I lowered my eyes. “What must I do?”
“When the time comes I will let you know,” she said haughtily.
“But how—”
She was gone. I was standing alone in the cold night. Far in the distance a wolf bayed at the newly-risen moon.
The more I learned from Ketu about the Way the more I was attracted to it. And repelled, at the same time.
“The key to Nirvana is desirelessness,” he told me over and again. “Give up all desire. Ask for nothing, accept everything.”
The world is an endless round of suffering—that I knew. The Buddha taught that we endure life after life, constantly reborn to go through the whole pain-wracked cycle again, endlessly, unless we learn how to find oblivion.
“Meditate upon these truths,” Ketu instructed me. “See everything around you as Nirvana. See all beings as Buddha. Hear all sounds as sacred mantras.”
I was no good at all at meditation. And much of what seemed perfectly clear and obvious to Ketu was darkly obscure to my mind. The thought of final nothingness, the chance to escape the agony of life, was tempting, I admit. Yet, at the same time, oblivion frightened me. I did not want to cease to exist; I only wanted an end to my suffering.
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.