Waking the Moon

every direction the ground seethed with snakes.

“Children, children,” murmured Angelica. The air was filled with a sound as of an entire forest of dried leaves taking flight. Still they came, forked tongues tasting the air, their supple bellies reading the stony earth, like so many fingers brushing across a loved one’s face. As they passed the other creatures rustled and shivered, but did not flee.

At the very last the greatest of all the desert serpents appeared. Diamondbacks and rattlesnakes, the immense and terrible sidewinders. The ground shook beneath them, and the noise of their rattles was like that of sistrums and tambours and stones in a hollow gourd; the sound of the krotalon, the ancient Greek rattle from which they took their name. They surrounded Angelica, the stored-up warmth of their bodies making the violet air shimmer, and curled around her legs and ankles like kittens. As though they were kittens she stooped to pick them up, the largest ones as thick around as a man’s arm, and strong enough to capture a young pig.

But to Angelica they did no harm. Instead they writhed and flung their coils about her wrists, their darkly patterned scales nearly lost among her clattering jewelry, and covered her until she seemed to be draped in a shadowy cloak set with winking gems. They gaped to display pale mouths and black tongues and fangs as long and curved as a hawk’s talons. Had they struck her, their venom would have caused the tender flesh of her arms to swell and then decay as necrosis set in, with its subsequent hemorrhage and shock and renal failure.

They did not bite, and Angelica did not recoil at their touch. Thousands and thousands of years before, when the first woman poked at the African savanna in search of grubs and tubers, the snake befriended her, sharing with her its eggs, its young, its own sparse flesh in times of drought. From the snake she learned the patience to hunt, the wisdom of sleeping when one’s belly is full and hiding when the inferno of midday raged. From the snake she learned that we can slough off our lives as easily as a dead skin, and that death need be no more terrifying than that empty sack. It warned her of earthquakes and devoured vermin. She read oracles in its sand tracks, and from its poison derived subtle visions as well as a cure for bites. Like the moon the snake renews itself; with the moon it became the first sacred thing.

And when the first woman’s people migrated north, the snake went with them. In the Libyan desert it was worshiped as an avatar of the goddess. Still later it was the uraeus, the gold serpent that conferred power upon the crown of the Egyptian pharaohs, and wrapped its coils around the blessed caduceus of Innana and Hippocrates. Tame cobras slept in the palaces of the Indus queens, and nursed the godlings of the Aegean, and in Crete every house had its snake tubes, where the sacred adders and harmless vine snakes slept.

“And now you will serve me,” whispered Angelica. “All of you…”

She lifted her arms. Above the Devil’s Clock a crescent appeared, spare and pale as a crocus shoot. “Othiym haiyo!” Angelica cried. A ripple ran through the carpet of small things at her feet. “Oh Great Mother, it is begun.”

Then:

“Go now,” she said, and set the great sidewinders back upon the ground. “As Menat I command you, as Feronia and Pele and all those who rule the stones: wake the earth, free your children imprisoned there! So may we destroy the cities of men and reclaim what is ours.”

And throwing their great coils across the shattered ground, the sidewinders departed, their rattles so loud they sent hollow echoes booming from the mesas.

“You, scorpions,” she said next, “As Innana I command you, and Echidna and Walutahanga and all those who guard wives and concubines. Go now and hide beneath the beds of cruel and unfaithful lovers, and sting them with your tails!”

And the little scorpions raised their pincers and clacked them together like stones, then scattered across the desert in a great army.

“Tortoises now,” she cried, and what had appeared to be a row of boulders lumbered toward her, their heads nodding wisely on withered necks. “In the name of the nymph Chelone I call you! She who was stoned when she refused to lay blossoms at the feet of Zeus. Go now to the lakes and seas and rivers, and wake there your sleeping sisters, the kraken and leviathan and Scylla of the gnashing waves! This I command in the name of Moroch, of all those who lay too long abed from fear.”

On and on she went. Each creature she called to her by name, and in the name of each of their patronesses she commanded them: Melissa of the bees, Arachne’s spiders, the patient ants and scarabs who had been waiting since Nefertari’s death to receive their due. All the beasts she named, all those that crawl upon their bellies and more besides, wolves and shrikes and owls and bats, every creature maligned by men because it had once been sacred to Her. And all of them answered, all of them came; and into the darkness they all raced away, to bring to all the other creatures and places of the earth her bidding.

At last she seemed to be alone in the darkness. Above her the moon had risen into the soft summer sky, its crescent smiling down upon her and the lunula upon her breast smiling back. The air was strong with the acrid odor of ants and scorpions and the venom of rattlers, but there was another scent there too, something sweeter and yet more noisome to the woman. A faint noise sounded in the sharp spears of the ocotillo, and the dry leaves of the huisache rustled softly.

“Who is there?” Angelica called. She turned with fiery eyes to stare into the grove of trees. “Who has not answered me?”

There came no reply. But it seemed that a wind was stirring the huisache, though it was a wind Angelica did not feel; and then it seemed that upon the dry branches blossoms opened, blossoms pale and fragrant in the moonlight. Angelica drew her breath in sharply: the blossoms lifted from the trees, fluttered and circled the broken patio until they surrounded her, a silent rain of butterflies.

“No!” she cried, and stamped her bare foot upon the earth, so hard that the lunula shuddered upon her breast. “I did not call you, it is not time yet—”

“Oh, but it is,” someone said in a low voice behind her.

Angelica whirled. “No,” she hissed.

In the shadows stood another figure—a tall woman with dark hair and deep-set eyes. Butterflies formed a halo above her, and momentarily lit upon her shoulders before wafting off once more. She was cloaked in purple and her face, though reserved, even sorrowing, was beautiful, as beautiful as Angelica’s own.

“Well-met, Angelica,” the woman said. She waved her hand, so lazily that a butterfly did not move from where it rested upon one finger like a topaz ring. “It’s been too long.” And though she did not smile, there seemed to be faint mockery, even laughter, in her voice.

“We have not met,” said Angelica. But the wind that had not chilled her before, did so now.

“Oh no?”

The figure remained unmoving as Angelica took a step backward, her fingers covering the lunula. “Where have you come from?” she demanded.

The woman laughed softly, then recited,

“For years I roamed, far from the birch groves of Ida
Until I lost myself among drifts of ice and the frozen steppes
There I lamented in caves where ravaging beasts make their home.”

Angelica’s fingers tightened upon the lunula. “You’re lying,” she said in a shaking voice. “I do not know you.”

“No?” the woman replied.

“‘But what shape is there I have not had’—”

“No!’” shrieked Angelica. “Why are you here, you