The Ghosts of Heaven (3 page)

long feathered shafts,

which she will use before the dark is done.

 

VII

At the water's edge, the great lake waits,

lapping lazily against the shore,

against the shins of the people as they climb aboard the canoes.

These boats are old,

but they have made this journey many times,

and the people believe in their boats.

They push out.

Climb aboard.

Four to a canoe.

One in front to see.

Two in the middle to paddle,

one to carry the weapons that they will need to kill the beasts.

The half-moon light

guides their way.

The night air is wet and cool,

and they shiver from the air on their skin.

Their furs lie on the ground, far behind them;

wet fur is heavy and colder than nothing at all,

but they shiver as the air strokes their skin.

Soon, the two who paddle will be warm

from their work,

while the others

will feel the cold all the way to the far shore.

The far shore; half a night away.

Paddles dip, silently,

unseen,

each stroke leaves twin spirals

spinning in the water behind.

In, push, out.

Twin spinning spirals in the night-dark water.

 

VIII

She watches.

The one who goes to the cave pulls off his fur.

He points at the boy, who does the same.

They turn and look at her, just once.

He who goes to the caves gestures now,

and her furs fall to the ground.

He who goes to the caves nods, grunts, satisfied.

He points to the things she will carry, turns,

and walks into the night forest,

under the cliffs, that hang high above them

and the people,

and the boats and the beasts,

and the lake,

and everything.

He who goes to the cave leads the way,

with the blue-gray light by which to see,

but he knows the way because he has made it his own.

It has become his.

Till now, when he hands it on to the boy he has chosen.

The boy's mind is full of fear,

the old man's mind feels only the years.

As she walks behind, the basket digs

into her bare skin.

The bow is slung across her shoulders,

the arrows in her hand.

The torches sit,

unlit, in the basket on her back.

Grasses whip against her legs, but her feet are tough.

And in the unseen green by her feet,

nesting and alarmed,

a snake coils, ready to strike.

Its body pulls in on itself, around and around,

and it tenses, holds.

But they pass and it uncoils,

curling around its eggs once more.

So she doesn't see the snake,

and yet, she's thinking.

She's thinking about the mark she made

in the fireside sand.

Something is trying to speak to her.

But it goes as soon as it tries to appear in her thoughts.

Then she's thinking about something else.

Three things:

the fronds of ferns,

the shell of the snail, and then,

a falcon.

She saw the bird on the walk before the waterfall.

Saw it stooping from the sky

Saw how it dropped, not in a line,

but in the shape of the shell,

the form of the fern tip.

Round and down,

round and down, far below to the ground.

The falcon, the ferns, the shell.

They are all trying to tell her something,

but she does not know what it is.

She cannot know what it is. Not yet.

 

IX

The cave.

The cave has waited for almost all of time,

waited for the people to come and make their marks.

The cave has waited since the rocks were young,

just after the face of the world cooled,

when the volcanoes grew still,

when the cliffs were pushed up to the sky.

It was a long wait,

during which,

nothing lived.

Stars burned out in the heavens while it waited,

until finally some tiny filament found a way to copy itself.

Some long strand, of twisting complexity,

which made itself anew, and then there were two.

Ages ached through the heaving dark,

and burning light, as the filaments grew,

slowly organized, preparing for the invasion,

the eruption, of life.

And then the cave waited no more,

as ferns grew at its feet, spread, and changed,

and then there were plants, primal and bare

the first flowers and brutal trees

that reached into the air

with the energy of the young,

with the infectious power of the young information inside them,

and the cave was no longer alone.

Then came the beasts, the first small creatures,

things that crawled without eyes,

things that slithered,

things that heard by smell

and saw with sound,

things with hard shells,

things without bones.

Next there were legs,

fur and teeth, fangs

and horns and now, at last,

the people,

come to the high hanging cave

to make marks in the dark.

For lifetimes of men,

they have come to the cave,

and as the hunters hurl their spears,

they draw the beasts on the wall.

But before they can draw the beasts,

before they can draw a horse or deer or bull,

they must announce themselves to the dark,

with the print of their hand at the mouth of the cave.

It is their way; each and every one who has gone to the caves

has left the outline of their hand on the wall.

Ochre blown through a reed,

red powder blown over the hand held against the rock,

and the negative print of the hand is made.

Then, each one who goes to the cave

must make it
his
mark and his alone,

with some sign inside the outline:

two dots, perhaps; three lines.

Crossed lines.

Forking lines.

Five dots.

Each one different, and he who goes to the cave now

has made his mark over forty times, so old is he.

Forty times the same mark: two lines.

Two lines.

Two lines he will make again,

on this, his final trip.

It is two lines he has in his mind,

as he walks with the boy,

and the girl who bleeds but who does not give children.

 

X

Through the wet, dark forest

she walks,

behind the boy, behind the one who goes to the caves,

who leads the way by owl light;

that half shine of the moon, which will operate on them tonight.

The basket is hurting her back.

She stops for a moment

while the ferns wind around her feet,

and lifts the weight from her.

Waits.

Then walks on after the boy and the man

while the ferns cry out after her

saying, understand us! Know us! Be us!

She doesn't hear them,

because her eyes are on the back of the boy

who is to become what she wants to be.

She sees

his weak arms,

his skinny legs,

and knows his bad eyes need him to keep close to the old man ahead.

She hurries, closes the gap

and almost slams into the boy.

The face of the cliff:

the way leads up into the dark

He who goes to the cave doesn't stop,

doesn't look

as he whispers one word:
climb
.

So they climb.

Through trailing plants, they make their way

hand over hand, toehold by toehold.

In the mind of he who goes to the cave

is a single thought; dawn is close.

As they reach the height of the tallest tree,

a breeze hits them, fresh dawn air,

and he doesn't need to look over his shoulder,

to see that the light is coming soon.

They need to hurry.

He increases the pace of his climb,

and the boy is left behind,

and behind him, lower down,

she knows why she was brought to carry,

because the boy is not strong enough to

climb with the basket on his back.

As she comes to the treetops,

she can see handholds ahead of her,

and yet the boy is holding her up.

She calls to him, gently,

worried he might fail and fall back to the forest floor.

He doesn't reply, but he moves on,

and so, slowly, they lift their way up the rock wall,

which runs with water and young green moss.

Her back is hurting, and her arms ache

as she pulls herself higher,

one reach at a time.

She looks up.

He who goes to the cave has gone from sight,

and with relief she knows the climb is nearly done.

Three more reaches and the boy goes, too,

slips from sight onto the shelf.

Three more reaches, and her hand waves into air,

her wrist is grabbed by the old man,

and he pulls her onto the shelf.

Crawls to safety, next to the boy,

who lies panting beside her.

She rolls onto her back,

sits up, and her eyes widen.

There is the world before her,

the whole world

wide and far below her.

The forest through which they walked,

the lake, and the plains beyond.

The far hills still too dim to see,

but the lake sits like a slab of black.

 

XI

Hurry
, says the old man, and they get to their feet.

He leads the way along the shelf,

wide enough not to fear falling,

uneven enough to make the going slow,

but he will not go slowly, because the sun won't wait for them.

The boy is lagging,

and her feet are dragging;

the way has been long and the man

though old, is strong.

He has surprised them both

with this strength, and they hurry to keep up,

through the skinny trees that dare to grow on the cliff side.

Then, they are at the cave.

He who makes the marks stops,

and for the first time,

he looks at her.

Fire
, he says, and with beautiful relief

she slips the basket from her back.

Fire.

She has brought two torches,

each a haft of good, strong wood,

wound around at the end with

resin-soaked hair.

She bends to work fast,

taking the fire-sticks;

spinning one on the other

by means of a bow,

a miniature version of the thing on her back,

but with a looser string.

A string that winds around the stick,

so that by working the bow the stick spins.

She's done it a thousand times before.

Spinning the first stick

in the hole she's made on the flat of the second,

till smoke comes, and then flame.

A thousand times, and yet,

it's only now that she sees something.

She sees how the string of the bow winds round the spinning stick,

and suddenly she thinks of the snail,

and the falcon, and the fronds of the ferns.

He who goes to the cave shouts at her.

She sees she has made a flame and not even known it,

because her eyes are full of the string of the bow.

From the spinning, fire has come

and she touches the end of the torch to the flame.

Hands it to the old man.

Who turns and goes to the cave.

Come
, he shouts over his shoulder,

and the boy follows.

She watches them go, then

she slides the basket back onto her back,

and she follows, too, clambering

over rocks and through brush

into the mouth of the cave,

desperate to see what she has always wanted to see,

so desperate she doesn't heed the warning

that her nose is giving her:

the faintest hint of a smell.

 

XII

There! Just inside the mouth:

Hands! Dozens of them.

Red hands in negative.

The ancestors of the people,

each hand made by the one who goes to the cave,

made before he goes to work.

The old man beckons to the boy,

points at her, but before she can get the reeds and the red,

the darkness erupts with a roar.

It happens so fast.

So fast, that at first

she doesn't know what it is.

A shape flies at them.

Before the shape lands, the boy is dead.

His head hangs by a cord from his shoulders,

stripped by a giant paw.

A cave lion.

It lands as the boy's body

pumps blood across the cave mouth.

The lion roars.

She stands. Frozen.

Her eyes on the boy,

and she remembers how he came from the belly

of the woman that
she
came from.

In another eye blink, the beast turns,

ready to run at them.

It does, but the old man is quicker

than the dead boy and leaps to one side.

Not fast enough,

the lion catches him with a claw,

and he collapses on the rocks, screaming.

He writhes on the floor.

Blood pouring from between his fingers,

pushing from long wounds in his side.

She scrambles from the cave.

The lion sees her and leaves the old man

to his pain.

It takes two steps, and she turns in time