The traveler comes down out of the great forest, long days spent there, he comes down into the boulders and scree feeling damp from the long gloom, the mossy wetness, sheltered by the cathedral of high arching limbs thick as a quartet of men. He comes down, his slightness working its way through the rough.
Stopping he removes his clothes and lays them on the rocks, the damp in them to lift. The sun is hot on his skin. Opening his pack he takes out the stowed bundles, the fungi and fern, roots fat and gnarled, he lays these too on the rocks, some had started to turn, and it is good he has left the forest. Four days for them to dry here, but the forest has been good on the journey here, to this another new place. Below he can hear a river, but it is not near, and so he will be safe here to let his gatherings harden and shrink. No hunters will come through these rocks, there is no game worth testing an ankle or an arm here, no reason to foolishly spend a life. Four days here will be unworried.
The stars again. Back in the great forest faint noises, forward the river, an incessant gurgling hum. The river he has yet to see.
He will be prepared, well armed with things, with knowledge to share, and perhaps the next ones will not be fierce or afraid. Yet he has seen all that before, formulated escapes before being propelled forward again, small and wary. Perhaps the next ones will be calm, kind. It is a risk, always a risk. His nervous thin fingers knead his legs. He closes his eyes and curls next to a rock. How many days has it been since he left the place of his birth, taught well but unwanted. Taught about the mouse ears for swellings, the cord root and blood bark for pains of the belly, the sour creeper for childbirth, and stranger things still, things which he isn’t sure are any more real than the circus of effects constructed by his teachers. He has often been the subject of jokes.
After three days he is ready to move, the gatherings ready early, so bright and fierce the sun. He is regretful to leave the great forest behind, as generous as it had been to him. How long will it be before he is so gifted again, the world a hard place for the empty handed. He packs the things, small bundles layered close. The bag in which they are laid comfortable, good yet, an easy shelter to bear, stained with sweat, untroubled by the rain.
He charts a hesitant down toward the river the sharply sloping tangle of stone obscuring his vision. He must be careful, knowing nothing of the water below, or how the stones may break away suddenly to a sharp fall, a steep cliff, ready to snatch and maim. But the stones level abruptly and diminish, now smooth the size of a ram’s head, then to gravel warm in the sun, and the river is there, green and full, swift and musical over the rough of it’s bed, but not violent, it will be crossable. On the far side a similar shore but beyond a pronounced flatness with a thick face of trees, the face of a place where people would live, would gather and hold ground.
For two days he follows the river without seeing anyone. He catches crabs, chews weeds. After two days he has found his crossing and he wades the broad skin of the swift his skinny thighs cutting the water, his feet cautiously reading the bed.
In another day he sees them, women by the waters edge, sitting, speaking. They are comfortable in their place, the others must be very close for them to so carelessly gather by the water. They see him, they raise their voices and men appear quickly, squinting, watching not only the traveler but looking beyond him to see if he comes with others. The traveler sums the people he has come upon, the style of their clothes, the look of their faces familiar. He knows their type. He moves his bag from his shoulder and holds it up, a sign of his intent. The men look at each other and talk, they motion for him to come near. The traveler proceeds, neither too quick or too slow, he is small and doesn’t threaten, the need to not show weakness is more pressing, and he moves with a vital assurance.
The group gathers around him and he is drawn into the center of their place. It becomes clear to the group what he is offering and the suspect ones he had seen watching, indirect but attentive, the kind who would follow when he leaves and wait for the dark, lose interest. He won’t have to worry about them, what he carries is of no use to them. Men question him as to his travels, what he has seen in the interior of the great wood, what game, what people are near that they may not know.
Slowly the gathering breaks apart, though some of the men sit and continue to watch him, idly passing the time. At last a small stout woman arrives, her face is tattooed, feathers swarm in her hair. She leads him away, she is the one with whom he will barter. She tells him of the valley into which he is heading, the journey of which should be safe, the people here not desperate, the families at peace, living close enough to temper the hunger of the wilds between them. In such a place he may need to stop and fashion salves, tonics, there would be little of uniqueness to be found in these woods to trade once the things from the great forest are gone.
He gets a new knife, dried fish, little more than earning his safe passage, finding himself traveling again for little reason other than a lack of place that will have him, dark and small, a wild light in his eye, he is not a guest who will be encouraged.
He starts out, there is enough sun yet to find shelter, near enough to these people that the dangers of the wild will be kept away, far enough that these people will be unworried by his presence. There is a path, a broken road that leads out, heading into the wood away from the river, rising gently. Despite the heat of these days the ground is wet, small streams, sluggish and full of life cut the passage. He has passed well beyond the edge of the gathering but the path continues, this is indeed a peopled place.
He stops, he sees a singular dwelling set apart, a suspicion, down toward the river which he can still see breaks of, moving slowly here, broad and filled with small islands. He watches for a time, sometimes such places can offer good things. Two half feral pigs root and roll, and then a woman is seen, she pulls apart and stacks branches, firewood. Her manner is hard and determined. The traveler looks up into the wide dusky blue, the brilliant sun leaning into its downward arc is no longer visible, gloom is starting to seep into the woods. Uncertainty. People together may be bold but their closeness evens their tempers, they become more predictable. People alone can feel more threatened, scheming, unpredictable, their distance from a gathering an omen of oddness. He is steeled by the ease of the people he has met here, he decides and descends toward the dwelling. He watches, the woman seems alone, it is a strange thing to see. The man may be away, but he sees no sign of children. She must be barren, alone like him.
He knows how to move quietly, sliding like shade over the ground, if not for his small size, his weak constitution, he may have been a hunter, he may have known home. He is near the dwelling quickly. She is intent and has not felt his approach, she lifts and throws, lifts and throws, separating the knot of gathered limbs, drawing from the tangle. In her movements is a scarcely contained anger, an evident desperation. The traveler stops and watches, her back is to him, the pigs worry the earth noisily. He becomes aware that she is speaking, the words barely audible. ‘I will always keep you warm. Watch it. Watch it. Careful, love. Come here, let me comb your hair. No don’t look that way. Please. He wont come back. He is gone.’ Her work stops for a moment, her head hanging forward. A branch slams down. ‘He wont come back. Stop, listen, trust me.’ Another branch fiercely into the pile, ‘Listen’. The traveler is transfixed standing suspended on the edge of her circle.
He has not moved from his place, not made a sound, but the woman jerks around suddenly and eyes him, eyes the color of night, her face not young but strong. She has stopped speaking but he can see her lips silently moving. She looks from the traveler to the pigs, he knows she is wondering if he has come to take them, yet she shows neither fear nor a desire to fight. He raises his hands, he has no need to assert, this woman could overpower him if she wished, the wounds not worth the game.
He keeps his gaze levelly upon her, to look away is to raise a question, to pull other powers into their now static circle. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head, like some insect tormented beast. She turns back to her wood, without a word to the traveler, dismissing his presence. He drops his hands and looks at the pigs, the night is drawing fast now. Why did he come here. A hot meal perhaps, some comfortable safe place to bed, yet this woman is perhaps mad, unneeded, without a man, without children. Such bargains make it easy to lose everything, make it easy to suffer. Yet he stays.
She has not offered him any kindness but seems affronted by the absurdity that he wouldn’t join her in the dwelling for food, to do so seems to be the progression of a natural logic, some intrinsic manner of the working of the world. The food was already cooking, and she stands now at the door frowning, in one hand a bowl, food steams in it, she looks at him with little patience and less warmth. He has been sitting off the edge of her clearing sharing time with the swine, watching the night arrive, swarms of insects billowing. He has watched and listened to her muttering, the rise and fall of her scattering chant, a story of another lays there in pieces, a female, Amada. He rises from his haunches and approaches. She doesn’t hand him the bowl, instead turning and walking back into the dimness. She sits first, near a weak fire producing more smoke than light, setting the bowl across the fire, for him. Then without a word or gesture she reaches around her and brings out the bowl she will use, lifting it to her face, one quick look over it’s rim and she is eating, her fingers occasionally working small bones from her mouth. He sits and takes his bowl. So this is how it will be. He is aware of a smell in the close quarters, the gamey smell of her, somehow both repellant and desirable. He looks around still trying to find evidence of a man, but there is little to settle the question, a heavy spear, but she a certainly a collector of what will keep this place hers, broken bits, discarded things are everywhere. She finishes eating first and looking down at the ground between them wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, an unconscious gesture. She still has not spoken directly to him, he wonders how deep her madness goes, and if he’ll even be safe here. Then with ease, unhurried, she turns and lays down on the ground which is the floor of the hut her face turned away. She pulls some covers over her. On an exposed shoulder the traveler sees scars, long and irregular, he has seen such before, has some of his own, left by sticks, switches, leather thongs. His eyes narrow as he remembers the smell of blood, the shame of released urine. It is nothing. Trails like these written across too many backs to be meaningful, but he knows now something about her. So odd that the crazed should be both so open and so closed. The pieces plain to see, but how they fit together such a puzzle.
In the night he awakens startled, in the dense gloom thick with the odor of human habitation and smoke he senses she is gone. After a moment he hears her voice again, outside, not far, troubled and quick. He listens hard but the words erupt and fall without clarity. Still it is only her voice, another has not arrived to throw his presence in question. He isn’t afraid, and he is surprised at this. Somehow to him she is familiar, somehow she is no threat. He stops trying to find meaning in what she is saying to the night alive with the sounds of animals and insects, soon he is drowned in sleep.
The morning is gone, the day will be hung with clouds, the long spell of sun now over. She sleeps, a still heap of flesh and covers. He knows the morning is passed by the sound of birds outside, the tentative calls of early morning long passed. He has rested well, a slumber long and deep, nourishing, unlike any he has had for a dialogue of days. He taps his fingers on the ground, watches her ribs heaving evenly, why is he here, why this woman.
Leaving the hut he looks about choosing where to relieve himself, her spot, easily seen not too far off, too intimate a place. He will wait, deciding it is a good day to fish, deciding he can provide her a meal, deciding to release the clench of his belly there. Heading off he leaves his pack full of hard won goods in the hut, though why he should trust her so he cannot say, full of his intent, untroubled and aware he heads down to the water, light in his gait.
He chooses the limb, snaps, and lays to pressing out the edge, the barb. Beneath this cloud caught day the prey will wander into the open, rise in the clear water, mouths making quick circles on the surface as yet unspattered by the coming rain. He wades in near a deep pool rimmed by undulating tresses of water weeds. He sinks to his knees the water pulling slow against his waist. Here he waits.
She is outside, hung at the door rooted by a thought, a dream. Her eye blinks as an insect lights on her brow, but her hands hang unmoving. Her lips move silently. Behind the curtain of her mind she sees a shape at the edge of the clearing, standing in the shadows, barely discernable. She sees the flesh of her hopes, what she waits for, listens for, held in suspension by an act, a violence, a past. ‘Come now, come. He is gone sister, lay with me. Oh sorrows. Oh blood, blood, everywhere. Shatterings. Clear it away now. Shhhhhh. Shhhhhhh. I will hold it safe for you now, just come back, come back. My sweetness, oh don’t run. Don’t break!’
The evening has come and again they eat together. The fish was fat, its flesh is sweet and the bones are few. He has roasted a few fibrous shoots collected near the river. While they eat he asks her about her life, about this place, but she refuses to speak to him, though her under breath comments, the ruin of laments and accusations allow him to learn a little. Her eyes remain hostile and hard as he talks to her. He tells her about his travels, the sea, the great forest, he tells her about the animals he has seen, about his craft how he can makes perfumes, cure ills. Suddenly she is up and grabbing his hand pulling him up and out of the dwelling into the damp drizzle colored day, “come now, come, come. Heal her, Amada. Come now.” He is confused by her urgency, after such long silence. He has waited to hear her speak to him and now her words are a wild rush, punctuated over and over by Amada, Amada. So perhaps she is not alone, perhaps the one she calls her sister is sick. She bursts outward, an explosion, stopping and turning to him, “you must come, Amada, my Amada”. She has been overcome by her emotions, her knees buckling. He steps to her steadying, the rain has beaded on her shoulders. She is choking grabbing at her clothes, holding her ribs. He feels his heart go under, a wave of pity, of stark desire. The brief trance is broken and she seizes his hand once again pulling him with new found strength. “Amada is hurt. She is hurt!”
They stumble down toward the river. Near it is a hollow, a damp pit, not far from the waters edge. He looks about trying to see anything, trying to understand. The woman stops at the edge of the pit and looks down her eyes wild, aflame, otherworldly. “There! There!” She points her arm straight and poignant. The traveler peers into the rocky depression, in the cover of the trees, beneath the smothering clouds, he can scarcely make out anything. Suddenly he is shoved hard from behind, the woman panting urgently sending him down, arms flying out to protect himself against injury. He falls forward grunting with the shock. He has scraped his face, but he has landed in the bottom sound. He works his way up onto his feet looking back where he stood, the woman is gone, the arch of limbs above him silent. He starts to move out of the mossy wetness, finding his footing, gauging his path back. His foot rolls on a limb hidden by the growth, the soft green, a limb, but no, it is too round and straight. He reaches down moving his foot, down into the mat. He pulls up straddling the hole the extraction creates. It is a bone, sharply white in the gloom. Long here. Clean. Amada.
When he returns she is not there. He enters and heaves out of his wet clothes. Amada. Amada. What happened to you? He feels hollow and caught up, frantic. For this woman he feels what? And she beset, haunted, by a hunger for someone long dead, a person capable of laying her sense crooked. What were they? He hopes in time she can learn to. What? He asks himself what is happening to his mind, perhaps being here with a woman removed from her sensibilities has poisoned him. A healer, can he heal her, is there a medicine to right her, to save her. He falls asleep overcome by puzzles, his self bound up and delivered.
The day is new. The clouds and rain continue, the day soft and wet she is back, lying there. He sits up knowing something is wrong. Her breath is hard, her erratic breathing hoarse. He reaches out, his hand pausing, he has yet to touch her, and he is afraid, afraid of her fierceness. She doesn’t stir when he touches her shoulder, her face turned away, but he can feel the heat on her, a terrible glow. The fever has her. He turns her toward him, his brow knotted. She isn’t light but she rolls passively, the helpless inertia of struck meat. He touches her face, the fever is bad. He is grim, he would never help such a person, there is no gain to be had, nothing will come to him for it, but his heart is caught up. He bends down and smells her hair, she is like a damp animal pulled out of the wilderness. He edges back to his pack, the constant of his sustaining. He rummages through and draws out several white withered roots.
Hurried, in the rain he gathers fresh ferns, fetches water, The rain streams through his tied up hair, down through the creases of his face. His finger alive, adroit, catching up ingredients. In the hut he removes her clothes, wet from the night before. He cleans her. He beds her in ferns, he puts roots in the fire, the hut fills with a strong vapor. He fashions a salve and rubs it into her fevered skin. He knows her illness is hard but not serious, still he is worried beyond the circumstance, too distracted by her being laid low to feel his desire for her now. Rubbing the greasy salve into her legs, her torso, he doesn’t note the oddness of his feelings.
The next day the skies clear. He is aching from being hunched over for so long. She rests and her fever is breaking at last. Sweat beads on her skin. She moans and turns. Muttering words now, calling for her Amada. He goes outside stretching, squinting into the bright day. His worry is lessened now, he sees she is rising up out of the swamp of her illness. He spits and kicks the dirt. Foolish little man, the twisted traveler sick in his heart for the mad woman, he has wasted days here, goods. He has spent too long wandering, too long in the company of trees, the animal blood has snared him with its desperate magic. He should snatch one of the pigs and be off, payment accepted. But to where? Anywhere he might go would be a place without her. He grimaces, no there is no where for him to go.
Her eyes open wide. She is aware and ready, but weak. She sees that she has no cloths on, that he has done things with her, but there are no bruises, no blood, she hasn’t the smell of sex on her, but there has been the invasion of her person, the usurping of her place in the world. His things are everywhere. Why the men. Always the men around her, troubling her, polluting her small space, taking from her. She has had many bad dreams. Amada, where is Amada. So many bad dreams, and oh, oh, she covers her face. Why must all the memories come back? Worse than the fevered nightmares of her illness.
She leaves her dwelling, shoving heaps of sweat dampened bedding out, the tools of his healing. She wants to go to the river, to wash the sweat and salve from her skin. The traveler is sitting on his haunches outside, not far away. He has been drawing in the rain softened Earth, dragging a small branch through the brown. He looks up a spark in his eye, his hopes flaring. The men, the men, they are like flies, impossible to avoid. She looks at him, apathetic, dully hostile, and she sees something fall in him, it is nothing, things fall all the time, some never rise. She turns toward the river and heads down, from her lips an incessant song, rising, despite the pleas of her tattered senses. She mutters to something fallen.
That night they eat again together, she is passive, unnoticing. He is bitter ready to find the road, ready for the putting of one foot after the other for hours, plotting the route, watching, shifting the pack from shoulder to shoulder. Hopeful that the power of thought, of decisions made, might overcome his want, his want that she should see him, out of her wilderness see him, and come.
And so it is. He stays days, finding some sense of place, but waiting, his eyes on the edge of her world, gauging the border, what is within, what is coming and what has gone. She remains far away and he finds himself speaking to himself too much. But he is unhurried and without worry, becoming accustomed to sleeping in the same place, to sharing a space with another, it is good. He knows now how he has been aching, he sees now the wounds he had to ignore for so long. The dwelling, the clearing, are but markers, are but the bones of the world. Something here is more tangible to him, something warms and fills, despite the insistence of her apartness she has become a home to him.
Then one night the man returns. The traveler hears him immediately, moving outside the dwelling, grunting, assured in the way that one is in ones own place. He knows now what an error he has made. So unlike him, so stupid. He knows now that he is in the wrong place. Life may continue but for this. His things are everywhere. He moves quickly snatching what he can. He listens so hard above the mad beating of his heart, listening for a chance, any chance, listening for the steps to go away, maybe the man needs to shit, maybe he has left something he must retrieve. He looks at the woman, “come with me”, she sits rocking, holding her sides, looking at the floor, at nothing, the rhythm of her chant unchanging. He looks at her not knowing now where this will take him, the play and violence should be so plain, but now he is unsure in the moment of his potential undoing. Still collecting his things, watching the door, watching her, he becomes aware that she isn’t going to signal to the man outside. He must come through the door, he will be unaware, the heavy spear leans against the wall. He is not a swift runner, he isn’t strong. Something heavy is being moved outside, dragged across the ground. He is very near now. The traveler grabs the spear from the wall and before he has time to set himself the man comes in. The traveler sees in an instant how stupid his hopes were, the man is huge, scarred, smiling now. The spear swings in an arc too slow, too clumsy, it seems the man’s arms flash in the dimness of the dwelling. The traveler is grabbed, his arm assuming a grotesque angle, his eyes spin in a frantic effort to see the path away. He is hauled out. The fresh air surrounds him, so close to the undergrowth, the road. All is so still beyond the manic moment which has snared him. The indifferent sound of crickets fills the night.
He is thrown down. It is like being handled by a bear, or a dog, there seems so little human in this mans movements. He has no sense that he was trying to take this man’s woman, only that he was grossly where he should not have been. He is being kicked hard, he feels something cave in and there is blood in his mouth, he knows he is dying. She is outside now, he hears her yelling something, what is it, “Amada, no, Amada!” He has crossed into another space, he knows she calling because of him. He smiles. In her delusion for a moment he is her Amada, he is finally loved.
The man looks down at the dark heap which is the traveler, he will come back to him. He turns and heads back toward her, he is shouting too. The traveler rolls over, one arm completely useless, his breath hot with blood. His legs still work and he gets them under him, one eye is swollen closed but through his good eye he looks back. The woman is weeping now, the man continues to shout, but he hasn’t hurt her. The traveler stumbles up like a newborn deer, barely able to stand, and crashes into the nearby bushes. He knows he cannot live, there is nowhere to recover, his wounds are deep within him. Is this all there is for him, to simply find a place to die, so feebly alone. He thinks of something, some old vagueness now sharp and clear, some old trickery, something more mystic than wraps or tonics, a recipe for when healing no longer suffices. Staggering down he has a dream of what he wants to come back to her as, of the way he will leave this useless wagon of cracked bone.
It isn’t far, and in the night he finds it easily. He is coughing blood, burning with every move. He is careful, so careful, just to buy a little time, time to weave, to sing a little song. He knows if he falls now it may be impossible to rise again. Down toward the river, down into the rocky depression. Here is where she died, here is where she has been waiting. His one good hand fishes in the sediment of moss and twigs. Here, here, a bone, brittle but whole, the bone of the one who came here before him. The loved one.
Then up and down again to where the river slows, where it pulls on small islands and thick weeds, down where the strong reeds stand against the seasons, reeds so strong. He grunts involuntarily, he knows tonight he will die. Just for one last trick, a little something more than the delusion of an insignificant one, a little time for an old prayer, to the Earth, to its subterfuge power. He collapses back onto a small island, his legs straight out in the cold pull, reeds all around him. He sets the bone he has carried aside and starts braking off reeds. He lays them in his lap, he places the bone in the bundle, he is singing a fractured song through his torn chest. The moon hangs bright and pocked, he ties the reeds, his one good hand working, he fashions them, knots them, his knees holding the bundle that extends out. Trancelike, his head hanging like a broken thing, he works. The shouting from the direction of the dwelling has long since stopped. A stream of wetness runs down from the corner of his mouth and over his chest, his lap is a puddle of his life. Time passes, such a rare good gift, enough he hopes. The weave has taken form, a crude figure, tall, lying half in the water. He knows he can do no more to it now. He drags it up next to him, lying down on the bank. He lays against the wet stiff form, the reed sister. His song and energies are spent and he hopes it has been enough, that she has heard and might return so that together they can go, go to where love awaits them.
The night is fading its hard curtain distilled. The world is still and circling, expanding out from a center of the given in untold dances, small and mighty miracles in every step. A water rat glides and dives its traced of ripples stretching out, thinning.
It is still grey. Only a few of the first birds tentatively call but in the break between the worlds a vigorous movement is seen, as though this time was meant was strictly for her, she of two souls twined, she the answer to the call, the world has thrown buckets and buckets on the flames, floods, of clear strong water. She wades up and out, her strong thighs cutting the water without resistance.
The woman has not slept, the stink of the man upon her, filling the small dwelling, her chant, her prayer, now a mere whisper. Her eyes are emptied, her self submerged.
She enters the clearing her eyes green, green, deep, rushing. The man has heard her, he has awoken ready, a vibrant animal. He comes out of the dwelling and what he sees bewilders him, not of blood, not of hot muscle, it smells like the river its face familiar from long long ago, the reed sister. It rushes to him and quick strikes him to his knees. Heavy powerful blows. His legs leverage and push, strong and sure, they are set for him to rise, to challenge, but it never happens. Relentless the reed sister is on him. Her strong hands grab fistfuls of his hair, one thigh goes over his shoulder pinning him to the step smoothed clearing. She twists, her arms giving no sign as to how easily she should do this. There is a snap, a snap before the wet tear of flesh coming apart. His head, eyes wild mouth open, is tossed away, sending the pigs scrambling.
It has taken but moments, and moments till the woman reaches the door of the dwelling, the reed sister turns and the woman sees now her Amada. She goes to her, her fingers seeking the hair which is ever more human, she sobs and kisses the smiling face. Amada. Amada. Her heart fills and she is light, the lifting breeze of the warming day no lighter.
They leave together soon, the precious three, the whole of their souls unchained, unafraid, set free of hope and memory.