The Cleft

Then one of the Shes said it must stop, either we decided to let it live and look after it, or not, but what was happening now would kill the babe. What did we do to it? The thing you all have in front, the lumps and the tube was what everyone wanted to play with. The little Monster screamed and screamed and its lumps were swollen and became sick and full of matter and bad-smelling water. Then one of the Old Shes said that the Monsters were really like us, except for your thing in front, and your flat breasts. It was like one of our babies. Cut off the thing in front and see what happens – well, they did cut it off and it died. All the time it screamed and howled and when another Monster was born and it was kept, it was a little better treated but I don’t want to tell you everything about how these little Monsters were treated. And I think that some of us became ashamed. We are not cruel people. There is no record of any of us doing cruel things – not until the Monsters were born. The Monster we were trying to bring up strayed outside the cave we kept it in and a watching eagle swept down at once and took it over the hill to the others. How they survived, those babes, we have no idea.

Then there were quite a few Monsters born all at once. Some of the Old Shes wanted us to keep another for a plaything, others not. But the story goes that quite a few of the babes were put out on the Killing Rock at the same time and instead of one eagle, or two, as many came as there were little Monsters, and we watched as the babes were carried off and over the hills. How did those babes live? Babies need milk. There is a tale that one of our young Clefts became sorry for the hungry babes, and went by herself over the hills and found the new babes crawling about and crying, and she fed as many as she could. There is always milk in our breasts. Our breasts are useful. Not like yours.

And she stayed there with the Monsters, but no one knows now what really happened. We want to believe it, I think, because we are ashamed of the rest of the story, but there is also the question, how did those babies live when they were not fed?

There is a tale that two of us were sitting by the sea, watching the waves and sometimes sliding in for a little swim, then they saw two of the fish we call breast fish, because that is what they look like, big puffy jellies, and they have tubes sticking out, like the Monsters, and one of them stuck his tube into the other, and there were little eggs scattering through the water.

That was when the idea first happened to us that the Monsters’ tubes were for making eggs, and if so why and what for?

This tale, I think, is fanciful, but something like that, I suppose, happened.

The Old Shes began to talk about it, because we told them – by ‘we’ there I mean the young ones, who found something intriguing about those tubes and the eggs. Some of the young ones went over the hill and when the Monsters saw them, they grabbed them and put their tubes into them, and that is how we became Hes and Shes, and learned to say I as well as we – but after that there are several stories, not one. Yes, I know what I am telling you doesn’t add up to sense but I told you, there are many stories and who knows which one is true? And some time after that, we, the Clefts, lost the power to give birth without them, the Monsters – without you.

This account, by this Maire, was later than the first document we have. Much later – ages. Ages is a word to be distrusted: it means there is no real knowledge. It is a smooth tale, told many times and even the remorse for cruelty has something well-used about it. No, it’s not untrue, it is useful, as far as it goes, but a lot has been left out. What that is, is in the first document, or fragment, which is probably the very first attempt at ‘the story’. It is crude, unaccomplished, and told by someone in shock. Before the birth of the first ‘Monsters’ nothing had ever happened – not in ages – to this community of first humans. The first Monster was seen as an unfortunate birth fault. But then there was another, and another … and the realisation that it was all going to continue. And the Old Females were in a panic, raging, screaming, punishing the young females who were producing the Monsters, and their treatment of the Monsters themselves – well, it does not make for pleasant reading, Maire’s account, but I cannot bring myself to reproduce that other fragment here. It is too unpleasant. I am a Monster and cannot help identifying with those long-ago tortured infants, the first baby boys. The ingenuity of the cruelties thought up by the Old Females is sickening. Even now, the period of putting the newborn out to die, then keeping a few, and mutilating them – well, it went on much longer than the account above suggests. Very much longer.

Something like a war developed between the eagles and the first females, who could not possibly win. Not only were they unused to fighting, or even aggression, they were unused to physical activity. They lay around on their rocks and they swam. That was their life, had been for – ages. And suddenly here were these great angry birds, who watched every move they made, and tried to wrest the Monsters from them as they were born. Some of the females, the young ones attending to the Monsters, were killed – swept into the sea and then kept from climbing out because the eagles hovered above them and pushed them under until they drowned. This war could not go on for long but it created the females’ first enemy. They hated the eagles, and for a time tried to hurt them by throwing stones, or beating at them with sticks. Not only fear, but elementary forms of attack and defence began in this sleepy (Maire’s word) community of the very first humans, the very first females. And this was in itself enough to throw the Old Females, who ruled them, off balance. They became almost as much to be feared as the eagles, and the young women banded together and threatened their elders with harm. After all, it was they who gave birth to the Monsters, had to feed them, if it was decided this one or that would be kept, or whether to get rid of them. It was they who were given that nasty task. The Old Females lay shrieking or moaning on the rocks, railing at anything and everything.

The coming of the Monsters not only shocked the first females out of their long dream, but nearly ended it. They had to stop fighting each other, because not every young mother hated the Monsters enough to destroy them. There was a churning and wallowing and upheaving of emotions, and that nearly did for them, in a kind of civil war.

I am writing this, feeling some of those ancient long-ago emotions. I note that Maire in her account said ‘we’ and ‘us’ identifying with the first Clefts, just as I cannot help identifying with the very first males. It is sickening to read the fragment that tells of the little Monsters. Even now, to read how the old ones ordered the young to cut off the ‘tubes and lumps’ of the babes, which of course killed them, and how they exulted – even now, it is painful. I shall spare you, I shall not reproduce the fragment. After all they, the females, decided not to include it in their official story, the one they taught to their Memories. Why then do we have this fragment? We have to deduce that there was a minority opinion, which did not approve of the truth being suppressed – the revolting, sickening truth. Someone, or a group, kept the fragment, and someone, or several, taught words to a Memory. A long time passed, while this sickening little tale was told, ‘mouth to ear’, our name for our oral histories, to generation after generation, and it was never incorporated into the main story. And then?

And then there was a point when all the verbal preserved tales were written down, in an ancient language which only recently has been deciphered. The seditious damaging addendum to the official story was always written separately, and that is why the earlier decipherers believed it to be a fraud, something written by males to discredit the whole female sex. But there is something too raw and bleeding about the account of the cruelties to be a fake. There are details that I don’t think it would have been easy to fake.

And who is this historian? I am a scribe and researcher, known for my interest in the unusual, the out of the way. My name for this book is ‘Transit’. What my real name is I shall keep dark. This parcel or packet of scrolls containing the story of the Clefts and the Monsters has been on the back shelves of libraries, or languishing in scholars’ shelves, for a long time. A good many people have read the story and no one has been unmoved by it. There have been copies made, for that kind of person who sees everything as pornography.

Shameful history preserved on ancient shards is by no means the only dangerous information kept locked up.

This is the place for an explanation. All this locking up and smoothing over and the suppression of the truth took place when it was agreed all hostilities were over and we were One – one Race, or People. With so much unhappy history in our memories, and much of it preserved in the Official Memories, it was agreed – this formulation always signals the smoothing over of disagreement – that as much of the inflammatory material as could be got together must be put in a safe place, and made inaccessible to anyone but the trusted custodians.

Of whom I am – I was – one. And this is the next part of the explanation. Why am I in a position to tell you about this material? It is because I have preserved, guarded and watched over it now for a long time.

I am establishing my credentials here, right at the beginning of my story. What I am about to relate may be – must be – speculative, but it is solidly based on fact. I have put right at the beginning fragments of what has been locked up, to give a flavour of the material I have had to work with. You may say that the account is not consistent. But we are talking about events so long ago, no one now can say how long. And this has an interesting aspect. It is a record of an interrogation by one of us – that is, the males (or Monsters, to make use of a still current joke) – of a She, or Cleft. This is in itself enough to make one stop and wonder. No doubt at all that the interrogator is in a position of power, and that locates the event late in our long history. But it was preserved by the method used by the females, the memorising of a history, an account, preserved in the memories of the Memory, and passed on down to the succeeding generations of Memories. So we are talking about very early events indeed, when we look at a later preserved, but still very early, tale which has little in common with what is taught our children as the truth. Which is, of course, that we males were first in the story and in some remarkable way brought forth the females. We are the senior, they our creation. Interesting indeed when you look at the anatomies, male and female. How, in our official story, is it explained that males have no apparatus for bringing forth and nurturing? It is not explained. We have attractive and hazy fables, created at the same time as the great Locking Up – and, I am afraid, often destroying – of documents.

But you cannot destroy what is preserved in people’s minds. The method used by the females, the careful repetition, word by word, and then the handing down to the next generation, every word compared and checked, by a method of parallel Lines of Memories, is a very efficient preserver of history. For as long as the checking and comparing continues. You would be surprised at the mass of material in our – I jokingly called them prisons. Yes, this, I am afraid, is the joke used by us official warders of the forbidden truth. Nearly all of it came from the female Memories, though, when we began to use the same process, from our Memories too. Though, officially, they took the process from us. Absurd. It is the sheer absurdity of our official version that has become such a heavy burden on us, the historians.

No one has undertaken the task of studying the material as a serious record, and then attempting to make a coherent history. Myths and legends are more the province of the Greeks, and this could be presented as a legend, but no Greek has taken on the task. That is probably because this is not a legend, but some kind of factual story. Our own history does not go back so very far, does it? And it too bursts forth out of myth, with Aeneas, and the flames from burning Troy illuminating our earliest time, just as they do the Greeks’.

Perhaps it has been felt that an account of our beginnings that makes females the first and founding stock is unacceptable. In Rome now, a sect – the Christians – insist that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male. Very suspect stuff, I think. Some male invented that – the exact opposite of the truth.

I have always found it entertaining that females are worshipped as goddesses, while in ordinary life they are kept secondary and thought inferior. Perhaps this tendency of mine to scepticism has made me able to take on the task of telling the tale of our real origins which, as you will see, does have elements of legend. Those eagles, for instance, the persecutors of the first females, the saviours of the first males. Well, we in Rome cannot criticise a tendency to make a fetish of eagles – even if ours are so much smaller than the great eagles of the Clefts and the Monsters.

We are the Eagles, the Eagle, the Children of the Eagle. The Eagles bore us on their wings, they bear us on their breath, they are the wings of the wind, the Great Eagle watches us, he knows us, he is our Father, he hates our enemies, he fights for us against the Clefts.

Note by Historian: This is the dancing song of the Very First Men, and it may be heard even now, its origins long forgotten, sung in remote places. The Eagle people continue the strongest clan, the rulers. Even now anyone killing an eagle must be punished: once they were immediately put to death.

Here is a war chant of the Very First Men:

Kill the Clefts,

Kill them, kill them,

They are our enemies

Kill them all.

On ceramics as old as anything we have are pictures of genital mutilation, by no means only of males by females, but of females by males. These are not the sophisticated jars and vessels of an era considered to be of artistic merit. They are clumsy and rough. Depictions of torture are kept locked up and most people don’t know of their existence. Some ruler of an optimistic cast of temperament decreed all depictions of tortures of any kind must be destroyed or kept locked up: apparently believing that we humans would be incapable of cruelty if the ideas weren’t first put into our heads. I wonder who he was. Or, perhaps it was a She. A long time ago. The hoard of pottery was found in a cave that it is suspected was a dwelling place for primitives.

So, I shall end the explanations and come to my attempt at a history; one that both Clefts and Monsters, males and females, would agree to. Immediately I confront a problem. I wrote there ‘males and females’. Males are always put first, in our practice. They are first in our society, despite the influence of certain great ladies of the noble Houses. Yet I suspect this priority was a later invention.

THE HISTORY

Compiled from ancient verbal records, written down many ages after their collection.

They lay on rocks, the waves splashing them, like seals, like sick seals, because they are pale and seals are mostly black. At first we thought they were seals. Singing seals? We had never heard seals sing, though some say they have heard them. Then we knew they were the Clefts. There were three of us boys. We knew we hated the Clefts though we did not remember anything of our earliest days, of being put out on the Killing Rock, or being carried over the mountain by the eagles. What we were seeing had to surprise, no matter what we had been told. More, we were disgusted. Those large pale things rolling in the waves, with their disgusting clefts, which we saw for the first time, and as we looked, from the cleft of one of those slow lolling creatures emerged a bloody small-sized thing. We saw it was a tiny Cleft. Only later did we reason that it might just as well have been a Squirt – one of us. We ran back, past the big Cleft in the cliffs, with its reddish stains and fuzzy growths. We ran and we vomited and we went back up the mountain and over down to our place.

This above is the earliest account we have of how we ‘Monsters’ saw the ‘Clefts’. There is no way of proving it but I would say it is a memory of something well in the past of the speaker. It has the smoothed-over much-repeated quality of a tale from long ago. There is nothing here like the raw angry fragment (which I did not copy out because of its relishing vindictive cruelty) which is the very first we hear from the Clefts.

To make a history from this kind of material is not easy, but I have to say in justification that seldom did the Memories of the Clefts and Monsters differ very much. Often the tone was different, and once it was believed that different events were being recorded. But on the whole Clefts and Monsters (or Squirts) lived the same story. Now I again begin my tale.

They lived on the shore of a warm sea on an island that was in fact very large, but they never went far from home shore. They were of the sea, sea creatures, eating fish and seaweeds and some shore-growing fruits. They used tall caves with sandy floors but they might as easily sleep out on the rocks as under the cave roofs. How long had they lived there? And at once we come to a main difficulty – indeed, this historian’s main problem. The Clefts did not know when their kind had first crawled from the waves to breathe air on the rocks, and they were incurious. They did not think to wonder or ask questions. They met the query – but this came much later – ‘How old are you, as a people?’ with bland, blind enquiry: ‘What do you mean?’ Their minds were not set for questions, even a mild interest. They believed – but it was not a belief they would defend or contest – that a Fish brought them from the Moon. When was that? Long, slow, puzzled stares. They were hatched from the moon’s eggs. The moon laid eggs into the sea, it lost a part of itself, and that was why it was sometimes large and glowing and sometimes pale and thin. As for their own capacity to give birth, they had never questioned it. That was how things had always been. Nothing changed, could change, would change – but this was more a feeling than something they could or would enlarge on or even mention. They lived in an eternal present. For how long? Useless to ask. When the first ‘Monster’ was born it was seen merely as one of the deformed babes that had sometimes to occur, and then there was another ‘Monster’ all shaped in the same horrid and disturbing way. They were put out on the Killing Rock, not fed to the fishes, perhaps, because of a superstitious feeling that in the sea the Monsters might proliferate and even crawl back to the shore. Can we use the word ‘superstition’ about creatures who did not live in any kind of reality we would recognise?

I believe the birth of the Monsters was the first bad or even disturbing thing to have happened to them.

Yes, there were high water-line marks on their cave walls, big waves must at some time have come rushing up, more than once, but these were creatures of the sea. There is no way of finding out what they felt about monster waves – their songs are not histories or stories but a kind of keening, sounding like the wind when it sighs and murmurs.

It was not the first Monster that shocked them out of their dream. A twisted arm or leg, a deformed hand, even blurred features or a misshapen head – that kind of thing was sad but not threatening, as when they saw the second or third or succeeding babes with the clutch of protruding flesh there in front where they had smooth flesh, a neat slit, fringed with soft hair. A horror … and then another … and then another … they could not wait to get these misborn babes out on to the Killing Rock. Those squirting protruding things there in front, which changed shape all the time, oh horrid, ugly, there was something about them that …

Well, the eagles carried them off and ate them, took them out of sight.

But everything had changed. It must have been the same as when you poke with a stick one of those torpid stranded beach creatures, which squirms as it feels the stick.

Shock after shock was felt by this community of dreaming creatures and it was their helpless panic that caused their cruelty.

And when it became evident that the Monsters were not going to stop appearing there was this new threat, that the numbers of the community were always reducing.

And there was fear that some female who had given birth to a Monster would then have another. How would she have been viewed? There is no record anywhere of early animosity among these creatures. Was she feared? Did she fear herself? Did a female who had given birth to more than one Monster procure for herself an abortion when finding again that she was pregnant? We have no answers to these questions.

How long did that early time last?

There is no help for us in the Memories.

There is a way of not measuring, but getting a feel of the long process. The deep grave or pit where the girls were sacrificed was crammed with bones, and it was a deep hole. At its bottom were cracks and apertures where rocks had fallen outwards, and through these could be glimpsed the lower layers of bones, not fresh and whole, like the top layers, but fractured and fragmented, and lower down still, on the floor of this great hole was a layer of whitish stuff, the dust of bones. It was a deep layer. It must have taken a long time for these bones to turn to dust, even though winds and salty wet blew into the holes and gaps, hastening the process.

It was not likely that these people who seemed to live in a dream were regular in their sacrificing, or regular in anything; impulses and rhythms we may hardly guess at governed their lives. But while there was no way of counting the skeletons or making an estimate of what the dust layers meant in terms of time, we may confidently say that we are talking of long periods of time – ages.

Of changelessness, of an existence like those fish that wash back and forth on the tides, responding to the moon’s changes. And then the real change, the defining change, the birth of the deformed ones, the Squirts, the Monsters. The beginning of squirming emotional discomfort, unrest, discontent: the start of awareness of themselves, their lives. The start only, like the affront the stranded fish must feel at the probing stick.

There is a part of this tale that has to remain dark. Yes, yes, previous attempts at solving the mystery have offered solutions more like myths than probabilities. How did the community of males begin? We cannot believe that the eagles fed the infants regurgitated raw meat and kept them warm in their feathers. No, there is a solution and this is it.

The defective infants put out on the Killing Rock were for – how long? – food for the eagles. And the very first Monsters must have been too. But then – but when we don’t know – boys kept as ‘pets’ and playthings by the Clefts escaped. We know that small boys as young as four, certainly aged five, six, seven, can achieve feats of endurance and even of strength. Two, three, four little boys ran away from the caves above the sea. The eagles, though they were very big, many times the size of the eagles we know, could not have carried children that size, not for fair distances. The children saw where the eagles flew back, to their nests, past the Killing Rock, over the valley, up the mountain – and they followed. Up on the ridge, where the eagles’ nests were, they did not linger. How terrifying those enormous birds must have been. Down the other side and into the valley where the great river was. The children had been reared on fish, and here were fish again, though different ones. They had been kept warm in the caves. But they were still little children, and how very large the valley they found themselves in must have seemed. How can we not admire them for their daring and their cleverness? The river was wide, deep, and rushed along. Yet they had to catch fish in it. How did they shelter? It did not at once become possible to make huts and sheds: they had never seen anything like them. They had seen the eagles’ nests and they dragged sticks and then larger sticks and made piles of them, and crept into them when dark came. Then they grew bigger and stronger and they began leaning fallen branches together to make shelters. This was an easy climate; they did not have to fear cold. But let us not forget the beasts in the forests that stood at a distance on either side of the great river. How they escaped the beasts has to remain a bit of a marvel. Did some god or goddess aid the little things? But in their records is never the mention of divine intervention. Yes, they were the children of the Eagle, but that is as far as divinity went, for them.