“I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the Doctrine. I go for refuge to the Order.”
His prayers must have worked. We were not attacked.
As we inched toward the Zagros Mountains that bordered the Iranian plateau we saw the Great King’s soldiers here and there along the road, usually near the wells or caravansaries. Their task was to protect travelers, but the roads were too long and the soldiers too few for such protection to be more than a token. Besides, they always demanded “tax” money in return for the little protection they gave.
“They’re worse than the bandits,” said one of my men as we rode past a checkpoint on the outskirts of a small town. I had just paid the captain of the local soldiers a few coins’ “tax.”
“Paying them is easier than fighting them,” I said. “Besides, they are satisfied with very little.”
Ketu bobbed his head as he rode on my other side. “Accept what cannot be avoided,” he said. “That is part of the Eightfold Path.”
Yes, I thought. But still, it rankles.
Ketu seemed more worried than angry. “Only a year ago I passed this way, heading for Athens. There were almost no bandits and all the inns were flourishing. The king’s soldiers were plentiful. But now—the new Great King is not being obeyed. His power has diminished very quickly, very quickly indeed.”
I wondered if his empire’s internal problems would lead the Great King to agree to Philip’s terms, so that he would not have to fight the Greeks with his diminished army. Or would he, like Philip, use a foreign foe to weld his people together in newfound unity?
My sleep was becoming more uneasy each night, more restless. I did not really dream; at least, I remembered nothing in the morning except vague stirrings, blurred images, as if seen through a rain-streaked window. I did not visit the Creators’ domain, nor was I visited by Hera or any of the others. Yet my sleep was disturbed, as if I sensed a threat lurking in the darkness nearby.
We posted guards, even when we camped with caravans that had their own troops with them. I took my share of guard duty. I needed little sleep, and I especially liked to be up to watch the dawn rising. Whether in the cold and windswept mountains or out on the bare baking desert, it pleased me deep in my soul to watch the stars slowly fade away and see the sky turn milky gray, then delicate gossamer pink, and finally to see the sun rise, huge and powerful and too bright to look at directly.
“They worship me,” I remembered the Golden One saying, “in the form of the sun. I am Aten, the sun-god, the giver of life, the Creator of humankind.”
I had given up all hope of reaching Anya, the goddess whom I loved. Those troubling half dreams tormented my sleep, dim indistinct visions blurring my unconscious mind, stirring forgotten memories within me. I wondered if I could ever achieve the state of desirelessness that Ketu promised would bring me the blessed oblivion of Nirvana. The thought of getting off this endless wheel of suffering, of putting a final end to life, appealed to me more and more.
And then one night she came to me.
It was no dream. I was translated to a different place, a different time. It was not even Earth, but a strange world of molten, bubbling lava and stars crowding the sky so thickly that there was no night. It was like being inside an infinitely-faceted jewel—with boiling lava at your feet.
Somehow I hung suspended above the molten rock. I felt no heat. And when I put out my arms, they were blocked by an invisible web of energy.
Then Anya appeared before me, in a glittering uniform of silver mesh, its high collar buttoned at her throat, polished silver boots halfway up her calves. Like me, she hovered unharmed above the roiling sea of seething lava.
“Orion,” she said, urgency in her voice, “everything is changing very rapidly. I only have a few moments.”
I gazed on her incredibly beautiful face the way a man dying of thirst in the desert must look at a spring of clear, fresh water.
“Where are we?” I asked. “Why can’t I be with you?”
“The continuum is in danger of being totally disrupted. The forces arrayed against us are gaining strength with every microsecond.”
“How can I help? What can I do?”
“You must help Hera! Do you understand? It’s imperative that you help Hera!”
“But she wants to kill Philip,” I protested.
“There’s no time for argument, Orion. No time for discussion. Hera has a crucial role to play and she needs you to help her!”
I had never seen Anya look so pained, so wide-eyed with fright.
“You must!” she repeated.
“When can we be together?” I asked.
“Orion, I can’t bargain with you! You must do as you are commanded!”
I looked deep into Anya’s gray eyes. They had always been so calm before, so wise and soothing. Now they were close to panic.
And they were not gray, but yellow as a snake’s.
“Stop this masquerade,” I said.
Anya stared at me, open-mouthed. Then her face shifted, flowed like the boiling lava below me, and turned into Hera’s laughing features.
“Very good, Orion! Very perceptive of you!”
“You are a witch,” I said. “A demon sorceress.”
Her laughter was cold, brittle. “If you could have seen the expression on your face when you thought your precious Anya had deigned to appear to you!”
“Then all of this is an illusion, isn’t it?”
The seething ocean of magma disappeared. The jewel cluster of stars winked out. We were standing on a barren plain in Anatolia in the dark of a moonless night. I could see my camp, where Ketu and the soldiers slept. Two guards shuffled near the dying fire, their cloaks pulled tight around them. But they did not see us.
The metallic silver uniform Anya had been wearing had turned to copper red on Hera. Her flaming hair tumbled past her shoulders.
“Most of it was an illusion, Orion,” Hera said to me. “But there was one point of truth in it. You must help me. If you don’t, you will never see your beloved Anya again.”
“What did you mean about the continuum being in danger of disruption?”
“That doesn’t concern you, creature. You are here in this time and place to do my bidding. And don’t think that just because Philip has sent you far from Pella that I can’t reach out and pluck you whenever I choose to.”
“Is Anya in danger?”
“We all are,” she snapped. “But you are in the most danger of all, if you don’t obey me.”
I lowered my eyes. “What must I do?”
“When the time comes I will let you know,” she said haughtily.
“But how—”
She was gone. I was standing alone in the cold night. Far in the distance a wolf bayed at the newly-risen moon.
The more I learned from Ketu about the Way the more I was attracted to it. And repelled, at the same time.
“The key to Nirvana is desirelessness,” he told me over and again. “Give up all desire. Ask for nothing, accept everything.”
The world is an endless round of suffering—that I knew. The Buddha taught that we endure life after life, constantly reborn to go through the whole pain-wracked cycle again, endlessly, unless we learn how to find oblivion.
“Meditate upon these truths,” Ketu instructed me. “See everything around you as Nirvana. See all beings as Buddha. Hear all sounds as sacred mantras.”
I was no good at all at meditation. And much of what seemed perfectly clear and obvious to Ketu was darkly obscure to my mind. The thought of final nothingness, the chance to escape the agony of life, was tempting, I admit. Yet, at the same time, oblivion frightened me. I did not want to cease to exist; I only wanted an end to my suffering.
Ketu would shake his head when I told him this. “The two are inextricably bound together, my friend, intertwined like the strands of a rope. To live is to suffer, to feel pain is to be alive. You cannot end one without ending the other.”
“But I don’t want an end to all sensation,” I confessed to him. “In my heart of hearts I don’t want complete oblivion.”
“Nirvana is not oblivion,” Ketu told me eagerly. “No, no! Nirvana is not a total extinguishing. All that is extinguished is the self-centered life to which the unenlightened cling. The truly real is not extinguished; indeed, only in Nirvana can the truly real be attained.”
I could not understand his abstractions.
“Think of Nirvana as a boundless expansion of your spirit. Through Nirvana you will enter into communion with the entire universe! It is not as if a drop of water is added to the ocean; it is as if all the oceans of the world enter a single drop of water.”