by Jon Jacks
Long, long ago, the role of the Wind was to carry out all the orders issued by the gods.
It would bring fortune to the people of the gods by bringing with it the rain that would irrigate their crops. Or it would bring the cool air to lessen the impact of an overly fierce sun.
When the gods were angry, it would bring misfortune. These were the stronger winds, that would flatten of even uproot the crops.
It could help the heavier rains pound the ground until it became useless mud, transforming the earth into a fruitless clay that would crumble when the sun dried it out.
Unlike the gods, however, the Wind possessed a kindly nature that saw no reason to punish these poor, vulnerable creatures so harshly.
It had often gently caressed the skins, tousled the hair, of these people. It had developed an affection for them, much as a parent develops an affection for a child.
The Wind thought it unfair not to at least give them some warning of whatever was about to befall them. Otherwise, how could they be expected to repent for their misbehaviour?
Of course, the Wind could not simply talk to these people. The Wind’s own language was untranslatable, as far as any of these people were concerned.
Yet within his many powers the Wind found it easy to whip up fallen leaves into a face, with eyes, nose – and mouth.
And through this mouth, the Wind could talk.
Could tell these people to beware the oncoming storm.
The powerful gales.
The pummelling rains.
To prepare for the worst excesses of these calamities that were soon about to fall upon them.
It wasn’t just leaves that the Wind could use to create a face through which he could converse with these people, however.
He could whisk up small stems discarded by the bushes.
He could utilise dust, powdered stone, the dropped petals of many flowers. (A particular favourite amongst the people he talked to, because it looked so delightful, so colourful.)
He could even whisk up the waters of a stream or sea, if necessary.
The people began to appreciate the many faces of the Wind. For every face was a kindly face.
Every face heralded a potential disaster. Yet every face also gave them enough warning to lessen the impact of those disasters.
Of course, the Wind soon came to be regarded by the people as a powerful god. And, moreover, a benevolent god who regretted and tried to mitigate the worst effects of any punishments inflicted on them.
The gods were appalled.
They were angry that the Wind had come to be regarded by the people as more worthy of worship than they themselves were.
They were angry that the impact of their retribution on the people was being considerably lessened by his intrusion into their affairs.
The Wind it seemed, they said, also required an intervention of the gods’; one to ensure he was fully aware of his true, more lowly place within the hierarchy of being.
They conspired to lessen the Wind’s power: to place objects such as leaves, dust, water, beyond the Wind’s direct control.
They would no longer obey his instructions, behaving only chaotically and unpredictably whenever the Wind blew across them.
No longer would the Wind be allowed to use his powers to form faces that could talk to the people.
Of course, not even the gods could prevent the Wind from talking. Neither could they prevent him from trying to warn the people of any forthcoming event.
Yet without his face – how could he talk in a language the people would understand?
And without the regular appearance of the faces of the Wind, the people soon began to think that, like the other gods, the Wind had deserted them.
He sought only to punish them, like any other god.
It wasn’t long before the people had forgotten that the Wind had ever attempted to warn them.
Even sooner than that, they had forgotten that he had been able to do so by forming faces of leaves, dust, water.
So now when they think they hear a voice warning them to take care, they just say:
‘Pah, it’s just the wind!’
*
Chapter 24
The wind was whistling through loosely scattered stones as they passed over the bleak area encompassing the highest peak of the mountain.
It seemed, particularly after they had listened to the stone giant’s story, that some of that whistling could be mistaken for excited voices, for laughter.
The way the stones around them were laid, the symmetrical patterns they formed, implied that they had once been walls, quite possibly of buildings.
If so, it was an odd place to build a town or city.
The wind blew excessively strongly here, to the extent that no soil for crops lay upon the ground, the wind having long ago whipped it up into the air and swept it down into the more sheltered valleys.
Water too, of course, was in short supply. It would also have been hard to keep herding-animals here, with not the slightest signs of the scrub even the hardiest goats needed to live on.
The voices of the wind gradually became louder, more distinguishable as individual cries, as the giant quickly traversed the mountain top. The wind itself whipped at his eyes.
The giant almost fell into the deep, sharp depression cut deeply into the ground, so cleanly and abruptly was it cut into the stone.
Glancing down, he and his passengers found themselves looking down onto a large, rectangular opening. Here a handful of people were playing a furiously fast game, a large ball of hard rubber hurtling between them.
Striking the ball with elbows, knees, hips, the players constantly knocked the ball back towards the four surrounding walls. The floor plan being in the shape of an I, the longer walls were a mix of sloping and horizontal planes extending far into the court.
The players appeared to be attempting to aim the heavy ball through the mouths of huge painted faces at each end of the court, the holes shaped like four interlocking circles.
The ball at last dropped to the ground as a player, looking up in awe at the looming giant of stone, faulted his play. Following his shocked gaze, the other players also looked up, their mouths dropping open in surprise.
Tesetra wondered if they would flee in fear. The giant must look even more terrifying than usual, she realised, as he was standing so much higher up on the ground compared to the players.
Although both surprised and awestruck, however, none of the players displayed any fear. Far from running away, they raised their hands in greeting, calling on the Stone man and his three riders to come down and join them.
The giant didn’t need to search for any steps that would take them down into the deep cutting: he simply clambered down, as any normal person would climb down into a small hole.
As the giant carefully lowered his three passengers to the ground, Tesetra was once again surprised to see that the players had no fear of the Stone man. Yes, they seemed amazed by his presence, continuing to stare at him in wonder as they gathered around him; but it seemed that his existence wasn’t entirely unexpected.
‘We’d heard that stone could come to life; but I never thought I would see such a man!’ one of the players, a woman, exclaimed excitedly as she stroked the hard leg of the giant.
If the woman was surprised by the giant’s rock-like composition, Tesetra was no less surprised by the woman’s own nature. What passed for her flesh seemed to have been made in some spectacularly elaborate way from plants, a tight mesh of stems, leaves, flowers that showed faintly in the texture and patterns on her skin.
In every other way, however, she and her friends appeared to be hardly dissimilar from themselves.
If either the woman or the other of the game’s competitors noticed any difference in their own composition to that of the three newcomers, they failed to show it. All their attention remained on the stone giant, who appeared a little disconcerted and embarrassed by their continued interest.
‘I must return to my own people,’ he stated flatly to Tesetra. ‘We’re not yet ready to involve ourselves completely in the lives of the other peoples of the Earth.’
Then, without bothering to make any further explanation or apology, the shy giant turned and clambered out of the huge court cut into the stone of the mountain peak. The ground shook a little as he quickly strode away.
At last, the people who seemed to have originally been made of plants turned to observe Tesetra and the two boys more closely.
‘You must be hungry?’ one of the men said.
‘You’ve travelled far, yes?’ the woman added, smiling benignly.
Tesetra glanced about herself apprehensively, plainly remembering the barren land they had just passed through, even if she could no longer see it beyond the high-rising walls of the court.
Surely these poor people wouldn’t have much food to spare?
‘We have plenty of food,’ another man said, as if recognising Tesetra’s reasons for her anxiety.
‘Our god provided us with all the corn we need,’ another answered.
‘Your god?’ Degrat frowned as if deeply puzzled.
‘The Serpent god of course!’
‘But…but you’re not the Snake People!’
*
Chapter 25
‘Degrat: didn’t we worship the Jaguar god, even though we’re not the Jaguar People?’
Tesetra couldn’t understand why Degrat still appeared confused that the Plant People could worship the Serpent god. Couldn’t understand why he continued to insist that that must mean the Snake People didn’t exist.
Was it, she wondered a little bitterly, that he secretly hoped the Snake People didn’t really exist? If only to punish Fandran in some way?
‘The Jaguar people?’ one of the men asked curiously, picking up on Tesetra’s admonishment of Degrat’s intransigence. ‘So the legends are true? Like the men of stone, the Jaguar People also really existed?’
Tesetra nodded.
‘The Stone People are the Jaguar people: or at least, the people as they originally were.’
The men and women swapped perplexed looks.
‘This isn’t what our legends tell us,’ the woman said to Tesetra. ‘They say the Jaguar People came before us–’
‘How far before you?’ Degrat interrupted rudely. ‘If they were the first people, then where do your legends place you?’
The woman didn’t appear to be upset by Degrat’s rudeness.
‘We came directly after the Jaguar people–’
‘You see, Tesetra?’ Degrat exclaimed with a strange mix of both triumph and nervousness. ‘They are the people of the Second Sun!’
‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that; the Second Sun,’ one of the men said graciously.
‘At least, in the sense that it followed the First,’ another added.
‘But we’re not these Snake People, whom you seemed to be expecting us to be!’ yet another chuckled richly. ‘We’re the People of the Corn: Corn People, if you will.’
With a polite bow and an elegant wave of a hand, he invited them all to walk towards one of the large facemasks decorating one end of the court. It seemed to have no exit, causing Tesetra to wonder why they should be directed this way.
‘Of the Wind?’ Fandran asked, as if still requiring further confirmation. ‘You’re the People of the Wind?’
The man and woman who had been doing most of the talking both smiled and nodded in agreement.
As they drew closer towards the end of the yard, Tesetra noticed a line of red ants climbing up the wall towards the face’s gaping mouth. Here they vanished through the hole.
The circular hole on the right began to widen, like the dark pupil of an eye expands, the surrounding stone made up of curving shards that slipped easily alongside each other.
At last, there was room for a person to pass through it.
‘Yet why here?’ Degrat persisted. ‘Shouldn’t you be out to the east?’
‘And the Jaguar people?’ the woman replied. ‘Shouldn’t they, by rights, be living in the south? Yet in fact many people have been displaced by the catastrophes that have punished our Earth.’
‘Though we ourselves,’ the man added, ‘moved here before the hurricane that took all our people bar us away.’
‘How did you survive?’ Fandran asked.
‘We were tending the corn.’
As they entered through the hole that had now become a door, they were confronted by a whole field of corn growing beneath a vast coned ceiling.
*
The sun shone surprising brightly into the cylindrical room.
It streamed in through an opening high up in the roof. It was a remarkable, almost unbelievable sight.
‘One of our kings originally insisted we move to the mountain tops; to avoid the ferocious beasts who controlled the jungle,’ the woman explained brightly.
‘There were few other animals for them to feast on at that time, of course!’ the man explained further.
‘We were safe from attack here,’ one of the others added. ‘But only because the soil was so barren, so unsupportive of life, that no one would wish to come here anyway!’
‘We thought we had fled one danger to fall into the trap of another: we were sure we would die!’
‘But then we recalled how the Serpent god had provided us with corn when we had lived in the lower areas.’
‘Seeing a red ant scurrying by with a kernel of corn, he followed him through the narrow cracks of the mountain. In this way, he discovered the very first, secret hoard of corn.’
‘So we did the same; and we found the corn that became our sustenance!’
‘It was a relief to find that our legend of the discovery of corn had a basis of truth.’
‘And so we shouldn’t really have been surprised by the sight of your friend, the giant of stone.’
‘We’d thought of the existence of such men as being nothing more than a childish story. Even though we had been assured that it was in fact a legend.’
*
Chapter 26
The Man of Rock
Once there was a Man of Rock who, being an extremely powerful man, married every beautiful girl he could.
And yet he abused these wives, leaving them crippled, with missing limbs, or at the very least very severely bruised.
When he heard, however, of seven young men who had a fabulously beautiful daughter – a girl who had miraculously sprung into life from the blood of a wound caused by a thorny plant – he insisted that she should become one of his many wives.
He charged the magpie with informing these people that he desired her as his wife. But the magpie had seen what had happened to all the other wives; he warned the people to refuse the rock’s demands, no matter how threatening he became.
When the magpie told the rock that his offer of marriage had been refused, the rock ordered him to return and inform these men that the girl must nevertheless marry him.
Now the magpie did not wish to refuse the commands of the rock, for he knew what the rock was capable of. So he suggested that the rock should use a far swifter messenger than himself: the hummingbird could carry the rock’s demands far more swiftly than he himself could ever hope to achieve.
Of course, the magpie was also fully aware that the hummingbird’s swiftness would enable him to save himself when the thwarted rock set out to pursue him.
Just like the magpie, the hummingbird warned the men that their daughter would be sorely injured if she married the rock. He advised them to leave where they were living as soon as possible.
When the humming bird returned, he told the rock he had been unable to find the men and the girl the rock desired to marry.
Yet the rock somehow knew the hummingbird was lying: and so he told the hummingbird to fly back to the men immediately and tell them that if they continued to refuse his demands, he would seek them out.
Recognising the rock’s power, this ti
me the hummingbird told the men that they had no choice but to acquiesce to the rock’s demands; but, he added, he knew of two animals who could help her.
So the girl went with the hummingbird back to the rock and his tent full of crippled wives. The rock was pleased that at last he had this beautiful girl as one of his many wives.
The next morning, as he did every morning, the rock rose up through the top of the tent. He left his wife there until he would return in the evening, entering the tent in the same way he had left.
While he was out, a badger and a mole dug a hole into the tent. Even so, they told the girl she must stay where she was until the rock returned.
They lightly covered the hole; and so when the rock returned, he fell into it. Then as the girl rushed from the tent, they cried out, ‘Let the Earth be covered again.’
The rock tossed and turned angrily inside the Earth as the girl returned to her fathers and they fled the area. The men and the girl travelled all night; yet by the morning, the rock had overtaken them.
The fleeing men wished for a steep-sided canyon to open up behind them, and the rock fell down its precipitous sides. While the rock attempted to climb out, the men and the girl ran on, once again running throughout the night.
Once again, however, the rock had caught up to them by morning.
Now the girl was tired of running.
She knew, she said, of a better place where they could go: a place where she could provide the means of living for all of them.
Along with the words, ‘First for my father,’ she kicked a silver ball she had been carrying high up into the sky.
Her father rose up with the ball.
And when she kicked the ball into the sky once more, another also rose up into the sky with it.
She did this for all of them, such that they all reached the sky in one place.
And when the rock was about to close in upon her, she kicked the ball a final time; and this time she rose up with it into the sky.
Then she said to the rock, ‘You’ll remain where you overtook us, troubling people no more, but found wherever there are hills.’
So now she and her seven fathers live in a tent covered with stars.
*