Evangel’s Arrival
The Meeting Place.
She took the tracking maps, some apples, and a flask. By rights, they were hers, though others might argue that point. From the medicine hut, she pulled a clean pouch and took what she needed then stole away the direction of the thickest bush and highest outcroppings, far past the tea garden and the herbs she had cultivated by herself since her mother died. They had favored each other, narrow shoulders, long limbs, an elegance of posture and expression. But they were both also pensive and complicated. More sad than happy in an honest-hearted way. Their world had gone to shit, and they couldn’t sugar-coat it.
The dignity of forests and meadows and plains and canyons had been either raped or forgotten. They had done their best to hold on to the acres that generated enough profit from their seed barter to feed themselves. And the teas and medicinals added some art to their lives. But once the Betters took hold, the community floundered and home-growing of anything but bigger waistlines (from the processed foods offered at the company store) became uncommon. Their land had been surrounded by the pollutants of agribusiness pesticides. The wind was complicit but not guilty. Humankind had been using the generators of energy, earth, wind, fire, and water, for millennia. Harnessing power, they called it. In the name of progress, leisure, and comfort.
She rested in the shade of a weary willow at the water crossing that would take her into the borderlands, The river, once noble and generous, had been choked upstream by a corporate dam of the Betters. She wore her brother’s boots and all of his leatherings. Passing her palm over the worn laces, she imagined the dear fallen one as she reached for her pouch, kissed it, and drew from it an offering of seed dust, cast to the wind. Tears dampened her cheeks, but she ignored them. “To everything there is a season,” she whispered as she stepped into the river’s driveling flow.
Massive boulders bordered by overgrown rose bushes and wild ivy concealed the tiny guard house. The Watchtress made it clear that danger was behind her but also took her napsack, promising its return in time. The fragrance of baking bread stole her desire to argue. She hadn’t eaten for two days. The Watchtress placed a bathing pitcher and bowl before her and gave her a freshly laundered shift and the woolen cloak of a sister just passed. She ate the rich stew and bread that was offered. Then she rested in a blue hammock that cupped her like the arms of her mother had when she was child.
She lolled until called for the introduction. Rise, she told herself. Rise and be the daughter of your mother and all the mothers before her. The command had been taught to her by her grandmothers, both of them, and was a call to dignity and courage. A resistance kept her cocooned in the folds of the hammock, but her pain was her weakness and never would she be a warrior if she let the pain own her. The voices of her grandmothers strengthened her spine as she uncurled, leaned upward, caught her breath, and flew to the ground.
“She’s got a lot of bird in her,” Our Protectress cackled, craning her neck toward the gray frock approaching. A slur of starlings netted the dimming light of the eastern sky. “Sisters, let’s make her feel welcome.”
The newcomer worked her way through the humming crowd until she found herself eye to eye with the one who had spoken. With hard fought resolve, she peered into the brown eyes set into the copper skin of a face that spoke from fierce angles of survival.
Raising her cupped hands toward her new teacher, she spoke. “I am Evangel.” Our Protectress nodded at the pouch she offered and lifted it out of her palms. And that is how her new life began. With an exchange of rare seeds for safe harbor.
