I felt the ice give, a little bit, more than before, and my arms instinctively circled my belly. I looked back to see the soldiers approaching the shore, where they’d found my lame horse. When they saw me, they lifted their bows in my direction and I knew that I hadn’t gone far enough yet. A few arrows were let go but the wind was strong and they flew wide. I knew the soldiers would learn from this first volley and adjust their aim for the second round. There was little doubt that I would be hit.

The second volley never came. Kuonrat gave a signal and the archers lowered their bows. It struck me as unlikely that he was worried about wasting ammunition; while it might have been that he thought I would deserve to live if I made it across, I doubted that as well. Most probably, he just enjoyed the sport of watching a woman on thin ice.

The way the soldiers stood made it clear that they’d wait me out for as long as it took. Knowing that I couldn’t return the way I’d come, I took another step towards the far shore. The ice underneath me buckled and I went down on my knees, throwing my hands out so that I landed on all fours. I told myself that if I could just make it past the middle of the river, I’d survive, because that should be the thinnest point of the ice. I told myself that if I could only make it over that imaginary line, my unborn child would live.

The question was the best way to proceed. Should I spread myself out on my belly and slide slowly? This idea, distributing my weight as evenly as possible, made sense. But then I wondered if this would simply increase the possibility that I’d find a thin spot which would collapse the ice in a chain reaction that would swallow my entire body-and, of course, I feared putting any weight on my stomach regardless. So should I sprint, hoping speed would carry me over the ice? My body said no, but my faith argued that I should. After all, it was the breath of God that had carried my arrow with perfect precision to your heart. Wasn’t it possible that the same breath would be at my back, lifting me past the danger? If there was ever a moment to surrender to the protection of God, this was it.

I looked across the river, to the other side, imagining myself as an arrow and the path in front of me as my trajectory. I lifted myself slightly and felt the ice swell. I tensed my legs, and jabbed my rear foot into the ice to gain as much traction as I could. I lifted one knee and curled my shoulders forward. I said a quick prayer and looked to the freedom on the far shore, concentrating on it as my target. And then I pushed off, surrendering to the Lord’s protection.

I only made it a few steps before the ice gave out and I fell forward as if breaking through a window. The watery chill cut through me completely and the weight of my soaked clothing began pulling me down. My first thought was of the baby and my arms went out frantically, to grab at anything. If I could latch on to the edge of the hole, I thought, I would be able to pull myself out. But the ice I grabbed at only broke away, and the hole grew larger with my every attempt to escape it. I could feel my heat being drained from me. From my baby. After a few minutes my mind was still racing, but my body stopped reacting.

The river’s current pulled me down and away. Although I knew that it was I who was moving, the hole seemed to be slipping away from me overhead until there was no opening, only a hard tile of ice above me. It couldn’t have been very thick, but when I pushed my palms against it, nothing happened. There was nothing below me to brace my feet against, only water. My only hope was to hold my breath and pray for the current to sweep me to another opening.

It’s a strange feeling when one’s body shuts down completely. This vessel that has carried you, that has served you faithfully for an entire life, stops reacting to the commands of your soul. It’s almost as if someone has flicked a switch to cut the electricity. I soon understood that even if the river’s current did bring me to an opening, it would be too late. My hands would not be able to hook onto its edge and, even if they did, I would lack the strength to pull myself out of the freezing water.

The most damning realization was that I could no longer expect our baby to be unharmed. With this, my spirit surrendered. I closed my eyes, because this is what one does when underwater and dying. My body dropped, and all my fear just left. There was a moment of startlingly beautiful acceptance. It’ll be easier this way, I thought with some relief, in the final moments before everything went black.

What happened next-I can tell you about it, but I can’t explain it. Not properly, not in a way that you could understand. At birth, I was given the gift of languages and I’ve been perfecting that gift for seven hundred years, but the words to describe what happened on that day do not exist. Not in English, nor in any other language I know.

When I woke, it wasn’t really like waking, because I hadn’t been asleep. It was more that I’d been in a state without any consciousness, and now I was returned into awareness. But not awareness in the way that we perceive the world around us: it was something greater, something sidelessly wide and endlessly deep. I was still under the ice, still being swept by the Pegnitz, but at the same time I was not in the water of a specific river. I was in the water of the entire world, the entire universe, but I wasn’t even “in” the water so much as I was a part of it. I was indistinguishable from the water itself; I had become fluid.

When people die and somehow come back, they always talk about a tunnel of light. This was not my experience. There was light but it was not a tunnel, it was all around me. Luminous air supported me, keeping me aloft even though there was no ground that I needed to be kept aloft from. It was in me and it was through me; I was the water and I was the light. I felt as though I were floating liquid radiance, a steady glow without warmth or cold. I no longer had any sense of my body.

Time does not exist when one’s body no longer exists, because there is only the body’s perception of time. We rarely notice our innate feeling for time until it’s removed. This is why amnesiacs are so confused when they become first aware of their condition. It’s not because they’ve lost memories-we all lose memories; it’s because they’ve lost time.

I became aware of presences. You couldn’t call them ghosts or spirits, because they possessed not even that much form. They existed only because I could sense them. But sense is again the wrong word, because how could I sense something with no substance? Like the light and the water, they were inside me. I felt them so completely that I knew that not only were they inside me, but they always had been. I had been ignoring them, all my life, in a kind of self-defense. It’s like listening to a conversation-you can’t concentrate on the words if you’re also listening to the clock across the room and the cars outside and the footsteps down the hall and the breathing of the man sitting beside the woman sipping tea. You cannot process all this, so you concentrate only on the words of the speaker. So it is with the infinite voices of the human body. You listen to your own thoughts, and you shut out the rest.

But now I could embrace every voice within me. I could hear all those presences, and they sounded like golden circles. I could taste them, and they tasted like comfort. They touched me, and it felt like music.

See? I wish I could explain it, but I cannot. It is impossible. Anyone who believes that she can explain the Eternal Godhead has never truly experienced it.

Three presences separated themselves from the host and came forward. Although they did not assume physical shapes, I recognized them nevertheless as the humans that they had been, even though in my physical life I’d only ever met one of them, Father Sunder. The second was Meister Eckhart and the third was Mechthild von Magdeburg.