Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [31]
She thought she was dreaming—perhaps she was—so she lay back and closed her eyes.
At dawn she rose and went to visit her mother, whom she found still asleep. But not asleep!
She did not breathe! Oh, Lilith, mother, mama, gone, gone gone!
It took Wata months to get over the initial shock of her mother’s death. She longed to see her again, in fact, now and then becoming convinced that Lilith had just peeked at her from behind a tree, and when a thought came to her on some matter about which her mother had taught her she could hear Lilith say the very words she was thinking. Fetch water before sunrise while it is still cool. Or, look before you step to keep from offending a snake.
She hoped for a miracle, she hoped she might find another mother. Who knows what lay outside her vision? You could not walk a forest path without seeing demons or go to bed at night without worrying about ghosts. She had, in fact, overheard the prayers of her father’s other wives too often not to know words that she might say in protection. The god her mother prayed to, and her mother’s parents before that, a man’s god, did not have much power here in the deep forest. Where she lived now only the local spirits held sway, and on a night such as this, when she awoke with an instant flash of fear, she could not help but turn to them, to the dark mother whose figure arched over all when Wata tried to imagine her, in her body of shadows and smoke, a cloud above the hut, a wave of air shimmering in sunlight. Wata! Yes, she thought of herself now in that way, named after a goddess, and trying to live according to how the goddess might want her to live.
And what would the goddess do with the creature who appeared next to her just now in the middle of another of those nights of half sleep, half waking dream, her mother in her thoughts both in darkness and in light?
“Wata…”
Here was the chief’s oldest boy by his second wife, and he smelled of bitter oil and some not so sweet brew he must have been drinking.
“Go away, you stupid boy,” Wata said.
The boy threw himself down next to her and said, “I am not so stupid for choosing you, am I?”
“Choosing me? What is your little game?” Wata said. “Now, shoo! Shoo! Go back to your mother, little boy!”
Instead, he grabbed her wrist.
“And who are you to order me around? I am my mother’s son, also, and my father is your master.”
“What do you want with me? It is the middle of the night. I was asleep, I was dreaming.”
“What were you dreaming?”
“I do not remember.”
“Try to remember. Tell me.”
“Are you a healing man? Did I come to you and say that I had a bad dream?”
He sat down next to her, as still as could be, which was not entirely still, because, after all, he was a boy.
“Tell me your dream, and I will let you go.”
“Am I your prisoner that you can let me go?”
“Tell me your dream.”
“And then you will let me go?”
The boy laughed.
“Sly you are, very sly.”
“A woman has to be,” Wata said.
“Yes, yes, especially a woman who belongs to my father and who will one day belong to me.”
“You will never own me,” Wata said. “No one will ever own me. I belong to my mother only, and her mother before her.”
“What?” The boy held up his hands in mock-amazement. Outside in the forest a wild thing howled, a monkey or a cat feeling the claws of another beast rake along its back or side or a small animal recognizing that it was about to be devoured by a beast larger than itself.
Wata!
A voice cried in her ear. That of the small beast? She didn’t know.
Wata!
Could the boy have been speaking? He sank to his knees and then lowered himself on top of her.
“Go away,” she said, squirming beneath him.
He didn’t pay attention to her voice, only to her body.
Wata!
Before she knew he had pried open her legs and stupidly probed away at her.
“Stop!”
“Hush,” he said, suddenly half out of breath.
“Stop it now!”
He kept on probing, stabbing.
She raised her fists as if to strike him—hard—but he grabbed her by the wrists and pushed himself into her at the cost of tearing