by Segoy Sands
*
First field was planted in barley already a hand tall, second field in potatoes. A small stream, a plank bridge, and a gentle slope separated second field from twin brook field. Amid the windbreak trees at the top of the slope, Horn was tethered. And there was Wren, standing next to a horse black as tar. For a moment, she guessed it was the horse that had pulled those tortured sounds from Tai and Srid’s throats. But there was something on the ground between Wren and the horse. The dogs cleaved to her as she stepped closer, worried.
“She fell off,” Wren said. “The horse came out of the woods. She fell off its back.” His eyes were like mother’s, only diffident. That was a lot of words, for him. Lately she’d seen the effort in his face. He’d been trying harder, with her and with mother, to be the man of the house.
“Did you touch her?” she tried to keep contact with his eyes.
When he looked down at the ground that way, it was hard to hear him. Boinn had to ask him again. “Did you touch her, Wren?”
“No,” he shook his head.
*
She was remembering her village, the thatched cottages and slate gray clouds of Yssera, the cry of gulls and smell of rain and salt. It hurt. Words like home, childhood, family might have thrown themselves forward to explain the hurt, but the truth was more elemental. What hurt was the memory of the sound of the pounding surf. Each time a wave struck the sand, one cascade of indeterminacies passed across and through another. Time itself was the hurt. They were poor, in the north, near the sea. Once, she had seen a monster eel washed up on the rocks, curled along the shoreline for a hundred yards, its granite gray, mottled body heaving and falling with the somber swell of the waves. Its dread eye had filmed over, and its long, white, fleshy whiskers moved about, limp, in the ebb and flow of tide. Its image came back to her, its eel flesh, its blind milky eye – the beaching of a sea serpent. That creature, drowned in air, was herself. It had taken twenty years for time to show her that.
She was a dark ray passed back into the spectrum of light. It hurt to be one and many. It hurt to live. A woman was singing over her, a highlander. In the periphery, a quick, sensitive face hovered. A boy with hazel eyes like the mother’s. The slow melody moved into words.
In darkness, whole.
In wholeness, dark.
She was lulled asleep, for a few heartbeats or a few hours. The boy – no, a girl now, with deft hands and smoldering eyes – held a pungent infusion to her lips. Thick-tongued, she drank, as the girl stirred smudge in the air. She turned onto her side. Her head and heart were pounding. The world was nothing but pounding. It was meaningless to ask if the pounding had a purpose. She woke in the night on a firm bed, to the fragrance of sweetgrass. The quiet house spoke of cleanliness, of early rising and honest sleep, of life obedient to the cycle of day and dark. Were the two not one? Her bed was across from the hearth. Embers gleamed red in an intricate slate chimney. Instead of a second floor, the builder had made shallow lofts and left the conical ceiling high and open. Her mind was not ready to cling to details. It hurt, in a physical way, to be impinged upon by the world. Too much, too soon. When she closed her eyes, her mind swam, her ray fractured; the only relief was to succumb to the oblivion, the rhythmic waves. In darkness, whole. In wholeness, dark.
It was daylight. The girl brought her tea and curd. She forced her eyes to focus. The girl’s eyes blazed impossibly bright, opals in the sun, silver-green infernos.
“How do you feel?” The highlands were in her accent.
The question seemed to have several meanings, but she forced her mind to limit itself. Even the stirring of the intention to speak increased the time-compression. She could almost see how the act of speech divided new time particles in the world. How it subtly diminished one’s vital energy. Streams of time particles attracted to streams of time particles. She felt nauseous. The other one she’d glimpsed, the boy, and this girl also, remained curiously real; neither dissolved in the qassig, but instead appeared even more substantial, in the world-unweaving pattern patternless.
Ill, highland girl.
The mother came, and touched her forehead.
“You’re past the worst.” Her hair was tightly braided, not wild like the night before. “Boinn,” she nodded toward the door. “I’ll tend our guest.” As the daughter left the room, tension melted from her body. “Rest,” she said. “You’re the third. You’re the last. Now my work begins.”
*
They were on the causeway in the moonlight, a bit away from the house. White mist curled around the edges of wood and stone, rolling slowly over the black bog as frogs croaked the alien night-rhythm that hummed from the earth. It was worrisome, mother asking her to ride to Tarn, the tiny hamlet near Twill. Mihala was in Tarn. Best the family avoid ties to that woman, who everyone knew was an open adherent of Tel Atael. Out here, in the high country, a person could think and do what she wanted, so long as she kept it to herself, but for years Mihala had been trying to build a cylch to worship the Dark Lady. If secret cylches were going to crop up somewhere, no better place existed than the area around Twill. Enough of the men had been in the Cora, and were skulking now, close to Dalach but also far enough away. Like so many of the Cora old timers, father kept his own counsel and raised his family far enough out to steer clear of tax collectors. Far enough out to pretend to be free. But people said bitterness brewed up north of the Turquoise, and that some women kept icons of La Teine and Tel. Anyone who associated with Mihala inevitably got marked as a wrach. Was that what mother was? Some knew more about her than she’d ever told Boinn. She’d just repeat the same old yarn, about being in the Spiral but losing her mind, and then meeting father and joining the Sei Sí. She never said anything about the rebellion, but Boinn was not an idiot. She’d heard. Lorca had done things a Spiral sister wasn’t allowed to do. Why hadn’t the Calyx come for her? Why was she helping crossers now? The woman in their house was a shade, an adept of the rites of the Telesterion. Boinn had the evidence of her own eyes.
“Someone will see me going in her house.”
Lorca looked tired. In recent years, her hair had been changing sun for moon, gold for silver. “It won’t matter.” She looked at her in that clean unreachable silence. It hurt.
“Why won’t you tell me anything?”
“I promised your father. He wants Durness to be yours.”
She could almost laugh at that. It was only a stupid crannog where no one ever came and nothing ever happened. Did he want her to waste her entire life, when she felt the world calling? She could laugh, but she did not, because she knew that for her father this deserted place meant something. He saw it as his kingdom. His world.
Lorca read her heart through her face. “Once you start on the path, you can’t turn back. That’s why I’ve waited, Boinn.”
“You’ve waited because you’re afraid of what I’ll do.”
“You’ll make mistakes,” Lorca said, matter of factly. “You’ll come to the point where there are only wrong choices.”
“I know that.”
The frogs croaked loudly around them, their strange voices pulsing. A faint white glow surrounded Lorca’s form, grew suddenly stronger, then waned. Even as it waned, it grew twice a strong. Again it waned, but her mother seemed to flow toward her, though she was only steps away, flow and grow larger, the whiteness all around face. Even as she saw it, it blotted out the moment, blotted the memory, and appeared again, stronger than before, and twice again, and twice twice, the whiteness, her mother, the whiteness, until she felt free. It came with a sound thousands of times louder than the frogs, a sound in the silence like the singing of infinite particles. The sound dissolved all things and created all things, an intense driving bliss.
Boinn stood, uncertain. “Is it Urra or Arru?”
“Respect both,” Lorca said, looking away into the dark water. “And the Irri, too. Know the proper ways. Live with a diligence finer than sifted flour. But inwardly, forget these divisions.” She looke
d at her lovingly and sadly. “Knowledge is sorrow. Doubt, deceit, and scorn are its clutches. Don’t wait too long. Come into the sweetness.”
The chorale of tiny green marsh frogs was loud around them, and the backdrop of silence even louder, the presence of the planet, vast, indifferent, and patient.
*
On his way back from the well, the sound of hooves heading for south road nearly made Wren slosh icy water onto his shoes. Perle’s gait. It had to be Boinn riding toward Tarn. That meant he was the only one there to protect Lorca. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the crosser. Its horse must still be standing there out in the field in the darkness. Or maybe it had gone back to wherever it had come from. Its eyes had no irises and no whites. It had stood there, eerie, unmoving, watching with those black eyes as Boinn rigged a stretcher, and rolled the crosser into it with two staves. When Horn began to pull the crude stretcher bearing its rider across the deep, rich, newly ploughed furrows, it made no move to follow them. Though they went slowly enough, the queer shadow-body was jounced around badly, and he was beginning to wonder what they would do about the rough beams of the causeway when Lorca met them and without hesitation gathered the crosser into her arms. She said a crosser couldn’t pull you into the Entuthon because it was well and truly in the Erwon, and that they shouldn’t call it an it because it was a woman even though it weighed less than a woman would weigh. He knew it was a woman, but it was also not a woman. Though he could not distinctly see its eyes, mouth, ears, nose, or any of its features, it was beautiful. Lorca made a bed for it, near the hearth, and Wren felt uneasy with it in the room. He felt pulled to look at it, and when he looked away, at his mother or sister, or at the fire, the things of flesh and substance seemed unreal, tinged with extra colors.
“Go fetch water,” Lorca had told him.
“Is it true that it can cross back, mother?”
“If she lives.” He could hear it in Lorca’s voice, the distance. The woman sitting in the chair was not his mother; he’d accepted it long ago. When he saw her in the whiteness, his thoughts, words, and deeds must be impeccable or he might pollute the blessing.
Now he’d fetched the water, but he would not go in. He’d just go out into the marsh a ways, into the woods. He’d go to the woods, and then to the bridge near the fields; higher ground, where stars seemed to well into the world and where heavy-winged owls slouched between perches. He’d go to the bridge, to watch the stream, rippling in the moonlight. It flowed cold and swift, without yesterday or tomorrow.
*
He’d been standing on the bridge, oblivious to time, in the trill of the stream, and the sighs of needle-laden boughs, and the crystalline dissonance of the stars. The music was in him. He forgot comparisons and judgments. He was not even afraid to see them coming, the three plasmic specters gliding over the furrows, barely disturbing the soil. He knew he should run, but he was too interested. Their bodies were almost void. No hair, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth. They were beautiful. He could not look away.
As in a dream, they quivered forward, as if welling through, into this world, so that he could feel the pull of that other world, the way a tired mind feels drawn to deep sleep. The one in the middle came forward and stroked his face, the others rippling at her side. At her touch, he felt freed of bodily burdens, all that held the heart to flesh, as though a weight came off him heavy as the pressures at the bottom of the sea. A shimmering face emerged from the plasma of her form: every detail, each individual silk strand of hair, each mottle of color was startled onto her flesh by the cold night air. He could see every raised pore of her skin. Softly she leaned to his mouth and kissed him, so that he shuddered, unmoored as if by potent liquor.
“Ah, who’s sealed your throat?” she breathed.
His breath came in shivers, at the smell of her hair and the brush of her breasts. At her side, the wraiths quivered, their abdomens a dark triptych where endless pairs of lovers joined in every form of union, in the single gelatinous pulse of life and death and endless interpenetration. There was a hush, a wind, a moment of oblivion. They must have flowed past him or through him. His mind could not think beyond the nonhuman presence welling all around him so forcefully: the porous old wood, the sponge, pulp, and pith of assimilative trees, moss, fungi, microbial soil. Existence welled forth as non-existence. There was only the crenellated bark of fir, spruce, and arborvitae, the rust and copper of needles on the dank forest floor, the distant, mindless, mechanical chorale of marsh frogs. For an unknown lapse of time, there was awareness with no person. It was not terrible, non-existence. It was naked and extraordinary, but he could not hold in its ground. Light-headed, he found his way to the bridge’s other end, scrambled down the bank to the pebble wash, and plunged his head in the bracing current – once, twice, three times.
He knelt by the stream, permeable, as though space flowed through and through, from itself to itself. He was too borderless to try to go home. Above the stream’s pure ebullience, silence expanded from an incorruptible source. It bubbled through him, original, from the origin, which was not in time. Whether or not one was there to experience it, it was. He knelt, and the stream was a bottomless pool. A luminous ground began to arise, like a full moon, everywhere and nowhere, without shelter. The smooth stones beneath the ribbon of current were faintly aglow, as were the trunks of trees, the lineaments of his body.
He looked at the bridge, then, and an animal sound forced itself from his core. There, on the coarse planks, his body was still kneeling, as it had been kneeling when the lady kissed him. He understood. He was a mental body. He stretched out his arms and looked at his numinous hands. He stepped forward and set foot on the water. It supported him. The current passed beneath his feet. Cedar branches loomed over him, heavy limbs draped in soft, fanning needles, welling with the alien.
2 THE RED DOOR
“She’s from La Teine, this infant babe, this vessel,” crooned Ootha, the toothless aksa of Red Flower Spiral. Age had done gruesome things to Ootha. Her hands, which had just caught Erete’s glistening newborn babe, were blue-veined and mottled, skin stretched over narrow bone to the point of translucence. Her doddering neck hung in long wrinkled wattles. Her milk-filmed, rheumy eyes seemed half-blind. The worst was the voice. It seemed obscene that a voice like that should come near a baby, the sound of the grave addressing itself to a life that had only been seconds in the world. Yet the infant responded with its own hoarse little cries, and a moment later it was placed at its mother’s breast, where it could feel the warmth and hear the sound of the pulse beat that had directed its long metamorphosis. Immediately, it latched and began to suck, and Erete felt herself fill with contented love.
When the birth pangs grew keen, she’d sent young Valla to bring the aksa. Every woman dreaded seeing the old woman at her labour. It meant for certain that something was wrong. But this was different. She had known that Ootha must be there. The infant had been conceived in the fires and must be sealed. She found, too, that she was soothed by Ootha’s skilled presence. Her teas and ointments worked. The pain had grown manageable and the child was born vigorous. There was a peace in the room, too, as if the air danced.
Now, still a few hours before dawn, Erete absorbed every exquisite detail about her daughter, each an instantaneous creation, the glister in her little dark eyes, the flaring of her perfect nostrils, the lift and fall of her tiny chest, the movements of her pink fingers, with their perfect nails. The little being was taking in its mother with equally profound attention. Gazing proudly at her fire-red cheeks and shock of brazen hair, a name burst from her mouth, “Ashe.”
“She’s from La Teine,” the crone hobbled over, and took her carefully, “but not like me, and not like the aksas before.” The bent old woman sat cradling the girl-babe beside the labour-bed. “This flame burns my hands.”
Erete was too lost in joy and exhaustion to care what Ootha said, but she murmured, “Is it fever? Give her to me.” She had given birth standing, bent over a
sturdy chair, red-faced, coursing sweat, cursing. Timid Valla, too young yet even for the first woman sign, had helped her wash away the blood and broken waters, cloth herself, get into the bed. It was Ootha who had caught the baby and washed off the vernix, breathing prayers to the ellieri, not the Urra but the Arru, the fiery ones cast into the Ignis. To pray to the Arru was forbidden. To serve the Red Lady was forbidden.
Molecules danced nakedly in the air. It was years since she’d been clear enough to see the qassig. In a sudden accident or shock, anyone might glimpse it. All that stood in the way were the ossifications of habit and belief. It was neither habit nor belief. The mind feared it and sought shelter in something that lasted, something permanent, something that could be explained. Even the aksas of the other spirals feared it. Even the Urra in the clear light of the Beulah heavens feared it, though its bliss had raised them to the Ellieri. It wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t hard. It was soft, it was easy. Most people never even knew they feared it, never even knew they were afraid. They contracted and did not know they contracted. She had heard of schools in Grael where learned men, Aurum scholars in gowns and caps, quibbled over mind and matter, subject and object: libraries filled with dusty books, legions of words, each ciphered letter a soldier in a battle such as a five year old boy might wage. But who could understand what could not be understood, what was not knowledge? The babe was silent in the old woman’s arms. Erete lifted her head from her sweat-drenched pillow and saw the translucent world floating on the lens of the new eyes, and the clouded, calcified world caught in the old ones.
