Priestess of the Dragons' Temple

Chapter 10: The Hunger of Her Heart-1

Chapter 10: The Hunger of Her HeartEnat followed Ara through the orchards and beyond the fields, into the pastures where ewes bore their young, into the foothills. “Here no law can reach us,” they said. “It is only Na’s law that concerns us now. Come, follow me on.”

– The Life of Ara

It was nearly midnight when Iola left Jasela in Savasa’s care. The quarter moon rested low on the western horizon. At full moon, only six days away, Jasela would emerge from her private chambers to greet the temple at large. She still seemed very weak and she looked far older than Iola knew she must be. The dragons had not been gentle with her. Iola wondered why it had been so hard, a retribution for some lack of devotion by the priestesses, or by the princes? Maybe the princes’ devotions had grown too sparse, their respect for the land too thin.

Whoever replaced Jasela in the ambassadress’s chamber would have to make recompense somehow, to bring the princes back to the dragons. She would have to inspire devotion where there might not be any. It would be much harder than just making the rite for common petitioners – that itself was mostly a pleasure. Iola lay awake, thinking. She wondered if she could even begin to manage the princes, to turn their greed for power into reverence. Jasela had begun to show her how difficult it would be to reconcile them to the dragons. In Jasela’s transformation, in her wasting away, Iola had begun to see why some feared the dragons, but she would not begin to now. She dreaded the princes a little, but in the end, they were only petitioners, only men. They had reason to love the dragons too, didn’t they?

§

In the early morning hours, few petitioners presented themselves at the temple gates, but one of the elder treasurers always kept watch through the night and into the morning.

“What brings you, petitioner, to our door?” the treasurer asked as he approached.

“I seek the dragons and their blessing,” Thorat replied. It was the ritual phrase. He hoped it would tell her nothing. Perhaps he ought not to have come.

The priestess assessed him, measuring the cut of his tunic and finding it lacking, but she opened the door even so, leading him into a small antechamber.

“What are the gifts you bring?” she asked.

Thorat untied his pocket string and emptied out half the contents onto the small tray the priestess held out before him.

She only glanced at the beads, but Thorat was sure she had taken in their exact number. “Is there any one of our priestesses through whom you seek blessing?” she asked, as if this were a routine question and not a heresy.

“Iola,” Thorat said. He’d never asked for a specific priestess before. It was better, by the custom, to go with whomever the moment brought.

The priestess seemed displeased. She held out the offering tray again. “She sleeps. Would you have me wake her?”

Thorat nodded. He had come this far. The world already felt far away, even though he could still hear a few sounds from outside – a bird rustling its feathers, the sound of a rat scurrying across the street. He dropped another trio of beads in the tray and the gate priestess departed, shutting him in as she went to find his priestess.

Thorat had waited in such chambers before, though not often. It was how men, especially those without wives, made their obeisance to the dragons. The other Defenders came too, the men at least. The women went to street corner shrines and left gifts for the dragons after men had been with them, whether husbands or lovers, just as priestesses took a share of their offerings to the dragons. That was the custom, at least.

He entered Iola’s temple knowing something of this way of honoring the dragons, the life of the land. Often, when he made his part in the rite, he had imagined Iola there instead of the priestess before him, and wondered what she would reveal. For all the nameless ladies of the dragons, and all other lovers of the dragon kind, he had always imagined Iola’s face more than the indefinite bliss beyond. Coming to her now, he didn’t know what to expect.

The inner door opened. “She will have you,” the priestess said. “Go and prepare yourself.” The priestess averted her gaze, tapping her foot impatiently while he stripped off his outer garments and removed his sword. Thorat took the towel she held out to him, knelt, and kissed her hand. She pointed him to a door on the far side of the courtyard, the entrance to the petitioners’ baths.

Thorat paused at the entrance to the baths. Even in the lamplight, they glowed like the sun, if the sun were made of gold. He caught his breath. This was no lesser temple. No wonder the treasurer at the gate had looked askance at his worn guardsman’s garb. Still, he knew that the glory of this gilt was nothing beside the dragons themselves, that it would pale before their true priestess, too.

He hummed the cleansing prayer as he lathered and rinsed, then let all his thoughts float away on the heat of the bath. Iola’s presence hovered somewhere nearby. She must be even more lovely now. The thought of her teased him on, but he also felt the heat and fire of the dragons’ realm around his body, a gentle touch from the deepest part of earth. The temple drew it forth, he could feel it.

He rose from the steam, feeling bare as a spring lamb, shorn of the past days’ distractions. The top of one wall of the baths was latticework, and through it he could glimpse the priestesses’ own baths, the lap of the dragons’ realm where they sometimes laid their offerings. Someone chanted there in a mild soprano voice, out of sight around the corner. Thorat shook himself partly dry and wrapped himself in the towel, taking his remaining offering under one arm.

Fronds of chilly air wisped over the garden in the silent dawn, playing on leafy boughs. He stepped out into the pale morning. A lantern glowed in a doorway, drawing him to it like a moth.

Iola held the lantern in her hands like it was the light of the world itself, like it was the breath of the hope of everything. She smiled.

She curled her fingers across her lips, kissed them, and extended them to touch his brow. Her fingertips glided down his face, seeing like the blind, until her hand rested on his chest.

“I have been waiting for you,” she whispered. “Let us begin.” Her fingers quivered as she withdrew and pulled back her curtain to let him enter.

He stood just inside the threshold, head bowed as she set the lamp down beside him. She gestured to the pitcher of water inside the door and he made his final ablutions, letting his draped cloth fall to the floor.

She looked back at him once as she descended. She was raven and ivory as he remembered her, glowing with the power that poured through her veins.

“Come and greet the great ones,” she intoned, “in the heart of the night, in the presence of the giving life. Come and woo them on wings of gold, woo them through the night. Come to them, you who seek their light.”

After that, he forgot all her words as she unwrapped her robes, unfurling into a blossom of flame. She folded herself into the form of the dragon and crouched as if she were also the birthing goddess of the lands across the sea, north of Ganat. She coursed around him, to him and from him, twining her legs like vines on a tree, like serpents. Her arms flew like sparrows on the long wind. She bent her body to echo creation itself, to become like the thing that was before the earth, before everything.

When she approached him again, he was ready. He could see the fire of the dragons’ realm pulsing up through her on the altar. She beckoned him to her and drew him down onto her offering place. He bowed his head to her, took her as the wine of life, then they moved, their gazes locked to one another, mesmerized.

In the half darkness, she was everything. Her presence did not dim in the dragons’ light, she burned with their fire, ever brighter. His mind joined hers and he followed it, flowed with it into the sea of life, to the power that is the mind of the earth. He was in the earth as surely as she held him. He emptied himself, giving his offering of life into that place that creates the world anew, again and again forever, with every meeting in the rite.

§

It was midday when he woke, feeling a fading pulse of fire flicker around his body, feeling her warm flesh beside his own, and the lap of the earth holding them both. He rolled over and kissed her, oblivious to the image of Salara – or was it Na? – coiled above them.

“Iola?” he said.

She clenched her eyes further shut, as if she were yawning, then blinked them open. “Thorat,” she said. “I had so longed to see you.” She gazed at him.

“You are like Ara herself,” Thorat said. “I wouldn’t – ” Thorat realized, to his bafflement, that at some point in their mutual blessing the night before, he had stopped thinking of Iola, that his mind was full only of life, of the dragons of the earth. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “I forgot where we were, as if I wasn’t even in my body, not touching you, but only the dragons.”

Iola seemed untroubled by his ramblings. “You’re a better devotee than any petitioner I’ve lain with,” she said.

Thorat shifted a little away. “I think it’s all in you, only … Well, I really don’t know what it is.”

Iola moved to the edge of the offering place. “Come with me,” she said. She took Thorat by the hand and led him across her chamber. “Sit with me here a while.” She pulled him into her sleeping alcove, under the stair, away from the altar and the eyes of the dragon which followed them as they withdrew. “How has it been, with you? I’ve heard that Sunna sees you, but I know nothing more.”

Thorat felt the stubble on his chin. His stomach rumbled. “I thank Anara for watching over me,” he said. “The dragons have guarded you well, Sunna says.” He felt that some further explanation was in order, but all of it was secret. “I know her from my sword hall,” he said, “but I shouldn’t have said anything. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Of course not – I’m a priestess. We don’t tell tales to any but the dragons.”

“And they know already.” Thorat smiled. She understood. “Why didn’t you come, last night?” he asked.

“Come where?” Iola asked. “I don’t leave the temple. I attend the ambassadress, and of course this.” She gestured to the altar. Thorat sensed the shadows of many men that had come there before him and lain with her, not understanding what they were going to. She had shown them the dragons, too.

“They came to meet me at a tavern. I thought you knew.”

Iola shook her head. “I wanted to meet you like this,” she said. “It’s all of who I am.” She spread her hands and looked sidelong at Thorat.

“I think not,” Thorat said. He swung her around to face him, and kissed her on the lips as if she were a village girl, a guildswoman, anything but a priestess.

Iola giggled uncomfortably and returned the kiss.

§

After they had made love in the common manner, Iola tasted the sweat on Thorat’s neck.

“I’ve never done that before,” Iola said, resting against him.

“Neither have I,” Thorat said, though Iola was sure that he must have had the chance. “It’s not the same at all, is it?”

“No, not the same at all.” Iola felt the old affection between them close in on her with a new force, then shook it off. “It’s not really encouraged,” she said. “The elders warn us not to, though I think the others do it some.”

Thorat nodded. “I hear that they do.” He pushed a loose strand of hair back from her face. “I always thought of you.”

“Was the rite different, the other times?” Iola asked him.

Thorat nodded. “There wasn’t as much of it, there was always the present time, the form of it, a little journey towards that place, but never like it was with you. I didn’t feel like I was even with you, last night. It was more as if I was only a part of the cosmos, in the dragon realms and even beyond.” He looked at Iola again, trying to recall the night before and finding that his memory wouldn’t hold it.