Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Here our lord buries you, inters you, and

  you shall become worn, you shall become weary.

  You are to prepare drink, you are to grind corn,

  you are to toil, you are to sweat, beside the ashes, beside the hearth.16

  When she had finished she told me how the midwife takes the girl’s umbilical cord and buries it in the earth next to the hearth. The girl does not take the cord with her to the fields of battle. A girl goes nowhere.

  “No Amanda—it’s what my mother says too but it won’t happen to us. Look at Hypatia.” Canoes flashed in the sun on the lake and by the landings where we had always discerned vestals going to their altars. “See, she’s already reached the dock. Our city is right there. We’ve seen it—it’s too late to keep us here. Somewhere down there is the greatest library of the New World, as hers was of the Old. Our Academy will be the Royal University and—”

  “No, Ixpetz. It’s not that.”

  She hadn’t told me about the song to talk to me about our destinies. Or our umbilical cords. There was something else. Well then what?

  Le había llegado su luna … Amanda’s cycles had begun.

  “But. Let me see,” I said stupidly.

  She shook her head, and in her shyness I saw suddenly that this was why—all this time. She hadn’t been bored with us or me at all, or with Ixayac.

  She confided that Xochitl had known it was coming even before it happened.

  “If I didn’t know, how …”

  “Mother wouldn’t say,” Amanda shrugged. “You know what she’s like. But she had the cloth ready for me.”

  What cloth?—and why hadn’t I known? Why couldn’t I see? I wanted to ask again—but no. Tomorrow.

  Once again Amanda was the faster one, I thought, as we walked ever more quickly back down to the hacienda. So far ahead I might never catch up. I was the only one left. The only one at the hacienda not quite—still and ever almost—a woman.

  As we came through the kitchen door, I asked Xochitl, wasn’t ten terribly early?

  “I’m almost eleven,” Amanda said.

  Xochitl didn’t pretend not to understand what I meant. “Early, yes. Only by a year or two.”

  “Will my time be soon?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Your sister Josefa was twelve.”

  “Xochita, how do you know these things?”

  “This sorcery, Ixpetz, is called doing laundry.”

  “What about María, then?”

  Xochitl shook her head. “I should not have told you Josefa’s secret.”

  “Xochita, please. Don’t make all the secrets here from me.”

  Her eyes widened slightly at this—she looked not so much startled as stung. “There is no reasoning with you when you are like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Moyollo yitzaya.”

  Your heart turns white with hunger.

  I told her I didn’t need another proverb, I wanted an answer.

  “Three months.”

  “Ago?” María was sixteen. I might be five years away?

  It was unthinkable.

  †machos, hembras: males, females

  †manzana—block (as in city block) but also, ‘apple.’

  HEART OF THE EARTH

  And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom….

  BISHOP JOHN OF NISKIU, Chronicles

  That night I read until tears of rage streamed from my eyes. I had hardly slept in days and yet as I read now, it felt more like dreaming.

  Heresy. This new thing was in some way that still escaped me the collision of Egypt and Rome, and Alexandria was where they met. I thought I understood that in Rome treason had become heresy, but now in Alexandria heresy was being made treason. Of all places, Alexandria, a crossroads for all the faiths of the ancient world, a city much like Mexico. Heresy—it made no sense, for what could Xochitl’s parable of the trout have meant but that all faiths, all visions of god, were only the masks of what cannot be known?

  I could not understand this hateful book, much less how it was making me feel. But perhaps I had begun, in some small way, to blame Ixayac. There, too, everything was changing, everything verged on transformation. Coming upon us so swiftly, it had overtaken even Amanda. It shimmered all about us, and the magic of stopped time no longer felt so sovereign. Late that night there came to me the idea of making some ritual to mark the changes. I knew a lot about rites and initiations into secret ceremonies but I didn’t know any, or they wouldn’t be secret after all. I did know that the Eleusinian mysteries had five levels. Purification was the first, knowledge was only the second. Next came the riddles of a third level, then a fourth, where there was nothing more to know except through silence. And that was all I knew.

  Well, then Amanda and I would have to make up our own ritual. Surely that was better anyway. It should be like a coronation, a rising into loveliness through holy fire, a secret theatre of sacred gestures. In the hours before dawn the magic lantern of my mind swirled and smoked with the possibilities—rites of the Maenads and Corybantes, ox blood and hippomanes. I would bring the Metamorphoses and mark all the transformations—but no, that would be the whole book. We’d read just the stories of Thetis and Proteus who changed bodies as naturally as the flooding Nile redrew the shapes of the fields. Indeed this was the message of the Egyptian Hermes: that the flow of god’s truth plunged all around us in a swift flood, and that to bind its meanings into a single form was to dam that flood and incur the most terrible violence. Such a torrent must be touched only in tangents—riddles, enigmas, proverbs and chants. Secret initiations.

  We didn’t have seven hundred thousand volumes to choose from, or the painted books of Ocelotl, but I had Exodus and Proverbs. In Proverbs I found lovely lines.

  Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth at the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths …

  … hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother: For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head….

  Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

  With just such incantations as these might Amanda and I deflect the tides of events into channels of our design, just as we had done all around our house the day of the forest fire. At first light, I marked the passages with green strips of ribbon to show Amanda. I went to meet her, and there coursed through me a tremendous flood of energy. As we reached the far end of the cornfield a half-dozen deer leapt the fence just ahead of us. I chased them a little way up the path shaking a fist in mock threat, then turned and waited for Amanda. I began talking about our ritual, and tried not to take her silence for disapproval. It wasn’t so unusual for her to be quiet. But how very awkward talking was while in the lead—on narrow paths, head turned to trail a kite-tail of ceaseless patter, glancing back every so often to gauge the effect only to lurch over some tree root risen up to trip me.

  Today she truly looked tired. Had she slept? I asked. No, not very much.

  We were sitting quietly on the flat rock beside the little waterfall. “Aren’t you going to swim?” she said after a while.

  “Not if you’re not,” I said. She shook her head just perceptibly. “Did Xochita tell you, you shouldn’t when …?”

  “No, she said it would be all right to.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to that’s fine.”

  She looked down a moment and smoothed her skirt over her knees. Then she glanced up slyly and asked if I still wanted to see the cloth. For a moment I thought she meant the one she was wearing, so I tried not to look disappointed when she brought three out of her satchel instead. They were pretty much as I might have imagined, but th
ree?—four, counting the one she wore.

  “Mother said today there’d be a lot.”

  We decided to climb to the upper bench to check on the falcons. She had always been swift, always graceful, but had rarely seemed delicate—and clumsy, never. As we probed next to the waterfall for our handholds and footholds, I heard from below me a sandal scuff as her foot slipped. When she reached the top after me, her right knee was scraped.

  We set down our satchels and took up station at the lower end of the teardrop pool. The sky was a pale, clear blue. The first wisps of cloud gathered at the lip of the volcano. The falcons, all five of them, far, far above us, gyred at their leashes like slow-swung lures. From time to time the faintest cry reached our ears.

  We picked a little at our lunches. For the second day in a row I’d lost my appetite, not from annoyance this time but from excitement, though I tried not to let on. Since getting the idea for a secret ritual I could hardly contain myself—within me I could all but feel the ingredients stirring, churning, as in the mortars of the Moorish alchemists.

  “And NibbleTooth you can make a dance for us and I’ll try hard to learn it. I know—we’ll throw the corn grains to read our destinies. What else … no need of holy water—we have that here. We’ll take an extra long temazcal, then hold ourselves in the hot spring longer, deeper, than we ever have. We can even cook some eggs in the spring for luck. What do you think of that?” Still no answer. “Then we dip ourselves three times under water, like people do against the evil eye.” I realized that I knew so many of these things from lists of practices banned by the Inquisition. What else had they banned? Chickens—the drawing of spirits with hens. The African curanderos only ever used a black hen, which they would then rub hard on the victim’s body. If the bird didn’t die right there from the influx of spirits, its throat had to be slit. So maybe a chicken. “We don’t really have any caiman’s teeth, either, or stag’s eyes. But we can check under the falcon’s nest for bird bones and claws—come on! Or … all right. Later if you like.”

  She just sat there, her legs folded under her, looking out over the valley, not joining in at all. I so wanted to offer her the perfect gesture. “What should we do, NibbleTooth? This is the place of women’s secrets, isn’t it, for the women of your family? This is the Heart of the Earth. We’ll be doing it for Xochita too—I’ll bet she told you she would have liked to bring you here herself. Didn’t she.”

  “Yes.”

  She had picked up a pine cone, was studying it intently as she turned it in her hands.

  “We’ll bring chocolate, and tobacco, and flowers. What else?”

  She shrugged.

  “Should we stay the night? Should we bring peyotl?” I was not entirely sure what peyotl was—she glanced away from me now—but one needed rare ingredients for secret potions. She was always picking herbs for Xochita, so why shouldn’t she do it for us? “That’s it—jimsonweed!”

  Staring vacantly down at the lake she had begun plucking bits from the pine cone. After a moment she said, “Mother’s teaching me, already.”

  “Teaching you what?”

  “The ceremony.”

  The ceremony. The real one.

  My frustration chased my temper through bright spirals behind my eyes. I waited until I could trust myself to speak. “No, Amanda, we need something of our own. Or do you just want to sit around up here all day doing nothing all the time? No wonder it’s become boring.”

  “It’s boring for you?” she asked, startled.

  “We hardly read anymore. We don’t swim.” I knew I was being unfair now. “You’re not even interested in the falcons. You just sit around staring off into the sky.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “So we’ll get jimsonweed, no? We could go down right now, try to find some.” I started to wrap our tamales back up. “What does it look like?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t know or you won’t say?”

  “I can’t.”

  “So you do know.”

  “I can’t Ixpetz. I promised.”

  I was getting sick of Amanda’s secret knowledge. Had I not been telling her all about Alexandria? Did she care nothing for finding a destiny all our own?

  The fledglings had come back to the niche. The adults were nowhere in sight. A chill mist of tiny prisms drifted round us. Without our swim the sun was especially hot.

  “I’ll learn your dance. I’ll work hard to learn it quickly. And I’m writing a poem to teach you. I’ve already started. Listen …”

  I recited what I had written. She gave no sign of having heard my little verse, not nearly so impressive as the one for the newborn girl.

  “Of course, it’s not finished yet….”

  Her eyes had settled on the city on the lake. Something in her face then looked defeated and helpless, unbearably sad. I thought I was the one who was sad. At work in Alexandria now was something that I could not quite grasp and yet that could not be stopped. The Christians had begun destroying the temples of Mithra and then the synagogues. By the command of a Bishop named Theophilus the temple of Dionysus was pulled down, and after it the Serapeum in Memphis—though he dared not touch the temple of Isis there. When the other peoples of Egypt still did not rise against him, he sacked the temple of Serapis and the daughter library in Alexandria and took control of the Nile-gauge. And when he died, the new Patriarch, Saint Cyril, the nephew of Theophilus, carried on his uncle’s heart-sickening work. Saint Cyril? These barbarians were Christians. Theophilus meant beloved of god, but how could that be? What sort of god was this?

  Flying back with a teal in its talons, one of the adults hovered now and tumbled the body into the nest. The young falcons set to quarrelling over their meal with the most terrible screeches. For some reason their squabbling made me furious. I was on my feet, casting about for a stone to throw at the nest. There were only a few pine cones.

  “Ixpetz, you can tell me what’s wrong.”

  Amanda sat there watching me, her hands still, shards of pine cone patterned on her skirt. There was such a chord of resignation in her throat, it was almost as if she’d been afraid too, was asking even now to hear anything save what I needed to tell her. But I was no longer sure what that was—what was it I was afraid to say? Or was I more afraid there was nothing left to say?

  Hypatia’s private classes were banned now by Cyril the Patriarch, and only her Academy lectures on mathematics were to be tolerated—no more classes at the homes of leading citizens. And then something happened that I could not bear. The details were few, and horrible. I could tell her in the hateful words of John of Niskiu. No, for us, I had to find words of my own….

  Hypatia began to take long rides south along the Nile by chariot, making short forays into the desert. South of Alexandria were the Natron lakes, whose salt waters had since the most ancient times been used for embalming. In the desert lived five thousand warlike hermits, assembled now by Cyril and roused to a fury against Hypatia. One day as she had almost regained the safety of the city, the monks of the salt marshes pulled her down from her chariot and carried her to a church called Caesarion.

  The Nitrian monks stripped her, tore off her philosopher’s robes, then battered her to death with heavy pottery jars. To her chariot they hitched the naked body and dragged it through the streets to a place called Cinaron. There the monks took the one who had been Hypatia and scraped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells and pottery shards.

  These were the details.

  That day at Ixayac, I had just these few incidents to offer, and endless questions. For all their horror, they danced and japed about like tantalizing clues to a riddle whose answer I felt must seem one day, as in all the best riddles, obvious once found. Why had Hypatia in a time of such danger been out alone, driving her chariot through the salt marshes of Wadi n’Natrun? How could it be that the warlike men of God were led by an illiterate named Peter the Reader, that the manner of her death was in Alexandria the
penalty for witchcraft—inflicted now on superstition’s great opponent …?

  Hypatia’s murder was the end of Alexandria as a great centre of learning as the students and scholars and mathematicians and librarians began to drift apart and leave for other places. And as the Dark Ages began, the pages of seven hundred thousand books heated Caliph Omar’s baths for six months. Six months of heat and light for a thousand years of darkness. What sort of equation was this?

  And yet, despite my confusion, from the expression in Amanda’s eyes I was convinced she had understood—everything, even why I was telling her. And seeing this I was so sure the silence, this new, dark shape between us, would just dissolve and we could talk about everything, and my fears for us—

  “We should go down now.”

  She’d said it not unkindly, but infuriatingly all the same.

  I led all the way, not once looking back. Down the ridge of Ixayac’s nose, through the woods, past the trout pool and across the river. I skirted the maguey plot and then, instead of cutting through the cornfields for home, I waved her on and turned for the far paddock. Baggy grey clouds hid El Popo’s tip, and through them rose a plume of brownish smoke and steam. The sky was otherwise clear, the deep blue of late afternoon. Hummingbirds and bees wavered and mumbled over sprays of wildflowers. The pastures were a furnace, moist as the temazcal, the air a bellows—the cows’ heavy calls, the cicadas’ eddy and pulse, a bright grist of sound milled in its intervals and ratios…. To walk in that air was to eat, to feel it fill my mouth with moist earth, life.

  I walked to the fence of the far paddock where we had watched the black bull among the cows. The bull on whose sharp horns Amanda had hung for me a cornflower crown. Just a year ago, but so much was now different. My twin had had the change that would make her a woman. My own time floated near like an intimation. I felt my breaths shorten, a diffuse, liquid sensation in my knees and in the soles of my feet. It was like standing barefoot in warm shallow mud.

  HALLS OF JADE