Chapter XIV
Muck-North
They lay askew there in the muck—a stillness so complete you would think them dead. Silt billows up in dark, languid puffs. The body has settled on its back, not quite flat. Arms splayed, outstretched, palms to the sky; back arched, as are the feet, curling into the seabed as if grasping for purchase. The shoulders are rolled slightly forward and the head tips back and to one side. Appears as if they have landed on something, a bit of sharp coral or a sea snake, uncoiled from a nest, sinking hollow fangs into the small of their back. Appears as if seized in pain or suspended at the crest of an orgasm. The skin, seen through the watery veil, is gray as a winter morning clotted with clouds—the color of death, surely, and yet there, under the lids, the eyes thrash in their sockets, side to side.
The sign not of dreaming or delirium.
The sign of that other life.
I study the body more closely then, as it has changed in flight. The bony ridge of Asmeret’s nose is still flanked by cheekbones as sound and graceful as the flying buttresses of a cathedral, but the lips are fuller and deeper blue-red-blue than before. The jawline, once delicate and curved, takes a hard turn under the ear toward the jutted-out chin—the muscle strung taut between jaw and clavicle. The breasts are somewhat smaller yet full and round at the bottom, large nipples prominent and dark copper-colored. Purple veins sprawl in all directions from their peaks under the thin coverlet of skin, like mountain rivers feathering out into streams where herds of animals and flights of birds gather to drink. The streams twine together, sluicing through the canyon between the ribs, past the muscles that step down either side of the torso like dunes carved by wind.
My gaze drops further, tracing the indigo river as it splits around the knotted scar in the heart of that hard plane, then crashes into a dense forest of pubic hair, heavily canopied, black as pitch. Thighs like tree trunks hide the genitalia in a bottomless crevasse and the river continues its journey across strange terrain, running in the valleys between the rolling hills of sinew and muscle that define those legs. The arms are of a piece with the wings, angling down from the shoulders as if gliding through a slipstream, carried by the Will of the One.
When the silt settles, they wake up.
I woke up to creatures drawing near. Sea creatures and others that slipped through the vents between worlds, which wafted open and shut like gills at the Will of the currents, by the Will of the moon.
While sea lice and sea worms, too small to be seen, started to nit at my skin, I was regarded by a ginormous catfish. It wasn't there, and then it was; doddering above me like a flatulent dirigible.
The bewhiskered and bulge-eyed blimp free-floated while needlefish began to sew my body in place. Long strands of seagrass criss-crossed my bare chest as the needlefish darted back and forth, back and forth, making knots in strategic places by swimming in elaborate, circuitous routes. The catfish smiled a terrible smile, flashing three rows of razor sharp teeth.
“Oh I am so very hungry,” Catfish glubbed and groaned, patting her bulging stomach with the tip of one waterwing and stroking my cheek with the tip of the other.
At its touch, I tried to get free, but the needlefish, there were a dozen flitting quick, had already sewn their way up to my neck.
I struggled against the moorings. The catfish poked at my breasts with her noodly whiskers and cooed, ooooo, I do miss having boobs. Catfish cackled at the 'oo' of the word as a child would, though it seemed from her monstrous size and the way her scales dripped off her in gelatinous glops, the fish was well into her dotage and might be ready to drop. Go belly up.
In the next moments all fates turned, just as one million goddesses (give or take) hoped—as the myth goes—because of the answer I gave to the question that burbled from the pooched lips of the Oldest Living Catfish.
I could still move my head and saw I had finger-tipped wings—black across the top bony ridge, descending softly to pure white at the tips. Raven, I thought, I am a raven now. And I was part right, though the wings would prove to be temporary.
I eyed the catfish. My newly refurbished reptilian brain produced the following thought about the hideous fish: I know who you are and how this works.
“Do tell, dearie,” Catfish loomed closer and grinned.
“You ask me a question and I must answer to your satisfaction . . .”
“Or?”
“Or you eat me for lunch.”
“Yes, that is about the size of it, shall we go on?”
“And if I answer well, you go hungry. I get to ask you anything, and you must tell the truth.”
“Yes, yes, now let’s get on with it, the lice and worms have nearly nibbled off your first layer of skin. Not the tastiest part, still, I like to enjoy my entire dinner.” The fish simpered and swayed, nudging her prey here and there to test for freshness.
“I’m ready.”
Catfish warbled in an ancient tongue, slavic I thought, Old Novgorod. The question, translated, was this: "Are you here of your own free will or by compulsion, my good youth?"
The answer would send me to my death or set me free.
Recall the stories of Asmeret astride Raven's back. Years of instruction on the nature of death and of memory and the songs carried in blood. And flying. How not to think but soar instead because one has wings and because one has sky. (Although, looking back, these weren’t memories to be recalled but a river of knowledge and way of being that flowed into and through me).
And now there are wings and talons for toes on this body that was once Asmeret’s and there is also the jawline and torso and legs of Asmara. Our hearts beat side by side in our chest, drumming ancient songs, feeding from the threefold quintessence—man, woman, raven.
Catfish knows all of this. Because before we had wings, before we had legs, before Asmara and Asmeret spooned together in the mother's womb, we were the muck where Catfish laid her eggs.
I pondered the question. The trickery wouldn't be obvious, wouldn't lie in the choice between free will or compulsory attendance, nor the illusion of here versus there or nowhere at all. A simple answer would miss the whole point and I would find myself in the jaws of the catfish.
Three words swam before me and winked: my good youth.
Two hearts pounded side by side.
One mind dismantled the riddle.
I said, “We—Asmeret, Raven, and Asmara—have become one being. Two of us arrived at this place by choice, by our will, though it came at great cost and, in the end, we compelled one another to take the last leap. The third, Asmara, made no free choices, only followed the shared thrum of our hearts spending all of his youth in pursuit of Asmeret.”
I gulped down the sick fear in my throat and continued, watching the catfish raise one slippery eyebrow. “You shook the ground under his feet and cast him to his death on the rocks on the beach.”
Emboldened by the way the catfish smiled at this, I finished my answer with a poetic flourish. “Raven scavenged his heart and fed it to Asmeret. We are your good youth again, whole, the princess and prince of the tarot and the winged one who wed us.”
“Good answer,” Catfish said.
I smiled and closed my eyes, the better to conjure the question I had won the right to ask.
I counted to ten, slowly, taking a deep, wet breath between each number.
While we wait, this is as good a time to point out that we are in the perilous realm where clocks and revolutions of planets and stars are not as they are in the world that you know. A good slow count to ten may take a day or a week. In this story, nearly a month. So relax, and take a nice, deep, wet breath for yourself. Now. Ready?
I spoke to Catfish as Raven had taught Asmeret, eye to eye, heart to heart. “Where have the goddesses set up the basecamp of their war?”
“I’ve no oceanly idea,” Catfish purred, “but wait here for my sister, she'll surely know.”
And this whole scene, from the needlefishes sewing me to the seabed to this line, repeats itself twice more. Although the second Catfish Sister adds this with a snap snap snap of her three rows of teeth, “Our third sister is the mean one. If she gets mad at you, no matter your answer to the question, she will gulp you down like one tiny smelt. She is hungrier than both my sister and me put together and as big as a whale.”
“What can I do?” I pleaded.
“If she gets mad, and she will, ask her for three hornfish and make the first play softly, the second louder, and the third louder still.”
When Catfish Sister Three repeated the act, as predicted, I infuriated her.
“Where,” I asked, when I had won the right to pose my question to the third catfish, “have the goddesses set up the basecamp of their war?”
“Up.”
I paused, not knowing if another question was permitted or would be cause for death by a good chomp. The first question Asmeret had ever pondered with Raven tumbled out, surprising me as the question seemed to simply appear on my lips.
“Which way is up?”
“Which way is up should be of no concern for a girl turned half bird who has swallowed her brother's heart,” Catfish the Third gurgled and shrieked. Her eyes nearly popped out, each one the size of one of Saturn's smaller moons, perhaps Thrym or Ymir. “The goddesses have their heads up their arses,” she thundered and spit. I am already fixing the situation they have royally botched!”
The sea started to shudder and boil.
“I was taking my time, giving them signs of their errors,” the Oldest Living Catfish sputtered. “Tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes are entertaining, but they leave me winded and full. I am tired of their games, humans and gods all, pitiful attempts to appease me. Too late. Too small.”
“Wait! May I please have the use of three hornfish, your grace?”
“Don't your grace me, what is that? Hah!” She wheezed. “Do I look like an old queen to you?”
But the catfish, even being who she was—the oldest queen imaginable under all of the kingdoms we have ever dreamed—believed some decorum was called for. After all, she considered rules of good citizenship her finest gift even though she had made the grave mistake of leaving the details to humans. She handed over three hornfish and cooled off a bit.
I asked if the catfish might loosen my bonds so that I might properly greet the trio of bright yellow and blue girdled hornfish that she served up, wriggling still, on the three prongs of a fisherman’s spear. I plucked them off.
The smallest was the size of my thumb, the next a bit larger, and the third as long and thick as my arm. Together the fish tooted a tritonic scale that was primitive yet capable of the most unusual compositions.
I tickled the first hornfish under the chin, which squealed softly, making the corners of the old Catfish's mouth twitch at the corners in spite of herself.
The second hornfish got a piece of kelp wiggled up his snout so that he sneezed and a loud snotty honk came out. At this the Catfish number three hooted, not in a mean way, but delighted as if she were still a small fry, fresh from the egg.
Quickly, to take advantage of Catfish's mirth, I clapped the third hornfish with a smart snap of my wings, surprising the poor thing so thoroughly that it blew a whole song, so loud and long, so eerie and mystic, that the fishes from the Red Sea and even creatures in the ocean beyond were stunned to statues for a minute or an hour and the knots in the seagrass came unknotted.
The firestone was shocked back to life. I could it feel it flare up beneath me in the muck; I was engulfed in blue-white-blue flames, dazzling the mad Catfish. With a colossal flap of fiery wings, I flew through the water, free.
Ara. The altar where the gods and goddesses convened to make plans and burn sacrifices before waging war on the Titans.
Ara. A constellation crossed by the galactic plane of the Milky Way containing a vast field of stars, each of which is also known as Ara and by other names as well. A short list includes:
Ara α a blue-white hued star of magnitude 2.8, 242 light-years from Earth.
Ara β an orange-hued supergiant of magnitude 2.8, 600 light-years from Earth.
Ara γ a blue-hued supergiant of magnitude 3.3, 1140 light-years from Earth.
Ara δ a blue-white hued star of magnitude 3.6, 187 light-years from Earth.
Ara ζ an orange-hued giant of magnitude 3.1, 574 light-years from Earth.
Araaa. The sound the sea makes sliding across silver-black wings; water singing. Like the wind, water cannot sound by itself, rather it speaks by rushing against something else.
Forged anew in the blue flames, I become an eagle ray for a time. After, when I walk onto the sand and the tail of the eagle ray becomes legs once again, the sound of the sea still sings in my ears. Inside the song I hear these words: Ara is your true name. And so when it comes time to speak again and be asked by what name I am called, I speak it as the sea; the A voiced full, the ra only breath.
And so it is written Ara.
Perhaps you have not seen an eagle ray swim, or seen one at all. The one in our story is a common variety, Myliobatis Aquila. In the world of rays this variety is quite plain, yet in the world of man and beasts it is extraordinary—a handkerchief with the countenance of a freight train.
Its topside is flat and a black that is not entirely black nor spotted but dulled like the hood of newly waxed Cadillac before it's been buffed. Underneath this hood hangs a surprisingly fat body for the way that it moves. Its head is bulbous and tacked onto the front is a large hooked beak, much like an eagle's (the bird being named first and so as it goes that the ray gets its name from the bird, rather than the other way around). Its tail trails behind, a very thin sword, an epee, a foil, a cartilage syringe loaded with venom.
I am this now.
I pull my whole body up along the spine, making a U, the tips of the fins thrusting out of the water such that someone watching the sunset from shore might think they are seeing a pair of sharks skimming the surface. When the fins fold down, it’s like letting a newly washed sheet fall after a good snapping out, water moves and the ray’s body shoots forward. The sensation is delicious.
I feel vivid and cool and capable.
I carry instant death in my tail.
Weeks pass as I play in the waves, leaping high in the air, crashing back into the ocean until I am spent, then drift for days on the currents barely wafting my fins.
Araaa Araaa Araaa.
I swim beside sea turtles who never seemed ruffled and hammerhead sharks which are ever twisting and barking like they can’t get comfortable. My favorite are the schools of tiny sea horses that swarm and peck at me with suction-cup lips. I appreciate their bravado; had I been hungry perhaps I would have eaten them. Perhaps not. They are the only creatures that touch me and it feels like bliss.
While Water caresses every inch of my skin, I crave hardness and what wet feels like having been dry, what warm feels like having been cold. I missed the touch of Earth and Wind.
One day I amuse myself breaching the water to see how high I can fly before falling back on the waves. I am far out in the ocean, in the heart of the world. I haven't seen land for two full moons.
Sea against Wind makes a sound like singing: Arrraaaaaaaaa Arrraaaaaaaa.
I leap higher to hear it again.
Arrraaaaaaaaa. Arrraaaaaaaaa.
I follow my true name home.
Near to the shore of the great inland sea, I sensed the ground rising beneath. I understood the time had come to walk the Earth again.
The crown of my head broke the surface and water streamed through my hair as I continued the climb slowly on my belly and then on my hands. I felt each sensation new on my skin and in each of my bones and the sinewy strings that bound them. My blood warmed, it knowing who I had been and who I would become.
Feathered wings rippled out from the newly carved blades of my back, drying in the sun.
(I would need them for a while longer and when they were gone my shoulders would appear slightly odd and my upper arm strength and agility would leave both humans and gods gawp-mouthed in awe.)
I stood in the shallows as naked as the day of our birth.
As I walked out of the sea onto the land, a luminous gold painting of Tree, in its most radiant splendor, unfurled on my silver-salted blue-black-blue body. Gilded vines grew up my torso shadowed by the indigo river that surged beneath my skin. Branches and streams circled my stomach and back and breasts and the centaurian seam of my wings, then divided, roping down my arms, limbing out smaller toward my wrists. Thick, glittering roots spiraled down my thighs splitting along the hard ridges of my calves, then sending out long curling runners that seemed to leap the bounds of my feet, leaving trails in the sand. The markings of the great hunters and huntresses graced my face, and the eye of Ara glistened on my forehead.
When a cool wind stirred out of the north, I shivered against it and realized I clutched the firestone in my left hand. I found a dry spit of ground at the base of the cliff and buried the stone, marking the spot by gouging a circle into the face of a wall shaped like a staircase with a sharp rock.
Wind tangled my hair, grown long and wavy, silvery black with strands of bronze and copper coursing through like the striations in the cliff, glinting and flashing in the sun. I dug my feet into the rough sand, toes curved and strong as Raven's talons, and riffled my wings. The breeze smelled flinty and peppered with bitters. I rolled the tastes on my tongue and swallowed until my belly was rounded. Air was remade for me but I wasn't sure how.
I surveyed the coast, honing in on a figure by a jagged piling of rocks. My vision was newly acute, seeing wavery colors hovering all around the beast as it moved . . . and the bodies that didn’t.
Our hearts thundered as I bolted across the sand.
It seemed like I ran for hours to reach those rocks, certainly only seconds passed. I was shocked at the strength in my legs and arms, I felt like a wild animal. I don't know which I saw first, the body of the man broken on the rocks or the hyena that loomed like a storm between him and me.
There were other bodies as well, strewn on the sand. Sea wolves whose throats had been torn but otherwise appeared un-mauled. Their coats, stippled shades of cream and brown, seethed tidewater and their bodies looked withered and gaunt. Their tongues hung from their mouths like strips of dried fish. They had been here a long time. The hyena too. She looked half-starved even while she stood amongst plentiful food. I didn't understand. And then I did.
The hyena was waiting for me. She was protecting the body of the man. I fell on my knees and hands and tore at the sand, my hair, my eyes. I howled down the wind and snarled back the water that dared touch me with its insistent laps.
After my voice was reduced to a raw, gasping rasp I collapsed on my side and curled into myself as tightly as I could. I shook. I felt the animal standing over me. I heard her fighting off more sea wolves and then heard their silence. I felt her back against my back. The wings unfurled and one covered me and one covered her.
I've no idea how much time passed. Does it matter? Time for me had utterly changed.
Now it is time to scream and claw at my face.
Now it is time to rest.
It is not time to dream. I no longer sleep.
Hyena and I knew the time to get to our feet. Together we pulled the man from his dying place on those rocks. I noticed then that the color of him was the same as my skin, or had been. The chest was open and empty and the salt in the air had otherwise preserved every detail. I put my hand to my chest and felt the two drums. Some part of me knew who he had been. Some part of him told me his name.
I cradled Asmara’s head in my lap and stroked his hair and cheeks and eyelids. His features were mine. I tasted pomegranate flesh and rosemary cream on my tongue and swallowed it down until I was full. Then it was time to bury this body where it would become earth, tree, and air again.
I lashed it to a kit I made out of driftwood and sedge. I wove a harness with two yokes and the hyena and I started the long ascent up the staircase. Without my wings we might not have made it. Sharp fingers of rock erupted out of the wall and mangled trees limbs were strewn on the steps. The aftermath of Catfish's mayhem, perhaps.
When the traces became hopelessly caught in the ruins, the wings opened up and, to my shock, grew on my back until with one stroke I was off the ground and my toes were talons that clutched the bodies of the man and the beast as if they had been bits of straw. I can't say I enjoyed the flight given the burdens I carried. Though they weighed no more under my wings than a pair of field mice, I strained for breath and pain shot from my chest to my groin and back again. I thought my spine might snap.
We made our way toward the baobab tree I had seen from the beach. It was the most fantastic tree you could imagine.
Even though it had not one leaf, from far away and far below it shimmered with life and appeared to float in the air past the face of the cliff, its roots swaying over the sand and sea. I was drawn to its recalcitrant position and decided to bury Asmara’s body there.
We landed beneath it. The tree was ancient, judging from its size. It took the hyena and me some time to walk its circumference. I counted as we walked: Twenty-two massive roots anchored the twisting trunk to the ground. Some jutted out from the trunk suddenly, rising up and then dropping fast and steep, making an archway taller than my reach, then punched through the ground with a knobbled fist, while others slid down in thick ropes as if the root had run like sap from the trunk and slowly seeped through the soil at my feet.
We explored the places between until I found an impression where an animal had dug its bed beneath a low grotto nested against the main trunk. Cool, bright moss lined the cradle and there I laid him out.
The hyena stood watch while I carried back stones that littered the beach near the staircase.
Together we made the cradle a grave, marked by rocks embossed with the echoes of millions of years stacked in a cairn.
When night came, a few flaps of my wings lifted me to the V where two trunks split out of one then wove back together far up above. I settled at the rim of the bowl between them, broad and deep enough for a small band of kudu to curl against one another in a creamy brown carpet.
There was only me. I hopped down into the bowl and fluttered about, warming the layers of old feathers and bits of bark and twigs and grasses and hair, all decaying together. The hyena kept watch near Asmara’s grave.
My whole body exhaled.
By morning the wings had vanished. I could feel their absence where the wood pressed my skin.
Ghost limbs.
I wondered if the tree felt this when its branches cracked off in the storms. While the branch rotted into the ground or perhaps on the beach or in the sea far beneath, did a ghost limb still sway from the scarred rent in the wood, unseen, yet there all the same?
I flexed my feet. The toes were still long and curved and incredibly strong, but there was no sign of talons or claws. I hoped they would appear again if they were needed.
I found it easy to get down from the tree, swinging branch to branch like a monkey. I dropped to the ground just at the edge of the bare canopy where the furthest-reaching root fell over the ledge. I sat on the rim.
The sky flushed deep pink where it met the sea.
Soon, the sun burst out of the water like a great red-yellow-gold fish, so bold and so full of its power it would leap from one end of the sea to the other and take the whole day to do so, scoffing at the notion a fish must live in water.
I smiled at the audacious flying fish and closed my eyes, the better to recall what it was like to burst out of the water, cartwheeling over the waves, then jump into a rushing current and ride for days.
I sat letting the salt and the silt that coated my skin dry into a taut, thin shell in the sun. My body thrummed like the call and answer of drummers between distant tribes on nights of shared celebration.
The heat and the beat swelled into waves of pleasure rocking my body and leaving me gasping. The shell fractured along thousands of feathery cracks. I fell back until I recovered my breath and then got up, brushing the remains of the sea from my skin.
I noticed then. I turned my hands in the light where each of my fingers was tattooed with one tendril of gold as fine as spider’s thread. They wound around and onto the back of each of my hands in geometric squared patterns enclosed in a sphere. In my palm, a tattoo was embossed in the skin, moving: three interlaced circles of gold slowly spinning, each on its own invisible axis, looping through one another yet never touching.
As I watched, fascinated, more golden circles spun out from the original three, all interlaced and slowly spinning. At first I stared, entranced, pulled into the center as happens when you sit under the stars and look into a fire. Then I waved my hands in the air but the orbs continued undeterred. I understood then that these circles etched in my skin had some purpose interwoven with mine, though I had no idea what that might be.
I felt rare and capable and elemental.
I returned to exploring the gold display on my arms. It appeared made of the same material as the orbs, like liquid metal, not painted on but poured into grooves and running like tiny rivers, flashing and flowing in the sun. When I looked closer, the gold was bound with deep indigo which chased beside it everywhere like its shadow. I traced the ends of several tendrils where they encircled my upper arms and spilled onto my breasts and others that disappeared around to my back and up on my neck.
I could sense the spray across my back and the thick strands rappel down my torso to my legs. The grooves grew wider down the backs of my thighs then thinned and curled gently again toward my ankles.
There was no pain, no heat, no cold, only the awareness that where I stand, I am home.
After some time, nobody knows how long, I heard a low whine behind me and turned toward the sound. I circled the tree and found the hyena pacing in front of a towering root. I looked to see what might be disturbing the animal and glanced up at the root’s peak.
I was startled to see a white raven perched there like a marble effigy. It was larger than I thought a bird could be, larger than the hyena that swung back and forth as if challenging the bird to a fight. Its color made me shudder. My mind flashed on a painting of a white man, glassy-eyed, waxen and drained of his blood. Where had the picture in my mind come from? Despite the gruesome association, the word perfect formed on my lips.
I couldn't take my eyes off the raven and realized I had been holding my breath when it flew up in a spastic twist and dove feet first at the hyena, sinking its talons into her back. The hyena spun on her attacker and all I could see was a dervish of fur and white feathers and claws.
I had no fear or need to intervene, I watched from a distance my body deemed safe.
They made horrid sounds and rolled in a cloud of dust into a dark niche, then dropped out of sight as if a mouth had opened in the ground and eaten them in one bite.
I paused, listening, before I slunk forward, crouched on all fours. I smelled the spot where they disappeared, a burrow of some kind, narrowing my eyes. There was only the loamy scent of rotting wood and fungus spores; no blood, no acrid stink of a territorial wall. I inched into the opening, sniffing the floor, and pulled myself through a tunnel. I came to an open space under the tree—a den, a lair.
Wan light leaked through the tangle of roots and vines yet I could see clearly in the half-dark. Grinning up at me, yes grinning, from a wide, shallow basin, sat the hyena and raven as if they had played a fun trick and lured me here with their drama.
I dropped into the pit where a curious structure made of odd objects loomed in the middle. It had obviously been built there with some sense of order. Some care and purpose. It resembled a sort of domed cage with an elaborate finial top set in the center of a stage, the main ring defined by a large, leather skin spread on the ground. Lion, I surmised as I skirted the rim.
The massive hide had been dyed deep red and crafted into a cloak with a hood. The construction on top of it appeared both primitive and fitted together as precisely as the workings of an astronomical clock. I believed without doubt this cunning cage had been left here for me and that somehow its undoing would help me get to the place where the goddesses waited.
Something like memory stirred in me.
Goddesses waited. The bare strokes of the words took on flesh and I spoke aloud to everyone and no one, “The goddesses are waiting for me.”
I wasn’t sure why or how I would reach them, wherever they waited.
I started to dismantle the structure of oddities piece by piece with a new sense of urgency, while the bird and the beast sat and watched.
“So you aren't going to help then?”
It seemed we were to be a threesome and while I didn't expect either of them to speak back, stranger things had been happening. No answer.
The hyena stretched out and began licking herself.
“HYAAA!” I yelled, throwing a rock. Not hard, just to make a point, landing the rock so it skittered and settled near her back foot.
“I don't want to see you tending your parts.”
The hyena got up and sauntered into the shadows. I could still hear the licking but I didn't have to see it.
The raven tittered and bawked like it was in on the joke. I rolled my eyes and smiled. This felt familiar and I had the vague sense I knew these two characters. The objects in the piling felt familiar too. My hands knew where to hold them and what to do.
I catalogued them as I pulled them apart—first, the finial top. My hands braced against what I suspected was a sword, the hilt comprised of two crescents, set back-to-back as if twin planets had collided and only these thin slivers remained. Between them, eleven tiny full moons were set in a ring, with the twelfth set on top, above a spiraling serpent. I fit my hands one on top of the other over the coils. The finely carved scales felt both rough and smooth on my palms. My fingers nested and tensed. I pulled.
Slowly I withdrew a huge blade from the core of its mark, chipped at the edges, dull and pocked. There was a word emblazoned on the broad center plane: θέλημα—Will.
The sword was long and didn't give up its task easily. With one last heave it slid free. The bars of the cage clattered to the floor, splaying out from the center like the spokes of a wheel or the sun's rays erupting from behind a wall of gray clouds.
Without picking them up I knew they were bones. Some were long and white while others were small and charred like they'd been in a fire. I picked up a tiny blackened rib and clutched it to my chest where I felt as though something sharp had got stuck. I couldn't breathe so well, my throat felt raw and my eyes blurred. Whatever this animal had been its bones were sacred and I must leave them exactly where they'd fallen, except for this one, which my hand wouldn’t yield to my brain’s command.
The bones revealed the next layer of puzzle, a hunter’s bow, pinned, string-side down, by eight arrows stuck in the ground, four on either side. I pulled the assembly apart and laid the pieces aside.
Under the bow lay a satchel of soft leather. It had a simple enclosure and a wide strap to be worn over the shoulder. The bag was bulging and when it started to move I quick grabbed it and opened the flap.
I fell back in surprise when three white hares, strapped together by their ears, leaped out as fast as I could form the words, How in the world . . . the raven snatched up the trio and flew out of the hole. I saw the bird and hares were the same color of white, confounding me more.
“Well then,” I said, as if the raven were still there, “I guess that was for you.”
I thought I would have liked something soft to pet for a while, and an easy dinner might be welcome later, but there was no rescuing the hares now. I dumped the remains of the sack on the ground: a simple shift cut of white cotton; a smaller leather bag, and a rectangular object tied up in a bit of raw silk.
I slipped on the shift—which fell loose to my knees and had long, fitted sleeves. The garment felt weightless and soothing to my skin. I picked up the rib bone. It had once protected the heart of the little animal; I wondered how it had died. The bone fit in the small pouch, which fit inside the satchel. The satchel rode on my hip, forming to my body so that I barely noticed its bulk. I took the bow and slung it over my other shoulder then slipped the arrows through loops I found sewn into the strap of the bag. I left the rest. I was satisfied I had all that I needed, except for one thing.
I opened the satchel again, looking to see if it had an inner pocket suitable to hold the firestone. There in the bottom was one small ovate object. Barely filling my hand, I recognized the size and texture as that of a snake's egg. I couldn't place the species. I would need to keep it hidden from the raven. I felt sure this egg wasn't meant to be its dessert.
As if in agreement that it was time to leave, Hyena appeared at my side. I reached out to her for the first time, really looked at her, and wanted to touch her fur. She allowed it, though she shivered with every move of my hand.
I started at her back, thinking this the least intrusive. Her shoulders were higher than her back haunches and I could see now this was because her front legs were longer than the rears. Like a giraffe I thought. The way they lope on the savannah, they look like cousins when they run. I saw she had a long neck as well, not like a giraffe’s, but as I worked my way across her body, she swiveled it into comical positions; high up so that she was taller than me, then sweeping the ground and looking almost completely backwards around her front haunches.
Her fur was a patch of weeds with large cocoa brown splotches. There were a hundred varieties of withering plants on her back, all dull and raspy and thick. Over the brown, or under or through, the hair was gray too—everywhere, and yet one couldn't grasp a single gray strand—an amalgam of wood and soil dusted with ash.
There was a distinct mane that stood up higher and stiffer than the rest of the pelt, running from the top of her head, between stout rounded ears, across her shoulders like a mantle then tapering to a point midway down her back. I brushed this tuft with my fingertips and found it surprisingly soft and giving.
I moved to kneel in front of her, slowly taking her huge head in my hands. I had the sense that the weight of it alone would equal that of a sack full of stones. The place where the upper jaw hinged to the lower felt like a vise made of iron. She bared her teeth at me, pulling back her black lips in an uneasy grimace. Behind many sets of deadly incisors, her molars fitted together like a mortar and pestle where she ground bones to paste.
Her face was a gargoyle's, a gothic ruin. One moment a dog's straight from a fight and another a cat's with hooded, keen eyes.
Eye.
One eye; the other a twist of angry, mottle-pink skin where an eye should have been.
I knew this face. I knew it. I knew it.
But I couldn't make the memory come. I hadn't realized until that moment that my memory was lost. All that came before.
Before the water.
Before the old catfishes in the muck.
Gone.
Gone.
“Breathe,” I whispered, “breathe.”
The air grew sweltering hot and I smelled burning roses.
My pulse raced and drums beat in my chest.
I was drowning, saltwater filling my lungs.
I stumbled to my feet and reached for the sword.
Two hands stained with gold, seeming detached at the wrist, chopped at hanks of my hair.
I stood in a grave lined with copper and bronze tresses.
Then the terrible thing happened. The sword dropped to my throat and started to saw but the blade was dull and chipped.
Our story turned again at that moment, from terrible to extraordinary.
The hyena came up behind me, slid between my legs and I collapsed on her back.
The sword dropped to the floor.
My fingers wove into her mane and we fled into the bright afternoon light.
FLY US HOME
Where would one million goddesses agree to make basecamp of their war? A place where the ground is made of ice and fire ripples in the air like watercolors on silk. A place defined by no fences. No flags.
A place where the one from the south, whose hair is laced with copper and bronze and body is scored with gold, would be pulled by magnetic force; the most northern point on the planet.
Here the empty throne waited for the new High Priestess to arrive and the Oldest Living Catfish prowled the glacial caves and slides beneath the ice floes; though, just as when human explorers came across the goddesses’ camp they sensed a rift in the arrangement and excitement of the molecular field that could not be seen nor detected in any true scientific manner, the goddesses couldn't define precisely what and where the Dark Mother was.
The center of camp was dominated by a structure that might be thought of as a cross between a tent and a dome made of crystal and steel, though it was neither. It was large enough to hold all of the goddesses comfortably, seated or dancing or milling around a central circular platform above which hovered their hearth; a globe made of blown glass forged in delicate interlaced spirals encompassing a blue and white ball of fire. Long tendrils of icy-hot flames furled out in what appeared to be a random pattern. Periodically, there was a loud pop and a shower of silver sparks exploded out of the sphere and down onto the stage like a rainstorm of stars.
Hundreds of feet above the hearth was a hole—an octagonal absence of matter in the top of the dome through which those inside could watch the auroras unfold and refold in spectacular waves and the north star could be seen in its exact center, no matter where you stood in the structure's interior.
Hestia was the hearth, firekeeper and touchstone of them all, but she had asked Athena to take over the north camp, as you might recall. Much of the time Athena couldn’t be bothered—wouldn’t be tethered to this frozen tundra on the cusp of the planet, and had left Mielia in charge.
It so happened that on this day the goddess Mielia was doing some stargazing when a trio of white hares, looking bedraggled, dropped through the oculus in the roof followed by the legs, body and wings of a ghastly white raven. Mielia roused from her gazing and stood to greet the fast descending bird.
“Sir! Um, I mean, your majesty or . . .” she stammered getting red-faced.
“Just shut up and take care of this,” White Raven mawked from its huge knobby beak, tossing the hares in Mielia's direction before landing on the stage with a whump.
Athena folded her wings and stretched her cramped talons. She would stay in this form, she thought, though expanded the body until it was twice as tall as the other goddesses, since it seemed to make clearer to them that she was in charge. If she was going to keep it that way, she would need to be at her strongest, and smartest.
Mielia mounted the hares in the palm of the slingshot she carried and shot it up toward the hearthfire, missing by quite a bit.
Athena rolled her eyes as she walked over to the stunned troika and shot it again. This time the flying hares hit the mark, spinning into a ball of white fire that passed through the glass spirals as if they were simply shaped air, causing a small burst of sparks that fizzed out prettily then disappeared in a curl of silver smoke that drifted out into the sky.
“Where is Hestia?” Mielia asked, hopeful for her return.
“South.”
“Still?” Disappointment frosted the word.
“Yes, is there a problem? Do I need to get someone else to tend the fire?”
“Uhhh, no?” Meilia offered, a question. “It . . . it hasn't gone out.”
Athena snorted. “Is that how we are to measure the success of our mission, then?”
“Um, I am not sure what you mean.”
“Of course you don't, which is why there are a million of you and yet here we are, still losing this war.”
Without a question to answer, Meilia thought better of saying anything more.
“Well, go get her,” Athena barked.
“Who? Hestia?”
“Yes!” Athena said, disgusted. Couldn’t they think for themselves—they were goddesses for chrissake. “Tell her the Ash Girl is on her way now. Can't she see that in those blasted cards? I sacrificed my best raven and that boy, the brother, who would have made a fine commander of men. Do I have to do everything myself?”
Mielia was wise enough to know these questions were rhetorical. “Will you watch the fire, then?” She ventured carefully.
“Do I have a choice?”
Another question too dangerous for an answer so Mielia used it as an exit door instead.
I felt for Mielia.
I had known one of her ancestral grandmothers once, very briefly, when she was of an age to not yet have been mated, and her people were camped on my beach, taking shelter under my dangling roots. They had been walking for months on their search for a way to cross the sea. Humans have always looked across water, sand, and savannah—anything that defied the limits of their vision—and needed to know what other magic life might hold. It is the only thing that truly distinguishes them from animals, the pursuit of mystery over food.
The name of the girl was a sound I cannot make. While the rest of her clan slept she watched the sky. It was an overcast night, but the winds raged up high and swept the clouds clear every few minutes. Against this backdrop of stars, appearing then disappearing, like a herd of animals blinking their eyes, she saw the shape of my branches, barren and twisted, and thought, What a spectacular height! Surely she could see clear into the sea from the uppermost point and a way to the other side.
The girl climbed the Staircase of Epochs, sure-footed as a goat, and came to the place where one of my arms reached out over the precipice. I could see what would happen, and I couldn't, and wouldn't, intervene.
Without a sound she dove, headfirst, from the tip of that branch into the water.
In the morning her people ran about shouting the sound that was her name but because they couldn't find her and because she was a girl-not-yet-mated they left without her the following day.
Her mother stayed behind for a while. Lit a fire. Mourned.
Finally, she too left, turning south down the coast. Some hours or days later the sea turned red and steamed with the colors of the sky at the ends of the world. After drinking the elixir, I leafed, bloomed, and bore golden fruit, but the fruit was left on my branches to rot.
They turned to ash and fell to the ground.
The girl walked out of the water. She had no wings, no marks. No animal waiting for her. She found her way, alone, across the sea where she married and had daughters and sons, but she was terribly unhappy and no one, including her, could fathom why.
This was before the goddesses realized their daughters needed help. The stories that sustained them, that taught them and made them to know who they were, went untold or unheard as humans spread out. The animals had stopped speaking too. The old ways of meeting one's guardian animal were no longer possible, especially where the new gods became stronger.
Mielia had been one of the first in Athena’s line to be properly initiated as a child and become her full goddess self, yet she’d pretty much had to figure it all out on her own.
Then Athena took over. She rallied the million, not an easy task I assure you, and declared war on the terrors she had helped start. She meant well, she means well. She truly regrets the part she has played in rebellions, regicide, and holocaust—has tried to make amends. But while her name remains, nothing will change. Athena's life must end.
I can feel it now, deep in my heartwood, the surge of elemental nutrients that rose from the sea—the elixir of the goddesses—up through my core and out to my limbs. The first leaves to grace these branches in centuries uncurled in the sun.
Ara had fallen into a catatonic state to the sway of Hyena's hips trotting down the Staircase of Epochs to the beach. It took concentration to keep the two bodies aligned so that Ara didn't fall from her ride. The center they shared held and even leaping over the hulking corpses of trees didn't unseat her.
Hyena dug up the firestone and sniffed it to be sure the essence of fire was still underneath. Satisfied, she picked it up with her teeth and nudged it into the satchel.
The beast turned to the south toward the strait of Bab el Mandeb, where animals had crossed the great red divide for thousands of years. She broke into a lope she could sustain for many months without stopping.
Near the Banks of the Padma River
Frieda padded to the courtyard of her house as she did each day when the sun broke over the tiled roof. She yawned against the call of late morning to rise as she had become something of a nocturnal creature. Stepping out of the shade of the portico that bordered the yard, she planted her feet on the scorched patio stones—barely feeling the heat on the thick pads of her paws. Limbs splayed, massive head tipped back, she tensed and released every muscle and tendon, sending ripples through the thick striped coat from shoulders to tail. She yawned again, a rumbling purr, and settled onto her side to nap in the sun. That evening, as the air cooled, she rose to her feet and slipped unseen from her house into the hills.
The villagers had long speculated about the elderly English Lady with the flaming hair who no longer came into town. The debts were paid and the house and property well maintained, although no local worker could claim being engaged by the lady in the past five years or more to prune trees or patch the chinks in the walls or replace the tiles surely stripped from the roof in the same storms that ravaged their own.
One boy in the village had caused a stir when he claimed to have seen a Bengal tiger, very much at home in the courtyard of the house, napping in the sun. This story set off a spate of dares to climb over the English Lady’s wall, which resulted in more tall tales from girls and boys as well as adults. From then on the lady and house stood as a mystery among them that wouldn't be solved and, as these things go, the lady and house disappeared in their minds where a variety of Tiger Lady stories took their place.
When young Aahana told of the times that she rode a Tiger Lady through the hills behind their village, and of the stories it told her of faraway places and princesses and princes, she was believed as much as anyone, which is to say, she was, and was not.
Charlotte found Frieda in the courtyard, curled into herself, smaller and so much older than she remembered, white roots flowing into the fiery tresses that draped the body like a sheet.
“I’m too late,” Charlotte said aloud, a part of her hoping the noise would startle Frieda awake. And she knew that wouldn’t happen. She couldn’t have been gone more than a few hours, she thought, given the heat.
Charlotte carried her inside and laid her on the bed, which was a simple, low platform covered with a plain pad. She found a lightweight cotton quilt with beautiful hand stitching and wrapped the delicate bundle tightly, then stopped to catch her breath and make a phone call.
“I knew it was bad, Ben, but I had no idea. She was gone when I got here . . . Yes, of course . . . No. I’m still going. I will need a few days more to take care of her things here.”
After a few minutes more, Charlotte hung up the phone and made a list.
Four days later, she packed the few items into The Amelia and continued the journey she and Frieda had promised to make for ten years.
She flew with the sun behind her, turning north at dusk. Often, Charlotte looked over at the strange pile on the seat beside her. She’d chosen the larger metal urn with three birds flying across a richly enameled sunset. She didn’t think Percy would have minded that she’d put Helge’s ashes in with Frieda’s.
Charlotte wasn’t one to cry—as if she’d used her allotment of tears in some previous life—and she was as sad as she could ever remember.
Next to the urn was the box that had sat in her office at the college, accusing her of procrastination. She simply couldn’t send it on, and had thought at this point perhaps she and Frieda could post it together. It would be fun for Helge’s great niece to see the postmark from her ancestral town in Norway among the stamps from India and the customs stickers as it was stopped, inspected, and held up at several borders on its way to Oxford. At one point, no one knows how, the package had been misrouted to Cairo as well.
Charlotte smiled at that postmark, thinking of the first time she’d met Anbessa. Perhaps next year it would be time to take Friedrich to Eritrea. See if he felt the same in that country—as if he was born there and had gotten lost somehow—which was close enough to his story to give her a twinge in her chest.
She dreaded the day Ben made her explain and she could only hope Percy had been a role model he would follow. She wished Frieda had lived to help her tell it—she and Ben had always had a way of communicating that brought him around. The man who fathered her son had been nothing to her but beautiful, so young that she almost felt guilty. Almost. Sleeping with him was like capturing of piece of that place for herself, holding him inside her, urging him to be still, felt primitive and raw and real. She’d never felt so alive in her life, or since. His whole being was intoxicating.
In the morning he was gone from her bed. She’d not even gotten his name.
Beside the over-stamped package was the velvet bag she’d found in Frieda’s things. The house had been nearly empty. Sparsely furnished, tile floors freshly swept, and the cupboards were bare except for a sack of rice and a few dishes and teacups. The bag was in the room Frieda must have used for her painting. All of the canvases had been wrapped and labeled for shipment to dealers around the world.
Charlotte had arranged for them to be shipped, and the proceeds put in the trust Percy had set up for the housing and maintenance of the seventy-eight tarot paintings and publishing the cards. The bag had been in a large wooden box, alongside neatly stacked tubes of paint, mostly curled to the tops where she’d squeezed out the last smear of each pigment.
The bag held coins of a surprising variety. Charlotte shook a few into her hand and selected a Norwegian skilling dated 1918 with a crest featuring a lion under a crown, between the letter C.L and Numerals XIII. She wondered if that ruler had been an ancestor of King Haakon.
Helge’s seventy-seventh birthday stories. Of course there would be coins left. Gertie had died that year and apparently the tradition with it. She knew Helge had sold some of the coins to fix up The Amelia. She would count them later, she thought. Have them appraised. Give the money to charity, carry on the tradition the younger sister, Kristi, had started the year that she died.
Out of nowhere, Charlotte started to laugh. She laughed until her stomach hurt. The Amelia: Flying Hearse. What had they been thinking, naming a plane after a woman who had gone down in the ocean, never to be seen again. She laughed until tears streamed into her mouth. Tasting the salt subdued her thoughts.
What was she going to do? Land in this town on the edge of the world, where nobody had ever heard of her and say, do you mind if I dump an urn full of ashes here?
All she knew was Helge’s last name. There might be Gulbrandsens on every corner. That made her start up again. She snorted, trying to say the name out loud. Couldn’t do it, nobody could. Dammit, she was only supposed to be the ride, Frieda had known what they were going to do. Charlotte had found a map of Norway at the house with a town circled and also, strangely, a circle around the North Pole.
By the time Charlotte was soaring through the Kåfjorden, her plan hadn’t gotten much better.
Near the Magnetic North Pole
Hyena and I crossed the snow dusted ridge. An aurora undulated over our heads. The air was crisp and thin in our noses and like velvet smoke when we exhaled. Neither of us was cold even though I was naked—the linen shift having long ago shredded off my shoulders and hips, trailing white strings across whole continents. A trail, if anyone had cared to track us out of Africa.
At least to that place where the Arctic Ocean ran ashore at the topmost point of the Scandinavian Peninsula, when I heard Raven’s voice, Focus, and the wings unfolded from the knobs on my back like a fiddlehead fern after a rain, or the first embryonic shoot from a newly-split seed. I flew, hyena dangling, grinning, from the talons that sprang out of the nailbeds, with eyes on the North Star, winking through the excited molecular field that changed color as if on some silent command. The best tracker in the world would have lost us, squinting helplessly at the sky.
When we landed on the ghost island, (a name the goddesses adored because they love all things that are nearly invisible) the wings remained, keeping me upright when the polar gusts wailed and beat at us with iron fists. The talons gripped the ice and rock terrain, pulling them ahead, my fingers wrapped in the stiff long grass of Hyena’s back.
The gold tendrils and roots of my tattoos and the silver threads in Hyena’s pelt shone in the half-lit night as we traveled.
We moved soundlessly; left no prints in the snow.
When we reached the end of the ridge we sat together, side by side, my legs swinging over the edge of the narrow plateau. We watched the ghost animals on their colorful carousel overhead, whirling around the rim of the aurora, prancing and tossing their heads and switching their tails. The elephants boasted glorious tusks and the horns on the rhinos tapered to diamond-sharp points. The gorillas clapped their massive hands and triplet white hares rode on the back of a Bengal tiger. A pack of sea wolves high-stepped in twos, shoulder to shoulder. A glossy yellow dog nudged along her litter of round-bellied pups, the little black one running to keep up. Round and round, in and out, the parade of beasts danced in their double-loop track.
Then the terrible thing happened, flitted across my brain.
But it didn’t.
The celebration continued for a very long time.
In the valley below, tiny tents of every size and shape fanned out in concentric circles from the glowing dome in the center—its frosted panels lit up silver-blue-silver from inside. We watched the camp, waiting for . . . we weren’t sure what. Maybe a signal. A sign.
A Small Town Near Norkopp, Norway
Helge’s Aunt Lydia poured hot tea into Charlotte’s cup and pointed to the place where the brushstrokes in the northern sky crossed.
“The North Star is the fiery tip of the arrow that the goddess Skaði shot through the aurora to keep it pinned to the earth forever, my father liked to say.” She laughed, “He was a storyteller, that one. Would’ve loved to be the one to tell the tale of his own disappearance into that aurora, but he didn’t have the chance.”
“What happened?” Charlotte asked, although she had heard it already from Helge.
“Never came back. Plane wasn’t found neither. Now, that’s not how he would’ve told it, of course. Or my brother—he could spin a yarn too, I’ll tell you that.” Lydia stroked the white cat on her lap, rocking so steady Charlotte felt herself, finally, getting tired. Bone tired.
“Helge told stories too . . .” Charlotte began but trailed off, too exhausted to talk.
When Lydia picked up where she left off, laughing and rocking away. Charlotte was grateful for the old woman in her funny little cap to talk enough for the both of them.
“Did he ever tell you the one about the three-eyed goat?” Lydia asked.
“What? No! Is that a story or a joke?” Charlotte grinned through the fuzziness that was her head. She listened, drowsy, until she could politely excuse herself and crawl under the quilts on Aunt Lydia’s spare bed.
The following morning, Charlotte walked down the hill into town and found the post office, right where Aunt Lydia said it would be. Thank goodness, because every building was the same wood construction painted the same color red—a solid-as-brick color that made the white trim and snow glow. It looks like a fairy tale, she thought. Then the vision arose of chasing Helge across Oxford in the snow, his long legs shooshing like skis through the slush, The King of the North on a quest to get back his lost kingdom and his lost queen.
Charlotte let herself have the long moment, this lovely respite of the mind, giving its gifts, conjuring scenes, curling a knobbled finger and beckoning—come.
After she’d paid the postage—after the man behind the counter took the right bills from her hand, affixing the stamp and hand-writing a postmark, after thanking him with an apologetic nod—Charlotte changed her mind. Asked for the package back. Gesturing, pointing. Please? She managed in something close to his dialect. He pulled the box from the bin and handed it back, scowling at her with his white, tangled brows and cornflower-blue eyes. He looked like a painting. Like the red and white village tucked under a cliff. Like Lydia and her rocking chair and her cat. Like a good story, waiting.
Once there was a story, and no one to tell it. The story belonged to . . . Helge. And he gave it to me. I need to finish it.
She opened the box, put in the velvet bag with the coins—fifty, she’d counted—and sealed it back up with brown packing tape from Aunt Lydia’s desk.
That evening, the villagers gathered on the shore where Helge had played as a boy, or close to that spot, the shoreline ever shape-shifting and remaking itself. The sky was as dark as it was going to get—a dull/bright half-light—the newborn auroras playing chase overhead. They made their prayers, and cupped hands around candles, sending Helge and Frieda off on their voyage. It was the custom in this village to sing something akin to Bon Voyage, or Until You Return, or When Next You Come, as if the dead are sailing around the world and will be back, and no one knows how long it will take. They would have said the same words when Helge and his family left Norway for England.
And here he was.
And there they go.
Charlotte watched the raft of ashes, toes of her boots in the ice-laced water. Watched until every speck had slipped underwater; melted into the reflection of the auroras and stars.
“Now you know what’s through the door,” Charlotte whispered, “come back and tell me that story.”
The whole village, it seemed, came out to send her off the following day. As The Amelia winged north the villagers called after her something akin to Bon Voyage.
Charlotte snuggled into the white fur of the hooded cloak Lydia had pulled from a trunk and insisted she wear. Wolf, she’d said. Nothing will keep you warmer where you are going.
The name the old woman called her then was strange, and fitting, she supposed.
In halting English, she’d said, “When I tell of your coming and the gift you have given my family, flying Helge home, I shall call you The Ash Girl.”
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