Copyright 2009 by Melissa Bowersock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
ISBN 1448677734
EAN-13 9781448677733
First Edition: October 2001, Elderberry Press
Second Edition: September 2009, New Moon Publishing
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I want to acknowledge five very special people, four women and one man, who contributed a great deal to me during the writing of this book. Kathie Colonnese was with me at the inception of the story, and from her I learned about honesty in friendship. Mary Sojourner has been with me in mind and spirit, if not always body, every step of the way, and understood me and this book like no one else. Gloria DiCenso helped me to sort out the patterns of my life well enough so that I could be open to the voice of Greer and my own creativity; and Rob Allen has given me the gift of sharing with me his experiences of life and death.
Finally, Greer—whose book this is—has become one of my greatest teachers. There is a part of me that believes this book is prophecy, and that one day in the distant future Greer will actually live and do these things. I don’t know if that means I have reached forward in time and witnessed her life and simply written down what I’ve seen, or if she has reached backward in time to me and given me her story as a gift. I only know that some of what I wrote, I wrote without understanding, and only later after the book was done was I able to experience what Greer experienced. She has led me on a journey, not only of her life, but of mine as well. She has become my teacher, my friend, my sister, and my mirror.
I cried when the book was done.
—MJB
GODDESS RISING
Book I
GRACE
CHAPTER 1
The eastern horizon glowed with a muted light. What few small clouds there were hovered nearby as if drawn to the arc of brightening color. The force of the dawn seemed to draw in on itself, gathering itself expectantly. A soundless vibration of the quickening day hummed inaudibly, its pitch increasing as the arc of light brightened and spread. When the horizon was finally capped by the first sliver of pure, white light, the silent explosion sent out shards of color in an immediate, brilliant display. The new day exploded upon the senses like lightning from a dark cloud: sudden, blinding and beautiful in its power.
The girl at the crumbled parapet gave a silent prayer of thanks for this new day, watching as the dawn blazed and faded, acknowledging this manifestation of the Goddess with wide, thoughtful eyes. Converted to faith by the quiet beauty around her, she should still have given proper thanks even without faith. Only fools ignored the Goddess, and they only for a short time. The glory and power of the universe, the Goddess was at once all Love and all Truth, but at the same time She was exacting and uncompromising. She was as constant as the sun and as changeable as the moon, therefore one did well to appreciate Her and give thanks.
The girl Grace surveyed the new day from her high outpost. The Ruins had been much taller once—or so her mother said—but to Grace they seemed majestic just as they were. Five stories above ground, the Ruins were topped with the twisted, crumpled wreckage of its upper structure, the rooftop littered with concrete and steel, pipe and block. The walls of the sixth story lay in jumbled piles around the roof edge, reminding Grace of the castles she’d seen in rare, old books. She walked the wall and let her hand follow its contours, up and down, over broken block and masses of concrete. The jagged parapet could not have been any more perfect to her had it been designed this way. She thought the Ruins the most wonderful place in the world.
Of course she had seen little of the world, but what she had seen seemed wonderful. The jumbled piles of concrete and wood that littered the valley were furred with luxuriant grass, and everywhere green things made their steady, inexorable way into and around the dead monuments to civilization. Grace’s world was a wonder-filled mixture of exciting mysteries, lost knowledge and ever-present natural beauty.
But she really shouldn’t be lingering. The sun was well up now, and there were chores to do. Sending one last appreciative glance up to the Goddess, she spun away from the parapet and raced downstairs.
At fifteen, Grace was growing toward adulthood, yet her chores were still simple ones, the easiest of all the women. For years after the Shift and the end of the Bad Time, no women bore children, or the babies came dead when they did come, so that Grace was the youngest member of the small colony until just a year ago. The fact that she preferred the simplest duties only seemed logical to the women, even though she had become capable of as much as they. The birth of Nidia’s son, Zak, and then Corrine’s little daughter, Kaia, had not changed that. It would be years before the new babies could contribute to the colony in any way except as symbols of renewal and promise. Until then, Grace had the simple chores. The first order of the day was fresh water. Grace took the last flight of steps quickly, afraid she might have dawdled too long on the roof and her mother would already be in the kitchen ahead of her. The older woman had a penchant for punctuality and conscientiousness that Grace liked not to cross. Pat was a strong woman, stern and serious. No one in the colony would rouse her temper if it could be avoided. The few times Grace had done that had been accidental, but she’d still felt the sting of Pat’s reprimand. Pat gave no quarter, even to her only daughter; if anything, she was harder on Grace than on anyone else.
Reaching the last corner, Grace rounded on the tableau of Pat standing, hands on hips, over the empty water buckets and knew she was too late. She was in for it now. Hoping to avoid an immediate scolding, she swooped down and grabbed the buckets from under Pat’s irritated stare.
“I’m here,” she said, meeting her mother’s eyes quickly. Yes, I know you’re angry, her eyes said, but I’ll hurry. “I’ll hurry,” she said out loud. “And I won’t daydream. I promise.”
Taking the absence of a reply as a momentary reprieve, Grace wrestled the door open and clattered outside with her buckets.
“That child,” Erin said cheerfully from the long counter at the back of the kitchen. “She’s got more energy and more dreams than I ever did at fifteen.”
Pat, still standing with hands on hips, watched Grace trundle through the tall grass with the buckets banging at her knees. Her mouth set in a familiar grim line, she noted how tall Grace was becoming. She was growing too fast; there was too much she still had to learn. Pat said as much to Erin.
“Oh, pooh,” Erin pouted good-naturedly. “Grace is a wonderful child. I don’t know why you have to be so hard on her. She’s an asset to the colony. Why, with no other girls her age, she’ll have her pick of young men, and we can choose a good, strong husband for her, someone who will strengthen the colony. The Goddess shines in her, you know. You can see it in her eyes, in the way she enjoys life. Let her be, Pat. She’ll grow up just exactly as she’s supposed to.”
“Yes,” Pat said, turning slowly from the window, “I suppose she will.”
Grace clattered along the narrow trail knowing she would have to be extra dutiful for the rest of the day. It was no great hardship; she enjoyed her day’s work. That was the problem, really. She found small joys in everything she did and that, for some reason, irritated her mother. And it seemed to irritate her more lately. Grace didn’t wonder about it—Pat was just Pat—but she was aware. And she didn’t want to cause her mother unhappiness. She would just have to be better about her chores from n
ow on.
The day was going to be another brilliant one. The sun, well up now, was incandescent in its light, and the grass was so emerald green it hurt the eyes. In contrast, the dark escarpment of the fault was inky, the wall of lava rock featureless in its blackness. Above the emerald and black, the sky was a brilliant turquoise and a pale, waning moon preceded the sun in its arc. The beauty of the Goddess was everywhere.
The fault was one of Grace’s favorite places. The long escarpment of cooled lava was a maze of air pockets and tunnels, all frozen in time as the lava had congealed to rock. Where the fault itself cut a gash through the old flow, the twelve-foot edge of rock sheared down into a harmless-looking seam, and here the far-wandering stream tumbled down over the lava into a peaceful pool. The place spoke of violence and cataclysm—the essence of the Bad Time—yet now it was serene and peaceful. Grace set the first bucket under the waterfall and watched it fill with clear, fresh water.
She had tried to imagine the rock moving, as Pat said it had during the Bad Time. Pat said the lava was flaming red instead of black then, and it flowed with the slow heaviness of half-cooled grease. Grace put one hand to the dark rock and felt its solidity, its unyielding density. Try as she might, she just could not imagine how rock could turn soft and flow. She supposed there were a lot of things about the Bad Time—and the Goddess—she would never understand. She could only listen to the old stories and wonder.
Thinking of the old stories reminded her of the Prophecy, and of the Sibling. The Prophecy was a wonderful thing, a gift of the Goddess. It began as a dream, given to only a chosen few at first. Pat said those chosen were afraid to speak of it, afraid they were insane or at least would be thought so. But the dream was so strong and so clear they could not dismiss it. Then the Goddess sent the dream to more and more people, dozens and dozens, until they began to speak of it out loud. It was a dramatic, compelling prophecy; no one could refute it. It became the controlling truth of the peoples’ lives and soon there was no one who did not know the Prophecy, who had not dreamed it or heard it or was schooled in it. Now the people lived their lives by the Prophecy, and waited for the arrival of the Sibling at the Ruins.
Grace thought of the Sibling and felt a familiar chill pattern up her spine. Greer, the Sibling, was a woman of Grace’s own blood, her mother’s sister. She would be Grace’s aunt. Grace knew the lineage by heart, how the Sibling was born to the daughter of the last God-believer, how that daughter was her grandmother, her mother’s mother. The Goddess had been strong in that line back then; the great mother had borne twelve daughters, dying only minutes after delivering the last at the end of the Bad Time. No one knew how many of the twelve survived—the Bad Time nearly decimated the planet—but all knew Greer lived and walked the planet and waited. When the time was right, she would come to the Ruins and bring the force of the Goddess to power. The Prophecy said she would lead the people out of the darkness they were in; she would restore order and bring prosperity, and the people would regain all that they had lost in the Shift. The cities that Grace had never known as anything but ruins would be rebuilt and the Goddess would rule in love and wisdom. A greatness Grace could only imagine would be discovered.
Looking around her, Grace wondered how the greatness of the Prophecy could be more beautiful than the valley was now. As far as she could see was the vividness of lush green, the shining black basalt, the wide blue sky. Pat had told her that before the Shift this place was an artificially cultivated desert and that without the manmade rivers and lakes, it was arid and bleak. When the Shift had begun, the planet had been torn open and remolded on a cosmic scale. Great land masses had crumbled into seas while volcanic forces had thrust up embryonic mountains elsewhere, and rivers of molten rock had gushed from the ground and decimated once-fertile areas. Here in the valley, the lava river had cooled into a long, snaking mound of rock that now trapped water that before had seeped away into the dry ground. And too, Pat said, the weather had changed; entire coastlines had been restructured and the valley now benefited from cool, moist breezes that before the Shift had dwindled to nothing on their journey across the continent. It seemed to Grace that, for their valley at least, the Shift had been more blessing than bane.
But she had not known how things were before and she had not lived through the Bad Time. She had heard how people had died by the multitudes in the geological holocaust, how afterwards the survivors had turned upon each other in their struggle to remain alive. For untracked years, people existed as no more than scattered packs, foraging among the ruins, killing any unfamiliar humans who might threaten their thin hold on existence. It was only in the past few decades that people began to band together in groups and to try to live more cooperatively. This world of separate yet interacting colonies was all Grace had ever known. It seemed perfect enough to her.
The water buckets filled quickly under the clear stream of water, and Grace hefted them in either hand, mindful not to slosh too much. Four more trips would be necessary to provide enough water for the morning, then in the afternoon she would do it all again. Almost fifty people lived in the Ruins and the elder women cooked for them all in the great kitchen that Pat said used to feed thousands. Pat had explained that the Ruins were, before the Shift, a place where people came to relax and enjoy themselves, where they paid with tokens of wealth for such services as food, care and entertainment. It all sounded very odd and very eccentric to Grace. Why would people want to pay others to do their work, the work that being a human being required? She wondered at the loss of integrity that implied and remembered how some of the old women said that was why the Shift was sent to destroy them, because they had fallen away from the Truth of the Goddess. Pat kept her own counsel on that issue—as she did on most issues—but Grace sensed her mother did not agree. Although Pat spoke sparingly and kept silent most of the time, it was not difficult to know her thoughts; at least not for Grace. Whatever way was honest and held with the Goddess, that was Pat’s way. It was no wonder Greer the Sibling was of the same line. There were times when Grace had wondered if her mother could not be the Sibling of Prophecy, as closely as she kept to the Goddess’ truth, but Pat refused to even discuss the idea and anyway, she was getting older—too old, she said, to lead anybody anywhere. That was for the young, she said; that was for Greer.
Grace walked the trails back to the Ruins at a much slower, more careful pace than when she had gone. The full buckets were heavy and bruised her legs if she were careless enough to let them bang against her. The wire handles on the buckets dug into her palms and she had to stop periodically to shift her grip. It was good that the fault was not far from the Ruins.
The Ruins rose up out of the verdant overgrowth like a sentinel. The clean rise of its five stories was almost startling in the open valley; all other structures had been razed during the Shift. No one knew why the Ruins had withstood the global convolutions. Perhaps, thought Grace, the Goddess had left it for them to live in. The great edifice was pocked with chips and smeared with dirt and sooty smoke. There was no glass in any windows; the women had long ago broken out what shards remained in the frames and sometimes used them for cutting. Grace thought the glass wonderful and felt sad that the art of creating it had been lost. Pat had said it was made from molten sand, but Grace wondered about that. Glass was clear, and sand was not; and anyway, who could melt sand? Only the Goddess, she was sure. That was another enigma she felt was better left alone. Someone wiser than she might understand; she was content not knowing.
“Well, finally!” Pat said as Grace carried the buckets into the kitchen. The women had already measured out their ingredients for the day’s bread, and the fires were laid under the big oven chambers. Susie and Myr had their laundering buckets out, just waiting for fresh water to wash with. Grace gave over her buckets, one to Pat for the bakers and one to Susie, stood quietly while they transferred the water and then took back her empty buckets for her second trip to the stream. There was water needed for drinking, for bathing
and for cleaning the kitchen, for watering the garden and for the small animals. There seemed no end to their need for water.
That was something else the old stories told—how water had come into every house through pipes before the Shift. That was almost incomprehensible to Grace. What a massive undertaking! She could not imagine the work involved in that sort of accomplishment but hoped, if the Sibling saw fit in the wisdom of the Goddess, that this strange feat could be done again. Some of the things the older people talked about seemed no loss to Grace; she could certainly live without them. But there were some aspects of the world before the Shift that sounded wondrous and exciting, and Grace hoped the Sibling would reinstate those things. That is, if Grace were still alive when Greer came. For years she had taken the Prophecy at face value, as she was told: the Sibling would come and deliver the people from chaos. She had always expected to see that day until two winters ago when old Nessa had died. The weathered old woman—oldest in the colony—had cried, knowing she would never see the glory of Greer’s coming. She, like Grace up until then, had assumed their deliverance would be within her lifetime. The disappointing realization shook Grace much as it had Nessa. After all, the coming of the Sibling was what everyone waited for, hoped for, prayed for. How awful not to be alive when it finally came!
In a tearful panic, the then twelve-year-old Grace had voiced her fears to her mother and Pat, terse as always, had simply said, “You will see it.” The simple statement was not enough to override Grace’s fears, although eventually she understood that Pat knew and Pat spoke the Goddess’ truth. Pat had the dream of the Prophecy—something Grace had never had—and Pat knew things. If Pat said Grace would see the Prophecy fulfilled, then Grace would probably see it. But still that small doubt remained.
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