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About the Grass
Told by Black Ewe of the Obsidian of Madidinou
Women go many times to the Grass, that’s the saying. Of course all Dances come and go, turning on the hinge of the year, and we in the Valley dance them many times in a life. The Sun, the World, the Summer, told like beads under the fingers – you might speak of this Moon or that one, the year it rained hard every night or the year you danced with a forest-dwelling man who you never saw again, the year everyone went up to Sinshan for the Water, or the year you first danced the Inner Sun. But the Grass – well, I can’t say what it’s like for the men. Maybe it is like that, the year the rains came early or the year there was the fire in the winery. But for us women, it’s we who change, not the dance. You dance the Grass as a woman who has her moon’s blood or one who doesn’t; as a woman who’s come inland and lives with a man or one who never does; as a woman with children in the Houses of Earth or children in the Houses of Sky. And in the end you dance it as an old woman, your body a dry husk at year’s end, ready to settle back into the earth again.
The Grass is the curling cloud on the mountain and the stopped breath of the wind; it’s the rain on the dry earth and the first faint haze of green, risen overnight: it’s the going down into the dark of the heyimas, full of bodies and power, and the coming up into the light. Dancing it for the first time, that’s a scary thing, when you open yourself up to the potential that lives in you.
You begin the learning of it when you join the Blood Lodge, stepping into womanhood, and it takes time: after you join the Lodge you don’t dance the Grass for a few years, or longer sometimes. Many dances are austere or demanding: the Inner Sun is requires fasting and solitude, and the first night of the World is for mourning. But the Grass is difficult in its own way and that’s as it should be. Growing a baby is not easy; getting it is, but growing it is hard, labouring is hard and loving a child is hard.
So it’s always a solemn thing, the first day of the Grass: all the women of the town come from their houses just as dawn starts to show, slipping through the town like ghosts; we wait in the dancing-place, silent in the half-light – old and young, friends and neighbours and sometimes strangers too, a woman come from another town to dance with sisters or cousins, or forest-dwelling women come back to share with their kin. And when everyone’s there and the sky’s just light we go down together into the heyimas.
What happens on the first day and night of the Grass is hard to explain: it’s a thing for the body and the breath, not the mind and the written word. In the dark of the heyimas there is nothing but the joined hands and the press of bodies and the power growing in the song: we pass the cup among us, lip to lip, and though we are mother and daughter, sister and cousin, adolescent or adult or old, yet curled in the belly of the earth we are all children and all mothers.
In the afternoon of the second day we come up again into the light. The men have closed up all through the town before then, the houses standing with their doors and windows shut and their backs turned: the Red Adobe build the shelters for us out in the meadow beyond the heyimas, and we go there to begin the long chant. All through the second night and the third day we carry on the singing and the people of the Sky join with us, singing the joy into being, the falling rain and the growing grass, the beginning year and the flourishing earth: then as the third day goes on the chant changes to the song of birth, and it brings us back into the Houses of Earth, first to ourselves and then to our sisters and kin.
By evening we’re tired and emptied out, and we go back across the hinge into the common place where the town is thrown open again to welcome us home, lanterns strung along the eaves to light the way and every door glowing with firelight, and the figures within waiting to bring each of us to her own hearth. Sometimes everything you want is in the house before you and you cross eagerly, willingly; sometimes nothing you want is there and your steps are slow. But as you go down and rise, so you must return. The Grass is not always an easy dance for a woman.
A Grass Song of the Red Adobe
Grass is rising on the mountains
Mist is gathering in the prairies
Rain is falling on the forest
Leaves are swirling to the ground
Swirling in the winds of autumn
Turning yellow, shrivelling, rotting
Decomposing into leaf-mould
Where the seeds will rise again.
On the first day we are silent
Hiding in the deep heyimas
Like the marmot, like the woodchuck
In their burrows underground.
Marmot sleeping over winter
As the snowdrifts fill the forest
Woodchuck sleeping over winter
Sleeping more than human sleep.
On the first day we are silent
On the second still are silent
On the third day we are waiting
Waiting for the moon to rise.
When it rises we will wander
Back to where our homes await us
Where we’ll find our men and children
Sitting by the blazing hearth.
More about the Grass
Told by Bay of the Red Adobe of Madidinou
The Grass is a strange time. It’s not like the Moon when we men go off to the sweat lodges and bathe in the river, or like the Sun when everyone celebrates together: the days of the Grass are days of silence and absence. The women all get up and leave quietly in the dark before dawn on the first day; by the time it’s light the town is hushed and half-empty. Of course the little children don’t like it, their mothers and grandmothers and aunts all gone, and when you go to work the vintner’s not there to advise or the wiring left half-finished… All three days we stay on our own side, doing the work of tending animals or crafting or learning, though nobody does any planting or hunting – even the Bay Laurel boys stay close to home.
The Grass is a women’s dance, but like the Moon, there’s not one without the other; a child makes both mother and father its parents, and a man is son, brother, father and grandfather. That’s why it’s important to have goestun, if there’s no man in a household – at the Grass a man should hold his family close. In the evenings some of the older men set up drumchants in the barns, but mostly we’re inside, taking care of things. We do a lot of cleaning and a lot of preparation: the singing of the Grass is hard work and when the women come home you want everything to be calm and welcoming.
Before the end of the second day all us in the town come inside and close the doors and shutters before the women come up to sing. Even with the shutters closed you can hear their song on the wind: you hear it when you lie down to sleep, distant and comforting like the rain through the night, and the same in the morning. There are stories about boys sneaking off to see what the women are doing, or of men who were jealous and tried to keep a watch on their wives, but it’s always a tale that’s long ago and in another town; if you went out you’d be seen straight away, and I don’t know anyone who’d really try.
The third day is the day of waiting; if an animal is sick or birthing we stay to attend it, and the Doctors to the very ill, but otherwise we stay close, singing breath-songs and listening for the change in the chant. It comes quickly when it comes, strong and swelling like the turn of the tide or the child hurrying to be born, and then we know to build up the fires and set out the lanterns. We men of the Red Adobe go out to light them all around the houses so when the women come back into the dancing-place their way home is lit and ready. It’s peaceful, the end of the Grass, not like the Sun or the Wine with feasting or games, just the women coming back into our houses to sit at the fire with us and rest.
Fireweed Tea
Gather fireweed leaves in the summer, taking them from the middle of the stem where they’re fully-grown and undamaged. Put them in a shallow basket overnight to let them wilt, then the next day take them in small handfuls and roll them between your palms. You have to work quite hard at it until they’re bruised and soft. Put the rolls of bruised leaves into a jar with a tight lid and leave them to ferment, opening the jar and stirring them round once or twice a day. After three days, once the leaves have turned dark, lay them out in the sun to dry. When they’re completely dried out and crumbling pack them into a sealed jar and leave to cure for at least three months.
Tea for the last night of the Grass: Cut two or three slices from a ginger root, and roughly crush a few peppercorns in a mortar together with a good pinch of fennel seed. Add the spices to a half-pint of water and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and add two spoons of dried fireweed leaves and a half-pint of milk. Stir and allow to brew for five minutes, then strain and sweeten with honey.
Flicker’s Story
It was not until my middle life, in the time when Stillwater and I lived together, that I understood the Grass Dance. As an adolescent I had feared it, and I was not alone in that: to own one’s body and one’s womanhood is no small work. But I had more reason than most to hold myself apart from it, for in those years I carried within me a love I would not name and the dream of a child I could not bear, and those I would not take with me to the heyimas. From one Grass to the next I lay abed while my grandmother and my mother and aunts went silently in the dawn, leaving me like a green berry on the branch, still sour and hard.
Later, when the vision of the Ninth House came to me and I went to Wakwaha to work with the scholars to tell it, I set aside all thoughts of the body. Only when I came back to Telina there was no stepping away from it any more and I made my late beginning, but the telling of the vision had left me too empty in body and soul to let the lessons of the Grass come to me. Milk said to me once, ‘Your body is not a vessel for another to fill; you must fill it yourself.’ But it is an impossible thing, to feel love when someone says you must, as impossible as to be told, ‘Dream!’
Yet when I first held my young son’s hand, love swelled in me like a creek at the autumn rains; for Stillwater and his children I was full to overflowing and in those years I danced the Grass with a whole heart. I could leave my sons and my husband in the house and go to do the work of womanhood, I could live the days in the earth and under the sky, go out and come back to myself, and in the evening it was nothing but joy to stand in the dancing-place and see the light in my door from the hearthfire within and the love I had not expected to find waiting to welcome me home. Those years stand still at the centre of my life.
When he was sixteen my younger son died, as we knew he must, and that time was ended. Stillwater went back to Chukulmas and I to live with Milk, and that first year it was not so bad: though she was heavy with age and I with sadness, yet we danced the Grass together – weight and grief are part of the dance also, and we could share each other’s burden. At the end of the third day we came across the Hinge of Telina together as the lanterns were lit and in our household found my older son waiting with the kettle over the fire, and even in my sadness there was comfort.
Soon after that, before the World, Milk died and after a few months my son went up to Wakwaha to study, leaving me alone in the house with only the Four-House people for companions. Stillwater and his mother and my own family had sung the Going Westwards songs with me when Kestrel died and the season for that was done, yet as time went by his absence only ached in me the more. The love that had swelled to fill me dwindled and drained, leaving me an empty vessel; I began to wrap myself around the emptiness inside me, holding it close and telling myself it was for him, my grief the last of him I had left.
I did not dance the Moon that year and none faulted me for that: no woman dances the Moon unwilling. The Summer games and plays took place with no heed from me; I danced the Water with the brothers and sisters of my House and swept out my rooms for the Wine, though in my heart the dancing and songs were as nothing. But the Grass comes as the rains come, as a child comes, whether you will it or no, and when the women and men of the Red Adobe began to build the shelters, wish as I might to sit with my grief and loneliness, it could not be: a woman does not stay at home at the time of the Grass.
At the thought of it my soul shrivelled like a dry seed and I decided that if I must dance the Grass, I could let it be somewhere else, among strangers. So when White Cloud of Sinshan sent a message to the Miller’s Society in our town to say that one of their solar panels had failed and they needed help to repair the bypass diodes I said straight away that I would take the parts and help reinstall it. My father Olive looked at me narrowly and said that Steady might take it, but I said, ‘A man should not be from home at the Grass; a woman will find her place in the Five Houses.’ Olive looked as though he wished to argue, but he said nothing more, and on the day before the Grass I set off walking with a bag of tools on my back and my grief heavy in my belly like a child.
From Telina to Sinshan is no great distance and easiest to take the way along the river past Madidinou, but I wanted no company save my own so instead I took the path up towards Sow Mountain, thinking to find the springs of Hechu Creek and follow it down to the Sinshan orchards. It was a day of rain, as it should be, the clouds low and heavy on the mountaintops and I walked for the first part in a world of quiet, only the drumbeat of the rain and the tiny seeps of birds hidden in the bushes; my feet squelched in the mud and soon the rain soaked through my hair to come trickling down my face.
As I came further up the slope and among the trees the rain lessened, though it came plopping down in fat drops from the branches; I went more slowly, and in a clearing I startled a group of small brown people scuffling in the dirt. They sat up, chittering in dismay and staring at me with round dark eyes. ‘So you are here, my brothers and sisters,’ I said, but they snatched up their pinecones defensively in tiny hands.
‘No stranger should see our store,’ lamented one.
‘No thief to leave it empty,’ agreed another, and they turned their backs on me and went bounding away into the trees. I knew then I walked on the mountainside with Four-House people that day, and I listened for the rushing of the creek to guide me lest I wander too far out of my way.
I heard it running full and followed its sound, and as I came along the slope to its bank Jay-Woman in her coat of blue and brown rose up behind me with a clatter, her screech of, ‘Mine, be off!’ echoing among the hills. As I had turned from the world so the world that day was turned away from me, and I came down Hechu Creek from the mountain with empty hands and heart.
I crossed the creek where the orchards of Sinshan began and went first of all to Sits Like The Hen House to speak with White Cloud; he was a dark, serious man and I think a little ashamed that the Millers’ Art of Sinshan had been unable to restore their power themselves, but we went straight away to the unit so I could show him how the diodes needed to be connected and the job was easily done. Afterwards he was very grateful and would have had me stay in his household, but it was as crowded and busy as my grandmother’s, cousins and aunts and children all coming and going, so I said I would be out of his way.
It was turning to an early dusk when I crossed the hinge to the Serpentine heyimas, and I found my House busy too with preparations, cauldrons of mugwort set for boiling and all the spaces being cleared out so they could be laid with rugs, but my sisters and brothers there made me welcome and found me food and a little guestroom to sleep in after.
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I was still asleep the next morning when a sister of my House came to shake my shoulder, and opening my eyes to the dark, for a moment I thought her a dream-person and myself back in the Ninth House. But it was only waking in a strange place, I told myself, and I dressed quickly and followed her up the ladder to join the women of Sinshan in the dancing-place.
Many were already gathered and waiting, some old and some in undyed clothing, mothers with daughters, sisters and cousins, or women alone like me. I carried my sadness inside me still, and as the sky lightened in the east behind a veil of cloud it seemed to me that I divined the same sadness in each one of those around me, rising from us like smoke – the sadness of those whose love was ill-placed and of those whose children never came to them, the sadness of women when their daughters and sons are grown and gone and the eternal sadness of passing years and growing old. The feeling rose and flowed in me, joining and gathering like floodwater until it seemed too great for me to contain and I began to tremble; I felt that I must crack and spill over, all the pain and grief pouring from me like the winter rains. So I held myself apart, hard as a stone, until we went down into the heyimas, and there I found a corner where I could lie alone and unmoving; I did not drink from the dipper as it passed and I took no one’s hand, curling tight around myself like a seed in the ground or an acorn buried by a jay.
Time passes differently in the dance: the hum of the song and the soft drumbeat began to seem far off and I to be alone in the dark of the earth, and then little by little I became aware of a quiet shuffle and the rattle of stiff feathers, and above the scent of close-packed bodies a faint stink of carrion. I opened my eyes to see a great bird with a hooked beak sidling close to where I lay, feathers pale at its neck and eyes black and bright, a condor come as they do to a birthing in the meadows. ‘Give me some of what is inside you,’ it commanded me. ‘You are full to overflowing: share with us.’ My voice seized in my throat and I could not move: I could only shake my head and raise my hands to fend it off. The condor hopped closer, hooked beak probing towards me. ‘You have much and more: you cannot keep it all inside you.’
My hands clutched at my belly and I shouted then, ‘You shall not have it; I will not share with you!’
The Condor looked at me from one black eye. ‘We are patient. When you are broken we will have what is left.’
I struggled backwards from it. ‘Be off!’ I shrieked, harsh as Jay-Woman; ‘No one shall have what is mine,’ I declared like the squirrel-people.
I struck out, but gentle hands seized my wrists and a voice said calmly, ‘The child must be born and the seed must grow: it is time to go up under the Sky.’ I looked again, heart pounding in my desperation, and there was only a woman beside me, a short woman with braided hair, going grey.
My head rang with confusion, but the woman rubbed my hands and my back and slowly I began to come back into myself; she and a woman of the Red Adobe took me up from the heyimas and helped me to lie in the shelter as the long-chant began. The older woman and another, very like her but with hair still dark and eyes like clear water, stayed with me; they shared some food with me and told me their names. The younger woman, she said, was Shining and the older Woman Coming Home, and I knew then that she was the woman who went to live among the Condor people for some years, then returned to the Valley with her child and her friend.
When I told them my name Woman Coming Home said smiling, ‘I went once to Telina to dance the Grass with my half-aunt Vine of Hardcinder House; now a woman of Telina is come to dance with us in Sinshan.’ She and her daughter kept me with them through that night and the next day as the singing went on, and gradually I was able to join in and let the Grass work in me as it should.
The evening of the third day was grey and misty, rain falling thin but steady, and when the singing was done the women of Sinshan went quickly in twos and threes from the shelters back to the common place where the town stood open and lit up for them. The Speaker of the Serpentine of Sinshan, a grave thoughtful woman, would have stopped me to speak about what I had said and seen in the heyimas, but I was cold and tired and most of all ashamed that I should have caused disruption to the Dance. As I stood hesitating, unsure what to do, Woman Coming Home kissed her daughter who went easily away to a house nearby; then she came to touch my arm and ask, ‘Will you come and drink tea in High Porch House? It is only I and my husband Alder, a brother of yours of the Serpentine.’ She had been so solicitous and kind I could not refuse, and something in me too longed for the comfort of an open door and a welcome at the hearth.
She led me down the hill a little way and across the creek that runs through the town, to a tall house near the common place with steep steps leading up. At the door on the first floor an older man was waiting, rather stooped and shy, and as we came up the stair, ‘So you are here,’ he greeted Woman Coming Home with a gentle smile, taking her hands to draw her into his embrace.
Woman Coming Home kissed him and said, ‘So you are here, my husband. And look, here also is Flicker of the Serpentine of Telina, come to drink fireweed tea with us.’
‘And welcome she is,’ said Alder cheerfully, and he took us inside to the fireside where the kettle was steaming and two beakers set to warm.
This household was not like White Cloud’s or my grandmother’s, noisy and crowded with people, nor was it still and silent as my own: it was a calm, comfortable place with patterned rugs on the floor and a padded chair of polished wood, a big loom standing to one side and on a shelf above a row of pots painted in rippling greens and blues. Alder saw me looking at them and said with an affectionate pride, ‘Woman Coming Home made them.’
Woman Coming Home, who was sitting at the fireside, laughed a little. ‘When I was a girl I loved best to pot,’ she said, ‘as a woman of the Blue Clay should, though I still have much to learn.’
She beckoned me to sit with her and I did, grateful for the fire’s warmth. ‘All arts are slow to learn,’ I told her; ‘I joined the Millers’ Art as my father did, though my grandmother was never glad of that.’
Alder had busied himself ladling out the fireweed tea and gave us a beaker each, then he fetched another for himself and filled it. I had seen as he moved around the room that he was lame, and he drew up the chair to the hearth so he could sit with us, asking, ‘Is that what brought you to Sinshan to dance the Grass with us?’
There was an easy answer I could have given him, that I came to help White Cloud with the connectors, and a difficult one, that I came because I feared the company of those who know me but I wished neither to speak dishonestly nor truly. I could only stare at him, tongue-tied, until it seemed that words rose unbidden to my lips and I said, ‘I saw the Condor in the heyimas. He spoke to me.’
I would have clapped my hand over my mouth in horror, but my hosts were not perturbed: Alder only nodded calmly and Woman Coming Home said, ‘My father, Terter Abhao, was a man of the Condor people. He came three times to the Valley, and the Condor stands at my shoulder still.’
Alder leaned forward in his chair. ‘Can you say what were his words to you?’
He asked it not challengingly, but with a gentle concern that drew me to answer, ‘The Condor was waiting for his share of what is inside me. I told him he could not have it, all was mine, but he saw that I must break and spill out enough and more for him to eat.’
‘And what is it that is inside you?’
Perhaps it was easier to tell my truth to strangers, perhaps it was the quiet with the fire’s heat to soothe me and the tea to warm my hands, or perhaps it was that I finally listened to what was in my heart, what the Four-House people had been telling me; at last it was not so hard to say, ‘My son Kestrel died two years ago. He was born sevai, we knew he must die. He had lived sixteen years. I have grieved and sung the Going Westward songs for him, but his death is still inside me.’
Woman Coming Home nudged my arm to remind me to drink my tea, its taste sweet and smoky on my tongue. ‘That grief is a heavy thing to carry.’
At that anger flared in me as it had in the heyimas and I asked her bitterly, ‘You brought your daughter back to the Valley with you and here she is, strong and beautiful. How can you say you know what it is to see your child die?’
Woman Coming Home set her cup on the hearth. ‘You are right,’ she said, ‘I suffered no such pain.’ She hesitated and Alder leaned over to touch her shoulder and she raised her eyes to mine. ‘I was the cause of it. While I lived in the city of the Condor all those years, I held the Valley and my mother in my mind unchanged.’ She was so sorrowful, it seemed to me that despite her grey hair I could see the girl in her again. ‘When I came back to this place and set my hand on the rail of High Porch House, when I climbed the steps as you did, I thought to find my mother as I left her.’ Now she was gazing into the flames unseeing. ‘It is easy to say, I came home. But I had smashed my life here to fragments, a damage too great to mend. When Terter Abhao left her a second time my mother Willow took back her first name, refusing to walk forward: but greater was the blow I dealt her, turning away from her love towards the dream of a father who had no use for me: at that the fire in her heart turned to cold ashes.’
She took my hand again, her palm rough with work and her eyes searched mine. ‘My mother swallowed her grief and let it turn inwards: her life afterwards was a stunted thing and not well-lived. I could not give those years back to her, but perhaps you will let me give now what I could not then. The Condor would have his share of your grief: let me share in it also.’
Her honesty disarmed me, yet I felt shame still. ‘I sang the songs of Going Westward and gave his name to the fire: when the season of mourning is done grief should not be spoken.’
Woman Coming Home smiled sadly. ‘Is the season of mourning ever truly done? A wise man told me I must not let my regret poison me, but that does not mean it is forgotten.’
‘Please,’ echoed Alder, ‘Will you tell us something of your son?’
And so as the fire crackled, scenting the room with applewood, and the steam rose from the kettle I began to talk, haltingly at first, of how Kestrel had come to me and the years we had shared; Woman Coming Home and Alder listened, attentive and patient, and little by little the words came flowing from me, telling of his courage, his bright-burning spirit and all he had meant to me, and as they did I found that inside me was not only grief, but love still, a love that came uncurling and reaching for the light.
When I fell silent Woman Coming Home spoke softly of her daughter’s childhood and those strange lost years, and after we sat while Alder hummed a song low, mingling with the drum of the rain on the porch and the drip from the eaves. I had come to Sinshan to be among strangers, yet at that hearth, the beaker smooth under my hands and the fireweed tea warm on my tongue, I found myself at home, a friendship as new born as the year at the time of the Grass.
A Song for the Third Day of the Grass
Green grows the grass
Damp hangs the mist
Dense falls the rain
On the hillslopes.
Silent we wait
Deep underground
While the men labour
Up in the town.
When the night falls
On the next day
Silent we rise
From our deep cave
Passing the fires
On the town’s edge
Passing the lanterns
On the doorposts.
Silent we come
Back to our hearths
Where the new fire
Rises and blooms
Flickers and flowers
Fanned by the breath
Breath of the children
Quickening our hearts.