Inner Circle (13 page)

‘Unbind me from the tree, Amo. I am light. I have shed the weight of pain.’ He climbed up the oak-trunk, grasped the bough and in a moment hung next to me. Below, Adam was waiting with his hands outstretched to help me down. Together they carried me into the house, put me on the bed, and then brought the child. When I woke up after a brief sleep, they stood at either side again, both silent. It was for me to speak, and I told Adam.

‘Give her a name.’ He turned his eyes aside. ‘I only had a name ready for a boy.

Yes, you give her one of your names.’ Adam looked at the sleeping child, but didn’t answer me. Then he looked at Amo, and Amo stepped back. Another glance and another step, then another, and he was leaning against the double circle on the wall. There he found courage to open his mouth:

‘I have thought and I have a name for her.’ He was waiting for a sign from Adam, but received neither permission nor a forbidding word. I didn’t want him to lose the strength he felt throbbing on his back, the strength from the circles.

‘Tell me the name you have made, Amo,’ I said.

‘I call her Irda.’

‘It has a happy bird sound, Amo. She is Irda.’ I touched the girl’s forehead and suddenly remembered the tree man’s message.

‘Has the listening bird been here since. . . .’ I couldn’t say more because inside a thought I saw myself hanging from the tree and the pain hung with me, its shadow at either side of the oak, divided. This time Adam answered.

‘We haven’t seen the parrot.’

‘No, we haven’t seen your bird,’ Amo echoed.

‘I must feed Irda,’ I said. ‘Then I shall sleep long. And after my long sleep I shall know what to say to the bird.’

I had no dreams. Perhaps Amo’s child dreamt them for us three in her new-born sleep, still lying between the skies. Rested, without pain, I could move about and do my daily work. Adam was gone. Not far, said Amo, not very far. Only to meet the Sky Man’s voice. One had to walk to that voice as to a place, Amo explained, thinking I didn’t know, and with a child’s insistence mentioned a rock, a lake, a clearing in the forest, an eagle’s nest. These were places one could walk to for a purpose. I didn’t tell him that the voice was a place between the skies, a circle turning upwards which drew the body in and kept it there engirdled by sound and light. No, my son, my husband, wouldn’t understand an explanation like this.

Amo seemed to me more like a child since Irda’s birth. Perhaps it was only my womb feeling their inner similarity. In the presence of Adam, however, he looked different, older almost than his age, as if putting on his face the wrinkled reflection of the begetter. It was a serious but excited boy who was now announcing the visitor I had twice asked about.

‘Eve, your bird is here! The listening parrot, Eve! Violet and yellow, with a red beak. Sitting on the stone.’

‘I know what he looks like, Amo. Let the bird wait. Come to me, Amo, kiss your Eve. You haven’t touched me since you untied my arms from the oak bough.’

‘It was a long sight of pain,’ he said quietly and lowered his head to kiss both my hands. His lips trembled on my skin, and they didn’t move nearer to meet my mouth.

I received the ape’s messenger in the doorway, alone. I sat on the stool stone and the bird hopped about the other stone with which we blocked the entrance against the rain and the hissing cats.

‘Parrot, I have my answer for your master.’

‘Call me Eeve birrd, call me treeman birrd. I carry your ssounds, I carry hiss ssilent sspeech.’

‘You speak better, listening bird, but you still hiss like the prowling cat.’

‘I birrd hate cats. My master kills tree cats for me. Treeman is strong, he wants Eeve strength, because treeman is stronger than all Adam men.’

‘Before your ape master talks peace with me, he must send back my daughters.’

‘Eeve, Eeve,’ the parrot jumped onto my knee, screeched angrily without making any words, then flapped his yellow feathers in front of my face. I tried to catch one of his eyes with a sideways glance to punish him for this impudence, but somehow he managed to hide them by unfolding a rim of violet. When he returned to the entrance stone his speech returned to his beak. ‘Eeve daughters are treewomen now and bear children better than Eeve.’

‘Did you watch?’ I was curious as though it mattered to have had witnesses at Irda’s birth among talking parrots and wordless beasts.

‘Watched with my master. Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’

‘Cheated, how!’ The bird surprised me.

‘Eeve not give standing birth. She Eeve was on tree.’

‘I always give birth in this way. My first-born dropped from the cedar-tree and you know he has the cedar’s strength.’ The parrot screeched without words, but it sounded like a mocking laughter. Then he spoke very audibly:

‘Sstorm killed Eeve tree. Eeve Cain killed Eeve Abel.’

I couldn’t answer him, and the mocking parrot triumphed with every colour on his outstretched wings. The hooked beak, too, flowed with blood red, victorious in shape and glow.

‘Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’ The repetition jarred on the stone itself. The bird spoke from it, louder and clearer. ‘Treeman can walk and stand. Eeve women weak, have children under trees.’ Then that screech of a laugh again.

‘Go to your ape master now, and tell him what Eve said. And say to him, bird, that he watched the birth of Eve’s new generation. My second daughters and sons will punish the treeman’s tribe.’

‘Amo daughters—Amo curse; Amo sons—Amo death.’

‘Go away, stupid bird!’

‘Bird mother never couples with bird son to make birth.’ And he flew away into sunset, piercing a cloud redder than his beak. Stupid bird, didn’t he see how many birds, both male and female, lived in the sky, and how few we were on the surface?

Soon after sunset, my husband Adam returned, but I wasn’t the first to see him.

Amo must have met him by the ditch and they came together. I found them talking under the oak-tree, very near the moss hollow which was now filled with acorns and covered up with clay. Amo was asking Adam to teach his lips how to move so that animals would understand him. He would scrape off the soft hair on his chin with a sharp flint. No beard for him either if only his father would give him the silent words to trap the beasts more quickly.

By the nightwatch fire in the doorway I heard and observed them. Amo’s black eyes shone next to those blue ones I knew so well, from the times when trees were young and tall with us. Now the sky trees couldn’t stand up to the blows from the sky: they fell, like my cedar, and lay at the watery feet of a storm, humiliated. Some survived, stooping under their own yellow crowns.

Adam’s stoop, his age sinking deeper into the eyes: the blue that was hungry for the sky, real and reflected, the Sky Man’s sky. Oh, how ancient and defeated he looked in the night fire, next to Amo’s eyes which were trying to steal his inner colour. Two fathers underneath the sky. I had to ask Adam about his ‘Our father’, although I half knew the outcome of their meeting.

‘What did he tell you to do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you no orders to punish us? Or is the Sky Man himself going to smite at us?’

‘Our father didn’t speak to me. I heard nothing.’

‘Didn’t you go to meet his voice, Adam?’

‘I did go and I stood alone between the skies. My feet were deep in the clouds.

Then. . . .’ Adam paused, and I was afraid for him, for his eyes and his feet.

‘What did you see then?’

‘Nothing. Both skies emptied themselves. I stood alone in emptiness. And there was that smell in the dark.’ He paused again. ‘The smell of death, Eve.’

2

The next day a message came through the bird from the treeman. I had no choice, the parrot screeched; either I went to live in the treeland, the parrot screeched, or they would take possession of Eve’s country by the big lake and invade my giant trees. Then I would be living in their new treeland, whether I wanted to or not. Theirs was the breed of the second beginning, not mine. I no longer held the queens hip over the earth, for my womb had been polluted by the seed of my son. The screech went on and on, like a pair of Amo’s flints being sharpened against the stone.

I slighted the treeman’s threats by making fun of his messenger. I told Irda that it was a listening bird who amused a tree-ape with human words, just a parrot under all those pretty feathers; and Irda could play with it if she liked. And though my baby daughter didn’t understand any of the words, she waved her hand and tried to catch the parrot’s tail. Angered and offended, the bird flew up, then sat on the edge of the roof, peering down at us. He didn’t feel like talking, but still waited for my reply.

‘Before the winter starts, listening bird, I shall plait a loose basket with a hole for your beak, and it will hang from the ceiling, over Ida’s sleeping basket. You will live up there, eat, listen, talk and lull Irda to sleep with your stories about apes.’

The parrot’s peering eye now had the colour of his beak. I waited for a better moment to confuse his anger. When he spread his wings to keep balance and began trotting along the edge, I suddenly said to him:

‘Look parrot! a word lying on my hair. A jewel word, look!’

The bird looked, his red eye met mine and he lost his balance. He fell to the ground, his tail touching Irda’s leg. She wasn’t frightened, at all, she laughed, and the thin sound stuck in the feathers like the point of an arrow. I wished I had blinded his left eye at least so that the insolent ape man could see the mark of Eve on his servant.

But the eye blinked after a while. The parrot felt the ground with both wings, uncertain how to take off. Then the beak jerked and he left us, slowly rising in the autumn air.

And I persuaded Adam to teach Amo a few silent words from his animal speech, but Amo was a slow learner. He twisted his lips, pushed them up with two fingers, wrinkled his nose to help the fingers, and in the end shaped the bear’s belly-ache sign instead of the monkey’s climbing pout. My first husband tried all over again, then asked Amo to rest his face.

‘Teach Amo tree sounds and bird feather cries. He will be better at them, I know he will.’

‘I have forgotten most of the tree sounds, Eve.’ Something crossed his thought as it was retreating into a grey distance, sadder than the colour of his hair. ‘The trees are beginning to forget some of the sounds, too.’ He turned to our son. ‘Abel, we should leave the animals alone, now that the world is divided. They understand my lips, they listen with their eyes and trust what I tell them, but they never show me their thoughts.’

‘Because they cannot think,’ I said.

‘It would calm the wild beasts to hear Amo rustle like an oak,’ my second husband said.

I saw the first band of apes on my land, when Amo had learnt by heart some oak-tree calls and a juniper whistle, enough to rouse a wave of curious answers from the forest beyond the rain wall. The apes sat quiet on the high boughs, catching the murmurs that passed from tree to tree before they rebounded against the sounds Amo was sending out. I wondered whether the puzzled animals knew what each sound meant, but they certainly seemed disturbed by the noise in the trees.

The night came, and they were still there. Their presence kept me awake. I told Amo to light two low fires by the wall, but not too near the needle bushes. The fire was the sign they all understood. But the full moon made the apes watchful. What more did they expect to see?

I got up, went to the glowing cinders and raked the ashes under them. The fire rose and threw a shadow from my body onto the stone wall. A murmur caught the long feathers of the palm-trees and shook them one by one. But it was the leaping and tail-swinging of monkeys that had caused the murmur. They were hopping about the palms to get a closer look at me. Then came a faint rustle, an echo of many rustles from the woods beyond my forest. The distant oaks were still acknowledging Amo’s call in the likeness of Adam.

For a moment I rejoiced that the new birth had brought them closer to each other: my seventh son had found his right to kingship in Adam, the name-maker and the first begetter. I had therefore done no wrong by receiving Amo’s seed. The treeman, chieftain of the apes, was jealous of him, and envious of Eve’s forethoughts. The evil had been spent long ago through Cain’s hands and loins, and now it was passing to the tree tribes of monkeys through the wombs of my three foolish daughters. That was why the big ape man fancied himself to be equal to real men in sharing a small part of our inherited evil.

‘Go home, apes,’ I cried over the dying fire. ‘You are on the sacred land of Eve.

Adam will punish you!’

A louder and wider murmur started amidst the palm-trees. They are leaving, I thought, they have recognized my voice. But as I stood in the doorway looking up through the shimmer around the moon, I saw long swaying shadows, like weeds that creep along the branches only to slip off at their end. Not weeds, no, these were their ugly tails; still wagging their insolence at me from their safe hiding places.

I put my hands at either side of my mouth, so that my voice would carry and reach them even on the topmost boughs.

‘I have warned you, stupid beasts!’

Then I woke up Adam who was sleeping on a thick moss bedding next to Amo under his beaver skins.

‘Rise, you have a duty. The apes are desecrating my trees.’

Adam got up at once. He never muttered in his sleep nor yawned on waking. He had mastered the habits of his days and his nights.

‘It’s not for me to threaten them, Eve. But I will ask them to go.’

When he appeared by the tall entrance stone, himself twice its height, the tails hung down rigid against the sky, more like dead eels smoked over the kitchen fire than dead creeping weeds. Then I heard his laugh. It wasn’t often heard, not since he began visiting us at my house by this lake.

‘They are so cunning, the apes. Like children, Eve, before some small mischief.

Look at them, pretending they don’t know that I am here. Silly children, they’ve turned their heads away.’

‘Because they’re afraid of your eyes.’

‘I don’t want any creature to be afraid of my eyes.’