Spanish Diosa! -

"You leave me scraps," she said, not unkindly. "You sing to the sun for life. You only remember me when you are desperate for what I keep: the stored water, the hidden roots, the seed that waits."

A young shepherd named —named in honor of the great resistance leader—felt the despair of his people. His own flock was dying. Driven by desperation, he remembered the old songs his grandmother sang, the forbidden ones the Roman priests frowned upon. Songs of a lady beneath the earth, a lady who held the keys to the spring. spanish diosa!

The tunnel sloped down, down into a silence that was not empty, but full of listening. Stalactites dripped water with a sound like slow, ancient heartbeats. Finally, he emerged into a vast, domed chamber. A black stone altar stood in the center, carved with spirals and crescent moons. And there, on a throne of polished jet, sat Ataecina. "You leave me scraps," she said, not unkindly

Ataecina leaned forward. "The sun does as it must. The dry is my season. It is the time when things must go into the ground, rot, and be forgotten. That is my gift. Forgetting. Death." His own flock was dying

She was not a gentle goddess of sunlit meadows. Ataecina was the Diosa Madre , but a mother of a profound and terrifying kind. Her skin was the pale grey of river stones in shadow, and her hair fell like cascading black water, woven with bones of small animals and the first pale crocuses that bloom in late winter. Her eyes held the still, knowing darkness of a deep well. The Romans, when they came, would try to fuse her with their Proserpina, but they failed. Ataecina was no kidnapped bride; she was the sovereign of her own shadow.

"But we are your children!" Viriato cried. "We leave you offerings of black lambs and the first wine of the harvest."

She told him then, in a whisper that filled the cave. The true story of Ataecina: "Long before the first wolf howled, the earth was a raw, screaming wound. The sky loved the sun and ignored the shadow. I was born from the first rock that fell into the first deep water. I saw that things needed to end to begin again. So I carved the underworld with my own hands. I built the rivers that flow under mountains. I planted the seeds of stars that had died. When the sun's favorite child, a beautiful mortal, was struck down by a hunter's arrow, the sun begged me to give her back. I said, 'She must rest in my arms for half the year. In that time, you will weep. That weeping will be rain.' The sun agreed. And that is why the land is barren in the cold months—it is the sun's tears for the child I hold. But in the spring, I breathe on the child, and she runs back to the surface as the first flower. The sun does not give life. I do. I lend it." When she finished, she handed Viriato a single seed from her pomegranate. "Plant this. When it blooms, the rain will come. But you must tell the story every year, at the winter solstice, when I hold the sun's child. If you forget, the seed will turn to ash in your mouth."