Chapter 7
June, 1949 CE
The Village of Ash
“Don’t encourage her,” Arsema snapped.
Bilen and the other Parrot Girls clung to each other under the thorn tree where they preened in the shade. They screeched in mock terror whenever Asmeret stopped running in circles to bare her teeth and snap at them with that weird grin on her face.
Parrot Girls was Asmeret’s name for them—the girls born in the same season, about to be nine. There were four in their village (five if you counted Asmeret). The four spent their days playing at being wives and mothers, swathed in bright cloth and draped in all of the beads they could collect and shells they could string. Arsema was their leader as she was the most beautiful and was promised to Aman, whom, all assumed, would one day be Chief.
The boys swaggered nearby in shorts strung on scrawny hips, bare bellies and chins thrust out to pronounce their husbandly traits. Arsema peered through the thorns and the whirl of Asmeret’s dust at Aman, the boy she suffered mightily for. They might be promised in marriage, but she wanted his love—wanted him to want her, not only have her. She sighed knowing that somehow Asmeret would spoil this game and everything else.
Asmeret wore shorts, like the boys. She jumped in front of Aman, blocking his path to Arsema’s roost, thrusting her bare belly and chin out at Arsema, which caused the Parrot Girls to titter and sneer. Aman steered clear, leading the other boys on a march past the cooking sheds—the last line of defense between the village and the vast wildness beyond. Asmeret wilted, torn between following the boys and keeping Arsema’s attention.
“She’s a mess, don’t look at her,” Arsema scolded the Parrot Girls.
She was right. Asmeret’s hair, what was left of it, sprang up here and there in weedy patches where she’d sawed fistfuls off—because it was hot and because she could. Because her father had left her for good.
She was filthy. The other girls’ skin shone with the oils their mothers and sisters rubbed all over their bodies. Asmeret’s skin, darker and silkier than theirs even without the oils, was blotchy with ash from the last time she’d snuck off into the volcanic plains by herself—a place strictly forbidden unless you were with an adult. And she stank.
“Did you roll in something dead?” Bilen asked, holding her nose.
Despite all of that, the Parrot Girls felt a strange attraction to Asmeret’s games. It was the way she made them jump and their hearts race. And it was her eyes—clear as water running over rocks, yet they always reflected a portrait of her world—the size and brightness of her irises shifted with the position of the sun and phase of the moon. They changed in principal hue with the seasons and mirrored the moment to moment temperament of the weather. On good days her eyes were bright blue-white-blue, with delicate veins of gold running through.
Arsema wouldn’t look at her. She didn’t see Asmeret’s irises churn like storm clouds, lightning flashing along their edges. Arsema was her world, her moon and her sun. Asmeret’s eyes reflected Arsema’s weather.
Asmeret dropped to all fours and hunched her shoulders, slinking toward the girls. “I’ll eat you in one bite!” she snarled.
The Parrot Girls jumped and huddled together beneath the thorn tree, laughing and shrieking. All except Arsema who stood by herself.
“Like you ate your brother before he could be born?” Arsema sneered under her breath. She didn’t have the nerve to say it loud enough for the others to hear. She was sharp-tongued but lacked the confidence and true animosity in her heart to dare let something so dangerous out.
Asmeret heard her and that was enough. Both girls had heard the story many times from Arsema’s mother, hissed into Asmeret’s ear when they were alone. Arsema was often nearby though as much as her mother boasted about her daughter, Daniat rarely saw her.
Arsema didn’t believe the tale about the brother. Asmeret knew it was true.
Asmeret ran around the tree faster and faster until she was a blur of teeth and dust. Until she disappeared.
9 July, 1960 CE
Beneath the Tree
“Asmeret!” Her mother’s voice? No, Hestia.
The spinning wheel came to a rest—the outer rim showed two cards VIII and IX: The masked Goddess of Wisdom balances the scales of divine justice from atop a towering headdress and holds the sword of human Will firmly between her legs, as if to say try me through her clenched lips. The Hermit wears its red cape, carrying the lantern of illumination from the cave—the three-headed dog at its heels. Asmeret wasn’t surprised by the cards on the rim. The masked goddess and the hermit rose from the cards, but unlike the Princess of Disks, remained rather small. She knew this story had to come out, the eight and nine pointing to those days leading up to her ninth birthday. The time that began with Arsema and the Parrot Girls taunting her in their childhood games. The days before she left home and her childhood ended. Something else had happened, she knew deep inside. Something she couldn’t remember. Something that was keeping her from becoming the woman she was meant to be. Asmeret watched, anxious as the apparitions moved toward a third card, drifting down the spoke made of swords. What about those days would the third card call forth?
ATU IX | THE HERMIT
Princess of Air
ATU VIII | ADJUSTMENT
When the hermit and goddess hovered over their chosen card Asmeret sighed with frustration. The Princess of Air, the card that showed itself over and over, yet remained silent. She picked up the card in her hand. It was painted all blue-green and yellow depicting a young woman, back turned, swiping at gray clouds in the sky with her sword. She wore a chiffon dress and a warrior’s helmet that covered her hair. The Medusa’s head rode on top like the prow of a ship. Asmeret felt a baffling pull to this card. The meaning and stories of the other cards in the deck immediately played out in front of her when she read, like watching the sea for days at a time and seeing a whole other universe that had been there all along. This card wouldn’t leave her alone. The sight of the card thrilled her, yet the story wouldn’t come. The royalty cards indicated people and some part they played. Even if a face remained hidden, she would hear a name. She’d wondered if the princess was Arsema once. She considered the other aspects of the card for clues. Princess of Air. Suit of swords. The one Princess of the North—the direction ruled by the princes.
“Asmeret!” Hestia urged. “We’ve only ‘til sunrise. Tell us what happened before your ninth birthday.”
Asmeret thought where to begin. Arsema’s face came to her then, making her pulse race, as it had on that day.
“Arsema was going to the market in the city with her mother,” Asmeret said. “I wanted to go, to be near her, but my mother said no.”
“Why did she say no, Asmeret?”
“I don’t know. The trip to the market was long even though we could take the mules and the cart. I really was a difficult child; I suppose she didn’t want to deal with me on the trip. Wanted to be free from me for a while, free of being a mother . . . then she said yes.”
“Why did she change her mind?”
“Because my father was gone and hadn’t yet returned. He left the day he and I tracked the kudu into the ash fields—I'd shot her and we followed her blood.” Asmeret drifted off into her thoughts.
All of those bones! The kudu lay there panting, dying slow—it wasn’t a clean shot.
Asmeret’s eyes turned cobalt and iron. They turned into whirlpools, and she took a step toward the bottomless hole that gaped and gurgled in the center of the room.
Focus! Raven barked.
Asmeret blinked, draining the whirlpools down her cheeks.
“She said she had no one to leave me with,” Asmeret said. Then, quietly to herself, “No one else was willing to be in charge of what they saw as a gravely wounded animal, not a child.”
“Where was your father?”
“What?” Asmeret looked up at the witch. “When?”
“When your mother wanted to go to the market.”
“Oh. He said he had village business—as the chief he had responsibilities all over the region. A lot was happening in our country after the war in the north. Secret meetings about independence. He was often gone for weeks at a time, sometimes months. From one war to another,” Asmeret said, “it’s all we know.” She thought of the guns stockpiled in Arsema and Aman’s shed.
Hestia let this part of the story rest, for now. “You went to the market that day with Arsema and your mother and aunt?”
“Yes. Once we got to the market I lost Arsema, or she lost me.”
“Yes. Tell that story. Theia will need to know.”
For a moment Asmeret hesitated, still wondering where the Princess of Air fit in.
Grandmother’s voice urged her, finally clear, “Just begin, my dear.”
Once, the princesses traveled to a city far away with their mothers. It took them most of the morning in the cart pulled by two mules to arrive at the market. The princesses were alone in the back of the wagon, so they called a sort of truce. Arsema had brought her oils and combs and rubbed Asmeret’s skin until it shone. Asmeret still wore the boy shorts and nothing more. And while Arsema fussed with the combs for over an hour, trying to make braids in a pretty pattern like hers, what remained of Asmeret’s hair stuck up all over.
You look like a boy, Arsema laughed.
Asmeret’s eyes brightened and danced. She quick leaned over and kissed Arsema on the mouth. For just a moment the princesses felt as they had when they were small, as if they were one heart in two bodies. As if they shared skin. As if one day they would be queens together.
Then the moment was gone and Arsema’s sharp tongue returned.
Don’t do that again, she spat.
Asmeret’s eyes faded to black.
Arsema went to sit with the mothers and Asmeret fell asleep to the sway and hitch, sway and hitch of the cart. When she awoke they were at the edge of the market. Colorful people crushed together between stalls stuffed with wares of all kinds in baskets and buckets and spread on the ground. Overhead, white cloth fluttered and flapped in the wind, strung from poles lashed together with leather braiding and twine. She caught a glimpse of Arsema walking into the throng, holding hands with Bilen. The other two Parrot Girls skittered behind.
Asmeret’s mother appeared, nearly knocking Asmeret off balance where she stood on her toes in the cart, watching Arsema blend into the crowd.
Get down from there now. Be back when the sun touches the top of that building, Tigisti said, pointing to a tower with a bulbous cap shaped like an onion.
It was Asmeret’s first time to another village. First time to a market that big. She squinched her eyes until the white sail cloth overhead turned into waves on the open sea and the brightly striped bulb that bobbed atop the minaret became an exotic sea flower that bloomed once every hundred years.
We can’t be on the road after dark, it’s much too dangerous, her mother said. Stay inside the market—here is a coin to get something to eat. Asmeret’s mother stooped to whisper in her ear, if anyone bothers you do your animal thing. She smiled at her daughter and kissed both of her eyes, then her forehead. Hurry now, and catch up to the girls.
Jumping down from the cart and hitching her shorts, Asmeret started down the middle path where Arsema had gone.
Soon Asmeret was lost in the most wonderful way, slinking among the vegetables and cloth and fruit and huge baskets spilling over with grain. Vendors thought her a boy with her bare belly and shorts and jutting out chin. The child, though ragged and small, had the features and swagger of the descendants of kings. They slid morsels of their best wares into the child’s grimacing mouth. Tell your mother to come, they wheedled and spat. She pushed their fingers out of her mouth rather than snap them off with her teeth, which she would have preferred, but it occurred to her the market was a game she could win. When she smelled something delicious she opened her mouth and the vendor slipped the treat in. The coin her mother had given her to spend remained in her keep.
Soon her belly pooched out and clutched inside. Yet she felt herself drawn by hunger (different from her hunger for food or for Arsema’s attention or her father’s return) to a small tent at the end of the very last alley—a domed frame draped in white billowy fabric that seemed to shift colors as the walls swayed in the breeze.
She stepped inside. It was impossibly cool as if the mid-day sun had traded spots with the moon. The tent was empty except for one basket, which stood alone in the center, stacked with a pyramid of small red fruit. Asmeret reached out, taking the one off the top, looking for the seller, who was nowhere to be seen. She crawled under the back wall of the tent and hid herself in a tangle of vines. She broke the fruit on a rock, releasing the red glistening pulp, which she scooped out with her fingers. As the sweetness succumbed to a hint of sour in her mouth, Asmeret felt something unhinge inside her. Her eyes rolled back and she slumped into the vines, convulsing so that her limbs stuck out stiff while her head and torso jerked in spasms. Finally, her body quieted and she sprawled like a dog napping in the sun. There was no fever. No dreams.
The sun was high overhead when Asmeret opened her eyes on a boy who squatted next to her, stroking her forehead and wretched hair. Squinting against the glare she could see he was just her size and color and shape. She sat up, the half-eaten pomegranate still clutched in her fist, any memory of the fit in the vines drifted away. Asmeret felt rested and well enough. She offered the boy the rest of the fruit. He took it and emptied the flesh down his throat. They laughed at the red stain of their lips then went back into the market, dodging between stalls, losing and finding one another again and again.
The boy knew the market well and showed Asmeret its best treasures. He gathered bits and pieces that had fallen under mats or been forgotten in boxes and made small toys to entertain her. He’d turned a beetroot and a length of string into a top that spun through the dust, then built more elaborate contraptions as he gathered more parts. The most curious was a handful of playing cards fanned around a small round cactus fruit—the cards fitted into slits he’d carved with a small knife he had in his pocket. He’d skewered the fruit and laid it crosswise on two sticks, like meat on a spit. The flywheel turned when he poured water on top. The water flowed neatly into a series of grooves he’d carved in the dirt. See? he’d said. Water can be stored and poured over the wheel, making rivers out to the fields. Then the crops can get water when there is no rain. He grinned. And the best part is that when this piece turns (he pointed to the spit) it makes electricity! Well, when it’s for real, I mean. Someday I’ll build it.
Asmeret was intrigued, asking all kinds of questions, which he answered eagerly. I can make anything I can think up, he proclaimed. She believed that he could. They spent the rest of the day thinking of what to make, then scavenging the bits they needed and laughing as the inventions either worked or fell apart. Asmeret always wanted to make things about animals and hunting of course.
Asmeret grimaced, recalling this part. She’d asked the boy to make her something that could kill a bird mid-air in an instant that wouldn’t shatter the meat like her arrows did. He’d looked at her amazed. Don’t you have slingshots? he’d asked. He’d made her one, quick and crude, with the materials they could find. He demonstrated by killing a rat that scampered past, scavenging for food scraps.
Asmeret, horrified, yelled at him, “Why did you do that?”
He laughed. “It’s just a rat. They’re diseased, awful things. Useless—and they stink.” He’d picked up the bloody rat and thrown it on a pile of rubbish behind one of the stalls. Then he saw her face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you liked rats.”
He was serious, not laughing at her. She softened. Forgave him. Things were different here. He offered her the slingshot, but she refused. “You keep it,” she said. “We don’t need to kill rats where I live, the dogs and hyenas do it.” Then they eat them, she thought. It’s food, not sport. She was shaken by this first way they were so different, but she recovered quickly. It had been ages since she’d had a friend.
The boy liked Asmeret, and she liked him.
When the sun touched the tip of the minaret, the boy led the girl to the east entrance of the market where the lost boys of the city—those with no families or tribes—tended the mules and carts for a coin or bit of food.
Asmeret! —her mother’s voice.
Princess Asmeret, the boy said. Then he bowed and kissed her stained lips.
Her palm pressed on his chest, feeling her own heart thrum under her fingers.
He slid away, weaving between wagons, back toward the market before she could say goodbye or ask his name.
The boy stood at the edge of the stalls watching the cart stumble down the darkening road. Was he waiting for something more? For the girl or her mother to turn around? To ask him home with them? Ask his name? He didn't call out. What would he say?
‘Come back’ filled his mouth once, but couldn't escape so he swallowed the thought. There it lay in his stomach alongside the sweet and savory morsels they'd indulged in all day.
The cart disappeared over a ridge.
The boy, groaning and holding his stomach, vomited behind a cobbler's tent amid the piles of thick hides, which waited to be cut and sewn into shoes for men who had important places to go.
“HYYAAA, get outta there!” The shoemaker scuttled the boy away.
The spell of the afternoon broke. The prince of the market stumbled home.
The boy slammed past Dehab without a word.
“What now?” Dehab sighed to herself, a habit born from running a household of boys on her own. Only twenty-three years old, she was one of the lost girls who raised herself in the streets and gave birth to her own child at fourteen—alone, the father more lost than she. The tiny girl's eyes never opened and though she breathed, the baby couldn't swallow. She died before morning.
Dehab was delirious with grief and the pain in her breasts when an old woman appeared by her bedside and spoke to her, although it may as well have been wind and rain for all she understood. Next, Dehab remembered lying in a warm bath and her milk letting down, clouding the water. The steam smelled sweet with relief. She lay on her bed and the wind and rain woman held out a bundle. Dehab took the baby and put him to her breast where he suckled so hard she bit into her lip. The infant fell into a rhythm, plucking at long dormant strings. Like a lute or a harp, she vibrated and shivered and moaned a song both utterly sorrowful and full of bliss.
After three weeks, when she felt sure that the old woman wouldn’t come back for him, Dehab named the boy Asmara. She named him after the city she imagined he had been spirited away from—a city fabled to sit so high on a mountain that the people looked down on the clouds. She named him Asmara because it meant He Who Unifies in the common language and when she looked in his face she imagined she saw all of the people to whom she’d been lost. She saw the face of her daughter when Asmara slept. She saw who and what she was in his eyes when he was awake.
Nearly nine years had passed and this boy (who had been boisterous and loud and fueled her world like the sun) was plunked down on his mat, arms wrapped around his knees, glowering at her.
She might have laughed—the antics and moods of the boy entertained more than vexed her. His lips were stained bright red, giving him a comic look, but the way he glared at her made her flinch. Asmara was her son, the only one of the many lost boys she had taken in who'd come to her as a baby, so she knew his mind as well as her own, as well as any person can understand another.
She was grateful the other boys were still outside, playing in the last of the day's light, when Asmara spat the words she most dreaded to hear from him at her feet.
“You're not my mother.”
Asmeret rode alone in the back of the cart. Arsema had been allowed to ride home with Bilen and the other girls after she begged Daniat, Please, don’t make me ride with her. Asmeret wasn’t surprised when the hot beads bubbled on her brow and swam from temple to temple. The fevers almost always started when the words formed in her mouth, so close to jumping out at her father or mother, I have a brother, you have a son. She couldn’t let those words out because then she would have to tell them what she had done, eating her own brother’s human soul in the womb. Making her Aunt Daniat have to take his animal body to the woods and leave him on the bloody stone—to keep her secret. When Asmeret came too close to saying the words the fever took her away.
You have a son, she said aloud in the back of the cart. The words tumbled overboard where the clomp clomp of the mules’ hooves stamped her confession flat into the dirt. I have a brother, she said to herself, tasting the sweet and sour of his lips on hers. He isn’t an animal, and he is alive.
Asmeret paused. Held her breath. Shook her head, “No . . . No . . . No.”
“He was alive, Asmeret,” Hestia said.
“Yes.”
“So why did the fever come then? Why couldn’t you say the words to your mother?”
“Because I left him motherless. I left him for dead.”
“No. Asmeret, it’s time to remember what you’ve forgotten. What happened next?”
“I was asleep, they said, for many weeks.”
“Yes. And no. Not asleep, you know that.”
“No, not sleeping, but I don’t remember anything before I woke up.”
Hestia turned from Asmeret. (As she did the face she had long ago borrowed from the witch shifted—transformed into that of the goddess in her most youthful, radiant form, though her crabbled hands and voice remained the same.)
Hestia spoke into the deepest shadow on the farthest side of the room. “Athena. The fevers, the convulsions, the fits, Daniat’s jealous rage—these were your doing. I know why. In a strange way these things protected Asmeret’s path, saved her life as a child more than once; the veil is too heavy, you must lift it now.”
Athena stepped out of the shadows, unfolded herself, as even at her smallest she couldn’t fully fit into this space. The years of continuous war in both worlds had made her fierce in disposition and humongous in size. Yet, this was the beginning of Athena’s end, and she knew it. Being there with the Ash Girl (she couldn’t bring herself to call her the Princess of Earth) was nearly more than she could take. But the story had a teller and couldn’t be stopped now.
Asmeret stared, trying to see the goddess clearly. It wasn’t the sparking firestone and furiously spinning rings that occluded her vision, or the smoke from the fires or the steam that rose through the hole where the Red Sea was growing hotter below, the goddess was shifting shape and transparency in a constant turmoil of fragments rearranging themselves. The classic Greek face Asmeret recognized from photographs in books of statues carved from marble—with the strong brow and long sloping nose—fledged into a white raven’s sleek head and hooked beak. The warrior’s helmet transformed into a headdress of Medusa’s snakes. Then a soldier’s uniform dressed the broad torso, adorned with a swastika carried by an eagle. Military boots became talons, then a woman’s feet again, laced in the sandals of the tribes that roamed the northern desert (a people best known for their butchery and dark magic). All of these images flickered in and out as if Athena was a compendium of thoughts projected into the darkness of the room by a lamp in which the delicate filament was about to combust.
“Ash Girl,” Athena cleared her throat, trying to temper her malice, modulate her voice. Her image settled into Woman, softly rippling like electric pulses riding the wires. “I have wished you dead, for that I can’t apologize. It’s in my nature to survive. To wield the forces that have been given me by your kind. It was I who . . .”
“Wait.” Asmeret said, tipping her head, studying the image that had solidified before her. “You were there, by the river. You spoke to my mother . . .”
“Yes.”
“Asmeret,” Hestia said, “this part you must remember or it all falls apart. Athena, she must remember the rest on her own.”
Athena bowed her head and stepped back in a gesture of deference to the Goddess of the Hearth and the One who had written our future in the cards.
“Princess Asmeret . . .”
Asmeret stopped. Looked for Athena. “You took me there?”
“Yes.”
“Flew me on your back.”
“Yes. Start there.”
Asmeret started to speak, growing used to the strangeness of having no idea what she would say.
Princess Asmeret stood eye to eye with a raven so white it disappeared against the scorched afternoon sky. The girl turned back, only for a moment, to see her body beneath the blanket of leaves that soaked up her heat. To see her mother asleep by her side.
She won’t know you’re gone, White Raven said.
Asmeret sat on the bird’s back and they flew until up was down and they were soaring far, far below ground. They landed on an island of ash—a citadel surrounded by a moat where four rivers circled together and a fire burned blue and white in the courtyard.
You are to go on a journey through this cavern. Follow the rivers. Come back when you’ve found what you are looking for, not before, White Raven said.
How will I know when I have found it if I don’t know what it is? the princess asked.
Everything you are looking for will know you and you will know it. Pay attention to which river is beckoning, which plants and animals, soil and water reply to your body with theirs. There you will find two gifts—one that is yours to take and one you must leave behind.
But . . .
That’s all I will say princess, White Raven croaked, growing to twice its size and snapping its beak.
Frightened a little, Asmeret turned in the ash until one river calmed and a bridge wove itself from the reeds by her feet. She crossed the moat, following the river into a tunnel. The chamber she came to was so large the girl could see no walls or ceiling or end—only sand dunes and wind-carved rock statues. The river had disappeared, yet she could still hear it rushing beneath the sand.
Soon her pulse slowed and she skated in the tracks of a sidewinder that essssed past. She felt of a piece with the sand and the rocks and the snake; she also knew she must keep going. A camel ambled over to her and bent its front knees to let her climb on its back. He deposited her where the river burbled back up to the surface. She dismounted and followed the river’s edge through another tunnel, into another land.
She felt she belonged here too, and the land after that and after that; each time meeting an animal, or sometimes a whole entourage of creatures, who carried her to the river’s beginning and end.
The princess was gone a long time, no one knows how long, and in this time she had traveled to every land under the ground—each time she felt she belonged to the place, yet no gift appeared that was hers to take. She had visited every land except one.
The last chamber looked, smelled, and sounded just like her homeland above, except for the river, the constant rolling thunder in the distance, and the canopy of fine mist that hung over it all. The thundering sound had another sound within it, shaped like the single letters of her name. Some of the letters got lost in the thunder, yet she was sure it was calling her—calling her to the place she belonged.
Princess Asmeret hurried, jumping and skipping and singing a song as she went, even laughing a little out of pure joy. She slowed only for a moment to see that her mother was standing among the reeds on the other side of the river, speaking to a figure whose back was to Asmeret—a woman of extraordinary height and breadth. She wore a flowing dress and a helmet on her head. Asmeret had the impression that they made up some sort of armor—perhaps it was the huge shield slung over one shoulder. A soldier, in a dress, Asmeret thought, how curious. Her name called again and the soldier seemed no threat to her mother, so she kept on.
Asmeret glanced at Athena, who nodded. Keep going.
The thunder grew so loud she could hear nothing else.
The reeds on either side of the river leapt up and braided into an archway. Princess Asmeret knew she must go through.
Then the terrible thing happened.
Asmeret paused. Swallowed hard at the vision that came so clear in her mind.
On the other side of the arch she found herself at the bottom of a waterfall that seemed to come straight down from the sky. Thousands of animals were falling with the water—singing a strange, echoey song. The very same that the girl had been singing as she skipped along. Enthralled, she walked closer. The animals flailed, kicking their legs and switching their tails, grunting and yelping when they hit the surface of the pool where Asmeret stood. All around her ghost animals floated below the surface; above them hyenas and ravens made of mist plucked at the drifting figures, lifting them up by the napes of their necks as if they were weightless and carrying them to the base of a towering white pillar that rose out of the pool. There the ghost animals joined the procession that climbed around and around the pillar up a staircase worn into the stone.
Asmeret followed a zebra that brushed against her as he was scooped up by a hazy raven. The zebra got back to his feet at the bottom of the stairs, shaking the water from his mane and his tail. He was white with black stripes (or black with white stripes? Princess Asmeret smiled, recalling a story her grandmother had told her). His body was partly transparent so that the designs etched on the pillar showed through his pelt—circles born from circles born from circles in endless hoops. Droplets sprayed off the zebra’s flanks, showering a white rhino who was missing his horns. The rhino butted the zebra with his head, a rotting hole where his horns had been, and they were both off up the steps. Asmeret watched the zebra trotting, trotting, round and round up the staircase—never tiring despite his generous belly and stubby legs. When he reached the top Asmeret watched him bow so low toward some unseen idol that his ears twitched as they grazed the top of the pedestal. For a second the zebra appeared as good as new—thick of flesh and vibrant in color. Then the zebra disappeared.
Asmeret blinked, not sure what she’d witnessed. She had to climb the pillar. Of all of the lands she had been to, this one felt like a home she’d once had and lost and lost and lost.
Taking a step forward, the girl slipped—drawn under by the ghost animal throng. Asmeret suddenly felt as if she might drown. Terrified, she reached out for the first animal that came near, and was pulled from the water clutching the neck of a boar who was missing his skin. He carried her to the staircase, seemingly unaware of this new appendage. She scrambled onto the platform and rushed into line just ahead of the boar. As she climbed the staircase the girl noticed how very many ghost animals were left in the water and sank out of sight before they could be rescued. There were so few hyenas and ravens compared to the number of animals dropping from the sky, they couldn’t keep up. What happened to those that didn’t make it out?
One hyena seemed to command all the rest. The beast looked just like the hyenas that circled her village at night, only bigger. This animal was not made of mist. The pungent stink of it made the girl wince. Arsema always said hyenas are the ugliest animals in the world. Asmeret wished Arsema could see this one. It was the most magnificent creature she could imagine. The girl and Hyena exchanged a look. Curiosity, perhaps.
A question shaped like, What next?
The animal turned away first, nodding almost imperceptibly at a group of ravens who tipped their wings, dove below the surface of the pool, and pulled an elephant from the water before it was gone. Angry gashes where tusks had once grown. Tatters of flesh where there should have been feet and toes.
Asmeret nearly cried out, What’s happening here? But she knew. She continued reluctantly up the steps. She would have liked to stop and watch the hyena work.
The boar reached the top before her. He must have walked straight through her, she thought. The stairs were too narrow for him to pass by. His curved tusks swept the ground when he bowed, then he disappeared too.
Deep crevasses made concentric rings from the outer edge to the center of the plateau. The surface was rough and milky white in some places, smooth and clear as glass in others.
A tree stump, Asmeret whispered. The pillar had been a tree—cut down at a very old age it would appear from the growth rings, and had been in this chamber so long after it fell that the stump had petrified—turned from wood into mineral.
Asmeret’s father had showed her the remains of a tree like this once, though of course it had been much smaller. They had been digging out bones for a new bow at the edge of the volcanic wasteland south of the village, the same place where the wounded kudu had led them. The tree had been cut down, maybe thousands of years ago, her father had said, when trees covered this land and people had flourished. A volcano erupted and the lava flow buried the tree. There, under the volcanic rock, the wood was deprived of air so that very slowly its structure transformed into crystal. Quartz, in this case. All white, he’d said. Different minerals could take over the wood, but this one was special—pure.
“Did the people have animals?” Asmeret asked. “Did the animals die too?”
Her father smiled, “Always the animals with you. Yes, they would have had animals, I suppose. Goats at least, and mules, like us. All buried here, most likely. This whole basin is a graveyard Asmeret, a magical one.” Anbessa winked. “Volcanoes erupt when the goddesses fight, like you girls when you play and someone gets mad. Then the lava kills all in its path and the goddesses feel bad. So they turn everything that gave its life into beautiful crystals of every color under the sun. They make jewelry to wear at festivals and weddings.”
“Even the animals turn to crystal?” Asmeret asked. She imagined a cheetah made of yellow glass with black spots.
“I don’t know, but maybe when you grow up you will be the one to answer that.” He chiseled a small slice of the crystal out of the heart of the stump with his knife and gave it to her to keep.
Asmeret realized that she clutched the crystal in her hand. Silently thanked her father for it. Felt her anger at him subside just a little. He had loved her once, believed in her like nobody else. The story called her back, the crystal was important somehow.
Asmeret bowed low, as the animals had, and when she looked up the hyena was there, seated at the center of the plateau, looking at her. She heard the letters of her name again and she walked toward the animal. At its feet, curled up in the very center of the crystalized tree was the Great Huntress.
Asmeret knew her, and was known to her, even while the goddess appeared to be asleep. Asmeret dared to touch her, had to touch her, and found her neither warm, nor cold—but the same temperature as the petrified wood. Her skin was smooth and translucent, like the quartz cup her body filled up, and gave way under Asmeret’s fingers a little, like the sheets of antelope sinew her people dried in the sun. Asmeret stroked the goddess’ cheeks and the arms that curved around her knees. Asmeret felt both relieved and bereft. She had known the Great Huntress was dying, the animals told her so, and here she was. I’m not crazy, like they say—a shocking thought. Maybe I’m not sick at all. But what can I do for her? I’m only eight. Nine.
Today is my birthday, Asmeret said to the sleeping goddess. Time had no measure here—no sun and moon to make days and nights, and she was sure of it. At her words, a gold ball appeared in the arms of the Great Huntress. Asmeret recognized this as the gift she was to take, picked it up. Exhaustion came. The child lay down with her head resting against the taut, mounded belly and breasts of Artemis and slept. The hyena watched over them both.
The room had grown dark despite the four fires and the bits of lightning still spitting overhead. Nothing moved in the shadows. Had she dreamed the goddesses and her grandmother’s presence or had they been here somehow? Alone was familiar to Asmeret, comfortable even; for the first time she felt lonely.
Out of the silence, her mother’s voice came to Asmeret like the song of a bird.
Asmeret closed her eyes and felt her mother’s arms around her, though she knew her mother was at home with Theia. She’d made sure of that before she returned to this place for the last time. The only way she could bear leaving Theia behind was knowing how much her daughter and her mother adored one another—seeing how confident and happy Theia was in their house and in the village. She was accepted as one of them despite the grudge they had against Asmeret—re-ignited by the past months when Asmeret had all but disappeared. She went mad after she burned up her own dog, they liked to say. Which wasn’t entirely untrue.
Her mother tittered softly in her ear.
“I mopped the sweat from your face again and again. We thought malaria caused the fevers when you were very small. We consulted healers from many villages—even other tribes. Your father brought the doctor from the city, do you remember? He said epilepsy or something that started with an ‘a’ that made children so unlike the others. I’d never heard of it before, but your father had. It made him so angry. He drove the doctor out after that. Some thought you were possessed by demons or cursed by a witch. What had you done to deserve this? You were a child. I admit, I blamed your father. He wasn’t there. Even when he came back from the war, he wasn’t there anymore. He loved you, though, Asmeret.”
Asmeret shook in her mother’s embrace that felt as real as the tears in her mouth tasted.
“You had so many fevers. Dozens of serious bouts by the time you were five. The first when you were just crawling. One day you slowed to a creep, sweat beads burst like rainclouds and drizzled your cheeks. Darkened your skin—you were always dusty from crawling in the dirt. Darkened your soul too. As the fevers pitched high, raising steam off you that slicked the underside of the tin roof, you thrashed and snapped your teeth and yowled so that I wrapped a wooden spoon with cloth and wedged it in your mouth. I was afraid you might bite through your own flesh. In between fevers—sometimes months, sometimes years—our little girl, who had once been a burbling, happy baby, grew quiet and scowled at us as if we were your captors. By the time you were eight, going on nine, you more often than not pretended at being an animal. Or perhaps you were pretending at being human.”
Asmeret smiled at this. Yes, she thought. That sounded right.
“Though I knew it was cooling you, I couldn't bear to see the rivers of sweat, it was like watching the very essence of your life drain into the ground. We had taken away your sleeping mat and gathered the leaves—your Aunt Daniat and I. Everyone else stayed away. They sensed before I did that your father would not be returning from wherever his life took him for months at a time and didn’t want to share the curse of our pain. Daniat’s husband was to be the new chief so she could afford to be generous. I poured water on you that turned to steam. I covered you in the elephant ear leaves—they absorbed the heat and the healers said they would keep ancient spirits of sickness away. Who was I to argue with these things—science or myth.
That night I kissed you on both eyes and your forehead as your grandmother used to do and begged the ancestors to let you live. You had grown so still that I lay on the ground, lifting the leaves to put my ear to your chest and listened for your heart as the doctor had shown me. The sickness had made your heartbeat so weak that I listened to make sure it was still there. Now it was barely a flutter, like a wounded bird near death, trapped in a cage. I resolved to stay awake, fearing you would slip away if I didn’t. Your silence scared me most. I had long grown used to your thrashing and yowling, asleep or awake. I fell asleep anyway, powerless to choose this, to escape the boundaries staked out by fate.
I dreamed I was in a cavern deep in the earth. I heard rolling thunder. I breathed air laden with mist. Water slicked the walls—they shimmered like gold. I heard your voice, although I hadn’t heard you singing and laughing in so long I wasn’t sure. I couldn't make out the words. I smiled and looked for you. Though underground, lush trees grew up in groves, less like forest than an oasis, fronds wavering in the heat. Bright flowers dripped from vines—birds fluttered overhead and twittered sweetly so that the thunder faded into the background. I was surprised that I could even imagine a place such as this in my dreams!
I walked until I came to a river and followed its banks. Silvery fish darted by in surging packs, and in their rushing and jubilance they broke the surface in pairs, doing flips in the air. Their scales flashed every color in turn, and their bodies made thrilling whups when they struck water again.
I caught glimpses of you through the reeds that lined the river's edge. Great white herons stood serenely unaware of their perfect reflections. When the silvery fish breached nearby, their reflections wavered and rippled for a moment, but the birds remained still. I thought how this was like us when we dream, another life rippling out underneath our motionless bodies, our mirror selves flipping with the silvery fish.
I could tell it was you even though you ran and skipped; I could tell because of your hair. Even though above us it lay in ragged damp clumps, your hair in my dream sprang full grown, a vivid, glorious crown the exact color of my own.
I lost you then. I fell asleep in the river reeds. I dreamed in my dream.
A formidable woman stood over me. She was giant, and perhaps that made her seem ancient to me as she was muscular and smooth and her face looked so young—like you are now. Twenty, perhaps. She scowled under a warrior’s helmet with a Medusa’s head on top—you know that myth? The one with hair of snakes who turned people to stone with her eyes? I was afraid to look—her voice rumbled like an avalanche. She told me her name. She talked about you.”
I am Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, Goddess of War. I have come to help you save the child’s life. What you do with these words will be up to you. Know this; she has been chosen for a task—I can’t tell you what it is. We need your help to keep her alive until it’s time. She is in terrible danger of dying too soon. Her heart has been carved away by those who don’t see who she is, by those who don't know her destiny or who they are in it, until there is only half left. Do as I say and then let her go. There is only so much we can do to intervene. The rest she must choose.
I dreamed she told me what to do then pressed a wooden coin into my palm with these last words, Don't forget.
When I awoke and awoke again from the echelons of my dreams, I felt that world slipping away. I clutched at the words Athena had said: “The witch possesses a pup born with just half a heart. She keeps it alive with dark magic. This dog’s heart and your daughter’s will make a whole, beating strong enough for them both as long as they are together. Trade the witch the coin for the dog—don’t, under any circumstances, let her give you the pup as a gift.”
I knew then who she meant. An old woman we visited from time to time for potions beyond our skill or answers to questions we already knew but needed to hear from a stranger—someone to blame when we couldn’t bear the truth. I went to the Witch of the Woods in the dead of the night, even though I feared for my own life crossing the border into those trees that harbored our most terrible secrets.
I stopped in a clearing to make sure I had the coin—the dream already seemed only a dream. It was there, in my fist, but something was different. The coin glittered. I looked up at the moon, saw it flicker. Yes, there again, it had gotten much dimmer then brightened again. I was shaken (I had always thought the moon was the one thing in this world I could rely on), but not as shaken as when I looked at the coin and it had turned to gold.”
Hestia interjected, making Asmeret jump at her return, or had she been there the whole time? She looked around. Her mother was nowhere to be seen in the room. Of course, how could she be there? Tigisti was back in the village, with Theia, unaware of what Asmeret was about to do. She silently asked their forgiveness, once again. “Your mother came to me—or rather, the witch—as instructed and bought the little black dog who carried the other half of your heart for a piece of gold, Asmeret. You know what came next.”
“I woke up.”
“Yes.”
“With the pup on my chest, her nose tucked under my chin. I could feel her heart beating so fast, so light, and mine racing to catch it. I didn’t want to open my eyes.”
“Why, Asmeret?”
“Because my father had left me. Flown away on the white bird that brought him back from the war.”
A shockwave went through Asmeret. An electric current that spread from her feet to her head, singeing each nerve. She still held the Princess of Air in her hand, the head of the Medusa on the helmet swiveled to face her, snakes spitting and striking from the realm of the card.
“You!” she exploded at Athena, who loomed behind the north fire now, “You took him. You are the Princess of Air. The white bird? White Raven? You took my father from me, after you’d brought him back from the war.” Asmeret was baffled, enraged. “Why? Why? What had I done?” Asmeret’s cries turned animal, wheezes and howls.
Hestia signaled Athena to wait. To let Asmeret finish.
“I thought he left because I was sick and ugly and no one would marry me. I thought he knew what I’d done to his son.” She looked the Goddess of War in the eye. “It wasn’t me, was it? It was you—the Princess of Air has always been you, torturing me, making me sick.”
“I’ve done many things to you Asmeret,” Athena said, “it’s in my nature to strategize and manipulate humans. That is who I am, but to what end? There is a purpose for it all, which you will know soon enough. I am not the Princess of Air in your story.”
“Then who?”
“Ask her.”
Hestia spoke to Asmeret gently, nodding, “Go ahead.”
Asmeret looked at the card in her hand, asked the question, demanded an answer: “What is your name?”
The north wind blasted cold through the tangle of rock and roots, causing the fires to flap and twist. The girl in the gossamer dress turned to face Asmeret.
Charlotte, the wind said. Don’t forget.
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