The Preserve

"I don't need any sleep. This work must be finished before I leave. It's what's expected."

The old archivist hacked away in a remote and dimly lit room in the byzantine underground chambers of the old manor house, clouded in tobacco smoke. She'd been the lord's archivist for going on 60 years now, and her eyesight could no longer be adequately corrected by the thick lenses she'd worn for decades. Her hearing was practically gone, not that it mattered because there wasn't much to hear down here. Her olfactory sense was defunct, and that was a blessing because the air she breathed down here and the food they served gagged the servants.

In the centre of the square room which was rather large—measuring roughly 625 square feet, she'd once estimated—was nothing but a table, a chair and a pendant light with a sooty shade that focused the 60-watt bulb on her work area. In the shadows of the walls behind her and to her left and right were stacks of books, manuscripts and papers collected over the centuries by the lord's ancestors. Her own work—a catalogue in no less than 60 volumes, each heavy and unwieldy—was arranged on thick oak shelves on the wall opposite and was frequently consulted with the assistance of a lighted candle.

Over the decades, the archivist had recorded much of the history of the religions of her lord's lands and those of the neighbouring lands. It was her singular focus, but in her mind it was the history of the world above in toto.

She had recorded in great detail this world's religions ... but only up to a point. At that point in the distant past for which there were no records, her knowledge terminated in a fathomless abyss of darkness. One could only 'speculate,' as her lord put it, about origins, but that she was not permitted to do. Her early 'speculations' had been taken away and burned, and she had been severely chastened for straying from the 'facts.' Certain inferences she had drawn from the annals—conclusions reached after much study and deliberation—raised questions about the lord's Lord and its all-encompassing truthfulness and utility.

Stealthily, her heretical findings had been memorized and carefully recited to ensure the fidelity of her knowledge. In her research, she had learned why the three major religions of the present day—symbolized by the circle, the square, the triangle—were so incompatible. The circle represented infinite recurrence, the square, permanence and stability, and the triangle transcendence, but all shared in common a sense of completeness ... i.e., a sense that there was no thing, no essence beyond their ken. Furthermore, each regarded the 'other' as a danger ... a danger that threatened to pollute and contaminate the true reality and therefore had to be conquered and destroyed.

For example, in the words of one scholar loosely affiliated with the religion of the triangle, the religion of the square had 'bloody borders.' She had studied the writings of others who regarded the cross as a sword, their adversaries regarding the crescent moon as a sickle-shaped weapon, and their rivals, in turn, seeing the isosceles as symbol of death by piercing. The star, representing a deviant hybridization of the circle and the triangle, represented a weapon for bludgeoning—most effective in close combat. So much the archivist could confirm from the historical reports; however, what became blindingly obvious was that these martial descriptions were equally applicable to all three—the circle, the square, and the triangle along with all their fusions and morphisms.

Even more surprising was the discovery that the connection between the military and religion was not just a phenomenon of a more primitive past. It was true today as much as it had been thousands of years ago. In fact, over the course of recorded human history, there was considerable evidence that the military and religion had been in collaboration from the beginning. Inasmuch as religion required exclusivity and domination, the military provided the means to achieving universality and hierarchy. While the scholarship and the technology grew ever more sophisticated over the millennia, the fundamentals remained timeless.

When the old archivist passed, the lord thought that all the heresy had died with her, but he failed to consider the oral history that had been carefully passed on in coded language to certain trusted servants. Nevertheless, the thoroughgoing ascendancy of written history over oral histories ensured that whatever truth there was in the old archivist's secret communications they would never effectively challenge the written word.