Chapter 2
CHAOS
Men name wars to pin them to paper, fold them up, tuck madness and destruction into a pocket. Forget. Never forget. Gain distance. Relive it. Blame. Ask forgiveness. Tidy up chaos into sentences and chapters. A title. A timeline. Statistics.
True chaos, khaos, cannot be scribed into dots and lines. No. Your people have forgotten that khaos is the void, the abyss. The silent still readiness for what’s next. The abyss exists in every moment and breath. Silence. Stillness. Readiness. It’s the noise of all that rose from the primordial muck, fighting its inevitable death, that masks the beauty of khaos beneath. Even my body groans against time.
Strange how this world filled with wars came to be called chaotic and is feared less than khaos itself. Perhaps it’s no matter, but consider this: The story of how man came from the abyss and what order should look like is at the heart of every war that ever was. What if, instead, you loved the khaos. Let the silence remake you with every breath. Succumb to autopoeisis—life remakes life.
It is your chaos, this story is about. The perception of total disorder reigning over Earth and the illusion that order is within your grasp. Even the goddesses think order is what they seek. They are mistaken. Order will destroy us all as surely as the wildly swinging pendulum of this age.
8 July, 1940
Dear Master Crowley,
I thank you for your concern of my health. While the fevers continue I am nevertheless able to work. Strangely, in fact, I am convinced it is the work itself causing the rise of heat in my body. Other changes too. I have of late found strands of auburn hair hiding in the gray thicket on my head, dare I hope this is some reversal of aging? What have your visions to say on that subject! Now don’t get riled, I can feel your impatience. “Focus, Frieda!” you are shouting at this paper. Well, quite rightly. Make hay while the sun shines and all that. As we agreed, I shall start the Princess of Air over again. (Sorry, Princess of Swords. I know you prefer to reference the Magician’s tools for the suits rather than the elements.) I fear the canvas will anyway be worse for the wear having not been properly sealed and up in my attic these past years. Cheer up, Aleister! Our little project is more than half done. Enclosed you will find a few of the studies for the queens, kings (are you still insistent on calling them ‘knights’ and mounting them horseback?), and princes for your comments. Perhaps you might travel here next, we have fine establishments in town and I can make arrangements. May I suggest that getting out of London for a bit might do you good—much less talk about war out here in the hinterlands. Percival brought home a war poster the other day. Shredding the stockpile, he said, as part of the paper conservation program. (Thank goodness I’ve an attic filled with canvas, it’s become nearly impossible to get!) The poster reads “Keep Calm and Carry On” under the Tudor Crown
Frieda paused mid-sentence. She smiled at the thought of the Princess of Air tucked in a corner upstairs, fighting the roiling clouds of her moods, and hoped dearly her face would come clear this time around. Keep Calm and Carry On, just so. Then, a vision arose of Amelia trapped in a cloud bank, blinded, surely strung out between euphoria and terror. The propeller blades of her plane beat at the smothering mist. Frieda scowled. Tiny splatters of ink rained on the letter as the pen trembled in her hand. It had been three years now since she’d heard the news. “Where did you go?” Her voice sounded too loud in the empty room. A familiar flush came to her face. She pressed her cool palms to her cheeks and waited until her head stopped swimming.
Quickly, she signed off the letter and stuffed it into the envelope, the sentence unfinished. (Leaving Aleister to assume the slogan, Keep Calm and Carry On, was directed at him, which riled him so deeply that later he spat those same words at the bartender, prostitutes, and his comrades-in-benders when the evening, as it inevitably did, took a nasty turn.)
“There you are,” Frieda said, pulling the small canvas from a rack tucked under the eaves, where the beams of the roof met the floor. The canvas sagged slightly between the bones of the frame, but otherwise had weathered the years in the attic without harm. Frieda set to the task of re-stretching the painting. Though she had promised Aleister to begin again, she would keep this one for herself. A sentimental reminder of the first time she had truly felt like an artist . . . more than that, she thought.
Her task complete and the dinner hour upon her, Frieda readied herself to go back to the house. She was eager to get started on the new version of the Princess of Air in the morning. Frieda propped the repaired canvas on an easel, with a freshly primed canvas on a twin easel beside it. As Frieda hefted open the door in the floor, she turned for a last look at the Princess of Air.
Frieda blinked. Furrowed her brow. Strains of yellow pulsed through the gray painted sky in front of the girl. The thick cumulus parted for her sword; rays from the sun flashed along the blade’s edge. The mountain beneath the princess was now cloaked in the clouds, hidden completely, though Frieda could still feel that rocky peak under her bare feet. Was this a trick of her own memory, or something else?
Still can’t see her face, Frieda thought. “Don’t look back, keep going,” she had pleaded—the last words she had spoken to the princess in the painting three years ago. It was as if the girl had spent that time heeding those words, swiping at the bulwark of oppressive weather, building her strength, gritting her teeth, the clouds she’d chopped down piled at her feet. Or had she risen? Flown far above the rumbling mountain and drifted, beating those lacy wings against the water-laden air, determined to see further, be further, beyond the sun even. Beyond the stars.
Frieda shivered. She couldn’t shake the sense that the painting was alive, perhaps not in the usual sense, but that its existence was affecting, well, everything.
“Keep going,” Frieda urged the princess again.
9 July, 1940 CE
Maidenhead to Oxford
Charlotte leaned her head toward the window, impatiently pushing back the rim of her hat to touch her forehead to the cool plate of glass. The sway of the train moving slow down the tracks and the crush of sweaty bodies in the coach made her nauseous. She wished she could fly instead. She could get from Maidenhead to Oxford in ten minutes, probably. Of course no civilian planes were flying now. Not with the war. Not that she knew how anyway. Just dreaming again. The sketchpad and books on her lap went unopened. The ride would take another hour at least and even the thought of words jittering around on the page made her feel like she might throw up.
The train cut through the trees then slowed down fast, wheels whining high-pitched and head-splitting. What station was this? She didn’t remember a stop on this line, but trains were running crazy these days. Her mother was sick about sending her to Oxford alone. Charlotte, as usual, wore her down. “I’m almost eighteen, for god’s sake,” she had complained. “I’ve been there before. Carl and Ben are meeting me at the station. With all those soldiers on the trains, sworn to protect us, do you think if I screamed, no one would help me?” Her mother conceded. She’d trust any officer of His Majesty’s military with the good china. And her daughter, apparently. “Ben’s mother said he will give you a ride back after the lecture, he’s home for the rest of summer session then,” she’d said, tucking a sandwich into her daughter’s bag.
Her mother probably was right to trust the soldier guy next to her, but Ben was something else entirely. Charlotte grinned. Her brother’s best friend had it bad for Charlotte, and he wasn’t shy about it. They’d known each other since Charlotte was five. Ben had been a gangly, awkward kid, and she had been no prize. Missing front teeth, stringy blonde hair, and way too smart for the other kids to much like. Teachers either, really. She asked too many questions, and as she got older, they mostly didn’t have the answers. Ben and Charlotte had grown into their own bodies and minds in roughly equal measure. She was a couple years younger, but also a girl so she had that on him.
He’d kissed her the first time in her friend Chelsea’s basement, at a princess-themed birthday party when she was six. When the kissing game started (what six-year-olds kissed at parties, Charlotte wondered with a decade of distance and wisdom to fuel her self-judgement) a boy from school, Thomas, joined her in the cupboard under the stairs and started giggling, then pinched her on the arm and left. She had sat, miserable and nervous. Her front teeth had got knocked out in a fall from a tree when she was four, so she’d been ‘toothless’ for nearly two years. No one was going to want to kiss her, ever, she thought. She was doomed to be a troll, living under a bridge. When Ben crawled into the cupboard and sat beside her, she’d cried with a mix of humiliation and relief. Through her snuffling and the tears and the snot running out of her nose, he kissed her cheek then held her hand until the kitchen egg-timer went off and they were freed.
The next time he kissed her was that blazing hot summer when she was fourteen. Her teeth had shown up “beautifully” everyone said (the unexpected event still bearing comment seven years after the fact), and her breasts had shown up beautifully too, if she might say so herself. Ben was sixteen. Lean, tall, and not afraid of her brain. He loved her smarts more than her body, he assured her, even as he slid his tongue past her straight teeth and brushed his fingers so lightly across her nipples (outside her shirt), that she thought she would scream—or be sick. Something like she felt right now, for much different reasons. Geez, her mind could sure take her off in strange directions. The train was full stopped on the bridge over the Thames, and the guy next to her (as if he could sense what she’d been thinking about) made a move.
“Watcha reading?” Soldier Guy asked, leaning in close. Was he making a pass at her or just being nice? She didn’t trust her own judgement, given her current state. Thinking about Ben touching her nipples made her pelvic bones ache and blood ring in her ears. She could barely hear Soldier Guy speaking to her. No matter if he was making a pass, she felt perfectly safe. The minute she slid aside her sketchpad to reveal the books underneath, whatever hots he had would be doused. She didn’t blame guys for their hots, it was all biology.
“Marie Curie’s research on radioactive elements,” Charlotte answered, flashing the cover.
“Oh,” Soldier Guy, said (somewhat doused). “Wait, who?”
“Marie Curie. Nobel Prize winner. Twice? Physics and chemistry?” Charlotte checked her tone, didn’t want to make the poor guy feel dumb. He was serving her country after all, probably have to go fight the Nazis and maybe not come back. She didn’t usually let herself think about all that, she had bigger things on her mind. Charlotte grabbed his arm, having thought of something that might interest him.
“She made it possible to take x-rays of soldiers right out in the field in the first world war. Built a whole mobile truck, then rode in it herself. Saved a lot of our guys, not that you’ll need saving . . .” Gad, I am such an idiot. “Will you excuse me? I have to use the toilet.” Soldier Guy blushed right over his freckles. Charlotte wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed about not knowing possibly the smartest and bravest woman on the planet, the crack about needing saving, or thinking about her in the toilet, but she would for sure have to move seats.
Charlotte pawed through the crowd, working her way to an open door between cars. Standing there, looking out across the river, holding on with her free hand, the rails of the tracks and the rails of the bridge disappeared. She felt like she was floating over the water. It was late afternoon. Far in the distance, the water blurred into hills and sky. The sun was so bright it played tricks with light; a flock of birds appeared in the sky as if out of nowhere, landing as one unit on the flickering surface of the Thames.
A memory caught Charlotte’s attention, blending dreamily with the present. She half expected to see the plane again, drifting silently toward her. Pontoon floats where other planes had wheels. It had been some time before she could see that it was a plane, or had been once. Both wings had been shorn off and strapped to the roof, like a broken bird made to carry home the lost parts of itself. The bird hoping, perhaps, someone would stitch its wings back on its body. Remake it whole.
That had been last winter, late March or early April, she remembered. The Thames skirted her town, winding and splitting apart around a lake, then coming together again. Just upriver from the lake, she’d been walking where there were no houses, or streets—no source of light except what the night sky could spare. She loved the river like this, when she could see the stars in it. She’d been sitting with her back to her favorite tree, the one she climbed as a kid, now her observatory, when the plane had come toward her, making its way around a bend. The river was narrow at the spot, the width of the plane nearly reaching bank to bank. It moved so slowly Charlotte thought she was dreaming. No, there was the small barge, pushing the plane ahead. No one dreamed a barge—not a girl of sixteen. It was so dark that night, the plane slid by like a shadow, disappearing entirely within a minute.
Something kept her from mentioning the plane to anyone, not even her father, who might have been fascinated. She scanned the paper and kept her ears open for news or rumors. When nothing appeared, Charlotte thought about asking Ben. He worked summers at the newspaper and might have an insider scoop, but he was away at school. Besides, despite their steamy past, they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend or anything like that.
The train started up with a snort and jolted her back. Arms pulled her inside; the conductor led her to a new seat. The flier she’d tucked inside the cover of Marie Curie was folded over four times. Charlotte smoothed it out and read it again: “Mysteries of the Night Sky—An Historic Journey in Pictures” Lecturer: Dr. Helge Guldbrandsen, courtesy of Oxford University. With commentary on the theoretical arguments for an expanding universe. Radcliffe Observatory. 9, July. 7:00pm. (Open to the public). Charlotte was getting so excited she really did have to use the toilet now. She decided to read instead, her nausea relieved by the fresh air.
The second book in her lap fell open to the inscription, written in her father’s delicate cursive. To my Charlotte on her seventeenth birthday. She smiled. Sixteen other books on the shelf in her bedroom began exactly the same way, except for her age. A dear explanation of how he had chosen that book followed, sometimes filling two pages. Her father had given her a beautifully illustrated leather-bound edition of the north fairytales East of the Sun and West of the Moon when she was five. She’d gone through a brief princess phase. Not the princesses the other girls worshipped (including the real ones that peppered their country’s history and present), no, she liked the dark princess stories—the old Russian and Norse fairy tales in which chopping off a princesses’ hand or making her endlessly sweep a floor or gather grains of sand was a regular occurrence. Yet once she passed the tests, if she persevered, the keys to the kingdom were all hers. Keys to a magic kingdom in another world. The stories had made Charlotte squirm with queasy delight. She poured over the pictures for hours. Memorized the words. She had taught herself to read from that book. North. That was where all the best stories were.
Amelia Earhart disappeared when you were fourteen. I remember you cried when we heard the report on the radio. I was surprised, as surely you had little idea who she was and, well, you aren’t a crier as such things go. As you’ve grown, it occurs to me that you have something of her same spirit. A need for adventure. Not adventure of any ordinary kind. You want to know what lies beyond what we can see of the stars, what beats inside each grain of sand, and I have no doubt that you will find out. I chose her memoir for you because it tells something of her life and her dreams. Who she was before she was lost. I feel for her parents, each time they let her go. Of course they had no choice because they loved her more than all of the stars and grains of sand on this tiny planet. At least I imagine that to be true, because that is how I love you.
Chipping Campden
“. . . carry on indeed! The British Royal Navy has burned the entire French fleet! Somewhere called, oh hell, I can’t pronounce . . . mer el ka bersh. Now where on God’s green earth is that?” Frieda lingered in the hall, listened to Percy rant to himself. Watched her husband rise from the breakfast table, leaving the newspaper on his plate. Off to find the atlas, she presumed, as he often did when he couldn’t put a place to a name. He pulled up short when Frieda slid past him toward her chair. “Your hair!”
“Do you like it?” Frieda asked, hopeful she hadn’t finally broken this man’s long streak of patience.
She read in his face all she knew to be true that he was too kind, perhaps too tired, to say now. That the shade of red she had chosen (not chosen really, as the box of henna bought on a whim twenty years ago was all she’d had on hand) was perhaps a bit, well, flamboyant, for her age. That he had hoped the business of her dressing up in strange costumes, in public at least, was behind them. And that, once again, he may be called upon to defend her erratic behavior to his fellow Party members and their wives (from which, he had assured her, the real chorus of protest chimed).
It had been suggested, more than once, in private and public, that Lady Harris might benefit from a stay at a reputable institution. It had also been intimated that Percival was simply too cheap to take this rational course of action. Percy was, indeed, a rational man. Not cheap. He simply loved his wife, bizarre as her behavior might appear to him. Each time she had come under attack by their social circle, instead of berating her or handing down ultimatums, he sent her flowers. Roses. Red, her favorite color. By the dozens. As if to apologize to her for the misbehavior and misguided judgements of others, for their blindness to what he saw in her: this woman who had lost both her parents as a young child, survived with her sister alone in the world, loved life so fiercely, even touched by death, she couldn’t live it loud enough to match the glorious thrum and flow she felt in her bones. Frieda had saved every bunch, hanging the bouquets to dry upside down from the rafters in the cottage attic. She wondered, with a quick grin, if her husband was mentally adding, “order flowers” to his itinerary for the week.
Percy laughed out loud. Kissed her on the forehead where she knew some of the dye had dribbled down and left a faint stain. “See you at dinner, Love? I’m off to a meeting in town.” Frieda watched him turn toward the front door. With his wife’s hair in flames, he had forgotten the fire at Mers-el-Kébirshe.
Frieda hurried to the cottage without changing out of her dressing gown. The slip of white satin fell to the floor before she mounted the ladder. Her newly red-streaked tresses brushed her back, nearly to her buttocks, as she climbed. The canvases, paint, and candles waited for her. She was glad she had set everything up the night before. Frieda moved around the room, lighting each candle and trying to slow her breath. In, count four, hold in her belly for seven counts more, out slow, her lips in an ‘o’ one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Move to the next candle. When all are lit, sit. Close your eyes. Let the silence come.
The flames flickered just beyond her eyelids, moved by her breath, like a tiny wildfire wafting through a field of dry brush. The slight movement kicked up the fine dust that seemed to fill the air everywhere these days, sifting through the cracks of the walls and settling between the floorboards. She sneezed, a truncated ha-whuff, after losing the battle to hold it in. Her skin, goose-pimpled from the initial chill of the room, smoothed and softened as the room warmed. A moment arrived. Soror Tzaba rose. Ready to begin.
She danced. Danced in a way Marguerite Frieda Bloxam Harris never could. She danced as if the sister spirits of dance occupied her now, her body the host, graceful and lithe. Her red-gold hair swirled as she dervished across the floor—the planks growing warmer as bone spun against wood. The fires burnished her bronze, leaping beyond the wax and wicks, flaring up higher, kissing the dried lips of those dozens and dozens of crimson red roses hung upside down from the beams, transmuting petals to ash that fell around Soror Tzaba, shimmering like a midnight of shooting stars. She danced for hours . . . an epoch.
Oxford to Maidenhead
Charlotte walked into the sectagonal viewing room at the top of the hall, flanked by her brother, Carl, and their childhood friend, Ben. Carl paid the entrance fee to a bespectacled student who manned a table just inside the door. “Your birthday present, mi-lady” he offered with a gallant bow and exaggerated, uppercrust accent, then whistled, “Yow! Look at this place.” The original molding spiraled up to an oculus in the roof. It was permanently shut as the mechanism had fallen into disrepair like the rest of the building—a crumbling, colorless remnant of its former self—but this room was still worth a whistle.
Charlotte followed the boys to their seats, thought about Soldier Guy for a second, and sighed her relief that these two hadn’t been called to fight, yet.
Ben and Carl had been at Oxford for a year already. Carl had decided to stay through the summer term, his best bet to avoid conscription. Ben had snagged a coveted reserved occupation at the paper back home as a journalist, so he was safe, for now, or as safe as anyone might hope to be. Carl invited his sister to come to the lecture as a poor man’s birthday present. He knew she was crazy for stars. He invited Ben because he knew Ben was crazy for Charlotte and Ben was a good guy.
A tall, thin man wearing a crumpled brown jacket over a starched white shirt, hunched around the projector, aiming the lens toward a giant screen that covered two of the six walls. Tendrils of silver-white-silver escaped the band that attempted to corral his unruly hair. Professor Guldbrandsen, she presumed, guessing his age between sixty and one hundred and two. Charlotte glanced around, counting. Fewer than a dozen people attended, scattered in the tiered seats of the observatory that had once been a jewel in the Oxford crown. The University had sold the building to a private owner, who had installed a medical research facility. The war had stymied all of that and the owner was glad to have a small income from the lectures the faculty such as Professor G (so nicknamed by his students due to the ungainly surname he’d brought with him from the far north) generated, who couldn't procure space or the support of their college for official sounding reasons that all meant, “We don't believe this or that theory quite yet.”
The ticket boy flipped a bank of switches and the room went black. The projector whirred and clicked, the screen glowed. The professor pointed a long stick at diagrams, explaining the redshift affect, which allowed astronomers to make educated guesses about the distance between celestial bodies. (Professor G joined a few rascals who believed Hubble's formula could be used to prove the universe was expanding. Hubble himself debunked the idea.) Charlotte was lost for once, the very edges of her intellect prodded to rapt attention. She leaned forward in her chair, while the boys tipped back in theirs and soon snored softly. For nearly two hours she drank it all in.
"Someday," the Professor concluded, "we hope to have actual pictures of the spiral nebula beyond our own galaxy. I have managed to produce a few shots of the very edge of our Milky Way, if you will indulge me for a few moments more.” The professor fiddled with the projector and the room was pitched into utter darkness again. Charlotte blinked and at that instant the picture flashed on the screen, crystalizing as it came into focus, as if she had blinked the starry sky into being.
The image was clear and crisp and shocking, detailed and luminous. The star-clotted view was produced by a small light forced through a tiny square bit of celluloid and a curved lens. While Charlotte intuitively understood the technology, the effect defied explanation. The professor's voice grew animated. His monotone hum shifted and warped into a Wagnerian opera. He spoke so fast Charlotte could barely understand him but on sight of the fifth slide her ears started ringing so loud she heard only one word, “Ara.”
The slide showed the same sky she'd drawn hundreds of times since her ninth birthday. The stars she drew stayed in one place, though she knew the stars rotated in the sky and changed by season. She had never once seen the stars arranged precisely as they were in her drawings, though she had tried on many nights from her tree by the Thames. And there it was, on the screen in front of her. The starry sky that seemed etched on the inside of her eyelids captured by this old man’s miracle of imaging technology. The screen a mirror, a portal, a door and a million and more blinking white-silver-white eyes peering back at her across almost measurable space and time.
Seeing her.
“Ara,” the professor said again, tapping a constellation of celestial bodies with a long wooden rod he seemed to pull from his pocket, all connected by more than that three-letter name. Ara. Ara.
She felt the sound more than heard it.
In that moment Charlotte's whole body went numb, something opened inside her, hollowed her gut just below her belly button. Her hands moved to cradle the curve, then pressed down, not hard but as if to keep whatever grew there from ballooning too large. Keep her from floating clean out of her seat. She couldn't name it or reason it out. She was too stunned to ask a single question or approach the professor afterward, though he was left to himself as the few attendees trickled out.
In the street, Ben took Charlotte's hand. She was grateful for the touch, desperately wanting something to ground her, to feel her body again. They said goodbye to Carl and Ben drove her home. Charlotte was quiet.
When their naked bodies slid against one another between her cool, white sheets she lost herself in the sensation like sea grass swaying far beneath warm, lapping waves. But when he shuddered against her she thought about a book she'd read that described the climax of sex like stars exploding and remembered her drawings under her bed, and the moment in the observatory when she knew what she held in her mind was real, and the professor's voice almost singing Ara. Charlotte dissolved into heaving sobs.
Chipping Campden
The rafters of the attic shimmered with a white hot crust, crackling along the beams. Blackened stems pointed to where the upturned field of roses had been, while the last few dried blooms burst into flames, dripping sparks and ash like Hell’s rain.
Slowly, seeping up through the floorboards, the lake that had perhaps escaped the suit of cups filled the attic, lapping against the sloping ceiling as it made its way up. Moonlight rode through the waves of ether, air, glass, and water to kiss Frieda on each eye. They opened then and the silvery face of her mother looked back for a moment, then slipped down through the door in the floor along with the water.
The heady smell of burnt petals and wood swirled around Frieda, wafting down from the ruined bouquets in the smoldering rafters, pouring out of the painting—a red-headed young woman, naked and glowing, follows a trail of fire, fed by her passions. She pulls a tiger by its tail—the beast succumbing to the Will of the Princess of Fire, her embodying the very essence of autopoiesis. Beside the princess, on a white pedestal embossed with circles begetting circles begetting circles, a pile of red roses goes up in smoke.
Frieda sank to her knees among the damp gray piles of petals on the floor.
With paint-covered hands—yellow, red, orange—she swept together a pile of the ashes and held them as they grew sticky and thick; watched them turn blue-black-blue as they cooled. She waited in the quiet and stench of roses on fire until she could feel the ash throb in sync with her own heart.
With the Princess of Fire’s life-giving power surging through all of her cells, Soror Tzaba parted the ash into two equal piles, crafting them slowly, deliberately into the shape of two babies.
Twins. A boy and a girl.
The goddess couldn’t get a clear view from the roof, even with the increased acuity of her vision in the form of White Raven. Athena could make out Frieda, curled in a ball, newly red hair fanned out around her, naked skin streaked with, what? Paint? Dirt? Her whole body had an orange cast. Dark blue-black striped her hands, stomach and breasts. She looked like a sleeping tiger, its coat singed in a fire. Beside the prone woman stood three canvases, completed it seemed. One would be the Princess of Air that Crowley had insisted Frieda repaint. “We must see her face,” he had admonished Frieda in a letter (Athena guiding his hand). The other paintings, she assumed from Aleister and Frieda’s correspondence, were two of the three remaining princess cards in the deck.
Athena couldn’t wait any longer. She flew into the room and stood in front of the canvases. Dammit. Still no face on the Princess of Air. “Turn around!” she screeched at the paint. The Princess of Fire had no face either. Athena glanced at Frieda, still asleep at her feet. Athena flashed on the image of Frieda at nine, taking the tiger by its tail. The goddess smiled despite her trepidation. She’s remembered her true name and certainly the woman was smart enough to see herself in the painting. There would be no stopping her now, but perhaps she could be slowed. Misdirected, Athena mused. She would have to be careful. Hestia mustn’t know.
She was so sick of Hestia berating her about the war. The human one that had begun in Asia and now spread west, devouring Europe. “It’s gone too far,” Hestia shrieked at her constantly. Even Athena had to admit it. She had flat out occupied certain key players, trying to get things under control, and it seemed that traces of her powers had scraped off and been left in them, to do with what they would. What they Willed. She couldn’t control what people desired, what they hated, none of the gods or goddesses could. She needed more recruits, and a leader, a human one. She needed another Amelia.
“They are close, Athena.” The goddess winced at Hestia’s voice in her head, the calm at its center almost unbearable. “They have almost achieved the means to destroy everything in a matter of days.”
Would the One let that happen? What does It care? He, she, it, they. Probably has a billion other universes, other earths. Why save this one? Well, as far as she knew, there wasn’t another party she was invited to attend. Let alone universe’s she might rule. If the princesses were the future, it was only fair that the Princess of Air belonged to her, as those born to the air had always been, wherever she was.
Athena turned to study the third canvas. This one had a face, one disturbingly familiar. The Princess of Earth, disks, Crowley called this suit. All these men marked their tarot decks like dogs pissing out barbed-wire fences with their cocks. Pentacles, disks, coins. If only he knew who was calling the shots on his little master project.
The Princess of Earth reined over Africa, or what Africa stood for, the birthplace of man, the birthplace of them all. Athena had to admit that Frieda, no, Soror Tzaba, had achieved something near to a miracle in paint, the skin of the princess shimmering with that rare, deep blue-black-blue of the tribes strung along the Red Sea. So few remained with this skin of the first kings and queens, those born under volcano plumes, a people seemingly made from fire and ash in the only place on Earth where the gates to the goddesses’ caverns could be crossed by humans. The painting practically pulsed with life. She reached out to touch the high, sharp cheekbones of the woman’s face. At her touch, the downturned eyes looked up. Met hers. The Princess of Earth smiled. Athena stumbled back. Artemis?
Recovering her balance, having tripped over Frieda’s curled form, Athena took in the picture again. The eyes were closed. “Artemis,” she shouted, trying to bring her sister back. She had the urge to shake the painting, shake the eyes open again, yet her nature was to be rational, measured, use her mind above all else. What does this mean? If these paintings, this tarot deck, is the true story of the world to come, the next aeon as dreamed by the One, who is the Princess of Earth? How important is she? What is her place?
Athena had been born from the minds of the great mystics, and lived in them still, she delved into that vast river of knowledge and came up with this: The Princess of Earth, the lowest of low and the highest of high. She has fallen as far from her divine birthplace as one can possibly get, and yet she is also the closest to becoming divine again.
Athena studied the painting. Soror Tzaba had captured the whole story right there. The princess stares into the abyss: the khaos from which she came. She carries a disk of dark and light that represents the truth of her life. When she recognizes her divine nature as well as the human in the stories that shaped her and reshaped the worlds—toppling the towers of what no longer serves—she calls her prince to her side. Reclaims that which has been lost. Reconciles. Steps off the ledge and re-stories herself. Becomes One again. Becomes the One. The One!
Artemis’ eyes in that blue-black-blue body, could it be her imagination? Athena’s head hurt. Suddenly recalled the twins born to her sister, the virgin. Harrumphed. Athena was the only other being in the worlds that knew about them, strategically keeping her sister’s secret. Was it possible for Artemis’ descendants to have that skin? She willed the vision to come, though seeing the past was not her gift. Artemis and Orion had occupied the bodies of a human couple from which the twins were conceived, somewhere further down the coast of the Red Sea. It wasn’t advised, letting an occupation result in a child. No one could predict what kind of being would come of that mix. It wasn’t a matter of skin color (even her own skin and hair in all of her forms was derived from a human mind and could be changed by their stories—like the first time she’d transmuted into Wolf) but a matter of molecular structure. Of perspective, allegiances, and power. Of the ability to withstand in one’s psyche living as a one-of-a-kind beast. Two of a kind, being twins, at least they had that. Born of her enemy, she hadn’t bothered to care how the children fared or keep track. Besides, born of humans, her niece and nephew should be long dead.
She looked again at the Princess of Earth then shifted her sight to all potential futures. Rage bloomed as all of the pathways agreed. This princess was a daughter of Artemis and would somehow be Athena’s demise, though the visions stopped at how. When? Where?
She stormed, agitated. Did what she could. She blew on the painting.
Her raven ability to turn black to white poured from her lips, changing the skin of the princess pale as the skin of the northernmost tribes that cling to the edge of the arctic sea atop cliffs made of ice. Turned the black, kinked hair long, straight and auburn. There. It was all she could think to do without Hestia finding out. Maybe it was enough to change the story back in her favor. Confuse those who would be the readers of the One’s tarot deck about who was to be the lowest of low and highest of high from here on out, at least until she could make a new plan. Find The Princess of Air to bend to her Will; replace Amelia.
It was then she noticed the swollen belly beneath the Princess of Earth’s robes, growing rounder as she looked. Pregnant? She turned to Frieda who still slept on the floor and kicked her, just a little, a gesture of pure hate and frustration tempered by the eye of Hestia. Frieda shifted in her sleep, uncurling but pulling the dark bundles in tighter to her breasts. Athena stared in confusion and shock at the twins covered in ash. Screeched, “What have you done?” as she flew into the night.
The Village of Ash
Staring at the figures Frieda had made, Athena had quickly pieced it together and flown to the birthplace of man. Land of the people made of ash with blue-black-blue skin as radiant as the full moon. She crossed the Abyssinian mountains and wheeled toward the sea. Once cleared of the peaks and past the cliffs that fenced off the coast from the rest of the continent, the distant cry of a newborn guided her in like a beacon.
White Raven lit on the tin roof of the hut. An elder woman, hunched with age, sat on a stone that surrounded their village hearth. Their eyes met. The woman bowed with respect to their people’s harbinger of death. The largest white raven she’d ever seen, and in that moment began to grieve the death that would come. More than one? Three in the hut walked in both worlds at this moment. How many would the raven claim? The wife of her son who minutes ago had been dead, revived by the firstborn’s lips on her breast? The second-born who, at this very moment, slipped into the mutinous hands of its Aunt, the wife of her second son?
Athena took all of this in. The woman was a shaman of her tribe, though she bore none of the usual tattoos or dress. But her nature allowed Athena inside her mind. Heard the old woman chant the newborn baby’s names, her right in her son’s absence. Heard the call to the ancestors to stay the hands of the Aunt, Daniat was her name, not to kill the boy outright.
Athena peered through a gap between the tin sheets of the roof. Sized up Daniat as she slipped that boy into her wrap, declaring him dead. Good. Twins shared one heart. The girl wouldn’t live long with half of her heart gone. The Princess of Earth would die of nothing Hestia could blame her for. But she needed to keep eyes on. To be sure.
She watched Daniat scurry out of the hut and slip by the grandmother while singing her lies. Made off toward the woods to the North. The old woman sat perfectly still and closed her eyes.
Athena needed only occupy Daniat’s body for a moment to see what she needed—what the woman desired, what she hated. They were alike in their natures. The woman would do nicely to protect Athena’s interests. Help change the story, as much as she could. Perhaps just enough to give Athena the position she desired, and deserved. The throne of the High Priestess must be hers.
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