His father gave a small nod. “It is. I guess it is that.” He pursed his lips, still looking ahead of him in apparent study. “Are you nervous?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
Niisa thought for a moment, still trapped by his father’s hand. “I don’t see what there is to be nervous about.”
His father seemed to have taken a great big breath. “Okay,” he said eventually, letting it out in a great rush. He turned towards Niisa, smiling. “It’s looking good.” He patted Niisa on the chest. “You’ll do well. Now go on. Get your stuff. We must be near ready to go.” He let go of Niisa and turned back towards Chiko. “Chiko! Let’s go!” he called.
“A little moment,” she chirped back, head buried in concentration over her flowers.
“No more little moments,” he said. Then he laughed. “You’ve got one more little moment, then if you’re not ready to go, I’m coming over there and carrying you away without those flowers!”
“Nope,” he heard her mutter.
He laughed again, raising his eyebrows. “What?” he demanded in mock seriousness.
“Done!” she exclaimed and twisted to her feet, allowing her wreath of flowers to unfold from her upraised hands. Unlike the cloak, Niisa could appreciate the full beauty of the wreath of flowers. All the flowers of the forest were displayed in perfect harmony, most dried, some fresh, their colours vibrant with life and joy.
“Beautiful!” said Fumnaya, walking back to them and standing before Chiko for a moment as her daughter skipped forward to give her a closer look. She placed her hand softly on the back of Chiko’s neck. “It’s lovely,” she said and Dikeledi echoed it.
“The chief has called it. We’re off,” she said in a louder voice as she turned to address the rest of them.
They set off through the trees with furtive glances backwards at their huts, as though they would disappear or come to some harm in their absence instead of simply sitting idly as they had sat full for all of the year before. But soon they were forgotten in the excitement and buzz of the upcoming gathering.
They walked through the trees, chatting freely and for once not trying to disguise their progress. They moved places on occasion, as jokes were shouted between the families and conversations started. Some of the women started to pair off, dragging their younger children with them as the men did the same. Boys followed their fathers, looking up with a little bit of wonder at the older men; girls followed their mothers and tried to decipher the meaning of the jokes and laughter between the women; for a while at least, until they gave up and became distracted in play. All were relaxed and jovial.
Niisa, as usual, walked apart from the rest, trailing the other adolescents who chatted animatedly ahead of him. He wanted to watch the forest as he passed it, not as a thousand separate parts but as something together, a growing, thriving, moving, living thing. He wanted to see the connection, the unity, the path of Daygo as he had sometimes managed to see before. On occasion he watched the activities of his peers or the rest of the tribe, but mostly he focussed on the forest. After a time he locked his gaze in the middle distance, hoping to see the peripheral as much as the focal as he walked.
He used to be often teased or jeered by the other children, but what their purpose was he didn’t know, and it made no difference to him. He simply watched them with interest until eventually they let up. Now they tended to ignore him unless they had reason not to. For years his parents had tried to encourage him to spend more time at play or to take part in whatever repetitive, mindless activities the other children played at, but slowly they too had started to accept his behaviour, as most of the tribe now did.
He knew all of the behaviours of the tribe. He understood them at a distance. He could adopt them and take part in them if he so chose. But he could not feel them as they did. And so it remained a sort of mystery to him. He tried to find comparative experiences that made him feel what they discussed, but he could not. He found it difficult to understand their perspective or to create it before his own eyes. Everything they talked about and everything they did was based upon this and he could never really grasp it, and so could not with any satisfaction engage in their behaviours.
He knew he was different, but it was a puzzle to him why or how they could all differ from him, especially as he understood that all creatures and life stemmed from Daygo, that all were unified and complete together, that all were connected and inseparable in movement that was called life and time. Even as he understood this, as he felt this deeply, emotionally and completely, he sensed that they in turn were reversed, that they knew of it, had learned of it and understood it at a distance as he had human behaviour, but they could never truly become fully engaged with it, never deep down understand the truth of what life was, or what they were within it. They could not see clearly. They were caught up in their own notion of self that they could not escape. Despite being able to talk as though they knew all things were of the same, that they all stemmed as small flows of the one Daygo stream, they lived and behaved as though they knew the opposite, that they and every other person they met were separate and complete and individual apart from all other life. That they in fact were not Daygo but their own confined self that would forever be apart from all else.
And so he often found himself apart from them, alone in the woods. Isolated, as they might see it. But there was no such thing as isolation in the world that he knew.
It took them almost nine hours of marching through the woods to get to the gathering space. Niisa broke from the forest into the clearing separately to the rest. The huts of their own village were built underneath the canopy of branches, leaves and plants overhead, but the gathering space was clear of all forest and was blinding bright from the yellow heat that shone down from the far distant sun. It was filled with hundreds of huts. The sky was a clear dome of blue above them.
All along the line of the forest, the Abashabi had stopped and stood blinking at the brilliance before them. The forest rose and fell in all directions as far as the eye could see. It made Niisa wonder at the vastness of the world. Could the great forest extend into infinity in all directions, did it ever come to an end? It was told by the chiefs that it ended somewhere in the distant north and south, and beyond that were open plains of lands with no trees to be seen for hours all around, and eventually there were great masses of water that extended into oblivion. The giant rivers at the end of the world. But to east and west it was said that the forests travelled as far as these great rivers, countless hours away. He imagined making that great trek. He wondered if it were true, or if he could walk forever, just walk, for a lifetime, and die, without ever coming anywhere. Just more forest, more creatures, more of the same. What was the life that energised all of this? Did it never tire?
He knew it was a human frailty to want for understanding, to look for the wisdom behind all things, to search to understand Daygo. He knew it was the loneliness of the human spirit, separated from the stream, from unconscious knowing for the brief extent of its life. And yet it seemed that he possessed some of that same strange arrogance that the rest of them did; the arrogance to want to strive to know as Niisa, as this strange entity that he found self within. He could not explain … but it felt like his destiny to know. And he could not escape its calling.
The clearing was alive with weeds, brush, flowers, vines and any one of a hundred plants that grew in the forest that had taken advantage of the lack of tree cover to become lush and full in the passing year. An occasional small tree still grew amongst the huts, offering some shade from the sun. It would take a full day’s work from the nine tribes the next day to clear it all and make it habitable for the week. But it was late in the evening and their main task that night was to make their chosen hut safe to sleep in.
Nine tribes attended the gathering each year. The Abashabi and the Afran Kallu, Kororofawa, Langbwasse, Maschascha, Amarcocche, Tusselange, Ait-Atta and Pani-Dui. With daylight shortening, and exhaustion from the long trek kick
ing in, there were only brief greetings shared between them. They picked their hut amongst the Abashabi, and Niisa set to work with his family, carefully clearing every piece of undergrowth that surrounded it, carefully looking for snakes, insects, spiders and ants that could prove fatal if they went unnoticed. As the light was dying, they spread more Tulsip juice around their hut from the container his mother had brought. His father made a final check before they bedded down for the night, falling quickly into sleep after the long journey.
******
The next morning Niisa and Chiko’s routine was disturbed by the underbrush pressing in upon them from all sides, the freedom of their movement was suppressed into tighter, more functional stretches, and for the morning meal they returned to the hut where their mother was already sitting up and arranging their food. Dikeledi still lay prone and grunting as they finished their meal. With a laugh, Fumnaya slapped him on the bottom.
“Up! Up!” she cried, and with a growl he rose and stumbled from the hut. When he returned, he stopped underneath the entrance of the hut and spread his arms wide, his face split in a broad grin. He shook his hands in excitement and the women laughed, his mother with an amused smile and half shake of her head, his sister falling over on her side with a high-pitched giggle. Niisa watched the pantomime blankly, chewing contentedly on the last of his nuts.
They spent all of that day clearing the underbrush from the Rutendon, the name given for the clearing where the gathering was held each year. Unlike the day before, there were many greetings made and breaks taken. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters were all reunited, having been separated to their respective tribes for a year. Their wives and husbands hugged the family they had married into, knowing that this week was about them and their spouse more than anything else.
Niisa spent some time pondering the place’s name as he helped with the clear-up. Rutendon was “a place of belief”. Who had named it thus, and what had they in mind when they did? From the histories told from the chiefs each year, the gathering had been happening for as long as the spoken record was recalled, and its origins were mythical and folklorish, with each tribe having many tales, repeated often, full of magic and wonder, that resulted in the first gathering of the tribes.
Certainly its name seemed to have no connection with its current function. It seemed more about matchmaking now than any form of belief. It hosted the picking ceremony where adolescents could find a match whom they wished to marry. These engagements were then agreed upon by the chiefs and the parents involved, ensuring they were not close relations, and deciding which of the two would leave their tribe to join the other. The following year the gathering would host the marriage ceremony. They also celebrated the births of the previous year and marked the passing of the dead. The gathering was the fundamental of tribal life. It allowed each tribe to live in their separate areas of forest, where food was plentiful and the hunt bountiful, knowing that they would meet their loved ones each year.
While Niisa wondered at the men who had defined the layout of tribal life for centuries to follow and pondered its lack of change over that time, the rest of the tribespeople got slowly drunk on cauim. Many sacks were opened in small secrecy and handed out, having been concealed and smuggled through the journey. There were conspiratorial sips taken amongst friends and family throughout the day as wives played along and pretended not to notice, even as they engaged in a similar enterprise; the discretion adding to the joys of what could have been called the first ritual of the gathering. Amidst laughter, drinks, hugs, kisses and jokes, with many spending time to break and bask in the sunlight, the clearing was steadily brought back to being a human town. The chatter was ceaseless throughout the day. They seemed to have so much to tell each other for a year that was the same as any other, Niisa could not think of what it was.
As the light was dying, the first great fire of the gathering was set and sparked to life. Many, if not most, were quite drunk already, and traditionally the first fire did not last long into the night; the sun, the labour and the drink of the day all taking its toll on the human body. But they set that first fire, danced that first dance and they played that first song and they howled into the night in delight that the gathering was here. They smiled and laughed with one another, and for once Niisa found something enticing in the frenzy of it all.
******
They woke the next morning with heavy heads but hearts still light. Hearts that lifted them back to their feet and spread smiles across their faces, even if some were a little rueful. Today they put the final touches to the clearing and the huts, but for the most part it was a rest day, a time to lie in leisure and enjoy the quieter parts of company as they grew accustomed to seeing the sun for only the third of seven days of each year.
There was no direction to the work that was done and no obligations on Niisa or Chiko, so they could wander at their discretion. Chiko skipped away to find the girls and boys her age, only two short years from becoming an adolescent herself. Niisa walked slowly through the camp, feeling as though he were expected to do more than he would, expected to seek out and talk to and play with others wearing a right ear stone but not a left. Still, he knew his parents were too engrossed in their own celebrations to interfere with anything that he might want to do.
So, knowing that too soon he would be expected back, he walked from the clearing and into woods that were unknown and unfamiliar to him. He let his hands dangle against the vegetation, he let his toes fall into the earth, he let his eyes broaden to everything in front of him. He moved slowly, smoothly, fluidly as the wind. Everything surrounding him moved, grew, died, changed, lived. He lived in the forest until he knew it was time to return and his mind brought him back through the trees and into the clearing that man inhabited.
There he joined with the rest of them to make the many fires that would be lit that night. There was the one great bonfire where the chanting ritual would be held. There was the second bonfire, not as large or great, where the picking ceremony would be performed. Then there were the many smaller fires set throughout the clearing that the matching couples would spend their time around in privacy, to learn of each other and find interest enough to marry and spend the remainder of their lives with, in a hut in the woods, making children and continuing the life cycle of the tribes that never changed or developed into anything. He saw nothing wrong with the tribes’ life and yet he felt separate to it. It did not seem to be his path. Daygo wanted more from him. Daygo needed him in some other way. He had been born for an alternate purpose, born as part of the collective intelligence of the universe, where all things were known and predicted unconsciously. There was no overarching consciousness to Daygo, it was simply pure intelligence, pure awareness, all things engaged in movement, in life.
Once the day’s work was complete, Niisa returned to the forest, where he stayed until the light started to fade. On his way back to the clearing, a black panther stepped into his path. Her yellow eyes were bright in the fading grey as she turned her head to examine Niisa. He felt no fear, only wonder, as he looked back at it; tracing its beautiful black skin, its glowing eyes, considering all that lay within them, behind them; its intelligence, its knowledge, its purpose.
The woods were never safe after dark, when many of its predators came alive. Bar the seven nights of the gathering, the tribespeople lived by day. But that night the panther turned its head silently and padded on by. Niisa looked after it for some moments before he broke the bush back into the Rutendon.
In the grey, the great fire at the centre of the oval-shaped clearing, sparking to early life, was like a newly rising sun. Crackling short, small flames licked the sides of the wood in sharp and bright colour, the early birth of that same colour that painted the landscape behind him, dulled and watered out over the large, expansive sky, spread and fading and yet still beautiful in its last minutes; quiet, sombre, subdued and dignified against the encroaching dark, like an old man bowing his head to the inevitable with no lo
ss of pride.
The young fire, the opposite, the child birthed into new life, raced up the wood, sharp and full of energy, spitting in its haste, in its confident defiance of the dark, full of young lustre, convinced of its complete annihilation of its opponent, as though it would eat up all the dark in the world with its light. The same colours, yet sharper, brighter, growing instead of fading; both sad and uplifting, as the briefly glimpsed future faded in the west, the reignited past burst forth in ignorance to the east, oblivious to its inevitable path, and yet admirable in its adamant folly. And still more behind it all the great joke, the everlasting humour to watch its pretending players, as though each one, from the smallest animal to the largest mammal were unique, new, special, separate, different, in the great rolls of the Daygo stream; none seeing the simplicity of truth, that they are miniscule and regular, and that yet they are everything that they truly wish for—not alone but united, joined to all and everything—not mortal but immortal, not limited but everlasting in what never ceases to be, life, Daygo, movement.
In their ignorance, they believe all the things they fear, and they wish forlornly for everything that is simple, unavoidable truth. And yet if they saw it so they would be unexplainably terrified, because they are not who they thought they were, they are not self but part of a whole.
It was in birth and death that Niisa felt that he could learn more, that he could see more, and he watched the catching fire and the setting sun with equal interest.
Throughout the clearing, the tribes began to gravitate towards the growing fire, breaking from their many small groupings to the one, a certain happy eagerness in the air. Niisa left the dying sun to join them.
As he moved towards the fire, he heard the first practice beatings of the drums and a few short chants as some playfully started warming up their voices. Many of the men started to shoulder on their ceremonial Agbada cloaks. Some of the chiefs already wore the bones of their forebears and carried their long wooden staffs in hand, occasionally shaking the hollowed-out orin sticks that hung from the top of the staffs, emitting a hollow noise to match the rolling vibrations of their song.
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