It was in that period when in fact everything was going wrong, something like fifty years ago, that we, The Twelve, made the great pool at the foot of the Fall for the small children. We were making new farms and forests, and ponds for fresh-water fish. We built silos for the safekeeping of grain, or rather grains, for we were always acquiring new kinds: when DeRod sent off his raiding parties we quietly approached some soldiers and ordered them to bring back any seeds of crops we did not already grow. We created a lake from a river that ran into the sea near The Cities. We imagined Destra was watching us and approving. DeRod did not seem to care what we did. He never commented, whether to approve or not.
About the time my son took my place as head of our household, we, The Twelve – by then eleven, and soon to be ten – decided to undertake the biggest challenge yet. We were going to transform the oldest part of The Cities, where the first villages had been along the shore. It was the poorest area. There were still some shabby buildings – huts, really – of wood and reeds. Some people, believing themselves to be more sensitive than the rest, find them attractive. But it was – and is – squalid. When there are bad storms the seas rise and the whole area can flood. We planned to build a sea wall of our wonderful and accommodating stone, to keep out the sea, and to straighten the streets, make good sewers and a new public park. It would take years. We were all elated, delighted with the plans, and then, at the height of our achievement, when we sent down overseers to arrange for the labour we found they had already been contracted. There was no labour. Who was to blame? DeRod. We sent messengers, asking him why, for by now we were unwilling to face him ourselves, for he had assumed such an intensity of arbitrary destructiveness for us. Never before had we faced a situation where we could not carry out a plan for lack of labour. His reply was, ‘he had use for the labour force’. We sent another messenger asking for explanations, and he said he had plans. We should not worry, he said, he was thinking of raiding the cities across the mountains for slaves. That confounded us. We could not believe it. Never had The Cities made captives of free people. Even The Cruel Whip had not done this.
The lower suburbs on the seashore remained at risk from flooding, stayed in their squalor, and we heard that DeRod was building a wall. He planned a long strong tall wall that would run from one arm of the sea to another, several days’ walking long, cutting off The Cities from the outside and accessible only through armed gates. He had made his raids, and his captives were in camps guarded by soldiers, and they had begun working in the hills to fetch boulders to break up for the wall. This force was not badly treated. They were prisoners but adequately fed and not overworked. Some, we heard, were pleased to be here, part of the most powerful state in the peninsula, no longer subject to the extortions of The Cities, no longer liable to be snatched from their families to become part of DeRod’s work force. Already there was a strong movement among them to get DeRod to bring their families. And DeRod was listening. After all, the young women could work, if they were not breeding. And there were all kinds of skills we, The Cities, did not yet have. We wondered if he had thought of the problems of feeding all these new people? If he had considered that there must be overcrowding, with space limited by his wall?
And soon there were shortages of food. So many of our workers on the fields and with the animals had been conscripted either for his armies or for the wall our food supplies were suffering. Our silos, for the first time, were half empty. Again we sent messengers, and his reply was to send us women, the wives of the new captives, to work at growing food and with animals. They were mostly pregnant and had families. DeRod was encouraging them to have children. These new people had no skills for agriculture, and it was hard to teach them, because our old ways of teaching by tales and songs and narrative poems were being forgotten. It hurt to compare the standards of husbandry to be seen in our fields now, with the past. These were comparatively barbarous people, coarser, clumsier, ignorant compared with – well, with our people in the past. We had to say that, at least to each other: compared with us, but in the past.
This was the moment of evident, apparently irreversible, change, when DeRod decided to build his wall. After that, the falling off was swift and in every possible way.
About that time there was a confrontation between me and my son Bora. That is how I remember it, but I am sure he would not particularly remember it, or think it important. I wanted him to comment on the pleasure garden we had made on the river that escaped from the dam into the sea. How absurd it is, this need of the old for approval from their children. I noticed it among my friends – I used to, when they were alive. Bora had never mentioned the Fall, the pool, the silos, the gardens – nothing of the things we had done, and I am sure I was always hoping for him to say something.
The day of the encounter I saw him walking up the path and hurried to fall in beside him. I came straight out with, ‘Have you seen the new river gardens yet?’ When he only nodded, I persisted, ‘What did you think?’
‘Oh, we always do things well.’ This took me so aback I actually stopped, but hurried after him. ‘Bora, come into my quarters, I want to talk.’ He agreed. Amiably enough. I felt it as a kind of indifference. And while we walked to my verandah that I had built to overlook the gardens and the sea, I thought what that ‘we’ could mean.
We sat, I clapped my hands for refreshments and I looked for signs of impatience in my son and thought that I saw them. It was some time since we had talked. Years, I think. This was because when we did talk I always felt I was knocking on a locked door.
‘Bora,’ I said, ‘there will be no more gardens, or projects for buildings, or anything at all. You must know we have been denied labour, except for field work.’
At this he turned on me eyes which seemed puzzled. He even scratched his head, an oafish gesture he had certainly never learned from us, his parents.
‘But we are building the wall. That will be a fine sight, when it’s done.’
‘But the wall won’t make fields and gardens and dams. There is need for labour for maintenance. The silos are dilapidating. The roads are too.’
‘Well, we’ll attend to it.’
That we again.
‘Bora, DeRod has never repaired anything, mended anything, planted so much as a tree.’
Again he seemed to be working something out. ‘But Father, everyone admires DeRod. When we had the Feast of Praise for him all the armies were singing about the new garden and the new silos too.’
I understood. It was such a blow to my sense of probability: Bora believed – they all believed – that DeRod was the originator of wonderful accomplishments.
‘Why didn’t you come to the ceremony? It was noticed. You and the old gang never do come.’
‘Were we sent invitations?’
And now he was openly irritated. ‘Since when did the old ones need invitations.’
‘The Twelve,’ I said. ‘The Council of Twelve. The ones that look after The Cities.’
‘But you are family,’ he said. ‘You are part of The Family.’
I had not heard that term.
‘Now, listen to me,’ I said. ‘It’s important that you should understand.’ And I listed our achievements over the past few cycles. ‘This is what we did. The Twelve. Not DeRod. And now we cannot get on with the work we should be doing.’
‘Well, it’s all part of the same show,’ he said at last.
I did not know how to counter this, how to explain. Instead I saw the heart, the very heartbeat, of our complaint. The festivals of songs and tales. Bora would remember all that. He would have to. He was brought up with it. I did not often talk to his wife, who was a decent enough woman, though without any depth to her, because when talking about anything but the children or practical things I met with incomprehension. Bora did not meet me with the perfect understanding of shared experience. But it was not with her ignorance, her blankness.
‘When DeRod abolished the old festivals,’ I said, knowing my voice was full
of bitterness, ‘he killed the heart and soul of The Cities.’
‘But we have festivals,’ he said. ‘There was a big army rally and there were some fine songs.’ And on his face appeared a grin, as if he were laughing with some accomplice I could not see. ‘We’ve got some great new songs.’
‘Bora,’ I said, ‘don’t do this. You must remember. It was different then – wasn’t it?’
He screwed his face up, he leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, as if about to jump up and go off. He gave me glances he was not trying to conceal. He knew what I was talking about. I could see that at some time, probably when offered a job in DeRod’s armies, he had come to some accommodation with his conscience, if not his memory.
‘I don’t see the point of that,’ he said. ‘But that was then. And the old gang did it well. I’m not denying it.’
‘The old gang – your grandmother, the great Destra, and the Council of Twelve.’
‘But DeRod was part of all that, wasn’t he?’
He did not know just how painful a question this was. How often had I tried to remember just how much DeRod had been part of it. I could remember him singing. Not the storytelling, though: he had no aptitude for that. To what extent had he been part of it?
Bora got up, ending it.
‘I don’t see what you are worrying about,’ he said.
It was shortly after that he too built himself a wing to retire into and my grandson, his son, became head of the household. This young man brought disgrace on the family, which was after all DeRod’s too, because he chose a wife his father, Bora, told him he would not acknowledge. She was a Barbarian from one of the cities over the mountains, captured as loot. She was beautiful in their wild immodest way, and had been a dancer in one of the taverns. My grandson was wild, mocked his father and mother, and earned his living buying and selling the unwanted babies of the new immigrants, the Barbarians. He did until DeRod heard of the marriage, and that his father had disowned him. DeRod gave him a job as supplier to the armies, where he makes his living still just on the edge of legality. Bora does not speak to either his son or his daughter-in-law.
This new woman, Raned, has achieved what every Barbarian girl wants, marriage with a citizen, and, in her case, into the leading family. If my grandson had not been such a poor type of fellow he would have aimed higher, perhaps at one of DeRod’s descendants. When challenged – by me – he babbled and boasted about love. In my experience love doesn’t come so cheap, though I have to say she is a beautiful thing. And there is more. She had none of the manners used by us – I should say, once used by us – and is free and easy with everyone, and thinks nothing of running up to me as I wander in the gardens to show me some garment she had acquired or made for her children – my great-grandchildren – or to tell me in her pretty voice that seems to sing some of the gossip from the lower town. I knew I could easily be in love with her myself. I thought her too good for my grandson. One day she came laughing into my wing of the house, her arms full of branches, and began setting them about in vases, saying it was the Festival of the Wall.
She said there were some fine songs but she thought that they – her city – had better. And she told me a story which had originated from us, from The Cities. I could recognise it though it had become distorted and lost its humour and its subtlety. Its humanity, too. It was the tale of a beautiful princess, captured to marry a barbarous ruler, but she had killed him to secure succession for her son. This was how the story of Destra had changed. I asked if this princess had become a good ruler, but Raned only laughed and said she was beautiful, wasn’t that enough? I said to her, complimenting her, that Beauty is always enough. She liked that, though I meant something different from what she thought I did.
I asked for other tales and heard more of ours, similarly transformed and debased, but recognisable. The Cruel Whip had become a magician who filled his coffers by selling magic tales, wicked tales, of power. And they certainly were wicked and cruel: she told me some.
I asked if she would like to hear some of our old tales, and she brought in her oldest child to listen. She enjoyed them, and so did he, but I thought the kinder aspects disappointed her. She liked the brutality of the magician’s stories. She had not learned to hear anything but the simple and obvious.
She asked me how I knew all these tales, and I said that they were in my mind, but a few had been written: by then I had begun to record them, afraid they would be lost when I died.
The idea of writing excited her: she had never heard that one could make letters, then words, then whole stories. She asked to be shown. And I had the pleasure of taking out the scrolls of reed with their smoothed inner skins ready to take the ink. I set out the sharpened reed, for writing, and the bowl of ink. She was awed. I have never seen such an admiring young woman. She wanted to know how I had learned. I said that in the old days a few of us had been taught to write, to keep the skill alive, but now there were only three still alive, myself and two of The Twelve who were then still living.
Would she like to learn? I asked, for not the least of my anxieties was that soon no one would be left to teach youngsters the art. DeRod, like all our commercial managers, used notches on sticks to measure and count.
She was tempted, I could see, but laughed, and said she was too stupid, she was just an ignorant woman. I told her that if she wanted to fit in to The Cities she would not talk about women as inferior. I saw from the look on her face that she did not understand me, or thought I was ill-informed. The women of The Cities are not as free as once they were. The change had been slow, and at first not noticed. It was the armies, you see: a military state is all hierarchies and ranks and steps of achievement, jealously guarded, and where did women fit into all this? Not only ordinary women, but the singers and the storytellers were not the independent, graceful, skilled women of the old days, under EnRod and then Destra. They do not impose or expect respect or admiration.
I asked Raned if she would like one of her children to be taught to write. ‘Or all of them,’ I said. She liked that idea, very much. She said they were too young but she would think about it, and look for signs of aptitude in that direction. That made me laugh: what would one look for in a small child to indicate an innate gift for the art of writing? She rebuked me, politely, saying that if one of her children – she already had three – seemed to be quieter and more noticing than the others, then she would bring this paragon to me. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t expect a child who is good at running about and fighting to have the patience for this.’ And she picked up one of my pens, as if it were a snake or a lizard that could bite.
This was not so long ago. And now I am the only one left who has the skill of writing and I am more than ever anxious because soon there will be no one. After all, while we know that north there lives a people with a whole class of scribes who have their history, their transactions and their tales kept on their reed-rolls there is no reason why we should expect another wanderer from their mountains to come our way. That is – was – one of our tales, how this ragged starving man appeared and taught us the art of writing in return for protecting him. He had run away to avoid some punishment for a crime we were careful not to ask him about.
I again asked Raned to let one of her children study with me, and she said she thought two might be suitable. They will start with me soon. They had to be prepared to accept the idea of writing. When I was young, under Destra, the men and women who could write were admired. It was a great day for me when I was chosen. Some people used to say that there was no need for the new skill, writing, because we had all our knowledge, our history, our tales, in our memories, and every child knew it all. Writing was a clumsy and cumbersome thing compared to that. I am sure no one then could have believed that our heritage of songs and tales could be lost, could disappear, and in such a short time. Now only old people remember.
If I still had the power to do it I would call all The Cities together and ask the old people who did re
member to come forward and tell everything to young people enough interested: surely there must be some left?
What a weight it all is, this anxiety, this sorrow. I do sometimes wonder why old people bother to keep alive, it is such an effort. Being old is a tedious business. How I love watching Raned’s young ones skip and dance about, the ease of it: above all, that is what one loses, the pleasure in simple movement.
And yet I mean to make sit down at least two of them, immobilising them long enough to learn their signs, that will open the world of The Word to them.
I sent out to find people who know the old skills of preparing reeds for writing, and a very old woman came up the hill to me, and I gave her money to teach others to do it, before she dies. She was so pleased to hear of anyone who needed her skills that she wept. She at least remembers how things once were.
‘It is so ugly now,’ she whispered, glancing about for fear of unfriendly listeners – and that, too, is a new thing. ‘Why is everything so loud and so ugly? Sometimes I sit and sing the old songs to myself, but I find a time when the youngsters are not about because they laugh at me. They say the old songs are insipid.’
‘I understand very well,’ I said, and so we went on, as the old do, remembering, until the servant came in, and we stopped talking. I know that my son asks his servants what I am doing and who I am seeing. He sends doctors to me when I am quite well. It is all meant kindly, I expect, but it makes me feel imprisoned.
And now I have reached the present. I wrote the word ‘imprisoned’ last night.
Bora remarked yesterday that DeRod was not well: people were speculating who would succeed. This took me aback. I know it will seem ridiculous and even impossible, but I had not been thinking of him as an old man – my age, in fact. My mental image of him has been for a long time of something not far off The Cruel Whip, supplanting memories of a charming handsome fellow – one of those people who, when you think of them, make you smile. An old man. Well, of course he must be … I sent him a message that I would like to see him, exactly as if nothing of the sort has happened for such a long time – getting on for half a century. Is that really possible? Well, yes, it must be nearly that. No reply. Did I expect one? Yes. This is because since the death of Eleven my mind has been filled so much with memories of us all, mostly of us as young things. I was so full of affection for the past, for us all, DeRod too, as he was.