. . .
Standing in creepy circles isn’t about sacredness, anyway. It isn’t even about joy or love or anything, not really.
It’s more about purpose. Meaning. That’ll be about fulfillment.
“He’s so righteous,” Emily says.
. . .
If she’d had better words —
If she’d had the tongue to let it out, all those feelings that flowed through her, when Bahlum met her eyes —
She might have cried out, and said: “Suddenly my life is filled with beauty!”
. . .
She might have spun on her mother. She might have taken her mother’s hands and her eyes might have danced as they met her Mom’s. She might have said, with a fervent energy, “It is so hard to live in a world, mother. It is so hard to be a person, who is living in the world. Scissors fall. We have desires. We make mistakes. We are imperfect. We do not know how to live in the fashion that is correct. But oh!”
She’d have turned. She’d have pointed.
“There, suddenly, and with such swiftness, my life is filled with beauty, mother. Can you understand what this has given me? Suddenly it’s slipped in, it’s touched me in some place beneath my consciousness, it’s speared right through the unfinished structures of my mind and now my heart is suddenly awake. Suddenly I am bursting with it, mother, suddenly I am full of knives of joyful feeling, they are cutting, cutting, cutting, they are letting out the sorrow and the blood. Suddenly the world is so big, so very much bigger than I am, mother, and so bright, and so beautiful, and so loving; it must love us, mother, it must be a gift, to be given consciousness must be a gift, to know and experience a world like this one must be a gift, mother, because, oh, look at the jaguar move!”
. . .
And if her mother had been struck dumb or timeless by this, unable to respond, able only to flutter her fingers against Emily’s, to share the moment, then the first rush of it would have passed and Emily would have gone on in a soft, low, urgent voice:
“How can this be happening, mother? Why is my spirit lifting? Whither fled my breath? Whither the walls I had built around myself? They are crumbling. Whither the little limitations that I had used to bound my world? They’re falling down. I am open suddenly to something magical and something awful, and suddenly I know that it is OK, that it is OK that I will live and breathe and suffer and struggle and fight and eventually I will die, probably screaming, probably even screaming because a magical jaguar has fallen onto my back, because, because, I do not know, I cannot say, I do not know how it can possibly be all right, how such terrible and burdensome and awful things can be all right, only, they are —
“Because it is there.”
. . .
“It is there. It is right there. The Thing. The True Thing, it is there, when I look at it, when I am lost in its beauty, O See it Move!”
. . .
And if she could have said any of that, then it would rise from her then like a song, and she would rise with it, and make conquest of all things in the world with it: one conclusive word to carry forth all of that, all that she has seen in the jaguar, one little word to follow that, vaster than any mortal “God” or “Om.”
. . .
Only, she can’t do that. She can’t do that last thing because she’s only human and therefore bound to the words spoken by humanity. She’ll work on it later, she’ll hunt for words like that, but they won’t be the kinds of things that human girls like her can say.
She can’t do the rest of the speech because she is seven years old.
There is no way a seven-year-old can say something like that, not even in the face of a jaguar, that is on fire.
. . .
Emily’s too young to understand that there are unfinished structures in her mind, not really, or that a heart can ever sleep; too young to understand that words exist for the things she’s feeling, beyond, of course, “Mommy! Mommy! Jaguar” or “love.”
So her mother doesn’t get it; and Emily doesn’t explain.
“Don’t you think it’s awful how it’s on fire?” her mother asks her. “But apparently no one can put it out.”
. . .
When Emily is hatted, and un-hatted; when she learns the Thunder Dance; when she leaves her House, and when she fights —
Everything she is, and everything she’ll be —
It’s all founded right here, right now, with that fiery jaguar and her Mom.
The Keeper, the traitor, and the savior — all the life and death of her, all the legend that should have been of her, and to the remaking of the world — it’s all born now, in this moment, when the beauty that is the flaming jaguar shines reflected in her eyes.
– 14 –
It is seven hundred years earlier.
Thon-Gul X has sent off the last of his scissors-swarm. He brushes off his hands. They are covered in small cuts.
He goes out to address his people.
He says, “I tell you this. Soon the Earth will trouble me no longer. Soon the Earth will stop its looking-upwards, its staring-outwards. Soon it will drown in blades, and Hans shall give up his life, and his humans and cling wrap and magic wolves and winter — robots, heroes, dreams, hopes, and hungers — they will trouble us no more.”
The citizens seethe. Politely, they applaud. Then they go home. They sit.
They wait for their warlord Thon-Gul to call on them again.
. . .
Time passes and Thon-Gul becomes concerned. He has a terrible foreboding. If the scissors do not cut the earth —
If they do not cut —
“I will send forth a world-killing meteor,” says Thon-Gul X, the wicked warlord of space.
You shouldn’t do that, you wicked warlord!
Oh, Thon-Gul!
It is bad.
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