Chapter 3 Meeting of a Supernatural Kind of the Coed Persuasion during a Journey with a Story thrown in for the Bargain
Strangely enough, even though the cab proclaims itself available and in fact has stopped of its own accord to take them in, there is already someone riding shotgun, so they both have to sit in the back.
Gentlemanly Nuala offers to enter through the street side, allowing Pah to enter through the sidewalk side.
Nuala fidgets a little, molding the seat to her body, adjusting her body to the seat. Then she steals a glance directed at Pah, to see if she is comfortable as well. Pah seems more comfortable than Nuala ever felt in her own couch.
Only then does she notice both the taxi driver and his passenger.
Instantly she tries to bow, but of course knocks her nose painfully in the back of the seat.
The passenger, a woman, raises her hand in an imperious halting gesture.
"No need." She says crisply.
"Father-Of-Us-All, First-Mother…"
And she stops, groping for words, finding herself at a loss, all the words having deserted her.
Pah casts Nuala another impish grin.
The man and the woman that have just commanded such an abject display of subservience from Nuala are an odd mismatched pair.
The man that Nuala addressed as Father-of-Us-All dresses as a tough guy, complete with shades. He has the looks of a muscle, of a mercenary; he is fit, but a fitness that seems to come not from the gym but from a very hard life. His skin is pale, though. He radiates an aura of a cold-blooded killer, someone who in fact could kill his own brother without even blinking.
Nuala is instinctively sure that it is none other than Caine himself.
The woman Nuala addressed as First-Mother is also very fit, this time ballerina fit. She is dressed in a sheath dress that seems made of snake skin, with scales, elastic, form fitting and thin to the point of see through. It appears to have been shed by a snake as it was molting, a sheath of snake skin into which the woman wormed herself. Making that assumption more plausible, she has a big snake draped around her shoulders, big enough to have shed the dress she is wearing. The woman radiates the strongest ever aura of Dominatrix.
Nuala is just as sure it is Lilith.
"I will tell you a story," Says the taxi driver.
Nuala sinks deep into the couch, making herself as small as she can manage, and then devotes all the attention that she has ever been able to summon to the listening.
"A long time ago there lived a people of farmers. Being farmers, they had settled in cities. They stayed put, and what changed around them was the pattern of the seasons, which directed the patterns of their farming; patterns to which they were very much in tune."
"Then along came a people of shepherds. Those went where their flocks went. A flock would find a meadow suited for grazing, graze it to a desert, then move on to the next suitable pasture. Their flocks seemed to have an uncanny sense of where to find their next feel, and the shepherds, nomads, went along for the ride. Whatever attunement this people might have with nature was wholly in the hands of their flocks."
"One day a group of shepherds chanced upon the fields of a group of farmers. The flock started to delightfully gorge itself on the produce."
"Now, understand this: The farmers were peaceful. All they could ever need was contained in the small world constituted by their village and their farms, and whatever else they might desire they could get peacefully, by trading with their neighbors."
"But when they saw the flock destroying their livelihood, they became enraged, and they slaughtered every animal, then proceeded to slaughter any man that had shepherded it."
"But this was only two groups, the first meeting between these two people."
"The shepherd people, on the other hand, were warlike, aggressive, and invasive. You see, of course they had done something like this before."
"There was war."
"And, even though the farmer people won the first battle, having fought with wholly uncharacteristic violence and having caught the shepherds by surprise, ultimately they lost the war."
"But the shepherds appreciated the delight with which their flocks had fed on the farmer's fields, so they settled for a compromise, of sorts."
"A mixed society was construed, of farmers and shepherds, with the village at the center, a ring of fields, and fields for pasture for the flocks, who occasionally would roam about in an indefinite corona."
"But, having won the war, the shepherd people and their way of life took precedence over the farmer people and theirs."
"And their gods."
The passenger woman then stares intensely at Nuala, to make sure she is pay9ing attention to what next she has to say.
"What he is not saying is this. That the farmer society was ruled by women. Because the cycle of the seasons ruled their lives, and the seasons were measured by the phases of the moon and the cycles of female bleeding, that were in tune with the moon. And their society being ruled by women, so were their Gods ruled by Goddesses."
"The shepherds were ruled by men, who were little more than hunters, that concentrated their prey beasts in large flocks and only hunted from them sparingly, and whose beasts had become habituated to their presence and the occasional culling. That, and that the shepherds hunted away any other predators. The shepherds being ruled by men, the shepherd's Gods ruled over their Goddesses."
"When the shepherds first invaded then established a compromised with the farmers…"
She glances briefly at Pah.
"Well, you can fill in the blanks."
Pah looks sharply at Nuala.
Nuala makes herself even smaller.
Suddenly:
"We're here." Says the taxi driver gruffly.
And so they are.
Nuala departs the taxi hastily, clumsy in her haste, almost stumbling out of it into the street and onto the sidewalk.
Pah leaves the cab as if she has all the time in the world.
They meet in the sidewalk.
The taxi speeds away.
"Where are we?" Asks Nuala insecurely, glancing nervously around.
"Where you are supposed to be."
"Oh, a park."
Pah nods.
"More exactly, Fresh Kills Park."
