Cowering on the cliff face, his shaking legs planted thankfully on the ledge once more, he felt a flood of rage at the pain, at Lashé, and at his own stupidity.
He screamed and scraped his forehead against the rock.
“Are you done fooling around?” Lashé said. “Try again, then. You had the right idea.”
Hugo bit back a retort. At least he did have the right idea. That was good to know. Maybe he had been closer than he thought.
Abandoning caution, he tried again. This time he fell much more quickly. He missed his footing entirely and found himself hanging from his hands, teeth gritted. He couldn’t hold on for much longer. He glanced down. Cannon had not come back to help. Lashé was not coming to his aid either. His left hand slipped from the wall. Then his right. As he fell, he reached for his power. He found it, touched the light, and Molad was there beside him.
It was a real choice this time, not a mere testing of the waters, so Hugo had little hope that he would be able to put his power back down before Molad had taken over. He was very much surprised when, a moment later, he found himself sitting at the top of the wall with his feet dangling over the edge, still in his right mind.
Why? he asked in his head, but Molad did not respond. Whatever the reason, for the first time ever (as far as he knew) Molad was willing to let Hugo remain in control.
Hugo watched Lashé finish the ascent. He was much faster now that Hugo was not slowing him down, and in a few short minutes he was sitting beside Hugo, looking down at the tiny figure of Cannon in the apple trees with his nose in a book.
“Have you learned your first lesson?” Lashé asked.
“Something about how staying in perfect balance will keep Molad from taking control?” Hugo asked.
“No.”
“Something about taking a leap?” Hugo said. “A leap of faith, maybe? Trusting myself?”
“No. You learned it down at the bottom, when you tried to access your power alone and failed. Then again when you fell and succeeded in touching your power.”
“I didn’t want to,” Hugo said. “I was afraid that when I did, Molad would come out. And I was right.”
“Because your power is not your own. One side cannot touch it alone. It belongs to both of you, and neither. The darkness is nothing without the light, and vice versa. That is why he saved you. This is the first lesson.”
Hugo shifted uneasily. “Actually, Molad’s been telling me that since the beginning.”
“Maybe you should listen to him,” Lashé said.
Hugo frowned. “That reminds me. Molad could have taken my power from me just now, but he didn’t. He let me stay in control. He’s never done before.”
“How do you know he’s never done it before?”
Hugo shook his head. “I don’t know. But how do you explain him doing it now? Why would he want me here with you when he could be flying back to Shael’s side as we speak?”
“Perhaps he is just as curious as you are to discover what I know,” Lashé said smoothly. “If I am being honest, it will probably benefit him just as much as it does you.”
Hugo groaned. “You mean that there is no way out. No end to the struggle? No one wins? Shael already told me that.”
“Telling is easily done,” Lashé said. “And words are easily dismissed. That is why I won’t be just telling you anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you think this climb was some silly exercise in symbolism?” Lashé said, getting to his feet. “We came up here for a reason, Hugo. We came up here for this…”
He stepped aside, and for the first time Hugo noticed a short, graceful tree growing out of a crevice in the rock. It was about as tall as Hugo, and all of its gently curving branches were on the right side. Even the branches that originated on the left side of the trunk bent around and ended on the right. It was the wind that made it that way, Hugo knew, blowing constantly in the same direction as the tree grew. Most trees like this looked strangely unbalanced, but this one didn’t. It must have been the perfect round white fruit that made up for it. There was something special about that fruit, to be sure. He could tell just by looking at it. He could feel the light from here. He was surprised he had not noticed it before; it must have been behind him the whole time, but he had never turned around to look.
“This is a truemeat tree,” Lashé said, touching one of the sloping branches gently.
“What does it do?” Hugo asked. “I mean, it’s clearly not a normal tree…”
“No,” Lashé agreed. “The truemeat tree allows two people to understand each other.”
“How does it work?” Hugo asked, reaching for a piece of fruit. Then he remembered his manners and looked at Lashé.
Lashé nodded. “Pick it,” he said, and Hugo did. It was much softer than he had imagined, like a ripe, skinless pear. He wondered how the fruit survived without skin.
“Wondering how it works?” Lashé said. “You take a bite, and I take a bite, and then we talk.”
“That’s it?” Hugo said, examining the fruit doubtfully. “How will that be any different from what we’re doing now?”
“Because I could lie to you, and you might not know it. After you eat the fruit, truth will be as easy to distinguish from falsehood as light is from the dark. Go ahead. Eat. You will see.”
Hugo took a bite of the fruit. It was soft and sweet and slightly bland, and miraculously warm. It melted in his mouth.
He handed it to Lashé, who took a bite as well.
Like waking from a dream, the world around him faded away. They were still sitting on the top of the cliff, but the bowl of grass and the apple orchard had vanished, replaced by stars. Hugo had never thought about what it would be like to float among the stars in the night sky, but that is what it looked like to him now. Stars, like a million distant pinpricks in a carpet of black, winked back at him across distances that he could not fathom. Part of him was suddenly afraid of all that space, as if it would swallow him, or by its mere existence make him insignificant, but another part of him felt deep peace in its presence, as if an equally great space inside of him were resonating with it. The blackness was broken up only by the distant twinkling of stars, and the faint glow of their own bodies, which had become slightly luminescent since partaking of the fruit.
“Ask me what the truemeat tasted like,” Lashé whispered.
“What did the truemeat taste like?” Hugo asked.
“Chicken.”
The word left his mouth like a storm cloud, rolling out of his glowing soul as a visible wave of darkness.
“Truemeat has always reminded me of warm milk and honey.” This time his words glowed as they left his body, like slow ripples from the fire that filled him.
“A lie and a truth,” Lashé said. “Now you understand.”
Hugo nodded, and a sudden spark of inspiration filled him. He could ask Lashé anything he wanted, and he would have to tell the truth. “Who are you, really? Tell me about yourself.”
Lashé shook his head. “I will not.”
Truth.
“Why?”
“Because it would impede my giving you the information that you require.”
Truth.
“Fine,” Hugo said. “Say what you have to say.”
“First I will repeat what I told you earlier: Your power is not your own. It belongs to the light and the dark, and it belongs to neither of you. Neither can have true power without being in a relationship with the other.”
Truth.
“So what?” Hugo said.
“So there is no war for you to win. One cannot ever annihilate the other.”
Truth.
“That’s what Shael said,” Hugo muttered. Then he remembered something. “But that’s not what he said about annihilation. He said that there was a path that I could take, and that it would obliterate the darkness, but it would kill me too.”
“That is a half truth. It is not the darkness that is annihilated on that path.�
��
Truth.
“Then what is?”
“You,” Lashé said.
A small, shimmering gray wave rose out of Lashé at those words, and he watched it float away thoughtfully. Not quite a lie, but not quite the truth. A misunderstanding?
“Let me rephrase. On that path, the you that you think you are now, dies.”
Truth.
“The me that I…what?” Hugo said. “Are you talking about Molad?”
Lashé smiled. “Right now you think of yourself as Hugo, am I right?”
“Obviously,” Hugo said.
“You think of yourself, Hugo, and Hugo is the light, and Molad is the darkness.Correct?”
“Well…yeah.” Hugo said. “I’ve never really thought about it before, but that sounds right.”
“In reality, Hugo, the real you is so big that it encompasses both sides that you see. You are the light and the darkness, Molad and Hugo. But there is another side to this truth. From another perspective, you are so small that you are neither of them. You, the real you, is the calm, silent being that stands between.”
Truth.
Hugo scratched his head. This was beginning to remind him of one of Archibald’s lessons, where he would ask a simple question and Archibald would answer with something akin to the unabridged history of the universe.
“I thought you were going to teach me how to control Molad,” he said.
Lashé laughed. “Youth,” he mumbled to himself. “I had forgotten how impatient it is. Yes, Hugo, we are getting there. Let me help you understand. Close your eyes for a moment. Watch your thoughts. Watch your own mind. Be like a cat, watching a mouse hole, waiting for a mouse to come out. A thought to come out. Then tell me what comes out.”
“This is stupid,” Hugo said. “I mean, that’s what came out of my mental mouse hole.”
“Good, good. What next?”
“Now there’s an apple tree, and Cannon. I’m wondering what he’s doing. Now there are these words that I’m saying.” Some of the initial strangeness of the exercise had worn off now, and Hugo felt an odd sense of freedom. “Now there is worry, because what if I don’t describe my thoughts right and you see lie-clouds coming out of me?” Hugo paused. “Now there is discomfort, because I don’t like telling you everything I think.”
“Good, good. Go on.”
“Um…Now there is more worry. What if nothing comes out of the hole? Where does that leave me?” He trailed off. His thoughts had rolled to a sudden stop.
“Ah,” Lashé said. “There’s the silence. It can take an awfully long time for a person’s mind to roll to a stop when it is spinning so quickly. Open your eyes.”
Hugo did. He felt peaceful.
“From this experience we see that you are not your thoughts,” Lashé said. “If you can watch them, then you are not them. They happen close to you, and you may feel close to them, attached, even, but they are not you.”
Truth.
“Now, do you trust me?”
“No,” Hugo admitted.
“Fair enough. But will you trust me for a moment? I promise to do nothing during this conversation to cause you immediate harm.”
Truth.
“Okay,” Hugo said. “Fire away.”
“Close your eyes again,” Lashé said. “Do everything as you did before.”
A few moments later, after Hugo’s mind had wound down into silence again, Lashé said, “Now, regardless of what you feel or hear, keep watching the mouse hole, keep watching your mind, and tell me what you see.”
Hugo watched, and waited. For a while, nothing happened. Then thoughts started coming back into his head. Thoughts of anticipation, of fear, and he spoke them as they came. Suddenly, in the middle of his words, Lashé slapped him in the face.
Hugo’s eyes snapped open. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t thinking anything at all, he realized.
Then something in his chest hardened and he felt a rush of anger.
“WHAT WAS THAT FOR?” he yelled.
Lashé sighed. “You stopped watching the mouse hole.”
Truth.
“Did you see the anger coming before you became angry yourself?” Lashé asked.
“Well…yeah,” Hugo said sheepishly. “I noticed it, for a second.”
“It came out of the same place, and for a moment, you were there with it, just watching it. But then it overwhelmed you. Emotions do that. They are so strong that we confuse them for ourselves almost instantly. One moment we are feeling anger, sitting there with it. In that moment it is a separate thing. Then we become it. We are angry. But you, the real you, are not your thoughts or your emotions, but the watcher. The deep, silent presence which sees them. When you absorb an emotion, like you just did, you become it. The real you, the watcher, goes unconscious for a while. Later, you wake up from the anger, as if something had taken you over.”
Truth.
“Unconscious?” Hugo asked.
“Asleep mentally,” Lashé explained. “The light of your awareness goes out and you can no longer act. Only be acted upon. You’ve already begun to figure this out for yourself. You have gained power over Molad by remaining aware, by staying in your place of power and not letting the world distract you or incite you into strong emotions and reaction patterns.”
“Well, at least I’m getting something right,” Hugo said.
“But that is not a good long-term plan.”
“Why?” Hugo asked.
“Because it is such a slippery slope if you stand between Hugo and Molad and favor one or the other. If you say, I want Hugo to win, and Molad is bad, then you aren’t silently observing anymore, are you? You’re wanting things, feeling things, judging things, and soon you will be unconscious. It is impossible to maintain balance this way for long. This is what your forbearers have tried and failed to do.”
Truth.
“But what else is there?” Hugo asked.
“There is a higher path,” Lashé said. “One in which you refuse to take sides. One in which you devote all your efforts not to one side of the struggle within you or the other, but to staying awake as the watcher. This is the path of non-resistance. In it, you do nothing.”
“But what if Molad takes over and does something bad?” Hugo said.
“There is no good or bad, Hugo, without your thoughts. On this path, you choose to have no thoughts about good or bad.”
“Excuse me?” Hugo said, but then he saw that Lashé’s words had come out as a gray cloud. Another half truth or misunderstanding.
Lashé waved it away. “No matter. On this path, you must trust that good and evil are already in balance. You must let them do as they please, and not put out your hand to tip the scale either way. This is the only path to balance that I can show you.”
Truth.
“But what if Molad does something bad?” Hugo objected. “There is good and bad, Lashé. You can’t tell me otherwise.”
Lashé nodded. “It seems so, doesn’t it? But most people who you would call evil are really just asleep. Their observers are asleep. Or they are drugged, addicted to negative emotions. They live their lives as a cycle of thoughts and emotions and desires that they can no longer differentiate from themselves. The more they fall asleep, the harder it is to wake up. Soon they are trapped in a dream, from which they cannot awaken on their own.”
Hugo nodded impatiently. “Okay, but there’s real evil too, isn’t there? Molad isn’t just a bad thought. He’s real.”
“Molad is darkness, Hugo. Not evil. Real evil is rare. Real evil takes someone who is truly awake. Real evil is when someone seeks to put other people’s observers to sleep. Real evil seeks to be the only one awake, and therefore, the only one really alive. Real evil seeks dominion, control, death. It is a very lonely sort of power. This is the type of power Shael seeks. This is the type of person he is.”
Truth.
“But why would anyone do that?” Hugo said. “Wh
at’s the point of living alone in an empty world?”
Lashé chuckled and tapped himself over the heart. “A good question. But now we’ve reached the end of what you will be able to understand. The only thing rarer than a truly evil person is a good person that is capable of understanding him. In time, you may come to such an understanding, but that is not the purpose of our conversation.”
“Right,” Hugo said thoughtfully. He had learned so much that his head was hurting. Come to think of it, his stomach didn’t feel great either. As if from a long way off, it began to rumble. The fruit had not been enough to make up for the fact that he had not eaten breakfast yet.
At that thought, Hugo found himself suddenly back in the real world. Cannon and the trees were back, along with the throb of his broken toenails. He tried to silence his mind again, be the watcher, but it was hard with all that toe throbbing. Finally he gave up and reviewed what he had learned instead.
The more he thought about it, the more his mood began to darken. “Lashé,” he said slowly, “you’ve just told me the same thing Shael did.”
Lashé got to his feet and stretched. “Why should that surprise you? Shael doesn’t need to lie to get what he wants.”
“He doesn’t?”
“No. He wants the world to go on in balance so that he can have people to gain power over. He wants the battle between light and darkness, and he wants you to stop trying to take that battle away from him. He wants you to do nothing, which as it happens, is actually the right thing for you to do.” He laughed. “The best thing for darkness is also the best thing for light. That’s balance for you!” He became serious again, and laid a hand on Hugo’s shoulder. “I know it’s hard, Hugo. It is the hardest thing in the world to sit on the sidelines and do nothing, but that is the task that was given to you. You have to trust light and darkness to balance each other out. You can’t be expected to shoulder that burden all on your own. As for Shael, your responsibility is to guard the balance between light and darkness, not beat down one evil person when he gets too strong. Leave that to other people. You face the incredible, nearly insurmountable challenge of doing nothing. The hardest thing of all. But that is the final message: the most powerful thing you can do is to surrender.”
Magemother: The Complete Series (A Fantasy Adventure Book Series for Kids of All Ages) Page 75
