And it was in this place, as time passed and our small band grew into a numerous people, who spread along that coast in both directions, that the first city of Isinglass was built, the mother of cities, which has been remembered in every city built since; and will be as long as we her people endure.
My name is Anabi. I am the last son of the seventeenth family of legend, the youngest child of the youngest child; I grew up in the palace at Isinglass, an apprentice in the House of Stories, and it was there that I became a Rememberer, one of those who tell again, in words and images, the Histories. What I have told you is the first story, the Passing of the Gate of the Crossing, which has been remembered and handed down among us since the very beginning, without change and without variant, so it is as true today as it was in the time that it happened, even though we know that the story is not really the happening but the record of the happening; just as we also know that, in the telling of a story, the events happen again in all their terror and wonder, in all their sadness and all their glory.
We in the seventeenth family trace our genealogy back to two women who appear in the oldest story, the far-sighted girl who took the dates and gave them out among the people starving on the shore; whose own mother accepted the bone, which we call the Map of Days, from the stranger woman and handed it on to her own daughter, the far-sighted girl who when she died became a bird; and also from one of the stranger women kidnapped into the boats as we left the island, who were accounted part fish because of their skill and freedom in the water, so that even in the generations beyond, girl children would be born with gills on the sides of their necks, who could dive into the sea and stay under the water and breathe there the way fish do; and this grandmother of mine when she died became a fish.
So these two, the bird and the fish, are my maternal forebears; and on the male side I am a descendant of the first man who went down to his boat and launched it into the water on the other side: for after the crossing was made we set up an image of him on that generous shore, a stone man standing there forever looking back the way we had come; perhaps he stands there still. And for my fourth ancestor I have fire, because he was the man who first kindled a spark on the new shore, out of wood and stone, and when he died he became a tree and that was the tree from which the wood came that made our fires in the earliest times in the new land, which we called Ys.
We had left our old ones behind on the further shore but their voices came with us, how we did not know; but when we recovered and found food and water and places to sleep, we also found that in the night, as we gathered around the fires, the voices of the old ones came upon the wind perhaps, or from the crackling of wood as it burned, or from the cries of birds; and they told us what we should do and how we should behave. And if it was so that in the night we could all hear the voices of the old ones, there were those among us who heard them more clearly and more often; and among these were some who could hear voices in daylight as well, or even see the old ones moving among us, in the pattern of light and shadow on leaves, for instance, or in the way the grasses moved on a slope above the sea. And it was from among these Hearers that the first Rememberers came; and it was from the things they heard the old ones say that the first stories were made and entered into the House of Stories, where I grew up and where I lived until the disaster that came upon us.
We say in the House of Stories that, before the one in which I grew up was built, there were four cities called Isinglass; and these four are remembered in their names as the City of Waters, the City of Dust, the City of Fire and the City of the Sky; the fifth, my city, was said to have been the Last City, which would endure forever unless destroyed and, if destroyed, would never come again. Except, as here, with its four sister cities, in a story. And now, as I attempt to start to begin again, I can’t say if any of the five cities ever existed anywhere else than in a story, not even the one I grew up in, the one whose halls echoed to my childish laughter, whose walls I painted with my own hands when I was older, the one where I fell in love, the one that, in my inadvertence and the carelessness of passion, I destroyed.
This is how the first city was built: the grandmother who became a fish showed the grandmother who became a bird how to read the bone her own mother had been given by the stranger women on leaving the shore of the black island. The notches on the bone, Grandmother Fish said, represented days or rather nights; and by counting these marks women could reckon the phases of the moon, when it would appear, when grow, when shrink, when disappear; and use that knowledge to predict their own cycle, when the blood would flow from their bodies, how long for, when it would cease and when it would come again. So that Grandmother Bird learned to count the nights of the moon and in time constructed her own map of nights, as the instrument was called, and so did others among our women; until this calendrical understanding was common among us.
Some of the men were envious of this knowledge the women had, and called the instruments goddess sticks and wanted to own them for themselves or at least construct some alternative that had a like power; but no one knew what kind of thing that could be, since men were not tied to the moon as women were, and perhaps were not tied to anything at all; but existed as free agents roaming across the face of the earth for no real reason, once the getting of food and shelter was accomplished. These men, among whom was Grandfather Fire, who became a tree, one day decided to proclaim their allegiance to the sun, as the women’s was to the moon, and they began to carve their own figures, which resembled animals such as lions or leopards made over into human form, and worshipped them and said that the figures contained gods, who spoke to them and told them what to do.
Meanwhile others among the men, following the women, said that the sun held no secrets for them; it was a daily miracle, certainly, but what was going on nightly in the sky held far more mystery; and so these men began to study the stars, how they rose and set, where they appeared along the horizon, where they disappeared; and these men also constructed instruments, not unlike those the women had, with which they counted days and nights, looking for patterns that repeated the way the phases of the moon repeat; and for these men the voices of the gods did not speak out of small carved figures that could be held in the hand, but came unpredictably from the void on still nights, without cloud, when it was as if the abyss gave voice to a silence that was in itself godly, that was a godly silence.
And my own grandfather, he who became stone, was of these men, because he thought that the voices of the gods as heard in the heavens on nights such as these were at the same time the voices of the ancestors we had left behind on the further shore; even that some of those ancestors had themselves become stars set over us, to guide us and to comfort us as we made our way through the world and its many dangers. And in all of this there was no one, not one single soul, who did not search somewhere, anywhere, for the voice of a god or a goddess to speak: in the stones, in the rustling of the leaves in the trees, in the eddies of water in the streams, in the paths taken by animals of the forest or the plain, in the flight of birds in the sky, in the rain, in thunder and lightning, in the daily return of the sun.
These two groups of men, those who worshipped the sun and those who watched the stars, contended with each other, as men will, for mastery, each saying to the other that they had the true knowledge of how the world was ordered, and how we, that is human beings, so called, fitted into that world order; while the women, who did not suffer from the same affliction, kept their own counsel. Indeed, in that time it was not generally understood how women conceived the children they bore. It was often said that children were born of congress with the gods, or that they came about when the spirit of an animal or a plant, even the spirit of an insect, crept into the womb of a woman while she was sleeping or even while she was awake; and so individual children were called things like the child of the date palm or the child of the god of the rapids, the son of the ibis or the daughter of the moon, no matter who their real father might have been; but no one ever doubted
who the mothers were, because how could you doubt what you had seen with your own eyes?
The contention between these two groups of men was like the war between darkness and light, between sun and moon, between fire and water, between solid ground and airy nothing. One party, the men of daylight, as we called them, would admit of no knowledge that could not be seen, made tangible, made real as stones are real; they said that their devotions made the sun return each day and that without their obeisances, darkness would return and cover the earth, as it had in the days of None. While the others, the men of darkness, said that all things are mysterious and hidden, nothing is as it appears, that the world may be understood only through signs that always mean something other than what they appear to say. These men of darkness said that the heavens, which they studied compulsively, were intricate beyond measure, and infinite and would endure long after men and women had passed on into some other eternity; and that our task was not to measure the infinite but become a part thereof.
The men who carved figures and said that there was a god therein made at length a kind of resolution of their dispute with the Listeners of the Sky, as the men of darkness were also known. At the confluence of two rivers, in the V of sand between them, they announced the building of a great tower upon which would sit an effigy of the god whom they worshipped, that is the sun, made out of stone so that it would endure as the days endure. They further said that it was the god himself, the sun, who had instructed them to do this; and that he had also told them the form and shape the effigy must take. They began to build the tower out of mud that was moulded and hardened in the sun or else baked by fire in kilns, burning the limbs of Grandfather Fire, he who was a tree; and from everywhere on the wide grassy plains where we lived, among fields of emmer and of spelt, among the fishy marshes of reeds, on the low hills where we hunted antelope and deer, we could see the smoke of kilns and, through that, the tower rising. And to some of us this seemed a dreadful thing while to others it was a wonder.
But to the Listeners of the Sky it was an atrocity, even more so when the shape of the effigy was revealed: for it was made after the figure of Grandfather Stone that had been set up on the shore of the Gate of the Crossing, looking south to the yellow land we left behind with such weeping and travail that to some that strait was known ever after as the Gate of Grief. So the Listeners of the Sky remonstrated with the Men of Fire and said that they had stolen their ancestor’s image and turned it into a travesty; that the voices of the ancestors would no longer instruct them if the statue was not demolished; that fire from heaven would anyway descend and blast both tower and image. None of this made any difference to the Men of Fire, who completed their work unhindered by doubt or fear, unless it be fear of the god they made, and then announced the day of its inauguration, which was the day of the solstice, the longest day, the day of the inflorescence of the power of the sun.
So that now we who had been one and listened only to the ancestors were now three and listened variously to the moon, the stars and the sun: we were the Wild Women of the low hills who kept their calendar and sought to raise their children away from the contention of men; the Listeners of the Sky who said there were no gods save those among us who had become stars; and the Men of Fire who believed only in the wisdom of the sun. On the day of the unveiling the sun rose above the flat sea to the east in all his yellow glory, and the first rays struck the great eyes of the statue and they flashed out across the assembled multitudes like a prodigy; so that the Men of Fire fell down on their knees before it and humbled themselves and gave thanks and praise; while the women from the low hills watched, with their children held close around them; and the Listeners of the Sky likewise hung back waiting for disaster to fall upon the idolaters; but nothing happened.
And after the sun that day reached its zenith and began to decline, and offerings of bread and milk were made, and the hearts and livers of animals burned on the altar, despair seized the Men of Fire, because no revelation had come, the god had not spoken, no word had come down upon them and they were bereft and uncertain and afraid, and some among them said the god was angry and needed more and greater sacrifices, that children perhaps, or slaves, should be offered to him; but the women had retreated by now; they had returned to their fields of emmer, their groves of quince and of fig, their gardens of aloe and garlic, of poppy and wormwood. And as the light died in the west and the world darkened and the stars began to prick through, the Listeners to the Sky came in a procession up the steps of the tower towards that purloined image and made their own devotions to it; they chanted the old words the ancestors had taught them, but the god, if it was a god, did not answer them either.
And now it became apparent to all of us that we had made a god that was neither good nor beneficent, a god who was indifferent, perhaps inimical to us, a god that we must fear, that we must tremble before, so unlike the ancestors who had formerly guided us, who always knew what was right and what was wrong, who were, indeed, ourselves—so much so that when children were born to us, we could see in their faces the old ones who had come back to us. No longer did we know who we were or where we came from; no longer could we say, yes, this is right, this is our path, or no, that is not the way to go, and act accordingly. For we had given ourselves away to a god who did not love us; further, in the way of such things, one god gave birth to other gods; he was like an egg who broke apart and ran everywhere, and where he ran, other gods and goddesses appeared: of thunder and lightning, of wind and rain, of flood and fire and pestilence; of death and of that realm under the waters from which no one returns.
So this was the first city, called Isinglass of the Waters, where we lived in fear and trembling in a cluster of dim houses grouped around the great tower built by the Men of Fire, so called, where nothing that happened could happen without the propitiation of the idol they had made, and all the other idols that had come from that original one. And the fields around about, and the low hills beyond them, and the mountains ringing the plains, where formerly we had lived free of supernatural terror, being ruled by the ancestors, who were incarnate in ourselves and also in the animals we hunted and the plants and fruits we gathered, became strange to us, a place of terror and darkness, where we could not go without permission that was not our own permission but that of the gods of the heavens and the hells we had made; and we lamented.
Grandfather Stone, or his son, or his, or his, down the number-less generations, under the wise tuition of Grandmother Bird’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter, learned how to make an instrument that calculated, not just the phases of the moon but the paths of the wanderers, so called, who to the Men of Fire were already, some of them, gods and goddesses; and he learned to see and understand that the heavens revolved above and around us in a pattern that, after various intervals (a day, a month, a year, a great year) repeated. And it was he, or perhaps it was she, or their son’s son’s son or daughter’s daughter’s daughter, who decided that one mark should henceforth be shown as 1, two marks, 2 and so forth up until 9 when, like the bodies in the heavens on their circuit, they repeated; unto the infinity that the Listeners of the Sky knew to be the only divinity and also no divinity at all.
And Grandmother Bird and Grandfather Stone repudiated the sacrifice of children and slaves on the altar of the sun, the horror of blood on the steps of the tower, the obscenity of beating hearts plucked from the opened chests of the still-living; they built in secret a boat from the wood of the tree that was all that remained of Grandfather Fire and, when the next flood came down the rivers from the mountains, took that boat and provisioned it and with their children set forth upon the waters, determined to sail into the east, where the sun rose, as far as they could go, in search of some other land, some other place where, listening only to the ancestors and to the sky, they could begin again. And on that holy day when the boat was set upon the flood and taken up and whirled down the swollen river towards the ocean, they saw leaping at its prow the grey shapes of dolphins, and kne
w that Grandmother Fish would also accompany them to the back of the sun.
But there is a worse horror than that of altars stained with the blood of the innocent, worse than the craven fear of gods and goddesses of our own invention, worse even than the dim halls of hell where the dead eat bread made from clay and drink only bad water, not beer or wine; for when that voyage down desolate coasts of sand and bare hills was over, when the green returned and they found themselves at the mouth of a great estuary all tangled with mangroves, with the greeny-black, clouded, jungled mountains beyond like a promise of plenty, when they discovered a channel through the mangrove tangle and sailed up on into that new land and founded a city there, that city repeated in its lineaments as much as its character the horrors of the first city; and became a terror to its inhabitants.
They did not set out to build an atrocity; why would they? No, the City of Dust, as it became known, was to be a paradise. Using their new knowledge, the numbers they had invented and the prodigious combinations that could be generated from those nine simple digits, they planned a geometrical city that was built, not around altars, but around baths. The towers of Isinglass of the Waters were repeated but made broader and flatter, and at their zenith rectangular basins were constructed, to which water was piped, using great wheels that turned on the green river side, lifting full and dripping buckets up high and pouring their precious contents into the conduits and so to the pools. For the people of the second Isinglass believed that in water is the essence of life, and on still nights, when the hammer of the sun had set in the west, where some thought they continued to see the great flaming, bloodied altars burning, they would use those pools as mirrors wherein to track the mysterious patterns of the stars.
Such beauty had not been ours before; we had seen it in the skies and about us on the natural earth but never before, we thought, had such beauty been constructed by human hands and minds for human eyes. When we of the second Isinglass gathered about the still high pools at the head of our towers for our ceremonies and saw in the black quiet waters those silver stars floating, we felt we had captured eternity, that in a bowl of stars was an image of the infinite, which was the only god and yet no god at all. Sometimes golden pollen dust from our fields of einkorn and of yarrow trembled upon the meniscus; and then it was said that in this conjunction was the marriage of heaven and earth. Sometimes a falling star flamed through the black waters, as it did in the sky above, leaving a golden trail; and then it was said that one of the old ones, one of the ancestors we had left behind when we passed the Gate of Grief, had returned to live among us; and the face of any child born that night or the next day would be examined to see if it could be determined which of the old ones it was who had come back.
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