Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Bettiann was shocked into silence, but Faye shook her head slowly, trying to reconcile this with the Sophy she thought she had known.

  “I never heard Sophy say that. I never thought of her as particularly … interventionist.”

  “Tssh,” Laura hissed. “Of course she was. She said she’d spent her life finding the ground on which to fight the final battle.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Laura hitched her chair forward until she was almost touching them, fixing them with her eyes. “Didn’t she tell you? There is a great battle brewing. Some perceive it as between God and the devil, light and darkness fighting it out, with earth as the spoils. Just like two rams on the hill, going at each other with their great curly horns. That’s the so-called Christian idea of it, a very much all-male thing, women and children irrelevant except as prizes of battle, wouldn’t you know. The battle that’s coming isn’t between a good male force and an evil male force. It’s more basic than that. It’s between balance and dominion.”

  Aggie murmured, “Sophy rejected Christian concepts, did she?”

  “She rejected the idea that battles are fought only between male forces with woman as the ground they fight on. Sophy said she had found the enemy, that he was powerful and dreadful, that he trampled on the graves of girl children and threw brides into his furnace, that wherever women were reviled, he was there, whispering into the ears of their persecutors. She said he had as his aim the extirpation of all burgeoning, all blessing, all that is female in nature.…”

  “The world wouldn’t last long with no women,” said Bettiann.

  “His world would. Sophy claimed we couldn’t let the battle be fought on those terms. She said the enemy mustn’t be allowed to call all the shots. She said we have to oppose him.” She compressed her lips, eyebrows raised, like one awaiting response to a password.

  They looked at one another helplessly, still without understanding.

  Laura shook her head, baffled. “You don’t understand, do you? Didn’t you know what she was doing, all those years? Didn’t you talk to any of us, the ones she saved? The ones she set into motion and sent around the world?” She looked from face to face, seeing only incomprehension. “No. I can see you didn’t. You were like family, right? And she was little sister? Children should be seen and not heard? So you didn’t listen.”

  “We listened,” cried Bettiann, not at all sure that they had.

  “Not well enough, it seems. Well, better late than never. You’ve come to the right place to find people who know Sophy well. There are many of them around here, half a dozen of us within twenty minutes of one another.”

  “All doing well?” Aggie asked. “All … happy?”

  Laughter. “Happy? Sometimes. But, then, happy is a sometime thing. When Younger Sister broke the happiness jug, bits of it scattered everywhere, so Sophy always told us. She said not to worry about happy, just get on the way because we’ll find bits of happy everywhere we go.”

  “I never heard about the happiness jug,” breathed Faye.

  “Oh, we heard all her stories. She set a lot of us on the way.”

  Aggie again. “What way is that?”

  That lilting voice, with a touch of Irish in it, suddenly chanting: “ ‘Onto the winding way, past the wicket gates left cunningly ajar, the ones with the barkers outside, urging you to come in for security, love, fame, love, riches, love. Past the lanes leading to the pastures of stupid cow, the kennels of bitch; past the paved roads leading to pedestals and plinths where virgin saints and mothers-of-many stand; past the doors opening on nurseries for pretty babies, or to harems, guarded by eunuchs of despair.’ ”

  “Narrow the road and strait the gate,” said Aggie, as from a great distance.

  “ ‘Many the paths and no gates, ever,’ ” Laura contradicted her. “ ‘Many paths to allow for meandering, for as the water flows, so will we, but no gates, for every gate has a toll collector. Go through none, and none can close behind you to trap you in a place you don’t belong. Track by your star; but keep an eye on your feet, for stones are set in the road to make you stumble.’ That’s what Sophy said.” Abruptly she folded her hands in front of her and began to sing lustily:

  “ ‘Men show us their roads across the land,

  which they have built straight and wide,

  where their tollgates stand on every hand

  controlling the countryside;

  And the gates, they say, are the only way,

  for women to save their souls,

  and when we ask why, the gatekeepers cry

  that we’ve got to pay their tolls

  to keep us demure, to keep us pure,

  to keep us at duty’s call,

  for we never can be as good as a man

  since we were the cause of his fall.…’ ”

  Bettiann cried, “Sophy wrote that for show-and-tell, years and years ago. It was a song—Faye set it to music as a trio. Faye and I sang it, but Aggie wouldn’t—”

  “It wasn’t respectful,” said Aggie in a distant voice. “It was … is heretical.”

  Laura laughed, agreeing. “Sophy isn’t respectful, no.”

  Faye shook herself, like a dog coming out of the water. “What we need,” she said, rather more vehemently than necessary, “is to know if any of you ever heard Sophy talk about a place she might be going or wanting to visit? Her home place or somewhere she’d been that she’d like to return to? We really, desperately need to find her.”

  Laura shook her head at them, but she said she would call the others. Let them sit out in the orchard shade and drink iced tea for a time while she did so. Minutes later they were ensconced on sun-faded chairs beside an old cider press while above them infant apples shone, sun-polished jade cabochons among the boughs.

  “They won’t know anything,” said Aggie.

  “They may,” said Bettiann. “Don’t give up, Aggie.”

  “She isn’t giving up,” said Faye, staring fixedly at Aggie. “She doesn’t want Sophy found.”

  “No,” Agnes cried explosively, thrusting out her hands as though to push them away. “I don’t! All my life I’ve fought and fought for my vows, fought for my celibacy, fought for my poverty! Fought to believe it was important! Poverty, chastity, obedience. I thought obedience would be easy—all those years of Catholic boarding schools, I’d learned to be obedient. Poverty was nothing. When you want nothing much, what is poverty? But celibacy … oh, I knew that would be hard, hard. You don’t know, you pretty women, you easy women, you women who bring the partners like bees, humming around you.… You don’t know what it’s like, the longings, the wondering, the curiosity! You don’t know the pictures the mind makes in the night so you wake from dreams with your body trembling, echoing, thrashing so it won’t stop but goes on and on.… And now … now everybody! Everybody chaste, everyone pure, without effort, without trying, and all my sacrifice is meaningless! Meaningless!”

  Faye startled, stared for a moment wide-eyed, then laughed like a dog bark. “Hey, Aggie. I’ll bet you’re not half as pissed as the pope.”

  Aggie recoiled as though she’d been slapped.

  Bettiann snapped her teeth at Faye, put her arms around Aggie. “Aggie, please. Faye’s just … you know Faye. We don’t mean to hurt you. We would never hurt you. We love you.”

  Agnes muttered, “It’s not your fault, Bettiann. It’s Sophy’s influence on her, on all of us. All those years. I thought it was Carolyn who was undermining, Carolyn who was the skeptic, but it was Sophy all the time. Sophy who was working us and working us, getting us to the point where she could use us, like a weapon, to do this devilish thing!”

  Faye said quietly, “Maybe God decided to make it easier on us. Maybe it’s a miracle.”

  “A miracle brought about by whom? St. Sophy?” She laughed, the giggle turning into uncontrollable shaking. “Oh, Bettiann, all those years rooming with her in school, she there in the next bed, breathing soft in the night, it was so hard not to
reach out to her, so hard not to touch her. Now I must fight against her with all my being, when I loved her so.…” The words hung in the air like the stench of vomit, sour with regret.

  The feeling behind the words was discomforting, almost repellent. They had little time to be troubled by it, however, for the women began arriving—some familiar faces, some not, some with their children, some with one another, with then-own answers to Faye’s unspoken question.

  “She was a saint,” they said. “She was our warrior angel. She gave us a place to stand.…”

  Aggie drew in a slow breath, as though it hurt her, and gritted her teeth. Bettiann took her hand and patted it.

  One of the women stood, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, and said: “I am Ellen, and I will tell you the words of Sophy, as heard by us of the First Dispersal:

  “Sophy said: ‘When I had traveled around the world, having seen in all nations what it was I had come to see, I was much troubled in my spirit at the power of the enemy who moves among us, so I went into the desert to seek the source of women’s being, for in that source is our strength.

  “ ‘I went to a mesa, high above the desert, where the stone is full of the shapes of little things that swam long and long ago in shallow seas. I went to a house deserted these thousand years. Roofless and doorless it was, with an age-old hearth on which to light my fires. Sweet smoke blessed me by night. Kind wind blessed me by day.

  “ ‘All around me lay the evidence of time. Before me lay all the works of man, the nations and peoples of the earth; above me the hawk circled at the zenith, the stars moved, and around me walked the creatures of the world. I saw no person except the man who came to bring me food and water; a wrinkled man who lived in an old yellow bus, a man I had known forever. His name was Qowat, Josephus, keeper and protector, shaman and seer. He came every week in his soft brown shoes, his feet mumbling over the stones, scuffling the sand.

  “ ‘I was there long days and long nights, seeking Her in meditation. At last She came to me at midday, sunlight crowned, rainbow clad, out of a prismed cloud. She asked me what I sought. I told her I sought help for the women of this world. She bent above me, touching me with her hands, and said that help must be defined before it can be given. She wrapped me in her cloud and left me there, telling me to think well.

  “ ‘Though I had spent years among the women of the world, seeing their sorrow, I could not define what help it was they needed. Long I stood wrapped in Her cloud, pondering: What help could do good without harm? What help would be wise and just? What help would benefit women without punishing men, for are they not our brothers and our sons? At sunset I was still there, watching the red clouds burn the last of the day into ashes.

  “ ‘It was then the stranger man came striding across the mesa as though it were a road, himself shining like a lantern in the dusk, his own heat lighting his way. I saw that he wandered to and fro on the earth, and up and down in it; his wandering had brought him to me. He stopped near me, tall and dark and shiningly beautiful, and I thought of the stags on the mountaintop, lifting their muzzles in the dawn. He sensed me, though he could not see me in Her cloud, and he held out his hands, summoning me. He whispered he would give me everything I saw if I would let him make love to me. His eyes were little fires like the smallest borehole of a volcano, the red-rimmed orifice of flame, leading to hotness upon hotness, to the core of burning where flesh vanishes and is transformed into pure heat, pure ecstasy. Inside me, I burned with wanting him. Everything born of human woman, never released, never let go, wound like a spring. I tried to say no, and the words choked me. I could only stand there, thinking no, I would not, while he stood and grinned fiercely, burning me, but burn me as he would, he could not touch me unless I willed it so.

  “ ‘I knew he was the enemy I had been seeking.’

  “And we asked her, ‘What was he like, the enemy?’ ”

  “She said, ‘He came to me as a man, tall and ageless as mountains, with eyes that see into the doubting places of the heart and a mouth that gives kisses like wounds. He came to me as the possessor, the holder, the restrainer. His are the words of dominion which are spoken from the loins, saying not Thou mayest but Thou must. He is the seizer who destroys all life but his own. He is the self-worshiper who makes gods in his own likeness. It seemed to me I had known of him forever, and though he was of your people, not of mine, I knew he was my enemy as well as yours.

  “ ‘Deep into the night he sought me, turning his head this way and that, scenting me as a hound scents. At last he went away. I could feel his skin against my own long after he was gone, as though he had left a hot web around me that went on burning. Thus, I said to myself, is woman made ashes by wanting. Thus, I said, is woman tempted from her own being into destruction.

  “ ‘But though I still felt his heat, I could feel also the rock beneath my feet. This rock was the floor of an ancient sea that had burgeoned with life, and it was not he who made it. I looked out upon the peopled nations of the world, and it was not he who created them. Around me moved feather and fur, the snick of teeth and the dart of talon, and it was not he who taught them their skill. Life in all its diversity was from Her, and I stood upon life and he had not moved me from that place.

  “ ‘All night I watched, and at dawn She returned, out of the rose cloud, wrapped in mist. Veiled and hidden though She was, I knew Her voice. She stopped beside me, She took my face in Her hands and asked me if I had decided what help was needed. I had not. She said, “To know what help is needed against your enemy, don’t you need to know what the enemy plans for womankind?” Then She went away again, Her feet leaving strange tracks in the sand, like a great bird.’

  “And we asked where Sophy went then.

  “And she said, ‘I sought the answer to Her question. I traveled far, hard roads into the lair of the enemy, to see what he planned for womankind, and I found his plans made manifest in that place. I went from there to meet my sisters beside the sea, and there She came to me for the third time out of a sunlit wave upon the sea and I told Her what help was needed. And now the beast has been summoned onto holy ground, the battle is joined, and I have come to send you forth.’ ”

  Bettiann said, “She was talking about San Francisco.”

  The woman nodded, smiling. “Yes. She was content when she came from meeting with you. Strength had come upon her, and she gave of it. She laid her hands on us and we felt the light flowing into us. She named us the First Dispersal, and having named us, she sent us out, into the world.”

  “How many of you?” asked Faye.

  “Oh, hundreds by then. Maybe thousands. Some like Sarah Sourwood, to go among the old dames of the cities who would carry the war into the marketplace, for all wars must be fought there, sooner or later. And some of us to set up places of refuge, as Sophy herself had done for us. Do you remember Rebecca Rainford? She was one of the first to set up a place of refuge. Some of us went to the brides in India, and the girls being cut, and the mothers told to kill their baby daughters. Some went among women who were alone, teaching them to join together, for there is hope in two women, help in three women, strength in four, joy in five, power in six, and against seven, no gate may stand. Some even went among men to tell them of the battle that was coming, to explain that it is not male god against male devil, nor is it female against male; it has nothing to do with gender but with dominion.”

  “And you all made it?” Faye asked. “You all survived?”

  Nods, smiles. “Survived? Well, some lived, some died, but all kept a place to stand. Once you stop trying to go through the gates, it seems so much simpler. Find your sun-warmed stone, she used to say to us, find it high in the sun, dance there, build your house there, then reach down to pull others up!”

  “She was from Piedras Lagartonas,” Bettiann said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I know what it means,” said Laura. “Lizard stone, the stone of the clever mothers. She said it was named for her, too. ‘Piedra
s Lagartonas’ is also ‘Petra Sophia.’ The stone of wisdom, the home of the wise crones, the Baba Yagas.”

  “But where is it?”

  The woman shrugged, murmured with the others. “South,” they all agreed. “She said it was hot.” “She came north from there to Albuquerque.” “It wasn’t in Mexico.…” “No. I remember! South of the Spring of Contention.”

  “Is that a place? Or a condition?”

  They didn’t know. Faye went back to the car and took out a folded sheet of paper, bringing it back to Laura. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  “What is it?” Bettiann asked.

  “That thing you wrote about the lizard,” Faye replied.

  Laura passed it around, and they nodded, smiling. They had heard Sophy talk about the dancing lizard. “It has to keep dancing, or it burns up,” one of them said. “It is one of the metaphors of divinity, that one must keep moving or the fire of creation will go out. Change is what it’s about. The constant movement and ferment of change and evolution.”

  When they’d said it all, they went away again, without fuss, with great affection for one another, arms reaching, hands patting, heads bent together, words whispered or spoken, the whole like a dance, circles within circles, the music unheard but the rhythm of it plain.

  “Thank you,” Faye said to Laura when they were alone once more. “If there is anything I can ever do for you, any of you, please call upon me.” In her mind she was creating a statue of the Goddess, a womanly figure, very Laura-like, holding out her hand to pull others up.

  Then back again, to the hotel suite in Middlebury, where Agnes shut herself in her room. Through the closed door they could hear her voice murmuring, praying.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Bettiann asked. “What is she doing in there?”

  “She was grieving over Sophy,” Faye said. “Now she’s grieving over herself. She didn’t say a word when the women were talking, but I was watching her face. She didn’t believe them, or she didn’t believe what they were told.”