Dreams of the Compass Rose (23 page)

“
Listen!” said Master Xin. “The gong sends its sound all across the world to unite it in singleminded focus. For while the wind is the natural sound of the world, the gong is the voice of the wind intensified, a single unifying note that fills the Secret Temple and reverberates, building in strength. Notice how the sound is everywhere. . . .”

“
Yes,” said Nadir softly. “The sound seems to ring and vibrate in my bones.”

“
Good!” said the Master. “This is how you are bound to the Secret Temple. Each reverberation that echoes through you also echoes back upon the rest of the world, back and forth endlessly, until you become inseparable from the living fabric around you.”

Nadir closed his eyes until he heard the echo behind his eyelids, and saw the sound, and then he took in a deep breath.

“
Yes! Breathe it!” whispered Master Xin. “The scent of the blooming garden is also all-permeating, and it fills your lungs and then your heart and spirit with heady perfume, and it too is carried on the wind. Breathe deeply so that you will always remember this when you leave us. . . .”

Nadir’s eyes flew open.

“
I never want to leave,” he said darkly. “I would rather stay here than return to serve her until she takes all my soul from me and drinks me dry. . . .”

“
What is the meaning of servitude, Nadir? To serve is to be strong. By serving you render assistance to one who is weaker than you in one way or another. She needs you, Nadir; go back to her and serve.”

There was a pause of silence as they both listened to the wind and the final dissipating echoes of the gong.

“
But if serving means being stronger than the one you serve, and we serve the gods,” said Nadir suddenly, “then is this not blasphemy? For would it not indicate that we are greater than gods?”

Master Xin smiled.

“
Ah, but this is where things are turned upside-down. For in truth, the gods serve us. They are the ones who watch over us like children, allowing us to grow through our own means, and stepping in only to avert the worst kind of disaster. And the greatest evil is not always what we think it is. So often we mortals raise our voices in anger at the gods, at their perceived indifference or injustice, like a child who is denied a favorite toy, when in fact the child is preserved from true harm.”

“
How can that be?” said Nadir. “How can death and sorrow and pain and war not be true harm? For the gods never protect us from these horrors. And the gods allow us all to die. Where in that is divine justice?”

Master Xin thought for a moment, and then pointed once again to the panorama before them. “Look at the garden, Nadir. In the garden, some trees die and are uprooted, while others are planted. Some flowers are pruned and plucked, while others are propagated and grafted onto new branches to form new hybrids. Some of these trees and flowers are old, others young, and it makes no difference. But the garden continues, and it is all one thing, that of balance and justice, for every day it is different down to the tiniest leaf and blade of grass, and yet in its sum total it is always the same.

“
And thus is the world. If you can sense that you are only one blade of grass, and that you are one part of the garden, then your fate and destiny and will and direction become amplified and at the same time dissolved, for you are all and nothing, the whole garden and a single blade of grass. And whatever happens to you happens to the whole garden, and whatever happens to the garden happens to you. You blend and you remain in eternal motion. It is only when you slow down to consider your separateness, your unique fate, that you fall away from the garden, for it continues to move and grow all around you.”

“
I need to think about this,” said Nadir, looking at the jade-green hillside, carpeted with countless blades of grass.

“
Think of this for as long as you live,” replied Master Xin. “Indeed, the Secret Temple is maintained by means of thought.”

“
You are a great man, Master Xin,” said Nadir with a sigh. “How I wish I had your wisdom and your immediate answers.”

There came high-pitched old laughter.

“
My answers are as old as this garden. And I am not what you think,” said Master Xin.

“
How so?” asked Nadir.

The old one paused to take in a deep lungful of the wind, then smiled blissfully, closing narrow eyes.

“
I was born a girl child, and grew to be a woman,” said Master Xin An-Dwei, as though only now remembering this detail. “I am old—an old woman, and few know it, even here in the monastery of the Secret Temple. And now it matters little and is all the same thing, because with time the distinctions between man and woman grow less and less.”

Nadir stared at the ground in shame at his own blindness and oversight, feeling his dark cheeks grow hot.

“
That is another thing you need to learn, that wisdom brings a mixing of the polar opposites, and if you have been born a woman, you become more like a man as you age, while if you have been born a man, you become like a woman. There is no shame in that, no weakness, rather the power of the divine comes to fill you more fully, for the divine is neither man nor woman but both, and the more of both you accept into yourself, the closer to godhood you move.”

“
I have so much to learn, Master Xin,” said Nadir softly, his gaze still lingering on the ground in shame.

“
Who doesn’t?” Master Xin said smartly, and as Nadir looked up he saw a twinkle of hilarity in her eyes.

“
But where to begin?”

“
Good question, young son. When new acolytes come to learn from the Temple they are usually told to begin to learn what interests them most. It is a fallacy that there should be a specific order of discovery of truth, because your own natural urge for truth best dictates what you must learn next. Your curiosity and need to know guide you better than anything. So then, what do you want to know above all else? That is where you need to begin.”

“
Then I want to know how to move with the impossible swiftness of that priest who guarded the door!” exclaimed Nadir. “I still do not understand how he did it, and I would learn from him this art of combat.”

“
I see you like pain. Why is it always like this with all of you young ones? But do not fear, you will have your wish. Stay with us and learn this thing, this pain. And as you do, I will come often and watch you practice,” said Master Xin and started to laugh, and would not stop.

W
as it only a blink of an eye, or had many moons waxed and waned? Had the rains come and gone, and then the leaves of many colors of fire fallen in the garden, leaving bare branches to be covered with the white cold powder from heaven?

Nadir was not sure. He lived in a dream of fluidity, silence, balanced movement and ascetic control. Days flew by him like gangly cranes or like soft dun-gray sparrows, long and short. And through it all he was slowly changing.

The Secret Temple permeated him with the peace and silence, and had entered him through his pores all the way to his innards.

The garden of jade hues came to him even in dreams, and the gong resounded in the earth and in his bones, until the routine of the monks and priests had become his second heartbeat.

Nadir learned pain, and he learned release. And most of all he learned how to tread the fine line between either extreme.

And then all of a sudden one day he woke up.

For a memory of the Princess Egiras came to him, together with old soul-sick constriction and images of the scorching desert sun. There were so many women here in the Kingdom in the Middle who looked like her, beautiful and deathly-pale yellow, with black silk tresses and slanted hidden eyes. And yet, observing them, never was he prompted to remember her who had sent him here.

Instead, what touched him was the sight of a great pale flower with rose-streaked petals that grew alone among the thicket of dark leaves on a bush near the bench where he used to sit every day.

The flower—proud and pristine, a thing of variegated perfection of whiteness interlaced with rose, and yet with petals fine and fragile as rice paper—was surrounded in a bower of intimacy by dark protective foliage.

Simple appeared the deep green leaves, simple and dark and strong. They shielded the delicate splendid blossom from all sides, always nearby yet never touching, never encroaching upon its perfect solitude.

Without the embrace of the strong leaves, the flower would not persist. And this revealed to him in part the nature of his promise.

Nadir knew now that all peace and reverie was shattered, and he had to go back.

He had to return to her, and to serve her, and to keep his promise to her.

And, as though reinforcing the perfection of his that one thought, a wind swept through the garden around him, and he heard the distant strike of the Temple gong.

T
he object floated in a water-filled pool in the exact middle of the world.

It had the shape of a four-point star, and its North-South rays were made of peculiar iron ore that aligned itself with the magnetic core of the world, and pointed North.

Its East-West rays were made of layers of buoyant cedar and sandalwood covered with resin to protect it from rot, for it floated in a water-filled pool and yet had to last forever, or at least until the gods deigned for the world to end.

The pool of water spanned a man’s height in diameter, and was hewn from the heart of a rock formation sculpted in the semblance of a great rose.

The stone was marble, and the rose sculpture itself reposed in the middle of a grand hall that was in turn the center of the greatest palace the world had ever known.

The
taqavor
who ruled the palace was lord over emperors and kings, and had conquered all the lands around him, to the rim of the horizon.

His were the wide expanses that faced the rising sun; his were the boundless oceans at its back. His were the lands at the sun’s cold right hand and its fiery left.

East, West, North, South.

The words had not existed before. They were newly brought into being by the force of the
taqavor’s
desire to assign order to the horizon all around him, to anchor that which was uncharted.

Past, Present, Future, Alternate—the realm of other possibilities. Such were the additional ethereal directions superimposed in an infinite array of invisible layers upon the physical ones. And the words to describe them existed but had no life.

And then one day they were all bound together.

T
he
taqavor
who ruled the mortal world had assigned his artisans and craftsmen an immense task—to produce one object that would define the whole of his
empirastan.

Before the artists could conceive the object’s actual shape and function, and seduce it into physical existence, there had to be found a natural equivalent of this object—a shape or form or structure on which it could be modeled.

At first, the artists looked upon the sun itself, and wrought a flat golden shape with a multiplicity of rays extending all around it in a gleaming circle. Then the sculptors took over, and created a golden sphere studded with needles of rays, like a bristling pine-fruit.

But the
taqavor
took one look at the object and scornfully motioned it away with his hand.

“
Take this away and create for me a thing not just of beauty but of inner power. For, this is an empty shell I see before me, and it does nothing to remind me of the power of my
empirastan
.”

The
taqavor
was no longer young, but he was strong, and luck and most of the gods were on his side. Thus he could still command instant terror in those who served him.

“
But my Lord, this object is the Sun itself! Isn’t its acute golden glory and uniform sharpness a fair representation of your realm?” asked one naive master of sculpture.

There came mocking laughter from the sovereign. “You call this a fair representation?” he said. “Look—as your golden pin-cushion rests upon the ground with its fine sharp needles, already the bottom-most points have broken off and have crumpled into gold razor dust, since they are unable to maintain the weight of this sphere. My
empirastan,
on the other hand, sits on the most solid firmament of the earth underneath it, and nothing can undermine its foundation.”

“
You are indeed wise, my Lord . . .” whispered the chastised artist, and bowed in shame.

“
Maybe we can suspend the sphere from the ceiling,” put in another artist, “and thus relieve the burden of its weight? Maybe we can set it on fire from within, just like the Sun itself, by creating a hollowed out replica and filling it with burning torches, so that the light would seep out through tiny holes—”

“
Maybe I can have your tongue suspended from the ceiling and your anus set on fire from within, idiot?” said the
taqavor.

The master artist blanched and retreated, and the prickly golden sphere was quickly taken away.

In the days following, the artisans watched the night heavens and considered replicating the full moon or its half-crescent shape, or even the tiny pin-points of stars.