Priestess of the Dragons' Temple

Chapter 2: Initiation Night and After-2

Myril’s hands, in her half-remembered body, reached out to draw him on into the offering place. She shivered. In the lamplight, the chamber glowed like the last traces of the sun against the twilight, or like dawn. He knelt before her, handing up a silk-bound bundle. Myril received it into the shrine. She lit the incense there and intoned the prayer of dedication.

“Great ones of the earth and sea, behold this offering which we give to you. I present your petitioner and myself, your vessel to make the great rite, to bind the earth to its soul, to fill the world with your bounty, to make ourselves worthy of the strength of life, of the power of the land which holds us.”

Myril flared again with the fire of the dragons. The petitioner’s sea-wind-hardened face went slack with awe. Then he took his place, bowed his head between her knees, and murmured his petition. He prayed for the good trade of his ships, for the grace of the dragons of the sea, for inspiration of the artisans of Anamat, and that he himself would be found worthy before his priestess and the dragons of Theranis.

He joined her there on the dais. Myril reached behind one last time to the shrine and drank from the cup there. It was water, not wine. It should have soothed the fire but instead she turned to the petitioner and pulled him to her like a stone into the water, sinking inexorably into her depths, water and fire feeding one another.

The fire reached up all around her heart and soul. Her flesh burned with it; it would not cool. She felt the man’s weight on her body and welcomed him. There was a moment’s hesitation, then he broke into the dam of herself that had held back that force of life until now and it plunged over her mind and flooded into her until she swayed like the waves of the sea and rose like flame and ashes blown on the wind caressing everything she touched and distantly watched her mind recede.

She was in the caverns of the earth again, following the dragon lines down toward the heart. Na was there, but also Anara, Helana, and all the other dragons, each in their place in the center of the earth, pushing up the life of the land, growing it crystalline in their caves and everywhere that they walked. Myril’s mind coursed out across the surface of the land and plunged again, then it was racing to the stars, embracing the universe, swinging around the moon and dancing on the fires of the sun.

Then there was only darkness and sleep.

§

Darna’s petitioner left as the light of dawn was beginning to brighten the sky. The garden still lay in deep shadow. She waited a decent interval after she let her petitioner go, trying to pray. She felt disoriented. The elders might say that she had crossed into another phase of life, but apart from a lingering physical unease and the unfamiliar smell of a man’s sweat on her, she felt exactly the same. After the baths, the last of that would be washed away, too. Then the only difference would be that now she was sleeping in an opulent chamber of her own.

She went outside, hoping to find Myril or Iola, someone to talk to while they waited for the dawn procession to the harbor, someone who would understand the disappointment she felt, the sameness of it all, but the benches near her chamber were all empty. At the far end of the walk, a familiar figure leaned against a pillar, staring out into the garden. It was Ganie, who as far as Darna knew had never seen an actual dragon outside of festival times, if then. Ganie looked up as she approached. She was crumpling a bit of sage in her hand.

“How did it go for you?” Darna asked. She just wanted someone to talk to, and Ganie would do, though she would have preferred Myril or Iola, or even Sunna, who was like a stern-yet-mischevous older sister.

“All right,” Ganie said, “but I’ve got Na’s own headache. Petitioner was decent enough, I suppose. He said he’s head guardsman at Getedun keep, but…” Ganie winced. “How about you?”

Darna shrugged and leaned against the wall beside Ganie’s door. “I’m not right for this,” she said. “I guess it was just what they call common s*x. I went through all the rituals, the prayers, the bells, the invocations. I know the elders say that sometimes it happens and sometimes not, but there was nothing: no dragons, no fire, no great ecstatic trance.”

“You could try the clazan next time –” Ganie broke off abruptly and squeaked. She bolted in the direction of the privies, clutching her stomach. Darna closed her eyes. Clazan didn’t look so appealing. She was tired enough from being up all night without getting sick too.

A straggling petitioner left Savasa’s chamber. He was young and well-muscled, with an arrogant swagger. As the sky brightened to violet, the other priestesses emerged from their chambers one at a time to gather around the ambassadress’s palanquin at the gate to the outer courtyard. Savasa emerged late. She re-arranged her robe, but Darna thought that she saw a bruise on her arm that hadn’t been there the day before. She went straight over to Tiagasa.

Darna hurried over to hear what they were saying. She didn’t have Myril’s preternatural hearing. Where was Myril?

Savasa hissed something.

Tiagasa shrugged. “He was handsome, wasn’t he?” she said softly.

Savasa shook her head, eyes closed. “I did what I said I would, it’s not my fault – ” She noticed Darna then, and stopped talking.

Tiagasa put an arm around Savasa’s shoulder, as if comforting her, and led her away from Darna who tried to pretend she hadn’t been listening. Where was Myril?

A pair of elder priestesses from the kitchen arrived with a steaming cauldron of tea. Darna joined the others to fill her cup and sipped her tea while she waited. No one seemed to be talking very much, beyond hushed whispers that didn’t include her or any of the other new peresi. Lenasa and Savasa had dark circles under their eyes that looked just like the ones Ganie had gotten from the clazan, but Savasa looked more shaken than the others. By the time Iola joined the rest of the peresi around the tea cauldron, the clouds on the eastern horizon were shining orange with the light of the coming sun.

“Morning,” Darna greeted her. “You look –” Iola was as serene and beautiful as ever, with no hint of circles under her bright eyes – not that she would take clazan even if she needed it, which she clearly didn’t. “You look like you’ve slept.”

“I don’t feel like I need to,” Iola said. “Isn’t it wonderful?” She smiled as if she’d seen the grace of Anara in the night.

“Sure,” Darna said.

“It was almost worth the wait,” Iola said, going on as if Darna hadn’t even spoken. “It was worth it. It was wonderful. I’ve never felt so complete in my life. I was born to this, I’ve always known it, since… Oh, since forever, or at least since when Tegana called me –”

“Have you seen Myril?” Darna interrupted her. Across the courtyard, the Aralel and her chosen attendants took their places around the ambassadress’s palanquin. The procession to the harbor’s edge and to the dragon’s island was about to begin.

“Oh, Myril?” Iola blinked. “Not this morning, no. Wasn’t she wonderful in the dance?”

Darna only had time to nod in response before the ambassadress appeared at her gate and the priestesses began a chant for safe passage. Its phrases, repeated over and over again, filled the morning air as they walked through the outer courtyard and down the processional way. Garlands of flowers hung from every window. The drummers, the invisible ones and those walking behind them, began their beat again. It was like every Midsummer morning since Ara had landed on Theranis’s shores.

Myril was still nowhere to be seen.

§

Iola hurried into the cool night air, through the arched passageway to the dragon tower. Her hips swayed, rocking the possible worlds between them. A pair of torches burned at the foot of the tower. After her initiation, it had taken her most of the day to find this place. She hadn’t felt like asking, hadn’t wanted to talk to the others. She just wanted to revel in this newfound current of life, this tapping into the pulse of the great ones. It had only been two days, but she felt as if she had always lived like this, giving audience to the petitioners and carrying a token of what they brought to Anara, down into the baths or up to the perch at the top of the tower. Iola preferred the tower, though the stairs were dusty. It seemed that few if any of her fellow priestesses came this way, but at the top, she could see the sky, the whole sky. From there she would be ready to see Anara return from the realm beneath the earth.

Iola lit a taper from the right-hand torch and climbed. Her latest petitioner had gone wide-eyed as the dragons’ power coursed through her. After some searching, he had found the answering power in himself. It came from far away, mortal, limited, focused. He was a craftsman, as many of the petitioners were. There were also some from the palace, and she’d heard that more farmers would come when the harvest was gathered and at planting time in spring. The princes and their men were already gone back to the provinces, having left the city as soon as the ambassadress was on her way to the other realm, scattering after their yearly gathering just as the priestesses did.

The petitioners brought an alien energy, a set of feelings and thoughts so different from her own that she began to see why they called her dragon-born and why everyone outside the temple had thought she was so different from other people. She’d known that she was different, but among the novices, when she hadn’t seen Anara in so long, she’d begun to feel almost ordinary. Of course, none of the priestesses here were ordinary, all of them had some gift of dragon-sight, however hidden. At least she believed that they must.

Now, she felt her difference from the petitioners in the core of her body, though surely the other priestesses were the same: part dragon fire, part human. Certainly Myril was. Myril was like a parallel stream in the earth, running silently beside Iola wherever she went. The men merely dipped their toes in her river and flew away, back to their civilized ways, their making and governing and tilling the earth. While they were with her, it was almost like dragon flight. Almost, but not quite.

She paused halfway up the tower to look out through a small window over the peresi’s garden. She hadn’t spent much time with her fellow priestesses since the first dance of presentation. She’d been glad of the silence at mealtimes and she relished the solitude of her chamber between petitioners. In her short time on the streets, she’d rarely been alone, and as a novice, never. This was the first time she’d had a room to herself. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the solitude she’d had once in the hills of Teganum. She didn’t feel like exchanging gossip or trading ornaments with other priestesses in the garden.

She climbed on up the tower. Her chamber was beautiful, no one troubled her there. She was the ruler of that small realm. For the moment, it was enough. She could make something happen that was like a kind of dragon fire in itself, and the petitioners bowed before the echo of the dragons inside her.

At the top of the stair, Iola leaned out onto a small balcony. She held the offering up toward the starlight then placed it on the ledge. She climbed out to sit beside it and tilted her head back to watch the stars swing past in their slow rounds of the heavens. In the cool quiet of the night she listened for the distant beat of dragon wings, a once-familiar sound. She thought she heard it far away on the eastern horizon. The wingbeat bent in, approaching the city walls, but before she could see anything it retreated. She turned to face that retreating sound. Squinting, she could just make out the shadowy form of an unfamiliar dragon to the east. She looked more carefully, straining with her mind’s eye. That was Lemira’s realm, over those hills. Perhaps it had been Lemira, or maybe only a crow in the darkness, or an owl. She wasn’t sure. She waited.

Later in the night, when the pink of dawn started to creep up over the horizon, Iola heard a wingbeat again, stronger and closer. She stretched, working the stiffness out of her back from where she had dozed against the rough stone wall. She stood, nearly losing her balance on the narrow ledge, on her sleep-numbed legs. Down in the courtyard, a pair of elder priestesses brought out the morning tea and set it on a warming fire. Iola caught herself on a stone in the wall and looked out again. Anara’s wingbeat sounded out over the harbor, over her island, but still Iola could not see the dragon. She strained forward, leaned out further. There was a flicker against the purple-blue horizon, a flash of gold as the first stroke of reflected sunlight hit the waves. It shimmered and there, sure as anything, was Anara.

Iola reached toward the dragon. Her red robe fluttered in the wind, blown close against her body. Anara circled the city, flying outside the walls over the countryside and farmland. She looked small from a distance, but the shimmer she left in her wake, the concentration of light around her, made her more vivid than everything she passed over. Iola kept watching. The dragon dipped out of sight for a moment then surged up over the city walls as she had blossomed out of her tower island that first Midsummer morning. The dragon shot straight to her, straight to Iola on the tower.

Iola did not faint, but shadows crowded her vision for a moment as the great dragon settled on the perch beside her. The dragon’s wing buffeted her as she landed, her hot, smooth scales aglow in the light of the rising sun. Iola took a deep breath and looked down.

The temple below looked so small. All at once and all together Iola remembered a thousand petty slights and impieties from the last five years, the way Darna had complained about her extra lessons, how Savasa had failed to bow as she passed the sanctuary, and the time when Lenasa had stolen a bit of the scrapplings’ bread. And Myril, possibly the wisest of them all, had been reluctant to take up dancing robes, to become a peresi, to join the rite. The elders were wiser than the novices, but only most of the time. The temple belonged to the priestesses. It did not belong to Anara. She belonged to Anara.

Iola let go of her handhold and reached out to touch the dragon’s side. She could feel the heat pulsing off Anara’s scales, smell the dry warmth of the chambers beneath the earth, the places she would some day travel to, she hoped. Anara’s wings refracted the light into a rainbow and something more, enveloping her in a beam of light. She and all priestesses were new here, new on the earth, new in the temple. Anara was as ancient as the hills. Iola would have let herself fall into Anara’s embrace, but the dragon backed away.

A long time, little one, Anara seemed to say.

Iola picked up her offering and held it out to the dragon. “I’ve become a priestess now,” she whispered. Anara was so present, so real. She overwhelmed the landscape below her. No, she was the landscape below her, she was the soul of the land, and even in the absence of the dragon’s form Iola had felt her presence in the growing things – a little – and maybe even in the stones of the temple, in the bath, in her body. But the dragon Anara had been all but invisible to her in the years since she’d entered the temple, appearing only at festival times, when she was in the midst of a crowd. Iola began to cry. It was too much, she had been too long away.

Anara retreated again, hovering for a moment in the air beside the tower.

You are not our Most Blessed One yet.

Iola hung her head. “But I’ve only just begun,” she said.

And begun well. Anara perched again and lowered her head to Iola’s belly, the great nostrils flaring over her flesh, blowing her back toward the tower. You have begun well indeed, but you are sad.

Iola backed away. “I’m not, it’s just...”

This is your ambassadress’s last journey. You will come to us.

Iola’s heart leapt. “So soon?”

Anara stretched her wings wide again and rustled them out to their full reach, as if that were an answer, but Iola couldn’t understand it.

She held her hand out again, cautiously, and made images in her mind of all the things that had passed in the time since she’d last seen Anara face to face. Anara had not seemed so big then. Iola thought of the dances, the learning, the temple gardens, and especially the past two nights and the day in between. As she thought, she felt Anara’s warmth soften, until it was almost gentle enough for a human to touch it.

Without a word or a thought, Anara lifted her wings and flew away, back to her gate in the harbor. She was gone. The sky was empty again, but Anara had returned to her at last, or Iola had returned to Anara, she wasn’t sure which.

Iola looked down once more. Back in the garden, a few priestesses had gathered to make their way to the early morning meal, the one for those who had been awake through the night. Iola realized that she was hungry. She hadn’t slept this past night, not to mention the night before when they’d all kept vigil, and she’d only had a little nap in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten since Midsummer Eve. She hurried down the stairs, dangling the burned-out taper in her hand, already wondering what she could show her next petitioner, now that Anara had returned.

§