The Flower of Change

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say… The bird has one eternal breath from which to sing. No pause… one breath… Twenty and six the length and width and each a home… a home to—to” the old woman spluttered a cough and fell again to the lilt of her mumbling. He could not wholly make out the words and he had long since let them pass unheeded. They were only the exhalations of a weak wind, mere whispers. Gone was the strength of her body. When she took a breath, it whistled faintly and he could not see her breast rise with it, it was so shallow.

He unstuck the strands of grey hair that clung to the sweat on her forehead and folded back the thick pelts she lay in until one thin and pale arm lay bare like just a thing, with nothing to do with her. He held her wrinkled hand. At his touch he watched her struggle almost to lucidity but the glimmer that flickered in the thin parting of her eyelids, already closing, was only the light of the fire. He watched her sink back to the deep place. Against the rough wall of the cave her twin was slumped and its shadow bloomed and wilted weirdly in the firelight as though its spirit would rise to hold her once more but shrunk at the urge, someway knowing its futility. His own twin he had thrown out of the cave, left it lurking in the cold night because he could not stand to bring its blasphemy into her dying.

But hers was beautiful. Where the light caught it, her twin was blue as the sky and where it merged into shadow it was blue like late evening, like the interface between the brightness of a star and the black of the void. In the whole village its symmetry had been unmatched, even to the fine whorls that swirled like fingerprint in the firm texture of it and the pattern of studs and raisings that traced the anatomy of its body, its face. Its face austere and regal because of its distant tranquillity, as if it rested on a placid thought beyond this world. When it was born, they had said a flower had sprung from the mould.

He was snatched back to her side by the lightest twitch of her hand and felt the sudden belly-sick of guilt at having drifted, even now at this last of her moments, into ‘the vanity’ as she used to say in that false, truly loving contempt of hers. Her eyes were wide open, staring at him with a transfixion so intense he nearly started for he thought that she had died. But her hand again strained a pressure against his and her dry lips quivered to speak to him. He turned his head, leaning in close until he could feel the air of her breath in his ear. Blank-eyed, he studied her things set in the dim alcoves cut into the wall. Feathers and dried animals. River stones and meteorites. The sleek plastic souvenirs of her travels and the clay vessels she had once handled with deft fingers; pinching odd dusts from there, spinning that bowl a quarter turn on the cooking stone. Even the figure of horn he had watched her carve was hung by a leather cord on a jut of the rock. All these objects now absurd and meaningless, ridiculous to see beyond the length of her failing body swaddled in its sour furs. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Dead man’ she mouthed, and the words were loose at the edges, almost nothing so that they came to him at the space between perception and imagination. ‘Dead man… bring death into life.”

⁎

Before he was a man, it was her who had found him where he crouched hiding in the root tangle of a storm fallen tree. Nothing but the wet green of the forest about him and the silence that he broke. Broke with the snot-mess sobbing of a desperate and confused child. She was still powerful then, and lovely; her movements as graceful and exact as the sacred deer of the inner glade. But when The Sky had reached for him with the sinuous blue hand of her twin and he had pressed himself in fear into the hollow, she had only left her open palm hanging between them. That calm, impenetrable face waiting for him without judgement, almost without even curiosity. He had held her hand until they returned to the village; and he knew when he let it go that she had gifted him the last kind touch due to a child and the rest of the way was his alone.

When they came to the God Mount the monoliths atop it slanted the westering sunlight so that columns of shadow barred the dancing ground beneath. At the foot of the hill, seeming to merge with it, the Mycelium shambled up in tiers of scalloped discs and fantastic stalks and folds of life to dwarf the circle of men and boys huddled there. Before he reached them, The Sky left him for the path up the hill to the Witch Cave, averting her gaze from the men. She had said nothing to him, or to them who had sent her to find him.

He stood at the edge of the foot-flattened circle and it was all that he could do not to run again when the men saw him and split their gaggle. Each were twin-held for the ceremony, enveloped by the colours of their clans and the shapes of their personalities. But despite the immutability of their expressions, he felt the intermingling of their disdain like a heavy weight against him. Only his father was turned away, the rich red of his warrior twin splayed in powerful sweeps of interlocking segments. In their silence the rest at least showed him some mercy. The children, bare-chested and scrubbed clean, were altogether without compassion. They called him filth and still-born, boys whose mothers had fed him as hers did them. Boys he had laughed with, played with, fought and consoled. In hisses they called him carcass and dead-man, and it was many years before he understood their nastiness for fear.

There was a piercing sound like the long-drawn stroke of a single string and the boys hushed. The Song Man had leapt onto the altar stone, his twin a deep green, yellow-flecked and spurred like the grasshopper. From the slowing vibrations of his opened scapulae the harsh wail of the sound faded to quiet. The boys looked to each other, wide-eyed, pulled suddenly back to the rite and understanding nothing. Then the men began to lean and crouch oddly, shuffling and stamping. The children held each other, gawping at the dancers, even his difference briefly forgiven by the mounting of a stronger dread. A sharp clack sounded and as one they turned to the body of ominous beings from which it came only to spin around to the deep thud that struck at them from behind.

The men enclosed them, herding them with a myriad of sourceless, jabbing noise. No longer fathers and brothers, no longer kin or friend but beast-men and myth-men, terrible and powerful. As the God Mount eclipsed the failing sun the dance rose to meet the fallen shadow and suddenly a rhythm took hold of the yowls, whirs and drummings of the twin-held. From the flexing of their unique anatomies the sounds came. Their movements became frenzied and elaborate. The dancers shuddered and rippled with the building of the song, instrument and body gyring in tandem. The Song Man danced a thread throughout their music, his leaps were the melody and the dissonance. The dancers were the mountains and rivers, the turning of earth and sky but the Song Man was the storm and the falling leaf, the call of birds and the rattle of bones. The song infused the deepening night with form and it did not seem to end. Then the boys, themselves impelled by a strange will to dance, forgot all thought of its ending. Then all memory of silence.

Finally, when the cosmos had long since diminished to nothing else but night and song the Mycelium joined light to the making of the new world. At first but a dim question of light the volvas, rings, gills and fans of its great mass began to glow in alternations of soft blue and pale white. The men and boys were made shadows then, separated from the dark. Then the sparkling hues of sun and moon and each rainbow colour shone from it, showing them again the reality of their bodies, their faces. But still the light rose and still the song was sung though lowered, slower; now in reverence the men bowed and swayed. He and the other children turned and stamped in exhaustion. All was forgotten, all identity and cause for joy or pain, only the ebb of song and flow of light.

When the colour of the light had transcended the splitting of the spectrum, and made the opalescent slick of oil a dull facsimile of colour the men grew still. The song was done. The children found themselves kneeling before the Mycelium, now vibrant beyond any known hue, facing in deep-state what they had been introduced to in the wakefulness of day.

“Begin” said a voice that each child thought was their father’s.

As if sleep-walking they began to clamber up the living flesh of the fruit they had never once been allowed to touch; climbing to the flower-like excretions of the Mycelium where their newly-born brothers lay half-revealed.

One by one they found their twins, knowing them by their peculiar familiarity, like the recognition of an inarticulate selfhood. At the first awed touch of timid fingers the Mycelium gave a gentle heave and the twins unfolded. Slowly, the boys were enveloped limb for limb until each of them had vanished into themselves; some twins fluidly shaped and toned earth-soft, others vibrantly coloured and wildly arrayed but every one of them right and natural for the man they now embraced.

He lingered. The call he felt from the shadowed recess of the malformed flower where his twin slumbered beneath the shifting light was not the call of harmony. He felt it lurch in his heart like the hateful scream of utter otherness. The trance was fading from him with the nauseous surge of his repulsion and the mind-warping fear of its inescapability.

“Begin.”

But he could not, he could not. Where the other twins had been offered high in the structure face-up, as though floating in the sea of the Mycelium they merged with, his was low and half-turned so that only part of the gnarled chest and thorned shoulder was spat from the greater flesh. And one skeletal hand beckoned to him in a sickening contortion.

“Begin!”

The men tutted and growled, this was not a place for too much talk, the deep-state would break, the spirits leave. He began to back away, he would run again, he would be a child forever, he would throw himself from the God Mount, he would escape. He took another step and suddenly he fell into strong hands and all reserve shattered. He struggled and twisted, tried to flee but he was not strong enough, he was only a boy.

The pulsing light of the Mycelium spun in the wheeling sky as he was lifted, now screaming and pleading and dragged into the rubbery folds of its underbelly. A red hand grasped his wrist and forced it free of his chest where he clutched at himself, trying to be small, trying to disappear but the hand forced his out to touch the hideous twin and then a wet darkness was slithering up his arm, his torso, his whole body sucked into the maelstrom of searching tissue. Then his head was submerged in the suffocating dark, its fine tendrils pierced his skin and the first-journey took him to hell.

⁎

A patter of animal sound brought him up from the abyss. A strange utterance of… language? Yes, language. Dimly he recalled embodiment, gradually he was solidifying into the material plane and there was thought being spoken around him. He began to remember that he too was a thinking thing. He tried to open his eyes and there was a quick brightening of daylight but he could not quite meet it yet. He was alive, he realised, and lying somewhere.

“… it cannot be proven—”

“He is the proof! See with your own eyes what they have done.”

“There is nothing we can do. It could have been half the village.”

“We must destroy it.”

Mother, he tried to say, father. But his voice would not come to him. A third voice spoke then, soft and lyrical but insistent as the breeze.

“There is another way,’ said The Sky. ‘I will teach him.”

⁎

They sat in the ring of standing stones that remained on the God Mount. The oblong bulks of the monoliths were struck up against the drifting clouds twenty feet tall and three men could not join their hands around them. The stones held the rough shapes of their earth-making but in certain angles of the light he could just make out the weathered bas-reliefs of the histories, eon-ground and near indistinguishable from the natural, pitted stone. The mossy rubble of the broken were scattered over the hill and in the craters of the lost ones, wildflowers grew. Below them the village seemed insignificant in the spread of forest and rivers that blurred into the haze of distance on the ring of the horizon. He watched the strong backs of the fishers stretching and bunching in the carving of a new canoe, the tanners stripping hides. He saw the silk spinners at their wheels and the dogs that were not hunting warming their bellies in the sun. From the God Mount their domesticity appeared somehow ephemeral, like a dream of real life.

“It isn’t fate. Its hatred.”

She sighed and raised her face to the sun, eyes closed. Her twin sat in the shadow of a monolith a little away from them but he had not worn his since the initiation. Almost three years ago. The other new men, and the women after their ceremony, had worn theirs daily, learning them and their uses with an obsessive delight to make the elders smile and shake their heads. They shook their heads at him but did not smile.

“Even the work of our hands is a work of fate. All that happens to us, happens inside of us, and makes us. It is the same as if it happened naturally.” In the bright sunlight her high cheeks were swept of the creases that had begun to gather in the corners of her eyes and she seemed like a queen to him, forever young.

“They buried the corpses of animals over the placenta my mother planted with her own loving hands! They tainted me with death. I was meant to be handsome and fierce like my father. Now I’m…”

He fell silent, there were no words for his shame and anger. She searched his face and he looked away.

“You do not understand’ she said. ‘You were meant to be how you are. It was meant to happen how it did.”

“They made me into their own sin! They rotted my soul!”

“Silence! You speak like a child. Do you think you are not an animal? Do you think you are the only one with a dark other? Yours is merely to the fore. It is not hidden. You have been given a curse-gift that could make you more powerful than you could imagine. Where do I go when I fetch the souls of the sick?”

It was as if the sun paled and the air grew chill. Visions of his first-journey came to him, fragments of nightmare.

“I do not want to go back there” he whispered.

“All Šaman go through there. You went, but you did not go through.”

Visions of grinding rock and shattered bone, of dry rivers sapping dead trees; the starless desert night. Abruptly she clapped, dispelling the shadow, and the true warmth of daylight returned to him. She waited for him to speak, watching where his mind would turn.

“You speak to me of plants and the animal-tongue and healing. When will you teach me Physics?”

“You are not ready!’ she snapped, raising her hands in exasperation. ‘With the help of the fruit, you must first be able to travel down again and up. Then once you can do it without the fruit you can skip the stone side-ways. Maybe. If you have learnt. But no, the man-child will not even face himself.”

He set his jaw in frustration and remained quiet. She left him to his petulance and went over to her twin. He made a point of self-hurt to look away but from the corner of his eye he watched her embrace it. It enfolded her until the two were made one and she returned to him as The Sky.

“Why must you wear it? You know it is safe on Blessed Isle.”

When she spoke from the twin it tingled at the nape of his neck and images came to him that were not of his own mind.

“That planet is far from safe. There is a sickness growing there that the twin-held can remind them against.’ She paused and considered him. In his minds-eye he saw glittering heights of endless city-steel; flying chariots and things he had no name for. ‘Besides, the stones are splitting or becoming lost more frequently with each passing.’ He made to exclaim an argument but she raised her hand and continued, ‘It is true. Let the village believe it has always been a risk but the Šaman know. If I am waylaid, my twin will keep me safe from the void, at least for a time. Now watch,’ and she huffed a derisive laugh, ‘if you are so keen to learn.’

She strode to her monolith and placed a hand on it. ‘In the Anthropomorphic Age the wise of that time—”

“Savages, like the Blessed.”

She turned to him with a sharp look. “Listen, man-child. The stars have changed but we have not, only our ideas,’ she turned back to the face of stone before her. ‘The wise of that time called Grounding ‘gravity’ and Radiance they named ‘the electronuclear force’. What is lacking?”

“I am not a child. But school was not that long ago.”

“Each time you hear something it is in a different time and at a different place. It is a different hearing. What is lacking?”

“Spirit. They only knew the mask of the world.’

“Good. Now tell me this: what is common between a mountain and the light of the sun?”

Before he could respond there was a thunderous roar of rushing winds and a stupendous blaze of fearsome heat that hammered the heavens to the earth in a crackling snake of lightning. Scrambling to his feet from the cacophonous pull of the sudden vacuum, he found himself half deaf and blind and wholly alone. The Sky and the stone had vanished and in their place was only the black maw of a smoking hole.

⁎

The cycle of omens that brought the storm of that night should have warned him of her return but he had ceased to believe in it. A deluge of rain made sheets of waterfall at the mouth of the cave where he watched the common lightning freeze and fade in the sky and felt the thunder rumble after it again and again but he was still closed to the wider pattern of things.

He had failed to predict the storm. He did not know all the songs. Though he had healed some with what she had once taught him of medicine, he could not go where she could go. It had been a long time since he had spoken to his father or mother. He was blamed for many agonies and with the passing of time the names the villagers muttered behind him grew far beyond the power he tried to teach himself from dreams and what he recollected of her. It was difficult now to love any of them. Man-child, they said, child-Šaman.

When the crack of lightning lit her wasted figure, clawing down the hill in the muck and enclosing dark he thought his twin had finally come for him. Then the world flared again and he saw the fear in her rolling eyes and her wailing mouth rang thunder.

After he had bundled her inside and lit the fire, he saw how aged she had become and shuddered. She had been in the void; he could tell by the depth to which her twin had eaten her but still she was too old. Too old for the span of her absence. Wildly she clutched at him and gasped:

“They have stilled the Change. They are eternal.”

Then as if she could not even stand the strength of firelight, she fell limp into sleep. He went out again into the storm to haul her twin from the peak of the hill where her monolith stood once more rain-black as any other, that she might be whole in dying.

And now on the third night of her fever her hand slackened in his and she was dead.

⁎

Under the gleam of the blood-risen moon a demon strode the place of gods. In his right hand was the fruit of souls and beneath his left a shard of mountain trembled.