The Bone Forest (22 page)

There can be only one explanation…
The forest is being cleared
!

It is hard to make out detail. The clearing is being made on the shores of the lake, which is brim full and brilliant in the dawn sun. Now I have a decision to make: do I extinguish the fires? But that might risk destroying whatever or whoever is burning the forest. If I leave them, however, they may bring barrenness to the land.

There are other fires. As the day in the real world advances, so coils of smoke drift up from my right groin, from an area in the dense mass of wildwood over my belly, and from two locations on my right leg. The pricks of pain are tolerable. I wonder if the communities are related?

They have begun to fell the great elms. Through the lens I see one of them topple, a tiny shard, no bigger than a trimmed whisker, yet majestic for all of that. I suppose that whoever is clearing the wildwood is also building the first settlement lodges.

The First Totems

In my dreams I can hear the ululations and strange chanting of the forest clearers. At night, they sing and dance around the smoldering fires of the day's clearing. They are dressed in the raw, red hides and heads of beasts. The people by the lake are the Clan of the Spiny Boar. Their youngest and fittest male wears the carcass of an immense wild pig; his body is impaled with sharpened tusks, and he dances and screams his invocation to this ancestral creature. They are called
Kalokki
. In my dreams I feel the presence of forty or more individuals. They shelter in lodges made of bone and wood, whose roofs are branches sealed with lake mud. They hunt at dawn. They are building crude boats and I sense that the mist-covered lake is a place of worship to them. They drift across the lake and throw huge wooden carvings into the water. It is here, when they are on the surface of Omphalos itself, that the sound of their voices is loudest.

All sensation of hunger seems to have gone from me. The forest itself sustains me, drawing nutrients from the air, from the light. A fine mist fills my room. The sounds of the outside world have faded. There is no light, no heat, save that which streams through the window.

Creatures move on the floor of the room, among the debris. Sometimes I hear thunder, but it passes: people at the door, friends perhaps, or colleagues, but I cannot move to answer them. Time is too precious. The body forest is too fragile.

The dwellers by the lake fight for survival. A Wolf Clan has attacked them. I dreamt the pain. They burned a lodge, then were driven away. But the Wolf Clan is hungry and restless and hovers in the wildwood, watching the clearing on the lake shore, biding its time.

All of this is in the form of glimpses, half seen, half felt scenes in my restless sleep. During the night the land heaves. No doubt it disturbs the Kalokki.

If only I could communicate with them. If only their words could be heard…

I pass my hand over the lake. I hold the lens toward them, peering through its rounded glass. Perhaps they see my face. What manner of heavens do they witness, I wonder.

The
Temple Builders

Over the weeks, dust and dirt, the grime of my room, has settled on the cleared land, and fallen in and among the dense wildwood.

I have been sensing the deliberate movement of these great stones for some time now. The Clans are orga-nized. They drag the monolithic particles of dust from the forest edges and shape them, working by day, by night, chanting to the instruction of the priests. They are erecting the massive sarsens into a great circle, on the very edge of the lake itself. A mightier stone circle has never been created. By fire they dance within its ring. Travelers have come south, from the cold woods of the Sternal Valley, to witness this great construction. They have journeyed north, from the now-desert land below the Plain of the Patella. Even in those dark communities, where the forest flanks the edge of the world itself, even there they have heard of the Great Stone Ring of Omphalos. And in my dreams I hear the crying and the singing of votive dedication. They are singing up the gods. They are dancing up the powers of the forest, and the lake. And they are planning a sacrifice…

Ritual Sacrifice

Her scream of fear alerts me. In a half dreaming, half waking state, I feel the pounding of her heart. It is dawn in their world, and a heavy, cold mist hangs above the clearing and the lake. Bone horns are being sounded, and bone rattles, and skin drums, beaten with a ferocity that makes the whole lakeside shiver with anticipation of the murder to come.

She is very young. They bind her with willow wood, arms behind her back, legs crooked behind her, tied to staffs of wood. Her neck is bent back. Creeper and ivy entwine her body. She is trussed and helpless, laid in a boat on a bed of leaves. They strike out into the water. A young male voice calls for her. The drums thunder, the bone horns blast eerily through the dawn fog. Water laps at rushes against the shores of Omphalos.

Soon I sense the stillness in the center of the waters. Something is whirled around a head, and it creates a strange humming sound. Voices drone. The girl struggles, but is held so tightly that she cannot even flex a finger. A thong is tied around her neck. It tightens and her heart screams for help. The blood thunders in her head. A blow by oakwood to her skull and the water is reddened and enriched. She is placed, face down in the lake, and sinks by weight of stone to its bottom.

I feel her enter me. She is sublime in her dying. She trails her life vertically in a coil of warmth to the surface of the lake where the small boats bob and the priests watch for signs of acceptance of their sacrifice. When she settles in the debris of the navel, her eyes are closed. Something slips into my mind.

She seems to have risen from the corpse and is running…

Journey to the Underworld

Where is she running?

She seems to be in a moondream wood. The trees gleam white. They grow from the roof and sides of a great winding passage. Where is she?

The moonforest is all around her. She expands to drift among the moonbright branches. Moonlakes glimmer. She floats above them. She travels through the caverns of the underworld, round the spiral tracks, into and out of dark caves, where the land heaves and shifts, like the pulsing body of some great creature.

And in this way she spreads to the north, to the place where the ice had once lain so heavily upon the rock, scouring the soil, feeding upon the seeds below. Here is a place where the trees hum and fire burns, great streaks and flashes of fire, running through the roots and branches. Here is a fire-forest where the voices of the ancestors sing loudly, where faces peer, bodies shift, and a whole world of image echoes through the crowded wood.

She is in the fire. She spreads herself to sink into the fire-trees. She spreads through the forest, stretched thin, touching the coils of the seeds, where the forest coexists with the creatures of the past, where the codes snap and fold, twist and replicate.

Our Lady of the Chromosomes

The Boar is threatened by the Wolf.

She means that war between the Clans is killing her people. She drifts there, in the seed-codes of the forest, enveloped by nucleotides, fed by ribosomes, arrows of RNA winging from her spectral presence. What do I say to her?

MAKE A FIRE THAT IS HOTTER THAN YOU KNOW. MELT ROCK. SOME ROCKS FLOW. WHEN THE ROCK FLOWS IT WILL HARDEN INTO BRIGHTNESS AND CAN BE SHAPED INTO A BETTER KNIFE THAN BONE OR FLINT.

I
must return to the lodges of the Boar. I must return from the wasteland. I must take this vision back to them
.

How do I help her? She is a ghost in the man-forest-machine that lies upon its bed in a rancid, rotting room. The forest above has disposed of her, thinking her dead. The forest within is a place of specters and she is a ghost.

FLOW INTO THE RIVERS OF THE WORLD. FLOW INTO THE SAP. I WILL GUIDE YOU BACK THROUGH THE CAVERNS. I WILL GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE CAVERN IN THE MAN-HILL. YOU WILL RETURN TO YOUR PEOPLE IN A GREAT FLOOD FROM THE OTHERWORLD.

She dissolves from the roots of the fire-forest, flows into the blood, and drifts into the channels that drain sap from the tissues and the organs of the land. I feel the building of the flood, and the rising of the Man-Hill. By the lake, the Kalokki watch the skies in awe. An immense shadow is across the land. The cave that opens at the head of the mountain gushes. The lake is filled. The Kalokki escape the flood by climbing the giant trees. The naked goddess returns to them, ghostly white, floating above the waves, bringing her vision from the dark and fiery wastes of Hell.

Anger of the Gods

I have slept for too long. Much time has passed, and I wake to great pangs of hunger. And yet hunger had been banished from me, and thirst too. The forest had sustained me, as all forests sustain the land. Why, then, hunger now?

The Kalokki have gone. They ceased to be in my dreams. With their passing came a time of resting and sleep. I have let the world on my body grow and flourish in its own, inexorable way.

Now, though, there is a great itching. I am swathed with the cracking, crusty signs of eczema. My skin seeps a thick and stinking exudate. What has happened? Great swathes of the Pectoralis Valley, and the Belly Plain, are barren. The wildwood exists in patches only, small, amoebic spreads of green in the orange and yellow wasteland. And even through that greenness I can see great lines and tracks of red, roadways, perhaps, although what travels along them is too small to see.

A heavy smog hangs above the groin. It is an impenetrable smoke, oily to the nostrils, and sulphurous… The air of the room is filled with a distant buzzing, like machines. Even as I watch I see the edge of the forest shrink a little. The itching increases. There is pain in my bowels.

Someone is drilling deeply into the world. Seeking for what, I wonder?

I have slept too long. I have let too much time pass. I cannot stand the itching. Whilst the pain of the Kalokki's forest clearing had been a pin prick, suffered to allow them to establish their presence upon the world, this eczema is too much.

I smear and squeeze, scratch and smudge. I blow away the smoke from above my groin. I scratch at the soreness and the hard scabs of the cities. A black and tarry residue fills my fingernails and I scrape it out between my teeth.

Soon there is stillness on the land. And peace.

I will have to find food for a while, but the grasslands will soon be reestablished upon the world. Then, the first seeds of the forest will germinate and the wildwood will return.

And once more I will dream by an ancient light.

Magic Man

Crouched in the mouth of the shrine-cave, One Eye, the painter, shivered as black storm clouds skated overhead and the wind whipped down from the northern ice-wastes to plague the grasslands with its bitter touch.

The tribe should be gathered together before the darkening skies could loose their volleys of rain and lightning; then they would huddle into the cliff wall and wail and moan their misery. When the rains passed the women would come, invading the shrine-cave and screeching at One Eye because he had not stopped their soaking.

He squatted, looking out across the grasslands to the man-high rushes that waved and danced in the biting winds. Stupid women, he thought. Stupid, stupid women. They should understand that his drawings were for the spirit of the hunt, not for their own comfort. They should be pleased when their men brought home bison, deer and, increasingly, the reindeer that strayed from the snows of the northern valleys.

"One Eye!" hailed a child's voice. One Eye looked down to where a small boy scrambled up the slopes of the cliff toward the cave.

"Go away, child. Go away!" shouted the old man angrily. But he knew it would be no use. The boy, brown and dusty, crawled into the mouth of the cave and squatted there, breathing heavily. The sight of One Eye's empty eye socket staring at him no longer perturbed the would-be painter as once it had.

"I want to draw."

One Eye let his gray hair fall over his one good eye, clenched his mouth tight in an obstinate gesture of annoyance and shook his head. "Go away, child. Wait for the hunters." Outside, the wind howled against the cliff and the dark sky grew perceptibly darker.

"I want to
draw. "
Big eyes stared at the old man, childish features, open, honest. The boy was filthy; his hair was lank and filled with grass from his earlier romping. "I'm tired of making
these
!" He threw the inaccurately made axe from his hand and it clattered down the slopes to land heavily among the women below. One of them looked up and shouted angrily. She was cleaning a skin and had blood up to her elbows. The fire around which the group squatted burned low, and charred bones and wood poked blackly from the pile of ashes. An adolescent girl, underdeveloped and sulky, prodded the dying embers with a spear. The boy, in the shrine-cave above, was angry. "I want to draw a bear. One Eye, please! Let me draw a bear, please?"