Legends of Garaaga

by Paul E. Cooley

  The floor disappeared beneath him. He fell through the crumbling stone tunnel and into darkness.

  Herodot landed in a heap. His right ankle twisted as he hit the floor. A low lit brazier cast wan light into the room. His head buzzed with pain. The scribe lifted his head from the stone floor and stared into the face of a bronze lion.

  He scrabbled forward. The smell of smoke lessened but he heard shouts outside the barely lit room. With his right hand, he reached around the back of the statue's head. His fingers touched the warm leather binding. He pulled the book from its hiding place and tucked it to his chest.

  Herodot crawled toward the brazier by the door. An ember dropped through the grate and landed beside him. He barely noticed when his tunic started burning. He kept moving forward toward the door.

  His knees bled. His left arm dragged along the stone floor.

  "Help me!" Herodot screamed.

  No response save the continued shouts outside the door. Herodot reached it. He banged on the heavy cedar with his right hand.

  Herodot finally felt his skin burning and rolled over. The effort made his chest scream in pain.

  Another bubble of blood burst on his lips. "For Rashim," he whispered. The world went dark.

  Herodot drifted in and out of consciousness. He dreamed of white robed Egyptian men hovering over him, chanting and plying him with strange liquids. In some dreams, the burned face of Cleitus stood above him, a sad smile on his face. In others, he only saw Akakios's burning, mad eyes.

  The room was cool and dim when he opened his eyes. His body was swathed in fine cotton. He raised his head and saw a figure slumped against the far wall.

  "Who are you?" he croaked.

  The figure shifted in the chair. Herodot drew a sharp breath and his lungs burned.

  "My boy?" a sleepy voice asked. "Are you awake?"

  Herodot sighed. The voice was familiar, if a bit more husky than he remembered. "Cleitus?"

  The figure rose from the chair and walked toward the bed. The old man's visage had been transformed. Scarred, shiny skin covered half his face and his hairline had completely disappeared on the left side. The old man had been burned badly.

  "Yes, Herodot."

  "Sir, I--"

  "You are the luckiest man alive."

  Herodot struggled to speak. "How so?"

  Cleitus chuckled. "Because Ptolemy's Royal Guards plucked you from the fire's embrace. The rest of us were outside fighting the fire." The old Librarian spat. "No thanks to Caesar, I might add."

  "Guard?"

  "Yes. Varsish himself carried you out of the treasure room. He said you looked half-dead."

  Herodot said nothing.

  "How in hades did you get in there?"

  "Tunnel. Went down the grate in the storeroom."

  "Ah," Cleitus wheezed. "So you fell into Alexander's artifacts?"

  Herodot nodded.

  "Lucky. What were you doing there? I thought I made it clear you were to stay in the dormitory?"

  "I--" Herodot took a breath. "I wanted to look at my scrolls."

  Cleitus nodded. He licked his lips. "I find it very interesting you didn't appear with any."

  Herodot said nothing.

  "And yet Varsish pulled you from the treasure room clutching a book."

  The Book, Herodot thought. "What book?"

  Cleitus smiled. "The book, Herodot. The one you found earlier that day."

  "I don't--"

  Cleitus waved his hand. "Don't lie to me, boy. I know what you found. What you think you found." Cleitus pulled something from his toga. "You found Nerutal's famous tome."

  The old man stood and placed the leather book on Herodot's chest. He clutched it. His left hand ached. Wooden sticks were bandaged against his fingers.

  "Is it so important?" the old man asked.

  Herodot said nothing.

  Cleitus nodded. "You know the Library is no more."

  "What?"

  "It has been destroyed. Part and parcel. All that remains is, laughably enough, the dormitory and dining hall. Even Alexander's treasure room has been destroyed."

  "Oh, Yahweh."

  "Ptolemy's men could not put out the fire. Nor could Caesar's." Cleitus cleared his throat. "We have dozens of Librarians missing. Your patron among them."

  Herodot said nothing.

  Cleitus moved forward until he stood at the foot of the bed.

  "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

  "I don't--"

  "Of course you don't," Cleitus said. "Of course you don't. Your friend Isaac is gone too."

  "Isaac?"

  "Yes. I'm afraid I misjudged him. He stayed in the dormitory through the choking smoke. Refused to leave until he found you."

  Herodot sobbed. "Stupid, stupid, bastard."

  Cleitus said nothing.

  "I-- I--"

  "I want to ask you a question, boy, and I want you to answer me. Truthfully."

  Herodot blinked away tears and nodded.

  The old man looked on the verge of tears himself. "Did you succeed? Did you find what you were looking for?"

  "Yes," Herodot said. "I did."

  Cleitus nodded. "Then the gods have blessed you." The old man tapped the leather book with a gnarled finger. "Ptolemy will lose this war, my boy. And I know not what will happen in the coming years. The Library is gone."

  "I'm so sorry," Herodot whispered.

  The old man waved his hand. "We will rebuild it, my son. We will. But I have another question to ask you."

  "Ask."

  "Do you remember the words? All that you have read? All that you have translated?"

  "Yes."

  Cleitus tugged at his misshapen beard. "Then maybe it was worth it all."

  The two said nothing for a moment.

  "I read the book," Cleitus whispered.

  Herodot looked away.

  "This is the book from Philus' story."

  He nodded.

  "Sanskrit was never my favorite language, but I know enough to get by." The old man smiled. "Garaaga."

  "Garaaga," Herodot whispered in return. "Do you believe?"

  "Do you?" Cleitus countered.

  Herodot didn't reply.

  The old man nodded. "They tell me my wounds will not heal. That I'm going to die soon." Cleitus scratched at his arm. "But I imagine as long as you live, I shall live too."

  "Yes," Herodot said.

  "That memory of yours will serve us well."

  "Yes."

  "I wonder. Where will you go next?"

  Herodot shrugged. "Archelon said I should leave the Library. Find Gujaritan."

  "Gujaritan," Cleitus mused. "Do you know where it is?"

  "I know where it should be."

  "The old man's maps were burned."

  "Yes," Herodot whispered. "And so was his body."

  Cleitus raised a brow. "And how do you know that?"

  Herodot said nothing.

  The old man sighed. "Do you remember when you first came to the Library? You were Akakios's shadow." Cleitus tugged at what remained of his beard. "Whenever he was at lecture, you were there. Whenever he was in Scribe Hall, you had a scroll in your hands."

  "Yes."

  "Wasn't all that long ago, was it?"

  "No, sir."

  A smile broke across Cleitus' face. "Yet you are the finest scribe the Library has ever had. The words are in your blood."

  He stared down at his ruined left hand. The fingers had begun to ache. "They will never work again. Will they?"

  "No, not likely. But your other hand is the writing hand. The important hand." Cleitus leaned in. "Just make sure you protect it."

  Neither spoke for a moment. From outside the room, Herodot heard the sounds of the market, of people going about their routines.

  "The war has left the city?"

  "Yes. Caesar burned his ships to frustrate Ptolemy's signalers. His legion launched an offensive and drove the confused army from the city. The fight i
s ongoing, but no longer with us."

  "What will you do now?"

  Cleitus smiled. "This is my home. We will rebuild. I'll see to it. It'll be my legacy." He looked down at his bandaged hand. The white cloth was stained with yellow and red. "I'll not be able to write anymore. I shall find someone to do that for me as well."

  "Sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "I will need money."

  "No you wont," Cleitus said. "You are Akakios's only heir. And since he is presumed dead..."

  His eyes were tearing up. "He left it all to me."

  "Well, not all, of course. Quite a bit of it was left to the Library, for the scribes."

  Herodot shook his head. "The man was a monster, sir."

  "Perhaps. But even monsters can do good deeds."

  The room was quiet. Herodot flexed the fingers on his left hand and winced. "It will take me weeks to reach Gujaritan."

  "Yes. It will. May I suggest you plan that excursion when you are stronger?"

  Herodot laughed. "I will consider it, sir."

  "You will always have a place here in Alexandria, my friend. Always."

  The old man offered his hand. Herodot shook it with his right.

  "Good luck, young man," Cleitus said. "Wherever your travels take you."

  "What of the book?"

  Cleitus shrugged. "What of it? Varsish died shortly after the fire. No one else knows you have it, or that it even exists. Do with it what you like. Besides," the old man grinned, "I imagine it will be safest with you."

  Herodot drowsed. It had been three wakings since Cleitus had come to see him. On the fourth waking, he struggled out of bed, donned a tunic, and stumbled out into the streets of Alexandria. Caesar had already won the war, although the battles were still being fought.

  It had been a week since the Library caught fire. He limped to the site and stared. The tall facades were gone. The fire had burned through the wooden buttresses, weakening the stone pillars until they collapsed.

  The roof had fallen into the top floor which then fell into the next floor down. With each addition of weight, the pillars crumbled. Huge shards of stone were visible in the hole where the Library once stood.

  The dormitory on the end was blackened, but whole. Herodot wiped a tear from his cheek. Isaac, Archelon, the maps, the friezes, statues, murals, painting, and the scrolls were all gone. Thousands of years of history lost in a single night and he was responsible.

  The image of Akakios's burning body falling into the papyrus bin, burning scrolls flooding across the floor, crept into his mind. His patron. His Library. All gone. He limped away from the lip of the burned hulk.

  A group of bored soldiers guarded the dormitory. They barely spared him a glance. He walked past them and toward the end of the remaining building.

  He slid his good hand into his tunic and brushed against the book. Its leather surface was warm in the cool air. It had to be protected until he found a way to destroy it.

  Cleitus suggested he stave off his trip to Gujaritan until he was rested. Herodot smiled. He turned his back on what remained of his home and headed toward the hovel Cleitus rented for him.

  He already found a group of Jews headed for Jerusalem and paid for passage with them. Akakios's fortune would pay his way, perhaps even allow him to find a home there. But more importantly, he would find a place to hide the book.

  Before the Written Word

  The art of oral storytelling is older than any of us would believe. Early man probably did more than just paint pictures on cave walls--it was likely one component of performance art around the fire.

  The legends around the campfire. Did animals have such a thing? Did their elders tell them stories of the hunters and the beast? Did Tiger Mother tell her cubs in growls and grunts about the time in the distant past where the village tried to fight the beast?

  The age in which we "mastered" the written word is one of the most argued subjects in academia. Every time a new cuneiform tablet or scrap of sanskrit is recovered, it's immediately dated and either used to shift the timeline backwards, or is placed within the dates of known history. If the areas of modern Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan ever reach some kind of stability, new waves of archeologists will no doubt descend and excavate with reckless abandon looking for new evidence of written language's beginning.

  But just because humans didn't know how to write doesn't mean they didn't know how to communicate. Even today, we have illiterates around the world whose minds are infused with oral storytelling. From the Imam in the desert preaching to bedouins to the podcast fiction we enjoy today, epic tales are told by voice alone. In the earliest cultures, myths, legends, and religions were all disseminated using only the human voice.

  Modern humans may find it difficult to believe that meaningful communication was possible without what might be considered a fully realized language, but even young children tell tales long before their vocabularies reach an iota of the available words in our dictionary.

  Primitive humans may have chanted their stories. They may have turned them into song. We will never know when the tradition began--we only know it survived the creation of the written word and continues today.

  An event like the great flood (which is most notably represented by the Jewish tale of Noah) was recounted in modern China, Mesopotamia, the Indus, and many others. Considering the Torah is only as old as ~500 BCE, it is hardly the most ancient account of the watery cataclysm. Until the Torah was written, how did the Jewish legend survive? Oral storytelling.

  By comparison, the oldest version of the Babylonian story "Gilgamesh" was written sometime around 1800 BCE. That's more than a millennia before the Torah existed. If that's the case, then the story of Gilgamesh may have been told through song and oral storytelling as far back as the beginnings of the Mesopotamian civilization (~4000-3500 BCE).

  "The Last Hunter" grew out of an idea to trace the beginnings of such a legend by telling it as it happened. Rashim's "legend" will travel through time, perhaps even to modern day Garaaga's Children stories. Will it change over time? Will it morph into something unrecognizable? Will some of the most salient details be modified to serve those telling the story? Only time will tell.

  So how does one preserve a tale's integrity? By writing it down, of course. Except... When civilizations fully embrace the written word, and most of their populace are able to read, the oral tradition slowly wanes. Instead of priests and the intellectual elite passing down the legends, scribes write them down and they are read directly from the tainted source. Once written, a story becomes digital. Once read, however, it can be rewritten into another digital copy that may or may not be as accurate as the original.

  The greatest example of this is the Christian Bible. It has been written, rewritten, translated, rewritten again, and made malleable by churches and monks over millennia. Just as we will never know the original author of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," it's impossible to find the original author of the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran.

  So where's the original copy of these books? Well, they either do not exist, or we have yet to discover them. These books were most likely put together by a consensus of religious scholars. Therefore, they are compilations of tales rather than a single narrative.

  Myths and legends become fact to believers. Regardless of whether the story involves Inanna, Ganesh, Yaweh, Jehova, Allah, or Garaaga, they are considered the word of a divine presence. The legend of Rashim is no different. For some characters in the Garaaga's Children universe, the story of the "The Last Hunter" will become scripture and proof of divinity. For others, it will be considered heresy that must be destroyed.

  Even through the story may change with each telling, the hard kernel of "truth" that spawned the legend remains. For instance, regardless of whether the legend is wrapped in the cultural trappings of Judaism, Mesopotamia, Indus, Greece, or etc, a great flood happened. Geologists and archeologists have discovered proof that it occurred and was so devastating, it affected
every culture in the area.

  But did it affect the entire world? Certainly not. Did it affect the "known" world for these cultures? Most definitely.

  This discussion is not meant to offend anyone's faith, but merely to illustrate the point of "The Last Hunter." Every religion, every culture, has origin myths. "Hunter" is the actual story as it happened. The legends and myths that follow in its stead form the background for all the future narratives. Rashim's tale lives on through the rest of the series long after the death of his culture and the original Keeper sect.

  Lothal

  Ancient Sumeria was conquered by a race of people known as the Akkadians somewhere in the neighborhood of ~2400-2300 BCE. The conquerors changed the name of Sumer to Akkad and had relatively little impact on the existing civilization. "Keepers" takes place at the peak of the Akkadian empire (~2200 BCE).

  The introduction of their language and a single god to the region's pantheon were the only marks forced upon Sumer. It is thought that the Akkadians brought the art of writing to the merchant class and created the vocation of scribes. Cuneiform was once controlled only by the priests but the increasing need for trade forced the Akkadians to disseminate the art of writing outside the temples.

  The peoples of the Fertile Crescent worshipped many gods and there is little evidence of disharmony between the worshippers. Just as Muslims, Jews, and Christians once used the same temples in Jerusalem thousands of years later to worship their deities, many of the ancient gods of the Sumerian people shared temples. The god Nabu was the deity of writing and wisdom. Any tupšarru, or scribe, would have worshipped him.

  The village of Lothal in the Indus Valley is credited with having the world's first known dock. However, it remains unclear if the dock was used solely for ceremonial purposes or for actual trade. I have taken the liberty of going with the theory that the dock was indeed used for trade. The weighmasters as described in the story are told as faithfully as I could manage, given the sparse information available.

  That said, the village of Lothal did ultimately become a center of trade. The Akkadians were likely their first non-indigenous merchant partners. The Indus people traded wood, gems, beads, lapis lazuli, and raw materials that were scarce in the post-Sumerian kingdoms of Akkad and Ur.