It was not a word; or if it was it was no word I knew. But it had meaning; at least that was my belief. To my ear it sounded like an open-throated shout raised by some newborn soul in the midst of the blaze; a yell of celebration and defiance. Here I am! it seemed to say. Now we begin!
I raised myself up on my hands to see if I could find the shouter (whether tt was man or woman I couldn't yet decide) but the rain of ash and detritus was like a veil before me: I could see almost nothing through it.
My arms could not support me for more than a few moments. But as I sank back down to the ground, frustrated, the fire overhead-having perhaps exhausted its fuel-went out. The ash ceased falling. And there, standing no more than twenty yards from where I lay, the blaze surrounding her like a vast, fiery flower, was Cesaria. There was nothing about her attitude or her expression that suggested the fire threatened her. Far from it. She seemed rather to be luxuriating in its touch; her hands moving over her body as the conflagration bathed it, as though to be certain its balm penetrated every pore. Her hair, which was even blacker than her skin, flickered and twitched; her breasts seeped milk, her eyes ran silvery tears, her sex, which now and then she fingered, issued streams of blood.
I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. She was too exquisite, too ripe. It seemed to me that all I had seen before me in the last little while-the laval ground, the tree and its fruit, the pale herd, the hunted antelope and the tiger that took it; even the strange, winged creature that had briefly appeared in my vision-all of these were in and of the woman before me. She was their maker and their slaughterer; the sea into which they flowed and the rock from which they'd sprung.
I'd seen enough, I decided. I'd drunk down all I could bear to drink, and still keep my sanity. It was time I turned my back on these visions, and retreated to the safety of the mundane. I needed time to assimilate what I'd seen-and the thoughts that the sights had engendered.
But retreat was no easy business. Ungluing my eyes from the sight of my father's wife was hard enough; but when I did so, and looked back toward the door, I could not find it. The illusion surrounded me on every side; there was no hint of the real remaining. For the first time since the visions had begun I remembered Luman's talk of madness, and I was seized with panic. Had I carelessly let my hold on sanity slip, without even noticing that I'd done so? Was I now adrift in this illusion with no solid ground left for my senses?
I remembered with a shudder the crib in which Luman had been bound; and the look of unappeasable rage in his eyes. Was that all that lay before me now? A life without certainty, without solidity; this forest a prison I'd breathed into being, and that other world, where I'd been real and in my wounded fashion content, now a dream of freedom to which I could not return?
I closed my eyes to shut out the illusion. Like a child in terror, I prayed.
"Oh Lord God in Heaven, look down on your servant at this moment; I beg of you… I need you with me.
"Help me. Please. Take these things out of my head. I don't want them, Lord. I don't want them."
Even as I whispered my prayer I felt a rush of energies against me. The blaze between the trees, which had come to a halt a little distance from me, was on the move again. I hastened my prayer, certain that if the fire was coming for me, then so was Cesaria.
''Save me. Lord-"
She was coming to silence me. That was my sudden conviction. She was a part of my insanity and she was coming to hush the words I'd uttered to defend myself against it.
"Lord, please hear me-"
The energies intensified, as though they intended to snatch the words away from my lips.
"Quickly, Lord, quickly! Show me the way out of here! Please! God in Heaven, help me!"
"Hush…" I heard Cesaria say. She was right behind me. It seemed to me I could feel the small hairs at the nape of my neck fizzle and fry. I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder. There she was, still cocooned in fire, her dark flesh shining. My mouth was suddenly parched; I could barely speak.
"I want…"
"I know," she said softly. "I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back."
"Yes…" I said. I was close to sobbing.
"But here it is," she said. "All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it's yours."
"No," I protested. "I've never been in this place before."
"But it's been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were born."
"Dreamed it into me…" I said.
"Every sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come… it's in your blood and in your bowels."
"Then why am I so afraid of it?"
"Because you've held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you're the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you…"
Did I dare believe any of this?
Cesaria replied as though she'd heard the doubt spoken aloud.
"I can't reassure you," she said. "Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you've ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again."
"Fall where?"
"Why back into your own hands, of course," she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn't blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I'd never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that: I was afraid.
"Ask your question," Cesaria said. "You have a question. Ask it."
"It sounds so childish."
"Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it."
"Am I… safe?"
"Safe?"
"Yes. Safe."
"In your flesh? No. I can't guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there's other hands to hold you. I've told you that already."
"And… I think I believe you," I said.
"So then," Cesaria said, "you have no reason not to let the memories come."
She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.
"Touch me," she said.
I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.
"Don't be afraid," she said to me. "They don't bite."
I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn't bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn't realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can't imagine how that's possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.
I don't believe I had ever stood so close to my father's wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush and forbidding. Strands of her hair were lifted by gusts off the blaze around us (to the heat of which I seemed invulnerable) and brushed against my cheek. Their touch, though it was light, was nevertheless profoundly sensual. Feeling it, and seeing her exquisite features, I could not help but imagine what it would be like to be received into her arms. To kiss her, to lie with her, to put a child into her. It was little wonder my father had obsessed on her to his dying day, though all manner of argument and disappointment had soured the love between them.