The priestess left the promenade of the gods behind and ran the path that wound up toward the temple compound. At one point she paused and looked back at the harbor. There was life there now. Several boats sailed toward the docks, bearing religious pilgrims keen to view the goddess in earthly form. She would attend to them in a few hours, as she did every day.
Approaching the compound the young woman paused once more. She loved looking at Vaharinda’s statue, which sat on its pedestal beside the entrance, both a monument to him and a reminder of Maeben’s ultimate power. The people of Vumu had chosen to honor their hero. He had been the strongest of all of them, the most pleasing to the eye, the bravest, the most endowed with the capacity to pleasure women, the man whom other men most aspired to emulate. They had sent a gift of riches to the people of Teh on the Talayan coast and brought home a great block of stone, of a texture unlike anything on the island. From it they had carved a statue of Vaharinda. He was seated in the reclined posture he enjoyed while at rest, his muscles sculpted in the stone, his features just as they had been in life. He sat naked, and also-as had been his situation through much of his life-his penis stretched up erect, like a clenched fist aimed at the sky. It was a marvelous statue, like none in the world before or since.
With this beauty to behold, the people of Vumu soon began to worship Vaharinda as a god. They said prayers to him, asked favors of him, bestowed gifts of flowers and jewels and burnt offerings to him. Soon women, seeing in the stone the man they had loved, mounted astride his penis and pleasured themselves. They went to him even in preference to their husbands, and many claimed to have gotten living young from the seed of the stone god. They came to him so often and in such great numbers that the ridges and contours of his member were worn smooth and its length gradually diminished. But still he gave pleasure and-in his silent way-he received pleasure in return.
Maeben hated all of this. It angered her more than Vaharinda’s scorn of her had. She took it upon herself to humble them in a way that hurt them most. First, she swept in on the statue and wrapped her talons around Vaharinda’s penis and snapped it off in her grip. She carried the broken length of it out to sea and dropped it. A shark watched her do this. Thinking that she had dropped a prized morsel of food, the shark rose from the depths and swallowed the penis in one massive mouthful. Maeben rejoiced. Vaharinda would pleasure women no longer. She was not finished with her vendetta against humans yet, however. She took the gift that Vaharinda had given to the women who loved him. She took their children. She swept down from the sky and snatched little ones up in her talons and beat, beat, beat her wings until she rose, the child screaming and writhing in her grip, helpless against her wrath.
The young priestess, walking past the statue now and into the compound, could not help but eye the damaged privates of the statue. Some part of her knew better than to feel so, but she wished she had seen Vaharinda in his glory. She even dreamed of mounting him as other women were said to have done. In these dreams he was not only stone, however. He was living flesh, and the acts they carried out together were of such sensual excess that she often woke stunned to have ever imagined such things. She was, after all, a virgin. She had to be. She lived out a continuing part in all of this drama. Long ago the priests had divined that the only way to appease Maeben was to select a living symbol of her that could stand before the people every day so that they might never forget her. The priests said that humans had to be careful never to take too much joy from life. They must always remember that they lived and prospered only at the generous whim of Maeben. They must always look upon loved ones with a measure of sorrow. They must never enjoy good health without remembering that illness is but a breath away. They should never praise fair weather without knowing that late each summer storms come, wreaking damage without concern for human suffering. All of these daily hazards of life were necessary, the priests said, to appease a goddess with jealous eyes that missed little of what transpired on the earth below her. And the priestess, above all else, should never succumb to the lust Maeben had mistakenly felt for Vaharinda.
Perhaps because of these penitent ways, the Vumu islands were blessed with an abundance that filled the people with confidence in the rightness of their beliefs. They harvested oysters in one of the sheltered harbors. Catfish the length of tall men swarmed the muddy rivers flowing out of the hilly uplands, the backs of them plowing through the water, so visible that fishermen had only to stand in their canoes and fling spears at the passing mounds of water. From the sea, bonito filled their nets to bursting in the spring. In late summer the trees in the valleys groaned under the weight of their fruits. And even boy children of eight or nine were considered old enough to venture into the hills on hunting trips. They always came back laden with monkey meat, with tree squirrels, and with a flightless bird so plump it was difficult to carry under the arm. Maeben, in truth, had much to be jealous of and the people of Vumu much to be thankful for.
“Priestess!” a voice called from the top of the temple steps. “Come, come, you dally too much.” It was Vandi, the priest chiefly responsible for getting her accoutred for the ceremony. He liked to look fierce, but in truth he was soft on her, like an uncle who dotes on a niece he knows he only has limited authority over. He held her underrobe out as if she were near enough to step into it.
The young woman took the stone steps two or three at a time. They were cut shallow so that one approached the temple with slow, measured, and reverent steps. But this applied to the worshippers, not to the one being worshipped. “Calm yourself, Vandi,” she said. “Remember who serves whom here.”
Vandi, like most Vumuans, was short of stature, with night-black hair, greenish eyes, and a tight pucker of a mouth. As he was a priest and often indoors, his skin did not quite match the villagers’ coppery complexions, but he was still remarkable to behold. “We all serve the goddess,” he quipped.
She slipped inside the garment offered her and let herself be bustled deeper into the temple. In the deep, incense-pungent seclusion of her chambers, attendants set about dressing her. They draped her in the various, feathered layers of her office, securing each with quick fingers. Others painted her face and fit the bird’s beak mask over her mouth, making sure that she could breathe. Perfumers hovered around them all, taking sips from precious gourds and exhaling the scented water in a fine spray it took them years to master the delivery of. They slipped talons onto her fingers, tugged them into place, and fastened them with wraps of leather around her hand and up her wrist. Each hand bore three of these, two partnered fingers and a thumb supporting the weight of the curving crescents. They were fearsome relics of an actual sea eagle, a creature so large it must have approached the goddess in grandeur.