Goddess Rising

by Melissa Bowersock

  After that, Greer had little time for boredom. During the day she fell into the routine of contributing where she could to keep the colony fed and clothed, then in the evenings Greer and Abel and sometimes Hannah would sit and argue ideas or draw designs with charcoal on thin sheets of bark. More often than not it was Abel saying, “Bigger, higher,” and Greer, shaking her head with a stubborn set to her chin, saying, “No, we don’t need it bigger. Small is fine.” Abel always left them hoarse, frustrated and reluctantly surrendering.

  The interlude of quiet, common routine was a pleasure for Greer, and at first she refused to support Abel’s driving desire to build the sanctuary now. There seemed no reason to hurry; the Goddess had not indicated to her or anyone else that speed was essential. As summer days wore on, though, reasons did appear, primarily on the big road from the mountain pass.

  Greer and Hannah had just finished their frugal dinner and were preparing for bed when a commotion erupted in the big yard. Voices were raised, querulous and insistent, a woman’s voice that refused to be silenced. Hannah, nearest the one small window, looked out at a small knot of colony people that moved nervously around three strangers. The shifting tableau moved fitfully toward the little house.

  “What is it?” Greer queried.

  “Strangers, I think. Three of them, a family it looks like. Erin and some of the others are trying to get them to go inside the Ruins, but they won’t have it. They’re coming here.”

  “Let them come,” Greer said, and Hannah signaled for them to be let through. Greer turned up the big lantern and pulled on a day robe over her sleeping gown. “Anyone who seeks the Goddess should not have to wait. Get fresh water for us all, will you?”

  When the family trio arrived at the shed, Greer was at the door to meet them. They made obeisance in whatever ways seemed appropriate—the woman bowing deeply, the man standing with downcast eyes, the little daughter staring frankly in awe—and Greer invited them in. Hannah put them to table and set food and water before them while Greer spoke with Erin.

  “I’m sorry, Greer,” Erin said, “I tried to convince them to wait until morning, but she wouldn’t be deterred. Kept saying something about the solstice—”

  “No, don’t fret, Erin,” Greer said, catching her old friend’s hand. “I will see anyone who seeks, any time. Don’t bother about it. But while I talk to them, will you see that a place is made ready for them somewhere in the Ruins? I expect they’ll want a soft bed.”

  Still somewhat aggrieved, Erin nodded. “Of course, Greer. Just send them over when they’ll come.”

  Greer went inside to sit with her guests. Although the man and woman had foregone the offer of food, the little girl sucked thoughtfully on a juicy red fruit. Hannah moved to the back and took up some mending.

  “Welcome,” Greer said.

  “Oh, please,” the woman cried suddenly. “Is it past the solstice yet? I’m so afraid we’ve missed it.”

  Taken back, Greer calculated quickly. “No. The solstice is not for ... several more days yet. Why? What is so important about this solstice?”

  “I was told,” the woman said in a quiet, insistent voice, “that we must be here by the solstice. We’ve traveled days on end. I was so afraid we’d missed it.”

  “Told?” Greer asked.

  “By the Goddess. We were going to come anyway—we knew you’d come—but we were going to wait until high summer. She insisted we come now. And then they—” she gestured toward the Ruins—“wouldn’t let us see you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Greer said. “You are here now, and welcome. You have not missed the solstice and they are preparing a place for you. You may stay as long as you like.”

  “Oh, thank you,” and the woman kissed Greer’s hand. “I’m so glad we got here in time. The others will be relieved.”

  “Others?”

  “Oh, yes. We passed some other groups of people coming here, but they could not travel as quickly as we could. They had carts, animals, all their belongings. They should arrive in a day or two, I would guess.”

  “I see.” Greer glanced thoughtfully at Hannah. “Well, if your fears have been laid to rest, will you stay with the others in the Ruins? It seems we have some preparations to see to.”

  “Yes, of course.” The woman stood quickly, drawing her man and child up with her. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Greer smiled. “Be at peace.”

  When the family had taken themselves off to the Ruins, Greer snuffed out the big lamp and came to sit at Hannah’s feet. With the diffuse awareness of a born mother, Hannah continued to sew while she listened to Greer.

  “So, She is not waiting until we are ready to be besieged; She is sending the masses to us right away.”

  “It would seem so,” Hannah agreed. “Her time, not ours.”

  “Yes.” Greer thought quietly for a moment. “I guess I had better spend more time with Abel and the plans for the sanctuary. Now I see he was right to be so impatient. I have been lax.”

  Hannah put down her mending. “Lax to enjoy some last days of simple chores? Some last days of normality before the confusion of greatness descends on us? I do not agree, my sister. I think you have needed this time, as I have, to strike a balance before we are besieged from all sides. Starting tomorrow, I think, that balance will be hard to find. Better to have rested a bit and go into the future calm than to rush, confused, into chaos.”

  “You do my spirit good, Hannah,” Greer said gratefully. She smiled up to her friend. “Would you tell me I had done rightly no matter what I did? Even if I baked rocks for dinner and had our sanctuary built out of bread?”

  Hannah laughed her clear, peeling laugh. “If that is what the Goddess wished for us, then yes, I would. I only pray She never does.” Hannah put her sewing aside. “Now go to bed. You will need to be sharp tomorrow so you can argue with Abel. He won’t enjoy it if you give in to him too quickly.”

  The next day Greer and Abel agreed on the basic design of the sanctuary and where it was to be built. A group of six more people arrived at the Ruins. They told of others they had passed who would be coming shortly.

  Greer and Hannah volunteered to take over care of the orchards in order to free up more people to make bricks. Luckily the newcomers were more than anxious to be of some use in their new home and were easily pressed into service. Before long Abel had cleared a large area near the spring where people mixed mud and straw into bricks and the first of them was laid.

  Loathe to give up her quiet, if too tiny, home, Greer had wanted the large sanctuary built near by, perhaps even incorporating the small building into the larger. She and Hannah had already planted a small garden and she saw no reason to spend her time traipsing from one place to another when more productive duties called her. Amazingly, Abel agreed to her condition immediately. He, too, thought the sanctuary should be close—close to the Ruins and all the colony’s pursuits. They quibbled a bit about precise location, compromised, and agreed to build on the west side of the shed, between it and the Ruins. The broad open dirt yard would act as a gathering place between the two larger buildings, making passage between them easy. And they agreed that the sanctuary would house Greer and Hannah and whomever bound themselves to the Goddess, and the Ruins would house the faithful others.

  Once begun, the work went smoothly. Everyone was excited to see the sanctuary rise up, brick by brick, and each group of newcomers that arrived only added to the enthusiasm. As more and more people followed their Goddess-given directives to the Ruins and their numbers added to the amount of production—both in the building and in the daily food management—the colony seemed to burgeon overnight. Soon the number of mouths to feed forced them to search out wider areas for fields, orchards and grasslands for their animals. Where before only a small corner of the valley bustled with industry, now a full quarter of it did so. And still people came.

  The solstice neared. Greer talked with Hannah about it, about what might be done, and took what few spar
e moments she had to feel for direction from the Goddess. Gone, she knew, were the days of smoking fires and hypnotic visions. Gone were the days when she and Balat would carefully orchestrate their rituals so that the people would have their “magic.” The magic she wove now was between herself and the Goddess, because only with a clear channel for receiving Her will could Greer carry out that will. In this she would be selfish, for only out of selfishness could she give the Goddess to the world. It was a paradox of truth; the serpent with its tail in its mouth.

  An idea began to take shape in her mind. Moving deliberately, without haste—for the Goddess would enact the plan or She would not—Greer approached Abel with her idea and questioned if it could even be done in so short a space of time. He thought perhaps at least some rudimentary accommodations could be made. Receiving his agreement on as much as he could do, Greer then went on a search.

  The fields had been turned long ago, the orchards cleared before that, but still she ranged the perimeters; it was the first place she knew to seek a stone. None spoke to her there. Knowing Abel was constructing a pillar already, she tried not to hurry, to worry, but she had to constantly rein her anxiety in. If the Goddess provided no material for her idea, then it simply wasn’t to be. From the fields she could look back and see the east wall of the sanctuary going up and the narrow, slotted window that was being built into it. She turned back to her search and ranged further.

  The fields gave up nothing; the orchards less. She returned night after night to the shed and spoke with newcomers, shared Hannah’s day, and wondered if she were a fool. The next morning she would go looking again.

  After days, she’d made almost a full circuit of the colony’s holdings and examined every place the ground had been turned. There was no stone for her. She had to accept the fact that the Goddess did not share her idea, and let it go at that.

  She made her homeward circuit along the stream to the spring and would follow the escarpment trail to the Ruins. Until now, she had avoided the spring. It held countless memories for her; idyllic memories of innocent, unknowing days; painful memories of isolation and denial; and anxious memories of her last moments among the people she had thought she was kin to. It was an evocative place. The stark, black rock of the escarpment set between the blue sky and emerald grass, the sweet trickling of clear water from the hard stone—it was a place of dreams, of contrasts and of turning points.

  She sat beside the spring and stared into the clear water. The sound and sight of it gentled her. She wondered if all the stones on the bottom of the stream were actually the same or if she just remembered them the same. She could see no difference. It might have been five years before. Unthinking, she looked for the fruit core she had thrown down then and was surprised when she couldn’t find it.

  A sudden sadness welled up inside of her, burgeoning up from some deep place that she had sealed off. She felt it push into her chest, causing a tightness there, and it moved up and closed off her throat. Tears stung her eyes. She did not want to give in to it—it seemed almost too painful to bear—but it would not be denied. She pushed against it, trying to force it back down into the dark place from where it came, but it pushed past her efforts and welled up again, stronger. She felt herself losing ground. It was too strong. Defeated, she let it take her.

  Sobs racked her. She cradled her head in her hands and let the tears flow. They slipped through her fingers and dropped into the clear pool at her feet. Tiny minnows, keen to any disturbance of their waters, darted out to investigate. The tears dropped onto the surface of the water and they flashed upward to see, but when they got there, the tears had melted into the clear spring water and had disappeared.

  Greer cried for her childhood, cut so abruptly short. She cried for the ones she had run from. She cried for Pat, the only mother she had ever known.

  How ironic that, five years ago, she had run from the woman she thought had betrayed her and hadn’t felt any loss during that time, at least not on a level she could understand. Now, after coming home and finding Pat gone—totally, irrevocably gone—she grieved as if the loss were new. And she supposed, on some level, it was. Pat, who had strengthened her with responsibility, who had taught her with earnestness, who had loved her with discipline—gone. The only mother she’d ever known, the only sister she’d ever known—gone.

  Suddenly, through her tears, she knew that wasn’t quite true. It came to her, a small glimmer, like the silvered reflection on the edge of a tear. She had a mother, and a sister: the Great Mother, her Sibling.

  You need never be alone, Her voice said softly in a place only Greer could hear. You are only alone when you turn away from Me, as you turned away from her.

  Greer knew it was the truth. She was at once humbled by her turnings away, and liberated by the knowledge that she need not ever feel alone unless she chose to. And yet she was only human, and imperfect. Sometimes her own pride drove her from the truth.

  I will love you—always, Her voice said.

  Greer cried again.

  When the sun was low in the sky behind her and the evening breeze caromed off the escarpment, Greer finally roused herself from her deep musings and turned toward home. She had no stone for the solstice but she had the quiet, perennial assurance that all would be as it should, that the world was turning as the celestial winds blew, that she was safely in the place she belonged. It was enough.

  She walked homeward along the snake-like mound of lava, her eyes unfocused, her mind wandering. The shadow-dark grasses made a pleasing contrast to the ebony rock. She realized that she was grateful enough to be home; she had no need to ask more of the Goddess.

  And then something winked at her.

  She stopped, but too late. The bright gleam was gone. It had been there, at the juncture of the escarpment and the grass. Curious, she backed up a step to see if she could recapture that brilliant sparkle.

  Ah—there it was. The sun was almost down, but its last rays starred out and struck something there in the grass and made it gleam. She pinpointed the glitter and went to it.

  “Oh,” she breathed softly. Parting the grass away from the seam of lava, she found her stone. It was a large, many-faceted crystal, almost the size of her head. Nodules and projections and geometric facets gave it an otherworldly beauty, a strange fragile hardness. Then she saw its flaw. Adhered behind the clear crystal was a lump of rough, black lava. It looked as though the molten lava had been ready to completely absorb the crystal on its hellish ooze from the depths of the earth, but just as it opened its black maw, just as it made to engulf the crystal, it had cooled and the crystal had been saved. Now Greer peered at the odd combination and wondered if she could pull it free.

  It looked as if the thin bond holding the composite rock to the escarpment was brittle enough. Perhaps with a good wrench, she could break it. She gripped the stone with both hands—one on the beautiful crystal, one on the black lava— and pulled. It gave, but only minutely. She got a better grip and pulled harder, twisting. The bond broke in a glasslike tinkle and the rock came free.

  But something dropped. She searched the grass, finding it when her fingers ran across something hard. She held it up.

  A piece of crystal had broken off, a very small, beautifully shaped piece. She held it between thumb and finger and turned it toward the setting sun. It looked like ... yes, it looked like a tear, a perfectly shaped frozen, crystalline teardrop. A tear that would never melt away in clear water.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She put the tear inside her robe. The stone would belong always to the Goddess and to Her sanctuary, to the solstice it would herald; the tear belonged to Greer.

  The predawn morning of the solstice found all the people of the valley gathered at the sanctuary. It still could not be rightly called a building; the east wall was a man-span high, but the rest was only a course or two of the rough, straw-encrusted brick. In the last few days, Abel had put every available person on the wall, topping the long, narrow window, and on the pe
destal that now stood at the center of the floor. Those two things were done to the finest measurement the people were capable of. The rest would come in due time.

  So they gathered, as many inside the perimeters of the sanctuary as possible, the rest outside. The eastern sky was brightening. The beautiful, eerie composite stone sat majestically on its pedestal, its two sides—light and dark, clear and obscure—facing east.

  Greer looked out over the assembled people. Amazement and a small thrill of excitement ran through her. When she had run from the valley there had been barely two score of people here; now she looked out at the eager faces of almost three times that many. But what excited her most was the voiceless certainty that ran through her mind like a litany: it’s happening; it’s actually happening. All the stories she’d heard from childhood of people coming together, throwing off the fear and distrust of the Bad Time, binding together again to build a new world—it was really happening. All the prophecies were true. And she was there to see it.

  It almost escaped her that she was the central figure of those prophecies; it was enough to know that she would see the great changes as a people drew together and reclaimed their greatness. The old childhood fear that she would die before it came to pass finally disappeared.

  Hannah touched her lightly on the shoulder. She turned eastward and saw the starred rays of the unseen sun burst from the horizon. In moments the great orb itself would appear.

  Moved to tearful love and joyful adoration, Greer stepped up behind the stone and raised her hands high over her head. “Great Goddess,” she intoned, “You bless us truly. As Your cycles continue—day to day, season to season—we live in the bounty of Your love and generosity. We live out our own small cycles within Your larger one, wheels within wheels, as You decree, and we are content.”