Three hours before dawn. The glade of the goddess, called the Girdle of Avalei, deep within the hills of the Blessed Isle. In the austerity of the Olondrian night, the olive trees painted black, we descend on thick uneven turf to the entrance of the shrine.
The hill is humped against the stars, covered with grass and small weather-beaten flowers that catch the lantern light. Facing us is the door, a jagged crack in the chalky stone, in that crumbling sand-colored rock with its channels of dust, its piled offerings. Leeks, a bird’s nest, bundles of sweet hay tied up with ribbons. A flask of olive oil, a small white harp. We walk past the seashells of supplication, the mulberries of remorse, and enter the long slit in the wall of the hill.
One must turn sideways to enter. We wear the dust of the hill on our clothes. We: the Priestess of Avalei in her jeweled lionskin cloak, her lissome attendants with dilated eyes, carrying wreaths of bells, the nine silent priests in their masks of shrunken hide, their ivory beaks. And I. Clad in a white silk robe with turmeric on my cheeks, I scrape through the stone and am eaten up by the hillside. At the last I feel a tearing anguish, the agony of departure. Never have I been so far from home.
Darkness. The darkness of the old gods, gods who though foreign are like my own: gods of discord, pathos, and revelation. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness. A blackness where something lives. I breathe in precious, pampered air, antique dust, the starveling ghosts of incense. Motionless, I feel the empty space around me tingle. There is a rustle, the loud rasp of a match. Then the darkness blooms: a dazzling light that makes me cover my eyes, and when I can open them a fire, a garden: a beauty that makes me cry out because it is lavish and unexpected, a bower of midnight roses, a cascade of gems. The cave is small and the walls are rough: its beauty is that of color. One by one the great pine torches are lit. They stand in iron brackets, lighting the orange of poppy fields and the scarlet of festive displays of lights and the gold on the walls. Under this glory the priests and the painted girls sit in a circle on the stone floor, crossing their legs in sublime silence. The high priestess stands before the crude altar hewn out of the wall with its flagrant, red-brown splashes, its smell of hot salt.
Our shadows are huge, unnatural; they seem to move more quickly than we. The priestess bids me kneel in the center of the circle. She takes the stone pitcher from the altar and pours something into a bowclass="underline" it is oily and oyster-colored, and tastes very sweet. After two swallows I gag. They wait in silence for me to finish. I hand the rough stone bowl back to the priestess. She dips her hands in another bowl on the altar and smears something rancid-smelling over my face and neck: clarified butter.
“Anavyalhi,” she says. “I waited for thee in the snows of the mountain and thou didst not come, O dove with the crimson feet.” Her voice is low, caressing and sad, as if she means the words, though she is only reciting from the book of her mind.
“Anavyalhi, my love with red feet, aloe tree, cloud of saffron. Lost voice over the water, oh lost voice of my love! Will I never again hear the strings of thy throat, O moon-guitar? Nay, say the waters; for she has departed forever into the dark country…”
The priestess steps back from me, her palms gleaming thickly with butter. Chrysolites wink among the coarse hairs of her robe. Above it her face is blank, heavy, watchful, the eyes like soot. Her gaze never wavers from me as she reaches a hand toward one of the girls.
A bird, a large dove violently beating its wings, is suddenly with us, drawn from the velvet bag in the girl’s lap. It is a white fire in the hands of the priestess as she holds it toward the roof of the cave and thunders something in an unknown, dreadful language. Then she holds it over the shallow depression in the altar and removes a small stone knife from her plaited hair. The bird struggles; some of its feathers are stuck together with butter. She slits its throat with a smooth, voluptuous movement.
At that instant the cave is filled with sound: the girls are singing, chanting, beating their wreaths of bells on their bent knees, and the priests, their voices muffled by the stiff hide of their masks, are droning too and shaking beaded rattles. Some of them have small ceremonial mortars and pestles of stone, which they wear at their belts, and now beat rhythmically. I am too fascinated to understand what they are singing. The sound is that of furious bees, cicadas, rattling chains. The priests inspire horror in me with their yellowed beaks, their invisible eyes, the brittle antlers or ragged hares’ ears sewn to the sides of their masks. They are like our doctors; they mean me ill. I look back toward the priestess and see blood running down a channel into a trench around the altar.
“And wilt thou never return?” she says, entreating me with her eyes, stretching out her hands, which shine darkly in the torchlight. “Nay, say the snows; for the earth which spills the delights of her lap for thee is but a shade unto thy love, and the shadow of a closed door. Could my love not keep thee, Anavyalhi, body of water… the way of the sword, or the path of the deadly unguents.…”
In a moment of pure lucidity I know that the liquid I have drunk is affecting my mind. Everything is clear in that moment. My vision is sharpened: I see the small hairs in the rigid mask of a priest, imagine how the hide would feel, hard and buckled, dried fruit. I see the bodies under the dark red dresses of the girls, secretive bodies, the ribs shuddering as they jangle their bells. I see more than it is given to the human eye to see, the sweat on their stomachs, their fear of the dark cistern, their fear of the dark. I see them washing their faces, becoming childish, pink, defenseless, crawling into their beds and speaking in code by touching fingers, passing gossip down the long row of beds, these girls called Feilar, Kialin, Kerelis, these young girls far from home. I can count the glimmering beryls scattered across the robe of the priestess, like copses in a field of tawny wheat. I think I can even catch the scent of them: they smell of mint. But the chalcedony smells like the bark of trees. I see her, Taimorya, the Queen of the Witches. I know that every night she eats a plate of snails, for eloquence. I see her sitting up by the lamp, painting a china apple. The prince is asleep in the shadow of her bed.
Then, as suddenly as it arrived, this clarity vanishes. My mouth goes slack; it is hard to keep my eyes from fluttering closed. The monotonous music, which never flags, which is now like a great company on horseback jingling and pounding through a gap between mountains, confuses me like a mist. It is the dust raised by the hooves. And far away, the echo of falling stones. I see the high priestess: only her face, beautiful, heartless, exalted. Her long black eyes reflecting the sparks of the torches. “My love,” she says. Her voice is deep inside my ear, so deep that I do not know if it is she who has spoken or I.
“Where are you?”
Now I am sure that I am the one who has spoken. But it is also she; I feel her speaking through me. I struggle weakly against her, suddenly terrified, trying to rise, lifting my heavy eyelids to see the dove’s body on the altar. I fight against the darkness but only think to myself, stupidly: They have put something on the torches. The smoke is strange… Then it becomes too easy to sink, to abandon myself to oblivion. The slide to the bottom is effortless, enchanting. There, at the bottom, I see unimagined valleys of white fish. There are deserts too, dotted with blackened rose trees.