Balant: A Beginning

by Sam Smith

  The savages had formed a group, the women holding their children to them. There ensued much talking and waving of arms. They appeared to be clad in animal skins, short tunics which ended above the knee. Agreement reached among themselves, the savages cautiously advanced towards Dag and Malamud.

  There followed what I can only describe as a comic dance.

  The savages closed on Dag and Malamud making what were apparently gestures of goodwill — the flat of one hand coming down over the knuckles of the other hand. When Dag repeated this gesture back to the savages, they laughed and rushed forward. Only for Dag and Malamud to beat a hasty retreat. This puzzled the savages. They conferred together, made the gesture again. Again Dag repeated it. Again the savages laughed and rushed forward. Again Dag and Malamud precipitately retreated. Again the savages were puzzled.

  This happened several more times, was eventually resolved by Malamud stooping to the sand, raising his palm to the savages, then moving back a few paces, stooping to the sand once more and, this time, raising his palm to Dag. The savages then curiously approached, inspected the sand, held another discussion, than promptly one and all sat down. Opposite them, about ten meters distant, Dag and Malamud cautiously lowered themselves onto their backsides.

  The conversation that followed consisted mostly of exaggerated dumbshow. I did notice, however, just before they had sat down, that the tallest savage was only as high as Dag’s chest. Even Malamud towered over them; and, as I watched them talk, I wondered if gravity or diet was responsible for their lowly stature.

  Behind the sitting group who were talking to Malamud and Dag the other savages tended their children, dressed one another’s wounds, comforted the bereaved, lit fires and prepared food. Some disappeared back up into the hills to fetch water, which they used to wash what I took to be splashes of the slime from their clothing and flesh. One savage gathered some large leaves to shade those who were sitting and talking to Dag and Malamud. Some of the leaves were tossed across to Dag and Malamud. Gestures of thanks were made. The savages' weapons appeared to be metal-tipped spears.

  Suddenly Dag and Malamud scrambled to their feet and skittered away. I gripped the control column. But it was only a child who had run through the ranks of the savages. An adult grabbed him, dragged him back behind those talking; and Dag and Malamud returned to their seats opposite the savages. Shortly afterwards the savages offered a bag to Malamud. It was refused. Malamud then rose and walked unhurriedly back to the shuttle.

  "Dag said for you to come over," Malamud said when he opened the door. “They don't mean us any harm."

  I, of course, asked for reassurances. Malamud said that, from what he could make out, they were grateful to us for coming to their rescue, wanted to embrace us.

  "Not a very savoury proposition," Malamud made an expression of distaste. "Bunch of unwashed titches."

  While I unstrapped myself Malamud gathered up food and water. I asked what he had done when he had stooped to the sand.

  “Drew two lines," he said. “That's the trouble with you learned old men, you don't know when to put your knowledge to use."

  I approached the group with some temerity; and, as I came closer, I saw why Dag and Malamud had fled from the child. Practically all of the children, some of the adults too, had mucus dribbling from their noses. Many of the adults also had pockmarked faces. Some of the men were prematurely bald. And all their clothes, as I had judged from a distance, were made of mangy animal skins.

  Malamud and I sat on either side of Dag. He appeared to be conversing with them in their language. When he paused I asked how he came to be familiar with it.

  "The byways of learning. Philosophers have to be linguists. A word is an idea, language the key to understanding. You can't trust voice boxes to interpret that correctly. So one has to learn the language, discover its nuances. I had to translate some old books once. Their language here is very similar to that ancient language. At least they seem to understand me."

  "Can they read and write?" I asked him.

  "Yes, but for some reason it's fallen into disuse. Probably because of the disruption caused by the arrival of the Nautili.”

  From talking to me he turned back to them. I heard the name Pi among his words. Even these primitive savages seemed amused by the name.

  "And this is," Dag said to me, "Ronan and his woman Yolande. So far as I can make out."

  Ronan had his hair plaited and his beard clipped. In his belt he had an iron knife. Yolande's hair too was plaited.

  "She's pretty, eh?" Malamud said to me from the other side of Dag. And indeed she was.

  Later, when she rose to attend to some matter among the people behind her, I saw that, though short in stature, she owned a supple gracefulness that Spacewomen seem to have lost. Although we continue to celebrate it in our arts.

  Ronan asked Dag what Malamud had said. Dag translated. Ronan nodded and smiled. Yolande blushed and hit him with her elbow.

  “Why did the Nautili attack them?" I asked Dag.

  "Apparently the Nautili are comparatively recent arrivals. As we guessed, the inhabitants all used to fish the seas. Then, about two generations ago, when Ronan’s father was a young man, the Nautili came and drove them from the oceans. First they wrecked the boats, then started on the coastal towns.“

  "But the cities were inland."

  "He says that wasn't the Nautili. It was something else. He keeps pointing to the sky, but I can’t make out what he meant."

  "So why did the Nautili attack them now?"

  "Ronan's a bit of a spaceman — he wanted to improve his people's lot. He calls himself their king. And he didn't want them to rot like the fallen trees in the forest. So they built some boats and went fishing as their fathers, as their forefathers had fished. For several days all went well. Then the Nautili sank two of the boats. Ronan realised, knowing what had happened before, that the Nautili wouldn't stop there. He had violated their territory; they would retaliate. The lines," Dag gestured to Malamud's groves in the sand, “had to be redrawn. So he rushed back to the settlement, evacuated it, and brought his people over the mountain. The Nautili, having found the settlement empty, pursued them here. Ronan says that he is not now very popular with his people."

  Ronan, having listened to the frequent mention of his name, now questioned Dag. While they frowned over each other's words, I studied him. His unpopularity did not seem to trouble him; and I found myself looking on him with respect, admiring his spirit if deploring his appetite. And I wondered at his justification for going fishing — that because his forefathers had done it, so too should he do it. A singularly regressive logic: that our primitive ancestors may have done something is no reason for our doing it. Life has changed since then. New rules apply. Though such backwards logic is typical of planetary intelligence.

  “How many of his people were killed?” I asked Dag.

  "Nine, and two children.” It was a mother who was making the wailing noise in the group behind.

  One of the savages came from a fire and presented Ronan and Yolande with a cooked animal. The three of us watched aghast as, between them, they tore the animal apart and ate its flesh I noticed that, so nauseated was Malamud by the spectacle, that he had to stop himself visibly retching. I simply laid aside the fruit that I had been eating. Dag, however, overcame his revulsion and continued talking to them as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

  "What reason did you give for our being here?" I asked him.

  "I told him that we had run out of food in our journey between stars, had stopped off here to take on provisions. One of his men has found our cave. I've told him that the bags contain food for our journey. Ronan has given an order that they are not to be touched.”

  “Where are they going from here?"

  “Back across the mountains. He’s going to make a new settlement further inland.”

  So the day wore on in faltering dialogue. The man we had seen on the mountain ledge had been one of Ronan's men. Y
olande asked Dag about the women of space. Unable to answer all her questions, Dag asked Malamud to help him in his answers. And I do declare that that Malamud flirted with her through Dag. While Ronan looked on more amused than outraged. In fact Ronan neatly put an end to it by asking how old Malamud was. When Dag told him he and Yolande leant together laughing.

  Dag and I again tried to discover what had happened to their cities — without success. According to Ronan, Balant legend had it that, before their destruction, the cities had been wicked and sinful places. That was on a par with primitive man’s understanding of cause and effect. Something so awful happens, something so beyond their comprehension, that they believe that its victims must have deserved their fate. Planetary histories are full of such phenomena — Tankli, Sodom and Gomorrah, Antoner, Pompei, Chuline, etcetera. One important discovery I did make though. Pointing to the ground I said,

  "Balant." With which Ronan eagerly concurred,

  "Balant."

  “That means,” I said to Dag, “that Balant is the indigenous name for this planet. Therefore that spaceman had contact with these people. How else could he have known their name for it?"

  So Dag asked Ronan if they had met any others like us from Space. Ronan shook his head. But, despite Ronan's denial, I wondered if that spaceman could have been an Emissary — sent here to prepare the inhabitants for civilisation. It would account for the valet. Had his attempt to treat with them, though, been premature? Had they turned on him, destroyed his ship; left him in hiding here and cursing the planet and its destructive inhabitants?

  Ronan was now quizzing Dag about our civilisation, occasionally shaking his head in open disbelief at what Dag told him, more often simply smiling over the oddities of another culture.

  Their own culture was on a par with the last immoral century. Hard for us to imagine now, but it was thought then that who you had sex with was of greater moral importance than who, not what, but who you killed. Entire peoples slaughtered one another, and judged themselves morally superior. But let one of their killing leaders have sex with someone outside of their marriages, and he or she was called immoral.

  So too on primitive Balant, where men of war were still regarded as heroes. Whereas we know that their men of peace, if any should come will be celebrated long after their men of war. Antir, Buddha, Nuvas are still remembered; while the generals and the battles and the killing of their times have long been forgotten.

  I asked, through Dag, why there were so few people on Balant. Had it been sickness or war? Again Ronan pointed to the sky. Dag said that, so far as he could make out, Ronan believed that the people had been swallowed by the night.

  I told Dag to ask him what noise the Nautili ships had made. Ronan made a noise like the wind.

  “Nothing more?" I queried him.

  "Whoosh. Whoosh,” he said. I told Dag to ask him what noise the shuttle had made. Ronan gave a muted rendition of our engines' scream. Then how, I fell there and then to wondering, were the Nautili ships powered if the only noise of their passing was the displacement of air? I was, I still am, intrigued.

  Come dusk we were still sitting on either side of our lines. Behind him Ronan's people had made shelters of branches, had metal cooking pots hung on tripods over fires. As night closed in I heard the unmistakable squeak of a violin. A violin badly played; but, without doubt, a violin. Eagerly I clutched at Dag's arm,

  "A violin. Listen. A violin. Ask him to bring it over."

  The request was listened to, an order given. A cringing man was chivvied up to the line. He was told to play. The violin was unlike any in my mother’s collection, indeed was unlike any that I had seen before. It had an almost triangular base, a crude fingering shaft. But it did have a bow, and it sounded like a violin; although some of the chords played made me wince.

  When Ronan saw my grimaces of distaste he shouted at the musician to stop. The musician cowered from him. All my fears of disease were cast aside.

  "Ask Ronan if I can play it,” I told Dag. Dag translated. Ronan gave the order.

  The small man fiercely shook his head, like any musician loath to part with his treasured instrument.

  Ronan rose angrily to his feet.

  “Tell the musician I only want to borrow it,” I quickly told Dag.

  Aware of the discord my request had sown, Dag diplomatically addressed himself directly to the musician. The musician looked beseechingly to me. Holding his eyes I nodded slowly and solemnly in an attempt to reassure him that I intended his precious violin no harm. Ronan barked at him.

  Stepping forward the musician laid the violin midway between the two lines. I stepped forward and picked it up, returned behind our line.

  Watched anxiously by the small line I tucked the violin under my chin, ran the bow over the strings, tested its scale. I tuned it. The violin stank of the man. Ignoring the probability that its strings were made of an animal's ligaments, I experimented with some chords. Although of a lower register, almost that of a viol, it sounded fine. So, taking a deep breath, I began to play.

  The piece I played was a small piece, simple and old. But for the first time in my life, on that desert floor, with a gang of savages my audience, my playing that night was inspired. I was at one with my instrument, with that stinking violin.

  I thought much on it afterwards, decided that the inspiration came from my wanting to transmit the beauty of the music to those uneducated people; from wanting that worried musician to know the harmonies that his violin was capable of creating; and from wanting to give them all, including Dag and Malamud, something which they had never known before.

  When I stopped playing there was silence; and I was empty within me.

  Stepping forward I laid down the violin. The small man was staring at me with a wonder approaching reverence. Then he quickly stepped forward to retrieve his violin, examine it with curiosity — that it should have produced such new sounds.

  Yolande and Ronan began chattering to one another.

  "Enjoy that?" Dag smiled at me.

  "Better than drinking," I sat back down beside him. Ronan asked him about the music. In the course of their conversation it transpired that musicians on Balant were generally regarded as simpletons and time-wasting fools.

  But I had lost interest in the conversation. All that I wanted now was sleep; and, soon afterwards, making the same hand over knuckle gesture as before, we parted.

  From the shuttle we looked over to their orange fires, talked of all that had happened that day. But Dag was hoarse from shouting across the divide; and Malamud, in recalling the sight of that cooked creature being torn limb from limb, was stunned anew into silence. So the three of us soon slept. When, late in the morning we awoke, the savages had gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The effects of Nautili slime are investigated at close quarters, our preparations for departure continue apace; and then... then I am kidnapped.

  Balant had been changed for us. In one traumatic day we had encountered the Nautili and had met its savage inhabitants. The rhythm of our life there, all that we had come to expect of life there, had been abruptly altered. We spoke few words that day.

  The three of us roamed at random over Ronan's camp site. We stooped to peer into the abandoned shelters, kicked sand over the bones of the animals they had eaten. In the rear of one shelter Malamud found a knife. It had a coating of animal grease to prevent it corroding. Sand stuck to the grease. Malamud cleaned the blade on some leaves, stuck it into his belt along with his stone hatchet.

  From the camp we wandered up into the forest to investigate the aftermath of the Nautili attack. Slime lay about the toppled trees, had left black streaks and holes on the tree bark, had shrivelled the leaves. Dag poked a blob of slime with a stick. The end of the stick came away blackened.

  “Some sort of corrosive gel,” I said. Where the gel had landed on the ground it had dissolved the grass. All that could be seen through it was bare soil.

  “The same stuff the silve
r trails are made of,” Dag confirmed what I had already observed the previous day.

  The fallen slime-blackened trees made an impassable barricade. Skirting the main area of damage we emerged onto the bare upper slopes. As if hypnotised we found ourselves drawn towards the shimmering blob of gel that had hit the woman and the child. Standing on a rock above we could see into the gel.

  The small plants between the rocks had been dissolved. So too had the hair and the skin on the woman's and the child's head, and the skin on their legs. As yet the gel hadn't eaten into the skin on their torsos, although the animal hides they had worn had been partially dissolved.

  “The woman was lying face down, the child on its back. Their skeletal fingers were still interlocked, the naked bones of their mouths open, the child’s eyes dissolved. I wondered if they had been conscious when they had drowned, or if the force of the blow had stunned them. I wanted them not to have known they had been about to so horribly die.

  "Just because," Malamud's voice was quiet, "they went on the sea?" It was a question that begged the sense of such slaughter.

  "Territory," Dag succinctly answered him.

  We returned along the mountainside to our cave. Some of the bags had been split open — we guessed by Ronan’s people before Ronan had told them not to touch our belongings.

  Dag’s cooking pots had been overturned. The metal must have excited their curiosity, for marks in the soot on the pots' underside showed where they had been banged and scratched. We restored some order to Dag's cooking pots, threw out the split bags.

  "I asked Ronan,” Dag suddenly said, “if he had seen or heard another ship like ours. He hadn’t.”

  I realised that Dag, thinking of the valet’s casing from which the pots had been made, was referring to the spaceman, was still trying to solve that riddle.

  We made our way back to the shuttle via the lake. The long grass by the lake had been flattened. The many footprints around the marsh told us that Ronan and Yolande's people had passed that way. Malamud proposed tracking them to see how far they had gone.