16. The rejection, part 1.

Each festival in the town was consecrated, marked by dancing and celebration and voices raised up. But festival times were also times for marriages. The woman spun and sang with wild abandon, devoted herself over and over again to the gods. Her mind left the baseness of the earth while the others feasted and watched her: some with lust, others with concern.

She soared, reaching her arms up. Just beyond the tips of her fingers, she could feel the hands of the gods reaching down to her from above.

It was two days after the festival of the harvest that she told her father. He brought two more suits to her, imploring her to accept one of the men. She watched him with her coal-black eyes, and finally said it:

"I reject this earth."

Her father stared. What did she mean?

Just that, she said. The earth was not for her. She belonged to the gods. Her life was not made to be rudely touched by the rough hand of a man, to birth his whelps, to carry wood, to slave in his fields. The gods were there, she could feel them, and she would become theirs. As her father stammered, she walked out of their home, to the center of the town, and proclaimed this aloud.

Some of the men who had been pressing their suit upon her were in the market. Crowds of people have possessed a savagery throughout time. Jealousy, covetousness, hatred, all these amplify. A circle formed; stones flew, hands shot forward and clutched and tore.

When the mob withdrew, as all mobs ultimately break of their one mind and shatter into a hundred regrets before running from the crime they have committed, the body of the woman lay on the ground, bleeding and broken.

The ending of every life is brutal, as the spirit fights to hold on to the scraps of flesh that remain. But this death had been different. This woman, who all that time ago so far away (but not that long ago, and not that far) had rejected the earth, moved beyond the tearing of her flesh and the blows raining down upon her.

In her death there had been ecstasy. She could feel the gods reaching down to embrace her and lift her away. Finally the men's hands had touched her, as rough and brutal as she had imagined them to be and worse, and finally the gods had taken her.

As she rose up through the air, it was a filigree, her body, though mangled, was like blossoms on white. The shocked faces of the onlookers didn't matter to her. She had left behind caring about them long ago, when she was a girl.