The Gates of Paradise Read online

  Garbed in soft new clothes, taking the first steps of the turning back, she knew she must not shy from testing the tenor of her renunciation against the light of world. The smile on the older girl’s face told her how lucky she was and how difficult the change would be. Round and round, up the gentle turnings, she was ascending in a dream, higher and higher still, so high she almost expected to come to the outer egress, the Gates of Luba, for the first time since childhood. Ascending that upward curving stair, she remembered the first time she’d set eyes on La Seritää Sierrellä. It had pulled on her like some great umbilicus, spiraling down into the living rock of the Carreg Goch, the red stone valley in the vast center lands of La Tierra Rosa. Arriving with five other small girls, after a month’s journey from Paidrin, she had stood at the edge of that navel in the world, the deep crater, and felt its patience, as a sister explained that its red walls were sacred, a living presence of the mother.

  Her guide now walked through another archway with tall, narrow roseate doors, but Ashe stopped. She had never seen anything so beautiful. The other girl raised an bemused eyebrow.

  “Here is the vestibule. Let me show you.”

  The doors opened onto a spiral stair, not of stone like the others but of orange-red sindoor, carpeted with a long vermilion rug alive with flame patterns. The southern wall, facing onto the open interior of the Sierrellä, was paned with glass, each stained a different hue, white, yellow, red, blue, green, violet. Late afternoon sun poured through the windows, casting onto the stairs soft-tinted beams that overlapped in unexpected ways, producing phantom hues like overtones in music, evanescing in and out of visibility. The beauty of it took her, so long a stranger to sunlight, by surprise, no mere display of colors but emotions made tangible.

  Rushing to one of the long narrow panes, she gazed outside for the first time since that final brief pause before the descent into La Sierrellä. The canyon lip seemed shockingly close at hand. If memory served, there were windowed apartments above.

  “Come,” the older girl said.

  She counted thirty three stairs, and thirty three tinted panes, all in the same series of six colors, until the last three, which were clear. At the top waited a landing and a door much more modest than the one below. It looked to be of rough wood the carpenter had forgotten to finish, but above it, on a marble lintel was carved a perfectly formed gypsum rose. Her heart pounded beneath her ribs.

  “Knock.” Her guide stepped down a stair or two, politely. “They’ll explain,” she nodded, and started back down the stair.

  Alone, between one life and the next, she raised her knuckle to the wood and rapped softly. A tall red-haired woman, with sea green eyes, appeared.

  “Sister Ashe,” she said warmly, “I am Saoirse.” She extended a long, delicate hand to lead her within. “You’ll want to meet the twins.”

  The quarters were rectilinear. Along the longer south-facing wall, across from the windows, stood four wooden doors, set several feet apart. One of the doors opened, and out stepped two slim girls with honey-colored hair, close to her in age. She’d seen twins before, but never such mirror images. As Saoirse had, they gave her sisterly hugs.

  “You’re Ashe, then?” one of them asked.

  “It seems so,” Ashe smiled, bashfully.

  3 Lumimi

  The pain sobered him up. Both his hands were burnt and bleeding, but his feet could find no purchase. Time sizzled around him, as if excited at the possibility that he might fall, his little thread of apportioned life cut. How long would it take to hit the rocks below? A few seconds? It was like waking up out of a dull haze. Some other person had been in charge, someone incompetent and lazy, a worm of sixty years, a tubular membrane of time and memory that had stretched and grown into a coiled dragon, a sea monster. That self-closed yet stretched out membrane - that drunk, muddled, self-involved yet ravenous tube - was responsible for the vast majority of his decisions. It saw the world through a dull film of familiarity. But now he was awake. The world was crystal clear. Pain and danger were cleansing his soul.

  To perceive the exact distance that needed to be climbed to find a foothold before his arms lost their fight, he had to perceive himself, sharply, precisely. The brain could not afford to deceive itself about its relationships. Lucidity had its price. It cut through the most cherished lies one told oneself. His foot found a crevice, permitting his arms some minor relief. Petre, the Ard Baile chief’s son who had squirreled up the face and secured the line, shouted something down to him from the opening in the ice ten meters above. Rufus flashed him a grin and caught his breath, waving down to Dagda, easy to spot, bald, fat, and covered in furs. Guts, that’s one thing Dagda had. He was a tub of guts. And guts had their uses, Rufus was thinking now. A man could trust his guts for quite a surprising array of decisions. His guts had told him that the ice looked too bright today. He had a superstition about days that were too good to be true. For some reason, in his experience, they always were, with a vengeance.

  As he looked up again at Petre in the ugly slice of cave mouth above, he could see that the noontime sun was already making the ice drip. And the angle wasn’t good. He wouldn’t be able to use his legs. He’d known that, watching from the ground. Petre had free climbed most of the face easily, but then stopped at that hump beneath the cave, at a dead stop for what seemed a very long time. That should have been the end of that. He knew better. From below, Petre had looked like he was doing the impossible, climbing upside down with only the strength of his fingertips to resist the immense murderous pull of the world. Petre could do that because he was twenty five years younger than Rufus, and, more importantly, he was a bloody Jökullinn. Vertical ice was like flat ground to Petre. It carried him, offering sure footing. Rufus knew he shouldn’t follow. It wouldn’t do that for him. But two things made up his mind. One was that he wasn’t going to leave Dolur until he got up to that cave. The other was that today was as good a day as any. In brief, nothing tempted him like fate. And now Petre was already up, so where was the cnuching choice? He was shouting down at him, and it looked like he meant to lower a second secure line, gesturing for him to tie it around himself in case he lost his grip on the main line. Lucky thing.

  The extra rope probably saved his life, or so he began to feel, the third time he found himself dangling in open space, flailing like a tiny two-legged spider, a speck of imperfection in a pristine void. It wasn’t skill that stood between him and death, but the fibers of well made ropes. He wondered who made them, what specific hands, male or female, old or young? What sorts of pains, joys, fears, hopes, and memories, what will to survive, had they woven into that length of line? Did they know even faintly that they were saving his miserable confused life? When he finally made the top, every muscle in his body screaming, every vestige of pride discarded, he felt that there was nothing dead in the world at all. It was all life, too much life to take in, strange, because by habit he’d dimly supposed life was within. He’d clung to that belief, even though he’d seen through it before, in dire moments when he looked death in the face. And saw life. Petre clapped him on the back, with newly sprouted worry wrinkles around his eyes. If a rope had broken, he realized, Petre would have had a hell of a time getting down. It was going to be bad enough anyway. They were losing their race with the sun. In an hour or two it would go behind the taller peaks, and in the meantime in its brief transit it had managed to warm the ice enough to make it pulpy.

  “I’m too old for this,” Rufus groaned, leaning over, head to his knees. He could not tell if it was his heart burning, as it drummed against his ribs, or his lungs. He drank deep from his gourd, the sweat cooling his wet clothes warning him how of soon he might feel the signs of water loss. Petre was wearing a thin fur from his pack, but Rufus had climbed without a pack, and so far didn’t feel cold. The cave was three yards high at its mouth, and three yards deep, but rapidly tapering toward the back. The two oil torches Petre had lit seemed to cast less light than they should in that ancient soundl
ess place. Rufus dug in the pack for more torches, his hand happening upon some bundled strips of venison.

  “What now?” Petre asked tensely.

  “Well, it’s either a way in or it isn’t,” Rufus mumbled, chewing. “Let’s find out.”

  He lit two more torches and stepped further in. The walls were uneven and irregular, as if magma had bubbled through them. By the time he was halfway in, he was stooping. His back, shoulder, and arms began to burn with a pleasant, sore warmth after the climb, and his head felt dizzy. He was still hungry. Very hungry. The far back of the cave was rounded and snug, like a place some wild creature might curl up and rest. But there was no trace of living things. He crouched all the way down and crept into that furthest bowl, noticing only that it seemed slightly warm there. The warmth and the tingling were aftereffects of the strenuous climb, he decided. Well, nothing there after all. He came back out and dug inside Petre’s pack for more dried food.

  “Maybe save some?” Petre said, tentatively.

  He looked down at his hands, a bit surprised. He’d already consumed two thirds of the stash. “Climbing in the cnuching cold,” he apologized. Vaguely, he sensed there might be something wrong. The burning in his muscles had subsided into a slightly vertiginous exhaustion, a deep centerless lassitude. His head seemed too heavy for his body, and the cave seemed a relief from burdens.

  “Rufus,” Petre said, in a tense half-whisper, sliding quickly back across the rock floor and pressing his back hard against the far wall as to make more space between them. He had broken into incomprehensible Oighear, the syllables so rapid, quiet, and pleading it must have been a prayer.

  Rufus wanted to apologize but felt an overpowering longing to curl up at the cave back and sleep for a bit. He was mildly surprised by the deep affection he felt for the place. It was such a comfort to be there. Though his eyes were already closed, he could hear rapid breathing and smell fear. He had allowed himself to stretch out, grow to his full size, curling up warm and well-insulated on the cave floor. He hadn’t needed to pack anything. He had fur of his own, deep and reddish brown. He could tell by the sounds that the frightened kid was already roping himself in for the descent. He knew he should stop him, but it didn’t seem important. His pulse was beating in his head, slower and slower. In his dream he could see that he hadn’t looked carefully enough the first time. There was a passage down into the mountain, right behind the bowl of the back of the cave. Down, down there, where the passage went, they were slumbering. They wouldn’t be angry. They would welcome him home.

  4 The heavy heart

  From the commotion overhead and the ripe sour smell, Dillan surmised that Bu was dangling foot rather than head first from the overhead bunk, though the converse was still distinctly possible, given the ambiguous bouquet of lymed hair. Either way, a hard fact announced itself. Morning. Time to face the daylight. By now, gossip would have spread. A bhuachtain had been stopped because of him. The maor had made it official: the eye of Essger was on someone in the ring. And not only Essger’s eye. There were old timers in the house. Those two macchas, the maor, the Eye, and who knew who else, would notice even the smallest signs of draíochta. The ciphers had not resurfaced on his face, and he’d wrapped the faded ones on his arms in cerements, but they’d have been watching him closely, a Dunlan, fathered by the Redwolf on his crazy runaway from the Spiral.

  Bu and Hog hadn’t been in the lodge last night. They were of the opinion that Kunnok had displayed a bit of illusionism in the smoky rug shop, a Nesso joke at their expense, and he had no desire to persuade them, instead, that this was real, that he’d seen one of their druk demigods, that he’d been changed somehow. Going back to Neserre to seek the truth didn’t sound like a good idea, either. He was old enough to know that the world was a bear: it would be neutral to you, if you were neutral to it. Going back to Cogan’s farm would be the best thing. Lie low and let be. Lesson learned. He could talk Keene into bringing him to see Mane-Blake, maybe. Or, not. He could just carry on as before.

  “Mighty Dill is mighty introspective this morning.” It sounded like Bu, overhead, was paring his toenails.

  “I’m not,” Dill disagreed. “I’m the only one in my family who isn’t.”

  “A family trait,” Bu noted, sympathetically. “A brooding brood.”

  “I’m not brooding.”

  “Brooding’s in your breeding, but it won’t help you breed a brood.”

  “I don’t want a brood.”

  “You must. Why else would you put yourself through all this? Work on your vomit ugly uncle’s farm, an extra hand to shovel cachue. You poor shit. The best part of you ran down your fat mother’s inner thigh. Why else would you end up here, on the bunk, beneath me.”

  “I like it here.”

  “Sure you do. You can brood. You want to brood. When you’ve brooded enough, you’ll get to breeding. I hate men who brood and then breed. They make bad fathers. But breeding things of the mind leads to seldom-seen offspring. Tell me what happened in the ring last night.”

  “I won.”

  “The maor stopped the meet. Explain.”

  “Essger’s Eye. He told you at the door.”

  “Not Essger’s Eye,” he tut tutted, “but what it sees. Essger watches for the obstructor and the discourager, who always show up sooner or later.”

  “Last night, the discourager and the obstructor showed up alright, but the Eye didn’t let the two of you through the door. So all’s well.”

  “Hardly,” Bu said. By the sound of it, he was lying back down on his bunk, with his arms behind his head, talking to the ceiling. “They’re nothing but the two who walk at either side of the mystery man in the middle, to let them know he’s coming. And the Eye can’t keep him out, because he’s the obscure cnuchen ruler of this world.”

  “Ah, that’s why he let me in. But you mean the divine cnuchen ruler of this world.”

  “The Selfhood, at any rate,” Bu assented. “We know his old names. Meistr. Jäkel. Mâr. Volpes. What’s his law? Hate others, as enemies, knowing they serve their selfhoods, even as you serve your own. That’s him, the unforgiving. Hanfaddeugar. Rhagrithiwr. And you know what? We all play his game. People who lose, people who win. As long as you don’t see some meaning beyond yourself in the ring, you’re serving the arglwydd anobaith.”

  “I think you got waterlogged in the rain yesterday and caught a case of religion,” Dillan accused the groaning wood slats overhead. “You sound like Keene, who won’t touch women, or blade, or wine, unless it’s well-watered down.”

  “No way, man, what I’m pouring’s the maccha’s crazy undiluted Orroch wisdom.”

  Hog came through the door with morsels of bread, cheese, and news.

  “I won’t sell it more expensive than I bought it, but you cnuched him good,” he announced, with a big smug smile. “You took him to the bakery. You showed him the three worlds. I don’t know what carn cac Merton pulled that sleeveen francach slanger Phelan out of, but Ewen’s new title of Aegle mouse is going to stick. Damnú! A more deserving person I couldn’t imagine.” The frame groaned as he sat on the edge of the bed and spread out the food. “Merton thought he finally had the upper hand on Walder. Expected his boy to win every bout right up to ore and ingot, make us fools.”

  Hog stopped. The mournful vibe was hitting him.

  “So, the Eye called it off,” he socked Dillan hard in the shoulder. “Crocks. But you’ll get another chance, for it’s the start of something beautiful, Deadly Dill. Next time, we’ll all three bury Darad, if they don’t find some small beer excuse to back out. Tell you what, don’t be too self-abasingly grateful, but I’m going to show you some of my best moves. No one becomes a Murphy without taking a beating.” He frowned at the lack of response. “What?” he asked, disgusted. “What?”

  “We’re taking him back,” Bu said.

  “I know. Cogan’s.”

  Bu spoke louder, “Neserre.”

  “Waesucks!” Hog sat back down.


  Suddenly, no one had anything to say. Dillan established within a reasonable degree of certainty that of the four flies buzzing in the ill-lit room, one was somewhat larger, and very likely of a different variety, than the rest. A horse fly, no doubt. The kind that bites so hard you shout with wounded pride. Who would it bite first, he wondered? Listening hard, he tried to home in on its exact location, but instead he heard someone approaching the door. Bu and Hog shot to their feet. Evidently, it was someone important, but Dillan couldn’t make himself sit up.

  “Got the Eye last night?” a man asked quietly.

  “Yes, that we did,” Bu replied.

  “Hamet’s seen to him?”

  “He’s fine. Not a bruise.”

  “Mind giving us a minute?”

  Dillan heard the door close. The man sat at the end of the bed. There was a touch of gray in his sideburns. He had olive skin, a furrowed brow, large ears, a slightly aquiline nose, and amused dark eyebrows above calm black eyes. He offered Dillan a warm, sudden smile. Even Dillan could see he was part Nesso. It had to be Je, then, the halfbreed Murphy of Aegle Klaast.

  “Don’t sit up,” the man said. He looked intelligent, humorous, and slightly sad. “Bed’s best. You lie there, I talk. I talk, then I leave. That’s my job, right?” He looked at Dillan appraisingly. “I’ll talk to you about the match and what you learned. It’s not over. A match doesn’t end when the fight ends. And you can still lose, though the other man’s down. How long did it take? I counted forty seconds. It will have seemed longer to you. No, it went quick. So, why is your heart heavy?