Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [33]
I can tell you what happened before you came to the forest, and I can push you toward the future, but I cannot show you the future, because so many people must make choices to water its time, yes, future time, like a flower, needs watering from the actions of all those alive in the time before it occurred.
This was the dream:
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Born on the side of a forest volcano she lived in the trees, though at a tender age she fell from a low branch and found herself standing upright on the forest floor. Putting one broad foot after another she now found herself moving forward. A handsome fellow who lived not far above chose to drop down out of the branches and take up the stroll with her.
This is good, he made clear to her that he saw things this way.
She touched his thigh, his chest, and turned her head aside to laugh, so full was her she-heart.
He touched her breast, her throat, his own chest full of longing and desire.
Pluck at us! Pick here, pick there! Tickle us! We laugh, oh, yes.
They told each other stories, using gesture and sound. In the trees, wide-eyed and wondering about everything around them the most pleasure came from living close to each other. Gradually it became clear that the main dangers in life, the cats that stalked them and the snakes that when disturbed would strike and bite, had only their senses of smell and movement. Lyaa and her lover-neighbor used these senses they learned to good effect by watching the animals but also found themselves in the dream world in which the goddess taught them lessons about the waking world. Did the big cats dream also? Did the snakes? Could there be a goddess of cats and snakes?
That handsome fellow shook his head.
Lyaa touched him on the throat.
She agreed.
Lo and behold, they discovered one morning, early, when the air smelled of smoke, and the birds remained silent, that they each had slept with the same dream.
Yes, yes, yes, Lyaa showed him the picture in her mind and he looked and tilted his head as if he were in thought. And she could see the picture in his mind, yes, yes, she could.
This land was once no-land, lying on the bottom of a bitter salt-sea, no trees, let alone forests, only curling undersea shrubs, among which lived large flat-bottomed fish with eyes at the end of long tentacles, if they had eyes at all. Sea-snakes as long as the line of the horizon shimmied here and there on the pebbly floor of the sea while sharks as large as tall trees roamed with impunity, and now and then a broad-beamed swimmer—whales?—floated past, bigger than entire hillsides.
Yemaya, splashing silently with her tail, drifted in and among these creatures, hand in hand with her brother Okolun.
At that time the sea tasted of sulfur and sweet oxygen, a flavor like berries and tart stones, or the rank stink of a kiss when the other body has not yet digested the flesh of the other he has eaten.
Shssssssss…Ay!
Whale ate shark ate snake ate proto-flounder, all digesting all, and the least of the fish merely working its jaws as it itself became another’s meal, with a watery burp!
Okolun thought this was enormously comical.
He laughed and laughed, and his belly grew as he did so, and the noiseless sound of his laughter grew ten-fold and finally a thousand-fold—so it increased, and the sea-floor jiggled and tilted. He pointed to the comedy of meal-time and danced on the buckling ocean floor. Yemaya cocked her head at him and then took him by the hand.
“You’ve done it now,” she said. “There are powers here as great as yours, I feel them, though I don’t know what to call them or where they live. Inside the core of our world, where the fires boil and bubble and flow?”
She leaned over and gave him a more-than-sisterly kiss on the mouth.
Oh, the force below took the moment to burst open before them!
Stand back! Steam and undersea fire upshot straight to the surface and kept on going, even less deterred by air than it was by water.
Sister and brother looked at each other and instantly understood. Their father, a god beyond description, had