Isinglass Page 16

  For we were no longer golden, we were not lithe and sleek and lovely as we had been; our skin was grey, our hair, if we still had hair, lank, our teeth rotten, our eyes glazed and sunken, our fingernails and toenails falling out, our limbs shrunken, our bellies protruding, our waste foul beyond belief … The horror walked with us and we were the horror. And so we were on the morning that our small band, no larger perhaps than that which crossed the Gate of Grief aeons ago, walked to the top of the last hill and stood on the crest looking down towards the sea. And the sea was white that day, not the white of foam or of waves crashing ashore, but a yellow white, a wide flat expanse of white with the glare of the weak sun shining down upon it, and yellow with weed perhaps, or waste—we did not know. And in our fear we looked down upon it and wondered if the sea too had died, the way the forest had; but when we struggled that last short distance to the veritable shore we found that the sea had not died, the sea could not die, and there along the littoral we found food of a kind that did not waste us, that nourished us: shellfish and seaweed and even small fish that were trapped in rock pools that we caught with our hands and ate raw; and we knew we had survived.

  The fifth Isinglass, called the Last, was built many years later on the shores of that shallow yellow sea, some way to the south and east of where we came out of the dying forest, at the mouth of a great river. We had increased as a people by then; we were numerous and strong and could not be threatened by any of the other peoples who also lived upon the shores of that vast and fecund sea, or on the many islands that lay within it, or upon the hills and mountains that stood like ramparts round about it. There were, for example, the sea people that our far-seers had told us about, who crossed and recrossed those seas, from island to island and port to port; who also, we learned, had seen us, the golden people of the forest, during their seances and their trance dances, their ceremonies in praise of the ocean.

  And then, in the islands to the east, there were small people, the smallest we had ever seen, like children, who followed the paths of a pygmy elephant that also lived on those islands and worshipped the spirit of the volcano; that is, one spirit but many volcanoes, because this was a land of fire we had come into. It was ringed by fire; there were smoking cones wherever you looked, and sometimes vast eruptions; and we understood that the catastrophe that destroyed the City of Dust most likely originated here in the Land of Fire. Further, in the wild jungled hills that lay behind the plains where we lived, there were black-skinned people who were so shy and wild we scarcely saw or heard them; and among them, living in the trees as we ourselves had done, a hairy red-skinned people who were likewise so wild and shy that they were scarcely seen; and we left both of these peoples alone, as we did the small people and the sea people and the giants who were rumoured to live beyond the mountains to the south.

  For the last Isinglass was founded upon certain principles that we learned in our wandering from city to city, and also in the perpetual wars we had fought with other peoples and, more seriously, with ourselves. We would be a strong and proud people, for instance, but we would not make war upon another unless first attacked; and we believed that in our strength and pride no one would dare attack us; and so we would live in peace. It was more difficult to find a way to prevent jealousies arising among us, for one party to begin to hate and despise another and plot against them; but we decided that the best way of doing that was to remove inequalities between individuals, to share the wealth equally among us, to likewise share the burden of labour equally; and finally to instruct our children in the truth of our ways.

  And the greatest truth that we knew, the one we had derived from all our wanderings, that was enshrined in the sacred objects we had carried with us, even in the trek through the dying forests, was that we ourselves were the measure of all things. In other words there were no gods but ourselves, no divine punisher or rewarder, no higher authority, no one to fear, no one to propitiate, no one to make sacrifice to, no one to worship … There was just us and what we could make of ourselves. This did not mean we were neglectful or vague. We had a system of beliefs. We knew what we admired: beauty of form for instance, in either a woman or a man, we worshipped that; great strength; eloquence; the ability to make rich and lovely fabrics or distil perfumes; prowess at games, both those in the water and those on land; the achievements of our hunters and gardeners, bringing to our tables new tastes, new foods, new drinks perhaps. All these things we appreciated and indeed loved, and in our appreciation of them we celebrated ourselves, our own accomplishments, our own beauties.

  For all that we grew and loved and honoured and celebrated, still we knew we must die; and we also knew that out of the fear of death, the fear of dying, the bloodiest practices of religions arose, in propitiation of the dead, who were thought always still to be with us, still directing the paths of our days, the fearful dead with the infection of terror that they inculcated into us. And this is where the institution of the House of Stories came from, for it was believed that, by truthful telling of the Histories, with their gruesome errors and horrible mistakes, the power of death, the power of the dead over us, might be broken. And this was also where the faith of Isinglass the Last was placed; this was our hope and our trust, that in the telling of the truth of the past, the goodness of the present would be ensured, that by proper observation of the way hence, the way thence could be found. And this is a naïve faith but also a beautiful one; and like all other faiths that we know, it failed.

  Isinglass the Last was a rose-red city built on a green hill that was itself an island at the mouth of the river. Its houses were flat-roofed, and they rose in stages up the hill to the palace that stood near the top, which was also flat-roofed and reminiscent of the star pools of the City of Dust; and here we kept our sacred objects, the counting sticks that we had had for so long, the inscribed tablets from the City of the Waters, other instruments of calculation that we had used or invented along the way. The city was walled about its circumference; there were palms along its avenues, and shade trees and groves of fruit- or nut-bearing trees in the unenclosed parklands where deer and horses and small grey elephants caparisoned with woven cloths grazed. And in the reeds down by the river, ibis and swans and geese and ducks and other birds waded or swam; and our black boats were moored there, with white sails furled; and on the water, lily pads floated, and lotus, with pink flowers; while beyond, in amongst the masses of forest trees, were the cleared fields where our crops grew, our tubers and our grain.

  Purple pennants flew from some of the higher buildings; pavilions of teak housed minstrels and dancers, artists and storytellers. Tapestries of silk hung in the interiors of dim galleries and in antechambers where woven mats of aromatic grasses lay on the packed-earth floors. We had our own writing by now; we knew how to turn the things that we said into words that could be written on the walls of the city; and they were written there, for all to see: intaglio-ed in black on the ochre walls the advice to enjoy the time while the woman of your heart is sitting next to you; let your days be happy and rest not therein, for no man carries his goods away with him, oh, no man returns again who has gone hither; rejoice, see the beauty of the place of the eternal repetition of the lifetimes . For although we believed in no gods but ourselves, the idea grew up among us that we repeated, that souls transmigrated down the generations, and we looked in the faces of our children for the lineaments of our grandparents; and as you look, so you find. And herein lay, again, the seeds of folly.

  For as time passed we began to search among our children for a particular form or countenance, a kind of beauty that seemed to express our essence as a people: who we were, who we had been, who we might become. And those we found we exalted above all others, calling them exemplars or paradigms, calling them nonpareils; and if we did not exactly worship them, we did give to them every privilege, every gift, every grace and every opportunity. Usually they were two, a man and a woman, and we expected that they would become lovers and bear children who would conti
nue what might be called the line of beauty; but if their children failed to show those characters we loved and valued above all others, we would look elsewhere in the city for their reincarnation; and so the office of nonpareil was not yet hereditary among us but would soon become so.

  We in the House of Stories were not considered, as we had been formerly, people of great importance; we were like the flute players and the drummers and those who bowed the strings, like the dancers who danced at ceremonies or banquets, like the muralists who decorated the walls of the chambers where the nonpareils slept or made love during their season of beatitude; but we had our own traditions, among which was our own system of belief in reincarnation, the persistence among us of ancient forebears: Grandmother Bird, Grandmother Fish, Grandfather Stone and Grandfather Fire. I was myself, Anabi, considered unique in my generation in that I was held to have united all four lines in my own person; and from a young age I showed an aptitude for remembering that had not been seen among us for many years. And it was in my time that affliction came upon the city of Isinglass, in the way that I will tell.

  For the nonpareils that were chosen in the time when I was young refused to give way to their nominated successors, who were not their own children; and instead said that only in their blood was the line of beauty preserved; and therefore their own children would become nonpareils in their turn and not those others who had been selected by the people. And one of their children was a girl called Ina, and Ina did not wish to become a nonpareil, she did not wish to marry her brother Ashur, as their parents demanded, she wanted another kind of life. And when I was a youth in the House of Stories, going through the long apprenticeship of learning the tales, these very ones I have told you and many others as well, which we had to do by heart and without changing a word from the way the old Rememberers told them, Ina would come to listen. And afterwards we would sometimes leave the city together to wander in the forest, watching the creatures at their play; and in time, as was inevitable, we became lovers.

  No one could know that we were such; her father and mother would not have allowed it; she would most likely have been imprisoned and I myself exiled; and so we kept our affair secret. But who can keep a secret like that in a city such as the one we lived in? It was not possible. So, in time, most of my contemporaries in the House of Stories, and some of the old ones too, knew what Ina and I were doing, but protected me because of my aptitude for storytelling. While Ina herself was protected by her status as the heir apparent and by her refusal either to marry her brother Ashur or to refuse to marry him. And Ashur was himself the kind of man who does not want one woman only as his lover but wishes to make love to many women, indeed as many women as he can.

  We can only hold back destiny for so long, and the day soon came when the King, for so he now styled himself, proclaimed the marriage of his son Ashur to his daughter Ina, so that the line of beauty might continue; and by that time things were so corrupted among us that he had a group of men, bodyguards he called them, but really they were soldiers who would do what he told them to do and so enforce his will; and no one knew how to dispute his right to do what he pleased, no one would argue against him, no one would protest: except one. For on the night of the marriage, when I was elected to stand and give the oration, to tell again the tale of the first marriage, the one between Grandmother Bird and Grandfather Stone in the beginning days when we crossed through the Gate of Grief, I refused to do so; I departed from the script, I made another speech entirely, one that had never been spoken before; and this was in itself a great crime, for in the House of Stories we learned only to tell of the unalterable past, never of the present or the future.

  And when I stood up to speak to the people assembled in the Chamber of Relics, I denounced the King and Queen, as they styled themselves, as pretenders; and I denounced their corrupt intent in marrying their own children, a brother and a sister, to each other, as a way of continuing their line; and I said that the result would be that a catastrophe would fall upon the City of Isinglass, for so I believed. And this catastrophe would take the form of a flood, when rising waters would drown the city and all it contained. And when I began to speak in this way a hush fell upon the assembled people, a silence in which every word I said sounded clear and strong, so that I knew I spoke the truth and those who listened to me knew it also. And it was so.

  But the King fell into a rage and demanded that the soldiers, his bodyguards, remove me from the chamber; and then Ina screamed and cried out against her father, and she too was made a prisoner and taken away; but I was escorted to the gates of the city and there told that if ever I returned I would be killed, and to go my way as an exile and to live out my days under foreign skies, among foreign people; or if I preferred, alone, with only the birds of the air and the fish of the sea for company; and I was given a boat and some provisions and sent on my way; and I went, thinking I would never see my city or my lover again; and so it proved.

  The boat they gave me was a small wooden shell, a coracle, without a sail or oars; like half a coconut lacking the meat. There was just room in it to recline. I didn’t care. I drifted down the estuary towards the sea, as indifferent to my fate as to the world around me. The current took us out into the fuming tides where, lighter than a cork, my boat danced upon the waves. I ate, I drank, I slept. I tried not to think. Days passed, and nights, and in all of that time I saw nothing but the waves rolling eternally over the graves of the dead. After not very many days my food ran out and I began to hunger, lying ill and helpless in the bottom of the shell. Sometimes it rained and then I drank from the sky.

  I must have fallen into delirium. When the sea rose and salt water washed over the edges of the hull I counted it a blessing: a douche of blue wine that washed my boat and myself clean. We were spattered with shit and vomit, on the outside, and on the inside by the grimy accretions of thought and all that it produces. Regrets, second guesses, ifs and buts, all the rest of that contaminated crew. So the sea’s blue wine washed over us and then it seemed I bathed in some oceanic, authorless poem—azure, lactescent, infused with the stars I sometimes glimpsed, like a promise, far above—this pale scrap of flotsam, this dreaming drowning figure, sinking towards death yet voyaging on.

  Sometimes I saw the bitter scarlets of lost love ferment, stronger than alcohol, in the blood that started from my eyes; sometimes I watched the sky break open with lightning. The slow rhythm of the light pulsing along the horizon line at day’s end another intoxication. Then the charcoal evenings, mute catastrophes of sense, followed by night watches so long it seemed they would never end; until dawn crept like a thief across the water and then, its robbery accomplished, erupted with birds, which might have been flamingos but were not, incarnadined upon the sky. Then I saw what men have thought they saw: the low sun, spotted, plague-infected, illuminating, with violet rays, clouds like actors from an ancient play; and heard the waves rolling far off, weaving shuttles of air as if on an antique loom. Those green dreams dazzled by white-capped snows; the phosphorescence of the sea, lined with fires of yellow and purple when I trailed my arm in the water.

  The swells, like herds of ruminants big with young, passed incessantly beneath us. Even on the quietest of nights, there was still that whisper, those slaps and sighs, those murmurings. Sometimes I saw my beloved, Ina of the Waves, walk on luminous feet, half-elevated, across the water towards me; but before her hand could touch mine, before I could reach out to her, she dissolved into abstract ecstasies of light and air. And then that greenish herd of waves rolled on again, all the way to the horizon.

  Sometimes, desiring relief, I hallucinated swamps belching putrid bubbles of glittering gas; or a whale drifting, belly up, torn by the beaks of screaming gulls. Once some unknown monster of the deep, big enough to swallow both my coracle and me, surfaced beside us, turned one glaucous eye to the heavens then sank again beneath the waves. During those endless nights I scried glaciers on the waterless moon, the nacreous crescents of mineral planets, deader
than tomorrow, skies full of flaming embers. Were they really there, those orange beaches where giant serpents, devoured by vermin, fell, black-scented, from gnarled trees into the scum?

  And then there were sunfish, fish of gold, singing fish—marvels from a child’s story book. Foam and flowers of foam. Breezes passing my ulcerated ears with golden rumours. Such wonders, though I knew they were illusions. Something my mind made, escaping for a moment the incontrovertible misery of the senses. The miseries of memory. While the sea, that endless agglomeration of tears, rolled on, bringing forth from her dark recesses the occasional miracle: the albacore, or flocks of flying fish with iridescent wings. When one fell into my boat I tore its raw flesh open with my teeth.

  We are mistaken in our inclination to ascribe wisdom to the sea. The sea forgets everything; unless that is wisdom. I remember crouching in my boat, on my knees, for hours; or days. I remember myself, an island of blood tossed upon a bed of yellow flesh. I remember the incandescent cries of seabirds, their cacophony like the revenge of time upon history. I drifted and in my wake drowned men, newly risen, sank backward again into the deep.

  I entered forests of caves, if such a thing can be. My boat entangled in the foliage, dangling from some green island. I clawed helpless at their tendrils then, when the tide turned, voyaged on. Another storm blew up and I was thrown into the birdless air; in a violet fog I shot through the reddening sky, its cauterising light spotted with small contagions like moons. I fell back. My coracle was gone. I clung to a weedy log, escorted by black seahorses, under the cudgels of the sun, burning in the ultramarine. I heard, leagues away, trembling, the moans of rutting behemoths and the thick aphrodisiac of the maelstrom, that eternal spinner of blue immobilities.