Sunday, January 31, 2010 - The sea guarded them and fed themIt gave their... |
| The sea guarded them and fed themIt gave their ships, always the largest armada in the peninsula, access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and enclosed them in a world within the worldNo wonder, as the tale-tellers said, no wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together to engender Morian and make the Triad complete
A world within the world, girdled by the sea
It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the ceremony that became the Ring DiveIt had been different in those early daysNot actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea in propitiation and token of acknowledgment, in the days when the world turned its face toward the sun and the sailing season began in earnest
Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it inSome said later she had been crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning and ambitious
In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbor with the ring bright in her hand
And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted and babbled in wild confusion and wonder the High Priest of Morian in Chiara suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, never to be lost: "Look and see! See how the oceans accept prada logo the Grand Duke as husband to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!"
And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knelt to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that followedSaronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwedLetizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done this unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very youngAnd their palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that High Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizia's finger
They were wed at MidsummerThere was war that autumn against Asoli and Astibar, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in the Gulf of Corte, south of the IslandA victory whose anniversary Chiara still rememberedAnd from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Dive was enshrined for use in time of Chiara's need
Thirty years later, near the end of Saronte's long reign, in one of the recurring squabbles for precedence among the Triad's clergy, a newly anointed High Priest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the DukeEanna's priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about the schemes of large gucci bag Morian's clergy and their endless striving for preeminence and power
A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triad's servants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances had come near to touching the bright new sanctity of the ritual itselfThe ceremony had taken hold on the imagination of the peopleIt seemed to speak to something deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger, or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea
So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding clergy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembered, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive
What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, was the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years ago
It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to dive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from the seaTo come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for life, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsulaThe ceremony was repeated with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and claimed
By contrast, the woman who fake louis vuitton handbags carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed as the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for lifeWealth and honor, an arranged marriage into nobilityMore than one had borne a child to her Grand DukeTwo had followed Letizia to the consort's throneGirls from families of little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering, hallucinatory future
Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everything had changed
Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazal's young bride had insisted on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering ceremony to some ill-bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous warShe had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful vision any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of ritual
When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the shore, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a girl and fainted dead away
After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched before or since on the IslandIn one isolated temple of Adaon on the north shore, all the priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought back the newsIt was the wrath of the god that was coming, so the portents were read, and Chiara almost strangled on its gucci bags leather fear
Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war fought between the erstwhile allies who had beaten itSuch a process, of course, was hardly noteworthyIt had been the way of things in the Palm as far back as the records went
But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died
All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too highIf another woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat
It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the other, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power without the sanction of that most potent ceremony
When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duke of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eanna's temple, and so there had been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a woman willing to dive for it, in search of Morian's intercession and the god's
It was eerily silent in the saishan when she and Scelto left her roomsNormally at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the castrates, fragrant and colorful with the scented presence of women moving languorously to the baths or to their morning orange prada bag m |
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