Echelons
Entymology: Borrowed from French échelon (“rung; echelon”), from échelle (“ladder”). Échelle is derived from Latin scāla (“ladder”), from scandō (“to ascend, climb”), from Proto-Indo-European *skend- (“to jump”).
SPOILER ALERT: MORE THAN PREVIOUS BLOG POSTS THIS ONE QUOTES LIBERALLY FROM THE CHAPTER
“I fell asleep in the river reeds. I dreamed in my dream.”
Chapter 7 is delirious with dreams within dreams and story within story as Asmeret navigates the very narrow space between worlds by following the darkest days of her life to see where the light begins. This carries us through echelons (layers) of the whole. As she picks up the thread of story that the cards point her to, we begin in the upper world where she plays with Arsema and the other children of The Village of Ash, four years after the cutting ritual and leaving her body to occupy a hyena. The fallout of those years is contained in this bit . . .
“Arsema wouldn’t look at her. She didn’t see Asmeret’s irises churn like storm clouds, lightning flashing along their edges. Arsema was her world, her moon and her sun. Asmeret’s eyes reflected Arsema’s weather.”
In literary terms Arsema* represents the path not traveled. The life Asmeret might have had if not for . . . and this cousin is the only place Asmeret has to channel her purest love, love she might offer herself if she knew how. In simpler terms, this is an age when little girls can love one another and themselves fiercely before cultural expectations begin to shape their beliefs about what is normal and good. The age when princesses are coaxed into a deep sleep.
Asmeret does fall asleep, but not like the other girls. We follow her through the door in her dreams to her initiation journey into the Goddesses’ Cavern—this story’s under world—but first, she is shown the lost mirror of herself, her twin brother thought dead (or killed) at birth and perhaps something of the future as well.
“Asmeret’s eyes brightened and danced. She quick leaned over and kissed Arsema on the mouth. For just a moment the princesses felt as they had when they were small, as if they were one heart in two bodies. As if they shared skin. As if one day they would be queens together.”
With the help of the cards and the bones and her guides, Asmeret, on her twentieth birthday, begins to wake up to the true story of this life she has lived. Back to age nine. It takes intention and a bit of magic to defy the laws of the Age of Forgetting.
“She knew this story had to come out . . . Something else had happened, she knew deep inside. Something she couldn’t remember. Something that was keeping her from becoming the woman she was meant to be.”
And so we follow Asmeret and the lost boy, The Prince of the Market, her brother, Asmara, as they find one another in the market . . .
“The sun was high overhead when Asmeret opened her eyes on the boy . . . just her size and color and shape. She sat up, the half-eaten pomegranate still clutched in her fist . . . offered the boy the rest of the fruit. . . He took it and emptied the flesh down his throat. They laughed at the red stain of their lips then went back into the market, dodging between stalls, losing and finding one another again and again.”
The sharing of the pomegranate is a layered metaphor. Once again, the separated twins (masculine and feminine) eat from the same flesh. They are marked by the shared stain on their lips as belonging to one another’s tribe, and pomegranate’s have long been mythologized as the food of the gods.
The story itself, being told as you recall in the room beneath Tree, is itself a middle world. A space in which Asmeret has the inspired mind to see both her human and divine aspects alive and converging in her life stories. In this place the veil between worlds is very thin.
Asmara* (yes, the same name as the City in the Clouds—now explained) doesn’t have access to such a place. He is left confused, angry, and bereft.
As Asmeret leaves the market she falls into one of her fevers, which we now know is a defining symptom of her ‘sickness’ since she was very small. As children do, Asmeret internalizes her own actions as the cause of her strangeness . . .
“The fevers almost always started when the words formed in her mouth, so close to jumping out at her father or mother, I have a brother, you have a son. She couldn’t let those words out because then she would have to tell them what she had done . . .”
And she isn’t entirely wrong. The fever states give her access to a deeper knowing of who and what she is and what she needs to reclaim that has been lost. She starts her own quest, unconsciously, when she dares say aloud for the first time, “You have a son,” even though Tigisti can’t hear over the sounds of the cart.
From the middle world beneath tree, with her tools (cards and bones), Asmeret isn’t so far from the underworld so, with a bit of help from Athena, she begins remembering her nine year journey with the Goddess of War. (Remember fairytales and myths are circular—you might notice that Asmeret, The Princess of Earth, repeats the pathway of Frieda, The Princess of Fire.) We sense that Athena is also on her own quest, for the throne of the High Priestess still, perhaps, but more to come to terms with the complex being that she is becoming.
“. . . this was the beginning of Athena’s end, and she knew it . . . being with the Ash Girl was nearly more than she could take. But the story had a teller and couldn’t be stopped now.”
This is a good time to just pause and note the theme of the Power of Story to create our worlds. Take that in. Do with it what you will.
As pointed out prior, its intriguing to think about what it means for a goddess to become something more human. I was struck when re-reading this chapter how Asmeret experiences Athena as a “compendium of thoughts projected into the darkness of the room by a lamp in which the delicate filament was about to combust.” (And perhaps you will notice with me the parallel to Charlotte, Princess of Air's, moment of profound in—sight as a projector made her dream sky visible as a scientific fact.)
On orders from Hestia, we assume, Athena in form of White Raven had flown Asmeret to the Goddesses’ Cavern. Here, she remembers now, she finds the land that resonates in her soul . . .
“Of all of the lands she had been to, this one felt like the home she’d once lost and lost and lost.”
(Notice the cues that we are in the Secondary World . . . once and the three times cadence lost and lost and lost referring to the times her destiny came to her and she declined.)
. . . and she meets The Great Huntress in person, though Artemis is already crystalizing. Notice too, that Tigisti, her mother in this life, is in the under world with her. In this space we have access to the whole story and everything seen and unseen—material and mythic are equally real.
Anbessa, her father, is with her too. Not in the under world, but in her mind’s eye as she recalls the crystal he had given her along with the story about the goddesses who set off volcanoes when they fight, then feel bad for the death and destruction they caused and turn the dead into crystals, which they include in their own rituals. In this moment we begin to feel, as Asmeret lets herself feel, the anger she has at her father for leaving her, and how she blames herself. And in this moment she also begins the process of forgiveness.
“Asmeret realized that she clutched the crystal in her hand. Silently thanked her father for it. Felt her anger at him subside just a little. He had loved her once, believed in her like nobody else.”
And Tigisti is with her, in spirit form, in the middle world also—remember the veil here is very thin. Tigisti, in a bird’s voice (birds in fairytales carry messages from Mother), fills in the perspective Asmeret can’t know on her own, where the witch and the little black dog and even Tigisti herself fit in.
Athena’s part in it all thickens very subtly too if you consider that she delivered the wooden coin to Tigisti that would be spent to save Asmeret’s life (given what we know so far about how the coins work).
“I dreamed she told me what to do then pressed a wooden coin into my palms with these last words. Don’t forget. . . I stopped in a clearing to make sure I had the coin—the dream already seemed only a dream. it was there, in my fist, but something was different. The coin glittered . . . it had turned to gold.”
The climax of the chapter, and a major crossroads in the story, happens next. As the truth of her relationship with her father and mother (remember—multi-layered metaphors), starts to emerge, with the cards painted for her by The Princess of Fire (Frieda), Asmeret, Princess of Earth, comes ‘face to face’ with the Princess of Air and, ironically, Athena is the one to bring them together . . . (don’t forget that there is a CHARACTER MAP for each chapter to help you picture these shifting relationships)
“There is a purpose for it all, which you will know soon enough. I am not the Princess of Air in your story.”
“Then who?”
“Ask her.”
Hestia spoke to Asmeret gently, nodding, “Go ahead.”
Asmeret looked at the card in her hand, asked the question, demanded an answer: “What is your name?”
The north wind blasted cold through the tangle of rock and roots, causing the fires to flap and twist. The girl in the gossamer dress turned to face Asmeret.
Charlotte, the wind said. Don’t forget.
Three princesses waking up, entwined in their shared prophecy. One in the North (Charlotte | London), one in the South (Asmeret | Eritrea), one in the East (Frieda | India). In the West, the fourth floats and dreams.
*(note: early readers implored me to change Arsema’s name . . . too close to Asmeret’s and Asmara’s as it is the same as the City name. “It’s confusing,” they said. I get it. I also hope you will understand that the naming is out of my hands.)