Brigid Jorvik's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The god that had been her serpent lay across the packed earth of the lodge, twice the length it had been at dusk. Its scales threw back the lamp light in colors she had no words for. Brigid stood at its head with the clam-shell blade still wet in her hand. The flamingo's body lay open at her feet. The snake watched her the way a stranger watches a stranger. She had made a god and lost a familiar in the same cut, and now she had to name the thing before the sun came up, or it would drift out into the reeds belonging to no one. She knew the rule. A god without a name answered to any mouth that found one first. If the shell-gatherers came at dawn and cried out over their empty shrine, they could shape a curse around the killer of their bird, and the serpent would wear it. She had to speak a name into its ear and have the swamp hear her speak it. Only then could she stand before any spirit or witness and say, this one is mine. She tried the old names first. She said the name her grandmother had used for the marsh-under-marsh. The snake did not move. She said the name carved into the boards of her lodge above the door. Nothing. She said her own name backward, which was a witch's trick, and the serpent only blinked once and looked past her at the wall. She went outside. The night was thinning at the edges. She climbed the stilted watch tower at the water's edge and stood on the narrow platform above the reeds. From up there she could see the shrine's low roof, and beyond it, a lantern moving through the grass toward it. A boy in a ragged pink cloak, alone, walking slow. Not a shell-gatherer. A stranger to the swamp, headed the wrong way for anyone with sense. She watched him stop at the shrine and lift one of the painted crab shells off its cord. He held it to his ear like a child listening for the sea. She climbed down and walked out to meet him. He did not startle when she stepped from the reeds. He said his name was Luca Omara, and he had come looking for a witch who was about to make a mistake. He said a god took its name from the first true thing said over it, and asked her what the first true thing was. She thought of the snake choosing her arm, and her choosing back. She said, We chose each other. Luca nodded once, as if he had heard the name inside the sentence. She went back into the lodge alone. She knelt at the serpent's head and spoke into the flat plate of its skull. She called it Chosen. The scales shivered under the sound. The swamp outside went quiet in a wide ring around the lodge, listening, and then it let the name settle. The god had a name now. It still was not hers.