Chapter X
TURN
And so we find our story at the turn of the wheel. A gate. A passing through place. Spinning toward the next way of being.
On this morning, Asmeret awoke to blood between her legs. More curious than frightened (she was no stranger to blood) she immediately remembered the initiation ceremonies. Alongside the more publicly celebrated thirteenth-year passage for the boys into manhood, the girls celebrated the first red tears of their moon. Their bodies wept every month, the story went, when no child was conceived. A brief mourning period was allowed—three days for rest and contemplation for every woman of the tribe. The first bloodshed are tears of pure joy, it is said. A husband promised. Children. A good life.
The mothers of the mothers-becoming (as the young women were sometimes called between their first blood and the birth of their first child), were even happier at the initiation ceremony than their daughters. Such joy and honor to usher their daughters into their full power of making life/death/life. Asmeret thought of Tigisti’s face the last time she’d seen her.
She moaned at the cramp in her groin and felt the ache radiate upward until it filled her throat, clamped her jaws shut, and made her head throb. Pain. The pain that I’ve caused my mother. Leaving her. Leaving Arsema, promised to Aman this month, forever, no matter what. When at least I could have taught her to hunt. To fight. To protect herself. To feed herself, heal herself and her children. To choose what she wanted for her own life. Asmeret thought she might throw up.
Choose. That was the word that kept Asmeret away. Afraid if she went back, even for a day, that word would no longer be hers. She had no idea what to do next. To ease the pain. To get back all that she’d lost—some of her choosing, most of it not.
Asmeret rose, swept the soiled bedding over the edge, woke the little black dog who was still curled in a tight ball (nose tucked indelicately under her tail), and made them a breakfast of plover eggs and the rest of the kudu’s liver. As she bit into the dark organ meat, Asmeret thanked the animal again.
The full moon had made hunting good the night before. The young kudu shimmered in the silvering light. Asmeret watched the doe hover in a scrub of acacia far from the herd like a mist that had got snagged in the thorns. The animal stood, unflinching, already a ghost. When the dog barked the kudu turned, looked their way. Asmeret knew from the dull look in its eye that she was weak and wouldn’t last the night. A painless death was what she could offer this delicate, doomed creature—one arrow through the eye to her brain. The kudu fell as if the ground had simply been pulled from beneath her. Silent and fluid.
Asmeret took the heart, the liver, and a rear haunch and left the rest for the clan of hyenas who hunted here. She could sense them, waiting, at the edge of her sight. They had grown used to her in their territory; the one who killed quickly and didn’t linger too long. Some nights they grew impatient and cackled and scuffed in the dark behind her. She had eaten the heart raw while they watched. Trace metals lingered on her tongue as her own heart beat stronger and her skin flushed. She had craved this part of the animal as never before, not on her tongue or in her belly but someplace lower.
After breakfast Asmeret cooled the firestone in her hand. Before putting it back she shook the remaining contents of her pouch out onto the red dirt. Asked the question. Listened to nothing in return. The quartz had fallen off to the side and she picked it up, turning it between her and the sun. It glinted and glared but said nothing she could hear. Asmeret retrieved her knife from a cache under the tree and walked the Staircase of Epochs to the beach.
She took her morning swim, shook the salty water out of her hair, then sheared it all off with the edge of her blade.
Clean. Clear on what she had to do, Asmeret gathered the things back into her pouch and retrieved the rest of the essentials from the cave—her bow and arrows, slingshot, the water flask—and put on her red lion cape. Calling the dog to her side, scanning for Raven’s return from his night work, Asmeret left the tree and walked toward the woods.
9 July, 1953 CE
The Village of Ash
Asmeret had visited Hestia many times in the past year, always ignoring the cards the witch placed nearby—next to the teapot or close to the jam jar—anywhere Asmeret might be tempted to pick them up. Until the moon when the girl bled her first blood; the day she turned thirteen years old.
Hestia opened the door of her hut. Noticed how the girl had matured almost overnight. Angular, beautiful. Chiseled cheekbones, strong brow, long slope of her nose. The unmistakable shape of the ancient queens. Something else had changed too.
Hestia dared to hope and invited Asmeret inside. The sun was still on its morning rise when Asmeret sat down across the round table.
“I’m ready,” she declared.
“Ready for what?” Hestia asked, hoping she knew, but Asmeret must say it. Make the move.
“The cards. They are the missing piece, right? What I need to hear the bones speak?”
“I believe so, yes. To hear your guides—animals, ancestors—yours and others from other tribes, across all cultures, space, time. Some would be called gods and goddesses, voices that translate wind, water, earth, and fire into something you can more easily comprehend.” Hestia stopped. Afraid that in her excitement, she had said too much. Might scare the girl off.
“I’m ready.”
Hestia unbundled the deck from its bit of silk. Asmeret watched warily, yet with keen interest, as the old woman placed each card next to one before it, methodically, gracefully. A wheel. A rim, spiraling out from four even spokes. Asmeret had thought at first the spokes were arrows, points aimed at the center where the witch had placed two cards to start, one on top of the other. Now she could see the whole. Thankfully, the colors and images on the cards kept still.
“Get your firestone, child . . . Yes, that’s it. In your left hand please.”
Asmeret felt the rings in her hand spinning to life as they always did when she held the stone in that hand. They were related somehow.
“Hold the stone over the cards in the center, with your palm flat, facing the sky. Be still and watch.” The old woman’s eyes grew wide in anticipation. Of what, Asmeret had no idea.
The air smelled faintly like rain and fire, like lightning strike. The stone sparked to life, silver-blue flashing inside as it grew translucent. The interlaced circles rose off her palm, like bread dough, like bubbles on the frothy lip of the sea, three spheres overlapping one another by half, scooping up the firestone in its center as they/it floated off her palm higher than the top of her shorn head, then stopped and started to spin.
Hestia cackled with joy and surprise. The two cards in the center lifted off the table toward the floating orbs, as if metal drawn to a magnet, planets around their sun, twin painted moons. Hestia watched the wheel and scowled.
Asmeret noticed the puzzled look. “What? What went wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m not sure,” the witch said. “The cards and the stone are responding to you alone, I don’t really know what should come next.”
The old woman’s lack of certainty clicked in Asmeret like a key in a lock. She reached into her pouch, filled both hands with the contents and cast them onto the table. The bones and the bits of animal and bird skittered to various places on the wheel. The quartz slid, as if by an invisible hand, to rest at the center where the two cards had been, then slowly began rotating, matching the speed of the orbs overhead. Asmeret had the sensation of watching the earth from the sky, she the huntress made of stars.
When all had settled in place, Asmeret and Hestia were stunned to see wooden coins arrayed in a circle, a wheel within the wheel.
“Where did the coins come from?” Asmeret asked. “Did you put them there when I wasn’t looking?” She counted. Thirteen.
“Wasn’t me,” Hestia protested.
Asmeret could tell from her tone, there was more to the story. She stared the witch down.
Hestia hesitated a minute more, then decided.
“When you were nine, Asmeret, you had a dream—one you promptly forgot. It wasn’t a dream at all.” Hestia went on to describe all that she could, all that she knew from what she had seen and legend and myth, finally coming to the part about the gift. “You were descended from Artemis and Orion, so you were drawn to her in your journey to the Goddesses’ Cavern. She gave you a golden orb, perhaps an apple?”
Asmeret couldn’t remember, yet every part of her body was vibrating wildly. “Go on,” she managed.
“There is a story I was given, once, long ago in a Siberian village. Perhaps it will serve. The golden apple opens when the gift is ready to move again, spilling its seeds. One for each year of the gift giver/receiver’s life.”
“Say I believed that,” Asmeret said, “what am I supposed to do with the coins? What do you mean move the gift?” Asmeret recalled her father using the very same phrase.
“The gift is unique to each person. You must discover what yours is, then give it away in equal measure to what you receive. Not every moment, not a barter with one other person, but over space and time. The coins act like markers, they say, to help you keep track in a way. When you give your gift freely, a coin turns to gold. Hoard many more than the years of your life and you grow weak, don’t feel right. Go too long without a gold coin returning to you and likewise you will feel depleted, resentful, alone, and unsure of who you are. It’s the nature of things. The gifts of the universe need to move and stay in balance or the whole weakens and dies.”
“If this is true,” Asmeret frowned, “then why doesn’t everyone have gold coins? Nobody in my village has seen gold, except for the bits in the volcanic rocks that wash up on the shore every so often.”
Hestia sighed. “Because so few believe the story—a thing can be real, be true, and still barely exist in the world. Even the thing that is meant to keep us all alive and well.”
Asmeret was quiet then, closed her eyes. Thinking. Hard. When she let her mind clear, she heard the wind in the eaves of the trees through the oculus. Arrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
She opened her eyes on the cards and the quartz and the bones. Watched as a princess—one of the points of an arrow closest to the quartz disk, wearing a crown of greater kudu horns over a strong brow and high, chiseled cheekbones—lifted off the card, shifting the fur cloak over her shoulders, taut belly bulging through her shift.
The quartz caught fire.
More princesses came forward, princes too. Then queens and kings. All drawn to the fire, making a circle. Except for the first princess, who stood in the shadows, watching. The princes kneeled. From the far side of the wheel, Asmeret glimpsed a bit of red making its way toward the fire. A hood. A lantern. A black dog at its heels. Asmeret’s heart pounded so hard she couldn’t hear any more.
She gathered the bones and the animal bits and the quartz. Then the coins. The firestone dropped onto her open palm (the spheres curling into wisps like smoke, drifting up through the hole in the roof). Asmeret put them all in the bag, nodded to Hestia and walked out the door.
“Wait!” Hestia called. “You forgot the cards.”
Asmeret pulled the red hood of her cloak over her head as she hurried away and bid the dog to stay close. They made their way through the wood to the Village of Ash. She had to see Arsema before she was Aman’s forever.
Later that night clouds gathered in the dark, pressing down low so that the smoke from the fire lingered, swirling over the heads of the boys who would be cut and tattooed. The underside of that roiling sky flickered with the light of gyrating flames and shadow dance of the women who began a low keening, which rode between the cracks and pops of young wood combusting—bursting into sparks—and the slick shoosh of hot steel across stone, whetting the blades that would carve a map of the ancestors—human and animal—into the cliffs and ridges just starting to push up beneath the tender skin on the faces of Habte and Aman.
Asmeret stood twenty paces past the ring of dancing women, watched as the boys sunk to their knees and tipped their heads back, exposing their throats. She heard her own breath—deep and rhythmic. The dog haruffed—a bit of fine ash having got up her nose and then the squawk of a Parrot Girl: “Such tiny muscles!” And that laugh, as sharp as the blades of the knives that glinted and sang as the men moved toward the boys. Asmeret's skin prickled under her cloak but she wouldn't let the voice, Arsema's for certain, penetrate further. Asmeret shifted from one foot to the other, as if to shake off the sound. In truth, she was trying to shake off the look in Arsema’s eyes when she’d visited her Aunt Daniat’s hut that afternoon. Was it surprise? Disdain? Some worn version of the anger seething between them since they were five?
When the sun had languished, making the afternoon almost unbearably hot, Asmeret watched from the doorway while Arsema was painted for the boys’ ceremony. Daniat dipped the fine-tipped brush in red ochre and drew another delicate curl. At thirteen Arsema had grown into her wide-set eyes, that deep red-brown of the soil. Red lines scrolled down the graceful slope of her nose, across her high cheekbones then spiraled out, cupping her ears and vining around to meet at the nape of her neck, then dangled down to the small of her back, finally bobbing gently just above the cleft of her buttocks. Other hands rubbed scented oils into Arsema’s skin, burnishing her until she glowed against the luminous white of her wrap. The sight of those hands sent Asmeret back, those same hands that had once held Arsema down, spreading her spindly legs (Arsema’s back arching with her screams and then falling flat to the stone with a thud and a guttural grunt before she blacked out), Tigisti and Daniat and the others acting as if the gods had ordained it, as if they weren’t women themselves, had no say in their own fate or that of their daughters. This, while five-year-old Asmeret had slept, hot and cursing, dreaming of Arsema, tearing at the arms holding her cousin down; the hands of the singer whose mouth wouldn’t open to save her own child.
Daniat had been radiant then, beautiful and skilled with her mouth—singing down the souls of their ancestors, the antelopes, and the gods with her voice. She had married Gebre, the younger brother of Anbessa, and they had four boys and a daughter. Arsema’s father, too, left his family for the war and returned someone they didn’t recognize. Asmeret wondered where her uncle was now. She didn’t see him at the fire. Pictured him kissing Daniat goodbye, then his daughter, never explaining. Never apologizing.
“Why not you?” Princess Arsema had cried later, her head in Princess Asmeret’s lap. From that day until now, the question hadn’t let the prettiest princess rest. Her voice, born to sing, to be a beacon to the gods and the antelopes and the ancestors, grew hard and sharp, even as the scar on her lip healed (where Princess Asmeret had bit clean through one perfect ambrosia lip, accidentally perhaps, as they played their games) along with the flesh between her bare legs. Both wounds had been raw for weeks, then scabbed, finally giving way to softness, though devoid of all senses—oases of death in the bountiful desert of her young body. The voice became shrill, rising a full scale when aimed at Asmeret, which it was, every day after, enchanting Bilen and the other girls who were shooed into the shade and given the light sewing and stroking of dried herbs from their stalks with the intention to preserve their smooth skin and delicate dusky pink of their palms for the delight of their future husbands.
The final touches: Asmeret watched her own mother dab the last paint on Arsema’s forehead (the task given the second highest ranking woman in the village—her mother was second to Daniat now, Asmeret realized); three dots of white rising up her forehead, an arrow shaft between the earth and sky, articulating her status as the village’s most-worthy bride. (This position having been whispered about and widely agreed upon once Asmeret’s otherness became such a problem.)
Tigisti turned toward her daughter and gestured, come inside, with the brush.
Asmeret crossed through the herd of women, stopping in front of her cousin. Cupping Arsema’s small chin in her hands, Asmeret kissed her hard on the lips.
Tigisti flinched.
“Asmeret! Christ,” she heard Daniat hiss, “have you lost your mind? You’ll smear the henna!”
Arsema opened her mouth, sucking Asmeret’s lower lip between her sharp teeth and bit. Blood flowed over both girls’ tongues. Dripped down the front of the red lion cloak and the white gossamer gown.
Asmeret grinned. I’ll eat you in one bite, whispered so only Arsema heard.
Asmeret walked out the door with the dog close on her heels, heard her mother call out “Come see me before the ceremony starts!” and then to the others, “I don’t know how she wears that cape in this heat, but she looks well, strong, doesn’t she?”
The little black dog looked back for them both as they made their way out of the circle of huts crouched between the mountains and sea. The girl and dog waited, napping in the tall grasses until night came.
When she saw the first flickers of the fire, Asmeret and the dog made their way back toward the village. Soon the pitch of the women’s keening song rose, filling the air between the red earth and the glowing underside of the smoke. If the Parrot Girls continued squawking, the singing overwhelmed their words. As the first drop of blood slid down Aman’s cheek and dripped on the ground, silence rose up in response, stealing the breath from Asmeret’s lungs.
Her vision wavered and warped: Arsema spread out on the stone. Asmeret flinched and wrapped her arms around herself under her cloak as the muffled screams of Parrot Girls raged through her head, her temples thunking a nauseating beat. The little dog by her side leaned into her leg and peered up into her face, whimpering softly. Asmeret had been spared. Or rather forsaken, she realized suddenly. Strange as she was there was little thought she would be wed and so wouldn't need the circumcised cup to match her husband's spear in their sacred marriage bed. They never intended for me to live until this day, she thought. The taste of blood and salt mingled with bile in her mouth. Asmeret leaned over and wretched in the grass.
Kneeling, she tipped her head back. No blade came to claim her.
Dizzy, Asmeret started to drift, feeling as though she would float away until the little dog dropped its head on her lap. The dog’s whole body seemed made of wet clay, kneaded into a shape by someone who had seen many dogs and couldn’t focus on a particular sort. Her head, in fact, was small compared to her body, with a slender snout and graceful brow, but it was heavy and pinned Asmeret to the ground.
Asmeret’s fingers found the dog’s head in the dark, sliding her hands gently from the crown, over her ears, flattening the satiny flaps, and cupping her muzzle where it was damp from panting; then started over again. Asmeret stretched out next to the dog, heads together, their torsos matched perfectly in length. The girl curled up her legs and they dozed for a bit, the smoke and the clouds covering them like a blanket.
She dreamed about hunting and eating the heart of the kudu. She dreamed of Arsema and Aman, bodies entwined, practicing for their wedding night, his hoarse moans the bold overtones covering Arsema's staccato chirps of pain. She dreamed about rosemary cream and sweet jam on the lips of the boy in the market, him calling her princess.
When all was quiet, Asmeret lifted her head. Told the little dog, “Time to go.”
Under a smoke-clotted sky, Asmeret turned toward the road to Asmara.
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