Sister Emily's Lightship: And Other Stories Read online

  Then Great Alta reached into the crevice of night and pulled up two light sisters with her left hand. She reached in again and pulled up two dark sisters with her right. The one pair, light and dark, she set facing one another, belly to belly and breast to breast. The other pair she set back against back so that their hairs intertwined but they knew one another not.

  “Ye are all my daughters,” quoth Great Alta, “whether you look toward or away, whether you look far or near. You will not lose any love wherever your gaze should fall.”

  She touched their eyes with her right forefinger, their mouths with her left forefinger, and their hearts with her open palm, and thus were they made fully awake.

  The Parable:

  As told by Mother Anda, great-great-grandaughter of Magna, last of the Sisters Arundale:

  Once there was a garden in which our mothers and fathers lived. It was a comfortable place where fruit grew without cultivation and water ran over twenty-one stones to become pure.

  But one of the fathers turned to his companions and said, “I want to see the world outside the garden. Who would go with me?”

  Some of the fathers said yes. Some of the mothers, too.

  But there were two mothers who did not go. “We are happy here,” they said. “Where the sun shines on us and the wind cools us and the fruit grows without cultivation.” And so they stayed in the garden and raised their children.

  Only once in a lifetime, some of the children followed the others into the outside world we call the Dales.

  The Story:

  Selna had never wanted a child to care for. Not a baby sister nor a little cousin. And so she had paid little heed to the Hame’s infirmarer during lessons about how children were got and how they were not. Of course she paid as little attention to the kitchener’s explanations about food. All Selna had ever wanted, even before she had to choose in the great ceremony before Mother, was to be in the woods with Marda.

  Her voice had never wavered when she and her seven-year sisters had been asked “Do you, my children, choose your own way?” Marda’s voice had been quiet, and Zenna’s quieter still. Lolla and Senja had replied in their high, light way. But Selna’s answer came strong and pure.

  And when she had marched up the stairs to touch the Book of Light, her knees had not wobbled. Not even when the priestess’s sour breath had touched her. Not even then.

  “I am a child of seven springs,” she had said. “I choose and I am chosen. The path I choose is a warrior. A huntress. A keeper of the wood.”

  No one, especially not Mother Alta, had been surprised.

  But now things were different, had been different for months. And Selna could not exactly say what was wrong, only that things were different. And Marda was gone. Marda, her best friend, who had trained all those years with her and who was her companion and blood sister—the last sworn with knives at the wrist where the blood makes a blue branching beneath the fragile shield of skin, a poultice of aloe leaves applied afterward. Marda had gone missioning.

  Selna’s mother had found her sobbing in the night. “She will return,” her mother reminded her, kneeling by the bed. “A mission year is but one world’s turning.”

  “Or she will not,” Selna had said, too miserable to hide her tears as a warrior should. “Some stay at their mission Hame. Or go to another.”

  Her mother nodded. “Or she will not. After her mission year in her new Hame, she may have other, newer dreams. But her decision will be between Marda and her dark sister. It is not between Marda and you.”

  “But…” The cry was out before Selna could stop it.

  “But what?”

  Selna’s traitor mouth would not contain the words. “But I was her sister. Her blood sister. There was no one closer.”

  Her mother’s dark sister kneeling at the bedside chuckled. “Soon you will understand, child.”

  “I will never understand. Never. I will be a solitary. I will call no one to take Marda’s place.”

  Selna’s mother stood and her dark sister with her. “Come,” the dark sister said. “She will know soon enough.”

  Selna looked up from her pillow. “The heart is not a knee that can bend,” she said. “Or did you not tell me that often enough?” Then deliberately she reached over and snuffed out the candle by her bed.

  Her mother’s footsteps were the only ones to go out of the room. Her mother’s dark sister, without a candle’s flame to guide her, was no longer there.

  The Song:

  Dark Sister

  Come by moonshine,

  Come by night,

  Come by flickering Candlelight,

  Come by star rise,

  Come by shine,

  Come by hearthlight,

  Come be mine.

  In the darkness

  Be my spark,

  In the nighttime

  Be my mark.

  Come by star rise,

  Come by shine,

  Come by hearthlight,

  Come be mine.

  Come by full moon,

  Come by half,

  Come with tears,

  Come with a laugh.

  Come by star rise,

  Come by shine,

  Come by hearthlight,

  Come be mine.

  The Story:

  Zenna called her own dark sister the next moon. Lolla and Senja, twins in everything, called theirs together.

  “It is a wonder they did not call up just one,” their mother said. But she said it laughing.

  Everyone joined in the laugher but Selna. Selna laughed very little these days. No—Selna did not laugh at all. She left the table where the conversation continued and went out into the courtyard of the Hame. She got her throwing knife from the cupboard and fitted it into her belt, then took down her bow from its slot against the wall. The quiver she filled with seven arrows and slung over her shoulder. Then she went out the gate.

  She ran down the path easily, her mocs making little sound against the pebbles. She used wolf breath to give her the ability to run many miles. It was not that far till she would reach the woods. As she ran, she thought about how she and Marda had raced almost every day along this same path, the one keeping breath with the other. How they ran left foot with left, right foot with right. How they matched in everything—the color of their hair the same wheat gold, their eyes both the slate blue of the rocks by the little river. Only she was tall and Marda was a hand’s breadth shorter.

  “I love you, Marda,” she had said the day they had opened their wrists and sealed their lives together.

  “I love you, Selna,” Marda had answered, as she smoothed the aloe onto the leaf and bound it with the vine.

  They had been children of nine summers then. Now they were fourteen.

  “I still love you, Marda,” Selna said. But she said it to the white tree standing sentinel at the woods’s first path. She said it to the three tall rocks that they had played on so often as children. And she said it to the river that rippled by uncaring. Twenty-one stones, the saying went, and water is pure.

  The History:

  The women of the mountain warrior clans lived in walled villages called Hames. As far as we can tell, there were five main buildings in each Hame: the central house, in which were the sleeping and eating and cooking quarters, was the largest building. It opened onto a great courtyard where the training of warriors took place. What animals they kept—goats, fowl, possibly cows—were in one small barn. A second, even smaller barn housed the stores, part of which were kept down in a cellar, where stoneware bottles were put by with fermented drinks—berry wines and even, in a few of the Hames, a kind of ginger beer. A small round building housed a bathing pool heated by a series of pipes to a central wood heater. There were two smaller, shallower pools. From the Lowentrout essay “The Dig Arundale: Pooling Resources,” Nature and History, Vol. 57, comes the interesting theory that one of the small pools was for the children while the other, with a separate series o
f exit pipes, was for women during their menses. The other building, some scholars feel, was a training center or school. Others hypothesized that this fifth building was a place of worship.

  The Story:

  Selna found the deer tracks by the river’s edge. They were incautious tracks, scumbled tracks, for the deer was still young and looking for any kind of footing. In the imprint of one was the imposition of a large cat’s track.

  “Ho, my beauty,” Selna said. Whether she meant the deer or the cat was not clear.

  Both deer and cat had crossed the river at the shallow turning. Selna followed them carefully, the bow already strung. She knew she might be too late. The deer might have made a dash for safety and the cat, in its frustration, got its fill of rabbit or mice. Or the cat might even now be feasting on raw venison. Or tracking behind Selna…but she did not believe the last. The cat’s prints showed it clearly and steadily behind the deer.

  She went back and forth across the river three times after those tracks and, at last, lost them both when night closed in. She was neither angry nor frustrated; only suddenly Marda’s treason gnawed anew. Once Selna had nothing left to do but make a hide in a tree for sleeping, her unhappiness came over her again, wave after wave of it, like a river in flood.

  Sleep would not come. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw Marda leaving.

  “We will think of you,” Marda had said, kissing her on both cheeks. We. Once, Selna knew, that would have meant Marda and Selna. Now it meant Marda and her dark sister, that black-haired, black-eyed echo, that moon child.

  “I hate her!” Selna said aloud.

  Below her in the woods a cat coughed in answer. Selna reached for her knife and, holding it in two hands, waited a long time for the dawn.

  The History:

  Here in the Museum of the Lower Dales is the only Daleite mirror archeologists have recovered, though mirrors play such an important part in Hame histories and legends. The ornate wood frame has been reliably dated at two thousand years, of a laburnum that has not been found in those parts for centuries. It was found in the dig at Arundale, wrapped separately and buried some hundred meters distant from the buildings.

  Many scholars have ventured informed guesses about the mirror. They include Cowan’s thesis that the mirror was the property of the Hame’s ruling priestess and that only she was allowed to own such a priceless treasure; Temple’s more conventional opinion that the Hame, being a place of women, would naturally be filled with mirrors; and Magon’s bizarre and discredited idea that the mirror was part of a ritual in which the young girls called up their twin or dark sisters from some unnamed and unknown alternate universe.

  Note that all the carvings on the mirror frame are mirror images of one another, a symmetry that has been much commented upon. We do not really know what they stand for.

  —FROM AT HAME IN THE DALES, MUSEUM BOOKLET PRODUCED BY MUSEUM OF THE LOWER DALES, INC.

  The Story:

  Dawn came before the cat. Or instead of it. Selna had finally napped a bit, just enough to take the edge off her exhaustion. The imprint of the knife handle seemed etched into her palms. Her hands ached, and her back and legs. As she climbed down the tree, her stomach rumbled as well. Spending all night in a tree was never comfortable, but as her teacher always reminded them, Better the cat at your heel than at your throat. And there had been a cat.

  She shoved the knife back into the belt and went to find something to eat. There would be berries down near the river. She had long since learned which mushrooms could be safely eaten, which could not. A good hunter never went hungry in the woods. She could always fish. When she and Marda went fishing …

  And there it was again, the ache when she thought of Marda. It was as if she had been halved with a great sword, cleaved in two. Everything she had done before had been done with Marda. And now nothing ever again would be. Always and always Marda’s dark sister, Callo, would be between them, whether or not there was moon or candle flame to call her out.

  The ache was so real, she clutched her stomach with it, turned off the path, and thought she would vomit. Only nothing came up. Nothing.

  “I am a warrior,” she reminded herself. “I am a hunter.” It did not stop the tears. It did not stop the pain.

  The Song:

  Beloved

  Oh, my beloved,

  My sister, my friend,

  I do not know where you begin,

  Where I end.

  My hand is your hand,

  My breast your breast,

  The soft pillow

  Where I take my rest.

  Oh, my beloved,

  My sister, my wife,

  If you are severed from me,

  So is my life,

  So is the earth gone,

  So is the sky,

  So the life from me,

  And so I die.

  Oh, my beloved,

  My sister, my friend,

  You are the beginning of me

  And the end.

  The Story:

  She fished anyway. Wanting to die and dying, she found, were two separate things. The pain in her heart could not be fixed. The pain in her gut could. She caught a splendid silvery trout with a rainbow of scales. The act of fishing made her forget Marda for a while. The act of gutting it did, too. But as the fish cooked on the fire, the ache came back again, worse than before. It was so bad, she thought she might bring the fish back up again as well. But her body was stronger than that. It had taken her a day and a night and another whole day to understand that.

  The body has its own logic, her mother often told her. The heart has none.

  She buried the fish bones, scattered the remains of the fire. She had been taught well.

  When she went into the woods to relieve herself, she found her pants spattered with blood and for the first time understood. The ache in her belly, the pain that spread like fire from her heart, had nothing to do with Marda after all. She was come into womanhood for the first time, here in the wood, here in her deserted state.

  The body has its own logic. She laughed and said it aloud. “The body has its own logic.” She covered the hole carefully with dirt, packed it down. She would have to go back to the Hame. A menstruating woman did not belong alone in a place of big cats. Especially with night coming on. She would wash in the river, and then she would go back to the Hame.

  The History:

  As in all warrior societies, the Amazonian women of the Dales did not concern themselves about gender. Homosexual couplings were common in the all-female society within the Hames. But in order for that society to continue, there had to be children. They were got in two ways. Either the women who were not exclusively female-to-female oriented went outside the community and mated with males, bringing any female offspring back to the Hame with them, or they took care of cast-off female children belonging to the outside world.

  Such outside mating when done within the armies was known as Blanket Companions. A woman of the Hames who went into the nearby towns for the express purpose of conceiving a child was known as a Year Wife. One who stayed longer, but eventually returned to the Hame with her girl children, was called a Green Widow. We do not know why.

  The Story:

  The river was cold, especially with night closing in around her, so Selna built a fire as close to the water as she could. Then she stripped off her leathers and, without giving herself time to think, plunged into the pool.

  The water scrubbed at her and she shivered at first, but soon the act of bathing made her almost warm. She looked up at the sky. The moon—full and round—was creeping over the tops of the trees.

  Selna stood still and the pool waters stopped rippling. The surface was like glass. When she looked down into the water, the moon was reflected back, as clear as in Mother Alta’s mirror. Selna was reflected too, as if there were two of her. Selna—and her other. Marda.

  The body has its own logic, she thought, slowly raising her hands and speaking
the words of the Night of Sisterhood.

  She meant the words to call Marda back. If they had power—and she knew they did, everyone in the Hame knew it—then maybe here in the woods, where she and Marda had sealed their love in blood, she would come. Marda would come.

  Dark to light,

  Day to night,

  Here my plea,

  Thee to me.

  She turned her palms toward her breast and made a slow, beckoning motion, reciting the chant over and over.

  It got dark, except for the moon overhead, except for the fire crackling on the shore. A slight mist rose from the pool’s mirror surface, a mist that at first Selna could see through. And then she could not.

  Thee to me,

  Thee to me,

  Thee to me.

  Her hands kept up the beckoning. The body has its own logic. Her mouth kept up the chant. The girls had trained so long with Mother Alta in that chant that once started, Selna could not stop. Her body was cold, almost immobilized by the cold. But the chant kept rolling from her mouth, and the mist kept rising, as if carrying away the last of her body’s heat with it.

  And then the mist seemed to turn and shape itself, head and hair and long neck and broad shoulders and arms that beckoned back to her and a face that was as familiar as Marda’s and yet not familiar at all. And the mouth echoing her own:

  Thee to me,

  Thee to me,

  Thee to me.

  “Alta’s hairs! It’s cold. Do we have to stand here till dawn?”

  “We?” Selna wondered if she were dreaming.

  “You, Selna. Me, Marjo. Your dark sister. You did call me out, you know. Blood to blood. Dark to light. Only it’s hideously cold. And I can’t move out of this stream until you do.”

  “Do?” Selna echoed. And then in an instant it came clear to her. Out here, in the woods, not in the cozy warmth of Mother Alta’s chambers before the mirror with the other mothers there for support, here she had called her dark sister. Marjo, not Marda. “I don’t want you,” she said.