Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [72]
“I see gardens. Windmills. People. Greenhouses. Where are the huts?”
“Below.” Luciente left the bike by the big maple and helped her off. “We’ll stop by Erzulia.” She used her kenner. “Zuli! It’s Luci. I brought the woman from the past. Meet us at your space to show a Cranberry dwelling, favor?”
“No such,” said a voice that sounded much more like a black from her own time than anybody she’d heard here. “Got a mean pelvic fracture, old person from Fall River. You drop right by my space and show it your own self.”
“Erzulia and Bee are sweet friends,” Luciente said. “Erzulia has tens of lovers. Person never stales on anybody, just adds on. Over there!” She pointed to a two-story building. “The hospital where Zuli works—hospital for our township. That great big greenhouse is one where they breed the spinners—those single-celled creatures we use for fences and barriers.”
“Creatures! They’re alive!”
“Fasure. They mend themselves.”
As they walked, she saw that courtyards were dug into the earth the level of an ample story, surrounded by dense, often thorny hedges—blackberries, raspberries. An animal or a child couldn’t push through. At ground level trees grew, gardens flourished, paths wound, swings hung from trees and people trotted and biked by. Goats and cows grazed, chickens ran pecking, a cat played with a dying baby rabbit. The solar heat collectors and the intakes for rain-water cisterns studded the surface like sculpture, some of them decorated with carved masks, others scalloped, inlaid with shell and glass mosaics.
Luciente led her by the hand down wide steps curving into a submerged courtyard. The yard itself was paved and had in the center a big weather-beaten table with benches all around and a scattering of chairs. A chess game sat on the table half played, under a clear cover like those Connie had seen put over big cakes. The four walls around the court were of glass threaded with spidery lines almost too fine to focus on.
“The glass can be opaqued or made one-way,” Luciente explained.
“This whole house belongs to Erzulia?” Maybe they were richer here.
“No! They live in families. Everybody has private space, but they have common space too, for family. For eating, playing, watching holies. The walls are plenty thick for quiet.”
Individual rooms opened onto courts and the courts served partly as hallways and partly as common space. Halls joined rooms on other courts. Luciente guided her through the maze, occasionally consulting her kenner to ask permission to open a door. They cut through a kitchen, where Luciente begged a taste of a hot spicy seafood stew. Only two private rooms were occupied at this time of day. In one, Luciente said, somebody was meditating. On the door was hung a paper hand with the fingers held up.
“That’s what they use when they don’t want you to enter. I say meditating—of course they may be coupling, reading, sleeping, or just pouting.”
Erzulia’s room faced west. It was spacious, with walls entirely covered in woven and embroidered hangings, texture upon texture and color upon color. Her bed was a high platform reached by a ladder, the space underneath closed in with hangings to make a dark cave of cushions, a small altar, shelves of herbs in bottles. The furniture was of a dark knobby substance that reminded her of bamboo. On the bed a strange blue costume was laid out.
“We should not stay here. That’s Erzulia’s raiment.” Luciente used the old formal word.
“Is she a mother getting ready for a naming?”
“Zuli’s never been a mother. Sappho is dying and Erzulia is her friend. They share a sense of old rites. Zuli follows voodoo as a discipline, as many do in Cranberry, while Sappho is an Indian old believer. But they share a closeness to … myths, archetypes.”
“Sappho? That old woman who was telling stories to the kids?”
“The same.