Wildfire (88 page)

smudged niches. The temple had been hollowed out of the mountain, and its vaulted ceiling showed crude chisel strokes. Four square stone pillars had been hewn from the bedrock and painted blue. Everything else, even the floor, was whitewashed.

 

  
I’d dreamed of this place when I was a captive of the king’s. And just as in my dream, there was something missing, something red. But beyond the blue pillars, where an altar would be, stood a figure as tall as a man, shrouded in white silk. An adept pulled away the cloth to reveal a statue of a hooded snake, its head upraised as if to strike. It was tiled in tiny red scales and had obsidian eyes. One of the postulants began to sob. I crossed glances with Arthygater Keros. Courage, we said to each other; we would not be frightened of a statue, no matter how fierce.

 

  
We postulants were made to lie down before this statue and cover our heads with our shawls. The noise was painful, all the initiates waggling their tongues to make shrill cries in this stony place, and clacking their fingerdrums. I wanted to cover my ears, but didn’t dare. There were grating sounds of something heavy dragged over the floor; water splashing. They prepared some kind of bath behind us, and scented it with mint. These were such ordinary sounds and smells that I was almost giddy with relief. I peeped under my shawl at the base of the statue. Each diamond-shaped red tile was held in place by gold wire.

 

  
The initiates fell silent, which was worse than their ululations. A touch on my right shoulder told me it was time to rise. I draped the shawl around my neck and turned, and saw a large wooden vat filled with water, a humble thing like a dyer’s vat. But there were snakes in the water. I couldn’t tell how many, for they moved with sinuous grace, entwining in curves and coils, and they were ringed with bands of blue and black that confused the eye. They swam like eels underwater, and their tails were flat as fish fins: sea snakes, each as long as my arm.

 

  
The postulant who had been sobbing gave a shriek. She looked sturdy, tall and broad shouldered, but her lips had turned pale from fear and her eyes showed white all around. Arthygater Keros gripped her arm and hushed her.

 

  
I knew, we all knew without being told, that we would be required to climb in the vat with the snakes to prove our courage. I looked at the adepts who stood all around us, so many women young and old, and among them Arthygater Katharos and the celebrant Aeidin. Each of them had done this. So it must not be fatal, only dreadful.

 

  
An adept led forth two white gazehound bitches, lean, long-legged, and graceful, on white leashes. Around their necks were jeweled collars hung with tassels of saffron silk, and garlands of marigolds. Saffron cords were
tied around their deep chests and narrow haunches. They trembled, and their dark eyes were mournful.

 

  
When the first dog was thrown into the vat, she paddled and kept her long thin head above water, looking to us for salvation. It seemed a long time before the first sea snake bit her flank and did not let go. She plunged and snapped at the snakes, and water rose up in sprays of glinting beads. The other snakes were vexed and struck back.

 

  
Three adepts used hooks to catch the gazehound by her collar and the saffron cords encircling her body. As they pulled her from the water, one sea snake hung by its fangs from her flanks, and an adept fearlessly stepped forward and choked the snake until it let go. She flung it back into the vat.

 

  
I thought the dog might die at once, but she managed to sit up, her forelegs scrabbling on the stone floor. When she gave a great shake, we postulants were showered with droplets of water. She didn’t bleed, and it was impossible to see the marks of fangs on her hide.

 

  
Initiates cast the second dog into the vat, and the snakes, already roiling in the water, struck at once. This dog too was hauled out, and the two gazehounds shivered in a puddle on the floor, their marigold garlands and saffron tassels sodden and limp. The dogs had gone to the sacrifice consenting, with never a whimper or a bark—ah, but of course, the gazehounds were mute.

 

  
I expected the adepts to cast us in the vat straightaway, but they made us wait, and the waiting was itself a trial of courage. They sang paeans to Katabaton; Aeidin sang one hymn by herself, with the pure perfect tones that had made her famous, and her voice seemed to travel about the temple like a bird caught within the walls.

 

  
Arthygater Keros and I bore up the heavy broad-shouldered postulant, and she sagged against us. The other two postulants stood side by side. One was small and plump, with hair the soft brown color of a mourning dove; the other, thin, dark-haired, and resolute, knew all the hymns and sang with the adepts. I wondered why we did not, all of us, turn and flee. But I knew. The bulwark of courage was shame. It no longer mattered why I’d chosen to undertake this trial, or whether my reasons sufficed. All that mattered was that I must not snivel or faint or run, not so long as Arthygater Keros was steadfast. I esteemed Keros for her bravery, and adored her too, because she was worthy of my Sister’s adoration.

 

  
The first dog lay on her side with her neck outstretched and strove to gulp air; her stiff limbs shuddered but otherwise were rigid. When she died, she released a stream of dark piss. The second dog persisted in living. She sat up with her hind legs splayed awkwardly, and a long thread of drool descending from the corner of her mouth. Her deep chest heaved as if she’d
chased down a hare. Maybe the poison killed her later, after the ceremony. I never found out.

 

  
The adepts began to hiss a chant, and the sound washed over us in waves. I locked my knees so I wouldn’t fall. I felt the chill scratch down my spine that told me a god was present in the temple. Adepts came forward with silver cups full of a dark liquid; Keros was served by Arthygater Katharos herself, and the other postulants by those who knew them, their upholders. I had no upholder and Aeidin offered a cup to me, a gracious gesture from one celebrant to another. The drink was sour and fermented, and among other flavors I tasted moonflower seeds in the gritty sediment I drained from the cup.

 

  
The swallowwort made me see everything smeared and refulgent and glittering in the yellow candlelight. We postulants disrobed, and our naked bodies seemed dusted with mica and yellow powder. Our shadows gleamed too, swaying to the praise songs, black and shimmering with iridescence.

 

  
Aeidin gestured that I should remove the red cord at my waist. I fumbled with the tight knot, and when the cord slipped to the ground I felt Dread flood into me all at once as if I were hollow. I prayed to the Queen of the Dead to spare me—or to welcome me, if I must die now. I’d forgotten about Katabaton.

 

  
I looked to Arthygater Keros and saw terror in her eyes too, yet she didn’t falter. Adepts came forward to support the broad-shouldered postulant, who refused to take those few steps to the vat of her own accord, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over in a shrill chant. And it came as a surprise and a marvel that, despite the Dread, so unwelcome and so familiar, which caused my legs to shake and my throat to dry—despite all that, there arose in me a Yes. Yes, I will. I will. It must have been a god in me who assented, because I couldn’t have done it alone.

 

  
The snakes had calmed. They undulated through the water. Sometimes one would show its small head and narrow snout above the surface, or a brilliant banded loop of its back. The dogs had gone in one at a time, but we climbed in all at once, except for the frightened postulant, who balked, and clung to the knees of an adept until they dragged her away. I wondered if the temple would return the tithe to her family, and the thought caused a tiny bubble of mirth to rise in me, which I swallowed. There was no time for such trifles, yet there was all the time in the world; it took an eternity to climb over the wooden walls of the vat and into the water. An adept pressed my shoulder, meaning sit down, and I felt a snake slide past my shin and my legs folded, though I hadn’t intended to sit. My chin was just above water and my back pressed against the rough slats. I was horrified
that I might be bitten on the face and I covered my face with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut.

 

  
The snakes were perturbed again, they darted through the water quick as lightning. One struck my right shoulder a glancing blow; another bit my left thigh and held on. I shrieked and heaved myself to my feet, and for a long moment the serpent dangled there, writhing. It had a small head with a black circle on its brow, and its blue bands were brilliant as lapis. It fell away, and many willing hands helped me from the water. The other postulants too were climbing out; the dark-haired one tumbled backward over the rim of the vat and was caught.

 

  
It was over. It had just begun.

 
  

 

  
There was a whitewashed door behind the blue pillars, and a stair leading deeper into the mountain. Four adepts carrying candles led us, and our shadows wavered over serpents painted on the walls. Down and down we went until we reached a curving chamber, a natural void in the mountain; no one had tried to smooth or polish the rough rock.

 

  
We postulants were bidden to lie down on feather-stuffed pallets. Adepts rubbed us with lumps of pumice, snakestones, they said, to take away poison. They said we were not going to die.

 

  
The adepts examined us for tiny punctures and scratches; the venom of these sea snakes didn’t cause bleeding or swelling or bruising at the bite, unlike that of vipers. I had three bites, the most of any. The stout placid adept who tended me—Horama was her name—plucked out a serpent’s tooth from the wound on my thigh and knotted it in my shawl, which had been carried down with my other belongings. She said the fang was a gift from the Serpent Katabaton, and a sign of favor.

 

  
Even now it began. My neck was sore and stiff and my right arm and left leg ached. My throat was dry and yet my mouth overflowed with spit, and I was obliged to swallow again and again, and each time it was harder, as my throat constricted and my jaw grew rigid. My tongue took up too much space in my mouth. My left side grew intolerably hot, until sweat burst from my skin, and my right side was chilled. But I couldn’t panic. I was drowning in euphoric lassitude.

 

  
Horama anointed me with a salve of aloe and grease. My sight was failing now, my right eye rolling one way and the left another, so that I saw the adept doubled as she knelt over me. She appeared as two overlapping hazes of golden light, and all around her shades and shadows undulated from the edges of my vision.

 

  
She drew on my body with a burnt stick, zigzag lines from my cleft to the notch at the base of my throat. My neck was rigid, and I couldn’t lift my
head to see what she was doing, but I felt the tip of the stick scraping my skin, and I knew she limned my serpent. Horama took out a long, shining needle and threaded it with a short thread, and before every stitch she dipped the needle and thread in a bowl of dark pigment. She embroidered the snake, starting at the lips of my cleft and working upward, taking careful even stitches all around the outline. She dragged the thread through the skin, just under the surface, and left color behind. She was a most meticulous seamstress. The needle pricked me entering and leaving, and pain ascended with every stitch. Far worse was the pain of the venom corroding the sinews of my body.

 

  
I heard someone else wailing. But Katabaton had turned a key and locked my jaws together, and I couldn’t pry them apart to speak or cry out. She has the power to enforce silence. And I had her blessing. She didn’t make me numb, but she made the suffering unimportant, ever more distant as I departed.

 

  
I sank down and down and at first I believed I was sinking into Sleep, but it was some other sea, one that doesn’t grant oblivion. I sank until I realized that all along I’d been ascending, wriggling upward through the umbilicus that unites Mount Omphalos, Katabaton’s Navel, to the overworld, where she dwells with her husband and child, attended by meneidon and the shades of the dead and the unborn.

 

  
In the overworld only my right eye was useful; my left eye still watched Horama at her work. I was granted a glimpse, I saw but could not
see,
for it was beyond my understanding.

 

  
I entered a place—a hall?—a forest?—a forest of pillars, with a sky of honeycombed vaults. This place was crowded with beings who moved swiftly and changed shape like leaping flames. They confused my single eye, for every being, and the place around us, was tiled in intricate patterns such as those found on the skins of serpents; it was hard to tell one being from another, or distinguish them from the surroundings. Perhaps they were all one, flames of a single fire. When these creatures—meneidon I supposed, in their true forms—when they spoke, their words too were patterned with scales, and their song-speech coiled about me, and I was caressed by meanings I couldn’t comprehend. I was amazed and baffled to be admitted there, where a mere person did not belong.

 

  
My own form was also baffling. I had become elongated, and scaly as a pale snake, a serpent-woman. Some creatures beckoned me to follow, but I was too torpid, my time was thick and slow, while their time was quick; I was too heavy to fly in their darting fashion, and too solid to change shape. I was able to open my jaw just a crack, enough to let out my forked tongue to taste the colorful ribbons of their speech.

 

  
But the glimpse was over. That was all I was permitted, and I slipped slithering down through the narrow voids within the mountain to the hollow where drool came from the corners of my mouth and ran down my chin. I took rapid sips of breath, for there was an invisible burden on my chest I could barely lift. My limbs were stiff and still. I thought I was going to die. Horama thought so too. Too much venom, she was thinking. It doesn’t matter, I wanted to say. If I die, I die.

 

  
Because I’d always thought that when I died, my lonely shade would be all that remained. But that was wrong, all backward. Our bodies are but shadows cast by the one fire, briefly, in this world. But oh, I loved the world and my body in it, the dark and solid shadow—though it might be, like a shadow cast on the ground, but a poor copy of a more splendid self.