writing: Heartbeat

Heartbeat

The blackness wraps around you like a soft, thick cocoon, easing your conscious mind from the world, its terrors and its cares. What follows is the sensation of descending into the deepest, most absolute sleep you have ever known.

You dream.

Clouds whistle past and the world is laid out below you, a brilliantly coloured map in high relief. A mile above the glory of the world, your mind is bobbing and spinning in a river of knowledge as you watch history unravel and time recede. In an instant, you have left behind the past five thousand years and the known civilizations of men, which in their glory seem to flare like a struck match: At first bold and bright and fiery, an instant later they burn down and soon are black and dead. As time regresses before your eyes, strange peoples arise from their ultimate decadence and decline, their races are made young, and finally they vanish into whatever place it is from which being springs. The continents drift and hills rise up from plains, and mountains from hills, only for their jagged spires to shrink again into the earth. Above all, the stars wheel through their unfathomable dance, the least changeable of the many things you witness.

Your sense of time itself is lost in the ever increasing confusion of this cosmic kaleidoscope. Until, minutes or eons later, the cosmos through which your consciousness swims resolves again into something that can be grasped by a mind which is, after all, merely human.

There is a particular location to which you are drawn. The land upon which it rests is beautiful and nameless, the mountains surrounding it stately and high, and perhaps never explored by man.

In the few remaining instants in which your mind is your own, you see that your destination is a village full of slender, bronze-skinned natives in primitive dress. They are an agricultural people, industrious and healthy, occupying a humble but well-organized settlement. The scene is pleasing to the eye and bucolic in every detail, but for the bulbous and unnatural hillock –seemingly comprised of sand, but if it were, too high and round to hold such a shape– that rises behind the village.

****
Your name is Ayat and you are a small girl. This is your first memory:

Your father’s strong brown finger is pressed into the earth by a trail of common black ants, going about their business. Ayat, he said, we are to the Diggers as these ants are to us.
You questioned this assertion at once.
But the People and the Diggers are the same size. Ants are tiny.
Yes, but just as I may crush this ant –and here, Father did crush a helpless ant– so may the Diggers crush us if they are displeased. That is why they are our masters.

You went to sleep that night believing Father to be the wisest man in the entire People. You never stopped believing this.

The Diggers are the People’s protectors and masters. They had only two points of similarity to an ant that you could see: they are both an impenetrable black, and both work constantly. The Diggers you see every day maintain the Nest, a huge, sandy hump shadowing your village. They work inside as well, but on what no one knows. They are of a height with a young man seeing twelve harvests, but very thin. They do not speak, but when passing each other touch fingers. That is, they touch the sticky manipulators at the ends of their upmost pair of arms. Father calls it “shaking hands”. Always they skitter from place to place in a great rush, gathering stones or twigs, soil, herbs and small animals, and many items the use of which is beyond the reckoning of the People.

The second type of Digger is the Warrior, with whom you are not at all familiar. You assume their purpose is to protect the Nest, but who would be so foolish as to attack the Nest? They also protect the People, for you have heard that when beasts get too close to the dog pens or grow so bold as to snatch a child, the Warriors are soon dispatched and that particular animal menaces no one again. The Warriors once were kind enough to leave a Longfang carcass for the village. You laid upon the rug made from its silky orange hide, and it was big enough to accommodate your entire family at once!

The Nest itself is a mysterious structure. Men from the village work inside at special times dictated by the needs of the Diggers, yet they never carry light with them, nor have you seen anything but blackness within the maw of the entrance. It is the home of the Diggers and beyond that you know nothing. You have tried to build a little nest of your own for play, but the sand will never form a pile in the high dome shape of the real Nest.

Papa, how can you work in the Nest when it is so dark?
Those who are blessed to work inside are given the power to see in the dark.
You try to remain skeptical, because Father teases sometimes, but what other answer could there be? Daylight does not –perhaps dares not– penetrate far into the entrance.
What do you do for the Diggers once you’re inside? you ask.
We dig tunnels for them, remove refuse and bones, whatever the Diggers ask of us. Some of their chambers are full of strange devices. Machines like our waterwheel, but far more complicated, and all made of metal.
The village had no metal but for a few scraps discarded by the Diggers. It was a wonderful material for tools and a few wise men were making a study of its many uses.
What do these devices do? Can you bring one home?
We who are so honoured to work with the Diggers ask no questions, and you are asking too many yourself. Off to bed!

****
Now it is the Season of the Hatching, the most important festival –maybe the only festival– of the Diggers. The hatching season does not come as often as the People’s harvest season, only once in many harvests. Father says there had been another when you were small, but you remember nothing of it. During this time the need for villagers inside the Nest is great. When the eggs are almost ready, they are brought out into the sunlight for a few days and carefully tended by the Diggers. The People have never actually witnessed the young breaking free, for the eggs are returning to the darkness for this most sacred event. You find this news disappointing, but the Warrior Diggers will be present and this will be your first chance to see one up close.

Father, where do the eggs come from?
They come from the Diggers’ god, deep within the nest.
Is the Diggers’ god the mother of all the Diggers? The idea of a female with so much power appealed to you at once. You wondered if working in the Nest would give you power over the men of the village.
The Digger’s god is very great, Ayat, so great that it is the Mother and Father of all the Diggers.
This silenced you for several minutes. By the time you had come up with a name for this god, the “MotherFather”, the time for questions was over.

You must be a dozen Seasons in age because your blood has come and you have the rapt attention of a certain boy named Nyhuru. He seems to shadow you everywhere and you are careful to ignore him almost all the time. As Father predicted, this inattention drives him mad. He is especially chatty about the hatching to come, boasting of his close study of Digger habits. Nyhuru says the Diggers are blind and if they cannot scent something then to them it doesn’t exist at all. He is full to the skin of such idiotic ideas.

Word has percolated through the village that the eggs will be revealed today. A wooden corral has been erected a short distance from the Nest. The villagers are not allowed within this corral and all watch from a respectful distance. First, a group of Warriors appears and stands around the corral, looking out. They are similar in appearance to the Diggers, but broader. Their heads are also much larger and sunk in the carapace. Their topmost limbs are the most unusual, for instead of ending in the Digger’s square finger stubs, they curve into long, graceful, and very sharp bones. These forelimbs are similar in shape to the flint blade of a skinning knife, and so long the Warrior is constantly hunched over and resting on their points.

Next, the Diggers appear with several grass-lined trays holding the precious eggs. They are about the size of a man’s fist, but longer and pointier than bird eggs. Every villager holds his breath. When the eggs are first revealed, they are in clusters of eight or ten and contained in some kind of membranous sack. The sack has bits of blood and unidentifiable flesh stuck to it, much like the birth sack of a newborn. You think that the MotherFather cannot be so different from a woman, although there are many sacks. When the sacks are cut open, the shells glitter in the sunlight in a way you have never seen. The refractions are hypnotic and seem to include colours beyond those to be seen in the rainbow, in the night sky or even in dreams.

The Diggers form a ring around the trays of dazzling eggs and kneel, something you have never seen before. For once they are perfectly at rest, as if in worship. This scene becomes a tableau, the Diggers and Warriors all stiller than a dead tree. The spectacle is apparently ended, and the People wander back to their duties or play. You sit, but remain in sight of the glittering ovoids of the Diggers.

You give a violent start when Nyhuru speaks and wakes you from your trance.

Would you like to hold one of their eggs, right in your hand? he whispers.
You would laugh if anyone else were to suggest something so ludicrous, but there is one thing you can confidently say about your pesky friend: he is an accomplished thief.
I’ll sneak you an egg in my shirt. Don’t worry, I’ll put it right back. They can’t see a thing, I’m telling you, and anyway I’m faster than a Longfang in rut!
Of course, it is terribly dangerous, but Nyhuru wants to prove himself to you. You will have to pick a mate before the next harvest, and this kind of test is beyond anything your friends or sisters could boast about… And the eggs themselves are so beautiful. You nod casually, so that if anyone is watching you can claim not to have heard Nyhuru’s suggestion, or that you thought it to be a joke. A small part of you hopes that it is a joke.

But he was off, swift and stealthy, and so lightfooted he barely disturbed the dust. Nyhuru approached the Warriors, close enough to trod their shadows. You swallowed a gasp, but the black sentinels, although they looked no less fierce, did not stir. Were they truly blind? Nyhuru finally found a gap in the guards’ row through which he could pass without brushing their carapaces.

Or so it seemed.

When he was past the Warriors’ picket, they turned as one and closed ranks. No one could see beyond the shiny black wall of their backs, and no sound was heard –except perhaps a single sharply inhaled breath? When the Warriors returned to their former stance, Nyhuru was simply gone. He was never seen again.

Nyhuru’s mother was sick for several weeks, and everyone else worked a little harder to cover her duties, but no one, not even she, dared breathe his name after that day.

You decided that perhaps someone less wild would make a better choice for a mate.

****
The years passed and you and Aktrak have a child of your own. Your first birth was a girl. This is not meant to be propitious, but it pleases you.

Father returns from the direction of the Nest at a run. This is unusual as no one has been working inside since before planting and you had supposed him to be in the fields.

Look, Ayat. Father holds his arm aloft and in the sun’s waning light you spy the glistening mucous hardened on his wrist. Father has been marked. He will be taken into the service of the MotherFather at dawn.

As is the custom, the elders of the village have been marked all at once, just that afternoon. There is much excitement. The best meat is eaten and the casks of fermented juice all drunk dry. Father is loud and boisterous, as is to be expected. He also constantly touches his face, strokes his chin, scratches at his temple. Father is not a fidgety man. Also, he is right handed, and all the gestures he makes are with his left, the limb that is marked. You understand that without knowing it, he is bringing it close to his face, to smell the substance smeared on his skin.

The vigil lasts every minute of the night for no one can sleep. You are saddened, not by the honour which has been conferred on your father, but by the fact that you cannot be alone with him, even briefly, in his last hours in the village.

You weep that night, but with a smile creasing your face as well. Through misadventure or sickness, not every person of the village lives long enough for the honour of serving the Digger god. Whenever you feel Father’s absence, you will comfort yourself in the glory of the new life that must be his.

****
Today, another village attacked the People. These creatures were worse than the beasts beyond the light, for inasmuch as they stood upright like the People, and had two arms and two legs, they were monstrous. Where the People were straight and strong and beautiful, these ones were disfigured in all different ways. Some had eyes which stared in two different directions. Others limped as they ran or had a useless arm. Others had rotten teeth. But worst of all were the slow ones with the grooved faces. Father had told you of these. Because they had no MotherFather to gather them when their life’s labour was ended, they slowly decayed, the light of the sun withering the flesh on their frames.

You are hidden and trying at once to clutch all three of your squirming, terrified offspring. The savages are laying about them with primitive clubs and other makeshift weapons. The village’s men have some hunting spears and are engaged in an awkward dance, for the moment keeping the filthy horde at bay. Somehow they are reluctant to strike. You want to scream at them, Kill! Kill them now! They are not like us, show no mercy! But your throat is stopped up with fear.

Where are your protectors? Where are the Warriors? And then the ground itself trembled and broke. In the moment it took for a fountain of loose earth to leap into the air –but not before the clods had fallen– the Warriors appeared from the very earth itself. You grabbed your youngest to hide his eyes from what would follow, but you yourself saw the first of the foul attackers rent into four separate pieces, the comical look of gape-mouthed shock on his severed head burned into your mind forever.

A ragged cheer rose from the huddled and fearful People, then a joyful chanting arose at the massacre that followed. You vomited.

The People had a feast that night never equaled in your memories.

****
Now you have children who are themselves mated and soon to give birth. Many seasons lay behind you, yet you have never been called to work in the Nest. It is the one thing missing from a long and full life, but even if there were some way to ask for this ultimate privilege, you would not, for it would be ungrateful to ask anything more of the People’s masters, protectors and saviours.

Returning from the fields at dusk, you pass close to a Digger returning to the Nest from one of their inscrutable errands. When your paths are at their nearest, he bumps briefly against you, and you feel a stickiness against the back of your right hand. You look to the Digger who has done this, but what is to be divined from a creature without eyes or face? It moves on as you continue towards the village, the wonder of the moment still dawning on you.

At the feast for those elders who will enter the Nest at dawn, you, like your father, cannot resist the scent of the wide streak of colourless slime on your arm. Every so often you retreat from the firelight and breathe deeply of its heady smell. It is like freshly killed game, like a flawless summer dawn, like the smell of your own children. It is all good things, an aroma without description.

In the last minutes before sunrise you and the other elders arrive at the dark mound behind the village, naked in preparation for your second birth. Immediately within the perfectly round entrance to the Nest, many tunnels branch off and as the others do, you move to the one marked for you alone. You know it is yours because the scent with which you are marked wafts from the darkness ahead and draws you on like a lover’s incessantly beckoning finger.

You walk tentatively away from the light, dragging a few fingers along one winding wall to guide yourself. When you stumble, the soft sand cushions you. The blackness is complete, but you increase your pace, and soon are running through the twisted tunnels without any guidance but the reward that guides you ever closer. The air is so thick you feel at times as if you are parting a river. You turn left, right, right, slither down a declining passage steep enough to be called a hole. You do not realize it but since up is the only direction denied to you, it is only natural you are moving constantly downward, below the Great Nest and below the earth.

You know you have arrived at your destination when you stagger into the arms of a half-dozen Diggers, servants to the same great god that you serve. You find yourself babbling out thanks and praise to the MotherFather as they gently lift you off your feet and into a warm and smooth declivity that shapes itself to your form. Here you are gently fixed with the same fluid the Diggers secrete at will. There is a profound silence then as the Diggers retreat, an ominous quiet which you sense portends even greater events.

The horror that follows is far from what you anticipated. A rough and terrible thing slithers up over your torso. Its texture is rough and bubbled and its shape, as well as you can make out in the all encompassing dark, is flat and broad, like a gigantic tongue. You thrust your head back as far as you may to keep its slimy tip from your face. The thing stops its prodding but still lays cold against you. You try to calm yourself, to order your thoughts. It must all be part of the MotherFather’s plan.

Some wickedly sharp part of the tongue-thing stabs you in the stomach, about the area of your navel, and plunges inside you. The pain is worse even than the birth of your first child, but before the echo of your first cry has faded, it is ebbing. The needle-like spine is withdrawn, leaving in its stead a spreading euphoria as intense in its pleasure as the previous violation was in its pain. A molten wave of joy floods you to the roots of your hair and the tips of your toes. At the same time, the interior of the night-black chamber becomes clear to your eyes. There is yet no light of any kind, yet your surroundings are now limned in a kind of blue-green flickering glow. You are in a great vaulted room, round and with a solid floor of wavy stone. Metal arches support the ceiling far overhead. Of the horrid leathery tongue you see nothing.

The greatest radiance comes from the massive glowing crystal set in the floor, and what you see there fills your skull entirely, for a time too wondrous to comprehend. It glows in all colours, and within it lays the MotherFather itself and you finally understand that it dreams the Diggers.

This you contemplate in awe for some time, but your transition is not finished. At first the sound was like a drumbeat, ever so distant and slower than the stars sailing between their cosmic ports. It is not a drumbeat, but a great throbbing pulse, overwhelming the beat of your own heart, and it rises all around. You know it to be the life force of the Nest. Visions of twisting warrens fill your brain, of Digger young wriggling in a rich soup of regurgitated millet, of bizarre machines and the Warriors’ patrols, everything limned in the blue-green fire. All the while the heartbeat of the MotherFather beats faster and faster again, until your heartbeat and that of the Nest are as one.

You believe now that the wonders of the MotherFather will never cease, that your existence has reached its ultimate purpose, that you will bask forever in the presence of the God of All.

Just before consciousness leaves you, you understand that the heartbeat of the MotherFather never changed in the slightest, but your own has slowed and slowed, until the wonders cease and you sleep.

****
You know at once that much time has passed. Your first sense is of a long and agonizing discomfort which has invaded your dreams for so long you awaken already weary of it. The roar in your skull has receded and been replaced by a never ceasing murmur, a chittering, clicking nonsense sound, that grates like a dirty fingernail scratching the inside of your skull. It is the silent language of the Diggers. When you open your eyes to spot the small group kneeling in a semi-circle some distance before you, their chatter thankfully stops. They do not move.

The MotherFather still glows incandescent in its thousand thousand colours but the emotions evoked before have been replaced with a desperate fatigue, and despite feeling bloated and heavy you are very hungry. You can no longer shift your head as it has been fixed somehow to the wall behind. Are there others from the village hung here in the god’s glory? Trying to squint beyond the MotherFather to the far wall of the chamber you imagine the other men and women of the village in a similar position to yours. Has their joy worn away as swiftly as mine? Is my faith in the MotherFather weak? You pray that there are other ways to serve the god than this.

Something shifts inside you, the kick of a little one close to birth. For a few moments, your groggy mind tries to recall the count of days since your blood stopped. But of course you are not with child. You lower your eyes as far as you are able and at the lowest edge of your vision discover the distended hump of a great pregnant belly. There are other movements inside you now, and a sound like stones rattling, accompanied by an unendurable, burning pain.

Then you remember the sunning of the eggs in the village.

Then you remember the membranous sack in which the eggs were delivered, covered in blood and gobs of flesh, fresh from their host…

Your belly is swelling still further, the bulge growing, and there is no rapturous joy to drown out this pain. As a shivering terror rises up to choke off your screams, you find yourself looking down at Ayat.

You are no longer Ayat. Mercifully, the egg chamber of the Diggers fades back into darkness. The images recede.

You dream no more.

THE END!