"The Church is United and Triumphant indeed!" he shouted. "And I am its Prophet!"
They flourished swords and lances whose points bore gruesome trophies and chanted:
"Sethaz! Sethaz! Prophet! Prophet!"
The man's voice rose to a tearing shriek:
"I am the Scourge of God!"
"Enough," Juniper Mackenzie whispered. "Enough…"
She staggered. A friend's arm supported her; she blinked her way back to awareness, and saw it was Judy Barstow. Her man Chuck was by her side, concern behind the elk-mask of a High Priest. BD was on one knee, leaning on her staff and wheezing in shock, and Melissa's face had gone milk-white under its ruddy tan. Other Initiates rushed to help them; only Signe stood alone, bristling and baring her teeth, hand closing on a sword hilt that wasn't there.
"Ground and center, ground and center," Judy said softly. "I'll take it from here."
Juniper struggled back towards calm, forcing each breath in and out, feeling the drumbeat pounding of her heart slow. The other woman's voice came to her in snatches:
"… go if you must, stay if you will… take our grateful thanks."
The rite made its way to its end, with the Circle opened. The Initiates filed out, and silence fell in the sacred wood. Juniper tucked the sacrificial sickle through her belt as they left the nemed .
Then she leaned on her staff, feeling her legs tremble, suddenly conscious of everything around about her, from the sweat-itch in her hair to the soft touch of the sandal straps on her toes. And that she was ravenous, and craved sleep almost as much…
The others were as shock-pale as she; Sumina's merry wrinkled-pippin face clenched like a fist, BD's as fierce as her wolf. Melissa was steady, with the stolid patience of the hearth-mistress and farm-wife she'd been these two decades past but with awe and terror beneath, and Signe's valkyr beauty stood hawk-harsh, her bright blue eyes probing. She and Juniper weren't enemies now, but they weren't friends either.
"Does that happen often here?" she said sharply, with fear trembling on the brink of anger.
"No," Juniper said flatly. "I've had visions granted… not often. And never shared like that. not even since the Change. It was always possible, I suppose, in theory, but-"
They looked at each other and nodded, acknowledging that they had seen.
"But even Christians don't expect to have the sun stopped overhead often," Sumina said, taking a long breath.
The skin between Juniper's shoulder blades crawled, and she shuddered as her mouth went dry as milkweed silk in autumn. Yes, she loved the Lord and Lady in Their many forms… but those forms spanned the universe of space and time that sprang from Them, and They could be as terrible as the fiery death of suns, as inexorable as Time. A mother's kiss on her child's face came from Them, but so also the glaciers that grind continents to dust.
"I thought… I thought They might tell us something of the Prophet, this madman out in Montana," she said.
Signe nodded sharply. "I saw him. It couldn't have been anyone else." She grimaced. "And he was as nasty as… well, as nasty as the rumors, which is an accomplishment."
"We all did," BD said. "But more than that."
Juniper took a deep breath, another, inhaling until her lungs creaked and then slowly releasing it, and all the tension in muscle and nerve with it. Ground and center… strength flowed back into her body, and firmness to mind and thought. She saw the others win to calm in their different ways; walking the paths they did gave you that.
"Now, these things we saw are signs, and a wonder," she said, in the County Mayo lilt she'd learned at her mother's knee and all her Clan had imitated. "But it is not the first I have seen here, in this place."
They all glanced at the altar. Juniper had prophesied when she held her son over it at his Wiccanning; and Raven had appeared to the boy ten years later, twelve years ago now. Juniper's voice gained strength as she went on:
"I am thinking that it is Their way of telling us that the storm breaking on us is one that troubles all the world. Not in words, but-"
"Even so, that was more… obscure than They usually are, wasn't it?" Signe said thoughtfully.
"Not necessarily, my dear," Juniper said; Signe had a warrior's fierce directness.
BD nodded. "An oracle's voice speaks like the wind in a forest, turning and twisting like Time Herself. They don't show us more than we can bear."
"We're all mothers," Melissa said in agreement. "You know you can't speak all your mind to a child. How then could the Divine to us?"
They paused, listening to the creaks and buzzes of the summer night, letting the cool scented air flow through them, winning to steadiness once more. The lonely sobbing of the wolf's howl sounded, far and faint.
Juniper added softly: "And also we are told that unimaginable Powers are at strife in the worlds beyond the world. Our struggle is Theirs as well."
"As above, so below," Sumina murmured, one of the maxims of their faith.
"How not?" BD said. "The Powers are many; and They are One."
Juniper signed agreement; both at once were true, and you couldn't begin to understand Them until you grasped it-not just with your mind, but with heart and gut and bone.
Melissa chuckled. "And sure, we're forgetting something. You have to be careful what you ask, for They have more answers than we can swallow. We should have asked as mothers, not just as… as politicians in fancy dress."
Juniper smiled ruefully. "My Rudi's east of the mountains; with your girls Ritva and Mary, Signe, and your Edain, Melissa. We should ask about them."
"Sumina and I will stand as Guardians," BD said. "But… you don't necessarily get what you ask for; They may give you what you need, not what you want. For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without- "
Signe smiled agreement, and completed the line: "-for behold: I have been with you from the Beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire."
Then she shook her shoulders; it was a getting-ready-for-a-tough-job gesture that she'd picked up from Mike Havel. Who had been her husband… and who had also fathered Rudi Mackenzie. It gave Juniper a moment's pang to see it.
"We should try," Signe said. "Though… I wish scrying were as reliable as turning on a TV in the old days."
"Well, yes, that would be convenient," Melissa Aylward said, a stout cheerfulness in her tone. "But on the other hand, there was never anything worth watching, anyway, even with a hundred channels on cable."
"There was always CNN."
"If you wanted a long story about a farmer in North Dakota who'd taught his duck to sing."
"Come," Juniper said, her momentary smile dying.
She walked from the circle of oaks to the pool that lay outside it and went down on one knee, leaning on her staff. The others did likewise. The water flowed quietly, dark and clear, reflecting only the stars and moon. Juniper raised the sickle towards the silver light in the sky with the point up, then turned it down over the water, as if pouring the contents of a cup.
"Ground and center," she said, laying down the bronze and passing her hand over the pool. "Ground and center. Be at one with each other and the world beyond."
They knelt around the still surface of the spring-fed pond. After moments that might have been hours or only minutes the focus lifted. Then each drew the wand of blessed rowan-wood from their girdles and touched the surface of the water. Signe sprinkled it with mugwort, picked at the full of the moon.