But woe to those children whose windows are left open at summer’s dying, because that is when Lilith comes and brings them fair dreams, then strangles them so that they the smiling; and woe to those who do not wear the new moon upon their breasts and so placate Lamasthu, whose bite leaves pestilence in the blood!
Upon the second day of the death of summer the silent poppy-goddess Spes walks. Spes whose mouth is red as poppies and whose skin is white, whose kiss is cold as alabaster. On that day, too, Aetna was worshiped, who disgorged her rage upon the city suckling at her breast; and the Haida goddess Dazalarhons, whose anger erupted when she saw that men were torturing the shining salmon in their streams instead of giving thanks for their plenty. In ancient Greece it had marked the transition to the time of the great women’s festivals, culminating in the Thesmophoria, that greatest and most holy of all feasts, honoring Demeter’s rescue of her ravished daughter from the lord of Hell. Everywhere that the moon shone, everywhere that people died and lamented, everywhere that infants failed to wake and grain turned to dust beneath the merciless sun, where women died in childbirth and their mothers and sisters keened in vain: in all these places, the dark goddess had been worshiped, and forgotten.
But now, in all these places and more, women had learned her name anew. Now, they called her Othiym. Now, her hour had come. Slowly she opened the doors leading onto the tiled patio, and stepped outside.
The dusk surrounded her like rumpled velvet, soft and warm and fragrant with the scent of crushed sage. Angelica breathed in deeply. Her heart was racing; a trickle of sweat traced its way across her rib cage. She tried to remember what Cloud had taught her about conserving energy in a marathon: breathe from the diaphragm, close your eyes, relax.
She began to pace across the patio, the heat from the tiles seeping through the soles of her feet and on up to her thighs. Compared to all that had come before—nearly two decades of work and study and sacrifice—there was really very little left to do. But the greatest sacrifice still remained. And only Angelica could perform that task.
In the course of the last year, she had instructed Elspeth and the other priestesses in the final rite of Waking the Moon. They, in turn, had gathered to them Circle upon Circle of women, radiating from Angelica outward to all the lost reaches of the world. It had taken years of patience for it to come to this, years of working alone and with small groups: waking first the women themselves, then encouraging them to teach their friends and neighbors.
But women work quickly once they are awakened. Angelica had learned that by watching television programs where women wept and fought and embraced; by reading the books that American women read, and the newspapers that told of their vengeance upon those who had harmed them; by visiting the tiny villages in Orisa and Bangladesh and Uttar, where girl children are aborted and wives are murdered for their dowries; by entering compounds in the countryside outside of Gracanica and Glamoc, where women were raped and forced to give up their babies to doctors and soldiers; by witnessing initiation ceremonies in Africa and New York, where girls were mutilated, and standing at the mass graves of nuns slaughtered in Central America and men and women and children in the jungles of Kampuchea. Everywhere, everywhere, she saw horror and death and brutality; everywhere she saw forgiveness, and ignorance, and endless cycles of poverty and servitude, women cringing before their masters and murmuring about love.
And everywhere she saw rage: rage that was twisted until, like an auger, it bored into the women themselves, and their children. Rage that like the desert creatures burrowed beneath the surface, waiting patiently for nightfall and moonrise.
“But it is time now,” whispered Angelica. She raised her face to the Devil’s Clock. Amethyst light danced across her brow, set the lunula aglow. “Oh Great Mother: it is time!”
She raised her arms, took another deep breath, and let her hands drop. Bracelets of bone and copper and gold slipped down about her wrists, and the linen shift fell from her shoulders, cascading around her waist and thighs in folds of white and gold to pool about her feet. Bare-breasted, naked save for her armillas and the lunula, she closed her eyes and sang.
As she sang she began to move, swaying back and forth and stamping her bare feet upon the tiles. At each step dust rose beneath her, and tiny fragments of terracotta. Her dance inscribed a circle upon the ground, an orbit of dust and dried grass and the broken wings of moths. Her bare feet slapped the tiles, her heels grinding into them as though she were extinguishing small flames.
Beneath her heels the tiles began to crack. Fissures ran from them toward the pool with its tranquil dark surface, and from the fissures reddish soil flowed, as though the earth beneath her was boiling. The soil stained her feet and ankles, but Angelica danced heedless, treading the red earth until it churned like wine or blood being poured in her wake.
Her voice rose to a wail, a lament for those green places burned by Othiym’s anger, for the temples destroyed and the children buried when her rage erupted into streams of liquid fire and molten ash. She mourned for Kalliste and Keftiu, Aetna and Sumbawa and Pompeii; but most of all she mourned Kalliste, the island that had been her sacred jewel, her emerald eye, the center of all her worship. Kalliste, whose name meant “Most Beautiful,” but which after its destruction was known as Thera: Fear.