Calliope dreamt she was bleeding out. She stood on a mound of desert shrub and wild grass covering a place she’d never been, a place the spirits called Hawikku Village.

Her ancient guides staunched her flow with corn husks woven into a blanket, which they wrapped around her, then led her down the red dirt path toward the stone shrines swept with cornmeal and turquoise and dedicated to the gods. The spirits surrounding her, their voices, a chorus. This place Coronado once occupied believing it the seventh city of gold, we have reclaimed.

Ice-wind battering her cheeks and face, she wrapped the corn blanket over her head as a rebozo. Beneath the mound, a pit house. Ancient ceremonial kiva. So too the Earth will reclaim. Broken pottery in colors of terracotta scattered the rock-lined trail encircling the mound.

In the place Calliope had bled, a trail of corn sprouted behind her. She picked the two tallest corn shoots then sat beside two large, smooth stone metates for grinding. From within her husk rebozo, she pulled a mano, shucked the corn, laid it on the altar, and with the mano in both hands, she began moving with the weight of her whole body, the strength of her shoulders and back pressing down through her arms, back and forth, shearing, until the corn became a fine yellow powder.

The Ancients sang her on as she worked. When the Earth has had enough, she will shake her troubles off. She will shake her troublemakers off. She scooped this and mashed it into the butter of her hands. Rolled it into a ball, flattened it again. Shaped and shaped until the corn grew into a child, who sprang from the stone of her hands, laughing.

For she was finished, and sank into the earth, solid, hardened, at peace. And as her corn-made child ran from the mound to the grass below, the spirits intoned. The Earth has all the power she needs.

When she decides to use her power, you will know.

* * * *

She awoke groaning, guttural and mammalian, rooted to the bed.

The pain was primal.

It had not diminished but intensified.

The women had not left Malia’s room; they surrounded Calliope’s mattress on the floor. She’d been redressed and could feel the cloths, cool and fragrant with herbs, between her thighs. Still, the cloths stung against the knifelike pain of her perineum. In her palm, Malia crushed a plant Calliope did not recognize, poured it into warm water, held it to Calliope’s mouth and helped her drink it. Like a child, the liquid spilled down her chin and landed on her chest, but she could feel relief almost immediately, a warming of her skin, a releasing of her leg and thigh muscles. Her uterus felt hard, like a pear. She reached down and touched her belly, the rigid mound softened, not flat but gelatinous, empty.