Chapter 9
1949-1953 CE
Somewhere on the Coast of Eritrea
The little dog growled softly, backing away from the tracks. “Stick close to me,” Asmeret cautioned her, “I won’t let it get you.”
Asmeret squatted, laying her palm flat and spreading her fingers wide, trying to fill the print. The girl glanced around and sniffed at the air. The stink of the animal lingered. It was nearby. She drew an arrow and held it ready as she rose very slowly and turned, surveying the half arc of nearly-bare ground that defined the reach of the tree’s roots. This side led to the open fields where she hunted rabbits and voles for their meals. On the far side the tree’s root bed ended abruptly at a precipice. Once, Asmeret had thrown a rock over the edge and immediately understood that neither she nor the dog could survive such a fall. “We won’t ever walk on the sea side of the tree,” she’d said. The dog dropped her head and flattened her ears as if she had been about to trot over and take a good look.
Hyena.
She had been hearing the distinctive guttural yips and inelegant shuffing as it skulked through the grass at night; keeping its distance yet not making much effort to keep its whereabouts a secret. Not that it had to. There was no way Asmeret could take a hyena with her bow or with the slingshot she’d kept from the boy in the market. Brother. She’d only let the word enter her mind once, then shut it away behind the words abo, and Arsema. The pain doubled her over when those words came and the dog nuzzled her and whined, licking her face. No, she couldn’t afford to be caught off her guard like that. Not here. The hyena had nothing to fear. It could scare off a lion all by itself if necessary, and nothing else would dare mess with it. She wished the beast would show itself but knew better than to go looking for trouble.
The only signs of the snake were the double-looped tracks it left in the dirt. Asmeret spent whole afternoons walking the loops, daring herself not to fall off. Sometimes she tried to entice the dog to walk the lines too, tempting her with dried bits of rabbit. Most of the time the dog took one or two steps then lay down, rolling over and wriggling on her back, obliterating the snake’s work, while begging for a tummy rub.
Sometimes a whiff of baking bread reached Asmeret or the dog on the wind. She was helpless against it, and no matter what else they might have had planned for the day—hunting voles, or gathering firewood, or taking eggs from the nests of ground birds—they would set out for the woods and the hut made of trees. A loaf of fresh bread waited on the grate, which had been replaced. No trio of circles woven in iron. If not for the marks burned into her palm, Asmeret might have thought her first trip to the hut was no more than a dream or one of the delusions brought on by her fevers.
One day a very old woman met her at the door. “Welcome, child,” she crowed, and stooped to ruffle the ears of the dog. “You are looking fine, yes indeed,” she cooed at the mutt, causing the dog’s whole back end to waggle with pleasure. Asmeret was a little miffed. What kind of guard dog was that? And no sign of the wild pack who usually pounced on her when she entered the wood. Today she was on her own.
Asmeret eyed the old woman. She had heard the whispers in the village about the Witch of the Wood. “You may call me Hestia. May I call you Asmeret?” the old woman said, causing Asmeret to flush. She tried to think if she had offered her name as she followed the witch into the hut. Had she read her thoughts? Witches could do that? She thought that was only a gift of the gypsies who roamed the north sands.
“Yes,” Asmeret stammered and smiled politely. “Thank you for the bread.”
“Your smile is thanks enough. There will always be warm bread for you here, Asmeret.”
The inside of the hut was tidy as ever, but seemed fuller somehow, now that the witch had appeared.
Something brushed by overhead and settled on the table.
“I believe you have met my friend, Raven?”
Asmeret hadn’t seen the black bird since it had led her to the tree, dropping the pup in the grass about a hundred paces off, then turning back to the forest. (Of course he had been there all along, keeping watch.)
The little black dog trotted right past the bird and plopped down in a ball by the warm hearth. She was asleep in a blink, snoring pleasantly, as if this was her house.
“Come.” Hestia beckoned. “Sit down, let me get you some tea.”
Asmeret’s mouth watered. The tea she made from the leaves she identified by memory, having paid good attention to the healers in her village, was weak and lacked something she couldn’t put a finger on.
While the tea steeped, the witch walked to a small chest of drawers. From it she pulled a set of simple clothes Asmeret’s size. “To keep the thorns from scratching that beautiful skin,” Hestia said. Asmeret slipped them on under her cloak.
As they ate hot marbled bread and drank tea sweetened with heavy cream (that was it, Asmeret realized, if only she had a goat to milk), Hestia asked how she spent her days.
“Hunting, mostly,” Asmeret told her between bites.
“Ah, yes. The Great Huntress. A special gift of yours, I believe.”
The old woman’s voice, for a few words, sounded just like her grandmother’s. She stopped chewing and swallowed the mess in her mouth, nearly choking.
“Oh dear, did I say something wrong? Here, take a sip.”
Asmeret took the cup and recovered herself. “You sounded like my grandmother is all. She used to tell me stories about the Great Huntress. I’m nothing like her.”
“Oh, you are more like her than you know. Both of them, actually,” Hestia said. “What’s that you carry around your neck?”
Asmeret lifted the pouch in her hands. Wondered what to say. “My grandmother gave it to me.”
“I won’t ask what’s inside. It’s your magic. I know about such things.”
Asmeret was startled, and relieved. She liked the old woman, and yet . . .
“Someday, when you are ready, you can show me if you like. Would you like to see my magic things?”
Asmeret nodded, hesitant, intrigued. She looked for the raven, wondering if it was some kind of a witch too, but it looked like a regular bird, perched on the back of the sleeping pup.
The witch cleared the tea things from the table and took a set of small cards from the top drawer of a chest. “Here, would you like to hold them?”
The rings burned into her palm started to tingle and Asmeret quick sat on her hands and nodded. “No thank you,” she managed.
Hestia hid her disappointment with a wink. “Of course not,” she assured the girl, “I’ll hang onto them, for now.”
Not sure what she meant, Asmeret watched as the witch fanned the cards, face up, in front of her. The colors and symbols swam off the cards, spilling onto the table. Blue-blue-greens and deep velvet browns puddled together, while red lions and white swans stalked one another. Asmeret squirmed but couldn’t leave her chair. The fire crackled to life behind her, spitting and sparking in the hearth yet the dog didn’t budge. She felt the witch’s eyes on her. Asmeret waited, afraid of the coming question.
“What do you see, my dear?”
A man with a three-ringed wand in his hand looked up at her from the cards and she felt the circles in her hand start to spin.
“Nothing,” she whispered, “may I go?”
“Yes,” Hestia said, “you are free to come and go as you like, you are welcome here any time.”
She gave the sleeping bird and dog a nudge with her crabbled old foot. “Raven will escort you home. It will be getting dark soon. Take bread. And cream, for your morning tea.”
Asmeret was out the door in a flash with the dog and the bird close behind.
After some weeks living in the tree, Asmeret woke up early one morning. She stretched. Patted the dog, which nattered at something that had got into her fur. Asmeret’s gaze wandered up, comforted by the sight of the raven, high above, preening its feathers. Behind the bird, the moon was lightly sketched against the dawn sky. Asmeret wondered how many days it might take to walk to the moon, then, as her senses came out of their sleep, she listened to the softly crashing waves of the sea and wondered how many days it might take to swim instead.
The raven took off, having finished his preparations, heading out on a hunt maybe. Where does he go? Asmeret eyed the moon again; marveled at the rhythmic rocking of the water down below. She had an idea. “Today I will find a way to the beach,” she declared to the dog.
She sat up in her nest and scooched across a huge limb that stuck straight out to the south, over the side of the cliff where the beach seemed less rocky. Yes, she had been right to think the shadows on that cliff face were oddly angular. Now she could see a staircase carved into the wall. She squinched her eyes to better see the steps, plenty wide enough for her to walk down. Asmeret shimmied backward on the branch. She scooped up the dog then climbed down a rope of vines to the ground with the wiggly bundle under one arm. “Ooooof, you are getting heavy, you little beast,” she teased the dog, who grimaced and panted.
When they reached the top of the crude staircase, Asmeret realized what a treacherous path it might be. Best if she only had to look out for herself.
“Stay here,” she said, pushing down on the dog’s hind end with a firm hand. She had to walk the dog back to the spot five more times before she obeyed.
Asmeret picked her way down the stone steps, pushing the flat of her left hand against the wall to steady herself. Instinctively she kept her eyes on the rock, rather than looking down at the drop-off to her right. She moved slow and became curious about the indentations in the rock wall and steps, like the tracks she followed to hunt, but shaped like shells and plants. Near the top of the staircase the shapes were familiar—though their exact names escaped her. As she got closer to the beach the tracings of long dead specimens grew stranger and softer around the edges. When a step crumbled underfoot, she just managed to catch herself. Froze.
“Focus.” she warned through clenched teeth. “If you fall from here, you’ll meet the same fate as these creatures.” She couldn’t help glancing down then, picturing the imprint her body would leave in the sand. Wondered how the shape of the dead and gone could still be in the stone when the body had blown to the wind. The body and what else? What is left and what escapes? The elephant graveyard came back again. Bones remember the shape of things. Was this wall a bone of something, or someone, bigger? Much bigger than the elephants that wandered ages ago into the volcanic plains to die alone? The thought made her start moving again.
After a time, she took her first step on the sand. It felt crunchy under her feet. The sand was as white as her feet were black.
Asmeret walked out to the sea. Felt the breeze on her face. She turned toward the tree, looking up, shielding her eyes from the new morning sun. Saw the tree floating in air, the roots dangling down almost to the beach, an upside down version of its trunks and branches.
With a jolt, she recalled the last story her grandmother had told before she joined the ancestors. And then she was in it, hearing the music, seeing the ghost animals falling down from their carousel. She watched their bodies hit the sand—skin and bones left behind in a pile, while another part of them fell through to some other land. Drifted in water. Then the animals paraded up a staircase again. But where? Asmeret blinked and it all disappeared.
She was alone on the beach.
One of her dreams that wasn’t a dream. Her grandmother’s story, but not that last piece. For the first time in years, Asmeret wondered about the truth in her grandmother’s tales. The tree was here. It was real. And so was she. She pinched herself to be sure.
And if the tree was real, then maybe the story of how it came to float over the sea was true. Had the girl in the story been her grandmother? Had animals put on shows? That was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Asmeret set all of her nine-year-old brain to the task of thinking it through. The raven swooped down from its roost and landed in front of her.
Stood eye to eye.
It spoke to her; heart to heart.
A question: Which way is up?
The girl was completely thrown out of her previous thoughts. The matter of real or dream no longer concerned her.
The question was too simple. Was the bird that stupid or did he think that she was? Was it some kind of riddle? Surely a bird of all creatures must know which way is up. Then again maybe it wasn’t a question at all.
“What do you mean?” Asmeret asked, eye to eye, heart to heart.
A black fingered wing unfolded as the raven grew bigger and bigger. A staircase. An invitation.
She climbed onto his back.
Asmeret settled astride him. She was looking to see what she should hang on to, when the bird’s feathers rippled up all around and soundlessly lay back down; her legs now tucked firmly beneath. All at once, with a gathering of a thousand small motions, the bird and the girl took flight.
The morning is dazzling, the air misting her face. In just a few moments her body remembers, a memory not her own, and leans in toward the bird’s outstretched neck. They dive first toward the sun, still climbing out of its bed, where it already pulses its full measure of brilliance. The girl’s legs are one with the bird’s muscular back. Her arms, now featherless wings, ride the waves of air that roll and swell over and under the pair.
The tree comes back into view—looks like a fallen star snagged on the edge of the cliff. Bird and girl tip and wheel in a great backward arc, looping under the tree through the dangling roots then over the branches, again and again, swooping and soaring until “which way is up” is of no matter to a bird and a girl.
The little dog watched from her perch at the top of the stairs. (She is braver than anyone thinks. Braver than her goofy looks and shy countenance imply. She is half the girl’s heart.) Curious smells drew her nearer the edge. Death peered back at Life—tempting and taunting. Come closer, Death whispered. Life pulled at her hips, backing the dog step by step toward the safety of the tree and, even better, the dark tunnel down to the lair where she stashes the bones the girl gives to her after their supper. The dog rooted in a corner and dragged out a bone. She sucked at the femur of a young kudu, cracking it open with her sharp little teeth and searching for the sweet, dank taste of the marrow. The fluid acts like an elixir, infusing the dog with new energy. Her short legs stretch farther and she leaps higher.
Often the dog spends afternoons chasing mice and plovers, which run more than fly. Once she came on the snake, curled in her double looped shape, so enticing. She curled up beside it and napped.
Some days she smells the other four-legged beastie. Stands in a set of perfect prints—her paws half the size. Feels her place in the chain of life/death/life. Feels watched. Puffs up her chest, tenses muscles, makes her hair stand on end. Bigger. Not so easy a meal.
Now she peers through the latticework walls, watching the girl and the bird dip and soar. Uneasy. Anxious. More rattled even than when she is stalked by the hyena. Happy again when they land on the beach.
Elated. Bouncing. Bounding down steps.
The girl shoos her back up the staircase.
Dog licks the girl’s long legs.
Panting, eyes bright.
Girl climbs the tree.
Raven lifts Dog and drops her in the nest like a helpless, baby bird.
She is indignant. No, she doesn’t like flying at all.
The dog and the girl fall asleep to the sound the wind makes in the branches when it blows from the four directions—arrrrraaaaaaaaaaaa.
Raven takes off to tend his night work.
So it goes for the next four years. The girl hunts larger game. Becomes more skilled. Develops unerring aim.
By day, the girl and the bird fly further, crossing fences, the borders between countries. Across the Red Sea. Fly over the birthplace of half of her ancestors to the East and the other half to the South, where the African continent tapers off into an ocean.
Once, Raven took her with him at night.
Harvest the carcass.
Drink the last breath.
Feed her from his beak.
She feeling more than fed.
Understands she is body and soil and death and breath.
And she is more, but cannot name it.
Flashes of memories cross her synapses, not hers, perhaps of the man.
Sips blood of the carcass—tang.
Watches Raven eat flesh.
Watches him call the other scavengers to finish. Hyenas come. They eat the bones too.
The dog diminishes in size as Asmeret grows taller, stronger. When they take off on their flights, Asmeret looks back at her. So devoted, always there. Waiting patiently as she and Raven fly into the infinite sky—their path looping back and forth in time.
One night they brush wings with a white raven and follow it to a field of broken metal and men. Raven set her down at the edge of the smoldering wreckage where the girl waits while the bird and dozens of other black ravens moved from man to man, performing some kind of ritual or dance. The visions come then, unbidden. A hut. A baby’s cry stifled. The body carried away. A woman walking out of the sea, painted in gold and bronze tendrils.
Each night the girl watches the stars; the pictures they make, clustered together. She looks to the one her father pointed out. A hunter with its bow drawn, aimed at the land beyond terrors, beyond imagination.
The girl visits the hut in the woods from time to time. Grows to love Hestia and trusts her as much as she can. One day Asmeret shows Hestia the things in her bag.
“Are you sure?” Hestia asked.
“Yes, I want you to see. And I am wondering if maybe you know what they do, how they work?”
“Let’s take a look.”
Hestia noted that more came out of the pouch than one might expect, given its smallness against Asmeret’s chest.
Asmeret pulled out a collection of bone fragments, in various shapes and species of origin; a bite-sized hank of zebra striped hide; an incisor tooth, from something once huge and fearsome; a bit of horn, unraveling into wiry strands of coarse hair; the wing feather of a raven (Hestia glanced at the bird; it scowled back and ruffled a bit); and the last—Asmeret cradled before setting on the table—a piece of quartz crystal, which looked like it had been sliced clean from its bed with a very sharp knife.
“Well, let’s begin with the bones, dear girl. Where did you come by them?”
Asmeret hesitated.
“It’s all right. Nothing you tell me will make me mad, or even sad. I only need to know to help you see what their use to you might be.”
“I found most of them.” She didn’t say before. The word for her whole life until her father arrived on the white bird. After was for her life since he left. Another white bird took him, they said.
Hestia, of course, had heard the rest too—the unspoken before and after. She proceeded gently. “Most?”
“The rest were my grandmother’s,” Asmeret audibly gulped.
“It’s okay, child. I know your grandmother.”
Asmeret looked up, surprised.
“She was a mystic, a shaman. A talented seer and healer of her tribe. You remind me so much of her,” Hestia beamed.
“But she never . . . They didn’t believe her stories. They laughed and let her alone in her hut.”
“Yes. That is so. Your grandmother was born at a time in your people’s history when the old ways crashed into the new and there was too much noise to hear the land speak. Sometimes the seers go unseen. Yet, she did her work anyway, didn’t she?”
Asmeret nodded.
“She told me the stories, about when the animals talked. When she didn’t think I was looking she threw these bones in the dirt and muttered to herself. She sat with me when I was sick,” her voice wavered.
“And now the bones are yours. What of the others?”
“I would hear something like singing and follow the sound. It always took me to the remains of a dead animal, half eaten usually.”
“What did you do?”
“I would sing back to it. Try to help it go in peace. Thank it for the meal it gave to something else. Then we talked.” Asmeret scanned Hestia’s face for a sign—satisfied, she continued on. “I asked them questions and they answered. Told me their stories. Not the ones my grandmother told but their very own. What is was like to live and die, what they loved most. Then they asked me to take one of their bones.”
“Some seers listen to the bones that find them to hear the wisdom of the animal guides. You carry all of the wisdom of your grandmother there, along with much that is uniquely yours.”
“I’ve tried to ask the bones questions and they haven’t answered, not once!” Asmeret protested.
“Even those who have a gift must learn to use it, Asmeret. I can teach you some ways to see, and get the answers you need, and in the end it will be all up to you. There is one way available to each seer, and until all of the pieces are in place, including your head and your heart, the bones will remain silent.”
Asmeret sat back and screwed up her face in a pout. “How will I know when I have all the pieces?”
Hestia laughed at the comical sight. “You’ll know. Now, what of these other things?”
Asmeret picked up the bit of hide and horn. “I got these after, in the sand, under my tree.” Her hand flew to cover her mouth; the tree wasn’t something she talked about.
“Oh, I know all about Tree,” Hestia assured her. “Your secret place is safe with me. And the crystal? What an unusual shape.”
“I got it from some old tree stump buried in the ground.”
“You mean your father gave it to you after you found it together on the forbidden plains?”
“How did you know that?” Asmeret shouted, leaping out of her chair.
“I am a bit of a seer myself, Asmeret. I would really like it if you could find it in your heart to trust me. I can imagine how hard that is for you, with all that you have trusted and lost.”
Asmeret eyed the witch. Then looked to the bird, dozing again on the back of the dog. She decided to try. Sat back down.
“What is the crystal for?” she asked, recalling her father’s explanation about the fighting goddesses causing volcanos to erupt, then making the dead in its path into jewels to wear at weddings and such.
“Crystals are special. Quartz seeks purity and offers clarity.”
This helped Asmeret not one bit. “So what do I do with it?”
“I can only tell you that when you are most lost, most confused, most surrounded by chaos and half-truth, the quartz will guide you.” Hestia thought of Artemis, curled so tight, the pressure of the entire earth bearing down on her body. Purifying. Clarifying.
Asmeret swallowed the sarcasm that rose like bile in her throat at the non-answers offered by adults. She was that age, after all.
Instead she thanked the witch and started to put the items back in her pouch.
Hestia waited, hoping for the question, exhaled when it came.
“Do you have something for me to put in here?” Asmeret asked quietly.
Hestia hurried, as much of a hurry as she could, and took the cards from the drawer.
Asmeret recoiled, holding up her hands—STOP! “No, not that.”
Hestia paused and turned. Confused herself. What could the will of the One possibly be? The child had asked for the gift, the cards she was destined to read, and yet she denied it all in one breath. Hestia caught sight of the rings burned into Asmeret’s hand. Of course. One piece at a time. The child is only twelve, can only do so much at once. She is, after all, mostly human for now.
“Of course, you are right, my dear,” Hestia recovered. “There is something else.” She hobbled to the hearth and fished in the smoldering ash with a stout stick that was forked at the end. She plucked out an ember, glowing red, and placed it in Asmeret’s left hand.
Asmeret didn’t flinch as she watched the ember cool from red, to orange then yellow sliding past a greenish cast, settling on a silvery blue.
“That is a firestone, Asmeret. You can use it to make a fire under any conditions.”
“Even in the rain?”
“Yes, it will even burn under water.”
Asmeret raised an eyebrow at that.
“What if I haven’t any wood?” Asmeret asked, thinking of the hours each day she foraged for sticks or waited for drift wood she found on the beach to dry. Thought of the wasteland of the volcanic plains. The endless sands to the north, that her father warned her about.
“The firestone is its own source, but only a few of us can make it work.”
“Am I one of the few?”
“You are now.”
Asmeret smiled. For once being the odd one was working in her favor.
Oxford
As Helge’s heart slowed, the colors of his boyhood sky threaded through the tunnels and alleys in his body once more. The last breath slipped past the tongue, which had swelled to nearly fill the mouth. It (the aspect of Helge that departed his body) rode the blue-green-blue breath, a shapeshift of ocean into rider and quest. Stars blinked and tumbled as the torrent of color rushed by, rearranging to make way for one of their finest knights.
North. North to the land of blue ice where a boy who would be an explorer once stood on the edge of the world and watched this wave as it was born.
Frieda slept with her head on Helge’s chest. Ben sat beside her, patting her back.
Charlotte knew he was unsure how to comfort these women in their loss. Percy’s passing had been a public affair handled by men in uniform carrying clipboards. Each of them had a scripted role. Here, with Helge, the three sat alone.
Charlotte walked to the window and opened it wide despite the cold. Helge had chosen to convalesce for these last months of his life in the attic at the top of the house. From here it was a short climb to the widow’s walk and he was able to make the trip every few days, until last week. Ben nodded toward the ladder when Charlotte met his eyes.
“I’ll stay here with Frieda,” he said as quietly as he could—even so the voice in the silent space felt like an intruder breaking through glass.
“Thank you,” she mouthed at her husband, grateful for this man who tried so hard to understand who she was and what she needed.
Charlotte couldn’t see the aurora hanging just above Helge’s bed, but she felt the electric force as it blew past her through the open window, nearly sweeping her up in its wake. She stared for a moment into the night sky, narrowing her eyes, trying to see what she’d felt. There, to the north, she caught the barest hint of what looked like a shower of tiny lights falling to the earth. Perhaps Helge was the true King of the North and with his death the constellation Ara had fallen apart.
Rather than climb the ladder, she descended the winding flights of stairs and walked out to the barn where they stored The Amelia.
The engine sputtered and Charlotte swore and pounded her palms against the wheel. “Fire, goddammit!” she yelled, angry at the machine and the gods and herself. When the engine caught and the propeller started to spin, Charlotte felt safe and held as if in a net made of silk and steel.
The Amelia eased out of the barn. Snow swirled in front of the windshield. Clear of the red double doors, Charlotte glanced up through the dome of the cockpit to assess the fresh snow as it fell wet and thick, pelting the glass then sliding off. She squinted ahead, determined to go. “Do your worst,” she muttered at what she imagined to be the Will of some ornery god of the wind and the weather, picking her out for a fight. “I am the Princess of Air, don’t fuck with me today.”
Through the white flurry she glimpsed a wisp of red. Charlotte’s body acted before her mind could form the word—STOP! The fingers of one hand found the kill switch and the other yanked hard on the brake. The Amelia lurched ahead, then sputtered out, while the wind made her shudder and the propeller continued to move with the currents. Frieda stood inches in front of the plane, her long red hair a fury, daring the gods and the weather to take her on too.
Charlotte broke then, the reality of the near miss surging under her skin. She could feel the chop of blades in her body the way they would have eaten through Frieda, mangling her torso and limbs. Charlotte jerked uncontrollably at the sensation. Inches, a moment, and this woman—who had become like a mother, her only family left aside from Ben—would have been badly hurt, or worse.
Before she knew it, Frieda had slipped in beside Charlotte. The touch of the soft fingertips, impossibly warm, brought Charlotte around. She took deep breaths as Frieda instructed, “Into your belly, that’s it, now hold it—count seven—good, now out through your mouth—steady—one two three four five six seven eight. Good, again.”
Now those hands pulled Charlotte into a cradle of arms, eased her face into the nest of the older woman’s breast and stroked her hair. “Not like this, Charlotte, you can’t go where he’s going in a plane. In the summer, when the sun returns, we’ll take his ashes back to Norway.”
“He never got to go home,” Charlotte choked—the words felt like daggers piercing her heart—burst the dam of despair she had held there for so long.
“Sweetheart, Charlotte, you were his home.”
They sat together, the silence of the winter storm broken now and then by a sharp intake of breath or a soothing, shhhhhhhhhh.
Neither woman noticed the cold slowing their pulses and numbing their feet.
Neither remembered Ben lifting them from the cockpit, one by one, and carrying them through the blizzard back to the house.
They slept.
At dawn, the three sat at the kitchen table where Gert had made meringue cakes for the Gulbrandsen children on their birthdays. Now they were gone.
“What about his sister, the one in America?” Charlotte asked.
“No, she is gone too,” Frieda said. “Helge wrote to her after Gert’s funeral and received a reply that the sister had died. Apparently no one in her husband’s family thought to send word, or knew how to find them.”
“And none of the siblings had children?” Ben asked.
“The sister in America, Harriet, Hattie they called her, had a daughter—and there are granddaughters. Three, I believe.”
“Should we phone them?” Charlotte asked.
“Write them, I think. That will do. I will take care of it, Charlotte, I have an address someplace for the eldest granddaughter, Alicia,” Frieda said, getting up to heat more water, make toast.
“So I will go into town and fetch the funeral director, phone lines are still down,” Ben said. “What else do you need me to do?”
Charlotte put her head on his arm, clasping his hand in hers.
“The papers are all on file, the orders for cremation, the urn, it’s all done,” Frieda said.
“I’ll dress and be off then,” Ben said, kissing the top of Charlotte’s head. He bent down to give Frieda a hug, pausing in her warmth. Charlotte watched. Of course, he was hurting too. He’d grown to love Helge almost as much as she did, although Ben’s father was still alive and that made a difference. He wasn’t an orphan like her. He wanted children so badly and still couldn’t understand why Charlotte hesitated. Why she insisted on taking private piloting jobs, traipsing all over the world instead of getting on with their life here.
Watching Ben’s car navigate the long drive to the road, Charlotte and Frieda made plans and ate toast.
“He left you the house and the neighboring farm,” Frieda said.
Charlotte looked puzzled.
“He bought it a few years ago, along with some surrounding land from other farmers downsizing their stakes. It’s what Ben always wanted, to farm, yes?”
“Yes, of course,” Charlotte answered. “I just didn’t realize . . . But what about you? You have lived here for years. This is your home.”
“Not really, not with him gone.”
“What if it’s not what I want?” Charlotte whispered into her teacup. Raised her eyes to meet Frieda’s. They both knew what was in the cards and, more importantly, in Charlotte’s heart.
“We will figure it out together, one move at a time. Me? I am going to India, finally.”
Charlotte laughed, “Really? Is that what all of the Bengal tiger paintings are about?”
Frieda laughed too. “You saw them? I guess you can’t miss them up there.”
Charlotte thought of the tigers watching over Helge’s body in what Frieda used as her studio now. “Do you have a plan? A house arranged? Anybody you know?”
“Nope. Just a pilot who can get me there and my free will.”
“When will you go? Umm, we go?”
“As soon as the storm breaks. Charlotte, will you really take me? I can’t wait until spring. I feel as though I have been waiting my whole life, and there may not be much of it left.”
“Of course. And I will come see you all of the time. We, Ben and me.”
“So that’s settled then. Thank you dear one. Now, back to you.”
“I just can’t be here, not like Ben needs. After all that I’ve seen. India, for instance, the place that will be your new home is in serious trouble. I fly over her every so often. The forced fracture of that country in two damaged the spirit of the land as much as the people. It yearns, Frieda. I can feel the two parts of India reaching back toward the other, longing and aching like a broken heart. It’s unbelievable what the lines drawn on paper by humans can cause. People massacred. Did you hear that they murdered the Mahatma? He was the very voice of consilience. We may no longer be in a world war, but the world is still at war, there is no doubt. I need to help, and I’m not sure how.”
They sat, quiet with their thoughts.
“It’s too bad the cards can’t just tell us what to do,” Charlotte said. The last time Frieda had cleared the dining room table and spread out the cards, the wheel had slowed and come to a halt. The key no longer moved at all. It was as if the deck and the key had run out of some essential energy, had lost touch with its source.
“We were never the ones meant to read them,” Frieda said, “I still have work to do.”
“And I will help. The Princess of Air is at your service, although I do wish I understood all that meant.”
“The answer to what’s next is always in the wind for you, Charlotte, and you have learned how to listen. Don’t forget. For me, I still need to get the cards published; the publishing house keeps dragging their feet and Aleister is making things very difficult on the legal side. The cards need to get to Africa, quickly, and America too, I can feel it. I have my deck and one other that the printers finally found. It’s like there are beacons out there and I can feel their pulse, drawing the cards toward them.” Frieda shook her head, exhausted, and sighed.
Charlotte watched the snow swirl through the window and was soon lost inside of it. She saw the flutter of red—Frieda’s hair flash against white, a scarf blown over the edge of a mountain into the clouds; the howling wind—arrraaaaaaaaaaaa; an African princess stands on a ledge—a daughter whose name describes the role chosen for her by the gods: She Who Unifies.
Charlotte looked up at Frieda, a strange smile crossing her face, “I think I know what to do next.”
By the time she had Frieda settled in the house near the Brahmaputra River (with hugs and promises that come summer in Norway, Charlotte would return and they would fly Helge home); by the time Charlotte had landed The Amelia, tucking her into the barn, and unpacked a few boxes (putting their wedding service in the cupboard nearest the stove, stacked together with Helge and Frieda’s mishmash of dishes from their combined households) a telegram from Anbessa arrived at the door.
PRINCESS, COME TO ASMARA.
HURRY WHILE IT IS STILL OPEN TO FOREIGNERS.
ANBESSA.
Charlotte had been worried about Anbessa and his family and Eritrea the moment the UN declared it a ‘Federal Component’ of Ethiopia. Massacres and ailing land were also the product of countries forced into an arranged marriage of unequals in size, power, and allies. In addition to all of that, his daughter’s name kept coming to her: Asmeret.
She’d sent him a telegram upon her return from India. Must see you, it said.
By the time she’d borrowed a jet from one of her clients, not willing to risk The Amelia in those perilous conditions, explaining to the ever-patient Ben one more time that she knew what she was doing, though she didn’t know quite how—reminding him of his own encounters with the magic in the cards, how they had predicted, or guided their hearts and hands to their own marriage—by the time she had packed her gear and the second tarot deck Frieda had thrust into her hands (trusting her with the next step in their journey), Charlotte was practicing what the hell to tell Anbessa.
If Athena had been paying attention, if she hadn’t fallen back into old habits war mongering with the men (now that the child, descendant of Artemis—her own niece if one cared to draw out the family tree—had been neutralized, nullified, lived life as a hermit, out of the way), if she had kept an eye on Frieda or even Anbessa (both of whom she had discounted as no longer factors), she would have found her Princess of Air. She would have seen Charlotte and realized who and what she was.
Charlotte was the only possible path to the throne Athena had now.
As it went, the whole business slipped through her fingers (or talons, depending). She was, after all, (mostly) only her nature and the stories written and told in her name—and there were plenty of humans whose only desire was to play war-games. Besides, she felt stronger than ever. Besides, she was becoming a bit, well, forgetful.
City of Clouds
Charlotte tied the red scarf tighter over her hair as the wind kicked up on the tarmac. The flags snapped violently; Ethiopian on top, the newly designed Eritrean Autonomous Region flag below. There was an awful, arrhythmic clanging as the metal rings hit the pole. She saw Anbessa standing under the flags, wearing a tan suit. He held his arm over his eyes against the glare. It looked too much like a salute. The military air seemed to have infected the whole world. Charlotte smiled at him over the grim thought.
The pair embraced briefly, then rushed inside away from scrutinizing eyes. African man, English woman did not play well, even now, especially here.
An elegant car with tinted windows carried them to the back entrance of a private club. “Where we meet with visiting dignitaries,” Anbessa said. “You will garner little attention here. It will be assumed you are the secretary of an official delivering a message.” Charlotte blanched at the characterization, then thought of how discounting the power of women had lost the Germans the war.
“Of course, I am happy to be with my old friend, wherever that is, under whatever guise.” Charlotte smiled professionally, aware of the glances in their direction.
“I am happy to see you as well, my Princess. Now, let’s have coffee and catch up on family before we get to your business.”
Your family is my business here, Charlotte thought, yet decided to wait. She needed Anbessa to understand, to believe what she was going to tell him, as hard as it might be.
“Ben is well,” she began. “We came into a farm and he is home now, getting things ship-shape.”
“Ship-shape?”
“Oh, pardon my slang,” Charlotte laughed. “It’s an old saying—nothing to do with farms.” Focus, she admonished herself. Clarity is going to be important here, given that what she was about to ask made little sense to a rational person. “Ben is preparing to be the farmer he always dreamed of becoming.”
“Delightful! And our friend, Frieda? How is she faring after Percival’s transition?”
Charlotte stumbled on the word, transition: translated in her head—transition equals death. She realized how long it had been since her last letter to Anbessa. “She too is following her dream. I flew her to India last month where she bought a small house with a sunny courtyard. She wants to pass her days painting tigers.”
Anbessa crowed and clapped his hands. Charlotte laughed, she couldn’t help it, that voice was infectious. So much for keeping a low profile. No matter. No one in the dim, smoky room was paying them any mind now. She recalled how well Anbessa and Frieda had gotten on during the brief visit he’d made to London. Wrapping up loose ends, he’d said when he took her up on the offer to give him a ride. She’d been more than surprised to hear from him. Charlotte didn’t mention Helge’s death. Anbessa hadn’t met him, and she felt too raw to speak his name and keep her composure. Keep her head in the game.
“Now what of your family, Anbessa? I have been worried with the UN declaration and the business of your neighbors. She had traveled on enough sensitive missions, for all kinds of organizations, that she knew to speak with great tact in public.
“My wife and daughter are safe and well.”
Charlotte had also traveled enough on sensitive business to know when part of the story was being withheld. “We have been through much together, my friend, and my business here is in the interest of your daughter’s well-being, I urge you to trust me and say more.”
Anbessa’s face fell and he slumped a bit in his chair. Lowered his voice. “Asmeret has disappeared.”
Charlotte’s stomach dropped. “Disappeared? How, where? Isn’t she only a child?”
“She is nearing thirteen years. She is alive; she knows how to take care of herself. Tigisti, my wife, gets reports from the . . . A woman who lives nearby and has contact with the child.”
“Can’t you go and bring her home, bring her here?” Charlotte was confused, and angry, she realized, that the obvious hadn’t been done.
Anbessa straightened again. “If she were some other child, that would be the right thing. Asmeret is not other children. I do trust you Charlotte, for more reasons than you may be able to understand. The ancestors told me you were coming—that I need to accept the gift that you carry and hope Asmeret does the same.”
Every hair on Charlotte’s arms and neck stood on end. She felt as if live wires had been strapped to her head. After a time, no one knows how long, she reached into her bag and took out a small bundle wrapped in raw silk.
Anbessa took the package from Charlotte’s hands, shaking with the weight of the task.
“I cannot go myself. I will find another way to entice her to take it. Thank you Charlotte,” Anbessa said, as if bringing their exchange to a close.
Charlotte was mystified. “Don’t you want to know the story? What it is, and why I chose her?”
“You didn’t choose her, Charlotte, the Great Mother did.”
Stunned, Charlotte could only murmur, “Of course.”
As a fatherless child, Charlotte needed to ask Anbessa one more question. She waited until she thought she might ask it without her voice breaking. She didn’t wait long enough. “Why don’t you take the gift to her yourself?”
Her question seemed to break something in Anbessa too. He wept silently for a minute then looked her in the eye. “I have equipped her to take care of herself in the bush and she carries the talking animal bones of her grandmother with her. She has known my love and has my whole heart. She is in more danger than my bow or my gun or my wise advice can save her from if I am home. What she needs most is protection from foreigners taking over our country. Here, in our borders, in our traditions, she may be misunderstood, even feared, hated, shunned, but no one will shoot a child or burn them to ash for the sickness she appears to have.”
Charlotte started to protest.
“No, Charlotte. Don’t be naive. I have seen it, and I have come to believe that you have seen it too. They rounded up those they thought mentally diseased first—the autistic, the schizophrenic, the epileptic, the depressed. Not the adults, the children. Cleaned out every special program, school, clinic, and institution. Experimented on them, raped and tortured them, then murdered them in the most barbaric manner. They are only animals, they believed. Only animals. Even that characterization reveals a deep disease I cannot let take root in my country, in my people. And so I stay here, I travel abroad, I make pacts with diplomats and sacrifice the love of my child and my wife. Sacrifice the role I could have played as a hunter and storyteller and chief. That life was taken from me. All I want is to give that life, the smallest chance of it, back to my daughter. Give her a chance for the life she was born to live. If I see her now, I may not have the will to return here to my work.” Anbessa was finished. He sipped his coffee.
“Sickness she appears to have?” Charlotte repeated.
“She isn’t sick, Charlotte. Asmeret is a shaman, one who will have more power than this world has ever seen.”
The Village of Ash
When the boy—nearly a man, in body at least—knocked on the witch’s door, Hestia was thrilled and terrified at the look of him. Angular, chiseled cheekbones, strong brow, skin glowing blue-black-blue in the light of the moon. His chest was already as broad as his father’s yet he stood taller, with his shoulders back and his chin jutted out. Bones the shape of the ancient kings. Beautiful. The eyes told her what he had come for. They had known the love of a mother, yes, but the longing and pain in them was almost too much to witness without looking away, those same eyes she had blessed and asked for forgiveness when she put him in Dehab’s arms (and put in the woman’s mind the name Asmara). Hestia knew what the boy sought at the hut of the witch—all that he had lost and nothing less.
Hestia invited him in. She knew something of him, having sent Raven now and again so as to be aware of his movements should they need to shift their gaze, but the less they looked, the safer he was. Even Athena thought the boy was dead, that Daniat had finished her work.
He built things.
“I’ve heard you can answer my question, help me find what I most desire,” Asmara said.
Hestia replied, “Perhaps that is true. First you must gift an old woman the pleasure of your company. Sit. Tell me about yourself.”
For some time, Hestia asked the boy questions. How old was he—nearly thirteen (and no men in his life to perform his initiation rites, she thought, chagrined). Where he lived (though, this she knew), what he knew about and what he did with his hands. Asmara understood how the water and sun worked together with the land to become grain and goat’s milk and bread. And how the water and sun didn't concern themselves with how much or how little bread the people would have but came and went as they pleased, deaf to the moans of empty fields and bellies. He learned to hunt when the grain and the goats grew thin. He invented ways to harness the water and sun.
Hestia fed him warm bread with jam and tea sweetened with rosemary cream, wanting to give him something to hang on to, the will to keep going even as she would turn him back. Not allow him to find what he wanted most. Not yet. He groaned and shut his eyes at the taste.
The day in the market filled the hut and they were back there again. The hood of Hestia’s cape draped lightly on long, raven hair, which drifted like spun silk around a much younger face—a body she had occupied for the day. She had slipped bits of bread and jam into the boy’s mouth when he came to her booth. Later she dripped sips of the cream onto the girl’s tongue when Asmeret asked, “have you seen a boy, just like me, come by here?” “No, my dear,” Hestia had crooned, “but do try the cream and tell your mother to stop for some to take home.” It had been quite a task, keeping Tigisti from seeing her son, and keeping the boy from chasing them home. The rest they did all on their own.
In those days, weeks, and years since meeting the girl (kissing her on the lips and feeling his heartbeat in hers), Asmara hunted bundles of plants, lured by their smell and fed them one by one to their goat, then gulped the milk. Hunted the savory sweet taste of her. Grew sullen and angry in his failure.
He built things to harness the water and sun and when they worked he cut them down.
“I know what you most desire,” the witch finally told Asmara, which brought him back to the present.
He looked at her, begged, nearly threw himself across the table. “Where is she?”
“Not here. Not now. Go home, Asmara.”
Though he protested mightily—offered her gold, his labors, his first-born child (everything he’d heard a witch might trade for), Hestia held firm and escorted him out.
At the door, Hestia gave him a bundle with bread, jam, and cream. She took his face, so familiar, in her crabbled hands, rose up on her toes and kissed both his eyes. “May Apollo and Orion watch over you, son. Forgive me. Someday you will understand.”
Asmara turned north once he was out of sight of the hut. He wasn’t going home and he didn’t want the witch to stop him. As he walked through the woods, he wondered if he had told the witch his name. Wondered who Apollo and Orion were; why they would watch over him. And what the witch knew that she wasn’t telling him.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Read the BLOG for the author’s commentary and orienteering to the story
Dig into the MAPS for annotations, links, and tarot tutorials related to this chapter
Reflect and share your own story based on The Ash Girl themes with these QUEST(ions)
Continue reading the NEXT CHAPTER
Share 3x3x3 with the buttons below!
