The Holy Man
Chapter 13:
As I entered his private room, it became clear why Zealot had reserved this particular space for himself. It was a room with a vaulted ceiling, stretching above me for about five meters. The gentle curve of each wall melded into the roof in a parabolic arc that was pleasing to the eye. Like elsewhere, glyphs and symbols spiraled across their surface. The most notable feature of the space was a slightly raised area of ground, somewhat akin to a dais but of a much humbler height. It was about a meter in diameter. Zealot was sitting on it.
Once again, two luminous orbs were set out to his sides. He sat with eyes closed, meditating as I approached and sat in front of him.
We didn’t speak for a while. The silence stretched into awkwardness, and past awkwardness into a meditative trance.
“What are you?” Zealot asked nobody in particular.
“Haye Zintan, outlaw, former member of the crew of the Destiny, new convert to your religion-”
“All of these things are who you are. But there is something greater than these things that flows through your very steps, young one.”
I paused, searching myself for the answer. “A child of the River.”
“Which means?”
“I… don’t know.” My brow furrowed. “That I’m a small part of it somehow?”
“Which is within and without the same as you, and I.” He nodded. “The highest calling of any person is to recognize the River within the other. Remember this, and you’ll have an inkling as to why I like you, and why I tolerate your wayward attitude in our midst.”
I grimaced.
“There are other reasons of course. You remind me of a young man whose life I inhabited long before I forsook my old name.” He smiled.
“You were an outlaw?”
“In a manner of speaking. I was a wild one for sure. My temper ran hot, my blood boiled, my lusts were unbridled. If I can be chosen to bear the burden I hold, you can be brought into the River’s embrace. And…” he opened his eyes and smiled. “I relish that challenge.”
We paused. I blinked.
“So, what is it that brings you here, young one?” Zealot murmured.
“I need to repent.” I answered firmly, ignoring the key that hung around the old man’s neck.
“Speak your repentance then.” He closed his eyes again.
“I…” flashes of Tian’ Xi’s betrayed face coursed through my memory, “I need to repent of my distrust of others.” The confession hadn’t been intended to be so sincere.
“Tell me about this distrust of others.”
I shook my head. “I feel as though others are a liability. I’m afraid of being backstabbed. I suspect everyone of being a potential threat.” This was a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. After all, Yuri wasn’t a threat, was he now?
Zealot’s calm expression didn’t change. “I sense the truth.”
His silence afterwards probed further. I continued, “I push away people, I demean them, I am brutal to them, because I am afraid of…”
“Yes?”
“I am afraid of being seen as weak and vulnerable.”
Zealot mused on that. “Yes. You and many others like you.”
“Yourself, when you were younger?” I queried.
“Yes.” He drew in a deep, relaxed breath. “And as it was in my case, it caused me great pain, and great pain to others around me. You are fortunate I have outgrown this stage of my stream’s flow.”
I briefly noted the irony of a man claiming to be beyond fear of others walling himself off from those he considered unbelievers.
“My experience teaches that turning away from this kind of insecurity requires a few things. Recognizing the harm which it has caused is firstmost in this, and you seem to have done so. The next step is absolution, which I bestow now on you.” He raised a hand in pronouncement, “I name you free from the River’s remembrance of the wrongdoings that you have done.”
I bowed my head, aping the motions I’d seen many others perform at chapel a long time ago.
Zealot continued, “With time, these things will pass from you. You will learn to trust others. The work of the River will flow through you and sanctify you.”
Another space of silence separated us before he broke in again. “Are you familiar with the Shroud of the Basilica?”
I shook my head.
A dark look crossed over his face. “For centuries, the Shroud of the Basilica has kept hidden under its folds a mystery unknown to those outside of the clerics that tend to it. When speaking of the unknown secret to outsiders, it is said that a great stone, carved by the original divine flow of the River itself through primordial space and time, is concealed underneath the Shroud. This is only a half-truth… There are those that know within my former order, and who have confirmed to me long before this expedition was conceived, the essence of what lies underneath the Shroud. Its true nature is not comprehensible to those who are not ready. And most of the world is not ready.”
I cocked my head. “Yeah?”
Zealot exhaled in contemplation. “Your mind is as shrouded to me as that great secret is shrouded to the congregation of millions. You are not telling me the full truth, Ms. Zintan.” Before I could speak, he held his hand up again. “I do not think you are lying to me. But there is something buried within your psyche that is occluded from my spiritual vision. We will have many such times with each other to converse. And over the course of these conversations, we will come to see what it is that the River has placed within you. For it is a secret that has welled up from the deepest depths of the River. I can feel it.”
He clearly suspected me of an ulterior motive, but perhaps I could distract him? Keep him from trying to process the secret I held?
I cleared my throat. “Why did you shoot at us?”
His brow furrowed. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah, you’ve answered this before: so you could maintain communal purity, or something like that. Problem is, you could have accepted us before now if you wanted to.”
Zealot frowned. “If you want me to restate that answer-”
I cut him off. “I don’t know what it is that the River put within me that you’re sensing now. But you could have gained access to it a lot earlier if you’d extended your welcome from the very beginning.”
The former chaplain was silent.
“Like, that feels like a sign to me.”
“A sign to you of what, young one?”
I held up my hands. “A sign that maybe separating yourself from those you consider impure… Or even,” I held up a finger, “those that maybe just maybe are a little impure, like the present company of myself, isn’t really what the River wants?”
“Once again, I must ask that you watch your-”
“Tongue. Yeah I know.” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to undermine your authority here. If I was, I’d ask that question outside of your chambers in front of your other followers. I only want to understand your authority so that I can carry out your will and the will of the River.”
“It is more likely that you want to try to snare me in a web of doubt.”
I shook my head. “Even if I wanted to do that, I can’t. I’m not the woman with that skill, and you’re not one to doubt easily. I’m not stupid enough to try sleeping without covering my eyes - so to speak.” Hopefully the Beltlander idiom would strike him as persuasive.
Zealot clasped his hands together in his lap. Closed eyes twitched briefly, as he considered the unpleasant thought that he may have been wrong. “Perhaps.”
“So, let’s say for the sake of argument, I’m right. Maybe the River placed some sort of message within Doctor Hennir for you to discover as well?” I shrugged. “Maybe it was there this whole time and you couldn’t see it because you kept-”
He waved me silent. “In your case I can see your argument because you have not seen the true light of the River yet and rejected it. You suffer from comparatively minor transgressions against your true source.”
“Couldn’t it be the same with the doctor?” I argued.
“No. She is far too intelligent for her own good in that regard.”
“Really? Intelligence is what motivates her waywardness?”
“Intelligence without morality, without virtue… yes young one. The greatest of transgressions is pride. And intelligence typically locks a proud person within their own sense of superiority over any moral code. Repentance is not within her grasp.”
“Again, repentance is not strictly speaking necessary for her to carry a message of the River, right?”
Zealot breathed in deeply. “No. Perhaps not to carry a secret of the River. But for it to be revealed and understood requires trust to exist between the carrier and the receiver. Trust in this case requires repentance.”
“Why?” I challenged him.
The calm across Zealot’s face broke. In a split second, the meditative peace that had imprisoned his expression in calm broke apart into a snarl of gritted teeth. With great effort, the holy man reassembled the mask of serenity over his inner workings. He breathed in and out deeply, filling the chamber with the sound of slowing breathing and the smell of unwashed teeth.
“You are in need of a history lesson.”
I shrugged. “My ears are open.”
“See that they are and that your mouth retains any further questions you have for a different time.” Zealot folded his hands in front of him and the tension in the space between us eased a little.
“Do you know,” Zealot began, “How long the River’s truth has prevailed among human civilization?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know when and how the Teacher came to this world to spread the truth?”
“No.”
“Your ignorance can be forgiven. Nearly two thousand years in the past - there is some chronological disagreement - the Teacher came to this world in the city states among the Se’an and first preached a truth that stood against everything the established potentates of the day valued. The gods of that time endorsed the virtue of their leaders. Indeed, many of them were kings and queens of years past, since deified. The law of the world was that might made right. The strong trod down the weak, who in turn suffered what they needed to. This is the moral philosophy on which entire empires were built. In truth it is still the moral philosophy on which some emperors and empresses nowadays construct their ambitions.
“Instead of this, the truth of the River, that we are all one and the same within the living breath of the universe, took hold and eventually unseated the selfish morality of years past. And the River should be praised and thanked for that. Though not perfect, we live in an infinitely better world for the spread of the Riverrun and the original founding of the Basilica by the priestly fathers.”
I inhaled the stale air and leaned back slightly as Zealot’s explanation continued.
“It is not too long ago in human years, a few centuries at most, that the first attempts to reverse this revolution were made by those claiming to act under the guise of ‘enlightenment’. They came to the Basilica and found a ready-made ally in the temporal leader of the time. With his blessing, the foundations of the Riverrun’s hold on the world were weakened. Generations of religious teaching were rejected in favor of more ‘rational’ and scientific thought.
“The Basilica was taken over and turned into a temple of the new religion. Its former occupants were dispossessed and made to walk among the folk of the world, poor and helpless. It is by the will of the River alone that our fathers and mothers in the Riverrun were able to survive and continue the great work among the peoples of the world.
“We, the children of the Riverrun, are outcasts, and for what? For hard narcissism guising itself as ‘rational inquiry’. For people who take a microscope to that which by rights should be experienced, not studied. For philosophers who extend freedom for their friends with one hand and chains for their inferiors with another. This is the kind of person that pervades every scientific field, and this is the kind of person that Dr. Hennir self-avowedly is. I read it not in just her character over this voyage, not just in how callously she trods the holy ground we’re on, but in her own words published from Ininger.”
Zealot exhaled and bowed his head slightly. I broke in, “I don’t really know enough about scientists to say otherwise. I’ve only met a couple in my life… doctor Ininsir seemed like a good enough person. But even supposing you’re right about Hennir, or even right about most scientists like you say, wouldn’t you be able to work together to survive?”
“You cannot survive here next to someone obsessed with the kind of moral philosophy that places the self at the center of the universe.”
“How do you know that?”
“Ask the exodus of the priesthood from the Basilica that question. They will provide you with an answer.” His lips parted as if he would snarl again.
I shook my head. “Well, I’m at a disadvantage in that case. They’re long dead, and I’m a world away. Or at least a half of one.”
“The conclusion from history should be obvious.”
I sighed. “Yes. It’s obvious the lesson you take from history.”
“And you don’t believe in this truth?”
I glanced upward at the ceiling, huddling my hands into the pockets of my jacket as I stood up. “I don’t really know a lot about history. What I do know is that I’m at my worst when I try to read the bad qualities into the people I know. Tian’ Xi is somewhere out there, possibly starving because I suspected her of… of something.” I kept my knowledge of the alien monster we’d seen to myself. “I think Hennir is at the very least interested in surviving. I think the first step towards really getting ourselves out of this mess is to try and share what knowledge we can with her, and maybe getting something in return.”
“I will remind you that she is not to be trusted.”
“Nor was I, yet here I am. I think we could work together with her.”
Zealot exhaled through his nose. “Then we will have many more such meetings like this one. If for nothing else than to correct the error of that view. For now, you will leave me, and I will seek the peace of the River.”
My footsteps echoed off the chamber walls as I turned from him and strode out. I spared one last glance backward at the holy man, once again enshrouded in his meditation. It was there that he felt protected. Invulnerable. For all his external power over others and his grandiose pronouncements, I’d caught a glimpse of a pitiful man underneath it all.