Heat lightning warm as eggs incubating when the priest come over the hill. We rustle and murmur, the gossip spreading slow and yolk-runny; our stomach contracts with the hunger-not-hunger; a press and curl-close, teasing fingers around our skinny bicep: yours. Soon.

There’s not yours so often, only once in a girl’s life.

He has a keen look about him. Could be carved from the same limestone as our cliffs. We seethe on our small mountain-top: tallest in the-land-before and taller yet now, the godstruck spring upwelling, runnelling divots around our anvil-foot, pushing us closer to Heaven. Iron Mountain, its old name, and Bright Well, name of its secret waters only for us, and Serpent Mound, older and yet new, brought from elsewhere in the long caravan of beggars and starvelings who fell at our feet in terror, in want. The hill’s minerals, nail-sharp, drew the god’s lightning, so the old lore went. To be struck so, to be blessed. To paint our faces in clear water that turned as blood on our skin. To drink down the god’s castings and grow inured to venom. To wind his serpents about ourselves with no loathing neither fear—

No fear, we note, upon the priest’s face. Much loathing.

We go a few of us in the daytime to his camp, and his stars do not repel us. We’re not schooled in the ways of priest; our skin raises no prickle when we cross his holy line. A few more from the town ways off shrink from it, the eight points and the priest standing arms high to Heaven. Shrink from us, gossip running-quick, a glance all between them questioning, their eyes to each other and to the priest. We stretch and flex, pale winter sun. Let you tell, we suggest with bared teeth. Let him come.

But some of us hiss low, belly back through the lime hummocks. Our nostrils flare for destruction’s scent, piss-sharp. His destruction or ours, it becomes a live thing tongued on the air. His-or-ours, folded into reality back and front now, his-or-ours: a thing of lore.

By night we coil in our weaves as bees to the hive. Frog-throb and wet beyond, the sky so bloody. In the-time-before sunsets had begun to ring pure, so the old lore went, the air clear and the sun, the sun. Then the god’s time come again and our sky weeping murder since, hibiscus and red-ears and iron clay. Our sisters’ hums begin, our mothers’ chanting. We are in travail, and soon enough a birthing. This whole year through the young of us come to their hatching, and soon enough: yours.

In this ringing yours, I come to myself. No yours unless I am mine first. The priest’s camp is dark past godhour. His bedroll green, old stuff—the-time-before clings to him rank as disease. Not big enough for two, but I am less inside than inside him, godlight a sending. The memory we all have, the eye that gazed on us from sky-split, and the barbed tooth our soul’s first tool.

I give him thus, a great gift it is to feel warmth from cold blood, desire from death, and am rejected. Waking he shows twin serpents in his gaze, and wrenches my hand from the snake of his joining. Awake he sees nothing but his own lies—no credence—not me before him but the wraiths of his mind given shape.

We are not troubled, I once more within us. Men time-before spit on us and will do again. We who are inured to venom, how should we weep?

Morning-time, though, Ophia speaks with one-voice. “We hear news of the priest and we like it not so much,” her one-voice wavering thin. We use our one-voice so few it emerges like static between pick-ups on a hand-crank radio. “We watch his baptisms and we see how he desire to drown instead. Sisters-that-are, let we not be drowned!” 

Ophia’s arms bending backward under great snake-weight. “And what signs shall follow us?” her one-voice sound no waver but god’s thunder. 

We shall take up serpents and be not harmed, with our one voice each by each, our one-voice.

“We send then the priest our parthen. Let him-there handle our serpent and see what him become.” 

I apart again, then, I without. I parthen until my hatching, the lore-word, unformed. The priest will form me in his mind to his liking, to his hate. By this will he be led.

I lead him with scripture. Never knew a man to like that. I lead him with promise of my body. Not to be taken but to be cleansed. I lead him by full sun through the lime-white labyrinth and by moon to the snakesand where born our mothers and mother’s mothers and our selves, once and again. 

Never known such hunger as ours.

He come among us naked, clothed but toothless. We know pride when we smell it. We see his guns stashed, bell flung down, sword quiet. No sword but his joining jutting; not a man among women but a priest among heathenry. We seen this before and in the timebefore, such lust as becomes law. Such law as removed us to the god’s own country, we safe among us, our name the hiss. Such lust only quenched in the god’s liquid earth.

We paint ourselves with Bright Well’s waters. We paint me into the snakesand shameless, for all the priest to see. I go in naked as an egg, I will come out thus. I go in me-mine to our bosom. Swallowing, a warm and musky flex, the consuming coils. I know them lifelong, our serpents, us. I, my legs twining tight, and I, my blood cold. I and us without harm, but the priest is blind.

Log-kneed he begs at the base of the godpole. His eyes hungry for the twin serpents bleeding rust, for stained cypress cross, for—

“Idolators!” he roars, piss-trickle echo of Ophia’s sunrise shout. For a priest piety-mad he looks greedily; he stares in the lore-manner, the sun dancers who gaze until their eyes burn out. He raises me up and sweats pride from his eyeballs.

“Walk, child! I swear to you I’ll finish this job,”  hot breath, licking-wet, “but first you must walk.”

Walk? Our head lolls, drunken-man to-and-fro, weaving the snake charm. Parthen is gone, our body reborn serpent-toothed, our parts secreted deep and snakes our own moon-grown, sharp-scaled in starlight. We raise our hands to the priest as the priests do to their flock. Press of tongue to flesh, our snakes loving after the manner of the god their father. 

Yours, we whisper to me. Yours, the hiss a chant. Mine, the priest-meat: mine before me, mine clasped within, mine venom-blasted, mine. Mine I raise him up and mine I look upon him and mine he sees his own self. Mine his despair, mine his blood, mine.