The Cleft (3 page)

This above is the earliest account we have of how we ‘Monsters' saw the ‘Clefts'. There is no way of proving it but I would say it is a memory of something well in the past of the speaker. It has the smoothed-over much-repeated quality of a tale from long ago. There is nothing here like the raw angry fragment (which I did not copy out because of its relishing vindictive cruelty) which is the very first we hear from the Clefts.

To make a history from this kind of material is not easy, but I have to say in justification that seldom did the Memories of the Clefts and Monsters differ very much. Often the tone was different, and once it was believed that different events were being recorded. But on the whole Clefts and Monsters (or Squirts) lived the same story. Now I again begin my tale.

They lived on the shore of a warm sea on an island that was in fact very large, but they never went far from home shore. They were of the sea, sea creatures, eating fish and seaweeds and some shore-growing fruits. They used tall caves with sandy floors but they might as easily sleep out on the rocks as under the cave roofs. How long had they lived there? And at once we come to a main difficulty – indeed,
this historian's main problem. The Clefts did not know when their kind had first crawled from the waves to breathe air on the rocks, and they were incurious. They did not think to wonder or ask questions. They met the query – but this came much later – ‘How old are you, as a people?' with bland, blind enquiry: ‘What do you mean?' Their minds were not set for questions, even a mild interest. They believed – but it was not a belief they would defend or contest – that a Fish brought them from the Moon. When was that? Long, slow, puzzled stares. They were hatched from the moon's eggs. The moon laid eggs into the sea, it lost a part of itself, and that was why it was sometimes large and glowing and sometimes pale and thin. As for their own capacity to give birth, they had never questioned it. That was how things had always been. Nothing changed, could change, would change – but this was more a feeling than something they could or would enlarge on or even mention. They lived in an eternal present.
For how
long?
Useless to ask. When the first ‘Monster' was born it was seen merely as one of the deformed babes that had sometimes to occur, and then there was another ‘Monster' all shaped in the same horrid and disturbing way. They were put out on the Killing Rock, not fed to the fishes, perhaps, because of a superstitious feeling that in the sea the Monsters might proliferate and even crawl back to the shore. Can we
use the word ‘superstition' about creatures who did not live in any kind of reality we would recognise?

I believe the birth of the Monsters was the first bad or even disturbing thing to have happened to them.

Yes, there were high water-line marks on their cave walls, big waves must at some time have come rushing up, more than once, but these were creatures of the sea. There is no way of finding out what they felt about monster waves – their songs are not histories or stories but a kind of keening, sounding like the wind when it sighs and murmurs.

It was not the first Monster that shocked them out of their dream. A twisted arm or leg, a deformed hand, even blurred features or a misshapen head – that kind of thing was sad but not threatening, as when they saw the second or third or succeeding babes with the clutch of protruding flesh there in front where they had smooth flesh, a neat slit, fringed with soft hair. A horror … and then another … and then another … they could not wait to get these misborn babes out on to the Killing Rock. Those squirting protruding things there in front, which changed shape all the time, oh horrid, ugly, there was something about them that …

Well, the eagles carried them off and ate them, took them out of sight.

But everything had changed. It must have been the
same as when you poke with a stick one of those torpid stranded beach creatures, which squirms as it feels the stick.

Shock after shock was felt by this community of dreaming creatures and it was their helpless panic that caused their cruelty.

And when it became evident that the Monsters were not going to stop appearing there was this new threat, that the numbers of the community were always reducing.

And there was fear that some female who had given birth to a Monster would then have another. How would she have been viewed? There is no record anywhere of early animosity among these creatures. Was she feared? Did she fear herself? Did a female who had given birth to more than one Monster procure for herself an abortion when finding again that she was pregnant? We have no answers to these questions.

How long did that early time last?

There is no help for us in the Memories.

There is a way of not measuring, but getting a feel of the long process. The deep grave or pit where the girls were sacrificed was crammed with bones, and it was a deep hole. At its bottom were cracks and apertures where rocks had fallen outwards, and through these could be glimpsed the lower layers of bones, not fresh and whole, like the top layers, but fractured and
fragmented, and lower down still, on the floor of this great hole was a layer of whitish stuff, the dust of bones. It was a deep layer. It must have taken a long time for these bones to turn to dust, even though winds and salty wet blew into the holes and gaps, hastening the process.

It was not likely that these people who seemed to live in a dream were regular in their sacrificing, or regular in anything; impulses and rhythms we may hardly guess at governed their lives. But while there was no way of counting the skeletons or making an estimate of what the dust layers meant in terms of time, we may confidently say that we are talking of long periods of time – ages.

Of changelessness, of an existence like those fish that wash back and forth on the tides, responding to the moon's changes. And then the real change, the defining change, the birth of the deformed ones, the Squirts, the Monsters. The beginning of squirming emotional discomfort, unrest, discontent: the start of awareness of themselves, their lives. The start only, like the affront the stranded fish must feel at the probing stick.

There is a part of this tale that has to remain dark. Yes, yes, previous attempts at solving the mystery have offered solutions more like myths than probabilities. How did the community of males begin? We cannot believe that the eagles fed the infants regurgitated raw
meat and kept them warm in their feathers. No, there is a solution and this is it.

The defective infants put out on the Killing Rock were for – how long? – food for the eagles. And the very first Monsters must have been too. But then – but when we don't know – boys kept as ‘pets' and playthings by the Clefts escaped. We know that small boys as young as four, certainly aged five, six, seven, can achieve feats of endurance and even of strength. Two, three, four little boys ran away from the caves above the sea. The eagles, though they were very big, many times the size of the eagles we know, could not have carried children that size, not for fair distances. The children saw where the eagles flew back, to their nests, past the Killing Rock, over the valley, up the mountain – and they followed. Up on the ridge, where the eagles' nests were, they did not linger. How terrifying those enormous birds must have been. Down the other side and into the valley where the great river was. The children had been reared on fish, and here were fish again, though different ones. They had been kept warm in the caves. But they were still little children, and how very large the valley they found themselves in must have seemed. How can we not admire them for their daring and their cleverness? The river was wide, deep, and rushed along. Yet they had to catch fish in it. How did they shelter? It did not at once become possible to make huts and sheds:
they had never seen anything like them. They had seen the eagles' nests and they dragged sticks and then larger sticks and made piles of them, and crept into them when dark came. Then they grew bigger and stronger and they began leaning fallen branches together to make shelters. This was an easy climate; they did not have to fear cold. But let us not forget the beasts in the forests that stood at a distance on either side of the great river. How they escaped the beasts has to remain a bit of a marvel. Did some god or goddess aid the little things? But in their records is never the mention of divine intervention. Yes, they were the children of the Eagle, but that is as far as divinity went, for them.

We must remember the first little males were badly mutilated, in ways I for one would rather not dwell on. Their ‘squirts' had been so mishandled, pulled and played with, and their sacs had sometimes been cut off for the game of extracting the stones, and above all, they had never known tenderness or maternal care. Their mothers had fed them, on the orders of the Old Shes, but reluctantly, and never enough. We may like to soften this painful story by imagining a Cleft who did feel some affection for her misbegotten babe, but she would have had to hide what she felt, and any caresses or care must have been sketchy. And they were tough, and hardy and skilful at avoiding attention. Skinny little boys, but
strong and fearless, improbably surviving, but at least they were away from their tormentors, the Clefts.

Then something remarkable happened. The eagles brought them some boy babies, left out on the Killing Rock. Hungry yelling babies, but not mutilated; and how were the little boys to feed them?

Not only dangerous wild animals lived in the forests, friendly ones did too. The little boys saw deer, with fawns and probably had their first lessons in parental love, watching does with their fawns. They crept close, to watch. A doe stood its ground, unafraid: there was no reason yet for any animal to fear our kind. And besides, this was a child, and needy. The boy stood fondling the doe's soft fur, while the fawn butted or licked his legs. Then the fawn began to suckle. And the boy, kneeling, did the same. The doe stood, and turned her head and licked the child. And so that was how began the intimacy between the children and the deer.

There was a song, ‘We are the children of the deer', but it was never as compelling as the songs about the eagles.

When the new babies howled and screamed and the little boys knew they had to be fed, what could have been more natural than for the babes to be taken to the does, who had soon to learn to lie down, the babes beside them. And what did the does gain from this? We may speculate. It is my belief that animals
are more intelligent than we ever give them credit for. After all, it was a she wolf who suckled our forefathers, Romulus and Remus. Her statue and the two babes are much loved by us. Probably the beginning of this bond was the terrible need of the babes, who were dying for lack of what the deer – and the she wolf – had in plenty. Need calls forth its response.

And why did the eagles take to saving the babes and bringing them over the mountain to the lads, instead of devouring them? For one thing, the boys caught fish for the eagles, and laid them on the grass, and the great birds, having delivered their burden of screaming babies, would stand over the fish, enormous fish, and feed there, and often they came between deliveries of babes, for their meals. Or they would take a fish or part of one – there were very large fish in the river – up into the mountain for their nestlings.

And the second wave of Monsters, or Squirts, were not mother-deprived, but were licked and nuzzled and fed by the kindly deer, who sometimes played with the fawns as if they were fawns themselves.

The feeding babies and deer would have to lie down together. There were no vessels or containers then. Soon, though, shells from the river became utensils, and gourds. There was not nearly as much weed in the river as there was in the sea, but these boys grew into strong lads, and the seashore was not far for
hardy boys. This shore was a distance from the Clefts' shore, but continuous with it. The boys did not know for a long time that if they had journeyed in one direction along their beaches – they had beaches, the Clefts only had smooth warm rocks – they would encounter the Clefts, their persecutors.