by Неизвестный
And she had an odd thought: the demons in those clouds don't hate me. They're just doing their job.
“Your body can't receive you back. Dead is dead. The ones who do return end up as ghosts, useless victims of the winds.”
This was a new voice, not big like the storm. Rather it was soft and small and full of peace. Amanda had heard something like it before, at the fairy stone. If a voice could be called sacred—she went to her knees. “I thought death was something like going down a long, hollow tube and then meeting my grandfather or somebody and being welcomed, and—”
“Each person creates his own death.”
Amanda was increasingly sure she knew that voice. And if she was right—then maybe things were going to get better. “Who are you?”
For just an instant Amanda glimpsed a bnght, tiny woman, quite perfect, with rowan in her hair.
“Leannan, it is you. I was hoping it was. Listen, please help me get out of here. I've got to find a way to go back without ending up in hell.”
The Leannan regarded her. “You've set yourself a difficult problem.”
“But I don't deserve hell. I'm not guilty of anything.”
“If you want my help, then come with me.” Tom was at her side, looking large indeed next to the Fairy Queen. “Don't worry about your demons. They won't stop you going deeper into death.”
“Oh, no, that's not what I want. I'm going to get out of this. I've got to go back to the Covenslead!” She turned—and found herself facing a narrow man with a sneer on his face and rape in his eyes. He grabbed her throat with a wet hand. Suddenly both he and she were as solid as living bodies. She could smell his rancid skin, see his oily tongue, hear his breath bubbling in his nostrils. “Hey, baby,” he said, “let's dance.”
“Oh, God! Oh, God, help me!”
He brought out a long, serrated knife. “This is God ” When he started squeezing her throat, she suffered very real agony. “This is just the beginning, you stinking bitch. I'm gonna cut your heart out and eat it right in front of your eyes!”
The blade caressed sensitive skin, and she saw a long spike of flecked drool start in the comer of his mouth. “Leannan, please, you said you'd help me!”
“Then you must follow me.”
“I'm sorry. I will.”
At once the rapist began to change. His form wavered and he rolled his eyes. His knife fell into dust, his whole body shivered, twisting back on itself.
Then Tom was there, swishing his tail.
“It was you! All the time, it was you! You're evil, you're a monster. A monster!”
“He obeys the law, Amanda. And so must you.” A hand so small it felt like a little, warm mouse came into her own. “Come with me. I want to show you your past, so you can learn what's drawn you so against your better judgment to your witches. Perhaps then you'll see that you should go to what you think of as heaven, which I call the Land of Summer. You've long since earned your peace.”
“I want to go back. I've got to.”
The Leannan sighed. “You're very strong,” she said ruefully. But the small hand squeezed Amanda's fingers.
Amanda walked along with the Leannan. She wasn't at alt sure she wanted to, but every other choice seemed worse. She had expended her last bit of resistance facing Tom the rapist.
She suspected that he was only the first in a long line of guardians of the gates of life. The scorpion, for example, was worse. And the little bird far worse. And then there was Mother Star of the Sea. Dear God, she was the very personification of guilt. In school she had managed to make Amanda feel hell-bound for having an untied shoe.
“Will you please hurry up, Amanda? I'm having trouble with my damn fire.”
That was Constance Collier—and this place—they weren't on the field of skin anymore, they were—oh, God, this was all familiar. “Oh, Leannan, thank you, thank you!” All the time she had been bringing Amanda back to the Covenstead. Deeper into death, indeed.
“The veil between life and death is thin here. But make no mistake. I have not brought you closer to the resurrection you seek. Let Constance show you your first life. Perhaps then you'll see that you have the right to the summer you have earned.”
The meadow was clear and bright, and Constance was sharply outlined by the sun. Things were still very strange: there were people around her, for example, but they were mere shadows, seated in a vague circle. Connie was stirring a great, iron cauldron, and that was very clear, too.
She smiled at Amanda. “You're slow as molasses, girl!” Her voice renewed Amanda's determination. Despite what the Leannan said, she could hear how very desperately Connie wanted her to return. The old woman waved her long staff for emphasis. “By the very Goddess we've got to get you back.”
Amanda ran up to the edge of the circle. “Constance, am I really dead? This is crazy—if I'm dead how can you be here?”
“Go round the circle once widdershins and you can come in. Then I'll tell you.” Amanda began to walk. “Not that way. That's sunward. Widdershins is the other direction.”
Inside the circle even the air was different. It had less of the sparkle of spirit air, and smelled of fields and farm. She could just see, if she looked very, very closely, the faces of the people huddled around its edges. She recognized Ivy, and her heart panged to see Robin. But they certainly did not see her. “Where is this place?”
“We can meet here for a time. The witches' circle lies between the worlds.”
“I'm on the estate?”
“The circle is in both places.”
“What places? Have you given me some kind of a drug?”
“Oh, little baby, the drug is death! You are really and truly dead. And we don't even know if your lunatic of an uncle will get himself back together enough to return you to life. He doesn't want to, that's for sure.”
“But you sent me to him! If you knew this would happen—”
“To be the witches' guide in life, you must leam the secrets of death. And to do that you've got to die. Unless there's a chance you won't come back, you aren't really dead.”
“The Leannan said that you were going to show me why I don't need to return. But you seem to want me back so much.”
“I'm going to show you your first life. How you take what you see is your business. Now I'm going to swirl the cauldron and you lean over and look into it. Be mindful of what appears, young woman!”
The cauldron gurgled and gargled almost like a living throat; it boiled and bubbled. Soon Amanda began to see things rolling about in the murky waters. Shadows, faces. . . things that made her look more closely.
“That's right, that's good.” Constance swirled harder.
“The tennis shoes you wore when you were ten, some snapshots of you then. Baby treasures, too, Holly your dolly and first friend. And Old Moll with her nose askew, and calico Kitten Stew—remember them?”
“I remember.”
“Look, then. Look at life in the classroom.”
Something was wrong with this picture. Her childhood had not been a time of such terror. Or had it?
The waters turned and turned. She remembered sixth grade. There was Daisy O'Neill and Jenny Parks sitting by the window, and Bonnie Haver in the back, plump Stacey behind her.
Two swishing rows of girls came down the chapel aisle behind Mother Star of the Sea. They chanted to the Stabat Mater tune:
“Touch your lips to a weenie on Friday, And you arc doomed. Be a whiner or a masturbator, And you are doomed. Drown a baby or steal Mother's eraser, And you are doomed.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Amanda said. “Eating meat on Friday isn't a sin anymore.”
Bonnie Haver: “But you did it when it was, so you are doomed.”
“I'm not even a Catholic! Mother Star of the Sea might have secretly baptized me that afternoon I fell asleep at my desk, but—”
“You are doomed.”
Just at the edge of the circle Amanda saw the blade-faced man again. He was wearing a long slack coa
t. In his hand was a smoking soldering iron. He held it up. “How about some scars, girl?”
Constance brandished her staff and shouted: “Away, Tom! Come as her friend or don't come at all.”
“He's a demon, Connie, and I think the Leannan might be one, too!”
“No, Amanda, they're not demons, not those two. They're gods. Or angels, your Mother Star of the Sea would call them. In any case, they're a couple of whores. All gods are. They'll be whatever you want them to be and do what you want them to do. If you declare yourself guilty, they'll take you to hell and give you to your demons. Or they'll sing with you in heaven. It's up to you.”
Despite herself, Amanda found that she was looking deep into her own soul, where the moss of forgetfulness grew. And under the moss she saw: “I did tease that nun. And I did it on purpose, because I wanted to make her suffer. Oh, God, I did it for the sake of hate.”
The man with the soldering iron stepped right through into the center of the circle. With a shout Connie pitched back and fell among the shadows of her witches. Amanda looked at the blue, smoking tip of the iron.
“Now, my dear, open your legs.”
She would not. She was guilty, but not that guilty, “I was just a little girl. It was the innocent anger of a child.”
The man twisted and hissed at her, then in a yowling instant was Tom again, curling about her feet, his tail low and sullen behind him.
Connie came shambling back, brushing corn silk from her cloak. This field had just been harvested.
“The particular deity you call Tom is your familiar, dear. You must leam to control him. Until you do, be careful. Remember that he follows your wishes. If you stay on this guilt trip, watch it.”
Amanda looked at the cat. He winked one green eye.
“No, dear, ignore him. Look into the cauldron again. See what you've suffered on behalf of the witches. You needn't feel guilty if you don't wish to make such a sacrifice again.”
“I thought you wanted me back, Connie.”
“Not out of guilt. Out of love. Now, look. Look deep!”
There was somebody in the cauldron, a tall and furious somebody from a far place and a farther time.
“You're beginning to see who you were. You've been a witch for a long, long time.”
“That other one down there—I remember him, too. He burned me!”
“He always does. But don't be attracted by his bishop's robe. Go back farther, to when he wore simpler things.”
Amanda looked deeper into the cauldron. Just then it shook as if someone had kicked at it. She seemed to slip and slide away from the edge. The waters, which had been clearing, grew murky again.
“What's going on?” Constance rasped. “Who's messing up the chant?”
“I'm sorry.”
“What's the matter with you. Ivy? Can't you tell she's here? Can't you see her?”
“Connie, I'm trying my best!”
“This is the most important circle we've ever cast! Don't you dare break it. Now, chant, girl, chant!”
“I said I'm trying.”
When the chant became smooth, the cauldron cleared again. But it lasted only a moment. Soon the waters were more turbid than before.
“Ivy, you are breaking the chant.”
“I'm sitting in a damned ant bed, Connie. They're swarming all over me.”
“Chant!”
The waters came clear. Amanda peered in. As before, her childhood floated at the surface. Below came the various colors of other lives, whole finished worlds swimming in dim old seas.
Back Amanda went through the babble of time, to a tiny brown village huddled beneath something vast and tumbled white, a mountain upon a mountain of pure ice, a glacier.
“This was the first life, Amanda. You had just fallen from the eyelashes of the Goddess. You were new then.”
Too late Amanda realized that she had leaned beyond the limit of balance. She fell into the boiling cauldron.
There was a shock of intense pain, then she was suddenly sitting in a reeking tent. It smelled of rancid grease and human filth, sour breath and sweat. She gasped, shocked that she had suddenly reacquired weight and substance. Her mind humbled about in an unknown tongue. Her body was smaller but heavier, her breasts enormous pendula, sweaty and jiggling with milk. She was swinging them back and forth over a fire.
Upon her head was a crescent of hom, around her neck a necklace cunning-twined of last summer's vine, the one upon which the Red Goddess Flowers grew.
She was Moom, Daughter of the Red Goddess. Moom, the happy, the rich, the good! Round her thighs were fastened leather garters, one on each, made of the softest doeskin, well chewed. They were marked with the waxing and waning phases of the Red Goddess and signified the rule of the wearer, who could dance in them, work in them, give love in them, and never need for an instant to remove them.
Wearing them, she was the Goddess. Without, she was only Moom. She kept the knots tight, never mind that it made her feet tingle. Other women envied the garters and liked to lie upon her lap and gaze for hours at them. Chief among these was Leem, who would have been the great queen ahead of Moom had she not stolen a cave bear cub to keep her warm at night. Its mother came in a rage and bit off her hand. No maimed woman could keep hold of garters.
The ritual of the raising of milk went on. As she swayed and wove herself about above the flames, Moom heard the leather of the tent slap against the frame. The whole tent shuddered. A frigid gust leaked in, making the men and the children in the outer circle press against the women who surrounded the fire. Moom felt the milk oozing out of her bones, sensed it running along the milk channels in her flesh, knew it was filling her breasts.
They soon became huge and tight, brown-gleaming in me firelight, their nipples rigid and dripping.
The women sat back on their haunches now. All were engorged. They began to clap. Three times sharp, three times soft, three times fast, three times slow. They hummed the music of the bees, to bring summer luck to the family. First their daughters and their sons came to them and took each according to his age, the youngest as much as they willed, the older less, and so on. Through this the men waited.
Then each man brought to the fire something of their mysteries, a great black haunch of bison, a liver from an ibex, a mammoth's stomach still stuffed with flowers and roots. All of these things they set in the immense earthenware cauldron, the family's greatest treasure. They dropped brands in it until it hissed and smoked and filled the tent with wonderful smells.
Moom chewed the blue flesh of the stomach while her husbands took breast upon her, and then ate the flow of her monthly blood.
Thus Moom's family shared the food of men and women, in the lost winter of a long time ago, not too far from what would one day be called Alesia, men later Eleusis, the central place of the mysteries of antiquity.
It was there, in the hard spring of her fifteenth year, that Moom met the most terrible of ends.
The water had flooded their lands that Maymoon, running down from the White King's icy haunches until the men said, “The White King's piss is going to drown the world.”
Moom said, “We belong to our place.”
The men said, “We cannot live in the White King's piss. We've got to get out of here.”
As a portent a great piece of the White King, so large mat it reached far past the top of the sky,'toppled into the meadow with a roar that loosened teeth and sent the leather tent flying about in tatters.
So they left, all but handless Leem, whom they abandoned to the winds. They went down the long stone ridges, into the forests where the little animals lived. Life in the forest was hard, for a hunter could spend all day seeking a beast not large enough to fill a single mouth. Moom, though, had been granted the secrets of mushrooms and berries, so they did not starve.
Beyond the forest there were plains so full of bison that the very air smelled of them. Moom wondered if they were not a single beast with many bodies, so closely did they cling to on
e another.
In the center of these plains, where mere flowed water, men had made many leather tents, and even some of grass and mud, more tents than Moom had ever imagined in one place.
“I am Alis,” said the man of the place, when Moom brought her family down among the dwellings. “We are Alesians.”
“We are Moom.” She slapped her belly. “I am the Moom! The powerful! Full of milk and blood and babies.”
Alis laughed. He was tall and graybeard. “Eighteen times I have brought back the sun! Oh, I am the Alls! The most powerful!”
She was confused and amazed. Challenged by a man, who could not even let the Red Goddess Moon into his baby closet? How could it be that he was so foolish? She did not know that Leem had come here ahead of them, traveling fast because she was alone, and contrived this treachery. “You might dry up the Goddess! I wouldn't risk that if I were you!”
The lands of the Alis, she noticed, were yellow and dusty despite their river.
He threw her down and took her garters and put them on. Then he strapped a leather flap to his loins to cover his bull. He danced the women's mystery dance, slapping his belly and shrieking the birth cries. Then the Alesians made cages of strong saplings and put Moom and her women inside.
When hot stones were piled high around it, Moom ran her cage, and shouted and shrieked in agony unspeakable. AH one day as the sun crossed the sky of Alesia she suffered. And she saw Leem, jeering among the men, waving her stub of an arm. The bars at the end were covered with Moom's roasting blood, and she was purple. She was cracked. She smelled like the last of the cauldron. Her hair was nubble that crumbled off in her hands.
She called at last: “I am Moom!” And died.
The Alesians ate Moom and her women. They remained beside the river a full season after that, but the men made no milk and birthed no young. In time other women came and took Moom's garters off Alis's legs, and the Aiesians went away with them.
Amanda lay weeping, exhausted, in the shimmering, dying circle. The figures around her were exhausted, too, dwindled from ghosts to embers. Somewhere a bell was ringing.