Chapter XIII
RETURN
There was still breath in the little black dog when the hyena showed up. The snake that had taken the cur to the edge of its life had slipped into the grass, leaving no trace.
The hyena was alone and moved in to satisfy her hunger. In her low position in the clan she often had to hunt on her own. This rare bit of fresh meat was not to be wasted. Her driving desire was to draw breath another day longer, pursuing life death and life in a perpetual circle. She bowed her head low in a rite full of grace.
She tore at the dog’s throat with sharp teeth, assuring the quickest passage to the next life for the animal that she could, then lapped at the growing pool of blood. Her body stirred with the infusion of minerals. The little black dog’s heart finally rested.
Hyena stopped drinking and breathed deep at the mouth, taking on the heat of the animal now dead at her feet. She flushed and shook as the essence—the quintessence—of the dog joined with her own and she became more than she had been a moment before. With this taking of one life into another, the hyena settled in to feed flesh with flesh.
In her desperate hunger, the hyena let down her guard. She was startled by a whoop then by exploding pain as the stone hit her eye.
Asmeret screamed—an enraged, guttural burst—as she shouldered her bow. When her eyes met the hyena’s and saw terror and pain her weapon arm froze. Her arrow would bring certain death. She reached for her slingshot instead.
Hit her mark.
Anguished sobs tore through her, wrestling her to the ground.
The hyena fled.
Asmeret crawled forward, shaking too hard to stand, and lay down next to the remains of her childhood friend—listened for some fading thrum of the other half of her heart. She stroked the white ruff; thousands of years of death and loss coursed through Asmeret.
The hyena’s head throbbed from the blow and the competing instincts thrumming inside her—run/stay; fear/ devotion; self-survival/love of other. Which of these impulses is dog and which is hyena’s? They are one creature now, so it is of no matter.
Hyena’s task had not changed even as she had become some new kind of animal—for the moment conflicted, in pain and half blind. She moved as the sea is moved by the moon.
Hyena loped toward the low hillocks where the den of her clan rises out of the grass. She didn’t make it back before she collapsed.
Two females of her clan, hunting together, found her on the border of their territory, half dead, and dragged her limp body back to the den. She smelled different, a scent that they feared, but they tended her anyway, licking her wound, huddling next to her, lending their warmth and bringing her bits of food.
The hyena returned to life, though she had lost her left eye.
Why didn't they leave her to die? Neither Hyena nor her saviors registered surprise or questioned or chose. In a sense they did as they were told, nothing more, nothing less.
When she had regained her full strength, Hyena left the den, never to return.
Tree by the Red Sea
Asmeret built a pyre and placed the dog’s body on top. All through the night she added wood and rocked on her knees and sang softly. As the morning light patterned the walls, she let the fire die and watched the bones cool.
For many days, Asmeret didn’t leave the cave, talking to the charred remains. One day she set down her bow and the arrows next to the bones.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she whispered to her friend. The look in the hyena’s eyes when she had aimed death at the animal made her question all that she thought she knew—about hunting. About animals. About who she was.
It couldn’t be the same hyena who had patrolled the land-side boundary of the tree all of those years. This one looked too young. Too inexperienced. Too frightened. Too small.
The hyena hadn’t killed the dog. Asmeret had found the twin puncture wounds on the dog’s throat, noticed how stiff her limbs were, as if frozen mid-step. Snakebite. If only I’d been there, she thought, then let the lament slip away.
It’s time.
I can’t live long with only half a heart; I will go see her in the morning.
At night Hyena circled the village of ash. Whenever Theia stepped out of the hut with the tin roof, turning her face toward the waning sliver of moon, Hyena hunkered down, silent, still, ready, and watched. On the first night that the child, still asleep it would seem, wandered into the field north of the village, Hyena leapt to her feet and nudged the girl back toward her bed. Other nights she would step between the girl and the envoys of hyenas that claimed this territory and stand them down. Hyena was unwelcome in their borders yet she had a job she couldn’t question, understand, or deny—keep the child alive until it’s time.
One night Theia saved herself. Half-awake she came face to face with Hyena, who had risen from the tall grass to herd the girl back, when some instruction her grandmother had given the girl took over her body.
“HYYYYAAAAA,” she screamed right into Hyena’s face, stretching up on her toes and puffing out her chest.
Hyena jumped, startled, and fled.
Theia returned to her bed and finished the dream she would remember many years later.
On the night her mother came and kissed her on both eyes and then her forehead, she thought that was a dream too. She heard her mother say, as she always did, “I will love you forever my Theia, maker of the moon.” When Theia woke up, her mother was gone and she knew the little dog was gone too.
9, July 1960 CE
The Village of Ash
Asmara leaned hard on the sturdy sword. It had been payment for his last services rendered—it was a beautiful ancient thing. The blade was inscribed in a language he couldn’t read yet the shape of the word filled him with a sense of power and destiny. That the weapon had been reduced to a hobbling stick, propping him up as he took slow, tortured steps, finally made him admit something was very wrong. What is happening to me? With every day, with every step, he felt he was nearer to finding her and he was falling apart.
This was a village of talented healers, he had heard. The Village of Ash is what they called it, strange name for these parts. He didn’t see any ashes except the smoldering heap in the village center, the same as in every village of his travels. He didn’t see any people either. Asmara sat, his broad back against one of the stones that ringed the fire, clutching his stomach, trying not to heave.
He heard her humming before he saw her. There, a little girl, no more than five, hummed and walked the line where the sun against the tin roof of a hut drew a hard shadow on the ground.
He watched the girl skate on the edge, arms outstretched, balanced, then pull herself up in perfect form as if to dive into the ocean of shadows. Now and again she made a little leap, or did a turn on one foot, serious and sweet as if she walked a thin wire strung over the sea and was testing her courage and skill. She came to the end where the dark met the light and there was no place left to go.
He didn’t see her watching him too.
Asmara winced against the sharp pains in his head and the sweat in his eyes, but grinned at the girl’s dance despite his agony. The girl tipped her chin toward the sky and let the sun flood her face with its terrible heat. Blue as the sky, Asmara thought. What a strange color for eyes in these parts, and her skin was a shade he hadn’t seen anyplace else on his travels. Her hair was also strange—instead of tiny tight braids, locks of winter wheat colored bundles hung in various lengths, bouncing around her petite face.
He stood, thinking to say something to the child, ask her to fetch her mother, ask where her people had gone, curious now if they were all the color of her.
Nausea rolled through his gut—gnarled fingers groping his intestines squeezing, squeezing—he gagged on bile and bit at his lip, cutting clean through it. Strings of red blood mixed with thin, sallow vomit. He caught the ground with his hands as it swung up at his face. Even so he hit his head on a rock.
He blacked out for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. The time that it takes to redraw the map sketched on one’s bones and hear a voice in the Hall of the Gods say turn around.
The healers of the village kept him alive with their oils and herbs and incantations. The women kept the traveler in their care hidden, orders given by Daniat.
Asmara dreamed the beauty of the barely-formed creature who danced in her body to the music of stars that only she had not forgotten how to hear. The child with eyes the color of sky and hair the color of wheat gives one perfect performance on a barren stage, her audience everyone and no one and him.
To the women who tended him he was a man in a fever bewitched by a force they have not yet divined. They wondered, alone and together, who this stranger (the same color as their tribe’s kings and queens) had wronged in this life. They covered him with elephant leaves and watched as he twitched and roared in his sleep.
Deep in his body, at the source of the heat, he is a lion, running and running, retracing his steps back to the girl in the market, now a woman.
He sees her standing, silent, still, ready, on the edge of an abyss. Wait!
Tree
“It’s almost sunrise, Asmeret, it must be done. This gate will close and may not reopen. Please.” She heard Hestia’s words as if she was underwater. She clutched one last wooden disk in her fist. The other stories she had believed all of her life had been uncovered, explored, rectified. She wasn’t a monster. Hadn’t maimed her brother in the womb or been the reason Daniat spirited him off into the woods. It hadn’t been her fault that he grew up without a mother, one of the lost boys of the market. It hadn’t been up to her to save his life, again. She hadn’t been sick and strange, but a shaman of her grandmother’s line who, like so many others, had lived with their true nature undiscovered—misunderstood, misdiagnosed—their bodies and minds unable to handle the burden of the gift without proper training and the embrace of their people. She couldn’t have saved Arsema from the cutting, she had been only a child. And giving herself to the ghost, letting him use her body for his own pleasure, had been the only way Theia, maker of the sun, moon, and dawn, could be returned to this world.
The last coin cut into her palm. The story she couldn’t face. The Princess of Air. The one named Charlotte.
Charlotte. The one her father loved and believed. His chosen family. Nothing in these re-made stories offered another explanation of why he’d left her mother and her. Moved to where? Asmara? London? Not here. Not here.
“Asmeret? What is it, dear? Please, let us help you.”
“I can’t . . . it hurts too much.”
“I know, I know. Once you tell it, look at its face, it won’t have a hold on you anymore.”
Asmeret wished she could believe it. She watched the figures hunkered down on the cards. Afraid to move it seemed, lest she stomp the life out of them with her bare feet. She could do it, she knew. If she chose not to take this path, the one into the abyss, the cards would fall silent, possibly forever.
She felt her grandmother’s hands, stroking her hair. “Think, child, remember who and what you are.”
“I am a great huntress, and a chief, and a mother.”
“Yes, and what else?”
“A shaman. A daughter of Artemis and Orion.”
“Yes, and what else?”
“The one who can see the whole story the One intends for us.”
“Yes, and you are all that you need to see the truth. You are light and dark and ash and heart.”
Asmeret shivered. Took a breath and held it, then let it out slow. Red Lion’s voice in her head, “That’s it, Asmeret, now steady your bow.”
He stood before her. Anbessa, Father, abo. She reached out to touch him, then pulled back.
“Ask him,” her grandmother urged.
Asmeret stood still for a long time, watching the image before her waver between Anbessa, small in stature with scarified cheeks and a lion with a massive, shaggy head and three golden rings emblazoned on his forehead. When her father stood before her once more, eye to eye, heart to heart, she handed him the last coin with these words: “I know you left me to save my life.”
Red Lion slipped through the hole in the floor.
A flash of gold light filled the room from below. The hole closed.
Confused, Asmeret stopped. Listened.
Thunder. But not thunder. Hooves and paws. Galloping in a circle overhead.
“Hurry, Asmeret, please.”
When she had finished making her final preparations, Asmeret climbed out of the cavern, up the tunnel and into the pre-dawn light. Asmeret looked around. She was alone.
She walked to the edge where the roots spilled over into the sea and called in a lost language she’d heard once in a shamanic trance, that translates, roughly, to this: “I’m ready. Come for me.”
Asmara clambered up the rough steps cut into the seaside cliff—the treacherous path that ends at her feet. The stone seemed to fight him, throwing low punches to set him off balance, then side swiped his ankles, knocking him down.
His heart drummed: she is real, she is real, she is real, a story he almost stopped believing, and his mind said get up.
The girl-now-a-woman stood at the edge of the drop gazing down, very still, out of reach.
He heard her, singing, but not singing. Arrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Stone stairs crumbled under his feet. He tumbled toward the jagged rocks that stand at the entrance to the Staircase of Epochs like guards at the gate. Asmara died by their swords.
Because he was not meant to reach her.
Not this way. Not as this man, in this body, this life.
Raven landed on Asmara’s bared, open chest, ripped out his heart and drank his last breath.
Asmeret startled when the bits of earth she had been working with her toes crumbled and fell away. She took a step back, sensing the distance between the shelf of soil under her feet and the hard surface of the water far, far below. The sea no longer appeared the bubbling, red cauldron as it had through the hole. The surface was dark gray and perfectly still.
Her breath caught sharp in her chest, and she resolved not to cry. Laying the bones, reading the cards, had cost her all that she was. And it wasn’t over. This part of the ritual would be the hardest. She still wasn’t sure she could go through with it. If she didn’t—no—she closed her eyes against that future, too terrible to face. For Theia, for the animals, for the earth and all who called it home.
Her neck throbbed where it curved into her skull. Fingers worked into the depression as she slowly rocked her head forward and back. Even my spine is tired of holding my head up, she thought. The firestone warmed as her hand tightened against the inevitable—its core rumbled and sparked.
It's time.
He had said she would know when the time came, in her muscles and bones if not her heart or her brain. Organs fail so easily. Don't look, don't think, he had told her a thousand times.
Where is he, she worried, looking hard at the sky. She wasn't sure from which direction Raven would be coming.
Blue sparks burst through her fingers and her whole body trembled. Her toes found purchase around a thin root as more of the shelf broke apart. She couldn't tell if she was shaking the earth or it was shaking her.
Do I wait for him or do I go?
She stopped thinking when the four winds whirled up from below. These gales were familiar; as a girl she had loved to let the dervish of air find her and make her its core, like the cardboard cone fed into a cotton candy machine she'd seen once at carnival in the City of Clouds, the pillowy, pink batting winding around and around the white spindle, disappearing it entirely. She had been thrilled when the spirals of air sucked up her playful screams and carried them off, leaving the fine hairs on her body bristling and her cheeks hot. Her scream now was not playful or girlish but something darker—animal, panicky.
When the wind moved on, Asmeret caught sight of his wings to the north, massive and full-spread, wafting above the staircase to the beach.
Then Raven dove, folding his wings back and pointing his beak at the earth like a bolt. Asmeret reached out and dropped the firestone over the edge.
She watched as it fell to see for herself. Sparks flared as the stone tumbled through the air. Flames stretched out behind, painting a trail of silver against the leaded gray sea.
Make a wish. Closed her eyes—one last memory of this life: Her father and she stretched out on the warm, red earth. He had taken her hand and traced constellations, called them and their stars the names their ancestors had given them. As they pointed, her hand so small in his, a light shot across the sky, across the path they had made. That one is yours, he'd said. Make a wish. Asmeret had wished and wished, not the things other children wished, and they hadn't come true.
She started to shake, let her mind wander down the path named regret. Then a voice, a chorus, of all her ancestors and guides sang these words: They haven’t come true, yet.
The firestone hit the surface of the sea. Earthairfirewater boomed and hissed as they crashed together. Asmeret opened her eyes and leaned far over the side, folding her arms back and crouching, steady. Saw shockwaves circling on the surface of the sea and the blue-white light sinking, growing smaller, still burning.
They were all around her then, circling, dancing, tossing their manes and tails. The ghost animals in their odd carousel. She felt the last of the soil and roots fall away. She clutched harder with her toes, crying out, calling for some shred of grace.
She glimpsed Raven skimming the water like a missile on target. Her arms lifted from her sides, steepling over her head as she drew the vibrating force of the earth through the tips of her toes, up to her fingers.
She lowered her shorn head until her jaw and chin pointed down between her breasts. Her toes unclenched. With a full gathering of muscles strung to bones, she leaped. She dove. Straight down, head first. No swooping and soaring. An arrow shot true toward the firestone below. There was no flash of her life going by in her mind. Thought, memory, language, emotion—all left behind. She knew this sensation astride Raven's back. She was born to fly and he taught her to choose it.
Moments before impact, the massive bird joined her in tight formation, belly to belly, wing to wing, eye to eye.
She opened her mouth and he fed her the heart of Asmara.
They had practiced and both knew their parts. Wings and arms tipped, necks reaching, they fell in fluent arcs, mirroring one another in this dance through the sky.
Which way is up is no matter to a bird and a girl.
The surface cracked open and they continued to plummet toward the firestone now buried deep in the mire. The water slowed them and tore them apart.
They landed in the muck at the bottom of the sea, arms sprawled on wings, where they all fell asleep.
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