Deathwalker

This story begins, I suppose, where so many real and true stories begin: at the end.

My end.

I am hanging by a rope, looking out at the crowd.  Trying not to see my children, yet yearning to see them one last time.  What must they be thinking of me?  What lies have they told them?  Oh, Goddess, what will become of them?    

My right hand tightens on the rope above me.  Pulling, pulling against the force of gravity.  All my desperate striving, holding on, trying to hold up the weight of all of myself and more, just with my right hand- unwilling to give up.  Desperately holding out against the inevitable.  My left hand, protectively cradling my round belly, is trying to reassure the babe who I can already feel fluttering, reflexively shuddering as our oxygen wanes to dark.  I will not let go.  

* * * * *

I will not let go.

Lifetimes I have carried her in my womb.  The loss of what should have been.  The legacy that was never received, never walked; now barren and lifeless.  Still I carry her.  Like a stone in my belly, pit of a rotted fruit in my pelvis, still I carried her.  Painful menses, painful sex, painful birth, still I carried her.  Still I strove with my right arm against the inevitable, trying to carry all of that weight with five fingers, muscle, bone, will, shoulder burning.  I would not let go.

The pain in my shoulder was unbearable.  Most of the time my hand was numb, but the numbness and pain now crawling up my neck, face, teeth, into my eye like the talon of some great bird was new.  I couldn’t go on like this.  The way was impossible.

This morning the hard frost came.  Crystalized blades of grass, frozen brown leaves, glittered and crunched under my feet.  I walked across the fenced-in field and garden, through the gate, out to the field at the edge of the forest where my youngest son was already making the little teepee of twigs and scraps for our fire.  The hawk cried out, and the crows called, once, twice, three times.  The ceremony was begun.

We sang the fire to life and offered blessings to all.  It was for all of us, and we all knew it.

I stood over the altar, legs spread eagled.  It was a wide stance, a strong stance.  Good for beginning- and for endings, I soon discovered.  I stood over the red cloth, the symbols of earth, air, fire, and water: malachite, eagle feather, burning sage, conch shell.  I stood over the symbol of spirit: my medicine bag, white deer hide stitched long ago with curious young boys asking over my shoulder, “Mama, what will it become?”

I no longer knew.  

The smoke from the fire before me blew into my face and I choked, coughed, eyes burning.  I wiped away the salt water streaming my eyes.  She put her hand on my shin, and my knee began to buckle, spin, unwind, as if my bony structure were unravelling at her touch.  So the journey began.

* * * * *

The first sound was high and piercing.  It was a startled cry, an inexplicable cry that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.  And then the pitch dropped down, down, into that deep oh so familiar pelvic drone, and I could feel it beginning and was helpless to stop it, the giving way to birth of that which had been held on to for so long.

Long and low and deep, the groans of my labor rocked through me again and again.  I swung my hips, tried to hold myself up, leaned against my knees as I moaned the pain of longing, the pain of losing, the pain of not being able to hold back, the pain of allowing the giving away.  I heard a whisper as of leaves in the wind, “You must not hold back.  You must no longer hold back from giving.  Where there is no giving and no receiving, there is no life.”

And suddenly the cry was sharp, and the burning so intense; I dropped onto my knee as with all at once she was a whoosh and out of me and onto the grass beneath. I collapsed to my elbow, heaving, crying, sobbing, as the grief rushed out of me along with the baby.  There she lay, perfect and unliving.  Dead.  Of course she was dead.  She could be nothing but dead; had we not died on that rope together?  Yet some part of me had hoped.  Hoped that what wasn’t yet could be.  But she was still.  And I cried into the earth and dirt and grass all the grief I had been carrying for so long.

The sobs shuddered through me unbidden, unceasing, rolling like endless waves through my body.  Yet I could not leave her.  I scooped her up, held her still and close to my breast, loved her still.  And the question came “What does she say to you?” and the anger then roiled through the waves of grief:  “She tell me nothing!  Nothing!  She is dead!  She is dead.”  

And they said, “Though the body is dead the spirit lives on.  What does she say to you?”  And in that question I knew that she, my daughter, was also myself- a part of myself that was meant to be but was disallowed, killed, rejected.  My daughter, taken from life before she could even begin it- and a part of myself that never had a chance to live.

The keening cry of that grief rocked me, sudden and strong, side to side, around in a spiral until I fell back and curled onto my left side, fetal.  Sobbing still, the voice was a hand on my back, my shoulder, asking again: “What does she say to you?”  And then, like a small bird that rustles in the bushes beyond the garden gate, the feathery sound of her voice was around me. “You must let go of the old in order to allow the new.  You must let go of what was, what never was, and what might have been.  Only then can you truly live.”

And I did not want to let her go.  She, who I had never held, never nursed, never sung to, never known except in dying.  And in death.  But she looked at me with large, solemn eyes in her small face, and smiled, though her eyes were sad.  “You must let go.  You must let everything go.  I love you, mom.  I know you can do this.”  Her eyes were like seal eyes; dark, and full of soul.

* * * * *

I stood at the mouth of the cave.  I looked back at her, but she shook her head.  “You must leave everything behind,” she said, looking at the staff in my hand.  “No walking stick?” I said.  “No light?”  I dropped the stick.  The voice spoke again.  “Are you willing to enter the cave?”

Yes.  I am.

The entrance to the cave was small, and I had to crouch as I moved forward into darkness.  The cave was only a yard or so wide, and I had to stay bent as I felt along the damp, cool wall, moving deeper into the earth.  The path dipped down and the dim dark went black as the light from the entrance behind me was lost.  I walked on, continuing a ways until I came to a dead end.  I could go no farther.

But I knew that could not be right.  Where could the path lead?  I felt along the wall and all was rough rock and earth, solid.  I looked up, wondering.  Yes.  I could feel it.  Inexplicably, the path went up- even though I knew I was to travel deep into the earth.  

I scrambled and felt for the ledge.  Sure enough, it opened up above me, just beyond where I could easily reach.  I scrabbled up, pushing off stone and hauled myself into the opening.  The tunnel seemed to go down sharply from here, and I tread cautiously in the steep dark. 

After a long while I could feel a change.  The air was different somehow; I could feel that the cave had opened up.  Then ahead the dark seemed ever so slightly less dark, and I could make out dim crystals, as if faintly glowing, all over the walls of a great cavern down below me.  As I slid and scrambled closer, I could see someone, a woman, near the back of the cave wall.  She was standing at a great black pot, stirring.  She turned and looked at me.

“Would you like to drink from my cauldron?” 

I could not speak but I walked up to her.  She held up her dipper.  “All the wisdom of all the ages,” she said.  And she poured a little into a cup that she held out to me.  “Will you drink?” she asked.

I drank.

She looked into my eyes.  

Cerridwen.  I knew her now.

“Thank you,” I said, handing her back the goblet.  But she held up her hand and shook her head.  “One can only drink from my cauldron with her own cup.  It is possible no other way.  The chalice is yours to keep, and to carry.  Bear it well.” 

* * * * *

I tucked the stem of the goblet into the inner pocket of my jacket, wondering how I was going to fit such a large cup into my small pocket.  But it slid in easily, becoming a pair of knitting needles.

I do not know how long I looked into her eyes then, but it was like looking into the starry night sky, or the ever changing depths of the ocean.  Some time later, or maybe eons later, I found myself looking up.  Something had caught my eye.  Or rather, I felt something, like it was calling to me; or maybe I was yearning for it?  I began to walk, toward what seemed like the back of the great cavern, and yet I felt there was more there, something to walk toward, something more than rock wall.  I walked forward surely, steadily.  I could feel the call.

It was as if the cavern wall was much farther away than it seemed, for I walked a long way and still I did not meet the hard edge of stone.  As I kept moving, a pathway seemed to emerge as I stepped, as if through the wall- or as if the path had always been there but the seeming wall had not.  But I did not stop to wonder at this strangeness because I could feel there was something up ahead.  It felt like a light, or, like a green.  Yes, that was it.  It felt green.  Green and green and green.  I quickened my pace.

And then suddenly I was through.  Through the stone and stumbling into the green green green grass inside the stone circle.  My stone circle.  

I know this place.  

I stood up, blinking in the sunlight.  I could see vast green land stretching out and out and mountains or maybe high high hills beyond.  It was so green.  

I looked around me inside the circle.  There in the center of the grassy area was a small white flower, a daisy, as if picked and left for me.  I smiled.  My daughter.  She knew.  She knew I would come through.

I walked over and picked up the flower, twirling it in my fingers.  I looked out beyond the stone circle to the vast lands beyond.  So green.  The green of growing, of living, the green of life itself.  I breathed it in.  I gazed up at the great blue overhead, wisps of clouds.  

Then I saw the birds.

It was a great screaming flock of them, dark against the blue sky and coming fast.  They were upon me before I knew it, big black crows and ravens, flying all around me, a loud chaos of screeching cries and beating wings, spinning and weaving, a great black thunderous whirlwind of beak and feather and talons.  My momentary wonder shattered into sharply spiking fear.  The great birds began to peck at me, tear at my clothes, eat away at my skin.  I could do nothing, as they kept their constant circling spinning weaving of beaks and wings all around me, and all was crow, raven, cawing out again and again from my own throat, shedding layer after layer.  Eating away the old skins of who I once was, who I thought I was, who I thought I should be; all the identities, roles, dreams, and ideas of myself I didn’t even know I still carried in my very skin. 

And then with a shrieking cry she was within me.  The great Crow Goddess herself, eating out the insides of me, picking away every last shred of self-identity until all that was left was a pile of picked bones and shreds and bits of desiccated skin.  Where once I had been, there was nothing.  I looked down at the bones.  And then, inexplicably, I stood.  After all was taken from me, yet still, here I was.  Something was.

I stood.  A great blue-black cloak of crow and raven feathers cascaded over my shoulders, and the deep hood covering my head was a sharp black beak.  I could feel her in me still.  The Crow Goddess.  She was in me now.  Or maybe, I was in her.  Or maybe something stranger still, something I did not have words for but yet could feel.  Crow Goddess. 

The Morrigan.

I knelt down and placed the daisy on the pile of bones.  I walked to the gap between the stones and looked out over the green land and hills.  “How do you feel now?” the voice asked. 

I smiled, breathing in the green before I spoke. 

“Ready.”

* * * * *

I began to walk.  Toward something, I knew, though I knew not what.  I was alone in the rugged landscape, the wind whipping my hair and my cloak.  Black feathers ruffled around me.  Alone, but I did not feel alone.  For the land and the sky and the wind all felt a part of me, or perhaps it was really that I was part of it, but nevertheless I was not alone at all.  I was the earth rising up to meet my footsteps and the wind fresh in my hair, and I was the smell of heather and the big big presence of the great hills.  And I could feel- feel- somewhere in this land something was calling me, urging me on.

Down a little valley and up the hillside beyond and I knew we were close.  I felt her before I could see anything- the rush of life and the closeness, the closeness of something longed for and half forgotten.  I saw the old stone church then, tumble down crumbing stone, abandoned.  Still I did not hear her.  But I knew she was there: the well.  My well.  The sacred well, and the waters of life that spring up inexplicable pure and clean and beautiful right from the heart of our Mother.  

I could not see where she was.  I could not hear her.  Where was her burbling song, her lintel stone?  I crawled over the crumbling half fallen-in wall of the church courtyard.  That time was over, and the church was in ruin.  The husk of it still shadowed the land, though, and I found it hard to pick my way through the debris and destruction.  I kept moving.  She was back there, beyond the structures.  I could feel her.

I could never have found her by looking.  It was that I felt her, and reached my hand up and felt the crevice open under my fingers.  Pushing back the heavy overgrowing grass, I reached in, invited her to open, felt her waters pouring over my fingers, gushing in a heady rush of love and life into my open palms.  It was a kind of ecstasy, discovering her here, remembering her, knowing her again.  I brought out my cup from within my cloak and filled the chalice.  I drank, long and deep, to her, to me, to life itself.  My well.  I had found the sacred waters once again.

* * * * *

“What is she saying to you?” the voice asks.  I listen.

“We have been waiting for you,” I hear the waters cascading in their sing-song way.  “We have been waiting for you to tend the sacred well and care for our waters, these sacred waters of life.”

“Fill your cup,” she invites.  “And drink deep.  Our waters will heal you.”

She pauses, then continues. “But it is not enough to fill your chalice and share the healing waters with the people.  You must teach the people how to find their own well, and how to tend it.”

“They won’t like it,” I said.  “They won’t like it at all.”

She replied, “It is not enough to bring a person healing.  Not now.  They would heal the surface ailment but not the root- and soon a new ailment would befall them.  The people are sick at their root, and they need more than healing.  They need to know themselves.  They need to know their belonging.  They must find their own well.  You must teach them.  You must show them the way.”

I stood, and my cloak of feathers fell around me.  As I raised my head, a circlet was upon my brow.  From all around me in the wind and soft waters she spoke.  “It is time to wear your crown again, daughter of Fae’elin.”

I opened my eyes.  The smoke from the fire before me billowed thick and pungent into my eyes, over my face, my body; but I was not the same.  I moved within the smoke as the smoke moved within me.  I was inside the smoke, with the smoke, around the smoke; and so the smoke could not blind me.  I did not hold back from the haze, but gazed into it, through it, beyond it.   And if the smoke stung my eyes, they did not water.  

I was not the same.

* * * * *

The voice spoke again, then.  “Have you anything to say?”

I lifted my head, opened my mouth to speak.  But it was not words that came out.  From deep in my belly arose the sound, coursing out through my throat, a great cawing cry.  Three times the fierce crow-call sounded.  And in the silence that followed could be heard the echoes of that cry resounding down the valley and across the hills and fields.

* * * * * 

So it seems this story ends the way so many real and true stories end: at a beginning.

Rhiannon Belliveau

Scotland, CT

October 18, 2020  

New Moon just beginning to wax