Sister Emily's Lightship

by Jane Yolen

  The women of power dreamed in levels. Late Blossoming Flower’s mother passed from one level to another with the ease of long practice, but her daughter’s dream quester had difficulty going through. She wandered too long on the dreamscape paths, searching for a ladder or a rope or some other familiar token of passage.

  When Late Blossoming Flower had awakened, her mother scolded her for her restless sleep.

  “If you are to be a true woman of power, you must force yourself to lie down in the dream and fall asleep. Sleep within sleep, dream within dream. Only then will you wake at the next level.” Her head had nodded gently every few words and she spoke softly, braiding her hair with quick and supple hands. “You must be like a gardener forcing an early bud to bring out the precious juices.”

  “Words. Just words,” said Late Blossoming Flower. “And none of those words has power.” She had risen from her pallet, shaking her own hair free of the loose night braiding, brushing it fiercely before plaiting it up again. She could not bear to listen to her mother’s advice any longer and had let her thoughts drift instead to the reed hut on the edge of the valley, where old Sand Walker lived. A renegade healer, he lived apart from the others and, as a man, was little thought of. But Late Blossoming Flower liked to go and sit with him and listen to his stories of the time before time, when power had been so active in the world it could be plucked out of the air as easily as fruit from a tree. He said that dreams eventually explained themselves and that to discipline the dream figure was to bind its power. To Late Blossoming Flower that made more sense than all her mother’s constant harping on the Forcing Way.

  So intent was she on visiting the old man that day, she had raced through her chores, scanting the milk beast and the birds who squatted on hidden nests. She had collected only a few eggs and left them in the basket at the bottom of the cliff. Then, without a backward glance at the withy ladders spanning the levels or the people moving busily against the cliff face, she raced down the path toward Sand Walker’s home.

  As a girl child she had that freedom, given leave for part of each day to walk the many trails through the valley. On these walks she was supposed to learn the ways of the growing flowers, to watch the gentler creatures at their play, to come to a careful understanding of the way of predator and prey. It was time for her to know the outer landscape of her world as thoroughly as she would, one day, know the inner dream trails. But Late Blossoming Flower was a hurrying child. As if to make up for her late birth and the crushing burden of early power laid on her, she refused to take the time.

  “My daughter,” her mother often cautioned her, “a woman of true power must be in love with silence. You must learn all the outward sounds in order to approach the silence that lies within.”

  But Flower wanted no inner silence. She delighted in tuneless singing and loud sounds: the sharp hoarse cry of the night herons sailing across the marsh; the crisp howl of the jackals calling under the moon; even the scream of the rabbit in the teeth of the wolf. She sought to imitate those sounds, make them louder, sing them again in her own mouth. What was silence compared to sound?

  And when she was with old Sand Walker in his hut, he sang with her. And told stories, joking stories, about the old women and their silences.

  “Soon enough,” Sand Walker said, “soon enough it will be silent and dark. In the grave. Those old bawenahs”—he used the word that meant the unclean female vulture—“those old bawenahs would make us rehearse for our coming deaths with their binding dreams. Laugh now, child. Sing out. Silence is for the dead ones, though they call themselves alive and walk the trails. But you and I, ho”—he poked her in the stomach lightly with his stick—“we know the value of noise. It blocks out thinking, and thinking means pain. Cry out for me, child. Loud. Louder.”

  And as if a trained dog, Late Blossoming Flower always dropped to her knees at this request and howled, scratching at the dirt and wagging her bottom. Then she would fall over on her back with laughter and the old man laughed with her.

  All this was in her mind as she ran along the path toward Sand Walker’s hut.

  A rabbit darted into her way, then zagged back to escape her pounding feet. A few branches, emboldened by the coming summer, strayed across her path and whipped her arm, leaving red scratches. Impatient with the marks, she ignored them.

  At the final turning the old man’s hut loomed up. He was sitting, as always, in the doorway, humming, and eating a piece of yellowed fruit, the juices running down his chin. At the noise of her coming he looked up and grinned.

  “Hai!” he said, more sound than greeting.

  Flower skidded to a stop and squatted in the dirt beside him.

  “You look tired,” he said. “Did you dream?”

  “I tried. But dreaming is so slow,” Flower admitted.

  “Dreaming is not living. You and I—we live. Have a bite?” He offered her what was left of the fruit, mostly core.

  She took it so as not to offend him, holding the core near her mouth but not eating. The smell of the overripe, sickly sweet fruit made her close her eyes, and she was startled into a dream.

  The fruit was in her mouth and she could feel its sliding passage down her throat. It followed the twists of her inner pathways, dropping seeds as it went, until it landed heavily in her belly. There it began to burn, a small but significant fire in her gut.

  Bending over to ease the cramping, Flower turned her back on the old man’s hut and crept along the trail toward the village. The trees along the trail and the muddle of gray-green wildflowers blurred into an indistinct mass as she went, as if she were seeing them through tears, though her cheeks were dry and her eyes clear.

  When she reached the cliffside she saw, to her surprise, that the withy ladders went down into a great hole in the earth instead of up toward the dwellings on the cliff face.

  It was deathly silent all around her. The usual chatter of children at their chores, the chant of women, the hum-buzz of men in the furrowed fields were gone. The cliff was as blank and as smooth as the shells of the eggs she had gathered that morning.

  And then she heard a low sound, compounded of moans and a strange hollow whistling, like an old man’s laughter breathed out across a reed. Turning around, she followed the sound. It led her to the hole. She bent over it, and as she did, the sound resolved itself into a single word: bawenah. She saw a pale, shining face looking up at her from the hole, its mouth a smear of fruit. When the mouth opened, it was as round and as black as the hole. There were no teeth. There was no tongue. Yet still the mouth spoke: bawenah.

  Flower awoke and stared at the old man. Pulpy fruit stained his scraggly beard. His eyes were filmy. Slowly his tongue emerged and licked his lips.

  She turned and without another word to him walked home. Her hands cupped her stomach, pressing and releasing, all the way back, as if pressure alone could drive away the cramps.

  Her mother was waiting for her at the top of the ladder, hands folded on her own belly. “So,” she said, “it is your woman time.”

  Flower did not ask how she knew. Her mother was a woman of great power still and such knowledge was well within her grasp, though it annoyed Flower that it should be so.

  “Yes,” Flower answered, letting a small whine creep into her voice. “But you did not tell me it would hurt so.”

  “With some,” her mother said, smiling and smoothing back the white stripe of hair with her hand, “with some, womanhood comes easy. With some it comes harder.” Then, as they walked into their rooms, she added with a bitterness uncharacteristic of her, “Could your healer not do something for you?”

  Flower was startled at her mother’s tone. She knew that her association with the old man had annoyed her mother. But Flower had never realized it would hurt her so much. She began to answer her mother, then bit back her first angry reply. Instead, mastering her voice, she said, “I did not think to ask him for help. He is but a man. I am a woman.”

  “You are a woman today, truly
,” her mother said. She went over to the great chest she had carved before Flower’s birth, a chest made of the wood of a lightning-struck panomom tree. The chest’s sides were covered with carved signs of power: the florets of the tree with their three-foil flowers, the mouse and hare who were her mother’s personal signs, the trailing arbet vine which was her father’s, and the signs for the four moons: quarter, half, full, and closed faces.

  When she opened the chest, it made a small creaking protest. Flower went over to look in. There, below her first cradle dress and leggings, nestled beside a tress of her first, fine baby hair, was the Herb Belt she had helped her mother make. It had fifteen pockets, one for each year she had been a girl.

  They went outside, and her mother raised her voice in that wild ululation that could call all the women of power to her. It echoed around the clearing and across the fields to the gathering streams beyond, a high, fierce yodeling. And then she called out again, this time in a gentler voice that would bring the women who had borne and their girl children with them.

  Flower knew it would be at least an hour before they all gathered; in the meantime she and her mother had much to do.

  They went back into the rooms and turned around all the objects they owned, as a sign that Flower’s life would now be turned around as well. Bowls, cups, pitchers were turned. Baskets of food and the drying racks were turned. Even the heavy chest was turned around. They left the bed pallets to the very last, and then, each holding an end, they walked the beds around until the ritual was complete.

  Flower stripped in front of her mother, something she had not done completely in years. She resisted the impulse to cover her breasts. On her leggings were the blood sign. Carefully her mother packed those leggings into the panomom chest. Flower would not wear them again.

  At the bottom of the chest, wrapped in a sweet-smelling woven-grass covering, was a white chamois dress and leggings. Flower’s mother took them out and spread them on the bedding, her hand smoothing the nap. Then, with a pitcher of water freshened with violet flowers, she began to wash her daughter’s body with a scrub made of the leaves of the sandarac tree. The nubby sandarac and the soothing rinse of the violet water were to remind Flower of the fierce and gentle sides of womanhood. All the while she scrubbed, Flower’s mother chanted the songs of Woman: the seven-fold chant of Rising, the Way of Power, and the Praise to Earth and Moon.

  The songs reminded Flower of something, and she tried to think of what it was as her mother’s hands cleansed her of the sins of youth. It was while her mother was braiding her hair, plaiting in it reed ribbons that ended in a dangle of shells, that Flower remembered. The chants were like the cradle songs her mother had sung her when she was a child, with the same rise and fall, the same liquid sounds. She suddenly wanted to cry for the loss of those times and the pain she had given her mother, and she wondered why she felt so like weeping when anger was her usual way.

  The white dress and leggings slipped on easily, indeed fit her perfectly, though she had never tried them on before, and that, too, was a sign of her mother’s power.

  And what of her own coming power, Flower wondered as she stood in the doorway watching the women assemble at the foot of the ladder. The women of power stood in the front, then the birth women, last of all the girls. She could name them all, her friends, her sisters in the tribe, who only lately had avoided her because of her association with the old man. She tried to smile at them, but her mouth would not obey her. In fact, her lower lip trembled and she willed it to stop, finally clamping it with her teeth.

  “She is a woman,” Flower’s mother called down to them. The ritual words. They had known, even without her statement, had known from that first wild cry, what had happened. “Today she has come into her power, putting it on as a woman dons her white dress, but she does not yet know her own way. She goes now, as we all go at our time, to the far hills and beyond to seek the Word That Changes. She may find it or not, but she will tell of that when she has returned.”

  The women below began to sway and chant the words of the Searching Song, words which Flower had sung with them for fifteen years without really understanding their meaning. Fifteen years—far longer than any of the other girls—standing at the ladder’s foot and watching another Girl-Become-Woman go off on her search. And that was why—she saw it now—she had fallen under Sand Walker’s spell.

  But now, standing above the singers, waiting for the Belt and the Blessing, she felt for the first time how strongly the power called to her. This was her moment, her time, and there would be no other. She pictured the old man in his hut and realized that if she did not find her word she would be bound to him forever.

  “Mother,” she began, wondering if it was too late to say all the things she should have said before, but her mother was coming toward her with the Belt and suddenly it was too late. Once the Belt was around her waist, she could not speak again until the Word formed in her mouth, with or without its accompanying power. Tears started in her eyes.

  Her mother saw the tears, and perhaps she mistook them for something else. Tenderly she placed the Belt around Flower’s waist, setting it on the hips, and tying it firmly behind her. Then she turned her daughter around, the way every object in the house had been turned, till she faced the valley again where all the assembled women could read the fear on her face.

  Into the valley, in the fear we all face,

  Into the morning of your womanhood,

  Go with our blessing to guide you,

  Go with our blessing to guard you,

  Go with our blessing and bring back your word.

  The chant finished, Flower’s mother pushed her toward the ladder and went back into the room and sat on the chest to do her own weeping.

  Flower opened her eyes, surprised, for she had not realized that she had closed them. All the women had disappeared, back into the fields, into the woods; she did not know where, nor was she to wonder about them. Her journey had to be made alone. Talking to anyone on the road this day would spell doom to them both, to her quest for her power, to the questioner’s very life.

  As she walked out of the village, Flower noticed that everything along the way seemed different. Her power had, indeed, begun. The low bushes had a shadow self, like the moon’s halo, standing behind. The trees were filled with eyes, peering out of the knotholes. The chattering of animals in the brush was a series of messages, though Flower knew that she was still unable to decipher them. And the path itself sparkled as if water rushed over it, tumbling the small stones.

  She seemed to slip in and out of quick dreams that were familiar pieces of her old dreams stitched together in odd ways. Her childhood was sloughing off behind her with each step, a skin removed.

  Further down the path, where the valley met the foothills leading to the far mountains, she could see Sand Walker’s hut casting a long, dark, toothy shadow across the trail. Flower was not sure if the shadows lengthened because the sun was at the end of its day or because this was yet another dream. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the long shadows were still there, though not nearly as dark or as menacing.

  When she neared the hut, the old man was sitting silently out front. His shadow, unlike the hut’s black shadow, was a strange shade of green.

  She did not dare greet the old man, for fear of ruining her quest and because she did not want to hurt him. One part of her was still here with him, wild, casting green shadows, awake. He had no protection against her power. But surely she might give him one small sign of recognition. Composing her hands in front of her, she was prepared to signal him with a finger, when without warning he leaped up, grinning.

  “Ma-hane, white girl,” he cried, jumping into her path. “Do not forget to laugh, you in your white dress and leggings. If you do not laugh, you are one of the dead ones.”

  In great fear she reached out a hand toward him to silence him before he could harm them both, and power sprang unbidden from her fingertips. She had forgott
en the Shaping Hands. And though they were as yet untrained and untried, still they were a great power. She watched in horror as five separate arrows of flame struck the old man’s face, touching his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth, sealing them, melting his features like candle wax. He began to shrink under the fire, growing smaller and smaller, fading into a gray-green splotch that only slowly resolved itself into the form of a sa-hawa, a butterfly the color of leaf mold.

  Flower did not dare speak, not even a word of comfort. She reached down and shook out the crumpled shirt, loosing the butterfly. It flapped its wings, tentatively at first, then with more strength, and finally managed to flutter up toward the top of the hut.

  Folding the old man’s tattered shirt and leggings with gentle hands, Flower laid them on the doorstep of his hut, still watching the fluttering sa-hawa. When she stood again, she had to shade her eyes with one hand to see it. It had flown away from the hut and was hovering between patches of wild onion in a small meadow on the flank of the nearest foothill.

  Flower bit her lip. How could she follow the butterfly? It was going up the mountainside and her way lay straight down the road. Yet how could she not follow it? Sand Walker’s transformation had been her doing. No one else might undo what she had so unwillingly, unthinkingly created.

  To get to the meadow was easy. But if the butterfly went further up the mountainside, what could she do? There was only a goat track, and then the sheer cliff wall. As she hesitated, the sa-hawa rose into the air again, leaving the deep green spikes of onions to fly up toward the mountain itself.

  Flower looked quickly down the trail, but the shadows of oncoming evening had closed that way. Ahead, the Path of Power—her Power—was still brightly lit.

  Oh, Mother, she thought. Oh, my mothers, I need your blessing indeed. And so thinking, she plunged into the underbrush after the sa-hawa, heedless of the thorns tugging at her white leggings or the light on the Path of Power that suddenly and inexplicably went out.