Book of Bravery

by James Burke

  The last glimpse he had of Tai was him sitting in meditation on a broad flat rock inside the cave. The only thing that would enter the cave from here on would be fresh air via a shaft opening, which could also serve as a last-resort escape route. The shaft went 500 feet up and some 1,000 feet down inside the mountain.

  After sealing the cave, Quintus grabbed what he was taking on his journey, which given he didn’t need to eat, sleep or drink, wasn’t much.

  His last act on White Dragon Mountain was to trim his long beard and tie his long hair into a bun. Despite being on the mountain for hundreds of years, he retained the looks of a man in his mid-30s. He hadn’t aged in appearances like his master had.

  Once he was ready, Quintus went to the terrace’s ledge and promptly jumped over it and made a controlled free fall for some 700 feet until he landed just above the tree line. His well-honed levitation capabilities ensured a landing as soft as a kiss.

  Earlier, Tai told Quintus that he would always watch over him as he ventured westwards, and his student had no doubt this would occur. From within the now pitch-black cave, Tai watched, via his mind’s eye, as his student made his way through the valley and beyond.

  The year was 367 AD.

  CHAPTER III

  Rise and Fall of Empires

  Quintus didn’t wander aimlessly after he returned to the West. For most parts, he was actually quite industrious. The idea of doing nothing as he waited for events to unfold was not appealing.

  After leaving the mountain it took him a year to return to the Roman Empire which by then had taken up Christianity — a faith he came to appreciate for its demand for human decency. He found this new religion exalted kindness as opposed to old Roman pagan rituals and other stark perversions accepted by the culture of his youth. After hundreds of years on the mountain learning the Way, his own beliefs in deities naturally moved on from what he was born into. Now he understood that gods and enlightened beings were unseen and unknown but at the same time were righteous and compassionate — qualities they wished humankind was more attuned with.

  In that new Roman Empire, Quintus established a life of sorts in the ancient metropolis of Aleppo in what is today Syria. He stayed there for a decade before moving on. In his next location, he altered his identity by changing his surname only. To keep some sense of self he retained his first name. It was a pattern repeated over and over every ten years or so.

  It was in Aleppo that his career in construction began. It was a decision that proved fruitful. From there, he worked his way up in the building trade around various parts of the eastern Mediterranean and, after a hundred years or so, he became a fine builder as well as an accomplished architect.

  In the years that followed, buildings accompanied him throughout history. They easily outlived people and outlasted empires. Their durability comforted him in an ever-changing world. Through late antiquity, he went on to build some of the grandest structures of the period, the third Hagia Sophia in Constantinople being a notable example.

  Much of Quintus’ time was spent within the boundaries of the Eastern Roman Empire which eventually became known as the Byzantine Empire. Among his favorite cities that he lived and worked in were Jerusalem, Barca, Germa in Galatia, Mokissos and Mystras in the southeast of the Peloponnese.

  From the seventh century onwards, the Byzantine Empire’s borders gradually contracted due to rampaging Islamic armies and infighting. Eventually the last vestiges of what was the Roman Empire succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 but by then Quintus was already long gone. Two hundred years earlier, he left Constantinople and travelled through Eastern and Central Europe to assist with the rebuilding of what the Mongol invasions had destroyed. Given the amount of destruction and slaughtering done, he was busy for some time.

  A century later, just after the worst of the Black Death cut Europe’s population by half, Quintus headed towards the Italian peninsula. It was overdue that he returned to the land of his birth. From Rome to Bologna, he built hundreds of castles, places of worship and homes. He similarly influenced dozens of Italian architects who went on to design some of the definitive structures of what would be known as the Renaissance period.

  Around 1460, Quintus ventured back north, this time through the Old Swiss Confederacy and then the German states. He kept heading up into the unions of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. He then did a U-turn and arrived in what is now the Netherlands in the summer of 1472.

  A year later Quintus was in France where he spent some 20 years before he moved to Spain where he arrived just as Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the New World. After some years there and in Portugal, he sailed across to England where he stayed until he migrated to Ireland which he called home for a hundred plus years. During this period, he repaired old-Norman castles for Irish nobles and taught construction techniques to common folk. He also built several churches and cathedrals for the faithful until 1649 when Cromwell’s invading forces put an end to that. Eight years earlier, ethnic and sectarian violence were omens of things to come. He had hoped it wouldn’t get any worse, but it did.

  However, I can tell you, nothing is by chance. All of his building — especially places of worship — and his many acts of selfless charity had upset the 13 Demon Kings of the Pit who were good to their word in watching him. The demons couldn’t tolerate so much goodness coming from a single individual, and one who was near immortal. Feeling unbound by heavenly rules and any past assurances they made with Tai, they maliciously set a path for Meng and his two henchmen to return to the human realm. This one called Quintus, favored by above high, needed to be sternly tested, they thought.

  The Island

  The wooden gallows-type structure built on a small rocky island was the only unnatural feature on the lake in Ireland’s Wexford country. It was a gibbet built by English parliamentarian soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army, an outfit I must say that I had no hand in creating.

  On a summer’s day in 1652, such men rowed out in boats to hoist a man-sized iron cage onto the gibbet. Inside the cage was Quintus. Apart from a loincloth, he was naked. Filthy and disheveled, he held no malice towards those who had beaten and mistreated him or who were about to hang him out in the elements.

  As they hoisted him up onto the gibbet most of the red-coated soldiers turned their eyes away. Some were even fearful that their God would strike them down for what they were doing. Many of them witnessed how Quintus’ bruises and cuts healed fully within a day or in some cases just hours. They had to come to appreciate why the Irish referred to him as a living saint.

  Despite this, all 13 men on the rocky island that day were more afraid of their commander than heavenly retribution. Their leader, Colonel Alcott Entwistle watched them intently. Entwistle had a reputation even before coming to Ireland. But he didn’t, at least on first glance, appear nefarious. He was tall and thin with clipped dainty features.

  The colonel earned his early infamy by burning at the stake a dozen elderly women accused of witchery in East Anglia. Rumor had it he did so to cover up his own occult activities. Yes, I can confirm, Entwistle dabbled in the dark satanic arts as did his two bodyguards who were always by his side.

  But it was his more recent acts in Ireland that shocked most of his soldiers. He’d made it his goal in life to reduce the Irish population in the county by half and his preferred way of doing this was through mass hangings.

  Now as he stood overseeing Quintus’ punishment on the island he and his two bodyguards took pleasure in yelling at a couple of soldiers arriving in the final row boat.

  ‘Hurry up, get those rotting things up here!’ Entwistle yelled.

  ‘You’re late!’ a bodyguard bellowed.

  The soldiers alighted from the boat, dragging with them a large wicker basket.

  ‘Give them a hand,’ Entwistle ordered his bodyguards.

  Dread washed over Quintus as the men brought the wicker basket to below his cage. They upended the basket and from it spilled a dozen decapitated heads
onto the stony ground.

  Quintus closed his eyes and bit his lip in anguish which caused Entwistle to chuckle.

  ‘I guess you now wish you didn’t hand yourself into me don’t you saint? You should have run and gone into hiding, but too late now,’ Entwistle said. ‘Now I’ve made any mention of your name punishable by death, so you’ve only got yourself to blame,’ he said. ‘And the rule of law needs to be enforced. You may notice numerous familiar faces among this bunch, even that Englishman, the Royalist Edward Hyde is under there somewhere. Was he a friend of yours? I was told he was.’

  Quintus didn’t reply, nor did he look at the heads eight feet below him. He could only think the worst and presume they were folk from the county who had wanted to hide him from the likes of Entwistle.

  ‘The Irish simpletons say you’re blessed with everlasting life. How can one fight against such extreme beliefs?’ Entwistle chuckled. ‘But I have to admit, I’m intrigued how you even survived in this wretched backwater. The papists would typically burn someone like you, insisting you were in league with the devil,’ he said. ‘Therefore, it’s up to me to do what they failed to do.’

  Entwistle paused waiting for some reaction from Quintus which was not forthcoming, so he resumed speaking and raised his voice by a decibel or two.

  ‘All this talk of everlasting life does fascinate me though. We should wager on who will die first out of the two of us,’ he taunted. ‘I’ll even gamble a farthing on it.’

  Again, Quintus did not react.

  The colonel ordered his bodyguards and the other soldiers back to the boats, leaving just himself in front of Quintus. He stared hatefully at the caged man.

  ‘Listen to me saint and listen good. If you escape from this island I will kill every living being in a ten-mile radius. Every child, every swallow, every lamb. Even the butterflies won’t be safe,’ Entwistle said.

  Each of his words carried a malevolence that was centuries old.

  Entwistle turned and made his way to the boats. Just before getting into one of them, he took a final look at Quintus and chuckled again. It wasn’t long before the colonel and his soldiers rowed away.

  Quintus wouldn’t have any more visitors step foot on that small rocky outcrop for another 12 years.

  When Endurance is Everything

  With no water a normal person perishes in three days. Deprived of food it takes a human around three weeks to die. Given Quintus’ abilities he would not have to contend with such scenarios while locked in the cage. Physically and mentally, he was equipped to cope with such an ordeal, at least for a decade or so.

  Due to his training, his body could continuously repair itself from any abuse suffered in the cage. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t feel the pain and discomfort of his predicament. He tolerated and endured it.

  But I don’t think I can do justice describing to you what Quintus went through. I’d say most of you would not make it past 48 hours in a similar situation before your mind unraveled.

  In contrast, after his own 48 hours in the cage, Quintus managed to get himself into a steady frame of mind. He put aside the grief for those who Entwistle had murdered and whose heads were below him like rubble. Quintus looked at his situation for what he understood it to be. Meng had finally come back for revenge in the form of another megalomaniac, that being Entwistle. It was no surprise. Entwistle even looked like Meng, just a Caucasian version.

  To keep his mind clear, Quintus recalled his time on the mountain. From the Tao Yin exercises to talks on philosophy he recollected them all in accurate detail. If any moments in the cage kept his mind strong it was when he thought of his teacher and his own responsibility to mankind at the end of time.

  He reminded himself repeatedly what Tai had told him: ‘You must endure the unendurable.’ He was determined he would outlast Entwistle and remain true to the Way. He would endure and come out on the other side not only intact but stronger.

  Well, that was the plan anyway.

  Why Entwistle had chosen such a punishment as gibbetting, Quintus was unsure, but he simply reminded himself it could be worse. It wasn’t a dark dank dungeon and it was not as extreme as the crucifixions he witnessed as a centurion.

  In the cage, he had at least the days and nights and the four seasons to keep him entertained. Apart from decaying skulls below him he found the view quite pleasing. On sunny days, the lake and its surroundings were beautiful enough to help him forget his predicament and to disregard the pain.

  As the years went by, Quintus got to know each and every tree around the lake. He watched some sprout and saw others fall to rot and feed the soil.

  The closest thing he had to a social life was befriending birds, especially bullfinches who he taught to sing. He welcomed the white swans visiting for winter and generations of swallows who built mud nests under his gibbet’s beam during warmer months.

  Even a bunch of fairies — who watched him for years before making themselves known — offered their friendship. Several of these diminutive folk occasionally visited him at night, their flapping silver wings shining in the dark.

  While Quintus saw such fantastical sights, he saw no people, not a soul, not at least during the first seven years. He presumed Entwistle had made the lake off limits. It felt at times as if he was the last person on Earth.

  The Wall

  During Quintus’ seventh year in the cage, a single rowboat manned by Entwistle’s two bodyguards came out onto the water and rowed close enough to check that he indeed remained in the cage. They noted that the naked, bearded and longhaired man was alive and then rowed back to shore.

  A week later more men arrived, this time laborers who began cutting down trees around the shoreline. After the trees were cleared, another gang of laborers began building a 10-foot-high stonewall circling the lake. It took them three years to finish the wall, which threw the natural dynamics of the lake out of kilter. The water silted up and an algae bloom killed the fish. The swans and the bullfinches no longer visited him while the swallows went elsewhere to build their nests. The fairies lost their home among the trees and they too had to relocate.

  To fill the vacuum, hundreds of crows arrived. They insidiously cawed day and night, taking turns to perch on the gibbet or on the wall.

  Quintus rightly assumed Entwistle was behind the building of the wall, which he grudgingly recognized was weakening his resolve. A gnawing sense of unease began to chip away inside him and by the time of his 10th winter on the island, cracks finally began to appear in his mental state. The monotonous horror of it all had become like sandpaper upon his soul.

  The first thing to go adrift was his perception of time. Everything seemed to slow down which magnified his suffering even more. Short periods of mental instability and acute restlessness followed. The shells of what remained of the skulls below began to haunt him as did the incessant caws from the crows. A mild form of simmering panic set in.

  Sometimes Quintus thought he saw soldiers patrolling the wall, tossing rocks at the crows but he wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating or not. On other occasions, he thought he heard the music from an erhu just as he did way back on White Dragon Mountain. It seemed to drift in on the northerly breeze, pushing out the nightmarish tones of the crows. It brought him some comfort. Revitalized him to a point.

  He likewise began sleeping, something he hadn’t done for centuries. It was another way for him to escape the misery and mind-numbing boredom he faced. Be it in his dreams or his waking hours, more than once he called out to his teacher, Tai, for help. However, by his 11th year it got to the stage where he wasn’t sure if anyone was listening or not.

  Midway through the last month of the year 1664, one of the coldest in a century, the rope that held the cage snapped. He and the cage dropped to the stony ground. The cage smashed the remains of the skulls of his friends before it came to a rest in an awkward position between two slabs of dark rock.

  Gravity pushed his body into the top of the cage, which now was point
ing in a downward direction. How he had been for the previous 12 years was positively more comfortable that what he now had to deal with. Quintus attempted to summon his abilities of levitation to budge the cage, but it was useless. Not being able to do his exercises or meditation for so long left him worn out and disconnected from his talents.

  As for the crows, they just laughed at him.

  An hour after his fall, it began to lightly rain, heralding what would be five days of non-stop drizzle and sleet. As the cold began to further soak into his bones, Quintus asked himself how much more slow-motion obliteration he could endure? He didn’t dare answer himself. His sanity was now hanging by a thread.

  A day after the rain ceased, he finally had visitors.

  Choice

  As he lay in a semi-consciousness state, Quintus heard two separate sounds. One was of agitated crows; the other was of paddles hitting water. He opened his eyes, tilted his head towards the noise that was not so typical. Moments later three rowboats emerged from the morning mist, scaring a half-dozen crows off the gibbet.

  At the bow of the lead boat was Entwistle who wore a fancy collared cloak trimmed with braid. Now aged in his 50s, his thinning grey hair was mostly hidden underneath a beaver hat.

  A shivering, naked Quintus could do naught but stay fixed to where he was and wait for them to land. The first on the island was Entwistle. His two bodyguards and five other soldiers followed. Soon enough, they found Quintus wedged among rocks in the rusty cage.

  ‘Oh dear, oh my, did the rope fail you saint?’ Entwistle asked, not expecting an answer. ‘You look a right mess, in fact more like a filthy animal than a man. What are we going to do with you eh?’ he mocked. ‘How about you have a bath or a splashdown?’