A Gathering Of Stones

4

At fast she thought the events of the night were a dream, but when she moved her legs, she found she was still sore. The linen packet fell away when she sat up; she looked at the bloodstains for a long moment, then folded it up again and put it in her rucksack. Feeling more than a little lightheaded, she took the tin cup to the stream and filled it. She drank. The liquid was merely cold water with the acrid green taste common to most mountain streams. She remembered water flavored and scented with diamonds, but that might have been something she did dream. She sipped at the water and thought about sleeping. She wasn’t supposed to sleep, she was supposed to keep vigil. She didn’t feel like worrying about her lapse. After filling the cup once more, she carried it up the gentle slope to her blanket and set it on the grass by her foot. She looked around.

The meadow space, was filled with stippled sun rays, the misty light slanting through the dark needle-bunches on the upslope pines and cedars; there was no wind, the quiet was so thick she could feel it like the laprobe pulled heavy and close against her skin. Her mind was weary; it was hard to tie one word to another and make a phrase of them. She walked about a little, her legs shaky. Her inner thighs felt sticky, the cloth of her trousers clung briefly, broke away, clung again. She grimaced, disgust a mustiness in her mouth. She stripped, dropped her clothing on the blanket and took a twist of grass to the stream. She waded in. The water was knee-high, the cold was shocking. She shivered a moment, then gathered the will and went to her knees. She gasped, then examined her thighs. She’d bled copiously which surprised her, but she didn’t waste time worrying about that either. She splashed water over the stains, began scrubbing at them with the grass. Each move bounced her a little on the gravel lining the streambed, she felt the bumps against her knees and shins, the rubbing, but the cold was so numbing she felt no pain until she climbed out of the water, put her clothes back on and warmed up a little.

She grunted as she tried to fold her legs; the bruises and abrasions she’d acquired in the stream made themsclves apparent, so she crossed her ankles and straightened her back and began feeling her way into further meditation.

Flies came from everywhere and swarmed around her; they settled on her and walked on her hands and on her arms and on her legs, everywhere but her face; they were a mobile armor of jet and mica flakes, buzzing through a slow surging dance up and around and down, black twig feet stomping over every inch of her. She sat and let this happen. When the sun was directly overhead, the armor unwove itself and flew away.

She sat. Something was happening inside her. She didn’t understand anything, but she had fears she didn’t want to think about.

A one-legged woman stood under the trees across the stream. Vines grew out of her shoulders and fell around her. There was emptiness on her left side; the vines swayed parted, unveiling nothing; the vines on her right side grew round and round her single leg. She hopped. Stood still. Hopped again. The vines bounced. Arms outspread, she began jumping up and down on the same spot, turning faster and faster as she hopped. Korimenei heard a whining sound like all the flies singing in unison. The woman went misty and the mist went spinning away into the dim green twilight under the trees.

Korimenei considered this. She slid her hand up under her pullover and touched the place where the amethyst had seeped into her. Her skin was cool and dry; there was nothing to show it had really happened. She pulled her hand out, let it rest on the slight bulge of her belly; it seemed to her she could feel a thing growing in her, growing with a speed that vaguely terrified her. She took her hand away, closed her eyes and began humming to herself. After a while she plucked a song from Harra’s Hoard, an Ow’song, and focused all of herself on it.

Mound midafternoon another woman came slithering from the trees across the stream. She was writhing on her stomach like a great white worm; her legs were all soft from hip to toe; she had no toes, her legs ended in rattles like those on a snake’s tail. She reared up the forward half of her body and danced with her arms and shoulders, shook her rattlefeet to make music for her dance. She had the polished ivory horns of a black buffalo, horns that spread wider than the reach of her arms. Her face was broad, her nose and mouth stuck out like the muzzle of a flat-faced dog. Her ears were pointed and shifted independently, a part of her body-dance. The hair on her head was like black broomstraw and hung stiffly on either side of her face. The hair under her arms was rough and shaggy like seafern; it hung down her sides, lower than the flat breasts that slapped against her ribs. There was a terribleness about her that rolled like smoke away from her, invisible emanations that filled the round meadow and squeezed Korimenei smaller and smaller.

Before Korimenei shriveled quite away, the horned woman sank into the earth and was gone.

The sun went down. Korimenei watched for Geidranay, but he didn’t come this dusk; she felt sad, lonely. “Tit,” she said aloud. “Trago, brother, talk to me.” He didn’t come. She was alone in the growing darkness with a thing growing in her.

She curled her hands and stared at her palms. “I don’t understand any of this,” she said aloud. That wasn’t quite true. The crystals were for eyes to see and ears to hear the things beneath/behind the things one saw in ordinary light. She’d read about them in the books that Shahntien Shere had drawn to her library from the four corners of the world, she’d heard about them from the wandering scholars the Shahntien collected on the temple Plaza and invited to lecture to certain students, those she thought would profit from contact with other symbologies, other systems of visualization. Sometimes the crystals weren’t crystals but roots or flowers, insects or beast organs; the effect was much the same. Her initiation had its parallels also, the event though not the details. The flies… she could call from memory a score of similar happenings and each of these had at least a score of interpretations, meaning one thing to the newly initiate, something else to the same person when he or she was a mature practitioner, something else again to that person when he or she was in the twilight of his or her life. The two women had no referents, but both frightened her, both reeked of danger, of power on the verge of erupting from control. She remembered what the Shahntien said and smiled, then went back to being friOtened; she pressed her hand against her swelling body. This… she laced down her fear, tying it tight inside her… had no parallel she knew of, only the familiar terror before dangers she hadn’t the knowledge or strength to fight against, the terror that swept through her when Trago came into her bedroom and showed her the Godmark that meant he was doomed to burn at the stake unless she could manage something, the terror that swept through her when the drunk caught her on the street and she thought he was going to hurt her, kill her before she could reach the Drinker of Souls, the terror that swept through her when Settsimaksimin snatched her from

0 her bedroom and so arbitrarily threw her to the Shahntien like a beast thrown to a tamer. Terror…

Sometime after moonset the white doe came from the woods; she stood gazing at Korimenei for several moments, then she lifted herself onto her hind legs, shrinking as she did so until she had the doe’s head still, but a woman’s body with white milky breasts; the breasts were bare but the rest of her wore the doe’s pelt; it glinted like silver wire in the starlight. Music came from somewhere, a flute played, a drum, a lute, something with a high sweet woman’s voice, singing. The doe spoke: “There is music. You are not dancing.”

Korimenei stood. Her clothing fell away from her. She began to dance. She didn’t know what she was doing, her feet were moving, she felt awkward, she was awkward.

The doewoman waded across the stream. She took Korimenei’s arm. “Be still,” she said. “I will teach you the proper dance. Come with me.” She led Korimenei toward the stream, choosing the place where there were two stones in the middle of it. She stepped on the first stone and pulled Korimenei onto it with her. There was very little room, Korimenei pressed against her guide, smelled her strong deer smell, gland and fur. The doewoman stepped across to the second stone; it was smaller than the first, there was no room for Korimenei but the woman tugged her after her anyway. Somehow there was room. They stood without moving. Korimenei looked around her. The stream was a river now, split into two strands; it was the widest deepest river she’d ever seen. The water was deep and silent as it flowed, it looked like green-blue grass. There was power and terror in it. And great beauty.

The doewoman made the waters rise. Korimenei lay down in them, her body pointed in the direction of the flow. The water took her. Her body began to undulate like the serpent woman, back and forth in sweeping s-curves. She went that way for a long time. She didn’t know how long.

The singing began again, louder. The drum was louder also, the flute more piercing. A man lifted her, carried her. His head was the head of the Gold Hart. His antlers spread like a great tree of heavy rough-beaten gold. His eyes were hot and piercing, they were gold, molten gold. Force came out of him like heat from a fire. It went into her. He laid her on the water; he stood at her feet, holding onto them. He made her sit up. She discovered that she was under water and she gasped for breath. She started struggling. “Be still,” he said to her. “ I am making you drink this water. Drink it. Drink.”

After she drank, he carried her out of the river and set her on her feet. Water ran out of her, pouring from her eyes, her mouth, from every orifice in her body. The doewoman was there, waiting, a small male fawn pressed up against her. The Hart strode over the grass to the Hind; he put out his hand. She rested her hand on it. They danced, a slow stately pavanne, circling each other, parting and coming together, face to face, then back to back. The dance went on and on. Korimenei should have been cold, but she was not. A Whole Moon larger than the moon she knew swam high overhead, full and white with traces of blue like a great round of pale cheese. The trees around them were bone white and still as stone, though they were not dead; Korimenei felt a powerful life in them. The grass was thick and short and black as the fur on a silver fox.

The dance changed, grew wilder. The Hart came to her, took her hand, pulled her into the dance. The three of them circled, parted, came together, face to face, then back to back.

Korimenei had no idea how long the dance lasted, she suffered no fatigue, she flowed with the pattern and felt only a cool pleasure.

The Hart and the Hind and the Fawn drew back before her. They sank onto four legs and trotted away, waded across the stream and vanished under the trees on the far side. The river was gone, or perhaps it had merely shrunk to what it had been before the white doe came. She was standing on the red dirt of the meadow; she was dressed again in trousers, pullover and coat. She went back to the blanket, settled herself on it, pulled the laprobe about her shoulders. She touched her swelling body, but the fear was gone. Something was going to come out of this, but she knew the dance now and nothing could hurt her unless she let it. Behind her the eastern sky flushed palely pink.

The second day and the second night were done.