Dhampire
Page 27
Her coils that were Shesha's coils as She was Shesha, thousand-headed, bleeding in and out of the void, in and out of existence; and on Shesha's coils stood the four grass-green elephants who supported the weight of the universe on their backs. And within that mountain universe, in the caverns beneath its roots, She was a winged serpent whose feathers and plumes were bright-burning blue flame, a winged serpent burning Her way up and out of the ocean of white fire, up through the rocky core of the world-mountain to emerge as a flowering tree, the Tree of All Life, that was no other than the serpent twined around it and around the Cretan priestess who took it and held it to her bared breast, fed it with her own milk and then let it slip from her into the pool where the sacrifices' bodies were thrown, which led to the golden ocean in which Dara and I drifted and swam, indolent and purple-scaled, our garlands of pearls streaming and singing with the currents as we made our way up and out of the ocean into the waiting channels of our spines, as we began to ascend them—
We sat facing each other across the six-pointed star of drying vermilion paste. Dara raised her left hand, moved her hands in a remembered gesture, awakening my response. I bent myself to the appropriate position, made the corresponding gesture with my right hand, feeling the eons come alive in me as I began following the fiery red solar breath in through my right nostril, throughout my body, my many bodies bleeding in and out of the golden ocean in which we swam, followed the breath out through the same nostril…
The Ritual had begun.
But the repetition of thousands of uttered and unuttered words, each with its own unique constellation of meanings and emotions, of memories it awakened, the description of the visualizations and contemplations and adorations, the taste of human meat or the feel of Dara's chill flaccid flesh against and around me when at last I entered her, the ways in which we bent and moved our bodies as we made love… none of this would tell you anything. There is no way to describe what we experienced except to say that for a time we were allowed to pass from the imprisoning darkness of our limited selves to the unbounded radiance of Shesha's infinite Self, from the joy of our lovemaking to the infinitely greater bliss of which it was a reflection.
There are no words. I will not even try.
And yet I have been permitted to realize, if only for a moment, my Oneness with Shesha, and the memory of that Oneness which I yet retain calms me as I sit here in the cabin watching over Dara's vacant body there on the bed where I put it when the stench of the decomposing bodies on which we lay drove me from the caverns.
I know that we succeeded, that Satan has been liberated and destroyed, because when I returned to consciousness of my limited self and surroundings I saw that Dara's canine teeth were normal human teeth again, and that the false parody of life with which Satan had animated her had departed.
As I stumbled with her body out of the caverns into the daylight, blind in the darkness beyond the lamp-lit chamber in which we'd lain now that I no longer had my powersight to show me the way, I stumbled over stiffening corpses, dry brittle bones already crumbling to dust… slipped in stinking pools of putrescent corruption: all that remained of my ancestors and their victims now that the normal processes of dissolution had resumed their course.
Just inside the entrance to the cavern I found Uncle Peter's twisted body, as though he'd been trying to crawl out of the inner darkness back to the day sky when he'd died.
The Bathorys are silent within me, drawn back with Satan into Shesha or freed to be reborn in new bodies, perhaps even to fall victim to the new evil gods which will rise to take His place, the others which have survived His destruction. Yet the dark tide no longer links me with them; both their strength and their hunger are gone.
She is so still. I press my hand to the cold flesh of her breast, touch her neck, but I can feel no heartbeat, no pulse. Dead. Yet I know that life will soon be returning to this, her body, that even if in liberating Satan and His victims she has been drawn with him back into Shesha, the Naga soul with which she shared her mortal body will reanimate it for its own use.
Liberation.
Annihilation.
There is a faint hiss of indrawing breath and her chest begins to rise and fall in a ragged rhythm that gradually becomes smoother. Once again I press my hand to her breast—her flesh is warm now, heated by returning life—and I feel the gentle flutter of her beating heart.
Who is she?
"Dara," I say but she does not respond. Perhaps she doesn't hear me, perhaps she is not yet strong enough to reply.
Perhaps she is gone, never to return for so long as the universe endures.
Her eyes are shut but I think I can see her eyelids beginning to quiver. When she opens her eyes I'll know who she is.
When she opens her eyes.