The Gates of Paradise

by Segoy Sands

  There was little to do but tend the horses, run through drills, do chores, and bath in the river. Afterwards, as usual, Lorca and Serle lay in the grass, silent for long stretches, following their own thoughts.

  “I like this,” Serle said, out of the blue. “I don’t know how I’ll go back.”

  “To the farm?” Lorca asked. “It’ll be even more peaceful than this.”

  Serle’s lips twisted. “Peaceful? If you’re tagging along because you like lying around in the grass with me, you’re in the wrong place.”

  She knew that was true. She didn’t feel the righteous rage that Rionma required of her daughters. She was a pitiful shot with a bow, couldn’t throw a spear, and wouldn’t last ten seconds against Ailil.

  “Rufus is a fighting man,” Serle pointed out. “Don’t fool yourself about that, and about why you chose him. Your heart knows he’ll bring you trouble and pain. Captured, wounded, defeated, dead, or worse, victorious. All roads lead to drink and anger. The toughest men end up the most broken. But a gentle man would bore you to death.”

  They were silent for a while. The wind’s cool caress was pleasant. A seemingly endless wave, it coaxed the monotonous green sea of grass to perform trills of color, but so subtly, so secretly, none would guess the full extent of the invisible worlds in this world.

  *

  Time was a concept. The sisters of Naarwa drilled that into the noviisi axiomatically. Ironically, they managed to impart only the concept that time is a concept. Now, the conceptual mind dissolving, she saw that time and the conceptual mind were one and the same. In contrast to the sisters, Reese had taught her that the flow of finite experience deserves respect. Life itself was the voidness of the Lady. Time and timelessness had never been separate.

  She could not say, afterwards, if everyone had experienced it. Had it been a meigeia of the yemes, the patterning of the pattern, which affected her, and her alone? As happens sometimes in an accident, it took months, and years, for her to organize those scattered intensities into a logical sequence of events. Even then, she could not say if she had imposed an order onto something that had occurred in the impossible manner in which she had first apprehended it.

  The three blue yemes had raised a coning around Saoirse, though Ailil was right beside her. From a distance, it looked like Saoirse sat her horse at the center of a blue spiral, narrowest at the ground, widest a span or two above her head. Ailil had drawn her sword. Serle, like many of the other riders, had thrown herself astride her horse, ready to charge. Rows of archers had bows strung and notched. Ailil and the Ymecla, not a yard apart, were exchanging words.

  From the Ymecla’s camp on the rise, a rider set forth. She gave a wide berth to the two opposed parties, galloping clear into the Rhiannon side of the field, halting only yards from the line of archers. Lorca had never seen a sister of the Calyx before, but her mother had taught her their colors and ranks. This one was a tëru, bare breasted with labrysi in either hand, like living serpents flowing with dark aether.

  The tëru made her clear voice carry. “Ymecla, D’ioya Isleene, voice of wisdom, requests you withdraw back into Ochre.”

  Serle answered. “It’s Ailil we follow.”

  “When a wise one walks among you, it is shameful to follow the unwise,” the tëru said. “You may assume, like a child of its parent, that the powerful will indulge and forgive the weak. But even a wise parent sometimes strikes a shameful child.”

  Several riders with Serle let their horses surge forward threateningly. In the middle of that throng, anonymous, Lorca felt oddly calm, as if the world was contracting and expanding, profoundly aware of the harm the lone Calyxe could do them, and of the strange fact that, across the field, Ailil continued to exchange words with the Ymecla. She felt the shape of something coming into being, and began to imagine a faint red miasma forming around the three blue yemes. As she watched, the blue binding lost its brightness around Saoirse, and a vivid red grew in a slow serpentine coils around the yemes. Ymecla and Ailil stood aside, as if this contest of the lone red sister and the three blues would decide things. Lorca had thrilled to see the blues, who she were gone from the world, but now she began to fear they would be destroyed. From the Ymecla’s tent on the rise, three yellows rode toward the Rhiannon, taking the same wide circuit the tëru had.

  Yula, mistress of the bow, directed her archers to target the approaching yellows.

  “Is this your welcome?” the tëru gave a scornful smile. “Put away your pointed sticks. Go back to your farms. Plunge your hands back into the mud you are capable of understanding.”

  Many things happened at once that, later, resisted clear memory. She heard Ailil shout. Yula gave the signal to loose arrows. An awful flash from the tëru’s wand, a whiteness that bloomed into a confusion of colors, washed through all material things. These things happened, but out of sequence. She remembered sensing the qassig build around the tëru before she struck. And her own voice telling someone beside her, “She bíseaches.” But she also remembered Ailil falling lifeless from her horse and striking the ground. She seemed to know more, and less, about those moments than could have been possible. She knew the Ymecla regretted involving herself so deeply in wordly affairs by undoing the wind of someone around whom so many currents flowed. She knew it was not herself telling someone, “She bíseaches,” but someone else, speaking of her. She knew not one barb in that flight of arrows would strike the yellow sisters because together they altered the very weaving of the air. She knew the tëru had aimed the corraí at Serle, but that it would move around Serle, cut through by a subtler wind, because she spoke to it. She knew full battle had broken out around her, as it had not broken out in Aina Livia in centuries, and that Saoirse, seeing Ailil fall, had for a moment raised such sweetness from the red earth that an ecstasy was in everyone, like the fire of paradise, alive in everything in which inheres the latency of flame, like laughter without personality. She knew the three blue yemes had crumpled. She knew the Ymecla spoke to the pattern and Saoirse was bound.

  More than anything she knew joy. The air sang with glistering motes, so that all were part of a dance, a festival, a universal consummation. She was married to Serle, as everyone was married to everyone else. She lay in blue-green grass, with flowers adorning her in accidental ways, as the soft sky above hummed with wisdom, and all space danced with joyous self-annulling radiances, as the river sang, self-emptying, peace-intoxicated, like a wild god of music, pouring suchness into suchness. Many lay on the ground, horses and riders, injured or dead, amid screams of agony or ecstasy. The rivulets in the earth were veins in her own body.

  “Anathema!” the tëru cried.

  Without opening her eyes she sensed the whiteness was around her, there, fallen in the meadow, in the midst of battle. Some were crying over her. The tëru was shouting, though whether with pleasure or pain she could not know. The singing in her ears grew louder, so that Nembulo circled round her in his least obstructed form, the Olonö. For a time she was nothing but a crystalline sound and an iridescence flowing through all the sentiences on the field, a centerless intelligence.

  When she opened her eyes, Serle was there, bleeding and bruised, looking down at her, wild haired and wide eyed. All had drawn back, save the tëru, who stood weeping, with the three kneeling yemes behind her, shaking with fear. She looked at her hands and they were curiously black. She reached out, several yards, and touched one of the yemes. There was an acrid charred smell as the girl shriveled and withered to a black, brittle nub. One of yellows outstretched her hands grievously toward that black remainder, the other vomited.

  The tëru remained, weak on her feet. “What my wrong? What is my failing? Why is it given to me to know the dark face of the dark mother?”

  She saw her own hand stretch forth, longer than it could be, to first touch the tëru, then the two yemes, so that all three melted into shade and fell into the Entuthon Benython.

  *

  To fall was to remember, becoming per
meable to things of the past that changed the present, vulnerable to the voice of the daemon that laughed at the circlet of personal time with which one confined the ever-fluid universe. To fall was to undo one’s earthly forgetting of the fires of the Ignis, to Tel Atael’s wraiths dancing in perpetual ecstasy, to the spiral temple where the red flower bloomed, an infinite unfolding from itself. Yet, strong as was the attraction of that flower, a deeper undoing called to her, dark beyond darkness. She knew it was her death, and that she must go to it.

  In her clinging to self-preservation, she reached out to one of those pillars of flame that shot through the Ignis, like sunlight lancing down from a cloud-piled sky above the sea, titanic forms of the Arru demons cast out of the heavens by the Urra. She expected to burn in the fluid heat that erupted around her, but instead felt freed into elemental warmth and the pleasure that matter forbids. The voice of the fire spoke to her. Melt away apparent surfaces, and reveal the infinite that was hid.

  *

  In the crannog, the life was hard enough to yield peace, while the love of her children overflowed the banks of mere contentment. One day, one season, passed into the next, in the cycle of plenty and scarcity, joy and woe, that led from cradle to grave and back. There was a music in the world, sufficient to itself, before human thoughts and ambitions. She was relieved to see that Rufus, too, could live in the rhythm of that music, though the wounds were there, the grief, the guilt, the self-blame. An injured man might well use a place like the crannog as nothing more than a canvas for the deep and terrible tinctures of his private pain. His gaze might bore a hole through the living world into an undead past.

  But, fortunately, the boys forced him back into human company. He couldn’t see them grow up isolated, so he took them twice a week into Twill, to watch matches and learn the basics of the mannerbund with other boys. He went on with his life. Soon he managed a bit of casual trade and brought home small luxuries. Word spread that his wife had a hand with simples, so she always sent something to ease bone ache or fever or labor pains or sleeplessness. The truce had quelled the fight in him, but, when winter comes, the animal burrows deep into the ground, and does not die.

  Once every year or two, they visited Serle’s farm in Tookham. Many of the Rhiannon had returned to their former lives, or started new ones. Serle had a new husband, Lewyn, and three children now, the twins Gemma and Namma, and her boy Orrin. Lewyn, a quiet man who bred horses, welcomed his wife’s friends, and let her preside over the table. He seemed a stable husband and good father. But one year, when Cole was nearly ten, and Wren still a babe, after dinner Lewny spoke gloomily of how the young men around Tookham were coming home with glazed eyes and unfelt hurts. Someone was selling them soma, and cheaply, to put hooks in them so they’d keep needing more. The roads were becoming unsafe. People were murdered in their homes by thieves who were not transients or strangers but the neighbor’s son.

  Afterwards, she wished he had kept his unease to himself. He knew they wanted none of it, but had given it to them all the same, reminding them that their crannog, for all of its withdrawal from the world, could not shelter them. They might try to keep their own children untouched by the times, but what good was that? Children belonged to their times. Children should live around other children, so that they could understand their world.

  Lewyn hadn’t said those things, but indirectly she felt he was accusing them, finding them guilty for living in Twill where there were fewer young men to fall prey to soma sellers. She had never pried enough into Serle’s business to know how she met Lewyn, but probably he’d been one of Ogden’s men, or at least shared their sentiment that Rufus had run away to a quiet life he did not deserve.

  Whatever the case, he had spoken of trouble, and it followed them home to the crannog. She felt it outside their door, each night. One night, there was a weak knocking. She told herself it was a branch in the wind. When it came a second and then a third time, she opened the door. At first she didn’t see it waiting there, a few steps back on the causeway, darker than the night, feminine yet without attributes.

  Rufus came beside her and growled, “Close the door on that thing.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “She needs help.”

  It didn’t move closer but stood swaying like the shadow of a willow branch, no doubt a viper in her husband’s eyes, a threat to his children breathing sweetly in their beds. With a soft motion, she signaled him to stay, as she went out on the bridge. “You’ve come back. What is your need?”

  “To die,” it rasped.

  A tormented human form shifted beneath the formlessness of the crosser on the bridge. She understood its suffering. The dark was not so painful. It was the light that hurt so much. Taking its hand, she led it to the threshold.

  “Not in our house, Lorca,” Rufus warned. Some said men could not look upon the dark aspect without murderous intent.

  “We must welcome her in,” she said.

  “No.” He held up the kindling axe with wild, pleading eyes. She knew he was afraid of himself, of the riastrad. He was the monster, the one who might change into a raging thing.

  “Leave us,” she looked compassionately into his eyes. “No one will blame you.”

  He raised the axe as she stepped closer, leading the shade. Grinding his teeth, groaning, with a hurt animal sound, he threw the weapon down and rushed past them into the night.

  *

  She was carried in the ebb and flow of immense tides, toward a looming black pyramidal structure with roots in plasmic nonentity. At its gates, in flowing white, the sisters of Naarwa waited, their skeletal arms outstretched. At their head stood the Aksama, eye sockets hollow, wielding a rod of corrosive black metal that emitted pestilence like blood spreading in water. All the sisters leaked corruption, crowding into her mind, polluting her, even as the Mother’s phantasm, long teeth open in a grisly howl, drove the miasmic metal into her heart, which closed around it, pulsating, infected with death, infested with life.

  Her wound was cold heat radiating in concentric waves, in gouts of black and white and red. Black termites ate her particles, swarming into her brain, effacing the line between person and non-person. Arching backward in the void, she died to the last seal of existence. It came, eyes like golden whorls, with horns of living spiral, a burning rainbow, the Olonö, ejected from her channels, sky prancer, traveler of la narañanye, obliterator of both sacred and mundane. She had resisted this. Since that day on the Turquoise, when she touched the three yemes and sent them, exiles or escorts, into the dark, she had resisted the knowledge that hers was the dark face of the dark lady.

  A lie, a small lie, had made the dark lady forbidden, closing the door to the dark spiral. A lie, a small lie, prevented them all - noviisi, yemes, ambas and aksas - from entering the dark temple and standing in the place of Tel Atael. A ban, like a small curtain of flesh, stood between the sisters of the spiral and the last initiation, the violet ray. Yet every woman must merge with Tel Atael - see through her mind, feel with her form - if the doors of wisdom would open.

  She stood in the Telesterion where a woman-child lay wounded, bathed in amethystine light, the conduits of her body insinuated with the rune-carved rood. He was there, too, the boy, of whom she had once been so possessive, mistaking a portion of infinity for a portion of herself.

  With a few soft steps she reached his side. No male could look on Tel Atael, but he opened calm, wise, watchful eyes. Beside him lay the girl, roseate breasts rising and falling ever so faintly, the filamentous rood twined around her spine, its seven silver tendrils fused with the seven spirals of her form. Violet light pulsed from her central channel.

  “Take the Rood,” she told him.

  *

  A form flickered in the flux. A question was asking itself. It may have been in words, there may have been a voice. There were no organs of speech. Yet, someone longed for something, and that longing gave her substance again. There were no eyes but a wish to see. Wishing it she could not prevent it. Anoth
er was there and she must contract her senses into organs of perception in order to see that other. It began to come into focus, condensed into a howling whiteness, with splinters of light in the narrow lenses of its devouring eyes. Endless creativity condensed into the figure of a boy. It was too sad to bear. How much must hang on love for the isolate soul. From where could such love come in a world so contracted?

  She began to comprehend. This was the Telesterion. Through slow time the dark mother had watched over her. Few could endure the dark flame, fewer survive the metallum’s touch. She had endured it, and now its Eile was come to claim it. It might be that he could hold power cleanly.

  “Don’t waver like that between Urra and Arru,” she scolded him, smiling. “Let them blend.” But few could surrender so completely. It had been no easier for her. His eyes widened as aether poured from his right side and nether from his left, and the sweetness shook his limbs with wild commotions as in the struggle at the gates of death.

  “Mutual Forgiveness of each vice,

  Such are the Gates of Paradise…”

  William Blake

  epilogue

  Moonlit waters ran over gold and mica flecked sand, like magic, the living transformation of the patternless pattern, the sweet and secret complicity in all things. From living breath, to cloud, to droplet, to flood and avalanche, water changed forms, cooling the world, slaking the slow thirst of mineral roots that spread into the fibers of the down-and-upward growing tree’s green whispering shade, the shadow patterning of leaves in a summer wind. Water was what sang in the blue whale’s long melismatic chant in the protean sea. Life gave itself form through its own yearning. But Maege had ceded all the dust she knew and more.

  She stepped onto the bridge and walked toward the two white dogs that were keeping vigil over the small body. Loyalty flowed from them. They were loyal to that boy, and were his guardians, because he had been good to them and they knew no better than to reward copper with gold. Nothing could stop them, not the night and all the things in it, not the stars, not the intrusion of one like her, a crosser. Yet at her approach, they flattened their shaggy ears, lowered their chins to their paws, and whimpered, as if to ask even her to help the boy.