The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  “Silence!” demanded the High Priestess, looking sternly around the room before turning back to Myrina. “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Talla.”

  “Talla?” The High Priestess leaned forward, gripping the armrests of her throne. “Your mother was Talla, and yet you dare come back here?”

  When she felt the men stirring behind her—as if preparing to drag her away again—Myrina felt a rush of dread. “Please!” she exclaimed. “I came here because my mother always said we belonged to the Moon Goddess. She served her faithfully all her life—”

  The High Priestess stood up abruptly. “Talla broke the rules of this temple. She consorted with a man and was defiled. Had she not run away, she would have been thrown into the pit, just like you.”

  Myrina was thankful for the ropes that held her so tightly upright. “I understand,” she said, forcing out the words. “Throw me back in the pit if you must, but”—she looked up at the High Priestess—”please have mercy on my little sister. She has been waiting outside all this time. She is blind and has no food.” Myrina tried once again to bend her knees, but couldn’t. “Remove these ropes,” she said, “and I will kneel down to implore you.”

  The High Priestess came down the stone steps with measured dignity. “Tell me,” she said, stopping in front of Myrina, “what compels a young woman to become a trespasser?” She reached out to touch the bloody bite pattern on Myrina’s arm. “To suffer such agony?”

  “I am a sister,” said Myrina, biting back a shiver of pain. “That is what compels me. I came here hoping the Goddess would cure Lilli’s eyes…. Now I see I have been naïve, and that my mistake will damage my sister even further. That is the agony I suffer.”

  The High Priestess studied her face for a while. “Your courage intrigues me. The eunuchs tell me you have killed a monster?”

  “I am a hunter,” replied Myrina. “It is what I do.”

  A faint smile of admiration tugged at the High Priestess’s mouth. “Most men would say women cannot be hunters.”

  “Village men may say so.” Myrina stuck out her chin. “But others hold that women are the best hunters. For they are nimble, silent, and patient.” She caught herself, then added, more humbly, “My father is a nomad. He taught me how to hunt.”

  The High Priestess frowned. “Where is your father now?”

  Myrina looked away. “He used to come and go, as nomads do. He always said that when I was fully grown, we would travel the world together. But … the nomads changed their routes, I suppose, and he stopped coming.”

  The High Priestess nodded slowly. “How many men have you loved?”

  Myrina was so surprised by the question she almost forgot her fear. “None. I have never loved anyone. Except my family.”

  “That is not what I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” said Myrina. “And the answer is none. I do not like men, and they are kind enough to return the favor. No man likes a woman who runs faster or shoots arrows more precisely than he does.”

  The High Priestess stood quietly for a while. Then she turned around and returned with much grace to her chair on the podium.

  The temple room fell completely silent. Everyone was on tiptoes to hear the final sentence; even the three eunuchs stood awkwardly still, their massive arms hanging limply by their sides.

  Leaning back on her stone seat, the High Priestess pondered the situation for so long Myrina began to wonder whether she would speak at all. Then at last, the verdict came.

  “In all my years,” said the High Priestess, “I have never seen so clear a case of divine intervention. By the infinite justice of the Goddess, you have suffered and survived your mother’s punishment, thereby clearing you both of guilt. And after hearing you plead your sister’s case”—she looked out over the silent priestesses—”I say you have passed every test of worthiness. What say you, daughters of the Goddess? Do you not agree?”

  There was a hum of reluctant consent.

  Snapping her fingers at the eunuchs, the High Priestess had them remove Myrina’s ropes at last. “Your courage has saved you,” she said, smiling at her own benevolence. “You and your sister. Tonight, when the moon rises, we will welcome you to our sisterhood.”

  Myrina stumbled forward, out of the ropes. “You mean—?”

  The High Priestess nodded. “You will be one of us. Indeed, I believe you already are.” Her smile gave way to gravity. “Being a priestess is no easy calling. You saw the unruly mob outside. Their land is drying out and they are starving. Not a month goes by without another report of pirates raiding the coast. These are desperate times”—she made a plaintive gesture at the ring of priestesses—”and we are far too few for the tasks at hand.”

  “For my sister’s sake, I will try,” said Myrina. “But I have never delighted anyone with my singing.”

  The High Priestess shook her head. “You are not here for that. The Goddess has summoned you to her temple in order to shame us. Your strength and courage, your weapon skills—” She made another gesture at the priestesses, this time one of accusation. “Look at us! We are mere waning shadows of the noble figures we once were. We call ourselves generals in the army of the Moon Goddess, but in reality”—the High Priestess fell back on her throne in disgust—”I am surrounded by silly, sweet-toothed slugs, who could not string a bow to save this temple!”

  Myrina could feel the resentful glares stinging her from all sides. She wanted desperately to speak up and somehow soften the censure, but she dared not risk it. Lilli was still outside, and the sooner things were brought to a conclusion, the better.

  “Now let us all thank the Goddess—” continued the High Priestess, holding out her arms so that the flared sleeves of her garment spread like the wings of a phoenix. “Thank you, kind Mistress, for sending this young woman to train us. Please help her strip away our folly and weakness that we may once again stand guard around your radiant majesty with our bows strung.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There was once, in the western parts of Libya, on the bounds of the inhabited world, a race which was ruled by women and followed a manner of life unlike that which prevails among us.

  —DIODORUS SICULUS, Bibliotheca Historica

  ALGERIA

  MY FIRST NIGHT AT THE TRITONIS DRILL SITE WAS ONE OF DISAPpointment. It didn’t take me long to realize that no welcome committee was waiting with bubbly and roses; Nick, it seemed, was the only Skolsky representative on location.

  After a lukewarm meal in the empty cantina Craig the foreman took me to the tiny trailer compartment that would be my home for the week. It was a relief to finally be alone, and the door had barely closed behind him before I broke out Granny’s notebook. Despite my exhaustion I was determined to continue my work on it and knew the next step should be to organize the foreign symbols in some sort of alphabetical order. But the bluish light of the buzzing ceiling lamp did nothing to help my efforts. It was set on a timer that made it necessary to get up and pull a plastic string of pearls every two minutes or so, and after having done this at least fifty times without making much progress with the notebook, I finally gave up and went to bed.

  Next morning, right after breakfast, I stepped out of the cantina to find Craig and Nick waiting for me with three camels. The sky was still dark, but bursts of purple and orange on the eastern horizon suggested the sun was on its way. The morning air had a pleasant chill to it; I suspected things would heat up soon enough. “I hope you brought your riding crop,” said Craig, breaking the silence. “We have closed off the site to motorized vehicles.”

  I glanced up at the camels, who looked regally bored. “I suspect a riding crop is not the way to endear oneself to these individuals?”

  Craig grinned at Nick. “See? She’s not as clueless as you think.”

  Moments later we were off, and I was happy to discover that the proud quadrupeds walked at a steady, phlegmatic pace that allowed me to look up and admire the landscape. Around us, th
e desert was slowly changing colors. As the sun rose in the sky, the sand came alive as if it were a vast tray of embers, flaring up at the first touch of dawn. Sitting there on the camel, rocking gently back and forth, I felt I had a balcony seat to a gigantic shadow play in the dunes; for each mountainous sweep of brightness there was a distorted black reflection on the other side, but with every passing minute those inky pools shrank into rivers, then lines, then nothing, as the sun took full possession of the world.

  The spectacle of our Sahara sunrise, however, was soon marred by the debris of human activity. As we crested a dune and looked down into a deep sand basin, we were met by the unseemly sight of scattered drilling equipment and a prostrate metal tower. In the middle of it all sat a brown Bedouin tent with two horses tied outside.

  “We discovered the building when we were trying to determine the best location for the tower,” explained Craig as we rode down toward the lonely tent. “It’s right beneath us, just a few meters down, but for some reason our imaging never picked up on it … just took it for sediment along the old lake.”

  “There was a lake here?” I looked around, trying to imagine a body of water in this parched landscape.

  “Oh, yes,” nodded Craig. “Probably an inland sea that covered parts of Algeria and Tunisia and was connected to the Mediterranean by some sort of channel. You can see the shape of it on a paleohydrology map. But that’s thousands of years ago. Over time, the sea became a lake, the lake became a swamp, and the swamp became desert.” He smiled wryly. “Climates change; that’s the way it has always been, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the big guy up there”—he pointed a thumb at the sun—”who calls the shots.”

  As we approached the tent, two men emerged to greet us. They were dressed in paramilitary clothing, and their sizable sidearms did not escape me. Although they both greeted Nick and Craig with smiles and bent their heads politely in my direction, I could not help feeling these were men who, if they thought it necessary, would not think twice about using deadly force—in fact, they might relish the prospect.

  The Bedouin tent, it turned out, was not a shelter for the guards as much as a barrier put up to cover our entrance into the underground. At first glance, it looked as if a large steel barrel sat right in the middle of the tent floor; only when I leaned over to look inside did I realize it had no bottom. It was a perfectly circular two-foot-wide hole in the ground, and it took me a moment to grasp that this was where we were going next: down an improvised chute in the middle of an ocean of sand.

  I looked up, ready to voice my concern at having been brought this far without being warned about the potential danger of the final stage. But Nick was already handing me a harness and a headlamp, and even Craig looked as if popping in and out of the underworld through a giant straw was a perfectly normal thing to do. “Don’t worry,” he said to me, fastening my harness with confident fingers. “I’ll go first and receive you. Here”—he snapped a rubber band around my head and placed a dust mask over my mouth and nose—”just remember to breathe slowly. You’ll adjust in no time.”

  “Adjust to what?” I wanted to say, but Craig was already astride the rim of the steel pipe, and without another word he whizzed away into the darkness.

  Feeling oddly disembodied, as if I were a mere gaping bystander to my own circus act, I let Nick and the guards help me into the tube and plop a safety helmet on my head, as if that would really make a difference. The next thing I knew they lowered me into the hole, and for a few long moments I could hear nothing but the unsettling creaking of the rope attached to my harness and my own panicky breathing amplified by the dust mask and the metal surrounding me.

  Then, suddenly, I was through the pipe, and all familiar sounds dissipated into a vast cold void. I dangled, like a grasshopper on a hook, wondering what manner of monsters lurked below in this dark, forgotten world.

  ONCE, DURING A SUNDAY dinner, Granny had fallen into a trance over the chicken potpie. Only when my mother had asked her three times to pass the salt did she stir from her reverie and peer at me across the table. “It is all down there,” she had said, as if responding to a question of mine, “underneath the surface. You just have to find it.”

  “There are three pieces of chicken per person,” my mother cut in, taking the saltshaker with a huff, “distributed evenly throughout the dish.”

  “They think it’s gone,” Granny continued, her gray-blue eyes still locked in mine, “but it is not. They think they can destroy it, and we will forget, but we won’t. That is their big mistake.”

  Only then did it occur to me that she must be referring to the newspaper clippings my father had recently removed from the walls of her attic apartment. To me, child that I was, Granny’s growing archive of articles had been too gradual to be truly shocking; every time I brought her one of my parents’ discarded newspapers, one or two scraps were added to her collection and ended up hanging from the sloping walls by tiny drops of school glue. “What are they about?” I had asked her once or twice. “All those articles?”

  In response, Granny had pointed at a recent clipping that was still lying on the table. The headline read FEMALE WRITER ESCAPES FROM HOUSE ARREST. I read it through twice, carefully, but did not see any connection with my grandmother or anyone else I knew.

  Seeing my bewilderment, Granny smiled in that childish way of hers, and whispered, “Amazons!” Whereupon she began walking around the room, pointing up at the clippings dangling from the walls, one after the other. “Amazons,” she said, her voice getting more confident. “All Amazons.”

  I stopped at an article that hung a little lower than the others. The headline read KHANABAD: STONING ENDS IN CHAOS, and there was a black-and-white photo of men and veiled women huddling behind some kind of barricade, clutching their heads. “Those women are Amazons?” I asked, wanting desperately to understand.

  Granny came to my side, but only to snort with disgust. “No! Those women are just as bad as those men! But they got what they deserved. Look at them!”

  “But—” I barely knew what to think. “What does ‘stoning’ mean?”

  Just then, a sudden draft swept through the room, and the newspaper clippings fluttered like dry leaves.

  Spinning around, I saw my mother standing in the door, a hand pressed to her mouth in silent horror. Ten minutes later my father appeared with a bucket and peeled off all the paper scraps without a word, leaving behind nothing but a star map of dried glue spots. As he did so, he didn’t look at us once; never before had I seen him so pale, so upset.

  Granny merely watched as her carefully assembled archive of imagined Amazon activity was dismantled and taken away, her face hardening a little more for every news story that disappeared.

  Although several days had passed since the incident, Granny’s eyes were still full of resentment, and she had only grudgingly agreed to come downstairs to join in our Sunday dinner—likely because she knew she wouldn’t be fed if she didn’t.

  “I assume you’re enjoying the meal,” said my mother at length, never able to pass on an opportunity to point out her mother-in-law’s bad manners.

  In an unusual fit of present-mindedness, Granny responded right away, in a voice so full of hate it sent a chill through the room, “Rule number three: Never assume.”

  Understandably, my mother said nothing else on the matter, but the look she sent my father was enough to make the food clog in my throat. Later that night, I sat on the stairs as I always did, listening to my parents arguing in the living room. It was actually not much of an argument—it never was—since my father’s contribution came mostly in the form of deep sighs and a restless pacing up and down the floor. “This cannot go on!” my mother kept saying, with growing despair. “We have to think of Diana. I can’t take any more of this obsessive behavior. God knows what she found in those newspapers. Will you please say something, Vincent!”

  When they both finally fell silent, I heard the unmistakable creaking of the attic door
and knew Granny had been listening, too. Cold and miserable, I wanted so much to go up and comfort her, but I was afraid it would only make my mother more upset if she discovered I was not in my bed.

  That same night, while I was lying awake in the darkness, my mother came into my room. She probably thought I was asleep, for my eyes were closed, and she bent over to kiss me and whisper against my forehead, “I will never let anything bad happen to you.”

  From that moment on, I had lived in constant fear of losing Granny. Maybe one day soon, I thought, I would come home from school to find her gone, and my parents would refuse to tell me where she was. They would assume that by removing her from my world, they could extinguish her influence on me. To them, silence had always been a cure-all, and they applied it generously where needed—usually on me.

  That was their big mistake.

  AS I SWUNG FROM a rope somewhere beneath the surface of the Algerian desert, I was so engrossed in my own primal fears that, when something grabbed hold of my legs, I yelled in surprise.

  “It’s just me!” boomed Craig as he eased me to the ground and unhooked my harness. “The bogeyman called in sick this morning.”

  While I was doing my best to breathe calmly in the cool, stagnant air, Craig lit a lantern and held it up between us, its ghostly light revealing that we were standing in a room so enormous I couldn’t see the walls. Here and there lay drifts of sand, which must have come in through cracks in the roof before the entire building, at some point, was swallowed up by the surrounding desert.

  “How extraordinary,” I said. My voice sounded just as frightened as I felt, and it seemed to travel through the darkness for a long time. “I can’t believe the pressure of the sand never made it collapse.”

  “It’s a bit of a wonder,” agreed Craig, “but our mineralogist can give you a good explanation. Something to do with the salt concentration in the sand. Depending on the weather conditions it forms a crust and, in this case, apparently, it became its own retaining wall. Careful!”