Approaching the temple, the priestess had to pass through the promenade of gods. The totems were enormous, made from the tallest trees of the goddess’s island, so lofty that the images toward the top were lost to the naked eye. They were not meant to be viewed from her earthbound point of view anyway. They were tributes to Maeben, to be noticed from a divine perspective, circling high in the sky above.
To name the goddess a sea eagle would have been a crass, sacrilegious mistake. She may take the form and have sisters and cousins that were truly avian creatures, but Maeben herself dwarfed them all. Her eyes were ever-seeing, keen and clear, able to focus in on any and all persons and see right into their centers. She deserved-demanded-their respect. And she had the power to remind them of this whenever she wished to.
Over the years, the young woman had learned that there were many gods in the Vumu pantheon. There were deities like Cress, who controlled the shifting of the tides. Uluva swam before the bonito, directing them on their yearly migration near the island. Banisha was the queen god of the sea turtles. It was only with her blessing that her daughters clambered up on the southern beaches each summer and buried their rich eggs in the warm sand. There was the crocodile, Bessis, that ate the moon bite by bite each night until it vanished; sated by this feast only until the moon fruit had grown again to full bounty, Bessis then rose from slumber and commenced his feast again. It was, she came to understand, a world in which the natural cycle of things was ever in question, depending as it did on the goodwill and health of so many different deities. She barely knew the names of them all, but this did not matter. Only two gods shared the apex of the Vumu pantheon, and only one of these was central to her life.
Maeben was not a goddess with a function in the natural world as were so many others. From the day she was born, she scorned being bound to such labor. She was the goddess of wrath, the jealous sister of the sky who everywhere believed herself slighted: by gods, by humans, by creatures, even by the elements. Maeben, the Furious One, was easily angered, ferocious in retaliation. She threw down storms, rain, and wind, snapping her beak to create the sparks that were lightning. Looking upon humans she had long ago found them too proud, too favored by the other gods. Only once did she find a human pleasing, but what unfolded from it was tragic.
The man’s name was Vaharinda. He was born of mortal parents, but for some reason he was blessed even before he had escaped the womb. Instead of his mother singing him to sleep, he sang to calm her. Instead of her stroking her belly to comfort him, he rubbed her from the inside. Vaharinda had a way with women; his mother knew this even before he was born. When he did emerge into the world, all were amazed to behold him. He was perfection. He grew like a weed, but in everything he was of a fine and shapely substance. By the time he was six or seven years old, grown women swooned on seeing him. By eleven, he had known hundreds of women sexually. By his fifteenth year a thousand women called him husband and claimed to have borne his children. He was a brave and skilled hunter also, a warrior that no other man could best. He hefted weapons other men could not even lift. His enemies knew only fear when they beheld him.
One day Maeben saw Vaharinda giving pleasure to one woman after another. She saw how they lay panting beneath him, enraptured, in awe and joy. She heard them call out the names of other gods, asking them to witness the wonder they were experiencing. All this made Maeben curious. She changed herself into human form and approached Vaharinda. She had not expected to lie with him, but once she looked into his eyes, she could not help herself. What a specimen! What a tool of pleasure curving up from between his legs! Why not climb on it and see for herself what joys the flesh could bring?
That was just what she did. And it was good. It was very good. She lay gasping on the sand afterward and only slowly realized that Vaharinda had not been equally moved. He was already chatting to another woman. Flaring with anger, Maeben called him back and demanded that he take her again. Vaharinda saw no reason to do so. He said that she was fine enough but not so much that he would forsake other women. Her eyes were pale blue like the sky, he said, but he preferred brown-eyed women. Her hair was wispy and thin like the high, high clouds that mark a change in the weather; he preferred thick black hair that he could twine around his great fingers. Her skin was the color of near-white sand; this was unusual, yes, but his tastes were more inclined toward hues of sun-burnished brown.
Hearing all this, Maeben grew enraged. She roared up out of her human form and became a great sea eagle of wrath instead. Her wings were the widest ever seen, her talons large enough to grasp a man around the waist, each claw like a curved sword. She asked him did he like her better thus? The people who witnessed this ran in fright. Only Vaharinda remained. He had never yet seen a thing to frighten him, and he was not inclined to change his ways yet. He grasped one of his spears, and they did mighty battle. They raged across the island and up the mountains. They fought in the branches of trees and jumped out into the sky and ran across the surface of the sea. Vaharinda fought like no man ever had, but in the end he could not prevail. He was a human after all; Maeben was divine. Eventually, she crushed him in her talons. She sat in a branch where the people of Vumu could see and she ate him piece by piece, until nothing was left. Then she flew away. Vaharinda’s story, however, did not end there.
The priestess left the promenade of the gods behind and ran the path that wound up toward the temple compound. At one point she paused and looked back at the harbor. There was life there now. Several boats sailed toward the docks, bearing religious pilgrims keen to view the goddess in earthly form. She would attend to them in a few hours, as she did every day.
Approaching the compound the young woman paused once more. She loved looking at Vaharinda’s statue, which sat on its pedestal beside the entrance, both a monument to him and a reminder of Maeben’s ultimate power. The people of Vumu had chosen to honor their hero. He had been the strongest of all of them, the most pleasing to the eye, the bravest, the most endowed with the capacity to pleasure women, the man whom other men most aspired to emulate. They had sent a gift of riches to the people of Teh on the Talayan coast and brought home a great block of stone, of a texture unlike anything on the island. From it they had carved a statue of Vaharinda. He was seated in the reclined posture he enjoyed while at rest, his muscles sculpted in the stone, his features just as they had been in life. He sat naked, and also-as had been his situation through much of his life-his penis stretched up erect, like a clenched fist aimed at the sky. It was a marvelous statue, like none in the world before or since.
With this beauty to behold, the people of Vumu soon began to worship Vaharinda as a god. They said prayers to him, asked favors of him, bestowed gifts of flowers and jewels and burnt offerings to him. Soon women, seeing in the stone the man they had loved, mounted astride his penis and pleasured themselves. They went to him even in preference to their husbands, and many claimed to have gotten living young from the seed of the stone god. They came to him so often and in such great numbers that the ridges and contours of his member were worn smooth and its length gradually diminished. But still he gave pleasure and-in his silent way-he received pleasure in return.
Maeben hated all of this. It angered her more than Vaharinda’s scorn of her had. She took it upon herself to humble them in a way that hurt them most. First, she swept in on the statue and wrapped her talons around Vaharinda’s penis and snapped it off in her grip. She carried the broken length of it out to sea and dropped it. A shark watched her do this. Thinking that she had dropped a prized morsel of food, the shark rose from the depths and swallowed the penis in one massive mouthful. Maeben rejoiced. Vaharinda would pleasure women no longer. She was not finished with her vendetta against humans yet, however. She took the gift that Vaharinda had given to the women who loved him. She took their children. She swept down from the sky and snatched little ones up in her talons and beat, beat, beat her wings until she rose, the child screaming and writhing in her grip, helpless against her wrath.