The Gates of Paradise

by Segoy Sands

  The Gates of Paradise

  Book Two of the Dark Spiral

  SEGOY SANDS

  “He who shall hurt the little Wren

  Shall never be belovd by Men”

  William Blake

  For my family

  Copyright © 2016 SEGOY SANDS

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0-9768265-7-7

  1 Dolur

  He woke feeling the many-mawed mwyäwr eating away at him from within. A morbus, northern folk called it, in hushed tones, with an uncomfortable downward glance. Strong drink was the only help for the afflicted, a bracing sip or two at first, and more as need be, to dull the edge of that exquisite nibbling, that scurrying of small, deft, agitated feet. As remedies go, it was perverse, more bane than balm, more akin to the disease than to its ease. Even a child had sense enough to know that to cure evil with evil was simply to feed evil. But what could a grown man do? What palliative was there for pain but death in small doses, the mercenary lord of despair whispering ingest me, take me into yourself, accept this loan of temporary relief against your own life?

  To appease the morbus, he sustained it. To sleep, he pacified it, only to quicken its appetite. Starved of sustenance, it grew. When it began to bore its way even into his dreams, he knew he was far gone. One look into the eye of that small, snarling fiend, and how could he deny it was part of his mind?

  Some mornings, it let him wallow until midday, dreaming of his wife and children and their quiet marsh home, and all he had lost. But this morning, laughing light spilled through the cracks and seams and pinholes in his musty tent, mocking him with infinite joyous energies. Others would be loathe to waste all that glittering promise, eager to better themselves, but he would trade all that light for more sleep. A heavy ban lay over him, which the other men sensed. Whether it was because they understood his pain, or took him for a taciturn, bitter bastard, they steered clear of his black tent.

  Often enough, even when the eater fell dormant, he dreamed of blood-soaked battlefields that became the fields of his own homestead, and of rage against enemies that became rage against his own wife and children. He wasn’t fit to be human, and maybe never had been. There was that small consolation. A man who was not human need not fret over a little lost sleep. He could turn back into stone. Lying there, in his bedding, gazing up at the tent ceiling, he tried his best to feel nothing and be nothing. But the heavy fabric could not stop him from remembering and from seeing. Today, he saw Wren, with his mother’s quick grey eyes. Of all his children, Wren was the least like him. He thought differently and felt differently. A man could not account for such a difference in his own offspring.

  They all sided with Lorca, and he couldn’t blame them. Cole and Dillan would likely soon be old enough to see how easy it was to judge, how hard to be, a man. They might understand a bit better, but not enough to stop his firstborn from choosing to outdo him in his worst traits, and his second to outdo him in his best. Cole would court women out of no real love and enemies out of no real hate because he was an eldest son who would never stop trying to prove himself, too handsome for his own good and perennially in love with danger. When he was a boy, maybe they’d tried too much to protect him from himself, and so he’d mixed up his will to exist with his will to die.

  Dillan had the benefit of watching his older brother in his pointless self-assertions, his fight with the sea, and would, gods have mercy, find some smooth-armed maid to ground him in his body, and a circle of pride-puncturing cater-cousins to anchor him in his mind. He had a good face to match a good heart that took honest pleasure in common company. But the gods never chose the brilliant ones to carry the baich, the heavy gift. They gave it to Dillan and not Cole, just as they’d given it to Rufus and not his brother Awenydd, though Awen’s brilliance shone, and many looked to him for leadership. If he’d shone less, maybe he’d have lived to lead the Sei Sí. A man needed to dull his own brilliance sometimes. Eyes were watching. Eyes of the court. Eyes of local clansmen. At twenty, he was knifed in a tavern. A brawl over a woman, some said.

  Cole was as handsome, or more handsome than Awen, and discovered young the joys of seducing the fairer sex. He did things for pure vanity and style, smoking arachuan, drinking groc, cutting a figure of studied nonchalance, composing dark romantic tunes on a weathered old chittan that an experienced ear might tell for a genuine varius. Worldly he might seem, but there was something that set Cole apart. Beneath it all, he had his mother’s unearthly spirit.

  Boinn, ironically, was the earthiest of the lot. Since she’d reached his knee, she’d known exactly how to manipulate him, putting people in their place and laughing at their airs, as if she was the most pragmatic creature in the world, and the most at home, but she didn’t fool him. Her mother’s fey was in her, too, and who knew how deep? He had to worry about all of his children, each in their own way. That was a stubborn fact, as non-negotiable as a stone on the ground.

  But none worried him more than Wren. His mother’s son, he was more like Lorca than any of the other three. He saw straight through lies. Life was full of lies, and many a good life was built on lies. A man who was too good for the world would waste what the world had to offer. Life was a gift, for living. Had she already sent him to the bedes? Maybe that was best, though it was cachu, a life spent mooning over ideas, wasting one’s days trying to give substance to thoughts. And Wren was likely too smart for them. When they were done trying to curb his intelligence, they’d realize he was different. They’d deny him the little bit of human warmth and fraternity that even they could offer, and sentence him to endless book learning, which only left a man prey to his own peculiarities. How could it not? Maybe they’d earmark him for an arch-bede or even an aurumnus. The boy was better off serving dirt and air. Better the life of a solitary farmer. There were stories in Aina Livia of common people who gained true wisdom but lived a good life like everyone else. At their death, there would be signs, a full-circle rainbow over their dwelling, or sightings of them in the wind body. Such things were possible for Wren, if he managed to avoid the nets and traps of ideas.

  He should have known, back then, lying in the grass with her on Serle and Ogden’s farm. He could have married with a view to what people called happiness. But the stars or the supernals or whatever they were tempted him with fate. The stars didn’t care one bit about happiness. They pressed on you, numberless, in the inexorable cycle of numbers. You could pray to the gods if you wanted. You could worship the Lady. But the stars (some thought them beautiful) tempted you with fate, and what was that but reality?

  A prognosticator once told him he would break his foot before the next sun-return, and break his foot he had. The stars did not make him break his foot. They tempted him, assembling the conducive conditions. In the end, what you did, you did to yourself. Every person knew that in their hearts, that they were, in each moment choosing - not between right or wrong, or better and worse, but freedom or bondage. It wasn’t just mathematics. It was magic. The affinity of one event for another. The men who could sense that affinity, enter into it, and alter it by feeling the infinite in the finite were few. He was not among them. He looked up and felt the stars press on his selfish existence, for they seemed cold to him in his selfhood.

  The north was cold. Hyperborean. This was only the Hyeöku, a mild range of innocuous snow peaks that rose out of the Greenmen. The Hyeöku in turn were dwarfed by the Jökullinn, that rage of ice. Forget the Hyeöku, even the Greenmen, inviting as they seemed, would have them for dinner, though Dagda’d been clotpole enough to take some strong dissuasion to ax his plan to bushwhack through. In the end, the consensus went to the long way around, on the Iâathân Road, though not everyone agreed. Cocksure, Earc, a minor chie
ftain from Maígh, led his splinter group straight into those ravines of perpetual rain and vast networks of feral warrens.

  “A month for you, a week for us,” Earc had gloated, looking him in the eye in case he mistook his meaning. “Make good speed and you might find a few warm, wet dregs of women and drink in Ard Baile.” He knew what Earc was really telling him: “The men dislike you. I’m the one who deserves Dagda’s trust. I’m going to prove that.” A few years ago, Rufus might have met that indirect taunt with violent indignation, because Earc was a self-serving ass who was going to get a dozen men killed to suit his own ambitions. But time had taught him that there would always be schemers and men to follow them. If they didn’t mishandle the march, they’d misjudge the battlefield, because some men didn’t care about seeing their mates home to their wives. They wanted to kiss the White Bride and would give their own souls to look behind her veil, though they knew they were only going to find the crone.

  A month on the Iâathân had taken them northeast to the headwaters where the Ololon split from the upper Tourmaline, and then up steeply to Ard Baile, home of the hale and spirited Oighear. To believe them, they’d inhabited Aina Livia since long before the Orroch, who’d come, so they said, from Var, before the lands cracked and the salt sea came sluicing in between, when Skår and Var and Grael had all been part of Aina Livia, before Môr, the ocean god, strove in the deep with Djöfull, eldest of demons. Grael, they said, once fit into the Bay of Ró, near Síoshána, but in that cataclysm was spun round like a cork in a river, so that it turned toward Var. Stories to help them through the long vicious Ard Baile winters, maybe, though, from what he had heard, more often they told tales of Logolodro, the idiot rascal who won fame and fortune, time and again, deceiving many a woman, wed and unwed, out of her modesty along the way.

  Some thought the Oighear and their culture crude. But why ornament the mind so close to the northern stars? After a long journey up into the weirdly corrugated and uninviting land above snow line, to come into their company was a most welcome thing. Their chieftain, Brodor, gave three nights of feasting, with platters heaped with mountain pheasant and two kinds of roasted mountain deer, the small oily hydd and the sinewy antlered ceirw, along with three kegs of Dagda’s best groc, hauled clear across the land from Dalach. Dagda spent the first two nights trying to cajole Brodor into lending him a score of seasoned Ard Baile men, both for the expedition and for the larger cause of driving the invaders from Aina Livia. Brodor responded by telling him an elaborate story about the Jöku, who lived in an ice city in the heights of the Jökullinn, the fiercest warriors in the world if they could but be persuaded from their pursuit of celestial illumination. They followed the god-prophet Mu, who taught that, as day becomes night, and winter follows summer, so the selfish among the selfish of the impure lowlands are reborn in the ice citadel to hear the sermon of no-self.

  On the third night, Brodor raised his cup and toasted Rufus with chwisgi, squinting so that countless fine wrinkles appeared around narrow black eyes in a broad face worn by the wind to a leathery mask. Reaching into his pouch, he brought out a fetish smaller than his thumb, carved in the likeness of a thin white bear on two legs, pushing it into Rufus’s hand. Before he could thank him, Brodor nudged Dagda, whose eyes had wandered to a plump smiling woman reclining near the hearth, and said something remarkably uncouth.

  *

  This morning, aqueous light quivered on the face of Dolur. Three weeks they’d been abasing themselves at its foot, supplicants of a cruel god. When he closed his eyes all he saw was towering milky ice shot through with bands of blue and black. Ten days to plan the first attempt, and then, when everything was set and the men full of nervous excitement, clouds had moved in, thicker than sheep on sheering day, and put them waist deep in snow. Restless at the delay, the men grew superstitious, imagining the elements were taunting them. Their three Oighear guides shrugged and went back to a steady routine of tea, food, gambling, and joking. When a perfect morning came, bright and windless, they said it was the twelfth day of the month, unlucky for climbing. Dagda’s men wouldn’t wait. Rufus reneged, without compunction, because one rule he’d learned in the Cora was to be careful of impatience. It meant missteps. People thought the world owed them something, or that they could take something from it they didn’t already have. It didn’t. They couldn’t. It had taken him a good long while to understand patience. The world owed a man nothing and gave him everything. Rushing to add to that was the root cause of error. Two men fell that morning from half way up the face, and the Oighear guides, standing and watching with Rufus, made no comment. They went back to their tent, while everyone waited for the other five to come back down, murmuring of the malice of the Sí.

  Wrapped in a long black cloak, with the coarse and cunning look of an old criminal, but with a chieftain’s political acumen in his beady, moribund black eyes, Dagda spoke to the men gathered round the pit they’d painstakingly gouged into the ice. The two heavy bodies below were wrapped in winding cloth speckled with dark frozen blood.

  “The fiáin live in their world, we live in ours,” Dagda began in a gruff, quiet voice. “Something like this shouldn’t have happened. Hanlwcus and Diflas shouldn’t have come here, and lost the chance to see their wives and children again. None of us should have come here. But men suffer and gods live in bliss, and that’s what makes us men.”

  Dagda held their eyes. The snow fell. The hollow wind raked its nails across the flesh of the world.

  “In old times, if a man needed help from the Sí, this was one of the entryways. It’s been a long time since any Orroch man has come here. But we’ve come here to help our people.”

  Rufus felt their eyes fall on him, as Dagda continued.When a man had the gift of the riastrad, he knew in his bones if war was coming. He knew the taste and the scent of the battlefields to be. He knew, he could see, the numbers of the enemy. He knew the time and manner of their attack. He knew who might live and who might die. He knew what must be done for the people to survive. Few wanted friendship with such a man, but no one wanted friendship with Rufus. They knew his faults, his failures, his crimes. He married the witch, calling her a sign of hope, and what followed was a litany of hurt: Ogden’s death, the failure of the Sei Sí, the Ten Rivers Truce. They knew it was because of him that they were standing in the cold over their comrades’ bodies.

  “It’s an old gift, the riastrad,” Dagda nodded, gravely. “We don’t honor it as we used to. Some of us would throw it back in the face of the gods. But there’s only one way with gifts. Acceptance. Do you know what acceptance is? Victory, you accept. Gain, you accept. But you skip the first and the last fact. Death. That’s where we start.” He looked into the pit at the bodies of the men. “That’s where we end.”

  *

  Some of the men had loaded their packs with two, if not three, score pots of groc on the last run into Ilyf. He’d not even breakfasted, but he uncorked a bottle and took a swig, swirling it around in his mouth. A few of his teeth had gone bad this past winter, partly from the bad diet, partly from simple cachun old age. He’d gotten used to the constant pain and didn’t mind adding to it. The alcohol burned in a good way. None of it ever really stopped, the ache, and the hope to soothe it, and the dull beat of craving at the back of the brain. He knew what he was now, a lonely old man. He’d wasted too much of his life on things without substance, and the things with substance had melted away. In marriage, he’d been given a wider being, a different side to every shared moment. Now he had returned to the narrow confines of his solitary outlook. But she had hoped for too much from him if she’d expected him to see a shade. She had tried to violate a law of nature. Any man would have done what he had done, run from his own home, to a room above a tavern and an empty bottle and an old wooden chair where he could shake until daybreak.

  He took another swig and let it burn at his gum ulcerations. If it ever ate all the way through his cheeks and jaws, he’d know it was grandgore. There’d been nights whe
n grog led him to the comforts of a woman, more than one woman, all the same woman. Flesh. A man could lie to himself, but there was soul somewhere in the flesh. Some were half his age, some were other men’s wives, some expected coin. He was old, and full of sin, and the poitin from Ilyf was fine this morning.

  By the heavy steps outside his door, he could tell it was Dagda. “Petre spotted something,” the chieftain said, poking his head in. He was bundled in furs, his big red nose riddled with spider veins and thick woolen cap dusted with snow. He eyed the cup in Rufus’s hand. “Two thirds up Dolur’s lovely body, right up in the ofnadwy bosoms. A cave.” Those shrewd, beady eyes were calculating whether he was fit to stand.

  2 The rainbow stair

  She had looked upon Nembulo Nucifera. She was a yeme now, and would no longer have to share a room with other novissi. Yet she was anxious. After years of following the same routines, she suspected that the turning back would not come easy to her. All the momentum of her mind was still toward the turning away. But perhaps that was part of it, not only for her but for every new yeme. Perhaps the art was to turn one flow into its opposite, rather than come to some final ending point, some point of readiness. What, after all, had led her to think that there was an end point in the turning away? Surely, it could go on forever. And the same must be true of the turning back. Between one moment and another, there was always the turning away and the turning back, in which worlds within worlds were altered, the perilous transition unmarked. At no point might one ever achieve perfection, only wider amplitude to share one’s abilities, to serve.

  Showing her up to her new quarters higher in La Seritää Sierrellä was a young sister, at most three years her senior, in robes curiously lacking in glyphs. Her hair, brown as her limbs, was strangely angled across the brow. Her eyes were amused. In a year or two, would she have cut the rough gem of herself into such clear facets? Or would she have shipwrecked on herself and been humbled? And was the humbling part of the honing? Was the preciousness of the gem its indifference to its value?