The Cleft (17 page)

But if the young men's need from the time they were little boys had been to distance themselves from the women, they did now miss the ease of the visiting,
women to men, men to women. And did they miss, too, the scolding and the advice?

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid – did you really think you could make little children into adults simply by treating them like adults? Did you really imagine that little boys would behave like your obedient young hunters because it would suit you if they did?'

Horsa took some of his men walking along the beaches, to see what he might find; he took them on trips inland to high points, like very tall trees or hills, any lookout where they might spy something that would justify Horsa's hopes.

Time passed. And now at last a happening which dated events, for them as well as for us.

There were several pregnant girls and their size and condition caused Horsa many difficulties.

They gave birth and then the long balmy beaches where they camped and feasted, male beaches, full of mostly men, heard the wails of infants. Horsa was appalled, and so were all the young men. This is what they had run away from – wasn't it?

‘Well, what did you expect? Girls give birth and babies cry, and you have to feed the babes and wash them and keep them warm – had you not thought of that? Idiots, fools, oh you make us lose patience with you … Horsa, do you mean to say you didn't know this was going to happen? Don't you remember we told you if you took girls with you they would get pregnant?'

Imagined scoldings and the words, ‘… and so what are you going to do now?'

A babe died. A certain fly inhabited this beach, yellowish flies settling in swarms anywhere they could find food, like detritus washed in from the sea, rotting fish or dead sea animals, seabirds, seaweed and, as soon as the light went, the almost naked bodies of the boys and men who remembered that their aprons of feathers and leaves did have their uses.

The fires were built tall and hot, and they all crowded in as close as they dared to the flames. The babe that died was swollen with bites and the girls tried to keep their infants safe by bathing them continuously in the waves – which made their skins pucker and become inflamed.

Horsa ordered an exodus, but it was only to move along to a beach where the flies were not. One sandy beach is like another for its amenities.

But the infants cried and were fretful, and the girls complained. They had come on this trip because they liked mating and the comradeship of men, but now they had gone off sex, and would not give ease to the men and the boys.

So what use were they? the boys grumbled. ‘What use?' argued the girls. ‘Aren't we making a new generation of people?'

But they are a horrid nuisance, said the boys.

They had come such a long way, measured by time,
at least nine months, though there had been stops and slows on the road. Measured by distance – but they did not know how to do that.

How long would it take them to return? Return where? The glade in the forest? Their trees, which they dreamed of – what a wondrous time that had been, the safety of the great trees. Many of the young men and boys were saying they had been mad ever to leave. All that was needed were well-armed guards around the edges of the glade, to keep off the marauding pigs and the creeping felines.

But for some reason no one wanted to do this: journeys are to get somewhere, find something, to discover, take possession … grumbling was not helping them. So what was to be done?

Another babe died, and the sounds of weeping women were added to the babies' crying. These boys could not remember babes dying from sickness. Presumably it
was
sickness that was taking these infants off?

The girls who had lost infants became listless, and wept or lay about, their arms over their faces, silent, suffering … and milk dripped from their breasts. Oh, horrible, unseemly, and the boys showed their dislike, and yet these were girls who had shared their adventures and were comrades, like the boys – but then they spoiled everything by getting pregnant and then all the rest of the unpleasant sights and sounds. As for the very little boys, they were revolted.

How much nicer it had been in the forest, not too far from the women's shore. Girls could visit, got what they had come for – to have their wombs enlivened – and then they went back home again and there were new girls, and they were helpful and useful, so handy about the glade, and particularly so good with broken limbs and little sicknesses. And look at them now, preoccupied with their noisy infants, or lying silent and unhappy. And they would not be kind to the boys.

And now there was a big halt in the histories. Horsa's expedition and the destruction of The Cleft marked an end. It was a beginning too, of the villages in the forests. But then they did not know there would be villages. The chroniclers did not know it. The words ‘Horsa did not know where he was' ended one long section of the histories.

‘It takes one to know one!' I can tell when an historian is looking back to a time far from his or her own and is uncomfortable because times have changed.

What did it mean to the new chroniclers to say: ‘Horsa did not know where he was.' Where were they, these new voices? In the villages in the forests. We do not know how many villages there were, nor how many people lived in them. What the chroniclers felt they must emphasise was that every village had a double
palisade round it, to keep out the animals. They knew where they were. For one thing, they were not far from the women's settlements along the shores. It took time for the women – ages? – to consent to leave the sea and move in with the men, and only then if they were within walking distance of the shore. So when the village chroniclers said, ‘Horsa did not know where he was,' we must assume they knew where they were. The exploits of Horsa and his mad trip across the waves had by then become recognised in songs and tales for telling around the fires.

I do not think that we Romans may easily imagine what it meant – Horsa not knowing where he was. We Romans are taught ‘where we are' in a thousand ways. When our legions return from Gaul, from the lands of the Germans, from Dacia, they tell us where they have been. When invaders threaten Rome we know where they are from. Our ships travel the seas, go north even to Britain, to Egypt, and our slaves know lands we hardly have heard of. We Romans know where we are, and even a young child is taught to say, ‘This Rome of ours does not contain all that is known.' And this child would know that if he stood on a beach and saw ahead a curving further shore, it might very well be the other side of a bay, and to get there would only need some days' travelling from where he stands to reach that shore.

But think of Horsa, and what he knew. He knew the rocky and choppy waves of the women's shore. He knew the great river and the forests of the eagles'
valley. He knew the forest glade and its great trees and the ways from it to the women. So when Horsa stood on his beach – but he did not know where this beach was – looking ahead across the waves, he had no idea that he might be in a bay and he was staring at another part of it. Oh yes, he knew bays from his fleet's progress around the shores from their starting place where he had said goodbye to Maronna. Little bays, little promontories. Did he have words for them? The later historians in the villages knew what a bay was, a promontory, because Horsa's mad dash across the waves had taught them: this was no bay, small or large, where Horsa and his men idled on his beach, not knowing what to do. I repeat, ‘Horsa did not know where he was' represents a limitation of knowledge that no Roman may easily imagine.

Horsa did not idle there alone. His older young men were with him, when not hunting in the forests. We know this was no contented group of men.

‘Horsa was much troubled by the women and their small children and the little boys, whom he could not control.'

The little boys thought of themselves as big boys, and emulated the hunters and the food gatherers. How many were they? Taking into account that some had left with the women who had gone home, our guess (this can only be a guess) is that they were perhaps twenty, not many more. ‘Some' is the helpful word
used by the chroniclers. They were very pleased with their accomplishments, would come swaggering back to the beach with the animals they had killed, just like the youths who had achieved their men's bodies. They were tough and fearless, and did not obey Horsa, obeyed nobody. They might go off in a band by themselves for a day or two. More than once one was killed by a boar or a pack of dogs. Horsa didn't know what to do with them. Attempts were made to attach a few to the hunting bands of the big youths, to include them into the general whole, but these little boys – who were very unlike any little boy we know – were proud of their independence. They even elected a leader, a boy not older than they were, but stronger and the most brave. They might apply to the girls, those who were ready to be friendly, for help with a broken limb, or a wound. It is recorded the girls were afraid of these wild boys who were a long way from being described as ‘little'. Little boys they were not. And the big youths, hunting, encountering a band of these boys, were wary with them, as if they were enemies. There were some fights between the grown youths and ‘little boys' who, if they were half the size of the grown men, were just as strong and wily and skilled in the ways of the forest.

What was Horsa going to do with these boys, who when asked if they would go back to the women, laughed or shouted, ‘No, no, never.'

Horsa's friend, who accompanied him on his venture, was with him on their comfortable beach, and they endlessly argued about what they would do. It is clear they weren't in any hurry to do anything.

They had wanted to find out if this land of theirs was an island but the concept ‘island' was not what we Romans would accept as island. They had thought thus: they might suddenly one morning see that they had sailed so far they would see the women's shore just ahead of them, with the cliffs and caves of The Cleft. So in their minds was the idea of a circumference, an end where a beginning had been. ‘Island' was used by the later village chroniclers. The journey of the ‘fleet' going just outside where the sea broke on the beaches had seemed endless. If they did know where they had set off, then they had no idea where this ‘end' was. How did they know this journeying was not endless? How did they know this land of theirs was not so large they might encompass it? In their elation at setting out these thoughts had not come near them.

Horsa and his companions, the young men, the hunters and trackers when not on a trip into the trees, idled about the bonfires at night, tried to reason with the ‘little boys', listened to the seas washing in and out with their endless messages of movement, impermanence, and stared out at a horizon … and perhaps it was at that moment, for the very first time ever,
that the idea of a bay, a very large bay, became something in their minds they might refer to. Did they find a word for ‘bay' and use it? They could at least make a short trip and see what they could find. To make boats of bundles of reeds, of little platforms and branches, was not difficult. A few – very few, probably two or three – of the big men, with Horsa as leader, went secretly on to a little flotilla of these ‘boats', leaving at a time when the ‘little boys' were not around, and they went on along the coast. I imagine – it is hard not to think like this – that Horsa might have thought of going off altogether, and abandoning the little boys. But that meant the girls and their infants too, and the pregnant ones as well. In Horsa's mind rang Maronna's words, ‘Don't you care about us, Horsa?' And that meant more now to him than it had then. Horsa knew, if perhaps not all of this company did, that to produce infants men were needed. ‘Don't you care about us?' Horsa must have thought that the women were months of travelling away (this would have been thought of, probably, as time passing, not space covered) and that they must be getting frantic, waiting for the men. It is known they all knew, men and women, that an interval elapsed between mating and the birth, though with these people who apparently could not master numbers in any combination or means of reckoning, the ‘interval' would have been vague. But time had
passed, and Horsa heard much too often, ‘Don't you care about us?'

Did Horsa care about what we call a continuation of our race in the same way as we do? For instance, for pregnant slaves we pay higher prices than for older women or ones with flat bellies.

In the forest glade, did he now take trouble over guarding and caring for the little boys? And we come back to this question we cannot answer: did he think about the people? When Maronna said, ‘Don't you care about us?' did she mean all of them, males and females, Clefts and the once-upon-a-time Monsters? Who was ‘us'?

Meanwhile Horsa went on for one day, two, three, stopping for the night when the waves were rough, and the shore unwound in front of him with no end. And looking back over their shoulders, they could see a streak or line of colour where they had stared for a long time now, and wondered if that was simply a curving continuation of the shore they stood on.

They turned back: they could not simply go on, abandoning the others.

Again in their place, where the girls and their infants greeted them in a way that said their thoughts had been that they had been abandoned, the young men stared out in front of them, and saw, without really seeing, at the very edge where sea and sky met, a line of distant colour that did not change its place. Like
a shore. Some said it was a shore – it had to be – none of them could easily conceive of a bay so large that its opposite sides were almost out of sight. It was not easy to accept that what they were looking at was a place they could travel to. Or could have done, if they had large enough boats. What would they find? A country where a boy, with or without his man's body, would not be treated as an infant? Young women whose bellies did not swell up and then give birth to howling infants? Friendly girls who never grew sad and sulky and refused to play?

Horsa, who was in a fever because of this shore tinted like a dream, said that until the storm they had all done very well in their fragments of boats: they had skulled and rowed and paddled for weeks, for months – for ages – then; and the waves had been kind to them, and the journey now seemed like a wonderful thing. Yes, insisted Horsa: they could easily make a craft fit enough to take them across to that shore that seemed to beckon him, and they would head out over easy pretty waves and find …

A raft of bundles of reeds was fitted together, bigger and stronger than any raft they had made before. The big boys and the little clamoured to be taken on this adventure, but were promised another trip, if this one was successful. Horsa and his friend, whose name we have never known, set out at dawn towards a
treak that in this light was pinky-pearl, with a line 0f dark-blue cloud over it.

They had expected to reach there soon – that was the word used by the chroniclers. Not ‘by evening' or ‘after a short time', but soon. They were taking much longer than they expected. They laboured with their paddles, and went on, and on, but that beckoning shore did not come any closer. It was long past midday, and on they went, and when it was already getting dusk they were within a distance of a new land, if it was that – but they had no idea what it could be. Beaches again, and trees of a kind they had not seen. It was the trees that seduced them into thinking this place was altogether better, richer, more beautiful than their own. The trees as described by people who had never seen anything like them sound like palms, and there were great white birds in them, with trailing feathers like the fronds of the palms. Everything they looked at seemed remarkable and new, and all they wanted was to land their flimsy craft, which was ready to fall apart after so long over the waves much taller than they had become used to, and then a new life would begin, and …

It was late afternoon and the light was dimming and stars filling the sky, and Horsa looked up at his constellation and thought that it looked down on him. It was essential they must land, soon, soon, but then their fragile support began to rock and toss on
the waves, and a wind came straight towards them from this gleaming promise of a shore, a wind that reminded them of the storm that wrecked their boats. The dark cloud that settled over the land blew towards them in thin black streams, and they found they were being blown back to where they had come from. Blown fast and then faster, they were being skimmed over now tall and choppy waves while they clung to a handful of reeds that was all that was left of the raft, which fell apart and dissolved into the sea. Horsa and his friend were being tossed like foam on the waves, and then spun and tumbled, and the two were flung on to the beach they had left at dawn, violently, cruelly. Night had come long ago, the fires were flaring all along the beaches. The young man who was Horsa's friend was lying still, bent and broken, and he did not respond and never came to life. Horsa's leg was smashed, it was twisted and he lay on the warm sand and sobbed from pain but even more from disappointment.