The Gates of Paradise

by Segoy Sands

  She survived, a girl of fourteen, smeared with the bands of the rainbow serpent. Altered as he was, Skaena nevertheless solicitously cloaked her nudity, and led her to a small bark, piloting her by flickering stars under the seven rays that rippled across the sky: white, yellow, red, blue, green, purple, black. Even the people of Traedglas were gone, all their tethered boats, save the one they’d borrowed, bobbing like toys on the undulating and ululating waves. Under that weird dance of bleeding dimensions, that vivid press of more-than-visible intensities on the fabric of things, she knew a different portion of self. She had no tears for Skaena, blackened to the bone.

  Once she looked back at Naarwa and saw that the marble pillars yet stood at the dome of the temple mouth, where it spiraled down, through double doors, and through the four-fold lotus walls, into a smooth rock passage, to the circular moon gate before the luminous womb of the Jnana temple. Those tall pillars were scorched and scored as if by raking claws. The trees were flattened for a league around like matted hair. Her mother had taught her that the Spiral - not the institution, but the wildness of la narañanye - knew its own ends. Its ways were not human ways, its pattern patternless.

  The long oar dipped again and again in the black waters, still churning, perturbed by the upheaval in the world, unable to reorganize its agitated sediments. She had no wish to reach the shore. She wanted the sound of the oars in the water, the sight of the seven rays in the sky, the feeling of being suspended between the beauty of death and the beauty of life, to go on forever. But before long Skaena brought the bark up against a jut of stone.

  Sunk back into his skull, his pained eyes were bright as tiny stars. He was not coming ashore. It was not black flesh that held him together but streams of numbers, like swarming ants. He was clutching something in his skeletal fingers, a bleached dagger of his own bone. When she stretched out her hand and took it, a wind passed through him, and the thin skein that was the remainder of his substance streamed into the night air, like charcoal dust. He had given her a gift. He had completed his surrender. The small boat bounced away from the rock, back to the hungry sea, as she sprang across water to solid ground.

  11 The Lady Manifest

  In Serle’s house, in Tookham, near Welen, she was a welcome guest until Ogden brought home a tall red-haired man who, she could see, was a wolf. She met Serle in Welen Market, where they set to laughing like childhood friends. All of nineteen, a daring spark in her eye, Serle had a way of seeming bored even as she charmed customers into buying sheepskins, woolens, and cheese wheels. Sensing a free spirit in need of someplace to stay, she asked no questions about the undoubtedly dark circumstances that had made her fly the cage.

  So it had been, ever since she took to the road. People had been kind to her. A smiling old farmer might offer her a lift on his cart, and then she’d be at his table, being served bread and stew by his gray-haired wife. It was a natural thing. Before, in Ojeida, she had always felt warm and welcome around country folk. She was more than content to do a bit of work in exchange for the generosity that seemed to meet her everywhere she turned. To give back, in any small way, made her feel rich. No one asked her name. They called her lass and missy and girl, and treated her like she’d grown up under their eyes. She could feel where she was safe, sensing the will in others as a bird in its long flight senses the subtle lines in the earth.

  A danger flowed around her, a gathering shadow, but for now the pattern led her from one temporary household to another. If she had stopped to think about it, she would have realized this had started in Welen, at the inn, on the sunny afternoon she saw the Traveler. It had lain dormant, and when there was nothing else it had guided her, so that every day was perfect and all roads led to bliss and old friends appeared in the guise of strangers. People were safest when they had nothing, no ideas, no objects, though they looked wrongheadedly for security in what they could accumulate. In such accumulation, one could not sense the seed, in which all things were incipient, and which was incipient in all things. In such accumulation, the pattern patternless could not move one as if by magic.

  Later, when she’d been staying with Serle for over a month, the days passing easily, unnoticeably, Serle insisted absurdly that it was she, so skinny and full of laughter, that created all that hilarity, making it impossible not to bring her home. Nonsense. Serle was the one who couldn’t help herself, treating everyone she met as if they would not dare presume to have a private world of their own, bringing out the friend in people faster than they could form opinions. Whether in fact neither of them could have chosen otherwise, or whether some extraordinarily tenuous and random, perhaps even misinterpreted, exchange of signals had led to the current state of affairs, they agreed it was too advantageous to change. Serle told Ogden that they were distant cousins, to keep him quiet, and for his part he didn’t seem to mind a rather convenient truth. Lorca proved such skilled help on the farm that he wondered aloud whether her kin, that sprawling clan no doubt just over the hills, rued her absence. Eventually, though, he made the mistake of bringing home Rufus, with his broad intelligent brow and sad, autumnal eyes.

  Somehow Rufus’s coming put Serle all in a storm. He was even bigger than Ogden, though not so barrel chested and heavy-boned. He was the sort of man that other women would be hoping to hook, and, for the first time, she saw that Serle needed to be desired above other women. She took Rufus’s presence as a challenge, but really he was as harmless as they came. Whether it bothered Serle or not, Lorca felt nothing but pleasure seeing him and Ogden lean their feet up on the table, drinking and smoking. She had met some of Ogden’s other friends, a good crowd, the sort who, if they weren’t married, wanted lively wives. Some seemed to think her suitable, but it was Rufus who finally came striding across the stable yard. She threw handfuls of oat groats to the grunting pigs, and he made small talk about forgettable things, his steady gaze making her giddy. She’d never kissed a man, but she kissed him behind the barn. For some reason, after that, he came calling nearly every day, and soon enough, in the middle of the night, to sounds of terrific marital disharmony, Ogden was thrown out of the house. But Lorca had worked it out that it was not only because Rufus was handsome and eligible. It really was jealousy. Serle was afraid of losing her man.

  “You’re in the Cora,” she told him, half sitting up from where she’d been lying, in the crook of his arm, on a green slope damp with night dew, listening to owls, coyotes, and frogs.

  “I’m a farmer.”

  “A farmer who’s in the Cora,” she played with his beard. “Out recruiting other farmers.”

  “That’s a dangerous accusation.”

  “You’re clearly a dangerous man.”

  She refrained from warning him of the things that stalked him, shadows that entered the world in those places where the Sivan and the Nog passed through each other. Since Naarwa, those gathering shades had been drawn to her. In ways she avoided thinking about, in some ill-defined manner that she could not understand, Rufus might be among them. Serle seemed to think so, branding him as bad a man for marrying as could be.

  “Don’t trust the ones that bring gifts,” she warned Lorca. “They bring a load of pain after. What’ll you get? Some friction in your lower parts? A month or two of brainless rutting? Because this bearded ox, this sentence to death on the birthing bed, is anxious to get a narrow little stick of a girl swollen with big-headed breach-born brats?” Serle looked around, challengingly.

  “You said to find a sweetheart,” Rufus reminded her, meekly.

  “And you’re looking at this little rabbit?” she stood up and bugged out her eyes at him. “What’ll you do, split her like a wishbone? I’ll tell you what. Go find a big-boned busty matron with lard legs and bovine hips, and be sure she’s already squished out a mewling wet litter or two, for breaking in. But stick your one-eyed monster in this girl, I’ll rip out your fresh water oysters.” She pointed a finger at him. “You’ve done it, haven’t you? Couldn’t wait for a wedding? Why not, she�
��ll stretch. I know. You think she’ll stretch loose enough to bitch your whelpings while you go groping around at night for the next tight new squeeze with budding breast-nubs.”

  Rufus took these outbursts gracefully, laughing along with everyone else, because Serle was one of those people, hated by some, precious to others, who said what they wanted.

  “I can see why there’s no little Ogdens,” Rufus once noted. “And no little Serles.”

  “With that thin batter of his!”

  “Maybe the pan’s too hot.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Oh, you’ll take more than words.”

  Ogden, Lorca, and whoever else was there usually tried to stay out of it, without much success. After the third or fourth cup, Serle would soothe things over with her singing voice, husky, raspy, hushed, and tender, filled with unexpected bright notes that made the sadness hurt the more. Ogden would pick up his lute, and his thick fingers would prove miraculously dexterous and gentle. Lorca and Rufus could just lean back and listen then. Serle would pay no mind.

  One moonless night, after sitting up late, Rufus lifted up his arms, stretched, yawned, and reluctantly made his apologies. With Serle on nightwatch, and showing no signs of ever going to bed, he had to accept he’d never be alone with Lorca that night. She could not help but share Serle’s amusement, watching how he sulked yet resigned himself. Any woman could feel it flow off his body, that hunger and that tenderness, to which she’d surrendered so many times already, as Serle well knew. Maybe Rufus actually believed Serle cared about propriety, or that she harbored some personal animosity toward him, and maybe he truly did not understand that on that night, as on any other night, Serle would have taken the slightest cue from her to give them their freedom. Maybe he did not understand that a woman needed more sign of love than passionate lovemaking. Sometimes words were good. He had already proposed to her in private, more or less, so she was not waiting for that, but something else, the day he found his courage to put his love in words in front of other people, maybe. It wouldn’t do to pledge to spend her life with a man who couldn’t speak his heart. For that, she would have to be patient, and so would he, evidently.

  Satisfying himself with a chaste hug, he took his leave, coaxing his skittish, nickering horse up the forest road. Lorca followed, because the night had something in it, crowding at the edges of her mind. He managed, doggedly, to get his horse into the woods, though the good creature must have sensed the shadow things. They might do no obviously bodily harm. He might never sense them, or feel their bite. He might only feel a pang of loneliness. But he would be changed. A shadow would haunt his eyes, a tiredness. He might surmise that it was the flawed touch of time, and he’d be partially right, for they would insinuate into his life a grain of doubt. She had not wanted to interfere in the pattern, for to touch it was to risk wild unpredictability, but this time it used her without her willing it, so that the whitestone talisman glowed, and her own flesh rippled, and the many faces of the Lady manifested through her.

  The next day, he found her in the field where she sat at sunset, with her back to a stone, gray and irregular, that was high enough to shelter a person in solitude. The rock reminded her of how old the earth was. No matter how long she stayed in one place, she would only be the trace of a trace of a trace, a seed within a seed within a seed, in the earth’s memory. And all traces were preserved, in altered form, in each trace. All were travelers, though they never left their homes. As sunset tinted the sky saffron, rose, and violet, she sat, knowing she might continue her travels at any moment if the road called to her. He knelt beside her and talked softly, sensitive to her mood.

  “Serle pretends I visit to lure Ogden into the Cora. It’s not that way, and she knows better. He’s been leader since Lain got himself filled with arrows on Tristwch border. A web of Cora men is watching this farm, protecting Ogden, and making sure I don’t wander off with their riastrad. Others like me have made a mess in the past, through drink, or jealousy, or lust for life. We’re touched with a taint of some kind, eventually, and some say it’s no accident. Some say we need watching, to guard us from shadows. But who can guard us from ourselves?” The question lingered then faded. “Ogden’s fairly certain he needs to guard me from you. He’s still trying find your folk.”

  She watched the cows graze unperturbed as crimson lit the edge of the horizon, like the light from a crack in the furnace of the world. Animals did not comment on the beauty and the mood of things, though they seemed to feel and respond to it, like dancers in time with music. They did not complain when winter came and did not try to make the summers last. Words meant nothing to them and nothing in the world surprised them. They had no futures and no pasts. For long stretches of time, they seemed to recede into the general presence of the earth.

  “Long I’ve loved the Lady, more than most maybe,” Rufus said, gazing at her intently. “It’s been a long time since the Lady was with us. Yemes in their fine clothes come sniffing about, to take our girls if they sense talent. We don’t see what goes on in their temples. We don’t see our girls again. Our struggle goes on outside those walls, and we’re weary.” She kept her eyes on a green shield bug ambling in the grass. “And if I tell what I saw last night, no one will believe me.”

  In the space between her eyes and that shield bug, bright particles were dancing, spontaneous, creative yet destructive, dying into life.

  “When a person understands,” she said, “they believe.”

  12 The noble lie

  The girl had arrived, as promised, delivered by a pack of rathacuns, trussed, gagged, and blindfolded over a horse’s bony back. It wasn’t his concern. Still, he had standards.

  “Strip her,” he told Magda.

  It was just the three of them in the hall. The portly housekeeper seemed to consider it her job to make the girl know her place.

  “Be still now!” Magda warned, but the girl deflected her rough plump hands and did the undressing herself. She let her garb fall and stood there with long red welts across her body from ropes. She was above middle height, well-proportioned, shoulders neither broad nor narrow, shapely but toned arms, hips with just enough curve, knees that weren’t bony, thighs with substance enough but no excess, a golden and downy pubescence, breasts pouty yet firm. Prowess in bed and in battle. Her dirty blond hair hung in matted kinks. Her eyes held glints of forest and sky, and of all the different means - quarterstaff, bow, dagger - by which she could kill him. A fetching girl. It helped having an unreadable face. A woman could undress in front of him and not detect the slightest interest. A stupid person might, by her body language, offer herself or hide herself, accustomed to thinking of her nakedness as something to be desired. She was not stupid. She stood there.

  “Now tell the lord your name,” Magda goaded. “And call him m’lord.”

  He shifted his long legs in his chair and took a sip of piping hot wine. The chair was too small for him, and despite all the prattle about Ojeidan vintages, he’d learned to prefer a clean dry grape from Stonewall. But he wouldn’t change the chair or the wine. Minor discomforts were essential. He’d stopped dining after midday except when he had to entertain, regrettably every other day, it seemed. Food, and its certainty, ruined so many strong men, who persisted in the oafish belief that constant feeding made them strong. The only thing they proved was that their bellies were made of cast iron, and he doubted that, too. Their wives and housemaids could tell a different tale of gross bodily discomfort, but a wise lord tried to grow into an impotent tub of lard as quick as possible. A man of goodly girth was not expected to gird himself for battle. Let his subjects sing the ballads of his younger days, and let the minstrel be handsomely paid. It was wise to become a monument.

  The girl was not going to speak. Magda was tensing to backhand her across her lovely mouth.

  He cleared his throat. “Bring a basin,” he said, casually. “Then leave us.”

&n
bsp; The gruff housemaid waddled out the door, returning quickly with a full basin in her stout arms, heavy enough for two maids. Maybe he should have had her replaced as a matter of policy when he came into ownership, but the woman was as used to the ins and outs of the manse as the ins and outs of household intrigue, and was both a sycophant and a bully. Good qualifications. She knew her job. He walked over to the glowing, crackling hearth, his back to his guest. He loved the sound of fire above other things, even the sound of rain and hooves. Some men couldn’t hear above and under and through other sounds. If there were a murmur around a table, or there were music in the room, they couldn’t hear the specific and separate whispers. They couldn’t even hear their own thoughts. His senses worked better when there was noise. He could hear that she hadn’t so much as shifted a foot behind him. If Onne’s techniques had succeeded in rousing latencies, he’d know in a moment or two, then. The idea of standing there as he personally washed her body would provide incentive. A mature bíseanna might control her impulses, but not one this young.

  To his amusement, he heard her plump down unceremoniously on the floor. He had given no permission to sit, but admittedly had not had occasion to make explicit his expectation, of all visitors to Tercera, of a high level of decorum.