by Clare Bell
Abruptly the sensation faded and she was back on the mesa, facing the line of masked kachinas. She glared into the narrow slots of eyes in the painted wood, knowing she had faced down her fears. The drum grew louder, the steps faster. Again the Blue Star Kachina stamped toward her, whirled and dipped, casting another net of scent over her.
It began as the spicy-fruity aroma of persimmons, painting a yellow-orange glow in her mind. It deepened to red, then fermented into purple. Everything around her seemed to grow soft and spongy, imbued with the tint of ripening plums. The shaman’s drum had the sound of a heartbeat or the beginning of the gentle movements of lovemaking.
At first Kesbe tried to resist the rhythm, but it intoxicated her, drawing her into the embrace of smell and sound. She let her body move with the drum in its now-languid beat. Waves of smell washed over her, arousing her. Inwardly, she smiled. If the shaman-woman was counting on her to be afraid of sex, Sahacat was badly mistaken.
The beat of sound and smell increased in pace. Kesbe danced easily, giving herself for she saw no danger lurking there. She felt as though she were moving in a bath of warm oil, whose waves, generated by her movement, lapped the inside of her thighs and seemed to surge up inside her. Even then she felt no alarm, for she knew that this was all illusion, however skillfully cast. You have no power over me through my womanhood, she thought at the shaman. That is not one of my fears.
The waves grew stronger and more insistent, washing through her. Then they crested, broke and died away, but as they ebbed, she felt them leave something at her center. She thought, as she continued to dance, that the heat low in her belly was the lingering effect of the kekelt drug and that it would soon dissipate.
It didn’t, however, and she grew uncertain. It is illusion, she tried to persuade herself, but the illusion refused to let her listen, ft planted the idea inside her mind that Sahacat had the power to engender fertilization.
The smell in her nostrils grew darker, more fruity, with an undertone of musk. Panic began to grow in her as she sensed the shaman had sought and found the root of another fear.
She kept dancing, but she could not help feeling the warmth above her pubic bone start to burgeon, pushing outward. She contracted her belly muscles until they cramped, but the slow, inexorable swelling continued. She closed her eyes, put more force into her stamping. This was not happening. There was no way it could, but even as her mind repeatedly denied it, the scent strengthened in her nose and the feeling possessed her body.
The ties of her kilt felt tight. She stood it as long as she could, then loosened them with fingers that trembled as she felt the growing mound of her stomach. No, she cried, but the illusion was firmly anchored within her and the fear only made it stronger.
The panic turned to anger. It was her body, dammit. She searched for a way to fight back. If Sahacat could deal in sensory images, so could she. By concentrating hard, she imagined a wide leather strap bound across her abdomen, flattening the swelling and forcing it back into herself. It seemed to stop, to regress and again she felt triumph as she danced.
She heaved a deep breath and in dismay, felt the leather binding stretch beneath the outward thrust of her belly. In her mind she remade the binder of a stronger material and still it gave. She recast it into a ceramo-metallic, but the push of life within her burst through. This was unreal, a distant part of her mind tried to tell her, knowing well that even the strongest swell of flesh could not break such materials, but in her fear the illusion held.
She gave up the ridiculous battle with her body. She grew heavier with each step she danced, her spirits sinking. Once she thought she would escape the fate nature meted out to women, to bear unwillingly, to be used, filled, reduced to a vessel on two legs whose spirit and accomplishments meant nothing. Keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant, the litany rang, and so had it been down through the years until technology provided effective contraception.
It was drilled into her in space pilot training that a slip-up could delay or damage a woman’s career and so she had opted for the fool-proof contraceptive implant. Those who depended on less effective means or willpower or luck often found themselves dealing with the inconvenience and disgrace of their fertility. And now by the shaman’s power she had been forced to take her place among them.
Her fear grew sharper and centered in her belly, which seemed to be expanding faster. How large would she grow? Would it end when she reached normal human limits? But no limits existed in this world of terror and shadow. She crushed her fears to her, trying to keep them from the shaman, yet she knew Sahacat had already seized them.
Weakened, weighted, she felt her steps slow. She sagged to her knees, doubled over. The mass of her gravid flesh pushed her thighs apart. Nightmare painted an image of woman-becoming-termite-queen, swollen to monstrous dimensions by the demands of fertility, made immobile by sheer bulk. She felt as though she herself would become a mere vestige of flesh attached to a malignantly ballooning womb.
And what did that womb hold? Not children, but things, such as the one that had spilled out of Imiya. Things that would suck and drain her, eat her out from the inside and leave nothing but a withered husk.
No, no, no…but she was trapped within that moment with all its sensations and she could not wrench free. She knew that in reality, she had fallen out of the dance and lay huddled in near-catatonic stupor in the dust at the shaman’s feet. She knew of that reality, tried to reach it, but was thrust back into the nightmare where her body ran wild, totally out of her control.
But that was not yet the worst. The worst was discovering that part of her was a conspirator with the shaman’s power. Part of her wanted the feeling of being filled, being ripe and burgeoning. Part of her loved the liquid warmth inside, a warmth that spread to her genitals, swelling her labia with a sexual engorgement and laying a joyous placidity over her mind so that she could live each moment with animal contentment.
And that part, when she found it, horrified and shamed her more than anything else. It was what made her vulnerable to a seduction that was more than sexual. She hated the insidiousness of it, how it played on her most deeply rooted desires, casting aside her fears. A false promise that was true to the most ancient parts of her brain and body, so true that she could not root it out.
She could only huddle and cry in the well of want, shame and deep degradation into which the shaman had cast her and where she would stay forever…
“Kesbe-Rohoni.”
Her ears heard Chamois voice, but to her mind it meant nothing. She felt a touch, but it was a million miles distant.
“They have gone. Why do you huddle so strangely and cry like a child?”
She felt the words. Now they hurt. She drew herself in as tight as she could about the grotesqueness of her nightmare pregnancy, trying to seal in the horror and the shame. No one must ever know.
But Chamol wouldn’t give up, nor go away. “Tell me what they have done—what she has done.”
Kesbe squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to open her mouth, but her teeth chattered too violently to let her talk. From the depths of the well, she tried to reach up, to touch, to speak. One word emerged, distorted, broken.
“Imiya,” she whispered.
“He is safe in your Gooney Berg. The evil is gone from him,” Chamol answered, misunderstanding.
“No. The evil…in me…Sahacat put the evil in me…” She groped outward along the curve of her belly. Couldn’t Chamol see the hideous thing she had become…had even half-wanted to become? The thought brought a flood of renewed tears and a wish, mercifully granted, to retreat into darkness. The last thing she felt was the Pai woman taking her hands and holding them firmly.
She woke to the soft sound of rattles and a soft breathing of air across her face. Something gritty lay under her. Sand. A feather-scale fan passed slowly across her face, caressing her. The low sound of chanting echoed within the room. A woman’s voice. Chamol.
She still felt pregnant. The weight of her
abdomen flattened her buttocks against the floor. From the corner of one eye, she saw patterns on the floor, patterns that reminded her of the sand-painting of Imiya and Haewi that she had seen in Chamois house. She craned her neck up a little. It was true. She lay in the midst of a sand-painting.
Her memory of the depiction of Imiya she had previously seen woke concern for the boy. How long had he been left inside the hot metal shell of the aircraft?
“Kesbe-Rohoni, it is good you wake. You must free my brother from your Grandmother Aronan. Nabamida will take Imiya to his house, where Sahacat will not find him “
Kesbe blinked at Chamol, remembering how she had wrenched the Indian woman away from Imiya and out of the C-47’s cargo door. Could Chamol possibly have forgiven her for that? She tried to explain, apologize, but the words wouldn’t form.
“That does not matter now.” Chamol touched her gently. “Give us the means to enter Grandmother Aronan and get Imiya.”
She groped, found Gooney Berg’s keys, slipped the cord over her head. When she tried to sit up, she shook violently. “Give…these to…Nabamida,” she managed to say, then tried to explain how the right key fitted into the aircraft’s door.
Chamol soothed her, saying that the bowmaker would be able to figure out what she meant, since he was an artisan who formed and shaped wood. She left the room briefly to deliver the keys to Nabamida along with brief instructions. Kesbe heard the tread of the man’s feet, the jingle of keys, the rustle of the door flap. Chamol came back.
Sitting cross-legged, the Pai woman began once again to sweep Kesbe ritually with a plume of feather-scales.
“I know what has been done to you,” she said softly. “In your mind, you are lomuqualt. It cannot be undone. It can only be seen through. I will help, for I know what it is to give birth.”
She smoothed Kesbe’s hair back from her sweating face. “Tell me what moves through your mind, your body.”
At first, Kesbe’s tongue was locked into silence by the overwhelming feelings of revulsion and shame, but gradually the fanning and the gentle chanting relaxed her. She began to speak, slowly and hesitantly at first, then the words began to spill from her lips as her trust in Chamol grew. She told her the hallucinations, the images, the feelings.
“You fear that you no longer own your body,” the Pai woman said, smoothing Kesbe’s hair. “But you never have possessed it entirely. All of us belong to something greater. We share ourselves with that which creates and that which is good.”
Kesbe felt that Chamois words were pressing against the barrier in her mind, but still could not break through. There was still something that she herself was holding back. It was the forbidden want that had colluded in her downfall and even now made her wish to retreat again into catatonia. It was something that wouldn’t come out in words.
“Sahacat is not the only woman with power among the Pai,” said Chamol. “I too have skill, though it is small. Sit up.” She took Kesbe’s hands and pulled her to a cross-legged position. She began to clap softly in rhythm while singing in a low voice. A smell blossomed from her and when Kesbe inhaled it, she felt as though she were out in the desert in full sun, sitting amid the rocks and fragrant plants.
“I will guide you where your mind fears to go,” said Chamol. “Where are you now?”
Kesbe told her.
“It is good. Stay there. Be with yourself, with your body. Do not judge it.”
She was there on the desert, with the sun bathing her face, her breasts and the roundness of her lower body. She felt strangely neutral, balanced on an edge where she might fall one way or the other. The key was her desire. Would she suppress it as grotesque or untimely, as her culture and her upbringing bade her to do, or could she somehow admit that this was something she could want.
She felt herself sitting cross-legged. She leaned forward, pressing her hands into the soil, letting her big belly rest on the earth. Like the world, she was engorged and plump with life. She rested in a serene animal contentment, feeling her fullness with rejoicing and pride.
“You are ready to bring forth,” said Chamois voice, now carried on the desert wind. “Straddle the earth and face the sun.”
She stood, leaning back with her legs spread. With her hands, she cradled the weight of her belly. Something stirred within her, growing to a warm turbulence that heated her womb. It kicked like a child about to be born, then pushed down with a molten intensity that almost became pain. The muscles in her belly tightened, wrapping and squeezing in a series of strong pulsations like orgasm. They became stronger, nearing the edge of pain. Sweat ran on her forehead and her breasts. She felt the nearness of fear, for this was the ultimate surrender of control.
“Your body was made to do all things,” said the wise voice on the wind. “This is neither the greatest nor the least. Let it happen.”
Kesbe loosed the tendons of her hands that had drawn her fingers into claws against her belly. She clasped them beneath the swell, giving herself to the pulsations that swept through her.
The gift of her womb surged down, and through and out, pouring itself from her in a hot cascade of power and life. She flung back her head in the joy, wonder and pain, letting loose a shout to the sky.
And as her belly gave what she had nurtured, she looked down to see a rainbow arching from between her legs in a fountain of colors that spread to the heavens.
“You are the woman-who-births-a-rainbow,” Chamol said and in that instant, Kesbe was back on the sand-painting with the aronan feather-scale fan sweeping the air above her. With a sting of relief, yet regret, she knew her body was restored, her belly flat, as it had always been.
She looked up, once again fully within herself. The fan paused.
“You are healed,” Chamol said. “Not only of the hurt Sahacat worked in you, but the deeper hurt given by your own people. Is it true that to the people of your tribe bearing and birthing is unwanted? Even shameful?”
“It can interrupt a woman’s life,” Kesbe tried to explain. “It can interfere with other things she may want to do.”
“But it must be a choice,” said Chamol softly. “Not something a woman…you…are driven from because of fear.”
Kesbe reached for the Pai woman’s hand and held it. “I am no longer afraid. What you did…was it magic? I know that part of me now and it no longer frightens the rest.”
“If it was magic, it was the magic of one woman reaching to another through the knowing sense. And the magic of a wounded spirit guided to heal itself.”
Kesbe sat up, trying to be careful of the sand-painting. “I think that when the time comes to make such a choice, I will be able to do it without fear.”
“That time will come,” said Chamol. She paused, studying Kesbe. “You have grown stronger through enduring and learning. I think it is right for you to learn one thing more.”
“And that is?” asked Kesbe as Chamol helped her to her feet.
“The truth about the Pai people,” the woman answered. “Come and you will see it with new eyes.”
Silently, Kesbe followed her from the room.
Chapter 21
Kesbe wanted to see Imiya first, but when Chamol reassured her that Nabamida was caring for the boy, she followed where the Pai woman led. Chamol took her to a small hut that stood apart from the pueblo. Dusk was falling, casting long dark shadows on the floor of the cave that held Tuwayhoima. Kesbe could see wavering lights through window openings in the stone and adobe wall. From inside came singing.
“We bless he who bears new life.
We bless she who bears new life.
The gods honor the coming of this one.
May it enter this world softly, in beauty.
May the one who is coming be held proudly to the sun.
That the god may know this child.”
She suddenly suspected what Chamol was taking her to see. She pulled back on the woman’s hand, stopping her briefly. “Is this a lomuqualt birth ceremony?”
“Yes.
Why?”
Kesbe swallowed, remembering what had happened to Imiya in Gooney Berg not so many hours ago. “I’m not sure I can stand to see more of that…kind of thing.”
“But you have not seen it,” Chamol said, her eyes wide and her face earnest. “You have seen Sahacat’s perversion of it and your fear of it, but you have not seen the truth.”
The singing rose up again, washing over and through Kesbe like a warm heavy wave. It bore a strange sort of comfort. Among the voices, she heard one she knew. Nyentiwakay’s.
She looked up in surprise.
“Come,” Chamol said, leading the way and pushing aside the door hanging for Kesbe. Even before she stepped into the dimly lit chamber, she caught the odor of excitement and expectation. Eyes turned to her, lips opened in surprise, but before anyone could challenge her right to be there, Chamol pushed ahead, whispering quick explanations.
People crowded the small room, some sitting cross-legged on rugs, others standing or leaning against the walls. At the center was a knot of people surrounding Nyentiwakay, making a living birth-chair on which the lomuqualt half-lay, half-squatted. What surprised Kesbe was that at least half of those present were Pai men and child-warriors. They were not just spectators, but active participants, helping to support and soothe the lomuqualt as the first pangs of birth began.
It conflicted entirely with Kesbe’s knowledge that among ancient Pueblo peoples, such an event was the province of women. She said so in a low voice to Chamol.
“But why should only women be present? The one who bears is a man,” Chamol answered.
“What?” Kesbe managed to splutter, turning more gazes in her direction. “I thought Nyentiwakay was a woman.”
“Nyentiwakay is a man. He is carrying an aronan-child. That is what it means to be lomuqualt. Women can also be lomuqualt, but only a woman can conceive and carry a human child.”
