“Yes?”
“When Tarr spoke of marrying—he didn’t say this, but I felt it—he wanted only to share in what was mine. He had nothing of his own to share with me. And what he wanted to share of mine was my ... power. He thinks I will be a teacher someday, greater even than you, and he wants to share in that greatness that I don’t even have yet, if I ever do.”
She fell silent. Balat continued the slow strokes of the knife along the sleek side of his wooden serpent, also silent.
“Well?” Grace asked after a moment.
“Yes?” Balat asked back.
“What do you think?”
“What do I think of what?”
She felt herself becoming impatient. “What do you think of Tarr and what he said and how I feel? This seems important, yet I am not sure.”
Balat put down his knife and faced Grace. “This is important, little Grace, and you have figured out most of it yourself. But let’s look at it together.
“You are right that marriage should be a wedding of two people who, once they are wed, create a third entity that is greater than each alone, and even greater than the one plus one. To create such an entity, each person brings his or her own creative energy into the marriage and it is the mysterious alchemy of marriage that multiplies those energies to new, more wonderful accomplishments, greater than either had known alone. This is the ideal situation, a perfect complementing of spirits, where each draws from and in turn replenishes the other. The less than ideal is what occurs more often: an imbalance of energies. Sometimes the imbalance is slight and the union endures, although it may never reach its potential. Sometimes, unfortunately, the imbalance is very great and then you have a much different type of dynamism. Instead of each person’s energy drawing from and nurturing the other, you will have one person’s energy siphoning off the other; one draws from the second and the second fuels the first, but as you can see, that is not a balanced, equitable relationship. The one who is nurturing the other gets no nurturing herself; eventually her energy is depleted, and then both are left wanting.”
Rapt, Grace followed the threads of Balat’s words, weaving them into the tapestry he designed for her mind. She thought she could see the intricate pattern he was creating.
“Tarr and I are like that. He wants what he thinks I have, yet he offered me no compensating energy. Oh, he did say his physical strength would protect me if I were to travel, but I am strong enough in my faith in the Goddess; I can protect myself.” She thought back to the way she felt after their conversation. “Now I see why I felt tired. He was drawing off my spirit. I knew I did not want to marry him, but I didn’t really understand why. Now I do.”
“Well, good, then,” Balat said, taking up his knife again. With his smooth, slow strokes he began to peel thin slivers of wood off the snake figure.
“Balat?” Grace said after a moment.
“Yes?”
“Tarr says the people believe I will have great power one day.”
“Yes, I have heard some say that.”
Grace nibbled her lip in thought. “I sense that Tarr ... would like to have such power himself.”
“That could well be.” Slices of wood drifted silently to the ground.
Grace frowned down at the scattered shavings. “I will accept whatever the Goddess gives me,” she said slowly, “but I do not want such power. I do not wish for it. Why does Tarr? Why does anyone?”
Again the knife stilled, and when Grace looked up, Balat’s eyes were focused on something far away.
“Power is a very strange thing,” he said. “Some people think of it as power over others, that the power elevates them to master, and they can command and control others. People who wish for power sometimes want it for that reason. True power, however, is not control; it is responsibility. It is not commanding others; it is being responsible for them. You can see that in both cases a powerful person holds the lives of others in her hand, yet how she addresses those lives is vastly different. People who wish for power rarely understand that responsibility; all they understand is the elevated status and the illusion of control. For in actuality, someone with power has less control over their own life than someone without.” He smiled at her grimly. “But unknowing ones never seem to want to hear that.”
Grace nodded, agreeing. “I see that,” she said in a fierce voice.
“And you do not want greatness to be thrust upon you?”
“No.” She sighed, then fixed his eyes steadily with her own. “But I feel somehow that I may not be allowed to avoid it.”
Balat returned her stare levelly, quietly for a heavy moment. Then he picked up his knife again.
Very simply he said, “No. It is possible you may not.”
CHAPTER 9
During the last days of high summer, Balat took Grace on a trip afield. They packed light blankets and water skins, digging tools and a knife, and left the rest up to the Goddess. Balat had faith that She would provide for them, and Grace had faith in Balat. They set out on a bright, warm morning and walked north through the forest.
Although Grace had not explored to the edges of the forest, she had roamed some of the parklands and felt she had some sense of appreciation for the size of the treed area. Yet when Balat led her northward for a full day and they never crossed any more open land than a large meadow, she had to adjust her ideas. What she had thought of as a small bowl of trees in a gentle valley became a vast carpet of forest that stretched beyond seeing. When Balat led her to the crest of a long rise, suddenly she could see the huge dark shape of the forest as it unfolded below them to the northwest horizon. To the northeast, where Balat said they would go, lay a land of sparsely treed parkland with low mountains beyond.
“How far does the forest go?” she asked Balat in awe. Looking west, there was nothing else within her field of vision but the dark stand of trees stretching, it seemed, to forever. Had she not known better, she would think the entire world was covered with trees.
“I don’t know for sure. Many, many day’s journey, even moons. It seems to follow this ridge of high ground. These trees like it better where it’s cooler. Our colony is actually at the southern edge of the forest.”
It was hard for Grace to imagine so many trees for such a distance; she decided she would simply accept Balat’s assurance as her truth.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“That way.” He pointed northeast. “Toward those mountains. There is much we can learn there.”
On their second day afield, after camping on the ridge and eating berries the Goddess provided, they dropped down into the sheltered parkland that lay like a great bowl within the arms of the forest. Some trees grew halfheartedly in the parkland, but they were few and widely scattered, and seemed stunted at best. Grace contrasted their scraggly, pitiful growth with the lushness of their forest neighbors, and wondered at the difference.
“This land is not hospitable to trees,” Balat told her. “Do you see how even the grass is thin and brown? This ground will no longer support much in the way of plant life.”
“No longer?” Grace echoed. “Then there were once trees here?”
“I think so.” He pointed out a rock that lay half buried nearby. “Do you see that rock?”
She did. It was black, or would have been without a fine coat of brown dust on it, and was honeycombed with small holes and pockets. It was an odd rock—and it struck off a familiar feeling somewhere in the back of her mind. Tingling with a feeling she could neither control nor understand, she went to the rock and kneeled before it. Her hands sought out the hard, dry texture of its pocked face, and where her fingers rubbed off the dust, the rock answered with a dark gleam.
“I know this rock,” she said, more to herself than Balat. “Not this exact rock, but one like it; a ... huge rock, a river of it.” She struggled with the forms and feelings that were arising only half shaped in her mind. Although the rock beneath her fingers was warm with sun, she had an impression of coolness,
of clear, cool water. There was more there, but ... She couldn’t reach it. It drifted away, like cloud shapes in the wind.
“You know what this rock is, then?”
Grace rose from the ground and tried to wed the strange memories to the working of her conscious mind. “I think this rock is from before—from the Shift.” The word felt funny on her tongue; she had not thought of it in a long time. “It was supposed to have been ... not rock, once.” She sighed, frustrated. “I don’t remember, and what I’m saying doesn’t make sense.”
Balat laid an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “But it does, little Grace. You are exactly right. This rock was once not rock at all, but the blood of a mountain.” He pointed far off in the distance, to an odd-shaped mountain that seemed to float above the horizon. “That mountain,” he said.
Had anyone else said this to her, Grace would have scoffed. But Balat did not lie.
“How can it be,” she asked instead, “that this rock could once be blood and could come so far from its home?”
“What do you know of the Shift?” he asked instead of answering.
Grace frowned. Her memories were so unclear. “I know that the world seemed to tear itself apart and to reshape itself in a violent way. Most people died. The ground shook and opened up and filled in again. Then the Bad Times started ...”
Balat waited. “Yes?”
But she couldn’t go on. There was a dark curtain over that part of her mind and just the thought of going to it and lifting it aside made her afraid. There was something there she was not strong enough to face; not yet.
“I don’t know,” she said, wishing it were more wholly a true statement than it was.
Although Balat seemed to sense the omission, he made no remark. He never expected more from her than she could give at any moment, and for that she was grateful.
“What you know is correct,” he told her. “The world did reshape itself violently and part of that violence was the great bleeding of the mountains. Mountains like that one,” and he pointed again to the bowl-shaped peak, “opened up and bled liquid fire which hardened later into rock like this. The strength of those mountains in pain was so great that they could easily spew this liquid fire very far—even as far as you see that mountain is from us now.”
Grace felt it was true. As distracted as she was by the war of emotions inside her—a war she did not really even understand—she still could feel the trueness of Balat’s words, and knew he described the time of the Shift accurately. She did not know how she knew, but accepted that, as well.
“So all of this land,” and she indicated the expanse of open parkland, “was decimated by the bleeding mountains?”
Balat nodded. “Not only molten rock and fire, but poisonous gasses and noxious dust spewed out to cover the land. It is those natural poisons that keep this area clear even now. In time the soil will recover and trees will grow here again. But not for a long time.”
They walked on. Now every chunk of black rock they passed reminded Grace of the great pain of the world during the Shift and also of that shadowy place within her that seemed to harbor a dark secret. She found the combination to have a particularly somber affect on her and she walked most of the day without speaking at all.
When the sun began to dip toward the horizon, Balat prepared a place for them in a small bluff. The bowl of sand would hold the warmth of the day and shelter them from the night winds that whipped the barren land. While Grace made a small fire with her firestones, Balat searched for and found a large tuber that would be their dinner.
The night seemed starker here than near the forest, and Grace was not sure if it was the sterile land itself that seemed less hospitable, or just the thought of all it had endured. There was no moon, and the feeble starlight did little to illuminate the darkness. Grace huddled by the fire and found herself wishing they were back in their cabin.
“Could you not have taught me about this place while we were still at home?” she asked Balat.
Balat smiled at her, knowingly, consolingly. “You do not like it here,” he observed.
She flushed at her own cowardice. “No. Is it necessary that I learn my lessons here? Could not you have taught me just as well in the forest?”
“Oh, yes, I could have taught you well enough back in the cabin but,” he added before she could protest, “then I might not have learned my lessons.”
“Your lessons? But what have you to learn?”
He laughed at her surprise. “Whatever the Goddess sends to me to learn. You think because I am so old that I have nothing more to learn? Or perhaps that I am so infinitely wise? Either way, you are wrong. I have much to learn before I die. And you, and this place, must teach me.”
“I?” Grace asked in shock. “But what lessons can I possibly—”
He raised a hand to stop her. “Do you not know, Grace, that every teacher is a student also, and every student is a teacher? You will come to understand while we are out here. That and much more.”
Grace fell silent then. There was nothing more to say. She still did not like this place, but she accepted it as a place of the Goddess and as such honored it appropriately. She would survive her days here. She would get through.
For two more days they wandered the open land, sometimes circling about in an aimless manner, sometimes walking directly toward the mountains. They examined rocks and small plants, discussed the evidence of animal life that crossed their path and watched the stars wheel by at night. The closer they came to the mountains, the more evidence they found of planetary upheaval. Where at first there were only sporadic chunks of lava about, now the parkland was dotted with it, and the chunks were bigger and more jagged. At one place they found a crack in the ground that opened into a great tunnel formed of black rock, and they peered in curiously.
“Is there a giant worm that eats through the rock this way?” Grace asked in awe. Her voice echoed hollowly through the tunnel.
“No, the liquid rock formed this itself. It is said that when the molten rock ran, the outside edges cooled and hardened first, forming the tube, and the interior river of fire flowed on through and left the tunnel hollow.”
“How strange,” Grace said.
As they walked on, she mulled over the great changes that were evident around them and she wondered at the great creative and destructive forces of the earth.
“Why do you think the Shift happened?” she asked Balat. “I have heard that some thought the people were being punished for great sins against the Goddess. I have heard that those people, before the Shift, did not believe in Her but in a god instead. Do you think She was angry and sent the Shift as punishment?”
With no expression to give his thoughts away, Balat turned her question back on her. “What do you think of that?”
Grace allowed the idea to incubate in her mind a bit, then sorted through the feelings that attached themselves to it. She shook her head. “I do not believe the Goddess would do that. I do not believe She would become angry; sad perhaps, but not angry. I do not believe it is Her way to punish.”
“And I believe you are right,” Balat said. “I have heard several stories about the Shift but only one makes sense to me. Have you ever seen books?”
Grace stopped, thought hard, and nodded. “Yes. I don’t know where, but I have.”
“There are still some about, although I think they are disappearing more and more. Well, my mother showed me a book once. It spoke of how the people before the Shift had inflicted great injury on our world. They drilled great holes, moved mountains, pumped oceans of water from one place to another. They pulled certain elements they valued from the land and replaced them with different, less valued materials. In short, they unbalanced the world. They had the power to do these massive things but not the understanding of what affect it would have. I believe they unbalanced the world to such an extent that finally the planet itself, in an effort to regain its balance, snapped and broke. It was this great breaking that destroyed so much.
But as you can see,” and he gestured to the great mounds of black rock, “even in destruction there is creation. They are the opposite sides of the same face—the Goddess’ face.”
For a moment in her mind, Grace saw that face: half bright in sunlight, half lost in dark shadows, a beautiful and terrible face that brought forth life with one look, destroyed it with another. Life and death and all the in-betweens, the comings and the leavings, were at the command of that dimorphic, protean face. Feeling touched by Her spirit, Grace murmured a small prayer of thanks for this understanding.
They traveled on toward the mountain. It had ceased to float upon the distant haze, but now sat anchored firmly to the horizon and awaited them. Grace realized at some point that she had lost her apprehension for this stark place, but now walked over and amid the black rocks with an easy familiarity. She began to see how even the most violent destruction was not forever, for tiny green shoots thrust up from the dry ground and small animals scampered around the rocks. She found that if she looked for the destruction, it was all around her, but if she looked for evidence of life, it was all around her as well. The world, she decided, was a great puzzle of duality.
When they reached the base of the bowl-shaped mountain, Balat struck an early camp. It was still bright afternoon, yet he made ready for the night. Grace felt a small prickling along her skin and wondered what it meant.
“You have seen me find food for us,” Balat said finally. “You have watched me gather berries and dig roots. You know what I looked for.”
“Yes.” Grace had followed his moves with keen interest, learning all about the bounty of this stark place as he had taught her.
“Do you believe it was the Goddess who provided for us, who put those plants in our path?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe the Goddess will provide for us now?”
The question startled Grace a little. “Yes. Why shouldn’t She?”
Balat nodded. “Tonight we do not go looking for food. Tonight we sit and let the food find us if it may.”
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