Isinglass

by Martin Edmond

  People are never really happy for very long, nothing stays the same, things keep changing; the change is however often a return to a previous state which those who are returning to it have forgotten. This is why the House of Stories was begun in that Isinglass that we called the City of Fire; this is where the genealogy of the Rememberers, of which I, Anabi, am one, begins. So that we would not forget who we are, who we have been, who we are becoming; so that we would not forget the things that had happened to us on the long trek since we had passed the Gate of the Crossing; which is not to say that everything before the City of Fire is made up, invented, like a vision or a dream, no, those stories had been told and retold among us for years, centuries perhaps; what we did in the City of Fire was entrust them to a particular caste, a particular family, the Seventeenth; and then it became our task to remember and to tell.

  Riches are evil some say, not because such things as rubies and emeralds, gold and silver, are malevolent in themselves, how could they be, they are just things; no, it is because of the value placed upon them, because they are rare and beautiful they become precious and because they are precious certain people wish to own them and at the same time prevent others from owning them; and so it was, more and more, in the City of Fire. We became subject to kings and queens who owned the wealth of the whole people as their own, their personal property as it were, and who averred they owned the people themselves as well; and set them to work to increase the wealth of the city, to dig in the earth, to search the gravel beds of the rivers, to scour the sands of the seashore looking for gold and precious stones; and the people did so because they believed their kings and queens consulted a higher authority who wanted things to be as they were.

  The higher authority came from those who went into the stupas to consult jewelled statues that were no longer images of the possible perfection of every man or woman but instead images of the elite, the jewelled ones who ruled our days and nights. And the objects that were kept therein, the mathematical instruments, the counting sticks with their map of days, the cylinders with the marks upon them which we had brought from the City of Dust: these we no longer used for their original purposes. Indeed, in time we forgot what their uses were, we could not understand the marks on the cylinders, we knew only they meant something but what that something was no one knew; and those who went into the stupas began to invent what those cylinders said, they began to talk for them, they said they were speaking under instruction. It was the old lie, the gods, returning in another form.

  And we, the Rememberers, became the allies of these who purported to speak for the gods; we were their creatures, we told the stories that the gods had spoken, we spoke for the gods themselves, our task became prediction as much as remembrance, we were both adornments and validations of the court, we did the bidding of kings and queens as much as we did the bidding of the gods, for some of us did not believe in the gods at all, we just believed in the power of stories about the gods; we were cynical, perhaps jaded, we did not care about the truth or falsity of our stories, what we cared about were the riches kings and queens handed down to us as the reward for our compliance, our services, our obedience. For, naturally, below us there were other functionaries, less well rewarded than we were; and below them still others; until at the bottom there were ant-like swarms of people who barely even had names to call their own: like a vast pyramid with kings and queens at the apex and the swarms of workers at the base.

  And then there were in the forest the short, golden-skinned, black-haired people who went naked through the glades; and since there is nothing but disaffection where wealth rules, everyone wants more than they have, everyone wants what the other person has, some of the disaffected among us began muttering that theirs was the true way of life, the true way of living, that the city with its hierarchies was corrupt and evil, that all men and all women are in essence the same and that all should be treated the same. And this became a matter of dispute between factions in the City of Fire; there were those who refuted the mutterers, those who said no, the people of the forest, whoever they were, lived like brutes, they grunted instead of speaking, they had no instruments of wisdom such as we had, they did not build, they did not till the earth, they did not keep animals but were instead animals themselves and should be exterminated.

  And this argument, it is easy to see, had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual people of the forest, whom we did not know, but was an argument about the City of Fire itself and what it had become; but this was not admitted by either party; they spoke only of the people of the forest and at last it was determined that, in order to settle the question once and for all, it was necessary to go out into the wilderness and catch some, as specimens, as objects of study, as examples; and this was what we did or tried to do. The expedition was however a disaster. Neither party benefited. What had been conceived as a joint enterprise was revealed as a shared folly: we could not capture any of the people of the forest; they melted away into the trees as if they had never been; and indeed, some among us said that they were illusions all along, the souls of the dead perhaps, or the souls of children not yet born—fairy folk.

  And when we had returned to the city none the wiser, the argument continued and became more vicious, more entrenched, until the White Party, who idealised the forest people, and the Black Party, who wished to condemn them, were to all intents and purposes at war with one another. Each clustered together in a different part of the city, which they fortified against what they imagined were the designs of their enemies; and at the same time began to plan their own incursions into the realm of the other. And as the days and nights passed, each became more belligerent, while always ascribing the cause of their own belligerence to the belligerence of the other; and even when they negotiated, as they sometimes did, the talks were really reconnaissances rather than real attempts to settle their differences, which had anyway almost been forgotten in the intensity of the preparations for war.

  Not all of us were enamoured of the coming war; not everyone joined the Whites or the Blacks; some of us remembered the ostensible cause of the conflict and continued to wonder who the forest people were and what kind of life they led. And so, when the drums began to beat and the manoeuvres began—the marching and countermarching, the handing out of weapons, the shouting and the tumult—and we knew that war was imminent the way you know when a storm is coming, we put our own plan into action, which was to leave that city behind and go into the forest and see if we could find another way to live. And so we went into the stupas, which were deserted, since everyone had by now forgotten that their exemplars were there, and we took the cylinders with unreadable signs upon them and we took our ancient mathematical instruments; but the gold leaf and the precious stones we did not take because they had already been stripped from the statues and taken away, to pay for the war or else to be hidden so that the other side would not lay claim to them and hold them and keep them.

  We left in the last dark hour before dawn, opening one of the lower gates just above the river and climbing down the slippery mud of the banks to the boats we had moored there. We left weeping and trembling, we left with our children muffled and our old ones lamenting, we handed down the precious bundles of the relics we had taken from the stupas, we handed down food for the journey, we handed ourselves down too and then, cloaked and hooded, as wisps of mist rose like ghosts upon the grey water and the light in the east turned the dark sky silver, we set our hands to the paddles and silently slid them into the rippling water. We were just in time: even as our boats arrowed north, we heard behind us the cries of the watchers on the wall and thought for a moment our escape had been discovered; but it was not us they were crying out to, it was their own people, Whites or Blacks, who knew, because the war they had prepared for so long and with such enthusiasm, had now begun.

  And in a day and a night that war loosed fire into the city; we saw it burning behind us as we made our way upriver, a great yellow and red and black light upon the sky, a c
onflagration that must have consumed every person therein, and the stupas and the statues therein of the gods and goddesses we could ourselves have been; and also melted all of the gold and silver leaf, and sent the precious stones tumbling into the ashes. And that is why that city, the third Isinglass, is called the City of Fire, because it was utterly burned and even afterwards, it was said, no one escaped from there except ourselves, the remnant of a remnant of a remnant; and we made our way in our boats upstream as if into a temple whose pillars were the trunks of great trees, whose floors were made of thick green spongy moss, whose roof was the sky we could see above us like a line of blue that mirrored the silver–grey line of the river we sailed upon.

  And as we sailed further and deeper into the vastness of the forest, the river narrowed, the darkness increased, the tops of the trees above us on either bank mingled their branches together so that we were now making our way as it were through a tunnel of deep greeny light; and we heard the cries of birds we did not know, and the chattering of monkeys, and saw sliding over mossy branches extended over the water the chevroned iridescent forms of pythons; and we wondered if we had left one peril behind for another that was as bad or even worse. And then, among the trees lining both banks of the river, some among us saw or thought they saw the shapes of people, the golden-skinned, black-haired people of the forest, over whom the war had been fought that destroyed the City of Fire; but they were never stable, never still—they were like flashes of sunlight on water or the long beams, full of motes, that stream down through the canopy of the forest and then, when the wind moves in the leaves far above, disappear.

  We drew our small flotilla together as closely as we could, keeping to the middle of the river, as far away as we could from either bank, paddling only enough so as not to drift downstream again; and we waited. And it was as if that golden sunlight, those beams falling from high above, full of motes, each one of them, gave birth to a person; suddenly we saw on both banks of the river the golden people materialise as it were out of thin air, or rather out of sunlight, with their tall spears and their bows and arrows and their straight black hair falling around their faces; and we saw then that their skin, though golden, was also covered in strange green marks that resembled the shadows light makes falling through leaves; but these marks were tattoos that they wore on their skins. And the other thing we saw and understood was that there were no women among them and no children either; just men; and we wondered.

  What were we to do? Paddle on into that green darkness ahead; or turn and let the river carry us back downstream to the burning city; or make some move towards the silent watchers on the shore? If so, which shore? Did they have boats of their own, as we thought they must, and where were they? And then we remembered that for us the people of the forest were uncorrupted, natural men and women who knew how to live at peace with themselves and with the world in which they found themselves and if that was so, why should we be afraid? And if it were not so then we had left our city and sailed away in the grip of a delusion that would not prove any less of a delusion if we turned and went back; and so we decided that our only choice was to go on up that dark river; and we did.

  And as we did so, the golden-skinned dark-haired people raised their spears and shook them and cried out to us as if telling us of our folly; and so it was that, as we paddled around the next bend of the river and the river narrowed and the current became swifter, we heard a muted thunderous roar of water ahead and understood that ahead of us we would find rapids, a cataract perhaps, perhaps even falls; and if we proceeded our boats would surely be lost; and so our two choices became one: we would have to pull to the shore and land, and even if we tried to go further, where would we be going? And how would we transport our boats through the thick forest on either bank? And then we knew that our fate, whatever it might be, lay in the hands of the forest people; and we pulled for the shore.

  Even here our choice was made for us, for as the river came down in a wide bend from that roaring cataract ahead, there was on one bank, the right, a small sandy half-moon of river gravel deposited out of the swirling waters, while on the other the dark trees came right to the water’s edge so that their branches hung down and their leaves trailed; and here some had fallen and lay tangled half in and half out of the stream; and there was no way of landing. We were few and hungry and full of fear but we persisted, we found courage, we dug our paddles deep into the water and arrowed our boats towards that river beach so that when they hit the sand they went a little way up and held fast; and we shipped our oars and leapt out and made ourselves ready for anything, any assault, a shower of arrows perhaps or of spears arcing out of the massed forest before us; but there was nothing, no attack of any kind, no sign of any people, just the roar of the cataracts ahead, the mist hanging from the trees, the cries of unknown birds.

  We pulled our boats further up the sand, we took from them our precious relics and also what supplies we had left to us, and we waited. And then, as if from far away but coming nearer, we heard voices: like the voices of children calling us to play perhaps, voices full of laughter, snatches of song, strange high wild cries that might have been made by birds or monkeys, had they not had an accent that sounded irretrievably human; and these voices, we thought, were summoning us to follow. So we took up our children and our bundles and began to make our way into the forest, climbing over great fallen mossy wet trunks of trees, past pools of water that gathered between the buttressed roots, slipping and sliding across land that seemed half water, half wood: as if the solid element, the dear earth, lay somewhere beneath a rich carpet of mulch and moss and rotten leaves, of fallen wood that was itself becoming mud.

  Meanwhile, mist coiled above us into the canopy, and from the canopy a fine rain fell down upon us that was not rain of the skies but rain from the treetops. And sometimes we saw golden shafts of light that likewise fell from above, making rainbows, and then we thought we saw in those rainbows, that golden light, the fugitive forms of the forest people calling us on. We were climbing, we knew that, climbing out of the valley the river made, and as we climbed our way became firmer underfoot though no less wet; and we followed the laughter that was always just out of sight ahead of us, not without fear, full of wariness lest there be some ambush ahead of us; but no ambush came.

  And then, when we were half-crazed with exhaustion and with the strange madness of that forest, where everything looked like something else but was only itself, we reached a place near the top of a rise where vast trees grew in a kind of glade; among the buttressed trunks there were cleared spaces, not light, because of the canopy, but not a tangled mass of undergrowth either; and here, at the base of one of the largest trees, we stopped and huddled together, all wet and muddy and bedraggled, infested with leeches that we pulled from our legs and arms, tortured by insects, scratched and cut and bruised and as far away from what we knew as any of us had ever been or ever thought we would be.

  The voices that had been calling us on had ceased; all around us we heard only the slow fall of the forest rain and the cries of birds or animals; and even though those voices had confused us and troubled us, now they had gone silent we felt bereft, the children whimpered, the women mourned, the men among us shifted uneasily, seeking shapes in the green darkness of the forest; but there was nothing to be seen. Until we sensed rather than saw, in the vast stillness of the amphitheatre of trees, some movement. It came from above and when we looked up we saw what we thought at first were lianas, vines perhaps, descending towards us as if growing from the treetops towards the ground; but they were none of those things, for as they came closer we realised that they were in fact ladders that had been made by human hands out of thick plaited fibres; and as the ladders descended to the height that could be reached by a man standing or a woman lifting up a child, the voices returned, murmuring, whispering, laughing; and although we did not know what language they spoke, we knew what they were saying: Come up, come up, come up; come and join us. And we did.

 
The ladders led up to the City of the Sky, which was the fourth Isinglass. We did not build it but we lived there so long it became ours; or rather, over time, we became one with the forest people, the lithe, golden-skinned, black-haired ones who rescued us from the river. They made their houses over wooden platforms constructed around the trunks of great trees in those places where branches radiated from the central stems, houses made so cunningly out of the stuff of trees that they were like growing things themselves, with planked floors, walls of saplings bound with lianas and intricately patterned with reeds that were dyed and painted, roofs of thatch with holes through which we came and went into the canopy on our daily excursions towards the sky. The ladders we climbed up from the forest floor were likewise in daily use; that was how the people came and went to their gardens in clearings where we grew root crops and other plants, and also to hunt the creatures of the forest. That is, those we did not take from the trees themselves, for we also made snares among the branches to catch birds, monkeys, flying foxes and smaller animals like frogs and sometimes snakes.

  Our fires were always outside, on the wooden platforms, in receptacles made from stones hauled up from the earth below and covered against the perpetual fall of rain; they were never allowed to go out, while our water was gathered from the trees themselves, via a series of runnels of small hollowed-out logs placed end to end that piped the precious fluid into the jars that were made out of clay we dug from swampy places and carried up into the trees to be worked. We knew the uses of every plant, from the fungus that grew upon rotten logs below to the flowers of the canopy from which we gathered nectar; where the fruit and nut trees were and when they would be in season; what essences could be gathered from herbs, what poisons distilled from the centipede’s venom or from that of tree or water snakes or indeed simply from the sap of otherwise innocuous-looking berries or seeds or from the bark of certain trees.