Adventure Four: The Emperor Milo
The dream began as any typical dream might. There was a tapping on Belamy's window from the arm of a tree, but in her mind it was her mother. Belamy was still able to feel her body in her bed as she watched her mother with her mind’s eye, until she disappeared into a more vivid dream.
Belamy was suddenly standing in front of a round, brick-red door set into the ground, like the lid of a well, and she opened it to reveal a landscape.
Bernard, her shepherd, approached her.
"We must swim upstream," Bernard growled in his dog voice. They were standing by a river.
"We will get lost up all those winding turns," Belamy said.
"Don't worry, I have a map," he told her. A map appeared in Belamy's hands, and it had a drawing of a river on it, with the number nine written in one corner.
They began to swim, but the current grew rough. Belamy lost sight of Bernard, and she climbed out of the river to see the red door again that had been set in the ground. When she opened it, there was only sand. Belamy turned around and she was in a great glass enclosure filled with the tallest trees. The ground was all bark, and there was a small cave from which a leopard prowled.
"Did you find Bernard?" the leopard asked her.
"I could not get to him," Belamy told her. She climbed on top of the leopard's cave, which was an enormous wooden stage. The footlights blinded her view of the dark audience, but she knew she had to say something.
Her perspective changed and she could see herself standing on the stage. She heard herself reciting a poem and the audience members applauded her. She could see her old kindergarten teacher sitting in the front row. The Belamy standing on the stage vanished and she was now by the riverside again, calling for Bernard.
Belamy's dream continued as such, in the nonsensical way that dreams do. But a strange thing happened when she saw the red door for a third time. She opened it up and plunged through the portal onto a wide tile floor. Her vision became greatly expanded, and her mind floated into consciousness.
"I am dreaming," she said aloud. Her voice echoed.
"Lucidly," she added. But she was uneasy. This did not feel like a lucid dream to her, and she was experienced in the feelings of dreams. This felt to her as if she were in her dream world. This felt real.
But it isn't real, she thought. I only think it is real because I am dreaming.
The tiles led Belamy down a long, low hall which had many left turns. She suspected she was spiraling inward, and would come to something in the center. Belamy was beginning to grow dizzy from going round and round each bend, always thinking the next would be the last. She finally saw a light whose source was hidden behind one final turn, and when she came around the bend, she saw that the narrow tiles of the hallway expanded out into a court which was so enormous that she could not see from one end to the other. The shiny tiles seemed to go on forever from left to right. Far in front of her she could see a great throne upon which someone sat. This was so far away that she could not make out if the figure was a man or woman, but as she trotted bravely to get a closer look, she decided that the person was most definitely male; it was something about the casually regal way he was sitting.
Sunlight poured into the court through long windows, each of which could easily have been higher than Belamy's house (which was three storeys), but they did not look any bigger than dollhouse windows because of their distance.
This must be the biggest court in all the world, Belamy thought (for she had a lot of time to think about such things). It took her quite a long time to get within talking distance of the figure, and even then she did not stop until she was only a few feet in front of the steps that led up to the throne. She could see the color of the man's eyes.
Black.
Like Rowen, the wolf’s, she thought. But at the same time, they were nothing like Rowen's. Since Rowen was a wolf, it was understandable that he might have the eyes of a powerful animal. This man's animal eyes made Belamy uneasy. Her toes itched to flee.
The man was dressed like a king, with a long fitted coat and boots pulled up to the knees of his ivory breeches. His hair was long and curled, and fell over his forehead in thick clumps. He had the long, sharp face of a military man, and he held a scepter loosely in one hand, which hung over one arm of his throne. He was swept with cool power.
"Welcome, Belamy," the regal man said; “My dear creator.” His voice was strangely accented, low and thoughtful.
Belamy grew very curious at this welcome. Only the people of her normal nightly dreams knew her by name, and nobody ever knew that she had created them.
"Excuse me, your Majesty," Belamy said, "but how is it you know who I am?"
"The things I have come to discover," he replied, "have filled volumes. I recorded them myself. That is not the correct question to ask. Not right now, at least. There is not enough time to explain before you awaken. A more reasonable question would be, simply: 'Who are you?'"
Belamy waited for him to answer his question.
"I am the Emperor Milo. This is my castle. Did you notice its size? My entire empire is built to such a scale. I suppose you could say that I am the emperor of all the land." He studied Belamy. "My land, anyway."
The emperor let his words travel through the air before adding, "There are many others, are there not?"
No body in Belamy’s dreams had ever learned for themselves that they were of a dream world. It had simply never happened, and Belamy assumed it was not possible. But here sat the calm Emperor Milo, telling her things of which only she would normally have knowledge.
"How did you do it?" Belamy asked him, at long last. "I did not think any body knew about the other lands save for myself."
The emperor lent her a silvery smile. "Now it is the two of us." He let his words go for a moment before he picked them up again.
This one likes a good patient pause, Belamy thought, to build suspense. And her heart was thudding heavily within her.
"I will tell you as much as you need to know for now," the Emperor Milo continued. "I need to ask a favor that might make sense to you. I am not as free as you may think I am. I may know about the other lands but I cannot go to them. Not unless you help me. You see, I am making plans to expand my empire, and I need to travel to other lands to do it. I have to learn everything there is to know about the world, if only you will let me.”
"I do not understand," Belamy said. "How can you know about these other lands if you have not already been to them?"
"Listen carefully," the emperor replied. "This may take me a few minutes to explain; if you don't mind."
"Please, I am entirely lost," Belamy said, frightened yet curious.
“I have done much to gain my throne,” he said. “I am not of royal blood, for I was appointed by the people. Before I was an emperor I was an ideologist, and a scientist. I was also a leader of war, and I conquered many parts of this land. I was very lucky to gain my current title; this land had been in disarray before I came to the throne. The people needed a leader, and I was there. But they feared me because of my power. My people, to this day, do not know the source of my power; the power which ultimately made me their emperor; the power which allowed me to discover other lands; the power which brought you to me. They think I am a magician. They think I am a god in the form of a man."
"Why?" Belamy asked him. "What power is so great?"
"There is none," the Emperor Milo said. "My people only believe that my power is great. I made some great discoveries as a scientist that my people do not understand. I was able to make these discoveries because I see the world very differently from any other man."
"I am not following your thoughts," Belamy said. "Do you have some secret you wish to tell me?"
"My secret. Yes." The Emperor Milo let his eyes drift for a moment, then he pulled them back to the small girl before him. "There is still a little I must say before I can move on to that. First, let me explain to you my work as an ideologist. You do know what an ideologist is?"
"It sounds like it has something to do with ideas," she said. “And I’ve learned that –ologists tend to put –isms at the ends of words.” It was a simple conclusion, but it was in fact the one thing that made the emperor stumble over his next line.
"Er," he said. "Yes, well. My work as an ideologist brought me to create a theory of the human perception, which I have been working on all my life, and which is called Human Perception--" this was where he paused for a tiny moment-- "Theory."
"You mean Human Perceptionism."
"I mean Human Perception Theory."
"But you meant Human Perceptionism."
"This theory," the Emperor Milo continued, "states that all of the things that we humans perceive come to us in waves. For example: we see, and we see using waves of light. We hear, and we hear using waves of sound. We think, and we think using waves of the brain. All of these waves come to us through the use of different sensory organs. We see with our eyes, we hear with our ears, and so on. And if you know anything about waves, you know that all waves are on a spectrum, and we can only perceive a tiny piece of it. We cannot see what comes before or after a certain color, we cannot hear under or above a certain pitch, and we cannot grasp thoughts under or above a certain level of consciousness. Am I clear?"
"Yes, but I have been learning many of those things already," Belamy said. "And many of them do not apply in this world. In fact, do you not think I am a small exception, being here now?"
"Yes, and indeed, your gifts were half of what drew you to me. I could not have brought a person here who did not share some of my power.” The Emperor Milo leaned forward on his throne. "Our shared power is knowledge. We both know everything about the world. You know everything because you created it. I know everything because I am able to sense all of it. My powers are so strong that I can see the entire spectrum of waves. I can even see waves that come seemingly from nowhere, what I know now to be other lands. I can see so much more color than any other man, and hear so many more things."
"Can you hear what I am thinking?" Belamy asked.
"In a way, I can. But not with my ears. I can see what your mind is sending my way, and it is a flow of colors. The main part of my theory, of course, is the interpretation of these colors; these waves. I have already learned to alter thoughts using a collection of mirrors; to interfere with certain waves and send them where I intend for them to go. That is how I brought you here. I called you here by altering your thoughts."
Belamy tried to follow all of this. She thought she should have been excited to meet someone kind of like herself. She thought she would have loved to meet him. But this emperor was only giving her a dull sense of worry. She could not place this sense, and she felt much of it was above her understanding.
"So now," Belamy said, slowly, "you want me to help you travel into other lands? So that you may become a greater emperor?"
"In so many words," the Emperor Milo said, shamelessly. "But I would do so only with the completion of my theory at heart, with only the advancement of science at heart, and only with the permission of others."
"That is not true," Belamy pointed out to him. "I did not give you permission to bring me here."
"I could not have asked it," the emperor said. "I had to take it only this once."
"You may wish to take it a second time," she said. "Emperor Milo, I thank you for having me here, but I cannot help you. I cannot let you go into lands that are not your own in order to rule over them. I am afraid..." she hesitated. "I am afraid something could happen to them."
The emperor frowned slightly at this. "Belamy," he addressed her-- and she knew he was becoming short with her, though his voice was in perfect control-- "you move through these lands every day and you are just a child. You are the reigning force of these lands yet you have barely lived. I have studied for years to gain knowledge of these lands through which you so happily come and go as you please. Has it ever occurred to you that we may want some freedom from your rule?"
Belamy had never thought of herself as a ruler. But now that she thought of it, she had to admit that since her world of dreams had sprung from her own imagination, she must be the ruler whether she liked it or not.
"I do not set any laws on the lands," Belamy said in her defense. "I only create them and let them go."
"But that still gives you some responsibility to me, and to your other creations," the Emperor Milo said.
"I will not help you go into other lands," Belamy decided. The Emperor Milo stared at her for a long time. He was calm and receptive to her words. Belamy tried not to blink, and kept looking into the animal eyes of this emperor.
"Very well," he said at last. "I do hope to meet you again. It was a great pleasure."
Belamy suddenly awoke to the safety of her twigh-lit bedroom, away from the Emperor Milo. For a moment she didn't know where she was, and then she realized that she was curled up on the floor just in front of the chalk outline of her dream world. This frightened her because it meant she must have sleepwalked into her dream world. She could only guess the Emperor Milo had something to do with that. Belamy began to cry just enough so that her mother came into her room to see what had happened.
"My little Belamy," her mother said soothingly, tucking her back into her bed; "Whatever is the matter? Did you have a nightmare?"
"Yes," she answered. “But I am afraid that this one will not go away."
"All nightmares go away," her mother said. "The daylight chases them away."
Belamy thought of the emperor, sitting in a pool of light on his great throne. She only nodded. Her mother stayed with her until she began to breathe more deeply, but even then she was pretending, and she dared not go back to sleep for fear of encountering the emperor again. She thought that first thing in the morning, she would see if her friend Rowen had made it over the mountains into the valley full of prey. She would see if he might be able to help her, or give her some advice.
Even with the assurance of seeing her friend the next day, she could not stop thinking about the animal eyes of the emperor.
Adventure Five: Rowen has a Clever Idea
Copyright 2010
