Looking over all her things for one last time, Angelica sighed. For nine days now she had been fasting, as the ritual commanded. She had grown so thin, and her skin had taken on an almost luminous translucence: as though her blood was already fleeing her, as though whatever strange raptures she had given herself to had purged her flesh of color and sinew and bone. When she gazed into the mirror her uncle had given her so long ago, the face that gazed back was no longer her own, but that of a caryatid or kouroi—beautiful, ageless, inhuman. For a long moment she stared at herself, touching the heavy mass of her bronze curls and seeking in vain for a grey hair. Letting her fingers brush against her cheeks, the skin smooth and cool as faience, unlined, unscarred. To look at her, one would never think that she was a grown woman with a grown son; but neither would one see anywhere within her the memory of the girl who once upon a time had astonished her friends with her explosive laugh.
“It was so long ago,” she whispered, and set the mirror back amongst the curling photographs and antique silver frames, the papery nautilus and cowries and rose-colored sea urchin. As she removed her hand something fell. She heard the chime of breaking glass, and with a low cry reached to pluck a photo from a sad heap of shivered crystal.
It was a picture of herself and Baby Joe and Oliver, Baby Joe smiling for perhaps the only time in front of the camera, Angelica in the middle and Oliver at her other side. His arm was draped across her shoulder, his eyes were so bright they might have been lit from within by candles, like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Oliver.” She bit her lip and blinked tears from her eyes. “Oh, Oliver…”
She thought of the poem that Sweeney Cassidy had liked to quote back at the
Divine, drunk on cheap beer and sentiment—
When suddenly at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts—
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions…
Crazy drunken Sweeney, already seeing the end of things, but oh, Sweeney, if you only knew!—
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.
Angelica wept. Bowing her head and sobbing until her chest ached, she clutched their photos to her breast and wept for all of them. Oliver and Sweeney and Baby Joe and Hasel and Annie and Dylan, but for herself most of all: Angelica di Rienzi, like her poor dead friends given to the night.
It was twilight when she finally composed herself. No more time to waste. She wiped her eyes and brushed her hair, turned away forever from everything that might remind her of that other life and went to the bed where her clothes were laid out. There she readied herself for what was to come.
First she drank the kykeon. On her bookshelf was the recipe, garnered from a tablet she had found in the museum at Athens. Barley and honey and the crushed purple bracts and pink flowers of dittany of Crete, fermented in a vessel of fired clay; the same beverage the initiates had drunk at Eleusis millennia ago. It had a pleasant yeasty taste, the honey’s sweetness offset by the dittany’s raw earthiness. After drinking she wiped her mouth on a piece of cotton. She anointed herself with ground coriander and sandalwood, rubbed a fist-sized chunk of amber against the hollow of her throat until it released its musky resin. Then she drew over her head a simple shift of linen shot with gold thread, and piece by piece slipped on the sacred jewelry she had amassed over the years: bands of ivory and gold and sweet red sandalwood, rings shaped like serpents giving suck to children, bracelets heavy with steatite figures of women giving birth. Last of all she took the lunula. She turned to the window, raised the shining crescent to the eastern sky where the moon waited and cried out.
Nike Materon! Nike Materos obscura!
Victory to the Mothers. Victory to the Dark Mother. She slipped the lunula around her neck, and glanced around to see if she had forgotten anything.
The floor was swept clean, the gauze curtains had been drawn across the other windows. On her bed was an envelope containing a one-way ticket to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. It was dated the thirty-first of July, the eve of the ancient feast of Lammas.
But that festival had more names than Angelica had hairs on her head. In India it was called Kalipuja, by the worshipers at the Temple at Dakshineswarand and in Calcutta—the city whose name is actually Kali-Ghatt, “the steps of Kali.” In Finland it had been the day of Kalma, “odor of corpses;” in the Antipodes that of Kalwadi, who devoured her own children and then gave them rebirth. On Coatepec—Snake Hill, in Mexico—there gathered followers of the serpent-skirted lunar goddess Coatlicue, she who wore upon her breast the moon and from whose girdle dangled dismembered hands and beating hearts, Coatlicue who danced upon the entrails of her son while wearing his flayed skin. Upon other hills, the sun-gilded mounds of Tuscany, the good fairy Turanna still brings children balloons and bells and Nintendo games, while her Etruscan companion Zirna strews the floor of their bedrooms with tiny sugared crescents.
But woe to those children whose windows are left open at summer’s dying, because that is when Lilith comes and brings them fair dreams, then strangles them so that they the smiling; and woe to those who do not wear the new moon upon their breasts and so placate Lamasthu, whose bite leaves pestilence in the blood!
Upon the second day of the death of summer the silent poppy-goddess Spes walks. Spes whose mouth is red as poppies and whose skin is white, whose kiss is cold as alabaster. On that day, too, Aetna was worshiped, who disgorged her rage upon the city suckling at her breast; and the Haida goddess Dazalarhons, whose anger erupted when she saw that men were torturing the shining salmon in their streams instead of giving thanks for their plenty. In ancient Greece it had marked the transition to the time of the great women’s festivals, culminating in the Thesmophoria, that greatest and most holy of all feasts, honoring Demeter’s rescue of her ravished daughter from the lord of Hell. Everywhere that the moon shone, everywhere that people died and lamented, everywhere that infants failed to wake and grain turned to dust beneath the merciless sun, where women died in childbirth and their mothers and sisters keened in vain: in all these places, the dark goddess had been worshiped, and forgotten.
But now, in all these places and more, women had learned her name anew. Now, they called her Othiym. Now, her hour had come. Slowly she opened the doors leading onto the tiled patio, and stepped outside.
The dusk surrounded her like rumpled velvet, soft and warm and fragrant with the scent of crushed sage. Angelica breathed in deeply. Her heart was racing; a trickle of sweat traced its way across her rib cage. She tried to remember what Cloud had taught her about conserving energy in a marathon: breathe from the diaphragm, close your eyes, relax.
She began to pace across the patio, the heat from the tiles seeping through the soles of her feet and on up to her thighs. Compared to all that had come before—nearly two decades of work and study and sacrifice—there was really very little left to do. But the greatest sacrifice still remained. And only Angelica could perform that task.
In the course of the last year, she had instructed Elspeth and the other priestesses in the final rite of Waking the Moon. They, in turn, had gathered to them Circle upon Circle of women, radiating from Angelica outward to all the lost reaches of the world. It had taken years of patience for it to come to this, years of working alone and with small groups: waking first the women themselves, then encouraging them to teach their friends and neighbors.
But women work quickly once they are awakened. Angelica had le
arned that by watching television programs where women wept and fought and embraced; by reading the books that American women read, and the newspapers that told of their vengeance upon those who had harmed them; by visiting the tiny villages in Orisa and Bangladesh and Uttar, where girl children are aborted and wives are murdered for their dowries; by entering compounds in the countryside outside of Gracanica and Glamoc, where women were raped and forced to give up their babies to doctors and soldiers; by witnessing initiation ceremonies in Africa and New York, where girls were mutilated, and standing at the mass graves of nuns slaughtered in Central America and men and women and children in the jungles of Kampuchea. Everywhere, everywhere, she saw horror and death and brutality; everywhere she saw forgiveness, and ignorance, and endless cycles of poverty and servitude, women cringing before their masters and murmuring about love.
And everywhere she saw rage: rage that was twisted until, like an auger, it bored into the women themselves, and their children. Rage that like the desert creatures burrowed beneath the surface, waiting patiently for nightfall and moonrise.
“But it is time now,” whispered Angelica. She raised her face to the Devil’s Clock. Amethyst light danced across her brow, set the lunula aglow. “Oh Great Mother: it is time!”
She raised her arms, took another deep breath, and let her hands drop. Bracelets of bone and copper and gold slipped down about her wrists, and the linen shift fell from her shoulders, cascading around her waist and thighs in folds of white and gold to pool about her feet. Bare-breasted, naked save for her armillas and the lunula, she closed her eyes and sang.
From the purity of your blasted lands I come, Pure Queen of Those Below,
Of Hecate and Durga and the other Goddesses immortal.
For I claim that I too am of your blessed race.
I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.
I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.
I have entered into the bosom of Desponia, Queen of the Underworld.
I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.
O Blessed Othiym, thou shalt make me Goddess instead of mortal.
Haïyo Othiym! Othiym Lunarsa.
As she sang she began to move, swaying back and forth and stamping her bare feet upon the tiles. At each step dust rose beneath her, and tiny fragments of terracotta. Her dance inscribed a circle upon the ground, an orbit of dust and dried grass and the broken wings of moths. Her bare feet slapped the tiles, her heels grinding into them as though she were extinguishing small flames.
Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of the Pure above,
Of Ashtaroth and Artemis and the other Goddesses and Daemons.
For I too, I cry to thee, am of your blessed race.
I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous
But now I come a suppliant to Holy Phersephoneia
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.
Haïyo Othiym! Othiym Lunarsa.
Beneath her heels the tiles began to crack. Fissures ran from them toward the pool with its tranquil dark surface, and from the fissures reddish soil flowed, as though the earth beneath her was boiling. The soil stained her feet and ankles, but Angelica danced heedless, treading the red earth until it churned like wine or blood being poured in her wake.
Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden,
A bush, a bird, and a serpent with scales that gleam in the moonlight.
But I turned from you, O Great Mother,
Like a bolt I fell, Othiym.
And in your sorrow you grew old and hungry,
In your sorrow you grew angry and pale.
In your sorrow you gave voice to anger.
You rose and began the sacred dance
And where your feet trod cities fell:
Knossos and Iraklion the fair, waves devoured the land
And Kalliste most beloved of all your children,
The sacred island consumed by flame.
Her voice rose to a wail, a lament for those green places burned by Othiym’s anger, for the temples destroyed and the children buried when her rage erupted into streams of liquid fire and molten ash. She mourned for Kalliste and Keftiu, Aetna and Sumbawa and Pompeii; but most of all she mourned Kalliste, the island that had been her sacred jewel, her emerald eye, the center of all her worship. Kalliste, whose name meant “Most Beautiful,” but which after its destruction was known as Thera: Fear.
For they turned from you, Great Mother,
The rhytons ran dry and you went hungry
Your thirst unappeased.
Your priestesses were seduced and then enslaved.
Your altars were dry and no blood given,
No marriage, no sons to slake your thirst.
For this I beg forgiveness.
I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.
I have given you sons and daughters too.
Receive here the armor
Of Memory.
Angelica your daughter, by due rite grown to be a goddess.
Her face gleamed with sweat, sweat coursed down her throat and warmed the lunula until she felt as though a heated blade nudged between her breasts. Still she danced, her breath coming in sharp hard bursts that were counterpoint to her footsteps, and with each turn and stamp of her heels she drew nearer to the edge of the pool. Behind her now all the earth was broken, tiles shattered and stones as well, so that it looked as though some small but powerful machine had razed the patio. When she reached the edge of the pool she poised, shining like a glazed figure still cooling from the kiln, then without a sound dived beneath the surface.
The water was warm as new milk from a mother’s breasts, so warm that her blood seemed to flow in and out of her veins, mixing with the quiescent darkness that surrounded her. Seven times she climbed from the pool, seven times returned to its depths; until at last she rose and stood upon the broken patio, the water sliding from her in pale ribbons.
Above the Devil’s Clock the storm had spent itself. Now and then faint rumblings echoed from the distance, but otherwise the night was still. With the storm some of the evening’s heat had passed. A chill breeze rustled the spiny ocotillo and the agave’s heavy blade-shaped leaves, bringing with it the smell of rain and damp shale from the mountains far to the north, the first augury of summer’s end. Angelica shivered a little in her nakedness, but the potent kykeon still burned inside her. She picked her way across the cracked tiles, nudging shards of terra-cotta out of her way. When she reached where the patio ended in a jumble of soil and broken pottery, she laughed and shook her head, her tangled curls flinging droplets into the air.
“Come then!” she called, opening her arms to the night. “I am ready—”
And they came: from every opening in the earth they scuttled and slithered and crept, hollow legs and shells rattling against the stones, scales rubbing together with a sound like sand running through the fingers, ponderous feet clawing for purchase upon terra-cotta. Gila monsters and elfin lizards, rattlesnakes and pit vipers, the tiny sacred scorpions of Innana that would be colorless were it not for the amber venom floating inside their arched tails, like retsina in a glass. Ancient tortoises pushed aside walls of earth and clambered up to gaze at the woman. Nestling spiders, and beetles that dwell within spheres of dung, and millipedes, whose legs whispered across the sand, and centipedes, with mandibles that clacked: all emerged from their sunken castles, to welcome her and give her homage.
But mostly, there were snakes. Docile rosy boas, western racers like wands of brushed steel, eyeless worm snakes so small a hundred of them would not fill a teacup. Puff adders, coachwhips, tiny ring-necked snakes that children could wear as glossy jewelry; lyre snakes, whose bite causes gongs to ring and clamor, and night snakes, whose rubbery fangs hold no more venom than a honeybee. As though they were being disgorged from the earth’s very core, as though rivulets of magma spewed forth and then cooled into living coils and veins of serpents: in every direction
the ground seethed with snakes.
“Children, children,” murmured Angelica. The air was filled with a sound as of an entire forest of dried leaves taking flight. Still they came, forked tongues tasting the air, their supple bellies reading the stony earth, like so many fingers brushing across a loved one’s face. As they passed the other creatures rustled and shivered, but did not flee.
At the very last the greatest of all the desert serpents appeared. Diamondbacks and rattlesnakes, the immense and terrible sidewinders. The ground shook beneath them, and the noise of their rattles was like that of sistrums and tambours and stones in a hollow gourd; the sound of the krotalon, the ancient Greek rattle from which they took their name. They surrounded Angelica, the stored-up warmth of their bodies making the violet air shimmer, and curled around her legs and ankles like kittens. As though they were kittens she stooped to pick them up, the largest ones as thick around as a man’s arm, and strong enough to capture a young pig.
But to Angelica they did no harm. Instead they writhed and flung their coils about her wrists, their darkly patterned scales nearly lost among her clattering jewelry, and covered her until she seemed to be draped in a shadowy cloak set with winking gems. They gaped to display pale mouths and black tongues and fangs as long and curved as a hawk’s talons. Had they struck her, their venom would have caused the tender flesh of her arms to swell and then decay as necrosis set in, with its subsequent hemorrhage and shock and renal failure.
They did not bite, and Angelica did not recoil at their touch. Thousands and thousands of years before, when the first woman poked at the African savanna in search of grubs and tubers, the snake befriended her, sharing with her its eggs, its young, its own sparse flesh in times of drought. From the snake she learned the patience to hunt, the wisdom of sleeping when one’s belly is full and hiding when the inferno of midday raged. From the snake she learned that we can slough off our lives as easily as a dead skin, and that death need be no more terrifying than that empty sack. It warned her of earthquakes and devoured vermin. She read oracles in its sand tracks, and from its poison derived subtle visions as well as a cure for bites. Like the moon the snake renews itself; with the moon it became the first sacred thing.
Waking the Moon Page 46
