5.

Jacobin and Estan were on the road again. Their path had to be away from Saanasthas and this time the reason for their departure had to be the stupidest yet. Some nobles in the trading company had been building their anger daily from being seen as inferiors year after year, and despite their comfortable position including a lot of drinking, dancing and partying the resentment they felt had manifested itself in the pettiest of ways. Outside of one corner of the trading company there was a garden of sorts, not a full-fledged one but a sort of an attempt to beautify this corner of the foreigner’s area. Some shrubberies had been planted basically outside of the area allocated for foreigners and the Shuitans had deemed it not acceptable, sending workers to cut it down while an official oversaw their work. But in doing so they had "trespassed" on the Arkansian grounds like their agreement with their guests meant nothing to them and this had caused a scandal and an outrage. Raising an uproar over something like this was ridiculous enough but the mood of the Shuitans had grown much more hostile and warlike in general, possibly due to the cultural change pushed on by their monks like Javek had talked about. Now it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the Arkansians would be kicked out of the city, but their pride just could not allow it, so a request had been sent for troops and apparently, they were on their way. Jacobin and Estan saw that it was time to pack their bags and split the city. Estan's frustration was twice as bad since he had seen how Javek had been disregarded for rocking the boat at all but then the nobles themselves had been completely ready to ruin their own success and burn their bridges for the most ridiculous reason possible.

Another sad and a fat fact at the table was simply that traveling was just becoming old. At the end of the day their journeys had mostly been an protest, an objection to the world at large that they of course knew wouldn't matter at all in any sense but it had brought some satisfaction to both of them, a shout that had said "We can't do anything about it but we're onto you." A sense of freedom had sustained them, even if it sometimes had undernourished their physical bodies, but that feeling had been slowly fading away. At the practical everyday level, every option available just seemed to be a different list of positives and negatives where, after all was said and done, the end result was pretty much the same, even though the pluses and minuses of their quality of life changed around. Some things had been good in Saanasthas and others had been better on the road and vice versa. What they had to show for after their adventures, tangible and intangible alike, wasn't much and most likely couldn't have been much, no matter what the variables were in their daily equations. Regardless of how they looked at it, most likely their sojourns were reaching an end, in one place or another.

Javek's case also kept creeping up in their conversations, even more so because Estan could always feel Javek's books weighing a little extra in his backpack. When taking a break under a few trees when rain had surprised them Jacobin reminisced about his days in the military. "Once.." he started while resting his head against an sturdy oak and filling his pipe he had made for himself in the trading company's woodworking shop, "..there was some general, not Malkov but somebody else, giving us an speech about what we were doing and why, not in an practical sense of why the hill we were supposed to take was strategically important or anything like that, but more an philosophical way of what our principle was, our prime motivation to function in this world." The tobacco in Jacobin's pipe wasn't lighting up since the bag where he kept it had become a bit damp, but Jacobin was patient with it and kept trying without forcing it. "He told us that all the great nations in the world had been homes to fighting people and if that fighting edge was lost, there was no way to stand as an equal with the best anymore. When the end times would come and the world would enter the Aeon of Higher Meaning as the scriptures promised us the circumstances would be different but, as of now, war was needed. No nation would be able to do the work worth doing without being ready to fight. What would be interesting for me know is that would Javek had been just as ready to cause a scandal and destine himself to the dungeons at home for the same reasons as he had been with the Shuitans?" There was of course no way to be sure, but Estan really doubted this. It seemed to him that if you packaged the same thing a bit differently you could pass it through without anybody batting an eye even if the end result would be the same. This rationalization fed to the Arkansians wasn't based on religion and Javek had been without a doubt in his mind always rooting for his king and country. Whatever it was with the meditation experience Javek had described, he had immediately turned the occurrence to fit his beliefs and not the other way around, never, for example, arriving to a conclusion that the Teachings of the Sun were wrong and twisted and the Shuitan religion was the thing to follow. Javek had been a very likable person with a moral compass, but it gnawed Estan that that very compass probably could so easily be pointed at any direction the powers at be wanted if they possessed an inkling of finesse. Good and evil were the terms that were often repeated in any discussions about moral questions, but Estan wasn't sure if those terms really were as useful as people seemed to take them for.

Where Estan and Jacobin were heading now they weren't quite sure. They were back in Arkansia and there wasn't supposed to be anything special in the territory they were going, but going back the same way they had arrived at Saanasthas would have meant colliding with the troops that had been summoned to the trading company's aid and there was a danger of being drafted, so this was a much better option.
After two weeks of walking, they met with the great river that ran through parts of Arkansia and saw several ships of various sizes on it. The river was used to move cargo as often as possible, its existence being a sort of a prevalent frustration to the rulers because if the river would have been closer to the center of the nation and been straighter, it could have provided a much-needed economic boost, but geography was what it was so everybody needed to make do. As Jacobin and Estan walked along the riverbed they started to realize just how substantial the traffic really was, seeing on the horizon at both ends of the river more ships coming and going. After a few more days they saw that there was a town of some sort where the ships were docking, but on the looks of it the place was constructed out of huge tents rather than actual buildings. They didn't look military either so Jacobin and Estan wondered who these people were in practically the middle of nowhere.

The mystery didn't hold for long. After reaching the top on a hill that provided a good view of the area, they saw more slaves than they could even count. For some reason the ships were unloading their cargo here and the slaves were divided into several groups, all heading to their own direction after a head count had been made and the health of the slaves had been checked. There were some Arkansian soldiers but most of the other free people here were working for the slave traders. There had been very few slaves were Jacobin and Estan had spent their youth and childhood, practically none, so the sight of such misery and misfortune cut into them, the emotion that much deeper because of the sheer number of these poor bastards. It was so easy to imagine that they could have faced that fate at some point in their lives. Some slaves were carrying the dead out of the ships, dumping them next to the long docks into a big pile that seemed to never cease growing. Some had ordered the corpses to be thrown into the river and a couple of slaves were performing the task, but there was a loud argument about it that could be partially heard even where Jacobin and Estan were standing. The thought disgusted them, but this was a chance to buy more supplies and they weren't sure when the next possibility would arise. They walked down the hill towards the tents, the wind bringing the stench of the dead and the unwashed into their nostrils whenever it blew.

It didn't take long to find a tent where food was kept and after a good while of haggling Jacobin and Estan still ended up paying an exorbitant price for a bit of bread, cheese, dried meat and fish. They decided to go back to the hill to rest and eat, but Jacobin was quiet and melancholic. "You go ahead and put a fire going, I'll be there in just a moment." he said. "If you're looking for tobacco, I don't even want to know what they are going to ask for." Estan said but Jacobin waved his hand in the air in a way that really didn't mean anything and walked deeper into the midst of this stinking place. Estan shrugged and headed back to the hill.

Watching the masses of slaves go by Jacobin was heavy hearted. He felt that he had been a part of this, not in a sense that he had personally subjugated anyone here, but he had been fighting in the villages, towns and cities back in the war where some of these people had been brought from. In a sense it hadn't been his choice, everyone able to fight had been drafted from his home village when it all had started and he had been too young to think much of it, but later on he had made the choice of not wanting to be part of anything like that ever again, so he had left on his sojourns with Estan. Jacobin wished that this decision would have held true, but all kinds of things had happened on their travels, some through the necessity of the circumstances and others through mistakes and miscalculations, through the inadequacy of the human mind and spirit. He had held his head high all his life, putting pride and belief in his integrity if nothing else, but looking back at it all Jacobin felt that there wasn't much for that integrity to hold on. Often, he hadn't been given the choice of doing what was right and often he had made the choice of not doing so.

There was a group of young female slaves being herded about, their destination whichever of the different hells available to them. A slave master went about with a ledger, taking care of his business and writing into his notes constantly. Jacobin squeezed the jewel necklace in his pocket, the one he had been carrying around with him for a long time now.
Estan was back on top of the hill, and he was just finishing with the fire, the flames now cackling and spreading their warmth around them. Jacobin's melancholy was present in Estan too, and he sat his back against the fire facing the spectacle of wretchedness spreading across him. He wondered if, at the end of the day and in the final analysis, the core of human experience could just simply be witnessed in views like this.

"Is there a place for an old man near your fire?" Estan heard from behind his back. He turned around and there indeed was an old man with white hair and beard standing there, wearing similar kind of worn robe Estan was. Estan had been sitting by himself without talking for a while now so his affirmation to the old man's request came out like a croak, so Estan gestured with his hand awkwardly for the old man to sit down. Gratefully smiling his guest sat opposite to Estan on the other side of the fire and he put his back bag down and rumbled through it for a second, took some bread and sausage which he split and gave the other half to Estan who nodded his thanks, little surprised at the unexpected generosity. They ate and after a short while of silence the old man pointed at the slave encampment with his thumb. "They're building a new cathedral in the capital and south of here they're opening up some mines, rich in copper I hear. Here they check out the condition of the slaves and do inventory, see who is fit enough for what. Then the slaves for the mines travel the rest of the way on foot. Not very holy, no?" It really wasn't. There were several passages in the scriptures that you could at least interpret as criticisms for slavery even if they were not outright condemnations. These parts were danced around or simply skipped, like a lot of texts seen as inconvenient. "You must be too young to remember, but many decades ago the plague came." the old man said. "It affected many nations and people were dying left and right. As a consequence, there was a serious shortage of labor and suddenly the peasants, coolies and servants alike saw how much they were needed and demanded better pay and better working conditions. Not having other options, those with money and power had to give in and pay up. It was good for a while." The old man had stood up and hands behind his back he looked at the slave encampment. Estan noticed that the old man actually looked somewhat peculiar now that he thought about it: he clearly was of advanced age, but his posture was perfect and there seemed to be ample strength and vigor in his body that his smooth movement betrayed. "But in other places where people were much more concentrated on small villages across the land and not in bigger cities, the nobles who had survived the plague saw their chance to round up the diminished population and make them work at their own estates for free. Then, in the places where people's lives had become better, once the plague let up and there were more people again, there was no more reason to pay better wages since you could again always find replacement workers if somebody refused to work. So, it was back to where it started." The old man was now pacing left and right, seemingly thinking out loud. "Religion is seen as the foundation of virtue and morality and a lot has been waxed and waned about the meaning of human life. Some of that philosophizing must be at least partially correct or have some value, but all of it seems to be subordinate to the basic fact of human exploitation. People may find meaning but that meaning starts to serve pursuits of power in one way or another. If any good happens, it happens because the circumstances of the world force those in power to act or behave in a way that benefits those under them, not because they themselves are motivated by virtue and morality. Often those good things are attributed to how the higher meaning is functioning and how we all should work even harder towards that cause, but it is like picking up apples from the ground and then saying that you grew them, even though the tree has been there a long before you came along." He gestured towards the slave encampment. "Hypocrisy is the basic feature, not an exception. On an individual level you can find people who try their best at being a moral person, but in the bird's eye view different groups, factions and nations only pursue their own interest at the expense of everybody else, no matter how steep the price others have to pay. Small minority gains power and the power is there to feed their ego, their self-esteem in constant danger of crumbling if any other nation, kingdom or empire becomes stronger than they are. The resources available to them serve their need to guarantee and flaunt that superiority, that need being cloaked into whatever the higher meaning they have at the moment. Some become true believers and they try to actualize that fantasy, others just exploit it, many do the mental gymnastics where they end up somewhere in between. At the end of the day, though, quietly and without a fuss, it all serves the exploitation. Then the rest can feel important about themselves." Estan had stopped chewing his food, perplexed by this sudden lecture. "So.." he stammered, trying to formulate a coherent question, "So where does this leave us? If the dogmas we subscribe to are going to be inherently impossible to follow, what is left? If it is not corruption but everything functions as nature intended and we just don't realize it, what can we do?" The old man didn't look at Estan, his gaze still locked at the vista before them, but he still answered the question. "The answer is to cast away the human criteria. No distinction, no achievement, no reputation, to be an empty boat on a river that doesn't end. To live in the land of the great void. Nature is cruel too, but it exists without a story to tell itself. As the wind blows or the birds sing, so should man be. When we gave humanity conscious thought, it clashed against the basic nature of living beings and went astray." Estan heard steps coming up the hill and he glanced at the direction of the sound and saw Jacobin walking towards the fire, but when Estan looked back to old man to say something, to his utter confusion the old man was nowhere to be seen. He looked around bewildered, then looking back at Jacobin, now realizing that there was a young woman with him.

6.

It was another frontier town, but a completely new one. Along the way Jacobin and Estan had run into general Malkov, who had recognized Jacobin's face, even though he didn't know him by name and Jacobin had been just another soldier without any special merits. Malkov told them that he was establishing a town in the untamed area in the far western part of Arkansia where an endless forest spread as far as the eye could see. He could use as many pairs of working hands as he could get, and everybody would get a piece of land to till for themselves. Several days a week would be spent working for him, but the deal was better than what you would have gotten as a regular peasant in any other part of the country. Few wanted to travel that far and start from a complete scratch, but there were advantages in such a situation. If your lord would become too draconian, you could try your luck by yourself deeper in the untamed land. In order to have people stay and work under them, the noble would have to give a better deal than he normally would give. So, they decided to go.

There had been plenty of communication issues with the slave Jacobin had bought. At first, they tried to communicate to her that she was finally free, and she could do what she wanted, but she spoke very little of the common tongue Jacobin and Estan spoke and when she finally did understand, she was horrified, and she panicked. Freedom for her meant that she would be completely unprotected and anybody passing by could do to her what she pleased. Being a slave meant that as somebody's property you were at least somewhat fed and protected in a sense as that people wanted to take care of their property. There was no support net for her here in any way so Jacobin and Estan gave up and just told her that she was still a slave and she calmed down a bit. For the life of them they couldn't pronounce her name, so they named her simply as Maria, which sounded somewhat similar to her original name. So now they travelled together, and they treated her normally, like they treated each other, but she was mostly completely silent and had her gaze cast to the ground. That probably was as one should expect, since she had been ripped from her home and probably would never see any of her family again. At least she didn't have to go to the mines anymore. The slave master from who Jacobin had bought Maria had thought that Jacobin was completely insane since he wanted to buy this one measly slave with the jewelry he had presented and couldn't believe his eyes. He had quickly pushed her out of the line and stuffed the necklace into his pocket, then walked away shaking his head.

Here in the frontier town Jacobin had been given a small cottage, a garden and some land in which he could farm. He was going to stay there with Maria, but Estan was unsure what he should do. Javek's books were still in his back and Estan had been leafing through them from time to time, wondering what he should do with them. It would have been a shame to leave them be and forget about them, especially since the translations seemed to be quite good.

Whatever the incident with the old man happened to have been, Estan wasn't quite sure what to think about his words. In the old man's eyes humanity was like a project that had gone awry and the only solution was to be like all the other projects of life, life without the attributes of humanity, but still that reasoning seems faulty. The idea that you were born as a being whose only true goal should be to shed all the things that made you that very thing felt depressing and seemed almost like an excuse. For whom such advice was even possible? Not for the vast majority. The whole monastery system for the church of the Sun had started from a somewhat similar worldview but as the numbers of the followers increased the monasteries had become institutions of power and learning that could no longer stay away from worldly affairs. For once Estan wasn't even suspicious about the intentions of the first monks and was sure that this hadn't been their goal but all of us were stuck and supposed to exist in this worldly and mundane level. If different institutions wanted to continue their existence, they had to live by the rules of the politicians. Estan was critical where this had taken the church, but he could understand the problems the pioneering monks had faced.

Estan wanted meaning in his life as much as anybody, had always wanted and had become frustrated time and again by what the society had offered him. His own experience matched with what the old man had said, but he couldn't just spend his days in a spiritual bliss that he possibly could create for himself. He was too much of a human, the need for action and goals rising from inside him, but he didn't want to burn his fire for faulty beliefs. Wouldn't he just end up creating a story for himself, a story that would sound epic and important, only for his efforts ending up serving those who he absolutely opposed? And if he didn't construct a story, was the only other option just to idle his life away in the pursuit of petty and boring hedonism? That was frustrating too. These thoughts culminated practically in Javek's books. If he would copy them with his own hands and find places to keep them safe and spread their contents as much as possible, it would honor his friend and make sure that Javek's work hadn't been wasted, further the understanding of Shuitan culture and keep their philosophy alive for its own sake, but as good as all of this sounded the idea of such a story nagged him. What good was the understanding of their culture if Arkansia was ending up in war with them for idiotic reasons and would these books be banned and burned anyway since they were a rival for the church of the Sun? So, what if the Arkansians would take up parts of Shuitan thinking? It's not like society would end up better for it even if they did. There was the argument of saving knowledge for its own sake, but Estan wasn’t able to back that kind of thinking up by himself with enough strength for it to be the sole motivation for his existence.

So, wherever you go, there you are. Despite his conflicting thoughts, the fact was that he needed something to work on, projects that would have clear goals and meanings. Fame and wealth didn't motivate him much, even with money he would still get frustrated in idleness. Life would go on with or without him fretting on it. Copying these texts was something tangible, something where could see progress day by day, and whether or not they ended up spreading was not in his hands, and he couldn't bring himself to fret about that. The ultimate goals bothered him, not the shakiness of his own personal success.

The more he thought about it, ending up in a monastery again seemed to be the only reasonable option. If he would find one where the abbot would be sympathetic to his task he could work in peace and the books could be safe. The translations had been originally ordered by the church anyway. Now that Javek's stink wasn't around them, maybe they would be more acceptable. "We shall see." Estan thought to himself.

All of this meant saying goodbye to Jacobin. There were no monasteries here and staying forever in such a place didn't suit Estan. They drank tea on the front of Jacobin's cottage and watched the sunset. If nothing else, Estan was grateful for having such friends in his life.

Estan had noticed two dogs running around in the village, but one day only one remained. Asking about it Estan found out that on a hunting trip the other one had been killed by a bear. The other one, much smaller for its size than it should have been, wasn't very useful and nobody seemed to especially want it. Estan had never really been around dogs in his life, and he was surprised by how complicated the emotional life of such an animal could be. It wasn't just angry or happy, but it pouted when it felt wronged, asked people to play with it in the most considerate way possible and it genuinely enjoyed human company. Estan remembered how he had been taught in the monastery that animals had no souls since they had no language so they couldn't have consciousness either. But if the animal could experience more complicated emotions than straightforward happiness or anger, how could it not have a consciousness? Estan could believe that a simple creature like an insect would be like a machine without any thoughts of its own but looking at the dog he wasn't so sure. Estan asked if he could take the dog with him if nobody wanted it and nobody minded. It was too small to protect him or do much else, but it was a living being, maybe something like the old man had had in mind.

So, they left together, the man and the beast, one with a soul and one without, neither of them any be off than the other.