The Schedule of Víhaan

John Clark Smith

10 Samu

Wherein we return to the present from Hután’s recollections

and learn while Hután is in Samu
Carina’s story and her abduction,
the identity of her patron,
Carina’s training,
the Cube Fortress
and why Rita died.

Víhaan, despite his own agenda, hadn’t forgotten

his willingness to assist Hután with two enigmas—

First, who took Carina, where they took her and why,

and Second, how did Rita perish from a heart attack?

A few surprises surfaced despite the many details,

such as the connection between Carina’s abduction

and the series of events that ended in Rita’s death,

a fact that meant, though rescuing Carina was a start,

Hután sought to know who risks abduction when Carina

had a powerful and protective personal patron

as well as members of the Remnant supporting her?

Long ago he had learned that there is always more to know

and new knowledge leads to ignorance and secret knowledge.

To remind himself he would chant two lines of mystery:

“I think not ‘I know well’ yet I know not ‘I know not;’ He

of us who knows It, knows It, yet he knows not ‘he knows not.’”[1]

After the meeting ended at Andaman headquarters,

Hután boarded a plane on route to a Polynesian

island, Samu—a location The Schedule suggested—

a forested island with gorgeous beaches, rocky cliffs,

one hundred caves, a dormant volcano, several small

villages around its coasts and one large town, Latika,

where The Schedule disclosed they now were holding Carina.

On the way he received a long text message from someone

unknown to him but claiming he was Carina’s patron

yet offered no name while acting as if he knew Hután

and requested Hután ask Carina to contact him—

the assumption being he couldn’t contact Carina

himself but only it seems through the Remnant and Hután—

and say to her Eger, a word unfamiliar to him

until he asked George, which promptly said it was a city

a couple of hours by train from Budapest, Hungary.

Hután was aware that her unknown patron had guided

Carina to the Remnant—she often talked about it—

by encouraging her to go to a Buddhist retreat

in Mount Shasta, California when Udaki was there

and where Carina could show a corrupt Hungarian

politician the toll his harsh policies inflicted

on the constituency until a brutal snowstorm

struck the region, stranding all guests, giving Carina time

to meet and talk with Udaki—the politician’s mind

remaining unchanged—talk that eventually convinced her

to join the Remnant, though the patron had signaled Hután

and Udaki that Carina would be there and how much

he wanted his prodigy to belong in the Remnant.

Yet the meeting was fortuitous for the Remnant too,

since Hután and Udaki also scouted Carina

a few months previous to the patron contacting them

and were impressed with her focus, skills, and maturity.

They too were waiting for the proper opportunity.

Now the patron appears again here, clearly very aware

that something has happened to Carina, and sends this code

word Eger, which will mean something when Hután rescues her,

a rescue that had to remain uncertain as he was

without his team, such as Carina herself, to help him—

since Udaki and he had agreed he must act alone.

Yet the patron was more aware than a code word would show.

This patron also paid for and arranged a covert passage

on a boat captained by a man who knew the back story,

the causes why these events happened, and who was involved.

Though he hadn’t traveled beyond the islands, to Hután

he seemed “to know the world without going about,”[2] a man

essential, for Hután had never visited Samu,

had no knowledge why Carina would have been taken here,

but, most of all, he had always had a dreadful feeling

about abductions—the abducted are either never found

or they are found dead in rarely pleasant ways of dying.

These were his thoughts when he rowed his boat to a dock

distant from busy shores, a place where the captain said

he would go unnoticed, and he trusted the old fellow,

because what Hután did know, he had learned from the captain,

who not only knew about Samu and its politics and society,

but about the people who caused this event to happen.

The captain told the tale as told to him by the patron:

A princess secretly bore an illegitimate child

and let the father raise the child while the princess married,

became a queen, had three sons—one of whom was Prince Andres—

but the princess, now the Queen, learned that the father—who had

a palace of his own on another island—had turned

her daughter into a spy, a warrior, a martial

arts expert, well-versed in weapons, the arts, economics,

sciences, languages, but importantly, a cowgirl,

he was proud to say, as rugged as any gunslinger;

and that angered the Queen more than all the other training

he was foisting on her daughter, because his obsession

with the American West was so vulgar, so irksome

and also so American, a culture she hated,

that, even if he had Royal blood and she could have

married him, she wouldn’t have married him, not when she saw

his own palace and the tasteless interior décor,

an amalgam of house styles from that period—or what

he believed copied the aesthetics of the Old West view

of interiors—with a lot of objects made of wood,

stone, leather, metal, in a simple hand-made rustic look,

and a varied assortment of mounted animal heads.

She couldn’t conceive of walking around every moment

of her day looking at those rugs, furniture, and walls,

but an even greater travesty was when he wanted

his daughter to belong to that cowardly, liberal,

sissy, Sunday school bunch of idealists, the Remnant,

not Dvorak, which she supported and greatly funded,

even using her son Prince Andres on Dvorak’s missions.

No, she couldn’t tolerate that, she had to do something,

and not let an idiot who struts in flashy cowboy

outfits and boots, who attempts to talk in a nineteenth century

accent of Old West townsfolk, try to brainwash Carina.

No, she wouldn’t allow it, none of it, she had to save

the girl and introduce her to the ways of the Queen.

So first she tried to threaten Hután himself by warning him

she would hurt his wife Rita unless he fired Carina,

a common threat that Hután ignored when used against him.

But the Queen wouldn’t be ignored, she continued her plan

to terrorize Rita constantly for several hours

by barking dogs, pounding the windows and doors, girls screaming,

keeping her from leaving, yelling out cruel threats at her,

shooting bullets up to the sky, and non-stop banging drums.

Perhaps another woman might have survived the trauma,

a less fragile personality who feared less the country,

but Rita lived in a state of fright before the terror,

her heart panicked too many times, she fainted and awoke,

fainted and awoke, five times to her worst nightmare,

a scene she had seen in her imagination daily,

till finally the heart, the mind, could not recover

and her life slipped away, with no one nearby to save her.

Afraid no more, her house under attack, Hután’s dog Wink

placed there to keep her company to scare off intruders;

but there were no intruders. The danger remained outside.

Wink’s last defense was to growl and bark and prowl for a while,

but even Wink, when he saw Rita lifeless on the floor,

stopped and lay down beside her, his head resting on her chest,

and stayed beside her until they took her body away,

the entire incident not what the Queen had intended.

She wanted only to coerce Hután to find a way

to release Carina so she would then join Dvorak.

She didn’t want the father to influence Carina,

but in the end, she blamed Rita’s death on weakness and fear,

and refused liability or regret and moved on.

At that point the captain stopped and stared at Hutan’s tear-streaked

face, this part of the story making him so furious

he couldn’t stop his tears and rushed on quickly to the sea

as if he was intending to plunge into its dark depths.

Instead, he stopped at the edge and picked up a couple shells

and hurled them into the water, then fell on to his knees

and cried with far greater force, ending in a long shrill scream.

After, he became very still and tried to meditate

and “turn the light around to shine inward so that the mind

is not aroused by things,”[3] as he had practiced so often,

finally relinquishing himself to the true story

of how Rita died and dissipating his emotions:

‘The Queen killed Rita? She caused her death? Carina’s mother?’

The Queen never seemed to care whether her first paramour,

Carina’s father, had big plans for his brilliant daughter

or wanted her to become what he could never achieve

even with all his money, a good outlaw in the Wild

West—but the “west” in this case was his homeland, Hungary.

He raised her to combine all her training, skills, and knowledge

and ride into towns where corrupt evil people govern

and save the town, to do what he wished someone could have done

for his grandparents, immigrant victims of tyranny.

None of these plans did the Queen know, and, if she did, she would

have rebuffed them, even if all those tyrants Dvorak

controlled and were planted there for the welfare of the town.

So the patron, Carina’s father, watched her life slowly

unfold, proud how she was growing into such a woman,

and expected—with no help from The Schedule—that the Queen

would try to change her views and ask her to join Dvorak,

or if not, she would then jail her to prevent an escape

so she couldn’t return to the patron’s choice, the Remnant.

Those were the first assumptions, but the patron was guessing

about the plans of the Queen, with no knowledge where the Queen

was holding Carina, since the crisis now in Eger

required Carina be found and freed as soon as he could

or the crisis there and in other towns would escalate.

The captain explained that the caves were the best means to move

around the island without being noticed and Hután

should use them to find her and return her to the same place

the captain brought him and take her home on the same boat route.

Hután stopped for a moment, sitting on the sand, and thought

about Carina, how she was always supporting him.

“What are tributes, freedom, or youth compared” to her,[4] his muse,

how effective she had been in executing his plans,

how he first noticed her when she was dancing with Prince Andres

and how her two giant guards had quickly rushed her away,

but even then, he wondered why someone targeted her.

Carina believed Dvorak was trying to threaten

her patron, but Why threaten her patron? Hután had asked.

Was her mother the Queen somehow behind the poisoning?

Yet that made little sense to him: why poison Carina

when she was abducting her now for another purpose?

So Dvorak once again became the perpetrator

who sent Prince Andres to poison Carina at the ball

without knowing she was his half-sister, their true motives

unclear at first to Hután, since he saw no connection

to Prince Andres, who broke the maxim of a follower

and a sage: “Follow not that of which you have no knowledge.”[5]

But now Hután understood why the patron was a threat.

The patron planned to challenge Dvorak’s ubiquitous

dictators, not only in Hungary, and the patron

had trained Carina to stop Dvorak, even enlisting

the Remnant to help before they focused on The Schedule.

Yet Dvorak wasn’t behind this Samu abduction,

this was the Queen’s scheme—though Dvorak would gladly back her—

a personal matter between the patron and the Queen

where the Queen had to prevent this molding of her daughter

by what she described as anti-establishment, vulgar,

naïve, idealist propaganda and corruption.

After these thoughts and the captain’s avid encouragement,

Hután entered the caves and took the captain’s instruction,

as well as the information given by The Schedule.

Most of the trip was dark, even with a light evident

far down different paths, each leading to a different

location on the island, some of them stopped at the shore

areas, others remained level and led to inland

spots, while thirteen opened to the city, exiting

from the underground into diverse places, such as shops,

people’s homes, from under the street, the churches, and temples,

the police station, the bank; but the captain, who had lived

his life on Samu, guided him where The Schedule pointed.

Hután came up from under the street and was confronted

with a two-story concrete cube without windows or doors,

and he thought, as he sat on a curb on the street and watched

at least six people roaming about and looking at him,

‘Now this building reminds me of a place to keep someone

abducted or imprisoned.’ Entering it from above

or below the building were choices anticipated

by Hután, for which the patron gave a helicopter

but which couldn’t be useful until her situation

was far more clear. The Schedule could say she was in a room,

it couldn’t describe her plight. Hután needed to witness

how they were guarding her and her mental and physical state.

He walked up to the building and scanned its walls to find out

if there was a way he could climb up, but nothing appeared.

He went around the back of the building to see if there

was a fire escape or some other device for scaling,

yet each side of the cube looked like a military fortress

without any means to enter. He hurriedly returned

to the curb and realized that entrance from above may not be feasible.

Perhaps from below a cave path might lead to an entrance.

He climbed down under to the path that brought him to the street

and tried several underground paths until he found one

that The Schedule approved as leading to the concrete cube.

The path had four guards, two at the start, two at the end,

Hután disabled the first two with paralyzing gas,

the second two he allowed capture until they opened

the door and then spit out two knock-out darts at their forearms,

dressed in one of their uniforms, and cautiously wandered

up the spiral stairs to an open and dim vestibule

so frighteningly quiet he had to remove his shoes

and tread lightly the next spiral stairs to an oval shaped

area bordered by Corinthian pillars, at the center

a blue pool with Carina floating there on a mattress

face up, a rope tied to legs and arms and to four pillars.

Hután hid behind one of the pillars, looking for guards.

Though no one was noticeable, he knew they must be close

since she needed to perform basic functions at some point.

After an hour of waiting, two female guards came, released

the ropes so she could stand and walk up the steps in the pool

and offered a table, chair, and a portable toilet.

Carina sat and ate her meal, used the toilet, returned

to the water without speaking or any protesting—

which Hután found most odd, ‘Was she doped?,’ he thought at the time—

but he learned that escape from this trap was impossible.

He had to act quickly since soon the effects of the gas

and the darts would wear off and the guards would quickly find him.

When he saw the guards leave, he cut the ropes, and Carina

followed him to the roof, where the guards appeared and attacked,

but Carina had no difficulty defeating them.

While the helicopter flew them to the shore, Carina

kept her arms around Hután and continuously thanked

and kissed him, and for the first time did what she had promised

she would do, laying on that mattress in lonely darkness:

express her true feelings for this man she had so long loved

and ignore the risk that had always plagued her. I love you,

she whispered in his ear, and he held her face a long time

and stared into her eyes and in them Rita was smiling.

A stubborn wall of bricks crumbled for such a waiting heart

that pounded hard at the sight of her and feel of her skin,

and as one once blind, he acquired vision with her embrace.

I love you too, he said, the words changing a man grieving

into a man looking into a future that could be bright and light.

I’m sorry you had to wait so long for me to see you,

but that’s done: Forever now you’ll be “in my hair and eyes.”[6]

They returned to the same shore where awaited the captain

who took them to the patron’s island and a private jet

that flew them both back to the headquarters of the Remnant.

On that jet was the patron, Carina’s father, in tears,

so happy to see his daughter escape from the Queen’s trap,

but who soon returned to his own plans to free Hungary

from the many tyrants now installed there by Dvorak,

plans that Hután and she eagerly heard and accepted,

and on which the Remnant had labored before The Schedule

but upon which they couldn’t act until they had resolved

all the problems and present dangers facing the Remnant.

 

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[1] Kena Upanishad, 10, trans. R. E Hume. Principal Upanishads dated ca. 800 to 300 BCE.
[2] Dao De Jing 47, trans. Ariane Rump.
[3] The Secret of the Golden Flower, VIII.11, trans. T. Cleary.
[4] From “The Muse,” by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), trans. S. Burnshaw.
[5] From The Quran (610-632), Chapter 17, trans. M. Z. Khan.
[6] From Kenneth Fearing’s poem, “Love, 20C The First Quarter Mile.”

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Setu, December 2025