fiction
by Bestia Mortale
The sun was so bright that afternoon, it made me squint, but with the chill light of October in the mountains.
I was lying between two boulders, trapped. Coalition troops above me were firing down at a group of alliance men, who were mounting a small mortar and heavy machine gun. I was waiting for a grenade to land beside me and blow out my insides so I'd die for hours, screaming, like my brother.
If they didn't kill me, one side or the other was almost sure to capture me now. They usually kept any girl they caught wired to a stake for a day or so, using her. Then they'd shoot her.
I'd been caught once four years before, when I was thirteen. A soldier grabbed me by the hair, tore my dress off and threw me down in the field. He got on top of me and forced a finger into me. Then, before he'd been able to do more, a shell landed nearby, and a rock or something caved in the side of his face. When the other side came running past, they didn't notice me under his body, hardly daring to breathe, his dirty hand still between my legs.
I remember my father looking at me sternly when the women brought me home and saying no man would marry me now, with my virginity destroyed. Then he laughed and said it was just as well, there wouldn't be any good husbands left after this war anyway.
My father had a generous heart. They shot him when he was trying to help our neighbor catch his goats. I remember him groaning for hours in the night before he died. In the end, I thought my father sounded like a dumb animal, like one of the cattle bellowing in pain.
My mother was already dead then, and my aunt sent me to my grandmother up in the mountains. I'd always hated my grandmother. She was small, brown and hard, like a rock you hold in your hand; no matter how you squeeze or bite it, jump on it or pound it, it's just the same.
The first night, she watched me with her hard black eyes as I ate and told me with her stone voice, "They've put a shell on you, girl, but you're not a turtle." I looked right back through her, not caring, liking my shell, knowing there was nothing more even she could do to me. She shook her head quickly once, like a bird. "We must take it off," she said. "Please, girl. We're all that's left." And I remember being shocked, when I thought nothing would ever shock me again, to see tears glistening in her eyes.
I came to love my grandmother as I gradually learned to see her heart, which was neither small nor hard. And she did bring me back to life somewhat.
After the first year, when she saw I was ready, she began to teach me the old ways and the old wisdom. She showed me how to sit on a rock in the sun watching the goats and see beyond them to other places without losing track of a single animal.
She taught me to read and showed me the secret place where she kept her books. She taught me the herbs and the poisons and the wisdoms of her craft. I soaked them up the way aloe takes water in the dry season. Learning seemed an anesthetic and a healing salve for all my troubles. We both delighted in how fast I learned, and how much I could accomplish.
But then, when I was seventeen and the war began to come up into the mountains, everything turned to ash in my mouth. No matter how much I learned, it would never be more than a fraction of what she knew. I gave up reading, and felt depression settle over me like a sandslide.
"What's the point?" I told her. "We'll be dead soon, and the world is all changing into hell. I'm sick of living."
"Ha!" she crowed, "Have they seduced you, then? Have they caressed you with their guns and bombs and bloody bodies so long that you like it now? Maybe you think you're ready for death, but it's fear you're taking for a husband."
That made me mad. "I know death," I said.
"No," she said. "No, you do not, you only know the dying of it. Perhaps it's time for you to go now, young as you still are..."
I looked at her in sudden fear, but her face was smooth. She was traveling elsewhere, the way she sometimes did, talking with the spirits, and she didn't come back that whole evening.
The next morning, after I finished the morning chores, she had me sit with her, and told me about the cave. "Though I'll show you on the map, you'll have to find it for yourself. I've been there several times, but it never seems to be where I remember. It's dangerous now in that part of the hills -- maybe you should wait. Still, my heart says you should go. But the choice is yours."
I saw in her eyes, dark and stony as the mountains themselves, that she loved me absolutely, in the face of everything, and it was the only thing that mattered. I didn't care if I lived or died, but I decided to go to the cave.
I didn't think it would be a hard journey. I was used to traveling in the high country, and I knew how to stay out of sight. It was less than two days' walk, and I'd done much longer.
The weather was beautiful, but I was prepared for cold, because it was fall and the mountains have their own mind about winter. I made good progress the first day, and saw no one as I crossed the first pass.
In late afternoon, though, as I was coming down the other side and beginning to look for a sheltered place to spend the night, I heard a strange sound coming from one of the shallow gorges, a syncopated whistling. I was curious, and I approached cautiously down the slope.
What I saw was a group of women, dressed in formal robes, tending a small fire. There was an appetizing smell of cooking meat, and the sound I'd heard rose and fell, drawing me closer. They must be women of the village to the east.
As I approached the fire, one saw me, and they turned. But now I had seen what they were doing. They had staked a man out on the ground, naked, arms and legs spread wide, and built the fire between his thighs, and boiled water on the fire, which they were spooning over him, little by little, so that the skin had begun to come off in places. They had put out his eyes and cut off his nose, and done something to his tongue and throat so that his screams of agony came out only as the strange whistling that I had heard.
"Begone," one of them said to me. "This is none of your business."
But something rose in me then, looking at the twitching meat that had recently been a man. I felt a bloody satisfaction to see one of them such and a great weariness that here was yet another ruin, and a third thing stronger than the other two.
"No," I said. "I have come to make an end to this."
"Never," said the one who had spoken. "You don't know what the enemy has done in our village. This one at least will pay as long as we can keep him alive, and then we'll leave what remains for the others to find."
"No," I said, in my grandmother's stone voice. "I know what was done better than you. Your spirits were forced even if no one touched your bodies, and now you're all pregnant by it. Now every child you ever bear will be the enemy if you let it. Is that what you want? No. I carry the enemy too, and I say no."
"Get out of here, stupid girl," said the one who had spoken before, "or we'll kill you too."
"So be it," I said, stooping and picking up a smooth hard rock. "It's death I've come for." I walked forward among them without hesitating, giving myself as an offering, but they parted before me, and I knelt beside the head of the dying man. "Go in peace," I said in the older language, and I crushed what had been his forehead with my stone.
For a moment, I almost felt him go, and it was not as I expected.
Then I stood and left them without looking back. They said nothing.
That night, tired as I was, I couldn't sleep. I felt a pain I hadn't felt in a long time, burning me with the same cadence as that whistling from the torn throat. Toward morning, I realized it had been burning in me for years. I just hadn't felt it.
The next day, traveling on no sleep, everything seemed strange, and I was so tired by mid-afternoon that I'd grown careless. Having reached the mountainside where the cave was supposed to be without seeing anyone, I didn't bother to scout it before heading across.
I awoke to my mistake when I glanced up and saw a helmeted head 50 meters away looking directly down at me.
I dropped to the ground instantly and wormed toward some boulders about 10 meters away. I'd almost reached them when the shooting began. At first, I thought they were shooting at me, but when the men below returned fire, I realized I was caught in the middle of it. Peering out, I realized how thoroughly trapped I was.
Lying there in the narrow space between the rocks in the brilliant sunlight, I tried to go elsewhere in spite of the rattle of gunfire. I thought of the night before and tried to offer myself again, but I didn't know to what. All I could see was the canny old ravens who would clean the bones of dead goats and talk to one another in the highest crags.
The thought of being captured kept pulling me back. I didn't want to be wired to a stake like an animal. I didn't want to be destroyed like that. I was so scared that my teeth were chattering, even though I was sweating in the sun.
The men below had gotten their guns working, and the combination of heavy machine-gun fire and mortars seemed to have killed or driven off the men above. I heard soldiers scrambling up the slope.
In desperation, I tried to work my way deeper between the boulders, but there was no room, except into a narrow crack under one. I'd always feared enclosed spaces -- the thought of being buried filled me with panic. Even glancing into that narrow space felt suffocating, and besides, one of the huge, black cave spiders had made her web close enough that I could reach out and touch it with my hand, between me and the crack.
"I saw her," I heard a man say, unexpectedly close. "She's hiding in these rocks. Oh, for the love of God, this will be good! I haven't had a girl in weeks."
I closed my eyes. Better to buried, better to die, better anything than to be caught in that blind machinery. I slithered sideways toward the spider and the narrow crack.
I opened my eyes as I felt the heavy web against my arm. Cave spiders are fierce, and their bite can make you sick for days. Bite me, I was telling her. Bite me, and then bite me again.
To my surprise, the spider scuttled out of my way onto the rock over my head. I rolled through her web and squeezed myself into the crack. It went deeper than I'd realized. Without letting myself think, I wedged myself into it as hard as I could, pressing my face against the rock. The crack curved downward, and the boulder pressed unyieldingly on my back and buttocks. I could only take shallow breaths now, and I couldn't turn my head. In spite of the panic rising in me, my inside arm kept finding finger holds and I kept pulling myself farther in.
Suddenly a helmeted face appeared perhaps a meter away, in the small patch of sunlight I could still see. "Here she is!" he shouted. "Come out of there," he said to me roughly.
"Shoot me," I answered.
He laughed. "Later," he said. "First, we'll see what you're made of. Lord, you're a pretty one."
"Shoot her in the ankles," said someone nearby. "We don't want her running off."
"No need," said the one looking at me. "She's stuck tight under there. We'll probably tear her clothes off just pulling her out." He started to reach a hand toward me and then jerked it back."
"Ugh," he said, "Cave spider! Ugly brute." He crushed it with his heavy sleeve.
In desperation I pulled myself even harder into the back of the crack. I literally couldn't breathe, and some part of me knew through my terror that this was the answer. Instead of trying to get out, I kept wriggling further in, ready now to die.
To my amazement, I squeezed through into a slightly larger hollow behind. I quickly slithered backward another meter and felt an edge with my inside hand, where the floor dropped away into space.
"Hey," the soldier shouted, "Come out of there you little bitch, or you'll wish you were never born."
I knew I didn't have much time. I swung an exploratory leg out over the edge. Nothing. Holding on with both hands, I slid my body over, catching one breast painfully. I hung for a moment, reaching desperately for a toehold, but the rock face was smooth. I couldn't see anything but utter blackness below me, and I had a feeling I would fall hundreds of meters if I let go.
"Okay you little bitch, you asked for it," said a distant voice, and I heard the kind of clink a grenade pin makes when it's pulled. I closed my eyes and let go.
I felt myself falling into nothingness, out of the world, starting a last fatal journey to jagged rocks far below, then landed on my feet and stumbled hard against the cliff no more than a couple of meters down. An explosion rocked the ledge I'd come from and lit up the little chamber for an instant, deafening and half-blinding me. Then there was silence.
I checked for shrapnel. Either I was untouched, or I couldn't tell. After a second, I heard voices again, faintly, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. I started crawling along the wall, without thinking, just to keep getting away.
Every second, I expected to run into rock, but instead the ground angled steeply down, and I seemed to enter a narrow passage. After a couple of minutes, there was no sign of light behind me. I heard a faint distant boom, probably a second grenade, but I just kept crawling.
When I became aware that my knees were hurting, I stopped and sat for a while, leaning back against the stone and letting my heart slow. The utter silence and total darkness were unnerving. My own breath seemed much too loud.
I closed my eyes and realized: This is the cave.
And this was the evening I was supposed to come, when my grandmother told me I might see through the mists to the other side.
After a while I reached over my head, and finding no ceiling above me, I stood up.
With one hand on each wall, I followed the passage downward. The floor was smooth beneath my feet, but the walls were rough, which made me wonder whether people had built this tunnel.
I walked for a long time, long enough to regret having left my water skin in my sack, long enough to begin reliving the sleepless night before. It was hard not to go elsewhere in the utter dark.
I was walking in a daze, wide eyes searching for any sign of light ahead, thoughts wandering on many planes, when I heard a voice speak plainly in my mind: Stop.
I stopped and leaned against the wall. I was so tired I must have been hallucinating. I let my eyes drift closed and gasped.
What I saw with my eyes closed was a great valley in front of me, lit with a beautiful light of a color I had never seen before, and in the middle, rising from impossibly far below, was a tree, huge beyond my imagination. The trunk -- it was hundreds of meters across, even at the height where I stood, and the branches were so large at their base that meadows of grass and wildflowers were growing on top of them, and smaller trees of different kinds.
I was standing right at the edge of a cliff overlooking this place, and no more than 10 meters from me, perched near the end of a great branch, was a woman -- a bird woman, at least twice my size. She was looking at me with eyes so full of understanding and love that I found tears streaming down my cheeks.
I opened my eyes, and there was nothing but darkness in front of me. I stuck out a foot tentatively to feel for the path, and found only empty space.
I closed my eyes again. The tree was so beautiful, I wobbled and almost fell forward. The bird woman's face had an expression of alarm.
"Careful, little one," she said to me in my mind. "I do not wish to escort you to the life tree so soon."
"Are you death, then?" I asked her. In my thoughts, my voice was strangely soft and full of feelings.
"I am one of the mistresses of death," she said. I noticed then how very beautiful she was, and that she was wearing no clothing. The triangle of hair or feathers in her lap matched the radiant multicolored feathers on her wings, and her great breasts seemed to promise an infinite comfort. Even her bird feet with her long claws seemed graceful and beautiful to me.
"I've come to meet death," I told her.
She laughed, throwing back her head, and the line of her throat was so lovely, and her laugh was so friendly that I almost laughed myself.
"You've come to the tree of life, little one. I am a servant of the tree."
"But you're a mistress of death?"
"Oh," she said, with infinite compassion, "You've seen such waste in your short life, you're scared to take the risks life requires. But there's no waste in death, and so you should live a while. You want life."
"I want none of it," I shouted at her in my mind. "I want no man, there are no good husbands, I want no children, no goats to worry about. I don't even want a lover with breasts as beautiful as yours. I want no more summers in the high meadows filled with flowers like the ones over there on the tree, no winter mornings so clear you can see fleas on a goat across the valley, I want no more of it, none of it."
"Yes," she said, "those are some of the things you want, and some of the things you shall have, and the pain of it will almost break your heart, but not quite. I promise to comfort you in the end, and the pain will slip away, and only your love will be left."
"Oh, I can't," I shouted out loud, tears pouring from my closed eyes.
She spread those beautiful wings, like a rainbow unfolding in my mind, and suddenly I felt myself picked up like a little child, and felt her breath and the softness of her skin, and the smell of her like spring earth and sweat, and then I was an infant suckling her, and I was filled to overflowing with a comfort I can't describe.
She set me down and I opened my eyes again, but now even with them open I could see the tree. And I could see her standing beside me, but she had become a beautiful boy my own age no larger than I, with laughing eyes, wearing kindness like a wreath around him.
"Hey," he said, using my name, "You've been a bit behindhand in courting these years. Will you let me share pleasure with you in this sacred place?"
And I, who had vowed never to lie with a man willingly, who had driven all the thoughts of a young girl out of my head, found myself wild as a hawk and randy as a goat in the spring. I reached for him, and as he touched me, we floated up into the air and did all the things I had dreamt of and many I had never imagined, and I had a pleasure I have only seldom matched since and never so purely. And we traveled to other places and I saw other things that I only dimly remember from time to time.
And when I was utterly spent, I went to sleep in his arms, in her arms in the air.
I woke up the next morning on the floor of a small cave, sunlight streaming in the mouth of it, feeling still as if I could float weightless. Instead of my clothes, I was wrapped in a rough goatskin, and every female part of me was alive with the pleasure of the night before.
I stood and stretched, happier than I could ever remember being, and closed my eyes. "Are you still there?" I asked. And she was there, and then I remembered how sometimes she had been he and he had become she, and how at times even I had become a he, and how I had somehow comforted my mother and danced with my brother and held my father for an instant in my arms, who was now a newborn girl baby -- was that all a dream? In my mind, she laughed -- that was no dream! And I laughed out loud myself for the joy of it.
Then wrapping the goatskin around me, I went out the mouth of the little cave into the sun on the rocky mountainside and walked home to my grandmother, willing now to risk a few things the soldiers feared.
Later, I learned that all through the region that night, troops had been visited by ghosts of their dead, as no one could remember having happened for hundreds of years, and many went mad. And after that, the war receded from our mountains.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author