Two hours passed as the rocks heated and Jaguar chanted and the moon ran in her course through the sky. The women began chanting with her, waiting for what they supposed was their punishment. They showed no signs of fatigue. The energy that coursed through them from the Artemis compound wouldn’t let them rest. Jaguar could feel the pull of it as the ritual space unfolded around them.
When the fire began to die down, Jaguar let Fiore kick the logs out of the way to reveal the glowing stones, and instructed her how to pick them up with the pitchfork, welcome them into the lodge with sage and water, slide them into the pit at the center. Then, she led the women inside the lodge.
As she knelt and pulled back the deerskin that covered the opening to the dome, she looked down and saw that blood stained the inside of her thigh, a warm trickle of red sliding from her body onto the earth. Fiore, looking at her from inside the dome, laughed as if she knew. The other women took up her laughter. They were all menstruating, sweat and blood mingling in a space much darker than any night.
The heat rose to a palpable mass as she pulled the deerskin down to cover the entrance to the sweat lodge. Once inside, she fed the fiery stones with sage, then poured water onto them. They sang as steam swarmed them. Even in the first round, where they honored the spirits of the East, it was a hot sweat. By the second round the other women had lowered themselves to the baseline of the lodge where they sucked in cool earth and moaned out responses to her chanting. She could feel the breathy openness of empathic space in them and around them. None had tested positive for psi capacities, but the sweat lodge sometimes opened regions long closed. And there was no telling what effect the Artemis compounds would have on any latent skills. No one had ever studied that. She’d find out more in the third round, when she’d make her first empathic contact with them.
She could hear Alex cautioning her against this, especially in the round of the West, called the House of No Words in Jaguar’s tradition. This was the place of death, the place of the ancestors and the black jaguar. Here you ceased being fully human or fully alive. You spoke only in the howls that came from the bottom of your belly and the scream that lived inside your throat. If she contacted them here she’d be touching primal energy, and that was risky. But it was also effective.
When she closed the door after the second round and poured more water on the stones, an inescapable fury of heat blanketed their skin. Jaguar tilted her head back and howled, and the other women followed suit, moaning and keening, barking and yipping and growling as she crawled around the pit, feeling her way through the absolute dark.
She reached Karena first. Karena, silent except for a whispered groan.
Placing her hands around Karena’s head, she intoned the ritual words that asked entrance to this psyche. Terez and Fiore screeched, but the sound of their voices left her as she felt her way through Karena’s interior world.
Hollow silence. Infinitely sterile emptiness, clamoring silently to be filled. To be filled. To be filled.
Karena worked for La Femme, women’s health and beauty products, but her personnel file wasn’t included in her packet, so Jaguar didn’t know how long she’d shown signs of trouble. She was here because she’d walked into a department store and pointed a gun at a cashier. He frantically handed over the money in his drawer, but Karena fired on him anyway, then turned her weapon on the other dozen people there. When the police arrived, she was struggling with a shopping bag, dragging it toward the door. The policeman who took it from her went white when he looked inside, then dropped the bag, spilling dismembered hands and feet and ears and breasts all over the marble floor.
“I was hungry,” Karena told the police.
Jaguar drifted in the vast white emptiness she cradled at her core, and breathed in the necessity of it. She would go no further with her. Tonight was just the first contact with each woman, a brief listening.
She released her hold and groped through the darkness to Terez, her beauty palpable even when vision was denied. Jaguar held her face gently, spoke quietly into the squealing terror of her mind, and found herself slipping into a space as rich and fertile as the rainforest.
There was rapture here, fleshy and sinuous with desire. A pounding and pulsing life-force, wanting to feast not so much out of hunger, but out of a sense of abundance. Yes. It said only yes and yes and yes again.
“Yes,” Jaguar whispered back, “and yes again.”
She let her go and moved to Fiore, who barked and howled and called out all the sounds of wild animals caught in the grip of commune with the night. Jaguar had to struggle to keep a firm grasp on her, her hands caught in her hair as she worried her noises like a dog with a bone.
There was joy in the storm of her voice, which managed somehow to remain profoundly serene within its own rage. A serene and free rage. A wild calm. Some improbable meeting of all that. A complexity, powerful and rich and complete as fire. To Jaguar it felt almost like home. With reluctance, she released her and crawled back over the slippery wet earth to her place.
She took a ladle of water from the bucket and tossed it onto the stones. As the heat hissed and seethed around them she breathed deeply, releasing any toxins she might have absorbed from the contact through the air of her lungs and the water pouring from her skin.
Aaiiyah, the women called out to the night.
Aaiyah they sang into the darkness and into her and into their own souls. When it was time, she held her hand up for silence, and though they couldn’t see it, they were suddenly still. Jaguar spoke through the stillness.
“I myself, spirit in flesh speak,” she said softly, and slid into her own center to meet what swam there.
Saw a woman feral and balanced. Saw a forest of knowledge she crawled through in darkness.
Touched the edge of a wordless whisper. The sigh of movement. That swift blackness which led her with vision thirty times more accurate than human sight.
She breathed in the blessing of that presence, and let it pull her into the spinning darkness, felt herself curling like a leaf within a coil of wind, lifted toward a translucent moon, trying to burst into fullness. She reached for it, all of her pulled to that source.
Grandmother Moon.
She was lifted to a place where light poured down around her, cool and sweet as a child’s hand in hers, bathing her in the same wild calm she felt from Fiore, who must be a daughter of the moon, a huntress. Light poured through her, cool and sweet as dreams.
She rested in it, let it rest in her.
In this light she saw herself facing a man. Someone young and old at the same time. Sad and quiet and full of rage, filled with death. She turned from him and saw another man, one she knew. She felt the warmth of his desire mixing with her own as the great grandmother light of the moon poured cool over them both. He raised a hand to her face, and it was covered in blood.
Aaaiyah. Aaaiyah Nissa nissa.
She saw his hand covered in blood and the moon pouring out a silken scarf of more blood to cover him, drowning them both in blood and more blood.
Blood on the moon, and the scream of pain that followed.
She opened her eyes, gasped, and shook herself out of the vision.
Blood on the moon.
“Open the door,” she said hoarsely to Terez, who sat nearest. Terez flung the canvas covering up and the three women crowded to it, gasping, steam flowing out in front of them like a river bursting through a dam.
Jaguar lay down and let them breathe. They had one more round to go, but they’d get water and a little cool air before they started. She needed to regroup anyway. Needed to climb back in to her own skin so she could conduct the last round.
Blood on the moon.
Phase psychosis. Artemis compounds. Women bleeding, going mad. She was bleeding now, too. Blood on her thigh, and on the thighs of all the women here, and on the moon.
Alex