Isinglass

by Martin Edmond

  It was also from the bark of trees that we made the cloth that we wore, beating it into long rectangular sheets that we decorated with motifs that we found around about us: leaves that we soaked in a dye made from the ashes of a nut we burned and pressed onto the fabric; stamps cut from wood and inscribed with the reverse of images of bird’s heads or squirrel’s claws or bat’s wings, that we inked and likewise pressed into the bark cloth; drawings of the ineffable ever-shifting contrast between yellow light and black shade that we saw whenever we looked up into the canopy. And these too were the motifs that we inked into our skin to make our tattoos, along with others that we saw when we ate a certain mushroom that we gathered, in season, from the rotten logs of a particular tree—with a brown–gold cap and gills that had a cyan cast to them, no ring and a stem that fluted outwards as it disappeared into the rotten wood. And when we took the mushroom we saw zigzags, we saw spirals, we saw chevrons, we saw a net of bright light that pulsed and scintillated, and when it opened we went through into the empyrean, the realm of yellow and blue, the light that was both sky and beyond the sky; and we travelled.

  And at other times we did not go into the sky, nor into the treetops, nor into the leaves and branches of the understorey, but migrated instead into the heads of animals: we became cloud leopards, we became deer, we became the small red bears that lived among the bamboos, dreaming their days and nights away in an alkaloid haze. And to migrate thus into the consciousness of another animal was not to be like that animal but to become that animal; and those who could accomplish this transformation were also able to see more and travel further than the rest of us; and some of these mental travellers said that in their visions or travels they had seen beyond the bounds of the forest itself, to the world outside, if such a thing could be; for others averred that there was nothing outside the bounds of the forest, that the forest was the whole world, or covered the entirety of the world. And yet we all knew that there were other worlds than the forest, for we had been there: the world below the earth, that fecund underground where we buried our dead and from which the mushrooms grew and to which they gave entrance; and the world of light beyond the canopy, where the souls of the departed went and became stars.

  But the far-seers said no, they were not talking of any of the three worlds, the earth, the forest, the sky, but of places beyond anything that we knew. To the east they said there was a great sea that was salt and stretched perhaps forever; to the north there were high plains, covered in grass not trees; and beyond that mountains that rose further into the sky than even our tallest trees; and in all these places lived people who were different from ourselves: they looked different, ate different food, spoke other languages, worshipped other gods or did not worship any gods at all. And those of us who had preserved the memory of the past, we Rememberers, we of the House of Stories, knew that this was so, there was a sea, there were mountains and plains, there were people who both looked and lived differently from the way we ourselves looked and lived. And so we began to gather the stories of the far-seers, as we called those who travelled furthest and saw most, and retold them in our own words.

  There were people living on the high plains who worshipped stones that they cut from the earth and shaped into polished tools that could be held in the hand. These people went down into the earth, into caves, to make their ceremonies; because deep in the cave they could conjure the animals that they hunted out of the very stone. And some of them claimed that they themselves could pass through the walls of the caves into the spirit realm and there herd spirit animals, which for these people were mostly cattle. Their houses too were built like caves, as if a cave should be constructed above the ground and yet still function like a cave; and to certain rooms in their houses they brought pieces of stalagmite and stalactite that resembled breasts or faces or bodies and placed them in the walls of these rooms, along with bull’s heads, leopard skulls, the jawbones of foxes and the beaks of birds, that were plastered over but still poked through. These rooms were dark and partly underground and could only be entered by climbing down ladders and then squirming through narrow openings, and here they would hold ceremonies like they formerly did in the caves.

  There was a herb they knew, which they gathered and burned over small fires in these cave-rooms, so that everyone there inhaled the smoke and it changed their minds. And men and women would dress themselves as cranes, using real cranes’ wings, and dance, to the beat of drums, in the yellow half-dark of the cave-rooms. Sometimes animals were killed down there and the blood used to paint the altars; it was even said they sacrificed children, not to appease any bloody god but in order to send their souls as emissaries to the other world, for they believed that power over their lives resided elsewhere, on the other side of the wall perhaps, under the earth, or in the sky. Those who were sacrificed in this manner had their skulls plastered over and painted as if they were living and, with shells for eyes and their eyes bitumen-ringed, staring, were buried under the floors of their houses; and it was believed that thus they saw into the other world. And even little babies who had died were sometimes wrapped in cloth and placed inside a brick that would then be placed in the wall.

  Only some of the people did these things and those who did, did them in such a way as to cause fear in those who did not, those who were not allowed to participate. They were sorcerers who used the power they conjured from the earth and from the dead to spread terror among the rest of the people, to make them afraid and thus obedient; and this was true, said our far-seers, whether or not those sorcerers really believed in their magic or only pretended to believe. Or perhaps it was not possible to say if they believed or did not believe; perhaps their minds were so dark with superstition, longing and dread that it was impossible for them to step outside of themselves; perhaps they really thought they could become animals again, pass through the walls of caves, or through the walls of houses where beaks and teeth and bones and even babies were buried, and on into other realms, where the dead lay, where the ancestors were, and from there pass through tunnels or spirals that were as much of the mind as of the world, heading upwards, towards the stars.

  Turning away from the barbarous plains and looking into the east, our far-seers told of another people who lived entirely on their boats, which they sailed endlessly from island to island across the vast shallow seas of the archipelago. These people were thin and dark, with wild tangled hair and tattoos that, when they were in the water, made them look like banded eels or sea snakes. They fished with nets and spears, and that part of their catch they could not eat they dried on the roofs of the boats that were also their homes, and sold them to other peoples who lived onshore. They were expert divers and their children, especially, had such good eyesight that, like fish, they could see under the water. Their boats were long and narrow, made out of wood, with elaborate carved prows and sterns, and ornamented along the sides with relief patterns that resembled their tattoos; the roofs were peaked and also long and narrow, running the length of the boat; and under its shade these people ate and drank and slept and loved, gave birth and died.

  But no one can live entirely on the water, our far-seers said, so the sea people, who could tell long before it happened when a storm was coming, or a tsunami, did have villages that they could go to at certain times of the year, for instance when the monsoon blew and storms raged. These villages were built out over the sea on stilts on the shores of barren islands, where no other people lived or could live; and the sea people inhabited them in much the same way they inhabited their boats, which would be drawn up beside the stilt houses or anchored underneath. And when the monsoon blew and the sea people went to their stilt houses, then they would repair their boats and their nets and their spears, or make new ones, in preparation for resuming their wandering life on the sea.

  They had no god save the god of the ocean, whom they thanked each time a good catch came their way; and a peculiarity of their way of life was that, although they lived almost their entire life on t
he water, they were determined never to lie there after death; so although many were lost in accidents or storms, while diving or to sharks, any body they rescued would be taken to land and interred there. And for this purpose they had special islands, which only they knew about, remote and desolate, perhaps made of coral, and here they would take their dead and place them in deep crevices or sometimes set them up, robed and decorated, at the topmost point of the island so that, as the flesh rotted away, a skeleton in all its regalia presided over the barren slopes and looked out forever with unseeing eyes across the changeless, ever-changing ocean. And these people too, when they buried an important man, would bind and tie young children and throw them into crevices in the coral, or into deep pools to drown, so that their souls might accompany him into the beyond.

  We lived a long time in the City of the Sky; we became one with the golden forest people; we extended our domain from great tree to great tree until our city seemed to recede into the vast distance the way the forest itself did; and we were a peaceable people who did not sacrifice our children to strange gods, because to us the trees we lived in and among were our gods, and they did not require sacrifice so much as simple care; and in return they gave us shelter, food and most of the other things we needed. And in time it became common among us to argue the barbarity of all forms of worship of entities that could not be seen, as opposed to our own practice, which was to inhabit known entities, real creatures, and become a part of them, and they of us, for as long as the experience lasted. And our extensions of ourselves, for we knew that humans always require extension, and without it become bored and troubled and destructive, our extension was to learn how to inhabit the minds, or perhaps beings, of every entity under the sun: for instance the mind of a centipede, perhaps, the mind of an ant; the being of a sweet potato vine, even of the weeds that grew in our swamp gardens.

  And there were some who claimed they could become stone, become water, become air or fire; there were those who learned to inhabit the essence of creation itself, the unseen principle that animates the living and departs upon death; and here a dilemma arose because those who said they could do thus, were they not going back to the old superstitions, the worship of gods who could not be seen? How long would it be before they claimed the manipulation of the unseen gave them powers that the rest of us must fear and obey? How long before yet another dynasty of sorcerer kings and queens, with their acolytes, their helpers, their enforcers, their brutes, began? And when these arguments were put to the mystics they said no, that was not their intent, they truly could see into the heart of silence, into the very essence of life, and become it, and in so becoming made all other forms of devotion null and void and even derisory; and again it seemed that we were seeing the formation of an elite that would oppress us.

  This was of course the beginning of the same argument, with different terms, that had destroyed the City of Fire; and it might have proceeded thus, with different camps forming and increasingly vicious disputes between irreconcilable positions, had we not been overtaken by events of a different kind. One season, instead of the warm wet winds that blew constantly from the north-west, bringing rain, we had instead a much colder wind, with ice on its breath, that came directly out of the north and blew incessantly, a dry wind and a cold wind that shrivelled tender leaves of new growth on the trees and desiccated the lovely vines that draped our canopies; and many fruits we depended upon did not ripen that year and some of the animals we hunted became scarce as they moved south to escape the cold.

  And with that cold north wind came a chill, a stirring of fear that was like a clutch of ice in the heart, and we knew all at once how fragile our city was, how much we depended upon the graces of wind and rain and sunlight; and we waited in trepidation for the opposite winds to blow, as they inevitably did, from the south-east; and that fecund wind did not come either but instead a kind of apathetic stillness of air, again colder than we were used to, began. How quickly things die! The biggest trees, healthy and booming, which seemed in the wet heat to bloom daily so that they looked larger than they were, as if surrounded by an aura of golden light, diminished and shrank before our eyes. And in the storey below, where a thousand thousand plants thrust joyfully upwards in unconscious competition for the jewelled sky, there was likewise a diminution of growth as much as of joy; and they wilted and fell back as if disappointed and died.

  The next season the warm wet winds did not come either, nor the next; and over those few disastrous years we saw before our very eyes the vast system of the forest, which lived on earth and water and sunlight, begin to fail. No longer did the great trees draw up water from the earth into the canopy, no longer did that water evaporate from the leaves and come down onto the earth again as rain; but everything shrivelled and decreased in the face of those dry incessant winds. Even our far-seers failed us, because one of the first plants to disappear were the mushrooms we used, which had always grown unaided on the forest floor; we had never cultivated them, we did not know how to make them grow, and when they had gone we were bereft of that extension, that habit of mind that gathered, perhaps delusionally, news from afar.

  It was clear that we too, like the animals we hunted, would have to go, but where? And then our far-seers went out into the furthest corners of the vastness of the forest in search of mushrooms; and what they found they heaped up together and took all at once, in a stronger dose than would usually be the case; and set off on their travels to find out where we might go. And when they came back they said that the ice was advancing from both the north and the south, that everywhere was becoming colder, that the forests were dying and even the sea was retreating; and that the only way they could see for us to go was to the shores of the ocean to the east, beyond the forest, because there it seemed there was some hope, some warmth that had not yet been infected by the cold; and where we could perhaps learn to live upon the sea things, the way our ancestors had subsisted in former days, as told by the Rememberers. And so, in great distress, mourning and lamenting our lot, we began our trek into the east.

  Where once we would have travelled through the canopy or the understorey, hardly touching the ground, except in those places where clearings among the trees prevented us, going from platform to platform, house to house, tree to tree, celebrating, now we had to descend to the forest floor and walk; and it was a terrible walk. Through the dying forest we went, over rotten logs and rotting vegetation, wading through muck, assailed at all times by the smell of decay, surrounded by death on all sides. And some of us could not stand the journey; they fell by the wayside, they became listless and apathetic, they did not care; it was as if they wanted to die with the forest; and that is perhaps the truth of the matter. Mothers neglected children, men abandoned women, old ones were ignored; those who could not keep up or did not want to, we left behind; we did not care, or rather we knew that if we became infected with their lassitude, we too would die.

  And so we who had been a strong and healthy and beautiful people, thousands strong, began to diminish; and as we went further through the dying forest we saw signs of destruction everywhere; people in their despair had begun to destroy their city. Some had taken to cutting down the trees where their platforms were and setting fire to them, warming themselves briefly against the incessant cold by consuming their own houses; and some of these fires had not gone out but spread to other trees, other platforms, other houses, other hillsides; so that there were parts we walked through that were merely blackened wastes, burnt fields, smoking and desolate, where nothing grew and where the people themselves, those who lit the fires, had likewise been consumed: we would find piles of ashy, whitening bone, human bone, their forms huddled together, melded, fused, as if in death the many had become one.

  Later, further away, we passed through regions where the drying winds were stronger and colder and maybe had been blowing for longer; here many of the trees had already died and stood like bones themselves, denuded of leaves, denuded sometimes of branches, just grey–wh
ite spikes that would without warning crack and fall to the ruined earth; and some of us were lost in this way, killed by falling trees. What we ate is not worth remembering; we ate carrion, we ate insects, we ate reptiles; we ate the bark off trees, we ate leaves, we ate earth; it may be that some of us even ate stones; or would have had they not cracked our teeth. And likewise we drank whatever water we could find, from ashy creeks flowing in the bottoms of burnt valleys, from soaks where a little moisture could still be squeezed from the muddy clods, from dank pools that had collected in the receptacles made by the stumps of fallen trees.

  And as we went we lamented: all of our previous exiles had been from corrupted cities; we had at least the satisfaction of knowing we were authors of our fate, even if that fate was a malign one; but the City of the Sky was a paradise, a place without conflict, without superstition, without the bloody worship of strange gods, without hierarchies or sacrifices; and yet it too had failed, it too had fallen into ruin, it too had faded into a legend that, if we lived, we would tell in the House of Stories. And how was this to be understood? Was it futile to try to live the way we had lived in the City of the Sky? Was it a mistake? Was it wrong? And so in the brief respites from travelling, when we could find a place where we could rest and eat and drink, we would sit around our fires and discuss these matters: if we survived, would we build another city? And if so what kind of city would it be?

  Grandmother Fish, Grandmother Bird, Grandfather Fire, Grandfather Stone: through what vicissitudes had we come and how was it that we persisted, the four ancestors, the seventeen families, the Rememberers and the House of Stories? Or was this persistence itself a fiction? Had we made it up? Was there no continuity save the continuity of story? And if this was so, were we not living an illusion? The black-haired, golden-skinned people of the forest, those with whom we had merged, those whom we had become, were they some kind of dream, some sort of beautiful invention we had made up to comfort ourselves in our distress? Had it ever existed, the City of the Sky? Where is the past anyway, if it is anywhere? Only in our own minds, the wise among us concluded; it is what we choose to carry with us. And as for the future, it is the same, it exists only in our minds, it is what we chose from the past to carry forward with us and try to make real again.