Stone Gods (14 page)

'I don't want to be the one who survives,' I said.

'Death will be quick and painless. The cold will gradually put you to sleep. It is only a dream.'

'It wasn't a dream. It was life. And you were life, are life.' She smiled. 'What do you think love is, Billie?'

'Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's recognition, perhaps discovery, sometimes it's sacrifice, always it's treasure. It's a journey on foot to another place.' I smiled and stroked her hand as I carefully detached her arm at the shoulder. 'What do you think it is?'

'I think it's the chance to be human.'

'Human? You make us sound almost worthwhile.'

'One day you will be. Feel.'

She took my hand and put it against her chest. I rested my hand there, silent, listening, wondering. Then I felt it. Then I felt it beating.

'What?'

'My heart.'

'You don't have a heart.'

'I do now.'

'But ... '

'I know it's impossible, but so much that has seemed impossible has already happened.'

'Only the impossible is worth the effort.'

'Who told you that?'

'I read it somewhere.'

'How long do you think it will be before a human being writes a poem again?'

'It will be millions of years, and it will be a love-poem.'

'How do you know that?'

'I know it because it will happen when someone finds that the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world.'

'"She is all States, all Princes I ... '"

'''Nothing else is."

Kiss me. A traveller's tale; I was the traveller.

It's dark now; the dark is cold and the cold is dark. The fire is low, and the little Three Horn is leaving his brief world to go back through the warmth to where he once was, before humans came.

Spike is dying, lying in my arms, not speaking. We are both silent now, waiting for the end.

There was a message today from Handsome. He is alive, and has received intelligence from Orbus: there has been a nuclear attack on the Mission Base. Unknowns perhaps, terrorists perhaps. The Central Power is preparing for war.

It will be a long time before anyone comes back to Planet Blue. And I remember it as we had seen it on that first day, green and fertile and abundant, with warm seas and crystal rivers and skies that redden under a young sun and drop deep blue, like a field at night where someone is drilling for stars.

Spike can barely speak. Silently we agree that I will detach her head from her torso. I first unfasten, then lay down, her chest, like a breastplate. Her body is a piece of armour she has taken off.

Now she is what she said life would be — consciousness. She has sailed the thinking universe back to the line of her own mind. 'Nothing is solid,' she said. 'Nothing is fixed.'

Unfixing her has freed her. She smiles, we talk, we kiss.

Kiss me. Your mouth is a cave. This cave is your mouth. I am inside you, and there is nothing to fear.

There will be men and women, there will be fire. There will be settlements, there will be wars. There will be planting and harvest, music and dancing. Someone will make a painting in a cave, someone will make a statue and call it God. Someone will see you and call your name. Someone will hold you, dying, across his knees.

The room is dark. Someone sits at a table, writing a book. He goes to the window and looks through his telescope at the stars. No one believes what he sees, but he goes on writing.

I opened the book Handsome had given me — James Cook,
The Journals.

March 1774. Sunday the 13th.

We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the SE side of the isle, but night put a stop to our endeavours. During the night the wind was variable, but in the morning it blew in squalls attended with rain which ceased as the day advanced. I steer'd round the South point of the island in order to explore the Western side. The natives were collected together in several places on the shore in small companies of 10-12.

In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors of Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island . . .

Her head is light, so light it weighs nothing. This new world that I found and lost weighs nothing at all.

Is this the universe, lying across the knees of one who mourns?

Things dying ... things new-born.

* * *

There will be a story of a world held in a walnut shell, cracked open by love's finger and thumb. There will be a story of a planet small as a ball, and a child threw it, or a dog ran away with it, and dropped it on the floor of the Universe, where it swelled into a world.

Your lips are moving, what is it you say? Your lips are moving over mine, what is it? I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure.

Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

March I774. Sunday the 13th.

We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the SE side of the isle, but night put a stop to our endeavours. During the night the wind was variable, but in the morning it blew in squalls attended with rain which ceased as the day advanced. I steer'd round the South point of the island in order to explore the Western side. The natives were collected together in several places on the shore in small companies if 10-12.

In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors if Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island ...

Get out in the Longboat, Captain says, he being sick of the bilious collick and not fit to make one of the party. Accordingly, we slithered rope-wise into the scoop of a boat, and rowed towards the shore of fine sand where upwards of a hundred men, no women or children, awaited us. With us in the boat were sixpenny nails and spike nails and a quantity of cloth to trade for foodstuffs. Pigs and fowls were much desired by the men who had chewed on a diet of saltmeat for upwards of four month.

As we manoeuvred ourselves through the shallows, some of the Natives came to aid us drag the boat, already curious at the bundles we carried. Mr Pickersgill made signs that we were in want of provisions and one of the men made a gesture inwards of the island and accordingly we followed.

I cannot say the sight was aught but dismal as the Valley of the Shadow of Death is dismal to them that must cross it. The island was stripped and bare, with few trees or shrub-bushes of any kind. Nature seemed hardly to have provided it with any fit thing for man to eat or drink. There was nothing of the green luxury we had seen in New Zealand or New Amsterdam, and little to testify that this was the place visited not upwards of fifty years since by the Dutch, and previous to that by the Spanish. In my master's cabin there had been talk only of abundance. But that must have been talk of some other place.

My name is Billy.

'Billy - fetch the sacks!'

I fetched the sacks, and dipped one down into the Well showed me by one of the Natives. It was a dug Well, not formed of a cascade, and the water was brown and brackish — no better in the mouth than the barrel-water stored with us on the Ship. Yet I did my duty and filled the sacks, and dragged them back to the shore where others of the party stood in desolation, having found no wildfowl or yet good fish. Of plant-life there was little and no incentive for Botanizing.

As I gazed at the island it was as if some great creature with hot breath had flown above and scorched all below. Mr Pickersgill indicated that we should return to the Ship.

I am not certain how it began — only how it ended for that has been of more concern to me.

Our bags of barter lay on the shore when a group of the Natives attempted to seize some of them. Officer Edgecombe fired his musket, and the ball falling short did little to deter a second attempt on our stocks. The next fire shot dead a man, and the Natives moved threateningly towards our party, who retreated at great speed into the Sloop and pushed off, being under orders from Captain Cook to make no furious Encounter.

I would have been in the Longboat myself, except that I was standing like a beacon at the top of a mile-away hill.

I durst not call out for fear of drawing the Natives' wrath to myself, and I unarmed but for a knife and a cutlass. I dropp'd down flat, like a hare in a gale, and waited.

* * *

The squalls that had vexed us the night previous returned with renewed force, and I was obliged to retreat to what shelter the dismal island afforded. Yet I was comforted, as I crouched beneath a stark rock, that the weather would keep the Ship awhile and that my master Captain Cook would send a Party to remedy my absence. I wrapped myself in the provisions canvas I was carrying, and that kept me tolerably dry, and the weather being warm, and myselfbeing young, I soon slept.

What lights are they that push against the eyes in sleep?

It was a cannon shot that woke me, the dawn rising yellow behind a curtain of rain. I got up from my shelter and scrambled back to the high point I had quitted, and looked out to sea. It was a dreadful sight. The Ship was sailing. In my agony I lost all care of my person and ran at pelt to the shore, waving my arms and calling. The petrels, thinking me of their kind, shrieked in return and widened their wings to welcome me. That was my companionship and I was fortunate of no other, for if the Natives had discovered me they may have revenged themselves on me for the dead man.

I half thought of swimming, but the waves were fierce and the Ship fast-tacking South with the wind. For what reason or purpose I had been left behind, I do not know, and it may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

So here I am, with nothing, at dawn, and the Ship like a thing dreamed from another star.

Up, Billy, up. There's none to save you now but your own self

I began to search the island.

* * *

Hardly to be understood is the lack of vegetation.

I came to a deep pit, a quarry, worked by human hands and stone dug out from it and, from the tracks gouged into the earth, the stone dragged on sledges of some kind, but sledges made of what, and for what purpose and to what place, I could not tell.

Near at hand I found charcoal deposits, evidence of great and prolonged burning, and I took up a little of the charcoal to start myself a fire. Such a piece of work is man that although he must be about to die he will question his situation. The mystery of the pits and the burning did not bear upon my survival at all, or so I deemed, yet my mind was as eaten by curiosity as my flesh would be by maggots.

I heard a noise familiar to all seamen. Sure enough, scraping in the shallows of the dug pit were four or five small rats. I shouted and the things scurried away, one rolling a bird's Egg in his forefeet. I came to be uneasy then, for what in this barren place did a rat find for its contentment? The thought presented itself that it might be human remains that employed these creatures so busily. Yet my masters on the Ship had not spoke of Cannibals. Happen this was a Ceremonial matter, and the dead put on pyres or burned here.

Yet I stayed uneasy.

And I had a thought of Lemon Curd.

If evidence was needed that man is nothing but a loose-tied sack of folly, seek no further than this my Billy-self I am lost, abandoned, hungry, like to die, perched above a charnel-house, uneasy in all my thoughts, and neither the scriptures nor the words of Great Men present me any comfort, but the picture of a pot of Lemon Curd.

'God Forgive Me,' I say, and feel pity for a Deity that must concern Himself with pots of preserve. Had I lordship of the Universe I should roll men like marbles in the pan of space and never ask where they stopped or fell.

Here I am, stopped and fallen, this little round of life called a man.

Here I am, little Billy, and nothing round me but the sea.

What's that over there? Moving rapidly towards. Quick, Billy, slither slope-side and stalk it.

The Natives appear to be making procession towards some totem or obelisk, except that it is fringed. By use of my small telescope I discover, to my great surprise, that it is a tree, standing alone, and a genus of Palm. It may be that this is some rite of fertility to encourage the land to renew itself, such as we have seen on voyage in Tahiti.

A great cry goes up round the tree and what appears to be a dispute. Women, and this my first sight of them, are grouped against the men, mayhap as a part of the ritual, but one of the women is lying the length of her body against the tree, and wailing so strong that I can hear it from my Warren. A male figure, wearing a headdress of bird feathers, strikes the woman, and at this signal, for so I interpret it, all the women standing by are struck at by the males and driven away, as you would drive off a chatter of monkeys.