The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [5]
I suppose there are canals, like Mars?
Oh, canals, and all sorts of things. Abundant traces of an ancient and once highly developed civilization, though this region is now only sparsely inhabited by roaming bands of primitive nomads. In the middle of the plain is a large mound of stones. The land around is arid, with a few scrubby bushes. Not exactly a desert, but close enough. Is there a cheese sandwich left?
She rummages in the paper bag. No, she says, but there’s a hard-boiled egg. She’s never been this happy before. Everything is fresh again, still to be enacted.
Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou. He rolls the egg between his palms, cracking the shell, then peeling it away. She watches his mouth, the jaw, the teeth.
Beside me singing in the public park, she says. Here’s the salt for it.
Thanks. You remembered everything.
This arid plain isn’t claimed by anyone, he continues. Or rather it’s claimed by five different tribes, none strong enough to annihilate the others. All of them wander past this stone heap from time to time, herding their thulks – blue sheep-like creatures with vicious tempers – or transporting merchandise of little value on their pack animals, a sort of three-eyed camel.
The pile of stones is called, in their various languages, The Haunt of Flying Snakes, The Heap of Rubble, The Abode of Howling Mothers, The Door of Oblivion, and The Pit of Gnawed Bones. Each tribe tells a similar story about it. Underneath the rocks, they say, a king is buried – a king without a name. Not only the king, but the remains of the magnificent city this king once ruled. The city was destroyed in a battle, and the king was captured and hanged from a date palm as a sign of triumph. At moonrise he was cut down and buried, and the stones were piled up to mark the spot. As for the other inhabitants of the city, they were all killed. Butchered – men, women, children, babies, even the animals. Put to the sword, hacked to pieces. No living thing was spared.
That’s horrible.
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for the trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories. Any more lemonade?
No, she says. We’ve drunk it all up. Go on.
The real name of the city was erased from memory by the conquerors, and this is why – say the taletellers – the place is now known only by the name of its own destruction. The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They’re fond of paradox in that region. Each of the five tribes claims to have been the victorious attacker. Each recalls the slaughter with relish. Each believes it was ordained by their own god as righteous vengeance, because of the unholy practices carried on in the city. Evil must be cleansed with blood, they say. On that day the blood ran like water, so afterwards it must have been very clean.
Every herdsman or merchant who passes adds a stone to the heap. It’s an old custom – you do it in remembrance of the dead, your own dead – but since no one knows who the dead under the pile of stones really were, they all leave their stones on the off chance. They’ll get around it by telling you that what happened there must have been the will of their god, and thus by leaving a stone they are honouring this will.
There’s also a story that claims the city wasn’t really destroyed at all. Instead, through a charm known only to the King, the city and its inhabitants were whisked away and replaced by phantoms of themselves, and it was only these phantoms that were burnt and slaughtered. The real city was shrunk very small and placed in a cave beneath the great heap of stones. Everything that was once there is there still, including the palaces and the gardens filled with trees and flowers; including the people, no bigger than ants, but going about their lives as before