Motherheart Dragon Priest

Chapter 6e

Our party set forth the next morning in a great caravan. Master Marco and I (along with other personages of note) were given a carriage each, our own Soong servants and Soong guards. The princess Tamurlai, daughter of Qublai Qhan, insisted on riding her horse.

Escorted by her amazons, as I had taken to calling them, she made a great show each day of her riding skills and martial prowess. By doing so, she made it clear to all who observed her that she was her father’s daughter. I had often spied her or some of her guard observing myself and Master Marco though, because they were veiled, as to what they determined of us I had no inkling.

Master Marco and I conversed whenever we could and it brought me great companionship for, upon boarding our respective carriages, I was reminded each time that this journey would be one of finality. This great journey to Nan guo was truly underway and, even though I was only a few leagues from an event in my life for which all else would pale into insignificance, I felt a lifetime apart from it already.

Something was occurring within me that I was unable to comprehend. Was it but the irresistible flow of Dao as Su nu called it, the wheel of change; or was this a shroud of some bedevilment that I had yielded to as I sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of heathen sin as many of my teachers in Jerusalem would preach?

I cast aside such thoughts for that way lay madness. To undertake this journey I had to remain the blank manuscript and allow my experiences to write themselves upon the great book of my mind. God reads the book of my soul at all times and guides me to live the true life. I seek every day to understand how to read the guidance of God. The words of St Jaqub give me succour in such times of doubt– 

The mindful soul learns from the living of the true life,

the soulful mind lives only the true life;

the true life is the Law of Twelve,

and the example of the Master.

I thought of the Master Jesus as we journeyed onward to Zaitun, the city of purple flowered trees for that is the meaning of its name. I thought of how we no longer followed his example nor did we live in community, but followed those who purported to know the Master’s thoughts and words better than we. I grew up in a Jaqubian community.

We gardened and farmed and worshipped after the fashion of the second twelve in their first years; before they went forth to establish new communities and so support the people through living the true life. They did not ask the living to support them as the old hierarchies of priests had done but sought to support themselves as St Jaqub had taught. Then the Alexandrians had invaded Israel again and scattered the children of Abraham before them and the Diaspora of Judah and Christ took place.

In this way the ‘Communities of the One’ were spread across the known world and the simplicity of the life and worship caught the Alexandrian imagination and their Greco-Roman federation and so spread throughout their Empire vying with the Mneseratae and all the other sects that had grafted themselves into the Empire that taught community, respect and peace in the here and now, and glory in the afterlife.

My mind returned to my present journey. Perhaps to the Joachimite Reformation I could contribute the re-establishment of community as the core of the “True Life”. To turn away from the false life of palaces, temples and churches. To return to the fulfilment of honest work, honest humanity and the honest worship of living the True Life. Respectful of the Mother, glorying in the Father and living as their children.

Was I here among the heathen to learn how the true life could be lived by any person? As yet I could not say I had observed any living as such. For the Monqhul war continuously, the Soong hold trade above community, the Ainu map the tides of passion and the Jomon appear as restless as the wind. And as I had seen everywhere else, all clamber upon the backs of the farmers who toil in the fields.