(2021)
Deep-dwelling Herdmother, unnumbered ancestors, forgive me!
Forgive me? What forgiveness? What do I need forgiveness for? I did nothing, I have no blame – strike me blind and foot-deaf if I lie – it was they, it was the apes, confound them, it was they who ruined the world! See them squirming and clambering over each other, hear them jabbering and chittering as if they've done good. And yet I gave them help. Gods of the Valley, I did! Wither my trunk, Herdmother, bind my ankles and tear out my tongue. Reach back in time, I beg you, I beg you, I beg you, and stop my idiot self from bringing about this disaster.
I feel myself suffocate – if only I'd suffocated first – if only I'd slipped into a ravine during the ascent – if only my mother, curse her bones, had purged me from her womb – I will cast myself down, I've seen the apes suffer long after a fall, but my body is heavier, and will burst on the crests before I can feel it. Here, I've drunk a soothing tisane, and will be calm enough to write.
Oh, Gods, this noise!
I am sound of mind and able of trunk, even in this unnatural air; what I plan to do will be my only sensible action in a long time. Who knows whether death will buy me a place in the cool, peaceful mud-fields below, and spare me from universal revenge? Who knows? There never was a crime as great at this, before today. I'll write this in clay, and leave it in a crevice, high enough to be spared by the end of the world. Perhaps some imbecile or scoundrel, cast out of the good lands, will read it. How fitting that imbeciles and scoundrels will be all that is left, although not me, the greatest imbecile and scoundrel of all.
I hated you then, Gods of the Valley, as I walked under your idols of glowing rocksalt, for making me restless and unhappy, and for making this world ugly and cruel. And I hate you now, for not falling from your pillars and shattering my skull when you could. The servant apes scrambled about with their baskets and amphors, some bruised and limping, some painted and perfumed. How little thought I paid them, once; they did not reach my knee, and they would take enough care of avoiding my footfalls.
I have wandered from city to city, as my father must have done in the arousal of the musth before he visited the household of my mother and aunts. What a sight was he, my mother would sigh, gleaming with copper and selenite won from so many rivals, and his tusks filed to murderous sharpness. But the musth was not for me; I briefly saw it in my brothers before they went their own way, while I should have stayed with my sisters and cousins, with the ape-swarm of our palace turning about us. We would see the sky only to visit the idols and bring them gifts of oil and crocodile skins.
The servant beasts would feed me argan branches and glasswort, peel the waste off my footpads, and rub me pleasantly with perfumed oils. I hated it, and hated them, and wished my tusks were filed and the nectar of rage pouring from my temples. Yet so sweet was their touch and so full their subjection – even when once I withdrew food until they had done bloody and unnatural things – that I found my contempt mixed with love. Their cries aroused more sympathy in me than the bellows of my sisters, who often beat clumsy apes. How could I take pleasure in them in the house that made us prisoners, with so callous a company?
One night I slipped under an archway and out of my natal palace, carrying as many servants as I could, scurrying around me or riding on my back. I started wandering all around the Valley, along dusty roads and canals lined with the idols of carved rocksalt. I sheltered from the sun behind towers and pyramids of limestone and saw the hazy, cloud-grazing cliffs that mark all the edges of the Valley. I would shelter with my apes in boneyards at night; I purchased them milk from discreet wetnurses, and gave them meat when a wild hippopotamus would stray into a city. How I suffered for them! I loved them, and they never loved me, cleaning me only when forced, and gulping down their bloody meals without caring if I could see.
Everywhere I saw monstrosity. One of my apes was killed by two youths for amusement, and often I had to sell their services for odious tasks. One I had to kill myself as it tried to leave, to betray me for crueler masters; the others, perhaps understanding its wickedness, refused its meat, and forced me to look for other food. Many I saw discarded at the feet of construction sites, or heaped on carts leaving a theater after a mock battle. I stomped the ground in anger and cursed the Gods of the Valley, wishing the outer gods who dwell on the vast cliffs around to bring destruction on this gruesome world.
Outer gods, outer gods, of all the desperate pleas raised from the beginning of the world, was this the one you should answer?
One morning I awoke from painful dreams while we were in the far west of the Valley. From the construction sites we stole a hundred sacks of ape-fashioned tools. We set to climb the great slope where it was most accessible, where the great cloudbanks gathered. Pushing, bellowing, threatening I drove my apes on the scorched path, through the brambles and the gravel drifts.
It rains, sometimes, and the great salt lakes overflow and flood the fields and towns all around. If they all overflowed at once, what a chastisement it would be for my brutish kind! I knew that there is water high on the western highlands, that the ladies of old had built a wall to keep out its tides...
Perhaps a year after leaving the palace we were up high on the far western cliff. We could see the many ramparts of cut sandstone and limestone mingle with the natural walls, dark shrubs and vines clinging to their blocks. They had been built and reinforced again and again over the generations; but what takes centuries to rise, may take a moment to fall. Is not a moment enough to slay a person, who has grown two years in the womb, and fifty outside? Is it not enough to fell a secular tree? Destruction grows from seeds, as well as creation; the ancient walls had been neglected in this complacent, gluttonous age; a modest breach in the highest and thinnest section, that would suffice.
I set my servants to work. They were of a breed created for construction work, and could brandish well hammer and chisel. They would chip at the lichenous mortar; they cleverly opened cracks in the blocks burdened with more weight, and spread them open with metal wedges. A feverish excitement made my body shiver at each directive, but I had brought with me stores of a sweet tea to calm my nerves.
For months the apes labored. They worked hard, chattering in sounds too high for me to hear. They fed themselves, mostly, by killing birds and collecting pine nuts; I still carried jars of curdled milk and dried meat, which they accessed less and less. I would sit in the shade, chewing deliciously sour branches. I slept more peacefully than ever, knowing that my anger had been entrusted to quick hands, and would soon find its consummation. A million fools, too, slept and chewed and mounted each other in the Valley; and nobody came upon us, nobody cared about the wall standing between them and utter ruin.
Eventually I succumbed to curiosity. I wished to see for myself if the lake I was about to unleash was larger than any on the bottom of the Valley. My footpads caught a slow, peaceful rhythm in its bulk. I went alone above the highest ridge, where I could see the other side of the wall, those waters that had been many steps lower when the Valley was first peopled. I broke through the last barrier of juniper and maritime pines, where I could hear the waves breaking, and smell the salt that they flung in the air.
I did not know.
I did not know, I had thought only another lake stood here; but the expanse, Gods of the Valley, the expanse blue and flat and bare and endless, enough to fill the Valley a thousandfold. Swarming birds screeched overhead, insulting me. All that water, released at once, ah, it can't be imagined, it would wash away everything like sand from dirty feet, overturn the hardest ground like sods behind the plough, close over the tallest pyramids and charge the farthest eastern cliff...
And still the apes labored. I raced down, but in my bewilderment I tripped on the loose stones and tangled myself in the brambles. Too afraid to leave my distant vantage point, I shouted at them to come back. For hours perhaps; and they came back to me at last, but then I could already see the dirty white of racing water project from a breach in the wall.
I hit them in blind anger, the little creeping devils. I kicked and crushed them underfoot, I flung them into the ravine and against sharp rocks; but even as they bled and died they made this shrill, revolting, panting call, which I know is a call of triumph and mockery. The remainder scattered away in the thirsty scrub, to mingle with their wilder kin – I hear them now, grunting and hooting behind the bushes. I hear them – despite this noise!
It's too late. Nobody can arrest the waterfall now, and as it pours and screams through the gorge it will only grow. The seed of destruction – I see tree-covered ridges slide and vanish in the froth, I see the cliffsides melting like wax. My ledge is already loose. The mountains shudder.
You – you little vermin – you think you've done something good? Your own kin down in the Valley – the cubs you've sired and born – your little hive-mounds and mating-coves – you will have only beastly mockeries for companions – civilize them, I dare you! No one to feed you and shelter you, you've murdered yourself, you stupid wastes of water – I loved you so, damn you all –
Unnumbered ancestors, unnumbered descendants – no – no descendants – never – no more people, not ever, only brutes and speechless cretins, cast out – cities, fields, all gone – songs and books – canals and gardens – all joy and love and glory – no more, not ever, damned outer gods, why must I know, why must I see –
Herdmother, spare me from that noise – oh, poxes, the foot-sound is so much louder and faster than the ear-sound – if there is mercy it will creep up my footpads and shatter my bones – my ledge quakes – ah! The water! I see the water! It's grand – it's beyond description – a piece of sky, falling – a mountain of glass, rolling over – a monster, all claws and coils – its shadow swallows a city – its froth rises tall as the cliffs – I don't want to see – I don't want to see – but look, it's grand – let me see