“I don’t understand,” she kept saying, over and over and over again. Bo-ring! Dicle didn’t know what there was to understand, so she gave Yıldız a roasted balık to munch on. It looked so good, Dicle ate one herself.
After Yıldız ate, she said, again, “We just left yesterday.”
“How can that be?” Dicle was getting impatient. The sun was hot and she wanted to clamber up the sacred stair to summon the Mother in the Salt, so she could pray and change and then start home again. “You could not have left yesterday. You are all grown up, but you don’t know about the Mother and you haven’t changed. Did you fail on your pilgrimage?”
Yıldız laughed, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. “Maybe so,” she said. Then she pulled her knees into her chest and put her forehead on them. “This looks like the Tuz Gölü Research Station, so maybe….” Yıldız looked up at Dicle. “Where are you from?”
“I am on pilgrimage from K’pah-doh-K’yah,” said Dicle. “Where are you from? There’s not another village for a million billion klickers.”
“Cappadocia?” Yıldız looked upset. “Where in Cappadocia?”
Dicle frowned. She must be from far away.
“K’pah-doh-K’yah is how you say it,” she said, Miss Matter-of-Fact. “I live in the caves, of course, and Stag-Face is our boss. Everybody lives in the caves unless they’re like Wriggler, who has to live in the lake, so he can breathe.”
“No one’s lived in those caves for centuries,” said Yıldız, as if she knew anything! “There were too many earthquakes; they were unsafe to live in. The Turkish government forced everyone to evacuate.”
“Turkish?”
“Yes, Turkish. Turkey. That’s where we are.” Yıldız got all glassy-eyed again and went quiet. Dicle wondered if she’d have to slap Yıldız to get her to wake up, until Yıldız started talking again, but it was like she was a tiny baby. “Tuz Gölü is an endoheric basin, so if there was any runoff from the Hypersaline Resonator, it wouldn’t get into the rivers—”
“The Music brought the Mother, who came here, but was always here, and she gave us our true shapes. The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” recited Dicle.
“The music what? The Mother?” Yıldız bit her lip. “I saw something down there…too big, it was too big, though. The lake should be less than a metre deep in the summer, and yet….”
“Come with me!” Dicle grabbed Yıldız’s arm and yanked her to her feet. “Space and time are the same thing. The Mother has always been there, forever and ever through time, so it’s deep and big enough for her! Don’t you know anything?”
Dicle took off running toward the altar, dragging Yıldız behind her. She was jitter-jumpy and restless, and anyways, the Mother would explain better, once she was summoned.
“Where are we—”
“Just come on!”
“What the hell is that?!”
Even though Dicle had reached the bottom of the sacred stair, which was made of hard rusty-crusty iron and ran zig-zag up the side of the altar, she turned around to see where Yıldız was pointing. There, at the top of the hill, terrible and looming against the bright afternoon sun, was Stag-Face. Dicle could see his antlers. He’d spotted her, and was running pell-mell down the salty sand to get to her. She began to tremble.
“Stag-Face,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”
“That man has a deer’s head!”
“Come on!” Dicle would not be thwarted. She yanked Yıldız up up up the sacred stair, until they reached the flat top of the altar. She heard clomping on the stairs behind them as Stag-Face’s hooves rang on the iron. Mean old Stag-Foot! He wouldn’t stop her, not now!
Dicle rummaged in her bag and, under the roasted balık, found the sack of her mama’s bones. She placed those at the base of the big circle and found the thing that Wriggler said was called a lever—it was just where he said it would be, on the left-hand side.
“No!” cried Stag-Face. He had reached the top and was pointing. “Dicle! Whee! told me you’d be here! Such a bad girlie! You don’t know enough, yet! You haven’t purified your heart; you haven’t learned the right songs! The Mother will not accept you for changing! She will punish us all!”
“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” shouted Dicle, as she wrapped her hands round the lever.
“Stop!” cried Stag-Face and Dicle heard his hooves pounding on the roof.
“He’s got a knife!” shrieked Yıldız. She was fumbling with something hanging on her belt. “Wait! Wait!”
But Dicle wouldn’t wait, even if Stag-Face had a knife. She yanked on the lever and big, crackling shafts of lightning began to curl around the circle, writhing and touching each other, just like Wriggler’s arms, and they were even the same purple-blue colour. Dicle felt a burst of heat behind her; she heard the angry sound of Stag-Face in pain, and then the salt began to sing. It was so beautiful, it made Dicle’s heart shudder and her skin crawl all over, and she felt a sudden gush of sticky hot wet over her face as she pressed her hands to the sides of her head in agony. It was blood, flowing from her eyes and ears and nose—ugh! But that was the sign of the Mother and, as the Mother emerged, Dicle began to pray, harder than anyone had ever prayed before.
Yıldız, who was now Spots, came back to K’pah-doh-K’yah with Dicle, who was now Jackrabbit. Spots took over bossing everyone because she had teeth and claws like a leopard, and she’d also killed Stag-Face with what she told Jackrabbit was called a “laser pistol”. And that was okay, because the Mother had made her understand, and afterwards Spots was the smartest of them all.
“Ahmet and I went through the Hypersaline Resonator, thinking we could visit this other place, a place up there in the sky that the star-watchers had said was okay for us to breathe and see,” Spots had explained. “The Resonator was supposed to help with the problem of too much time passing here while we were gone. But when we got there, we saw a Mother—a different Mother, or maybe the same one, I dunno—and we were afraid it would come back here through the Resonator, because we didn’t understand that the Mother loves us all, her children, and that would be a good thing! Silly us! But now everything is better.”
Jackrabbit, who had been Dicle, was sure that Mother loved everyone, but she wasn’t sure everything was better, even though she had finally changed. It was true that the Mother had granted her prayers to be the fastest of everybody, but she was now also the scaredest and rarely wanted to come out of her hidey-hole in the caves. All the sounds were so loud in her big ears! She’d almost gotten gobbled by the ghouls on the journey back home because, every time she heard something or saw something, it terrified her and she couldn’t always control her urge to run away and get deep underground.
But, she reminded herself every day, at least she could dance in the revels and she could jump higher than anyone. Not that she felt like jumping or reveling much, even for the sake of the Mother. She was very sad, all the time. Wriggler hadn’t lived more than a few months after snuggling with her. When he’d seen her true self, he’d said she was so pretty and they’d done the huff-and-puff a lot, but only for a few weeks. All of a sudden, he’d gotten sick and pale and told her to go away, so she’d gone away. When she next worked up the courage to bolt down to the lake, she’d found his corpse washed up and rotten on the bank. No one had eaten his meat and that was sad. All Jackrabbit could do for him was clean his bones and put them with the rest, for the time when the next little babies grew up and made their pilgrimage to the Mother in the Salt. And nobody else wanted to be her snuggler, not even Whee!, because Wriggler had put a baby inside her, but when it had come out, she’d gotten so scared when everyone had crowded around to see it that she’d gobbled it right up!