noumena

A Name Day Story

One day long ago, when Thuban was still the Polestar, a man went out to gather mushrooms, for he was of a mushroom-gathering people.  The night before, just beyond the horizon, they had seen the light of campfires reflected against the otherwise unanimous dark of the night sky.  At dawn he had set out to find a particular kind of phosphorescent mushroom that proffers clairvoyance.  Slung under one arm in a turtle-leather papoose was his baby son; this baby son of his had no name, for the mushroom-gathering people did not name their young until they were old enough to distinguish among the various plants, fungi, and lichens that those people gathered: for in their custom, names were sacred and reciprocal among all things.

At the bottom of a dank arroyo he laid the boy aside to get under a felled cypress, rotted through and quivering with clusters of long, frail mushrooms.  As he worked a scout at the head of the tribe advancing upon them spied his bent brown back between patches of green and black foliage laden with flowers.  Moments later the whole deputation descended upon him, caroming down into that florid crevasse like dislodged boulders, checked here and there by tangles of vines, whooping and wheeling, and had scarcely bashed him to death with their war hammers when they moved on, howling with exultation.  They were a marauding, war-making people.

They were also a wind-listening people, who addressed all their metaphysical queries and requests for war-luck to the sky, who ascertained the future by climbing to the highest, rockiest heights, to hear out the wind’s night-howling, and whose dead’s ashes had to be released into a fierce gale before their souls could be freed.  The unluckiest thing of all was to die during a doldrums, and they avoided low, swampy places, such as the home of the mushroom-gatherers; but they had come to that place, against the soothsaying of their oldest man, because they lived off booty and the times were lean.

The mushroom-gatherers were slaughtered completely.  Neither tribe knew the use of metal, but the wind-listeners did nothing but make war while the mushroom-gatherers, who were big, vegetarian folk isolated in a swampland, had never known it:  Indeed their last murder had been hearsay two generations old.

After the battle the wind-listeners went about preparing a feast, but they were disoriented by the stagnant air, redolent with mud, and were caught unawares by an evil swamp spirit that laid out two dozen of their number with a violent, bilious fever.  A rearguard was posted amidst the fire-blacked bricks of the extinct people’s village until the afflicted would die or recover.

That same night one of their maidens went out walking.  Her name was Cumulonimbus-But-Portentous-of-Static-Electricity—a much shorter and prettier name in their language, now long gone from all memory, vanished together with a fifty-thousand-year-old tree of languages, of which theirs was but one leaf.  She was not sick but left behind as a caretaker, and it was her habit to get away at night to sing.  She was just traversing the path above the ravine where the scout party had initiated its attack when a curious thing happened.  Down in the arroyo a swamp-bear, who had been munching beetles under the felled cypress, had just ingested some of the phosphorescent mushrooms when she came upon the child in the turtle-leather papoose.  She snuffled the baby’s naked belly and the unfamiliar scent triggered a sudden delirium.  All the scents that comprised the world for her became intensely sharpened and intensely strange.  She was afraid, and she lumbered away groaning with fear but the baby, who all the time until then had been slumbering against the warm earth, was tickled by her wet nose and began to laugh.

For three days, Cumulonimbus nursed the baby in secret.  Much like a bear she had that sort of inexhaustible motherly energy that absolutely excludes the rest of the world as a presumptive enemy.  On the third day a sick baby succumbed to fever.  He had been the son of a widower warrior who had gone on campaigning with the others.  When she discovered that little body, cold in its soiled swathing, Cumulonimbus took the chance to swap the live infant for the dead one.  She secreted the tiny corpse out of camp under pretense of going night-singing, built a fire well out of sight in the same efflorescent gully where the other babe’s father still lay in the blood-irrigated humus, cremated him, and bundled up his ashes for safekeeping until she could return to the windy plains with the rest of her people.

Now the dead boy’s name had been Cirrus—an extremely common name among wind-listeners—and that is what everyone thereafter called the son of the mushroom-eaters.  The tribe of wind-listeners roamed the earth, singing, listening to the wind, and visiting war and mayhem upon all the riparian or agrarian peoples whom they crossed.  Cirrus grew up quickly.  Altostratus-at-Dawn, Cirrus’s supposed father, was a sullen and especially dangerous warrior who regarded the boy with a mix of indifference and suspicion.  He also disliked Cumulocirrus, whose singing annoyed him.  (In truth, she was an awful singer, which is why she went out night-singing alone, and never married; for the wind-listeners correlated a beautiful voice with fertility.)

Little Cirrus came to be known and teased for his devotion to his adoptive mother, whose bad singing was the not earliest but the most constant sound he had known.  After 121 new moons he was taken away from her to be sired in the war trade.  Under the tutelage of the warrior caste he gained renown for his ability to track enemies and to see the future.  He also grew to enormous proportions:  Before he had even known a woman he was the tallest man in the whole tribe.  They all said he was taller than a bear on its hind legs, until one day Cirrus disproved them by walking right up to face a bear:  In his right hand he clenched a ready javelin, but the bear, suspicious and rather affronted, merely dropped to all fours and sauntered off snorting.

Cirrus grew to be so large and skilled at combat that Tornado, his supposed uncle and for many years chieftain, began to fear him:  Tornado was not so old as to have had his fill of rule, and he plotted the young man’s demise.  Cirrus was sent to the front of every war party, but always came out of battle untouched.  The old chief ordered audacious attacks, even against adobe-walled cities, and lost many men, but never the inexplicably broad-backed adolescent, whose fame was redoubled with every new exploit.  Tornado, secretly worked into a fury and unable to sleep, would walk about at night cursing the skies for engendering such a colossus among his people; and then, fearful of fate and full of contrition, begging the skies to becloud Cirrus’s clairvoyance, which he suspected of being the ultimate source of his power.

Such were things when Altostratus went away to climb to the top of an enormous red plateau that had appeared to the west of them.  For eleven days he communed with the winds.  On the twelfth day, the tribe was gathered around a bonfire of saguaro husks, singing the song that was sung after eating, when Cirrus roared for silence.  Their clapping ceased.  A babbling toddler was silenced with a slap upside the head.  Cirrus alone stood, staring at the horizon, a deerskin cape about his shoulders.  Like sunflowers in the evening the tribe’s faces rotated west.  There was naught to be seen out there but the incandescent line of the planet’s circumference, wavering and delirious, broken only by the opacity of the plateau’s base.  What Cirrus could see out on that plain, sparsely dotted with long-shadowed sagebrush and creosote, the tribe could not see.  The saguaro fire ululated, bowed hither and thither by the harassing wind, and swept low out over the dirt, as if it too would flee westward to slip down over the horizon with the fugitive sun.  For a long time they waited.

“Speak!” called out Dust-Storms-That-Begrit-The-Teeth.

But Cirrus did not speak.  Finally a faraway gaggle of coyotes was set to barking and the tribe began to murmur:  Who could be night-walking out there?  At last the head and shoulders of a hooded figure became discernible against the aquamarine sky.  Whoever it was, he was coming towards them at a near-run.  Eventually someone reckoned Altostratus by his gait, but Cirrus already knew.  When he was in full view of the bonfire Altostratus flung away his bearskin haik without breaking stride.  Clutched against his belly was a long, unsheathed dagger, and his eyes glittered with reptilian hate.  Cirrus faced him.  Old Tornado, seated under a mound of rugs, stroked his upper lip and watched his brother Altostratus draw closer.  When Altostratus was nigh upon them two elders stood one just after the other as if to speak but Altostratus silenced them with an inhuman scream and charged.

Cirrus knocked the dagger from his hand and with an easy blow sent the weathered warrior reeling.  Altostratus scrabbled for the dagger in the dirt and came at Cirrus again.

“Die!” he screamed, but again Cirrus clobbered him with an offhanded swipe.  On all fours in the dust Altostratus seethed, a tendril of drool swinging from his lower lip.  Before he could make for the dagger again six braves had restrained him.

At dawn Cirrus, who had not slept, set out with a woven hamper of provisions and his spear.  He had been unwilling to kill his father, and that trial by ordeal had proved the truth of Altostratus’s vision:  Cirrus was an interloper, of alien stock, wind-deaf.  Cumulonimbus wept for her adoptive son, the baby who laughed at bears, but as a surrogate she could not speak to his birthright.  They parted without a word.

For years Cirrus roamed the earth alone.  He passed through many lands, each one novel to his eyes.  He saw jungles, mountain ranges, glaciers, and the ocean.  He bore witness to fabular megafauna, mammoths and mastodons and every manner of tuskèd pachyderm; lions with huge fangs protruding an arm’s length from carrion-stinking maws; bugling elks with moss-laden antlers; superannuated tortoises with impenetrable armor, massive, like locomotive boulders; dreadlocked muskox like walking wigwams that exhaled foul steam and shat piles of black stones; and once, from the vantage of a high crag where he had crawled to escape a plague of mosquitoes, the largest living thing he had ever seen, a beast without analogue, evidently some manner of reptile, lumbering slowly and alone across a whistling plain with its head down, its serpentine tail undulating horizontally.  He witnessed lightning storms that lasted for days and took on unspeakable forms, like the electrical labors of interstellar spiders; blizzards that seemed to annihilate even the possibility of color; and hailstorms that massacred bison herds.

His heart, in the first days of his banishment all freighted with bale, became toughened by solitude.  In time he lost consciousness of himself.  He stopped making fires.  His game and forage he ate raw, and then live.  His cape disintegrated.  His hair knotted and thickened into crude braids, reached his waist, and then ceased to grow.  Finally, he began to forget his language.  He realized this one day while staring at a spray of tiny white flowers of a kind that Cumulonimbus had favored, but whose name he had lost.  One by one the names of things fell away; and finally, once nothing had a name, he ceased to move about in the world.  He no longer went from here to there, and from there to further on, but the world became like a river that flowed around him: a shimmering aggregate of colors and shapes that was ever-morphing but ever-fixed in one place, like staring at one spot in a river from the riverbank.  The fevered dream-flow brought marvelous sights up before his eyes and dragged them swirling away never to be seen again.  He knew no fear and no desire.  Nothing was definite, and everything lacked precedent.  His energy waxed and waned, cyclically he grew weary and not weary, but he no longer distinguish between waking and sleeping, and at last he ceased to think altogether.

In such a state, weary, on his knees, in a place that had grown warm and wet and filled with the croaking of gaudy macaws, there appeared before his eyes a cluster of strange phosphorescent shapes.   His hand—what a strange simian spiderform—reached out and plucked a few of the glowing mushrooms, and he ate them.  His sense of taste had become supernaturally percipient and the taste was bitter but palliated by a sort of oleaginous menthe totally unknown to him.  He stared at a fern.  And then something happened.  The fern was cognizant of him.  Instantly it fled, sucking itself down between a cleft in lichenous rock.  Everything else of vegetable matter did likewise, whisking downward into gaps in the earth or exploding into evaporative flight like multitudinous flocks of green birds alighting to disappear skyward.  The world was transformed into a hard and mineral wasteland and there arose cragged mountains to his right, terrible peaks ringing with lightning, and to his left an abyss dropped away, a razorous valley where far below a river of mercury wound and wended, roiling silver.  A perpetual night had fallen and in the furthest distances, past vast plains of harrowed igneous and angelfire dancing over iron slag the terrain appeared like dark and irregular floes afloat on a sea of glowing lava.  His longtime dreamstate of benumbed peace was stripped from him by the austerity of that world blowing straight through him with the force of a cold interstellar wind, and with it all the deferred sorrow of some twelve years of solitude.  He clutched his scarred knees and pressed his face into his lap, come to rest at last on a narrow switchback path high above the mercury river and its poisonous bellows, far below the frozen stone peaks clanging with sterile electricity.  He succumbed to terror and nausea, falling to his side, moaning like a sick animal.

It was then he heard a light clopping noise close by.  It was coming from around the bend in the path.  He looked up and saw a small doe.  Her slender neck outstretched, she tentatively stepped towards him, each hollow hoofstep making a small echo against the rock wall.  She did not appear injured or sick or lost.  She looked perfectly ordinary: ordinary, perfect, and beautiful.  Still trembling, he pushed himself sitting up.  She approached him with caution but without fear.  And it seemed—some new sensation now—that with every step she took, an invisible weight was levied upon him, a ponderous layer of somnolence.  He was transfixed, but his eyes were closing.  Clop, clop, clop: the soporific poundage increased.  She had reached him, and it was only with an agonized resistance to the enormous torpor dragging him downward that he was able to look up into her eyes—not round obsidian deer eyes at all, but primate eyes, with white sclera, black pupils, and irises that spun around them like microscopic planets of blue, brown, and green gas.  He could hold out no more, and gave up to oblivion.  But it was not the phantasmagoric sleep of his wander-years, ridden with hallucinatory analogues of waking life.  The sleep to which he succumbed was total, save for one sound.  A female voice, in a language he had never heard before but understood perfectly, spoke to him out of that blackness.

The surprise, the effortless percipience of an unknown language aroused some imperfectly sedated volition within him, and he tried to speak back:  But he had no mouth.  He heard no more.  There was not even blackness.

When he awoke, flies were crawling on his face.  He waved them away.  He was on his back, evidently in some swampland.  His stomach growled.  Everything seemed extremely tangible—painfully tangible: the moist earth that clung to his back; the snarl of an insect swarm; the smell of a river somewhere nearby; black vines, twisted and articulate against a gray sky; an ache in his head; an acrid taste in his mouth.  The spell of solitude was broken.  And he knew the names of everything.

“Fern,” he said, touching a leaf.  He looked up.  “Egret.”  It was not the wind-listeners’ language, but a language all his own.  He stood up.  “Cattail.  Bittern.  Mud.  Man.”

Standing he could see water.  His feet were on a dry hammock dense with hardwood trees.  He walked over to the water and parted thrushes with his hand.  Kneeling, he found a place at the base of the paper-sharp stems where the water was clear.  For a while, he stared at his own ape face, the hollows from which his ape eyes peered.  Then he broke up the reflection and palmed water into his parched and sucking lips.  When he had drank his fill he stood again, and began walking in the direction of a name.