Two Eyes Cenote Leaf-nosed

She was treated by the old hemet. She had no say in the matter, but after a day or so, she became accepting of her, because she never asked for more than Eset was willing to give.  She worked quietly and efficiently. She chased visitors from the infirmary room. Her scent did not conjure images of endearment, but it was soothing. Earthy. Familiar.

Eventually, Eset had let go of that endless string of dreams and potentials. The final spatter of blood had been cleared from her thigh, and they were gone just like that. She had nothing to bury. No physical memory of them to hold. It’s like they’d never been here at all. And maybe they hadn’t.

The mind self-edits. The mind reforms. In the end, Eset convinced herself it was her pride that had suffered more than her soul. But she wasn’t ready to return to her responsibilities in the terrestrial. One day she laid upon the stone and watched @Qiao as the coyote moved about her business.

“Who taught you?” It was the first sentence she'd volunteered.

qiao set aside the fraught ends of chicory she had been separating from stem. her gaze climbed up to the woman, noticing it was perhaps the first time she had voluntarily spoken.

many women. the seer said, turning her gaze back to the beheaded flowers who would find their petals crushed into a palatable tonic. she got the sense eset expected more than a clipped reply, and reluctantly unwound another tendril of history. my sisters were hired to tend the wounded of a great kingdom's army. she had been very young, and her sisters had no choice to kneel to the summons of the king.

it was then she had met an igbo woman who had changed her life forever. and you?

Eset wasn’t really a healer, more of a botanist than anything else. But she had no desire to make this distinction, and her tongue felt swollen and numb, too thick to form proper words.

“Tavina,” she murmurs still, thinking the two wrights must have crossed paths during their time under Pharaoh Ramesses' reign, and must have made something of each other. Her eyes are sent across the room, lethargically absorbed by the steady grind of paw against mortar.

“Coyote women?” Eset asks, gaze following north towards the healer’s stern face.

the name upon eset’s tongue brought forth a brief smile that could nearly be called kind. the doctor. she responded, now braiding pieces of late goldenrod together. a good teacher.

she set this bundle against the hearth of stone, noting eset’s vaguely unfocused gaze. it would be some time yet before eset returned to her former self — but she may find a part of her was lost forever. yes, some coyote. her expression straightened. will you try again for children in the spring? 

the question, so painfully direct, was aimed delicately; qiao wondered if eset knew the dangers, now that her body had gone through its worst crucible yet.

In the quiet of that room she tried to find a way to make sense of it, to understand why the Gods allow their cruel turnout. Few thoughts come. The death of language seemed the truest part of Eset's loss.

She’d thought words had all lost their meaning until the hemet speaks again. Flinching, as if struck, her eyelids pinch to shut in inconceivable despair. It took her a while to sense that she could trust the coyote, because her relationship to everyone was shifting. 

With bleak eyes she turns back upon Qiao and whispers, “No.”

Never again.

In her focus, long claws of goldenrod. She watches them weave back and forth in the healer’s hands.

“Would you tell me of them. The coyotes.”

an insensitive question for a moment deserving of some sensitivity. qiao watched the woman flinch, her expression remaining clinical. good. the first time -- you are lucky. the second time, you go with them. she brushed aside an errant leaf and continued her braid, content with the silence until eset prompted her further.

qiao was not one to reminisce. her life was an arrow's cruel trajectory -- always forward, never back, cutting down anything in its way. to think back on these women evoked their memories and awoke their spirits -- some of which qiao preferred remained dead.

a proud race. chwezi. the world has moved on from them. sister-wives to the earth, they drew from it their power and knowledge, which they guarded fiercely. they tended the dying by king's order, but were not his subjects. like mercenaries, they were hirelings and marched to the war-drums of whoever paid the highest cost. men were fearful of them -- worried they might run off with their women in the night. her light laugh ended with a clap. they would die to see the fellahin today.

Warm tears spill over her cheeks and down her muzzle, coating the length of her neck in a wettened sheen. She sucks a quick breath in and stifles the following sob. Mourning is a lapse of strength, a vulnerability she would trust with no one. And so the half-coy forces open her silken gaze and aims it at the hemet, summoning all the steel she can.

“What is wrong with me?” Eset asks, defeated, but adopting the woman’s same pragmatism. She blinks away an impossible dream of her baby playing alongside Toula’s children and struggles with another breath.

Her entire body went limp. No ire was left to contest the healer’s mockery of the fellahin. The forgotten chwezi sang through her mind, their voices mournful.

you were born in a man’s world, achalugo. qiao’s gaze softened to see the woman’s fortitude unfold. you think your worth is in the fruit in your womb, what you make for men. it is not. she drew the braid roughly, preparing another sheath. your worth is what is in your soul — your aniti, yes? but it was not a question, and the seer’s eyes darkened with unknowable energy.

the chwezi did not take husbands or wives. it was women that carried on their future, preserving their knowledge and rituals. children are the death of duty to yourself and they knew this — you are made less for each child you nurse under your breast. the cost of bringing them whole is a part of you — eventually you have nothing else to give. her tone had grown ardent, but it softened now. an unspoken invitation leveled in her voice. this one had what some cultures called steel to her backbone; she would make a fine witch. there is still something to be had for you in this world, but it will require great sacrifice.

“They were for me,” jaws, lips moving around the whimper, repressed tears stinging the backs of her eyes. “I wanted to belong to someone.” The child, whose bud she had carried within the core of herself, and with whom she fell into a perennial love.

Unguarded, a paw touches her belly. There is no rejuvenation of deads buds, or dead nerves. She lays, hand upon her valley of flat desiccation, gaze dully fettered to a single budding goldenrod that would never be her’s.

The coyote is adamant; she is unwound from a life that would only end in senseless death. The sting, the wound, the shame, the guilt, she must have known it, arranging the stems in her palm– the white noise of her womb.

Eset’s own, silenced.

“What sacrifice?” No inflection in the voice, instead her eyes ask Qiao only for a numbness to this pain. But what more had she to give?

belong to someone? qiao's ears cupped forward in repressed outrage. reductionist. belittling. these were the words wrapped around the seer's mind as she bit back her tongue. no, you only belonged to yourself -- and the sooner you realized that, the better.

you have already paid the first sacrifice. qiao observed darkly. but to become a witch, you will need to provide so much more. there is a ritual -- it will hurt. raw as eset felt now to experience the fruit of her womb silenced forever, qiao wondered what she would think to know it flooded with poison.

she thought of her first pupil, a young girl raped in the corn rows by passing soldiers. angry. bitter. qiao had acted out of impulsive kindness as she brought the girl to her first baptism, said the ancient words to bind her to their coven. the girl's anger had turned to black oil in her mouth -- she did not survive the water.

no, grief was a far more potent conduit. would you like me to help you?

One I did not make knowingly.

Another silent protest, added to the mass of all things unspoken.

Her pulse slows. Blackened eyes ferry up and over the coyote, tracing hard lines and years of history spelled out upon a face that had known much work.

How can she keep so indifferent? Is that what it means to become a witch? To become unbreakable?

“Qiao. It is your name, isn’t it?" She withers. "Why would I become a witch, Qiao? Magic is just that,” and if Eset had ever once dreamed of realities spun by the radiance of heka, she no longer did.

“Not real.”

she’d kept her tongue when eset admitted she tied her self worth to someone else’s belonging — but now that restraint unraveled. 

too old to be insulted, a quiet rage diffused within the crone. 

not real? her eyes climb the full of eset’s lithe body. how could she be so blind? life is magic. were you not born straddled to life’s shackles, you would see it for what it is: a spark of white against black, the conjuration of improbable existence from permanent nothing. brief and flaring and gone the moment you hold it. 

tell me, when you summoned new life into your womb did you feel it then? each new soul came from somewhere. 

did it feel real to you? when those souls left you and you bled out in the dirt?

the offer remained on one upturned palm, yet its window hovered on the cusp of slamming shut.

Exacting her voice, and fatal. The hebsut shrinks, weakening arms bound tightly in penitence, her eyes black, half-opened, fixed in an unknown direction where love is dead.

“Yes,” she confesses, silent and solemnly, finding in it none of the affecting power Qiao weaves with her words. For her eyes had been opened to what peace life could bring, and now her arms grip around emptiness, being told that to try again was lethal.

“Yes,” she repeats through tears and wracking sobs. Eset felt her heart had shattered into a thousand broken pieces.

She wanted only the reverse of sensation now. To feel nothing at all. 

it had been cruel to wedge such a tender topic into eset’s breast — but in qiao’s eyes it must be done. 

things happened for a reason; the overworld designated the strings of fate in this world, and their methods were often violent as they directed means to their inevitable end. 

she sniffed, setting aside the last of her patching. did you bury them? or were they so small they were only wads of incomprehensible red viscera?

“There was nothing to bury,” a tearful whisper. Her heart broke to think of them taken away in a thousand pieces by a foehn wind. She had nothing of them to hold, to remember. They’d never had a chance to become more. Her body was too venomous to grow something so pure.

It occurred to her then that it was his blood who made her this way. The master’s iniquitous wolf ancestry which fouled her coyote mother’s purity also killed Eset’s child.

“What must I do?” her cheek shifts. From the low table she seeks the eyes of the medicine woman, as if Qiao was the only one in the world who could numb this pain.

nothing to bury. qiao disguised the bitter disappointment with a slow, owlish blink of her green eyes. there were other things they could use; remnants of a vile placenta, discards of uterine lining. it would not be as powerful, no — but pieces of flesh were a better offering than nothing. 

you must rest, first. qiao instructed, beginning to rifle through the scant things in her pouch. then, i will find you in the morning.