Woman Who Loved the Moon by Elizabeth A. Lynn Read Free Book Online Page B

summer, before all that they had to do was done. But on a clear, cool autumn morning Shea and Rhune walked to the beach; to where Windcatcher waited. The breeze stiffened her sail in the sunlight. Shea called her; like a sentient thing she came and hovered in the shadows.
    Shea fastened the gray cloak around his shoulders. “Look for me when the storms rise,” he said. “If I come back it will be on a hurricane. And if ever you have need of me, come to this place and speak your need aloud, and the winds will bring your words to me, wherever I am.”
    Rhune nodded. “I will. And if ever you need a companion in your travels, Shea, get word to me by any means you can, and I will come to you.”
    They embraced. The bay reached in, and a wave wrapped Shea in a gray-green fist. He rode it to the little ship, and boarded her, and turned her outward. The current took them. The sail winked in the sunlight once and then grew small: a white wing skimming a green sea.
    “Farewell. Sail well,” called Rhune. The wind caught his words and tossed them into the brilliant air. For a while he lingered on the beach, till he could no longer see the ship. Then he turned, and, without looking back, walked across the beach to the house of Kameni Bay.
     
     

 
     
    The Gods of Reorth
     
     
    This story is the second story I finished. It too was written in Chicago. I started submitting it to markets in the summer of 1972, and it came right back to me with encouraging little notes saying that although the editors didn’t want that story, she/he/they liked the quality of my writing. Vonda Mclntyre and Susan Janice Anderson wanted to buy it for Aurora: Beyond Equality, except, they said unhappily, it didn’t really fit their theme. A few editors, all but one male, returned it to me with snarly comments about wanting to kill men. I thought they’d missed the point...
     
    * * *
     
    This is the story of a goddess Who had once been a woman named Jael, and what She did.
    She lived in a cave on an island. Around Her island of Mykneresta lay others: Kovos and Nysineria, Hechlos, Dechlas, and larger, longer, fish-shaped Rys, where the Fire God lived within his fuming, cone-shaped house. She was the Goddess. From Her cave sprang the vines and grains that women and men reaped from the fertile ground; from the springs of Her mountain welled the clear water that made the ground fertile, and gave life. Her mountain towered over the land. When She grew angry the lightning tore from the skies over Her cave, and the goats went mad on the mountainsides. “Hard as frost, indolent as summer rain, spare us, spare us. O Lady of the Lightning,” Her poets sang. Sometimes the music appeased Her, and then She smiled, and the skies smiled clear and purple-blue, as some said Her eyes must be. But they were not: they were dark and smoky-green, like the color in the heart of a sunlit pool, touched to movement by a summer shower.
    They smoked now. Above Her cave lightning reached webbed fingers to the stars. “The Lady is angry,” whispered the villagers. Inside the vast cavern that was Her home She stood staring at a pulsing screen. It burned and leaped with pinpoints of light. She read the message from the screen as easily as a scribe reads writing, and Her fingers sent a rapid reply out to the waiting stars.
     
    WHY DO THE MEN OF RYS ARM FOR WAR?
    MYKNERESTA IS A PEACEFUL AND FRUITFUL PLACE.
     
    A moment passed, and the patterns answered, scrolling lines of amber fire on the dark, metallic screen.
     
    PROBABILITIES PROJECT RYS AN EMPIRE.
    THIS IS DESIRABLE. DO NOT IMPEDE.
     
    Jael stared at the fading pattern, and swept a fierce hand across the board. The message vanished; above the cave’s roof, fireballs rolled and then disappeared down the sides of the mountain.
    This is desirable. In her mind, the silent screens retained a voice, a cool, sardonic, male voice. War! She scowled across the room. An ugly, evil thing she knew it was—though she had never