Bark bit her hand. Her jaw began to throb. She pushed back against the trunk as leaf after leaf down the column caught, all the way to the base of sand below her.
A story … she thought. The Three Beetles and the White Bird was a tale she had hugged her knees at, leaned forward to hear of its hill-skirmishes and sea-chases, its burnings and battles, its brave feats and betrayals. Reflected there on the flickering waters, it all seemed somehow reversed to … not something horrible. The reason she held the branch so tightly, pressed herself back against the tree, was not from any active fear, but rather from a sort of terrible expectation of emotion, waiting for the sound (amidst the faint crackling she could just make out) of screams, waiting to see figures leaping or falling into the ring of flaming waters. All she actually felt (she loosed her hand from the branch beside her) was numb anticipation.
There are people in there, she thought, almost to see the result of such thought, dying. Nothing. There are women dying in there, she tried again (and could hear Venn making the correction): still it was just a curious phrase. Suddenly she raised her chin a little, closed her eyes, and this time tried moving her lips to the words: ‘There are women in there dying and our men are killing them …’ and felt a tickling of terror; because for a moment she was watching two boys and a little girl playing on the docks. And all the waters before her and the forest behind her were a-glitter and a-glimmer with threat.
She opened her eyes: because something moved in the water … twenty feet away? Fifteen? (In the bay’s center, fire fell back to the water’s surface, with things floating in it aflame.) Several largish pieces of flotsam were drifting inland.
The one just in front of the beach stalled on submerged sands: charred and wet, it was some kind of carton, which, as she watched it, suddenly came apart. For a moment, the dozens of things floating out of it actually seemed alive. Taking up the same current, they continued, tiny and dark, into the shore.
After a while she got up and walked down to the sands’ wet edge, stooped, and picked up … a ball of some sort, perhaps as big as her father’s curled-up forefinger. Wet, black, it wasn’t exactly soft. Many, many of them, she saw, were bobbing in the dark water.
Squeezing it, frowning at it (the boat was craggy, dark, blotched with fading embers), she turned back up into the woods.
She walked away on her soft-soled shoes in the loud underbrush, pondering an unresolvable troubling—till finally, after climbing into the window of her room, and lying on her bed, looking at the shadows on her bare, narrow walls—she slept. The rubber ball was under her pillow.
4
SHORTLY AFTER THAT BEGAN a period of some five years, which, were one to have asked her after it was over, Norema would have no doubt said was the most important of her life. Certainly it obliterated the clear memory of much of what we have recounted. We, however, shall all but omit it—at least we shall condense it mightily: four weeks after the burning she met an affable red-haired man from another island who worked (indeed who was a leader of) a twelve-boat fishing cooperative of ten men and two women. Three months after meeting him she married him and moved to his island. Their first child was a son; then, in what seemed to her much less than eighteen months, she had two daughters. Through those years there were moments which, when they occurred, she thought to remember for the rest of her life (in much the same way that the firelight on the night beach she had thought to drop from her memory forever): sitting on the deck with her husband and her children at dawn the way she had sat with her mother and her sister; moonlit evenings on Willow Scarp—her favorite spot on her new island—looking out over the nets of foam that rippled round the rocky point; the afternoons when her husband would be working on his nets, perched on one of the pilings that stuck up about the rush-matted docks, and she would come up silently behind him and look up to see his sunburned back, the curls of coppery hair clawing at the translucent shell that was his ear. She had already begun to do some of the things with her own children that Venn, years ago, had done with her and the children of her island; and was both amused and a little proud that she quickly developed, on her new island, the reputation for being both odd and wise—a reputation which she could never quite understand why her husband so disapproved of.
In the fifth year of her marriage came the plague.
It killed her son, four years old now, and, had she not been so involved in nursing the island’s ill with one of Venn’s herbal remedies that at least lessened the pains if it did not curb the disease, she would have taken one of the overturned dinghies and put to sea in it until land was out of sight, then sunk it and herself with a knife jammed through the sapped-over rushes.
The plague killed seven fishers in her husband’s fleet.
Then, at the height of the sickness, when the wailing of the children and the coughing of the aged hacked at the walls of her hut from the huts both sides of hers, her husband came in early one afternoon—the time he would have normally returned from a morning with his fishing fleet, though he had told her earlier he was not taking his boat to water that day. For five minutes he paced around the house, picking at the loose staves of a half finished basket, rubbing his big toe in the dirt by the side of the hearthflags: suddenly he turned to her and announced to her he was taking a second wife.
She was astonished, and she protested—more from that simple astonishment than from any real desire actually to rebut him. He argued, and while he argued, memories of Venn’s account of the Rulvyn returned to her—the second wife was apparently the daughter of a wealthy fisherman who had recently moved to their island, a very beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who had developed a reputation in the village as a spoiled and impossible person. Somewhere in the midst of her arguing, it suddenly struck her what she must do.
So, she agreed.
Her husband looked at her with utmost surprise, seemed about to say several things, then turned and stalked out of the hut.
Two hours later he returned. She was squatting by the cradle of her younger daughter—whose breathing had become strangely rough over the last hour—and was trying to ignore the three-year-old who was asking, ‘But why can the fishes swim, Mommy? Why can fishes swim? What do they do under the water when they’re not swimming? Mommy, you’re not listening to me. Why do they—’
Her husband grabbed her up by the shoulder, whirled her around, shoved her back against the support pole so that the thatch shook between the ceiling sticks across the hut’s whole roof. The three-year-old’s chatter cut off with an astonished silence into which her husband began to pour the most incredible vituperation:
Did she know that she was a vile woman and a horrible mother? That she had ruined his business, soul, and reputation? That she was in every way a plague to him and all who came near her far worse than the one that wracked the island? That she had murdered his son and was no doubt poisoning his daughters against him even now? And how dare she (the while, he was striking her in the chest with the flat of first one hand then the other) think she were fit to share the same hut with the beautiful and sensitive and compassionate woman he was now determined to leave her for? Even her suggesting they might all share one house was such an obscenity that—
Suddenly he backed away, and pushed through the door’s vine hangings. Seven hours later Norema, her eyes closed, her arms locked across her belly, a shrill and strangled sound seeping from her pursed lips (somehow she had managed to get the three-year-old to an older cousin’s when the infant’s blood-laced, greenish phlegm and raw choking had assured her exactly what it was), sat on the floor of her hut with her baby girl dead and stiff on the dirt at her knees.
Two weeks later some boats came to take her to Nevèrÿon’s Kolhari, with the fifty others, who, from the island village whose population had been close to eight hundred, were the only ones left. (‘In the name of the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is kind and compassionate, all those who can pass before our three physicians and show no stain of plague may have free passage to H
er chief port city in Nevèrÿon, there to begin a new life for Her honor and glory.’ The captain was a small, hairy man with a verdigrised helmet, a fur jerkin, bloodshot eyes, and tarry hands, with a dumb goodwill that in him had now become a sort of fury about every detail of the evacuation, as his ship plied from stricken island to stricken island.) Once more she looked for some great feeling when she saw that two among the dozen who had been turned away from the boat by the physicians, with their poking at groins and armpits and their pulling back of eyelids and staring down into ears and throats, were her husband and his new woman. No, it had never been anger she’d felt—hurt, once; but grief had obliterated that. (Her remaining daughter had been taken away to a neighboring island a week before on the very day her phlegm had gone green—Norema did not know if her child was alive or dead … No, she knew.) Rather, it was the exhausted sympathy for the misfortunes of someone who, a long time ago, had been a difficult friend. And so, as she came into Kolhari port, numbed by an experience of rejection and death, she kept telling herself that whomever she might now become, it was this experience that would be responsible for anything bad or good that ever befell her again; yet while she was trying to rehearse all the awfulness of the past months, sort it all out in memory as the portscape drew nearer and nearer through the dawn, fragments of it were constantly slipping from memory, and her imagination kept retreating through the years to afternoon walks with Venn, to the night on the tiny beach with flames out on the water.
— New York
November 1976
The Tale of Small Sarg
And if, tomorrow all the history on which it is based is found to be defective, the clay tablets wrongly interpreted, or the whole formed out of a mistaken identification of several periods and places, our reading of it will not be affected in the slightest, for the Stranger, the City, the sights, smells and sounds, formed by the poet out of history and human activity, are real now at another level of being.
—NOEL STOCK, Reading the Cantos
1
IN THAT BRUTAL AND barbaric time he was a real barbarian prince—which meant that his mother’s brother wore women’s jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness. It meant at fourteen his feet were rough from scurrying up rough-barked palms, and his palms were hard from pulling off the little nodules of sap from the places where new shoots had broken away. Every three or four years the strangers came to trade for them colored stones and a few metal cutting tools; as a prince, he was expected to have collected the most. It meant his hair was matted and that hunger was a permanent condition relieved every two or three days when someone brought in a piece of arduously tracked and killed game, or a new fruit tree was (so rarely) found: for his tribe did not have even the most primitive of agricultural knowledge.
Everyone said fruit and game were getting scarcer.
To be a barbarian prince meant that when his mother yelled and shrieked and threatened death or tribal expulsion, people did what she said with dispatch—which included stoning Crazy Nargit to death. Crazy Nargit, within the space of a moon’s coming and going, had gotten into an argument with a woman called Blin and killed her. Everyone said that Blin had been in the wrong, but still. Then Nargit got into another fight with Kudyuk and broke the young tow-headed hunter’s leg so that Kudyuk would be unable to walk for a year and would limp for the rest of his life. Also, Crazy Nargit had killed a black, female rat (which was sacred) and for two days wandered around the village holding it by the tail and singing an obscene song about a tree spirit and a moth. The rat, Small Sarg’s mother insisted, made it obvious that Nargit wished for death.
His uncle, shaking his blue-stone strings of women’s ear-bangles, had suggested simply driving Nargit from the tribe.
Sarg’s mother said her brother was almost as crazy as Nargit; the tribe wasn’t strong enough to keep Nargit out if he really wanted to come in and just kill people—which is what, from time to time, with clenched teeth and sweating forehead, shivering like a man just pulled out of the stream after being tied there all night (which several times they had had to do with Nargit when he was much younger), Nargit hissed and hissed and hissed was exactly what he wanted above all things to do. Nargit, his mother explained, was bound to get worse.
So they did it.
Stoning someone to death, he discovered, takes a long time. For the first hour of it, Nargit merely clung to a tree and sang another obscene song. After two more hours, because Sarg was a barbarian prince (and because he was feeling rather ill), he went and found a large rock and came back to the tree at the foot of which Nargit was now curled up, bloody and gasping—two small stones hit Sarg’s shoulder and he barked back for the others to cease. Then he smashed Nargit’s skull. To be a barbarian prince meant that, if he wanted to, he could put on women’s jewelry and go off in the woods for long fasting periods and come back and be consulted himself. But he preferred men’s jewelry; there was more of it, it was more colorful, and (because he was a prince) he had a better collection of it than most. His older and radiant sister, who had very red, curly hair, and whose reign, therefore, as barbarian queen was expected to be quite spectacular, was already practicing the imperial ways of his mother.
Small Sarg was left pretty much alone.
The stretch of woods that went from just beyond the fork of the little river and the big stream (where many weasels lived) up to the first fissure in the rocky shelves (two days’ walk all told) he knew to practically every tree, to every man-path and deer-path, almost every rock and nearly every pebble; indeed, most of the animals that lived there he could identify individually as well as he could recognize all the human members of the Seven Clans, which, together, formed his principality. Outside that boundary, there was nothing: and nothing was part of darkness, night, sleep, and death, all of which were mysterious and powerful and rightly the province of terror—all outside his principality was unknown, ignored, and monstrous. The Seven Clans consisted of the Rabbit Clan, the Dog Clan, the Green Bird Clan, and the Crow Clan—this last of which was his.
It was only after the strangers came and took him away that it occurred to him there really were just four to the Seven Clans, and that therefore his tribe had probably once been much larger. Suddenly Small Sarg began to conceptualize something that fitted very closely to a particular idea of history—which, because we have never truly been without it, is ultimately incomprehensible to the likes of you and me—only one of the many ideas he had been learning in the rough, brutal, and inhuman place they called civilization. Once that had happened, of course, he could never be a true barbarian again.
2
BENEATH THE THATCHED CANOPY that covered half the square, the market of Ellamon was closing down for the evening. Light slanted across dust scaled, like some reptile, with myriad lapping footprints, a spilled tomato basket, a pile of hay, trampled vegetable leaves … A man with a wicker hamper roped around his shoulders stopped shouting, took a deep breath, and turned to amble away from under the canopy, off down an alley. A woman with a broom trailed a swirling pattern as she backed across the dust, erasing her own bare footprints among a dozen others. Another man pulled a toppling, overturning, evergrowing pile of garbage across the ground with a rake.
In one corner, by a supporting post, a fat man stopped wiping sweat from his bald head to brush at a bushy mustache in which, despite his pullings and pluckings, were still some bread flakes, and a bit of apple skin; also something stuck the corner hairs together at the left. His dark belly lapped a broad belt set with studs. A ring with a modern and sophisticated key, a double forefinger’s length, hung at the hip of his red, ragged skirt.
Beside him on the ground, chained in iron collars, sat: an old man, knees, elbows, and vertebrae irregular knobs in parchment skin otherwise as wrinkled as many times crushed and straightened vellum; a woman who might have just seen twenty, in gray rags, a strip of cloth tied around her head, with an ugly scab showing from under the bandage. Her short hair above and below the dirty
cloth was yellow-white as goat’s butter; her eyes were narrow and blue. She sat and held her cracked feet and rocked a little. The third was a boy, his skin burned to a gold darker than his matted hair; there was a bruise on his arm and another on his bony hip. He squatted, holding his chain in one hand, intently rubbing the links in his rough fingers with a leaf.
A shadow moved across the dust to fall over the single heavy plank to which all their chains were peg-locked.
The slaver and the woman looked up. The old man, one shoulder against the support pole, slept.
The boy rubbed.
The man whose shadow it was was very tall; on the blocky muscles of arm, chest, and shin the veins sat high in thin, brown skin. He was thick legged; his face bore a six-inch scar; his genitals were pouched in a leather web through which pushed hair and scrotal flesh. Rings of brass clinked each step about one wide ankle; his bare feet were broad, flat, and cracked on their hard edges. A fur bag hung on his hip from a thin chain that slanted his waist; a fur knife-sheath hung from a second chain that slanted the other way. Around his upper arm, chased with strange designs, was a brass bracelet so tight it bit into the muscle. From his neck, on a thong, hung a bronze disk, blurred with verdigris. His dusty hair had been braided to one side with another leather strip, but, with the business of the day, braid and leather had come half unraveled. The leather dangled over the multiple heads of his ridged and rigid shoulder. He stopped before the plank, looked down at the chained three, and ground one fore-knuckle around in his right nostril. (Black on one thumbnail told of a recent injury; the nails were thick, broad through heredity, short from labor, and scimitared at cuticle and crown with labor’s more ineradicable grime.) His palms were almost as cracked and horny as his soles. He snuffled hugely, than spat.