Excerpt

I AM A soothsayer.

I admit this freely now despite all that I have learned. Or perhaps because of it.

In ancient times, it was said that a soothsayer was someone who claimed to foretell events, a prophet, or seer, someone who could calm or relieve pain.

I have never foretold any event. I do not see myself as a prophet or seer.

I have calmed and relieved the pain of many. I have also caused pain to many.

Perhaps this truthsaying, this story of mine, will calm or relieve the pain of some.

Perhaps not.

But it is all I know.

TEN YEARS EARLIER, I awoke in a cave with no memory. I picked my name from the graffiti on the rock. The stone read: Sarah, Susan, Constance, Virginia, Bobby, Gloria. I chose Gloria. I liked the shape of the G, how it curved around into itself and then back out again. Like me in and out of that cave.

Although I did not remember anything about myself when I awakened, I quickly realized I must have been a healer. As I walked around the woods near the cave, I recognized too many plants and knew too much about their healing properties to be a casual student. Then I passed a little girl with bloody knees on my way into the town nearest the cave. We were both astonished to see the gravel cuts disappear when I touched her as I picked the stones out of her skin. She thanked me but ran away quickly. I turned and headed for another community, a ball of fear forming in my stomach.

I made the Washington Territory my home for a time. I worked as a healer, disguising my hands-on healing abilities as best I could. One year, I journeyed to the Arizona Territory. I got through immigration easily and was awestruck by the desert. All the prickly vegetation and seemingly stark landscape made me feel as though I had found a kindred land. I offered my services to the town of Coyote Creek and had been happily ensconced there until the day the man from the governor tried to follow me up Black Mountain to my home.

He kept tripping and falling on his way up the hill, pricking himself with every cactus that came within yards of the path. I hurried over the ridge to lose him. Cosmo stood on the trail watching the man, his head cocked in what I took to be an expression of puzzlement.

"Woman!" the governor's man called.

Cosmo's low growl carried up the hill to me. He did not like the man either.

"Gloria Stone!" the man screamed. "Get this mangy dog away from me!"

"Coyote, you idiot," I murmured, and hurried on. I could see my small house tucked into the next ridge, surrounded by saguaro and juniper.

"If the governor wants you, he will have you!" The man's whiny voice reverberated up to me.

I stopped. Who did he think he was? If the governor "wanted me," he would "have me"? I should go down and take his shoes and make him walk back barefoot. Or maybe I should rip off his clothes and let Cosmo chew him all over.

No. Too much trouble. I had had a long day, and I was tired.

Then I heard the sound of scree rolling and the man's cry as he tumbled down the hill like the useless little weed he was.

Cosmo yelped.

"I'm coming," I grumbled.

Lucky for the man, a magnificent saguaro had stopped his descent, and he now lay sprawled against it.

Cosmo waited on the trail until we met. Then he followed me to the saguaro and the injured man whose face and hands were bloody from the prickly pear he had rolled into.

"This is your fault!" he said.

Cosmo yelped. The man shut his mouth.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Primer," he answered. "I'm from the governor."

"Yeah, yeah," I said. I reluctantly knelt and felt his legs.

"Stop that," he said. "You are to come with me at once. That hurts!"

"It ought to hurt," I said. He had a bad sprain.

I did not have any herbs or lotions to apply to distract him from my hands-on healing.

"I can fix it if you'll shut up and let me," I said. I had to have his permission; it was an ethical thing with me. "If not, I can leave you here with Cosmo. He's not a vegetarian. Or a scavenger. He kills his meals."

The man grunted and nodded assent. I put my hands on his left ankle.

"Listen," I whispered. Dazed, he looked away from my hands and up at my face. Some. Thing. Was wrong. I connected. Felt dizzy. Could not sense. Then a little. Peculiar.

My hands moved slowly over the torn muscles. Something was different. I could not find. Him. Then suddenly, his muscles healed quickly.

"There," I said, moving back onto my heels and away from him. My dizziness disappeared. "I guess it was just bruised." I scratched Cosmo's neck.

The man touched his ankle. "It feels fine. You are a soothsayer."

He got up and dusted himself off.

"No," I said, "just your local health-care provider."

"Will you come with me now?" he asked.

"I've relayed this message to the governor before. I'm too busy. This community needs me. Maybe if things slow down in the summer." I started up the trail again. The huge old saguaro waved at me with both arms.

"Summer! That's next year!"

"You better get down the hill before dark," I said, without looking back. I suspected he feared the dark. "Do you want Cosmo to take you?"

"No! I know the way." I heard the stones rolling under his feet again as he started down. He would be lucky if he did not break anything before he reached the village.

Cosmo ran up beside me.

"I wonder why the governor sent someone like him to get me?" I said, as we went over the ridge again.

I reached the low twisted juniper which signaled level ground and my home just as the sun was going down over the mountains, changing the land from gold to rose. Cosmo yelped and went to run with the dusk, as was his habit. He ran straight toward the receding light. To hurry it on, I often wondered, or to try and catch the curtain of light and pull it back? Either way, he had fun.

Once inside my house, I kicked off my shoes and walked across the cool stones to the table in the middle of the large airy room which was my kitchen and living room. A vase of fresh flowers stood alongside my covered dinner and a glass of lemonade. I took off the ceramic lid and steam rose from rice, beans, and vegetable burritos. The smell of cilantro filled me with anticipation. I picked up the plate, flatware, and lemonade and went outside to watch the sunset.

This was my payment for staying in Coyote Creek: this house which they cleaned and kept up; my clothes, which I got to choose; and three meals or more a day, mostly cooked by Millie and brought up to me by a variety of people. In exchange, I was supposed to keep the inhabitants healthy, or at least to heal them when they fell ill.

I sat on the gravelly Arizona dirt. Cosmo howled in the distance. For a moment, I imagined I could feel the ground beneath his padded paws. "Go, Cosmo!" I called and laughed. I stared into the bloody light, noting but not really focusing on the hills, rocks, cacti, junipers, and Joshua trees which surrounded me. A kind of jumble of disparate struggle in this desert, so silent and still. I longed for this spot all day as the people came to me. I touched them, healed their bodies, and sometimes their spirits, and did not feel touched by them or connected to them. I was more comfortable with scorpions, rattlesnakes, and coyotes than I was with people. However, the scorpions and rattlesnakes did not feed and clothe me.

I gulped the lemonade. My face puckered in sourness. It was just the way I liked it: only a touch of honey.

Coyote Creek was a nice community. Arizona Territory was well organized. Most people had enough food and shelter. Trading with other territories went well, and the governor seemed to be good at keeping out plagues and other undesirables. The communities in Washington had been more isolated and paranoid toward outsiders like me.

The governor here was relatively new. His mother had died a few years back. Soon after her death he had started sending out messages that he wanted me to come to the Grand Canyon and meet with him. Thus far I had successfully avoided our meeting. I suspected he wanted to see me because he believed, like everyone else, that I was a soothsayer.

He was wrong. I had heard all the stories: soothsayers were extraordinary healers, inheriting their abilities from a long line of illustrious healers. They had great compassion, wisdom, and empathy. I had no lineage of great healers that I remembered; I certainly was not compassionate or wise. Supposedly soothsayers could not lie. They were always "truth sayers." Although I did not do it very often, I could lie quite easily and convincingly. No, I was not a soothsayer. I just had the heat or energy or whatever it was in my fingers to put disease at ease.

I finished off the burrito as the rose sky was replaced by a gray one. Now Cosmo would be indistinguishable from anything around him. A gray ghost. This was his time of day: the between and betwixt time. Magic time. I smiled. What would our good Reverend Thomas Church think about my magical musings? He had already asked me if I was a witch. Was he preparing a bonfire in my honor? The Rev made me nervous. Or else the supposed comeback of Christian churches made me nervous. Rumors were circulating that some congregations were using soothsayers as their latest scapegoats, accusing them of being the devil or witches, or worse, tech violators.

Of course, I really did not know Church well enough to judge him, even if I had found him snooping around my clinic more than once. I did not know how he felt about soothsayers or healers or anything. I hoped he would not cause any problem so that everything could remain the same. I liked the town and this piece of land where my house sat and Cosmo and I roamed.

The land was not mine, of course, but it felt like home.

"Of course this land is home," my friend Kara told me once. "When a woman bleeds on a piece of land, she becomes a part of it and it a part of her."

I did not tell her I did not bleed. In the ten years since coming out of the cave, I had never menstruated. I did not know my age. Judging from the other women I had met, I was somewhere between thirty and fifty, so maybe I had already gone through the 'pause.

One day Cosmo and I were roughhousing outside and my wrist got caught on his incisor and started bleeding. I watched in fascination as the red dripped onto the beige ground. Color. Life. After a time, Cosmo whined and I covered the wound with my other hand so I would not bleed to death. A moment later, not even a scar remained as a reminder. But I knew. I was now a part of this land, and it was a part of me. I liked the feeling.

It was dark, and I was reminiscing too much.

I went inside to the bedroom where I fell asleep to the sound of coyotes serenading the rising moon.

Later I half awakened to milk light and the smell of something feral or musky.

"Cosmo?" I whispered, turning into sleep again.

I felt lips on my earlobe, warm breath on my neck.

"Benjamin." Kara's brother, fresh from the desert night.

He caressed my back and shoulders, kissed the back of my knees, massaged my calves, put my toes in his mouth: first one and then the others. Sleepily, I turned over and held out my arms to him. He was a shadow leaning down to put his mouth over mine.

"I thought you were Cosmo," I whispered.

"He kisses you like this?"

"I never have seen the two of you together."

He laughed, leaning his head back just as Cosmo did when he howled at the moon. Benjamin's hair slipped over his shoulders and brushed my cheek. "I guess you've found me out."

I pulled him down against me. "I don't care who you are. You smell good, and I'm awake."