“This one here is a Magpie. The Magpie is one of the smartest creatures on the planet. They say they can recognize their own reflection in a looking glass. What do ye think of that, eh?” asked the bird master, carefully depositing the magpie in a spacious coop. It shook its feathers out, settling itself on its new roost.
“I know,” Deliverance said, finding her girlish voice. “Sometimes one will come to Mamma with a message. She told me how intelligent they are.” She recalled wanting to stroke the spot on one of the bird’s wings, like a dollop of fresh cream on the oily black feathers.
The elderly man frowned. “Cat should not be getting messages firsthand. ’Tis not for women to receive such information unvetted by the Men’s Hall.”
Deliverance stared up at the man, horrified eyes rounded, realizing she must have said something she shouldn’t have.
He grimaced, opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it again and sighed. “Ye best keep that little tidbit to yourself. Sometimes it’s best if certain things are kept silent. Do you understand, Deliverance?” He finally bade, chiding the little girl and then shuffling her out of the aviary. “Your mother will wonder as to where ye be. Off with ye.”
It was not until Deliverance was much older that a fuller understanding of what had transpired in the aviary that day would dawn on her. Some concoctions take time to brew.
CHAPTER 2
Deliverance
Present Day
“Honestly, daughter, if your head was any cloudier, I would ask ye to rain a bit on my posies to keep them from wilting,” Cat called Deliverance back into the here and now. They were up to their elbows in lanolin, shearing the sheep, and Deliverance had still managed to wander off in her own mind. How she could do so in the midst of all the stinking grease and bleating, she could not rightly fathom.
Deliverance asked her mother as she returned to her shears, “Why is it all the gods are men?”
Her mother smartly replied, “Because if they were women they would be goddesses.”
But Deliverance was in no mood for her mother’s vagaries. “I understand the linguistic nuance, Mother, but not the cultural one.” She stared at her mother with a look that allowed no idling.
Cat sighed and put down the wooly beast she had been pruning, and wiped the sweat from her lined brow. “Which gods do we most often call upon?” she asked patiently.
“The Hunter God and the God of Horizons,” Deliverance replied.
“Yes, and do you know why that is?”
This time Deliverance had some difficulty answering. “Well, the Hunter God provides us with game and helps us to live through the winter…and the God of Horizons…I don’t know. Lives in the sky?” It had not been a subject she had pondered much. On the solstices and proper eves, she had dutifully gone through the motions of the rituals with her mother, alone by a bonfire on their stretch of beach. But the reasoning had never really occurred to her.
“Daughter, you were born with a good mind. Use it more often,” her mother chided. But she softened the blow by explaining, “The Hunter God is not just our chosen because of survival. When you are alone in the woods, pursuing your prey, the world is your own. He allows you to move with the grace of a cat, the stealth of a wolf, and the precision of a hawk. You are the predator. This is empowering, daughter. Women so often are the prey.”
Deliverance mulled this over, turning the idea over in her mind, exploring its edges and finally accepting it. “But what of the God of Horizons? I never even hear the Abbot mention that one.”
Her mother smiled, secretly, indulgently. “Well, the Abbot is not in possession of all the world’s knowledge, now is he, daughter? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Deliverance smiled. “Those are beautiful words. From whence do they come, Mother?”
“From none of the tomes in the Abbey vaults, daughter. The God of Horizons is the god of infinite possibilities. Not only does he rule the skies, but he watches and sees all that happens beneath it. And as to your question about goddesses, who is to say how a god views gender? Perhaps the God of Horizons is indeed a goddess? It is not for us mortals to know or say. We just do the best we can.”
Best they could was exactly what Deliverance and Cat did with their lives, and they did quite well. It was a happy existence, she and her mother amongst the towering pines and rocky crags of their homestead. Deliverance loved the little cottage growing out of the mountain, as if the cottage were fighting to emerge from the boulders. The walls were lined with paintings and weavings handed down from generation to generation of Cat and Deliverance’s family—always a mother and a daughter, then for a time a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter, until the universe reverted once again back to the duo of mother and daughter. Two of everything existed in their sphere—two wooden bowls, two kiln-fired mugs, two knotty chairs by the hearth. There was one bed, which Deliverance shared with her mother, and one dinged, iron tub for bathing. But these were exceptions to the rule of two that seemed to overtake the tiny abode.
“Now,” Cat said, again interrupting Deliverance’s reveries, “pick up those shears or I’ve a mind to use mine on that curly mop of yours!”
***
“Tell me the lore, again, Mother,” Deliverance said, hugging her cup of mint tea close, huffing in the warm steam.
“How many hundreds of times have ye heard it, Daughter?” Cat laughed into her own cup. They were relaxing by the fireside after the long day of sorting and cutting wool.
“I know…it’s just. I have been thinking a lot lately,” Deliverance began, but did not know how to finish her thought.
“And when are ye not thinking, daughter o’ mine?” Cat quizzed her, but soon relented, settling back to retell the story.
“In the time of your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s mother, and perhaps some mothers more, the island of Nar was uninhabited,” Cat began, falling into her rich storywinding voice. “The Kingdom of Nar existed in the Outside, connected to many other nations and kingdoms, some of which we still receive news of via raven today. The Queen of Nar was reported to have been a great sorceress, without a name gift, as they did not exist yet, but possessing many other gifts. She used them to control the King of Nar and impose her will on the entire kingdom. The queen was evil though, and was said to have had a great disrespect for men. She often made them dance like puppets for her in her court. She took their voices and made them howl like monkeys or made them fight amongst themselves unwillingly.” Deliverance had also heard darker versions of the tale, in which the queen had done other unspeakable acts to the men of her kingdom, the tales mostly emanating from Effie, who had a sense of the darker side of life and a great many connections to powerful men with access to information in the village.
“Nar was the only kingdom in the world to produce sorceresses,” her mother continued. “As you know, men were incapable of magic of any kind even in that ancient time. The queen’s voracious appetite for evil soon closed all its political doors with the surrounding kingdoms. No one wanted any part of what the alien, merciless queen had to offer. Then, the King of Nar, in an act of desperation, reached out to the queen’s only living relative, her elderly aunt who was on her deathbed, to aid him in rein
ing in the reigning queen. The aunt, as her dying magical act, ripped her niece’s power from her soul. But as with many magical acts, there had to be counterbalances, prices paid.
“The king, in his desperation, agreed to the aunt’s terms. In exchange for taking the queen’s power, the power had to be distributed elsewhere. And so the gifts of the queen were filtered throughout all the females in Nar. But the king and the other men would have some recompense against the abuse of powers as the females, with such diluted magic, could only possess one gift each. The gifts would be determined at birth with the Naming ceremony, which the aunt prescribed, scribbling out the incantations in ink on papyrus to later be preserved, copied, and kept in the vault of the God of Names in the temple run by the Abbot on the island. If a mother were to name an infant something overreaching, say Dominus, or Reina, well…an infant is a delicate being. Many do not make it long past the birthing. Ambition can be deadly.”
Deliverance nodded at this, knowing this wisdom to be truth.
“With the aunt’s last breath, the curse alighted across the kingdom, sapping the queen’s power from the marrow of her bones and scattering it across the land. The other kings in the surrounding nations, having heard of the queen’s seized power and subsequent execution, converged on Nar once again. They convinced the King of Nar to move his people to a faraway island for the good of the rest of world. Even though the women were far less powerful than the queen had been, they still possessed unnatural abilities, which had to be contained. And thus came the Great Migration to the Island, and here we been ever since.”
To Deliverance’s knowledge no one had ever tried to leave the island. Had reaching the Outside been attempted, she probably would have heard about it. Effie knew everything that went on in the village, and so, by proxy, did Deliverance. No one ever discussed elsewhere…the Outside was an academic concept having no tangibility in their minds. In any case, she was not sure how one went about leaving an island or how they got there in the first place. That knowledge was kept strictly confidential in the vaults of the Men’s Hall and the records kept in the Abby’s vaults.
Still, her daydream earlier in the week whilst visiting Effie had conjured questions about the great looming Outside. Especially weighing on her mind was how did they manage to get here in the first place? Magic? Some gargantuan bird? It seemed incomprehensible and yet intrigued her.
“Are ye satisfied now, daughter o’ mine?” Cat laughed, reaching to stir the pot of stew bubbling over the fire.
For a moment, so slight Deliverance could have imagined it, Cat seemed to hesitate, as if she had something more to say. But Deliverance nodded because she knew even if she prodded, there would be no more answers tonight. Cat was often a guarded book and Deliverance cherished these telling moments but knew if she pushed for more, the book’s cover would snap shut.
CHAPTER 3
Deliverance
“Gods’ teeth! Do you have sheep’s wool stuck in your head, girl?” Deliverance exclaimed one overly warm summer day. She squinted her mossy green orbs up at the sun and wondered if the God of Horizons was delivering just a little too much sun that day. Any more and they would roast like plucked chickens.
“It’s not as daft as it sounds!” Effie defended herself, pointing a corner of her generous salami sandwich at Deliverance. They sought their usual shady refuge under the massive oak outside the town square in the brunt of the afternoon. The corner of the browned bread reminded Deliverance of the honeycombs she had just harvested the other day. It was the same shade of amber.
“You think I’m royalty!?” Deliverance snorted, the incredulity dripping from the gesture.
“Well, not royalty anymore. We don’t have royals no more. Not here anyways. But used to be. Royal descended,” Effie explained, mouth full of masticated pig.
“Right…whatever would give you such an addlepated notion?” Deliverance demanded of her friend, amused all the same at the imagination of the girl.
Effie tossed her burnished auburn curls over her shoulder and with mock importance stated, “I am a lady of the night. Men tell me things. Things they would never tell their wives. I can suss out a string of information like a badger can find a mound of juicy gob-worms.”
“Lady of the night? Where in the Fades did you hear such a term? Not that it is not fitting,” Deliverance said, changing the subject, although she knew for a fact that Effie conducted her business at all hours, not just the eve.
“The carpenter. He reads a lot in the Men’s hall. He said it’s a real title for my job description,” Effie explained. Everyone knew Effie was a harlot. She insisted it suited her and took to the trade not long after her body took the shape of a woman’s. She earned her keep and more besides. Deliverance was told once by the Abbot’s wife that she should choose better company, but Deliverance wondered if the woman was simply jealous of Effie’s freedom. Of all the women in the village, the Abbot’s wife was the most constrained, doomed to a life of servitude to that sniveling man of gods.
“But it’s not the carpenter that told me of the lore. It were the butcher,” Effie continued, not to be dissuaded from her intended mission of convincing Deliverance she was some kind of royal offspring. Deliverance wondered briefly if every man in the town had been in Effie’s bed, and made a mental note to supply her with more tonic to ward off any illness. She did not need to contract the baker’s wife’s unfortunate bout of warts…
“He said in one of the stacks there was a book that said that the aunt was spiteful of the King of Nar, who brought us here in the Great Migration for being too weak to contain her niece himself. And so, as part of the curse ridding the queen of her power, she made all the queen’s daughters indifferent to men. And the king’s line would forever be daughters, no sons to console and be comforted by, so he would die lonely.”
“And so, you think…I am indifferent to men?” Deliverance raised an eyebrow.
“I’m just saying that ye and your mother and her mother and her mother’s mother have all lived out there in that little cove on the other side of the isle…for generations…with no men. I mean, there must have been a man…men…at some point. For Hunter’s sake, you did not just spring from your mother’s forehead!” Effie babbled on, indifferent to her friend’s grimace. Deliverance too had had no inkling in all her 23 years from her mother from whence the other half of her being came. It was a sore subject with the young woman. “All I’m saying is that the curse was supposed to make the royal line indifferent to men, or that’s what the butcher said he read in the book. That they would be odd and separate, having no need for the regular social conventions of the people.”
Deliverance mulled over this thought, but it seemed…off, like a puzzle box with too few pieces. It was true she had never had any friendships with anyone other than Effie. It was not as if she did not notice the young men her age in the village; she simply did not need them. Her life was replete without the complication of adding pheromones and sex and the power trips that came with interacting with the awkward other sex. It was a precarious business interacting with men. Deliverance left it to Effie, who was naturally inclined to handle that business.
“And what of this book, this insightful tome which the butcher just so happened to alight upon?” Deliverance asked, finishing her sandwich and taking a swig of cider from her waterskin.
&nb
sp; Effie twisted her mouth. “You know, he did comment it was odd, the book was rather new. Most of the lore books have been collecting dust in that blasted mildew-ridden Men’s Hall for generations. But this one was neater, with a newer cover and tighter binding. Or maybe he was reaching for information. By that time, I was almost done with him, and he knew his time with me was short,” Effie commented as an afterthought.
Deliverance noted that even though Effie’s customers paid her, she dictated the length of time and terms in which they could keep her company. Effie had truly made a racket of her gift.
***
Deliverance thought she had dismissed Effie’s frivolous notion from her mind, until later that night when she found herself asking her mother about it as they had their wine by the hearth.
“Do you think it’s possible?” Deliverance asked, always just slightly too hungry for information about her origins.
Cat smirked to herself, although Deliverance caught her smug expression and raised her eyebrows expectantly. But as usual, Cat was just as agile at dodging her daughter’s dogged inquiries about their lines’ complicated name gifts.
As always, Cat measured her words carefully before speaking. “I suppose it is possible, daughter. It would explain our proclivities, giving us rhyme and reason to our society. Rather convenient, is it not?”
It was rather convenient, Deliverance noted, but if the men wanted to take it as further reason to leave them the Fades alone, then she was all for it.
“That Effie girl, though, needs to be careful in her mining for information. The society on this isle is never kind to a woman who wields power…of any kind,” Cat said, closing the subject for discussion.
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