by Mindi Meltz
“Your daughter has offered to sleep down there in place of my—in place of the Unicorn,” Delilah is saying. “She said to the Unicorn, ‘I will sleep here in your place, to redeem the mistakes of my father.’ So the other people are still down there with her. Do you understand me?”
The old woman nods, and yet she does not understand. My daughter, she thinks, remembering the young woman who came to her only a moment—or was it a year?—ago. Is she still here? Didn’t she go? But how could I be a mother? The old woman thinks suddenly, confused. I am so young—only thirteen, fourteen years old! Like little Mira. My life ended on that beach of dead trees, long ago, when I found out I could never go home. However old she is supposed to be now, she does not feel wise.
“So we’re going back through the sea,” the warrior girl is saying now. “Yora will carry us. Goodbye, Queen.”
The old woman with no name nods. She feels something wet on her knuckles, and doesn’t understand, and only long after she is alone again, does she realize that Delilah kissed her hands in farewell.
She stands up now. She opens her hands, lets go of an imaginary string, and imagines the waves pulling it out. “I am done now,” she says to the bright beings in the distance across the world, whose sweet voices once called her the Dark Goddess, and comforted her from a mystical garden of love on a mountain far away that she would never see. A place she could never get to, a place opposite of all that she had become. “Release me. I am gone.”
She turns around. She feels for the chair, and moves past it. Then she walks deftly, without stumbling, to the place where she knows the entrance is. She feels shaky with relief, and the relief bleeds into a kind of escalating urgency. The steps feel watery beneath her. Her hands stretch out, pressing against each cold wall. Her knees weaken with each step. It’s as if she is returning to that same cave, that cave where once she hid her agony, her terrifying transformation into motherhood—and where once she thought she was finally safe, and where her daughter was torn from her arms for the first and last time.
She has reached the bottom. She knows the exact number of the steps without counting. Maybe gravity is stronger down here, closer to the center, or maybe it’s because she is so old and has already taken two long walks today—down and up and down again. But she finds herself sinking to her hands and knees now, grasping at the cold hard ground, her body touching other bodies, recoiling faintly.
“Oh,” she says sadly, in this darkness which is no more dark to her than the light, feeling forward with her fingers, feeling the bony rib cage of someone sleeping who turns and groans under her touch. They are so old now, old like her. When Hanum was alive she used to sleep down here among them, curling around their unconscious bodies—bodies that were only memories of the lives that once lived in them, that had not needed food for years and years—and she would mumble her memories into their unhearing ears, in her own language. But after Hanum died, she stopped coming. She sat out on the rocks, haunted by her own guilt, and sometimes they tossed in nightmares below her and began to scream, and she did not know how long it would be before they were silent again.
“I did not mean to,” she moans softly now, touching the thin hair on a bony, sleeping head. The touch of it horrifies her, like a corpse, but she cannot stop. “I did not mean to betray you. I did not mean for you to end up here.”
“It’s okay, Mother,” comes a light, clear voice. “None of us mean to do what we do, not really.”
“Daughter,” the old woman cries, hurrying forward on her hands and knees. The voice sounds close, and yet far. How wide this room is—if it is even a room, or if it even has walls and doesn’t expand endlessly into space, for she has never known. “My daughter, where are you?” She hears herself—her horrible, choked-monster voice—and what is she? What has she become? A bitter, twisted creature, without light, without love, barely human, without one good thought to redeem her, crawling below the earth. She crawls over the bodies, not caring. She drags herself.
But her daughter’s voice is simple and clear. “Here I am,” she says. As if they two are standing together in a lit green place, the sun filtering between the trees, looking across into each other’s eyes. As if they could walk right to each other, and take each other’s hands, and go carefree together through a bright forest, where there are no dangers from below and no magicians from above. Just the two of them.
The old woman crawls forward. “Right here,” says her daughter again, softly, and the old woman recollects herself—she is, after all, the elder—and gets up on her knees and takes her daughter’s hand, where her daughter is lying on the floor.
“You have no bed to lie on!” the old woman cries.
“It’s all right,” says her daughter. “Soon I will be asleep, and it won’t matter.”
The old woman begins to sob. She knows it. She can feel it now. It is she herself who is sobbing. “Oh, but you will never wake,” she cries.
“No, no,” says the girl, caressing her hand. “Don’t cry, Mother. I will wake. We will all wake, me and the others. For he is coming back to me, and he will see what this place is. He will see in the dark, as we cannot, because he is a Dream God, Mother.”
The old woman shakes her head. “Who?” she mutters. “Who will come? No one will come.”
“Yes,” says her daughter gently, patting her hand. “You never believed, but he will come. Perhaps that will be the proof you always wanted! You will see. He has to come, because the world is round, and love is round, and so he will end up back here with me, because there is nowhere else to go.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” asks the old woman suddenly, drying her eyes, taking her daughter’s head into her lap. For what the girl says frightens her, though she does not know why. She does not believe it.
There is a moment of silence then, and the old woman wonders in a panic if her daughter is already sleeping. But then, “No,” comes the slow answer. “It’s strange, but I’m not afraid. You said that I would come back here, and it’s not so bad as I thought. I’ve been in underground places before. One time I was with an older woman like you. Her name is Eva. She has a peaceful, candlelit room under the earth, in a hillside, and that’s where she dreams her dreams. She brought me down there to tell me the story of my father, and where I come from, for the first time. Also, underneath her daughter’s house, there was a dark place like this too, where they kept all the food. It was a place of nourishment and safety. You’d go down there, and know that you had everything you needed. Once there was a boy down there—so young, so innocent, looking into the dark places where no one else looks, for the roots of things—and we shared a secret moment, that no one will ever know.”
The old woman is holding her daughter’s hand so tightly that she doesn’t even realize it until the girl moves her fingers a little, trying to loosen the grip. Who is this beautiful, beautiful girl, and what has she done, and what has she lived? The old woman tries to remember the word again: daughter. How could it be that she has a daughter? For it seems that this woman lying in her lap knows so much of the world. She seems so wise. And she herself, the old woman, is so young—only thirteen years old—and she does not know anything but this island and the sea. She does not know anything except that this grief has been lurking around her forever, like an unshrinking fog hanging over the island, like a destiny of brutal ending, and it is beginning to creep closer. Yes, it is beginning to close in around her.
“Mother,” the young woman says now, “did you make that bed for me?”
The old woman leans closer. “What bed?”
“The bed I lay in, in the tower. The bed I always slept in. Made of feathers and clouds, grasses and earth. My father could never make a bed like that.”
No, the mother thinks. I never saw you again. I never did anything for you. But she doesn’t want to tell her daughter that. And now as she traces her daughter’s face with her fingertips, she does s
eem to remember, in her mind and in her hands, a bed that she wove together out of whatever she could find on the beach—a place she prepared for herself and her infant, in advance, knowing what would happen. It is possible that Hanum took that bed, just as he took away everything else that belonged to her. “Maybe I did make it,” she whispers.
“I thought so,” says her daughter, and sighs a sigh that makes the old woman sigh, too. The grief is coming. Oh, it is coming down, it is coming in, like the ocean. But in a way it feels soft, and so good, more precious than the touch of a lover—more real, even, than the voice of the Goddess.
“I want to know your story,” says Lonely.
“But I want to know yours,” says the old woman. “And we don’t have much time.”
“Please,” begs Lonely. “Because you are my mother, and I need you to. Please.”
I am the mother, the old woman thinks again, and she remembers the cave. She has never been able to give her daughter anything, but for one meal from her own breast, before she was taken away. At the very least, she can give her this much—one sad story, all that she has to give.
“But first tell me,” she says to her daughter, “why did you give yourself? Why did you sacrifice yourself to set Mira and her sister free?”
“Because I feel responsible. I mean not guilty, but the way I feel responsible to everyone who has done so much for me in this life. Like my father, who was only trying to love me. And Yora, Dragon, Moon, Fawn, Rye, Chelya, and Eva, and Sky, and the animals and the trees—everyone who gave me so much, helped me so much on my journey. And Delilah, who was my mirror and who saved my life, who helped me even though she didn’t understand me, even though it cost her to do so. But especially, especially the Unicorn, who carried me to my dream, without whom I may never even have left the shore and never known where to go, and to whom I never gave anything in return. I wanted to set her free. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Yes,” says the old woman.
“And who knows,” continues the young voice with urgency, “but that these people sleeping are not my brothers and sisters. Who knows—they could be all the forgotten children of my father, that he made in that City, children of all the peoples he—he raped and—that he denied. For you know, Mother, you know that he was terrible.”
Then she begins to cry.
“Don’t cry,” says the mother. For she cannot bear it, and yet she cannot think of a single word of comfort. “You are braver than me,” she says finally. “I refused to give of myself and have paid ever since.”
“Please,” murmurs the girl. “Tell me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Were they going to sacrifice you to the Dark Goddess, in the swamp?”
The old woman hesitates. She did not expect this to be the first question. She expected questions about Hanum, about Sky, about the men. This part of the story, for her, came before the story even began, and she never questioned it.
“I was chosen from birth,” she says slowly, “to meet with the Dark Goddess. The Dark Goddess spoke to me always. My whole life. From our union—the union of me and her—the Unicorn would be reborn. That was my destiny.”
“Do you mean you would become the Unicorn, or that the Unicorn would be born of…? What does it mean, mother?”
“I don’t know. I was not really I—I was not an individual person the way other people were. I was raised differently, kept by myself. I cannot explain it.”
“But what was the Unicorn for? What would the Unicorn do, once it rose again?”
“What would it do?”
“Yes. What was its purpose?”
“I don’t know. It was just the Unicorn. It was pure beauty. It was everything we long for, without understanding what we long for, when we think we long for other things. Haven’t you seen the Unicorn, child? Haven’t you ever seen something so beautiful that it was simply enough?”
“Yes,” whispers Lonely.
“Well, then.” Hearing silence again, the old woman continues. “It was not seen as a sacrifice. There was nothing to give up, because I had always been destined for this. At least—I did not think there was anything to give up, until I saw Hanum.”
“You saw him? When did you see him?”
“When he was waiting for me there, in the sky. I saw him.”
“Then what? What happened?”
The old woman sighs. “I know I was chosen for this rite, I know. But sometimes I wonder, was I not the right one after all? Because I was willful and romantic, though I did not always know it. I had been taught to be all the light parts of being, so that I could meet the Dark Goddess as her opposite, and the light and the dark could join. So up until then, all sense of those dark things—lust, greed, selfishness, betrayal, rebellion, anger, dark passion, grief—had been connected only with Her, while I was only the light, the gentler love, compassion, wisdom, spirit. But when I saw Hanum, I felt those dark things rise up in me. I felt that they were in me, after all. I also saw, for the first time, my own beauty—reflected in his eyes. I thought, why should I be sacrificed? For it seemed like a sacrifice then. I thought, why should I be forced to this suffering, when this powerful, magical man comes to rescue me? I saw him coming. I knew he would come. I began to feel things I never knew I could feel.” She sighs. “And so.”
She had never known the relief that could come with telling one’s story. She had never even known she had a story. All this time….
“Was it Sky, who tried to stop you?”
“Yes, but I did not know him. I did not know—intimately, by name—anyone in the village.”
“What did you say to him, to make him stop fighting?”
“I told him to stop. I told him I wanted to go. I know that shamed him. But I could not bear the guilt of seeing him fight so hard for me, when I knew, somehow, that this was my fault. I had longed for it. I was betraying my people, and I knew it, and I did not want this boy to get hurt or killed for me.”
“How old were you then?”
“Thirteen.”
She can feel her daughter thinking. “How old were you when you had me?”
“Fourteen, I think.”
“Then I must be very old, because you are so old, and you were young when you had me.”
She shrugs. “Who knows. I do not understand time that way. I know, when I lived in the City, I aged perhaps a hundred years. And when you lived in the tower, you did not age at all.”
“What happened? Did you ever love my father?”
“I don’t know. I thought that I did. I loved the idea of this new life, this adventure, this whole new possibility I had never dreamed of, of what my life could be and who I could be. He treated me like a princess. He made me know something of myself for the first time, with all the good and the bad that such knowing brings. But then I began to feel homesick—for the safety, the safe ancient wisdom of my people cradling me, and for the place and the sense of belonging and even the Dark Goddess who had loved me—and he became angry. He did not love me any more. Then I felt so lonely, because we could not even speak each other’s language, and I felt so guilty for betraying my people, and I thought all the time of that boy who had tried to stop me. I wondered who all those people were who had loved and worshipped me, that I had never even known. I wished, sometimes, that this boy would come after me, and rescue me back from the man I thought had rescued me—but who had actually ruined me.”
“What happened in the City?” Her daughter’s voice sounds a little drowsy now. The old woman notices the part of the story she skips, but says nothing. She knows they will come around to it again. She knows intuitively that the girl is saving it for last, a final treasure before she falls asleep.
“Hanum cursed and blinded me, as punishment for showing him all that he did not want to see. And also, I think, so that I would not follow him. It was because of my blindne
ss that I could not find my way out of the City and never returned to you to try to claim you.” But then she knows that is not the whole truth. “Also,” she admits, “I was afraid.”
“Then how did you come back to the island?”
The old woman’s answers are brief now. She feels her daughter fading, and is ready for her own death—which she feels so clearly now—to come more quickly and make the final blow. How nice it would be, if she could die before her daughter goes silent forever. “Hanum made his men remove the Mad Ones—the ones who suffered openly in the streets, the ones who spoke the truth about the City’s illusion. He had them removed to this island, and above it he built your tower, to hide them. One day, they removed me, too. I had become one of them.”
“And what did he say, when you came to the island with the Mad Ones?”
“Nothing. I had learned his language by this time—your language, the language everyone speaks in the City and almost everywhere—but it did not matter. He denied me. He said he did not know me. I had one brief moment of happiness again, the last I have ever known, when they told me you were up there in the tower. But then I found out I would never see you again.” The grief is crushing her now, very gradually, taking her breath away bit by bit….
“Why didn’t he lock you up with the others?”
“Because he needed me. I was willing to care for them. I could soothe them, help keep them quiet. Because of where I came from, I could speak to the spirits of things, and for a while I was able to convince the River Goddess, Yora, to come here and give them the love I did not have to give. I could catch fish from the sea, and harvest the seaweed and the snails, and keep us fed so that he did not have to do it. Until we all began to change into something else. Until somehow, we no longer seemed to need food.”
“But what have you done all these years? How have you survived?” The old woman hears the tears in her daughter’s voice.
