For it was felt and believed in the early days of the second city that we had re-established our lost connection to what lay behind us; and our priests and priestesses, those who made and kept and read the instruments that described the patterns of the sun and moon, the planets and stars, told us that the voices of the ancestors had returned, that they could hear them speaking, not just on those nights when we all gathered to look into the dark waters but on other nights too, when the rest of us went about our business, whatever it might be: the farmers of the soil and the tenders of animals, the artisans and craftsmen, those who raised and taught our children. But we, that is the ordinary people among us, did not think we heard such voices any longer, if we ever had. We had resigned our part in that particular drama; we were, as it were, extras only, waiting for the word to descend from above. And in that humility, if it was humility, or abnegation if that is what it was, lay the seeds of terror.
It began with a haze in the east out of which the sun came up bloody and enormous as if dragged like a great red weeping egg from the waters of night; and instead of climbing out yellow into the blue fields of the sky it darkened, if such a thing can be, until it resembled the single eye of some choleric god we had forgotten how to appease. The haze became a cloud and the cloud too darkened and rose higher than the sun, and when it reached halfway up the sky began to mass and roil, and then we smelt a sulphurous smell and a fine choking dust began to drift and settle upon the still waters of our sacred pools: not the golden pollen dust from the fields but a grey particulate matter that also caught in our breath and made our eyes water and left smears like ashen tears on our cheeks and an acrid taste in our mouths; and when that day was ending, the prodigious sun swelled again in the west, firing long red arrows of light across the dusty city, and was swallowed, and we knew there would be no stars that night.
That night was darker than any we had seen or heard of before, and cold, and full of mutterings; and we huddled together in our houses, full of fear; we tried to close every aperture against the dust that nevertheless infiltrated each crevice, every chink; while up on the platforms, by firelight around the sacred pools, the priests and priestesses consulted their instruments and chanted their chants and cried out to the ancestors for guidance; but no sound came back from the obscurity of the heavens, the obscurity of the past, the obscurity of our minds that had darkened as the world had darkened. And in the second dawn of that fearsome time, no sun rose but instead a black wind howled out of the east, the sky cracked open, a vicious rain began to fall that was like no rain we had ever seen before; it burned our skin, inflamed our eyes, ran in fiery streams down our faces; and there were some who said that even though that rain was cold as ice, when it fell into the pools, the water steamed and then boiled.
And the sun did not return that day and not for many days afterwards; or if it did, we saw it only as a pale ghost, a transparent ring of light that could sometimes be glimpsed between the torn masses of black cloud, the acid rain, the hot stones that fell sometimes in showers from the hellish heavens. And then our priests and priestesses, cloaked and hooded and with cloths about their mouths, keeping their vigil by the pools, called for sacrifices among the people; they told us that we must bring out our children as offerings to the powers who rained those afflictions down upon us; they reverted, they lapsed, they regressed, they became like those we had fled from in the City of the Waters; they could see no way forward except one that went over altars slippery with blood; and those of us who would not surrender our children to their barbarous outcry had them torn from our arms by the gangs of maddened acolytes who resigned their will to the priests and the priestesses, who murdered their own children there beside the stinking pools, on the very platforms which the Watchers of the Sky had used for their observations of the heavens, and now wished to murder ours.
And it seemed to us that our humanity, so called, was a thin veneer above a savagery that was not like anything we had seen among the animals, which will maim and kill and dismember and even devour their own kind, but not from a need to propitiate the gods of thunder and lightning, the god of the sun, the goddess of the volcanic earth, but for hunger perhaps—or survival. And there were those among us who refused to join the orgies going on around those bloody and polluted pools, which had so recently been reservoirs of starlight and were now a theatre for unspeakable acts committed by men and women with each other, by men against women and women against men and both women and men against children, the old destroying the young, the young wailing as they were dragged out of the darkness of houses into the darkness of the world and then dispatched to ultimate darkness.
We retreated to the lowest depths of the City of Dust, we few, into the ageless labyrinth that seemed to have been built before the city itself had been raised above it, that city of identical houses: the fireplace on the west wall, the window on the east, the hole in the roof for coming and going, the ladders with their feet in the mire and their heads in the stars, which had now fled forever perhaps. We went down, down, among bones and shards of skulls, leaving behind the ransacked granaries, gleaning what we could from the seeds that ran from the broken jars, sometimes finding sweet water stored also in jars but more often drinking from pools that gathered on the broken floors, river water which had seeped into the lowest depths; and in that hell below the city many died and some were devoured by their own kind; but others among us would not—we would rather die ourselves than eat of the dead. And we ourselves had never known how ancient our city was, nor that it had been built upon bones.
How we came out of that hell is not remembered, or rather, remembered only in a story, where it is told that we were saved by the wisdom of a child, one of Grandmother Fish’s daughter’s daughter’s daughters who, seeing on the one hand the abyss of waters and on the other the void of earth, chose the way of earth and slid her thin body through tunnels made by otters perhaps, or some other animal that lives partly in the water and partly on the land; she burrowed up through the brown river dirt, the sediments of a thousand floods, slipping and sliding, covered in slimy mud, with her ears and nose and eyes and mouth clogged and then unclogged; she wormed her way upwards and out, she found the path, she cleared the way, others among the children followed her and then we followed our children.
Many were lost, many drowned in those unspeakable passages, adding their bones to the bones that lay beneath the atrocious city, but a remnant survived. We came out into the strangely altered world, the crops dying, the animals we tended vanished, the sky still dark and riven with lightning, the sulphurous smell; and then we set out into the east, into the heart of the darkness of the storm, leaving behind the ruined city, leaving behind our dream of the stars, leaving our ancestors too; for we did not want to flee that storm, we did not want to go back west towards the altars to the sun; we wanted to embrace the chaos ahead of us, to perish perhaps in the conflagration; and if we did not perish we thought we might pass beyond the storm, to the other side of sorrow, the further shore from darkness; and there we would begin again.
The storytellers at this point always ask their audience to imagine: a vast darkness in the sky, darkness upon darkness, lit sometimes by lightning, at all times with the mutter and grumble of thunder in the distance; rain and hail; cold; and the sulphur smell as if to mock the chill in which we live. We are a line of thin brown people walking in single file through a sullen and blasted landscape. We are starving; we scavenge whatever we can along the way, not much, because it seems the earth too is dying: that black cloud, that acid rain, the poisonous exhalations from whatever catastrophe occurred, has killed or is killing everything green that grows, and like ourselves the animals are dying. We grub in the ground for roots, we drink bad water, we eat the corpses of animals, just to stay alive. We eat anything and yet we are still hungry.
And we walk. Where we are going we do not know because none among us has travelled this far east before. We are wary at all times, in the pale greyish days when we walk, in the
noisome black nights when we sleep huddled together, wary of wild animals, driven mad by hunger like ourselves; and wary of other bands of rogue humans who may not have, as we have, sworn never to devour our own kind. These were the days and nights in the wilderness and it was on that now unimaginable journey that certain among us began to believe that all life is sacred, that there is nothing living under the sun that does not have the same right to life as we do ourselves; further, these philosophers said, all life is transformation: we are continually transforming from one state of being to another, we are egg, we are caterpillar, we are chrysalis, we are moth, and when the moth dies, even then we are transformed, into air perhaps.
And furthermore these philosophers, who may have been mad as all the rest of us were mad—mad with hunger, mad with grief, mad with terror and horror—said there are no gods or goddesses as the people of the abandoned cities that lay behind us in the west said. That is a mistake; we are alone on the earth with the other creatures. Indeed we are really just another kind of creature, endlessly transforming, ant into beetle, beetle to frog, frog to lizard, lizard to bird, bird to human, human to ant, endlessly. There is no escape: death is the closing of one door and the opening of another … These men and women taught us a philosophy that came out of an extremity of despair, an extremity of survival, an extremity of hope: all living things must be protected, honoured, cherished, even the mosquito that lands upon your arm to suck up your blood, even the worm that gnaws in your gut, even the maggot that sucks up your flesh when you are dead: all sacred.
So that, when that awful journey at last was over, and we reached the sea and found that, even though the land appeared to have died, the sea still lived, with its fish and its shellfish, its kelp and its seagrass, and we who had lived for so long only on dead things, fell to gathering and eating living food, these philosophers sternly admonished us and said again: all life is sacred, you must not kill the least thing, cover your mouths when you breath lest you suck small insects into it, sweep the ground before you when you walk lest you crush an ant or a beetle beneath your feet. And we said to them: how are we to feed our children? How feed ourselves? Look, we need that salty meat that comes from the oyster on the rock, we must have the blood of the fish, it is good, it sustains us, it helps us to grow and also keeps off the sickness.
But these men and women, these philosophers, would not agree; so there on that shore our small band parted, some going north, others going south; and we who went north crossed the mouths of great rivers with their freight of trees and corpses; we walked along wide sandy estuaries where the mangroves, toughest of plants, still lived; we climbed over cliffs and headlands and down the other side; we went on and on, never leaving the sea because the sea sustained us as the land could not. Until one day we saw that the dark clouds roiling in the sky were not so dark as they had been, one day the sun returned, just a pale ring of the palest gold, but the sun nevertheless; and after that, the moon, like a ghostly zero; and, much later, the stars came back. And though we were just a remnant of a remnant, our little band began to grow, our children no longer died, they lived and grew to have children of their own, and those children also thrived.
And still we did not stop. It was as if the terror that had set us walking still drove us on; or was it that we could not stop because we did not know what we were looking for? Or was it that we had not yet found the place that we sought, and would not know it until we did? On and on we went, until the sun that had risen pale and cool on our right hand now rose hot on our left, whereby we understood we had walked around the head of a great gulf, unimaginably huge; and now that the sun had returned to warm us, now some days we even saw blue in the sky again, now that the plants of the earth were stirring from their sleep and out of the great drifts of grey dust, shoots of green were starting to appear; now certain among us said that it was time to stop, time to settle, time again to build a city. And we did at length stop and build a city; and that was the third Isinglass.
Never again, we said to one another, would we build flat-topped pyramids or towers; never again seek to conjure the approval of the heavens from some high place where sacrifices were made. From now on we would look within ourselves for divinity, if divinity was what we required: perhaps right thinking, right action, is all that is needed. So the city was laid out horizontally, on a plain above the sea, bisected by a river; and we made that city a mirror of the sky, so that on any corner of any avenue you were standing as it were in the midst of some starry constellation that, on clear nights, could be seen above you; and the other constellations were as if mapped before you on the city streets. Of course it is true that the constellations wheel nightly across the sky; and our city was made of obdurate stone and did not move; but there was always a moment, on every night, when mirror and image coincided, earth and sky were in harmony, and felicity flowed between. And we lived for those moments.
We built tiered buildings with rounded eaves, like certain trees in shape, the young pine for instance, and we made sure the topmost part of these came to a point, so that when lightning struck and thunder rolled, sometimes the flashes came down onto these finials and charged the whole building with the powers of heaven. And in these buildings we placed our sacred relics, the ancient counting sticks that had been preserved among us, the mathematical instruments with which we laid out the city in accordance with the stars, and also certain cylinders we carried with us from the City of Dust, whereupon we had learned to record other marks that did not represent numbers so much as they did the things of the world: grain, wine, the names of the ancestors, the names of the gods we were determined never again to worship. These signs were inscribed in reverse upon the cylinders so that, when impressed upon clay, or covered in pigment and rolled on a flat absorbent surface, the signs re-appeared as we had imagined them to be in the first place. And in as much as the cylinders were the negative of what would hence become positive, our city was likewise conceived as a negative of the heavens, which would in time become the starry city.
And although we had parted on the grey shores of yesterday from those among us who held that all life, even that of a bug or a flea, is sacred, we did not entirely leave behind the things they believed; for we said among ourselves, yes, all is transformation, one thing into another, one creature dies, another is born, endlessly; and we further imagined that this process was not random, though it is perhaps unwilled; and so we elaborated the idea that, like our starry city, every person who lived therein might in time, after many lives, attain to perfection. And so we began to set up in our stupas, which had at first housed only the precious things that we had carried with us or used and did not need to use any more, images of the perfection of form, both inner and outer, of the ones we would become: women of wondrous beauty, with rounded breasts and thighs, laughing eyes and painted mouths, hair like golden sheaves; and men of elegance and power, of wisdom and foresight, whose narrow bodies, shapely heads and almond eyes looked out at us from eternity.
Our city grew large upon the plain above the sea, and all around it the forest also grew, for the catastrophe that seemed to have obliterated the face of the earth had not done so, it had simply obscured it for a time; and that which had fallen away came back stronger than ever, and we had to fight the forest in order to keep clear the fields where we grew our grain; but we used it too: we found fruit trees there and learned to cultivate them; we found animals that we enslaved as beasts of burden, or hunted for their meat; we found herbs and gums, flowers and seeds, that were good to eat or could be used as medicines for the sick; and so in time we came to think that the forest too was a mirror of the city, it was a negative for our positives but also a positive for our negatives. And when one day we learned that there were people, both like and unlike us, living in the remote fastnesses of the deepest forest, we were amazed and sought these people out and tried to learn to speak with them; but they were shy and we could not, we simply glimpsed them now and again, short, golden-skinned, black-haired people w
ho went naked through the glades.
Also in the pebbles and gravels of the river we found hard durable stones that showed forth such reds or greens or blues or yellows that it was as if the very essence of colour was expressed in them; and we learned to polish these stones and value them for their hardness and durability. And those who searched the gravel beds for precious stones also found fragments of gold there, tiny flakes or tiny pebbles, and they gathered them up and melted them together and discovered how to hammer from gold thin sheets that could be used, as clothes are used, to clothe the statues in our stupas. And soon enough those austere men, those laughing women, began to be adorned with jewels and with gold leaf, like divinities; and as they were the exemplars of ourselves, as they were the ones we wanted to be like, certain men and women among us also began so to adorn themselves. Grandmother Bird’s jewelled feathers; Grandmother Fish with her scales of silver; Grandfather Stone with his ruby eyes and emerald teeth; Grandfather Fire in his lineaments of cloth of gold that shimmered when he moved.
Isinglass Page 13