The Ancestors’ Long Shadow
by Danko Antolovic
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The younger man, still shaken, was much less confident of his steps in the dark, but he made his way back to Men’s House in the middle of the village. Wide awake, he sat on a rough wooden bench in front of the House and watched the canopy of stars roll ever so slowly above him.
His coming of age had newly earned him a lodging in Men’s House, but he felt ill at ease with the man’s duties that lay ahead. He thought about the nuptial dance: yes, the end of childhood had opened his eyes to the allure of the girls’ slender bodies, but he recoiled from the prospect of securing a mate by sitting naked among naked men, watching naked girls dance. So much could go wrong...
As his father said, he will be expected to have children; maybe he will fight in a war, but probably not... Other than that, his duties will be light: he will grow some crops, fetch what he needed from the Giving Cave, live a life of unchanging days like everyone else, days broken by a few celebrations in the course of the year. With some luck, he will live long enough to see his great-grandchildren and count as an Elder... And up the hill, in the Cave, the enigmatic Atua will dwell, taciturn and unchanging, seemingly content to watch over this unchanging village life forever.
After a while he stood up, went up the few steps that led to the door, and entered the long, open space of the Men’s House. The rows of cots along the walls were still mostly empty: a few men were asleep here and there, and a small circle of men were sitting on the cots in one corner, talking among themselves, but many of the villagers were still out and about, perhaps playing a game of dice by the campfire or smoking sacred leaves that made them happy.
The inside of the House was sparingly lit with several small lanterns. In the communal washing area, a mirror hung on the wall, illuminated by one such lantern that was placed on a shelf below. Abel approached the mirror. He noticed that it was cracked, but apparently nobody had yet gone to the Cave to get a new one. He picked up the lantern and lifted it to his face. “I resemble Father,” he said softly to himself in the mirror.
The lantern gave a pleasantly steady, unflickering light, not at all like the light of a fire. No one in the village knew how to make such a lantern, or repair one when it went out: they threw it away and went to the Cave for a new one. He put the lamp down, found his own cot, and laid himself down on it. Yes, he resembled his father, but tomorrow would be different from the drowsy, ever-same days of his and his father’s life. He would make it different.
* * *
When Abel awoke, the sun was already beginning to climb in the sky, and the House was full of men. They had filed in late in the night, and were now sleeping sprawled on their cots. Abel knew they would not be getting up any time soon: staying up late into the night was preferable to the heat of the day at this time of the year, and moreover no urgent duties awaited their awakening. So they slept in.
Abel filled his bag with a few days’ worth of provisions from the House’s communal store, and stepped out into the sunlight. Like the Men’s House, the rest of the village was still mostly asleep. Walking along the road he noticed, as if for the first time, the litter that surrounded him: damaged tools and fire-starters, torn pieces of clothing and dented cooking pots, burned-out lanterns, and a thousand other things that, once asked for and now broken and discarded, littered the grassy patches by the roadside and lay half-hidden in the bushes. He took the path that led from the high plateau of his village, through the forest and toward the coast.
The overgrown, little-used trail wound its way steadily down, down the hill and through some dense thicket. By the time the path came out of the forest and the coastal plain opened up ahead, it was close to midday. Shielding his eyes from the bright sun, Abel surveyed the view: the flatland was covered in neatly outlined fields, almost all the way to where the plain met the forested hills from which he had emerged. He saw people in the fields, accompanied by work animals. And in the distance ahead, shimmering in the glare of the open sea, was the coastal town. Abel followed the now straight road toward it.
Back home, people had always spoken of the coastal settlement, the village of the Roons, as similar to their own, and perhaps it had been so at the time of their last great conflict. But as Abel walked along the long road leading to it, he saw that this was no simple village: the town was many times larger than his highland settlement, with pleasant-looking wooden dwellings, and with straight and wide streets bustling with people.
Once he had entered the streets, Abel grew leery of approaching the townsfolk. He stood out in the appearance of his face and garments, and was worried that the lowlanders might recognize him as a highlander, and repay to him the highlanders’ long-standing dislike of them. But as he apprehensively passed the locals in the street, they either didn’t notice his looks or didn’t care about them. Only a few children, with charming little faces and rich, thick heads of hair, gave the highlander their curious, wide-eyed stares.
He needed some answers, though. He had come here with a purpose: to find out the truth behind the traveler’s story from years ago, the story that had cost the unlucky man his life. People of his village cherished the memory of their legendary battle with the Dawendi, the battle that had won them Atua. Atua’s beneficent presence made them unique and grand in their own eyes, made them the True People. But if Atua was also present here, among the coastal lowlanders, how much of this great legend was really true?
As it happened, his wary wandering through the streets led him naturally to an open space in the middle of the town, a place where two wide streets crossed. In this clearing the lowland people had raised a stone edifice made up of three or four square platforms stacked on top of one another: a small pyramid. On the top of the pyramid, Abel saw standing a large stone boulder, with an enormous face carved into it.
Abel had never seen anything like that before. He climbed the steps leading up the pyramid, and approached the stone face. The face had a blank, heavy look, except for a pair of strangely captivating eyes. “Atua?” the young man called out to the statue. “Atua?” he touched the stone with his hand. Nothing. The face made no sign; its eyes stared fixedly into the straight, wide street ahead, and toward an outcropping of shore cliffs beyond the town’s border. No, he thought, this boulder was not Atua, this was not what he was searching for.
Abel looked up at the stone, then dejectedly down to his feet. Suddenly, his senses tightened and his hair stood on end at the back of his neck: the pavement in front of the great face was covered with a washed out reddish-brown stain. Some of the stain had congealed in the grooves in the pavement, and Abel at once became aware of the unmistakable smell of butchery. He could not know what creatures’ blood was spilled there, but it had to be a lot of it, and recent.
With a wild animal’s urgency, he fled from the pyramid, following the statue’s bewitching gaze, down the street and out of the lowlanders’ town. Only after he had passed the last houses at the town’s edge did he notice the long stairway leading up into the cliffs by the shore.
* * *
The winding stone stairs had led Abel to a vaulted doorway high up on a cliff, overlooking the sea. He stood and contemplated the doorway for a few moments before walking in, certain of what he would find inside.
Atua hovered in mid-air, a disembodied face about a head’s height above Abel’s. Behind, a smooth metal wall closed off the deep interior of the cave. The wall had a door through which Atua received the sick and wounded for healing, drawers and hatches from which disembodied hands emerged and dispensed the requested goods. Abel had seen all of this before, in the Giving Cave. It was the same here as it was there.
Atua’s visage turned to Abel. It was a visage alien in its simplicity, a face of no one in particular, a face of a doll. The eyes, glassy and hard, not of human flesh yet somehow expressive, fixated silently upon the young man. Abel approached:
“Are you Atua of my ancestors?”
“I am the ancestors’ legacy; I am the repository of your patrimony,” the visage replied in a distant, dispassionate voice.
“But how? You serve the Roons, and they are our enemies!”
“I am the same in your village as I am here. I guard the inheritance of the coastal people, as I guard yours.”
A wave of bitterness rose in the young man’s breast: “Well, you certainly do not give out our inheritance equally. I came here from my village, a dingy, brutish little place that never gets any better, year after year after year. Stupid, stupid people! Even my father knows in his heart how awful it all is, but he is afraid to say it aloud.
“And look at the coastal town, large with its straight, even roads and big, nice houses, and tidy fields all around! My elders raided and killed coastal people in the days past, and then talked up their bravery for years afterwards. Meanwhile, the coastal people built all of that! If they come after us, our village will disappear in flames, and we, I think, will have our throats slit before that great stone face in the middle of their town. So why is that? Do you love them more than us?”
“They asked for different things than you. I gave them what they asked for, and I gave you what you asked for.”
There was silence for a few moments. Atua continued: “Is that not true? I could not give your mother’s life back — no one could; it was too late — but did I not grant your people every wish they came to me with?”
“You did, and more,” the youngster shot back. “They have littered the place with the trinkets you gave them! And you stood by silently when they killed a harmless, well-meaning man. Why didn’t you stop them? Why didn’t you punish them?”
The visage descended gently to Abel’s eye-level, and Atua’s even, distant voice seemed to gain a tinge of warmth as the answer came:
“Abel, I have seen many cruel things done by your people, as I have also seen them done by the people of the coast. And there will be more, you are right about that. But I am not a judge, nor an avenger; I am the guardian of your inheritance. The ancestors have entrusted me with it. I am their creation.
“They were not gods, the ancestors, even though they held sway over the Earth for many hundreds of years, and had bent the world to their desires, both noble and cruel. I know them well, but I am not called upon to judge them.
“The wisest among them knew that nothing is eternal. When they saw the end of their reign in the world draw close, rather than fight in vain the descending darkness, they made me the custodian of that which was best of their time on Earth. I guard the fruits of their lives’ efforts from dissipating in the night.
“They made abodes for me throughout the world, abodes like this one, and the Giving Cave. Different peoples have given me different names, and they tell different stories about me, but I am the same everywhere.”
There was silence again. The young man walked the few steps back to the cave’s entrance, and stood there for a while, watching the sea below glimmer in the sunshine. Beyond, there were other lands, other people telling other stories. The silent Atua watched over them too, silently offering the ancestors’ boon to those who asked, demanding nothing, judging nothing...
Abel turned back and faced Atua again. His anger and agitation gone, he addressed the visage calmly: “Atua of the ancestors, what is my inheritance? What should I ask for?”
By way of answer, a loop of string and some wooden pegs fell out of the dispenser.
“Take this loop of string. It is marked off into twelve equal lengths with knots all around it. Spread it out taut on the ground with three pegs, and span the lengths of three, four and five.
“Now look closely at that shape on the ground, and tell me if you see anything remarkable.”
Abel looked closely, carefully for a while. He had drawn shapes on the ground before... Then he exclaimed: “Ha! These two sides cross evenly, like the streets and field borders down there. Is that how they do it?”
“Yes,” Atua replied. “Crossing lines evenly in this way — they called it the right angle — is something the ancestors had learned from their ancestors, in times that are now forgotten by everyone but me. It makes it easy to repair the boundaries of fields after storms and floods.
“Now come, young man, sit by my side and listen patiently, for I see that my words will not be wasted. There is much that I have to teach you.”
Copyright © 2022 by Danko Antolovic
