Jumping Read online

  I have to agree with that. But then I look at him shrewdly. “Listen to you! You're the wise one.”

  “Yes, and don't I look like it?” he says, mischievously, looking up at me.

  “Well,” I say, feeling slightly embarrassed at where this conversation seems to be going. I don't want to talk about the fact that he's a mutant.

  Leonid laughs. “It's a projection!”

  “What?”

  “It's a projection! I project this image of –what did you call it—a mutant. I carry this, as a tool for healing.”

  “Explain that!” I say, confounded.

  Leonid laughs again. “Think about it. Projections can be individual or group, any setting imaginable. Why not a projection onto the arena of ourselves? You can use space to do that.”

  “But why would you?”

  “As I said. For healing.” I look at him, still confused, and he says, “It can be healing for the person who carries it, because he may have mistreated deformed people before, and by wearing the deformity, he learns they are the same as he is. It can be healing for the people who witness it because they are reminded to hold onto their compassion, which they may not have done before, when confronted with a deformed person.

  “I wear it because I inflicted this kind of deformity on someone else. Before the lesson can be completed, though, there has to be complete forgiveness. I have to forgive myself for doing such a thing, especially if I did it with intent, or with relish. Otherwise it becomes part of what gets carried down to other generations, other lifetimes, through bloodlines. But I can't forgive completely without fully knowing what I inflicted. It's completed when we come full circle and are made whole again, without anger or guilt or shame, by walking through the experience of it.” He looks at me seriously.

  “Wait a minute. You inflicted this kind of harm on someone else? I find that hard to believe. You're one of the kindest people I've ever met. I know that, right down to my core.”

  He looks up at me. “I did it to you. In another life. That's why I wanted you to see it. That's why I was the first cohort member you met. The healing is for you, too, so you can forgive me.”

  I just look at him, stricken by what he has said. But I feel the truth of it, just as I felt his truth on the hillside.

  “Wait a minute! I'm forgetting my manners!” He points to the two people we both seem to have forgotten, standing a few steps behind him. “I want you to meet two other members of our cohort!” He steps aside to signal them forward, and I stand there stunned and overjoyed. Now we're cooking! Cohort members!

  One of them steps forward, hands extended, smiling broadly. It's a woman! She's a woman, I correct myself. Her height and her short hair and all this loose, non-descript clothing fooled me for a minute. She grips my hands, and I feel her strength. She's like an Amazon, exuding an energy of confidence and toughness and kindness. As we grip hands, I feel solidly connected to her, heart to heart. We look at each other, and I love her! This sensation overwhelms me, and it feels absolutely new to me. I don't think there's ever been a time when I felt this strongly this instantly for anyone.

  She laughs uproariously, reading my thoughts. “Why do you think you jumped? Because you've always felt this! You've been our role model!”

  I look confusedly at Leonid. “It's true, Miles. You're good at feeling things and allowing that to guide your behaviors.” He smiles and adds, “Jumping isn't a head decision, you know.”

  I shake my head and look back at the woman. I still feel drawn to her.

  “I'm Norwenna,” she says, “and we've known each other forever, practically. Mainly, we've fought together, over and over, because our cohort has done a lot of that. It's why we feel so close. Being shoulder-to-shoulder in life and death situations does bind you.” She laughs again. “It's why you're so anti-war now. You've had too much of it. You'll get there!” She punches my shoulder and steps aside to allow the other person to step forward.

  This one is a man—I can tell by his short, well-trimmed beard. He's tall and thin and reminds me of the five elders back on the hillside, only younger. The man hesitates, sensing my thoughts, and Leonid says, “Miles, this is Keilor. He's an intergalactic being, yes, but he's also a very powerful healer. He's here to learn from us, as he helps us heal. He's always been a part of our cohort, and he's not our only intergalactic member.”

  I look at Keilor. His eyes are his most striking feature. They're large and they're a golden green. They seem to hold a deep knowing. He looks at me and smiles. I feel so warmed by his smile that I smile back, extending my hands to him. He takes them immediately in both of his, and I feel tears prickling my eyes. I discover that I love this man, too.

  “I'm here to learn more about how and why you battle and to help you heal from it,” he says. “It can be hard to heal from, but your planet desperately needs to do this.”

  His accent sounds faintly British to me. “How do you do that—help heal a planet?” I ask.

  “I help through the energy I carry,” he says. “It's different than your energy, because I've never fought.”

  I look at Leonid, perplexed by Keilor's statement. Leonid says, “It's true. His energy is more pure. It has the power to negate the energy generated by battles and wars. That energy has nothing to attach to with him. So he can heal by his very presence, if someone is ready to heal.”

  I hardly know what to make of that, but I'm deeply moved by it. I feel as if I'm in the presence of a holy man. Leonid nods at me in agreement, so I know he's heard my thought.

  “Come on. Let's walk,” he says and heads up the direction the torch group went. We follow him. I notice the bottom of the Void is vast and there are other seemingly endless passages off of it.

  “Where are we going?” I ask him, not wanting to get too close to that torch-bearing projection.

  “Let's go see if we can find Ethelred, then you can get the whole story.” He looks at me. “You have the opportunity to experience the story directly, for yourself, for your own healing. If you want.”

  “Ethelred?” I vaguely remember that name. From medieval history. “Do you mean the Ethelred who was a king of England?”

  “Yes, he was,” Norwenna says. “I remember him well—Ethelred the Unready, to some. His reign was marked by lots of military crises, for which he wasn't unready—in fact he was quite forceful. He was just so burdened by how his reign began.”

  “Say more,” I say to her. “Wasn't there something about brother killing brother?”

  “Yes, sort of. His half-brother, Edward, was murdered at sixteen, after being king only three years, which gave Ethelred the throne when he was only ten. Clearly these children were pawns for larger forces. It was all about possessing land, for power. That's what monarchies are still all about today. But they had no way to maintain real control of all that land back then. They just passed it around on paper—I mean parchment.”

  She pauses a minute, looking off down the tunnel. “Ethelred's mother was believed to have orchestrated the murder. But they were brothers, who played together as children. So Ethelred could never forget that his rule was founded on the blood of his brother. He spent much of his life working to make his murdered brother a saint, which he did.”

  “Why are we going to see him?” I ask.

  “He's part of our cohort,” she says. She looks at me somberly. “Knowing your cohort is knowing your full self. Being in battle together makes you really identify with each other. It can be the foundation of a cohort. And often it keeps us choosing male lives, because the male experience is indelibly imprinted on our spirit.” She smiles. “That's what I'm trying to balance.”

  “But I'm against war!” I protest, trying to imagine all of these fighting lives. I've always been against war.

  Leonid laughs. “Well, you are now. Because you've learned a few things. Nothing makes a war a good thing, and you found that out. But we're talking about what happens to people within a war, and I suggest they can still find the good, even
as they learn the bad. Or maybe because they learn the bad, together.” He looks at me and laughs. “Heck, this planet is all about war! There had to be more to war than just war, or you'd all be dead.”

  Keilor, who has been quiet, nods. “I think the fact you're against war now is a good sign. It means you've experienced some healing.”

  While I'm pondering that, Leonid stops at the opening to another passage. They all look at me, as if to make sure I want to do this. I nod, not really knowing what we're doing but trusting them all, and we head into the passage, which to me looks like all the others. We walk for a ways, without talking. Slowly the walls gain my attention. There are markings, hieroglyphs. They look like chicken scratch to me, but they're in color and some are repeated. I ask about them.

  “They're war stories,” Leonid says. “That's what this tunnel is—the War Hall. Warriors have left the tales of heroic battles, whether won or lost. This is part of their healing, to tell the tale.”

  “Say more about us choosing these lives of war and why we would,” I ask, troubled to be in a place that marks the events that meant death, often horrible death, for so many.

  “Well, the choosing is all done between lives,” Leonid says. “That's when we do the planning. We figure out why now, and with whom. You're making that choice when you're who you really are, your whole, fully knowing self—you're holding all the experience, all the memory, all the history. And you're doing it with your cohort, who have been there every step of the way with you. It gets pretty complicated, as you can imagine, because there's lots of other people, too, on the same purpose. You see how it's different from projections—it has a common, consciously realized purpose for all. We're not re-living something we haven't gotten clear of yet. We're creating something, together.”

  “But why? Why would we?”

  “Well,” Norwenna says, thinking about it. “It's done according to contracts, typically. As a contract, it's often done as a favor to a cohort member or to complete your own karma with that person. It works to balance karma, to balance what's been released into the world by war. So, ideally, we would have fought once, like kids fighting over a toy, and we would learn our lesson, never to do it again.”

  She actually snorts at this.

  “But on Earth, we've done it over and over. The irony is that every time we do it, we're all agreeing to fight to end all fighting!” She shakes her head and kicks at a stone on the tunnel floor, sending it flying into the dimness ahead of us. “It just seems to take us a long time to do that, to get that lesson. So, we fight because we're young and ripe for adventure, or we fight because we've been talked into it—to see ourselves as heroes or properly patriotic, or maybe we're branded cowards if we don't.”

  She looks at me, to see if any of this is ringing a bell for me. Considering all the war experience I've apparently had, I guess it should be. But I'm not feeling it yet.

  “Or maybe we're just forced to fight, by somebody more powerful than we are, who holds our lives and our families and our property hostage. Anyway, the idea is we get used to fighting, if we do it enough.” She pauses again, thinking. “And it's hard to stop.”

  She looks at me, and I see a deep sadness in her eyes. “That's what happened to you. And to me.”

  I don't want to hear this.

  “I want to heal,” she says. “That's why I'm here. I don't want to carry the blood and gore any more. I want other experiences. But sometimes I think I've stayed too long at the fair.”

  Her words chill me. I'm not like her, I say to myself, but it carries no conviction.

  “No one wins. This is my last piece of work here, and then I can move on. But it's taken its toll. I find I don't make a very good woman.” She smiles at me, and I feel the chill to my core. “Too much baby killing, I guess.” She turns away from me, saying, as she turns, “You can extinguish your own light before you know it.”

  I can't speak. Fear has a hold of me.

  Leonid goes on talking. He agrees with her. “Think about your own Civil War, right on your own territory. Your own history tells you it was fought in 10,000 places, with three million dead. Think of the battle at Cold Harbor. Your history tells you about that, too. Skeletal remains from the first battle at Cold Harbor were found when they dug in for the second battle. More than 7,000 men died in 20 minutes. Necessary?

  “World War II, history tells you, called more than 85 million people into uniform, yet the over-whelming majority of people who perished were civilians. They still say the real number will never be known. And wars are full of stories like that. Yes, that kind of chaos can create fertile space in which to learn some of life's toughest lessons, if you survive. But it's not the only way to learn or even the best. It's just the most expensive way to learn. Somebody pays and somebody profits. Somebody always does.”

  Norwenna looks at me, her eyes cold and dark. I'm disturbed at seeing the light go out of her this way. “Some people think wars bring out the best and the worst in us. But I think they're designed to bring out the worst, in order to win; the best is only incidental.” She looks down.

  “You know, things like blood lust can develop in wars.”

  “I don't really know what that is,” I say, wondering if I want to. But this seems important to her. And I have a feeling if it's important to her, it's important to me.

  “People consumed by blood lust just want to kill, to feel powerful, maybe because they've gotten attached to their possessions or their people. Or maybe they're too afraid of being killed, so they just kill everything they can, trying to feel safe. Maybe they're even supposed to be killed, and they know it but don't want to be, so they kill instead. Newer, less experienced souls might follow them, caught up in what they see as the glory, the spoils of it.” She looks at me, and I have to admit I feel something here, like she is telling my story, too, not just hers.

  “And so-called religious wars are the worst!” she says. “Convincing ourselves we're doing it for the highest possible good. It's the highest possible delusion, but it can take a while to work our way out of it. You should know. You've been there, done that,” she says, with a short laugh. “So have I.”

  Seeing the unhappy look on my face, Leonid says, “Think about it, Miles. Ethelred is our cohort. Battle was our cohort's way for millennia.”

  Norwenna and Keilor nod. I'm thinking about what it means to try to heal from all this. I guess it's possible, because Keilor is here.

  We come around a gentle curve in the tunnel, and Leonid points out an opening on our left. This time the markings scrawl across the left side of the opening, indicating some sort of battle associated with the portal. It's dark inside, but the three of them walk right in. I follow and as my eyes adjust to the dark, discover myself in a good-sized room with high ceilings, and a low-burning fire in a fireplace in front of us. By the fire's light, a table is visible with a couple of flickering candles on it. The table stands between us and the fire. A large man sits with head bowed over some papers. Startled by our entrance, he rises up out of his chair. Then his face lights up at the sight of us.

  This must be Ethelred. He shouts a greeting and rushes around the table to give each of the others a bear hug that lifts them off the ground and then settles them back down. Tall as Norwenna and Keilor are, they seem dwarfed by this man. They're all talking and laughing.

  Ethelred looks over their heads to see who is behind them. All goes still. He stares at me for a long moment. I'm feeling just a little unreal. Who am I to this man? This, after all, is a king.

  He comes over to me and takes both my hands in his—a gesture of unquestioned loyalty, even at Ethelred's time in history. “A bond stronger than life,” he says, as he looks into my eyes.

  Leonid says, “Ethelred, meet Miles. Miles this is Ethelred.”

  So, I meet Ethelred—inside his castle, in the middle of the night and have to smile. I feel deeply touched by this man. Though I do realize, after all the war talk, that castle is just another word for fortificatio
n against war.

  Ethelred looks at me with tears in his eyes, and once again, I have tears in mine. I have never felt as close to anyone as I do to these people.

  “So you've come to help us,” he says.

  “If I can,” I say, and mean it, though I have no idea what might be expected of me. He looks at me for a moment, with such love that I finally have to look away, I'm so overwhelmed. He squeezes my hands and then lets go, turning to the others.

  We all look at him, and he seems to sense that everybody is ready for whatever it is we're going to do. I think I've stopped breathing for a moment, the atmosphere seems so heavy with this unnamed purpose. I'm just going with this flow, with these people.

  “Let's go,” Ethelred says quietly, and we follow him from the room.

  Ethelred seems to know clearly why we're here—“to take a look at some significant warfare for our cohort, to heal it.” That's what he tells me as we all walk down the dark halls of the castle. Apparently he's used to walking these halls in the dark. Nobody mentions grabbing a torch or a candle. He's trying to give me some background for the battle we're apparently going to witness, as we feel our way down narrow winding stairs in the dark, trying not to bump into each other. Ethelred sees like a cat—he points to engraved words above the door we exit by. The words are in Latin, so he translates them—“If you want peace, prepare for war.”

  “It's what we live by,” he says. We head outside, past the animal pens and out into the fields surrounding the castle, and he talks to us about the work and duty that fill his days.

  Once outside, I finally get a real sense of where we are—in another place and time. Everything feels different—the air, the ground, the sky—as if it doesn't fit me but it's allowing me to be here on borrowed time, only because we have work to do. There's a full moon, and by its light I can see the walls of the castle stretching up and up and up behind me. I can't see the top of them. I can't see the extent of their breadth either. The walls go out into the night on both sides of the door we came through, without a visible end. The ivy that grows part way up them undulates with the light wind, adding to the sense of being somewhere other than solid reality. In front of me, land rolls away in every direction as far as I can see. The woods take up part of it, but they go on and on, too. There's such a vastness to it all. Who could rule this? No one could. Yet they try.