02 - CHAPTER II The Chamber of Lanajia

     etcee was hauling rocks. Her arms ached as she dug around yet another stone, freeing it from its partial grave in the cold, wet sand. Then she wriggled it lose, and hauled it up into a two-arm embrace against her chest. Her legs were weakened, shaking with fatigue, and she almost fell. It was a heavy one. But she took a step forward, and then another, stomping the ground, searching for footing she could not see. Then she staggered with the weight of it all the way to the back of the cave, and dropped it onto the pile she was making. The mist from the waterfall made the rocks slippery, and she’d dropped some heavier ones a few times, nearly crushing her own feet. But she expected this now, and adjusted her grip before she got near the pool.
      She’d been doing this for a week now, and the pile was now over her head, sloping upward from the sand by the pool toward the hole in the rock she’d noticed high up near the ceiling of the cave. She wasn’t even sure if anything was up there, but she had a feeling. She’d thrown pebbles up there and heard them rattle and echo down what sounded like a long tunnel in the rock. It went somewhere, but where? And so, not having anything better to do with the endless days of her life on the island, she’d begun constructing a crude stairway of piled stones.
      She’d already cleared out every sizable stone she could find from inside the cave, carrying them first one by one, the larger ones, and then one in each hand, once she’d gotten around to the smaller ones. It was exhausting work, but it was blissfully mind-numbing as well. She found she could blank out for hours at a time, escaping the mental torment that idleness inflicted upon her, and she would just walk out to the beach, dig out rocks, and haul them back to the cave, one by one, over and over again. And the pile got higher.
      That was her life for two whole weeks.
She’d made a friend of the Papaya tree. She talked to it in the mornings while she ate her breakfast. The tree never answered her in any discernable way, but she knew it heard her when she spoke. It was a tall, majestic-looking thing, and she took comfort in its presence during the idle hours of her day. She’d named it Gînarzia, (zhee-när’-zee-ä) the tall queen. Its branches spread out like a crown, and it watched her as she wandered back and forth, hauling stones.
      In the late afternoons, when she could no longer even lift another stone, let alone carry them, she would lie upon her cloak and practice her Mîm’rae. So far she had not been able to cast another ice bolt as she had on the day she’d had the dream, but she was getting better day by day, as her focus improved. When in a trance, the sweet intensity of the mîm became a blur, and she saw things, heard things, and knew things that she could not quite understand. But at least now she knew what she was supposed to be focused upon.
      There were flashes of blue light, like drifting dust specks that glowed inside her mind, and when she concentrated, she found she could make them cluster together, into a ball that looked like the bulging seed bulb of a kingflower. And from this ball, there were dull murmurings, like that of a congregation in group mediation. They were whisperings that she merely had a sense of, more than actually heard, but they were there. They were in another language too, an ancient, forgotten tongue that seemed to hold power in every word. When she focused upon these whispers, and concentrated, she found she could make the scattered mutterings come together into a single voice, all speaking in unison. And she was learning the words they spoke by slow repetition, even if she didn’t understand them. She was slowly learning them, and as she joined the whispering chorus in her mind, she began to get a sense that she knew what they were talking about, if not the exact meanings of the individual words.
      They were talking about bolts of ice that fly from one’s fingertips. They were talking about shields of energy that protected you from heat. They were talking about ancient energies in the air, in water, in rocks, in people and animals, and how the will of a focused human being could control them.
      But invariably, the sweetness of the mîm would overwhelm her. Tingles and spasms of physical joy would spread through her like devouring flame, and she would climax, suddenly snapping back into the awareness of her flesh and shaking with ecstasy, panting and shivering, and crying out with frustrated moans that echoed off the walls of the cave. Her focus would be lost and it would take her hours to summon enough energy to repeat the mental effort.
      It was not unlike hauling rocks. Except with Mîm’ra, the rocks were as large as the universe itself, and all its energy, and it took every inkling of her mental effort to even find and understand these great stones of ancient wisdom, let alone control and move them.
     “If only the mîm were not so beautiful,” Betcee said, sighing aloud and writhing   sensuously upon the cloak as the aftershocks tingled through her. “I was nearly there.”
     “The mîm is the power,” child, her Twîg had once told her. “We do not wish them less intense; we do not seek to reduce our enjoyment of them. We seek to absorb them, control, harness, and direct their intensity into magîce; they are not a distraction, they are the objective.”
      Betcee had not understood this lesson then, and she was having trouble with it even now. She wasn’t even sure if her Twîg completely understood it herself. She was a mere Twîg after all. The pinnacle of the Mîm’ra, the actual manifestation of magîce, was a result only achieved by the Bowers of the Order and higher. She’d seen it happen with her own eyes, saw the blue glow of an unwavering Master, and the electric crackle of power she summoned. And Betcee sat in awe at the time.
      But now she was discouraged by the demonstration she’d seen so long ago. If such intense focus was so difficult, even for a Master, how could she ever be expected to learn it, and without guidance, here on this forsaken rock of an island where her only companion was a tree? How could she be expected to concentrate on the mysteries of magîce when such beautiful spasms of ecstasy flooded through her, reducing her to a shivering mass of tingling flesh right when she needed her intellectual facilities most?
But she was getting closer. At least now she was seeing the mîm, and hearing their whispers inside her, not just feeling them. And though she had no guidance, she had all the time in the world, and none of the daily chores that were imposed upon the Leaves and Twîgs back home in the fortress of the Order.
      And her stairway was getting taller. She now had to walk up the pile of rocks a bit and place the new ones carefully on the top. She’d selected mostly flat, square stones, and heavy, so her footing was for the most part secure. But a few of them wobbled, making the climb difficult. She’d get to the summit of Mount Stairway and drop the new stone in a suitable place, adjusting its angle and rotation until it fit securely, like bricks in a wall. Then she’d step up on it, and check how much higher she still had to climb.
     “One hundred more, perhaps.”
      But when she’d added a hundred more, she still couldn’t reach, even when taking a small hop. She was not even close yet. And when she hopped, the stones shuddered beneath her feet. And she would slip a bit too; the stones were as wet up here as they were when she carried them. Hopping upon a precarious mountain of rock, no matter how flat and heavy they were, was an extraordinarily bad idea.
     “Maybe just a hundred more.”
      And she’d stop for a meal now and then. More roots, herbs, and fruit for dessert. She gave thanks to Gînarzia the tree, and spread the seeds around at her roots. Some of them had sprouted since she’d begun, and she used their growth as a measure of the time that passed, that, and the cycles of the moon. When every day seems like a blur of the same old thing, you begin to measure time in months instead of minutes or hours or days. She was already up to the third moon, and the sprouts were ankle-high, and she’d lost track of how many hundreds of rocks she’d added to her stairway.
      Finally, a week after that, she was able to do the magic of ice again. She figured it out after an injury that nearly killed her.
      Yet another stone was added to the top of the pile, and the bottom of the pile was nearly five paces out from the rear wall of the cave. She stood tip toe on the top of the pile, reaching up for the bottom edge of the gap above her. She could almost reach it now. She was so close, but the wall was as slippery as the rocks were, slippery with the mists of the waterfall, and when she took a little hop to try to grab for the ledge, her feet slipped out from beneath her. She found herself tumbling down the stairway, rolling, scraping, and crashing all the way down to the soft sand at the bottom. And she lay there, glowing with black agony, gasping with the sharp shocking pain of the fall. She cursed aloud, and rolled onto her back. Everything hurt. Everything was fire and angry flesh, stinging, burning, pulsing with heat and the quick, hot flow of blood to the wounds.
      She lay there for almost half an hour until her body grew numb. She stared up at her stairway and the doorway near the top, and tried her best to ignore the ache. Finally, she rolled over a couple of times and sank into the icy pool up to her neck. Her body screamed again, but this time it was from cold, not the stinging heat of scrapes and cuts and bruises. But she was only cold for a few minutes, and then everything went numb.
She cleaned her wounds and rose from the pool, feeling better. She wrapped herself in the cloak and rested for the rest of the afternoon, feeling frustrated and helpless. She had not been badly injured thankfully. She had no broken bones, and no serious cuts, but she had been banged up pretty bad. Some of the stones she’d piled had even come loose under the crashing weight of her body.
      What’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I even alive?
      Betcee was near weeping once again, near giving up on her resolve to master her own heart. But as she stared up at the mountain of stones she’d created, and the doorway above it, she had a revelation: The mountain of steps was a kind of Mîm’ra. Yes! She was building it up to a peak, atop which she could access a goal, a doorway into another place. This was the lesson her Twîg had been trying to get across to her! All this time she’d been wishing for the mountain to be lower, the ecstasy to be reduced, so she could concentrate more clearly on the doorway above, but she needed it to be tall, unstable, precarious, so she could actually reach that doorway, instead of merely concentrating on it. It was the premature collapse of the mountain, or rather, her falling off of it that was the problem. The problem was not the height of the mountain. She needed the mîm to be higher, more intense, more dazzling, more beautiful, and she needed to ride through it without thinking of it as a failure when she got to the peak.
      And so, with this new understanding she attempted the ritual once again. She went out and stood in the sunshine beneath the tree, ate a piece of fruit, and found a rock to lie upon. Her body ached however; every posture she assumed, every movement she made throbbed and ached and burned. She could not concentrate at all. She would have to heal first.
      So she dropped the robe in the sand and went to swim naked in the sea.