A Wild Divinity

by Rebecca Schneider

  “What end? Why does He want me? What is going to happen?”

  My goddess’s silence tells me the answer will be horrible.

  “He has taught himself to find great pleasure in siring life, and then destroying it,” She says finally. “You will bear a child for him, and birth it, and he will vomit it out, and then devour it. You will bear many children for him this way, until your spirit wears to nothing. He takes one woman each century to satisfy this appetite, generally from among his followers. I do not understand why he does it. How can a being who can contemplate such complexity take pleasure in adding and subtracting, adding and subtracting? I would gladly suffer in your place, but I cannot bear his offspring.”

  I feel stunned, empty, as if I have already been extinguished.

  My goddess’s arms tighten around me. I close my eyes, and for a moment She is everyone who has ever loved me. “I refuse,” I say, clinging to Her. “I won’t let him near me.”

  “Sweetheart, it’s too late,” my goddess says. “You are inside him, and he is inside you. Life already stirs in your belly.”

  And when She says that, I can feel it. It is not a physical sensation, but an awareness of something tremendous inside me, like a cloud bearing lightning. I am carrying power.

  I slip from my goddess’s arms and look at Her. “Do you have any power of Your own here?”

  “Nothing to speak of. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but it’s no good fighting. He’s done this before.”

  “Please—anything You can give me, it could help. I think it’s different this time, because I know You. If the others were devotees, they wouldn’t have known You.”

  My goddess touches my cheek and shakes Her head. “If you fail, I’ll suffer for it. Any hope I have of leaving this place will be gone forever.”

  “I understand,” I say, but my heart beats faster, because this mean She does have power to give me. “It’s a terrible risk. But if I succeed, I’ll save both of us. Please believe in me as I believe in You.”

  “I always believe in my children,” my goddess says.

  She stands to removes Her carnelian belt and fastens it around my waist. Then She bends over me and kisses me on the lips. Her mouth is hot, and sensation floods my body, spreading out through my limbs, down to my vulva, and deep into my belly.

  I become aware of many things. The power I carry in my belly becomes visible, distinct as the embryo inside an egg that is held up to a candle. It is composed of three distinct parts: my god, my goddess, and me. Like strands of yarn, like braided light, we join in the hollow space in my body.

  My god is a strand of oxidized iron, ancient but strong, sharp enough to draw blood. Beside him, my goddess is a long scarlet ribbon, glossy, sinuous, easily frayed. Then there is me, a length of olive branch, evergreen, brittle.

  But braids can be twisted and yet remain themselves. I follow the strands in my mind’s eye, and I understand that our entanglement is an illusion. We are completely free.

  I twist away from the other strands. My god bends after me, but with my goddess’s strength in my limbs, I’m faster than he is. In the next moment, I fold not only myself but my goddess’s red ribbon. We join in a two-stranded braid.

  We look across to see my god lying alone, a tangled scrap of rusty wire. Pieces begin to flake off him. He is turning to dust.

  The goddess reaches out Her hand—for while all this is happening, we are still embodied, side by side in the courtyard—and touches him. He unspools to a silver mesh.

  I lift him up, as if he were a length of gray cloth, and pull him around my shoulders like a shawl.

  ***

  I Unleash a Wild Divinity

  I float above the Patrician’s gardens, one with the clear blue sky.

  I am not certain who “I” am, exactly. I wear the rags of my god around my shoulders, and my goddess’s belt around my waist, but I understand that these symbols of divinity are instruments, like the telescopes in the temples of high priests. They are ways of looking.

  Beneath me, the festival goers move in a stately dance. The lutes bend the air with exquisite complexity; the drums rap out their algorithmic patterns. Everything marches in time to the two-beat rhythm of the human heart.

  I take off my god’s cloak and let it fall over the earth. It settles over the crowd, a net of beauty worn thin by confusion and time, and becomes part of their intricate design. Laughing, dancing, drinking, kissing, they slip into the web my god has left behind and begin to knit it anew.

  The festival day is not like festivals in years past. Everything is richer, deeper, charged with meaning. The lutes sing in wild improvisations, and the drums beat against one another in complex syncopations. Young people dance in circles, never holding the same hands twice, and old lovers entwine in private retreats, familiar joinings charged with new energy.

  The tendrils of the weaving push down into the city. They slip through windows and scale walls. The temples are infiltrated, and the watchtowers, and the dungeons below the judicial courts.

  Denizens of the city fall into unwonted mathematical reveries. A devotee of the Garden God, weeding a flower bed, contemplates the arithmetical concept of the golden spiral as expressed in the petals of flowers. An overworked cooper’s apprentice, rushing to complete a tardy order, pauses to daydream about the barrels that might exist in higher spatial dimensions.

  Meanwhile the Patrician’s personal calculator, an elderly man who professes to no longer enjoy holidays, drowses over his sums and dreams that the variables in an algebraic equation have decided that they are in love and will share the same value, though there is no possible solution to the equation that allows this to be so.

  Voices, music, movement, embracing. The net is densely woven now, a shimmering silver web. My goddess and I stand side by side above it, and I see what it could become: a multidimensional palace, an intricate mind.

  My goddess takes my hand. “I’m smaller, you know. Part of me has gone into this weaving.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You did what you had to, my darling. It’s good to be free after so many years. And he is free, in some sense. You saved what you could of his works, though he could not be saved. That was nobly done.” She turns to me. “And what will you give of yourself?”

  It would be easy, I think, to give everything. To become the silver mantle, and weave beauty. But I shake my head. “I won’t be worshiped.”

  She nods. “It’s your choice. Though I warn you, the power you’ve loosed today won’t rest. A wild divinity is a dangerous thing.”

  “It will find its shape,” I say. For I have changed too, and I comprehend my creation with a lord’s pragmatic wisdom, and a priestess’s wild intuition, and a human woman’s open-hearted love.

  ***

  I wake to the afternoon sun on my face.

  Wincing, I sit up. I’m lying on the bed in my apartment, feeling as if I’ve run a footrace. Two women sit across from me. I stare stupidly at them, wondering if this is another vision. The women are the Consecrated Tehafa and the Devoted Jacanda. They are watching me with a wary interest, as if I were an unusual variety of spider.

  “How did I get here?” I ask groggily.

  “We found you on the grounds of the palace,” the Devoted Jacanda says. “One of the brewers, kind man, lent us his hand-cart to bring you home. That was an hour ago. We were not certain you would wake.”

  I look between the two of them. “You know what happened?”

  “Every holy person in Valatira knows what you did,” the Consecrated Tehafa says flatly. “The city has been flooded with divine power.”

  “The temple is in total upheaval,” the Devoted Jacanda says. “Several of us danced for hours to music no one else could hear, the Devoted Irdul solved the Bilutab Conjecture, more than a few couples declared their passion and barricaded themselves in the dining hall, declaring it a Rational Temple to Love and Friendship, and I myself spent most of the day re-tiling the bathhouse roof in a manner th
at will certainly not keep out the rain but possesses most interesting arithmetical properties. All of little importance, considering our order must necessarily dissolve after today.”

  “My dear friend…forgive me…”

  She shakes her head, her eyes suddenly bright. “You could have told me, you know! It’s why you ran away, isn’t it? If I had only known…”

  And then both of us are crying, and the Devoted Jacanda sits beside me, and I put my arms around her, and say again and again, Forgive me, and the Devoted Jacanda says, No, no, you were so brave. I know what it costs her to say those words, this woman who loved our god with a deep and profound love. Who deserved better.

  Both of us are drying our eyes when the door opens and Eidel stumbles in like a sleepwalker, bleary-eyed, his braid coming undone.

  “You.” He stares at me. “You’re all right!”

  “I told you to stay at the temple, Eidel,” the Consecrated Tehafa says. “None of this concerns you.”

  Eidel doesn’t seem to hear her. “Your belt.”

  I touch the carnelian belt. I hadn’t realized I was still wearing it. “It was a gift.”

  “From our goddess?”

  “Yes,” I say, holding his gaze. “And it wasn’t your fault, or Hers, that She never showed Herself to you. She was imprisoned.”

  “But now you’ve freed Her,” Eidel says. “And what else did you do?”

  “Eidel, go home,” the Consecrated Tehafa says wearily.

  “Eidel will do as he chooses,” I say loudly.

  The priestess stares at me. I boldly meet her gaze.

  “Eidel has made vows,” the priestess intones. “He will never belong to you.”

  “I don’t want him to belong to me! Have you never heard of a friend?”

  For a long moment I think the Consecrated Tehafa will curse me dead. For all I know her curses work, now that our goddess is free.

  But still she doesn’t say anything. I wonder when someone last contradicted her.

  Eidel bows to her. “My pardon, Holy One. I’ll be happy to discuss my vows tonight. But it is my day off.”

  He steps forward and offers me his arm. “I think I owe you a walk,” he says. “I think I owe you a lot more than that.”

  I squeeze his hand. “A walk will be fine.”

  ***

  The Devoted Jacanda follows us down to the street. She embraces me again. “Be well.”

  “Come see me soon,” I tell her. “I’ll get you a job.”

  When she’s gone, Eidel begins to laugh. “I thought the priestess would wring your neck.”

  “If you leave, she’ll never forgive me,” I tell him.

  “I don’t know if I will leave,” Eidel says. “I don’t if staying is the right way for me to worship Her, but I think I want to try.”

  We walk toward the river. It’s coming on evening, and sunset paints the city in vivid light and deep shadow.

  “Whatever you choose, She’s lucky to have you, Eidel,” I say.

  Eidel’s arm presses against mine. “And we’re all lucky to have you,” he says lightly. “But you really have some explaining to do. I have been knitting the strangest things all afternoon.”

  ___

  Copyright 2020 Rebecca Schneider

  Rebecca Schneider is a reference librarian and graduate of the 2019 Futurescapes Workshop. A native of New England, she currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she spends her days listening to podcasts, attempting to identify trees, and writing three novels at once.

  Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

  http://giganotosaurus.org