Chapter 6
9 July, 1960 CE
Tree, on the Red Sea
Once a year she startled awake, gasping for breath. Reached for him as he slipped away. Wait! Wait.
When she was younger, Asmeret could still see his blue-black-blue face, the color of the ancient kings and queens of their tribe. Smell the blood of their mother on him. Hear his breath. Feel his heartbeat next to hers as it had been for the time in their mother’s womb and the no-time in the no-place before that. Over the years the one that carried him away moved faster until the boy who was her other half was only a blur with no color or smell. This time she saw his face. Saw him reaching for her. Heard him call, “Wait!”
Stretching in her bed between the great twisted arms of the tree she smelled their shared blood on the hot, salty air. Today was the day then. The beginning and end. She had until sunrise tomorrow and then it was over. Asmeret blinked her brother’s face away. She couldn’t wait for him anymore.
She shuddered and cradled her knees to her chest. Looked out to the east where the sun rose out of the sea, shaped by unseen palms scooping the water into a ball of red-yellow-gold fire. This is the story the sun told her of its birth, death, and birth. Each day born by Sea, swallowed by Mountain. Moon was more secretive. Asmeret looked to the place in the sky where the moon should be. Only a whisper of light, the hint of a curved slice that would soon disappear for many nights.
Perhaps Sun and Moon know which story is true. She’d read hundreds of accounts from all corners of the earth. All of the storytellers must have seen the same sun and moon—same sky—yet the stories were all different.
“Not unlike the stories you think you know about yourself, Asmeret,” the Witch of the Wood had said. Hestia was her name, though Asmeret only called her that to her face. Witch of the Wood, or simply witch, was what the people in her village had always called the old woman who lived deep in the trees. She was to be avoided, unless one was desperate.
The witch had told Asmeret, “Who and what you truly are is in every moment you have ever lived, and yet you may not know the whole story. Most people don’t. Don’t even want to, sad as that is.” Asmeret had scowled, recognizing her own desire to turn and leave the witch’s hut.
A soothing voice murmured like a mother to her child, go back to sleep. But today she was twenty years old and carried a burden rarely bestowed on one of her years.
“Yes, the choice is yours,” the witch had said, perhaps sensing the girl’s wavering will. “Forgetting is easier, never knowing easier yet, but both lead to ruin in the end. We believe the gate will be open sunrise to sunrise and then it will close. The choice will no longer be yours.” Asmeret swallowed the impulse to ask, who is we?
One breath. One step at a time. This, Asmeret told her daughter when the child was scared or sad. Wisdom that served most dilemmas faced at age five but seemed inadequate to the decision Asmeret had to make now. Today. Return to the village and try to be the mother that Theia needed or finish the rites the witch had described, trust the cards and the dreams. Not dreams. She wished she had another word.
“You at least owe it to yourself and to Theia to see the truth before you decide,” the witch’s voice urged, “The truth of your birth. The truth of who you have always been.”
Asmeret looked up toward a rustling noise overhead. (Expected to see Raven perched in the crown of Tree, waiting for her to rub the sleep from her eyes and go on one of their flights. Expected somehow to be nine again. Before Theia. Long ago, before she had gotten so lost.) But there were only the branches, still barren of leaves after all of these years.
She gathered herself. Quieted her thoughts so that she could hear the odd beat of her heart, grown fainter every day since the death of the little black dog. One breath. One step.
With the movement of a creature practiced in stealth, she slipped down from her perch to land on the top of a root that thrust out high from the massive trunk of the tree like a flying buttress on a Gothic cathedral. Leaping to the next and three more, Asmeret dropped to the ground. Dropped to her knees and felt for the entry to the tunnel.
The mouth of the passageway snaked through a thick blanket of lichen, then layers of soil that had reshaped to her and the dog’s growing bodies over the years. She moved forward in the dark with the thoughtless ease of the old man of her village who had lived in one room all of his years, having lost his sight so slowly that his fingertips grew eyes. When the walls hardened and narrowed she lay on her stomach with her arms stretched ahead, finding fissures in the rock with her fingers to pull herself through.
Usually even this part of the tunnel wasn’t a problem. She regularly pushed bundles of food and firewood ahead of her until they dropped into the cavern beneath the tree. Like the day that the bundle was the lifeless, torn body of the dog wrapped in her cape, grief swelled in her and she was stuck.
Twenty years of unspent sadness and rage bloated her body until there was no space between the blue-black-blue skin and the walls of the tunnel. She tried to turn onto her back but a serrated scar of rock scraped her breasts straight through her thin tunic. She yelped, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. Only that once. Never before and never again.
I could die here, she thought. The dark tunnel closed in tighter, swallowing her whole. This third option asked nothing of her. It was finally over. She could go.
“Not this way, Asmeret. Trust my voice. Trust your own sturdy heart.”
Asmeret startled at the sound, the words as clear as if the witch were beside her. “Keep Going.”
With her next breath, she heaved herself out of the tunnel into the space suspended between the tree and the sea. Unseen from the cliff top or from the beach below, a tangle of roots woven together with thick ropy vines formed a large room. Ages of soil sifted down from the ledge and sand swirled up in dervishes from the beach slowly formed walls and a floor. When the winds blew just right or Asmeret moved suddenly, the whole structure swayed.
Everything she needed was here. She’d started preparations at the new moon as the witch had instructed. Stooping low, she circled the rim of the gently cupped floor, steadying herself with her fingertips against the soft sway her slight weight set off.
Unseen from above or below, the space secreted
Asmeret took her leather satchel down from its hook. The bag had been a gift from her mother when it became clear Asmeret was planning to live on her own, far from home. She had been nine the first time that she left, returning to the village and her mother’s hut once or twice each moon; when she was thirteen she’d left for good. The flap of the bag fell open as if its contents were impatient to make their escape.
From its depths, Asmeret pulled out the firestone swaddled in pieces of pale, pocked leather—from the hide of a white rhino the witch had said.
Asmeret tugged at the thong holding the firestone in its nest. Layers of hide unfolded like petals across her palm. Exposed to the air, the stone glowed white then blue as it spat and sparked back to life. Asmeret took the firestone in hand; it was always cool to the touch for reasons the old witch had never fully explained. She could feel something inside the stone moving, spinning perhaps. She imagined the inside hollow and vast. She imagined that if she split it open every star in the sky would come spilling out, but the firestone wouldn’t crack—she’d tried to open it many times as a child. The stone didn’t like to be held for too long; tiny, flying fires landed on her arms and breasts where they burned up in a flash, leaving no marks. The ashes wafted off her skin as she moved, making dusty constellations in the crisscrossing strips of light that leaked through the cracks and gaps in the walls.
She lit four small pyres, one in each of the four sacred directions. “Beacons,” the witch had advised, “to find your way back again.” Her hand shook as she touched the firestone to the dried grasses and animal dung. Flinched at the blue-white flames that blazed cold instead of hot. It should have been a relief to the building heat of the day but it filled her with a terror that had no name. She had run from her strangeness all of her life, now she was out of road and out of time.
The fires filled the room with light. While the fires in the north and west burned cold and blue, the pyres to the south and east burned hot now, yellow-orange-yellow, tempering the air. She stripped off the knee-length tunic she wore against the winter night chill and stashed it on the stone shelf where she stored the few items she used day to day. A cup and a bowl. A cook pot and her grandmother’s mogogo. Spare clothing. Her slingshot, the knife and a few other simple tools she had fashioned over the years for one task or another. She kept her books here too. She should have left them with Theia. He had said they were for their daughter as he pushed the package into her arms, but Asmeret knew the man she had only called ghost meant them as a gesture to her. A plea. A way of seeing her that she’d never allowed.
A way of her seeing him.
The thought came unbidden. Surprised her with its clarity and force.
“The books will be here for her,” the witch’s voice again. “When it is time, Theia will know the stories that shaped her mother’s life, and hers.”
Asmeret shook her head, trying to make sense of all that was happening.
Don’t think. Raven’s voice now—bottomless as the moonless nights.
She walked around the outside edge of the room to a deep niche behind the blue-white-blue fire of the north. She felt for the things she kept there, pulling them out one by one.
First, the cape. The one she had worn every day since she was nine—her mother’s cape. Her father’s. Hers. But she couldn’t bear it on her shoulders now. Didn’t deserve its shelter and grace. She spread it on the floor, the ragged outline of the massive lion it had once been defining the ritual space. In this final gesture she hoped to earn her part in its story.
The face of the fortuneteller came back to her then. An instant. The look of recognition. The look of astonishment. “You’re the reader they’ve been waiting for.”
“No.” Yes.
That was the day Lion had given her his story. How he came to be the red cape. The day the Princess of Disks stepped from her tarot card, silently pleading with Asmeret. The princess doomed forever to wait on the edge of this world for all that she’s lost to come back for her, calling for something, or someone, to soothe the beasts that snarl and yowl through the cage-bars of her dreams.
“The cards Asmeret,” the witch again, “you haven’t much time.”
Asmeret squinted to see past the fires into the dim corners of the room. Where the sun breached the thicket of roots, patterns of light flickered softly like the inside of the Islamic temple in the City of Clouds.
“Maybe I am crazy, like they all say,” she sighed aloud, startled a bit—it had been so long since she’d bothered to vocalize anything. The sound of her own voice after these months made what she was doing finally feel more real than dream.
The silk-wrapped bundle nearly leapt into her hands. Asmeret unwrapped the cards from their sheath, feeling the weight of them. Felt them inhale, taking her in.
As she turned back toward the center of the room the border between the cape and the floor distorted, rearranged until the red lion it had once been stood before her in the circle. Her eyes brimmed as she caught glimpses of her grandmother, her mother, Arsema, Theia, in the lion’s eyes. She blinked back the tears and the lion faded back to a crimson shadow on the floor.
She was so tired. Asmeret resisted the comforting pull of the soft cloak and the temptation to rest for just a while longer. But no. No time left.
As she worked, feathery tendrils of new root fluttered against her freshly shorn head. She brushed them away, giving no thought to the forces that converged to replenish the web of roots that had fed this boabab tree for thousands of years. The tree had grown so large (and was still growing despite appearances that would lead one to think it long dead) that Asmeret could stand up straight in the space. An echoey sound like singing, but not, filtered in with the light. Asmeret laid the seventy-eight tarot cards in a wheel on the red lion’s coat, working from the center out. The end and beginning cards of the major arcana, 0 and XXI, lay face to face in the middle, then each of the four suits spiraled out from the hub like the spokes of the wheel in their respective directions.
The suit of Disks stretched toward the South, the direction of earth and body and animals. The Prince and Princess of Disks crossed one another, making an arrow aimed at the center. The ten through two of the suit formed the shaft with the knight and queen at the top, as if they were the feathers forming the knock where bowstring meets arrow, drawing back, capturing the energy of all four directions and the unwavering pull of that line’s intention. There, in that space of everything present, waiting, sat the Ace of Disks. “Pay attention,” Asmeret murmured to herself, brushing the Ace lightly with her fingers, the words part of the ritual.
She moved to the arrow of Swords. North. The direction of air. The space of thought, inspiration, the rooms of one’s mind. The place of the stories we tell that make the worlds. Asmeret paused. This last phrase presented itself to her as if she had been hearing those words all of her life, a mantra, a truth, a guide. She stooped down, wanting to pick up the Princess of Swords. “Princess of Air” formed on her lips. The card had been coming to her over and over again yet remained stubbornly flat. Ink on paper. No movement. No story. As if taunting her, the princess refused to show her face. “Come to me now,” Asmeret implored. The phrase hung over the Prince and Princess of Air, the words freighted with layers of meaning Asmeret didn’t fully understand. “Please,” she added, her throat swelling with need.
As she turned to the cards angling in from the West—Cups, water, flow, the place where the worlds converged, above | below, the space of letting go—the floor beneath her trembled, ever so slightly. Not the sway she had grown used to when the winds blew outside, more like a shudder as if the packed dirt underneath the cloak were itself a beast waking up. She hurried to finish.
Stepping across to the arrow made up of the suit of Wands, she chanted, “Let go. Hold the vision. Speak your truth without judgment.” The firestone flared in her hand, at home in the direction of East, the suit of fire. The space of life begetting life. For the first time it occurred to Asmeret that the firestone was somehow connected to the Ace of Wands.
The ground rumbled and growled beneath her bare feet. Quickly, she set the firestone in the center, on top of the cards named Fool and Universe. She stepped back, anticipating the eruption as the firestone crackled and jumped. It started to spin and rise into the air, building up speed until it was a blur of white-silver-white; tongues of lightning lashed out wrapping back on themselves until there were three glowing rings, each spinning independent of the other two, yet the three were inextricably linked. In the vesica between the three rings, the firestone hung perfectly still.
Asmeret stared into the halo—her irises flashing with silvering stars. The strange song swelled, filling the room.
The rim of the wheel, made up of the remaining twenty cards of the major arcana, started to spin, slowly at first then faster until it was only a dervish of color and sound and light. The red leather pelt began to vibrate, breaking apart into dust, sifting through the fissures spiraling out from a hole opening in the floor below the three spinning rings—growing larger as she watched. The princesses and princes teetered on the rim of the hole.
Though the hole seemed to be bottomless and black, warm light wavered up through the cracks. Another movement on the floor caught Asmeret’s eyes. The Princess of Disks unmooring herself from the card, taking shape in a shaft of white-gold-white. Unlike before, when the figures on the cards rose and moved of their own accord, remaining small, like chess pieces on a board, the Princess of Earth grew larger until she was Asmeret’s full height.
The lowest of the four tarot princesses bows her head, crowned with the spiraling horns of a greater kudu. She stands on the edge of this life and the next staring into the abyss.
Asmeret began to dance to the music that filled the chamber: instruments from her childhood that scored the dances in her village, the whinnies and harruffs of the animals she heard in her dreams, Theia’s whispery bedtime voice, the south wind whistling and looping around the wind of the north, the hiss of hot lava as it pours into the sea. She whirled through the room on her toes.
When the music stopped, Asmeret stood in the shaft of light that was the Princess of Disks, kudu horns crowning her shorn head. She teetered on the rim of the hole, peering down where the waters of the Red Sea had flooded the beach epochs below. She leaned forward, mesmerized.
A voice like her grandmother’s but deeper, full of silt, said . . . “Not yet, Princess.”
Surprised at the voice, and the address, Princess, Asmeret obeyed, though every part of her wanted to leap. End the pain and the terror of this life for good. But she and the Princess of Disks, the apparition from the cards, were somehow one being—a ‘they’ now. They felt light-headed but crystal-clear.
They noticed then that the Fool and Universe cards were gone. Shadow and light spun and juttered across the wheel from the halo of rings overhead. They looked up to see the first and last cards of the trumps orbiting the firestone like paper moons.
“What do we do now?” they asked. Pay attention.
They scanned the room. At their feet, Asmeret’s pouch appeared, sitting atop the Ten of Disks. This pouch that had once belonged to her grandmother. This pouch that the ghost had stolen from Asmeret, then given back. He only wanted to know her better, to know who and what she was. Yes, that was the story they could tell now. The story that remade the worlds.
The weight of the bag in their hands grew. The princess spilled the contents across the floor. Wooden coins. A glittering slice of white quartz. A collection of bones, some white as sand—those gathered from the wild animal carcasses across this land—some charred black, the ribs of the little dog. The bones skittered to cover various cards. The coins piled up at the princess’ feet. The crystal sat in the palm of their hand, glowing softly from within. They waited, listened.
“Ask them again,” the witch spoke in their head, “use the words that I taught you.”
“Please, come. Show up and fill the air with the story I need now,” the princess spoke from memory and practice, though they hadn’t until now understood whom they’d addressed. They were asking unseen ancestors that hovered nearby, and the goddess they were destined to bring back from her deathbed. They were asking the blood in their veins and the marrow in their bones, and Raven and the little black dog and Hestia, the Witch of the Wood. No. Not a witch. The goddess who kept their hearth and their story alive. If the witch is a goddess, then what . . .
The princess stooped down, awkwardly clutching their rounded belly, and counted the coins—nineteen (where there should be twenty, or none).
Asmeret’s mind reeled back: Her belly swollen with the child of the ghost—joy and anguish; the missing coin pinched between the sharp fingernails of the fortuneteller—hope and terror. Three days ago, desperate, knocking on the witch’s door for the first time since Theia’s fifth birthday. Not witch—goddess. Hestia.
“I can’t live like this anymore. What do I do?”
“The cards know,” Hestia had replied.
The cards had been yowling and moaning at her from beneath the tree. The thought of unleashing all of those creatures from the cards, the way they seemed to need her, coming to life and gathering at her feet, the Princess of Disks so somber, staring into the abyss, so still, made Asmeret feel sick. “Read them with me,” she’d begged Hestia.
“Shuffle the cards and let three come to your hands,” Hestia had instructed. “Lay them side by side.”
The card on the left showed a stooped figure in a red-hooded cloak a hermit, bearing a lantern, with a three-headed black dog at its heels; in the center, a golden wheel, spinning in an endless loop; to the right, ten gold coins arrayed in a pattern Hestia had called the Tree of Life, more than a tree, a journey—destiny and denial. Asmeret was relieved that the cards remained cards, paper and ink. She watched Hestia raise an eyebrow and asked what she saw.
ATU IX HERMIT
ATU X FORTUNE
10 of Disks
“This is the story of your journey at this moment,” she’d said. “The left card is your body, the center is your mind, and the right is your soul, all taking one step at a time. The purpose of a life is to discover your true nature and gifts; the journey of a life is to give those gifts away. That is what keeps all life in balance. If you don’t discover your nature and gifts, you grow weak, dispirited. If you hoard your gifts, cling to them out of fear or greed, they turn to dust in your fists.”
“And these three cards, what do they say about my journey?” Asmeret asked, though she could see it, she needed someone else to say it aloud.
Hestia complied, to Asmeret’s surprise. “Your body has been protected by powerful forces while you have struggled with your nature, denying who and what you are.” Asmeret sat still in her chair while inside she writhed in discomfort. “It is your mind, Asmeret,” Hestia said, tapping the wheel, “the stories it tells about events in your life that hold you back from your true path, torturing you so. You have been sharing your gifts all of your life, but your mind won’t let you see it, and so you are stuck where you are, between ending and beginning, with all of the coins still clenched in your fists.”
Princess Asmeret gathered the coins in their hands. They were mere disks of wood in most hands these days, in the Age of Forgetting, but now the princess understood the part the coins played. They were reminders from the Mother of Mothers to move our gifts. Storyteller, huntress, mother . . . Asmeret’s mind stopped the list. Hestia had said that when your gifts were shared fully in a moment, without expectation of payment or barter or thanks, the story of the worlds moves toward balance and truth. A wooden coin given freely turns to gold in the receiver’s hands.
“The Princess of Disks, she haunts my dreams by day and by night,” Asmeret had confessed to Hestia, “who is she?”
“Why, she is you, Asmeret, and you are her. In a way I don’t expect you to understand quite yet, the princess is every human on earth.”
“She stands, staring into that abyss. I don't know what she wants from me. I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s time, Asmeret. You are stranded between worlds (she hadn’t said dying, but they both thought it), and now you have a chance to cross the threshold to the place you belong. To spin the wheel and face who and what you truly are and finally choose to follow the path written for you in the cards, or . . .”
“Or what?” But she knew.
Holding their hand over the hole, one wooden coin tumbled toward the sea and the mouth of some unseen, gurgling beast. Wind moaned through the uppermost branches of Tree. The firestone crackled and spit.
The Princess Asmeret stands in a dark, dying wood, under a shower of silver stars, staring into an abyss. Gold light gazes back through the blackness, kisses the underside of their mounded belly and breasts and jutted-out chin.
They must follow the darkness to see where the light begins.
The wheel spun around Asmeret. The firestone glowed in the space between the three conjoined rings, flanked by its paper moons. The vesica was somehow connected to the hole in the floor at Asmeret’s feet—a gate of some kind. A void to be crossed. The beginning and end seemed all one thing in her head.
One moon floated down, buffeted on invisible updrafts before landing on the Three of Swords. Asmeret felt as much as saw the 0 that numbered the card. Stroked her stomach. Felt the burgeoning emptiness where Theia had once been everything possible waiting to be born. The memory of her own birth grew before Asmeret, filling the cavern with the smells and sounds of the hut where her mother labored.
ATU 0 FOOL
3 of Swords
Tell the story, she thought. But how can I know of the true story of my birth?
“Tell the story. If not for you, tell it for Theia,” Hestia’s voice. They were all there. She could sense them gathered in the room, just beyond the four fires. Hestia, Raven, her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmother. More Asmeret couldn’t name.
“Trust. Read the cards like no one else can. They were painted for you, they are your pathway, your Staircase of Epochs. They know this life in a way that you don’t. What you’ve forgotten and more. You’ll know what to tell her, Asmeret. Listen and let go of what you thought that you knew.”
Asmeret thought of Theia. The stories she loved. The fairytales from all over the world she’d tell her at bedtime.
Once there was a little mermaid, the pride of her father, with a voice more beautiful than any wonder beneath the sea . . . she gave her voice to the witch in trade for legs, for a chance to be something else . . . Theia loved that story. She seemed to understand that when the little mermaid died, she wasn’t gone forever but lived in the sea and the wind.
Asmeret’s hand reached for the child’s face with the upturned nose and her father’s green eyes. Mermaid hair. Flowing like seagrass, unfurling behind like the flag of a new nation when she ran. Hair unlike Asmeret’s; unlike her people.
Focus, Raven croaked.
Asmeret held the vision of Theia, wrapped a curl of that mermaid hair around her finger, turned to the south fire and began again. She was a storyteller like her grandmother and her father. Even if she didn’t know the middle, or end, at least she knew how to begin.
Once there was a story and no one to tell it. The story belonged to me, now I give it to you—to tell, or not—in hopes you will understand and claim your true place in this life when the time comes. Listen. Don’t forget.
The girl was born under a plume of ash so thick it swallowed the sun and the moon. The village hadn’t seen a sky like that since the babe’s own grandmother was a small girl—on the day that the fire burst from the sea and the ground shook in waves that toppled the huts and swallowed mules and goats and stray dogs and many of their people in the crevasse that opened and shut like the stinking, bottomless mouth of a monster. They had thought the girl swallowed up too but she wandered home three days later, no stranger than before.
No one knew where the ashes came from on the day the baby arrived. The sea was calm. The ground had settled flat. The ashes peppered down from above, laying a thick coat on the tin roof of the hut, tamping the animal cries that came from inside.
The mother-becoming, a beautiful woman named Tigisti, lay near death having labored two days already. The women tended her, rubbing her skin with oil, massaging the thick, scarred slit the baby must pass through, and singing the songs that would coax the new soul into this world. The men of the village were away at a war that was not their own, including the chief, Anbessa, the father-becoming—a circumstance that seemed inconsequential at the time, as the men played no part in the birth rites.
But would come to matter more than anything else, Asmeret thought.
The wife of the chief’s younger brother had no love for the laboring beauty. Daniat was a vain and jealous woman whose own daughter, Arsema, had been born only days before. Arsema was by far the loveliest child the village had seen in three generations but as it stood now, Daniat’s daughter would always be less than the child being born. At least if it’s a girl, Daniat reasoned, my husband will be chief when Anbessa dies. The chief could be dead now for all they knew. The thought cheered her and Daniat promptly stepped forward to end it.
The women in the hut started the death song, a low wail that quickly built in volume and pitch to an almost intolerable level. Outside, the children covered their ears and the feral dogs loped back to the woods.
Enough, Daniat commanded. Stop your wailing and cut her. The other women did as she said, slicing through the thick rigid tissue where soft, forgiving petals should have bloomed like a flower to make room for the child’s coming. Tigisti fainted. The whites of her eyes spooked the attendants who backed away, moaning in fear.
Daniat reached up inside Tigisti, getting a grip on the small head with her long curved fingernails, and pulled the child out into the air. A girl, she saw. So that was that. And ugly to look at. Hideous really, she thought. She pinched her nails through the fleshy cord and detached mother from child. Once she put the baby to the mother’s breast, the girl started to suckle.
And then the terrible thing happened.
Tigisti’s heart stopped.
When the thrum under her cheek ceased, the baby paused—turned her small face back toward the Hall of the Gods.
At that moment Birikti, who had overcome her terror and begun packing the new wound with a paste of milk, honey, herbs, and ash, hoping to stop the bleeding, stumbled back once more.
There is another baby, she managed.
What? That can’t be, Daniat said. Pushing past Birikti, she felt inside Tigisti and indeed there was a second child—feet first. Daniat grasped further until she found what she dreaded between its legs. Both dead, mother and son—such a shame, Daniat said aloud, a lie she would make true if she could. Take the girl from the breast and give her to Hewan, she commanded. Tradition would have Daniat nurse the orphaned girl alongside her own but there was no way she could bear it.
The women couldn’t get the baby to let go. Instead the girl suckled harder and harder until Tigisti’s chest rose and her back arched. The boy came then—slipped out onto the ground. Daniat snatched him up, slicing the cord with her nails and whisked him out of the room.
More than dead, her Aunt Daniat told Asmeret as she grew. He had fur on his back, a tail, and a full set of sharp little teeth—the boy was half animal. You ate his soul inside your mother, she’d hiss in her ear on afternoons when she’d gotten Asmeret alone. You’d best never speak of him. Your father will blame you—if he comes home. The son that should have been chief of the village is dead, now all that’s left is you. And thanks to your stubbornness in coming, your mother lived but is torn so badly inside she’ll never fully heal. Never have any more children, Daniat said.
In this way her aunt shamed Asmeret every day until she turned five. By the time her father returned from the war, Asmeret’s lips were sealed shut about her brother the animal. A brother with no name.
Asmeret grew quiet. The fires warmed her from all sides, holding her close. The wind yowled through the hole in the floor, making the three rings over her head whirl and the firestone flare. “What is his name?” she whispered to the cards and those beings who breathed in the dark.
The name came clear, and she told it for Theia, continuing her story.
It wasn’t until the day of her death that Asmeret learned her brother’s name: Asmara.
The face of the boy in the market swam into her mind. They’d spent the day hiding from everyone, running between the tents, eating stolen pomegranates and drinking rosemary cream. She had known then he was her brother, somehow alive, but she didn’t say. She had not asked his name. Asmara | Asmeret. They both meant the same thing in the common language of their place and time on the map: They Who Unify.
Asmeret picked up the two cards and saw them as if with new eyes. The Three of Swords reminded her of a death shroud—dark gray with a single, white flower pierced at its core by three arching swords.
She felt the tips of those blades pressing into her stomach; into the knotted scar that marked the place where Daniat’s razor sharp nails had cut her from her mother. Asmeret loved Tigisti but it was as if with Asmara gone the mother and daughter could never truly belong to one another—their spirits consumed with loss.
“There is more to the story, Asmeret,” a voice warbled (a voice like her grandmother’s but thin as a wisp of cloud floating past), “keep going.”
Asmeret contemplated the second card: 0—The Fool. The Green Man’s eyes bulge as he cartwheels inside an endless loop. She had read the myths, many in fact—the Green Man was the first creation of Gaia out of Chaos, also the bridge between Paganism and Christianity. The card meant life-becoming in the between place, formless and waiting. The next words took shape.
Despite the story Daniat told the girl, Asmeret knew in her heart that she had been the one to save her mother’s life and that of her brother. She had the power to make life out of death.
Asmeret had known this when she was born, when she’d had the strength to draw her brother and mother from the zero place back to this life. The baby born under the plume of ash knew who and what she was at that moment, then forgot.
In the water, far below, the wooden disk turned to gold.
Above, Tree shuddered and ached, feeling its long dormant greens bud and leaf.
Below, the voices conferred, “She must continue. There are eighteen more coins she must turn to gold before sunrise.”
Hidden hands set the wheel spinning again.
ATU V HEIROPHANT
5 of Swords
For some time, no one knows how long, Asmeret stood still at the hub of the wheel. When it stopped the card numbered V on the rim pointed to the Five of Swords. Five. Asmeret slumped to the floor. Too hard, she murmured, curling into herself. I can’t go back there again. She felt as though something monstrous had reached out of the hole and had her by the ankle. Coaxing her through.
She recalled the night flights on Raven’s back, the lessons she learned about life and death: Your choice. You can end it now. You’ve seen what that kind of end looks like, tasted the last breath on the lips of unfinished men.
“Wait,” Hestia said. And another voice, far away, joined the chorus. “Wait.”
“There is more. You can remember all of it now,” Hestia’s voice assured her.
“I am five,” Asmeret began, her voice regressed to a younger self.
“Before. Before you woke up on your fifth birthday. Three days before . . .”
“They dragged her away.”
“Dragged who away?”
Images came unbidden to Asmeret: beads scattered like confetti in the field, thrashing brown arms and legs, dress bunched up around her cousin’s chest, back scraping on rocks and ruts in the parched path leading out of the Village of Ash.
“Arsema.”
“Yes. Where?”
“North. To the stone in the woods.”
“Where were you?”
“Asleep, no not asleep. I was sick in my bed.”
“Where were you?”
“I was there too, in the woods. Watching them cut her.”
“Yes. Begin there.”
“She was screaming and there was blood on the stone, I couldn’t . . . my mother was . . .”
“No, tell it for Theia. Begin again.”
Once there was a story and no one to tell it.
“Yes.”
Asmeret took a breath. Hugged herself, rocking gently as if she held Theia in her arms.
The story belonged to me, and now I give it to you. Once there were two girls, cousins, who lived in a dangerous land. They thought themselves princesses with magical powers to keep each other safe from the wild beasts that circled their village every night. They vowed to keep one another from being dragged into the woods where the witch and her raven lived.
One princess was pretty and lively—she laughed easily and was beloved by all. The other princess was small for her age, with scraggly clumps for hair—she kept to herself. This other princess was often sick, falling into strange fevers and making terrible animal sounds. She made most people sad or scared. But the two princesses had each other so they would both be fine as long as they weren’t taken into the woods by a beast and eaten up in one bite.
Asmeret smiled. It was a game she made Arsema play. One would be the lioness and the other the prey. Asmeret was almost always the lioness, because she loved the game and played it so well, and Arsema didn’t mind being a goat or kudu for a while until it was her turn to decide what to play next. Asmeret stalked Arsema between the huts and the cooking sheds, then pounced when Arsema least expected. The two girls rolled on the ground, laughing and nipping at each other’s necks, Asmeret growling, “I’ll eat you up in one bite!” Then they’d start again.
One day the princesses woke up particularly happy. It was Arsema’s fifth birthday. When little girls turned five in this land, preparations began for the day when they would be wed. On this day all of the women of the village gathered around because Arsema was the loveliest princess to ever be born, and all wanted to be a part of seeing her down the long path to join the man she was destined to be with in this life and the next.
Asmeret paused, stroking her own arm; picturing the painted gold and bronze tendrils snaking up Arsema’s arms on the day of her betrothal to Aman. Remembered the taste of her lips—like flowers on fire.
Focus, Raven said.
Both girls dressed in their best dresses. Asmeret never wore dresses, but did just this once for her beloved cousin. They borrowed bead bracelets for their ankles and wrists. The older girls were unusually generous in lending their jewelry to the little girls on their fifth-year celebration days. They handed the trinkets over with sad, knowing smiles, then helped paint the special girl’s arms and face with wedding tattoos.
Arm in arm, the two princesses walked to the gathering place in the center of the village. There, Arsema was showered with small gifts and sung little songs that were meant to highlight all of the ways she would grow to be a good wife. The two princesses beamed with pleasure, for the pleasure of one pleased the other.
All at once the songs were over and all but a handful of women remained—Arsema’s mother and Asmeret’s mother among them. The sisters-by-marriage each took one of Arsema’s arms and started to lead her away. Asmeret followed until they reached the last shed before the open field to the north of the village.
North. Asmeret felt wingbeats in the air all around her, felt her grandmother’s lips on her forehead.
Daniat turned and scolded Asmeret. Not you, she said.
But, I want her to come, Arsema protested.
Too bad, Daniat retorted, yanking her daughter hard by the arm.
That’s when the terrible thing happened.
“My mother turned too and told me to go home. To wait. To wait there until she returned. Then they dragged Arsema toward the woods, and I . . .”
Asmeret shivered and droplets of sweat skimmed the top of her lip.
“Asmeret,” Hestia’s voice, so clear Asmeret looked around.
The old woman stood in the shadows just beyond the firestone’s light. Asmeret felt some comfort in her presence. She hadn’t felt truly safe since before. Before she stopped hunting, before the hyena killed her dog. Before she brought Theia home. When she’d lived in the city . . . when she let the ghost . . . so much had gone wrong. Asmeret’s temples throbbed and her vision dimmed. It felt like the five swords were slashing her body, spilling her organs. Before her father left home.
“You know how to control this now. You are almost done. No more fevers, I promise. Start again.”
They dragged Arsema toward the woods and I . . .
“Asmeret . . . You mean ‘Asmeret.’ Say the name.”
Asmeret looked Hestia in the eye and swallowed, tasting rosemary cream on her tongue.
Asmeret fell down and down and down into the darkest fever she’d ever had. She was awake though. Hands lifted her—they were like ice on her skin. They put her body in the hut with the tin roof and the cracked, dusty glass that filled the hole in the thatch over her bed. They’d cut the hole only to fill it with the glass, mudded in at the edges. The girl always wondered why they would do that—keeping the wind out and the monster in.
They took her sleeping mat away and laid her in a shallow pit in the ground where her sweat and the red dirt made a poultice that cooled her when they lay the leaves over the top. The healers did that—the women of her village who kept the old ways, using plants and words to heal. They knew what to do to keep her body alive while the rest of her was somewhere else. They knew what ailed her, but no one else in the village wanted to hear it. To believe it. So they stopped saying.
Asmeret whispered, “They knew what was happening to me and they stopped saying.”
“Where were you?”
“I was in the woods. Watching them cut.”
“Where were you?”
“I was in the hyena.”
“Yes. Tell us about that.”
Princess Asmeret lay in her bed in a dream-filled sleep, or so they all preferred to believe by the way her eyes fluttered beneath her closed lids—the way her fingers and toes twitched. But she knew she wasn’t dreaming. She crouched very quietly at the edge of the clearing, kneading the leaves and layers of deadfall with her powerful paws. The smell of metal and blood made her heart race. Arsema’s screams tensed her jaws and narrowed her eyes. Hunger bunched the muscles of her haunches into taut springs. The girl on the stone looked at the hyena hidden in the brush, saw the eyes—clear and bottomless yet flecked with the colors of her own shame and rage. Help me, Princess Arsema begged. Her back arched at the touch of the blade. The women held her down at her shoulders and hips, pinned her feet far apart. One held her head. Finish it, another said. Then Daniat cut her daughter between the legs again. I will eat you in one bite, the hyena snarled. Arsema’s eyes turned entirely white. She stopped moving.
“I wanted to help her but I didn’t know how.”
Yes, Raven cawed.
Asmeret watched him drop from a tangle of roots overhead and land on Hestia’s head.
“My mother . . . My mother held her head.”
“Go on, Asmeret. Tell the rest.” Hestia placed her crabbled hands on Asmeret’s shoulders, felt the sharp blades like tectonic plates shifting under her blue-black-blue skin and flashed for a moment on what was to come.
“Arsema never forgave me. She hated me after that.”
“Why?”
“Because I was never cut.”
“You weren’t cut. Start again there.”
The animal in the brush turned into mist, which drifted to cool Princess Asmeret’s head. She slept after that, for three days and three nights. When she woke up it was her fifth birthday. There were no dresses or bead bracelets. No gathering of women in the village center. No Arsema either. But when she woke up her father was there. Even though she had never seen him before, he knelt by her bed and she knew him and he knew her.
I flew through the sky on a huge white bird to get here in time for your birthday, he said. He presented her with a small bow and arrows, just her size. She felt much better and they spent the whole day practicing—fitting the knock of the arrow into the string and pulling back firmly before the release. Breathing is the secret, he said. I will teach you to be a great huntress.
The princess was the happiest she could ever remember. She forgot all about the stone in the woods, and the cutting, and Arsema’s screams.
“I forgot about Arsema!”
“I know.”
“And I wasn’t cut.”
“Yes.”
“Because I was a monster. No one would marry me. No one wanted me. Because I was sick and ugly and strange.”
“No.”
“She said so.”
“Who said so?”
“My aunt, Daniat.”
“Think, Asmeret, what did she want most?”
“To rule us all.”
“Yes. Tell us that story.”
“She got her wish.”
“When?”
“When my father got on the white bird and flew away again.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
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