Emerging Into Sunlight

“Emerging into Sunlight” by Lorena A. Sins

Right foot. Left foot.  

He remembered the first time he had seen his beloved. She was wearing flowers: a wreath of them, resting on her light-brown hair, daisies that love the sun. Here and there the sun ran a golden finger down a strand, and the strand answered the sun’s caress with a golden gleam.

           “Because they love the sun,” she had laughed later, much later, when they lay, skin by skin, on his tunic, spread out over the flower-starred grass. That same sun the daisies loved was warming them as they rested, lazy after love. He had asked her why, on that first morning, the dawn of his life, it seemed to him, she had risen so early. Not before the sun, though.

           “Daisies open their eyes with the sun,” she’d said. “I love to watch them wake. Petal by petal, they wake and unfold.”

Right foot. Left foot.

Always keep one foot in the light of the sun, he told himself. In this place, though, the light was trapped in a tiny circle.  Sunlight gathered by the leaves of a gnarled old olive tree had been kept safe in its wood till now. Sunlight had slept, patient in the wood, until he needed it to guide him in this darkness where the sun had never shone.

           “The daisies shut their eyes at dusk, so they never have to see a world without sunlight,” she said. Then she had stroked his mouth with the petals of a daisy; she was never without them, wearing them like jewels, as long as their season lasted. He had smiled at the touch.  The tender petals traced his lips’ new shape, guided by her hand.  Eyes closed, he could still see the sunlight, shining through his lids as though through fine cloth, red-tinted. Then her lips, no less tender than the daisy’s petals, shaped themselves to his and kissed, and though he couldn’t see her through his closed lids, her shadow, coming between his face and the sun, told him she was there.

Her shadow is still there.

           Imagine: if we walked thus, her hand resting on my hip and the sun behind us, and aslant, I would see her shadow walking next to mine. Her shadow is still there. . . .

Right foot. Left foot.

           For their epithalamion dance, she must have daisies for her crown, to embrace her throat and waist. He must be her daisy king, and her attendant maidens garlanded. The flowers must be freshly opened, so she got up with the dawn, to go to the hill that the sun gilded first each day, where the daisies opened their eyes first in the morning.

           Snakes, he had been told, loved dark places under the earth; the Great God himself had taken the form of a serpent to lie with his daughter, the mighty Queen of dark places, and get on her his twice-born son, the god begot in darkness impenetrable and born in blazing fire.

           Maybe Kore missed her flowers. Maybe she begrudged his beloved the sun that was life and joy to her. One serpent the Dark Maiden sent, to coil in sunlight and wait, to draw into darkness eternal his love, his sunlight, his soul.

Right foot. Left foot.

           She was not without pity, the mighty Queen, mightier even than the Iron Lord who sat enthroned beside her. She heard the sunlight in his song and wept, then prevailed upon her Lord to do what he had never done before. She had even given him, the seeker for love in dark places, her warning.

Right foot. Left foot.

           All his world was the torchlight at his feet, the case of polished wood against his back, and her right hand, pressing on his hip.

Right foot. Left foot.

           A steep and broken slope rose before his feet, climbing up and up, as far above him, he thought, as the seat of the gods must be above the High King’s chair. It would be a long and weary stumble among the stones for one who still limped from the venom that had killed her.

Right foot. Left foot.

           But his heart leaped, O joy in darkness: for the first time since he began his desperate journey, his sun-starved eyes saw light from a source that was not his torch or the ever-burning brands of the Lady of Witches and the Kindly Ones.

           “A bit more, my love,” he gasped. His mouth and throat and tongue were parched from the acrid fumes rising from the River of Hate, and his living lungs blistered inside him, but he would not stop now, not if a fountain of liquid crystal coolness had sprung suddenly from the tormented stones beside him. He switched the torch to his left hand and reached back to press the hand that clutched his hip. He thought that he felt it tighter slightly in response, but the skin was cold and dry, and the bones pressed through like ridges of stone. Maybe she would only live again when sunlight touched her, he thought.

           “Come!” he cried, suddenly terrified. A corpse clung to his hip: a lemure whose clutching bony claw could rip muscle from joint out of jealousy, cripple him to die while the faint light of the sun mocked him, far away. “The sunlight will make you whole again! Remember how much you love the sun, and climb!”

           He started moving faster, his eyes fixed on the faint white-yellow glow, the ghost of sunlight down in the land of the dead. To keep fear of the dead hand at bay, he sang, turning memories of their love in the sun into songs. They cheered his heart, and he thought that she who walked behind him stepped more lightly for his songs.

           As he walked, he stumbled and struck his feet painfully on stones. He moved the guttering torch back to his right hand, bent his head down, away from the faint light, and watched his feet move in the circle of the dimming torch. He thought he felt her stumble, too.

Right foot. Left foot.

           Higher and higher and nearer and nearer they climbed, but more slowly too, as his limbs began to fail, coming to the end of his hero’s strength. Now that he watched the stones at his feet, she stumbled less. 

           “Come!” he gasped again, and then he spoke and sang no more. The torch burned low and wavered in his hand.

Right foot. Left foot.

           But he did not need the torch’s faint light now. The doorway stood above them, no more than three body-lengths away, and the path upward lay in its light. The path was nearly vertical now, though, and he threw aside the torch and let the polished case on its leather strap swing and batter against the rock as he used both hands to climb. Somehow she was still with him. Her hand gripped tighter, and over his own tortured gasps, he though he heard her faintly moaning breaths.

A few steps now, my love, he thought. No breath now for speaking. His left hand, grabbing for a handhold, landed in the sunlight. The rock against his palm burned, and the skin on the back of the hand smarted and stung. 

Right knee. Left knee.

           His face was in the sunlight now. It blinded him. A last scrambling effort, and he stood full in the sunlight. He closed his eyes as he stood still there and raised face and arms and his last croaking shred of voice in a paean to the Lord of the Sun. He heard water trickling nearby; the scent of fresh, sweet water brushed through his parched nostrils.

           I will kill an ox for you, he thanked the Sun Lord in his heart. I will kill an ox . . . .

           His eyes snapped open. Her hand no longer rested on his hip. Had she climbed with him?   In his fight for his own life, he had forgotten his fight for hers. He did not know if she had followed. He only knew that her hand was gone, and he did not hear her any more.

           These thoughts were his as he spun, searching for her, his sunlight, his daisy, now waking, he prayed, from death into the sunlight of her new day.

           The hand that had clung to his hip was stretched out, in sunlight up to the elbow, and as he watched, the other hand joined it.  The hands pulled against the weight of the underworld, and her face emerged.  The sunlight kissed her, and she woke up.

           He saw all she had endured flash across her face in an instant: the traces of terror and pain as she died, the numbness of despair, knowing that she would never see the sun and him again, then joy, joy beyond grief that he had come for her, that he had dared beg the Lord of Death for her, that he had wept and sung before gods for her. That he loved her as she loved him.

           He stooped to grasp her hands and pull her out of the shadow completely and into the sunlight that was life to them and the never-dying symbol of their love.

Her hands were warm.

           But fear filled her eyes again. Her hands slipped from his as she rose up in mid-air, her face level with his, her waist encircled by the arm of the Boundary-Crosser, the Psychopomp, the one who crosses over from the living to the dead.

           Her arms still reached for her lover, but they were in shadow now, pulled backward by the Implacable One, who knew who to count among the living and who among the dead. Her lover stepped toward the darkness, bound by love to follow, but the Boundary-Crosser lifted his hand in a gesture of warning. Not again. A half-mocking smile danced upon his lips, but his eyes were sad. One last instant in which her lips formed the words, “I love you,” and they were gone. As he staggered back from the dark cave, his brain reeling with exhaustion and shock, he imagined that already she stood beside the Iron Lord’s throne and wept.

           He fell to his knees, searching the shadows blindly. His head drooped in grief, and his eyes fell on the sunlit ground before him. He saw something, and picked it up.

           A single daisy, maybe fallen from a bridal wreath or funeral bier, drooping on its wilted stem. It was closed, petal by petal, in the sleep from which it would never wake again.