There was a great tumble of stones, each one bigger than the sky itself; grey and black and brown. Paler ribbons threaded through them that looked like deep walkways through the rock, some of them coruscating slightly as if water flowed there. Ragged birds hung over the sharp peaks of the stones, screaming in the new day. The north; of all the directions of the world, it was the most fascinating, because we knew so little about it. From the territory of the Obliviata, all that could be seen of it were black cliffs in the distance, but here... I was awed by the size and splendour of the bare rock. How many hara had stood as I stood now, gazing out through the glass, perhaps waiting for death, and unsure how to claim it for their own? Was Doon the shrine of self-destruction - the dark cup, the razor knife? I had seen no sign of life or death here. Doon was empty. I was sure of it.
And then the sun lifted himself from the bed of dawn, rising up behind the Tower of Doon, up over the cracked and fallen city, up above the broken needles of other, lesser towers, to stretch out the sleepy limbs of his muted light over the mountains before me. It happened suddenly, as if there had been a crack in the enveloping clouds - which I knew was impossible - but the grey and the brown and the black of the hidden north absorbed the light and threw it back to me in a splash of colour; green and purple, dark blue and yellow. I blinked against this unbelievable vision, this hallucination of exploding light and life. There before me, yet far away, I could see the sparkling foam of water falling, the placid gleam of a great lake, the moving black motes that became, as I stared, a slow-moving herd of beasts loping to the water. There were great forests that swept down onto lawns of flashing green, starred with acid-bright blooms. The Tower of Doon took the sun, impaled upon its crown, and showed me this: this that existed, unseen by the Forgotten hara, above the black cliffs, the gateways of impenetrable, vertical stone. This. If I’d known the word then, I’d have called it Paradise.
In those moments, as I blinked at the hills, I thought of my tribe scrubbing, banished, exiled in the wilderness and how they never questioned what might lie beyond the boundaries. All we needed was courage to investigate. We could follow the Torrent to its end. We could run across the plains of fire. There had to be another side to the ruined towns - they couldn’t go on forever - and above the black cliffs, there was life.
Whatever we had done to be imprisoned within the wilderness, within the city, within ourselves meant nothing. There were no real barriers to cross other than those erected by our own lassitude, our idle acceptance of the very least because it required effort to attain the very most. Some hara must have known the truth because they’d come from far away and yet they never told us. The palm-stroker had known - obviously. This was the secret of the Tower of Doon. Death, yes, maybe, but not extinction of the flesh. Ananke must have seen this. Did his bones still lie here or...?
I looked towards the north once more. I felt hot tears gather in my eyes. It was a strange experience and oddly cleansing. I wept aloud, as a harling might, as the harling I’d once been probably had, at the time his hostling had become cold forever. I could not remember. To me, the release was the first of its kind. I had not wept for Ananke.
‘You did not come back for me,’ I said, and punched the thick glass with my hand. ‘Why didn’t you come back? Why?’
There was grief, hot and hard, around me on every side, that I could not escape. There was anger too, but it would not stop me following him. We might never meet again, but my future had been changed for me. I would follow. I would find a way through the black cliffs and soon my feet would be trampling grass, not ash, and my vision self would have a face, and it would embrace me, and I would be whole.
There are no questions in the wilderness...
Fireborn
You can waste a lot of time being in love with people. Or so said my friend, Maqite, as she lay dying of a broken heart. Perhaps it was her calm resignation which kindled the final, fatal anger inside me. That, or my helplessness, as I watched this woman sink and fade like a sunset before my eyes. Sunset colours: that was Maqite. Even as her skin paled and shrank, her hair was the colour of evening across the shawls of her bed. She handed me a bead necklace, said ‘Take it’. It hung limp from my outstretched hand; limp and so cold, splashing colours over my knees as the light passed through the beads.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I asked her.
She looked at me long and wonderingly. Perhaps there was.
She could not speak the words, because she doubted whether she should or could, but I saw them in her eyes; flickering glyphs that spoke of an unacceptable hope. She was a good woman, and had suffered much in silence. Now, a shivering candle of resentment burned dim against her goodness.
Some months back, a sashaying, slant-eyed travelling-girl had come to our settlement. Her name was Kamaara. She had surveyed our community and attached herself to Maqite at once. She clearly did not intend to waste her time with anyone who did not sit upon the highest boughs of the community’s social tree. Maqite was a woman of status. Her lover ruled our settlement with an inflexible will. Everyone adored him, which I suppose made him despise them.
For a while, Maqite’s friendship with Kamaara offended me, for hitherto we had been inseparable. Then, extending her questing awareness further, the interloper used her clever eyes and a basket of exotic promises to lure Maqite’s lover into her canopy of indigo folds. Maqite had been devastated. I had been furious, and secretly glad, for hadn’t Maqite at first been as bewitched by the stranger as her lover now was? I was shocked too, for the strange, beautiful creature who was Maqite’s man had seemed immune to feminine wiles. It had always amazed me he had remained by Maqite’s side, but I was relieved he had, for otherwise I might have had to do something about him myself. It was a prospect that filled me with feverish excitement, but also a sense of dread. He was like no-one I had ever met; inscrutable as a cat, and just as deadly. Better he remained safe in the arms of my friend.
‘Banish her!’ I told Maqite, when she finally admitted her suspicions to me about Kamaara.
She shook her head. ‘No. It will fade. He is only interested in the dazzle. It is nothing. I should have kept silent.’
I knew she still entertained Kamaara in her canopy, and kept her anger under control. But, despite this outer calm, knowledge of the affair only weakened Maqite. It infuriated me that she would not fight. Now, all the life was draining from her. It was hard for her, so hard that they had brought her to this. Hard for me too with my black, bound feelings.
I replenished Maqite’s incense bowl, and went outside, the beads clutched tight in my hand. Her daughter, Mivien, was playing in the dust. Around me, the awnings and canopies of the settlement looked tired in the late afternoon, flapping listlessly. Maqite’s tent was seamed with dust; testament to her inability to shake the fabric recently. Mivien looked up and asked me how her mother was.
‘Tired,’ I said. It was then I decided I could not let her kill herself. Not for this. As for me, I doubted there was anything to do with this matter that could kill me. I had developed an immunity, sipping the poison continually over the six years I had been a member of the community.
At that precise moment, a shape came out of the heat-haze, wreathed in dust. This phantom pranced to a halt before me; a nervous, over-bred horse, betasselled and steaming. Its rider dismounted, conjuring running, crouching boys, who competed with one another to lead the animal to shelter. He stood there, desert-dusted, with only his eyes flaming out from the scarf around his face. Whenever he was near me, I could smell burning.
Mivien leapt up and danced past me, crying ‘Dadda!’
Her joy at his advent made me feel nauseous. I began to walk away, towards my own dwelling.
‘Pashti.’ He said my name. To me, a violation, at that time.
I did not turn but said, ‘Yes?’
‘How is she?’
I knew he would have picked up the child. I could hear her babbling excitedly. How dare he ask me that? ‘
She is resting.’ I am supposed to bow, to manifest my supplication to this man. He has the power to crush me, exile me, perhaps worse. I should guard my words. Still, he let it rest, and I heard him go into the tent, followed by the low murmur of voices, the sharper remarks of the child, who craved his attention. I wrapped the necklace around my wrist. Maqite would not want me to act, but I had to. There was no choice, come ill or good. I waited until sundown, before I blanketed my pony and rode away.
A woman gives her life to a man. Her expectations of life are, in the main part, modest: shelter for herself and her children, continued support on an emotional level. She is quite prepared to fight her own fights to secure nourishment, and will defend her family more fiercely than any man. Her inner ways are unknown to men, as they should be. Something had attacked Maqite so fundamentally her sense of survival had fled. In her place, I would have struck out, exchanged snarl with snarl, cunning with cunning. The thorn, when it had stabbed my friend, had been poisoned. She now lacked the strength to defend herself. I, possessed of sanity, and an ability to concoct strategies, must become her, fight this battle for her, as she would, if she had the stamina. There must be some way to rekindle her energy, so that the war-flag could be passed back. Ultimately, she must be the one to inflict defeat. I could not do this alone, for I lacked the power of persuasion. She sickened, as if cursed, yet could not look with clear eyes upon the cause of it.
Besides, it was also my battle.
To ride to this place, it is essential to perceive the world in a different way; we ride into a dream reality. Nothing but the most severe need would propel any of us in this direction, between the standing stones of The Hovering and The Backward-Looking. There is no trail to follow as such, just a feeling of intense aversion, a prickling of the skin, a grinding of the joints, which signals a person is heading in the right way. I had to blindfold the pony, but wrapped around his eyes a layer of palm fronds soaked in the juice of the desert violet pod, which brings visions of a pleasant land to human or beast; a place where the hawks hover in flocks: an unusual and impossible image. Thus, I tricked him into trotting towards the unthinkable, but still I dismounted at the place where the red scrub becomes glistening black stones, and tied him to a shrub beside a mud pool, where he could nuzzle the gloop and believe himself supping nectar. If the palm fronds dried out before I could return, he would come to his senses and rid himself of the blindfold, before galloping in terror back to the settlement. I hoped this would not happen, for I had ridden, by then, for two hours.
I walked into the shunned territories. People lived there, we knew that, and they were feared, for they were not like us. It was said they were exiles from a far, high place, where they had grown tall in the rarefied air. I had never seen any of these people, and sometimes doubted their existence, but for the tales that were brought to us, and the garbled, fevered rantings of those who travelled towards them, desperate and numb to fear, seeking answers and favours. The tall people were known by many names, but we called them Yazatas, the adorable ones, out of wary respect, for we lived too close to their lands. In the holy books of our people were the commandments which forbade us to build in stone or wood. This rule was said to have come from a Yazata mystic, who had come to our people when we lived in a town of obsidian glass. He had shaken his staff and the town had shattered. Now we lived under fabric and hung charms at the swaying portals to ward off eyes of evil, which were the eyes of a bird, hungry and yellow. The holy books said many things about the Yazatas, although only the seers and scryers had read them all. We knew that the adorable ones understood true sorcery, and that they worshipped the demons of fire. They were known as a dangerous and capricious race, to be avoided. Why then was I walking towards them, when I had laughed at the desperate fools who had gone this way before?
The answer is simple. The Yazatas were powerful, and could proffer solutions to any problem, for those who were brave enough to ask.
I walked down into a valley, following a path scoured, as if by running water in some far-distant time, through the bleached yellow rocks. The crags here were lumpy and twisted, as if wrung by the hands of giants into tortured shapes. That, or they were petrified titans, frozen in anguished poses, shying away from a divine lightning blast, or a vision of ultimate truth. I began to feel uneasy. My teeth ached, and I was sure I could hear sounds that were not there at all.
At last, the path led me out into the open. It was a place that looked as if a god had punched the earth; an uneven oval hole in the rocks that it might take an hour to cross. All around me the stone reared high, while the flat centre of the valley was marked by strange monoliths; twisted red and ochre stone catching the light.
My heart was beating fast. As I approached, I realised that among the bulbous towers of stone, there was a village, or rather the stones were the village. The nearer I came, the more the scene before me seemed to solidify. Between the dwellings, I could see the smoking remains of many fires, dying in wide, shallow pits. The ground beneath my feet changed from yellow dust to black and grey cinders. Each crunching footfall threw up a reek of ashes. The air smelled strongly of smoke, which was acrid as if weeds had been burned. From the sentinel towers, I sensed watching, waiting eyes, although I could see no sign of human life. Only a few skinny dogs were nosing among the embers, and they did not appear to notice me.
For a moment, I halted in the shadows of the towers, and considered turning back. An instinct within me warned I should go no further, that to carry on I risked death, or something more damaging. Yet would I be allowed to escape, now that I had come this far?
My flesh tight against my bones, I walked between the silent, watching towers. Daring to look up, I could see that each one comprised layers of rooms - which I presumed were living quarters. Each tower had only one entrance, at ground level, but dull rags flapped before rough-hewn holes that punctuated the towers’ height. Strings of tiny bells hung from these openings, chiming thinly in the wind, wound around what looked like long hanks of hair or combed hemp. I sensed a thousand watching eyes, and kept on walking, simply because I was too afraid to stop.
She stood, as if waiting for me, at the edge of the settlement. It seemed to take an age to reach her. Her unnaturally tall, angular body was swathed in dark cloth and she leaned into the wind. When the distance of only two or three strides separated us, I halted and said, ‘I have come.’ I had no doubt she had expected me. She wore a ragged shawl of charcoal grey fabric around her head, which she held closed at the neck with a long-fingered, dark brown hand. Tails of grey-black hair whipped around the edges of her shawl. Her face looked very different to those of the ancient desert peoples I had encountered before. The cheek-bones were high, the nose aquiline, giving her a haughty appearance. She seemed to be unthinkably ancient, yet her black eyes were bright, and her skin strangely smooth. Her lips worked in rhythmic chewing, and whatever she had in her mouth exuded a thin stream of black liquid, which ran over her chin. She did not seem concerned about this. I could hear her muttering faintly to herself, but the words meant nothing to me.
‘Will you help me?’ I asked her. Simply by looking at this strange woman, I understood the danger I was in, and the folly of having come to this place. Still, it was too late to regret that now.
She nodded to me, and bade me follow her, away from the settlement, up into the rocks. A path was cut there, worn smooth beneath the passage of countless feet. My heart beat painfully like the dull throbbing of a bruise. My vision became dark. Above me yawned the entrance to a cave; shocking yellow rock against the lilac sky, framing a core of black. Throwing back my head, I watched the shimmering image of the woman enter into the darkness, but I could not follow. She must have sensed my reticence, for she turned back, looked at me for a few moments, then beckoned for me to come to her. I detected a sense of impatience in her gesture. Wasn’t this what I had come for? Why now did I balk at the very threshold of understanding?
Then, I saw his face hanging before my eyes;
a mirage of deceit. The image retreated before me, mocking, and I walked after it. Thus, I entered into the dry darkness of the cave. I said aloud, ‘He is the most beautiful thing alive.’ But the only response was the soft sifting of desert dust, duned by the restless winds, and the threading plash of water. I knew that I had surrendered myself willingly to the caprices of a place of power. The air hummed with it. Deep within my ears rustled the crackle of flames and my nostrils were filled with smoke and the perfume of clear water.
As my eyes opened up to the darkness, I could see that the far wall of the cave was curtained by a waterfall, which frothed into a wide, shallow basin. I thought to myself, ‘Why, the water is powerful here, yet they worship fire.’
My guide stood beside the spuming basin. I could see her bare arms now, scored with ancient black tattoos. She was grinning at me still, her jaws working as she chewed. Then she spat onto the sandy floor, expelling a black, greasy wad of something, and wiped her mouth. She spoke to me, but her words were harsh explosions of sound, which I could not understand. Pulling a grimacing face, she gestured towards me, and laughed.
‘You know why I am here?’ I asked her.
She grinned more widely still, and turned in a whirl of ashen cloth, to duck beneath the waterfall. I did not want to be left alone in this place. Anything could come. Anything could happen. One wrong move and I would be dead. Perhaps that what why she left me there. These thoughts were part of the ritual I had begun when I had made my decision outside Maqite’s canopy.
I waited as patiently as I could, although my heart still hammered with the desire to flee. The busy water, the walls themselves, seemed imbued with spiritual presences, none of which felt benign. I began to wonder whether I would escape this place alive and even moved back towards the mouth of the cave. But just as my toes nudged the bar of sunlight across the threshold, I heard a movement behind me. Turning, I saw my guide had returned. In her hands she held what appeared to be a bottle of green glass.