Orion and the Conqueror (18 page)

Ketu would shake his head when I told him this. "The two are inextricably bound together, my friend, intertwined like the strands of a rope. To live is to suffer, to feel pain is to be alive. You cannot end one without ending the other."

"But I don't want an end to all sensation," I confessed to him. "In my heart of hearts I don't want complete oblivion.

"Nirvana is not oblivion," Ketu told me eagerly. "No, no! Nirvana is not a total extinguishing. All that is extinguished is the self-centered life to which the unenlightened cling. The truly real is not extinguished; indeed, only in Nirvana can the truly real be attained."

I could not understand his abstractions.

"Think of Nirvana as a boundless expansion of your spirit. Through Nirvana you will enter into communion with the entire universe! It is not as if a drop of water is added to the ocean; it is as if all the oceans of the world enter a single drop of water."

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 traveled 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 traveled 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.

We were given a small house in the section of the city where the army was quartered, not far from the palace. The men quickly learned about the king's harem and joked about how they would relieve the loneliness of so many women who had to wait upon the pleasure of one man.

"You mean he has a couple of hundred wives?" asked one of my men at dinner our first night there.

"They are concubines," explained Ketu. "Not true wives."

"But they're his?"

"Oh yes, they are certainly his."

"All those women for the king alone?"

"It is death for them even to see another man."

Another shouted across our dining table, "Can we get them to keep their eyes closed?"

"If a man is found among them," Ketu said, very seriously, "he is dismembered, a little at a time, over many, many days. They start by cutting off his testicles."

That silenced their jokes, but only for a few moments.

"Might be worth it," one of the men muttered, "if you can work your way through forty or fifty of 'em before they catch you."

"Yah," said another. "By then your balls would be all worn out anyway."

To my surprise, Ketu asked me to come with him when he was granted his audience with the Great King.

"I want Dareios to see the kind of men that Philip has serving him," he told me. Then his face relaxed into a warm smile. "Besides, my friend, I think you are burning with desire to see the man who rules this mighty empire."

I had to admit that he was right. Another blow to my progress along the Eightfold Path.

Three days after we had arrived in Parsa, we were called to the great audience chamber of the hundred pillars. Ketu wore his best and most colorful robe, a striking pattern of bright red against lemon yellow. I had polished my bronze breastplate until it glowed like the sun. No weapons were allowed in the presence of the Great King, although I wore my dagger beneath the skirt of my chiton almost without thinking of it, it had become such a part of me.

There was enormous formality to an audience with the Great King. All morning one of the king's masters of protocol, an elderly man with shaking, palsied hands, instructed us on how we were to prostrate ourselves before the throne, how we were not to look directly at the Great King, what forms of address we were to use. Actually, I was to use no form of address at all; Ketu was to do all the talking.

We were marched to the great audience hall by a full squad of soldiers, gleaming with gold and silver. At the enormous double doors, four times higher than my head, heralds announced us, an honor guard in golden armor formed up ahead and behind us, and we paraded through that forest of obsidian pillars toward the distant throne. A throng of noblemen stood watching, their robes resplendent, pearls and jewels gleaming from necklaces and earrings and bracelets. Most of them wore rings on every finger of both hands, even their thumbs.

As we walked the endless distance toward the throne, I saw that it was of carved ivory in the form of a peacock, with jewels in its tail glinting in the sunshine from the great skylight above it. The man sitting on it seemed small and slight against that magnificent throne. His robe was heavy with gold thread, jewels bedecked him, and he wore a massive crown of gold and still more glittering gems. His black beard was curled and oiled. His slippered feet rested on a special stool, since the Persians believed their king's feet must never touch the ground.

Once we reached the foot of the throne the chief herald, standing to one side of the dais, spoke our names aloud once again. On that cue, we laid ourselves face down before the Great King. It rankled me to abase myself, but I reasoned that when in Parsa one does as the Persians do. I smelled great decadence here; all these jewels and formalities and shows of pomp spoke of the trappings of power rather than power itself. Philip's court, in contrast, was about as formal as a group of friends meeting to discuss the price of horses at the marketplace.

"The Great King Dareios Codomannus, lord of all the world from the rising to the setting of the sun, conqueror of . . ."

It took the chief herald several minutes to speak all the titles and honorifics of the Great King. His voice was powerful, and he gave each title a dramatic intonation. At length he said to us grandly, "You may rise and gaze on his magnificence."

Of course we had been instructed specifically
not
to look directly at the Great King. I clambered to my feet and gazed slightly off to his left, close enough to see him clearly.

Dareios III appeared much younger than Philip, although that might have been because he had led a much more comfortable life. His beard was so black that I thought it might have been dyed; it was curled and oiled like a woman's locks. His face seemed to be powdered; it was noticeably whiter than any of the other Persians I had seen. Sitting on his massive throne of ivory and inlaid teak he looked somewhat small, as if the throne had originally been designed for a much larger man. His robes were so stiff and heavy that it was impossible for me to tell much about the body beneath them. But I would not have been surprised if Dareios were soft and pot-bellied. The jeweled crown he wore must have been much heavier than a battle helmet.

No queen sat beside him. There was not a woman in the entire vast audience hall. Off to his left, however, sat a dozen older men, some of them in soldier's uniforms, others in robes: the king's advisors and generals, I surmised.

Dareios leaned slightly toward the chief herald and spoke in a near-whisper, "Ask my ambassador for his report."

The herald called out in his clarion voice, "Your report, ambassador of the Great King."

I understood their language as easily as I understood the tongue of Philip and Demosthenes. Why did the Great King tell his herald to ask for Ketu's report? Ketu spoke their language fluently. Then I realized that the Great King was considered too lofty to speak directly to his ambassador, or—horror of horrors—to have the ambassador speak directly to him. The chief herald was the go-between.

Bowing low, Ketu told the herald of Philip's desire for peace, and his demand that the Greek islands and the cities of Ionia be granted their freedom. He phrased it all very diplomatically, using words such as "dearest wish" and "friendly request" instead of "offer" and "demand." The chief herald relayed to Dareios exactly what Ketu had said, almost word for word, as if the king were deaf or his ears not attuned to hearing voices from the foot of his throne.

"Tell the ambassador that we thank him, and will in due time prepare a fitting answer for him to bring back to the Macedonian."

"The Great King, munificent and all-glorious, thanks his servant the ambassador and will, in due time, present him with his gracious and sagacious command to the Macedonian royal house."

I almost broke into a laugh at that word, "command," thinking how Philip would react to it.

The king mumbled something more to the herald, who turned to me and announced, "The Great King, ruler of the earth and leader triumphant of battle, demands to know the name and origin of the barbarian presented with the ambassador."

I was startled. He was referring to me. With only a moment's hesitation, I said to the herald, "I am called Orion, in the service of Philip, king of Macedonia."

Apparently my size had impressed the Great King, which may have been the real reason Ketu brought me with him to this audience. The Persians were not small men, but few of them had my height or the width of shoulder that I have. The king and chief herald buzzed briefly, then I was asked:

"Are you a Macedonian?"

"No," I said, unable to hide my grin, "I am from one of the tribes conquered by the Macedonians."

The Great King's eyes widened. I laughed inwardly at his brief loss of self-control, hoping that he truly realized that Philip's army was not afraid of size.

Inadvertently I looked directly at Dareios. Our eyes met momentarily, then he looked quickly away, blushing. And I knew in that instant that the man was a coward. We were instructed not to look directly at him, not because it would rouse his imperial wrath, but because he did not have the courage to look at men eye to eye.

The chief herald dismissed us. Bowing, we backed away from the throne for the prescribed distance, then were allowed to turn our backs and walk like men from the hall.

But we did not get far. At the great doors a Persian soldier stepped before us.

"Ambassador Svertaketu, barbarian Orion, follow me.

He did not look like a Persian; his skin was more olive-toned and he was much bigger than the bejeweled dainty men I had seen at Dareios' court. In fact, he was the biggest I had seen in Parsa, nearly my own height and size. And a squad of six other equally big soldiers fell into step behind us as he led us out of the audience hall into the bright warm sunshine of the early afternoon.

"Where are you taking us?" Ketu asked.

"To where I have been commanded to bring you," said the soldier. His voice was deep, almost a growl.

"And where might that be?" Ketu probed.

"To see one of the Great King's slaves, in the palace. A Greek slave."

"Where are you from?" I asked.

He turned a level, cool-eyed gaze at me. "What difference does that make?"

"You don't look like a Persian. Your accent is different from the others we have spoken to."

He thought about that as we walked out into the sunshine and across the flagstone square between the audience hall and the palace proper.

"I am from Media, from the high hills where the old worshippers still tend their sacred fires. My people, the Medes, conquered Babylon and created this great empire."

His voice was flat, his tone unemotional. Yet I felt there was a world of scorn and bitterness behind his words.

"You are descended, then, from Cyrus the Great?" Ketu asked. It was more a statement than a question. Cyrus had founded the Persian Empire ages ago.

"From Cyrus, yes. Though today the Medes are hardly more than one tribe among the many that compose the empire, still we serve the Great King whose power has come from Cyrus' mighty army. We serve, and we remember."