11. A Glimpse of Fog
From Marek’s Journal:
I’m taking a moment to preserve some of the key tenets of today’s lesson before the whole matter flees from my mind.
Understanding follows a maturation process that occurs first beneath the surface mind…Oloron shows you the truth, and Oloron kills what is within you that is not a part of that truth. What remains, in the end, is only what the Creator intended you to be…I not only know the way, but I’ve been there before – and a part of me has never left… And while we strive, Sirrus pursues the Adversary in all its hidden nesting places - as we are learning to do also.
I felt that I needed a more concrete understanding of the nature of the Adversary, and I asked Sirrus if he would clarify his definition.
“The Adversary…hmm, how can one speak of the nature and origins of such a One?”
His wigwam was heavy with moist, sticky heat, and I could tell that the dwarf was struggling to be cheerful in the midst of his (and my own) discomfort.
“I have felt Its malign intent, Its hatred of the Creator and all of the Creator’s works, but the truth about where It comes from and what motivates Its sickly ambition may always lie beyond our ken. There are many theories and myths that strive to account for the Adversary. But the story I find most inspiring says this: that the demonic realm is the joint creation of every being that exists, because without evil there would be no adventure through which we might test – and thereby come to know – the veracity and depths of our spirit. I know not whether this is the word of truth, but it appeals to me.” His grin was so irrepressible that I could not help but share it. “How can one strive for nobility in the midst of naught but love? The Adversary casts a shadow upon the world so that we may lose ourselves – but only so that we may find ourselves again.”
Initially I found this explanation profoundly comforting; but then, upon reflection, I realized that it offered no solution. That mankind may have initiated this adventure of consciousness in the first place does nothing to insure that we’ll survive it.
“Can any man realize himself in the time that is given him?” I asked.
“Or else what – is life too poorly designed?” Sirrus laughed. “Your spirit chooses to clothe itself in this flesh that will fail and wither – if it is not slain long before. The question is, do you trust its choice? And will you validate that – give it meaning – with your own choices in each moment?”
I grimaced. “I don’t want to waste any more time.” And then, in that quiet lapse, I made my decision. “Sirrus,” I said, “I spoke with Eden after he returned from his fruitless search to learn the whereabouts of the Assymyans. Now I am feeling called to go. I will not do anything rash; I assure you, I only want to know where they are. The information Eden and Jamaro have given me may enable me to succeed where they did not.”
Sirrus squinted at me – one eye a slit and the other wide open – and said: “Do you want to hear what I know of this Taho?”
“Taho?” I could hardly get the word out; my throat was suddenly dry.
“Their new chieftain. When Jamaro mentioned his name to me, I…I received a brief glimpse, a vision.”
I managed to find my voice again. “Tell me.”
“Taho avails himself of all the darker impulses that you’ve been coming to realize are poisonous to any descent into the soulful depths. Where we feel into the hurt of the wound, he sublimates it with rage. Where we seek to be bound by the intimacy of shared experience, he binds his Assymyans to his will with fear. I’m sure you’ve already guessed a lot of this. Down in the depths, Taho’s will means naught but isolation and suffering. He would quail to witness his reflection in my Mirror. But in the world, his will is very powerful.”
I recalled my sortie with the Assymyans at the pass near Drum Lake, when they’d taken Jasmine from the Oskwai and kept her, in defiance of their promise to me. As with the Oskwai, there is in them the essence of true barbarism. I felt a tremor of fear, but would not let myself be deterred.
“Has he any weaknesses?”
Sirrus shrugged. “My own resources are inadequate to conquer him – as are yours, and everyone else’s. Ahh – but if we were to unite with the much greater Will, that which created and still informs this world, then who can say what is possible for us?
“As for his weakness, I glimpsed this only: that his eyes are blind to the soul of woman.”
He gave me a look of commiseration. “And you feared rightly, my friend. He holds both your ladylove and her child. Indeed, Taho desires your Jasmine to be his own bride, to sate his lust as well as soothe the uproar amongst his people, their outrage that they should suffer a male leader after so long living under a Matriarch.”
I saw his eyes widen; he must have noticed how suddenly I’d paled. “No, my friend,” he hastened to add, “I do not think he’ll try to take the lady by force. Such a thing would shame him before his people. For now, he will bide his time.”
“And the child?” I asked…being not quite able to say Eden’s daughter.
Sirrus smiled and wagged a finger at me. “Now, harming the little girl would not endear him to the mother, would it?” But just as quickly as it’d sprung, his smile crumbled. “Another vision is in order for you, I think – a harbinger for your journey.”
I groaned inside. I didn’t feel fit to endure what (I believed) would be more recriminations from the Mirror. But I nodded and kept my peace as Sirrus swept the silken sheet off of the tall looking glass. I stepped in front of it, and at first all I saw were the familiar aspects of my appearance: my sky-blue eyes, my aquiline nose like my mother’s. My neck and cheekbones were markedly gaunt: a consequence, no doubt, of my obsession with finding Jasmine, which sometimes leads me to neglect my body’s needs. My brown hair had grown passed my shoulders; my mustache and beard had thickened, and overall I think I looked a decade older than my twenty-nine years. But I shrugged off my misgivings. Simple care and rest will remedy most of it; and anyhow, I was too scared to lend weight to such trivialities.
I heard falling water, and the communing sounds of jungle fauna – so real that I looked about me before realizing that this heralded from a lush scene growing within the Mirror. Lilies in a maddening plethora of colors burst into little forests, casting pink shadows onto the falling rill. Flora webbed a roof over me, denying the sun. In a rush of exhilaration, I realized I was witnessing all of this from a lower vantage even than Sirrus stands - as if I was kneeling, though I wasn’t. Then, gigantic yellow eyes with black pupils the shape of canoes peered through the phantasmagoric foliage, presaging the head of a great cat with fangs of sheerest ivory, long as daggers…its feral awareness sought and found me, and I reeled away from the Mirror in terror.
“Yes, enough!” Sirrus averred. “He’ll get you eventually, I’ll warrant, but you’ll come no closer to dying today!”
When I did naught but pant and stare back at him, he said: “What? Did you imagine that Oloron assumes only human forms?”
I still could not reply. The sheer potency of the vision left me stupefied.
“But it was a victory for you, even though you fled,” Sirrus said. “A breakthrough. You noticed how you looked up, as if you were three feet tall?”
I nodded.
“That means you have delved below your mind, in a manner of speaking. You’ve broken passed frozen layers of conditioning to finally be able to behold this scene as a child would. And believe me, Oloron will not slay that child. He will slay much of the lost man that grew up to replace the child that was lost, though. And my!” – He clapped his hands together – “Won’t you be all the freer for that!”
My slow comprehension must have been obvious, for he swiftly changed tactics.
“Think of it as a doorway. When the inner life cannot express itself freely in the world, it must live someplace else. The Mirror brings you to that place. Remember those cat’s eyes! Their sight grazes everything in the manifest world. Power – real power! Mental constructs can’t fathom it. Be at peace with His direction.
“Real life is rich in mistakes, embarrassments, regrets and pain. Don’t miss it by trying to be the perfect older brother. Besides, you’ll not be doing anyone else any favors either. Nothing but denying people their chance to make their own messes in the real soup of life, and to learn from them.”
I looked down, then, at my diminutive mentor, feeling false – and a little ashamed of it, somehow – in my height. Sirrus had touched a part of me that was as soft and unprotected as a trout’s underbelly. Perhaps I have written of this already, how I’ve never before seen myself as a man who keeps himself under such tight control.
“I don’t want to miss it,” I muttered. “I don’t want to live inside these walls forever.”
Part of the reason why I’d gravitated to Sirrus, I realized now, was because I’d felt those walls around me, stifling the outcry of my soul.
I smiled at him. “It sounds like you’re giving me your blessings for the journey,” I said.
In answer, Sirrus merely grinned and waved his hand towards the tent flap.
*
Jasmine prepared me for the impact of Sirrus and his teachings, to be sure - as much as father and mother and our devotion to the Guardians ever did. Jasmine prepared me by revealing how unsure I really was; so that when Sirrus’ Mirror began to introduce me to myself, I didn’t fight for my own version of what I thought was truth.
Truth. Some seekers living in Aspen Meadows still shudder to hear the word, as if reality must always be harsh and uncomfortable. A deeper level of truth is actually more wondrous than anything we’ve suspected in ourselves; but to really know this we have to win passed a sort of persuasive fiction, a story that not only have we told ourselves countless times to make sense of reality, but also the world has echoed back to us time and again. “Life was an accident. Death ends the journey. The Creator’s displeasure in us is the cause of our guilt and shame.” These are just a few themes woven into the deceiving story (and was the Adversary its author?) - But I could go on and on.
One doesn’t enjoy the stink of one’s old self after inhaling the soul’s perfume. And nothing whets the appetite for growth and change like that very aversion. Don’t mistake me: I have compassion for myself in my failings. You see some people who join us to be devotees, and after their first few glimpses into the Mirror they beat themselves up, cursing their blindness and ignorance and probably feeling secretly righteous doing so. But I have seen the despite hidden in that, and I believe it is another tactic of the Adversary.
Beyond all these forms of struggle is the realization that I am loved and cherished by the Being who breathed life into me. This love is something that I can feel right here in my breast, where it counts. It sustains me now so that I don’t berate myself for having failed.
“Whose suffering do you ease when you punish yourself?” Jasmine once asked me. I should’ve answered that I’ve always striven to spare others from their pain so that I wouldn’t have to feel my own.
I am writing these words whilst sitting atop a tall knoll that shies away from Bear River’s western shore. It’s been blackened from a forgotten forest fire: a few bare pines, the color of dry pitch, jut from the blasted earth; but nothing green grows. All has been washed clean from many rainfalls, and no scents remain of old smoke. According to Jamaro, this hill is called “Mushadei”, a Shi-Intean word that means, “sacrifice”. After hearing him relate the legend of it, I knew this would be a place where I could wait and watch and fear no violence from any tribesmen, Assymyan or otherwise.
The story goes thus: not but three or four generations ago the Maniteks had claimed all this land for their hunting grounds. There were huge herds of buffalo that roamed the plains beyond these ridges. The Maniteks and the Shi-Inte of Mei-phal feuded over the land – this went on for a long time, and it was assuredly vicious. Eventually neither tribe dared go hunting for fear of the other. Both might have starved. Now, Tocumtu had been a Manitek chieftain. He’d gone forth alone to the Shi-Inte and said to them: “Is my life worth your giving up all this bloodletting?” The chieftains gave long consideration to this question, and they decided that it was. So they slew Tocumtu upon this very hill where I’m sitting. And after that, they honored their part of the bargain and foreswore all violence against the Maniteks.
Legend says that it was the fire of Tocumtu’s spirit, as it sped from his body, which blasted the hill of Mushadei like a torch consumes a pile of brush.
I spent a little time with the Maniteks before coming here. I’d been four days traveling downriver in a canoe seeking their village. Now, I am not heedless of the peril of Churani soldiers or scouts patrolling the river. But I’m interpreting my last vision from the Mirror as an omen that I should give my passion free reign and not acknowledge the voice of fear. Anyway, the adventure went without incident and at last I walked into the small encampment of the Maniteks – announcing, to all ears, that I was a friend of Jamaro’s.
At first I encountered children, scrawny and dour-faced, whose games had led them away from their parents and on to the outskirts of the village. It was, by now, evening time, and as I followed a sandy path that cut between two hillocks I looked over the vast expanse of the western plains, which were washed the ruddy hue of blood in the sunset. The Manitek teepees make a circle of sixteen that cover a quarter-mile of the dusty pan. A much larger wigwam sits in the center of this circle. I looked upon this arrangement and thought that it might work equally well for us in Aspen Meadows, now that our numbers have swelled.
There were few folk about: mostly women carrying laundered clothes or vegetables in wicker baskets that they balanced on their heads. There were some men, but comparably few, sitting in woven chairs and smoking from pipes. A goodly number were old. And the plains were quiet.
The Maniteks have no chief. Indeed, Jamaro seems to have been as much an authority among them as any other man or woman I met yesterday. But I did find one old fellow who knew a smattering of the trade tongue. I was so intent upon my quest that – it shames me to say - I did not even get his name.
I told him that I’d heard of the food bribes that the Maniteks offer to the Assymyans, and that I intended to wait until Taho’s warriors returned to the village. But he was much distracted by the whispering and giggling of a few of the younger females nearby.
“Maybe you have noticed that the women in our encampment outnumber the men by many,” he said. “Several men have died. They would not let their wives starve, you see, so they accepted privation themselves. Others were forced to join in Taho’s band, because their families were promised safety only if they would do so.
“Look around you! Are not some of the Manitek women beautiful? And you would do them much honor if you would choose one to spend the night with.”
I stiffened upon hearing this. “A woman already has a claim upon my heart,” I said, “and there’s little enough of it left to give to anyone here.”
I passed a hand through my greasy, tangled hair and grimaced. I imagined there was probably ash and sand in there…and soot on my face…and I smelled like smoke and sweat. What straits were these people really in, that they would desire such a wretch as I must have looked?
But I understood that, in the reckoning of the Maniteks, my refusal was likely to be taken as an insult. So I bowed and took my leave of the village. As I made my way beyond the circle of tents I heard the old man’s voice following me out.
“The Assymyans did not come this last cycle. It has been two weeks already! Maybe the heavens have intervened to protect us!”
Did not come. Well, I had traveled all this way and I wasn’t about to turn back immediately. The peace bribe of the Maniteks was my one clue as to the Assymyans’ movements. I was obliged to travel on foot from here, just as Eden had done. Not far downriver one comes to sheer limestone cliff sides some fifty feet high. They funnel Bear River, pushing it faster and faster. And the whitewater laps against the feet of the rock; there are no banks to follow. The water is ghastly cold, too, as it originates from high up in the Sky Pillar mountains.
I had to venture out onto the plains. I was fortunate to have meat and other provisions. The land out here is broken, rocky, and absolutely devoid of game. The Maniteks have a name for it in their tongue, which translates to “starvation trail”.
So, after toiling through the badlands all morning, I finally reached this hill. As I topped its crest, I looked out west and beheld the omen I’d been seeking.
I’ve been examining a ridge that passes between two taller mesas; they stare at each other across perhaps a three-mile expanse. The mesa to the right has sides as white and smooth as a whetstone. Its crown protrudes over the lip like a mushroom’s cap. But whereas this rock stands revealed and bathed in the evening sun, its sister’s knees are shrouded in fog. At first I thought the heat was straining my brain or playing tricks with my eyesight. But I blinked, squinted, stared again, and the vision of fog remained.
The mid-rift and crown of the left-hand mesa emerges from this mist like an island in a sea of white. The tendrils of fog wave to and fro, but neither retreat nor advance - even though the plains are hot and parched, and there is nary a cloud in the sky.
Though I cannot fathom the mystery of this eldritch fog, I feel certain that it is the reason why Taho and his warriors shun this area now. Also, I sense that it is intimately tied with the fate of the Twice-Born in some way. For this reason, I have decided to return to Aspen Meadows; I should have followed Eden’s example to begin with, and contented myself with deepening my spiritual work before attempting this mad gambit. This is not the first time I’ve envied my younger friend for his humility. It is a quality I’ll strive to emulate more in the future.