CHAPTER 5
TRIAL OF THE HEART
I was not permitted to witness Cassandra’s trial. The rites and sacred mysteries of the Maeskoloi were precisely that: mysterious. Only those embraced by the order know what the Trial of the Heart entails, and those embraced swear a sacred vow—to Ahura Mazda, to their masters, on their very lives—never to reveal the nature of their sacred mystery.
And so what transpired for Cassandra the week before we were set to depart from Jadd I cannot say. She never told me, and I did not ask. For am I not myself an initiate? The acolyte of a tradition far stranger and more secret than anything practiced on Jadd?
But I know why they call it the Trial of the Heart, or a piece of that why, at least.
Whatever challenges Cassandra faced when she climbed the mountain that damp and steaming morning, I cannot say, but my own heart went with her, followed her up the Scala Aspara to the Atash Behram Jaddi, the Temple of the Eternal Fire set at the highest terrace man had carved upon the mountain, nearest the caldera.
My heart had leaped first to my mouth in its quest to hurry after my daughter.
“You know she may not return,” said Master Hydarnes du Novarra, when he had visited me in the villa the night before. Cassandra had gone to keep vigil in the agiary at Volcano House. Neophytes were required not to sleep the night before the Trial, to stay awake in prayer and fasting through the darkness until the coming of the sun that marked the watch called Hawan.
“I know,” I said in reply. The bottle by my hand was nearly empty. That hand had ceased to shake.
“Most neophytes do not make the attempt until they are one hundred standard years of age.”
“She said you told her she was ready,” I said. I had always believed that century of training a necessary requirement, but life at the Fire School had disabused me of that and many other misconceptions. A neophyte might climb the mountain as early as his second day at the Fire School—though it was said only three had ever done so, and two of them had died. It was only that most learned first the humility and patience the Trial demanded.
Hydarnes had smiled then, his satyr’s countenance recalling the face of Prince Kaim, of Olorin, my friend and sponsor. “She is ready,” he said. “She has no choice but to be. You depart in days.”
“Si,” I said, and remembering myself adopted the more formal style. “Ari.”
“I understand the Sollans have claimed you at last,” said he. “That you do not go by choice.” In answer, I only recharged my glass. “You are loved by the God, I think,” Hydarnes said. “Those the God loves most he tests the most dearly, as gold in fire, to learn if they are true.”
“Don’t speak to me of your god, Swordmaster,” I said, a bit too sharply. “He may take my daughter from me in the morning.”
“The God takes nothing.” Hydarnes shook his head at that—might have filled the moment with a swallow of wine, had I offered him any—and said, “Cassandra will come down the mountain tomorrow night. You will see.”
“And if she doesn’t?” I asked.
“Then you will have had nigh forty good years with her,” the master said. “It is more than I had with my Mardun.”
I blinked at him. “You had a son?”
“Just one,” the master said. “My wife ill-named him. Marduniya is mild in the old tongue. Gentle. He took the Trial, as I did, and far before he was ready . . . ” The swordmaster had grown quiet then, smoothed the folds in his snow-white mandyas. “He wished to be the youngest to reach the Ninth Circle.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Do not be,” he said, standing, “this night of all nights.” The master lay a hand on my shoulder. I hardly felt it through the wine. “There comes a time when we must let them go, Al Brutan. A time to let them fly . . . or fall.”
I looked up into Master Hydarnes’s pointed face. There was a shadow there, the pale reflection of the boy who had climbed up the mountain and not returned. “What is this Trial?” I asked, knowing I would get no answer. “Tell me that.”
Hydarnes only patted me on the shoulder. “She has wings, your girl-child,” was the only answer he gave. “Trust in her.”
I did not sleep, but sat in my study until the sun bruised the curtain of night, all the while watching the lights of the cities gleaming on Jadd’s three moons, watching the algae dance on the night waves. I hardly saw them. I saw instead the white megaliths that formed the walls of the fire temple, the flame eternal—Atash itself—dancing in its brazier, my girl standing at the edge of the circle of firelight, white bandages wound about her arms, her palms, the base of her fingers.
When the sun rose and the prayer call signaled the start of Hawan, I emerged onto the balcony outside my tower study. I watched her go, eyes shining, one hand shielding them from the sun.
A lone figure in white, her black hair bound in double braids, mounted the Scala for the Grand Agiary that stood high above Volcano House on the slopes of the Hephaistos, which the mobads of Ahura Mazda called the Kauf Adar.
“There comes a time . . . ” I muttered, not certain this was it. “Valka, forgive me.”
Had Valka been there, she would have swatted me.
She’s not a child, Hadrian, whispered her shade in my ear. You can’t protect her forever.
“I couldn’t protect you.”
“Sir?” A polished voice intruded. “Are you quite all right?”
I looked round, found Neema standing in the door of my office, prim as ever.
Turning from him, I looked back to the Fire School, its white towers and cupolas glimmering in the morning sun. “She’ll have reached the Temple by now,” I said to the smaller man. I had lost sight of her near the spot where the towers of the dead rose silent above the upper terraces, topless drums left open to the sky. The Jaddians did not bury their dead, or burn them, but left them to the birds after the manner of their Persian forebears.
It was said that those who failed the Trial were not laid in those towers. They went to Atash, to the fire itself. To give a corpse to the flame was a terrible sacrilege . . . but to die by fire?
There was no death more pure.
“I’m sure she’ll be all right, sir,” Neema said. “The girl is a terror, but . . . for this sort of thing, one ought to be.” When I did not reply, the Nemrutti servant ventured, “You did not take breakfast, master. Shall I fetch you something?”
“How can I eat?”
It was easy to see how our ancientmost ancestors believed it was the suns that moved about their planets, and not the other way around. Like a glead of molten lead, the red sun of Jadd ran, rolling first up, then down the bowl of the sky. The wind tasted of salt and smoke—as it always did on that island of black and green. Flame redder than the very sun flowed down the canal from the Kauf Adar through the Fire School to the sea. The ever-present mists blew up from the lagoon’s waters, white as spirits. Green grasses swayed, tall as men in places, in others shorn flat as the finest carpet.
The very world seemed to itch, to squirm with expectation.
There was nothing still, nothing . . . save myself.
I had become the very center of the world, my tower the axis mundi about which the whole of creation turned. And Cassandra had become one of the unfixed stars.
But was she rising? Or setting?
A figure would come down those steps.
A lone figure in white or black.
If it were black, it would be Cassandra returning, garbed in the raiment of the swordmasters—in the sable of her house—having divested herself of her student’s whites.
If it were white, it would be only one of the mobads of that God of Fire, come to proclaim that my child was dead.
My child.
Cassandra, you cannot know how much I love you still, how much I have always loved you, from the day the natalists pulled you from the tank and cut your cord and put you into my hands . . . and from before, from the day they first brought me to the hospital to see your little face, half formed behind the glass.
I loved your mother, but our love was a thing slow forged, built year by year, day by day. You I loved at once, and loved completely. Would that you had had some better father, some better man than I. I who brought you into a kind of prison—however gilded—who forced you into a life of war.
Wherever you are, forgive me.
I would have spared you every pain.
Still I think upon your little hands, as they first grasped my fingers, and recall the bleary way you looked up at me, confused, disturbed to have been wakened from your dreaming sleep by the world waiting to receive you. That so wonderful a thing might come from my sorry cells . . . that is a miracle greater than anything I have seen. Greater than the power to defy the Watchers, greater than the power to defy Death . . . That my love for your mother might breathe new life into our dying universe . . .
. . . that is a mighty thing.
And on that day, that life hung by the slenderest thread above a lake of fire. I did not dare abandon my post, but fretted back and forth—pacing, always pacing, waiting for an answer to the question I dared not ask. I kept thinking of Pandora’s cat—of a world filling with darkness.
Filling again.
Living or dead?
Dead? Or living?
White . . . or black?
The prayer calls signaled the end of Hawan, the start of Rapithwin—afternoon.
Rapithwin ended, Uziran began.
The sun went down in fire, its reds growing redder still.
A figure emerged from the doors of the Atash Behram Jaddi, the Temple of the Eternal Fire. Seeing it, I turned to my doors and ran, bypassing the lift in my haste, half falling down the winding steps. Neema’s voice carried after me, but I did not stop for him. I left the old house entire, and pelted up the lawn to Volcano House, and through Volcano House to the White Stair.
We met in the shadow of the funerary towers.
Two figures in black.
One wore the long coat of a military man, his dark hair streaked with white.
The other wore the mandyas of a Swordmaster of the Fire School over her black tunic, red and gold.
Both wore the same lopsided smile that broke into open laughter, and rushing to take my girl child in my arms—a woman grown—I lifted her into the light of the red and setting sun, and crushing her to myself I said, “You did it! Anaryan, you did it!”
“Abba!” Cassandra gasped, having regained her feet. “Are you surprised?”
I looked at her. She stank of smoke. Of brimstone. Black ash colored her face, and there was blood on her hands. Her cheeks. “You’re hurt,” I said. “Burned? Did you go into the mountain?”
Her feet were bleeding. Blistered. Black.
How had she come so far, and under her own power? Her hair was singed, her body soaked with sweat. It was said that a tunnel in the Grand Agiary followed the lava flow down into the caldera itself. In my mind, I saw my daughter treading there, bare feet on burning sand.
“What did they do to you?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Abba! It’s done! I did it.”
Her smile—brighter than the setting sun—faltered as she looked up at me. Then she collapsed in my arms.