Priestess of the Dragons' Temple

Chapter 2: Initiation Night and After-1

Chapter 2: Initiation Night and AfterDance and trance were closely linked to the great rite, to bridging the gulf between human mind and dragon mind. At initiation, the young priestess gave herself over to the dragons’ consciousness, becoming the honored one, becoming one substance with the dragons.

– The Chronicles of Theranis

Sunlight spilled down the fountain, shimmering over the pollen-golden flowerbeds and sparkling on the water. Myril held her bundled offering in front of her. She felt naked already, even though she was still wearing her novice robes. Their empty audience chambers waited, quiet refuges of meditation, cauldrons for the roiling power of life that would flow through them. Myril braced herself. The flower beds had been tended that morning. The peresi’s garden was purely ornamental, with broad walkways and many roses, none of the plainer-looking medicinal herbs

Myril loved the temple’s gardens. After she’d gotten used to the sleeplessness in her second year, she hadn’t minded the gardening, not as much as some of the others did. The earth had been soothing in her hands, cool and solid, reliable. In her imagination, she could feel the dirt under her fingernails, but today they were preened and pared in preparation for the night ahead. Her robes would soon be red, no more undyed novice cloth.

Darna had arranged Iola’s hair in perfect, even layers. It shone like polished jet as they waited for the Aralel in the cool blue shadows of the walkway. A lone priestess wandered in through the petitioner’s gate and hurried to her own chamber when she saw that the novices had arrived.

The peresi sat on low stone benches outside their chambers, meditating, talking, or lounging in the after-haze of clazan. Myril had heard about clazan in the kitchens. Some of the peresi drank it to spur their trances deeper. Ganie said that Lenasa and Savasa had gotten a little to help them through their initiation night. Myril didn’t want any and Iola certainly wouldn’t need it. Darna had refused to make any special preparations, as if none of this would really happen to her.

The Aralel entered through the western gate of the courtyard and circled the garden until she reached the gathered novices.

“I hope that our efforts and your talents will bring you through the night ahead and the years to come,” she said, raising her hand in a gesture of blessing. “May you have the grace of the great dragons whose service you join here today.”

Her attendant bowed and backed away as the Aralel pointed the novices one by one to their new chambers. Lenasa and Savasa were shown to chambers near the ambassadress’s gate. Tiagasa met them there and linked arms with Savasa. A quiet woman and her neighbor led Myril across the courtyard and to the place she’d been assigned.

The garden was full of the sound of the fountain and the smell of sage and roses. As Myril entered her chamber, those sounds and smells disappeared, as if she were crossing into another world. A breeze ruffled her hair, then she stepped into the still space within. A sense of dread gripped her heart. This very night she would have to perform the rite. She must be ready, but she didn’t feel ready.

“It’s all right, dear,” said the priestess who’d led her in, just as all the other elders had said. Her hand settled on Myril’s shoulder, pushing her gently forward. “I was just as nervous, we all were.”

“My friends aren’t,” Myril murmured. The woman before her was at least ten years older than most of the novices. She seemed perfectly self-contained, as though she walked every step in a blissful meditation to which she might admit an earnest petitioner. Her shoulders were a little narrow and her thin nose did nothing to improve her otherwise well-proportioned face, but she had an enviable calm about her. She pushed a wisp of dark brown hair away from her eyes, betraying something like impatience.

“Your friends are either over-confident or bluffing,” she said. “Come now.” Another priestess took Myril’s other shoulder.

Myril had never been in an audience chamber before. A patch of red carpet shimmered in the sunlight while the rest of the room lay in shadow. The two priestesses splashed water on their feet, hands, and brow before they descended the last steps. They murmured a brief prayer then turned their attentions to Myril. Cool water poured over her hands and into the bowl, then she touched drops of it to her head and feet as she’d seen them do, then onto her center, from which everything radiated. They took her hands and led her on down. Myril’s hands felt clammy with sweat.

“It’s better to be nervous now,” the second priestess prattled. Myril hadn’t even really looked at her. “It will pass before the audience, before your first petitioner comes. The dance of presentation will soothe your nerves, it did mine.”

Myril nodded even though she felt that the dance would only jar her further. Her feet sank into the soft pile of the carpet but she felt clumsy, off balance. The center of the chamber was open for dancing. A clothes chest and a sleeping bench were tucked on either side of the descending stair. The room was almost as large as her mother’s cottage had been. It was all for her alone, and for the rite.

“We’ll get your robes on in a moment,” the first priestess said. “Have you brought your offering?”

Myril nodded. The two priestesses stepped back as she approached the shrine. It was only a little larger than their sleeping nooks in the dormitory, large enough for two people to lie side by side before the image of Helana and a tray of offering. Helana, Myril thought. They remembered that she had come from Helanum? At least it wasn’t Na, or maybe Na didn’t have a place in this kind of sacrifice. She doubted that he could be tempted to enter the orderly world of Ara’s Landing.

Myril stubbed her foot on the step up to the offering place. She sucked in her breath. The second priestess, who Myril now saw was darker than the first and just as calm and composed, went forward to light lamps. Burnished copper discs reflected the flames, brightening the dragon’s wings, lifting the shadow from the floor. There was no excuse to falter any more. Myril bowed low and held the offering out before her, a scroll she’d copied the month before.

As she stepped up, she felt the weight of Ara’s inheritance descend on her. She was heir to the movement between the realms, to transcendence of the earth and sea, to seasons and growth, to all that makes the earth whole and good, to all that can compel the dragons to bless the places in which they dwell. The force of the priestesses’ task and the dragons’ presence was in her, as it was in all of them. She set down her offering and her surroundings faded away. She drank from the cup she found on the shrine as she had been told to do. Far away outside, a drum beat. She touched the floor and felt the earth spreading out around her in all directions, the paths of its dragon-lines beneath the surface, the bulk of the mountains, the inexorable rhythm of the sea.

Someone touched her shoulder and a fraction of her mind returned to her body. The two priestesses made her stand in the middle of the room and stripped off her novice robes, turning her in a spiral around the center, invoking the dragons who were already there in every fiber. Myril felt the dancing-skirt slide onto her naked hips, over her bare legs. She felt every stitch and weave, felt the dragons embroidered there like living things, twining around, reaching into her, pausing only at her gates, waiting for the appointed time to hasten on. The scarf around her shoulders teased at her neck, shadowed her breasts from the thin lamplight. It was loose-woven, fluid, shimmering.

The priestesses led her back up into the courtyard, back out into the open air. She didn’t even see the others when they emerged from their chambers, not even Darna and Iola. All she could see was the sky. At some point, she sensed their bodies beside hers as if from some unbridgeable distance. The sky was fiery with sunset, smoky at its fringes with burning torches, their flames flashing against the polished stone walls shining in the light of the rising moon. The priestesses, all but the Most Blessed One herself, processed to the stage to dance, Myril’s eyes were drawn to the horizon, far out beyond the temple’s wall, beyond the harbor. They were all one together, she thought, unbound, undifferentiated, whole. A starting rhythm beat from the drums below. For the first time, Myril wondered who held those instruments. She didn’t know.

That was her last coherent thought. The dance began. A sea of faces spread below them, petitioners great and small, curious country folk and admirers. Fire flowed through her, stronger than the torchlight. She spun through the rounds, bending low, honoring the crowd and the dragons who dwelt within the earth and beyond the edge of the sky. They danced on the horizon, unnamed dragons. They swirled among the gold and purple clouds in a flowing meditation of their own. As Myril stepped alone across the stage, she felt their power crash down on her, but she did not fall. The other priestesses’ stomp and sway drew her back into their ranks, and she relaxed into that backing rhythm as another and another crossed the stage before her.

§

The stars came out to grace the year’s shortest night, blinking to life in the midnight-blue sky over Ara’s Landing. The drums beat, dancing the priestesses on, down into the parting sea of devotees, down into the massed bodies of would-be petitioners, casting out blessings as they moved in time with the drumbeat. Their bodies parted the crowd and the priestesses moved as one, as links in a train of gilded garments, dancing up the broad steps and into their garden, into their sheltered offering places.

After the dance was done, petitioners entered the courtyard, bearing offerings sufficient to the occasion. Myril’s awareness came back to her for a moment as they entered the torch-lit courtyard where the petitioners’ nearly naked bodies were silhouetted against the white marble walls, against the wavering light of floating lanterns, against the midnight sky. She felt the drumbeat in her bones. Surely it must have ended with the dance. Could it still go on in the outer court, where the petitioners had waited? It was so loud, too loud to be echoing up from the city streets outside. She felt as though she were still a puppet on the strings of that music which bore her dancing and swaying around the fountain.

A gong sounded. A man knelt on the ground before her.

“Blessed priestess, hear my plea,” he spoke.

“Dweller on the earth, what do you bring to the winged ones?” The ritual phrase seemed to come out of her mouth of its own will. The sound of her own voice in her ears discomfited her.

“My offering is in your hands,” the petitioner said.

There was a long moment when Myril simply stood, looking at him, but then she remembered what she was supposed to do. She nodded to him and made a half-curtsy so that her dancing skirt touched the path. “Come, then,” she said.

The movements had been drilled into her and the other novices a thousand times. A worn path in her body knew what she had to do and it led her along as surely as the music had. Her body recited its ritual. She led the man to her chamber door. She advanced before him down the long, broad steps. She stood where the spot of sun had been that afternoon, where the lamplight now shone making the gilded threads in her robes glow and spark. The fire surged through her and she danced off her cape, advancing and retreating like the wind, until her skirts fell, too, and she sat in the place of offering. Her hands beckoned the petitioner to stand before her.

“I am Lerat of the guild of ropers,” he said. “I ply the sea and bear bounty of Cerea and Enomae to your own fair shores, my priestess, my messenger to the great ones, the ancient ones of the earth.”