He was completely convinced of it and happy in his conviction. I could not overcome the doubts that assailed me. If I achieved nothingness, I would never see Anya again. Never know her love, her touch. If I found the final oblivion I would never be able to help her, and from all that I had gleaned from Hera, she needed my help desperately. Yet Hera was keeping me from her. How could I break through Hera’s control and—
I realized that I was far, very far, from being without desire.
On his part, Ketu remained fascinated by my claim to remember my earlier lives; at least, parts of some of them. For all I could remember were isolated fragments, a brief moment here, a snatch of a soldier’s song, the great dust clouds of the Mongol Horde on the march, the burning fury of a nuclear reactor running wild.
One sunrise, after another troubled, tossing night of obscure fears and blurred memories, I sniffed the crisp breeze blowing from the northwest as the men prepared their morning meal. We had camped in the open, along the shoulder of the long, wagon-rutted Royal Road in the middle of flat brown scrublands.
“Lake Van is in that direction,” I said to Ketu, pointing into the wind. “And beyond it is Ararat.”
His big soulful eyes widened at me. “You know the sacred mountain?”
“I lived near it once, with a hunting tribe…” My words dwindled away because that was all I could remember: the snow-capped mountain, steam issuing from one of its twin peaks, shrouding the heights in clouds.
“A hunting tribe?” he urged.
“It was a long time ago.” I tried all day to recall more, but the memories were locked away from me. I knew that Anya had been in that tribe with me, but there had been someone else. A man, the tribe’s leader. And Ahriman! I remembered the dark, brooding danger that he threatened. I remembered the cave bear that killed me for him.
A week later a new memory assailed me. We were near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, where the temples of Ishtar and Shamash once rose in glory. And mighty Sennacherib, who claimed that he himself had invented crucifixion as the most agonizing way to put his enemies to death. I remembered the rows of crosses lining the road as we marched back toward his palace—the grandest that had ever been built, he believed.
These were the memories that assailed my sleep. I had been in this ancient tortured land before, many times, many lives ago. The memories seemed to rise up from the blood-soaked ground like ancient ghosts, shifting, indistinct, tantalizing and almost frightening in a way. Anya was at the core of all these half-remembered lives. The goddess had taken on human form time and again, for my sake, to be with me, because she loved me. Was she trying to reach me now? Was she trying to break down the walls in my mind that separated us?
“I will never achieve Nirvana,” I confessed to Ketu one night as we took our supper at a well-guarded caravansary. We were almost at Susa, at the end of the Royal Road. The Great King obviously had a firmer grip on the land here.
“It takes time,” Ketu said gently, sitting across the table from me. We had been given a private booth since Ketu had told the innkeeper that he was an envoy of the Great King. “It takes many lifetimes to reach the state of blessedness.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll ever get there. I don’t even think I want to.”
“Then you will continue to endure life after life. Continue to suffer.”
“Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to do.”
Ketu would not argue. “Perhaps,” was all he said, keeping his convictions to himself.
But he was curious. “Two weeks’ journey to the southwest is the mighty city of Babylon. What memories do you have of it?”
I concentrated, but nothing came forth.
“The hanging gardens?” Ketu prompted hopefully. “The great ziggurat?”
Something stirred at that. “Uruk,” I heard myself say. “Gilgamesh the king and his friend Enkidu.”
“You knew them?” His voice went hollow with awe.
I nodded, wishing that the memories would become clear to me. “I think I was Enkidu,” I said. “I know that Gilgamesh was my friend.”
“That was at the very beginning of time,” Ketu whispered.
“No,” I said. “It was long ago, but not at the beginning.”
“Ah, if only you could remember more.”
I had to smile at him. “You are not entirely desireless yourself, my friend.”
CHAPTER 20
We arrived in Susa at last, and a mighty city it was, but I saw almost none of it. We “Greeks” were told to camp outside the capital’s looming walls, while Ketu was escorted to the palace by a squad of the king’s soldiers.
He came back a few hours later, looking unhappy.
“The Great King and his court have already moved to Parsa. We must go there.”
Parsa was the springtime capital, a city unknown to Philip or even Aristotle. In time, Alexandros would call it Persepolis. We started out for Parsa, this time escorted by a troop of Persian cavalry, their horses glittering with gold-decorated helmets and silver-studded harnesses that jingled as we rode even farther east through gray-brown desert and hot, sand-laden winds.
When we finally arrived there, I saw that Parsa was magnificent, but it was not truly a city. The old Dareios, the one who had first invaded Greece nearly two centuries earlier, had built Parsa to be his personal monument. Laid out in the sun-baked brown hills on a flat terrace at the foot of a massive granite promontory, Parsa looked as if it had been carved out of the living rock itself. Indeed, the tombs of Artaxerxes and other Great Kings were cut deep into the cliff face.
Parsa was not a true city. It had no private homes, no market place, no existence at all except as a residence for the king and court for a few months each spring. Oh, a scattering of people lived there all year long, but they were merely caretakers to keep the place from falling into ruin from one royal visit to the next.
Yet it was magnificent: far bigger than Pella, far grander than Athens. The king’s palace was enormous; it had to be, to house his extensive harem. The meeting hall, where the court convened and the king sat to hear petitions, held a single room so large that fully a hundred pillars supported the vast expanse of the roof. Everywhere I looked I saw statues leafed in gold, gigantic reliefs on the walls of winged bulls, lions with men’s heads on them, or human forms with animals’ heads atop them. Among Philip’s Macedonians the lion was a common symbol; in Athens all the statues I had seen had been of men or women—humans, even when they were representing gods and goddesses.
To me, this Persian architecture seemed heavy, ponderous, almost ugly in comparison to the fluted grace of the Parthenon. These massive, gigantic buildings were meant to dwarf mortal men, to awe them and impress them with the power of the Great King, much like the colossal palaces of the Pharaoh in his cities along the Nile. The cities and temples of the Greeks were much more human in dimension. Here the buildings were gigantic, decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, with ivory from Hindustan and carnelian from the mountains that were called the Roof of the World.
Yet despite all this display of wealth and splendor—or perhaps because of it—the palace seemed to me more pompous than majestic.
What was impressive was the fantastic variety of peoples at the court; a thousand different nationalities were bound up in this vast empire. To reach Parsa we had already travelled through Phrygia, Cappadocia, Syria and the ancient land of Sumer between the Twin Rivers, over the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plain. Now I saw that there were even more lands and more peoples in the empire: swarthy Elamites and turbaned Parthians, olive-skinned Medes and dour lean Bactrians, dark men from distant Kush and eagle-eyed mountain dwellers from the Roof of the World. The Persians themselves were only a small minority among all these mixtures of peoples. The palace hummed with a hundred different languages, and buzzed with constant intrigues that made the machinations back at Pella seem like children’s games.
Dareios had only recently come to the throne, after the assassination of the previous Great King. The empire was in turmoil as the new king struggled to bring its far-flung peoples under his central control. We had seen the signs of chaos as we had travelled on the Royal Road. Here in the magnificent palace at Parsa I saw that Dareios was working hard to solidify his hold on the throne.