Horsa did not idle there alone. His older young men were with him, when not hunting in the forests. We know this was no contented group of men.
‘Horsa was much troubled by the women and their small children and the little boys, whom he could not control.’
The little boys thought of themselves as big boys, and emulated the hunters and the food gatherers. How many were they? Taking into account that some had left with the women who had gone home, our guess (this can only be a guess) is that they were perhaps twenty, not many more. ‘Some’ is the helpful word used by the chroniclers. They were very pleased with their accomplishments, would come swaggering back to the beach with the animals they had killed, just like the youths who had achieved their men’s bodies. They were tough and fearless, and did not obey Horsa, obeyed nobody. They might go off in a band by themselves for a day or two. More than once one was killed by a boar or a pack of dogs. Horsa didn’t know what to do with them. Attempts were made to attach a few to the hunting bands of the big youths, to include them into the general whole, but these little boys – who were very unlike any little boy we know – were proud of their independence. They even elected a leader, a boy not older than they were, but stronger and the most brave. They might apply to the girls, those who were ready to be friendly, for help with a broken limb, or a wound. It is recorded the girls were afraid of these wild boys who were a long way from being described as ‘little’. Little boys they were not. And the big youths, hunting, encountering a band of these boys, were wary with them, as if they were enemies. There were some fights between the grown youths and ‘little boys’ who, if they were half the size of the grown men, were just as strong and wily and skilled in the ways of the forest.
What was Horsa going to do with these boys, who when asked if they would go back to the women, laughed or shouted, ‘No, no, never.’
Horsa’s friend, who accompanied him on his venture, was with him on their comfortable beach, and they endlessly argued about what they would do. It is clear they weren’t in any hurry to do anything.
They had wanted to find out if this land of theirs was an island but the concept ‘island’ was not what we Romans would accept as island. They had thought thus: they might suddenly one morning see that they had sailed so far they would see the women’s shore just ahead of them, with the cliffs and caves of The Cleft. So in their minds was the idea of a circumference, an end where a beginning had been. ‘Island’ was used by the later village chroniclers. The journey of the ‘fleet’ going just outside where the sea broke on the beaches had seemed endless. If they did know where they had set off, then they had no idea where this ‘end’ was. How did they know this journeying was not endless? How did they know this land of theirs was not so large they might encompass it? In their elation at setting out these thoughts had not come near them.
Horsa and his companions, the young men, the hunters and trackers when not on a trip into the trees, idled about the bonfires at night, tried to reason with the ‘little boys’, listened to the seas washing in and out with their endless messages of movement, impermanence, and stared out at a horizon … and perhaps it was at that moment, for the very first time ever, that the idea of a bay, a very large bay, became something in their minds they might refer to. Did they find a word for ‘bay’ and use it? They could at least make a short trip and see what they could find. To make boats of bundles of reeds, of little platforms and branches, was not difficult. A few – very few, probably two or three – of the big men, with Horsa as leader, went secretly on to a little flotilla of these ‘boats’, leaving at a time when the ‘little boys’ were not around, and they went on along the coast. I imagine – it is hard not to think like this – that Horsa might have thought of going off altogether, and abandoning the little boys. But that meant the girls and their infants too, and the pregnant ones as well. In Horsa’s mind rang Maronna’s words, ‘Don’t you care about us, Horsa?’ And that meant more now to him than it had then. Horsa knew, if perhaps not all of this company did, that to produce infants men were needed. ‘Don’t you care about us?’ Horsa must have thought that the women were months of travelling away (this would have been thought of, probably, as time passing, not space covered) and that they must be getting frantic, waiting for the men. It is known they all knew, men and women, that an interval elapsed between mating and the birth, though with these people who apparently could not master numbers in any combination or means of reckoning, the ‘interval’ would have been vague. But time had passed, and Horsa heard much too often, ‘Don’t you care about us?’
Did Horsa care about what we call a continuation of our race in the same way as we do? For instance, for pregnant slaves we pay higher prices than for older women or ones with flat bellies.
In the forest glade, did he now take trouble over guarding and caring for the little boys? And we come back to this question we cannot answer: did he think about the people? When Maronna said, ‘Don’t you care about us?’ did she mean all of them, males and females, Clefts and the once-upon-a-time Monsters? Who was ‘us’?
Meanwhile Horsa went on for one day, two, three, stopping for the night when the waves were rough, and the shore unwound in front of him with no end. And looking back over their shoulders, they could see a streak or line of colour where they had stared for a long time now, and wondered if that was simply a curving continuation of the shore they stood on.
They turned back: they could not simply go on, abandoning the others.
Again in their place, where the girls and their infants greeted them in a way that said their thoughts had been that they had been abandoned, the young men stared out in front of them, and saw, without really seeing, at the very edge where sea and sky met, a line of distant colour that did not change its place. Like a shore. Some said it was a shore – it had to be – none of them could easily conceive of a bay so large that its opposite sides were almost out of sight. It was not easy to accept that what they were looking at was a place they could travel to. Or could have done, if they had large enough boats. What would they find? A country where a boy, with or without his man’s body, would not be treated as an infant? Young women whose bellies did not swell up and then give birth to howling infants? Friendly girls who never grew sad and sulky and refused to play?
Horsa, who was in a fever because of this shore tinted like a dream, said that until the storm they had all done very well in their fragments of boats: they had skulled and rowed and paddled for weeks, for months – for ages – then; and the waves had been kind to them, and the journey now seemed like a wonderful thing. Yes, insisted Horsa: they could easily make a craft fit enough to take them across to that shore that seemed to beckon him, and they would head out over easy pretty waves and find …
A raft of bundles of reeds was fitted together, bigger and stronger than any raft they had made before. The big boys and the little clamoured to be taken on this adventure, but were promised another trip, if this one was successful. Horsa and his friend, whose name we have never known, set out at dawn towards a treak that in this light was pinky-pearl, with a line 0f dark-blue cloud over it.
They had expected to reach there soon – that was the word used by the chroniclers. Not ‘by evening’ or ‘after a short time’, but soon. They were taking much longer than they expected. They laboured with their paddles, and went on, and on, but that beckoning shore did not come any closer. It was long past midday, and on they went, and when it was already getting dusk they were within a distance of a new land, if it was that – but they had no idea what it could be. Beaches again, and trees of a kind they had not seen. It was the trees that seduced them into thinking this place was altogether better, richer, more beautiful than their own. The trees as described by people who had never seen anything like them sound like palms, and there were great white birds in them, with trailing feathers like the fronds of the palms. Everything they looked at seemed remarkable and new, and all they wanted was to land their flimsy craft, which was ready to fall apart after
so long over the waves much taller than they had become used to, and then a new life would begin, and …
It was late afternoon and the light was dimming and stars filling the sky, and Horsa looked up at his constellation and thought that it looked down on him. It was essential they must land, soon, soon, but then their fragile support began to rock and toss on the waves, and a wind came straight towards them from this gleaming promise of a shore, a wind that reminded them of the storm that wrecked their boats. The dark cloud that settled over the land blew towards them in thin black streams, and they found they were being blown back to where they had come from. Blown fast and then faster, they were being skimmed over now tall and choppy waves while they clung to a handful of reeds that was all that was left of the raft, which fell apart and dissolved into the sea. Horsa and his friend were being tossed like foam on the waves, and then spun and tumbled, and the two were flung on to the beach they had left at dawn, violently, cruelly. Night had come long ago, the fires were flaring all along the beaches. The young man who was Horsa’s friend was lying still, bent and broken, and he did not respond and never came to life. Horsa’s leg was smashed, it was twisted and he lay on the warm sand and sobbed from pain but even more from disappointment.
And now I really cannot stop myself from intervening again. It is because I feel so much for that youngster there, Horsa, lying hurt on the sand and dreaming of that other place, which he could not reach. He did try, though … I feel that he is my younger self, perhaps even a son. What was he longing for, when he saw that distant shore and wanted it? I know there are those who think the Greeks said the last word on aspirations. But I am not one to yield to the Greeks, not in this field. I am of the party that believes we Romans have bettered the Greeks. Horsa was not after finer dimensions in life, I see him as an ancestor of us, the Romans. What we see we need to conquer; what we know is there we have to know too. Horsa was in himself a coloniser, but that was before the word and idea was born. I see poor Horsa lying there crippled and think of how Rome has hurt itself in our need to expand, to have. I think of my two poor sons, lying somewhere in those northern forests. Rome has to outleap itself, has to grow, has to reach out. Far and further, wide and wider, our Roman empire’s bounds are set. Why should there ever be an end to us, to Rome, to our boundaries? Subject peoples may fight us, but they never can stop us. I sometimes imagine how all the known world will be Roman, subject to our beneficent rule, to Roman peace, Roman laws and justice, Roman efficiency. Truly we make deserts bloom and the lands we conquer blossom. Some greater power than human guides us, leads us, points where our legions must go next. And if there are those who criticise us, then I have only one reply. Why, then, if we lack the qualities needed to make the whole earth flourish, why does everyone want to be a Roman citizen? All, everybody, from any part of our empire and beyond, wants to be a free man inside Roman law, Roman peace. Answer that, then, you carpers and doubters. As for me, I imagine poor Horsa, lying there on his patch of sand, crippled because of his need to know that other wonderful land – and I think of him, secretly, as a Roman. One of us. Ours.
He lay like a child with his arm across his face, and when he could speak and the others wanted to listen, he told about the wonders of the other shore. For while this land, their own, had noble trees and birds and animals, whose eyes gleamed at them from the bushes, the shore he had failed to reach and from which he had been ejected so fiercely by the tyrant wind, this land, the new one, was seductive and desirable in a way their own land could never be.
But the others did not seem inclined to listen. There were tasks, and difficulties, first of all the disposal of the dead youth’s body, thrown into the waves, which brought it back again to lie brokenly not far from Horsa. One of the girls who had lost a baby came to insist that the sea did not accept the dead; it was much better to bury this body. So Horsa’s comrade was put under the sand and Horsa lay nearby and thought that it could have been himself who disappeared into the choking sand. Another girl brought him water and food at the evening’s feast, but what all these big boys and young men were talking about was the smaller boys, who had brought back a carcass from their hunting, but were cooking it at a separate bonfire not far away, instead of adding it, as was usually done, to the common supply. The children were dancing and singing, wild with their independence and mocking their elders who were around their own fires. Horsa shouted at them to come over and join the main feast but the children ignored him. Horsa was being generally ignored, and he did not understand it, nor did he see that an air of hilarity and anarchy that prevailed was because he was not there, leader of them all, in command, always visible as central focus of authority. No, he was lying on the sand, or crawling, trying to sit up, and weak with pain.
The sea had tossed up a piece of wood, and Horsa grabbed it, tried to raise himself up on it. People turned to stare and then to smile, glancing at each other; the crooked stick beside the crooked leg was like a mocking echo and the little boys at the other fire, seeing Horsa with three legs, one dangling, began to jeer and point. The older youths did the same. Horsa stood tottering, holding hard on to the stick, but then he fell and there was a shout of laughter. Horsa tried to rise, but failed. The girl who had lost her baby came to lift him, but she failed. She wandered off. Horsa lay, helpless and like a shamed beast. He felt he had become cast out from them, and when the little boys came over to stand around him, pointing and jeering, he lay huddled into the sand, trying to be invisible. They wandered off too, back into the forests near the shore. The big boys were planning a hunt for tomorrow. No one seemed to see him. He had to crawl away from them all to meet a demand of his bowels, and when he returned lay behind a long rock that hid most of him. No one spoke to him. He did not understand what he felt. He had always been whole and strong and handsome, and he wished he could disappear altogether.
In the morning he woke, in bad pain, raging with thirst – and had to crawl slowly to the container where the water was. He could not lift the great seashell. Few of the others were awake. The older youths had gone off to hunt, the little boys were not there. Some girls with their babes, apart from the main body of people, saw him and did not seem to want to help him. At last, seeing that he was going to let slip the shell and waste the water, a girl did come and give him water. She was not unkind, but he was used to a greater … what was it he lacked, and what was it she did not offer him? It was respect, which he always had, and needed.
Then, sated with water, he turned to look at the sea and there, far away, where the sea and sky met, was the gleam of light which he knew was his imagined place, his land where he would find everything he wanted – though until he had seen the pinky-pearl shores where the great white birds decorated the trees like dreams, he had no idea what he longed for. He was there sheltering from the fierce sun in the shadow of the rocks, staring, always staring, while the enticing shore changed colour as the sun moved. No one came to offer him help, water, food, or to talk to him. He wanted so much to tell them all about this wondrous place he had seen, which he had nearly reached, where …
If you have had authority all your life, because of your nature, something you never knew you had, and then you lose it, then it is hard even to ask the right questions. What was it he had lost? What now did he lack that all the others had needed in him? Horsa had not decided to be a leader, the uniter of the many warring groups – if it was he who had personally done this thing, and not someone from whom he had inherited authority – he had not fought for authority over others, but had never not known it. Why now did his comrades seem to be deaf when he spoke to them? The same girl, whom he called to bring him water and did answer, sat near him while he talked about his wondrous land that he had seen, actually seen with his own eyes, before the wind blasted him back across the waves to his own beach. Then she said that he must not lie there mumbling about his vision, the others were saying he had gone mad, and they were all disturbed by him. This enterprise of theirs was failing, and in dangerous wa
ys. Decisions should be made and who was to make them? She seemed to take it for granted it could not be crippled and crawling Horsa. He, Horsa, must choose one of the older youths to work with him and make some kind of central command. While Horsa was muttering in his delirium about this other land, dangerous things happened.
The young men were taking no notice of Horsa, who was trying to stagger around on his crooked stick. The girls were no better. They had fewer infants, for some had died, and there were no girls swelling up with pregnancy. They kept apart from the men, when they could, in a group, though they got their share of food. The little boys sometimes joined in the general evening feasts, but mostly they were off somewhere: their voices could at times be heard echoing from the forest. There was no question now of controlling them. Children they might be, but if they had not achieved their men’s bodies they were as brave and skilled as the men who, the truth was, were afraid to tackle them.
Some kind of central command or authority, it seemed, the girls were demanding and when they tried to assume control of the young boys, they were told they were just Clefts, and must shut up.
The Cleft Page 16