Chapter Fifteen: Acceptance
Susan didn't understand what was so terrible about her final ordeal at first. She waved at Rabidash from across the ravine, and lifted the crystal high into the air. For a few moments, it was no more troublesome than holding a paper sign over her head at school.
But then her shoulders began to ache, and then her arms and legs. And the sun seemed to be growing really hot. To distract herself from her bodily discomfort, Susan began to imagine what it would have been like if she had married Rabadash during her first visit to Tashbaan. She imagined the lavish splendor of the Calormene wedding ceremony, when the altar was heaped with flowers and the air was filled with a thousand perfumes. She pictured the dark eyes of her royal lover, glittering with desire as he beheld her in her wedding costume, which was far more revealing than anything a Narnia bride would wear. And afterwards, in the royal bed chamber . . .
The wind was picking up now, the roaring of it starting to sound almost like a hurricane. Susan gasped with pain and fear as the crystal was nearly yanked from her hands. There was roaring in the jungle, the dinosaurs and other beasts stampeding towards the entry point to this word. Between the pain and the fear and the rushing wind, Susan had a strong craving to escape at once with Rabadash, to turn back time and simply imagine they had married as she once had hoped. Closing her eyes, it seemed that she really was back in Calormene, on the morning after her wedding night, sated after a night of love-making. She saw herself lying on the bed, dark-eyed and dreamy, allowing a pair of chattering female slaves to arrange her hair in the elaborate Calormene fashion. Her body ached yet there was pleasure in the pain. It seemed that the daily routine for a Calormene lady involved little more than trips to the baths, gossiping with friends, shopping, long massages, beauty treatments, and a good deal of daytime sleep. Of course she needed to be fresh and rested for the nights, when Rabadash came to her chamber and claimed her in every way a man possibly could. His love-making was so passionate that she hardly cared how cruel and savage he was to his own people . . .
"Aslan! Mercy!" Susan's agonized cry was swallowed up by the thunderous winds, which had swelled beyond hurricane force and were threatening to tear the valley apart. The sky was black now, the air filled with flying tree limbs and boulders the size of her head. The Queen of Narnia felt terror now, horror at her own imminent destruction. She wanted to flee from the ravine and save her own life, whatever the cost to this world, to her own world, to everyone she had ever loved.
"Do not despair!" Cried a voice in the howling wind. "Susan, my love, do not despair. Hold firm for Aslan, my queen!"
"Rabadash?" Was the voice real, or was it in her head? Susan's entire body was screaming by now, her back and shoulders knotted by cramps, her tender skin lacerated by pebbles and sand and every form of flying debris. It came to her suddenly that Aslan was stripping away her skin, her bones, her life, little by little and layer by layer, until there would be nothing left, nothing but what was most precious. There was a moment of inconceivable horror, as the beautiful young Queen of Narnia came face to face with the brutal ugliness of extinction, the moment of her own death. Then the moment of horror passed, and there was acceptance.
And peace.