The God of Battles

by David Menefee

  Eric nodded. “Sure thing.” He glanced at Cassandra. “Why don’t you two stay at my place? I can give you a lift in the Cruiser. I don’t think Angela should drive right now.”

  Cassandra nodded.

  He looked at Angela. “Are you parked legally?”

  “Yeah, I’m in the lot across the street.”

  Cassandra glanced at Simon. “You okay with this?”

  “If you mean, will I be okay with my usual nightmare, the answer is yes, I’ll be fine. Just let me know what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  Angela and Cassandra left with Eric, discussing their plan of attack fruitlessly on the way to his place. When they arrived, they turned in for the night on Eric’s sofa bed.

  Within minutes, Cassandra was snoring, but Angela could not get to sleep. Despite her exhaustion, her mind kept spinning around her questions. She had to get some answers, and it was far too late to call Nadia to ask her for advice. The only other option was to make yet another excursion into the Otherworld even though it was dangerously draining.

  Lying on her back, the blanket safely tucked between her and Cassandra, Angela pressed her fingers to her own forehead then her breastbone. Her head spun, the walls of Eric’s living room dissolved, and she squinted in sudden daylight as she stood in her Otherworld meadow.

  She walked to her cabin, decorated now with the furnishings of war, and retrieved her spear. Picking a random forest path, Angela started walking.

  “Nana. Nadia. Help me,” she muttered as she picked her way along the path. Her presence in the forest, bringing as it did the daylight of conscious awareness, would attract attention to her. She hoped it would be friendly attention.

  She continued walking, seeing only the usual anonymous rustlings in the undergrowth. An interminable while later, the trail opened up into the ocean-side clearing. She climbed the bluff toward the cliff edge above the ocean far below. Upon reaching the highest point, she leaned on her spear and looked out over the ocean. Not for the first time, she speculated on what she would find beyond the reaches of the deep unconscious, for which the ocean was the analog in this place.

  “I wonder what’s out there,” she muttered.

  “Other peoples, other lands.”

  Angela whirled, her spear ready. Nadia’s oversoul, Crooked Staff, stood by her side. Angela smiled in relief and lowered her spear. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  Crooked Staff peered dubiously at her, that disconcerting blind gaze at once penetrating and depthless. “You look very angry. Will you strike an old, defenseless woman?”

  Angela raised an empty hand, palm up. “Never. Please look past the stain of war. I need your help.”

  The woman peered more closely then nodded in satisfaction. “I can see a warlike crown upon your head. But you wear it unwillingly. Be careful, dear. That crown is very expensive.”

  Angela resisted the urge to reach up to her head. “Please. Can you tell me how to find Aphrodite?”

  Crooked Staff jumped, her eyes wide. The oversoul raised a finger to her lips. “You should know better than to speak her name in your condition. She could strike you down where you stand.”

  Angela’s mind reeled. “So, she is real!”

  “Real? You throw that word around freely, child. You don’t know what ‘real’ means.”

  Angela placed her spear on the grass and sat cross-legged, a pupil before her teacher. “You’re right. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know what to do, either, but I need to find an ally, someone who can remove this stain of war before it infects the whole world. I think I need to find Love.”

  “Love is love, dear.” Crooked Staff cackled, not unkindly. “You have love in your life. She is right there. Or have you forgotten already?”

  “In my, as you put it, present condition, I’m afraid love is nowhere near me.” Angela studied her own hands, unwilling to meet the woman’s eyes. She was afraid all she would get from Crooked Staff would be more of her cryptic oracles, and that would be that.

  “Nonsense. Take off that crown, and love will reveal herself to you.”

  “I wish I could. My oversoul is bound to war. To… him.”

  “As you say.” Crooked Staff nodded curtly, turned, and started walking away.

  Angela’s heart sank. She jumped to her feet. “Wait! Please. How do I find the lady of love?”

  “You know the road to war.” She spoke without looking back. “The path to love runs right alongside it. But you need to send love to meet love.”

  Crooked Staff faded into the forest.

  The sound of dishes clinking from the kitchen forced Angela awake. For a moment, she forgot where she was, seeing light streaming in through unfamiliar windows, but then memory returned. She was in Eric’s living room. She got up from bed when she noticed that Cassandra’s wheelchair was gone.

  “Cassie?”

  “Yeah,” Cassandra replied, poking her head around the corner. “I made tea.”

  Angela and Cassandra sat in Eric’s dining nook, drinking tea in the early-morning light, and puzzled over Crooked Staff’s cryptic utterances from the night before.

  “I feel like I’m endangering Simon now.” Angela sighed. “He’s haunted by his oversoul, who’s drawing power from him as if he were some kind of battery. My presence seems to strengthen Iron Star and weaken Simon.”

  Cassandra frowned. “I don’t know any other way to do this. He’s the only one who can help you get into Bald Eagle. I don’t know how to have a lucid dream.”

  “Yeah. Me neither.” Angela sipped noisily. She thought about Simon’s anguished face. “When all of this is over, and he’s finally free, I want to invite him to the cabin. I think he could use some peace and quiet.”

  Cassandra rolled over to the fridge. Opening it awkwardly, she peered in and rummaged among the boxes of leftovers. “I’m starving. Aren’t you hungry?”

  Instead of answering, Angela picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Muting the sound, she switched to a news channel. A grim-faced anchorwoman spoke, and the scene cut to stock footage of a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen read, “War in the Middle East.”

  “Crap. Cassie? There’s no time for food!” Then Angela raised an open hand. “Sorry,” she said more quietly. Cassandra did not reply but continued rummaging.

  Retrieving a bag with a flourish, Cassandra looked over her shoulder at Angela. “Eat something.” She handed back a cold croissant and took out a glazed donut for herself. Glancing at the TV, she frowned but said nothing.

  Angela drummed her fingers on the table. “Eric had a really good idea. The way I see it, we’ve got to find the entity that governs love. Call her Aphrodite. But from what I learned from my oversoul, there’s a hierarchy to these beings.”

  “Makes sense. Like a manager running the store, she would have departments working for her. So there must be a department we can reach.”

  Angela nodded. “Well, we are lesbians. Maybe there’s a department in charge of women who love each other.”

  “Yeah.” Cassandra licked her fingers. “So what do you think Nadia’s oversoul meant?”

  Angela took a bite then set the croissant down. It tasted like cardboard, and she had no appetite for it. “You know, the way I get to war is through one of those soldiers. They embody fighting, conflict. What we need is somebody, something, that is made out of love.”

  She looked up. “Cassie? I can’t talk to Aphrodite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nadia’s oversoul said that in my condition, even speaking the name of the goddess might earn a thunderbolt or something. If I try to talk to her, she’ll kill me.” Angela’s mind began to spin. She dredged her memories of her previous life in the old world, but nothing in that ancient wisdom had prepared her for trying to contact Aphrodite.

  Cassandra sat in her chair, rolling a few inches forward and then reversing. Back and forth, jittering. She refused to meet Angela’s eyes.r />
  She stopped fidgeting, her back to Angela. “I’ll go.”

  “God, no.” Angela’s voice cracked. “No fucking way, Cassie. What if we end up stuck in that war zone? Iron Star’s already nearly killed you twice. What’re you thinking?”

  Cassandra turned her head. “It’s either that or we all die in a nuclear war. I have to go, and I have to talk to Aphrodite.”

  Angela stuck her arms out straight, pushing against the dining table, and tried to control the shaking in her limbs. She took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. This was the woman she loved, and one of the very few people in the world who knew her story and loved her for who she was. There was no way she could risk losing Cassandra again. There had to be another way.

  “Angela, I know what you’re thinking.”

  She looked up with blurred vision and had to dry her face on a sleeve. Cassandra’s eyes were so large, so beautiful. Angela even loved the tiny vertical crease in her forehead between them. Her mouth, often compressed these days in a firm line, had opened just a little bit.

  Not trusting herself to speak, Angela nodded.

  “I’m sorry, but I picked something out of your mind just now. The oversoul, Crooked Staff, said something else, didn’t she?” Cassandra rolled her chair closer and laid a hand against Angela’s face. “She said you need to send love to meet love.”

  Cassandra was right, but that made it no easier for Angela to accept. “Why does it have to be you?”

  “Because,” Cassandra said, a sudden grin on her face, “it’s my turn to step up. You’ve been the hero all your life. I think the gods, whoever or whatever they are, want me to do this. And listen.” Her tone deepened into earnestness. “I’m not going to jump on Iron Star’s back, I’m not going to pick up a gun. I am going to make hot, sweet love to you right there on that battlefield under that alien sky, and I am going to find that goddess and ask her for help.”

  There was a cool tingling at the base of Angela’s spine. Her inner, wiser voice spoke. This is right. Listen to her for once. She’s been through the fire. Angela looked down again to avoid that dark-eyed stare of the one person in the world she wanted far away from the Otherworld. But Crooked Staff, the Wise Old Woman—Nadia’s oversoul—had never led Angela wrong before. It was time to let go of fear.

  She looked up and caught Cassandra studying her. “Okay. Just for the sake of argument, you go without me. So how do you propose to get there?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d figure out a way.” Cassandra bit her lip. “She said the roads to love and war run the same way. Maybe she meant that you could use the battlefield to start. I still don’t understand how you do what you do.”

  Angela searched for a way to describe the inexplicable. “Cassie, it’s kind of hard to explain. See, the forehead touching is like a… a keyword, a mnemonic. In my previous lives, I worked hard to get to this point. My natural talent is the ability to assemble new realities. This physical world,” she tapped the table, “is one reality. I can shift my consciousness and experience a completely different one. But unless I have some sort of link, some kind of meaningful connection to guide me, I’d just end up wandering all over the place. I’ve done that, too, by the way.

  “So my previous self developed several techniques for walking into different worlds. It just so happens that her favorite one involved walking to a world that corresponds to the minds of living people. She called it the Forest of Souls. And she took all the complicated mental gymnastics needed to get there and compressed all that into the forehead-touching gesture, which I’ve inherited.”

  Cassandra nodded. “Okay. So, what happens when you touch a soldier in Simon’s dream world?”

  “Well, all I’ve got is a guess.” Angela sat forward. “When Iron Star took you with him, I was running on pure instinct. Later, I figured that I could follow him because that soldier was an extension of his will. That’s why they all looked so robotic. Touching the forehead of one of those robots gave me the link I needed to assemble the world Iron Star went back to.” A thought was taking shape in her mind, a way to get to the realm or dream world of Love. But Cassandra beat her to it.

  “Maybe we go to that battlefield, but instead of you touching one of them, you and I make out, and you touch me.”

  Angela stared at her. “Cassie, that’s brilliant. Sex as the doorway to love.”

  Cassandra grinned. “I got that out of your head, gorgeous.” Her smile faded. “But can you send me alone?”

  “Yeah. I learned how to do that in my other life. I sent all the survivors from the Great War here. It was a long time ago, though. The important thing is that you be the one to talk to Aphrodite.” Angela got out her cell phone. “At any rate, we need Simon’s help to get there. To the dreamland.”

  “Why can’t we just do it in the meadow? Start there and then go on?”

  Angela hesitated. “I tried something like that. When I was a kid I was in an experimental mood. Granddad was teaching me in his meadow. I touched his forehead to see if there was somewhere else to explore. Nothing happened, and I figured it was because we were already in his head. This battlefield isn’t in your head or mine. It belongs to Simon’s dreams, so I think we’re both free to use it to launch into other places.” She selected Simon from the contact list on her phone. “At any rate, this dreamland place where Simon goes is different than the meadow.” The phone rang, and there was a click. “Simon?”

  “Yeah.” His voice sounded tired.

  “Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Naw. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Okay. I really hate to ask, but do you mind if we tag along in your dream?”

  “So, you’re going to do it? What’s the plan?”

  Angela explained what she had learned from Nadia’s oversoul and what they had decided to do.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I use my altar and fill my mind with thoughts of courage when I invoke Ares. Those are his tokens, his symbols. That’s what I learned in my group.” He paused. “Hate to tell you, but there’s a big hole in your plan. When did Cassie learn how to get out of her body without morphine?”

  Angela’s heart sank. “Oh crap. You’re right.” She glanced at Cassandra.

  “We’re not dead yet,” Simon said. “Let me talk to her.”

  “Cassie? Simon wants to talk to you.” Angela handed the phone over.

  “Hey.” Cassandra smiled broadly. Then her smile faded as she listened. “Shit. Well, I never learned how. I mean, I got out under morphine, but…” She paused. “No, not really.” There was a longer pause. “Okay, like I’m rocking in a swing. Got it.”

  At Angela’s lifted eyebrow, Cassandra gave her a thumbs-up gesture. “By something in me, you mean like energy or something? No?” Another pause. “Okay. Makes sense. I hope so. Thanks, Simon. See you there. Here’s Angela.” She handed the phone back to Angela.

  “Hey.”

  “Listen, I told Cassie what I do to get out. But I think you need something else to make sure you get where you need to go. Otherwise, you might just end up in some sort of astral porno.”

  Angela giggled, despite herself, at the ridiculous image this evoked. “Yeah. So, what’s your idea?”

  He cleared his throat. “Something I used to study, before I got injured. Ever heard of tantric sex?”

  “Who hasn’t? We live in California, remember?”

  “Yeah. So, when you two have sex, you need to try to visualize Aphrodite and hold that until you climax. I don’t know how your talent works, but it seems to me that you always need some kind of connection to where you’re going. Right?”

  “That’s what Cassie and I were just talking about. Exactly.”

  “Cool. So, that’s my idea. Give me half an hour or so before Cassie tries to get into my nightmare, okay? I slept like crap, but I’m too keyed up now to sleep, so I’m going to take tranquilizers.”

  “Okay. Thanks a million, Simon.” She hung up, and she a
nd Cassandra exchanged stares.

  They heard a polite cough and turned. Eric stood in the hallway that led to his bedroom. He wore boxers and a bathrobe, and he rubbed his face sleepily. “Hey, you two. I heard some noise and forgot you were here. Can I get you something?”

  Angela smiled. “No, that’s okay. We were just planning our strategy.”

  “Okay. You know, I thought I was having one of my nightmares.” He turned to go back to his bedroom. “I’m going to get a little more shut-eye.”

  Cassandra looked at Eric then at Angela. “What’s he talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” On an obscure whim, she called out, “Eric?”

  He turned back around. “Yeah?”

  “If you have a nightmare again, can you tell the good guys I need their help?”

  “Sure thing, hon.”

  Angela contemplated the contrast between the coolness of her exposed, sweat-dewed skin and the warmth under the sheets on the sofa bed. She lay in a calm, empty trance, resting next to Cassandra. Part of Simon’s instructions had included using the energy raised by sex to put Cassandra in the state needed to get out of her body.

  Their extraordinary tension had exploded into furtive, feverish, but somewhat awkward lovemaking as they maneuvered around Cassandra’s cast. Angela savored the present moment. As soon as her mind returned to Cassandra, however, all of her worries returned in a rush. Her heart sank as she thought of what would come next.

  Cassandra stirred next to her and groped for Angela’s hand. Angela twined their fingers together. “Cassie? Are you ready? Is Simon dreaming?”

  Cassandra groaned and turned her face to the air with a sigh. “Yeah. I sure could use a smoke right now.” She pushed her damp hair out of her eyes and peered at Angela. “Let’s go.”

  Angela nodded.

  Cassandra lay back, closing her eyes, her forehead wrinkled.

  Taking the cue, Angela lay back, as well. She cleared her mind, relying on Cassandra’s extraordinary gift to open the way.