by Naomi Foyle
Yoki, sitting beside Astra, gripped his staff tighter. Astra knew why. Apart from Hokma, she couldn’t remember another Or adult ever mentioning Sheba in front of Nimma. Neither she nor Yoki turned round. Behind her, Nimma’s grief was like a forest cobweb in the night: she couldn’t see it, but it was drifting over her, getting stuck in her hair, caught in her breath.
Suddenly she felt smothered in guilt. Of course Nimma would feel sad tonight.
‘It was a seven- or eight-hour journey, Yoki,’ Klor said into the silence. ‘People had to stay overnight, so their work and other Shelter children suffered. Some mothers with infants stayed behind and missed the ceremony altogether.’
‘A national ceremony would be far too long,’ Hokma said firmly. ‘I’ve never thought it was a good idea.’
‘Sec Gens would probably have the stamina for it,’ Ahn said from the back, ‘but having so many people drawn to one location could make Is-Land vulnerable, Yoki.’
Yoki swung around. ‘Could Non-Landers attack the Blood & Seed ceremony?’
‘Is-Land isn’t vulnerable, Yoki.’ Astra raised her voice but kept the tone level. She wasn’t contradicting Ahn, she hoped, but reassuring her Shelter sibling. That would show Nimma she was a good sister, worthy of the beads Sheba had loved. And it would also show Ahn that she could fit in with the Sec Gens. ‘The Boundary is well defended.’
‘Of course it is, Astra.’ From behind her, Nimma spoke crisply. ‘But we don’t want the roads blocked, causing chaos that Non-Landers could scheme to take advantage of.’
‘Oh, politics! Let’s not talk politics for once, my darling,’ Klor exclaimed beside her. ‘Look, Or-kids. A gap in the trees – there’s the steppes! Gaia’s stubbly cheeks!’
‘Klor!’ Nimma protested, and all the adults laughed. Yoki giggled too, and bounced in his seat, and Astra relaxed. The bead braid was heavy, yes, but she didn’t mind. She wasn’t going to spoil tonight by being a selfish non-Sec Gen. Tonight was going to be perfect. Tonight she was going to belong.
They were leaving New Bangor, now, taking the road to Sippur. As twilight began to fall, the adults started singing ‘Gaia’s Endless Bounty’ and soon they were all harmonising. Then, suddenly, the glint of the Boundary was visible on the right. Instead of sailing past it, as she and Hokma had done in the bus so long ago, Pan turned up into the mountains and joined a stream of traffic flowing towards the Blood & Seed ceremony: buses, cars, minivans and horse-drawn carts full of children and their parents.
* * *
They drove into a big field filled with vehicles and people. Just inside the entrance a parking steward in a bright yellow tabard flashed a STOP sign at them. Pan unrolled the window.
‘Happy Blood & Seed Day,’ the steward greeted him. Pan told him which school they were from and the steward pointed at a tall blue flag in the corner of the field.
‘Golden Bough’s over there. Most of the schools are here now. When everyone’s gathered and ready, you’ll hear the signal to enter the site at the foot of the flag.’
The fourteen school flags were lined up along the edge of the wood that protected the Boundary. More parking stewards helped direct the van across the bumpy field, down a double row of vehicles parked in front of the blue flag and into a space beside a wooden cart and horse. It was Silvie’s Shelter mothers’ cart, Astra knew, the one they sometimes brought from Higgs to New Bangor laden with produce. Today it was decorated with bright green boughs and lengths of silver-and-red rope Silvie and her community siblings had knitted. Yoki slid out of the van and Astra joined him on the grass. Ahead of them, their friends from school were milling around on the verge of the field, examining each other’s hipbeads, necklaces and staffs. Their parents and some of the teachers were there too, chatting. Mr Ripenson had come earlier to help set up; he was standing next to Mrs Raintree at a folding table, pouring cups of tea from a flask. He noticed Astra and Yoki and waved.
‘Go on then,’ Nimma said, ‘join the others – but don’t wander off. We’ll be going in soon.’
Astra, shiny and strong in her hipbeads and brand-new boots, carrying her staff with its beautiful heart-shaped knob, with all her Shelter parents beaming at her, strode with Yoki down the avenue of vehicles to join their classmates. The braid beads swung gently from her head and the hipbeads rolled over her skin and clicked lightly against each other.
As her friends parted to let her and Yoki join their Murmuration, Leaf reached out to finger Kali’s beads. ‘O Gaia, those are so gorgeous. I just want to suck them!’
Soon Astra was right in the middle of the crush, telling the story of Kali and Atlantis, and checking out everyone else’s hipbeads. All the strings had to be made of at least three IMBOD-recognised Blood & Seed beads, one brown, one red and one white, from a choice of wooden, nut, bone, glass, mother-of-pearl or ceramic beads and a range of semiprecious stones: garnets, dark carnelian, red jasper, rubies, moonstones, opals and pearls. No one in the Golden Bough Murmuration had a ruby – those were for wealthy urban children – but the school had decided that all the girls should have a garnet as a centre stone and the boys a moonstone, and Leaf one of each. Some of the larger beads were carved into lacy patterns, others were painted with tiny dotted or flowered patterns. Even the smaller beads were all different: translucent or opaque, flat discs or spheres, faceted or smooth. Tedis’ necklace alternated moonstone cubes with carved round oakwood beads. Leaf’s divider beads were white ceramic, hand-painted with red petals. Each bead string was a power cord that connected you with Gaia. You would keep it forever, and wear it in your Gaia-bonding ceremonies, when a loved one died and during the birth of your children. At the end, you would be burned or buried in it.
The sun was setting now. To the west the sky was flushed. The evening air was warm and supple. Rubbing everyone else’s beads between her fingertips, explaining over and over how Kali had worn a rubber wetsuit and iron lungs to buy her Murano beads in Neuropa’s famous underwater city, Astra almost forgot about Ahn. There was great excitement too over Silvie and Sultana, who were both wearing blood panties, Sultana having had her first bleed in sync with the ceremony. The school would score points for this. Tedis was wondering if they had time to send scouts to check out the other schools and see how many blood-panty girls they had when Baz pointed into the air and asked, ‘What’s that?’
A Kezcam was swivelling above them, a small black ball punctuating the deepening blue heavens.
‘It’s the camera,’ Astra said. ‘We’re not supposed to look at it, remember.’
‘Yeah, Baz.’ Tedis punched his arm. ‘Was that you at rehearsal or did you send your Green Spoon Room clone?’
‘Ha ha. I didn’t think it would look like a burnt testicle.’
Everyone laughed. Carefully, Astra cast an eye out over the field. Ahn was standing by a horse and cart, the Kezcam bag on his hip and Tablette in hand. He was swiping the screen and scanning the air above the crowd in his practised way. Hokma and Mr Ripenson were in front of the tea table and they were watching Ahn too. Then Mr Ripenson raised his hand and as if jerking herself awake, Hokma stepped over to join Nimma and Klor.
The sun had set. Whooo hooo. Whooo hooo. Mr Ripenson made the call of an owl and the children rushed to line up behind him in order of height, shortest to tallest, alternating staff hands like rowers with their oars on a scull. The other teachers and parents following in single file, they entered the paperbark woods along the edge of the field and passed into the Congregation Site.
* * *
The Congregation Site was a clearing between the woods and the Boundary. From the road it was a golden wink, but here the Boundary was a towering screen, a gilded curtain of swooning light running between two dark mountains and disappearing at either end into the woods. The Boundary was imposing, impenetrable: two watchtowers jutted up either side of the clearing and IMBOD soldiers, Astra knew, were patrolling the parapets behind its fiery veil. But at the same time the Boundary was enchanting, intoxicating, exh
ilarating. Beneath the royal blue twilight sky its bright yellow and orange flames mingled and rippled to the ground like an endlessly falling bolt of sateen. Looking at it was like watching a cascade of golden salmon leaping down a waterfall. The Boundary was the Or Story Fountain, but ten times higher and infinitely longer. It was Tabby held under the covers at night when you were little, filling your vision with soothing colours and ushering your brainwaves into Beta-flow. It was the flare inside you when you peaked and remained peaking for an eternity – but it was there for everyone to see and share. The Boundary was Gaia’s sacred girdle, Her holy ring of fire.
Moving towards the Boundary, Astra felt her legs begin to drag, as if a magnet in the earth was pulling her to the ground to worship Gaia right here, right now. But she couldn’t stop: she had to keep walking, following Leaf down the centre aisle between the site’s amphitheatre seating towards the Blood & Seed labyrinth.
The fourteen schools were to stand in rows, seven on the right side of the labyrinth entrance and seven on the left; their parents and teachers sat on the benches behind them. Mr Ripenson was ushering the children into their row, behind a school from Cedaria.
Peat had not been allowed to tell her and Yoki what the labyrinth looked like, only that it was awesome. All Astra knew was that it was set out in a Chakravyuha pattern, an ancient Hindu battle formation. The first time the children walked the labyrinth would be at the ceremony – in rehearsal they had simply walked around in a circle, chanting their hymns. Here, as she took her place in the row and peered between the heads of the students from Cedaria, she could see the pattern for the first time. The Bioregional Wheel Meet had paved it with red marble stones, bordered with beds of white irises and lilies. Solar garden lamps planted at regular intervals between the flowers lit the path, which doubled back on itself in wide circles until it reached a tight spiral at the centre. It was supposed to look like a blooming lotus or a spinning chakra. Warriors on the rim protected their leaders in the centre, and if the enemy somehow did manage to penetrate, they would find it impossible to escape.
Though the labyrinth looked like a maze, there was only the one path to the centre and back. If you met celebrants coming the other way, you were to step around them. The marble was glossy and the stones, though flat, might be uneven and slippery to walk on, so you had to walk slowly and use your staff for balance. Fundamentally, though, you didn’t have to worry about anything as you walked the labyrinth. It would pull you to the centre and then release you.
Everyone had entered the site now. The sky was darkening and the Boundary flames were shading from orange to crimson. Mr Ripenson had gone to join the Golden Bough parents and teachers in the seats. Four IMBOD officers, two men and two women, all tall and toned, processed down the centre aisle and took their places either side of the labyrinth entrance. Behind them, the Boundary imagery morphed from fire to liquid. Now it was as if waves of blood and milk were washing down the screen. Beneath it, the labyrinth shone with an eerie glimmer, the faint auras of the solar lamps almost absorbed by the Boundary’s deepening ambient light. Against the spectacle, the IMBOD officers were dark silhouettes, four black outlines against the pouring wall, the two men facing the two women on either side of the entrance. Then, from the watchtowers, two spears of bright white light struck the two officers nearest the entrance. Bleached in the beams, they lifted their arms, each bearing aloft a chalice.
‘Blood & Seed Day,’ the four IMBOD officers began to chant. Astra heard the adults behind her rise to their feet.
There were no speeches here, no master or mistress of ceremonies, no one telling you where the toilets were, or the order of events. Everyone had rehearsed; everyone knew what to do. She opened her mouth and joined the hymn.
Blood & Seed Day
Blood & Seed Day
Day of Sowing
Day of Growing
Day of Ripeness
Red and Whiteness
Youth abloom
Spilling, spooling
Powering, pouring
Into Gaia’s
Sacred Womb
The words were simple, but they were repeated in different patterns, in counterpoint to the other schools, and many hours had been spent rehearsing the full cycle with recordings of the other parts, and once with a Tablette connection between the fourteen schools. Sewing petals in the Earthship, Astra had tried changing the words to ‘Day of Snoring, Day of Boring’. But though Yoki had giggled, he’d caught himself and shaken his head. ‘Don’t make fun of Gaia, Astra,’ he’d ordered. And now, hearing the hymn in its full-throated glory, rising into the evening sky above the Boundary, she forgot that she’d ever resented having to learn it, forgot the times she’d pricked her finger sewing, forgot about all the petals she’d sewn only for Nimma to say not good enough, unpick it and start again.
The row ahead of her was moving now as the children from Nīrāgā began to walk towards the entrance to the labyrinth. She was nervous, she realised, suddenly pierced with the dreadful feeling that she wasn’t good enough to be here, she hadn’t practised hard enough, she wasn’t Sec Gen, she had let herself get woefully distracted by Lil. But she couldn’t give in to the fear; she couldn’t let anyone know. She had to concentrate on the hymn, not let the school down. If you forgot your place, it was better to mouth the words until you found it again. Right now they were repeating each couplet five times: Day of Sowing, Day of Growing, Day of Sowing, Day of Growing … She knew this. Repeating it, she felt her tremor of panic subside.
At last her school line began to move too, starting from the innermost child – the tallest, Tedis – and then she was turning and following Fox on her way to the heart of Gaia’s womb. The beams of light were moving over the labyrinth now, and the IMBOD officers were as tall as trees in the night. Astra hardly noticed them, focused as she was on counting phrases and moving one slow step after another in time to the hymn. At the labyrinth threshold Fox stopped and took a sip from the chalice offered by the man on the right, and another from the one held by the woman on the left. That was the beginning of the ceremony. Without Fox, she might have forgotten. As Fox stepped over the threshold and into the labyrinth, the two Chalice Officers turned to their Second Officers, the flagon-bearers, who refilled the goblets. Astra remembered to face the female First Officer first. The officer was dressed in full uniform: boots, knife belt, hydrobelt, medpac and peaked cap. She lifted the silver chalice to Astra’s lips. It was filled with a dark liquid she knew was red, though it looked black in the weird mixture of light swirling over the clearing. She took a scant mouthful of sour cherry juice, then turned to the male officer. His chalice was full of liquid that should have looked white but didn’t; it was grey and shadowy, streaked with the red light of the Boundary, but it tasted exactly like what it was, her favourite drink, gorgeous rich coconut cream.
Day of Ripeness.
Red and Whiteness.
Now she was chanting again as she stepped over the threshold. She didn’t need to watch Fox any more; though he was only a pace ahead of her, he was in his own world and she was in hers. She plunged her hand into the drawstring bag hanging from her staff and withdrew a fistful of petals. As she placed her boot on the first red marble paving stone, she let one fall. The path was already scattered with red and white drops of embroidery and hers was immediately lost in the drift. It didn’t matter: she was in the labyrinth now. The path turned sharp right, not around the edge of the labyrinth, but into one of its middle rings. As she stepped on, other celebrants moving either side of her, she allowed more petals to trickle through her fist. Some fell in the cracks between the stones, others wafted into the flowerbeds, their sequins glimmering in the soft glare of the solar lamps. Ahead of her, Fox was chanting loudly and shaking his fist like a silent rattle in time to the hymn. In the glow cast by the Boundary his back was marbled like the paving stones. So was her own skin, she noticed vaguely, as the red streaks veining her forearms deepened to crimson. Then a beam of hot white light po
ured over her, draining everyone near her of all colour. Everyone was bathed in an ever-fluctuating stream of womb-blood and semen.
Youth abloom
Youth abloom
It took longer than you thought to walk a labyrinth; that was what Mr Ripenson had said; but at the same time it took no time, because it took you outside time. In her peripheral vision Astra could see the empty centre, but as she reached the end of her first near-navigation around it, the path doubled back on itself, taking her one ring closer to the outer edge. She was walking back alongside the path she had just trodden, further from her destination than she had been before. She was a petal in an eddy of chanting and as she walked the wider ring, planting her staff, dipping into her bag, shedding her petal-seeds, singing her monotonous songlines, she began to understand what it meant to be letting go of childish desires. The hymn was rising and ahead and behind her the celebrants were steadily pouring into Gaia’s womb. She didn’t need to be first to the centre. She would get there in time. She didn’t need to be faster than the others. Their steps gave hers fraternity, sorority, solidity, strength. She didn’t rue the spilling of her petals, the weeks of painstaking work they represented. She wanted to offer them to Gaia, to the feet of her brothers and sisters, to the vision field of her parents and everyone’s parents, sitting in the darkness outside the rim of the labyrinth. And she didn’t want to be angry with Lil any more. She wished now that Lil could be here too, except she was, because she was in Astra’s heart and her rough tears were staining Astra’s petals and falling softly down to the path too. She was shedding Lil’s anguish for her and letting it mulch into the mystery of Gaia’s benevolence, Gaia’s offer of renewal to every broken, damaged, wounded generation through their children and their children and theirs.