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the path of the lonely ones, these days
Nov. 17th, 2021 11:53 amPilgrim
“The pilgrim is tried by the pilgrimage.”
—66th Canticle of Bothemius
Since her childhood initiation and later pledge to Silence, that phrase in the Canticle had fascinated Aranna. She had imagined that the path itself, hewn through ancient trees, would buck and heave, throwing pilgrims hither and yon like dust scattered by a hunted serpent writhing in a soundless owl's grasp.
Later, of course, she recognized that Bothemius had been speaking metaphorically. At the start of her own long-awaited pilgrimage, she had known herself to be prepared and strong, had made certain that she’d be able to handle blisters and meager rations. She was also adjusted to the possibility that she’d be in a center-of-the-crowd position and unable to get a glimpse of the holy relics—until her own purity was recognized and she would be called to the front.
But now, lost in a place unmarked and unrecognized, Aranna truly understood. The pilgrimage was testing her by removing the path completely. It was gone.
Trembling, she dared not call out. Even if she could have found her voice after decades of training to extinguish source and perception of sound, none would hear her. Those committed to the path no longer had the capacity to hear such impediments to their Pilgrimage to Pure Silence.
But this was the pilgrimage for which Aranna had prepared her whole life!
For a moment her training wavered and unease welled up within her. Then, focusing on the remembered image of trees towering high enough to stop the wind’s slightest sigh on the forest floor, she stilled her mind. She felt for the path.
And came up empty.
Empty was certainly silent but this silence gave her nothing. Where was the sign? The inner indication and surge of knowing? Which way to the Deeps? Which to the Beyond? She couldn’t tell.
She thought back to what she had last observed of the way. Each day’s Station of Divine Stillness was marked, the next preordained in the markings, but somewhere between Days 25 and 26 the banners had come down. Her companions had thinned out and the path had simply vanished. Now she stood among mere saplings that dappled the ground in light and shadow. The edge of the old forest was impenetrable due to the thicket. She was alone. No miracle had transported her. She had not magically flown to the Farthest Beyond.
Aranna, alert after years in heavy cloistered rooms, approached a stand of young trees and put a hand out as though they might take it and guide her. Their bark was smooth and to her surprise they seemed to vibrate. The longer she touched the louder the vibration grew in her mind until it reached a pitch that took her training and crushed it underfoot like chalk under the imperious headmistress’s foot. She whirled from the trees and crashed through the brush, her head filled with the clamor of it all, her heart pounding in her ears, her breath ragged and wheezing, and she collapsed. Maybe, she thought, this was to be a pilgrimage to death. She would be felled by noise.
A moan escaped her lips, and a word, and she knew it was all over.
“Help,” her disused throat rasped. “Please!”
And then, by her own sound, she knew she was very much alive. Her heartbeat surging through her entire body proved it. It was full of messages of rhythm and tone that could only be deciphered with the kind of silence that danced between sounds and did not deny them. She reached for the trees again and found in them the same liquid rushing contained in her own body. The living sound thrummed through the trunks, from a source beyond their roots, branches and leaves, throbbing into a deep-drum earth and a bird-song sky. Everything around Aranna pulsed with strength and direction and pointed a way through.
Three decades of training, but only afterward—in the way of sapling, sky, and heart’s song—had she found her voice.
She made her way deeper into the woods.
