He shook his head. "Do you?"
"The mother in the desert mentioned Muing-wa and Sand Altar Woman. She told me she was protecting her child from she who had no name."
"Sand Altar Woman is associated with child-birth and nature. To the Dineh she is Changing Woman. The earth goddess."
"I think we've got another player here we haven't seen yet."
In the meager moonlight the flowers of the cacti gleamed white, giving off a strange musk that tickled my nose and made me want to sneeze. Massau whirled and twirled before us like the pulled threads of a kachina doll, spreading like the wings of his butcherbirds.
Spear-in-the-Heart spoke a number of prayers: the shooting chant and spirit chasing chant. Hopi songs are eerie and guttural, as if rising from the bowels of the Five Worlds.
"Black horned rattler, young chief
Your sacrifice I have made
Your smoke I have prepared
This day I have become your child
This day your grandchild I have become
Watch over me
Hold your hand before me in protection
Stand before me and arise as my protector."
His words faded into the mountainside, and like a ridge of the cliffs he stood waiting, forcing the issue with a bogeyman god who would not stand still. I could see his muscles knot, willpower pressing out on the yei. A man—something more than a creation—he too created, with the same loves and hates and passions that drove the Holy People. Isaac pushed, against what I couldn't tell, but he kept on pushing, arms extended as if shoving up the sky.
More laughter.
Not Coyote's. No bitterness or rage, but something filled with much worse. A deranged happiness, a fanatic infatuation, and she came to us and the clown, dancing too, hungry and hunting for children.
She leisurely floated to the hogans and trailers, her tongue flicking for the taste of fresh meat. "What's holding her back?" I whispered.
Hair twirled about her like the mad whips of masochists, teeth sharp as needles and pressing her lips apart—she was anti-human in every malicious aspect, and my natural reaction was revulsion and fear. It was like being exposed to a pit of vipers. Self smiled, aroused.
Isaac stood enthralled. "Who is she?"
The Tetragrammaton name of God folded back in my throat as she moved past the entrance to the kiva. "Lamia?" I said. "Or Lilith."
It's Lilith.
Puzzled, Spear-in-the-Heart asked, "Who's Lilith?"
Eyes cold as obsidian, almost mother of us all, her hate for the sons and daughters of Eve bled from every nuance. "The first wife of Adam, a child devourer."
A hell of a dancer.
"She was his twin, joined to his back. She demanded equality and left when it was denied her. She chose to sleep with Satan and bore the djinn. God sent the angels Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelaf to make her return to Eden. They found her bathing in the Red Sea and threatened to kill one hundred of her children every day. She still wouldn't return and eventually came to take newborn children in return. According to the Zohar of the Kabbalah, her powers are greatest when the moon is on the wane."
"Like tonight."
"Yeah."
"Now it makes sense." He gestured obscurely. "All the internal and external conflicts, the misinterpretations, contradictions. Those indecipherable portents, and even your reason for joining me here. I understand now. Massau, the Skeleton Man, has married your Lilith, lover of the Devil. Do you understand the implications?"
So far as I knew, it had never happened before in any hierarchy: no two gods of death ever paired off. In almost all polytheistic religions the wedded male and female figures were direct opposites: earth and sky, sun and moon, life and death. If not directly then at least particular visages of the two were opposite.
Self licked his lips. What a hot mama. His arousal snagged in my brain, the images horrifying and exciting at the same time. I doubled over, the kink taking me down. Sweat exploded on my brow.
Quit it.
They'll mate and breed and their spawn will cover the earth. Self slowly pirouetted in time with her motions, spinning past the clown face of Massau. Look at her. She dances as she did for King Herod the Tetrarch, when she posed as Herodias' daughter, and was brought the Baptizer's head on its silver platter. No one can resist.
"We've got to cut in," I said.
Isaac nodded. "How do we do that? I can't work your magic, and you wreak havoc with mine. How did they ever manage it? How could they even allow it themselves? And what is your familiar doing? Joining them? Can't you control it?"
Contradictions. Opposites. Polarity. "I've got an idea," I said. "And you're not going to like it."
"I'll bet you're right," he said.
"We walk widdershins."
"Like I said, you're right. I don't like it, and I don't even know what it means."
"We move against nature, against the tide and flow of the universe."
He drew back and stared at me. "You're kidding. You're not kidding? Then you're insane. Fly in the face of Changing Woman? That can only cause more trouble. All our ceremonies are built on existing as one with the world, to merge with the elemental forces. Don't you know that?"
"Wicca is based on the same beliefs. But I know you've been chewing your weed and staring into the well of Fourth World and nobody answered you until I fell down the rabbit hole. It's time to break a few rules, make some noise. That's the power of widdershins. It's . . ." I thought about what had happened on the fourth plane. ". . . Coyote's power. Chaos. The Trickster's proven to be the most honest god we've met so far. His fury was real. He said he wanted her back. His mischief offsetting her evil. Hopefully widdershins will rupture the fabric of her magic, and we'll cause a rip. Think about it. You want to watch her dance off with the rest of the mesa?"
"Madness," Spear-in-the-Heart said. "I don't know if I should trust you."
"This is just foreplay, Isaac. They're not noticing us because they've only got eyes for each other. She hasn't been killing your children. Massau has. He's courting her. Infant murders are like candy and roses. When they get serious, they'll wipe out your people, and the rest of the world."
He touched his medicine bag and looked inside it as if the chindi of his parents might weave out and make his decision for him. "All right. We'll spit in the face of nature if we must, but what do we do once we've got their attention? Forces like these unleashed could change our universe."
He wasn't exaggerating. Self made his way back to us, the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever looped in his mind. "I'll also need a cord."
"What kind of cord? Where are we going to get a cord?"
Here, Self said, reaching out to take one of Isaac's braids, and with a slick motion of his claw cut about a foot of hair from his head.
"Little bastard!"
Self guided me in the pattern of the knots. Not too small, you'll have to untie them again.
I know.
Spear-in-the-Heart dumped his pocket dust and cornmeal into a heap and did a quick sand painting. He moved with grace and speed and artistic integrity that caught the leash of life and held on. He looked at the cord of his hair and said, "What's that going to do?"
"It's a mystical snare called the witch's ladder. We've got a lot of gods to catch."
"With that?" He sighed heavily and plucked at one of his remaining braids. "All whites are crazy, but especially you damn witches."
A child wailed again, and the dance ended.
Evil became palpable, air diseased, the mesa cursed down through its cliffs. Lilith turned and saw us, taking notice, and cocked a twisted eyebrow. Massau took off his mask.
Spear-in-the-Heart spun and shouted, "Don't Look!" Throwing up an arm to shield himself, he threw sand in my eyes. Too late. Beneath his mask the Skeleton Man proved faceless, containing black hole universes replete in each of us, from Adam on. Thrown from Eden, hanged in chasms, burned at the stake, sucked into a shallow grave on the side of the road, caught
up in fires and floods, bullets to the back of the head, drinking Drano, sacrifices, cancer, crib death, endless in our endings.
When my vision cleared Massau and Lilith were kissing, dead on dead, demonic homicidal gods in love.
"Come on, Isaac. Widdershins to Changing Woman."
Drawing the back of his hand across his forehead to wipe away sweat, Isaac spoke fast and furiously. "All right, you answered the call, I have to trust you. But make no mistake, this isn't ritual, not like the time we fought Redclay Fang. He was a powerful sorcerer, but really only a crazy old man. That was a human battle. Now we're using the machinery of the infinite, as the yei do. We're not here to beseech the gods, but to compel them, and with you involved I just know it's going to piss them off, too."
A lot like Enochian magic, where man argues with the archangels. I asked Self, Can we call upon Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelaf to help us? To return and strike at Lilith?
No, he said.
"Hurry," Spear-in-the-Heart urged.
"Walk with me."
"How?"
"Just stand by my side."
We walked widdershins, and I untied the first knot of the witch's ladder: Lilith and Massau both fell back a step, out of synch with each other, as if a blade had plunged down and separated them. Self leaped between them too, claws extended, a grotesque son of a different mother, but Lilith paused without striking him down. He looked vaguely like the djinn, and she must have thought back to a time before King Solomon had bottled her children. She nipped at his ear and hugged him to her, and he played along. Massau turned as coyotes in the distance howled in the desert.
Isaac swallowed back a groan, performing magic in a sick and despised way according to his people, crossing nature. Big Fly and Corn Beetle appeared and buzzed overhead, begging him to take heed of their warnings and protest.
This was the Witchery Way. The four elements: Earth—the north—sign of the pentacle and female principality, representing fertility and darkness, green of the world, the gold mined, Air—the east—and the wand, male, his intellect, energy, and will, yellow of the burning sky, silver from ground, Water—the west—cup, chalice, cauldron, the wife and her emotions, sensitivity, blue ocean, silver metal, Fire—the south—my sword, witch's knife, the male's courage and anger, flaming orange, and gold.
We walked against nature: like torn tissue paper reality ripped and flapped around us, the world wavering. Isaac gasped and held his breath as the cliffs blotted out for an instant, our tear enlarging. Here we created our own physics, the village flashing by us like a merry-go-round as widdershins wrenched the structure of the universe. I untied the next three knots and a spit of lightning flashed overhead, thunder rumbling on for much longer than it should.
Lilith had Self, spinning him in her arms; by now he looked dead to me, eyes rolled back in his head, lengthy tongue lolling. My heartbeat hammered. She dumped him and Self laid in a heap in the dirt plaza, unmoving. Massau approached one of the homes, stepping to the door. It was the place where the two old women had taken the mother and little Betty. They cried out, calling for Isaac.
"Hurry!" he bellowed. "He's going for the children!"
Massau tore the door off the house and reached inside, looking to pluck roses for his love. Isaac broke off to run and the rip enlarged, black on black as nature roared around us. The earth roiled, wheeled, and snarled. I said, "To hell with it!" and untied the remaining knots all at once. Lightning erupted from under our feet, frying the soil, and we both screamed, hair electrified on end, flesh burning. Isaac rolled on top of me and slapped at the flames spreading across the back of my shirt. I crumpled in the dust on my belly, fighting off shock, the acrid stench of broiled meat heavy in my lungs, and raised my chin out of the dirt just in time to see her approach.
"Told you," Isaac gasped. "Piss everybody off."
Changing Woman: mother: beautiful in the ways you don't normally think; plump and wholesome with fat cheeks and heavy arms, ready with a gawkish smile, humble in her power and life. Isaac stood and held out his arms to her, in respect and love, complete with nature and parent of his tribes and land. Gaea, mother of Wicca, goddess of the shaman. Changing Woman—whom I'd moved against—arrived now in her perfection, swaying languorously though men had treated her badly, the most natural of dancers, and took Massau by the hand to lead him from Lilith. He resisted for a moment, but death was too much a part of nature for him to fight her off. Skies shattered and the rain began, widely-spaced drops pouring from the darkness and cooling my red skin.
Lilith screeched at the insolence of Nature and attacked her, needle teeth biting, talons rending. Both a mother and child of rage, she threw herself at Changing Woman the same way she'd burst from the garden of Eden, divorcing herself from heaven and earth. Changing Woman took Lilith in her enormous arms and held her struggling, which was all either of them could do. Love and hate closing the circle. Coyotes howled and Lilith screeched, the Skeleton Man leaving by the natural turn of the universe as the rain washed down. Lilith sat beneath the waning moon and crawled through Changing Woman's belly back to Fourth World. I wondered if Coyote would still want her, or if even the Trickster had already had enough.
I passed out, and when I came to Isaac was putting the herbs back on my tongue. "Nothing's changed," I whispered.
He said, "A journey of thousand miles begins with one step."
"I can't believe you said that."
Spear-in-the-Heart laughed, a human, magnificent sound. "Me either."
This time I left his medicines on my tongue and tried to find some taste in his healing ways, the memories unlocking and coming a long way to find me, seeing my own childhood and mother again and finding myself not so very different from these people and their gods. Some of my strength returned and Isaac continued to laugh, until Self came over spitting as if he'd sucked on lemons, stuck a claw against my tongue and scraped the shaman's curing touch from me again, saying with both love and bitterness of his own, De nada.
EYE-BITING AND OTHER DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION
Dead dogs lined the mountain road, spaced about a hundred yards apart for more than a quarter mile so far. Dobermans, St. Bernards, Great Danes and large mongrels all leisurely curled and laid out, tongues lolling, as if only resting after a good day's hunt. Soil surrounding them lay trampled; they must have pawed, kicked and danced insanely for hours before dying of shock and exhaustion.
Wind keened sad tunes through the boles as the sun began its slide against the horizon. There's an ancient art of reading shadows thrown on corpses that I'd never grown proficient in. I could only make out a few signs, but didn't quite know how to interpret them.
Something about a prison? Bars on the window.
I shifted my satchel across my back and knelt beside a German Shepherd with the nametag RONKO. I turned the animal over, checking lividity. Its legs were already loosening out of rigor mortis. At least ten hours dead, yet despite the summer heat no scavengers had picked at the dogs and no flies covered them.
A lake lapped quietly in the distance. I followed the dead pets onto another, narrower dirt path leading further back up into the woods.
After a half hour the trail opened into a small, weed-covered field thick with moonlight. A lot of truck tire tracks and beer cans in the crabgrass, but not many condoms. Kids still hadn't gotten the message that death even wanted you when procreating. Dogs were packed much more closely here, huddled in groups, a few still alive and whimpering, licking at my ankles as I walked by.
A simple spell called the rite of release freed lingering souls. It took a while to work out a subtle variation to liberate the live animals from their watch. They yelped and crawled off through the brush. Enough corpses remained to point me towards the abandoned well ahead.
The keening breeze grew louder and carried a stench that started me coughing. Self roused from his reverie as I walked across the field. Uncoiling over my shoulder, twining around my neck, he sniffed the scent of murdered witch's blood an
d began to growl. Salt lay piled in areas around the well. Self could see that holy water had been sprinkled across the grass; it appeared as red drops of flame to his eyes.
Exorcised and sown with salt, he said.
Something small wandered the edge of the well, hopping and fluttering and swinging back and forth in the bucket: semi-human with a hairy body, it had two raven-heads with tiny human faces in its knees. The creature finally sat still and began weeping. It took no notice of me as I approached.
Mammon? I asked. One of the four dukes of Hell?
Maymon! Self shouted, leaping down and rushing forward. They hugged like long-lost friends meeting again at a funeral. Self cradled Maymon's bird-heads, cooing assuring whispers.
Maymon whined and whinnied, even tweeting at times. The faces at its knees looked puzzled and pained, staring wide-eyed at me and mouthing unrecognizable words. They licked and bit their lips. I realized this was some lower tier spawn of Duke Mammon. Something off the bottom of the circle—one of Self's formerly favorite stomping grounds.
What's it got to say?
Not much, he told me. Doesn't have a lot of his father in him. Four millionth generation spawn, mother was a Thalidomide stillborn. He's a familiar now.
For who?
Whom. She's been dunked. Her suffering and death has cleaved him.
I stood at the well and looked down. Recent rains had raised the water level so that the body almost floated to the top.
Once she'd had a face; I couldn't tell if it had been plain or lovely, one to die for or to live for. Now somebody had taken most of it away.
They'd used the old techniques on her. Her flesh was scored with needle tracks. They'd pricked her searching for the witch's mark supposedly left by Satan's raking claw. She'd been bloodied, slashed just above the nostrils as a way of bleeding off her witchery. Breasts lanced, nipples burned and torn at with red-hot pincers. Eyelids were sliced as her torturer searched for the devil's mark beneath them, needles driven into moles and scars, any kind of blemish. I reached down and touched her arm. She spun languorously to me like a skinny-dipping lover. Four of her fingernails had been efficiently pulled out by a device called the turcas. The only ones I knew of still in existence were in museums. They'd used the bootikens, too, crushing her feet.
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