4. The Cloak

A moan of pleasure made Lilith snort with disgust. Danu and Greenman did little to conceal their lovemaking. Averting her eyes from their jungle bed below where they lay, Lilith riveted her eyes to the clearing in the jungle. There, on a knoll, stood the dead Tree of Life, starkly black in contrast to the lush life all around it. Below it, the picked rib cage of the basilisk arched like open jaws of sharp teeth. The couple's heavy breathing quieted. Lilith wiped a tear and slid away from them down the basalt ledge into the leaves of the jungle. She pushed aside draping vines and wide leaves until the jungle opened to the mossy clearing. Vines already grew up the arching rib bones of the basilisk. Strange, they had barely seen death as children, but now death was everywhere, merging seamlessly into the landscape. 

Leaning against the dead tree, she picked at the loose bark. The dead seemed to be her only companions. Even lifeless, the tree gave her comfort. The events leading to the death of the tree turned over and over in her mind like a tumbleweed that stirred into hate for her sister. Eve had taken Adam from her and must have coaxed Adam to kill both the basilisk and the Tree of Life. Eve did it to have Adam to herself, knowing that Adam had liked Lilith's companionship better. Eve was too slow, too sensitive, and too needy for Adam. Her thoughts were interrupted by intimate murmurs from behind the tall ferns. Lilith pushed her ear against the trunk and scraped harder at the dry porous layer with her fingernails. Everything hurt too much. She pushed the world away as her cuticles bled.

The outer bark crumbled to expose a rough inner layer. Picking at a stringy strand of this black inner bark, it separated easily into a fiber strip. She pulled and it peeled up the tree trunk all the way to the top of the broken branch. Lilith picked at another strand, and the long strip separated. The peeling was gratifying and eased her angst. She peeled strand after strand. Flaking away more outer bark, she pulled numerous black fibers from the tree. This mindless picking became obsessive and eventually, she had made what looked like a thick, scraggly lock of hair hanging from where the branch cracked. Running her fingers through the black fibers she felt a welcome sense of peace.

She yanked at the fibers. They seemed strong and didn't break. She went to her bed mat on the edge of the clearing. Since Danu had taken up with Greenman she had slept alone and had moved her mat nearer to the Tree. She picked up a black stone, thick at one end and sharp at the other, and returned to the tree. Putting the stone tool in her mouth she maneuvered up the broken branch, climbing to where the cracked branch splintered but was still attached to the tree. At the top, she leaned on the tree to rest. In the distance, black volcanic mountains smoldered.

Long ago, she'd gone with Adam to that volcanic area where they had found many such sharp stones. Tears blurred her vision. Her heart wanted to go through the same old story of blaming Eve, but the calm she felt from the tree made her more sensible. She knew that Adam had killed to save himself, maybe them all. The basilisk would have eaten one or more of them before it flew up into the sky to give its mating call, calling other basilisks to come to this world. Lilith tried to imagine how different it all could have been - a world of basilisks with humans as their servants. Lilith paused. The air buzzed with insects and flying lizards. She imagined dragons instead of lizards. It would have been a different life and probably not a happy one. She sighed. Either way, Lilith would not have had Adam. There was no use in thinking about him any longer. She shut out the thoughts.

Using the sharp edge of the stone, she sawed aggressively at the fibers. One by one, they fell to the ground. When she climbed down, she gathered up the pile of black fibers and went to the far side of the clearing where her bed mat lay. She would weave them into a new bed mat. At least she could make use of her loss.

Lilith's hands moved surely with her work, tying the strands to sticks, and using a makeshift shuttle of folded sedge grass to weave the uneven, black threads. Unconsciously rocking, her eyes glazed and she hummed a repetitive melody to the beat of her work. Unthinking, she moved in a light trance as her hands guided the strands back and forth again and again and again.

The day dwindled to dusk. She reached for more strands, but the fibers were gone. The work seemed to have gone so quickly; it had been pleasurable and relaxing. She was disappointed there was nothing left to weave. The mat was coarse, lumpy, and uneven. Untying it from the sticks, she placed it on top of her old reed mat. Laying on the rough fabric was scratchy, but there was a strange comfort to it, a closeness that she yearned for. She closed her eyes and drifted into sleep.

In the lightness of the dream, she felt herself rise up into the night sky as the fiber mat lifted her higher and higher. Clutching at the hem of the mat, it curled around her comfortingly. Dizzy as she peered down, the Earth appeared to curve into a dark orb below. Looking up, space opened into an expansive spray of glittering stars. Lilith panicked, but the mat wrapped around her comfortingly. The threads of its fibers floated out to connect to the dark space around her with a cord reaching back to the dark sphere of the Earth. The mat carried her farther out through space, past burning stars and great swaths of luminous clouds. She flew deeper into space until the great burning suns become small stars that merged into a larger swirling current, then the current turned into a gigantic disk, a wheel of millions of stars. She moved out farther still. The vastness of space was frightening as the swirling flower of millions of stars shrank out of sight to become just a luminous dot in so much empty space. She wanted to cry out. It all was too big, too empty. The mat squeezed her, holding her. She peered through dark space with a distant wash of starlight. Something lurked in the space – or a someone, a big someone. It was waiting for her. She clutched the mat. She needed her home. She needed to feel ground. She needed life.

The mat's fibers whisked her back through the emptiness, toward the swirling disk of stars, past dust, and luminous suns, past the silver ball of the moon, to the dark side of the planet, through the clouds, till she floated down to the ground.

She awoke screaming and bolted upright. Something clung to her arm. It was the mat. It curled around her. She pushed it off. In the purple light of dawn, she stared at the black mat. It looked different. Examining it closely, she saw that the weave was tighter, more supple, and smoother. It twitched and she jumped back. She watched it to see if it would move again, but it lay still. She glanced up at the purple sky with a sliver of a moon and a glimmering star. She had been out there. She could picture the round ball of the moon hanging in space. What a magical flying journey! Kneeling down next to the mat, she pulled it onto her lap and caressed it lovingly. She had made it and it was special. It was hers and only hers. This was more than woven fibers, this was power.

Picking up the fabric, she folded it carefully. She snapped a large leaf and covered it. She rose and left it to bathe in the pond and rinsed off the sweat. Floating in the water felt reminiscent of the dream. When she waded to the shore, she glimpsed through the long reeds the Greenman standing by her sleeping spot staring at the folded mat. He hunched down and lifted the leaf. Lilith rushed from the pond, up the bank to him. It was her mat. As she approached, he pulled his hand away but stayed squatting next to the mat. Lilith sat down on it possessively.

He looked at her, then at the mat, seriousness in his green eyes. "This is my skin."

"You have skin. This is from the dead tree."

He reached down to touch it, but she tucked it under her wet leg.

He looked into her eyes with a pleading sadness. "It is of me. I didn't realize it could be remade. It is yearning for a life to reanimate it. I can feel it calling to me."

Lilith coldly stared back. "If you wanted it, you should have made one yourself, but you spent all your time playing with Danu." She could not care about him, or Danu. They had ignored her, and she had been outside of their love. Aloneness had made her weak but now, it was her power. Lilith held her hands over her the edges of the mat hiding it from view. "This is mine."

He stood up and walked away.

She kept the folded cloth by her as she started her project again by scraping off the rest of the dry porous bark and stripping the last section of black fibers. Sitting in the shade during the heat of the day, she made an even larger mat. The Greenman watched her and she secretly gloated that now he wasn't hanging all over Danu. But she kept her work close afraid he would take it.

That night she slept on top of the new rough mat and under the older, now soft fabric, gathering it and pressing it next to her body like a lover. With the lightest touches of sleep, she felt herself again rise, but this time she shot up into the dark night. Again, she passed through incredible swaths of space littered with burning suns. Out past the swirling disk of stars that soon became distant. Lilith felt the weave of the fabric press in on her as if it was reassuring her, keeping her safe. This time she was not as overwhelmed. She flew even farther out and saw many swirling disks of millions of stars; many glowing flowers made up of so many stars, each held by an ominous hand of empty darkness. Whisked out farther and farther until the great universes of stars shrank down into sparkling specks. Enveloped in the magnitude of emptiness, she sensed the space - it was aware of her. It was not entirely empty. Like the fabric holding her, it had a rudimentary conscious. Space was curious, even loving. Lilith sensed that all this empty space, this holder of all forms, was somehow... the Great Creator of all.

The light of the galaxies was becoming dim specks. She was becoming lost in an unimaginable amount of emptiness. Nothing could fill it, yet it yearned to be filled, to know itself through form. The feeling of dissipating into the vast nothingness made her clutch at the fabric around her. She needed something solid. Yet the fabric seemed to be entwined with the emptiness. Its loose fibers extended into the darkness. She wanted to go back. She pulled one floating strand but it was held taught as if connected to something. It sent a chill through her. This was all more than she wanted to know. The dusting of specks grew larger and brighter until they became bright stars that then grew into enormous disks of stars. Enlivened by the sight of such abundance she was awe-stricken. Yet, Lilith now possessed a haunting awareness that whatever could be seen was just a speck in the true enormity of the empty womb that held it all.

Back through the space, stars, and dust to Earth, she opened her eyes wide and sucked in a startled breath. It was dark, but there was ground beneath her and the smell of green, moist air brought her great relief. Entangled in the fabric, she had to struggle to free herself from its folds. She sat in the dark, arms around herself, rocking. The overcast sky let in no starlight. A sense of the depths of space hung around her. She felt it within the air, the plants, even within the Earth. The emptiness seemed to be a dark water that circulated through everything, connecting all things into one body. Form was an aspect of space. Space loved its forms. She felt close to it. She knew it. She had experienced the Divine Creator.

In her youth, the basilisk had encouraged her to name plants, animals, and insects, or rather to hear the name by listening to the creature or plant. A name would come to her by listening to its spirit. But what to call the divine holder of everything, who held the stars - the great nothing? How to describe it? She let her mouth make a sound, Ahh. It came from her heart, the sound of openness, but her lips closed into an mmm sound with her feeling of close love and then opened again with ahh. A word formed- Aom'ma. She said it aloud several times, connecting it to her sense of this immense presence.

Suddenly, the Greenman's voice came from the shadowy night. "It cannot be named."

Lilith snapped her attention into the darkness hearing him emerge from the dense foliage.

"I like to name. It helps me... know things."

"It limits your understanding." He said as he approached.

She bundled up the fabric in her lap protectively. He knelt down beside her. She pushed him away, but he took her hand and gently held it.

"I'm here to help you." He whispered.

She pulled her hand from his grasp. "I don't need your help."

"You have made something amazing, but you don't understand it."

The sky lightened enough for Lilith to see him staring at the fabric. Looking down, she noticed the fabric was now very fine and smooth, even glossy. Lilith caressed it and it curled into her fingers. "I understand more than you."

"You should not be knowing these things. This is the knowledge from the Tree of Life. It is showing you the mystery that I serve."

"The... Emptiness?- Aom'ma?"

He nodded.

A small smile graced her lips. Lilith now shared a secret with Greenman. Like Eve to Adam, it connected Lilith with him and she liked the feeling.

Greenman went on. "The basilisk was my symbiotic companion. As a seed, the Tree of Life travels with the basilisk through the great emptiness. Our destiny is to breed variations of life to fill the sacred void. It is our spiritual pilgrimage, our sacred duty. Together, we spread life throughout the universe."

"What about us? Humans are important."

Greenman's face was stoically patient. "It is a trinity of service: Humans serve the basilisk; basilisk inoculates the Tree of Life, and the Tree creates genetic variations to please the yearning void."

Lilith gazed at the fabric. It twitched with life in her lap. "This fabric, it will turn you into a tree again?"

"I think so. This anomaly of tradition - the death of the basilisk and spontaneous conversion of tree to human - this has never happened before. A Tree of Life can be killed but we have powers of regeneration that are beyond knowing. The emptiness holds a secret power of spontaneous genesis. I don't understand it, but I feel it. This weaving you have done, it wants to join. It needs a life to give it life."

He picked up the corner of the fabric. She snatched it out of his hand. It was hers.

"You don't understand. This is my skin. It's yearning for a living body to unite with. It will be able to turn me back into a tree, perhaps a Genisis Tree." His eyes brimmed with hope. "Please."

She acquiesced. How could she deny having the Genisis Tree alive again? It might make her a human companion. He waved his hand over the fabric, and it lifted into the air to greet his hand. It wound around his wrist and up his arm. Where it touched him, it transformed from a weave into a glossy, seamless skin. Lilith marveled at its sheen and iridescence. In the early dawn, it glinted like the scales of the dragon on his hand. As it wrapped tighter over his hand, his fingers sprouted leaves and his hand turned into spongy bark.

Lilith panicked. He was taking her creation! She yanked the fabric off his hand. It ripped from his flesh, and he screamed in pain. His blood splattered on her. Frightened, Lilith grabbed the fabric and ran. She left him hunched over crying. She couldn't care. This was her work, her magic, her fabric. He had a lover. He didn't need to take the only thing that brought her any comfort.

The fabric grew heavy. She stumbled through the forest until it opened along a riverbank and she dropped the thick, weighty cloth. Panting she watched the forest to see if he followed. All was still. She took a drink from the river and splashed the blood off her arms and face. She spread out the shiny fabric. The separate pieces had sealed themselves together to make one large length. In the early light, it glimmered. It was so beautiful. She gently touched it and it quivered. The corner of the fabric curled over and reached up to her hand, winding around her wrist.

The dark folds slinked up her arm to her shoulder. She stood and it inched up her shoulders and flowed down her back, falling to the ground. Like a curious animal, it slinked around her legs. She giggled at its tickling exploration of her body. It went across her chest, wrapping around her snugly. Lilith felt constricted and tried to push it open, but it squeezed tighter.

"What are you doing? Too tight!" She tried to push it off, but the fabric held her arms to her side. She panicked. "Oh, no! Greenman, help me!" But he was not there.

It crept up her throat. She screamed as it wrapped around her face until it muffled her mouth. Her heart thumped in her ears. The last thing she glimpsed was Greenman running out of the bushes before the dark cloth covered her eyes. Her breathing was stifled as the fabric squeezed the air out of her lungs. With no more breath, it was killing her. She would die.

She did not breathe, but she was not dead. She felt the threads of the fabric twisting under her skin, taking root, searing itself into her. She tasted dirt and felt a need to drink through her feet and feed on light through her skin. It wanted her to be a tree. Lilith resisted. This was her life. She would not be what it wanted her to be. It must serve her. A struggle of needs and wills coursed through the joining systems. It tried to soothe her, but she shut it out as she did with so many feelings. She would not succumb.

Blanketed by its steady presence, she sensed it held genetic memories and could shape shift into many different animals and plants. It was seeking out a pattern of life that it could attain with her, but Lilith would not succumb to any of them. It held her, needing her life, but she would not cooperate with its genetic patterns.

It sank its tendrils deeper into her. They were joining. It morphed with her, and both were transformed. It moved with her will, her stoic resistance, forming them not into a living being but into a piece of the Earth. They became dense, solid. They became life on the edge of non-life: no movement, no sound, no thought. A heavy, solid sureness pressed into Lilith's mind that evolved into a knowing; a knowing that she could wait, she could hold herself still, she could not be swayed by time. Lilith became a stone.

Resting in the resolved entanglement, she was calm. Satisfied, deeply satisfied, there was nothing she wanted. The sun's rays warmed her south side. The sun's arc blazed across the sky and then disappeared behind the western horizon to burst forth again from the east. Sun and the Earth danced around each other as if days and nights were one breath, in and out. Time was of no consequence. Wind curled around her, rain dripped down her, and lichen grew on her. She accepted her prison and it accepted her resistance. No longer Lilith, she was a stone upon the Earth.

It was sudden. The touch of a hand, a murmur of words, and the trance of stillness abruptly broke. The fabric peeled back from her face. She blinked and sucked in a breath, her chest rising, and blood pulsed through her thumping heart. It felt like a swirling dance to be alive.

A man stood by her. He touched her face and pushed back the hood, uncovering her head. Thought returned. She squinted. Sunlight blurred her vision. She looked down at herself where the long black cloak parted, her bare feet stood in a mat of pine needles - a patchwork of brown and yellow. Where was she? Her last memory was of a rocky shore. A strange man stood before her surrounded by a thicket of pines. The bubbling river was gone, replaced by a quiet lake. Was this the same place?

Her dry lips parted. Her voice cracked, "How long?"

"Long." The person replied.
Lilith focused her eyes on his face. This was not Greenman. This man was short with yellow skin like Eve. His almond eyes wrinkled when he smiled, and his white thin hair was pulled back into a bun revealing pointed ears. "I see you don't have the green life within you to make a tree. But a rock? I wouldn't have imagined."

Lilith shook her head in confusion. He proclaimed, "I am Greenman, but now my name is Shakan. Like you, I am transformed."

Lilith moved stiffly. She felt like she was remembering a dream of another lifetime. How much time had passed? She looked at her hands. Her brown skin still looked youthful. She touched her face. "How old am I? Have I missed my life? Where is Danu?"

Shakan smiled. "Only the Earth and I have changed." He brushed her long, wavy hair from her face. "You have not aged. As long as you wear the cloak, you will hardly age at all. You are still a young woman. I made Danu a necklace from the last bits of bark from the Tree. She is aging very slowly also, but not as slow as you. She is in her early womanhood. I alone have lived within the beat of time."

"Why? Why don't you extend your life also?"

Shakan's eyes flashed with anger, pain, sadness, and wisdom, like the leaves of the jungle harboring many creatures, his dark eyes harbored complexity. "You have my skin. It is with you now." He looked over at the glassy lake. "There was not enough bark left to make my own. I took what I could glean to save Danu. I had to find another way."

Lilith looked down ashamed. She pulled the cloak tight. In her defense, she said, "I made it."

With a wry smile, he said, "It is yours now. But it also has you."

He turned and picked up a stone and skipped it out on the water. It jumped along the smooth surface. "I found a way to skip in and out of existence. By allowing myself to die, I can be reborn anew - a different kind of immortality."

Lilith's brow creased. She could almost understand, he seemed to use death like the birds used the wind. "You are another you. How do you do it?"

"You remember..." He looked into the blue sky, "... the emptiness, Aom'ma, you called it."

"Yes, Aom'ma."

He circled his hand in the air and a hole opened in the space as if the space were a curtain that was pulled back to reveal another dimension. "The void is both life and death. All that is created goes back into the void to be reformed."

The hole seemed to be a window into a dark space behind the surface of the world. Greenman swiped his hand over it, and the hole closed as if nothing had happened. "I am aware enough to not lose myself in the void. I can enter the empty space but find my way back to be reborn without losing too much of myself." He grinned. "Some memories are lost; our lives feed the hungry, infinite space. I always lose a bit of myself when I die and am reborn, but I gain new qualities; that is the way of the emptiness; it is cleansing."

"How many lives have you lived?"

"Three."

"It took you three lifetimes! Why? Why did you wait so long?"

For the first time, Lilith saw a flash of real anger in the Greenman's eyes. "You took my destiny. You are lucky I helped you at all. It took me three lifetimes to forgive you." Lilith lowered her head in shame. He studied her. "It wasn't so much forgiveness." He glanced up into the canopy of long, green needles. "It took me a lifetime to figure out how to turn into a tree without my old skin. I had to remember that I am the Tree of Life. I don't need my old skin to merge with the green world. I can do that easily now. When I realized I had the power I yearned for, I stopped resenting you."

Lilith felt stiff. The cloak weighed heavy on her shoulders. She wanted to move. She wanted to be free of it, to stand alone. "You can have it." Lilith reached around to take the cloak off, but when her hand tried to lift the fabric, it stuck to her. She shrugged her shoulders to slip it off, but it clung to her. The more she wiggled, the tighter it cinched. A deep foreboding welled up in her stomach. She panicked and struggled with the animated cloak but could no more rid herself of the cloak than she could her own skin. Exhausted, she ceased, the cloak relaxed and hung limply around her.

Shakan beheld her with both envy and pity. "It is part of you now. It will give you great strength, immortality, and abilities beyond any human, but your life is now for the cloak." He took two shiny shells from his hip pouch. He handed her one. Lilith turned it around in her hand. It was a hard scale from the basilisk. He pulled the cloak shut over her right shoulder. The cloak spun itself around the scale to hold it as a clasp. Greenman took the other scale from her hand and pulled the cloak over her left shoulder, and it held fast. "These are fertility scales from the basilisk. The trinity of genesis is rewoven: tree, basilisk, and human. Now, instead of three, there is one. The purpose of the trinity is to spread life and create variations. It is your destiny and duty to do so."

She was excited to have such power but had no idea what to do with it. Lifting the edge of the cloak in her hand, the cloak curled around her like a pet snake. Flashing on her days of loneliness, it seemed a time of freedom. She realized she would never have a private moment again. She was now the bearer of genesis.

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