Daygo's Fury (27 page)

“It is possible to achieve communion without reaching Samadhi—at least not reaching it in the sense that we know it. There are different forms of Samadhi. Sometimes very strong emotional experiences can cause the oncoming of Samadhi, or moments of epiphany which fall upon us for unknown reasons. Through repetitive movement, breathing and chanting, brief glimpses of Samadhi can be attained that will allow the commune to take hold. Even sometimes if one becomes completely lost in a task, they can achieve a brief glimpse of Samadhi, and there sense the world, sense Daygo.

“The sense is only lost again through distraction, or through fatigue. To process such a large scale of information, simply being aware of it, wears strongly on the mind and the body, as you will know and feel after we break from the communal. This is why we choose to break with it, before exhaustion causes us to lose it through unconsciousness.

“We have also learned that through the drinking of pacroot that a fascination and concentration can be achieved upon a specific action, which can cause this brief communion with Daygo in those who are hyper-sensitive, bypassing the need for Samadhi. And so this explains its use in the test amongst the tribes’ adolescents. Daygo, in these instances, and all instances, is most visible during times of transition; as for example, the moment an animal dies, when its Daygo flow is dispersed into countless new and separate flows of smaller consistency.

“It is my belief that all people can reach the commune, but for most it may take forty years of persistent practice and study before it is possible. For all of us, it was a natural thing, one that would have undoubtedly happened at some point in our lives inevitably. And so it is important, being hyper-sensitive, that we learn to control the commune, to gain knowledge in it and, since it is readily possible for us, to bask in the bliss of its awareness, so that we may maintain and preach the truth of our existence to the tribes.”

******

After communion was over, they returned from the caves and ate sparingly around the fire pit that was rarely used at the centre of their circle of huts. Then, feeling exhausted, they retired to their huts to rest or sleep. About an hour later, they rose and had their main meal of the day. This time, as they ate together, they discussed the commune and Daygo philosophy. All thoughts, all feelings, all concepts were discussed. After this time, the rest of the evening was their own to do as they willed. The vegetable patch was tended to. Some went into the forest to gather food or other things, sometimes they went to the river, which flowed down from the mountain that rose behind the cave, to bathe. The water was cooling and refreshing. The river, which was more a stream, was clean and clear.

At night, Niisa liked to stay up, past when the rest of them fell into their huts. He sat a few steps away from his hut, his back straight, and gazed at the stars overhead. It always felt a new wonder to him to be able to do so. A whole lifetime he had spent in the forest, the sky forever forbidden to him, the night a danger to be hidden from. Here, in the clearing, there seemed little danger. He could watch the stars and the moons until light came again. He had been freed from restrictions he had never seen. He felt grateful every night that he stared at the sky.

Lost in stillness, in silent wonder, he often found his gaze land on the red moon. And there, for hours, the red eye would stare back at him. The stars would slowly move across a curved trajectory as the night wore on. The pale blotched surface of the white moon, showing itself only partly, moved from one side of the sky to the other, or did not show itself at all. But the red moon made a single, uneven circle in the night sky, its black centre invisible, showing nothing, like the crazed bad eye of a cross-eyed man, spinning evil above them. Hours into his nightly perusal, he sensed its pull.

******

He was an adolescent when he arrived. There were three grown women priests amongst them. They were no relation to him. None were from his tribe. None were married or part of a family. All were toned, fit and healthy with the bodies and faces of women of younger years. One, Onyeka, was past childbearing, and another, Bosede, must have been nearing its end. Yejide, the third woman, was still young, though likely as old as his own mother. In the tribes, she would have been married with a full family, but, at something not far past thirty years, her body was young and firm, her hair long, dark brown and silky. Her eyes were green and seemed to hold an inquisitive curiosity and told more than a face that stayed mostly flat of expression. Like the panther’s eyes, it was there that the soul lay hidden, there it was brightly visible; the rest was only skin.

He grew more a man as the months passed. He had known erections and inclinations towards women before he joined the Walolang, but what had been easily dismissed before started to rise within him, causing distraction beyond what was acceptable. He started to lose calm. He started to lose perspective. He started to lose Daygo.

Would that be his lot? So easily overcome by base animal urges to mindlessly rut, sire and continue the cycle dumbly, without thought? Was it so easy for simple desire within him to overcome his mind?

As they moved in the mornings, his eye was drawn to Yejide’s breasts, her hips, her ass, the tone of her legs, the texture of her skin. He forced his eyes away, only for them to fall instead to Bosede, and his mind to revealing what was underneath her walothsa as she spread her legs open or closed them tight. It was a pent-up desire that was forgotten for only small moments before glimpse of them brought it back in full fury.

His meditation stuttered. Stillness evaded him. Breathing techniques helped, but it seemed nothing could offer him release from this growing madness.

One evening it became too much. He stood and almost ran from the clearing. Finding a place by the stream, he stripped clear of his walothsa and lay, belly down, in the cool water, wishing it to wash him clean of desire.

Movement from the woods brought his head up. Yejide stood by the trees, looking down upon him from her green eyes, her face a flat mask. As she stood there, her posture perfect, his eyes unwillingly traced over her body, from the ears that pressed slightly outwards, to the nose that was small and wide on a round face framed by hair the colour of light bark that fell loosely behind shoulders held perfectly in place, in such a way that her breasts were propped up and firm, hanging temptingly in front of her. Her nipples were a darker brown upon clear, soft skin. Her spine held a perfect arch. Her navel was flat. His eyes wandered over the smooth curve from waist to hip as though it were his hands passing over the flesh to the point where it flowed underneath the walothsa that hung loosely atop her hips. His eyes continued, irrepressibly, down her toned legs to the small feet that held her in perfect balance. For a moment they rested there, until they shot back to meet her own. She slowly, pointedly, looked across the back of his own body, before returning to his eyes. The stream had turned warm beneath him, though he wished the smooth stones to turn sharp and sear his skin.

Never before had he felt hate. Never before had he felt a need towards violence. Never before had he felt such a panic rise up from underneath him, fluttering like a butterfly from his base, up through his stomach, making his heart race and his limbs go weak. It had to end, but he would never give in. He feared for his sanity, he feared for his wisdom, he feared becoming just another man, like his father and all the rest he had known. Was this how it happened? He would kill her first, and the other women.

He turned around onto his back. “Look what you do to me,” he said, his voice tight, hard. He raised his hands to either side of his hips. “I can’t stop this. I can’t think!” He splashed his closed fists into the water and clamped his jaw shut. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I will not accept it.”

There was silence. He opened his eyes. He could see Yejide standing as she was, unfazed, at the edge of his vision. For a time, most of his life in fact, he had stood as unfazed by anything put before him. In that moment, he made up his mind. He could no longer continue on his path with Yejide and the other women constantly distracting him, tempting him, driving him towards insanity. He would find a way to kill them all, and then return to Daygo, return to his path of discovery.

“You try to deny your body,” she said. “To deny what you are. An animal, as everything else.”

“I am more than that,” he said.

“You are a mind within a body.” She gestured towards his erect penis. “Make it go away.”

He shook his head, filled with an overpowering hate for her. Filled with violence.

“I can make it go away,” she said. He rolled his eyes up towards her, his mouth opened, he licked his lips, hungry for something. Desperate for something. Beyond reason. His heart jumped, threatening to burst free of his chest. Nails pressed deeper into the flesh of his palms.

“Shall I?” she asked. He trembled. He could not help it. A croak escaped his mouth. Was it a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’? He forced a swallow within a dry mouth. He was consumed by her, entrapped by her, frozen by her. He watched, unmoving, as she nodded her head and slowly undid the ties of her walothsa, the walothsa that magically held atop her hips. It dropped to the floor. Naked, she stood before him. A small jerking motion encroached upon the stone-like stillness of his frame, as his gaze skipped from the uncovered flesh of her hips to the brown fuzz between her legs. He watched, tongue suspended within his mouth, as she stepped from the fallen fabric, and stepped again along the rocky grass of the stream’s bank, and again upon the soft water flowing over white stone; her soft skin belonging to every place her feet touched. With delicate grace, with the languid sway of a forest cat, confident and at ease, green eyes threatening and yet impaling with the visual yet hidden beauty within their depths, she moved towards him, through moments suspended in time. Until a brown foot splashed softly above his right ear, and he watched, looking up between the legs of this mythical creature as she passed above his eyes. At his knees, she stopped and turned, depriving him the sight of her rear and rewarding him with the equally appealing opposite side. She squatted down before him and reached her right hand to grab a hold of him. “Release,” she whispered, and with four, five quick jerks of her hand, he succumbed.

A moan escaped through his lips. All was gone. All was lost. Time passed. And nothing. Only a vague euphoria, a loss of mass, only a translucent warm glow, not confined or assigned to anything, no real sense, a loss that was whole, an emptiness that was full, an openness that embraced and warmed. A comfort. A piece of the fabric of existence. And then a re-awakening. A return to sense and body and mind. His body shaking, jerking still. He thought, it sat on him, he considered, it sank slowly within him and settled with a pleasant feeling that spread from his penis, his testicles, up and out through his lower torso and thighs; down even to his feet and up to his shoulders. His muscles relaxed, fell limp. His heart was steady and full, his lungs breathed deep with clean air. From loss of all to fulfilled self, he watched it, he listened to it. His eyes were open, the bright colours of the sky and the day were all around him. And then it was gone, it left him, he was normal, he was back, and he suddenly saw the terrible danger of the thing. He smiled as he felt an anger at its loss, as small tensions returned with small impatiences that danced within him. The consuming desire, the unrepenting need, the madness, had left; like smoke, dissipated into the air. He had found a return to peace, a return to control.

She squatted in her place, her hand moving softly. Then it was removed. She washed it in the stream, as he thought. She stood up and walked to her walothsa.

“Tomorrow, again, I will see you here,” she said. “You have more to learn.”

She returned to the woods. Niisa lay where he was.
Life
.
There was always more. More to see, more to learn, more to know.
He smiled softly, feeling finally relaxed.

******

In the days that followed, they had sex frequently, Yejide showing him how he could achieve his own relief, and how he could offer it to her. As time passed and he looked at the older women, he thought that he might like sex with them as well. He proposed it and, after some consideration, both acceded. Their different behaviours and different bodies were of some interest; all three women sought and achieved release in different ways, though similar.

As time passed, he felt content to allow their relations to dissipate to a less frequent level, though he made sure that he was tended to every day, if not by them, then by himself. He never wanted a return to the crazed, unthinking animal that for a while he had become.

******

They had all been taken from their tribe as children, when the mysterious and feared priest of the Walolang de Kgotia arrived at their village, testing for hypersensitivity to the Daygo flow. Over the years, they all spoke at some time about their terror at being picked, about their shock, and their sadness and fear at leaving the lives they knew, the families and tribes they loved, never to see them again. But they had embarked upon a holy path. The path of bliss, and wisdom, and knowledge.

They learned a path, but Niisa learned too that these priests were not as he was. They learned. He always knew, inherently. He was different. He was special. There were no others like him. Daygo, in its infinite wisdom, the ingrained knowledge of nature, had chosen him, had brought about his existence, to learn something, to change something. What it was lurked beyond his reach, but he always felt its presence, he always knew it was there, and so he followed with faith, until he would discover its true meaning and his true purpose. Since he had been a baby, he’d felt the presence of his purpose.