'And leave us unsatisfied?'
Danlo watched the firelight dance over her naked limbs, and he traced his fingers over her hip. 'When we are still boys, we are taught how to touch women to their ecstasy. If I had reached my moment before you ... I would not have left you unsatisfied.'
She smiled and kissed his navel, and she said, 'There are different intensities of satisfaction.'
'That may be true,' he said, 'but the universe is made the way it is, yes? Men are made the way they are. All male animals. Have you ever seen a shagshay bull mount an ewe?'
'No, I really haven't.'
'The entire copulation lasts less than ten seconds,' he said. 'Ten ... thrusts, a little bellowing, and the bull is done. Would you change all that is natural?'
'Would you?' she asked. She looked at him and smiled, almost as if she could read his thoughts. And then they both broke into laughter.
'I have often thought about this problem,' he said. 'Why should the passions of a man and a woman be so out of joint? And if we are both of us natural children of a ... natural nature, isn't this proof that the whole universe is shaida?'
'Is shaida the opposite of halla?'
'Not precisely. Shaida is ... the left hand of halla.'
'I see. You want to do only what's natural.' She sat up, spine straight with her feet beneath her. She folded her left hand over his right hand and squeezed it.
After a while, he asked, 'Do you think a man should try to forestall his ecstasy to match a woman's?'
She touched the scar running across his forehead. She smiled and said, 'Some men find that in forestalling their ecstasy, they make it more intense. And then ecstasy is multiplied by ecstasy – the possibilities between woman and man are said to be infinite.'
'I do not know how it could be any more intense,' he said.
'I can't always match my passion with the quickness of yours,' she said. 'And I wouldn't want to, even if I could.'
'But how is it possible to forestall such a force? When one's moment comes ... it is like stopping a star from exploding.'
'Shall I show you how?'
'Could you do that?'
'It would be my pleasure,' she said.
Again, she kissed his mouth, kissed his eyes, kissed his body from his neck to his knees. And he kissed her. They spent a long time, kissing and caressing, and then he moved to lie atop her as before. But she pushed her hands against his chest and eased him onto his back. She knelt over him, clenching his dense chest hair in her fists as she settled atop him and slipped back and forth. She did this not as an ecstasy-forestalling technique, but because she was a courtesan obeying her Society's rule of the alternation (and equality) of sexual positions. In fact, it would have been easier for her to apply these techniques with him atop her, but Tamara was not one to break rules merely for the sake of expediency. She moved back and forth, faster and faster, sliding and pressing down against him with her loins. Danlo ached to thrust freely inside her, to control the pace of their copulation. He was sweating now and breathing quickly, and every part of him felt swollen and overfull. He was dying to reach his moment and be done, he was very close, and then suddenly she reached down behind her and touched his stones, and pressed her fingers down into the taut skin below them. She showed him the pressure points to forestall his ecstasy.
She showed him how to breathe, and she cooled his surging blood and his blind desire. Twice she did this, and each time she allowed his passion to build to a greater intensity than he had ever known before. At last, after a long while, she took pity on him. Her fingers found other places on his body that urged him straight into ecstasy. It began as a quickening of energy that seemed to coil around the base of his spine, or rather, uncoil, rapidly, filling his loins with a rare and marvellous power. She, too, was full of this power, he could see it flashing in her lustrous eyes. They looked at each other, and something vast and vital passed back and forth between them, eye to eye, hand to hand, cell to cell. Then she closed her eyes and started rocking back and forth in frenzy, still pressing him with her knees and her vulva and her artful fingers. He was young and full of seed and the soft clasp of her body was squeezing the liquid life out of him. He was now too full of life; it burned like a river of fire inside him, inside his belly, up to his heart, then behind his eyes. For a moment, while he could still see, he looked up at her as she threw back her head and gasped for air. Her eyes were tightly closed, her face a mask of rapture glowing in the light of the fire. And then he closed his eyes too, and the pressure in his loins grew so intense that he cried out and clawed the muscles along her thighs. There was a wild rush of energy, as of lightning shooting along his spine from his hips to his head. In this moment of pure, blinding joy he felt something extraordinary completed between them. He emptied himself into her in quick pulses of life, over and over until she fell gasping against him and kissed his neck and pressed the side of his head with hers. He lay there in utter exhaustion, with her collapsed atop him, and he was utterly empty. And yet he was as full as he had ever been, aware of all that was going on around him. He heard voices from the deep parts of Bardo's house and the wind against clear diamond panes; he was aware of fireflowers opening in Bardo's garden, and the pungence of triya seeds, and the sweet smell of sex. Tamara's breath rushed in his ear, and her heart beat next to his, and he was aware that he had never fell so strong, so whole, so utterly alive. After a while they rolled onto their sides. Gradually they passed back into a normal, waking consciousness, and then into a conversational consciousness. Tamara ran her fingers through his hair and touched his white feather. She said, 'I've never known anyone like you before.'
'And I have never known ... anything before,' he said. 'There is so much to know, isn't there?'
She nodded her head and laughed. 'Some men practise with courtesans for years before the serpent strikes them.'
'The ... serpent?'
'Did you know we call our art "The Way of the Serpent"?'
He grasped her hand and touched the ring coiled around her middle finger. It was made in the form of a thick-bodied snake, whose eyes were two tiny rubies set into gold. The snake's mouth opened onto its tail, as if it were about to swallow itself. This continuity of golden fang to golden flesh made a perfect golden circle.
'I noticed that you wear the ring of Ouroboros,' he said. 'This is an ancient symbol, yes?'
'Then you do know about the serpent?'
'Not really. That is, I have studied the religions and have learned the meaning of their symbols. A few symbols. Ouroboros, the serpent who swallows its own tail – this is a symbol of nature itself, yes? The immortality of all things. The way life lives off life, consumes itself, yet continues. The great circle of life and consciousness, continually shedding death like an old skin and being born anew.'
Tamara looked back and forth between her ring and his eyes, and she said, 'I think I like your interpretation better than the one I was taught. It's simpler, more profound.'
Danlo bowed his head and smiled. 'This symbol means something different to you, yes?'
'Have you ever heard of the serpent called Kundalini?'
'No, I am not familiar with that name.'
'But you've heard of the tantric yoga?'
Shaking his head back and forth, he said, 'We are taught many yogas, of course. But not the tantric yoga.'
'Tantra is the ancient name for this yoga,' she said. 'It's the yoga of sex and energy, the life energies. Many of its techniques have been incorporated into the other yogas.'
'And the courtesans are masters of this yoga?'
'Not precisely,' she said. 'We have our art – it's been evolving for a long time. Our practices differ, in many ways, from the tantra. Our theories are different.'
'Is the Kundalini a theory or symbol, then?'
'Both,' she said. 'In the ancient theory, the Kundalini energy lies coiled around the base of the spine like a great serpent. Various techniques are used to– '
'I felt something like that!' Danlo said all at once. 'At the base of my spine – only it was more like a twisted bolt of lightning than a serpent.'
'It is like lightning, once it's teased out of its sleep,' she said. 'Once the serpent energy is awakened, it uncoils, straightens and strikes the body like lightning. It pierces the spinal cord and rushes upward through the chakras. Behind the navel, there's a chakra, and the heart chakra, and– '
'These are the energy centres, yes?'
'How did you know?'
He sat up and stared at the fire. He thought of his test and trial in Lavi Square when the heat of lotsara had flared up just behind his navel and had saved him from freezing to death. He told Tamara about this, and then said, 'The Alaloi have their theories, too.'
'I would have thought your people were too busy just living life to worry about awakening their chakras.'
'Is that what the Kundalini does? Is that what courtesans do?'
She laughed and continued, 'I was telling you about the ancient theory. In this theory, the Kundalini energy burns its way up each of the seven chakras. Ideally, it burns through them – sometimes the pathway is blocked, of course, by old wounds to the body or mind, and the energy is trapped.'
'Like light in a bottle of stone?'
She nodded her head. 'If you like.'
'There is no flow,' he said. 'No release, no ... connection.'
'For most people, this is the way it is,' she said. 'But in a few people, the Kundalini burns through the chakras one by one. At last it bursts through the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head.'
He was sitting crosslegged with his back to the fire, listening and thinking. She came around behind him, then, and pressed her hand against his tailbone where it rested in the soft furs. She traced her fingers in sinuous waves up the naked skin over his spine, then across the nape of his neck to the top of his head. Her fingers danced through his thick hair and sent shivers of pleasure across his scalp.
'And then?'
'Then there is a connection,' she said. 'The Kundalini shoots into the sky, and the ancient connection between mind and the heavens is completed.'
He turned his head and kissed the inside of her arm. 'And this is the old theory?'
'A very old theory,' she admitted.
'Then the courtesans have abandoned it?'
'Most have, of course. Though we still retain the Kundalini as a symbol of the life energies. The Kundalini, once it's awakened, enters every nerve in the body, every cell. And then it wakes up the cells.'
Quickly, in her serious, dulcet voice, Tamara told him a little of the courtesans' theory of the Kundalini. She explained that each cell of the body has its own consciousness, a cellular consciousness of electron transport chains and protein synthesis and DNA. When the cells were completely awakened to the secrets locked inside them segments of DNA that had never been active before – this DNA was sometimes called the 'sleeping god' – would turn on and come alive to its true purpose. And then humankind would truly evolve. It would be a willed evolution, a conscious journey into a new symmetry of body and mind that few dared dream of. And then someday, perhaps farwhen, perhaps tomorrow, man and woman would come together to give birth to the first truly human being.
'This is a splendid theory,' Danlo said. 'But is it true?'
'No one really knows what causes the DNA to turn on, or to evolve,' she said. 'Some of your eschatologists postulate form fields or super genes. These theories are almost as old as the tantra. I've heard that a few masters still teach the random mutation of the genome as the driving force of evolution, if you can believe that. The best theory, I think, comes out of the Rian school. You've heard of Cipriana Ria?'
'No, who was he?'
'She,' Tamara said. 'She was the Lord Eschatologist a hundred years ago. She postulated a consciousness field isomorphic to the genetic fields the biologists claimed to have discovered. Of course, this is all still theory. Your Order has been trying to understand the nature of consciousness and matter for five thousand years.'
She went on to discuss the different schools of eschatology, bringing in theories from other disciplines – such as the cetics' theory of the circular reduction of consciousness – to support her arguments. 'Of course, everything that's known about matter and consciousness will have to be rethought in light of your father's discovery.'
'Do you mean the Elder Eddas?'
She nodded her head. 'It's said that your father discovered a mathematics of consciousness.'
'And this mathematics, this consciousness ... is locked up in memory?'
'The memory of the cells,' she said. 'If we could wake our cells up, we could recover these memories.'
'Is this why the courtesans are so interested in Bardo's remembrances?'
'Some of us are,' she said. 'And you?'
She met his eyes and looked at him a long time before saying, 'I want to wake the body up. The self, the whole bodymind. If this awakening involves the cellular memories, then I've a passionate interest in remembrancing.'
'You seem to know a great deal... about a great many things,' Danlo said. 'You might have been a holist. I did not know the courtesans were so erudite.'
Tamara combed her long, blonde hair with her fingers and beamed in obvious pleasure with his compliment. As he could see, she loved praise as some people loved chocolate. She was quite vain, in an open, unselfconscious way. And she was quite proud, not of her physical beauty, which she took for granted, but of her accomplishments in the courtesan arts, and most of all, proud of her memory and mind. Many courtesans learn smatterings of the various Order disciplines so that they might converse intelligently with the lords and masters about important subjects, but few had learned so deeply or well as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth.
'I never knew a pilot could have such a talent for ecstasy,' she said.
He laughed and said, 'Neither did I.'
'It's rare for the Kundalini to be awakened so easily, with so little art.'