The Fertile Confinement
Everything would have been different if the Maiden had understood that the fine hair on newborn Goat Foot was just the sweetness of peach skin, a baby’s fuzz, soft and auburn. But no. That’s not how it went.
The first major event in Goat Foot’s life was to be punished for being a baby with inconvenient, hairy looks. Profuse hair on a human female: Abominable defect? Source of shame? Yes, for the Maiden it was.
Everything related to hair is taboo, hard to interpret; all that’s known for sure is that the Maiden cast out her firstborn and decreed that she’d enjoy no velvet or smooth silk, cherries or watermelons, not even sweet dates or any other form of comfort.
The girl was taken away under cover of night, in a secret procession, wrapped in that intensely blue cloth with black stripes that foreshadowed her tragic destiny. A troupe of paid mourners broke the air with cold wails. Behind them came the emaciated sex workers who specialized in showing up to burials and offering their bodies among graves. In the middle of the entourage, a eunuch carried Goat Foot, who was destined to die before dying, or to know death in life. This was the price she’d have to pay for an unknown crime, the atonement imposed onher, even though all children are born innocent. Behind the eunuch there trailed two shuffling old servant women, Anguish and Sorrow, whom the Maiden had ordered to torment her daughter in the underworld with daily doses of small, humiliating, tedious deaths.
“What if that’s not how the story went? If it wasn’t the mother who hated Goat Foot, but the other way around?” Sometimes, the alaleishos wonder and doubt, despite their unshakable faith. “It could be. Or could not be. Every face has many faces, all myths have a thousand interpretations, and all hate is a two-way street,” they say, answering their own questions.
In the damp ditch where her mother sent her, Goat Foot, the rejected princess, has only a few belongings scattered on the ground or crammed into chests, and a small altar she’s assembled in the depths of her cave.
“Descent takes tremendous courage!” the alaleishos exclaim with admiration.
To leave the known world, penetrate what’s feared, search for clarity in darkness: Goat Foot was capable of it. She turned herself into an initiate, right there in the earth’s womb, and learned to carve precious stone; developed an oblique intelligence that could interpret oracles, solve riddles, and decipher dreams; worshipped the mysteries; embroidered a shirt of a million stitches by hand; discovered medicines for smallpox, coronaviruses, and cancer; and bathed in the sulfurous waters of eternal youth.
The ages pass and she continues there, buried. Sorrow and Anguish have died and Goat Foot can’t even turn to those harpies for their insidious company. She’s tired of the cockroaches crawling over her pillow, and she longs for the caress of sun on her skin, which is turning green from the damp. She’s learned everything the universe below can teach her, she’s sated by so much eternity and misses the feel of instants.
Sometimes she hears something from the world above, where daylight shines. The moans of a girl who’s suffered disappointment.
“As if you were someone else’s son,” the girl weeps, “you no longer sleep on my breast.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” the alaleishos cry. “How Goat Foot grieves to hear that lament that reminds her of something, or nothing, of what she never had or wants to have!”
Once in a while, other sounds are heard from above that she hadn’t noticed before but now reach her ears. Vague murmurs, phrases on the wind, loose words. The wail of wild dogs, hermits’ prayers, owl hoots, shepherds’ whistles, some traveler’s tired sighs, the voices of women closing windows. Goat Foot pines for a house with doors and windows. She startles at the booming of many steps on the earth: They’re the Malencoii warriors, marching to battle in goat masks. She hears a sailor’s song: “If someone gave me a boat...” Until she catches a conversation between walkers:
“And after that?” asks the father.
“We’ll go back home,” replies the son.
“You know the way, son?”
“Yes, Father.”
Goat Foot is pensive. What home could she return to, when she never had one? Above her head the night ripples and curves, but she, buried, cannot see it.
“Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is sweeter than wine,” a song echoes vaguely. “Come, my love, let us go to the fields and spend the night among the wildflowers, so the dawn finds us among the vines.”
Who could be crooning this way? A strange babbling that fills Goat Foot with longing. The buried princess sleeps, and dreams of a secret night visit from a very tall man—one might call him colossal—with a cape of liquid gold and dark, living curls spilling over his shoulders. He is the fourth Wise Man, called Heretic, and he travels against the guiding light of the North Star. His face is in flames, he has the voracious eyes of a lynx and a clairvoyant’s inverted horns. Goat Foot sees an admirable resilience in him: He’s an orphan, with no father ormother, no genealogy or end of his days, which is why he wears a hat whose brim is in the shape of an eight, or infinity sign. There’s something seductively feminine in his silky eyelashes and the gentle ripples of his golden cape. He’s a giant beast who stirs dread and fascination, and who wakes in her an attraction to what’s feared. He stands before a small table where he’s placed yellow objects that look like spheres, or plates, or alum stones. Goat Foot understands that this giant is also a banished, punished creature, just like her, and that they’re bound by an invisible knot. Despite his appearance, the giant magician is kind. She stares openly at him and sees a reflection of herself; they both live at the margins, they are the marginalized, they are proof that true power resides in what’s been pushed outside. He plays with her, entertains her with magic tricks, makes her laugh. He gives her one of those yellow objects, and she puts it in her pocket. She understands that the fourth Wise Man is initiating her into an unorthodox form of knowledge, the occult science of heresy, which she wants to study.
“What is your god called?” she asks him.
“My god is called Abyss.”
“And where is his word written?”
“His word is called Silence.”
“And that god of yours could protect me and hear my prayers?”
“My god doesn’t listen, nor see, nor protect. He has no desires, nor hatred, doesn’t think or remember, doesn’t move or stay still, doesn’t live or lack life.”
“So what does your god do, then?”
“Not much. He lies calm and alone on the vast plains of a time without time.”
When the princess wakes, Heretic will have disappeared along the path that moves away from the North Star, lost among veils of light and darkness. The yellow objects or alum crystals will also be gone. Goat Foot won’t remember anything about the meeting, except the terror and fervor stirred in her by those avid eyes, which she’ll recall later when she sees those eyes again.
