Episode Five: Revealed
And so began eight years underground.
Hamar was escorted back to the tapestried chamber. An incense burner had filled it with a pungent haze, and through it he could see the dishes had been cleared away, the room tidied, a big boxy thing that turned out to be a purple velvet pallet with silk bed curtains was now in the middle. By one wall was an ornate chest with many drawers apparently put there for clothes and belongings, and one of the men undraped Hamar’s cloak and reverently put it on a stand on the floor. The Adepts looked for his approval and then withdrew.
Hamar wandered around. Then he sank back onto the floor cushions with his head spinning.
The strange feeling of loftiness remained, yet told him nothing. He picked away the crust of dried blood from his nose, and finally hid his face in his hands.
He felt large, then small, strong then weak, felt knowing and then unknowing, as if steadily diminishing in waves somehow. He must think, he must. Who was he to them? What was all of this!
What had he just been? Hamar Mi-sha Baltshazar! Why had his name excited them? And who and what were these terrible people? Flashes of the ceremony repeated to him, the last of the strange strength bunching his muscles and then fleeing out of his body, leaving him collapsed back exhausted onto the pallet.
He stared overhead at the ceiling and watched the lamp vapour freely escaping up through its hole, knowing himself trapped somewhere in a room outside of his life, outside his snug hideaway in the alley wall where his beggar day should end!
He rolled over, hiding his face from all of it, and reviewed every part: Why did his name mean so much to that horrible priest and the rest of them? He knew that Baltshazar was a heroic name but an awkward one, no one had ever smiled at him in Al Musar when he told it to them. It apparently had even shocked his mother when his father gave it to him at his infant naming ceremony.
He tried hard to remember his people’s age-old legend about the original Baltshazar, a strange foreign man who’d outshone the Chaldean arts of the great Babylonian priests.
He remembered how his Grandmother had told how the legendary foreigner, Baltshazar, had been cornered by the Babylon king into a showdown over their folk-majic, and that after the stranger won he was grandly declared chief majus above all Babylonian maji, – a high honour for him maybe, but being that Chaldean knowledge of astrology and mystical powers were what exalted the Chaldee people above all the other races around them and earned them a place over Babylon’s royal courts, the name ‘Baltshazar’ was an awkward one for any Chaldean to have.
Hamar had preferred to answer to, ‘Hamar’. But now the weighty name was back.
He could make no more sense of it. The only thing he was sure of in all that had just gone on was that the astounding energy had seemed natural to him, had even been easy to keep within himself when it was there, along with an authority that had never been his. And now all of it was lifting from him, none of it under his control, not even the sharpness of the memory.
He slept deep in the silk and velvet that night, so tired out he never even rolled over. He woke to find a steaming wash basin on a stand beside him, a silver bottle of oil, fresh garments, a tray of food, and a servant who carefully kept his eyes down when backing out of the room to leave Hamar alone again. Surrounded by the tapestried walls, his cloak on its stand, only the pains in Hamar’s body assured him he wasn’t dreaming.
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