Trembling, Deoris covered her face with her hands. Into what world have I, by my own act, come?
IV
But the world of the Grey Temple was soon familiar to Deoris. She continued, occasionally, to serve in the House of Birth, but most of her time was spent now among the Healers, and she soon began to think of herself almost exclusively as a Grey-robe priestess.
She was not accepted among them very soon, however, or without bitter conflict. Although Riveda was their highest Adept, the titular head of their Order, his protection hindered more than helped her. In spite of his surface cordiality, Riveda was not a popular man among his own sect; he was withdrawn and remote, disliked by many and feared by all, especially the women. His stern discipline was over-harsh; the touch of his cynical tongue missed no one, and his arrogance alienated all but the most fanatic.
Of the whole Order of Healers and Magicians, only Demira, perhaps, really loved him. To be sure, others revered him, respected him, feared him—and heartily avoided him when they could. To Demira, however, Riveda showed careless kindness—entirely devoid of paternal affection, but still the closest to it that the motherless and fatherless child had ever known. In return, Demira gave him a curious worshipping hate, that was about the deepest emotion she ever wasted on anything.
In the same mixed way, she championed Deoris among the saji. She quarrelled constantly and bitterly with Deoris herself, but would permit no one else to speak a disrespectful word. Since everyone was afraid of Demira's unpredictable temper and her wild rages—she was quite capable of choking a girl breathless or of clawing at her eyes in one of these blind fits of fury—Deoris won a sort of uneasy tolerance. Also, for some reason, Deoris became very fond of Demira in quite a short time, though she realized that the girl was incapable of any very deep emotion, and that it would be safer to trust a striking cobra than the volatile Demira at her worst.
Riveda neither encouraged nor disparaged this friendship. He kept Deoris near him when he could, but his duties were many and varied, and there were times when the Ritual of his Order forbade this; Deoris began to spend more and more time in the curious half-world of the saji women.
She soon discovered that the saji were not shunned and scorned without good reason. And yet, as Deoris came to know them better, she found them pathetic rather than contemptible. A few even won her deep respect and admiration, for they had strange powers, and these had not been lightly won.
Once, off-handedly, Riveda had told Deoris that she could learn much from the saji, although she herself was not to be given the saji training.
Asked why, he had responded, "You are too old, for one thing. A saji is chosen before maturity. And you are being trained for quite a different purpose. And—and in any case I would not risk it for you, even if I were to be your sole initiator. One in every four ..." He broke off and shrugged, dismissing the subject; and Deoris recalled, with a start of horror, the tales of madness.
The saji, she knew now, were not ordinary harlots. In certain rituals they gave their bodies to the priests, but it was by rite and convention, under conditions far more strict, although very different, than the codes of more honored societies. Deoris never understood these conventions completely, for on this one subject Demira was reticent, and Deoris did not press her for details. In fact, she felt she would rather not be too certain of them.
This much Demira did tell her: in certain grades of initiation, a magician who sought to develop control over the more complex nervous and involuntary reactions of his body must practice certain rites with a woman who was clairvoyantly aware of these psychic nerve centers; who knew how to receive and return the subtle flow of psychic energy.
So much Deoris could understand, for she herself was being taught awareness like these magicians, and in much the same way. Riveda was an Adept, and his own mastery was complete; his full awareness worked like a catalytic force in Deoris, awakening clairvoyant powers in her mind and body. She and Riveda were physically intimate—but it was a strange and almost impersonal intimacy. Through the use of controlled and ritualistic sex, a catalyst in its effects on her nerves, he was awakening latent forces in her body, which in turn reacted on her mind.
Deoris underwent this training in full maturity, safeguarded by his concern for her, guarded also by his insistence on discipline, moderation, careful understanding and lengthy evaluation of every experience and sensation. Her early training as a Priestess of Caratra, too, had played no small part in her awakening; had prepared her for the balanced and stable acquisition of these powers. How much less and more this was than the training of a saji, she learned from Demira.
Saji were, indeed, chosen when young—sometimes as early as in their sixth year—and trained in one direction and for one purpose: the precocious and premature development along psychic lines.
It was not entirely sexual; in fact, that came last in their training, as they neared maturity. Still, the symbolism of the Grey-robes ran like a fiercely phallic undercurrent through all their training. First came the stimulation of their young minds, and excitement of their brains and spirits, as they were subjected to richly personal spiritual experiences which would have challenged a mature Adept. Music, too, and its laws of vibration and polarity, played a part in their training. And while these seeds of conflict flourished in the rich soil of their untrained minds—for they were purposely kept in a state little removed from ignorance—various emotions and, later, physical passions were skillfully and precociously roused in their still-immature minds and bodies. Body, mind, emotion, and spirit—all were roused and kept keyed to a perpetual pitch, restless, over-sensitized to a degree beyond bearing for many. The balance was delicate, violent, a potential of suppressed nervous energy.
When the child so trained reached adolescence, she became saji. Literally overnight, the maturing of her body freed the suppressed dynamic forces. With terrifying abruptness the latent potentials became awareness in all the body's reflex centers; a sort of secondary brain, clairvoyant, instinctive, entirely psychic, erupted into being in the complicated nerve ganglions which held the vital psychic centers: the throat, solar plexus, womb.
The Adepts, too, had this kind of awareness, but they were braced for the shock by the slow struggle for self-mastery, by discipline, careful austerities, and complete understanding. In the saji girls it was achieved by violence, and through the effort of others. The balance, such as it was, was forced and unnatural. One girl in four, when she reached puberty, went into raving madness and died in convulsive nerve spasms. The sudden awakening was an inconceivable thing, referred to, among those who had crossed it, as The Black Threshold. Few crossed that threshold entirely sane. None survived it unmarred.
Demira was a little different from the others; she had been trained not by a priest, but by the woman Adept Maleina. Deoris was to learn, in time, something of the special problems confronting a woman who travelled the Magician's path, and to discount as untrue most of the tales told of Maleina—untrue because imagination can never quite keep pace with a truth so fantastic.