Another Green World
There is a large crowd on the neatly trimmed grass that runs up the hill away from the lake. A deep blue sky frames the snow capped mountain on the opposite shore. With its omniscient wide clear eye it overwhelms all others but the water, which glaring back in blacker hue does not flinch in its reflecting gaze, but even so must eternally surrender as the lesser god before the greater. A light wind kicks up tiny traces of white on the lower surface. Here on the land, trapped between those cyclopean stares, cypress and spruce are mannered beside gravel paths. The garden is formal and subdued. It can not be otherwise. The air is dark, though noon is hardly gone and the sun above the mountain not yet concealed by the shadow it will throw this way. It feels as though the eye has returned from too long reading white paper under the summer, to find everything shocked into shrouded retreat. But it has not. Even the white villa, vaguely classical in a late European way, is by no means bright enough to succeed in shattering the alien veil.
Look at the people. They walk slowly and sedately down the paths and across the sloping lawns, talking quietly to one another. Listening to the voices is disconcerting as the language is half familiar and yet cannot be understood. In tone it is reminiscent of French but only a few of the words are the same. This is high society. The men are dressed in velvet black dinner suits, the women in full skirts supported by bustles and fastened at the waist with silken bows in oranges, blues and reds. Waiters pass between the guests with silver trays of glasses which occasionally catch the sun to flash a dark sparkle in the air. The effect is like that of an Edwardian party but the costumes are closer to the Victorian, except for the bows of the ladies. The bows are Japanese.
An ornamental fountain feeds a small stream, bounded by dark mossy masonry for the length of the garden until it escapes the stone to flow into the quiet depths of the lake waters. This artifice is repeated at the other end of the villa, but between the two cool unnatural springs and the sweeping steps at the front of the house, there is a section of flat land. It is here that the party is focused. Billowing like some giant puffball up above the building, an enormous white, hot air balloon bubbles gently full before a score of onlookers. A wicker work basket beneath is supported by thin but strong ropes, and the whole tied to the ground with loops of a heavier twine round metal spikes in the pristine turf. In the basket is a young man with a dark handlebar moustache, dressed in red military uniform. He is accompanied by a blonde woman, trim and small in her early twenties and an older white haired man in a sober black coat. The major and Lady Rosalind are being chaperoned by the doctor.
And now they are away! The ropes fall behind and up into the sky, up and away into that eye, the white moat floats! Polite claps flock below them like thin birds, too weak to follow in the breeze.
Rosalind in unhappy. She does not like the major. He is awkward but impatient. The front with the royals and the infidels did not present the problems he finds now.
The doctor notices nothing. He takes in deep breaths and as they rise the air becomes clearer; crystalline and bright. A long time sharpness in his chest is wonderfully asleep. Today it seems to him that anything might happen. The lungs of the occupants are heady with oxygen wine, the stronger for its rarity. At any moment it can happen.
Watch them drift across the lake. The burning gas keeping them so high already sounds muted to the party goers as they vanish into their new element. Soon they will pass over the near shoulder of the mountain to glide above the plain. How the peasants will cheer ! All the villages and the farms of the fertile west will be spread out below them. Almost out of sight of the few observers they are a tiny dot. It is a long way to the mountain. At last, though, they can see the first of the harvest lands: like a tapestry, Rosalind thinks: like a coloured map for a campaign, the major thinks. But today he has a different sort of campaign in mind. He puts a bold arm around Rosalind’s tiny shoulders. She shakes a little without volition but it is not from the cold. The doctor notices nothing.
It happens.
The sound of a misplaced word has done it, but no one can remember who spoke. It has fractured the air along a fault line like the first blow of a jeweller on a new and large rough diamond. A strange rhythm shakes the world and cracks the sky. With an eyeblink flash it flickers from dead blue to azure. Perhaps even its mighty gaze before was through some translucent membrane; through a half closed lid. If that was so it is opening up now - waking up to a new day. How terrible that is! Below them the land has vanished and there is a thundering sea with islands bathed in a warm wind! The tang of salt is unmistakably strong and there are hints of other aromas.
See, saw; they are back. Rosalind shakes the major’s grip as they reel into the colder world.
Sea, saw. Don’t look over the basket. The trespassing ocean is back again! The doctor is exhilarated. The major feels sick, although the only source of motion is the usual hiss and creak of the balloon. There is the rhythm, and there is the dark blue where the land fades back into reality.
Sky saw, and the whole universe has changed. The heavy air is redolent of powerful seas.
Sky saw.
Can it be seen? From the distant villa some people think the balloon is flickering in and out of vision. Of course they are deluded. They have had too much of that strange spirit which the waiters are supplying.
Sky saw.
The crack has healed. How pale the sky is! Was there ever such a turquoise? The balloon drifts on in a tropical warmth and the doctor, the major and the lady wonder.
Through the easy air, then, they glide in silence. Sea birds wheel about the basket, then fly away, their orange and red bills in sharp contrast to their white wings. High calls echo round the cloudless sky as if wailing in lament at the size of their new competition. The doctor cries out to the major. No, the major has never seen anything like it and he does not recognise the place or the birds. Clearly they are floating over some sort of archipelago. At least six islands of varying size are visible below them. As they travel over an atoll a flock of white death hits the water and emerges seconds later, most of the birds carrying flopping silver fish from the unlucky shoal that had swum too close to the surface. Breaking surf is loud on coral for the minutes it takes them to pass. The balloon is losing height in the warmer air but ahead of them is the largest island. The major casts some sand over the side and Rosalind watches it fall away, dropping into the waves with a tiny foam splash that is soundless here where the creaks and groans of rope, and the living roar of flame is the only language of the balloon straining to rise into the sky.
They cross the coast. The beaches are silver yellow and empty to sea, sun and wind, but inland a dense jungle quickly takes over with a chaotic mess of greens. At the centre of the island, a dark cone of a mountain rises; most probably the heart of an extinct volcano.
The doctor is the first to see the thin trails of smoke escaping from between the trees. ‘Fire Island!’ Rosalind exclaims in her lilting incomprehensible tongue, and the land acquires another name. A small open pool, almost but not completely overhung by the bows of jungle giants, reflects their passage for half a minute. No one wants to speak but the major is uneasy. Now they have passed the mysterious fires on their right and it is clear that they will get no closer and see no better. The sun hammers on their unprotected heads. You might imagine that a fine steam is rising from the jungle to invade the basket, but it is too dry for that. It doesn’t matter. They can all smell the cheap and pungent perfume which the jungle wears, compounded of cinnamon, honey, musk, pepper and sweat, and spread liberally as though she is a desperate harlot trying a last trick to snare a final customer. Shade and secrets hide beneath the canopy. Their shadow crossing the leafy carpet seems to shake the trees from their daydreams as rustling leaves skitter in the wind. Little cries and squeaks ascend like supplications from within the forest. Here, bright yellow and red flowers add an extra subtle ingredient to the aroma from a particularly magnificent tree. They are heading straight for the pumice slopes at the centre. An unexpected and deep throated gargle from below causes the major to finger the hilt of his ceremonial but nevertheless functional sword, nervously.
After a hasty discussion the doctor and the major are agreed that they will not be able to clear the summit. All are decided that they must land here. But they are not prepared for the speed with which the ground has risen to meet them as they talk. Now the tops of the trees are lightly brushing and snaring the basket, as if they want to grab it and draw it into a deadly embrace. Twigs are snapping and branches breaking. Rosalind clings in fright to the side, the doctor can only hold tight to a rope, but the major tries to throw more sand bags clear. It is too late. In a desperate and very final lurch they dive towards sudden smooth rising stone where the trees peter out. With an enormous ripping, tearing, catapulting, popping, scraping and amazingly soundless crash the graceful balloon and its occupants are shattered and scattered over the crest.
Pale light with the quality of pearl bathes the land in the early morning. It is only two hours after midnight, but this is the tundra. This is the land where the sun will rule for almost a full day and only give the night a grudging hour or two while the height of the summer passes. How flat the landscape is ! Stretching to a weary horizon the earth can nowhere summon up the energy to rise more than a bare meter or so above the plain. Behind us is the sea and coming across these flatlands to meet it is the longest river in the world. After all this distance it isn’t making much effort. Large meanders are often cut into oxbow lakes. Still pools sit in silence as evidence that the river once passed that way. Meres, tarns and divided estuary channels add to a liquid mellow confusion where there is only a little more land than slowly moving or stationary silver mirror waters. It is as though, at the last the river cannot find the resolution to finally commit itself to the sea, or perhaps it cannot even find the object of its journey.
Where there is solid ground, there is life in profusion. It is unambitious life but ostentatious and assured for all that. Lichens and mosses thrive to carpet every available rock surface as it is exposed. They are so luxuriant and so thick that the ground seems hardly natural - slightly surreal. Rival species are lurid light and dark greens, velvet reds and livid yellows and oranges. Their texture is soft and deep to cushion the walking foot, but there are no large animals to tread them down. Only small scampering white rodents feed on the fat arctic fish. But there are the insects. Royal purple moths with two centimetre wing spans flutter no more than a meter or so above the ground in an involved dance with tiny black butterflies. Occasionally you can glimpse a less common intricately patterned and finely feathered red and cream species flitting more purposefully in low hops across the pools.
A short distance inland, and just away from the main body of channels is the most prominent area of raised land, about three meters above the surface of the waters and forming a dry little plateau safe even from the excesses of spring meltwater. A tiny stone croft house has been built at one end and there are signs of attempts to cultivate the stony ground outside. We can see that the building has not been there more than one lifetime, even though rain and wind have long since weathered the rough edges. If it had been, the slow growing but patient mosses would have reclaimed the stones from which they were so rudely evicted. It is a crude structure but an adequate shelter.
Outside is a simple wooden sled such as might be used to drag heavy loads across this terrain in winter or summer. In an outhouse, little more than a knee high stack of rocks abutting one short wall, there is a store of logs brought from goodness knows where. At the opposite end of the plateau is a cairn. It is not possible to bury the dead in this land. They must lie above ground. A simple wooden cross of two cut branches provides some memorial and you might be able to read the faded carving chipped on the largest stone.
‘Joanna Sandford R.I.P’
Hung around the cross by a loop of twine is a corn doll. In yellow and brown gone dull with age it depicts a country woman in full skirts, twisted stiff by the craftsman who made it many years ago.
Look through the open door. An old man lies on a pallet close to the ground. The remains of his last meal are left in one corner on a thin cut of wood that serves as a plate. Fish and moss supply him with all the dietary essentials but occasionally he manages to catch one of the white rodents. Although only tiny animals, they add some variety to his meals. They smell awful. Yesterday he was lucky enough to catch one drinking at a pool. It seemed mesmerised by its reflection as he killed it; a circumstance he has noticed before. An outsider might consider the hunter unlucky, given the revolting stench he must now endure.
The man does not seem to notice. He is asleep, even though the light of a new day gains all the time. When it is summer in the tundra sleep must be sought outside the decent hours of darkness. But the man is restless, gnarled and woody. His wizened body will not stay still. He turns over at intervals on the painful ground, muttering incoherently to himself. He is dreaming. This is his dream.
It is late evening and dark - really dark with the blackness of an honest temperate night. The sky is scattered with a myriad glowing stars which twinkle in the heavy air. A warm breeze kisses the skin. It blows across ripe August corn fields and towards the road where the man strides. He has his arm about a comely dark haired woman who matches him step for step. He whispers something in her ear and Joanna laughs, low and soft. Ahead of them the moon shines like a beacon; their guide in the pursuit. There is nothing more serene or lovely than that August moon. Bountiful and cool, it smiles on the waving warm corn fields, puts the dark hedgerows to bed and paints the road in a light blue water-colour wash. Magnified by harvest, its face looks benignly down on the lovers.
This is indeed another world and another time. Soon the pursuit will be over and it looks as though Marcus and Joanna will gain the high honour. It is certainly not every young couple who last out the seven days, and to do so is a most propitious sign. Then the marriage ceremonies will begin.
Marcus has often thought it is a strange custom, this business of mock flight and chase, which every couple to be married must go through. He knows that it is one practised by all the villages of the fertile circle, and ever since he was old enough to run with the rest he has taken part in the chasing pack, at the summer feast. The pair who will be man and wife may be given shelter in any of the other villages and no one outside their native hamlet may help the pursuers, but if they are caught by one of their friends, relations or neighbours during the week, the individual who touches them receives a high seat at the wedding and the couple are brought back early.
Now for the only time in their lives, Marcus and Joanna are on the other side. They are fleeing in partnership to escape that touch. Suddenly he sees why. It is a way to test the strength of a relationship before irrevocable vows are made, and a successful evasion is a symbol which he desperately wants to attain. Together they are striving to catch that which perhaps cannot be caught. Together they are running away from those things which they ultimately cannot escape.
Dream on old man, dream on. Dream about the scrambling and the struggling and the strategy. Dream of open moors with yellow gorse and closed leafy lanes with red campion; of bubbling brooks and friendly faces. Dream of summer storms and electric tension in the touch of your hand with that of your young companion. Dream of small towns and taverns where you rested. Dream of the innkeeper at the Wheatsheaf, watching a dark country cross-roads, who shyly gave Joanna that corn doll as a good luck charm. But most of all, dream of how you got here.
You had come to an unfamiliar region of the fertile circle, a long way from home. Maybe it was outside the circle even. It must have been the very last evening when you needed to hide. Tomorrow you would start to return in triumph. This was a desolate place, a desert of a moor, but you had found a hollow where bracken and low insects lived which seemed the perfect shelter for the night. But in the gloaming you saw a light. Rising up you were both drawn like innocent moths to the flame. A standing circle of white limestone crouched like old men in conference only a few hundred yards from where you had rested. Strangely, you had failed to notice it before. How heady the air was that night ! It felt like the shock before a lightning bolt, but the sky was clear. Around the stones a blue light played. St. Elmo’s fire had you both spellbound. As if it was a dream you walked to the centre of the circle. You kissed. It changed. Now you are here.
Wake up old man ! There is work to be done and no one here but you to do it.
The hunting party is too large. The leader knew it as soon as it was assigned. It is all very well to insist that the youngsters are trained but the object of the exercise is to bring back meat. What will anyone learn on a bungling expedition, doomed to failure because the prey can smell their combined scent and hear their combined breathing over two decent throws away? Under the circumstances he has opted not to try for the lowland herds, and delivered a sharp rebuke to the grumbling trainee who fancied he could kill an ice grazer on his first day. The forest bounders are not particularly easy to kill either, but they offer some hope for a large group. If he can position the five members of his team carefully and skilfully round the burrows, they might be able to flush one into the path of an agile knife.
At ten meter intervals they are spread out in a rough triangle which advances slowly up the hill. At the apex, prey will be funnelled to the leader but he doesn’t really expect much yet. It is cheerless and cold, and they all pull furs tighter from time to time in an effort to retain some body heat.
The trees are grim and ironic. Brown needles have dripped acid onto the soil for year upon year, and silent hopeless cones crunch excruciatingly loud beneath the feet of the novices. Black green foliage is even more depressing on these evergreen trees than the lowland plants which at least have the honesty to die back before the winter snows, instead of persisting in enraged half life, too bitter to surrender. The shadows cast by late afternoon are crisp and chill on the forest floor. Resin oozes from the rough trunks, only squeezed out for the sole reason blood can flow from a stone; iron pity cracked by irresistible dark forces. A faint scent, it is the concentrated essence of pain at the edge of awareness.
The leader shifts his knife from hand to hand. Something strange is happening. The breeze is changing. The scent is changing.
How were they to know? When the shadows and the trunks changed, the new story was written. Fracture. The continuum bleeds with its own silent agony. These are not the same trees. This is not the same land.
The Green World smiles up at the sun. A brightly coloured pastoral arc it runs heavily through the black and empty void, and in other places it spins other stories to while away the million years.
This one is close in time, if not in space. There are dark trees here too. These trees despise their distant northern cousins. These trees are rulers and their domain is truly frightening to strangers. Through the jungle Rosalind, the major, and the doctor walk in silence. It is hard going. At first, the major had to use his sword every few minutes to hack at obstructing undergrowth. Now they are well under the canopy and little grows in the gloomy gothic cathedral, but twisted roots grasping the earth like a miser present almost as great an obstacle to progress. The doctor’s left arm was twisted horribly in the crash and he holds it awkwardly in his right hand. Rosalind’s dress has been torn, her hair is loose and her face unmade. Often she stumbles.
But nervous exhaustion has set in and at least the travellers no longer jump at every noise which startled them earlier. The party by the lakeside is a memory like weak tea fading in the stomach. Even the major hardly looks like a commanding officer. His training in the blinkered acceptance and imposition of discipline assumed too much. Despite outward calm, inside he is slowly turning mad. Only the physical demands of putting one foot in front of the other are keeping him going. Perhaps they will find people at the fires who can help them; people who can explain. First, though, they are aiming for the coast. It is a long and confusing way, but at last the dreadful monarchs seem to be giving way. A sluggish brown stream guides them under waving fronds to a promising clearing.
They emerge into bright yellow sunlight and surprise. There is a village here. Around a central fire stand a varied collection of wooden houses and huts. Some are quite simple but others show considerable sophistication. At the far end of the clearing is a large stone building, well built and carved with abstract patterns.
There are people round the fire and at the doorways. They turn to stare at the newcomers, but they are not human. They have never been human. They would not want to be human. On back jointed knees their thin legs support great barrel chested bodies. Two long pairs of arms, spread out like wings or folded against the chest seem to possess a multitude of digits. More arresting than any other part of their anatomy, their large faces peer in wonder at three strange animals intruding on their life. Feathers run from the top of their heads in mottled browns and blacks, like the head-dress of a Red Indian chief, but more than a simple adornment these feathers are still growing. The eyes are enormous. Some are amber pools of light, some purple, but all are wide and dark with narrow pupils. The flat brown beak at the centre of each face would look comical if it were not for those eyes. They are quite quiet.
It is all too much for the major. Suddenly old superstitions break through. He remembers the temples of the infidels. This is all a curse laid on him when he led his men in triumph through that unholy capital of the defeated horde on the stone plain. It is clear to him now. Despite the easy words of the new chaplains, he knows that the old devils are not dead. These are demons. He draws his sword and charges with an insane cry for the honour of his God. Tiny darts hit him as he moves. They seem so small. Why does he feel so weary? The doctor and Rosalind are shrunken and standing still. Even the enemy do not move. He cannot raise his sword to smite them. In the tropical sun a darkness comes, and as he collapses a little corner inside weeps to know that for all his high training in violent ends he cannot understand his own new alien death. The breathing stops and there is no one left inside.
The big ship forges through the blue currents, thick with green life. Tropical water foams easily before the bow and the steady damp wind fills the sails without effort and provides relief from the burning sun. What a strange ship this is ! A four masted wooden galleon, she is crewed by fifty or sixty nimble sailors, running up the rigging, swarming over the spars and heaving on the ropes. And what strange sailors they are. Each one has a full growth of feathers on his head, large purple coloured eyes and a beak.
Now the “Sister of the Waves” is arriving at a new group of islands. Garlands of exotic orange flowers blow about her spars, and the sails are painted vivid green and red. Wave crests dance before her. In shows of bravery, some dare others to rise up and touch the wooden figurehead but despite much splashing and vigorous tossing of spray from choppy impatient onlookers, none of them can manage it. The ship slices the water like shiny steel rather than wood, such is her speed, but it has been a long journey and there may still be far to go.
Eager eyes scan the lands ahead. Two of the islands are rather closer together than any of the others, One is large and has what looks like the cone of an extinct volcano at its centre. The other is much smaller and flatter. A wide sandy channel separates them, and the captain doubts if it is deep enough for the “Sister of the Waves” to navigate safely. There is a fierce discussion between two of the tree guardians. One of them claims that this is the island of legend, where the stolen moon pearls are hidden. The other is scornful, and most of the rest of the guardians agree that it cannot be the place. It looks as though another enormous theological argument is about to start. Old scrolls are brought out to point to passages supporting one claim or another. Whistling voices grow into shrieks. The captain wonders wearily, and not for the first time, why he ever agreed to command this vessel.
In the end it is decided that they must sail through that sandy straight to settle the matter. Somehow the captain thought it would turn out like that. He gives the orders and they move through the shallow sea. Fortunately it is deep enough for them to pass safely and this is not the island they are looking for. There is no need to stop for provisions or fresh water. They last anchored only two days ago and there are so many islands in these parts that they are certain to be able to make land again within the week. So on they sail, that endless expedition, following the setting sun. On to find the hidden island. On to find the stolen moon pearls. In the blue rolling waters the “Sister of the Waves” carries the tree guardians and the captain and all his crew with the evening breeze all around the green world.
A ragged man stands on the shore of a small island. He watches a big ship recede slowly towards a red sun sinking in the ocean. ‘More Estranjeros’, he thinks. ‘They surely are the oddest looking lot I’ve ever heard of.’. This is not saying much, as it happens. Disconsolate, he turns away to the small shelter built only a little distance back, where the sand of the shore blurs with advancing vegetation. Palm trees shade him and coconuts feed him. If ever there was a classic castaway, Billy Ben is it. He wouldn’t know about that, since his education has been strictly limited, and he hasn’t heard of Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family Robinson. A pity.
Billy Ben is not his real name, either, but he has grown used to it. He was born in a small Mexican village north west of Tantoyuka, but when he came to ship out, the captain explained that he could only sign him as a crew member under an English name; something to do with ‘bluffing out the union quotas in the American docks’ which he didn’t understand. He couldn’t write a word of English anyway. Not even a word of Spanish. One of the other sailors, who didn’t seem to mind, showed the young Mexican how to form the letters of his simple American name. He practised until he could write it on demand, while his crewmate explained what he was to say if American officials questioned him. The necessary papers were quickly completed and he was christened anew.
Sometimes Ben wonders just where he has been washed up. He doesn’t know much about the sea. At seventeen it was only his fifth voyage when the ship was sunk in a sudden squall somewhere between Tampico and Galverston. With no company except a couple of timbers from the ill fated steamer he floated here six months ago. Since then he has been totally unable to get away.
He goes inside the shelter and sits down. All things considered, he makes a pretty good castaway - rather better in fact, than he was as a sailor. He has fashioned a reasonable home here, whilst waiting for rescue and if the truth be told, he would not be completely happy to leave. He was lucky enough to be carrying a long handled knife, and had fishing twine and a couple of hooks in his pocket when they foundered. The knife, always a useful tool for splicing ropes and cutting meat, has proved invaluable. It is made of good steel, there is no doubt, for he has cut the branches of his home with it, and killed the curious crabs and grey furred marsupials that haunt the outer fringes of the forest, with progressively cleaner thrusts as his hunting skills improve. Lean, stringy and dark he is the island’s number one predator and the nine inches of sharp steel his most valuable possession. Platted rope from palm leaves holds the shelter together, along with dark mud from water holes in the jungle; and the stronger twine he brought with him, he is able to use for its intended purpose. With a couple of rough fishing rods, Billy often waits patiently by the deep pool in the island’s only fresh water stream and steadily depletes its very scarce stock of fresh water fish. He doesn’t even know that he may be the sole instrument in the extinction of an entire subspecies. Darwin would be horrified.
He has few amusements. Outside the back window there is a vegetable garden. A small cleared spot, where he has tried to grow to order some of the roots and fruit of which he is most fond. This is not really much more than an amusement. He has no skill at gardening and precious little success, although one bush yielding delicious yellow berries seems to have survived transplanting, if in a rather poor condition. But as a symbol it is important. It even has a little fence and a garden gate.
On a rough wooden table there is a solitaire board and forty four tiny brown nuts sitting in their required positions. Billy starts another game. Ever since one of the Americans on the steamer showed him how to play, towards the end of the second voyage, he has been fascinated by the pattern of vanishing beads and the action of jump and counter jump. Often he sits here, watching the waves from his front window and counting away the captured pieces. He does not always play to win.
Across the ocean he can see the home of the Estranjeros on their larger parcel of land. He lacks the words to describe them. Obscurely, he knows that they are not human but consciously he does not formulate the thought. He just thinks of them as foreigners. So profound is his ignorance on these matters that he can blithely put down all differences to region. In some ways they are no more peculiar than the Americans in their big cities. Their culture is closer to his own, now, and if he does not understand the language it is no worse, no more alien, than the loud mouthed white English of the dockers.
The island he watches every day has a steep sloping volcano at its centre. It has been called many names since it rose from the ocean. It has been called ‘Fire Island’ today. Billy did not see the white balloon descend from the skies. He was fishing as it crossed the island, and trees screened him. But this evening, with a sensitivity to change beyond thought, he knows that something is different. He waits.
Billy calls the island by many names himself. As the only other place he can see, perceptibly distinct from home territory (that needs no name) it naturally occupies a large place in his imagination. Sometimes he thinks he has been washed ashore in Hawaii and he calls it Honolulu. But another part of him remembers that the Hawaiian islands are in the Pacific, and anyway they would be too far away to drift to from the drowning boat - wouldn’t they? Sometimes he thinks it is Cuba and he calls it Havana. He is very loose with geography. Mostly he gazes at the volcano. The only place he has heard of where there is a volcano is Santiago. Santiago, he feels, is on the mainland but he is not sure. He has the strong impression it is somewhere in South America. The people there are strange. The sailors have told him many stories about South Americans. Santiago, then, is his favourite and although he less than half believes it, that is what he most often calls it.
He knows the Estranjeros will not rescue him and so he waits. He waits until a ship with his own kind draws near enough for him to shout. Then he will be saved. But as he waits the memories of his former life grow dim. The pictures he has of the catholic orphanage and the biting dust in that earthy Mexican village where he was born are washed paler and paler with each swim he takes in the warm salty ocean. Sometimes it feels as though he has been here forever. Sometimes it feels as though he will be here forever.
Patiently he watches the island. Only one thing is wrong. He has a daydream. Some day, a fine lady will come to the island. He has seen pictures. On the fourth voyage they took two passengers from America. There was a furtive man who carried a gun, smoked a lot and clutched a plastic briefcase to his chest. With him was a hard nosed blonde with brassy eyes and a sharp little chin. The captain obviously did not like them. He was taking them ‘as a favour to a friend’, he’d said; none of which Billy understood.
But the lady had a magazine and Billy sneaked a look when they were out of the cabin. It was called ‘Vogue’ and it was printed on glossy paper of a sort he had never seen before. Inside were European ladies in elegant costumes. He can picture them now. They wear long flowing dresses, high necked blouses and floral skirts, or silver grey fur coats and bright red boots.
He thinks of the things he would make if a fine lady came to his island. There would be another chair. He would fashion a cloak from the pelts of the marsupials. He would climb the coconut trees to get the largest and ripest nuts, instead of waiting for them to fall. On the other side of the island he would dive where the coral grows for the juiciest ripple fish and he would make her necklaces and bracelets from shells and berries.
Whatever she wanted, I would do it, he says to himself. He yawns. His thoughts are fuzzy and confused. The waves are sympathetic but their endless rhythmic chatter is only making him sleepy. With equatorial suddenness the night descends.
Another green world lazes in the sun. Another green world sleeps in the shade of its own slowly turning body. How peaceful it is and how empty! It is a world of a myriad tropical islands without a continent and a northern continent without islands. There it lies at the bottom of an energy well - the local minimum in an uncharted plane of parallel histories - the most indolent of its neighbours. To be there is to be overwhelmed by wind, water and sun. It is to be dominated and diminished by the green. One by one it takes them in the fractures; slippages between the times that move towards the restoration of some ill defined interuniversal equilibrium.
But in the green world there is only the present. It is not a place to think about the future or the past, but to dream like the thriving plants in an eternal now. The temptation and the lotus live.
The northern tip of the island is a mess. The four principles of earth, air, fire and water have long used it as a battle ground. Under their intermittent and savage or continuous and relentless assaults according to each one’s different style of war it has grown wilder and more hostile to life. The beach is rough and black. Large rocks hurled from the volcano are scattered as igneous outposts in the raging surf, but they go no further than fifteen meters from the land. At that point the sea shelves sharply and a deep current whips around the coast. The incessant trade winds which circle the green world hit the land, just about here. Coming to meet them are the stiffly formal frozen rivers of lava, which sought to extend the earth’s frontiers when the volcano last had to plaster the planet’s widening wound.
Life is an intrusion here; an afterthought which slips beneath the notice of the elements only because they are thinking in terms of aeons. That is the way in which they are always subverted.
This is the favourite place of the Great Grey Dragons. A small wild colony ambles through the most untamed wilderness. They are tall beasts, about the height of a grown man at the head, with low back legs and a long flat tail running back to balance the weight of their thin necks, which cannot be entirely supported by the more delicate front feet. Fearsome as they look, the reptiles are herbivores. Raising their thin front limbs they can tear and pull leaves from low shrubs and trees into their mouths. In this way, they munch through great supplies of greenery every day. No predator is large enough to threaten them and if it wasn’t for the fact that they mate very infrequently the island would be overrun and stripped bare. As it is, they live long lives and have a serene and patient existence.
In the afternoon most of the sixteen in the current population can be found sunning themselves, both on the shore and out amid the waves on their own personal rocks. You might imagine that they are meditating for their eyes are closed and they hardly ever stir.
Today they are being watched. Large amber and violet eyes stare from beneath furtive leaves. Quick little minds study the precise location of each animal, calculate probable escape routes and review the details of their plan. Capturing a Great Grey Dragon is never easy, but the king wants a new ceremonial beast to ride in the biannual progress. With a green saddle, gold bridle and tackle heavy with intricate carving and finery, the Royal Dragons are magnificent; an awe inspiring sight and a fit mount for a ruler to ride. First they must be caught.
A foolish observer might think that the reptiles are asleep. Where the wind massages their backs and the silent sun is soporific, why should they not sleep? A foolish observer might think that the reptiles are unaware of his presence. Those eyes are closed and I am well hidden. How can they know?
The watchers are not foolish. They have done this before and they know full well that the dragons are almost as conscious of them as they are conscious of the dragons. The lumbering grey beasts know this jungle too well to miss any changes, however subtle. But for the moment they are content to feign ignorance or indifference and to wait; to let the irritating little two legged scamperers make the first move.
So they do. Around the peninsula five small boats come swiftly on the current, each paddled kyak fashion by two natives. One dragon is rather isolated out to sea and three of them approach him. He is a youngster, barely thirty years of age. Rapidly they move in and he is surprised by the direction and co-ordination of their actions. Jump! Into the surging waves and over with the long thin craft nearest to the calculated splash of disruption. What confusion! He swims to shore, but the two other boats take up the chase. One of the feathered ones is floating very still. His companion in misfortune kicks free from their sinking craft and pulls him to the rock. He will live.
Now the dragon is wading out onto the shore. Relatives make way for him, otherwise doing nothing. He looks for the trails. One of them is blocked by screaming natives who have emerged from hiding to wave wicked looking spears. The other appears almost empty but even so, there are signs that the feathered ones are there and he senses a trap. He makes a quick decision. Between two outcrops, is a narrow alternative, heavy with foliage and as yet untrodden. Crashing through the thick leaves, it is a mistake. The little ones have reasoned right with a feint and a surprise. The net falls on his head and in a trice they are swarming over him. Bounding and squawking, their agile bodies seek to harness and to tame without harming the wild creature. They are skilful but this is the easy part. Resistance is low. In less than five minutes they have the dragon quiet and ready to be led away in triumph from the peninsula. Its foot splashes loudly in a small sandy creek, perhaps in a last gesture of defiance, as calling and chirping, the troupe start their homeward march.
Throughout the spectacle the other reptiles have been quiet. With studied indifference they have left their fellow to his fate. It seems as if they cannot conceive of helping, or as if they have a long tradition of stoic philosophy; the resignation of a monastery of Zen Buddhists born into the genes. Qui sera, sera. They look out to sea as the sounds fade. Staring into infinity where the sky and sea meet, or closing their eyes once more their sombre thoughts return to rest. Now they are fifteen.
Soft mud settles slowly in the warm salty water. It is quiet beneath the surface. There is a sudden movement! Where the Great Grey Dragon has left his mighty footprint a dull little fish swims out of concealing sediment into the main channel. Its tiny tail whips out towards the sea but at the crucial boundary it stops and sinks again.
A shoal of about thirty brilliant red and green fish flash past in iridescent glory. Their movements are simultaneous, restless and bright as they head out to the coral. The water is sweet with life on the leeward side. The murky churning near the shore gives way, all at once to the beautiful clarity of the currents above the deep waiting corals. Sunlight can more sharply illuminate the darting slippery bodies through a rippling blue ceiling; a turquoise interface to a forbidden world - a heaven that can be touched but only entered on pain of gasping death. Red branches sway gently where the community of coral polyps stretch into the welcoming sea. It is rich with food. Large grey-green crabs scuttle in worry over the floor. Further down are the thousands upon thousands of dead that have built this city. The past residents now support the living community as foundations in the softly moving dark, which keep their descendants in that gentle patterned light. Quick, quick are the little fishes! Now they move out to sea, now in again to graze at the spreading tendrils and the endless soft gaping mouths of the microscopic harvesters. An aqua sun tickles them in motion. Up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards are all the same. In and out of the twisted town they chase, as though there is no other sport. Their laughter is the tiny bubbles which flee from them, ascending into heaven. Their tears are the tiny coral bones buried in the darkness below them.
A sandstone track crumbles up the hillside to a wide cave. Low deciduous trees are sprinkled to either side in subdued, subtropical and temperate tones of green. This is the southern extremity of the northern continent and there is another captive here. He is one who is trained to think in those terms and that is how he recognises his predicament. The green world is his prison.
He sits outside the cave on a flat yellow rock, warm from a day’s steady sun. Dusk is coming in violet footsteps across the water, announced by the faint clucking of woodbirds. The man was not used to solitude before he turned the twisted corner through the worlds, but he certainly is now. Evening is the worst time. He hums a monotonic little rhythm as the stars break through the weakening brightness of the day. Behind him the lilac rosy glow from the potassium lamp flickers feverishly against the rock before steadying. Beside it, there is a locked metal box with a painted yellow circle cut by three black arcs. A Geiger counter clicks idly, unmoved by the powerful source shielded in the box. Leaning against the opposite wall, the vacuum laser rifle rusts. Its tiny signal sighting mirror has long been warped out of alignment with the main tube.
The man fingers a knife at his belt. He is thinking of the last skirmish. The trade zone wars had boiled over for the fifth time in as many standards. Away from the metaphorical knives at the conference tables they escalated into bloody little battles across the traditional triple star frontier planes. Move and countermove, play and strike were often distant from his tiny garrison in the backwaters of the Old Alliance. He had guarded an unimportant little world, a minor member of a small band of mercenaries who didn’t care if they saw no action provided the pay kept coming. “Tiger Twelve,” they were called, a tiny part of a small defence. Then United Tools saw an opening and decided that they could seize Earth from the Old Alliance. Even a small market is better than none if it can be acquired cheaply.
A soft wind blows from across the sea. The man is getting old. He often dozes now in the sun but he sometimes wonders who won and which of his comrades survived. First alert sounded when the orbital relays blew. It was quite spectacular. The primary defence prevented unrequested interlock access but somehow United Tools technicians had overloaded the network. All the distributed processing centres were alerted but on the night side the pyrotechnics from geostationaries was more than enough warning. There were several possible lines of attack now, and not much good second guessing. As it happened, they didn’t pursue a particularly subtle strategy. Troops moved in from orbit and their intelligence must have been accurate because from the way the carriers split, they were heading straight for supply and demand nerves.
In space a battle would be raging for control of the near orbit communications systems and it was crucial that United Tools did not establish their own bypass channel satellites. Several of the troop carriers were shot down. Unhappily for the men of “Tiger Twelve,” ground batteries failed to take out the landers aiming for their zone. The AgGen IV unit which “Tiger Twelve” guarded was responsible for monitoring and collating farming data over a wide region of North Western Europe, and issuing purchasing recommendations. All around the central depot and in their own bunkers the men hired by the Old Alliance prepared their defences and waited for United Tools. If the enemy successfully captured the machine, supply and demand data would go through different data processing based on subtly adjusted economic models favourable to the giant industrial combines beyond Procyon. Earth would be a new market, when the automatic packet ships distributed their next orders from the moon.
It was a bad time for the defending mercenaries. They had just been issued with new kit prior to their impending transfer to a low orbit detail round Valwar VI. The laser rifles, for instance, were almost useless in this thick atmosphere, and though they still had the heavy mortars and the personal combat weapons which any mercenary always carries, projectile weapons and flare guns had been removed. Someone had screwed up.
The collation depot was buried into the hillside to protect it from weather and war, which was just as well. In these games of cat and mouse there was an added element of danger to both sides. It was perfectly legal to destroy ancillary equipment from the marketing agencies, such as the access net employed by the Old Alliance, but it was a serious offence to damage any part of the physical structure of a sovereign planet’s management system. If the codes so carefully laid down in the ‘Dictates of Symeon III’ over a hundred standards ago were infringed in any way, retribution would be swift. The mercenaries were well aware that Legal Integrity troops - many of them mercenaries themselves but hired by the planetary government, were sitting back just waiting for a violation. The infamous slaughter of Alcoor only twenty standards past, had resulted from the accidental bombing of a MinGen II when the Red Star Products group were trying to shift a band of tenacious troops from Inter World Dynamics out of a complex of titanium mine shafts. All the initial combatants lost their lives when Legal Integrity forces moved in and both companies had to pay extensive and painful fines.
So they moved carefully. Through a strand of trees round the far slope, United Tools advanced. It was only then that it was actually confirmed which company group opposed them. The distinctive black uniforms with the white stylised combustion engine removed all doubt. The expected enemy were the actual enemy. As they moved, the mortars fired, breaking up clusters of men thought too dangerous. Between them, in careful sorties and rapid harass runs, the men from “Tiger Twelve” attacked.
One man was cut off. Isolated from his comrades, fighting their losing battle for the Old Alliance, he found himself on a quiet part of the hillside where an unexpected cave could hide him. There was no doubt now that the conflict was going badly. As he watched, some United Tool troops silenced a ridge top bunker. It was no dishonour to withdraw until the battle was over and he suddenly knew what he must do. In these circumstances, he reasoned, why should I get myself killed for a lost cause? To emerge and surrender after it was all over was quite within the accepted ethics of the trade wars. Next month he might be fighting under a new contract for United Tools. So he went in.
And when he came out he was here. The man sighs. It is an easy life but it is a trifle boring. He bites into one of the juicy soft fruits which are so abundant at this time of year on the slopes below. The evening is as long as always. The eternal golden hours pass like solemn suns. Beside him there is a tiny black box; a universal reference map. It is really only a toy. When he was a mercenary they were a popular fad found in many a soldier’s personal effects. Representations of the night sky as seen from any known system in the galaxy are visible through a tiny eye piece. It stores complete reference data for over ten million stars which might be accessible to the naked eye from somewhere in explored space, despite the fact that less than two thousand planets have been systematically developed. You can set up patterns with the tiny controls and the machine will search for a match with any possible stored pattern. Pretty useless really. It’s not often that you can forget just where in the galaxy you are, and in interstellar navigation mistakes are never like taking the wrong turn at a road junction and ending up in the wrong town, much more like right on the doorstep or blown to atoms. Perhaps mercenaries liked the nostalgia value of recalling old skies, or perhaps they liked to impress the planet bound with this trinket of “travel”.
The man knows he is hopelessly lost. He has used his universal reference map, carefully setting up the strange night sky signs and it has failed. He sits back against the cave wall. Surreal patterns from strange imagined constellations burn into the back of his eyes; the molten clock, the spider and the broken sword. In cooling purple the hard light of alien stars comes out.
Picture a Hollywood yacht; a Florida diversion. White paint on aluminium is sharp in the crisp sunlight. The sky and sea are filter split into hot copper and furnace green. The boat drifts with its white sail limp and passionless for the lack of wind, where no breath wakes the feverish ocean. The steel perfect mast casts a stiff little shadow from an overhead sun. Light waves lap up to caress the unnaturally smooth flanks of the decadent metal.
There are two on board. A bronzed man drowses at the tiller. His arm rests lightly on the rudder which angles up from the new purity of the blue ocean - the great eye of the green ocean. His head droops forward over thick sinews. Blood flows dark hot and strong in his slumber.
At the bow is a tall woman. She lies stretched full length across the deck, black ringlets of long springy hair cushioning her head and spread behind. Only a thin triangle of bright green fabric across her loins, protects her browning body from the sun god it worships. Her breasts are ripe and full. They laze heavily, the nipples dark and blind, quivering gently with the slow rise and fall of her chest. The shallow shadows which they cast are of no use. The cruel sun god bakes every available square centimetre of the offered flesh without mercy. Skin breathes desperately; gasping for life through pores which open to cry or bleed their rivulets of sweat. Tracks of dried moisture across the soft creamy white and darkening belly and thighs are only intermittently refreshed by beads of new liquid wrung from her dehydrating body. One leg hangs wantonly languid over the side of the boat to escape below the captive holding rails, whilst the other, bent back at the knee, receives the full grilling on the deck. Her toes cannot quite reach the water. On this shaded side, light, reflecting from the waves writhes lasciviously over the virgin hull and plays across the floating limb.
Nothing moves. The yacht is becalmed a half mile and an eternity short of a tropical island in a world quite different from the one where it was fashioned as a rich man’s toy. So subtle was the change that the crew continue their pleasures of indolence unaware. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is sleep.
Under the gently rocking cradle the fish swim unnoticed. From their coral citadels they have come to shuttle about the new arrival. The gentle roar of water in the ears, shells pressed tight and waves on coasts is transmitted through the medium of the all encompassing sea right around the world and seems to find its own sonic echoes from the blade of the pleasure craft. Dissonance is delicate and retreating - beyond the course senses - vanishing as absorption to the green world is complete.
The woman stretches, forcing her arms behind her head. Tiny muscles are contorted beneath the skin, stretched on a rack to add to the torture of the heat. Their stabs of protest penetrate dimly through to their mistress’s torpid brain. She utters a low moan of mild protest. Her eyes half open. In the gap between wide open eyes and completely closed lids the sun is refracted through long dark lashes. It is hard to tell whether the shield black blue is genuine vision or a tungsten bolt of sheet lightning burning through an inner lid straight to the retina. There is no detail in the colour but then there is no detail in the sky. For a few moments she experiments with slowly opening and closing her eyes, recapturing the transitional blue and trying to pinpoint the moment when reality intrudes.
There is a balloon in the sky. Drifting from bow to stern she sees it suddenly and watches it without effort, continuing to lie sprawled in sacrifice to the sun. It is daubed with bright jungle purples and reds though it looks as if it was once white. In the full light coming from behind her head the occupants are mysterious. Although too small to make out clearly they look strangely foreign. All at once she knows, without being able to say why, that this is nowhere near Miami.
There is a brief conversation in the balloon which will not carry far in the pristine air. The two travellers watch through large amber eyes the clean lines of the boat below. It will ground on the coral about nightfall, they agree since only the weak sea currents are moving it. Guests of the spirits, they agree. In the high air their feathers gleam proud and tall from dark scalps. They have crossed many islands in the reclaimed “Daughter of the Sky”. This far above the still surface the nature of the air is kinder and it carries the patched cloth bubble with ease. But we cannot say where they are going.
In different elements, with different speeds their drift slowly separates the two vessels. Even when the sky ship briefly burns its lifting tongue it is only a quiet echo to the sea. The woman sleeps.
A little while before the sun sets on another uncounted day in the life of the green world, a procession reaches holy ground. For an hour they have walked at a steady and solemn pace along the rising jungle track, each man carrying a torch and each woman a gift of fruit. This is the cone of the volcano; the ground within the concave dip where the fire pools display the precious blood of the earth. Lava priests lead the way, dancing, jumping and singing round the grove. The old religion is strong here with none of the weak hearted nonsense introduced by the schismatical and blasphemous tree guardians on another shore. In fact the heresy has never been preached here at all. Fires are lit around the edges of the crater where the jungle has crept up to the lip. They are propitiation and imitations designed to please the spirits and prevent them from unleashing the true fire. It is to the true fire and the one blood that the priests must attend. Night falls.
A red glow bathes the arena in even and disturbing warmth. The priests are now still but the rest of the village start to dance and shout, drinking cheap liquor from the Lumcis fruit; staining their thin garments yellow and orange with intoxication; daring the spirits to respond. Shadows cast by flickering flames twist in and out of the trees. They are ancestor support, jumping in and out of reality when the spirits are to be summoned and bolstering the courage of the motionless priests even as they twist around the trunks, cackling and crackling in their half courageous, half frightened games of hide and seek. Stars shine with intense interest for the twilight does not last long enough here to conceal the ceremony from their timeless and insatiable curiosity. Joints spring and feathered crests splay wide. Upper and lower arms fold and stretch. Some climb and leap from the rim with loud screeches, spreading vestigial wings as if to fly but only crashing down to rejoin the frenzy.
A man in a dark coat sits at the rim; an alien; a new wise one from the spirits. They leave him alone out of respect and awe. He watches without interfering. In this way the doctor has learned to live.
A circle of four high ones stand around the central pool. They cannot go too close because the heat rising from the bubbling orange fluid would burn their feathers. They are nervous. What if this time, as fifteen cycles ago, the spirits should be angry, goad the earth to bleed and the fire erupt?
Then half the village had been killed scrambling to safety and only one priest had survived. The lava rumbles softly. No one can tell where it will break through the thin solid crust to form a new pool. The ground here is always hot and the rock never more than twenty cycles old. Thick and rich is the blood of the earth.
Now the larger moon, hard and white, peers over the edge of the trail and all at once there is stillness and quietness. The dancing stops and even the ancestor shadows seem to be more circumspect, scuttling behind the thicker larger trees with only an occasional peek to see what is happening at the centre. Those whom the lava claimed in death are already in the host of spirits and these around the edge will never be released by the earth. Ancestors are such cowards!
Night birds call softly. The wail of the lonely sea hunters gliding over the moonlit ocean comes through the black air, mournful and occasional. One at a time with careful and ritual precision, fruit is thrown into the pool. It hisses quickly and quietly as the molten rock reduces it to carbon and steam. The ritual chants begin and the people wait.
With half their hearts they hope the spirits will answer the summons. With half their hearts they fear the spirits will answer the summons. The night vigil will be long but warm. They settle down, crouched and drowsing as the weird song continues to wait for the souls with power - waiting for the spirits.
The air is almost still this night. A light breeze has softened to whisper rumours of distant or mythical lands. Across the water there is another song which is, or was, or will be, sung with the colours of darkness.
Before the day ends, Billy Ben walks on the beach with Rosalind, watching the waves. He is teaching her how to skim stones across the surf. Mostly they use the circular plate like shells of the long dead clams that had lived in the tidal sands, but occasionally one or the other finds a true stone, sculptured by the sea throughout an aeon for their purpose, thin and flat and cool and smooth. They chatter in a mixture of Spanish and the musical tongue the blonde woman has brought with her - a language of their own learned slowly but eagerly over unnumbered placid days in the green world’s eternal tropic summer. They both laugh often, for they are happy in each other’s company. Billy crouches.
“Like this,” he says and spins a darkly patterned shell low and hard into the wind. Perfectly parallel it hits the calm water between two crests.
Skip, skip, skip and it dissolves into the advancing white foam of a swift little breaker.
“Now you try.”
Rosalind holds her shell awkwardly, spanned between thumb and fingers. He takes her hand and shows her how to grip the edges - pantomimes the throw.
Skip, skip. She claps in delight and he smiles with wide white teeth against dark skin as her shell follows his into the ocean of forgotten play - sinking beneath the kindly waves. They run on, bounding and calling barefoot round the shore.
As the light fades at last they sit down near the hut facing fire island. The sand is damp but firm beneath them. Insects simmer in the forest at their backs, promising winged meetings in the night. For a little while they are quiet as the young Mexican remembers the day when the Estranjeros brought this fine lady from their island. Four of the Estranjeros accompanied her in a canoe which they paddled across the straight. She was frightened then, and shy, but she was company. The long loneliness had ended and the imaginary friends he peopled his world with vanished forever into the forest.
Rosalind pushes her fingers into the wet sand, savouring the sensations as it squeezes through her hand. She wriggles her toes, delighting in the freedom. Recently she has cut her dress above the knees and the tender air touching her limbs speaks of new liberty and the end of old formality like a forgotten winter cold. It will all be well here, she knows now. Everything.
The sea glows with a faint blue luminescence from a myriad micro-organisms. Just now and then the breeze brings faint hints of the revelry in the volcano cone - a snatch of song at the limits of hearing.
Then Billy sings. His love song is hesitant at first. the melody is slow and he does not know where it comes from. Twisted out of an old ballad he may have heard but with elements of that alien ceremony, the sea and the breeze, it is totally new. Born of the green world he sings it on the instant, quietly composing, drawing the threads of their lives; thence to be forgotten. Rosalind listens entranced.
And it is thus that the moon finds them as it clears the summit of the volcano. Glancing across silvered beaches it picks out their dark figures; landmarks on its patient journey through the tropical night.
When the tribe is asleep; when the priests have long since ceased their chanting and returned to fitful dreams; when the forest is quiet and the islands, drenched in slow and silent moonlight, lie drained and semi-conscious in the anaesthetic black sea, the spirits emerge. Out of the pools of lava they creep, and they flit over the prostrate bodies into the brooding trees. No one stirs as the last one makes good his escape. How foolish the Lava priests are! They know how to release the spirits but they have no idea in these degenerate times how to control them. The spirits whisper to themselves and to each other, chuckling in benign triumph over the living. Then one by one they take their leave and separate wherever they will in their green world.
The spirits are not particularly coherent. Their origins are mysterious, their identities and interests different, their forms dissimilar and their thoughts diverse. Some are hidden like faces in the landscape of a child’s puzzle book. They cannot move and are not with those fleeing from the volcano. Some are half seen movements in the air. Some are dreams that move from mind to mind, jumping through a crowd of life as if each individual were a stepping stone over a void of Nivannah. Some are dark and slow, creeping on the ground like moving moss. Some can alter their shape at will, huge floating heads of frozen lightning with terrible features or subtle darting will o’ the wisp.
A few things, they all share. All are bound to this world by a stronger force that none dare name. There are laws they must obey and taboos that they cannot ignore while the present interuniversal situation lasts. It has held for almost as long as their all but immortal souls can remember. It is likely to hold for as long again. So they watch and wait with a patience that has to be hammered to the infinite on the anvil of each moment. And in their own separate ways they know all the stories that the green world tells.
This is a spirit.
It floats outside a stone hut in a land where the sun is only just below the horizon at midnight. There is an old man inside, sleeping. The spirit remembers him and is amused. His terrible lightning face creases into a condescending smile as he listens to the mortal’s dream - the same one he always dreams. With playful ease the spirit changes - a metamorphosis to a more familiar form - the form in which he once greeted two new guests of the green world. For a few moments St. Elmo’s fire flickers around the barren stones then leaves the other to his distant slumber, fading up the river.
This is a spirit.
A dark night cloud, it hovers over the band of hunters in the grim forest. They are doing well. A small fire gives off the smell of roasting meat, and the men eat and talk noisily. Perhaps for these guests the green world is not such a change. Or perhaps it will take more time for them to see the differences and to feel their own change.
This is a spirit.
It bubbles in the water within the cold fire of a big ship’s wake, hidden by the organic light, laughing loudly to itself. There are tree guardians here, it thinks to itself. And it knows what the tree guardians want. How stupid they are! The new religion breeds ignorant flatterers and ingrates worse even than the Lava priests. They act as if this expedition is going to recover the moon pearls! The spirit knows where they are and it knows how to get them, but this is not the way. To tease the crew it rises to the surface and transforms itself into a malignant little gust which blows about the rigging and sails in counter to the material wind for a few uncomfortable moments. Then it speeds into the vast oceanic night, still laughing heartily.
This is a spirit.
It peeps into a cave on a verdant hillside where a soldier sleeps. Kept at bay by the lilac glow of the light which he never extinguishes, it prowls outside for a few minutes then gives up disappointed. Cavorting and dancing round the crown of the hill it hums to itself in the language of the stones and the dust. Then, growing tired of its solitary game, it slinks off back down the track to the sea.
This is a spirit.
Puzzled it watches the latest arrivals, an invisible curl of cold air above the sea. A white yacht has been opened up by sharp coral and the sea water is already washing away the signs of life inside with an antiseptic sting. Near by, on a small island, a man and a woman are lying in exhausted sleep. A heap of their possessions salvaged from the wreck is stacked where dark fronds drop to the beach. The spirit moves closer, curious to see what manner of creatures these are. It sees a thin trail of blood running to where the man lies, and even now oozing slowly from a wound in his left foot where the dark red liquid stiffens. The coral can be cruel to the unwary or the hasty. The woman has curled into a ball. Foetus like, she mutters some premonition of birth as the spirit touches her. Startled, it skitters away into the thickets behind, and has soon forgotten all about them.
This is a spirit.
It is a very old spirit. Perhaps it is the oldest spirit in the green world for it has forgotten most things about life and love. Century after century it contracts, weathered away by the ceaseless contact with the living. Now it is no more than a fire fly; a speck of light dancing in the darkness. It pauses for a moment in a land very close to the volcano. Through the window of a well fashioned hut it can see Billy and Rosalind where the shadow strong moonlight shines on their small and taut naked bodies. They are making slow and serious love through the patient minutes. For a while the spirit stays, enjoying a kind of ethereal voyeurism as the lithe and vital forms perform their ecstatic acrobatics. There is an abstract sculptural beauty in the clear young skin and the contrast of pale and dark. But there is a world to patrol out there and over the millennia the spirit’s interest in these earthly matters has waned. It cannot hold concentration for long but must move forever onwards.
Throughout the hours of darkness the souls with power guard the green world. Like spies without a cause or country they collect its secrets from force of habit and horde them in the day, for when the new sun rises they must return to the earth. Their vigil is truly long for they can imagine no end to these night watches. Without release and with empty reason they must continue. The moon shines, the sea breathes and the air dreams. In emerald darkness, the spirits drift.
DMFW - 27/08/86
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