Free Sorceress by Celia Rees Page B

little black gnats formed clouds around her head, biting her neck and sticking to her sweating skin. With a water carrier in each hand, she could not even slap them off.
    A blue jay called close by, answered by another cry. She shied instinctively as it broke from cover and swooped above her, and swore as the screw top popped off the canister and water slopped all down her trouser leg.
    Her aunt said nothing when she got back to the cabin, just took the carriers from her. Agnes waited to see what chores she should do next. Aunt M set the water down and slowly walked over to where Agnes stood by the door. She reached up and plucked something from the crown of Agnes’s head and from her shirt collar. Then she opened her hand to show two blue feathers. She smiled.
    ‘It’s time. Come with me.’

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    13
    Looking Glass Lake, day two, afternoon
    A fire burnt on the far side of the yard. Flames leaped transparent in the sunlight, causing the air to waver like a mirage. Flat rocks lay heating at the ashy white centre of the hearth. The heat was intense as Aunt M led Agnes past the fire towards a low dome built half into the hillside.
    ‘Take off your clothes,’ Aunt M instructed. ‘Go in.’
    Agnes did as she was told, stripping down, then she moved the stick that held the skin flap in place and stepped into a dark space smelling of earth and pungent smoke.
    The floor was marked out with white quartz rocks laid in a circle, radiating from a central boulder like the spokes of a wheel. Low wooden platforms, strewn with blankets and animal skins, lined the walls. Agnes seated herself on one of these. She had never taken part in a sweat lodge ceremony before, never been in a sweat lodge. It was rather like a sauna, both in principle and function, but she had a feeling that whatever went on inside was likely to be a little different from anything that happened at the local health club.
    Sweat-lodge ceremonies were not traditional to the Haudenosaunee, but Aunt M was not averse to adopting and adapting the practices of the other peoples. The ways to wisdom were many. She did not see one religion, one nation or one people as having a monopoly on the truth. Her own path had led her to different teachers from different traditions. She had brought what she had learned back with her, introduced it into her practice and used her medicine power to help, to serve, to teach those who came to her. If the sweat-lodge ceremony was Lakota, what did it matter?
    The flap pushed aside again. Aunt M came in, using a forked stick to push a white-hot ash-flecked rock into the centre of the circle. She manoeuvred it into a depression just below the white quartz boulder. Then she left and returned with another and placed it on the other side, and then others until there were six in all. One for each direction, one for the earth and one for the sky.
    She returned for the last time and addressed Agnes.
    ‘In here I am Kanehratitake, Carrying Leaves, and you are Karonhisake, Searching Sky. We left Miriam and Agnes with our clothes at the door. D’you understand me?’
    Agnes nodded.
    ‘Good. Now. Speak when I tell you, do as I say, and don’t interrupt. Is that clear?’
    Agnes nodded again.
    ‘Very well. Let’s get started.’
    Aunt M unwrapped the sacred pipe and filled it with tobacco from the otter-skin pouch. The pipe was short, the bowl and stem of polished black stone. It was of an unusual type, and very old. Aunt M lit the pipe and offered the smoke to earth and sky and the four directions, then she offered the pipe to Agnes. Agnes took a puff, trying to hold the smoke inside her, but it made her eyes water and she had to try hard not to choke on the thick acrid stuff. Her aunt rested the pipe in the centre of the circle and pinched herbs from the bundles suspended from the ceiling. She cast the leaves on the hot stones where they writhed, curling and withering before igniting in tiny puffs of fragrant smoke.
    The lodge was heating up. Aunt M