“Oh, no, Oberon, now that would have angered me. Longer, in that rhinestone Sodom? And I think that term is no misnomer; there were homosexuals there! Nothing was to be gained. We should have turned around as soon as we got there. Or better yet, never left the Grove.”
“Okay, okay. Anyway, Holcomb gave us a donation even after he realized we were a mismatch. He shows a little more of an ethic than most of the developers that infest both the Front Range and the Western Slope, and I was glad to have a chance to reinforce that. Besides, nobody made you come along. Next time I’ll go it alone.”
“You needed supervision . . . probably would have tried to recruit the lot of them. And I wanted to examine the lichens on that side of the Divide—only to find them all bulldozed away, paved, polluted, or inundated. The cryptogam crust everywhere shattered by knobby tires. I saw more lichens on that mansion’s fireplace than anywhere outside! I tell you, the mountains are going, same as Gomorrah down there on the plain.”
“A.k.a. Denver. On that we agree. But all the more reason for our principles to prevail. If anyone has a chance of bringing some sense into the land-use quagmire, it is those who think as we do. So much the better if some of them come from inside the belly of the beast, where Holcomb lives.”
The one in brown simply grunted.
Oberon went on. “I think if we can influence the politics while keeping out of the fray, we . . . wait, what’s that by the road?”
“Where?”
“Must be a deer—someone hit a deer,” the bearded driver said as he swerved the truck to avoid hitting a lump stretched out onto the road from the tundra verge. “No, wait,” he said, braking and backing up almost to the sprawled figure. “I think it’s a person!”
“Go on, Oberon, it’s a deer, as you said. Let’s just get home.”
“No, look, Attalus—it is a person . . . a woman!”
“That’s worse! Go on, Oberon, it’s no concern of ours. Leave it to the sheriff.”
“Are you mad, Attalus? She might be hurt, or dead.”
“Dead, it won’t matter; injured, we aren’t equipped. We can call an ambulance when we reach Idaho Springs.”
Oberon set the hand brake and leaped out. He knelt beside the supine form. It was indeed a woman, unconscious. Feeling her wrist for a pulse and warmth, Oberon took in her fine features, wind-tangled dark hair, thin arms. He smelled human sweat and tundra musk. The sculpted lips moved but made no sound he could hear.
As he held her head and considered what to do, Oberon noticed his surroundings in the dim dawning. A tundra rill tumbled down through pungent willows above and into a mossy, stone-built culvert. Bistort, Indian paintbrush, elephant’s head, and mountain harebells crowded the ditch, sending up a perfume that seemed to belong to the still-warm woman. They muffled the stream with their dense petals and foliage. A steep deer trail descended from the krummholz above the trickle. He reckoned the woman must have come down that trail, then stumbled onto the road. Her forehead was scarred, but long healed, and a blue bruise was flushing there too. Otherwise she seemed unhurt.
“Is she dead, Oberon? Can’t we just leave her for the authorities to deal with?” Attalus’s voice sounded way too much like hopeful.
“No such luck, Attalus. Sorry to disappoint you, but this woman is alive. Just passed out, or maybe knocked out from a fall. Probably been walking a long way. Maybe hypothermic, but I don’t think so yet . . . she still feels warm. But it’s cold on the pass, and the temp could still drop before sunup. Hurry and open the back, and I’ll bring her inside and get a blanket around her.”
Attalus complied, but with no joy. “Not a woman, Oberon. We get rid of her in Idaho Springs, and that’s that.”
“We’ll see. She may be in need of our help. How could a young woman come to be lying on the edge of the tundra like this?”
“Abducted, raped, discarded. Happens all the time. Or so they say. She’s lucky she didn’t get her throat slit. And likely her own fault—probably a harlot from the city.”
“That’s unworthy of you, Attalus, and appalling! Can it now. You might be right that she was assaulted, but victims of rape are never at fault. Even you should know that. Where’s your Christian compassion, man?”
Attalus shut up and retreated into the truculent husk he’d worn ever since Dillon, until they’d crested Loveland Pass and the truck began its nervous descent of the Eastern Slope. Then he said, “Why in the name of Asa Gray didn’t you take the Eisenhower Tunnel as I suggested, Oberon?”
“As I told you: if the engine quit, as it very well might at any given point, I didn’t want to be caught inside the tunnel with fumes of the night truck traffic—or with the trucks, for that matter. I don’t relish getting rammed by a highballing semi at sixty-five in a hole in the ground. Anyway, I felt we should take the pass. Now it’s clear why.”
“You don’t mean you think we were meant to find the woman?”
“Of course not. You know I’m no kind of fatalist. I revel in the come-what-may and the humble gifts of happenstance. But even in the indifferent universe that most of our brothers buy into, wonderful coincidences occur all the time, if our eyes are open.”
“So?”
“Well, this poor person was in danger of death by exposure. How fortunate that we saw her first, or before a gasoline tanker came along and crushed her there—you know they’re barred from the tunnel.”
“Might have been the merciful thing.”
“I told you to drop such talk! You’re doing yourself no credit, speaking like that. Anyway, she should be warm enough, wrapped in blankets. We’ll take her to the Grove.”
“Like hell we will! Oberon, don’t speak madness. You know very well that I cannot abide any women there.”
“And you know that must change, Attalus, if you are to remain. We’ve been over this time after time. Pan presides over a sexually mixed—and equal—realm. The refusal to recognize that fact has been one of the great failings of your former order. After all, Oberon was no superior to Titania. Astarte watched over wildness for the Phoenicians, Artemis for the Greeks, Diana the Romans. You know as well as I that Pan merely represents the male shadow of the great goddess. Your intolerance of women is not only despicable and outworn but also unviable in our order. Attalus, you must adapt.”
“And I also know,” Attalus shot back, “that women tempt, defile, and destroy. Only the Virgin was free of stain. Women will ruin our hopes and our aspirations and undermine our comity. Only dissonance can come from their entry to the Grove.”
“ ‘No woman, no cry,’ eh?”
“What?”
“Never mind. A reference outside your experience. Attalus, your ideas were obsolete even when they arose. If you still believe what you say—and in virgin birth, for Christ’s sake—you should have gone down the mountain with the rest of the old order. Maybe it’s not too late.” Attalus said nothing, so Oberon pressed on. “How can you deny the essential feminine in Nature? Of Maia? Or Gaia? And you know full well that males are next to superfluous in most populations of plants and animals. Sperm and pollen are the height of redundancy, eggs and seeds essential.”
“Nature is asexual, except at its basest level. Parthenogenesis and budding work best. Where females are a necessary evil, they must be subordinate, subordinated. Kept within the bounds of secular function and service, out of the temple, and powerless to offend the affairs of men with their . . . their sex.” A tiny sound, just this side of silence, was heard from the back, then nothing more.
“Our sex,” said Oberon. “Now, no more of your ludicrous cant. She comes with us, and that’s that. The ER in Idaho Springs might do her no good, and we’d be stuck there for hours, obliged to be interviewed, maybe even detained, by the police. Of course we’d be prime suspects for whatever happened to her. Do you really want to be questioned?”
Attalus only groaned.
“If she seems hurt or ill when Thomas examines her, he can request
help from the hospital in Loveland, where we are known. Otherwise, she is welcome to our hospitality for as long as she needs or wants it. For now, she’s sleeping soundly. With luck, she’ll awaken in the safety of the monastery. Now deal with that the best you can, and keep your peace. If you persist in your bullshit dogma, I won’t remonstrate with you again: I will simply invoke all possible powers of the community against you. That, I promise.”
The faces of both men boiled with anger—one younger, sculpted of slabs of sandstone among copses of soft, mottled pelage; the other obdurate, older than its years, flaccid but for the tight thin lips drawn across audibly grinding teeth.
“And you might as well know,” the driver carried on after calming down and considering whether to bring it up now, “that some of us are talking about a spiritual and physical union with the women’s peace encampment at the Rocky Flats plutonium plant.”
“WHAT?” Attalus roared.
“Keep it down. You’ll wake her, and then you’ll be in for it. She might tempt you right back there and pop your righteous cherry for you. You heard me correctly.” Calm again, Oberon picked his words like peaches in a farmers’ market. “Our methods, goals, and reverences are similar. We feel we would bring much to each other. We need their strength, commitment, vitality, and experience with direct action. They need shelter for the winter in sympathetic surroundings near the front. I spoke with some of their leaders when I attended the Earth and Peace Conference at Naropa in Boulder last month.”
“Why haven’t I been told of this?” Attalus fumed with a bitter croak, never ungritting his teeth. “As the only representative of the old order—”
“Exactly. And as the only misogynist among us. You were to be told at the upcoming Forest Meeting. Now be still and conjure on the good changes to come. Meditate on your own personal reformation. And yes, I do apologize for getting you out on this goose chase, except for the good we may be able to render this poor woman.”
“I wish she had been dead, Oberon,” Attalus muttered into his cowl.
“Where is the Christian in you?” Oberon gently taunted. “I refuse to believe that you mean it—you, who were once a caregiver. Now let’s be quiet. We might wake up our passenger, and I suspect she needs her sleep.”
Mary needed it, all right. She had walked, scrambled, finally crawled over the chill tundra and fellfields for several hours, eventually dropping through a shag of subalpine fir forest and meeting the road again. With no idea of the half circle she’d made or of any destination, caught between a vague sense of homing and a rising fear of being returned to the “home,” she rambled on, a tundra creature herself. When the road appeared yet again, having snaked beneath her and back around into her random path, she collapsed in exhaustion at its side. Her last thought was to continue at dawn. But her head glanced off the stone culvert on the way down, putting her right out. Then, dreams: strange conversations about her, about women, about nature, and some names she seemed to recognize but could not quite recall, all in hushed, agitated voices.
A long time later Mary awoke in a small room. At first, when her head unfuzzed, she thought with a sick rush of despair that almost made her retch (she hadn’t eaten in many hours) that she was back at the nursing home. Maybe she’d been captured; maybe she’d never really left. Then she opened her eyes wider. Followed the ceilings to their high, rough, whitewashed plaster heights, breathed in the scent of actual pine instead of pine freshener meant to cover the urine, tobacco, and other odors she didn’t want to remember. Cool silence took the place of shouts, TV, and gobbledygook. Fear flushed away as a mountain stream of calm flowed in, and she felt washed all over in a kind of peace and rest she’d never known, or else had forgotten. For the first time since her crash, a spontaneous smile took over her unaccustomed lips. The creased brow of determination and frown of fear that had long molded her features now melted away. The smile lasted until a sour thought came: she might only be awaiting transportation back to Denver. Such was indeed the topic of a heated controversy downstairs, beyond her hearing.
“We’ve been through it already, Attalus, and it’s nonnegotiable. Until we learn where she wants to be, the woman remains under our care and patronage. Brother Thomas here says she does not seem to be in need of further medical attention for now. She’s had a bump on the head from a fall, but it appears to be minor. She is sleepy and confused, but that may have to do with exhaustion or the scar on her forehead. She has our full hospitality and protection.” Oberon finished his recitation, and four of the five others present nodded.
“In other words, she’s unbalanced,” retorted Attalus. His thick-veined temples crowded down on the corners of his lipless scowl, and his nostrils twitched. “Crazy, and a wanton to boot. Probably a common streetwalker. You saw how provocatively she was dressed.”
“Jacob, Jacob, Jacob . . . or Attalus, if you insist,” said Thomas, the old medic. “Confusion and talking in one’s sleep do not a madwoman make! And her dress is merely a simple cotton frock, a little torn from her ordeal. If you find her provocative, it is in your own mind.”
“And the worst of it—” Attalus sputtered on. “You all heard her mutter who she claims she is! Dreams or not, no fantasy could be more damning than that. Or, if she’s correct, surely you’ll agree, disaster is within our doors.”
“Rubbish,” burst out a huge man from beneath his heaving cassock. “Quite the opposite would be true—you of all of us should see that. But clearly, confusion is the word. It has to do, surely, with the rigors she’s been through and her arrival all unawares in this strange and intimidating place. She feels she has been here before, perhaps on the mountain, and her sense of the place must be mixed up with her personal identity in her dreams as she struggles to come out of a deep and troubled sleep.” This was Abraxas.
Attalus made one last rant. “The woman is a whore and a witch. How else did she penetrate this place? She must leave! We would be within our rights to stone her, by the Old Book. But at least we must call the police, who will no doubt take her away.”
“Attalus!” Oberon thundered. “Now I say it is you who are mad. Even if she were a prostitute, it wouldn’t matter at all to us if she were in need of our aid and shelter. A witch, she well might be, and welcome. But if, at this fragile point in the germination of our experiment, you still regard women and witches in that archaic light—or darkness, rather—of stoning and locking away by men, then you don’t belong among our number.”
“That’s right,” broke in the fourth, a little man with a resolute mouth that he used little but well. “If you think such things, you must be gone from our midst. A love of nature is not enough. We’re not the Audubon Society here. The fact that you are a respected lichenologist is not enough, either. Your renunciation of the Roman Catholic Church and coming over to the Grove is insufficient in itself. You seem to be against half of humankind, a misogynist worthy of the worst examples in the worst of times of your former faith, and that just won’t wash here in this loving band of Pan.”
“Well spoken, Xerxes,” rumbled Abraxas, the large one.
“At the Forest Meeting,” said Oberon, “I’ll move for our learned brother’s expulsion.”
“Wait, Oberon,” Xerxes said softly, taking his elbow. “You are forgetting—”
“Yes, he is forgetting,” Attalus gritted, and glared.
“Attalus, as the representative of the previous order that occupied this monastery, was named trustee by the archdiocese,” continued Thomas, “as a condition of deconsecration. We may all hold equal shares in the legal title to the place, but no major matters of policy can be decided without his concurrence for five full years.”
Oberon sighed in frustration to be reminded of these facts. Grunts of grudging recognition rolled around the room and fell off the wooden walls onto the floor like rotten plums. “I suppose you’re right, Xerxes,” said Oberon. “At this point, I guess we can only censure him. But I fear that his malevolence toward this
woman, and all women, will ruin our plans and, in the end, frustrate our movement altogether.”
Attalus gloated. His lips smeared into a second’s snicker before he turned grave. “Do not underestimate me. I left the old order and the church and joined with you because I embrace the anti-supernatural pantheism we all subscribe to. I have no desire to spoil the effort or wreck the communion. But as is written, woman is the vessel of the devil! If you attempt to populate the Grove with wantons, I will use all my powers to bring an early end to the experiment. Then the land and buildings will go to the second bidders—the Mormons—after all.”
Oberon had been thinking, and now he spoke once more. “Hear me, Brother Attalus.” Xerxes and Abraxas closed ranks behind him in support of whatever it was he intended to say, as Thomas made sure that his medical bag was still at the ready. “We recognize your expertise and your earnestness toward the elements, and we hope that we might still, somehow, reconcile you to the movement. But your views on half of humanity are both intolerant and intolerable. Since our kind of pantheism is in part humanistic, it embraces male and female human beings, along with all other species. Sexual differentiation is the great gift of the gods of evolution to us mortals, the very engine of natural selection, whether one chooses to use it or not.”
No one else spoke, unsure of where he was going with this. “You will find in the Forest Meeting that you are a minority of one. Meanwhile, this woman, whatever her past or her mental state, is in our care for now. You will not go near her, nor will you seek her removal—she goes when she decides to go, and then only. Now, be off!”
Attalus went. Directly out of the monastery, off the grounds of the Grove, down the highway to the lodge below.
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