Two thick-necked young men in north woods jackets stopped Rory at the gate of the W.O.W. farm. When he mentioned Young Goat Star, they sent someone to get her. Rory pulled a stocking cap down over his ears and shivered in the wind until she came to vouch for him.
"This isn't the best night, Rory," said Laura as they walked down the driveway.
"I tried to call first, but the operator said you aren't listed."
"We don't have a phone. We're holding a ceremony tonight, and outsiders aren't allowed to watch. It's not like we've got anything to hide, you understand, but you wouldn't get anything out of it unless you believe. You know what I mean."
"I guess so."
"You can come to the Preliminary Lecture though. Then we can go someplace and talk. It'll be a good night for that. The comet-watching will be good, and I know I won't sleep."
"Something important happening?" asked Rory. They walked down the driveway, crunching gravel underfoot, the lights of the farmhouse glowing on their right, Troll Valley black beyond it. The stars were precise as watchmaker's tools, and the moon was a little gibbous, like a kicked cheese. The cold wind raised goosebumps and expectations.
"Like I told you, Hamster Rory something special's happening here. Now. Like a birth, only it'll be everybody's baby. And we'll be ready. Very soon."
They swung around the yardlight pole, past a windmill, a pumphouse and a chickenhouse, into an old grove of willow and pine, planted in wide rows long ago.
They followed a path through a gate under the shadow of the Troll Valley trees. Laura pulled a small flashlight from her jacket pocket to light the way. The path took them gradually down until, rounding a bend, they saw a crowd of young people gathered around a bonfire near the foot of a tall ash in a wide place by the riverbank. A tall man in a turtleneck and a leather coat stood by the fire, speaking to them. He wore an eyepatch.
"Isn't that Sigfod Oski?" asked Rory.
"Shh. Of course it is. He's the speaker tonight. He's an incredible man."
Oski was saying, "...and Loki looked about him, and all the gods were laughing at him, and pointing at him where he lay on the ground, pinned by the giant's belt. And none laughed louder than the fair Freya. And Heimdal took off his sealskin and resumed his own form. He said to Loki, 'Now the Brisinga necklace is mine, and I shall enjoy Freya tonight. And you must pay the forfeit of both your eyes.'
"And two dwarfs came and ripped out Loki's eyes, and Heimdal threw them into the sky, so they became the stars you see just there."
Everyone craned their necks and looked at the stars he pointed out.
"And Heimdal went into Freya's house and gave her the necklace, and they had great sport that night. And Loki found a boy to lead him deep into Giant's Wood, and there he found a witch. She took two hot coals from the hearth and gave them to him for eyes, so that ever after no man could look Loki in the eye unblinded. And he found the dwarfs who had ripped his eyes out, and he changed them into ravens, and since that time ravens have always picked out the eyes of the dead.
"Ah! The tales are many! So few of them found homes in books. It's a mercy that even a few were saved, when the cold hand of the Church stretched to clutch the heart of Europe.
"You cannot know you cannot guess how it was in those days. And yet you shall know, and soon. For the great Truth the truth which has been lost, but cannot be forgotten is that Time is a wheel. Birth, death, spring, winter, good fortune and bad they come and come again, in small circles or large, like the comet above us.
"The Christians say not so. The Christians say Time is a straight road, starting here and ending there. They speak thus because they see nothing they feel nothing. The world they have built is a narrow, walled place, full of signs that say, 'Keep Off,' 'Don't Touch,' 'Don't Look.' You know nothing of life. You see nothing born, you see nothing die. You plant not and harvest nothing.
"But that circle too turns over. Soon all of you here will learn the true wisdom born of earth Earth, our common Mother. She is a mighty goddess, wiser and kinder and crueller than you can conceive. She teaches in rhythms and cycles, with no law but the law of life and death and rebirth. Harmony is all.
"But I stand and look at your faces, and I ask, "Are you all equal to the quest? Are you ready to take the cold plunge into the world of the spirit? Can you turn your backs on the little rules they've taught you? Can you be strong to defy the thousand niggling voices?'"
"We have to go now," Laura whispered. "The ceremony will start soon." Rory felt her hand on his arm, and he roused as if from a pleasant dream.
"Hm?" he said.
"We have to go."
"I'd like to listen some more."
"I'm sorry, it isn't allowed." She glanced at two big young men in plaid moving toward them. "Not now. But come with me and I'll show you something you'll like."
He followed her back up the path to the farm. They went into the barn, which stood a little tilted, like a mugging victim. Laura switched lights on as they went, revealing cobwebby posts and rafters, as they passed through the main barn with its gutters and dangling iron stanchions and into the little shed that connected with the silo, sweet with the smell of remembered alfalfa silage.
Unlike the more common old brick silos, and most new silos, made of a glass material, this one was built of galvanized steel panels bolted together. The curved wall faced them like the hull of an upended submarine. A row of square steel doors with rungs on the outside provided a ladder up, sheltered by a verticle steel half-cylinder.
"Follow me," said Laura, skipping up the rungs and twisting to look down at him.
"I'm not much good at heights."
"You're not scared, are you?" She grinned, and he melted a little.
He followed her up. He enjoyed the view of her blue jeans bottom, and that kept his mind off the height. And other things that were troubling him.
He was surprised to come out onto a platform, in the icy wind under the stars.
"We took the whole top off last week," Laura said, whirling with her arms spread. "Isn't it an awesome observatory? You feel so close to the stars!"
Rory shivered, feeling much too close to the stars. He got as near the center of the platform as he could, and still felt insecure. It was clearly a recent construction, and he wouldn't have sworn to its strength.
"We've got our telescope here " Laura went to the edge, where there was a short parapet, and took a tarpaulin cover off a very expensive piece of astronomical equipment. "You'd be amazed at the view you get of Cerafsky."
"It it seems like a lot of work just to watch the stars. Putting all this up here, I mean."
"It's part of our Faith. We've got a working astrologer on staff. But the big thing is Cerafsky. Cerafsky is the key."
"You waiting for a flying saucer, like the Heaven's Gate thing?"
"No, of course not. Cerafsky is the key to the new age. Our astrologer figured it out, and Solar Bull saw it in a vision. Something passed out of the earth on Cerafsky's last pass, hundreds of years ago. She's coming close again, and we have the chance to get it back."
"And what'll you be getting?"
Laura smiled. "It's hard to say. But it's beginning to look like it has something to do with Sigfod Oski. There's real power in that one. You felt it. I know you did."
Someone had nailed a vinyl-covered cushion to the platform, and Rory sat down on it. "Yeah, I felt it. To tell the truth, it scares me a little." Rory felt like a man trying to nail a piece of plastic over a window in a hurricane he kept losing control of corners of his thoughts and feelings. The wind seemed to have gotten inside his ears, whistling, making it hard to think.
"You've got to be brave, Rory. I know you are. If you could just see what I've seen feel what I've felt I know you'd join us."
He wanted to tell her what he'd seen, what he'd felt when he gave his heart to Jesus. But somehow, with the wind in his head and Oski's words looping in his memory, he couldn't get his thoughts in a row.
She sat beside him and pointed upward. "Look at the comet, Rory!"
Instead he put his arms around her and kissed her.
They made love on the cold cushion, in the singing wind. When it was over, Rory pulled his clothes together, suddenly freezing. He said, "Oh God, I'm sorry."
"Why Rory? I'm happy."
"I wanted to show you there's there's another kind of love than "
"Who needs another kind of love?"
"I wanted to show you that a guy can love a girl without just using her body." He spat a word he hadn't used in years. "I haven't done anything like this since I left L.A.!"
"Then it's high time. Don't look so mad."
"I'm not mad. I'm sorry. I apologize even if you don't know what I mean. I've got to go."
She caught his arm. "You'll come back, won't you, Rory?"
"No! Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe it's not a good idea."
"You've got to come back, Rory. You've got to meet our High Priest. He's somebody from the old days maybe you met him, back on the streets."
"Who?"
"We call him Solar Bull, and he's the most wonderful, giving man I ever met. He's got so much to share. Back in California, they used to call him Rowan."
Rev. Judith Hardanger-Hansen sat in the front row of the crowd, firelight in her eyes, the wind in her ears, watching Sigfod Oski. Solar Bull's arm was around her waist, and she felt more exalted than she had since her wedding day, long ago. This was greater than a wedding, and certain to be more permanent.
She'd never met a man like Solar Bull before one who respected no, venerated her womanhood. He saw her as a True Soul, a Person, a Priestess.
Which, of course, she was.
In the wind, she heard again the Call that had led her into the ministry. Ever since that day when, as a child, she had told her preacher daddy, "I want to be a pastor like you when I grow up," and he had patted her on the head and explained that little girls shouldn't grow up to be pastors, she had known her Call. Justice. Equality. The struggle that never ends, for the sake of all the weak, all the poor, all who are exploited and deprived and stunted by power. For the sake of every hungry belly, every tortured prisoner, every child without hope, every soul in chains in all the world, she must follow that Call anywhere. Anywhere at all.
So, at Solar Bull's invitation, here she was, ready to be initiated, ready to take the next step in the eternal pilgrimage of the Spirit.
"How I envy you," Solar Bull had said to her that first night when they had talked and talked in the parsonage. "Just being a woman gives you a primal knowledge a wisdom I can never aspire to. Your body is tuned to the cycles of the moon-goddess. You carry the miracle of life you bring forth children. You any woman you're like a flower, like an altar, like an ocean. A man can't know a woman any more than he can swim to the ocean's floor."
She felt the truth of it in her bones, in her woman's heart, felt her priesthood like a bud in the belly.
And now she would see greater mysteries still, in the eye of Sigfod Oski.
"And what of women?" Oski cried. "What of the crime done to them? Thrown down from their high places, made bond-slaves to their husbands, saddled with the blame for what they call Original Sin! Was any rape ever so cruel?
"There are men, you know, who fear women. They won't admit it, but if you search you can see it in their eyes. When a man looks at a woman any man, any woman he sees the Goddess. And small men, men who fear life itself (for Life Itself is in the woman), such men fear the Goddess and wish to dethrone her. Such men make religions where the Male is supreme. They turn their backs on the wisdom of their mothers and try to remake a world where they need not kneel to Woman, need not pay the price Earth demands.
"And growing up under their fist, we are all made little. Lost is the beauty, lost is the terror, of the true earth, of life.
"Come back with me, children! Do not fear the night, do not fear the fire, do not fear the blood. All these are Woman, all these are the Goddess your mother and your lover."
He stretched wide his arms and cried, "Will you follow me?"
"Yes," the crowd murmured.
"Can you touch the Night?"
Louder: "Yes."
"Can you embrace the Fire?"
"Yes!"
"Can you drink the Blood?"
"YES!" they shouted, and Judith shouted with them.
"THEN BRING THE GOAT!"
"Wait! Wait!" somebody called.
Judith turned her head to see a tall young man and a thin young woman pushing forward through the crowd. What could be wrong with them?
Once near the fire the young man said, "Nobody said anything about sacrifices when we joined up!"
"It is time," said Oski, frowning.
"That's not what W.O.W. is about! This is just what the witch-hunters are watching for, so they can start the burnings again! We'll never beat the prejudice this way!"
"The time for overcoming prejudice is past. Our victory will come by other means."
The young woman yelled, "Get away from here, old man! You're poison! You're not one of us!"
Oski laughed. "Look at them!" he cried, swinging a long arm toward the crowd. He shouted, "The goat!" and the crowd began to chant, "The goat! The goat!" clapping their hands, weaving in a Reggae beat.
Oski took a step and seized the young man by the front of his flannel jacket. "It is you who do not belong!" he shouted. "Courage is demanded! You fail!" He lifted the young man with one hand and threw him against a tree.
The young man lay stunned for a moment. The young woman went to him, looked at Oski, looked back at him.
"EVIL!" she screamed.
Oski laughed again. He laughed as they stumbled away together, was still laughing as he turned back to the crowd.
"THE GOAT! THE GOAT!"
A girl led a billy into the firelight. She had a rope over one arm. She handed the rope to Oski.
He made a noose with practised hands, then tossed one end up over a hanging branch of the ash. He pointed to a young man, who came forward. He gave the young man the end to hold while he fixed the noose about the goat's neck.
"Pull up the slack," he said to the young man. "But not so tight as to strangle it yet." It was done. The goat bleated and leaped short leaps on its back legs.
Oski kneeled and took up a length of pole, which someone had converted to a spear with a survival knife.
"The offering must be stabbed and hanged," he said. "That is the ancient law."
"You!" He pointed at Judith. "Come here! You are a priestess!"
With joy she said, "Yes!"
"When I have stabbed the offering, you must put your hand inside the wound.
"I want you to feel the life in the heart!"
Carl Martell felt a weight of guilt as he sat in his office and gazed at a pile of uncorrected tests.
"If I'm going to be a teacher, I'm going to have to start working at it now and then," he said. But if he read the tests, he'd know who'd cheated. It seemed unsportsmanlike.
Besides, he had other things on his mind. A few hours back he had turned down the offer of Elaine's body. It was morning now and, as he'd expected, he hated himself in it.
"Welcome to the Prig's Hall of Fame," he told himself. "Someday they'll display you in a glass case, with a card that reads, 'The Common Victorian, Extinct.'"
But he laughed, because there had been other reasons than moral ones, and because he knew bathos when he heard it.
"I'll never make a Byronic Hero," he thought. "Possibly an Ironic Hero. This is important to understand. If I'm moving toward a Noble Death, I'll want to know what kind of an exit to make." But that was more self-pity, and he couldn't take it seriously.
Blast! A man should have a bottle in his bottom desk drawer, like a hard-boiled detective, for times like this.
He should call Sigfod Oski. He'd tried to reach the man off and on all night, more frightened each time. He'd promised.
He dialed the number, his hand trembling.
The phone rang. He let it ring ten times. Nothing.
He hung up, missing the cradle the first time. His palms sweated. Thank God.
Something crashed out in the hall.
He rushed out of his office in time to see a fist sticking out through a hole in Roy Corson's door.
He went closer to investigate.
The fist was withdrawn, and Carl bent to peer through the hole, keeping well back. Corson was looking out from the other side.
"Hi there," said Corson, smiling lopsidedly.
"Hello."
"Terrible workmanship in these doors. I'm barely hurt."
"Glad to hear that."
Corson pursed his lips and wrinkled his forehead. "I suppose you're curious why I did this."
"I don't want to pry."
"But I want to puncture! Ha! Come in, Carl." He opened the door and waved Martell in.
Corson settled behind his desk, and Martell noticed a small semi-automatic pistol sitting on it.
"You notice the firearm," said Corson. "That, like the broken door, is what they call a subtle cry for help."
"What's the matter, Roy?"
"I've got a garbage bag here," said Corson, fumbling in a desk drawer. "My idea was to put it over my head before I blew my brains out.
"See, I knew a fellow once who shot himself in his living room, and his wife had to clean up the mess. Brains all over the wall, blood soaked into the carpet I mean, it's not like TV those suckers bleed. Completely destroyed a very fine black velvet painting of a matador from Mexico. So I thought, 'Why should I make a lousy job for some cleaning lady who never did me any harm, just because I want to off myself?' I thought maybe the bag would contain the mess, you know? Only I'm not sure it would work. What do you think? If the bullet went right through, it would probably just rip a big hole in the bag, am I right?
"Of course, in a larger sense, why should it bother the cleaning ladies? Cleaning women? Cleaning persons? I don't know what the hell you're supposed to call them nowadays probably Domestic Technicians. Anyway, they dust all the time, and you know what dust is? Household dust, I mean? Mostly dead human skin cells. I read it in Smithsonian, I think. We may not have been created out of dust, but dust is definitely created out of us. So it's all the same, right? Dust and blood and brains?
"Where'd I get the gun? I bought it in a pawn shop when I was living in Chicago. Wanted to protect my valuable person."
Carl sat and looked at him.
"Don't sit there looking compassionate, you Calvinist. I am a rational, autonomous adult. I choose to take my own life. It's a considered, adult choice, protected by the Constitution, and I stand by it.
"Only I couldn't stand to pull that freaking black bag over my head.
"So I put my fist through the door. Hole in the head, hole in the door, it's all the same thing... isn't it?"
"You ought to get that hand looked at," said Martell.
Corson looked at his knuckles, put them to his lips. "Nothing wrong with my hand," he said. "They make those doors out of pressed Post Toasties."
He opened his bottom desk drawer and, just like a hard-boiled detective, pulled out a bottle. "A man should always have one of these handy," he said, fishing in the drawer and coming up with a fat glass tumbler. "You want a slug?"
Martell smiled. "You hit me on the right night. Have you got another glass?"
"You take this one. I'll use the bottle." Corson poured a healthy shot and passed it over. They drank together solemnly, like members of a last-man's club.
Corson picked up a sheet of white paper. "I've got a memo here," he said. "It's from the Head of the Department. It says all personnel will be required to attend an inservice workshop on Literatism. Know what Literatism is, Carl? It's the oppression of those who can't, or won't, speak and read grammatical English by those of us who can. They're going to show us how to teach English without expecting anyone to learn English, and how to grade English classes without giving an unfair advantage to anyone who actually knows how to use the language. It begins to dawn on my chemically clouded brain that my life's work has been for nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
"I ever tell you about my dad?"
"Not that I recall."
"He ran a men's shop in Saginaw, Michigan. It wasn't ever much of a concern, and as our neighborhood deteriorated it dwindled like a congressman's ethics. But Dad hung on, because he believed in Brotherhood. He said it was a matter of principle.
"Anyway, there was this old Hispanic ragpicker who used to work the neighborhood. He was quite a show crazy as an art instructor talked nonstop, a running commentary on every house and business he passed, pushing his smelly cart down the sidewalk, blocking people's way.
"For some reason he had it in for Dad. He'd stop that cart right in front of the shop, and he'd yell for ten, fifteen minutes about the gringo and his cheesy, overpriced clothes that fell apart. He'd say half the rags on his cart came from my Dad's suits, only a week or two old. Crazy things. And somehow he got the notion that Dad was hot for latin women, and how everybody'd better watch if his wife or girlfriend went in there, because everybody knew what he'd be doing.
"Dad understood the old man was crazy, of course. But a guy can only take so much.
"One day he just blew. He stormed out the door and kicked that old man so hard he bounced. Then he kicked him again and again, half way down the block, until the old man left his cart and ran off, screaming. And Dad stood there yelling at him, telling him to take his stinking rags and his stinking cart and his stinking filthy mouth and never come near his shop again.
"Note what happens next. There was a newspaper stringer on the street that day, shooting pictures of something or other, and he got a whole roll of shots of my dad kicking that crazy old man. The paper printed one of them, and LIFE magazine picked it up and ran it in a special feature on racism in America.
"Well just the local part hurt Dad. But when he saw himself in LIFE, and knew people all over the country were seeing it, I think it just broke him. It didn't matter what he tried to do after that the one mark he'd leave on history was a picture of white-on-brown violence. People would see that picture, doing research, going through the stacks in libraries, reading microfilm, for hundreds of years. It would be his monument, and he couldn't handle it.
"The night before he killed himself he said, 'Roy, I don't know what to tell you. You try to do right, you try to do wrong, it all comes out the same. Maybe it's entropy.' Sometimes I think people like my dad are our culture's substitute for human sacrifice."
He looked at Martell, sagging to starboard. "You never been married, have you, Carl?"
Martell shook his head. "I've found other ways to stay poor."
"Wise man. Are you gay?"
"No."
"Being gay might be wise too. Never tried it. I imagine it's pretty much the same as straight sex, though. Which is to say undignified and messy.
"When I was a young buck, I used to believe in sex, Carl. I mean, it was my religion. In those days you remember the sexual revolution? we figured that if we could just get more and more people to score more and more sex with more and more varied combinations of partners, it would end all the world's problems, because frustration was the real cause of all the trouble. Funny how it never occurs to you when you're eighteen that an eighteen-year-old's problems aren't the only problems in the world.
"You know who knew the score? The Church Fathers your Augustines and Origens. They said the sex urge should be buried, suppressed, mortified, and used, if at all, under carefully controlled conditions, like plutonium.
"Maybe I'll become a monk. Do they let agnostics become monks? The church is pretty broadminded nowadays."
Martell looked at him.
Corson swung his chair around to profile, studying the damaged door.
"Sally's having an affair," he said.
Martell dropped his eyes. He could almost taste the truth, with its essential tang of tragedy. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Second marriage, Carl. For me, I mean. Sally's first, but not her last. Six years I thought we'd been through the worst. I thought I'd learned from my mistakes. I read all the right books, I tried to be supportive and affirming and nurturing you know how to get along with a woman, Carl? Learn to crawl. Start each day with an apology. 'My dear, I beg your pardon for five thousand years of intolerable male oppression, and for my own appalling bad taste in being born with a Y chromosome.' Don't you ever believe any married man who puts you down for being single, Carl. You can bet your bagels he envies you right down to his hair-shirt.
"When I was a kid, a real man was John Wayne. Later a real man was Phil Donahue. And everybody called that progress.
"But everybody missed the point. Here's the point this is what sexual politics is all about a man needs a woman more than a woman needs a man. Emotionally, I mean. And neither John Wayne nor Phil Donahue allowed for that.
"Personal fulfillment. Independence. It's all crap. I need Sally. I'll crawl, I'll eat crow and eat quiche, I'll do whatever I need to do to keep her. Maybe that's where macho comes from. Who could blame a guy for trying to compensate for a condition like that?
"You know, now I think of it, I never met a Don Juan in my life who wouldn't tell you, when he'd had a few drinks on a slow night, that he was only tomcatting to fill in time, until he found that right girl.
"Then there's you, of course. The last of the rugged independents. How do you manage that? Are you made of iron? Stop too many lowballs playing baseball as a kid?"
Martell frowned. "I found the right girl. Unfortunately she was looking for the right guy. So I learned to do without. It's like losing a leg, I suppose. You narrow your horizons and cope."
Corson took another drink, refilled Martell's glass. "What'll I do, Carl? Knowing she's banging another guy I can live with that. I think. I lost my pride years ago." (Lie.) "But what if she comes to me and says she needs to leave me to fulfill her human potential with her young stud? No names, Carl, but he's somebody I don't think I can compete with. He even makes more money than I do, but then who doesn't?
"I shouldn't have married a younger woman. Oldest dirty joke in the world it was a chestnut to Chaucer. Although I suppose there's a kind of comfort in knowing I'm part of a venerable tradition.
"The cuckolds of old had it better, of course. They could just kill the pair of them and nobody'd raise an eyebrow
"My God, did I say that?" Ray's eyes went wide in horror. "No wonder she doesn't want me. I'm a monster. I didn't know I was a monster..."
Martell said, "You're not a monster. You're a man in pain. It was yourself you meant to kill, not them."
Corson looked at the automatic. "It's still a good idea. Maybe you should just go home and leave me alone, like they used to do when they caught London clubmen cheating at cards."
"I don't think so."
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when Martell finally walked Corson to his own apartment and tucked him into bed. He collapsed on the sofa and slept until after noon. Corson's gun he had dismantled as they walked, and dropped into a series of trash containers.
"Dala horses. You know, those painted wooden horses from Sweden they sell in the gift shops," Deputy Stokke was explaining to Esther, the dispatcher, a thick, blonde woman in a uniform a size too tight. She sat in front of the radio control board, smoking a cigarette and looking tired.
"Yeah, I've seen 'em. Never saw the point of 'em."
"They're a traditional Swedish folk craft. But what I'm saying is, they actually look like carvings of Norwegian Fjord Horses."
"Don't the Swedes have horses of their own to carve?"
"I'm not sure. I think we have the horses and they have the cars."
"How come I'm not surprised?"
Deputy Stokke was working on an answer when a call came in. Esther listened on her headset, then pulled it off, saying, "It's McAfee. You'd better talk to him."
"How come? He get somebody else claiming they saw wild Indians on the streets? Tell him to do his job, for pete's sake."
"This one's touchy. He just found Mayor Sorenson walking out on County 12."
"What happen, his car break down?"
"Hard to say. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and nothing else, and singing Kan Du Glemme Gamle Norge?."
"Oh boy," said Stokke. "Full Moon City."
Esther began to laugh, noisily and damply, and he didn't get it at first.
The wolf skulked from the cover of a windbreak to lap water from a low spot in the ditch, at the mouth of a culvert. The smell of man was everywhere, and wherever its own scent blew, dogs barked. The wolf was weary, but it could no longer sleep. It was hungry, but too weak to run down prey. It was frightened, but the excitement blanketed the fear.
Fenris. Fenris.
The itch in its brain had become something like a noise. A thing it could not understand, a thing no wolf had ever known before.
A thought.
The wolf had learned its name.