Ankutse had outdone himself. The great table in the common room was beautiful wood, rubbed to a sheen and as smooth as stone. The bedroom pallets were all sturdy and level, the chairs supportive but comfortable. It was obvious to Greer that all of the craftspeople and artisans had given of the best of themselves to this place, and she was humbled.
“Please,” she said once the tour was complete. “Come sit with me in the gathering room. I have something to say to you all.”
They all sat, except Greer, who paced before the Goddess-stone.
“I can see just by looking around me that each of you has done the very best work you could possibly do here, and I am extremely grateful to you. My first inclination is that I feel indebted to you and I would very much like to give each of you a gift in payment for what you have done. However,” and she raised empty hands, “I have nothing to give you. You, on the other hand, have not only given me a beautiful place to do what I have been called to do, but you have given yourselves the most treasured gift that anyone could. You have made possible your own reward, your own honorarium, your own acclaim. You have given yourselves greater recognition than I ever could, for about you people gathered here, it may now and always be said that you helped build the Sanctuary of the Goddess.”
The powerful ring of Greer’s words echoed away in the great room and the people sat silently.
Most of them had felt honored to work on the Sanctuary at the beginning and had thought little about reward. They would gladly have done all they could with no payment expected. But sitting here now in the great, open room with Greer’s words ringing away in the silence, suddenly they saw themselves as Greer saw them: good people, generous people, hard-working people, people who had carried a dream in their hearts and had finally built it solidly in the world so that all could see it. They knew that the Goddess praised them even as they praised Her, and loved them and smiled on them. They saw that they had truly created for themselves a most wonderful gift.
“Hooray for us!” Ankutse bellowed out, jumping abruptly to his feet. “Hooray for us!”
“Hooray for the Sanctuary!” Asherah called, standing up beside Ankutse.
“Hooray for Greer!” Mazar and Ivan and all the workmen were on their feet, all calling out, arms raised, voices ringing.
“Hooray! Hooray!”
The temple rang with the cheers, its walls catching the joyful sounds and tossing them back, laughing. Greer stood still and felt the waves of pride and love and community breaking over her and, smiling, she cried.
Other people, hearing the shouts, came running. In ones and twos they came, asking questions with their eyes, but instead of getting answers they were simply swept up in the celebration until they, too, laughed and clapped and cheered. Soon the gathering room of the Sanctuary was full and overflowing, and people danced through the windows and out around the walls. As darkness fell, people brought lamps and the Sanctuary was ablaze with fire and light. The children, exhilarated by their open schooling, laughed and squealed and understood that something wonderful was happening, just as Hannah said it would. It was a party to commemorate the building of the Sanctuary and a celebration of life. It was accomplishment and pride and joy and gratitude. It was the sound of the Goddess smiling.
Late that night when the waning crescent moon rose timidly into the black sky, Greer walked alone through the empty building. All the revelers were gone; the colony was silent. It was just she and the Goddess and the light of the crescent moon. Her footsteps echoed softly on the hard floor.
Greer felt very odd. The Sanctuary was empty, and yet each room felt alive with fullness. There was—would be—joy in these rooms, and pain; dreams and disappointments. She could feel sorrow and boundless love; sweet, new life, and slow death. All the stages of life would play out within these walls and she would see them all.
Standing at the great arched window, she looked up at the curved sliver of moon and felt its silvery light shimmer down on her. The cool light shone on her upturned face and she could feel it infusing her with a power of spirit. She breathed deeply, dragging in great lungfuls of magical light, pulling it into her body and blood and soul. The moon belonged to the Goddess; she breathed in the Goddess’ light. It infused her, fueled her, set her blood singing. Her being resonated to a high, fast vibration that was the dance of the stars.
Turning back to the open rooms, she saw with a clarity that was surreal, yet she also saw ghosts that drifted and wavered. Her vision was at once crystalline and smoky, clear and hazy. She saw what was and what would be; what had been and would never be again. Before her other-seeing eyes, she saw the ghost of Balat, the ghost of Grace, the ghost of an older Greer. They formed and shifted and reformed, past and future melting one into the other, forward and back, backward and forward.
Greer felt herself trembling and sank to her knees on the hard floor before she fell. The parade of visions continued their eternal, unique ebb and flow. A strange feeling crept into Greer. She put her hands together and prayed.
“Great Goddess, please hear me. I am confused. I feel as if this place, this temple we have built to You, is a beginning and all our greatest work will now begin. But I also feel that this is an end, and that the greatest work has already been done.” Greer looked around as if she might see the Goddess standing back in a shadowy corner. There was only empty air.
“There is much to do before our people are secure and cared for. There is much to do to free us from our past. And yet ... ” An uneasiness coiled in her stomach. “And yet, all is in motion already. We have books, we have a school for our children, we have food and work and love. What more is there for me to do but ride the wave that washes over us?” She felt her eyes pool with grieving.
“Great Goddess,” she said through her tears, “I am afraid. I do not know if I am starting now or ending. I do not know if I am growing or dying. Should I rejoice or grieve? Should I sing or cry? I feel very alone.”
No answer came to her. Only the tangible emptiness of the rooms echoed her words. She looked around for a sign, a vision, the changing of something old into something new, but there was nothing. The rooms were dark; the floor around her pooled with moonlight. Her shadow was the only one reflected there.
“Then I must feel alone,” Greer said in a small voice. “I must feel this confusion until it becomes clear to me. That is my path.”
She lifted her head and saw through the window to the shimmering stars beyond. She knew, even in her aloneness, that the Goddess was there and created such gifts.
“Great Goddess,” she breathed, “I do love you. I do.”
CHAPTER 25
Greer and Hannah moved into the Sanctuary.
Abel would have had them leave all their crude belongings in the hovel, to be burned or destroyed while they acclimated themselves to their new, more spacious home, but neither woman would agree. The two of them carried all that they had, from the plainest wooden bowl to the finest robe, and put their things in their new abode. Many of the people offered help, but the two women preferred to do it alone.
“The children asked me if I would show them all the Sanctuary,” Hannah told Greer. “I told them no. That was difficult when for days and days I’ve said only yes to them before.”
Greer nodded. “It will be one of few times. The gathering room belongs to all; these back rooms are ours. Even the Goddess has Her privacy, and we shall have ours.”
“And the two extra rooms?” Hannah asked. “Do you know who will live in them?”
Greer shook her head. “No. But they will come in their time.”
Ankutse stayed available to Greer for whatever additions she might want in the way of furnishings. She and Hannah asked for two more benches for outside the gathering room, and then planted a tree between them. There would come a time when the great room would not be large enough to hold all the seekers who made pilgrimage there and the yard would be hard packed by innumerable feet. Hannah and the children planted flowers against the wal
ls.
It wasn’t long before Greer realized she herself would need a place to sit. Once she and Hannah occupied the Sanctuary, people came daily to petition, to worship, to feel peace, to air grievances, and Greer found she needed a chair to sit in while working through her agenda. She took her need to Ankutse and he seemed pleased.
“I will build you a throne,” he said, gesturing toward the expanse of the great room, “where you can hand down judgments in comfort.”
“No.” Greer shook her head. “Make me a simple chair, to set below the Goddess-stone. I will give counsel, not judgment, and I will do it as humbly as I may. A simple chair, Ankutse, for a simple human.”
Baffled, wondering, Ankutse obeyed.
Once the chair was built and set below the stone, Greer found she could hold the Goddess’ court in patience and ease. She heard every prayer, every wish, every complaint and gave each her attention. She listened, comforted and counseled. She began to feel the rhythm of the colony, the ebb and flow of the people, through their concerns and she began to feel a kinship to them that was new.
“Do you know,” she told Hannah one night, “I am beginning to feel like a mother? I feel as if I have all these children, now, coming to me with their joys and pains. It is a very different feeling than I’ve had before.”
“I think I know that feeling,” Hannah said. “It is motherhood, but in a much larger sense than simply being the mother of a child. It is almost as if we have carried the world in our wombs and have borne all these people as our children.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Greer agreed. “It is a large feeling. And right now it feels very good.”
Almost as if the completion of the Sanctuary were an extrasensory signal somehow, more and more people surged into the valley, swelling the numbers of the colony. Luckily the growing season had been good so both food and work were plentiful. Abel reported to Greer that construction of houses continued and that he expected they could build throughout the winter due to the mild climate, but that the residential area was becoming jumbled.
“Take Ankutse and Asherah,” Greer told him, “and sit down and map out the growth. We must have lanes between the houses and broad paths were people walk. Make them wide enough for carts. Asherah will have a good sense for other things that we must consider, also.”
Even in the waning days of autumn, the valley was an engine of industry. The days shortened, the nights grew colder, and still the work went on. Greer tried to keep count of all the new faces that came before her to seek comfort and blessing, but she lost track after only a few days. There were too many; she no longer knew everyone’s name.
One morning Greer awoke to the cool gray before dawn feeling as if her head would burst. When she failed to rouse, Hannah came to wake her.
“Greer? Oh, you are awake. What’s wrong? You don’t look well.”
“My head,” Greer moaned. Even the half-light felt like splinters in her eyes and Hannah’s soft voice was a pounding drumbeat. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Greer said. “My head feels like it may explode.”
“Shhh.” Hannah stroked Greer’s hot, aching brow and pulled the bedclothes back over her. “Sleep if you can. I’ll get a cool cloth for your head and some tea. Don’t worry about today; the colony can survive one day without your guiding them. Try to sleep.”
The hot tea and cool cloth helped only in so far as Greer was able to fall back into a troubled sleep. It was not a sleep of rest. She dreamed that her headache was a vortex of pain that seized upon her intellect and isolated it from her other senses. In her dream, she watched herself as her body was stretched out in a long, grotesque caricature of herself, her limbs and torso long and thin and elastic, her head large and bulging with pain. She tried to fight the sensations but the pain weakened her. She felt drained, exhausted. She wanted to battle the drawing out of her body, but she had no strength for it. Finally she surrendered to it all—the pain, the pulling, the exhaustion, the powerlessness—and felt herself sinking down into it as if an ocean swallowed her in its liquid rhythm. She let herself be drawn down, deeper and deeper, into the soft blackness, until even the pain disappeared.
Rousing sometime later, she blinked open her eyes to see the whole of the valley laid out far below her. She was high and away as if she stood on the crest of the high mountains, yet when she looked down, even they were far below. She stood on nothing; she drifted easily on the cold, thin air. The day gleamed with the bright silver light of afternoon.
Looking down, Greer could piece out the entire valley. It looked different than she would have expected. The Ruins rose up in its broken splendor, the ragged sovereign of the valley. There were many more houses around it than she remembered. The Sanctuary faced it across the open yard—but the Sanctuary was different. She looked closely at it. The front part was the same, the high arched window of the great room intact, but the back part was changed. The roof over the private rooms had been built on, built up, so that an entire second story reared above the front half. How could that be, thought Greer in disbelief. She had looked over the Sanctuary last night in the orange light of sundown and there had been no second story. It was impossible for one to be there now, only half a day later.
She tore her eyes from the strange addition and scanned the valley again. There were a great many buildings, hundreds of houses fanning out in rows behind the Ruins. More people than she had ever seen moved along the pathways and cart trails. Southeast of the Sanctuary, in what was open land yesterday, a young orchard had been planted.
Greer felt the air leave her lungs and felt as if she’d been struck. For a moment she teetered in space, unsteady and flailing. Then a gust of warm spring air billowed up beneath her and seemed to hold her cradled. She gathered her senses about her and forced her mind to function.
The valley she looked down upon was not the valley she’d slept in last night. This was the valley in some distant future. She did not know where her certainty came from, only that she was certain. She was seeing the future.
She also knew that, down there in that valley, she and her present body no longer existed. She was dead in this future time. Her body was buried beneath one of the trees in the new orchard and the life force of her body now replenished the earth and nurtured the tree.
Tears ran down her face. She wasn’t sure if she felt more joy or sadness. It would be sad to leave the valley, she knew; to leave the people she had come to love, to leave the green grass and black lava against an azure sky. But there was joy beyond the sadness, joy that no living human might know. It was the ultimate release, the incomprehensible freedom. It burst in her and drove her upward, toward the sun. She flew toward it with open eyes, its brightness blinding her, its warmth pulling her in. She closed her eyes and embraced its pull, flying up the beacon. With a powerful jolt, she fell up into the sun, a prayer of thanks on her lips.
When she awoke, it was still gray. The dream must not have lasted any time at all. Thankfully she noted that her headache was gone. Hannah and her wonderful healing teas.
As if conjured up by thought, Hannah pushed aside the doorway curtain and came in. She was halfway to the bedside before she realized Greer’s eyes were open.
“Oh! You’re awake. How do you feel?”
“Much better,” Greer said, sitting up slightly. “The headache is gone already, which is amazing. I’m still a bit tired, though. I dreamed and I don’t feel as if I rested much.” She touched her temples lightly. “But your tea must have cured my headache almost instantly. It’s still not quite dawn.”
Puzzled for a moment, Hannah looked concerned. She sat on the bed and leaned toward Greer.
“Greer, this is not the morning. A whole day has passed. This is twilight, between sundown and moonrise.”
Greer started to smile at Hannah’s joke, but then realized it was not. She pulled aside the cloth that curtained her small window and looked out westward. The horizon, although shadowed, still had the silvery halo that marked the sun’s w
ake. The first star of evening winked down at her.
“How very odd,” she said, releasing the curtain and leaning back. “I slept the whole day? You’d think I would be totally rested instead of still tired! I feel as if I haven’t slept at all.”
“I’m not quite sure what you did,” Hannah said, “but you did not sleep, I know that.”
“I didn’t?” Greer asked. “What do you mean? What happened?”
Hannah hesitated. “Let me bring you some food. I can tell you about it as you eat.” She rose and started for the door.
“Hannah, what happened?” Greer called after her insistently. “What did I do? Tell me.”
Hannah sighed. “All right. You ... became an oracle. You prophesied.”
As Greer sipped down a bowl of thick, warm soup, Hannah told her the story.
“You went back to sleep so quickly that I knew it was what your body required, so I left you to it. I was preparing some food and cold tea that I was going to set by your bedside before I left to meet the children but before I could finish, you walked out of your room. You looked strange; eerie. Your eyes were wide open and staring and yet unseeing, it seemed. When you looked at me, I felt you weren’t really seeing me, but seeing past me. I was almost afraid you’d gone mad.”
As Hannah talked, Greer tried to assimilate the narrative, to feel these things that Hannah said she’d done, but it was as if Hannah were describing a stranger. She had no memory or feeling for the things she’d done.
“I was just about to try to lead you back to bed when you spoke. ‘Send the children,’ you said. ‘Send them out with the message: the Goddess will speak this day!’”
As visibly shaken as Hannah was in just recounting the story, Greer could guess how the actual happening must have affected her. She laid a hand on her friend’s arm.
“Go on.”
“I was terrified,” Hannah laughed shakily. “Your voice was an octave lower and very commanding. If the Goddess ever does speak directly to me, that will be how She will sound, I am sure.
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