When I was Woman Coming Home I went to Wakwaha and Kastoha-na to tell them my story of living with the Dayao. I left Wakwaha as soon as I could, because telling the story I felt as if I was back in Terter House, and I didn't want to live with the Condor anymore. But when I came to Kastoha, coming down the Valley, I stayed there two nights in a house of Blue Clay people, because I still felt like my spirit was with the Dayao, and I didn't want to come home to Sinshan and High Porch House and Ekwerkwe until I was back in the world.
At the Blue Clay heyimas in Kastoha the woman Heron Flying told me that I needed to go dream with the Stone Trees for a night, and that would bring me back into the world, if anything did. So they gave me some food and I went to the Stone Trees, which is two hours' walk west of Kastoha, almost at the edge of volcano country where the lava under the dirt came from Ama Kulkan at the headwaters of the Na. First I went to the baths and got clean, and then I said heya to the plumed water, which made the walk longer, but to dream well you should start well.
I had never gone to the Stone Trees before and I wasn't sure what to expect, but there was a very old house there, Stone Trees House, with a lot of red brick in it, and a Red Adobe woman from the Madrone Lodge, Mountain Laughing, who lived in it with her daughter. She showed me the Stone Trees and told me all about them. She said that once there had been forests here of giant redwood trees, like the ones that still grow on the east slopes of some of the mountains, but this was in the days when primitive creatures like the Thunder Beasts lived on the earth. Then Coyote got tired of the noises the Thunder Beasts made, and she woke up Ama Kulkan, the volcano, with her complaining, and the volcano spewed out ash and fire for many days, much longer than any of the eruptions that people in the Valley remember. And when it was done the creatures were all burned up, but the trees had fallen over sleeping, because they were hard to burn. And buried deep in the ash, they slowly dreamed themselves into stone, so that when the ash was washed away again by the water when the land rose up, the stone trees were still there dreaming in their fallen forest.
We walked around the forest of stone trees while the last of the evening light went. Scrub oak and manzanita grew around and sometimes through the giant stone logs, so it was like there was small young forest and a giant ancient forest, all overlaid on the same land. Standing at one end of biggest of the stone trees laid out sleeping on the ground, it was like looking at a roadway going straight into the edge of the world.
Most of the trees were lying half-buried in the ashy dirt, but people had dug around many of them so that they could be seen better, so it was like they were lying in trenches. Mountain Laughing told me told me to pick one to sleep with tonight, and I would lie in the trench beside it like a seed planted in the earth, and it would show me how to grow into the world.
I chose one that she called Grandmother Tree which was not the largest, but had long horizontal cracks across it, which felt like I felt coming home from Wakwaha. And I rolled up in the blanket I had brought from Sinshan, and Mountain Laughing sang a Red Adobe song over me, and then she laid my Dayao cloak over me, which I had brought along to show to the Archivists at Wakwaha.
I was ignorant, because I had never learned many things that everyone in the Valley learned, but even I knew about all the animals and forests that had lived over all the ages of the world, and how over time, they had changed; and how there had been a world of giant animals like the Thunder Beasts that was destroyed by fire falling from the sky, and one that was destroyed by the ice that came from the north, and one that had been destroyed by the poison in the tavkach, and then there was our world after.
Even the Condor people, who could not read and could not use the Exchange, knew about these things. Where they had lived to the West, when they were wandering people before they came to the Volcano Country and built the City, they had sometimes travelled through great plains and deserts where all of the river valleys and canyon bottoms were filled with piles and piles of the bones of the Thunder Beasts and Water Monsters. And sometimes riding through the desert after a storm, they would come upon a skeleton of a giant creature from before Puma sent the shootingstars, as complete and new as if it had only died that winter.
Terter Zadyaya was old enough that she could remember travelling through the places of the bones, and she remembered even more stories from her grandfather. She would tell them sometimes if it was storming and her granddaughters asked her well enough: how there were the shells of ancient sea creatures that would call the buffalo to be hunted, and how you could pick up the small loose bones and use them for medicine, but if you tried to disturb the giant skeletons, or take the large bones away from where they were piled, they would shoot a splinter of stone bone into you, and then you would never prosper or dream again. And how if you went to the right part of the right river in a storm in the middle of the night, and sang the right song, and had not eaten meat for three days, you could see the Thunder Beasts and the Water Monsters alive again, fighting each other for who would rule the earth.
This is what I was thinking about when Mountain Laughing sang over me, tucked under my Dayao cloak next to the stone tree, and that is where I was. Not in the Stone Forest two hours' walk from Kastoha-na, but in the land my father's father had come from, in a high desert with a black sky over me and ringed by piles and piles of old stone bones, like a fence of dry thorn.
Puma found me there and said nothing, but sat and watched me, eyes yellow and tail twitching. I was afraid to move, between Puma watching me, and the bones that might shoot a splinter into me. Puma and I watched each other, and the sky above us was as round and dark as I had ever seen, because the land was so flat that there were no mountains or trees anywhere, only the piles of bones. Shooting stars fell from the sky.
Finally Puma turned and walked away, and the mist came with her when she went, and the mist fell around the stone bones, and the ancient creatures they had been rose up, fantastic monsters with horns and spikes and feathers like something from a children's play. And they danced together and then they rose into the sky, and I rose with them, but the sky was not the sky; it was a giant forest, the redwood forest that the Stone Trees had been many ages ago. And I clung to the top branches of one of the trees, so that I would not float up into the City in the sky with the bone animals. And as I clung to it, the tree shrunk down to a digger pine, and then a scrub oak, and then a shrub, and then I let go and my bare feet were back down in the earth of the Valley. And Shell said to me, "Are you coming home yet?" and I said "I am coming home," and then I went into a deep sleep that I do not remember.
When I woke up in the morning I rolled up my blanket and my Dayao cloak, which was soaking wet with dew, and I came in and ate with Mountain Laughing and her daughter, and then I came home to Sinshan, because the Stone Trees had led me back into the world.
Owing Greatly and the Bird Women is a "summer-evening play", not associated with any particular festival, but part of a repertoire of "children's folklore" passed down orally from cohort to cohort of children and adolescents. They would be put on by groups of children of all ages and Houses, often led by younger adolescents, as informal - and sometimes unscheduled - performances for peers and neighbors on long summer days. Costumes, sets, and props would be improvised by children from materials available around them, and the "stage" was often only a heyiya-if design marked in the bare dirt in a common place.
This is one of the more elaborate summer-evening plays, similar in form to the "hingebolt" plays performed by adult theater troupes, with improvisations built around "peg-lines" that would almost certainly be known to everyone in the audience. There is no author attributed, even for the peg-lines, but sometimes it's said to have been so old it was a story written in tavkach. It also generally involved extremely elaborate costumes and sets, with the making of the costumes often taking up more time than rehearsal or performance: very likely a large part of the appeal for the children. We were invited to a performance in Tachas Touchas by a child of around eight, who ran up to us already wearing her "feather cape" made mostly of plume-grass, and were told by her mother that the children had been rehearsing (or performing; with childrens' plays the distinction between the two can be small) since the World Dance. I was given permission to record and transcribe the performance, though both adults and children were somewhat amused by the idea that I thought it worth preserving, as "there will always be another summer-evening".
OWING GREATLY AND THE BIRD WOMEN: at Tachas Touchas in a summer evening.
The ground is marked out in a heyimas, with a central ring and two "wings" to either side. In the central ring is a stockade/fence of reeds or small sticks with a gate at the front. The audience - mostly close relatives of the performers - sits on the grass or on blankets or stools.
The audience hums the Beginning Tone to mark the start of the play, music at these plays being more ad-hoc than otherwise. The Chorus run onto the stage, leaping, running, and slashing out with hooked "claws". It's reminiscent, in the body language, of some of the bird dances at the World Dance, but altogether more wild and energetic. They are costumed as Bird Women, in "feather cloaks" and beaked masks that have the occasional duck, goose, or chicken feather, but are mostly decorated with plume-grass and other feathery sorts of plants. It is larger than the usual chorus for a play: maybe a dozen children or more. Some carry drums and beat a 5-5-7 rhythm that I am told is associated only with this play: ta-ta-tah TAH TAH ta-ta-tah TAH TAH ta-ta-TAH TAH-TAH TAH-TAAH. The Chorus are usually the smallest children in the play, and sit down between the stage and the audience after they enter.
Owing Greatly enters from the left, leading two more Bird Women (in even more elaborate costumes) by strings tied around their wrists, and brings them to stockade and closes them in. This is Blue Stripe and Clever Woman.
CHORUS: Owing Greatly! Owing Greatly! What do you owe?
OWING GREATLY: When my head was on backwards, I fought in a war, and I killed a man in the war. And after that I could not go back to my house and live as a son with my mothers, because I had killed a man in a war.
CHORUS: And how do you pay back what you owe?
OWING GREATLY: I heard that on the Island of Clouds, Snake Man had learned a way to give life to the dead bones of the people of the time before the City of Man, and I thought, if I can help to give life, I can give back what I owe. So I came here to the Island of Clouds.
Clever Woman jumps against the stockade toward the side where Owing Greatly is.
CLEVER WOMAN: You give life by keeping us in cages?
OWING GREATLY: I keep you safe.
Owing Greatly sits down against the left side of the stockade, and pulls out a simple reed whistle and plays a tune to the 5-5-7 rhythm as some of the chorus tap it on their drums again. The Bird Women calm down and sit against the other wall. As the music ends, from the right, Snake Man, Yellow Flower, and Shining Light walk on stage. They are dressed like people from the Valley.
Snake Man gestures to the bird women in the stockade.
SNAKE MAN: You see, with the new Bone Art we have made again the Thunder Beasts, as strong as they ever were before Puma sent rocks from space to burn them. We have spared no Art.
SHINING LIGHT: You did it. You son of coyote and her grandmother, you person from outside the world, you did it after all. I did not believe that you had.
YELLOW FLOWER: Why did you? What is the good that could come of this?
SNAKE MAN: Don't you see how beautiful they are? How powerful? What a wonder of all the world they are?
YELLOW FLOWER: Puma created the Thunder Beasts, Puma destroyed the Thunder Beasts. Puma created the City of Man, the City of Man destroyed Puma. Now, you, Man, have created Thunder Beasts again.
SNAKE MAN: I have spared no craft or art to create them as well as they were! Come, let me show you, and then you can go back to the Valley and tell them all what I have done, how great and powerful I am.
Snake Man leads them in front of the stage and gestures around the audience as if pointing to various things. Sometimes members of the Chorus mime what he is describing.
SNAKE MAN: Look, there is Old Three-Horns, large as life! And Duck-Bill! And Crested Woman, who spits poison. Here's Water-Monster, in the lake. And here's old Long-Neck, eating leaves from a tree!
SHINING BRIGHT: They eat?
SNAKE MAN: They eat, and sleep, just like people do! They even shit!
One of the chorus members mimes squatting, and drops a large sheet of brown cloth as they get up and move away.
YELLOW FLOWER: That is one big pile of shit! Do they do everything that living creatures do?
SNAKE MAN: Everything!
YELLOW FLOWER: Do they fuck?
SNAKE MAN: Of course!
YELLOW FLOWER: Then what is to stop them from swimming away from this island and overrunning the world with their children, just like they did before the fire from the sky?
SNAKE MAN: We've made sure they won't have any children. They're all women, do you see?
YELLOW FLOWER: How do you know they're all women? Is someone lifting up their skirts to check?
SNAKE MAN: We used the Bone Art to make sure.
YELLOW FLOWER: Do you think that will help? Life breaks free. Life grows. Life expands to new territories. Life, heya, finds a way.
SNAKE MAN: We have spared no art, we have made it safe. Look, there is the greatest thing we have made, the largest of all: the Terrible Chief!
He points to a chorus member who is riding on another chorus member's shoulders. Their costumes overlap to look like one giant bird monster eight feet tall. They lurch around the audience, growling and snapping at people. The audience mimes fear and scrambles out of the way. Yellow Flower and Shining Brightly watch with awe.
YELLOW FLOWER: You Blood Art people were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn't stop to think if you should. If you can't control that creature, it will kill us all.
SNAKE MAN: Let me show you how safe it is. Here's Owing Greatly, who takes care of the bird women.
Owing Greatly stands up and moves around the stockade.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: You can control these bird women?
The Bird Women shriek and throw themselves at the stockade.
OWING GREATLY: It's not about control. It's about respect. It's a relationship of mutual respect.
The Bird Women keep shrieking.
OWING GREATLY: Look, listen.
He pulls out his whistle and plays the 5-5-7 tune. The Bird Women grow calm again, and he opens the gate and walks into the stockade. They come up to him and lean on him, and he pets their feathers.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: What's that in the fence?
They look down at a large round white stone that has appeared in the stockade, and Owing Greatly lifts it up, and then carries it outside the stockade, carefully closing the gate behind him.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: It's an egg. They're laying eggs.
SNAKE MAN: Impossible! We spared no Art!
YELLOW FLOWER: Life finds a way. Even the little fence lizards can learn to lay eggs without any men. Snake Man, you don't understand what you've done here. You learned the Blood Art from the Exchange, and thought you could give life to dead bones. But you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you didn't take any responsibility for it.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: I don't agree with this. I don't endorse you. I am not going to tell anyone that you have done good here. Yellow Flower, let's leave. Let's go sleep.
They leave stage left.
SNAKE MAN: Everything is safe! I spared no Art!
He leaves stage right. Owing Greatly looks down at the egg he is holding, and slowly goes back into the stockade, carrying it. He and the Bird Women curl up asleep together around the egg.
The Chorus begin to beat the rhythm again and slowly creep nearer the stockade, but retreat when Snake Man comes back onstage, muttering to himself.
SNAKE MAN: They don't endorse this! They won't go back and tell the others. I will show them what the Bone Art can do. I will take the egg back to the Valley and hatch it there, and when it grows up, I can train it for war. Yellow Flower and Shining Brightly can stay here with the Thunder Beasts if they don't want to tell the Valley.
He very quietly opens the door to the stockade, tiptoes in, and lifts the egg out of Owing Greatly's arms where he and the Bird Women still sleep, then tip-toes out again, but just as he is locking the gate again, Blue Stripe wakes up and sees him.
BLUE STRIPE: He's taken our egg! He's taken our egg! Owing Greatly, he's taken our egg!
CLEVER WOMAN: Why are you waking Owing Greatly? We can get our own egg back! Look, he's left the gate unlocked!
Blue Stripe and Clever Woman run out of the stockade and offstage, then chase Snake Man back onstage, and then through the audience several times, while the chorus drum the rhythm. Finally they catch up to him, tackle him, and disembowel him while he screams messily: there is a bladder of some kind of red juice involved. After a last small whimper, he collapses. Blue Stripe takes the egg from him and then they both look around and run away stage right.
Yellow Flower and Shining Brightly run on stage left, looking frightened.
SHINING BRIGHLTY: Wake up, Owing Greatly! Wake up!
He wakes up and looks around him.
OWING GREATLY: What's happened?
YELLOW FLOWER: Snake man has opened the gate and set the Terrible Chief free!
SHINING BRIGHTLY: He's opened all the gates!
OWING GREATLY: Where's the egg?
YELLOW FLOWER: He must have taken it away, on purpose. He set the beasts free, so we can't tell anyone. They're going to kill us all. Man, do I hate being right all the time.
The Terrible Chief comes back through the audience. They look up, and run. The Terrible Chief and the chorus chase them around for awhile, menacing the audience along the way. Finally they crouch beside the stockade while the Terrible Chief stalks around slowly, looking for them, and the chorus settles among the audience.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: Don't move. He can't see us if we don't move.
They sit very still. The Terrible Chief looks around but can't find them, and finally stalks away.
SHINING BRIGHTLY: What are we going to do?
YELLOW FLOWER: Die?
OWING GREATLY: The Bird Women respect me. They can help us.
He takes out his whistle and plays the tune again. The Bird Women come slowly onstage, together.
BLUE STRIPE: It's Owing Greatly.
CLEVER WOMAN: It is.
BLUE STRIPE: Should we eat him, now that we are free?
CLEVER WOMAN: Yes.
They run toward the stockade, snarling. The people jump up and run away, but Yellow Flower stumbles and Clever Woman kills him. Then Shining Brightly stops to look back, and Blue Stripe kills her. When Owing Greatly hears the noises he stops and watches the Bird Women eat them. When they are done they both look at Owing Greatly.
OWING GREATLY: If you want to eat me I can't save myself. But aren't I your friend? Didn't I keep your egg secret? I can help you get your egg back from Snake Man.
CLEVER WOMAN: We don't need your help. We have our egg back. We have our island.
BLUE STRIPE: Haven't we eaten enough, Clever Woman? Can't we let him go back to his Valley?
OWING GREATLY: I would love to go back to the Valley!
The Terrible Chief comes back, roaring, and stalks toward Owing Greatly.
BLUE STRIPE: Don't kill him, Terrible Chief! He was our friend!
She runs in front of Terrible Chief. Terrible Chief roars again, and then swipes at her with one hand. She falls to the ground and lies very still. Clever Woman cries out in grief and runs at Terrible Chief, roaring in turn. Confused, Terrible Chief runs away.
CLEVER WOMAN: Come with me, Owing Greatly. Blue Stripe wanted you to live, so I will show you where the boat is, to take you back to the Valley. Come with me.
They walk back toward the left hinge, but the Terrible Chief runs back out toward them, and they have to run. As Terrible Chief crosses in front of the left hinge, very suddenly, someone costumed as the Water Monster leaps out of what must have been a covered hole dug in the ground in the curve of the hinge, and tackles him into the hole, roaring: half of the audience screams. While they fight, Clever Woman waves Owing Greatly off stage right, and then slowly dismantles the stockade as the chorus drum the rhythm over the Ending Tone.
Then the chorus take off their masks and go find their mothers and ask them if they were very scared of the Terrible Chief, and Blue Stripe invites us all to go have fried chicken at her grandmother's house - because, she says, the Bird Women are not so scary if you think of them as just big chickens the size of humans!
While we were eating I asked the person who had played Yellow Flower - a boy of the Bay Laurel Lodge, wearing undyed cloth once he had changed out of his costume, and one of the oldest of the players - about the ending, because it seemed that some of the audience had been honestly startled when the Water Monster rose out of the earth.
He laughed, and said, "That play has many endings. Sometimes they all die together, and sometimes the Bird Women kill the Terrible Chief and Owing Greatly stays on the island and marries them, and sometimes all of the human people live and find the Exchange and help comes and they all live, and sometimes a volcano explodes and burns the whole island. That's the most exciting ending, but it's been a dry summer so the Smith Art people wouldn't let us make the fireworks for it. I only heard about them doing the Water Monster ending once before, in Madidinou, but when Water Strider heard about that ending she wanted to play the Water Monster more than anything, and we thought it would be a nice surprise."
Alexander-Ammon has come seeking Pandora, and her daughters tell him she no longer lives there, and to look for her in the Valley - she's drawn a map to get you there: and in the Valley they tell him to ask at the Black Adobe in Sinshan, and the Black Adobe woman he finds in Sinshan says, eventually: yes, yes, heya, we remember, she was here, and not so long ago: we sang her the songs of going Westward with the Sunrise but she was never one to put down roots in the Earth; she flowed like water, we left her at the creek, where she would sit and watch the stream running down the Valley and make her poems that she always wrote down and never read aloud.
The creek is high in Autumn, after fire season, and there are no fish in it, and no Pandora, but somehow still mosquitoes, and poison oak growing up lush like a jungle. And whatever she had found there he can't find, and the Sinshan people walk past him, not as if he's invisible, but as if he simply isn't interesting enough, which he isn't accustomed to.
Finally he stands, and walks down the creek, to the River, through the Valley, and past the marshes to the sea; and it's a great flat water, with nothing to find at all. But finally one of the people who lives on the shore points to one of the island-mountains that still stands above it and says there is a woman who lives there outside the world who talks to people, sometimes, if they know how to ask.
He has come too far already to turn back empty-handed, and he's made worse journeys for an oracle, so he gives them some coins for a boat and goes.
If he doesn't find her here, he will - he will go home, he thinks, and wait for fire season to come again. The island a double peak, still the highest point for many miles around, and when he climbs to the top he can see what must, to the people of the Valley, seem as if it is the entire world: water, and more islands, and the great gateway to the ocean, and the highlands on three sides. Alexander-Ammon walks down the side of the mountain, ash-gray scree kicking under his feet, his great stone horns still coiled either side of his head, an unfamiliar weight
Nothing grows here but weedy scrub: whatever people had lived here before the waters rose, they haven't come back.
"We called this Mt. Diablo," she says. "Do you remember? The Devil's Mountain." She rises out of the water and leans herself on the rock, pale and weathered like the mountains, clothing soaked worn and wrinkled to her skin, not the girl he'd heard tell of, who had been singing in the Valley. But--
"Are you the Devil of this place?" he asks. It's pouring rain, and dark already, although the evening is young, yet. She's no wetter out of the water than she was in it.
"Are you?" she says. "You look more the part, brother-conqueror," and he remembers his horns, again. "But then, before us, they called it Tuyshtak, Time's Sunrise, rising out of the water. It's all tunnels down there still: I've been exploring in the dark. The geology here's wrong for flooded cave systems to happen naturally; the Rain people are only just starting to learn what to do with them. I keep thinking I'll take a wrong turning and wander into the Painted Room instead, full of Bird People with wings." She's dressed like someone from the Valley, though it's hard to say if the cloth is undyed, or just as faded as if it is, and she has a goatskin bag over one shoulder.
"Are you Pandora, then?"
"Ah! You came seeking Pandora!" She laughs, an old woman's laugh. "She's dead. Died a long time ago, died before memory, before the Flood, even. Positively antediluvian, she was. It was only Pyrrha who survived when the waters rose."
"I came here seeking Pandora's advice," he says.
"Advice?" she says. "What advice does conquest need from an old woman, Alexander-Ammon?"
"They say," he tells her, "That Pandora had a vase, and in that vase were all the things of the world - power and strength, riches and conquest, plague and war, art and craft - and she opened it, against all warnings, and when the rest of the things had spilled out, only one was left. I have gained everything else - I have conquered all the world, and started on the stars - and now I look, not at defeat, but failure. I need to know what it was that is left, after all the things of the world are gathered back up; and I am told you-" because this must be Pandora, he knows it now "-You took that last gift that was left to you, and brought it here, to make it safe."
"You come here, to me, on the darkest and longest night of all, and ask Pandora for her present? Well, then, here it is, the treasure I've found hidden in the very depths under Mount Diablo, what is left when everything else has gone out of all memory." She reaches into her bag and hands him something.
"Coal?" he blinks. "You've given me coal." It isn't even very good coal, crumbly and barely lithified.
"What else were you expecting from the tunnels under Mount Diablo?" she asks him. "But then, the mines here were barely open fifty years. Though I suppose there's a lesson to be taken from the fact that there was still some to be found: even you and I, between us, could not quite scrape the earth clean of it."
He twists his mouth, dark and wry. "I came here seeking Pandora's last gift, and you've given me coal."
"When I was here before, when I was young," she tells him, "I found hope here in the chaparral and the scrub-oak and the coast redwoods." She takes the coal back and turns it over in her hands, then drops it back in his. "This isn't so different, really. You can still see the bark and the grain of the wood that made it, give or take 200 million years. Perhaps that's all there is to my last gift, in the end: 200 million years, and you can still see the grain of the wood: and even we didn't quite manage to burn it all to ashes, in our few centuries."
"When I came here, I was hoping," he says--
"Oh, that's your mistake right there," she cuts him off.
"I was hoping that you could show me how to make a world like the Valley. That doesn't burn it all to ashes."
"Oh, that one's easy," she says, and tilts her head like a quail. "To make the Valley, I killed all the babies. A mother's solution, that one: if you can't find a future for your children, just kill them. Not very clever, though, I must say. I'd have thought a conqueror would have a better strategy. But after a few more million years, I don't suppose it matters anyway: I don't suppose the coal will know the difference. As for my advice-- if you hear them tell you you're the son of God, always check the translation first."