Thirst, Source

I. How We Began

We say that Light forced Darkness,
And Dark returned the rape.

They battled then, each bent on revenge.
Both wept as they fought--
So hard and so long that their tears at last swelled into a world,
That their tears sealed them up
In the core of a Pearl.

Now they were One.

This, if either could have admitted it,
This was what they had craved:
The starving in their hearts could now be fed.

Realizing this-now close, now united,
They raged as never before.

Trapped, they bit each other to pieces.
Soon pieces were all that was left--
The pieces swarmed like locusts,
And the swarming struck a wildfire:
In the bowels, in the belly, of the Pearl.

The pearl cracked and shriveled; it scorched from within.
The Bitten Things tunneled from the core.
Some gave out, and settled for the Pearl's middle strata.
Some went on, and pierced the skin, but
Collided with an airless wall:
There was nothing beyond the burned Pearl.

The Bitten Things shook with terror: they quaked the Pearl's hide,
Until it shed nacre like leaves.
The leaves took reality with them. As they fell away,
The swarm of them formed an Outside.

When the Bitten Things saw the swarm,
When the Bitten Things suddenly could breathe,
They shouted and yodeled and blew.
We are fragments, they called,
Just like you.

The nacre-leaves showered outward;
And the Bitten Things blew.
The nacre-leaves drifted together
As the Bitten Things trumpeted,
And the Bitten Things blew,
And the scraps they did bind
And stretched a new skin for the Pearl--
New, high above the peeled old.

The Bitten Things blew,
And the skin stretched taut.
It hardened, and became a shell.

No one has ever told why the shell named itself Sky
Or who it told.
But like a creek-bank exoskeleton filling with memory,
It coated its interior and cushioned the pearl.

The bits and pieces peered, blind.
Then, something burning dropped out of a crack in the pearl--
The Pearl's molten, lost heart.
It hissed on the wet inner curve of Sky, but began to roll.
It rolls across Sky, even now.

What is this? Someone cried.
Dawn, someone else called it.
All over the land, heads popped up from holes and agreed.
They crawled up from where they had never been,
And agreed upon this thing they named Day.

II. Our Life Then

Within that green carapace called Sky,
Among the scarlet ferns and the pale blue leaves,
Though we hungered,
Though we needed caves and canopies, had to chip stone and cut hide and kill,
We knew no thirst. Full measure of liquid we contained.
There was no such thing as rain.
Water-we knew what Water was, as we knew a pheasant or an earthworm or an elk. Water held fish, and water kept snails. But Water herself was as irrelevant to us as was the slime in which slid our stock of dinner slugs. Water was not useful. Water snaked always in her course-but we could not cook or skin her, as we could a good snake.

And better than any snake, we shed skin at will.
We did not even need to bathe, for anything that adhered to our skins we cast off.
Only children bothered to splash with creeks: the Chieftain told us that this was right.
Let them play, she told us. It's a toy.
If we forbid it, they'll want it. If they get it, then toward it they'll grow dull.

When we came of age, we spurned that toy, Water-and we did it witnessed by all.
We shriveled in the creek, for hours, before Dawn.
Chieftain marched us into a pool in a bend
Exposed to Dawn no matter what time of year.
When the sun stuck the Water, our eyes zeroed out.
By the time the hands wheedled us up the bank, we were as hungry for dry land as for bread.
By the time we gave up our allegiance to our own,
We would have sworn any oath just never to have to soak again.

The Chieftain would speak then about Water.
Let me tell you about my grandmother, she'd say.

III. Grandmother's Judgment

My grandmother, Chieftain said, stopped at nothing:

She emerged--my grandmother did--one blinding noon
From the mouth of the cave that she had entered before dawn and left after midnight
Forty straight times preceding.
She had re-wrought the world, for us.
The roots of grains and herbs had agreed to shoot forth whenever we asked.
Trees undertook to encase their seeds in fruit.
Bees bought her arguments about making honey above ground.
Animals whose civilizations moved entirely in burrows and caves
Heard about this and contracted
To live naked in the light.

My grandmother was weary after all this, and unused now to sun.
The water made molten shrapnel in her eyes.

She discovered our youth, all too big to call themselves girls or boys,
Splashing and singing,
Wearing like garlands the water and light.
They sang about grass in the morning, and they sang about hot coals in the night.
They sang how the sky was an oyster
And they were refulgent pearls.

My grandmother at first she kept quiet.
They were young, she said she told and told herself.
But when they declared the creek water good as diamonds
My grandmother blared with rage.

She had just come from council with the minerals of the ground. The diamonds had been particularly hard.
We'll give you some radiance, they said. Sharpness, even, we'll give.
And you'll use us, and trade us like flints. Why should we come to you? Why?
My grandmother was strong.
She was a trader, as we all must learn to be.
It will take a long time, she told them. But we can peel your dull onion hides.
In our hands I promise you'll fall open like lilies of light.

The diamonds were dubious.
My grandmother made it up as she went along. It was all lies, as far as she knew.
But she had looked the diamonds in the eye.
And she was pretty sure she knew who would someday need who, even if she didn't know why.

But now that was behind her.
My grandmother was strong.
She was a trader, as all must learn to be.
She had made deals with the diamonds, and now she would deal with us.
She picked up a branch the size of a sapling tree.

She drove us like deer from the water.
We all wore welts, and some of us, blood.
She hefted her weapon:
We listened.

This is child's doings, she declared.
You are no longer small.
Do not your roots swell and grow heavy when you gaze upon one other?
With toys are you done. Root to the ground, and each other.
And she smashed the dry branch into shards.

But then my grandmother seemed sad.
Do not, she told us, punish those small.
They know not. But you do.

She was always very kind, Chieftain would recall.

My grandmother, Chieftain told us, took me aside, later.
My grandmother told me,
Those young people were not wise.
They were not taking care of us.
They have grown big and should know better ways.

I, Chieftain told us, bowed my head.
Not one of us since have needed to ask or be told.

Now, that is where the Chieftain would end her tale.
You would finally get to dry off and put on beads and robes.

But, if you snake-charmed Chieftain, if you cajoled,
Even if you weren't the one coming of age,
You could finally get her to tell about Water's grief.
Hysteria-that was what she'd repeat. Hysteria, absolute.
But those rumors about Water-if you could get her going, she'd say.

Every one of us, Chieftain would say-
Every one of us, she said, we heard our name called for weeks.
The creeks and springs pounded like strings and like drums.

Grandmother would have none of that. She called for noise.
We blew through reeds, whirled rocks and pounded on gourds.
We warred with noise, and we won.
Soon, all was quiet when we stopped.
We all slept--
And so must we all!

Chieftain would declare this, and to dreaming we'd go.
That is, unless Raven was around.

He and Chieftain could argue through dark and light.
He called her a fool, and she called him a whirlwind's fart.
Really, it's all Raven's fault. But no, it isn't, it's hers.

IV. Opponents

You're being stupid, he would tell her.
There's no reason you shouldn't get wet.

What's Water got that I should care about? She would reply.

Usually they would both just get tired and that would be it.

Then came that night that Raven ruined it.
Why, he asked her, does everyone have to suffer--
Just because your granny was tired and couldn't take the sun?

Chieftain would have killed him, except that he could fly.

Suffer? She screamed.
He cowered in the rafters. She slammed down the bar on the door.
Everyone else in the lodge found something else to do.
She shook her fist at him, gripping the apple he had pecked.
She lowered her arm, and broke the fruit open with her thumbs.
And this? She yelled.
What sweetness did you taste, before she brought us this?
She bargained and suffered, that's what my grandmother did.
She did it for us, and you're better for it, too.

Her eyes were never the same, you know.
She wouldn't let anyone lead her, but she could barely see.
She gave that for us!

I didn't know that part, Raven croaked.
There's a lot you don't know! Chieftain snapped.

I've had enough, she told him.
You talk too much about things that no-one needs to hear.
What's water do?
What's it do for these kids?
Their mothers and fathers obey.
The small ones can too.
The earlier they shun foolishness, the sooner are we strong.

Chieftain was silent,
Then wrenched the bar up from the door.
She threw it open, and pointed into the night.
I will complete, she said, my grandmother's goals.
She was kind. I will be stern.

Raven tried to argue, flapping and scratching,
But that very next dawn, it was done.
Water, we were told, was to be by no one touched--
Even the babies and children, even the laughing parents minding them--
Water was to be by no one touched.

V. Insurgence

For her part, Water had already grieved.
She liked all the tickling.
She purled around lean thighs
And floated up the bellies of the fat.
She liked pressing silken through the keyhole of each pair of legs.

She'd loved revealing sun could be amethyst
And magenta and aquamarine, and topaz and bronze.
She'd loved our limited voices, that could only sing one tone at a time,
And nursed some ideas
of how we might all dance.
She was sure she could talk to us, and we to her.

All it would take was a lot of afternoons
And skin she could caress and enclose.
We were all sure. We were.
But now all that was gone.

Raven flapped that morning, at the brink of the creek.
I tried, I tried, Raven told her--
I don't care much for you, but I like them.

You're an even bigger idiot than they, Water replied.
None of you can think about anything but what you say ought to be.
You, black bird, can see and hear even while they've blocked themselves as with sleep--
But even you won't dive your beak and rip out wrong.

She pushed up a sparkling fist and took Raven by the throat.
Raven struggled, but Water's grip coiled tight.
Why hurt me? Raven choked.
Your excuses, Water growled.

She drew herself up, Raven told us,
And crashed wide a kaleidoscope of drops.
They hardened to opals and fell.
She opened a sack of fog,
And it bulged.

She still had Raven in her grip.
His throat she ligatured with mist.
Fly, she commanded.
Raven choked, and struggled his burden high.

Water had never visited the sky;
What play! She cried.
Off Raven's back she dumped the sack
And with no word to him, she jumped.

His burdens gone, Raven dived.
He sped, and tried to warn.
Water in the sky? We all said.
You're insane.
He talked till he was raw.
Even then, beyond words he rasped and squawked.
He has never been able to talk since, not as he once could.
He gave his voice to us, but no one took the gift.
He was still flapping and croaking in the skeleton of a tree,
When what had once been harmless, hit.

VI. Storm

For the first time, we knew rain.
Water's bag had bulged:
The gems returned to liquid
And swallowed all.
We wept; the creeks and rivers roared.

Some of the children had still been out when we all hid.
The drops, having been gems,
Blazed and were so beautiful that the small ones could only follow their fire.
Water had found them, or rather they found her.
We had had them; and then,
They were gone.

The Chieftain, that hero, did the needful.
Chanting swelled, shields clattered, quartz spear-points sprayed light.
The summoned ones rattled and yelled, ready to act:
But all the paths were drowned, and those fighters had never braved mud.
When three days had passed, all their food was foul, and no one could reach them with provisions.
The hides they wore loaded them down with dirt and clay; they were inside an hour of home, and lost.

Raven wheeled above, but had no voice. He could barely creak out words, and did not dare to fly down close enough to be heard. But he had been spotted with Water riding on his back, and the spear points, having nothing else to skewer, glinted for him.

Chieftain was desperate for a plan. "Follow the traitor!" she cried. "He returns to his home!" Those in the rear sent up a great shout and slogged forward, but some up near her said that Raven had wheeled above her for hours, and that she had sat silent-staring down at the mud, then up at him, over and over and over.

We tell how Raven wheeled and wheeled, with no pause for anything, not even--
Those up in front snickered privately about the Chieftain's black hair, that day streaked birdshit white.

Some who were up front-they say that did it.
Into the water she plunged her streaked head, and by the hair she was got.

VII. Why We Tell What We Tell

All Chieftain could do at that point was lead:
Water was hauling her by the hair along the banks,
So Chieftain raised her crystal-pointed spear--
She bellowed command,
And charged after what yoked her on.

O, the tales we tell of that charge!
O, the brave ones who died!

Those brave ones saw Chieftain wrestling with they knew not what, and rushed to fight.
Water let them draw near, then swallowed them whole--
And their comrades that swelled in behind--she ate them up too.

Chieftain, ignorant that her warriors were being blanked out behind her just as surely as the pressings of her feet, was dragged along the bank to a valley that once had been dry.
Now it was a whirlpool's core.
Our children had been herded here: this gold-streaked rock we'd every one of us climbed and played on was now a still point in a bath of rage.
The children huddled. If one tried to swim, the current garlanded the child's feet and wrists--and lifted itself, and the child, smack back on the rock. Any knocked into the whirlpool were treated the same.

The warriors saw their babies, and surged: no such flower gentleness was granted them.
Fathers and mothers drowned, and their little ones saw.
May I never hear anything like it again.

Relent,
Water demanded.

We say that Chieftain, in mud, broke down.
We say her tears calmed the goddess' heart.
But then,
There are those who go ahead and tell it:
How Chieftain came back
Speckled with little dried rubies all over her ribs--
And that they noticed how many of the crystal spear-points hadn't been cleaned.

We say that the vortex stilled,
And how it became but a pool, light and shadow strewn with floating blue leaves.
And we say how the children-the only ones of all of us who could still remember how to swim--
Paddled through the cold shade to shore.

When the small ones had crawled onto dirt,
And we got them, scraping them clean of the mud, we tried just to care for them, and ignore our tongues--
Our tongues had never shriveled down to stumps.
We tried to ignore it, while the kids bashed bright with joy.
They kept talking to us--they told and they asked, again and again.
They did not understand why we could not talk.
We fell, one by one.
Our children, so lately safe, stood in shock: then they too, each, fell to Thirst.

And the waters, they troubled again.
A black-shelled geode, a star-spined basin, bobbed up on the waves, as no rock ever had before.
It drifted over to where Chieftain lay,
And it clouted her in the head.

Chieftain, we say, rose up from her pain. She gazed at the rock.
It floated: it had all the time in the world.
She opened her desert throat:
She tried to make a deal.

It is too much, she croaked. You want us your slaves forever.
The rock bobbed gaily. She stared, oblivious that a counter-offer was not to come.

Someone cut a branch, and began to whittle. We don't tell this part.

Somebody else took out an obsidian blade, and with it some sharpening rocks.
One by one, we all did the same.
Chieftain heard us all around her-the grinding of knives, the whetting of sticks, the gnashing and scraping of dessicated lips.

We do tell how Chieftain caught the sparkling bowl between her hands. She held it high, standing against the sun, long enough for all to see.
She issued commands!

First the children, then the warriors, and lastly-finally-Chieftain herself--
Everyone pressed lips to the lip of the stone.
Throats fell open,
And Water came in.

The children lapped it, spat sprays at each other, as if their terror had never been. The warriors, to whom this was a new sort of pain, drank, but slowly, and debated it the rest of their days.

Chieftain's own water bowl was thereafter to be squeezed full of berries and herbs and left out to cook in the sun and then chilled for later in a small pocket cave. We did it--it kept her quiet and calm. Others discovered that they liked such a drink as well, and this is how we came to use our purplest creek pearls as money--
Because some that lived up on the hot bald hill could make this drink easily
While those that lived tucked in the valley could not.

Those down below had to give something everything liked.
Those up above had to be willing to give it back.
After all, everyone now had something that someone else lacked.

When Chieftain and the warriors and the children returned, they discovered us all near death: we had never been thirsty and did not know what to do. Some of the children grabbed gourds and tried to scoop for us from the creek, but the warriors blocked their way.
The warriors waited, and stood with spears.

Chieftain, with hair so tangled that none of us could ever comb it out, herself fetched geode after geode and gourd after gourd, and pressed the priceless cure to our mouths.
She pressed it, herself, to each mouth.
I heard that the warriors snickered as they watched every sip.

When we chant the tale, we tell of how Chieftain accepted Water's bargain-that Water must never again be refused. We chant how out Chieftain ransomed us from death. We chant of the sparkle of a cup of stone. We chant--with dancing and flowers and clay paint-the spilling of the geodes and the gourds.
All of this we chant. We chant what we shall remember,
We chant what we will know.

All the rest of it is jokes--
But we keep on telling them,
And Water,
Water always laughs.