We walked until the world ended – my woman and I. Before that, on the plains, there were more – my little boy with the dull hair, my sister and her two children, some other families, the young man with no woman who was taught to watch the sky. And long before that, before my child was born, in the mountains, there were many families, many young men and women and the older men who watched the skies and taught the cleverest of the younger ones to say when it would be warm and when it would rain.They are all gone now, but I can remember their faces as if they were before me. Sometimes, I think I can remember them better now that they’re gone. Sometimes, when I cannot make fire or the night is warm enough, I see them in the outer shadows. We heard stories, as children, that if the bodies of the dead were not given to the sky, they would come alive when no one was looking and follow their families on the earth. We had tried our best out on the plains, but no one but the men who watched the sky reallyknew how to move a body there. And when the others were gone, I tried to carry out the ritual as I had seen it done. It was so much harder to cut the flesh and break the limbs of my sister when she went. Even though I knew that she felt no pain, that I was releasing her from the pain of her body, I had to close my eyes. The stone slipped over smooth bone and cut wrong. I hoped the birds wouldn’t mind. I held my hand, where I had cut it by accident, over her corpse and let the blood drip out, thinking some taste of life might encourage them. I never found out if my ruse worked. I couldn’t bear to watch her leave the world in pieces, so I told the others we had to keep moving.
My sister had died in her sleep, having been too warm in the head for many weeks. The air in this place was like that, much too warm, it smothered you. We were all afraid for some time afterwards that there was poison in it. The children – mine and my sister’s – would feel each other’s heads in the morning and dunk their hair in streams to keep the heat from entering them. When I think of them now, what I remember most clearly is their hair: My boy’s hair, soft and dull, decorated with beads of clear water. My woman’s hair, bright and glistening as though it were alive. She never cut it because she said it felt like she was cutting into herself, so when she ran it would float out behind her like fire from a thrown torch. On the darkest nights, I think I can see the light of it slipping from tree to tree. This is the only thing I see at night that does not make me afraid.
She died protecting our son from the dark men who came over the hills. He had wandered off, hoping to find… I don’t know what he hoped to find out there, really? Sometimes I think berries, because he knew his mother liked them. Sometime I think it was just a child’s whim. We didn’t think too much of it, since my sister’s younger one was sick too, with a warm head. Maybe he went to get water from the stream to cool her. We heard him shriek, once, and that was all. My woman went first, before I could even think what to do. I told the young man to take my sister’s children and run. He slung one over each shoulder so that the last I saw of them were the pale faces of the children looking back at me as they slipped into the woods, bobbing up and down with his steps.
I turned and ran in the direction of the scream, not knowing which way exactly to turn until I heard hoarse cries and snapping branches off in the deep brush. I found them tangled together, my woman and this scrawny-looking creature, with hair the colour of tree bark. She had her long fingers wrapped around his throat, pressing so hard that you could see his sand-coloured skin poking out between her fingers. His eyes were wide open, the widest eyes I’d ever seen, staring up through the trees at the sky. She was stretched out on top of him, a smooth spear-shaft embedded in her back. The blood from her wound saturated her hair, but seemed to make it all the more beautiful and vibrant. It looked, truly, as if it might rise and embrace me in soft comfort, entirely without her. Our child was gone.
I turned this way and that, mute and rooted to the earth, searching the brown trees for another flashing of red hair. There were sounds all around me, a soft whispering and snapping branches, a hoot or the rustling of leaves. I could see movement, but it was all the same, the men and the trees. I felt dizzy. The woods began to echo with a wailing that grew, from a single voice, as if the wind, to a whole chorus. I remembered how my father told me that the dark men hunt like wolves, they surround their pray and drive it mad with howling. I tore my cutting stone from around my neck and, rather than crying out with rage as I told myself I wanted, rather than rushing into the woods to slaughter as many of the beasts as I could, I knelt down and cut a handful of my woman’s bloody hair. Clutching this, feeling the blood between my fingers, I ran back the way I had come. I stayed low, pretending in my broken mind that I was a deer, fleeing from my own people’s spears.
I never found the young man and my sister’s children, although I searched the woods for sign the same way I would hunt a very specific animal. Being clever as he was, I imagined he knew how to hide such things. I was thankful he did, for I imagined the dark men could hunt as well as I, although I’d heard stories that they eat roots and berries for food and only hunt for the taste of meat and not its substance. I wonder sometimes that a race so much like the lowest of the beasts could be so dangerous. They eat like raccoons yet hunt like wolves. They speak, but it does not sound like speech. They walk, but it is a strange walk, like they are held on their shoulders by invisible hands. They make fine cutting stones, yet do not cut their dead so that they can leave for the sky. I find, now that I am alone, that I do not hate them, nor do I fear their smooth sticks and sharp stones, but I fear their presence. It disturbs me to think that their feet will forever tread over the valley where I grew into a man and found my woman. It disturbs me to think that nothing beautiful will grow there ever again. Sometimes, when I am very hungry I have nightmares where I see her as one of them, short with small hands, smooth skin, but pale as our child’s was, and still that bloody red hair.
I have come now, at last, to the end of the world. The dark men and the walking dead of my family can follow me no further because I have nowhere further to run. The great water stretches out in three directions from this place. The sun rises and sets in its depths and I am terrified twice daily when I can see, in the water, that blood, that hair. I feel surrounded by blood. I think that when I die, I will stay in this place. There will be no one to offer my body to the sky, so I will just lie here. But I think, also, how I left her body there, so tense and stiff and permanent. And perhaps if I lie here, her blood all around me in the water, then one day she will come. I find a smooth, flat rock and lay myself down. I spread the dry hairs I have carried all this way, now caked with blood, across my chest. And here, at the end of the world, I wait for someone to find me.
No comments:
Post a Comment