Ride the Moon: An Anthology (11 page)

She would not let him go.

Only now, she would let him go, to languish in the next life unable to hunt or pray or help.

Demaswet rolled her beloved son over on his back to cover his simple clothing and exposed skin, painting him for the ritual to return life through the sacrifice of his. He grunted and moaned a few times, but she shushed him to silence. She was to remain silent and not speak to him, for his spirit was already preparing to depart. The sounds above would drown out her words if she uttered them, but Father would hear and only punish her further.

Yes, I will.

After she covered his clothing and face, she stepped back. The men carefully rolled Nawdithi to his front. He struggled now, his face pushed into the ground. Once again, she stroked him with the red ochre and shushed him to compliance. He turned his head and rested it on its side. She covered him, her heart pounding and tears falling freely now.

Can I at least say good-bye to him? I have done as you asked.

I am not without mercy. You may say good-bye.

Exhausted and drained of any reason to keep drawing breath, Demaswet did not argue. She whispered her thanks. She kissed the red-painted face of her son, the paint brushing on her lips. Nawdithi focused his eyes and they filled with fear and betrayal, before his glance drifted off once more.

Demaswet's breath hitched in her throat. It would not be enough to give up her son. No, she would endure an eternity without him or his forgiveness. He understood her punishment. He understood she had a choice.

Was it not enough to kill him?

No, you needed to suffer to learn. Never again will you make this mistake.

Demaswet stood and squared her shoulders. She would be strong. She was only one person. Her pain was nothing compared to the pain of her people. There was no rush, and so she lingered at her beloved son's side. Then, Shanaitwasa completed her prayers and entered the pit. She inclined her head to Demaswet.

Demaswet was lifted from the pit and returned to her seat of honour. The chants, prayers, and songs grew louder. The holy men placed a large rock on Nawdithi's back, pinning him to the ground. He let out a cry of pain and fresh tears dripped from Demaswet's eyes.

Shanaitwasa grew a circle of red ochre around Nawdithi, his arms waving and legs flaying. The efforts were fruitless; the stone weighed nearly as much as him. Yet, he struggled. A hunter's spirit lived inside her son.

She forced herself to watch. This was the price of pride, to watch the destruction of a prized possession.

The firelight danced in Nawdithi's eyes and Demaswet could see the fear and comprehension in his expression. The herbs and mushrooms did not do enough to cloud his thinking. He knew he was about to die. He knew it was his mother that caused his death.

His eyes said he knew his mother would not save him. Demaswet stared into her son's eyes, tears falling down her cheeks. She betrayed her beloved son.

“We honour your sacrifice, Nawdithi. In your death, we hope to live. We will forever honour you. We pray to the Father to bring us the ice once more. Without the hunt, we cannot live. We have offended the Great Spirits and now we must sacrifice.”

Around Nawdithi's kicking body, they placed the sacred hunting tools. A seal harpoon, with its notched head attached to caribou sinew. The knife her brother made for Nawdithi's first hunting. The bird bone flute that his father made.

Then, Shanaitwasa pulled the bone pendant from around her neck and placed it on the stone on his back. “This has touched my heart since I was a child. Now, it will touch yours for eternity. Never forget us, as we will never forget you.”

And with that, several men stepped past the drummers and into the sacred space. They began to return the earth and stones to their rightful resting ground, on top of her son.

Nawdithi's wide eyes frantically searched his surroundings, but the herbs had clouded his mind so much that he could not cry out. The pyres continued to burn, the fish continued to bake. Food and tools to tempt his spirit, since it would be bound under the rock, never to be let free.

As the dirt covered Nawdithi's face, so too did it bury her. She murdered her beloved child because she failed. It did not matter who lived now, since she would soon follow her son into the next life.

Present Day

Endless, unyielding time passed. Demaswet paced around the rock cairn that held her son, as she had done for countless ages. If he could not hunt nor eat, neither would she. She stood guard against time, pacing and wailing and waiting for the day her son would finally join her and the ancestors.

It was her fault. All of it, square on her shoulders. Time taught her that. She had been such a young mother, so very young. She did not understand how to apologize to Father for a failing in her own character. She had wanted to celebrate life and was too inexperienced to understand how to temper her own pride with selflessness.

If only she had learned that lesson sooner. Father might not have taken Nawdithi. She would not have taken her life to tend him in the next.

Though, Father's opinion seemed to no longer matter. He did not speak to her, no longer taunting her. He'd forgotten about her, leaving her and Nawdithi to linger for eternity. Now, she could only exist for her son.

She put aside her fear and regret and instead drew hope from the strangers around her, apprehension and excitement waging war within Demaswet's soul.

The strangers dug their perfectly square pits on their hands and knees. They used their tiny picks and shovels, and brushed aside the centuries of dirt and rock with hand-held brooms.

Would these strangers release Nawdithi or would they doom his spirit to oblivion?

They dug into the earth.

They dug into her Nawdithi.

They dug and dug and dug. They found the rock on Nawdithi's back. They held up black boxes and flashed lights at him.

Demaswet held a hand to her neck, anticipation rising.

The strangers lifted the rock and gasps filled the air. They cheered, and smiled, and laughed. Demaswet just stared and waited.

Her beloved child stepped from the bones. He climbed from his home for too long, his eyes squinting against the bright summer sun. A light breeze tousled his black hair. Then, he turned to her. Recognition dawned on his face.

And then, he smiled, wide and bright and the barriers around her heart collapsed. Her son! Her son!

“Mother!”

As her son wrapped his arms around her, forgiveness flowed from him to her. He understood. His embrace said what words could never define.

He understood.

He forgave.

He loved.

She laughed, a joyous, sobbing bark of laughter. And her heart swelled with maternal pride.

An impish breeze slipped into the garden, ruffled the leaves of the gardenia bushes, then rode the coattails of a certain gentleman who was making his entrance into the glass atrium of the hotel. The slip of wind sighed around a planter and wafted into the conference lobby—unnoticed.

“Welcome to the Hotel Imix,” the front staff said, pronouncing the ‘x' like an ‘s'. “It means ‘light' in the language of the Maya.” He seemed used to explaining this.

The man nodded, not really listening.

The breeze left this gentleman at the front desk and floated down the hall. It shook out the silk of scarves and rattled the necklaces hanging in one of the booths at the Lion-Hearted Women conference. Jacqueline paused and sniffed the air. Jasmine? Cinnamon? Imagined an island lying low in the sea under a moon swelling to full in a Maxfield Parish blue sky.

The breeze flowed back and rolled over the rumps lined outside Starbucks. The people shifted and murmured to themselves, thinking of liaisons or the comforts of rain. For it was raining in Los Angeles, and they'd had thunderstorms followed by brilliant rainbows, none of which had slowed the planes across the street at LAX.

The puff of wind blew down another foyer. It passed Don Carlos, who followed it with his eyes beneath his sculpted Mayan nose, then looked back and turned the page of his newspaper with a rustle. The faint scent of charred wood wafted up for a moment.

The breeze drifted down to the last lobby and wound a figure eight around the ankles of the channeler, who heard a tune he hadn't imagined before, smiled and pushed the button of the freight elevators, avoiding the crowds for now.

The wind squeezed under the door of the storage room and riffled the lids of boxes until it found the right one, where it settled in to wait.

People sat on the floor outside the 11:11:11 Crystal Skull conference, hoping for tickets for the evening's special event—the revelation of the mystery skull. The conference goers ate their meals and dressed for the evening, dabbing rose oil over their wrists or putting diamonds in their ears—or quartz crystals. They all yearned for that intangible something they couldn't put a name to, but knew existed. Somewhere. Perhaps in the words of a speaker. In the eyes of a crystal skull. In that perfect dress draped by the perfect scarf with the exact waft of perfume.

The full moon crowned in the east, just as the sun slipped into the vast Pacific, then pushed up from the folds of the horizon and peeked down onto the city of angels.

No one thought of the moon. Only Don Carlos.

And maybe some of the skulls sitting on their keepers' tables, murmuring amongst themselves, dreaming of their old temples. Remembering how they sat atop a particular pyramid, surrounded by bronzed worshipers. Before they were buried, then uncovered again. When they sat in auction houses. Were bid over by mushroom-pale collectors.

At dinner, Mason and Gail sat in a corner by themselves puzzling over the menu. “There's a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away,” she said. “And Thai.”

“How do you know?”

“Got a map from the concierge.” She ran her eyes down the menu again. “Probably half the price.”

“But I have to do a sound check. Be sure my power point will work. We don't have time.”

“Maybe an appetizer,” she said. They ordered and sat in companionable silence, the silence of twenty years.

His cuffs were frayed, his shirt had a spot on it—already and he hadn't eaten yet. His gaze looked everywhere but at her, skimming the conference attendees, who glanced at him over their shoulders. Put their heads together and whispered. Gail wondered if they had anything else to offer each other. Maybe she should slip out of his talk and go to the Lion-Hearted Women presentation tonight.

‘Man as Hunter', the flyer read. ‘Honour your mate's need to seek out and conquer'.

Not appealing. Whatever happened to the feminist days? Well, she knew the answer to that. The last decade had been hard on all such ideas.

When they'd first made love, Mason had knelt down and said he would worship the goddess in her. An Arabian moon hung in a cerulean blue sky, Venus just above the tip of the crescent. He told her about the Hoopoe birds in Egypt, where he went every year. How the Queen of Sheba had sent that bird, with its black and white stripped wings, red crest, and long, arching beak—like the moon, he'd said, pointing out the window—to tell Solomon when he could come to her.

“I'll make love to you like Solomon to the Queen.” And he had.

The waitress delivered fried eggplants and tuna with artichoke hearts. They ate, occasionally tasting each other's dish. But not like they had. Not in that flirty way where they'd fed each other from their forks, mouths opened in anticipation. They skipped dessert and finished quickly. The waitress brought the check.

He pushed his chair back. “Got to go,” he said. “Bring those extra skulls down. You were right. I think we'll sell them all.”A concession.

She smiled to acknowledge it. “OK.”

The moon pushed up higher from the horizon, her whole body clearing Mother Earth. She hung, huge and orange, in the eastern sky. The drivers on freeways gave her a second look.

Gail wandered up to the room, turned on a movie channel and reclined on the bed. Soon she'd refresh her lipstick, comb her hair, choose a different Egyptian scarf and go down. But not just yet. She flipped the channels, looking for something. Something else.

Downstairs Jacqueline tweaked a blouse in her display, spread the folds of a skirt, then stood back and cocked her head.
Yes, perfect.

She picked up a terra-cotta pot, its cinched waste circled by a turquoise squash blossom, and stood holding the empty vessel at her hip, remembering him.

They'd both worked for IBM back in the day, she writing code, Sam climbing past the glass ceiling. They'd been young enough to hang out in clusters of friends like grapes. He'd asked her up to his apartment once. Served mushrooms in a cream sauce.

A waxing gibbous moon hung in the dark sky. He told her his career was more important than any relationship. He was putting all that off until he was head of something. A vice president.

She'd left town six months later. Heard he married a woman with two kids. Had a golden retriever. Maybe a picket fence.

“Do you have these in purple?” a woman interrupted Jacqueline's reverie. The customer wore a white evening gown, the skirt flowing around her bare feet, the bodice sequined. Amethyst earrings hung from her ears and her lids were the colour of lilac.

“We might have one more left,” Jacqueline said. She put down the jug and bent below the table, rummaging in boxes.

“This conference—” the woman said, “—it's changed my life. I believe in my dreams again. I've found my lion heart.”

Jacqueline emerged clutching two scarves, one the colour of violets nodding in the shade, the other deep and dark as an eggplant.

“Oooh.” She snatched the violet one and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Perfect.”

It did look good. Jacqueline handed the woman her receipt and thought about closing up, going to the other conference to hear him.