Demon

But Cirocco had already come around the table and lifted the baby. She handed him to Chris, who seemed pleased.

"Come on. Chris will take good care of him, won't you, old man?"

"Sure thing, Captain."

Cirocco was pulling Robin's elbow, gently but insistently. The little witch gave in. She followed Cirocco through the kitchen, out onto one of the railed walkways lying atop a horizontal branch, and up a gentle rise to a separate building half-hidden in the branches. It was five-sided, made of wood. The door was so low Cirocco had to bend over to enter. Robin was able to walk through with an inch to spare.

"This is a weird place."

"Chris is a weird fellow." Cirocco lit an oil lamp and set it on the table at the center of the room.

"Tell me about it. Valiha warned me he'd changed, but I never ... " Robin trailed off, having finally looked at the interior of the pavilion.

All the walls were copper. Hammered into the metal were a hundred designs, some of them quite familiar to Robin, others foreign. Still more seemed to remind her of things deeply buried.

"What is this?" she whispered.

Cirocco gestured to the largest of the artworks. Robin moved closer and saw a stylized woman, angular and primitive as a hieroglyph. She was nude, pregnant, and had three eyes. A serpent coiled around her from one ankle to the opposite shoulder, where it reared its head and stared into her face. The figure gazed back at the snake, unblinking.

"Is this ... supposed to be me?" Her hand went involuntarily to her forehead. It was the location of her tattooed third Eye. She had earned it over twenty years before, and without it, would have been unable to return to Gaea.

She also bore the tattoo of a serpent that wound around her leg, across her body, and up to her breast.

"What is this?"

There were two straight-backed wooden chairs in the room. Cirocco pulled one toward the center and sat in it.

"You probably should ask Chris about that. I think of it as a memorial. He liked you. He didn't expect he'd ever see you again. He built this."

"But it ... it's weird."

"As I said, so is Chris."

"What's happening to him?" Robin said.

"You mean physically? He's getting what Gaea promised him so long ago."

"It's disgusting."

Cirocco laughed. Robin flushed again, then knew Cirocco was not laughing at her, but at some private thought.

"No, it's not," she said. "It's only startling. You're seeing it all at once. I saw it day by day, and it looked entirely natural and right. And as for startling ... you shocked him more than he shocked you."

Robin had to turn away. She knew what she looked like.

"It's called age," she said, bitterly. The terrible fact was that she looked a lot older than Cirocco.

"No. You've aged, but that's not the shocking part. In your own way you've changed as radically as Chris has. Some terrible fear has marked your soul."

"I don't believe that. Failure and disgrace, yes. Not fear."

"Fear," Cirocco went on, inexorably. "The Great Mother has deserted you. Your center is gone. You no longer burn; you float, your feet unable to reach the womb of the earth. You have no place to stand, no Umbilicus."

"How do you know these things?" Robin screamed.

"I know what I see."

"Yes, but the words, the ... the secret words ... " Some of them were from Coven ritual, from ceremonies and exorcisms Robin knew she had never mentioned to the Wizard. Others were from the darkest corners of her own soul.

"I've had some guidance. Right now, I want to know your purpose here. Why did you come? What do you hope to do?"

Robin wiped away tears and pulled a chair closer to Cirocco. She sat down, and eventually was able to look at the older woman.

She told her story.

Robin had come to Gaea, like so many others, to be cured.

Gaea was a god who never gave anything away. Robin had been told she must prove herself, do something heroic, before a cure was possible. She had not been inclined to do so. Her condition had not been impossible to live with. She had dealt with it before: when her hand began to tremble with the onset of a seizure, she had simply amputated her little finger.

But through the persuasion of Gaby Plauget, Robin had embarked on a trip around the interior of the wheel, accompanied by Gaby, Cirocco, the Titanides Psaltery, Hautbois, Hornpipe, and Valiha, and Chris Major, who was also seeking a cure.

Gaby and Cirocco had an ulterior motive. They were seeking an ally among the eleven regional brains of Gaea. Gaby was seeking a lot harder than Cirocco was; the Wizard had been a hopeless alcoholic who had to be dragged into the enterprise. Some of those regional brains were allies of Gaea. Some were enemies. The lines had been drawn during the Oceanic Rebellion while humans were still living in caves.

Gaby's plan had been nothing less than the overthrow and replacement of Gaea herself. She had been out to recruit a new God. The mission had cost her life, and possibly much more. It had cost Cirocco her status as Wizard. It remained to be seen whether it had cost the Titanides their survival as a race.

The only ones who seemed to have benefitted from the abortive quest were Robin, Chris, and the Iron Masters. Robin and Chris had been cured. The Iron Masters had, for reasons unknown, been allowed to expand from their tiny island in Phoebe until they now challenged the Titanides for dominance of the great wheel.

And at the end, Robin had headed for home, intending to live happily ever after.

"It was great for a while," she said, and smiled at the memory. "Chris was right. There was a great deal of labra in growing back a finger. I recommend it as a way to amaze your friends."

She knew Gaby and Cirocco had dismissed labra as the female version of macho. They had been wrong, but it didn't really matter. The fact that it was Gaea who had replaced Robin's severed pinky had continued to gnaw at her, and in the end hollowed out both Robin and her victory.

It was as meaningless as the third Eye, which was supposed to confer infallibility. In practice, the wearers of the Eye were bullies who could do no wrong, sanctimonious as any Pope.

"I left the Coven already a semi-mythical figure," Robin went on. "I came back... I don't know a word for it. The Coven had never seen anything like me."

"Superstar," Cirocco supplied.

"What's that?"

"Archaic word. It's somebody whose reputation exceeds all reasonable bounds. Pretty soon, they start to believe the reputation."

Robin considered it.

"There was some of that. Yes. I moved up as quickly as I wanted to. I could have gone faster, but ... I wasn't sure I should."

"You heard a voice," Cirocco suggested.

"Yes. It was my own voice. I think I could have been proclaimed the Great Mother herself. But I knew I wasn't. I knew I wasn't even very good."

"Don't be too hard on yourself. You were damn good, as I recall."

"Damn fast. Damn strong. Damn mean and a cast-iron bitch. But where it counted, to me"- and she thumped her chest -"right in here, I knew what I was. I decided to get out of public life. There are places we can retreat ... something like nuns. Isn't that what nuns do?"

"So I've heard."

"I was going to meditate for about a year. Then I was going to have a child and devote myself to raising her. But I didn't have time. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant."

She was silent for a moment, looking back on it. She chewed her lower lip, and at last looked back at Cirocco.

"This was a year-more than a year-after I got back from Gaea, you see. On Earth it could have just slid by. But in the Coven, we have to artificially-"

"I remember. I know what you're talking about."