by B Catling
I buried the compass of her and covered it with a heavy stone. I obeyed with perfection, tearless and quiet, picking up the arrow that she had made and walking back into the house for the last time.
The bow quickened astonishingly, twisting and righting itself as the days and the nights pulled and manipulated its contours. There was a likeness to Este’s changing during her dying, although that transition had nothing in common with all the deaths I had witnessed and participated in before. With Este, an outward longing marked all, like sugar absorbing moisture and salt releasing it. Every hour of the three days rearranged her with fearsome and compelling difference. Every physical memory of her body, from childhood onwards, floated to the surface of her beautiful frame. Every gesture that had evolved into her grace found its origin and almost joyfully puppeted its awkwardness through her. Every thought found its way through her bones and exhaled waves of shadow from a deep ocean floor, rising into sunlight and dispersing, meeting the decay that was closing in. I could not leave her. I sat or laid next to her, fascinated and horrified, aroused and entranced as the procession gently disgorged. Her eyes waxed and waned memory, pale transparency to flinted fire. She was dimly aware of me, but able to instruct and explain the exactitude of the process. She did this to dispel my anxiety and pain; also to confront the ecstasy of her control. In the evening of the third day, the memory in my dreams began to show itself. It refined our time together, the constancy of her presence. Since leaving her village, we had never been apart, except for those strange weeks when she had asked me to stay inside while she dwelt in the garden day and night. When she returned, she was thin and strained.
The bow is turning black now, becoming the darkest shadow in the room. Everything is very still. I sit holding the two wrapped arrows in my hands. Out of their turnings comes hunger and sleep, forgotten reflections of my own irredeemable humanity.
From the cupboards and the garden I juggle anticipant food, flooding my senses with taste and smell. Citrus and bacon rise in the room, sage and tomatoes, green onions and dried fish unfold. Separation has been hewn by the essential, and a long, dreamless sleep waits to sanction it.
My hands tremble holding the bow and the morning door, the arrows between my teeth. The exact moment has come, and I wrench into dazzling light, the ancient wood sucked inwards and falling from its twisted hinges. Overwhelmed, the house gives up, showing its previously unseen squalor as an act of submission. Heat, buffeted by a bright wind, wakes me to this world and seals the shrivelling house to a hollow.
I untie the dark, dry leaves from the arrows while holding the bow cradled to my chest. They are white; an infinite, unfocused white without any trace of hue or shadow. They absorb the day into their chalky depth and I grow sick looking at them. I lift the bow, which I must have strung in my sleep, and knock one arrow into its contrast. The other is wrapped away and saved to be the last. I would make many in between. This is the moment of departure, her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my strength, and feel this single gesture brace every muscle of my body, feel the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. Pulling the great curve silences the world and even the wind stops to hold its breath against my energy and the release. For the first and last time, the bow is silent, except for small, creaking sighs that echo my taut bones. I raise it skywards, perpendicular to the track that runs over the low foothills in an almost vertical scar from our home.
It lets itself go, vanishing into the sky with a sound that sensually pulses through me and every other particle of substance and ghost, in or out of sight. I know I will never see that arrow again. It is not to be my guide; I will have to make that one differently.
That first white arrow is still travelling the spirals of air, sensing a defined blood on its ice-cold tip. For a moment I am with it, high above these porous lands, edging the sea, its waves crashing endlessly below. Above the shabby villages and brutal tribes, leaning towards the wilderness and the dark forest which cloaks its meaning.
The pain calls me back as I stand before the track, dazed in the garden. The inside of my arm is raw from where the bow string lashed it, removing a layer of skin with the ease of a razor, indifferent and intentional. Stepping forward, I pick up my sack and quiver, steady my looping stance against the bow and walk forward into the wilderness.
The land has become depopulated. Too much effort is needed to keep the parched fields active enough to grow clinging tomatoes and dusty, dwarfish melons; it is a country of the old, tending their patches of earth out of habitual purpose, the last days of the clock ticking through daily ritual, the weights almost unwound from their creaking spool. There are no young people to reset it, no one to wind the well each day and sprinkle the ravenous earth into function. The young have left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They are underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They are in venomous sheds, weaving chemical cancer. They are automata in chains of industry which do not need identity, language or families. All their saved money is endlessly counted as escape. Some come back to the fields to help the old and infirm raise the dented bucket and spade; others attempt to return as princes, buying expensive and bland new homes in the crumbling villages of their origin. This will fail, and their children and the land will turn on them and intensify the shuddering fatigue. The scuffed tracks of their efforts are erased under my feet, walking through the few occupied remnants of community.
It will take me three days to clear these places, another three or four to cross the low mountains and be further out at the rim of the wilderness. We had lived in this place for eleven years, healing the gashes and fractures of our past, using the sun and dust to staunch the jagged memories. This peninsula of abandonment had given much, and a part of me ached to plan a return, even though I know it will never be possible.
The heat of the day has become saturated with weight, the brightness sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds have thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water is being born, heavy and unstable.
This is the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land; a wind which sucked rather than blew, its hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toys with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, whilst beneath the reservoirs, caves and cisterns strained their emptiness towards its skies.
This was the reason we had lived here. Este said the isolation was part of the treatment, but the mending and evolution of the body and spirit could only take place above a honeycomb of hollows. The skies and the sea would be heard in those places. Their vastness and motions would be echoed down beneath the taut earth, swilling and booming the darkness into quiet against their unseen mineral walls. She spoke of their unity of voice, from the humblest well to the vastest cathedral cave, how they are like pipes of different sizes in a mighty organ. An organ constructed to shudder in fugues and fanfares of listening, not playing; where a cacophony of silence was only counterpoised by insistent drips of water.
She knew it was their action that influenced the minute physical and the immense mental and spiritual spaces inside human beings. I think of this as I walk across the lid of their meaning, of her unfolding these wonders to my baffled ears. I think of her voice, very close, very clear, and I stare in shock at the truth of holding her bones and flesh in my sweating hand.
During the night, lightning can be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flicker, marbling the curve of the earth on their way towards here and the waiting dawn. I take shelter in a dug-out shepherds’ cave at the edge of one of the poorest villages. The terraced fields here are worn down, losing their boundaries in limping disrepair, survival and oblivion quarrelling among the falling stones and parched plants. In this domain of lizards, flies and cacti, the human signatures were being erased.
My shelter feels like it has not been used for years, the stitched-together sacking that made its rudimentary door falling apart
in my hand as I try to unhook it. This crouching space had been scratched out from the soft yellow stone, just big enough for a small man or boy and a few goats. There are still remnants of occupation: a low bed or table blocking the far end; a few tools bearing the labour scars of generations; a car wheel, its tyre worn smooth; dry, sand-encrusted empty bottles and a few exhausted shotgun cartridges. Hanging on a nail is a fragment of rusted armour, an articulated breastplate of diminutive size. Whether this is a genuine artefact dug up from some unknown battle, or part of a carnival costume from one of the gaudy pageants that once marked the saint’s passage through the year, it is impossible to say. The hot land and the salt wind have etched and cooked it into another time, a time that never stained memory, because it was too ancient to have yet been conceived.
The cave’s bare interior seemed at once empty and brimming with occupation. I curl into the sanctity of this most human shelf, and taste the joy of its simplicity with the edge of my sudden tiredness.
The thunder enters my sleep. It slides between the laminations of dreams with the grace of a panther, its first sound being no more than a whisper or a vibration. Each mile it runs it gains volume and power, each mile it flies it trains my unconscious to not respond, each growing resonance being only fractionally louder than the last. The hours are eaten in its stealthy approach, my nightmares absorbing the shocks until it is directly overhead and its massive percussion shakes the ground with light; a huge whiteness, battering the pale morning with a fury that refuses all kinship.
The village is awake and active, people darting from one house to another as the sky opens and torrents of rain fall to meet the rising earth’s unbridled appetite. Within minutes, the fields have drunk deep and are forming lakes. The streets and tracks of the village are alive with rivulets and yellow tributaries of fast water. The villagers fall upon these eddies with a great frenzy of action. Rolled-up sacks and hessian are used to divert the flood into wells and gulleys which lead to other cisterns. Logs and stones, even items of clothing, are improvised to divert this precious storm. The feuds and squabbles that fossilised the village are forgotten, water and its capture going beyond blood and its boundaries. The rain is constant and spiteful, the villagers are determined and drenched with mud. People slither and run, shout instructions to the very young, scream for more sacks, laugh and fall with the very old, who curse. Those who are normally locked away join the rush, limping and screaming with exhilaration and confusion. The entire village turns into mud beings, a chaotic, purposeful mania rattling under the rains. Some animals watch from their stables and doorways, surprised and indignant at so much energy, water and noise.
I can not stay outside of this circus vortex, so I carefully stash the bow and other goods high in the cave, away from the flood and beasts, and run to work alongside a toothless elder who is trying to build a dam of rocks and rags.
His efforts are useless against the power of the flow. His slowness gives a pathetic humour to the event, and his wall tumbles away every few minutes while he methodically continues to pile, seemingly unaware of the gleeful water and his mechanical futility. Together, we manage to turn the stream, sending it into the corner of the courtyard. It pours into the mouth of an open well, and falls into its resounding depth with echoing splashes. As I watch our minor triumph, in a flash it occurs to me that I have no memory of Este bleeding, no picture of the blood leaving her body, just a vague blur of its presence drying everywhere in the room. Have these sounds caught a reflection, cupped the act in a palm of memory?
The old man tugs at my sleeve and clears my vision. He has started work on another stream and needs my help. We continue directing the water for two hours, soaked to the bone but satisfied. The storm passes, the rain stops and the steaming earth has begun to dry. Birds noisily make use of the orange puddles before they return to dust. A saturated heat begins to rise, forcing all labour to cease.
The family of the old man insist I join them in their dripping home. Our celebratory feast is simple but powerful: we drink a coarse red wine made from the family’s parched, hard grapes and eat a dish of fat rice and dark meat cooked in pomegranate juice, punctuated by delicious bread with black onions baked into its crust. There is much merriment and we share that language of need and alcohol, where the native and the foreign are overrun by excitement, and delicacies of grammar are jolted loose by emotion.
The old man concentrates on his food as if it were his last. I make some slight comment of jest about this, and am carefully told that the rains and the old have a special relationship in this land. I had heard rumour of this before, but our isolation had kept most things at a distance; our contact with the neighbouring communities had been remote. But the spring rain ritual is true, and my host explains its necessity and the intricacies of its operation between mouthfuls of food and wine.
The old are a burden on their poor economy, becoming increasingly incapable of work. So, once past their useful stage, they are given to the mercy of the spring gods and placed outside their homes with food and drink for three days. At that time of year, the rains are soft and constant, very unlike the autumn deluge we had just suffered. They would sit in silence, knowing that conversation or pleading would not help their condition; better to save strength. After their allotted time, they are welcomed back inside and returned to their anxious beds. They understand that this was a more civilised and kinder test than those conducted by their forefathers. In those distant days of famine, the old had been taken to steep cliffs and forced to find their own way home, the Gods growing fat on their torn and fractured remains.
A quarter of the old will die during the coming weeks; night chills, influenza or phenomena being the divine intervention. The rest will be celebrated, fed and honoured for another year. The old father cleaning his plate with his last scrap of bread has survived six spring rains, and has the intention of surviving many more.
In the afternoon, I say my farewells and return to my cave, where I sleep a peaceful and dreamless journey.
* * *
Far to the south, twilight was tasting the air. Swallows darted and looped in the invisible fields of rising insects, restless arrowheads spinning in the amber sunlight. One moment, black silhouette, iron age. The next, tilting to catch the sun, flashing deep orange, bronze age. Dipping and rotating in giddying time: iron age, bronze age, iron age.
Watching them were the yellow eyes of a lone black man who sat on the mud parapet wall of a colonial stockade. He watched and attempted to gauge their distance and speed, making abstract calculations across the infinite depth of sky, a solemn assessment of range and trajectory for a shot that could never be made. Across his knees lay his Lee-Enfield rifle, a bolt-action firearm of legendary durability, in perfect working condition and untouched by any other hand since he was given it in his early manhood. He still remembered first grasping its solid weight and the smell of the brown, oiled paper it was wrapped in. The excitement of possession, matched by his pride at becoming a member of the bush police. That was forty-two years ago, and now Tsungali was beginning to feel the old rifle grow heavy again.
He and the gun bore cuneiform scars and indentations. They had been written into. Prophecies and charms marked his face, talismans against attack from animals, demons and men. The butt of the Enfield was inscribed against touch or loss, and for accuracy and courage; it also carried the tally of the twenty-three men and three demons it had officially dispatched. Tsungali had not worked for the police or the British army for many years. The Possession Wars had made him an outcast from the authorities, and far too much blood had been shed to divide the beliefs of both sides. So he was confused and disturbed at being called for, summoned to the enclosure he had known so well and loved as home, the same compound he had seen turned into the bitter kraal of his enemies.
They had come looking for him, not with troops, shackles and threats like before, but quietly, sending soft, curved words ahead that he was needed again. They wanted to talk and forget the crimes
of before. He had smelt this as a trick and set about carving new protections, constructing cruel and vicious physical and psychic traps about his house and land. He spoke to his bullets and fed them until they were fat, ripe and impatient. He waited in docile cunning for their arrival, which had proved to be calm, dignified, and almost respectful. Now he sat and waited to be ushered into the fort’s headquarters, not knowing why he was there and surprised at his own obedience. He was shocked at the scent of homecoming which befuddled his warrior’s instinct. He gripped the Enfield to fence it off, and used the swallows to gain focus before, during and after the event. He bled their speed into his anticipation, as the fierceness of the stars took command of the darkening sky.
* * *
I set my path by the night and walk out of the village while the track remains luminous. Later, starlight will make it shine in a different way, polishing the miles ahead with a bright, invisible velocity.
I walk between banked walls of white stone as if in a riverbed, the road hollowed out by time, weather and the continual passage of humans, migratory as birds. Tribes crossing and re-crossing the same gulley, desperately trying to draw a line against extinction. It is with this herd of ghosts that I travel, alone.