Astra (43 page)

‘Blood & Seed Day,’ the four IMBOD officers began to chant. Astra heard the adults behind her rise to their feet.

There were no speeches here, no master or mistress of ceremonies, no one telling you where the toilets were, or the order of events. Everyone had rehearsed; everyone knew what to do. She opened her mouth and joined the hymn.

The words were simple, but they were repeated in different patterns, in counterpoint to the other schools, and many hours had been spent rehearsing the full cycle with recordings of the other parts, and once with a Tablette connection between the fourteen schools. Sewing petals in the Earthship, Astra had tried changing the words to ‘Day of Snoring, Day of Boring’. But though Yoki had giggled, he’d caught himself and shaken his head. ‘Don’t make fun of Gaia, Astra,’ he’d ordered. And now, hearing the hymn in its full-throated glory, rising into the evening sky above the Boundary, she forgot that she’d ever resented having to learn it, forgot the times she’d pricked her finger sewing, forgot about all the petals she’d sewn only for Nimma to say
not good enough, unpick it and start again
.

The row ahead of her was moving now as the children from Nīrāgā began to walk towards the entrance to the labyrinth. She was nervous, she realised, suddenly pierced with the dreadful feeling that
she
wasn’t good
enough to be here, she hadn’t practised hard enough, she wasn’t Sec Gen, she had let herself get woefully distracted by Lil. But she couldn’t give in to the fear; she couldn’t let anyone know. She had to concentrate on the hymn, not let the school down. If you forgot your place, it was better to mouth the words until you found it again. Right now they were repeating each couplet five times:
Day of Sowing, Day of Growing, Day of Sowing, Day of Growing
… She
knew
this. Repeating it, she felt her tremor of panic subside.

At last her school line began to move too, starting from the innermost child – the tallest, Tedis – and then she was turning and following Fox on her way to the heart of Gaia’s womb. The beams of light were moving over the labyrinth now, and the IMBOD officers were as tall as trees in the night. Astra hardly noticed them, focused as she was on counting phrases and moving one slow step after another in time to the hymn. At the labyrinth threshold Fox stopped and took a sip from the chalice offered by the man on the right, and another from the one held by the woman on the left. That was the beginning of the ceremony. Without Fox, she might have forgotten. As Fox stepped over the threshold and into the labyrinth, the two Chalice Officers turned to their Second Officers, the flagon-bearers, who refilled the goblets. Astra remembered to face the female First Officer first. The officer was dressed in full uniform: boots, knife belt, hydrobelt, medpac and peaked cap. She lifted the silver chalice to Astra’s lips. It was filled with a dark liquid she knew was red, though it looked black in the weird mixture of light swirling over the clearing. She took a scant mouthful of sour cherry juice, then turned to the male officer. His chalice was full of liquid that should have looked white but didn’t; it was grey and shadowy, streaked with the red light of the Boundary, but it tasted exactly like what it was, her favourite drink, gorgeous rich coconut cream.

Now she was chanting again as she stepped over the threshold. She didn’t need to watch Fox any more; though he was only a pace ahead of her, he was in his own world and she was in hers. She plunged her hand into the drawstring bag hanging from her staff and withdrew a fistful of petals. As she placed her boot on the first red marble paving stone, she let
one fall. The path was already scattered with red and white drops of embroidery and hers was immediately lost in the drift. It didn’t matter: she was in the labyrinth now. The path turned sharp right, not around the edge of the labyrinth, but into one of its middle rings. As she stepped on, other celebrants moving either side of her, she allowed more petals to trickle through her fist. Some fell in the cracks between the stones, others wafted into the flowerbeds, their sequins glimmering in the soft glare of the solar lamps. Ahead of her, Fox was chanting loudly and shaking his fist like a silent rattle in time to the hymn. In the glow cast by the Boundary his back was marbled like the paving stones. So was her own skin, she noticed vaguely, as the red streaks veining her forearms deepened to crimson. Then a beam of hot white light poured over her, draining everyone near her of all colour. Everyone was bathed in an ever-fluctuating stream of womb-blood and semen.

It took longer than you thought to walk a labyrinth; that was what Mr Ripenson had said; but at the same time it took no time, because it took you
outside
time. In her peripheral vision Astra could see the empty centre, but as she reached the end of her first near-navigation around it, the path doubled back on itself, taking her one ring closer to the outer edge. She was walking back alongside the path she had just trodden, further from her destination than she had been before. She was a petal in an eddy of chanting and as she walked the wider ring, planting her staff, dipping into her bag, shedding her petal-seeds, singing her monotonous songlines, she began to understand what it meant to be letting go of childish desires. The hymn was rising and ahead and behind her the celebrants were steadily pouring into Gaia’s womb. She didn’t need to be first to the centre. She would get there in time. She didn’t need to be faster than the others. Their steps gave hers fraternity, sorority, solidity, strength. She didn’t rue the spilling of her petals, the weeks of painstaking work they represented. She wanted to offer them to Gaia, to the feet of her brothers and sisters, to the vision field of her parents and everyone’s parents, sitting in the darkness outside the rim of the labyrinth. And she didn’t want to be angry with Lil any more. She wished now that Lil could be here too, except she was, because she was in Astra’s heart and her rough
tears were staining Astra’s petals and falling softly down to the path too. She was shedding Lil’s anguish for her and letting it mulch into the mystery of Gaia’s benevolence, Gaia’s offer of renewal to every broken, damaged, wounded generation through their children and their children and theirs.

She was on the outer rim of the labyrinth now. If she were in battle, she would be one of the bravest warriors, facing the enemy, baring her teeth, lunging and stabbing, never losing formation. But she was safe, shielded by the Boundary, its wealth of ruby and silver illumination coating her from braid bead to toenail as she walked the far edge of the circle, back yet again to near the entrance, where the path made a wider loop inwards, up past the middle rings she’d already walked and into a simple spiral, its coils tightening towards the centre of the labyrinth. From the corner of her eye she could see the Cedaria had reached the centre. The girl paused, only for a moment, then turned and began to spin back out again onto the path. As Astra made the dizzying rotations towards the core, she met the girl returning, and then her train of Cedaria celebrants. One by one they stepped carefully around her. The prospect of this interweaving had concerned her when it was explained in rehearsal, but now it was occurring she realised the path was wide enough and the brush of flesh on flesh a signal of the energy building in the labyrinth. She had wanted to be the first student, hers the first school to enter; she had thought that being first was a privilege, she had wanted the whole labyrinth to herself; but she now understood it was more powerful to be lost in Gaia’s eternal turning. She dug deeper into her petal bag: she had to cast away all her petals, all her childish doubts, desires and fears, before she reached the centre.

Even though she had been spying it the whole way, that pivotal space – Gaia’s womb-heart, the battle vortex, last standing ground of mighty Warrior Kings and Queens – when the centre of the labyrinth was finally there, underfoot, its arrival surprised her. A tiny part of her mind had
been worrying that it was too small, too crowded, her time in it would be too short – and she
was
briefly crushed up against Fox and Leaf as she entered and left, the queue bunching and inching to accommodate her – but in the moment that she stood and planted her staff in the soil between the three paving stones that marked the centre, she felt as open as the steppes. Her petal bag was empty, her head sang with understanding, her heart was winging in her chest. She whirled once around her staff and began to retrace her steps back to an entirely new world. As she placed one poised foot after another, lightly manoeuvring around celebrants still journeying to the centre, still shedding petals, still burdened with childish desires, she felt her stomach wrench and liquid trickled down her thigh.

She kept walking, but when the blazing white beam passed over her again, she glanced down. It wasn’t wee. It wasn’t Gaia-play juice. It was black.

* * *

She finished the labyrinth walk with tears brimming in her eyes, blood pouring down her legs. Gaia had visited her in the Blood & Seed ceremony. Gaia had
chosen
her. She chose girls rarely, not every year, and when She did it was a great blessing, not only on the girl’s school, but on the whole bioregion. Astra knew exactly what to do. When she exited the labyrinth, instead of following Fox back into their school row, she presented herself to the two female IMBOD officers still standing sentinel at the entrance. In the spill of light between their two erect figures, she patted her leg and showed them her dark wet palm.

Silently, her back straight, the chalice-bearer strapped the chalice into her hydrobelt, retrieved her Tablette and handed it to Astra. Astra wiped her hand on her belly and touch-typed her name into the screen. Her photo came up, with three rows of text beneath it:

Astra Ordott
Golden Bough School
New Bangor
Not Gaia-bled

This was the official IMBOD Gaia-blood database. Girls who had already begun bleeding were listed with the date of their first Gaia-blood. If their cycle coincided with the ceremony, they had to wear blood panties, like Silvie. The only way to possibly cheat the system was for a girl who
had only just begun bleeding to keep the fact secret, then wear a mooncup or a tampon and pull it out and discard it while in the labyrinth. But because of the penetration rule even small tampons and mooncups weren’t allowed until at least age fifteen, so the girl would be breaking
two
laws. Besides, she would have her staff in one hand and all the other celebrants would see her grappling with her Gaia garden with the other as she walked. Even if the girl had somehow connived to gain glory for her school by asking her friends not to report her, celebrants from other schools would see her, and so would the IMBOD officers in the watch-towers, passing their bright beams over the labyrinth in search of any such desecrating act. And later, of course, the site gardeners would find the evidence, even if the girl had managed to tread her tampon or mooncup down into the earth with her heel. So in fact, cheating was impossible – but naturally the officer had to check the records.

The Chalice Officer examined her Tablette, rapidly thumb-swiping and tapping the screen. The swirling light from the Boundary was haloing her thick hair and the screen up-glow coated her face with a greenish patina. She smiled, and her teeth glinted like emeralds. For a moment, she looked like the ancestor in the far seat of the arrowpain. Then she put a hand on Astra’s shoulder and gripped it in a half-shake, half-hug. Beside her, the Second Officer raised her flagon in the air. The Chalice Officer shoved her Tablette back in her belt and twisted Astra around to face the stands of parents and teachers. As the two watchtower beams converged on them she grabbed Astra’s staff-hand wrist and lifted it high in the air.

Astra was quaking and a lathe of pain was rotating in her stomach. The bright white lights were cascading over her, delineating every blade of grass at her feet, sending long black shadows criss-crossing down towards the school rows, striping the celebrants still processing out of the labyrinth, still chanting the Blood & Seed hymn. Over the choral tapestry of interweaving voices, a roar rose up from the stands. The adults were applauding. They were calling
Gaia Gaia Gaia
.

The officer was yanking her arm out of its socket and her gut was wound tight as a scarf caught in a bicycle chain. Her face contorted with pain and she was afraid she might drop her staff. When she opened her eyes, a Kezcam was dropping out of the sky. With a tiny shudder, the black ball stopped directly in front of her, on the edge of the spotlight.

Astra stared into the lens and placed her free hand between her legs. She thrust her dripping red palm out towards the camera and up into the
air. The cheer of the crowd intensified and their clapping became rhythmic in time to the chant. The spotlights swerved back to the labyrinth, the applause ended with a final full-throated
GAIA
, and she and the officers were left in the dark.

As her eyes adjusted back to the marbling Boundary light, the Chalice Officer dropped her arm and bent down to shout in her ear, ‘Go back to your place in your row.’

She was a woman now – but like a child, she wanted to find Nimma and curl up in her cushiony lap, or go and lie in the long grass on the edge of the woods. Instead, she rejoined the queue of exiting celebrants, strange students from another New Bangor school who parted to let her in, and when the queue reached her row she peeled off and slipped back to her place next to Fox, walking slowly with head held high past all her friends, who couldn’t reach out and pat her on the back or hug her because the Kezcam was following her and any breach of protocol would subtract from the points she had just earned, but whose sweet, kind, familiar faces radiated joy for her and pride for Golden Bough School.