by David Malouf
Does the boy watch all this, I wonder? And what does he make of it? What species does he think we might belong to? Does he recognize his own?
I think this all the time I am chewing the thick deer steaks and sucking my fingers clean, and afterwards while the men sing together – an eerie sound out there in the empty woods. Does he hear it? What creatures does he think might make such noises? Has he discovered that he too can draw sounds out of himself by means of his breath? Has he discovered the rudiments of speech? Does he speak to himself, having no other creature with whom to share his mind, his tongue? Being in that like myself.
I fall asleep thinking such thoughts, and half wake to find myself alone, with only the stars overhead, then fall into a deeper sleep, and dream; or wake again, I cannot tell which. I am conscious anyway that some animal has come up out of the dark and is staring at me. A wolf? Is it a wolf’s snout I can feel, a wolf’s breath? A deer’s? Or is it the Child? As in that earlier dream I am face to face with something that is not myself or of my own imagining, something that belongs to another order of being, and which I come out of the depths of myself to meet as at the surface of a glass. Is it the child in me? Which child? Where does he come from? Who is he?
I wake, and there is no one. On the other side of the fire, one of the young men, wrapped in a skin, turns over in his sleep and mutters incomprehensibly a few strange, thick-tongued syllables – whether in his own language or in the no-language of sleepers I cannot tell. Someone must have covered me against the cold. I lie for a moment looking up at the stars, which seem very close, and they fade into me, through me. When I wake again it is dawn.
The winter has come and gone. We are already deep into spring. The days are watery blue and the wind blows mild, but there is no blossom to be seen. The scrub is grayish green rather than black, the sea throbs and burns. But there are no orchards to break into bud, no violets, no shade trees to show their pale green fronds, no streams to bubble and braid in the sunlight.
Winter has been terrible beyond belief. For seven months the wind from the pole comes howling in across a thousand miles of open grassland, flattening the brush, whipping the sea into black foam, till at last the whole ocean freezes, and you can walk out from the shore upon it and see the fish motionless below. The brackish pools from which the women draw our drinking water grow solid, and it is the men who go out now to chip lumps of it that they haul back to be melted, as we need it, over a flame. Impossible to venture out in that freezing gale without a flapped cap and wrappings of fur, a cloak, boots, leggings – and even then the breath freezes, the beard forms icicles that snap and tinkle. A man’s speech might be chipped off in the same manner as our drinking water and melted later in the warmth of the house, if anyone dared open his mouth out there to pass even the time of day. We move about it in a dream, as if our wits had turned to sharp little crystals in our head. As if, like bears and other such creatures, we had crawled deep into some cave in ourselves and fallen asleep, moving about only as dream figures, stiff, unseeing, as we pass in and out of each other’s lives.
My mind moves out continually to the deer forest and the Child. How does he survive out there? Naked. Unhoused. I see him often in my sleep, a ghost moving over the snow among the birches, chewing at lichen, digging under the ice for mold. Can he survive this season? Will the men find his tracks next year? I am impatient for the weather to soften so that I can urge the old man, Ryzak, to make up a party and search for him. It is my secret. I will speak out nearer the time. It is what keeps me alive in all this. Meanwhile, night after night, I hunt the Child in my sleep. I warm him with my breath. Or is it the breath of some animal that warms him, wolf or deer, even there in my dreams? Or does he perhaps sleep out the winter like one of the creatures, curled up in some hollow and tied to the continuance of things only by his own slow breathing? And if so, how is he fed? And what does he dream of? Does he dream?
He is the wild boy of my childhood. I know it now. Who has come back to me. He is The Child.
Two events give shape to these white months. One was the first news in our village, cried from street to street and beaten out with wooden gongs, that the Dacians had taken and burned one of the towns to the north and were streaming toward us over the river. The other, which followed almost immediately, was their attack on us.
The river, long before the year’s end, had begun to freeze. Five-thousand paces wide, it was now a bridge of solid ice, and the Dacian horsemen, hundreds of them, poured down from the northern plain and were thundering across it. We had to man the walls of our village against them, and I too was called upon to turn out with one of the companies, given a lance and helmet – I who have lived through fifty years in an empire at peace with itself and never done a day’s drill – and sent to stand behind the palisade in the cold night air, unrecognizable under my mountain of fur.
I am taken with the irony of it. As a Roman citizen of the knightly order, the descendant of a whole line of warriors, with the law and the flower of Roman civilization to protect against the barbarians, I scoffed at such old-fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And of course, my own skin.
As it happened, on the night the raiders came I was in bed, and had to be shaken awake by one of the women. I heard it too then. The thunder of their hooves on the ice, the wooden gongs beating, the voices in the dark. Ghostly figures out of the north, out of my dream, galloping in across the wide arc of moonlight that was water only a few weeks ago. I stumbled out. Arrows rained out of the sky and fell in the thatch, struck a poor fellow watching at the stockade, and he fell, writhing. The arrows are tipped with poison. The wound festers and stinks, and for three days the man whose body has been struck is in delirium, finding his way slowly out into the grasslands beyond the river to the place where the earth will receive him. All night they swirled round and round the stockade, yowling, yelping like wolves, and the arrows fell. In the morning they were gone, and all the brush to the southeast was aflame. Great clouds of smoke rolled back over us, black, bitter with the smell of thorns.
They have passed on to one of the settlements on the Thracian side. And now it is spring.
I have spoken to the old man about a search party (I have enough of their language now to make the most pressing of my wants known to people) but he seems unwilling to commit himself. Is he afraid? Does some superstition exist about the Child? Was the shaman’s trance song, which I took to be some sort of blessing on the deer hunt, in reality a ceremony for the Child? Where do these people believe the Child comes from? The gods? Do they think he is one of their own people? Is he? Or a child perhaps from the grasslands to the north, who has been lost here in one of the raids?
I have not told the old man that I know the Child, and used to speak to him when I was a boy at Sulmo. Nor have I admitted to him that I want to capture the boy and bring him here among us. Only that I need to assure myself that he has survived into another season; which the old man believes readily enough, since they think me mad anyway, endlessly in a ferment about things they care nothing for, fussing about notions in my own head. But day after day the old man makes excuses. The palisade has to be repaired, and they have to make a long trip north to the pine forests for timber. Then an old man in the village dies, and the whole male population has to make a two-day funeral journey to see him interred. Then the fish are running. A whole week is taken up while the men row out with nets day after day and take them. Then another period when they go out with lanterns after the squid. Is the old man simply humoring me? Must we wait, as before, for autumn?
It is autumn. Tomorrow we go again to the birchwoods after deer. I dare not mention the Child. We ride out in the same way as before, make the same detour up to the plateau and through the screen of pines to where the dead ride high on their fleshless horses
. Only this year the cold has come early. The plateau is in cloud, gray mists swirl across before us and the poles click and sway. The shouts of the men as they ride round scattering their handfuls of seed are dampened by fog, cut off and blown back into their throats.
On the way to the woods it drizzles. There are no tracks. The earth underfoot is soggy and the horses splash through puddles of brilliant blue light amongst the leaves, or through dirty-gray clouds. We hunt deer. Flay them, butcher the meat and load it in panniers. There is no sign of the Child. The other men look anxiously about them and are glad when we can get away. I am crazy with disappointment and grief. Another winter. How can he survive? How can I survive, without knowing he is still there?
Another spring.
I understand all that is said to me now in this rude tongue, by these plain but kindly people. I have begun to teach the old man’s grandson Latin, to write it, and to recite poems. Some of them my own. He is a bright child, but of a sullen disposition, and he sees no use in what he learns. Listening to the old man now, telling his stories in our little yard, I know what the different voices signify: they are the north wind, they are wolves, they are giants, they are the ghosts of warriors, they are a shinbone, a severed head, they are the bottom of the sea. The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it. Our civilized fables that account so elegantly for what we see and know seem feeble beside these elaborate and absurd jokes the old man mutters over. They make the head buzz, they numb the blood. They seem absolutely true and yet they explain nothing. I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic. And yet daily he seems nobler and more gentle than any Roman I have known. Beside him I am an hysterical old woman. Utterly without dignity.
It begins to be autumn again. There is a smokiness in things. Once again we go to the birchwoods.
Almost immediately, in the golden light of a fine autumn day, with the sky broken in rainpools among the drifts of yellow leaves, he is there, standing quite still and taller after these two years among the slashed birches. I am filled with joy. He is there. He is real. The others see him too. He is streaked with mud, with bony knees and elbows and a shrunken belly. An ugly boy of eleven or twelve with a bird’s nest of dirty hair.
We are sitting, five of us, in a circle, drinking a little of the thin soup we have brought with us, while the horses wander among the birches, grazing off what blades of grass still push up through the leaf mold. It is late afternoon. Still. We hold our cups in both hands, drinking, not speaking, and suddenly the boy is there, watching us. The men’s eyes dark over the rim of the cup and their fingers grimy. We all look. First at the boy then at one another, and are frozen. Even the horses cease grazing and raise their heads against the watery blue of the afternoon, sniffing, scenting another presence. I can hear our breathing. It is as if we are all, for a moment, charmed. As if time had stopped. And I feel that if we could sit like this long enough, cross-legged on the leaves, so that we seemed like another part of the wood; if we let our spirits out, shaking them loose, and became wood, leaf mold, lichen – he would come to us. The others, I know, are afraid. Their stillness is a sort of terror. These men who are not afraid of whirling horsemen in the night with poisoned arrows and firebrands, or of a wild boar with its tusks foaming, are afraid of the Child. I am not. My stillness is for fear that we may, even with the lifting of a finger or the catching of a breath, startle him into flight.
So we sit – for how long? – and stare at one another. He does not startle. But one of the horses, lowering its head to nibble, moves across between us, and when it passes, the space between the birches is empty of all but light.
I am calmer now. He is still there, that is what matters. There is time for the rest. We shall stay two nights in the birchwoods.
The first night just at the edge of the fire’s circle, where the dark begins, I set a bowl of gruel: mixed grain seed boiled in brackish water and flavored with honey. For hours after the others sleep I sit wrapped in my cloak, straining to hear a footfall among the leaves. I know he must come to watch. He has begun to look for us, I know that, as we look for him. He feels some yearning toward us, some need to satisfy himself about who we are, and why we have a shape, a smell, so unlike that of the other creatures of the forest. Has he begun to ask of what kind he is? Does he guess that some part of us, at least, is of his kind? As we know that in shape at least he is of ours.
I listen but hear nothing. I fall asleep, still sitting upright against a birch trunk, and am woken by the first silvery light of dawn. I scramble across to the bowl. It is empty. Something has come and lapped up the gruel. A deer? One of the forest demons these people worship? The Child? I hide the bowl under my cloak and pretend I have been to relieve myself but the old man watches me and knows. He thinks this is all folly. And dangerous folly. He is too much ashamed of me, and my old man’s silliness, to let me see that he knows. He orders the young men about in a voice louder and gruffer than usual as if he were trying to frighten the Child away.
It is a clear still day and the deer are everywhere. The men hunt and kill five or six of them, and our camp in the clearing is like a butcher’s shop, the smell of blood is all over us, the skins hang dripping from branches, joints of meat – haunches, legs, rib-halves – are stacked ready for packing. The women will salt and store them against the winter. The work takes us all day. We will spend a second night here and be off at dawn.
Again I set out the bowl of gruel, and this time sleep on the far side of the fire, propped up hard against a tree trunk and determined not to doze.
I fall asleep almost immediately, and dream. What I half thought in the woods yesterday, while we were watching the Child, is true. We have all been transformed, the whole group of us, and become part of the woods. We are mushrooms, we are stones – I recognize my companions. I am a pool of water. I feel myself warm in the sunlight, liquid, filled with the blue of the sky; but I am the merest broken fragment of it and I feel, softly, the clouds passing through me, their reflections, and once the suddenness of wings. Slowly it grows dark. A breeze shivers my surface. And as darkness passes over me I begin to be afraid. My spirit hovers somewhere close and will, I know, come back to me when I wake. But I am afraid suddenly to be just a pool of rain in the forest, feeling the night creep over me, feeling myself grow cold and fill with starlight, feeling the temperature drop. I consider what it might be like to freeze. I imagine that. But only at the edges of myself, as the first ice crystals click into shape. It is fearful. What would happen to my spirit then? I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leans toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. The sensation on the surface of me is extraordinary, I break in circles. Part of me enters the deer, which lifts its head slowly, and moves away over the leaves. I feel part of me moving away, and the rest falls still again, settles, goes clear. What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolf’s tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop and leaving me dry? That too is possible. I imagine it, being drawn up into the wolf’s belly. I prepare for it.
Another footfall, softer than the first. I know already, it is the Child. I see him standing taller than the deer against the stars. He kneels. He stoops towards me. He does not lap like the deer, but leaning close so that his breath shivers my surface, he scoops up a handful, starlight dripping from his fingers in bright flakes that tumble towards me, and drinks. I am broken again. The disturbance is fearful, a noisy crashing of waves against the edges of me. And when I settle he is gone. I am still, reflecting starlight. I sleep. I wake.
>
It is still dark. The Child, I see, is just setting the bowl down. He is stooped, holding it in both hands, his face covered by the hanks of coarse hair.
He hears me draw breath. He is no more than ten feet away and our eyes meet for a moment, before he drops the bowl. It rolls towards me. He springs to his feet and stands there, puzzled, as if uncertain, for the first time perhaps, which of the two worlds he should fly to – back into the woods, or into whatever new world he has smelled and touched and taken into himself that comes from us. He has eaten from an earthenware bowl made by men, on a wheel. He has eaten grain that has been sown and gathered and crushed and boiled, and sweetened with a spoonful of honey. Something, as we face one another in the darkness, has passed between us. We have spoken. I know it. In a language beyond tongues.
Next year there will be no need to hunt him. He will seek us out.
Only now he backs slowly away into the darkness, his bare feet scuffing the leaves, and I must wait for another whole winter to pass.
It all happens as I knew it would.
The year has passed quickly. I have become sturdy and strong again and have stopped mooning about and regretting my fate. I go for long walks in the brushwood, which is full of tiny animals and insects, all of them worth observing. I climb down to the shore and talk to the fishermen, while the sea grinds and rattles at the smooth black pebbles. The sea in these parts is full of strange fish, all beautiful in their way, all created perfectly after their own needs, every detail of their anatomy useful, necessary, and for that reason admirable, even when they are the product of terror. I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the spring and release it. Such changes are slow beyond imagination. They take generations. But it works, this process. We are already the product of generation after generation of wishing to be thus. And what you are reader, is what we have wished. Are you gods already? Have you found wings?