CHAPTER 9.4
Lesley's Diary - Guilt - July 23, 1909
I can’t make up my mind whether to kill Charlie or thank him. For all that his face looks like pizza, the boy is growing on me (I never knew sincere attention could feel so nice). He keeps his distance, but is always around, which at once stressful and reassuring.
I can’t quite remember how or why, but we were speaking of his best friend, who had not survived the Voidmark, and Charlie had been telling me the story of how, swinging from ropes tied to trees, they had collided with each other in mid-air and fallen fifteen feet… and I realised I couldn’t be his friend.
After all, I’d murdered his true best friend.
It’s funny how no one I’ve met in the camp talks about those they’ve lost… really talks about them. The dead may get mentioned in passing, but then the conversation almost deliberately turns away to something less morbid. Aside from Charlie, no one, absolutely no one, talks about those they’ve lost. Charlie said that Mort lived only in his memory now, and that speaking of him was the only way to honour that memory.
How do I explain this…
I don’t get sentimental about things, but there’s one thing that always sets me off. It sets my brain on fire, my tears flowing, my vision becomes a little red, I get a sick sort of hunger in my belly, and nothing would make me happier than cursing off the faces of those responsible…
A little over two thousand years ago, on the south bank of the Mediterranean, the Alexandrian Kingdom had a library. Not just a library – THE Library. The written human world had been getting back to its feet after nearly being annihilated in the Sentinel Wars, and that Library was tasked with the collection and protection of the world’s complete scientific, cultural, philosophical, magical and literary knowledge. And it did – every great story that was ever told, every discovery ever made, every poem ever written or stars ever named; genealogies and inheritances, laws and philosophies; glyphs and runes and charms – everything that mattered, a record of it was kept in the library. Some of these records were the only ones in the whole world.
Over the next six or seven hundred years, the Library of Alexandria did its job, and became the world’s greatest repository of knowledge.
Nineteen hundred or so years ago, a man came out of the Judean Desert. He claimed to know of only one true divinity. Over the next two hundred years, his followers warped his words, teachings and philosophies and become a powerful religious force in their own right. They were a small cult to begin with and the Shamanate let them get away with their ‘silliness’. But two hundred years is a long time for such cults to fester. They declared that magic (which, at the time, was a privilege restricted only to the elite) was an abhorrence of nature, a leftover from the Sentinels deployed by a Master Demon. They rewrote history to claim that Seraphs were and always had been angels sent down by the one true divinity. They preached of a world where all were mundane… and all were equal in the eyes of the one true Divine.
Finally, they gained enough power and influence among the mundane and the underprivileged that these camps became politically powerful, and then, militarily so. In the Second Century, they fought the first ever Holy War. In the Third Century, they fought the second. And in the fourth century, they fought the third and final Holy War and for a while, it seemed as though they would win. But it wasn’t just power they sought – it was the total and complete eradication of the magical way of life. In that pursuit, every thing that was ever discovered under the influence of Ancient Shamanic Culture was declared blasphemous, and destroyed. In the year 343, they razed the library of Alexandria to the ground.
I first heard this story when I was ten, and even then, I thought someone was having me on. People are antsy and protective about their libraries even now – a library as great as the one in Alexandria – no way anyone would have dared touch that… but they had, and they had burned everything. And when I realised that the story was real, and that they weren’t making it up, I was so angry and upset that I just walked out of Mrs. Delnaz’s class, and everyone thought I making excuses. I wasn’t.
Why does it make me so angry? Because death is bad. There is nothing… NOTHING on this world that is as bad as death. I don’t believe in that whole Will/Spirit-returns-to-the-Primordial mumbo-jumbo nonsense. You are what you have here and now – it’s the one shot you have to leave something permanent behind, the one chance to make a mark.
For most people, making that mark is simple – they make babies and they pass on their bloodline, and they have lots of fun in the meantime. This is the easiest route to immortality, where you submit to your genetics and lineage, where you are diminished, but still a vital part of your descendants.
But mating, finding a partner to mate, and ensuring security for your children and future descendants takes energy… and sometimes, there are those people who take that energy and focus it elsewhere. These are the dreamers, the thinkers, the philosophers, the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the travellers. Somewhere in their minds is a hunger to understand the universe, to explore it, to learn it and to know it as surely as someone else might know their friend or spouse or child. And because they focus their energies on the pursuit of knowing the universe instead of securing their bloodlines… a lot of them forgo the chance to ever have children. They don’t have the social skills, the physical strength, and the political standing to secure mates… all they have is their work.
I won’t say that it’s actually this black and white. Obviously there are people who can do both – be thinkers and family men at once, those who can invent, and draw and dream and philosophise and at the end of the day still come back home to a family. But there ARE extreme cases when people can’t and don’t do that – where they either invent nothing worthwhile, or they don’t have family.
Is it so hard to imagine then, that in the ancient world, the works of most of these childless dreamers found their way to Alexandria? The library itself was a renowned patron – many of these ‘childless’ were sheltered and encouraged there, and their life’s works, their worthiest contributions to the world, were preserved in that library.
When the Library of Alexandria burned down, all these childless truly died. There is nothing left of them now – no words, no thoughts, and no blood. Every trace of them has been erased, as though they never were.
Their deaths were murder.
On the seventh of July, 1909 I murdered, or at least, assisted in the murder of five million people. And almost certainly, for some, I’ve taken away not just their pursuit of the universe, but also their bloodlines. I still cannot feel guilty enough for all their deaths, but I think I feel as much guilt now, as it is possible for a single mind to feel. I wish I could stop thinking, but that would be escape, wouldn’t it? It’s good that I’m hurting, isn’t it?
I don’t even have enough room in my head to feel disgust at my self-pity.
Was it because talking to Charlie finally gave my victims a face… because it made them human? If I had been back in Domremy right now, would I have realised the humanity of my victims sooner, if I’d seen people I’d known among the dead?
There’s only one silver lining in all this: the demon feels my pain, and my anger. I’ve learnt to tell to tell its movements and states somewhat, and ever since yesterday night, when I began to cry, it had begun to hurt. Good. If I ever manage to dig into my own mind one day, I’d better find it cowering and trapped in the guilt centre of my brain.