Lemara
I woke in Roses. Flushed and scared, their faces nodding in the breeze all wet with color, petals slick-snapping, scented milk-pink and their shadows violet as the inside of me. Then he threw the grey blanket over, and it shut me, it silenced my skin.
Oh, and itching with the blanket’s tiny claws! His lips cold kissing, and the kissing woke me, tore open the Dream—Oh of Tiras, who waited and warned me of something desperate to know—what? There was fear in that kiss that woke me, and not my beloved’s.
Roses the color of my sleep, and the scent and the sound of it—a sound only heard in Dreams—of petals falling endlessly into death,sweeping over each other, like a Rain without Sky to begin it or Earth to end it. Even now, I feel them growing, never stopping, from Sprouts to Vines, from Vines to Trees, from Trees to thickets, then becoming a great castle of Roses—and because they grew, I did not have to grow. I am still that age I was then, the age of initiation, the age of the Sacred Marriage. Yet I know I have slept far longer than day and night, longer than the Moon swelling and forgetting, longer than a season or more.
Enchanted Roses. One of my fathers bought the seeds from Sirenian traders, in exchange for my first Priestess gown. Made of Egret feather and the white peeling skin-bark of young Nuba Trees, but he did not return it to the Trees, no. He sold it to the Sirenians, for the Roses. They’ve held me like a seed in a dormant pod, these Roses, while I Dreamed.
They fight the Wye prince as he carries me, they mean to protect me. Each time he cries the raw cry that sickens me, I duck my head, the thorns comb my hair. Each time he cries out, as the Roses tear him, I remember a Dream like a body torn to pieces, I remember it in ashes that cover my eyes, I remember it like dark, speechless birds passing over, I remember the Dream I Dreamed while I slept, but no. I can’t remember it now. Tiras, my beloved, cried out in that Dream as if by some violence, but I cannot, I cannot remember!
By the Wye prince’s sword, the Roses shatter into light. We emerge from atop the Temple of Women and I know where I am—that I Dreamed here, where my people planted the Roses all around me to protect me. He woke me, and my Tiras is gone. This face coarse with beard and roughof eye, not like our sweet Hummingbird boys—oh, I woke weeping, and could not tell why.
Never before have I seen a Wye-man, the color of driest dust. And never have the women I love not come running. And never—oh Faeries that bind and light and tend, what has happened? On I am carried, through the Sun and into His falling, and no one cries for Him but me, and terror seizes me lest He never return. I cannot see nor feel the Moon. On and on now within this thing called Carriage, a cavern drawn by Horses, sad creatures imprisoned by reins, moving as if in place forever.
Where my La-deer friends, my best girl Esha? Where my Mama, and her lovers and sister-friends? And where Tiras, Tiras, Tiralas... I have come into a world that does not love itself. The Earth smells too faint, as if She doesn’t want the Sky, and the Sky far away, smelling like no Rain forever. No mist moves between them; the lone Trees strangle and weep, the Sun is not tender but lashes us, never sweetening. The Air is formless and dead around things, the portals to Dreams not singing, not alive. My body imprisoned and I cannot feel the land, I am broken from the land of my Ancestors and will die—a twig broken off—and the things—I cannot really touch them with my eyes, I cannot reach them—they say, This is all.
And the people out there beyond the carriage— I do not know them.They look, almost, like my people with their wild River eyes, but their hair is yellower like the people who came from Sirenia and tried to change us. They smell a hissing, angry, sour smell like dying bodies with no Earth to welcome them in and receive them; they sit alone atop the hard, hardsoil, squatting alone around the dirty things they live in. Awful, dead-flesh people.
We are not for sale, said the woman who was old, the woman inside the dark of the Tree. I remember her long-sighing wheel that spun life into thread, telling me I could have what I’d never seen... And she would weave from this thread my marriage gown...
We splash through a Stream whose shape I seem to know—the Stream speaks the name of the River Golden—but it’s like a skeleton with the flesh of green all gone around it. These people watch me and I wonder if they have heard some tale of me. I wonder do they know I am Lemara Hummingbird, Priestess of Hummingbirds, of the Southern Primeval Forest? Where are we, Faerie of the River Golden? Where are we, Deep Forest folk with your castles made of shadow? No Animals, not anywhere. Forest muted, no Flowers and no wings. Only the poor Horses that drag us on, bound.
What is it pulls me backward; what is it breaks my heart? The Temple, pulsing still beneath and now behind me as if the women sung below me while I slept, Dreamed a Dream through me. I squeeze the ropes of my hair, run the light through my fingers, and I hug myself, my shoulders, breasts, heart in my arms. The blanket falls to my hips, Air flirts along my spine almost recognizing me and I sigh, oh. I feel the Wye-prince beside me, and the two other men. I feel suddenly danger—I open my eyes—and other eyes sweep away, my heart heats and bleeds, what is this? I clutch the blanket over my bare breasts. Shame, says my heart. It is called shame.
Why?
I don’t know, says my heart, and begins to cry.
I move my knees, my toes. Am I here? Can I flee? Ancestors, I cannot find myself. The carriage bumps and throws me side to side—can I leap out of it, or will I be lost between worlds? I have never been here. I have no Dream to explain it.
Now there stands a high church—I recognize the shape—like the one they tried to build in the South Forest, but we drove them out with Dancing. How we used to laugh at their backwards stories, like their story of how the world began, of how woman was created out of man—from some part of him—instead of the other way around. It was like a jokester story, the kind we tell to make the Faeries laugh on midsummer’s eve. Like telling that the Deer eats the Jaguar, or that the old one grows smaller year by year and dies a babe—this funny story of woman being born out of the body of a man.
I hunger but I will not eat the dead meat Prince Micah offers me.
He speaks but I turn away. I know some of this Wye prince’s broken half-words, for long ago our languages were the same, our people were one. But they took our language and dried it out—only a husk now with no hands to give it spirit, no breath to give it song: clipped words without tails. His mouth moving, and no other part of him. I turn away, and perhaps he believes I do not understand him.
My last meal I remember—Dewberry wine, Flame Mushrooms, a bowl of Snails that Awhee gathered and brought for Esha and me, for Awhee is the best at gathering Snails. A slow, sweet day, Esha shivering her fingertips on the inside of my arm, and I sighed for the froth it made in my body, saying I’m restless, Sha-sha, I will go out and find Tiras. Our marriage day only seven days away, and every night we would meet to taste each other’s mouth-nectar with our lips, with our fingers, cheek sliding to cheek and thigh shaking to thigh the way the leaves of the Rain Tree shudder before a Rain. Each night I loosed a single strand of his braid, only to feel his muscles loosen against mine, his voice silenced by desire... And Esha whispered no, you are to stay here in this Nuba Tree-palace today, for your Mama bid me watch you. But Esha didn’t mean it. She would do anything for me. Kissing my shoulder, her lips always wet, eyeing my lavender nipples I’d ringed with white shell gloss. Watch me what? I teased. For a whole moon before the Priestess’s day of marriage, no one was allowed to make love, and so we all trembled together—with the pent-up, delicious Fire.
And then we heard the Humming sigh.
Like the Hummingbirds would sound all around the Tree-palace we made this season, if you stepped outside on a limb, for it was built in basket-nests and lithe little bridges into the great Nuba Tree itself. The way they would hum all around you, a loving little roaring, beating their tiny star-hearts and their fast-blurred wings. But not this sound. This sound sighed deeper, and on and on.
A darker sound from down below, it seemed, and deeper, darker in. I’ll go, I said, and see what that sound is. And Esha called No—don’t go, my Priestess, for your Mama bid me watch you. The curse is near in these days, she told me. The curse of the Dark Faerie, that waits for you at the count of fifteen years.
But it was a new thing, this counting of years, making a number for each time the season came again. They only did it for me, because of the curse. I shook it off me, I did not like it. I laughed at Esha—for how couldI believe her, when my body rocked in joy? I could not hold myself.
I remember now—how I went forth to that sound.
Breathless, I spiraled around the great Nuba trunk, my hands and feet all skittery over the Tree’s peely skin, not knowing what I longed for with my faster and faster heart, only that it reminded me of the wings of the lusty Hummingbirds in the Rain, and I thought I would find that something that itched and pulsed in my Dreams all year now... Oh Tiras, I thought.
At the base of the Tree, a cave among its roots, tall as my tallest father once and a half over. Never seen an old woman before, ha, said the old, old woman inside it—her skin pale as her hair, like the old Sirenians—where the Humming led me. No one had gotten so old in the South Forest for a long time, the forest so wet and hot with Jaguars and sickness. But this woman who was old felt irresistible to me, her with her humming, sighing wheel, the infinity of it. I had never seen infinity moving before, except in the River. What is it? I asked, and she said, That is the Animal fur becoming a thread; that is the mortal thing becoming immortal. And I did not understand.
She said, I will make you a dress, Priestess, a dress of Silver and Gold, for your wedding day. See?
Without stopping the turning of the endless Wheel, she nodded so that my vision fell upon the Silver and then upon the Gold. Such colors we did not have, there in the Southern Primeval Forest. They are not colors at all, but something else altogether. Like places. Like times of day. I fingered them—the Silver made of Moon, the Gold made of Sun; the one like desire, the other like satisfaction. How Tiras will tremble, I thought, when he feels it.
I will make you a dress, she said, if you invite me to the ceremony. If you let me see the Sacred Marriage.
We do not show that, I told her. It is a secret of our people.
But you have shown other Dances, said she. Show me this one.
Mara! called Esha to me from up above. She was afraid.
But I called to her, Don’t be silly. It is not the Dark Faerie. It is a Sirenian woman, come to see the Dances.
Do you agree? asked the old woman, looking suddenly at me, and I stepped back just one step, at the greed in her eyes. But I could not look away. Do you agree to invite me to the ceremony?
I nodded. I wanted the Gold and the Silver. I had never seen such a thing. I thought of how Tiras would sigh for me. It seemed such a little thing to give—to let one old woman see the ceremony.
Then this is a magic wheel, said the woman, and she laughed a laugh like leaves in the dry season rubbing one on the other and lifted her hands in the Air, offering me the spiral of thread upon the spike of wood, from where the story unwound. Spin the wheel once, she said, to put your spirit in the thread, and then your dress will be made to suit you.
So I reached out, and felt pain...
BACK TO BOOK INFO. PAGE
Oh, and itching with the blanket’s tiny claws! His lips cold kissing, and the kissing woke me, tore open the Dream—Oh of Tiras, who waited and warned me of something desperate to know—what? There was fear in that kiss that woke me, and not my beloved’s.
Roses the color of my sleep, and the scent and the sound of it—a sound only heard in Dreams—of petals falling endlessly into death,sweeping over each other, like a Rain without Sky to begin it or Earth to end it. Even now, I feel them growing, never stopping, from Sprouts to Vines, from Vines to Trees, from Trees to thickets, then becoming a great castle of Roses—and because they grew, I did not have to grow. I am still that age I was then, the age of initiation, the age of the Sacred Marriage. Yet I know I have slept far longer than day and night, longer than the Moon swelling and forgetting, longer than a season or more.
Enchanted Roses. One of my fathers bought the seeds from Sirenian traders, in exchange for my first Priestess gown. Made of Egret feather and the white peeling skin-bark of young Nuba Trees, but he did not return it to the Trees, no. He sold it to the Sirenians, for the Roses. They’ve held me like a seed in a dormant pod, these Roses, while I Dreamed.
They fight the Wye prince as he carries me, they mean to protect me. Each time he cries the raw cry that sickens me, I duck my head, the thorns comb my hair. Each time he cries out, as the Roses tear him, I remember a Dream like a body torn to pieces, I remember it in ashes that cover my eyes, I remember it like dark, speechless birds passing over, I remember the Dream I Dreamed while I slept, but no. I can’t remember it now. Tiras, my beloved, cried out in that Dream as if by some violence, but I cannot, I cannot remember!
By the Wye prince’s sword, the Roses shatter into light. We emerge from atop the Temple of Women and I know where I am—that I Dreamed here, where my people planted the Roses all around me to protect me. He woke me, and my Tiras is gone. This face coarse with beard and roughof eye, not like our sweet Hummingbird boys—oh, I woke weeping, and could not tell why.
Never before have I seen a Wye-man, the color of driest dust. And never have the women I love not come running. And never—oh Faeries that bind and light and tend, what has happened? On I am carried, through the Sun and into His falling, and no one cries for Him but me, and terror seizes me lest He never return. I cannot see nor feel the Moon. On and on now within this thing called Carriage, a cavern drawn by Horses, sad creatures imprisoned by reins, moving as if in place forever.
Where my La-deer friends, my best girl Esha? Where my Mama, and her lovers and sister-friends? And where Tiras, Tiras, Tiralas... I have come into a world that does not love itself. The Earth smells too faint, as if She doesn’t want the Sky, and the Sky far away, smelling like no Rain forever. No mist moves between them; the lone Trees strangle and weep, the Sun is not tender but lashes us, never sweetening. The Air is formless and dead around things, the portals to Dreams not singing, not alive. My body imprisoned and I cannot feel the land, I am broken from the land of my Ancestors and will die—a twig broken off—and the things—I cannot really touch them with my eyes, I cannot reach them—they say, This is all.
And the people out there beyond the carriage— I do not know them.They look, almost, like my people with their wild River eyes, but their hair is yellower like the people who came from Sirenia and tried to change us. They smell a hissing, angry, sour smell like dying bodies with no Earth to welcome them in and receive them; they sit alone atop the hard, hardsoil, squatting alone around the dirty things they live in. Awful, dead-flesh people.
We are not for sale, said the woman who was old, the woman inside the dark of the Tree. I remember her long-sighing wheel that spun life into thread, telling me I could have what I’d never seen... And she would weave from this thread my marriage gown...
We splash through a Stream whose shape I seem to know—the Stream speaks the name of the River Golden—but it’s like a skeleton with the flesh of green all gone around it. These people watch me and I wonder if they have heard some tale of me. I wonder do they know I am Lemara Hummingbird, Priestess of Hummingbirds, of the Southern Primeval Forest? Where are we, Faerie of the River Golden? Where are we, Deep Forest folk with your castles made of shadow? No Animals, not anywhere. Forest muted, no Flowers and no wings. Only the poor Horses that drag us on, bound.
What is it pulls me backward; what is it breaks my heart? The Temple, pulsing still beneath and now behind me as if the women sung below me while I slept, Dreamed a Dream through me. I squeeze the ropes of my hair, run the light through my fingers, and I hug myself, my shoulders, breasts, heart in my arms. The blanket falls to my hips, Air flirts along my spine almost recognizing me and I sigh, oh. I feel the Wye-prince beside me, and the two other men. I feel suddenly danger—I open my eyes—and other eyes sweep away, my heart heats and bleeds, what is this? I clutch the blanket over my bare breasts. Shame, says my heart. It is called shame.
Why?
I don’t know, says my heart, and begins to cry.
I move my knees, my toes. Am I here? Can I flee? Ancestors, I cannot find myself. The carriage bumps and throws me side to side—can I leap out of it, or will I be lost between worlds? I have never been here. I have no Dream to explain it.
Now there stands a high church—I recognize the shape—like the one they tried to build in the South Forest, but we drove them out with Dancing. How we used to laugh at their backwards stories, like their story of how the world began, of how woman was created out of man—from some part of him—instead of the other way around. It was like a jokester story, the kind we tell to make the Faeries laugh on midsummer’s eve. Like telling that the Deer eats the Jaguar, or that the old one grows smaller year by year and dies a babe—this funny story of woman being born out of the body of a man.
I hunger but I will not eat the dead meat Prince Micah offers me.
He speaks but I turn away. I know some of this Wye prince’s broken half-words, for long ago our languages were the same, our people were one. But they took our language and dried it out—only a husk now with no hands to give it spirit, no breath to give it song: clipped words without tails. His mouth moving, and no other part of him. I turn away, and perhaps he believes I do not understand him.
My last meal I remember—Dewberry wine, Flame Mushrooms, a bowl of Snails that Awhee gathered and brought for Esha and me, for Awhee is the best at gathering Snails. A slow, sweet day, Esha shivering her fingertips on the inside of my arm, and I sighed for the froth it made in my body, saying I’m restless, Sha-sha, I will go out and find Tiras. Our marriage day only seven days away, and every night we would meet to taste each other’s mouth-nectar with our lips, with our fingers, cheek sliding to cheek and thigh shaking to thigh the way the leaves of the Rain Tree shudder before a Rain. Each night I loosed a single strand of his braid, only to feel his muscles loosen against mine, his voice silenced by desire... And Esha whispered no, you are to stay here in this Nuba Tree-palace today, for your Mama bid me watch you. But Esha didn’t mean it. She would do anything for me. Kissing my shoulder, her lips always wet, eyeing my lavender nipples I’d ringed with white shell gloss. Watch me what? I teased. For a whole moon before the Priestess’s day of marriage, no one was allowed to make love, and so we all trembled together—with the pent-up, delicious Fire.
And then we heard the Humming sigh.
Like the Hummingbirds would sound all around the Tree-palace we made this season, if you stepped outside on a limb, for it was built in basket-nests and lithe little bridges into the great Nuba Tree itself. The way they would hum all around you, a loving little roaring, beating their tiny star-hearts and their fast-blurred wings. But not this sound. This sound sighed deeper, and on and on.
A darker sound from down below, it seemed, and deeper, darker in. I’ll go, I said, and see what that sound is. And Esha called No—don’t go, my Priestess, for your Mama bid me watch you. The curse is near in these days, she told me. The curse of the Dark Faerie, that waits for you at the count of fifteen years.
But it was a new thing, this counting of years, making a number for each time the season came again. They only did it for me, because of the curse. I shook it off me, I did not like it. I laughed at Esha—for how couldI believe her, when my body rocked in joy? I could not hold myself.
I remember now—how I went forth to that sound.
Breathless, I spiraled around the great Nuba trunk, my hands and feet all skittery over the Tree’s peely skin, not knowing what I longed for with my faster and faster heart, only that it reminded me of the wings of the lusty Hummingbirds in the Rain, and I thought I would find that something that itched and pulsed in my Dreams all year now... Oh Tiras, I thought.
At the base of the Tree, a cave among its roots, tall as my tallest father once and a half over. Never seen an old woman before, ha, said the old, old woman inside it—her skin pale as her hair, like the old Sirenians—where the Humming led me. No one had gotten so old in the South Forest for a long time, the forest so wet and hot with Jaguars and sickness. But this woman who was old felt irresistible to me, her with her humming, sighing wheel, the infinity of it. I had never seen infinity moving before, except in the River. What is it? I asked, and she said, That is the Animal fur becoming a thread; that is the mortal thing becoming immortal. And I did not understand.
She said, I will make you a dress, Priestess, a dress of Silver and Gold, for your wedding day. See?
Without stopping the turning of the endless Wheel, she nodded so that my vision fell upon the Silver and then upon the Gold. Such colors we did not have, there in the Southern Primeval Forest. They are not colors at all, but something else altogether. Like places. Like times of day. I fingered them—the Silver made of Moon, the Gold made of Sun; the one like desire, the other like satisfaction. How Tiras will tremble, I thought, when he feels it.
I will make you a dress, she said, if you invite me to the ceremony. If you let me see the Sacred Marriage.
We do not show that, I told her. It is a secret of our people.
But you have shown other Dances, said she. Show me this one.
Mara! called Esha to me from up above. She was afraid.
But I called to her, Don’t be silly. It is not the Dark Faerie. It is a Sirenian woman, come to see the Dances.
Do you agree? asked the old woman, looking suddenly at me, and I stepped back just one step, at the greed in her eyes. But I could not look away. Do you agree to invite me to the ceremony?
I nodded. I wanted the Gold and the Silver. I had never seen such a thing. I thought of how Tiras would sigh for me. It seemed such a little thing to give—to let one old woman see the ceremony.
Then this is a magic wheel, said the woman, and she laughed a laugh like leaves in the dry season rubbing one on the other and lifted her hands in the Air, offering me the spiral of thread upon the spike of wood, from where the story unwound. Spin the wheel once, she said, to put your spirit in the thread, and then your dress will be made to suit you.
So I reached out, and felt pain...
BACK TO BOOK INFO. PAGE
