DUALITY: The World of Lies (23 page)

T
he elders
of The Order held conference each spring in Tulan and was attended
only by those of their highest echelons. Every year Gahre always
held some faint hope his father would come, but he never did. The
conference was held in a lodge outside the village, down a trodden
path beside a stream in the oak grove. They met at night, and the
fact that they met was no secret. What they discussed, however,
were secrets of the highest order. They spoke to each other in a
language no one understood. There was not even a name for it other
than the “elder’s language.” But Gahre wondered if it was not the
language of the Forbidden Land of Arath he had recently learned of.
He knew better than to speak of his discovery. In fact, no one must
know.

A couple years earlier, he had committed a
wrongful action. He had pried open a window and entered the Elders’
meeting lodge when it was deserted. He’d gotten away with it too,
though had been disappointed in his findings. The interior of the
lodge was quite bare and modest. There was a long oak table,
surrounded by 12 sturdy chairs. There were lanterns and candles.
There was a sink and an assortment of mugs hung on hooks on the
wall behind it. On the counter sat a tea set. There was but a
single bottle of wine stored in the basement. There was a toilet.
There was a back room with cots and blankets. What there was not,
was not a single book or single scrap of paper; not a single
foreign looking object. Not a single clue that would lead him to
Forbidden Knowledge.

Now, he intended to commit another wrongful
action at the lodge. But this time, he was determined it would at
least prove productive. Having retained a vivid memory of the
interior, he formulated a plan to hide among the rafters above the
conference table and listen in on their meeting. The central beam
was made of solid oak and was over a meter wide. He would lie at
its center quietly. True, he would not understand their language,
but perhaps, if he concentrated, he could pick something up. The
elders seldom spoke their graceful and rhythmic tongue in public.
Seldom. People had heard bits and pieces over the years. So he knew
the words for “yes” and “no”, and “hail”/”farewell”. He knew the
word “Arath”. And it was hinted in shadows that they did
occasionally drop in an Occitanian word when they spoke, since it
was, after all, their mother tongue.

Gahre arose well before dawn and slipped out
of uncle’s house as silently as he had slipped in the night before.
He did not head into the quiet streets of town, but directly into
the forest. He would have to circle town, and leave no trace of his
passing. The elders did come in and out of the lodge throughout the
day, and a few of the visiting members were sleeping there even
now. Gahre would summon all his patience and wait for the right
opportunity to enter. He did not eat or drink that morning, for he
knew he must not urinate or sweat, he must not sneeze or fart or
clear his throat or rustle around. He would practice perfect
stillness like the radiant ascetic he had encountered 5 days
prior.

He approached the lodge most stealthily, and
scoped out a vantage point where he could best conceal himself. He
settled in a cropping of tall stones and underbrush some forty
meters from the building and watched through a patch of thorny
thicket. The building was dark at first, but within twenty minutes
a candlelight glow emerged from the window, and the smell of
woodsmoke began to fill the air. He caught a glimpse through the
window of Counselor Botha sipping his tea and gazing out toward the
wood in Gahre’s direction. His heart jumped, because, for a moment,
it seemed to Gahre like Botha was staring directly at him, that he
saw him! But Gahre calmed his mind, knowing full well from his
hunting experience that that was impossible -so long as he did not
stir.

An hour later a robed man Gahre did not
recognize came outside to perform exercises, and Botha popped out
for a short time to gather firewood. And Gahre was pretty sure
there were at least two other men in the building. He hoped they
would leave after breakfast. But weary travelers that they were,
they decided to spend the early afternoon there. By then, there was
ample solarshine to warm Gahre’s chilled bones a bit. He was
getting restless, but continued to remind his heart to remain still
and alert. The thought of a nap entered his mind more than once,
but he pushed it aside. This day was too important!

He was dismayed to view the arrival of the two
local elders, but their visit was brief. And then the moment came,
when all six men headed off toward the village for a proper meal. A
proper meal! No. He couldn’t think about that now. His cautious
moccasined feet tread lightly toward the building. The window he
had entered last time was quite thoroughly locked. He didn’t
remember it even having a lock. Perhaps they had detected his
previous intrusion. That made him even more uneasy. Some part of
his mind suggested turning back before it was too late, but it went
unheeded. It should have known that it was not in Gahre’s nature to
turn back.

How to get in? He checked the other windows
without success. There was a vent near the apex of the roof but no
conceivable way of climbing to it. There was the chimney, but that
route would cover him and the floor in soot. The Elders were
perceptive, and would certainly know something was amiss when they
saw it. He examined the door and pulled the handle. To his
surprise, it opened.

He entered the lodge and knew right away it
was devoid of folk, for Gahre could sense beings. Then it occurred
to him to lock the door. The door had been unlocked, but it was
supposed to be locked. So would it be more suspicious to lock the
door or not? They had forgotten to do it which meant that they
would expect to find a locked door when they returned. But what if
the Elder Panthus, who had closed the door, walked away with some
vague sense of error? What if he remembered suddenly and then came
back to find the door locked? No, he decided. People do not recall
such mistakes, and when they do, they tend not to admit them. He
locked the door. Then he smiled. Elders make foolish errors
too!

It was then that the half-eaten biscuit on the
floor caught his eye and held it for some time. Why would a biscuit
be on the floor? These are refined people; they don’t throw food on
the floor. Someone must have dropped it then, and it had rolled
there into the corner. No. He must not eat it. No foolish errors
for Gahre today! But… but what if the hunger caused his belly to
growl, as it sometimes did? Why did he not bring food?! Why was he
wasting time when he knew he should conceal himself right away? If
no one knew there was a biscuit on the floor, how could anyone
possibly miss it? In a swift, erratic action, he snatched the
biscuit off the floor and stuffed it into his mouth.

Still chewing, he approached the conference
table and looked up at the beam. It was higher than he had
remembered. There was no way up along the walls, so he stood upon
the conference table and leapt. It took a couple of tries to latch
his fingers over the upper edge of the beam. Now came the hard the
part, pulling himself up. Gahre was a large boy, a full 90 kg, but
he was mightily strong. He was able to get his chin over, but the
torso was not so easy. With a great heaving and enormous strain
upon his fingertips, he managed to pull his chest over and quickly
grasped one hand then another on the far edge of the beam. From
there, it was not so hard to get his legs up and over. Dust had
flown all around, and a clump had fallen to the table below. There
was nothing that could be done about that now. He certainly was not
inclined at this point to climb back down and repeat the
process.

He lay as flatly and comfortably as he could,
belly down across the surface of the beam, arms outstretched before
him. If any part of him were raised too high, it would become
viewable from below. He would not be able to see anything, except
the wooden plane before him. This job relied on the ears, and his
hearing was as excellent as all his senses. And it was another of
his senses, smell, that started irritating him once he became
settled and the waiting began.

He sensed something in the building, an animal
to be sure. He raised his head and took a few hearty snorts of the
air. Then he realized the source of the odor was right below his
nose: some kind of rodent scent trail. A woodrat! That made sense.
If he were a rat, he would move in here too. There couldn’t be
many, or the smell would have been stronger. He hoped it was just
one, and that it remained in hiding.

Many hours he lay there and felt too uneasy to
have a proper daydream. In time, a faint shuffling sound snapped
him out the trance-like state he had fallen into. It came from
somewhere amongst the rafters. “Rat! Wherever you are, I warn you.
Do not disturb me!” he hissed into the darkness.

There was no sound after that, and more hours
of waiting followed. He tried to keep his mind active so as not to
nod off, and his thoughts kept returning to the ascetic –and to
Arath. Forbidden Knowledge. Just to know of its existence begged so
many questions, with the most poignant being not “What is it?” but
rather “Why is it forbidden in the first place?” If something is
true, should not the people be allowed to know it? Why must those
in The Order learn it and forever separate themselves from regular
society? Why does it change them so deeply? What benefit can there
possibly be in ignorance?

He knew that there was a Forbidden Land in the
eastern world called Arath. On the surface, that didn’t seem like
much, but it actually told him an awful lot. This first obtained
piece of Forbidden Knowledge was precious to him, more precious
than a king’s emerald or the tooth of a dragon. First, by obtaining
just a wisp of Forbidden Knowledge, he had gained a frame of
reference. If a simple piece of geographic information can be
considered Forbidden Knowledge, then perhaps it was not all as
mystical as some imagined. Perhaps it paralleled common knowledge.
It dealt with things foreign, as he’d always suspected. If the
knowledge of a foreign country’s existence is forbidden, then
perhaps it’s safe to assume what he considered to be Forbidden
Knowledge was to the people of that realm simply common knowledge.
Could it be possible too that the common knowledge of his realm was
forbidden in theirs? But, again, why! Is The Order doing
this to preserve our culture from the domination of another? And if
knowledge of another culture’s ways would tend to
dominate their culture, perhaps their ways were better?
At the very least, they ought to explain to everyone how it is
possible that a society could benefit from intellectual
repression.

Night fell.

The clacking of the lock almost made him stir,
and his heart began racing even as he begged it to be still. They
did not speak as they entered and their footsteps were light. He
prayed to Fo and Dao that they not see or hear him. Then the first
voice emerged, and to Gahre’s delight, they were speaking
Occitanian.

“Brother Botha, it’s odd. I don’t remember
locking that door when we left. I fear my age may be catching up
with my senses.”

“Elder Panthus, do not flog yourself over such
a minor slip of the mind. Why, I am but half your age, and just two
years ago I returned to Cashilam to take my leave –only to find I’d
forgotten that my wife and child had relocated to
Babashire.”

“Oh, dear Brother Botha, that is a terrible
tale!”

Botha laughed mischievously.

“Brother Indulu, Venerable Elder Panthus,
Brother Risso, yours is among the loveliest villages in all the
Pangea. The people of Tulan have joyous spirits. As I walked among
them this day, my heart was lightened, and my resolve in our works
strengthened.”

“There can be no higher complement then when a
man of Cape Cathal praises the beauty of one’s village, Brother
Botha,” spoke Indulu. “I insist that you allow me to fill your
cup.”

“The penultimate host, as always, Brother
Indulu. But I am disappointed in one respect, that the son of
Brother Danu so much spoken of late was not in the village today. I
dearly wanted lay eyes on him, just to see if I get a glimpse of
what you see in him.”

“Truly, Gahre spends little time in the
village these days, Brother Botha. I fear it’s too confining for a
young man of his… nature. But… we will speak of him
later.”

Gahre couldn’t believe they were talking about
him at all! Wasn’t he a trivial subject when placed next the care
of the world?

“As you wish, brother. It seems Monloch was
right on schedule. The biscuit is gone!”

Gahre nearly gasped. He really, really had not
expected anyone to notice the missing biscuit.

“Yes, Brother Botha, thank you for feeding him
today.”

“Comrades, you have baffled me. Who is this
Monloch?” came a new voice.

Again Indulu responded, “Oh Brother Sanguji,
had no one told you that we have a rat in this place we’ve bid you
sleep? That’s the kind of hosts we are in Tulan.” A round of mild,
pleasant laughter followed.

“I look forward to meeting this Monloch,
Brother Indulu, pray though not in my sleep!”

More laughter ensued.

“For the time being, Brother Sanguji, you
needn’t fear. Monloch is a simple creature. His temperament
strictly follows his belly, which is now satiated with wheatcake.
No doubt he’s curled up somewhere in the rafters, bloated and
sleeping. But for future reference, do beware, as he is a
possessive fellow, and hunger brings out his more aggressive
qualities.”