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By Root 1137 0

many before her, first opened her eyes on a place without trees, with mountains only, and a great mountain had just blown open and splashed a fiery cloud above it made of smoke and ash. Lyaa’s belly ached and her head felt as though it were on fire as she lay dreaming in the dark, picturing those sparks, that sea, that sky, one far bright star above it breaking through the nearby fire so strong it was and so close to home. That star would ignite itself each sunset and serve as a signpost which each and all of her mothers would use as a marker of the trail toward safety and the future, even as she knelt in the dust and retrieved that stone that had shot up out of the burst of flame from the bowels of the earth, the stone gift from the belly and bowels of the mother.

Here it is!

Nothing settled down on this voyage except the pain, a dull rumbling in her belly and chest that never left but also never rose to the heights of the unbearable. It stayed with her, like the shifting of the timbers below decks, like the thumping of the waves against the hull, stayed always with her through the dark and into the moments when crew descended into the belly of the ship, torches burning.

When fever attacked her, she lay there burning in her own presence, calling again on Yemaya to grant her safe passage, though to where she could not say. For all she knew she might sail forever, bound to the bench, starved and thirsty, hearing voices in torment and voices in song. When she recovered from the fever—a miracle? Or just chance? She chose to see it as a gift from the goddess, who surely was guiding the ship toward safe harbor, wherever that might be—

Her blood had stopped.

Yemaya!

The goddess and her cohort tested her faith fully when the ship sailed into a deepening storm that made everyone in the hold as sick as dying monkeys.

Yemaya!

For days the benches—the world—rolled and pitched, dipped and pitched, and everyone threw up the contents of their near-empty stomachs, which meant blood and bile slopped the floor and swelled the air with a stench unimaginable to anyone who never lay chained to a bench in the middle of the ocean in a storm that nearly took the ship apart timber by timber.

When, after some nightmare of time, the ship settled once more into a steady forward pitch, she believed that she might have died, except that around her she could see some were living, some were dead, and there was a difference. The dead merely lay there, in various odd positions. The living twitched, vomited, and moaned.

Could anything more horrible happen? Oh, yes, oh, yes.

Once again into her world descended the bald-headed sailor and without a word released her from the bench and led her by the chain up the steps onto the upper deck. She had to follow, and yet she wanted to follow—if she were not on the chain she would still have kept quickly behind him, recognizing the pain in her belly was hunger and admitting to herself—forgive her, goddess!—that she would do anything for food.

And she did anything, and everything, and things she could never have imagined, under cover of darkness—dark below in the captives’ deck, dark above on the upper deck, with dark clouds covering a sky that seemed lighter than the ocean on which the ship coursed along, sails full of wind, Yemaya’s children blowing into the cloths to swell them and push the ship along.

This went on a while, this time, and other times, always in the middle of the night, and one night a full moon, graced with passing clouds, cast down its eye on her, and she became afraid, could not move, and the sailor twisted her and pushed her, goaded her with the handle of a whip, and she heard Yemaya telling her, “Go with him, young woman, go with him,” and she never wondered why after that. The sailor gave her bread and bits of meat, kept her alive so that he could have his way with her, but by living she had her way with him.

Now in the dark she could feel the weight of her ribs pressing down onto the bench on which she lay—and she was one of the lucky ones.

Now in the dark, she felt the rush