Magdalen Rising by Elizabeth Cunningham Page A

necessary—the Cailleach insisted it was—and if I had not been so apt a pupil. I love words. I love to play with them. To me they are real and substantial. Forget the pen is mightier than the sword. Who needs a pen or a penis or a sword when we all have tongues. Don’t you love it that another word for language it tongue? We speak of our mother tongues. Say it: mother tongue. Taste it.
    My other course of study was geography, the lessons conducted in the language of whichever region we were studying. She would draw maps in chalk on a big, flat rock near the shelter. When the rain washed the maps away, it became my task to draw them from memory. My understanding of the world’s shape traveled back and forth through my hand and arm. As I scratched on the stone, I also traced the outlines of coasts and mountains and borders in my brain.
    The Cailleach’s maps not only delineated what scholars call the known world, she also made maps of the secret world, the mythic world,
so called because it was retreating from consciousness. Disappearing under the waves, into caves. Wherever there were far-flung isles like ours or dense forests or sheer mountains with hidden valleys, there were people, often women alone, living in secret, the Cailleach said. Though she also drew these maps on the rock, I fancied I could see a map more clearly and indelibly in the lines of her face.
    I was so engrossed in my studies that I hardly noticed the seasons changing, except when my mothers, who seemed much smaller than I’d remembered, came to visit on festival days. The moon waxed and waned. I paid scant attention with my waking mind. Relentless study is almost as effective as running laps and taking cold showers for keeping hormones in check. But now and then, perhaps when the moon drew closest to the earth, I’d be so restless that I’d walk and walk. Usually I’d climb one or the other of the Bride’s Breasts. I’d stand at the top and try to make out the shape of the distant lands in the dark, bringing to bear the full force of my imagination to try to flesh out those maps into masses of land, rivers, mountain ranges, cities, peopled places. More than once I went to the Well of Wisdom at just the right time to catch the reflection of the moon’s face. But that was all I saw: the moon round and ripe and self-contained. I never saw the face I longed to see.
    It was after one of these moon-lit wanderings that I returned to the shelter to sleep and had what you may believe is a dream. To me it was more real than much of what passes for reality. There are times when the rules of the universe are bent out of shape. I believe I passed through, perhaps not a gateway between the worlds, but a gap in the fence or a minute tear in a tightly woven cocoon.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    THE DESCENT OF THE DOVE
    F OR THE SAKE OF convenience, we’ll call it a dream. Maybe you remember dreams of your own that took you to places you have never been, showed you things completely outside the realm of your experience. As you know, I had lived all of my life in a wattle and daub hut on an isolate island.

    Now I see a huge space, open to the sky, but enclosed by massive columns that look to me like impossibly straight tree trunks stripped of branches. This vast wall of what you would call colonnades surrounds latticed inner walls. Through various doorways more people than I’ve ever imagined come and go in an unceasing flow. Within the inner walls, I glimpse a roof made of solid gold, vying with the sun for glory.
    But it’s the people that amaze me most. They crowd closer together than trees in a forest; they cluster like stars. But stars and trees are still. The courtyard is more like an amplified anthill, full of motion and commotion, the rumble, murmur, and shrill of many voices, male voices, issuing from lips obscured by alarming facial hair. (I keep a sharp eye out for a fox-colored beard.) Some of the people have