Since childhood, he had known he had been called to fulfill a destiny apart from those of other human beings. The signs and portents accompanying his birth were merely the outward manifestations of the flame he felt burning within him, a dervish of heat and light, dancing in the void of being that linked him with the eternal truths he sensed at the core of the material world. Despite these prodigies, and the child’s obvious gifts, his parents determined that he would not be coddled.
Before he had learned to read and write, he spent hours in his father’s carpentry shop, running errands, and later being taught the carpenter’s craft itself. Nevertheless, the boy’s undeniable abilities marked him for a special course in life. At the age of twelve, while the other boys of the town were learning with difficulty the rites of passage to young manhood, he accompanied his mother and father to the capital of the province.
Despite their vigilance, for they knew him to be a curious and capricious child by nature, the boy wandered off and disappeared amid the maze of winding streets of the bazaar where they had gone to buy silks. When they realized he was missing, the boy’s parents were frantic. Fearing the worst, they searched the city, only to discover that he had wandered into the great temple not far from the soukhs, where he had begun to discourse with the priests, amazing them with his profound knowledge of matters they were a loss to explain how he had come to know.
News of the boy’s gifts spread through the province, and from that time on he was recognized as a prophet and a healer, for within him the dervish spun at a greater speed and the light within him grew. His consciousness of his own mission began to grow as well, and as he reached his teens his introspection brought a new awareness of the same spinning light dwelling within all other created beings.
Already by this time, many revered him, but he himself made every effort to hide the light, preferring the coarse clothing of a workman to the white garments of the priests, the tools of a carpenter’s apprentice to the vestments of the holy men, and the satisfaction of performing honest work by the sweat of his brow to the idolatry of the crowd that might revere, but did not understand him.
For by now he had already seen enough of life as it truly is to realize that along with the light, there was darkness, and that as the dervish spun it brought darkness and light by turns, and in his heart the seeds of doubt had already been planted. In his early twenties, he had come to understand that he too was imperfect, that he too could sin as freely as any man.
In the home of a friend of his father where he had come to perform his work, he had permitted the woman who was the wife of this man to believe she had seduced him. It was not the first time he had engaged in sexual relations, nor would it be the last, but it had been the first time when he had felt cheapened by what he had permitted to happen.
During these years, as well, he had seen the coarseness, the pettiness, the brutality and the bestiality to which those same beings in which the light within him dwelled were capable of performing. Certainly the times were hard. The conquerors of his people had been sorely oppressing them, but they had allowed themselves to become mirrors instead of men, mirrors reflecting the ugliness of their persecutors. He might pardon this in the conquerors, but not in his own people. While his fame as a prophet and healer continued to grow among the people, in his own heart he realized one day that he had come to doubt everything he once held as an article of faith, even the presence of the light within him.
He resolved, with or without the consent of his parents, to leave the country of his birth for a time. Perhaps with a change of scenery, he thought, he might find the light again. And so, using the money he had earned at the carpenter’s trade, he booked passage on a bireme bound for the distant port of Cathay.
At first he was homesick, lonely for his parents and friends, and for the familiar sights, sounds and smells of his village. Then too, he found that he missed the veneration which the people of the country held for him, for onboard he was an ordinary passenger, one whose identity was not known to the traders, most of whom were foreigners.
After some weeks at sea, however, his spirits began to grow buoyant again. The ship had stopped at several exotic ports of call already, and the natural curiosity of the young man could not help but respond to the allure of new and strange things. Soon he had begun to smile again, and during the evenings joined the merchants in smoking the hookah and singing songs.
His skill as a carpenter quickly earned him the respect of the traders too. Always ready to give of himself to anyone in need, he readily volunteered to repair the ship’s damaged rudder, which otherwise would necessitate a long delay in the journey by sea. Befriended by the captain and master merchant, who in fact adopted him almost as a son, the young passenger was given the chance to make his fortune upon arrival at their destination. He would be loaned whatever capital he required to purchase silks, jewels and other fineries which, upon his return to his country, would make him a wealthy man.
The captain’s young charge consented in this, for there was nothing in his philosophy which prohibited the earning of wealth by honest means and hard work. On the contrary, wealth would enable him to honor his parents and do good works for the poor and the sick of the country. Now more than ever, whatever lingering misgivings concerning his chosen course evaporated, and in their place was the hope of better things to come, and he already began to dream of the day of his homecoming, when he would distribute gifts to all and be honored for this.
But the young man’s dreams were fated never to be realized. Sometime during the crossing of the great western sea there came a storm which struck without warning. So fierce were its winds that men were washed overboard and others, including the captain, lashed themselves to the mast lest they join those who had been drowned in the sea. The young man prayed for a speedy end to their travails, and when the storm finally passed by morning, he believed that the worst was over, and that his prayers had been answered.
To his chagrin, he soon found that this was not the case. The captain announced that the bireme had been blown far off its charted course; in fact it was now in completely unknown waters far from any land. To make matters worse, the winds, which had battered the vessel with such violence only a few hours before had now given way to a dead calm. Certainly the oarsmen, though their number had been decimated during the storm, could still row, but to where? Aimless sailing would probably only worsen their predicament.
Nevertheless, some action had to be taken. By a mixture of guesswork, intuition and the chance sighting of a propitious star one night, the captain gave orders to row a due westerly course. Within a few days, he announced, he hoped to be within sight of land; if not Cathay, than somewhere close to it.
The days turned into weeks, however, and still no land was sighted. The rowers began taking sick with fatigue and a strange malady. The bodies of the dead soon were dumped overboard. For those who lived, food and water soon ran out. The young man was among those who survived, although he too was stricken by the malady. Before he thankfully succumbed to a the balm of oblivion, his last memory was of the captain dying in his arms as he prayed for his soul.
When he again came to his senses, the young man knew at once that something had changed. He could hear the loud flapping of the sails as they billowed in the wind and he could smell the distinctive, spice-laden odor of land. He rose and became aware of the screeching of the gulls.
When he looked over the prow of the bireme, he saw a coastal land covered with mangrove forest. He did not know what mangroves were then, but he instinctively recognized they were kin to the palms of his own country. His joy at being saved and the prayers of thanks on his lips were quashed by the remembrance of what had happened and the sight of the corpses of the crew all around him. A check through the ship brought him the sickening, though somehow expected, knowledge that out of all the others, only he alone had survived.
He tried to turn the bitterness within him away, to engulf it in the light, but it would not be so. It dwelled in the heart of the light, as angels within the heart of the furnace, and he thought back with sadness to the time he had strayed from his parents in the bazaar, for it was the story of the angels in the furnace about which he had been discoursing with the learned elders when they had found him.
He cursed his headstrong nature, cursed his wanderlust, for if not for these he would still be in his home instead of in this accursed situation. Yet, he could not help his curiosity from getting the better of his misery, for when he looked landward again, he saw that there were men who awaited him on shore.
Though weak from hunger and sickness, he had strength enough to descend from the ship to the white sands of the crescent beach. To his chagrin and yet not without its humorous aspects, the men on the beach were kneeling at his feet as he strode toward them, and they had brought offerings of fruits and other victuals, some which he recognized, others which he did not. He bid them rise in his own language, but they did not understand.
Realizing that if he did not take immediate nourishment he would certainly collapse, he ate of what they had brought him. Seeing this, they began speaking words to him on their knees which were obviously words of supplication. He bid them rise again but they still could not understand, and he did not press them, for he knew that they believed him to be a god, and though the part of him that burned as the light told him to disprove this notion, the dark angels within the glow of the furnace bid him otherwise.
And so he permitted them to raise him upon a palanquin plumed with feathers and carry him upon their shoulders through the mangrove forests, and deeper inland by way of trails that snaked and twisted through the underbrush until at last through the interlacing network of trees he glimpsed the city of white stone beyond, and then was out into the place where the city began and saw the great stepped pyramids high upon their mounds of earth and the humbler houses of the priests beneath them.
And as the palanquin bearers carried him through the streets he saw the people of this strange city which had come out to see him, and as they bowed to him, he blessed them, and blessed those who flanked him as his bearers carried him to the top of the pyramid.
Then, he did not understand the meaning of the word Quetzalcoatl, by which the chieftain of this people addressed him. Later, after his sojourn among them, he would understand that they called him Plumed Serpent, and that he was so named because of the huge plumed serpent from which he had descended to earth in a time of need.
By this time he did not feel it necessary to explain that the snake-shaped masthead of the Phoenician vessel and the colorfully striped sails which they likened to the plumage of the gaudy quetzal bird were nothing like the evidence of godhead the priests considered them to be. He had come too far along for that to be an option by then.
But in the early days of his sojourn, all he knew was that a great famine ravaged the land and that the supply of maize which the people depended on was dangerously low. Responding to their supplications to deliver them, he quickly saw that their agricultural methods were far inferior to those of his own country. A pest similar to that which attacked crops in the provinces back home was at fault. He instructed the indians to destroy those crops infected with the pest, and showed them other methods by which they could fertilize their crops and improve cultivation.
In their eyes, his godhood was proven beyond doubt, and in his honor, as well as to thank the other gods, they gave him the fairest among their women as his wife and began to build for him a palace dwarfing even that of their chieftain. They also dedicated to him an entire week of sacrifices to his father, the sun, from which he had descended to earth to help them.
Though he refused even to touch the ceremonial dagger of polished black malachite which the chieftain — and by now his father-in-law — tried to press into his hands, and turned away from the slaughter of his fellow beings, he made no move to prevent his adopted people from leading the drugged captives one by one to the great, blood-spattered stone at the top of the pyramid, cutting out their hearts and rolling the corpses down the stairs to the priests waiting below. For his mind was focused upon the dark angel at the center of the light within, which had grown to almost blot out the light.
In time, plague visited the land, and again he proved himself the savior which his adopted people believed him to be. It is true that for some, the laying of hands upon fevered heads and the utterances of prayers brought forth true miracles, for he had always had the gift of healing, even since childhood.
But with others a superior knowledge of medical science commonplace among his own people yet unknown to the natives was responsible for cures deemed miraculous by the local populace. And as he walked among them, shod in sandals, they reverenced him with a love that knew no bounds. He found that he loved them too, for despite the wickedness of some of their practices, in most other areas they had the same longings for salvation that his own people manifested.
Yet when, to celebrate the passing of the plague, they launched a war party to gather captives for another sacrifice of thanksgiving, he found himself blessing them as they filed past him, granting his approval to their wantonness. He knew then that he had been corrupted, and that he should leave this place immediately, even make an effort to return home. His ship still remained beached where it had landed. Though damaged, his skills as a carpenter were equal to the task of making it seaworthy again.
He had long since taken to studying the captain’s charts, and at night, with the aid of the priests who watched the skies from the top of the sacrificial pyramid, he believed he had managed to divine a fairly good idea of where the ship had been blown off course and, perhaps more importantly, how to navigate a course home. It would be a simple matter to recruit a crew from among the people. They believed him a god — their god — and would follow him wherever he asked.
At night, watching the skies, alone atop the pyramid, these thoughts proved overwhelmingly powerful and he pledged that in the morning he would begin to carry them out. But in the light of day things were different.
Whatever they might have been, by whatever mistaken notion they regarded him as something he was not, he had already come to be in fact what the indians deemed him and they were his people. Throughout the day he carried with him the hundred problems that he knew he alone could solve.
By now too, he had grown close to his father-in-law and several among the nobles for whom he felt a genuine fondness. And there was his wife too. She was now with child and he knew that he could both never leave her behind nor risk her life on a perilous journey home.
So he permitted things to remain as they were, and the dark angel within to eclipse the bright, hot fire, and became Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent god of his adopted people. And although he had refused to take the ceremonial dagger of black malachite into his hands on those prior occasions, upon the birth of his firstborn son — the son of a god — he knew that another refusal would be deemed a malev]olent omen by the people, and that he could no longer refuse.
Wearing a bonnet of quetzal feathers, with the disk of beaten gold bearing the image of the sun god upon his chest, he stood at the summit of the temple of blood and plunged the dagger into the side of the first of the many victims, and then he tore out the still-beating heart, holding it high above the cheering multitudes below.
Spattered with blood and gore, his arms, legs and torso daubed in crimson, he dispatched victim after victim. Through the long, torchlit night, he sacrificed them, and far into the next day, until his right arm became too weak to hold the dagger and his father-in-law assumed the role of officiating priest in his place in ceremonies that lasted for seven full days.
He fell into delirium after that, and spoke words in the strange language he had spoken when he had first fallen to earth, the language of his father the sun, for indeed the priests who attended him then believed that they heard him now ask his father for forgiveness as they attended him in his delirium; the words seemed similar.
When he awoke again it was like the time, years before, when he’d smelled the land smell and heard the flap of the sails billowing in the wind. He looked inside him and the darkness had receded, and the light had returned.
Yet what had begun as a dark spot at the core of the light and had grown finally to eclipse it entirely, was now suffused with the light and the light was now a part of the darkness, and for the first time since he was a child he again had no doubts as to the course he would follow.
Wasting no time, he announced to his people that his time on earth was fast coming to an end. He would be leaving them soon, returning to his father the sun upon the huge plumed serpent from which he had sailed the seas between heaven and earth. They were not to despair, for one day he would return to them, but in the meantime they had his teachings to enable them to carry on, and from the fruit of his loins would come a race of great kings to lead them.
He bid the people rejoice and prepared for his departure, overseeing repairs to the bireme and assembling and training a crew of mariners to accompany him on his return voyage to the sun, making sure that they all understood clearly that they would have to die to a man once Quetzalcoatl was within sight of his heavenly abode, for his mission required that no trace of these past years remain within the memory of his race.
On the morning of his departure, he stood at the stern of the ship looking out over the multitudes who thronged the shore until they had receded into an inchoate blur. Then he turned away to chart the course homeward. His path lay elsewhere, and if he survived the arduous journey he knew lay ahead, he knew also that he could find redemption.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands had died in his name, but the final sacrifice he knew, would be his own. In their deaths, he had already died, and had become one unto them. But in his suffering and final agonies they, and all in whom the fire burned within, would become the same as him; then the circle would be closed.
-David Alexander
