And, she thought darkly as she gathered up her stones, signs that could have prevented the catastrophe yet to come. For once again the collection of pebbles and small rocks that had been handed down through countless generations, all the way back to the very first Keeper of the Gazelle Horns, told the same message: the children were going to have to die.
She peered through the trees at the tragic collection of women and children. They were weary from lack of sleep. Nightmares plagued them, horrific dreams that Alawa believed were the result of the dead not having had a silent-sitting. If the silent-sitting had been performed, the unhappy ghosts would not now be haunting the dreams of the living.
Her own daughter, running, an invader close on her heels, grabbing her flying hair, pulling her off her feet, slamming her down onto her back, his club coming down again and again
.
At first it had only been a few invaders and Doron and the hunters had been able to drive them off. But then more strangers had come, having heard of the lush green savanna teeming with wildlife, and then more invaders, swarming like ants over the western hills until Alawa’s people were overwhelmed. Pushed north, they had encountered other settlements—kinsmen whom they saw at the annual gathering of the clans: Crocodile Clan, which Bellek had come from many seasons ago, and Egret Clan, which had been Doron’s. There, with the help of kinsmen, Alawa’s people had tried to stop and fight. But the invaders, stronger and in greater numbers, had kept up their assault, unwilling to share the abundant valley.
Little Hinto, child of Alawa’s daughter, seized by an arm and flung into the air to come down on an invader’s spear. Istaqa, Keeper of the Moon-hut, turning to throw a spear at a pursuer, to be struck by a rock in her face with such force that it split her skull open. The blood running into the earth. The screams of the stricken. The moans of the dying. Blind fear and panic. Old Alawa running for her life, her feet pounding in cadence with her thumping heart. Young Doron and the hunters staying behind to protect the women and the elders
.
Perhaps they should perform the silent-sitting now, Alawa thought as she rose to her feet, her ancient joints creaking. Perhaps that would appease the unhappy ghosts who were haunting their dreams. But there was a problem: to perform the ritual meant speaking the names of the dead, and to do so would be to break the most powerful taboo in the clan.
She looked at the children and felt an immense sadness sweep over her. So many of them were orphans, their mothers having been killed during the battles with the invaders. And then there was little Gowron, son of her daughter’s daughter, playing with a frog he had found. Alawa herself had pierced his little nose with the egret bone that prevented evil spirits from entering his body through his nostrils. It pained Alawa’s heart to know he must die.
She turned her attention to Bellek, bent and wheezing as he explored the surrounding tamarisk thickets for signs and omens. He had to find the moon and so it was crucial that he concentrate and pay attention to every little detail. One mistake could spell disaster for them.
Even back on their ancestral land the people had lived in constant fear of the world around them. Death came often, swiftly, and brutally so that even there, among familiar rocks and trees and river, there was enough to be afraid of. The people had been constantly on the alert not to offend any spirits, constantly speaking the spells, carrying the right amulets, making the appropriate gestures that they had all learned since earliest childhood. But one of the problems they faced in this strange place was not knowing the names of things. They saw unfamiliar flowers and trees, birds with new plumage, fish they had never encountered before. What to call them? How to make sure no harm came to the survivors of the Gazelle Clan?
As Alawa watched the withered old shaman go about his readings, crouching to inspect a pebble, sniffing a flower, running dirt through his fingers, she wondered how he was going to react to her news. It occurred to her that Bellek might not like having to kill the children, even if it meant the survival of the clan.
It also occurred to her that Bellek was past usefulness.
Alawa had always been contemptuous of men anyway since they didn’t create life, and she had often wondered why the moon even made male children. Perhaps back in their river valley the men had been good for bringing home rhinoceros and hippopotamus meat, work too heavy for women, thus feeding the clan for weeks. But this new place was filled with food for the picking. Hunters were no longer necessary. Was this why her dreams and the magic stones were telling her to sacrifice the children? As a way of cleansing the clan?
Alawa returned her attention to the children as they ate and played and tugged at mothers’ breasts. She especially watched the boys, who ranged in age from nursing infant to the threshold of puberty. Boys older than this had left their mothers and joined the band of hunters, and so they had perished in the Reed Sea. As Alawa kept her eyes on the boys she thought again of the dead hunters and the lost moon and the nightmares that were plaguing the women, and the frightening thought that had formed in her mind days ago spoke louder now: that the drowned men were unhappy and jealous of the living. This was why they haunted the women’s dreams. How could it be otherwise as there had been no silent-sitting performed for them? Everyone knew that the dead were jealous of the living, which was why ghosts were so greatly feared. And would the dead hunters not be especially jealous of the little boys who they could see growing up to take their places?
Reluctant though she was to carry out the deed, Alawa was firm in her resolve. As long as the hunters continued to be jealous of the boys and therefore haunt the women, the moon would not come out. And without the moon the clan would die. Therefore the little boys must be sacrificed to send the ghosts away. Then the moon would return and put babies into the women again. And thus the clan would survive.
At the next resting stop, the women sat with their backs to trees to nurse babies and cuddle their children. Some, having reached the end of their stamina, began to cry.
They had all lost loved ones in the Reed Sea—sons, brothers, nephews, uncles, sleeping partners. Bellek had watched his younger brothers perish; Keeka, the sons of her mother’s sisters; Alawa, five sons and twelve sons of her daughters; Laliari, her brothers and her beloved Doron. A loss beyond comprehension, beyond counting. When the new tide had swallowed up the band of hunters, the women had run up and down the shore, screaming and shouting, hoping for a glimpse of survivors. Two had thrown themselves into the raging water to disappear forever. The women had camped on the new shore for a week until Bellek, after eating magic mushrooms and walking in the nether realm, had decreed the place bad luck and that they must leave. That was when they had gone north to encounter a vast, terrifying sea, and then had turned inland, to go in search of the moon.
But they still had not found it and the women were becoming disconsolate.
Seeing the tears streaking down Keeka’s cheeks, Laliari reached into the pouch that hung from her belt and, bringing out a handful of nuts, offered them to her cousin.
Keeka had been plump, before the invaders came. She loved to eat. She had lived in a hut with her mother, her mother’s mother, and her own six children, and every evening after the communal meal she would hurry back to the hut to store food away that she had hidden beneath her grass skirt. Keeka also loved coupling with men and didn’t need to be coaxed. Nonetheless, the hunters who came and went from her hut with frequency brought her extra gifts of food and so dried fish and rabbit haunches hung from the roof of her shelter, onions and dates and ears of corn. But no one minded. Everyone in the clan ate well.
As Keeka snatched at the nuts and gobbled them down, Laliari looked back through the trees and saw a tragic figure lurking in the mist.
She Who Has No Name.
Laliari was amazed the poor creature had survived this far, being cut off from the clan as she was and having to trail behind the others through the thick fog. Laliari felt sorry for her. People were afraid of childless women because they were thought to be possessed by an evil spirit. How else to explain why the moon had not favored them with babies? Before the invaders came, She Who Has No Name had lived at the edge of the settlement, treated as invisible, eating tossed-away scraps. She had been forbidden to touch food that other people were to eat, or their drinking water, or someone’s hut. And no man would embrace her, no matter how desperate his need for sexual release.
No Name had not been born with bad luck. She had in fact started out as any other girl. Laliari remembered when the clan had celebrated No Name’s first moonflow, how special she had been treated, according to tradition, everyone speaking her name in joy, pampering her and lavishing her with gifts and food. An even bigger celebration was held when a woman became pregnant for the first time and her status in the clan was greatly elevated. But when No Name’s moonflow kept appearing regularly, and the seasons came and went and she produced no baby, the people had begun to look at her askance until finally she became a pariah, stripped of her name and standing in the clan.
Although Laliari had gotten used to the poor creature that had followed them from the Reed Sea, No Name’s shadowy presence now sent fear shooting through her. Without the moon, would they all eventually end up like her?
Laliari curled anxious fingers around the magical amulet she wore about her neck, an ivory talisman that had been carved during the increase of the moon. She also wore a necklace made of over a hundred hornet bodies that she had painstakingly collected, dried, and cleaned smooth. They resembled small nuts and made a soft clacking sound as she walked. It was not for decoration but for the power of the hornet spirits to protect her and her clan, hornets being such fierce defenders of their own homes. And in a tiny pouch that hung from the woven waistband of her grass skirt were the precious seeds and dried petals of the lotus flower, her personal spirit-protector.
But Laliari found little comfort now in amulets and necklaces. She and her sisters and cousins had lost their land, their men, and the moon. If only she could speak the name of her beloved Doron, what a comfort it would be.
But names were powerful magic, not to be uttered frivolously, for a name embodied the very essence of a person and was directly connected to his or her spirit. Because names involved magic and luck and determined how a person’s life was to run, they were not bestowed lightly but only after great thought and a reading of signs and omens. Sometimes a name changed at adolescence, or after a major event in a person’s life. Or depending on a specific occupation they adopted, like Bellek, which meant “reader of signs.” Laliari, meaning “born among the lotuses,” had been so named because her mother had been drawing water from the river when her birth pains began. For the rest of her life Laliari was protected by the lotus flower. Keeka, “child of the sunset,” since that was when she had been born. Freer, “hawk spreads his wings,” had been the most powerful of their hunters. A name once used was never used again. Finally, it was bad luck to speak a person’s name after death as this summoned his unhappy ghost. And so Laliari had to let Doron’s name go unspoken, and therefore Doron himself, ultimately forgotten.
She drew the gazelle hide tighter about herself. When they had found they could stand the cold no longer, the women had untied the bundles they carried on their backs, animal skins meant for creating shelters. At home, when the river was low they lived by the shore, but when the river started its annual rise and flooding of its banks, the people tore down their shelters and relocated to higher ground, building new shelters out of skins and elephant tusks. When they had been forced to flee from the invaders, the women had tied the precious skins into bundles and carried them on their backs. Now they used them as capes against the chill of this foreign land.
As she shivered, Laliari thought of Doron again and how he had warmed her at night in her mother’s hut. Tears sprang to her eyes. Laliari loved Doron because he had been so kind and patient with her after the death of her baby. Although most men grieved over the death of any child, since it was a loss to the clan, they quickly got over it and could not understand a mother’s prolonged grief. After all, the men reasoned, the moon always gave a woman more children. But Doron had understood. Despite the fact that he himself could never know what it was like to have a son or a daughter, and that his only kinship to a baby could be through his sister’s children, he understood that Laliari’s baby was of her blood and that she would grieve the way he himself had grieved over the death of his sister’s son.
Now Doron was dead. Swallowed up by a newborn sea.
Alawa cried out in alarm. The trees were weeping!
It was just the fog, so thick in the valley that moisture had collected on branches and leaves and dripped like rain. But Alawa knew what it really meant: the spirits of the trees were unhappy.
She made a protective gesture and drew hastily back. Her fears were growing daily. Despite Bellek’s insistence that the farther north they went the better chance they had of finding the moon, Alawa was not so sure. Everything about their exile had been strange and baffling, starting with the inland sea that contained no fish, no life of any kind. When the women had trekked eastward from the sea that had no opposite shore and had found a body of water in which no fish swam, no algae grew, surrounded by a salt-covered shore that had produced no mussels or reeds—a completely lifeless sea—they had been alarmed. Even Alawa had sworn that she had never seen so strange a sight. But then they had followed the salty shoreline and had come to a river that flowed backward!
Too fearful to take even another step, the group had camped on the shore of the backward-flowing river while Bellek had eaten the magic mushrooms and roamed the land of visions. When he awoke he had decreed that this new river was safe, despite its backward flow, and that they must keep following it, for the moon lay northward beyond the mist.