THE SILK TREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The morning heat was beginning to take hold and Nicander threw aside the light linen bed cover. On the previous evening, unlike Marius, he’d held off on the wine, finding it sweet and cloying. He’d not appreciated the coarse gaiety of the Kuchean dancing girls, nor the lewd frolics of the performing boys. His mind was restless in a way it had never been before.

He freshened up, staring at the face that looked back at him in the bronze mirror. If they ever made it through he would be a very different man from the one who had set out. All the old certainties, his place in the world, what was possible to achieve, what was not, the value of things – were now in a state of fluidity.

Dao Pa had planted seeds of doubt. The towering genius of Greek thought and philosophy that he’d taken as the final answer to questions of being was no longer enough.

His father’s expensive education had given him a thorough respect for the structures of logic and reason that lay behind decisions he made.

But now there was an alternative. Which was right? Were they both – or neither?

‘Marius! Are you awake?’

‘No, go away,’ his friend growled.

‘I’m off to take a look at that big temple we saw on the rise. Do you want to come along?’

He grunted. ‘No. I need rest.’

Nicander swirled on his new robe and fastened his hair in a topknot as he’d seen on Dao Pa.

On foot it was hot-going, and the road steep. His outer robe was capacious and he drew it over his head against the fierce heat.

In the distance he heard the booming of a great drum and the flutter of cymbals, then the drone of chanting.

Was this a more effective way to claim the attention of gods and angels than the solemn ceremonies in the Hagia Sophia? Were they calling on the same god or were they having their existence in different worlds? So much to know, to learn!

He paused at the tall ornamental gate. The pagoda reared up in all its mystery.

‘Why have you come, Ni lao na?’ From nowhere Dao Pa had appeared, his features nearly hidden by the robe over his head.

‘I… I need answers, Master.’

‘What do you seek?’

‘The Tao,’ he said simply.

‘Then this is as good a place as any to begin your path to understanding. Come, I am known to the abbot.’

They were given a room. It was austere and bare with high windows. Dao Pa sat cross-legged in the centre, motioning Nicander to sit opposite.

‘Your road will not be easy. Your mind is rigid with the teachings of your race which declares rationality the only path to understanding and will allow no rival.’

‘It has served me well. Why should I abandon it?’

‘No one requires you discard your birth-learning. Rather to widen your perceptions and place it within a larger frame of reference where it will have its function still.’

‘I’m willing to learn, Master.’

‘There are many works of depth and value devoted to the striving for enlightenment, but these are closed to you.’

‘But why?’

‘In the eyes of this world you are unhappily an illiterate.’

‘Then how…?’

‘There are other methods handed down to us that are quite as effective. These require that the self does rise above its containing body and in discipline gains control over the gateway to understanding.’

‘Teach me.’

‘The first is the truest, most potent – and is called meditation. You will attend closely: for the uninitiated, the acquiring of such a state of being is as a butterfly ascending to the clouds – not unattainable but demanding the devotion of every particle of body and soul to that end. Are you prepared?’

‘Yes, Master.’

On the third day Nicander reached a point where the first tendrils of illumination had entered his consciousness, an understanding of the transcendent that could never be reached in ways that were confined to the prison of words.

It was a wondering revelation; to feel the mind float free of the grossness of the body and enter a world of purity of thought and perception. But it was as though he were newly born, unable to make sense or reason of what he was experiencing. By some means he had to seek his own way, find the truths that must lie in the writings of the ancients that had trod the same path before him.

Dao Pa came and sat beside him and said softly, ‘The chief mysteries are those whose essence is sealed by time.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Let me show you.’

They left the room for the glare of the sunlight, crossing to a small building apart from the others. It was dark inside, but an obliging monk fetched a lamp.

‘This is the hall of relics. Look around you – there are sutras carried from India at great cost, there is the cast of a footprint of the Enlightened One himself. And over here…’

Some writings were laid out which were in the form of characters descending below a continuous horizontal line. Nicander peered closely but could make nothing of it.

‘This is in the native tongue of the holy men of India, the very source of the philosophy and understanding of the people of Buddha. We know it well for it has been translated into Chinese for all the world to take knowledge from.’

Dao Pa went to another, quite different, the writing vertical, with irregular jagged protrusions from the line the only indication that it held intelligence. ‘It is the hand of the ancient nomads, those who had their living in the plains beyond the Tien Shan that are without limit in this world. Uncountable numbers of their people are now extinct – and we know nothing of what they say.

‘It means that their world is unknowable by us. What they spoke among themselves through this writing may hold wisdom unmatched by ours but we’ll never share in it.’

Despite the warmth Nicander shivered. This was touching on mysteries perhaps they had no right to pierce.

They passed to an inner room. At first he could see nothing, then the flickering lamp picked out a body laid on a carpet and covered with a richly ornamented cloth.

Dao Pa tenderly drew it back revealing a mummy, perfectly desiccated.

‘This mortal – he may be one hundred, one thousand years old, it doesn’t signify, for he is lost to time.’

Nicander recoiled. It was beginning to affect him, not just the mystic aura of the pagoda but the unearthly, spectral sense of having reached the borders of human reason.

‘See there; he has red hair and a thin nose – like yours.’

Nicander felt a chill go down his spine. This was not an oriental at all. If anything it resembled one of the barbarous Celts from lost Britannia.

‘Why do they venerate him so?’

‘He was found in a city half-swallowed by the sand, buried with all the grave goods of a prince and ruler. No one can speak his name, his kingdom or his fate – he exists, yet he does not. He has substance but never a word or thought of his will we ever know.’

How had this man found his way across the world here to this unknown remoteness? Or was it that here, in fact, was the first homeland of the Celts and they had left it for a better land at the edge of the world? This was not impossible – the Huns and Goths were at the moment doing just that, sweeping out of the dark unknown of steppe and forest to take what they wanted from the Romans.

Either way this was more uprooting of his certainties, another realignment of perspectives – he had to break free and contemplate it all.

‘Master – I must take my leave now. There’s much to think on.’

‘I will be there for you when you need me.’