45. Dughall’s Revenge
As he sat at the LHC control center, Dughall’s musing became enjoyable to him. He brightened as he remembered going to his master’s home, intent on revenge. He had the element of surprise as he had always been a dutiful slave, not one to backtalk or show any signs of rebellion. His mother prepared him well for just this moment.
“Why are you barging in here boy,” the master bellowed as Dughall kicked through the door. “You belong out with the hogs and filth, not in your master’s home.”
“Maybe this will be my home now,” he impertinently responded.
“What?” his Master yelled. His eyes raged at Dughall. “You will leave my sight at once and go back to that hole with your whore mother before I beat you to within an inch of your life.”
“You will take back what you said about my mother just now, you swine of a man, or so
help me,” Dughall responded with fire in his eyes.
“You have gone too far slave. You have lost sight of your place in life,” he said as he went to reach for his sword lying on the table beside him.
But the old, fat merchant was slow, his reflexes dulled by hours of drinking wine. Dughall knew this was his moment. He leapt with impressive speed and agility for the sword. Before the merchant had risen fully from his chair, Dughall had the sword in his hand.
“Look here boy, you can barely hold that blade, let alone wield it,” the merchant sneered at Dughall. “Lay the weapon down and I may choose to spare your sorry life,” the merchant pled.
Dughall had to admit that it was, in fact, difficult for him to hold the sword. It must have weighed more than twenty pounds. He was strong for his age but being only fourteen, it took all the strength of both his arms to hold the sword up. But Dughall’s desire welled up from his core, a will forged by years of suffering and abuse.
There are some who live such a life. In suffering, they grow immense compassion and peacefulness with all of existence. In others, the years of torment and observation of ill will among their captors breeds a hatred and anger that is unmatched.
From that place of ultimate despair and sadness over the loss of his only love, from that place of deepest desire to have her revenge, from that place of wholly unchecked anger and hatred, Dughall summoned a strength of body and will that surprised even him. Dughall lunged at the rotund merchant and plunged the man’s own sword deep into his belly. The merchant’s dull eyes were filled with surprise as the warm blood that had been pumping through his portly body spilled out, great torrents of crimson.
Dughall stepped back a few paces as he watched the merchant fall to the floor. Dughall stood by and watched with a rising feeling of glee as the life force once powerful in this large man spilled across the floor.
Emily's House (The Akasha Chronicles) Page 19
