Daygo's Fury (11 page)

Nine tribes attended the gathering each year. The Abashabi and the Afran Kallu, Kororofawa, Langbwasse, Maschascha, Amarcocche, Tusselange, Ait-Atta and Pani-Dui. With daylight shortening, and exhaustion from the long trek kicking in, there were only brief greetings shared between them. They picked their hut amongst the Abashabi, and Niisa set to work with his family, carefully clearing every piece of undergrowth that surrounded it, carefully looking for snakes, insects, spiders and ants that could prove fatal if they went unnoticed. As the light was dying, they spread more Tulsip juice around their hut from the container his mother had brought. His father made a final check before they bedded down for the night, falling quickly into sleep after the long journey.

******

The next morning Niisa and Chiko’s routine was disturbed by the underbrush pressing in upon them from all sides, the freedom of their movement was suppressed into tighter, more functional stretches, and for the morning meal they returned to the hut where their mother was already sitting up and arranging their food. Dikeledi still lay prone and grunting as they finished their meal. With a laugh, Fumnaya slapped him on the bottom.

“Up! Up!” she cried, and with a growl he rose and stumbled from the hut. When he returned, he stopped underneath the entrance of the hut and spread his arms wide, his face split in a broad grin. He shook his hands in excitement and the women laughed, his mother with an amused smile and half shake of her head, his sister falling over on her side with a high-pitched giggle. Niisa watched the pantomime blankly, chewing contentedly on the last of his nuts.

They spent all of that day clearing the underbrush from the Rutendon, the name given for the clearing where the gathering was held each year. Unlike the day before, there were many greetings made and breaks taken. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters were all reunited, having been separated to their respective tribes for a year. Their wives and husbands hugged the family they had married into, knowing that this week was about them and their spouse more than anything else.

Niisa spent some time pondering the place’s name as he helped with the clear-up. Rutendon was “a place of belief”. Who had named it thus, and what had they in mind when they did? From the histories told from the chiefs each year, the gathering had been happening for as long as the spoken record was recalled, and its origins were mythical and folklorish, with each tribe having many tales, repeated often, full of magic and wonder, that resulted in the first gathering of the tribes.

Certainly its name seemed to have no connection with its current function. It seemed more about matchmaking now than any form of belief. It hosted the picking ceremony where adolescents could find a match whom they wished to marry. These engagements were then agreed upon by the chiefs and the parents involved, ensuring they were not close relations, and deciding which of the two would leave their tribe to join the other. The following year the gathering would host the marriage ceremony. They also celebrated the births of the previous year and marked the passing of the dead. The gathering was the fundamental of tribal life. It allowed each tribe to live in their separate areas of forest, where food was plentiful and the hunt bountiful, knowing that they would meet their loved ones each year.

While Niisa wondered at the men who had defined the layout of tribal life for centuries to follow and pondered its lack of change over that time, the rest of the tribespeople got slowly drunk on cauim. Many sacks were opened in small secrecy and handed out, having been concealed and smuggled through the journey. There were conspiratorial sips taken amongst friends and family throughout the day as wives played along and pretended not to notice, even as they engaged in a similar enterprise; the discretion adding to the joys of what could have been called the first ritual of the gathering. Amidst laughter, drinks, hugs, kisses and jokes, with many spending time to break and bask in the sunlight, the clearing was steadily brought back to being a human town. The chatter was ceaseless throughout the day. They seemed to have so much to tell each other for a year that was the same as any other, Niisa could not think of what it was.

As the light was dying, the first great fire of the gathering was set and sparked to life. Many, if not most, were quite drunk already, and traditionally the first fire did not last long into the night; the sun, the labour and the drink of the day all taking its toll on the human body. But they set that first fire, danced that first dance and they played that first song and they howled into the night in delight that the gathering was here. They smiled and laughed with one another, and for once Niisa found something enticing in the frenzy of it all.

******

They woke the next morning with heavy heads but hearts still light. Hearts that lifted them back to their feet and spread smiles across their faces, even if some were a little rueful. Today they put the final touches to the clearing and the huts, but for the most part it was a rest day, a time to lie in leisure and enjoy the quieter parts of company as they grew accustomed to seeing the sun for only the third of seven days of each year.

There was no direction to the work that was done and no obligations on Niisa or Chiko, so they could wander at their discretion. Chiko skipped away to find the girls and boys her age, only two short years from becoming an adolescent herself. Niisa walked slowly through the camp, feeling as though he were expected to do more than he would, expected to seek out and talk to and play with others wearing a right ear stone but not a left. Still, he knew his parents were too engrossed in their own celebrations to interfere with anything that he might want to do.

So, knowing that too soon he would be expected back, he walked from the clearing and into woods that were unknown and unfamiliar to him. He let his hands dangle against the vegetation, he let his toes fall into the earth, he let his eyes broaden to everything in front of him. He moved slowly, smoothly, fluidly as the wind. Everything surrounding him moved, grew, died, changed, lived. He lived in the forest until he knew it was time to return and his mind brought him back through the trees and into the clearing that man inhabited.

There he joined with the rest of them to make the many fires that would be lit that night. There was the one great bonfire where the chanting ritual would be held. There was the second bonfire, not as large or great, where the picking ceremony would be performed. Then there were the many smaller fires set throughout the clearing that the matching couples would spend their time around in privacy, to learn of each other and find interest enough to marry and spend the remainder of their lives with, in a hut in the woods, making children and continuing the life cycle of the tribes that never changed or developed into anything. He saw nothing wrong with the tribes’ life and yet he felt separate to it. It did not seem to be his path. Daygo wanted more from him. Daygo needed him in some other way. He had been born for an alternate purpose, born as part of the collective intelligence of the universe, where all things were known and predicted unconsciously. There was no overarching consciousness to Daygo, it was simply pure intelligence, pure awareness, all things engaged in movement, in life.

Once the day’s work was complete, Niisa returned to the forest, where he stayed until the light started to fade. On his way back to the clearing, a black panther stepped into his path. Her yellow eyes were bright in the fading grey as she turned her head to examine Niisa. He felt no fear, only wonder, as he looked back at it; tracing its beautiful black skin, its glowing eyes, considering all that lay within them, behind them; its intelligence, its knowledge, its purpose.

The woods were never safe after dark, when many of its predators came alive. Bar the seven nights of the gathering, the tribespeople lived by day. But that night the panther turned its head silently and padded on by. Niisa looked after it for some moments before he broke the bush back into the Rutendon.

In the grey, the great fire at the centre of the oval-shaped clearing, sparking to early life, was like a newly rising sun. Crackling short, small flames licked the sides of the wood in sharp and bright colour, the early birth of that same colour that painted the landscape behind him, dulled and watered out over the large, expansive sky, spread and fading and yet still beautiful in its last minutes; quiet, sombre, subdued and dignified against the encroaching dark, like an old man bowing his head to the inevitable with no loss of pride.

The young fire, the opposite, the child birthed into new life, raced up the wood, sharp and full of energy, spitting in its haste, in its confident defiance of the dark, full of young lustre, convinced of its complete annihilation of its opponent, as though it would eat up all the dark in the world with its light. The same colours, yet sharper, brighter, growing instead of fading; both sad and uplifting, as the briefly glimpsed future faded in the west, the reignited past burst forth in ignorance to the east, oblivious to its inevitable path, and yet admirable in its adamant folly. And still more behind it all the great joke, the everlasting humour to watch its pretending players, as though each one, from the smallest animal to the largest mammal were unique, new, special, separate, different, in the great rolls of the Daygo stream; none seeing the simplicity of truth, that they are miniscule and regular, and that yet they are everything that they truly wish for—not alone but united, joined to all and everything—not mortal but immortal, not limited but everlasting in what never ceases to be, life, Daygo, movement.

In their ignorance, they believe all the things they fear, and they wish forlornly for everything that is simple, unavoidable truth. And yet if they saw it so they would be unexplainably terrified, because they are not who they thought they were, they are not self but part of a whole.

It was in birth and death that Niisa felt that he could learn more, that he could see more, and he watched the catching fire and the setting sun with equal interest.

Throughout the clearing, the tribes began to gravitate towards the growing fire, breaking from their many small groupings to the one, a certain happy eagerness in the air. Niisa left the dying sun to join them.

As he moved towards the fire, he heard the first practice beatings of the drums and a few short chants as some playfully started warming up their voices. Many of the men started to shoulder on their ceremonial Agbada cloaks. Some of the chiefs already wore the bones of their forebears and carried their long wooden staffs in hand, occasionally shaking the hollowed-out orin sticks that hung from the top of the staffs, emitting a hollow noise to match the rolling vibrations of their song.

“It won’t be long until you have your own Agbada now,” his father had told him earlier that day, with the usual small smile on his face and a measure of anticipation greater than his own.

The chanting dance that took place each night was something that Niisa longed for perhaps more than anyone else in the Rutendon. There was something spiritual in the combined movement and noise of so many people.

As he walked closer, the light of the bonfire was blocked by the massing crowd, and he had to squeeze his way through to find his way to the fire. He recognised Tapiwa and Sekai from the Afran Kallu and Wikesa’s family from the Maschascha who were his first cousins, his father’s brother who had married into the Pani-Dui and left to live amongst them, his mother’s brother who had stayed in his native Tusselange. His mother had left to join his father in the Abashabi. Everyone was a familiar face, in reality one large tribe, not nine separate ones. But only so many people could live in any area of the forest comfortably, so it made sense to make use of its limitless expanse. They touched him and ushered him through, directing him to where his family were, though it was not his family but the fire he wanted to get close to.

His sister collided into him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Ijo!” she squealed into his ear, smiled devilishly and ran away, dancing through the crowd. The drums took up a regular beat and the ten hundred plus tribespeople began to move in a steady rhythm.

The fire crackled and licked at the stacked wood, sending sparks into the surrounding people, still only at its infancy, only now starting to gather real heat. There would be no extra fuel added to it, the chanting and movement would match the tempo set by the fire, reaching its zenith as the heat became unbearable and the flames climbed into the sky.

Niisa joined effortlessly into the chant. The dance was free, as was his voice; ten hundred people finding their own way in the mass of noise, in the burning fire, in the pressing bodies.

The sky turned dark but the red moon watched on, almost pale in the blackness, smooth like the shiny surface of a stone, unlike its pale counterpart that showed only the barest curved line of white on its blotched face.

Niisa’s mind returned to look back into the panther’s bright eyes and locked to that vision as he danced and sang.

The tempo grew as the flames grew bolder and higher. What began as an out-of-sync concoction of noise and movement converged together in common, complimenting purpose.

Niisa’s spirits rose with the noise, his vision dispersed, everything left in movement and song, in unity and connection and an unknown known until it seemed that it was not ten hundred tribespeople that acted but one collective intelligence and will.

In his glazed eyes, in his glazed being, Niisa felt something more than he ever had before, saw it with something more or less than his vision, with a knowing that eroded all else. Limitless, invisible connections seemed to sparkle in the night air, connections that tied all together. But more, as his eyes raised to the red moon, he felt an attraction between it and all things, a connection, a synchronicity that he could not understand but somehow knew was present.