The Gates of Paradise

by Segoy Sands

  When it came at last, and she knelt naked with her three friends on the smooth, intricately etched black stone of the qiva floor, she felt curiously free of apprehension. There were many qivas in the moon temple of Naarwa, and though all were caves, there was an artistry in their carving that made them seem small temples in their own right. It was said the qivas formed a ring around the ova of the ambas, which in turn encircled the Jnana temple, where the Aksama abided, in the perpetual peace of the blue lady. On this mid-winter’s night, each and every one of those qivas would be filled with sisters performing the rites. Certain ambas would even be admitted into the Jnana temple, to raise the sweetness with the Aksama. Lorca could feel and see it in the air, as she knelt with her sisters before Lethe, whose body was painted in the five colors, offering each of them the lyf.

  When she drank, it was as if the sweetness welled through every particle of her body, and as if there were vast expanses between each of those particles. Even the rock walls seemed to be filled with space, breathing. Or, rather, immensity breathed the walls, breathed her, breathed her sisters. One by one, spiral winds rose before them, and though hers was last to begin its dance, it did not fail to arrive. She could see her body, and the bodies of her sisters, passing through colors, of which Lethe’s body paint had been an emblem. Each color carried a feeling, warmth, wisdom, caring, wrath, all good in themselves. Dearmad had settled into blue, Saela into yellow, Jordan into green, and so, her logical mind told her, she should settle into orange. But still the waves of colors passed through her.

  Already Lethe was raising the split staff and calling to the Elkirri, and already the spinning silver of its presence began to manifest, moving too quickly around Lethe to be quite visible. Before her, and each of her sisters, the smaller vortices spun, yet each now in the form of whichever of the the three Elkirri that had chosen them. Even as Lethe had forewarned, it was impossible to focus on any Elkirri but one’s own, because with its presence there came visions. For a moment, it was said, in the first rite, one might glimpse the full blueprint of one’s life, and even more, the blueprint of the world, in the pattern of a single atom. Many sensed something of that kind, a faint intuition of having been looked at, and seen through and through, by the pattern patternless, though none remembered what they saw.

  For her, though, the spinning wind split, first into two, then four, each in distinct and organized Elkirri form, yet none more inviting than another. As they fused, radiances softly exploded in the air, space time growing thick as water, and if she looked in any direction, she saw faces, places, and events that were bubbles in the pattern patternless. She understood, with utmost clarity, that it was only the clouded state of her daily mind that made it seem to her that she was not many in one and one in many. But it was not a clouded state. It was a veil. All wore the veil but knew it not. Only the coming of the sweetness could undo it, for the veil was life without sweetness. And the sweetness came to many on whom the veil had not wholly settled, and then only to those who had so wearied of the veil, and so sorrowed for the world, that they called without knowing they called to it.

  After that night, her fears were lifted. She felt that she was part of the moon temple on Naarwa. Or, rather, she felt connected to her sisters, as if her own calm might flow into theirs, and theirs into hers. An amba came to see her, and they walked out together to the temple mons and overlooked the sea, speaking lightly of trivial things, yet all the while sharing wordless depths of peace. After that, the amba came again and led her through the temple, to the twin-leafed door of the Jnana temple, where she embraced and left her.

  The sweetness seemed to press around the entry, sizzling up and down the seam between the doors, and the doors, though of smooth pale wood, were like nacreous mother-of-pearl. She may have lifted up her hand to open them, or perhaps they parted themselves, but already they were shut behind her, and she was in a round and luminous place, low-ceilinged and close, the inmost temple of Naarwa. On the floor before her sat a woman all blue. The sweetness sang in the air around them, at such a heightened pitch that its very life prevented inert or half-dead traces of knowledge and memory. It was the presence of life to itself and not to attend to it would be turn away from life toward that which is not life. It was the gift, when the gift is not wasted. It was too close to be recognized, too easy to understand, too wonderful to accept. It entered the world in every moment more forcefully than all other things combined and yet asked nothing of anyone. It was a gift freely given that could only be freely received.

  “Sister,” said the Aksama, who was bald and smooth-skinned and, she had no doubt, more than a century old, “sit with me.”

  “Forgive me, mother,” she replied. “I am unworthy of this place.”

  “You cannot taint it. Peace, sister, is more ferocious than war.”

  She sat then, with little room to spare, across from the Aksama and felt herself subside into sweetness. It was not existence. It was that which never exists. Nothing could be added or removed.

  Yet the Aksama said, “We are comforted by the small healing, but would delay great healing to some other time and place. You bring great healing to the spiral.”

  “I’m nothing,” Lorca said.

  “You are Lorca. I am Diafael,” the Aksama said. “Those are names. That’s good enough. If I hoped to correct things, I would become peevish and irascible. I am too old to bother.”

  As she looked at the blue woman before her, she saw that she was not fixed but fluid, a moment to moment appearance out of emptiness, fading, vanishing, reappearing twice as vibrant as a moment before. All the luminosity and clarity in the air was emanating from the Aksama.

  “Any form of the lady, any form of incarnation, can manifest on the basis of the seed of emptiness,” Diafael said. “If one imagines La Nila, the lady of medicine, then she manifests. Only that seed is reality, for this is the power of reality, to produce all forms of imagination, secret yet out in the open, self-concealing by its very nature. You have learned of your own to withdraw the senses from the grosser minds. Of your own, you have relaxed the knots, reabsorbing the winds back into the central channel, and back into the innate primordial drop. Of your own, you have passed beyond explanation.”

  It seemed to her that she had not done any of these things, and yet none of these statements were false. All were true. For to deny these things in herself would be the gravest betrayal. No serious person could deny these things.

  “You are what is called a Lady withdrawn,” Diafael continued. “It is a dangerous thing to bring a Lady withdrawn into the presence of a Lady manifest. For if the Lady manifest carries too much reality, the Lady withdrawn may withdraw yet more deeply. And if the Lady withdrawn carries too much reality, the Lady manifest may manifest yet more intensely. As you are now, if you were to immanentize the Lady, you could not speak as I do now, aware of myself, Diafael, and of you, my sister, Lorca. You would be wild and primordial. The cost is a terrible absorption. Yet, as I am now, manifesting the Lady, the cost is a terrible wakefulness. I freely accept this cost. Are you, Lorca, willing to accept this cost?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Go back to your yeme and your sisters. Be content. Come to the Jnana temple when you are called. Proceed with your training, respecting the steps. To be nothing is joy.”

  So she began to sit with the Aksama, at first once a week, then once a day, always for brief intervals. In the meantime, she lived as she had before, as Lethe’s novice. At certain moments, she felt she sensed signs of carefully concealed curiosity on the part of her sisters. But no one spoke of her ever more frequent absences. Lethe herself gave no hint that she knew Lorca was visiting the spiral mother. It was a great relief to her. She could accept many things about her present situation. She could accept that she rarely caught a glimpse of her mother in the passageways of the temple, in the course of daily things. She could accept that she no longer had the freedom to be garrulous and mischievous, as she had in their home in Ojeida,
which was swiftly fading from memory. But she could not accept that she attracted attention here. To be nothing was joy. And so her days flowed on with minimal disruption.

  More visitors began to come, from the mainland, sometimes from as far as the court, to find healing, and ever more healing was found. It sang in the very air at a high pitch that nevertheless soothed the human heart. Pilgrims came, to receive La Nila’s blessing, kneeling at her icon at the top of the stairs of the temple mons, and all forms of unease, such as long sorrow, or grief, or resentment were healed, as well as sleeplessness, wildness of mind, fear without cause, and deep craving. Wounds of the flesh were healed, too. Sores that would not close. Aches in bones that could not bear the body’s weight. The lame walked. The blind saw. Traedglas began to grow prosperous, as did Llawglas on the other shore. Ambas were called to towns, cities, and even to court, so that Naarwa began to rival the Serai.

  One day, instead of Nest, two other ambas came to lead her to the spiral mother. Wyn and Reese. But rather than lead her downward toward the inner sanctum, they led her up, into the daylight, to the high balustrade of the temple mons. They stood together as they had more than three years earlier. Her mother had grown thin, and calm. Her head was shaved, and the blue dot had been painted at the center of her brow, indicating that she was among the highest rank of ambas. She had never thought of Reese as small, but now she stood a hand’s breadth taller than her, where before she had not reached her chin. Still her mother’s eyes pierced her with wisdom and patience.

  “The Mother speaks approvingly of you,” Wyn broke the silence. “When you become an amba, you may live among us. We may know the happiness of your presence. That is good news, yes?”

  Lorca smiled. “Yes, but first I’ll have to become a yeme, won’t I? I’m slow. Many of my sisters have already advanced.”

  “The time comes,” Reese said, holding her gaze. “Do you welcome it?”

  “I haven’t even begun to find my novissi,” she said. But even as she said this, eight girls, all near the age of ten, came out onto the balustrade. “You’ve chosen them for me?” she asked, confusedly, looking from Reese’s face to Wyn’s.

  “It is to be soon,” Reese said simply. “And before it happens, we must speak.”

  As the eight girls came closer, she felt the sweetness thicken in the air, as if being near them made brought her closer to becoming their yeme.

  Wyn took her hand. “The Mother has told us that she has never once seen you take La Nila’s form. Yet you flow. You flow, and yet you remain yourself. You remain yourself, yet you diminish, intermittently vanishing.”

  She looked from Wyn to her mother, blank.

  “In the rite of the Yeme,” Reese explained, “you may enter a state that might redound on us all.” On that blindingly white stair above that blindingly blue sea, under a sun at mid-station, with Wyn and the novissi gathered around the two of them, she felt her mother’s eyes look deep into her heart. “Would you proceed with the rite?”

  “Yes. I wish to.”

  “Then I have something for you,” her mother smiled solemnly. From her robes she brought forth a white and silver glinting thing. It was a silver chain of a finely wrought helical design, with a whitestone pendant of L’Ávana, set in a field of various colored rubies, kneeling with the kiste and kalathos crossed in front of her. Reese put it on her with sure hands. “Normally we go naked in the rites, but this is something you should not take off until you pass it on to your own daughter.”

  They linked hands - she, the ambas, the young novissi - and a wave of peace passed through them. It was as if a film were removed from her mind, and the world appeared with redoubled clarity. What was there to do but to love?

  “Then let it be tonight,” Wyn said, squeezing her hand. “We are all ready.”

  “We all choose this freely,” Reese affirmed.

  Reese led her back into the temple, down the lamplit spiral passageways, past the qivas, to a bath chamber she had never seen before. Unlike anywhere else in the temple, here the cave rock had been left raw. But the pool itself was smooth and rounded. “The waters are scalding,” Reese said. “Surrender to them. Empty to your mind. We will come for you when the rite is prepared.”

  So she stripped herself of everything but the talisman and entered the pool, feeling the stillness and silence of the place press around her. Lying back in the water, she gazed up at the morphogenic stones above, though it was difficult to face their primordial weight. All of the atoms of the universe, it seemed, were crushed beneath a terrible weight, their own weight. One could not ordinarily see them, but they were all there, and space a mere fantasy. At first, the waters scalded, and soon she began to sweat and to thirst. Yet she surrendered, lightheaded, as the patternless pattern in the air grew ever more tangibly insistent, singing in her ears and singing through her particles. Softening her gaze, she watched it dance, swift, infinitesimal, infinite. Even the cave walls, that had seemed so absolute, were part of its flux, for it alone was real, and all else a partial perception of its plenitude.

  A woman came then, whose body was painted in the five colors - blue, yellow, orange, red, and green - and who bore in her hands the forked branch of the yeme that was also the sign of the Elkirri’s branched horn. She raised her from the waters, and painted her body, wrapping her in bands of color, placing the forked branch in her hands, leading her to the low entry of a qiva.

  She crawled inside and saw, in darkness lit by a single torch, the eight girls gathered there, naked as she was, kneeling on the stone floor. In the center of that floor waited the spiral conch shell. Quietly, she lifted it, cradled in her hands, and brought the lyf to each girl’s lips, then drank from it herself. Settling herself before them, she tried to understand each novice in her singularity. Like all living beings, they flowed, with faces before them and behind them. In each, a thousand faces dissolved and rematerialized, more clearly than before, more lucidly, as their present face. Around each, there was an aureole of color, violet, or blue, or yellow, or green, or, pink or white.

  Relaxing her gaze, she saw the borders of those colors merge. She saw herself rippling with whiteness, connected to the girls by filaments of color that streamed through the air, passing through their bodies, weaving through the room. At the back of her mind, she realized the lyf was taking effect, as each girl rippled like a mosaic of various jewels. Some yemes in the rite chanted invocations to the Elkirri, but she saw no need. Already, a spiral wind, like spun silver, rose before each initiate. Already, she felt that she was at the center of all those energies, yet elsewhere, watching herself from outside herself. The watcher had never been her. She felt in herself a grounded power of intuitive movement, the wisdom to flow where she would, following inspirations that branched from her crown. Strange new worlds were opened to her, but she wished to stand fully present, at the flame within the flame within the flame of many worlds in this world. Waves of limpid clarity flowed through the room. Waves of peace. Waves of calm.

  The faces of the girls were no longer various but flowed in a clarity that had never been before and would never be again. She saw the nature of the world as healing and healed. And she knew that she had vanished, as she nearly had before, sitting with the Aksama. She felt the intentions of every one of her sisters in the spiral, and more, the pattern of all intentionalities. What she wished for, the world wished for. What she willed, the world willed. She had always known this, but had not known she knew this. She had toyed with anger, resentment, greed, fear, and hope. But she had known all along that she could only love.

  Somewhere, at the inmost heart of the isle, she sensed another will, subtly unlike her own. Love there was, and the wisdom of choicelessness, but with a furtive centuries old training. Despite the layers of living stone between the outer qivas and the Jnana temple, she could see the Aksama rippling, manifesting the blue lady thousands of times between each instance of moment-to-moment impermanence, unfolding from a infinitely withdrawn germ. She could sens
e how the Aksama had waited for this moment, this precious opportunity to unbind the final wind knot.

  The flickering of iridescent filaments with which the rite began redoubled, then redoubled again, as atomies flowed from the Jnana temple, each one the Lady in subtlest form, pouring through the world. Sacred was the Olonö, the burning rainbow, consuming all flesh away. A single tear rolled down her cheek, not of sadness, but of parting, for not one of her sisters - not the eight girls before her, not Wyn, not her mother - might endure it. She remembered the small squeeze Wyn had given her hand, and heard a different meaning in her words, let it be tonight. They had known, and they had done this for her, believing that through her the Spiral might be healed. But it was imperfect, their gamble too dangerous. She could not endure the Olonö. She could not remain in the world. She could not be parted from her mother.

  A great stabilizing whiteness shone out from the talisman of L’Ávana, encircling her in a sphere of blinding radiance that, even as it spread, seemed to shield her in a space of refuge, isolating her from her sisters in their unbinding. She could still sense their instant leap beyond distance and duration. Whatever hope they had placed in her, and whatever their sacrifice in seeking to immanentize the lady, every iota of her being yearned to follow them past the threshold of human feeling. And as the whiteness grew, and the child luminosity merged with the mother luminosity, she saw that she could do so. And so she had made her choice, and so it would have ended, if a hand of fire, swarming with black ciphers, had not reached into her bubble of calm. Taking her hand, with a heat that did not burn, it pulled her from the qiva, and swiftly upwards through the alarmingly opaline, warping passageways to the temple mons. Again, a sacrifice. How long had Skaena been watching over her, ready to take the form of the Al Jaebre, but once in his life, to hold the Book of Numbers, so that the pattern warped around her, enfolding her in itself?