The Ghosts of Heaven Read online

He clutches it as if he needs it,

  and gives a small cry,

  falling to his knees,

  and then to his side,

  where he lies in the grass, panting fast.

  with wide eyes.

  The people who are near him scatter in fear,

  and then the others are on them,

  without warning.

  They have spears, no bows,

  but they do not need them.

  They throw hard and well,

  and the people are taken with barely a sound

  as spears land

  again and again and again,

  thrown hard and well.

  Thrown well, despite the fact

  that the throwers have parts of their fingers missing.

  One of these others leads the rest.

  He has four stumps where his full fingers should be,

  but his aim is true.

  He pulls his spear from a woman on the ground

  and stabs her in the face

  to finish her.

  XIX

  From the cave of the black hands,

  down the widening shelf she runs.

  On a turn in the shelf,

  she glances at the water,

  at the plains, and her heart runs loose and free.

  She stops at the sight.

  For with her very good eyes, she can see the people die.

  Horror holds her for a moment,

  and then she knows what she must do.

  She runs.

  To camp, she runs,

  and her guess is a good one,

  for soon, the shelf reaches the forest floor,

  with the lake shore close through the trees,

  and she knows the way back to camp.

  But still she must hurry,

  the way is long, though easier by light.

  She thinks about the dead boy, the dead old man,

  she thinks about the people

  who went across the water,

  and those who stayed at camp.

  It is them that she must warn,

  and sooner than she hoped,

  camp comes toward her through the trees.

  It is empty.

  No one there,

  and then she remembers that they will have gone to find food,

  even the very young,

  even the babies, carried at their mother’s neck.

  She staggers around the smouldering fire.

  Twice she runs,

  in desperation,

  and something is screaming at her from deep inside,

  but still, it will not be heard.

  Should she look?

  Should she wait?

  Should she hunt for them, or wait for their return?

  She stands silently now in the dawn forest.

  Her chest heaves, not from the running,

  but from fear.

  She stares at the soft sandy earth

  beside the fire.

  She stares at it, seeing the end of her stick make its mark.

  She wonders. She begins to dream.

  And then …

  A crack, and a voice.

  A stick breaking on the summer-dried floor,

  and a voice, but not a voice she knows.

  She hides,

  she slips from the camp,

  and choosing an easy tree, she climbs.

  Out of sight.

  XX

  They come.

  Not the people.

  The others.

  They come through the trees.

  Not from the lake,

  but along the shore

  and she knows they are more

  of the ones who killed her people on the plains.

  They sound different from her people.

  Before she sees them, they sound different,

  when she sees them, they look different.

  They walk differently. They wear different furs.

  Naked, she clings to her treetop,

  and with horror she waits as two

  stop beneath her tree.

  They smell different,

  and she is clever enough to know that she might smell different to them.

  So she shivers in the high wavering tree,

  as they pour into camp,

  and prowl.

  They touch nothing; they merely look

  silently.

  Holding their spears

  lightly.

  She wonders why they don’t take the food that’s there,

  the furs and the tools.

  And then she knows:

  they want to kill.

  Then, the people return.

  She hears their sound coming through the forest.

  They are singing.

  They are singing the songs of the hunt magic.

  No, she thinks. Do not sing!

  But they sing as they come back to camp,

  and the others have heard them, too.

  They steal away,

  hide in the green,

  and even though she saw where they went,

  they are invisible now.

  Even the two others who stood at her tree,

  she can no longer see,

  but she knows they are there from the smell.

  XXI

  This is the moment.

  This is the moment when she fails.

  As the people come back.

  She stares down from the tree

  and all she can see is the sand by the fire,

  and her stick tip touching the sun-dry earth,

  so easy to make a mark.

  And as the people come back,

  the others slide from the green,

  and throw their spears with barely a sound,

  the last of the people begin to die.

  She doesn’t help them.

  She would only help them die.

  There’s horror mounting

  in her throat

  and her belly,

  and as she realizes that the two are gone from under her tree,

  she slips to the ground,

  ready to run.

  She takes a last look through the leaves

  to the fire pit,

  where blood is welling in the sand—

  blood from the body of the woman.

  The woman is still, just one among all

  who die that day.

  But as she looks through the leaves

  at the killing and the dead,

  this woman puts a picture in her head,

  of what it was to be young,

  before the bleeding,

  before the drawing,

  before the talking,

  what it was to be young

  and to be held

  in the arms of the woman from whose belly she came.

  She watches her bleed in the sand.

  They are all dead, or dying soon.

  No one is left, not the young or the weak,

  so she turns, and runs,

  away through the trees

  and green leaves,

  and blades of grass

  where tiny snails spin spirals around themselves,

  as if they know a secret.

  XXII

  The last of the people runs.

  Blindly, she runs and is at the water,

  and sees boats arriving from the far lake shore.

  Her hopes are dashed before they can even rise,

  because the boats are not hers.

  More of the others

  come back from the killing on the plains.

  So she turns and runs through the trees,

  still running blind,

  and then she hears a shout,

  and despite her sense

  she looks back.

  Two of them have seen her:

  the two from her tree.

  One points; they sprint.

  She bolts,

  but her legs won’t move as she wants them to;

  fe
eling the fear from seeing the faces of the two.

  Faces painted with tight black lines,

  round eyes, down cheeks:

  magic made on the skin,

  and she knows it must be killing magic.

  That is the magic that makes them powerful,

  and strong,

  and fast and feared.

  In that moment, too,

  she saw

  the way their fingers stop short.

  Knuckle-cut fingers, and yet still they hold their spears

  with strong hands.

  More killing magic: the mark of the hands.

  She hears them closing in,

  and though her legs are strong,

  she’s growing tired.

  Yet there is no choice

  other than to run and to live,

  or stop and die.

  Then.

  There!

  As she runs, she sees the shelf down which she came.

  Up there, on the high forest shelf, clinging to the cliff,

  is the buzzing body of the lion.

  And somewhere in the grass beside it;

  her bow. Maybe an arrow, or more than one,

  and an idea;

  a picture in her mind

  of her killing these two,

  comes to her with such sudden power than she runs faster than ever before.

  She turns and starts to make the climb,

  but they have seen her turn,

  and follow.

  She will need to put some time between them,

  time in which to find the bow,

  time in which to fit an arrow,

  to roll onto her back and let it fly.

  She pictures it all in her mind,

  as she runs, and then she does nothing but run.

  There is nothing in her head now.

  She is the runner,

  and though the two can see her ahead,

  she puts space between them,

  space and time

  that she will use to kill them.

  Then.

  For some reason.

  She stops.

  She is by the entrance to the black-hand cave.

  She stares into the blackness,

  looks back once more,

  and then

  she steps inside.

  XXIII

  Just inside,

  by the mouth of the maw,

  there lie her fire sticks on the cold clay floor.

  She takes them in hand,

  and the dropped torch,

  and pushes inside, pursued.

  They falter as she reaches the cusp of light,

  beyond which is pure magic blackness.

  She is the one who goes ahead,

  when others fall behind.

  She has been in the deep cave once,

  and made magic,

  as she made the stag on the wall.

  She has dreamed her whole life of what lies in the inmost cave

  and she has no fear of what that might be.

  But they do.

  They stop at the mouth.

  They are not magic men.

  They have magic on their skin,

  but that was made by another’s hands.

  Theirs is to hunt and kill,

  to swim and fish,

  to run and trap,

  but out in the sun-bright day,

  not here.

  Not here, in the cold, wet dark

  where time doesn’t move.

  It’s here that the magic comes

  from out of the world,

  from the deepest part of the dark,

  and they are afraid.

  Hearing no sound behind her,

  she stops and turns.

  She sees them

  outlined against the day-bright light.

  She knows why they have stopped,

  and that is enough to give her heart some strength,

  and yet to fill her belly with fear.

  They stand that way for an age,

  here in this place where time barely moves,

  and, with every step, deeper into the blackness

  moves more slowly still.

  For deep in the darkness,

  in the inmost cave,

  lies the prize,

  the secret.

  The two stand,

  then step a step,

  then stand.

  Back away.

  Come forward again,

  and she makes to run into the dark, past the black hands

  and her red-black stag,

  when the world shakes.

  The world moves.

  The world thunders and the sky outside burns a thousand times more brightly.

  Something rips it apart,

  pounds the mountain,

  and the rocks around start shaking so hard she falls to her knees.

  A sound louder than a thousand suns

  tears through the sky and into the earth.

  The shaking world begins to crumble.

  The two,

  fear-frozen in the cave mouth,

  fall.

  Above them, the rocks crumble,

  collapsing.

  So easily,

  they die.

  She watches.

  Light flickers through the rock fall.

  Dust and debris obscures her view,

  but as silence returns and the world stops shaking,

  the light, and the world outside with it,

  has gone.

  She is alone.

  XXIV

  The last of the people

  lies on the floor in the darkness.

  Choking clouds of dust roil back to her,

  and she lies, heaving her lungs and spluttering her throat.

  Around her is nothing.

  She can see nothing.

  She is nothing.

  But rebirth.

  She feels for the floor,

  wet clay and water pools,

  and waits for the choking to stop.

  When it does, she laps at the water and washes her face.

  She shivers.

  She stands, if only to know one thing;

  which way is up.

  The cold skitters across her skin again, and water drips from her hair

  and her fingertips.

  She will die in the cave.

  That part is easy.

  But before she does, perhaps,

  there is something else.

  Something that’s been lying in wait for her,

  and her alone.

  She kneels, and finger-sees her way across the floor.

  She fails.

  She starts again, more slowly,

  moving in an ever-widening circle,

  turning and growing,

  not knowing that above her head

  a spider is spinning a giant web,

  turning and growing, in a line that will not end.

  Then,

  she finds them; the torch and her fire sticks,

  resting on dry rock.

  She does not find the fire bow,

  but it can be done by hand,

  and, though it takes a little longer,

  a red glow appears in front of her between her flying fingers.

  She pushes on, spinning the stick between her palms,

  and the glow becomes brighter,

  and flicks into flame,

  and soon the torch is alight once more.

  She lifts it close to her skin,

  feeling its warm breath on her breast.

  Fire flickers in her eyes.

  She’s alive.

  She walks.

  There, at the cave mouth,

  the way is blocked. It will never be opened.

  So she walks

  into the heart of the mountain,

  hunting for that final understanding.

  She walks past the black hands, past her red-black stag,

  and she keeps on walking.r />
  She walks where time never moves,

  so there is plenty of space for her thoughts to come.

  She climbs over rocks, and scrambles up slopes,

  lets herself jump deeper and down

  into the heart.

  The snail goes with her,

  and the ferns.

  The falling falcon and the spinning bow.

  The eddies in the water of the lake

  light her way past the spiderweb.

  She begins to understand.

  She understands many things.

  She remembers that she made magic of the stag,

  and it did not work.

  She knows why,

  because though she put her red hand mark on the wall,

  she did not place a mark inside.

  The old man had his two lines,

  and yet she made no mark inside her red hand.

  She did not connect to the cave.

  She did not become one with the cave,

  and thus with the magic.

  But now the cave has her,

  and she will become one with it, forever.

  She should have made a mark inside her red hand.

  She comes to a place,

  so vast her torch cannot touch its walls,

  nor find its heights.

  The floor is flat, but slopes gently down,

  so she follows the path that lies before her,

  and there, in the far wall,

  lies a crevice,

  a tunnel, leading still farther.

  From the tunnel ahead whispers pour from the dark,

  calling her on,

  calling her in.

  She approaches the split

  the slit in the wall,

  and though it’s barely wider than she is herself,

  she lights her way with the torch,

  and goes inside.

  There, immediately,

  she sees:

  hand prints.

  Marks.

  No animals, no beasts.

  Just marks.

  Dots and lines,

  crossing and forking,

  in black and in red.

  Waterlike waves,

  spotted points.

  Mark after mark after mark after mark.

  She walks past them all,

  toward the end,

  as her torch starts to fail.

  She sees the sand by the fire pit,

  back at the camp.

  She sees her stick tip in the sand,

  and now she finally knows what it means.

  What it could mean,

  to make a mark in the sand.

  If there was a way,

  she thinks.

  To make a mark in the sand.

  And that mark to be known by all.

  And that mark to have a meaning.

  A meaning known to all.

  There could be different marks

  for different meanings.

  Then there could be a mark to mean go

  and one to mean follow

  and one to mean find

  and one to mean help.

  And then, she thinks,