Chapter 8
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What came next is this.
Asmeret stared at the card in her hand; curls of blonde hair escaping the helmet, intelligent blue-gray eyes full of questions. Eyes, she realized, that couldn’t see her, though they seemed to try. Asmeret looked from Athena to Hestia. Then to the wisp she understood was her grandmother, now an ancestor.
Grandmother nodded. Reassured her.
Asmeret continued, “Charlotte is the name of the Princess of Air? She flew my father? Is she like you, part goddess, part raven, part . . . I don’t know what?!” (This she spat at Athena, still furious.)
“Yes, and no. Yes, Charlotte is the Princess of Air,” Athena said, “and, yes, she is like me in many ways—she is of air, not a raven, that I know of, but she is a pilot of unusual skill . . .”
I flew through the sky on a huge white bird to get here in time for your birthday, ran through Asmeret’s head, “So the white bird, that was a plane?”
“Yes.”
Asmeret didn’t know if that was better, or worse. Her body switched her mind off.
She walked, circling the wheel of cards slowly, one eye on the hole in the floor and the roiling water below.
She walked back in time with each step. Minutes, hours, ten years and five more. She had opened her eyes on her fifth birthday and her father was there, smoothing her hair with his small, firm palm.
Everyone else faded as he became the sun of her world, the only weather she wanted or needed. He taught her to hunt. They made arrows for her bow, small and deadly. He taught her to kill clean, only what they needed, and to give thanks. To promise her flesh back to the animals one day as grass. “The gift moves,” he said, “it is the only way.” And she knew the raw, simple truth of it, even at five. They built fires, cooked the meat, danced the old hunting dances, cured the hides.
Asmeret felt the lion cloak shiver beneath her feet, grounding her to the present even as it pulled her back to the past.
“Grandmother died before she could tell it,” Asmeret said, one night when they slept out in the bush.
“Tell what?” He asked.
“How you came to be called Red Lion,” she said.
“She is an ancestor now, invite her into your dreams and she will tell you the stories.”
“But she said you are the storyteller and I might become one too.”
“Yes, you might just. I have seen too much. My stories have lost their magic. It is too late for me, perhaps not for you.”
She grew taller and stronger under his scarred gaze.
Daniat skulked in his shadow, mouthing to her, tell him nothing, or I will tell him what you’ve done.
One day, hunting together, a cobra rose out of the grass, hooded and swaying in their path. Terrified, Asmeret’s fingers twitched toward an arrow.
“Be still,” her father whispered.
After a time, the snake sheathed its hood and slid in and out, in and out, in and out, between and around Asmeret’s legs. She didn’t move. It seemed like forever.
When the snake finally left, Asmeret and her father studied the double-looped track.
“It’s the sign of the Great Mother,” he said. Asmeret believed him.
She continued to dress as a boy. Tigisti complained, Anbessa indulged her. No one else dared say a word about the chief’s daughter.
Then he was gone.
And it started again. The taunting, the fevers.
“He’ll return,” her mother said.
And he did.
“Council business in Asmara,” he said, explaining his absence. When he heard her fever had returned he sent for the healers; all kinds and all tribes represented. The white doctor, sweating and red-faced, said words that made her father shake.
The next day he told Asmeret something she didn’t understand, yet it made her afraid. (More afraid than she had been at the snake rising up in the grass, or Daniat’s voice, hissing at her.) “If white men in white coats come for you, Asmeret, I want you to shoot them with your bow. They will tell you they can help you and you mustn’t believe them.”
“But abo, she’d said, choking on something rising in her throat, “you said never point my arrows at a human, it isn’t our way.”
“You will shoot them, forgive them, and run away Asmeret. Promise me.”
She promised. And then she forgot.
Her father had abandoned her slowly. More time went by between each leaving and return. If the men in white coats had come and said they would take her to her father, she would have gone with them. Each time he left, he took more of her heart. By the time she was nearly nine, the pulse in her chest and temple and wrists was half that it had been. The only person she trusted and didn’t want to shoot was Arsema. The brother-sized hole inside her grew, first swallowing up her mother—still alive, lost in her own pain—her grandmother, her father, and the rest of the villagers who had rendered her invisible. Now the hole wanted her too.
“Asmeret?” A hand on her shoulder. The crabbled fingers of Hestia. “What is it? Please, it isn’t time yet. We aren’t finished.”
Asmeret stood looking into the abyss, imagined drowning her anger and grief. Being done with it. Arms rose from her sides as if preparing to dive, head first, then stopped. Not finished yet. She had one more question she needed answered. She could ask it now. She wouldn’t have to bear the answer for long.
“When he left for good, where did he go?”
Athena spoke. “He called Charlotte. She came back for him. Flew him to London.”
So they were right. I am the reason he left. He wanted a daughter but got me instead. He chose her. Not me. Not me.
Asmeret screamed and cried, but only inside.
Had she reacted with more than a stony stare they could have helped her see the rest of the story.
If only she’d asked, said something then, it might have gone easier in the end. Instead they urged her to continue her story for Theia, turn the rest of the wooden coins to gold: Complete this task that would allow her to pass through the door in the floor and take her true place in the new story, though none of them could see what that would be, not even Athena.
Next, Asmeret came home from the market, where the boy had given her back a brother-sized piece of her flesh. Her heart had already been broken by then. The girl had fallen into the hole, too weak to fight the fever and fits. It wasn’t much, but Hestia and Raven did what they could and hoped she would live.
This is where the little black dog comes in.
June, 1949 CE
Village of Ash
The mother dog sprawled beneath the cooking shed where a patchwork of tin sheets warpled and bent up from the ground, still hot to the touch long after the cooking fire died out. Moonlight trickled down the metal grooves, dripped like warm milk on her parched tongue. Her eyes rolled back to front under thin lids as she pushed the last pup from her heaving body onto the dirt. One last contraction sent a sticky, sweet wash over the pup. A female. Not yet squirming and grunting like the others. Nine in all.
This last one was small, no bigger than a slight woman's hand, with a pure black coat. She was silent, stranded without breath.
The night wind spooled through the trees that held the north edge of the village, shaking the bitch to her feet—a loose sack of bones and not much else. Wan milk leaked from her eight swollen teats. She turned in the hole she had dug that morning, making a nest, and licked the last issue in her line until the pup sighed and its chest rose and fell in a reliable rhythm. Then the mother succumbed to her death.
The dog had been of no discernible breed, only dog-that-runs-with-the-pack; dog-that-belongs-nowhere-to-no-one. She had been of medium height and girth, standing eye to eye with the babes in the village who took their first steps with small damp fists twisted in the dog’s ruff or clamped on her ears. Though wild, she had been gentle-souled and maternal, having whelped four litters by the time she was five. She had no name but Dog.
The eight eldest pups belly-crawled over their mother's prone body, mouths making soft sucking sounds as they rooted for milk. The smallest lay still, smelling of her mother's tongue and the moon.
By dawn all nine dogs were gone, each claimed by one or another of the hungry creatures that slid out of the woods.
None had bothered with the runt, though each had snuffed her with their leathery nose or flicking, forked tongue. Not food pulsed in their brains. Then the black talons came and, though sharp as fangs, they didn't pierce the pup’s skin lifting her into the last gusts of the night wind.
In the hut in the woods, Hestia ceased fretting over the cards when the light shaft from the waning moon stammered and stuttered through the oculus in the roof. Crabbled hands cleared the center of the table and retrieved the mogogo stone warming in the hearth. Thunder rolled overhead, though no clouds blackened the sky.
Raven slow-beat his massive wings, hovering between the moon and the roof, waiting. When the table was set, as if in prayer, finger-tipped feathers steepled together and the bird dropped through the port. Raven draped the little dog on the stone like a handful of well-kneaded dough.
“You found her in time,” the goddess crowed. Webbed crags and sagging jowls pulled up in a grin. Cupping the pup's muzzle in her palm, Hestia spooned sweet, pink pomegranate juice into its mouth and stroked the damp fur until the pup slept.
The great bird diminished, seeming to tuck himself in, perhaps folding feathers in half and half again, then hopped to the top of Hestia’s head. Together, they peered at the cards and waited to see if the Ash Girl, adrift in fever, would wake up. They had done what they could, what the cards whispered straight to their hearts and their hands. Now they waited in hopes that the mother of the child was listening to the instructions Athena gave her in her dreams. Hoped she wouldn’t forget. Would walk through the door to ask for the one thing her daughter needed in order to live through the sorrow that threatened to keep her.
There was only so much they could see; so much they could do to intervene.
9 July, 1949 CE
The Goddesses’ Cavern
Perhaps I am dreaming. I didn't know we could. I try to lift my head but it won't move. This body I have been cloaked in for thousands of years is turning to stone.
I hear my voice as it was when I was very young, laughing and singing songs my twin brother and I made up about the animals and fishes and birds who were our playmates. They gurgled and bellowed and cawed us their tales, and we composed little tunes and sang them back. That was before the terrors began. Before my mother was raped. (I didn't have that word then.) Before the monster came to our door and changed my story.
Don't they know? I don't think they do.
The humans, I mean.
How much power they wield with the stories they tell.
When that first man wondered aloud about our childhood—the goddess of the moon, Artemis, and her twin, Apollo, the god of the sun—the storyteller changed my destiny and the fate of his descendants three thousand years later. He wove a tale about our mother and our father, Zeus, king of the gods. Our mother was not his queen and the storyteller chose to devise Queen Hera’s revenge. The storyteller conjured a giant to destroy the woman who lay with Hera’s husband. I don’t know why. Perhaps because this man felt impotent and small under the gaze of the moon and the sun and the wife who stared through him as if he were invisible—even as he broke her cheekbone with his fist.
He imagined my mother held by the throat and violated, violently, while her children watched. Because of this man's vile mind and vicious tongue, my brother and I crouched in a corner, terrorized, until one brave and intelligent girl sitting off to the side of the enraptured crowd interrupted the storytelling and called out to him, "Wouldn't Zeus's children be very strong and kill the monster to save their mother? That is how I would tell it,” the girl said.
And so we did.
My brother and I tore the monster to pieces with our bare hands in the heart of this girl, and in her words spoken to many—a story retold over and over—so in the worlds it came to pass.
We were seven or eight or twelve, depending on which version you heard. And while I became the most popular (and thus the most powerful) goddess of that age, I never laughed again. Never sang.
No, they have no idea the power they wield with the stories they imagine and the stories they tell.
I hear my voice as it was before I had blood on my hands. It isn't a dream: I am aware of the way my flesh hardens a bit with every act of unavenged violence against a woman or a girl; with every vain slaughter of an animal, for I am their queen too. The stories say so.
I am petrifying, forgotten, and made almost entirely now of the sadness and shame those humans feel, or should. (And so those unclaimed feelings fill me up, like poison water in a glass cup.)
Now I am laughing, rather I hear my childhood self, laughing. I hear it now as if someone is re-storying my past once again.
I hear my mother's voice calling, "Asmeret! Asmeret!" That is not my name, though it has the same sounds, rearranged. And then a girl is beside me, peering closely at my face. My daughter; a descendant, perhaps the last one, of me and my secret lover, Orion. A child of passion and death.
Where is her brother, her twin? I can see him in my heart. Where is my brother, it’s been so very long? I can't tell if this sensation where my organs used to be (decayed to roiling water and muck) is excruciating pain or unbearable bliss. Humans make me incapable of emotional temperance.
I can feel her fingers trailing over the smooth, cool surface of my body, which has become my sarcophagus. I wonder what I look like to her. I wonder if she can feel where I yield under her touch, and if she can sense my power and hers, pulling from the very same source.
A golden orb appears, cradled in my arms. Yes, take it, I plead trying to speak to her, eye to eye, heart to heart; perhaps she is young enough yet for that ancient way of divine inspiration to work. By the time they are ten or eleven, more or less, their Will is too strong unless they choose to open the door between us. I can't tell if she hears me or not, yet she takes the gold ball for herself.
Then the extraordinary thing happens.
She lays her head on my cold chest and falls asleep.
I am pulled into my memories of this child’s ancient origins, and the beginning of my own end. I am back in the time when I walked the earth in human form, although I was also animal and the moon. Some humans have discovered a way to do this in reverse, to shift themselves into medial forms. They call it skrying now, I think. I want to go back to the morning when my babies lay on my chest, the moment I felt most like myself as they searched for me with tiny pink tongues. Back to the mother I could have been—before. Before I gave them up to be raised in that village south of the woods, because they deserved better than me. I find myself going back to the night when they were conceived, making love with the man of my heart. (No, I was not a virgin goddess, despite what you’ve heard.) You do know parts of the story; it is sometimes retold even now. Yet while humans have prodigious powers to make our stories we live untold lives as well.
The father of my children was the Great Hunter, Orion. He was the only man I allowed to know me, to get close. We were friends. We hunted together and spent long hot afternoons laying on rock outcroppings in the form of two lions (the myths say my beloved was human, but he was much, much more). We copulated and I gave birth to many litters of cubs that grew to be kings and queens of the veld. Only once did we make love in human form. I was terrified and delirious with desire. (I wonder if the girl asleep on my chest can sense the volcanic rumbling underneath. This is a story I don’t want to relive but it has found a teller and cannot be stopped.)
"It was an accident," I tell myself. I borrow this language from humans and hope that detachment comes too. It doesn't. We gods and goddesses don't have powers of denial, only the entwined blessing and curse of truth. The truth is I murdered my lover.
We had taken to traveling across the south sea, far beyond the Greek empire, far from the judgment of those who might recognize us. On this day we had ridden alongside the Great River Nile until it twisted east and spiraled back on itself like the tail of a scorpion; then climbed through the Abyssinian mountains and valleys until we arrived on the flats near the coast of the Red Sea. It was our secret, favorite place.
The land was lush and verdant then, sprawled out in all directions, yellow grasses rippling in the breeze like finely spun gold. When we weren't lions we hunted by slipping into the bodies of tribesmen and women, granting them their desires—our presence enlivening their own muscles, sharpening their vision, and heightening their skill. Their village would eat well for a while.
One night Orion and I joined their celebration and danced in the bodies of a betrothed couple, circling the fire, chanting their chants and sharing their feast. Bowing to honor their ancestors and deities.
We brushed against one another as we danced, barely touching. The small space between us crackled and flared. We fed one another roasted meat with our fingers and when we could no longer contain our desire we walked into the woods with the bodies of the man and woman we'd taken over.
We whispered love talk as we lay on a soft bed of moss. I closed my eyes as he entered me. And then I don't know. My heart stopped in my chest and I was seven or eight or twelve, and the monster was on top of me bearing down, tearing the body of the woman I occupied now where the sacred opening was far too small. I screamed and thrashed until the world went black.
When I woke up Orion was dead. His throat was torn open and his body ravaged; pieces of him scattered like acorns and branches. Still, the deed was done. I crawled to the hut of a witch in the woods who nursed me and let me stay until I gave birth to the twins. I left them on the village’s sacrificial stone, praying that a goddess could be forgiven.
How my lover, the father of our son and daughter, came to be immortalized in the stars is a story you can tell any way that you wish. It makes no difference to me or to the fate of the worlds. However, her story, the girl asleep on my breast, the last in the line of Artemis and Orion, changes everything. I can feel the truth of it as her breath on my neck melts through the stone.
And I think maybe this is atonement.
Asmeret could feel an ocean of sorrows swell beneath her hard pillow. While she slept on Artemis’ chest, Asmeret dreamed of all the world's anguish.
As human intellect grew, the question why loomed like a storm over every birth and sickness and change in their fortune. Blame was born, and fear and shame, and anger and war. Although she was just nine years old today, Asmeret was the same age as our universe.
In her dreams, in this chamber where the goddesses gather, she understood that she was one of the fractured pieces of the Great Mother descended from the stories that had made Artemis, the Great Huntress and Protector of Women, Queen of the Animals. She understood that the sadness and rage she had carried inside her was not her own, but an echo of the great sorrow of women and men, separated and lonely. She came to know that the Great Mother’s voice had gone silent, her story long lost, and now she was gathering all of her pieces back into One. Whispering the mysteries again into the ears of artists and mystics.
Asmeret dreamed a woman with flowing red hair dancing and painting in an attic. She smelled rose petals on fire. She watched the woman fall to her knees and sculpt babies from ash—a boy and a girl. She understood that the ashes were not only those rained down from the burning blooms in the rafters, but also ashes that rained down from the sky, plumed from the smokestacks of kilns where humans burned humans, ashes that drifted on airstreams and sifted through cracks in the skylights to coat the worn floor. Asmeret understood that she was the Ash Girl, and that she also had a brother born of passion and death.
The Great Mother had whispered them into being and had plans for them. Asmeret heard her true name sung by a chorus of ghost animals, causing her heart to stammer and stall.
It was at this moment, in the Village of Ash, in the tin-roofed hut, with her ear to her daughter's burning chest, that Tigisti thought her daughter was dead.
Asmeret, deep in that chthonic place, wasn't dead, yet having complete understanding of her origins and her destiny was a burden no child can take. She would need to make choices; she would need help. She would need to learn to listen and watch, to know when she was being the Great Mother’s story and when she was not, because the instant she woke up from the fever, the dream would be gone.
Her heart was in shock, nearly stopped and growing cold. Tigisti needed to move, move now, and do as she had been told.
In the reeds by the river in the cavern of gold, Tigisti listened to Athena. The goddess' voice was dark brown and thirty feet deep and boomed like thunder rolling down a mountain. Asmeret's mother couldn't make out the words but she knew exactly what the towering goddess had said.
As is often the way, Tigisti forgot her dream when she woke up. But when she bent over her daughter's breast and heard nothing, she wrapped herself in her warmest cape, lit the lantern, and stumbled into the night chanting to herself as she ran: “Find the witch. Give her this coin for the pup. Lay the dog on Asmeret's chest. Tell the story this way: My daughter lived."
Hyena is never far from Artemis' side. She gives a signal cry that suspends the work of the ravens, stops the parade of animals up the stairs of the pillar. Then settles next to the sleeping goddess and girl.
The creature was nearly as large as a lioness. Her rear haunches were lower to the ground than her front and her long neck had a pronounced downward arch, giving her the look of a hunchback. Her pelt was thick—mottled with brown and gray patchy spots—looking as scratchy as a shrub full of burrs. A short mane bristled from the top of her head, down between her hunched shoulders and onto her back like a crop of dried weeds. Her eyes were small, glossy stones the color of night. Her incisors were daggers which eviscerated her kills so swiftly and efficiently they died without pain. Her molars were set into a jaw so strong she pulverized bone as easily as you might crush a cube of sugar between your fingers.
Where others see a snarling beast with evil eyes, Artemis sees a pure embodiment of nature's intention, so perfect in its achievement as to persevere unaltered for thousands of years.
Neither Orion nor Artemis saw or heard the hyena that night for she was built for silence.
Artemis was the queen of Hyena’s clan and the queen of the moon which presided over their hunting grounds, gave them food, gave them life. The goddess and hyena were entwined forever. When Artemis began gurgling and snarling under Orion, like an animal fending off death (the same sounds Hyena had heard Artemis’ mother make when the girl was seven or eight or twelve), Hyena leapt on Orion's back and ended him. Just as she had ended the life of the monster who had once been a man but had fallen prey to Hera's power and greed. Orion had once been a man, then a Great Hunter turned monster in Artemis’ mind when a door opened deep inside her to a room where she cowers helpless in a corner while endless horrors are enacted on women and girls.
Hyena circled Orion. She wasn't hungry, yet she tore his body apart before she was done. After, she lay next to Artemis, keeping watch until the sun and moon gazed at one another overhead. For centuries, on mornings such as this, when their celestial bodies hung in perfect balance in the arched vault of the sky, Apollo came to Artemis, or she to him, and they lay on the ground eye to eye, heart to heart. Wholeness emanated from their skin and grace kissed their eyes and foreheads and healed their wounds—when they were together, all was well. There had been times in the history of humans and gods when the two stayed like this for hours, or months, or an age. Not now.
The moon goddess called to her brother, but he couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see her face. Couldn’t sense her pull as her light had already begun to diminish and his grew so very bright.
These are dangerous times.
Hyena watches Artemis and Asmeret dream.
Waits until she is needed again.
9 July, 1949 CE
Village of Ash
Asmeret opened her eyes, scowling against the hard light from the window. She felt too tired to move. She stared at the long winding crack in the dusty glass. Remembered long mornings tracing the crack with the tip of her finger, painting it into a river; she riding over the frothy blue surface on her zebra, past rolling dunes of sand to the kingdom she rules. There, animals prance in great parades for her entertainment and a radiant, yellow sun hangs in the sky opposite a white, glittering moon. The sun and moon neither rise nor set but grace the kingdom with perpetual light. Now Asmeret only saw the dirt on the window and the crush of time on their hut.
She looked around the room. Her mother was gone and so was her father. She knew her mother would return, just as she knew that her father wouldn't.
The part of her that was only his—the part that grew warm and big when they made her bow and arrows together; the part that beat hardest when they walked in the bush and were both hunter and hunted, every sense enlivened, electric—now tempered and hardened. She felt as if an icy hand had reached inside her chest, gripped her lungs and heart in its bony fingers and squeezed. She raised her hand to the pain in her breast and was surprised to feel the furred mound of the pup lying there, its whole body rising and falling with deep, silent sighs.
At the touch of the soft hand on her back the dog uncurled without waking and settled her head just under the girl's chin. The feathery breath tickled her neck. The girl smiled. For a moment the crack in the glass was a river again.
The girl rose from the pyre that had been her bed for the last full cycle of the moon. Her skin glistened in the hazy light from the window as if she had been remade of blue-black-blue clay, glazed in moonlight, and baked in a kiln until she shone. She stood, hefting the pup. The girl should have been thin and weakened from the long illness, instead she emerged strong and lean; at nine she had lengthened out of her baby fat as most girls do at twelve or thirteen.
She walked out the door. The sun brushed her shoulders as she crossed out of the hut's shadows, appearing flecked with gold like the rocks the village children sometimes found on the shore of the Red Sea after a storm. Asmeret was alive and she towered, naked, beside her tin-roofed hut with a glossy black dog in her arms.
They stared at her now. Mouths opened as they shut up. Shock and alarm rolled through the children as if an unearthly creature had materialized right in front of them. The Parrot Girls, clustered around their leader, Arsema, in the shade of the acacia bush, raised lovely arched brows narrowed their eyes. The boys froze into a garden of cherubic statues, clutching half-sized weapons in half-grown hands.
Only the scattering of wild dogs that snuffed in the dirt moved. Sensing the orphaned pup of their pack perhaps, they wandered toward Asmeret, squatting on gaunt haunches at her feet. Asmeret shimmered in the heat and glanced past the children as if they had ceased to exist.
Tigisti, coming around the corner of their hut from the shed behind the house, took in the scene. Relief, pride, and worry stormed over her face. She started to speak to Asmeret, who was strangely still except for the squirming pup in her hands, but the girl walked away from them all.
Rather than stop her, Asmeret's mother ran inside their hut and grabbed the cape that hung by the door along with Asmeret’s bow and quiver of arrows and the pouch her grandmother had left the girl for her treasures. She raced after Asmeret, calling her name.
Asmeret didn't turn or even slow down.
The child's legs had grown longer and she moved swiftly, like a young feline on the hunt. The dogs trailed behind her in a game of follow the leader. Catching up, out of breath, her mother took Asmeret by the shoulders. Tigisti wrapped her in the cape, her most valuable possession, made from the skin of the lion Anbessa had killed in his initiation hunt from boy to man.
He had given it to her to show his intentions. Tigisti had worked it for weeks with her hands and a sharp-edged rock until the hide was so soft and thin it cascaded around her like a waterfall. She had dyed it deep crimson red, the color of life, declining to decorate it with embroidery, feathers, and shells as others girls would. She hadn't left the edges of the hide uncut so the legs and belly line of the lion undulated when she walked. It was perfect in its simplicity—primitive and stark. Tigisti tied the braided thongs across Asmeret's chest, slipped the pouch and bow over her shoulder, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss the girl's forehead.
Asmeret didn’t look back, as much as she wanted to. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her back, and further away, even more penetrating, Arsema’s gaze. Leaving her was the hardest. Who would protect her now? None of the other girls had learned to shoot. Aman was too young to pay attention, and anyway Arsema’s future with him was part of the trouble. Even at nine, Asmeret knew Arsema would follow him to her doom.
The men left in the village after the war were very old and Daniat would sacrifice Arsema for her own glory; already had in more ways than one. That Arsema had never forgiven Asmeret for the day of her cutting was clear, but she hadn’t stopped loving her fiercely either.
The leaving was hard, not impossible. Asmeret felt stronger than she ever had in her life. She broke into an easy trot, with the little black dog tucked under her arm.
Away was her only intended direction. When the sun was high overhead, she recognized the markers of the forbidden entrance to the volcanic plains. Cairns of stones dotted the rim where the grass grew more brittle and sparse and the red soil was baked hard enough to crack into a web of jagged crevasses.
Asmeret stopped to take cover under an outcrop of rock, finding a flask of water in an inner pocket of the cape. She gave the pup sips, then took a drink for herself. She realized with surprise how the cape felt weightless, though it should have been heavy, and its shade kept her relatively cool as she walked, especially when she drew the cowled neck up like a hood. She dozed lightly for a time. No one knows how long.
When she woke up the dog was gone.
“Doooooggggg,” she called, her heart pumping wildly. There were snakes in this grass, flattened against the stones, hidden beneath a fine layer of ash. They never bothered her, but would eat the pup in one bite.
“DOG!” She danced in place, uncertain which direction to go.
She chose the longer grasses and plunged in, calling to the dog, spinning in circles trying to see movement.
The bird flushed then. A black rush of wind with fingerling wingtips and a chevron tail rose out of the grass right in front of her. A raven. Then she saw the pup dangling from its curved talons.
Asmeret drew her bow, planted her feet and fitted the nock of the arrow into the string, drawing it back in one smooth motion, aimed. Stopped. What if I hit the pup?
She started to run.
Raven took her the long way to the forbidden forest so as not to go near the Village of Ash. They couldn’t risk the girl losing her nerve and going back to that ring of huts, not now. Not yet.
As frightened as she was, Asmeret barely noticed her own stamina. She loped tirelessly behind the bird, never taking her eyes off the pup. Where was it taking her? To its nest? Asmeret knew ravens were hunters yet knew nothing more of their habits.
No. No. No. No. She chanted in her head.
When he reached the tree line of the witch’s wood, Raven dropped the little black dog as instructed. “She has to find her own way, we can only do so much to intervene,” Hestia had insisted.
In moments, Asmeret was on the spot. Scooped the dog up in her arms and burst into tears of anguish and relief. As she sat and sobbed with the pup on her lap, the long grasses leading up to the wood started to sway all around her. Asmeret stood, slowly, carefully, then exhaled as the heads and backs and tails of the dogs wagged themselves silly. One by one, they sat at her feet. She had known this pack of dogs all of her life, and it occurred to her that the pup she held in her arms must be one of theirs.
None came forward. None claimed it when Asmeret held the little dog out for their inspection. They leaned in, noses at work, seeming content to leave the dog in Asmeret’s care.
All at once, the dogs’ heads swiveled toward the trees. As if answering to a silent command, they stood as one unit and headed into the forest, herding Asmeret along with them. For a moment Asmeret resisted, this was the same woods that bordered their village. The place of terrors. The place she had failed Arsema. The raven had dropped the pup on the far side; this part of the forest was unfamiliar. It felt to Asmeret as if she had stepped into a different world.
The dogs scattered through the trees like a fistful of gravel launched from the worn pouch of a slingshot. Dogs of every color and shape snuffed through the underbrush. More than one found itself in a standoff with a snake it prodded awake, the serpent uncoiling its tightly wound body from beneath a red skin of soil. A large yellow cur with a shaggy pelt and sagging abdomen lost its battle and crumpled to the forest floor, stiff limbed, as venom hit the stem of her brain. The knowledge of how to be dog froze instantly; icicles in her veins and muscles etched with lacy-white frost.
The red cape billowed around Asmeret, making her thin frame loom large and intimidating enough to keep the animals who would hunt her at a distance. A boar, with his diamond tipped tusks, smelled lion yet saw something else and pulled up short letting Asmeret pass untouched.
The girl held the pup close to her chest but the tiny dog started to wriggle and yawp with the need to feel her own paws on the ground. Asmeret set the dog down to get a better grip, but before she could grab her back up, the pup hopped off the path and belly-crawled under a thicket of thorns.
“Wait!” She called. The thorns would shred Asmeret’s legs and bare feet where the cloak didn’t reach. She ran around the hedge to the other side and there, out came the dog, unscratched. Relieved, Asmeret moved to pick up the pup. The little beast would have none of it and barreled past her. Asmeret turned to follow and found herself on a different path altogether.
This country is hard, a converging place where desert breathes over savannah, singeing the tips of the grass; mountain hunches over river, guarding it from those who dare trek over its treacherous ridges; sea spits salt onto soil, sapping water from roots and dwarfing the sorghum crops and drum palms; magma surges over rocky plains and explodes up from the seabed, destroying and creating in vicious, unpredictable cycles. The wood looms, defiant, at the crossroads of these forces. At its very center, the myths say, a witch tends a hearth, baking bread and speaking in ancient tongues to a raven. She is, in a sense, the source of it all.
Asmeret followed the dog through the woods on this narrow, vine-choked path, straight to the old woman’s door. The pup nosed open the slab of wood hung on thick leather hinges, though how she had the strength, Asmeret couldn’t fathom.
The dog disappeared through the crack and the smell of hot bread made Asmeret’s mouth water. She hadn’t known she was hungry until this moment. The pursuit of food suddenly consumed her and she pushed through the door without knocking or thinking to call out to the owner. Asmeret nearly ran to the center of the large room where a fire simmered, ringed by a low wall constructed of small, cut stones, fitted together cunningly as if by a tiny mason from a miniature town. A scrollwork-iron grate hovered over the low flame with no feet to the floor or chains to the roof that Asmeret could see. Three loaves of newly-baked bread steamed in a row on the grate over the quietly crackling fire.
Her hunger reached through the curtain of heat and snatched the biggest loaf. She tore the golden crust open with her teeth; steam curled from the breach, up and out a round hole in the roof. The girl gnashed at the tough outer layer and ground the fibers of the dense body into a soft mash she could swallow.
Asmeret hadn’t eaten for the weeks she had been lost in the fever; kept alive with the broth her mother dripped past her parched lips. She couldn’t imagine a more satisfying sensation than eating this bread.
The first loaf was gone so quickly. As she bit into the second—a small, oval, dark brown loaf—her shoulders arched in delicious response to the spices and syrupy sweetness laced through the dough. She sank to her knees, eating the loaf more slowly and tipping her head to chase the drifting scent.
The floor was a circle, while the walls formed a dome. It was as if she had been caught in the top half of an egg. Asmeret had the odd feeling that the bottom half bulged underneath her, the walls continuing to curve through the packed dirt of the floor. The fire spit and flared, then resumed its quiet burn. As she watched, one smoldering ember slipped between the ironwork and fell, but didn’t land in the bed of gray ash below, instead the ember disappeared, as if into a pit. She listened, expecting to hear the ember hit bottom. After a while, hearing nothing more, Asmeret looked up to the ceiling thinking that the ember might come back through the hole in the roof. Waiting for this, or something more to happen, she couldn’t think what, Asmeret noticed tiny twigs springing from the ribs of the hut like a fringe.
Trees. The hut was made of bent saplings, planted with purpose, she supposed, in a perfect circle and trained to meet in the middle. She thought how lovely it would be to sit in your house while it grew up around you.
Still ravenous, Asmeret took the third loaf, which was large and round and shone glossy black, as if it was burnt. When she picked it up, the bread nearly floated into her hands. Her fingers and teeth couldn’t break through the crust so she banged the loaf against the jagged edge of the hearthstone. She tore a piece of the white, effervescent center from the rind and popped it into her mouth. A dank, velvety flavor bubbled and burst in her mouth. She continued to eat, even after her belly was full. The bread made her grimace. While her tongue worked at the mossy bits that clung on her teeth and caked the roof of her mouth, the girl stared at the fire.
The soft, dancing flames turned suddenly sharp, scraping against one another with a flinty, metallic shriek. Goose bumps rose on Asmeret’s arms as the fire turned blue-white-blue and the thin slick of sweat at her hairline turned to ice in the sudden wash of cold. Asmeret’s eyes blurred and she blinked madly to clear them. When she could see again, the iron grate she had been staring through came into focus, it had turned from black to white.
Unable to stop herself, though her mind screamed HOT, she laid her hand flat on the center where three ironwork circles twined together. Flesh sizzled and steam rose from between her splayed fingers. The girl stifled a scream and gritted her teeth, holding her hand there until the grate broke apart. She watched as the white smoking bars fell into the ash.
The child looked at her hand where she could feel the circles burning in her palm but saw nothing. She cupped both palms together as if to hold the entwined spheres in a cage, they fluttered in the space she made, tickling her skin like the wings of a moth. She lifted her hands to her eye and peered into the darkness inside. There, floating in the center, silver and flashing, the three circles hovered. Each one spun on its own axis, its rim running through the other two, yet never touching. Tiny strands of every color of light wriggled in the space defined by the inner edges where the three rings made a center. Asmeret stared for some time at the spectacle in her hands, then, suddenly, violently, mashed her palms together.
Something had risen up insider her, something like fear.
One idea loomed at the edge of her mind, something like disappear.
The fire popped and crackled, soft yellow-orange-yellow again.
Asmeret took what was left of the third loaf and slipped it into a pocket in the red cloak. Where will I go? The notion came to her to put her hands on the trees.
The child got to her feet and crossed the room to the spot where she’d first come in. Close your eyes, a voice came over her shoulder—a voice not unlike her grandmother’s—and she did. Asmeret found the first sapling with her hands. She was accustomed to making up games to amuse herself and avoid being the amusement of the other children in the village.
Close your eyes, he had said. The boy in the market flashed into her head.
“Close your eyes,” he had whispered over her shoulder and she did. “Open your mouth,” he said, and in this way they had tasted all the vendors had to offer, comparing their favorites, which were almost always the same, and spitting the ones they disliked in the dust behind tents, laughing and cursing the makers. Asmeret’s mouth flooded, salty and sour. She swallowed hard, and the market boy was gone.
Use your hands, the whispering said and she did. The first trunk was smooth and cool to the touch. Like a tusk, a bone. She remembered a ribcage she’d found once with her father, it scoured clean by animals and the sun and the sand. They walked through the remains, admiring the ribs that towered around them. Strange, he had said, to find an elephant carcass here. Where ‘here’ was, Asmeret couldn’t remember, intent on remembering her father’s face. His skin was smooth and dark, like hers, and tattooed with the marks of his father’s line. Chief Anbessa. He had been born to the kings of his tribe, he had told her, but the ways of their tribe were like this elephant. Scavenged for the easiest parts to digest. The bones though, he’d said, stroking the length of a great arching rib, the bones remember the shape of things.
Move—the voice came again. Asmeret continued around the room, feeling her way to each of the trees, each feeling like some other being. The next felt hard and knobbled like the shell of a tortoise, the next coarse and hairy like the tail of a zebra. Each of these textures came with a memory of touching these animals, most of them half-eaten, rotting on the ground. She realized that except for the elephant bones, she was always alone when she found these remains. She remembered talking to them, gently. Asking them questions. How did you die? Did you have brothers and sisters? Patting what was left of their bodies while she listened to see if they would share their stories. They almost always did.
She counted the saplings, counted the memories, as she went. As she progressed further from the first tree, further from the elephant bones and her father’s face, she felt emptier inside and in the emptiness grew something like fear again. Her breathing grew shallow and fast until she was panting like the pack of dogs that galloped across the forest floor at her guard. Her fingers and mind groped in the dark behind her eyes for the memory she sought, though it wasn’t a memory at all.
“Twenty-one,” Asmeret said aloud in the room. She hesitated, then laid her hands side-by-side on the last trunk. All of the breath in her body whooshed from her mouth and her eyes and her nose and her pores; emptied her out.
Under her fingers a river flowed, cool and rippling where silvering fishes darted back and forth. She leaned into the wood, laying her head against the trunk, feeling the cool silk of it like the back of her mother’s hand stroking her cheek. She slid her hands up and the tree became a serpent under her touch, its heart beating slow along its whole length. She could sense the long body tracing a loop doubling back on itself; tail meeting head and head meeting tail. Asmeret had the odd sensation of starting to melt into the scales when the voice spoke, loudly this time, Follow me.
Asmeret opened her eyes and found herself sitting on the floor of the hut, leaned against the last bent rib where the roots gripped the ground. Standing in front of her was the raven, the largest bird she’d ever seen.
He ducked his mastadon head at her, flaring his crown of black-blue-black feathers, then turned, picking up the little black dog from her sleeping spot by the fire and flew out the door.
The girl followed behind the dog and the bird.
Asmeret disappeared.
When they arrived I willed the roots buried into the cliff face to renew their grip, bracing myself for, I wasn’t sure what. Not the extra weight of the girl and the dog, both so tiny, although if you viewed me from the beach below or the Staircase of Epochs you would have wondered how I was standing at all. Floating far above the sand, bare roots dangling. More an island adrift in the air than a tree. But the girl came from the woods so her view was different.
If she were an adult, one of her tribe, she would have seen a dead hulking shell of a tree forgotten at the edge of the sea. They wouldn’t have believed their luck. A gift from the gods, surely, ready to harvest. Cut the main root chained to the precipice and watch the carcass drop to the beach. Scuttle down the stairs and pick up the pieces. Carry them home and burn them to ash. Release the energy for cooking and curing and festivals. Two season’s worth, maybe three, maybe four. I am notably huge. The way she stopped in her tracks, the look on her face as she stared up at my trunk and branches, well, it is humbling to be so seen. So thoroughly witnessed.
The bird and the dog continued to tumble and flit in their game of chase, knocking into her. She shooed them away.
With something like reverence, with something like rapture, the girl moved toward me.
I started to quiver. I, the four elements and she, the quintessence. Every ropy fiber, every infinitesimal pathway from root to crown enlivened when she placed her small hands on a bent knee and started to climb. I sighed as the winds from the four directions whirled up from below as they do at times, playing my branches like a quartet of stringed instruments.
Aaaarrrraaaaaaaaa.
She climbed until she came to the V where my trunk split, one arm reaching east and one reaching west. There, a kind of cup had been formed, a valley, a nest, filled with seasons of decayed bark, feathers, and leaves. There the child rested, sprawled on her back and listening to my branches and the vines that snaked up my sides strum their odd tune. After some time, I don’t know how long, the girl sat up and began exploring again.
Asmeret reached out to touch the wood where there should have been bark. Instead the surface was smooth, like stone scrubbed by sea and salt, yet soft and warm under her palms. She pulled her left hand back, as if she’d been stung but I knew it was a very small shock; charged ions attracted to the rings burned into her skin. Then fingers, thin as new twigs, traced the cords that surged up the face of my mountainous sides. Up close she could see the wood is striped in undulating rivers of color—one thin vein of deep purple sluices through ribbons of greens, blues and oranges—stain rubbed on then wiped off leaving a faint rainbow trace.
I wondered if she would climb higher. She looked to the ground. Looked for the little black dog she’s never let stray very far from her half-beating heart. She saw the waggling rear just as it disappeared under one arched root. “Dog!” she called. “Dooooooogggggg.”
She shimmied down, lengthening out, finding purchase with her toes, then curled up again like an inchworm over and over until her feet found the ground. Found the hole. Dove headfirst after the animal.
As above, so below, your saying goes. The girl can stand in the space where the taproot splits overhead, a gothic arch of a structure, the weight of the whole distributed equally; force riding down the twin taproots then fingering out and out along the webbed lines of upside down branches. Soil has sifted through the scaffolding over the centuries, making the floor solid under her feet, although quite thin, while the walls are pierced, delicate, intricately patterned panels. The light and wind whistle through and she laughed with delight as the kaleidoscope turned.
The girl and the little black dog slept in the nest under the stars most nights. When it stormed, or when the moon went dark, they slept below, rocking with the waves and wind. Raven kept watch from his roost at the very top of my canopy. Hyena patrolled the border where our peninsula connects to the mainland. Snake swirled in infinite loops, leaving her tracks for the Ash Girl to find in the bone-white sand and blood-red dirt.
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