Her face gleamed with sweat, sweat coursed down her throat and warmed the lunula until she felt as though a heated blade nudged between her breasts. Still she danced, her breath coming in sharp hard bursts that were counterpoint to her footsteps, and with each turn and stamp of her heels she drew nearer to the edge of the pool. Behind her now all the earth was broken, tiles shattered and stones as well, so that it looked as though some small but powerful machine had razed the patio. When she reached the edge of the pool she poised, shining like a glazed figure still cooling from the kiln, then without a sound dived beneath the surface.
The water was warm as new milk from a mother’s breasts, so warm that her blood seemed to flow in and out of her veins, mixing with the quiescent darkness that surrounded her. Seven times she climbed from the pool, seven times returned to its depths; until at last she rose and stood upon the broken patio, the water sliding from her in pale ribbons.
Above the Devil’s Clock the storm had spent itself. Now and then faint rumblings echoed from the distance, but otherwise the night was still. With the storm some of the evening’s heat had passed. A chill breeze rustled the spiny ocotillo and the agave’s heavy blade-shaped leaves, bringing with it the smell of rain and damp shale from the mountains far to the north, the first augury of summer’s end. Angelica shivered a little in her nakedness, but the potent kykeon still burned inside her. She picked her way across the cracked tiles, nudging shards of terra-cotta out of her way. When she reached where the patio ended in a jumble of soil and broken pottery, she laughed and shook her head, her tangled curls flinging droplets into the air.
“Come then!” she called, opening her arms to the night. “I am ready—”
And they came: from every opening in the earth they scuttled and slithered and crept, hollow legs and shells rattling against the stones, scales rubbing together with a sound like sand running through the fingers, ponderous feet clawing for purchase upon terra-cotta. Gila monsters and elfin lizards, rattlesnakes and pit vipers, the tiny sacred scorpions of Innana that would be colorless were it not for the amber venom floating inside their arched tails, like retsina in a glass. Ancient tortoises pushed aside walls of earth and clambered up to gaze at the woman. Nestling spiders, and beetles that dwell within spheres of dung, and millipedes, whose legs whispered across the sand, and centipedes, with mandibles that clacked: all emerged from their sunken castles, to welcome her and give her homage.
But mostly, there were snakes. Docile rosy boas, western racers like wands of brushed steel, eyeless worm snakes so small a hundred of them would not fill a teacup. Puff adders, coachwhips, tiny ring-necked snakes that children could wear as glossy jewelry; lyre snakes, whose bite causes gongs to ring and clamor, and night snakes, whose rubbery fangs hold no more venom than a honeybee. As though they were being disgorged from the earth’s very core, as though rivulets of magma spewed forth and then cooled into living coils and veins of serpents: in every direction the ground seethed with snakes.
“Children, children,” murmured Angelica. The air was filled with a sound as of an entire forest of dried leaves taking flight. Still they came, forked tongues tasting the air, their supple bellies reading the stony earth, like so many fingers brushing across a loved one’s face. As they passed the other creatures rustled and shivered, but did not flee.
At the very last the greatest of all the desert serpents appeared. Diamondbacks and rattlesnakes, the immense and terrible sidewinders. The ground shook beneath them, and the noise of their rattles was like that of sistrums and tambours and stones in a hollow gourd; the sound of the krotalon, the ancient Greek rattle from which they took their name. They surrounded Angelica, the stored-up warmth of their bodies making the violet air shimmer, and curled around her legs and ankles like kittens. As though they were kittens she stooped to pick them up, the largest ones as thick around as a man’s arm, and strong enough to capture a young pig.
But to Angelica they did no harm. Instead they writhed and flung their coils about her wrists, their darkly patterned scales nearly lost among her clattering jewelry, and covered her until she seemed to be draped in a shadowy cloak set with winking gems. They gaped to display pale mouths and black tongues and fangs as long and curved as a hawk’s talons. Had they struck her, their venom would have caused the tender flesh of her arms to swell and then decay as necrosis set in, with its subsequent hemorrhage and shock and renal failure.
They did not bite, and Angelica did not recoil at their touch. Thousands and thousands of years before, when the first woman poked at the African savanna in search of grubs and tubers, the snake befriended her, sharing with her its eggs, its young, its own sparse flesh in times of drought. From the snake she learned the patience to hunt, the wisdom of sleeping when one’s belly is full and hiding when the inferno of midday raged. From the snake she learned that we can slough off our lives as easily as a dead skin, and that death need be no more terrifying than that empty sack. It warned her of earthquakes and devoured vermin. She read oracles in its sand tracks, and from its poison derived subtle visions as well as a cure for bites. Like the moon the snake renews itself; with the moon it became the first sacred thing.
And when the first woman’s people migrated north, the snake went with them. In the Libyan desert it was worshiped as an avatar of the goddess. Still later it was the uraeus, the gold serpent that conferred power upon the crown of the Egyptian pharaohs, and wrapped its coils around the blessed caduceus of Innana and Hippocrates. Tame cobras slept in the palaces of the Indus queens, and nursed the godlings of the Aegean, and in Crete every house had its snake tubes, where the sacred adders and harmless vine snakes slept.
“And now you will serve me,” whispered Angelica. “All of you…”
She lifted her arms. Above the Devil’s Clock a crescent appeared, spare and pale as a crocus shoot. “Othiym haïyo!” Angelica cried. A ripple ran through the carpet of small things at her feet. “Oh Great Mother, it is begun.”
Then:
“Go now,” she said, and set the great sidewinders back upon the ground. “As Menat I command you, as Feronia and Pele and all those who rule the stones: wake the earth, free your children imprisoned there! So may we destroy the cities of men and reclaim what is ours.”