The Idol's Gilded Eye Melinda Selmys            Originally published in Issue XVIII of Vulgata, February, 2008

The little ship huddled on the waters at the foot of the silver cliffs, with a crew of refugees hiding in her womb, and the mouth of a river opening in front of her. Cast off from her bow, a wooden Water-Spider carried a party of explorers up the river, under a thick canopy of sharp-toothed palms and trailing mosses. Supposedly, they were going to find out if the land was "good to build a city." They all knew that even if it was infested with flying snakes and poisonous dragons, they were going to have to bring the families ashore. But all these civilized people liked to pretend they had a choice, even when nature had them bound up in her loom.

Litta held an oar and hummed a song from her own land, full of rhythm and deep sounds that came out of your gut and reminded you that your body was a part of your humanity, and of your past.

“Please,” said the Narananti captain, “if you could be quiet.” He was studying the jungle like an unskilled hunter searching for a war-pig.

“You have it in your breast, still,” she said. “All that wall. You didn't leave it behind there on that shore. You didn't leave all those crook-necked old ladies with their dry mouths and their scoldings. You didn't leave nothing of it behind you. It's still here. Now I'm going to sing my song, and you're going to listen until a little of the jungle comes in to take that wall apart.”

“We are here,” he said calmly, “to find a good piece of land and found a city. Not to revert to savagery and chase ghosts through the woods.”

“Then your city is going to be the same as the one you left. In a generation, your son is going to run away from its walls. Tell me, wall-builder, what kind of land you think he's going to run to?”

“I'm never going to have a son.” The words dropped from Nidyom's lips like a stone into the water. “My wife would not come with me. She knew that men were losing their posts at the universities. That we were being sent to the fields and mines to work like beasts of burden. She had heard the rumors of castrations as 'a remedy for aggression.' She knew, though she denied it, that they were also a remedy for protest. But do you know what she said? My faithful wife? She said, 'You have been blessed with the work of the mind. Now be blessed with the work of the hands.' And when I insisted, she said, 'If you must, then you may take the knife in protest. I will go with you to the place of dying.' She said it as though it would be her martyrdom, to stand by and watch me die in a worthless gesture. But she would not come with me.”

“Then you don't have a wife. There are plenty of women on ship. You find yourself a good one this time.”

“I will never have news of her death. She is still my wife, and we do not take more than one.”

They landed around noon-time, on a little island of silt at the a fork where two rivers joined into one. Litta named the place 'A good place for landing, where noon-time is evening' -- Tikapotaka-watawa-go. Nidyom named it Myetoa: 'where two rivers meet.' They didn't bother to fight about the name.

Eyes peered down from the trees above, and a thick sludge of bright, almost glowing algae had started to collect around the edge of the Spider. The air was thick with the smell of a mystery. Litta got out onto the slender tongue of silt that was sticking out into the water. She took a long knife from her pack and chopped a hole in the greenery at the edge of the river. There were places in the world where all the trees stood sentinel by the waterside, and if you could get into the interior it was possible to move freely. This was not the case here. The entire land seemed to be one vast, impenetrable mess of vines and surly, cankerous aloes. “We have to go further on,” said Litta, and changed the name in her head to 'Full of evil plants with bad manners.'

Nidyom shook his head. “This is the best that we have come to in half a day's travel. We need to be able to make it back to the ship by evening. We're going to have clear a space as well as we can.”

“What do you know about jungle?” Litta-Po demanded. “You don't want to work fields. In my land, we don't even know fields. We know gardens, and we know beasts. You go into combat everyday with the buffalo and the war-pig. Maybe you find you lose an eye. This is the kind of land you're coming to. You think you're going to build a un-i-vers-i-ty in this?”

“I don't object to work. I object to slavery. We're stopping here.”

“Kookti, soft-arms. You don't know about work. Well,” she handed him the knife. “I guess you better start to learn.”

“People!” Nidyom announced. His hands were blistered and cut up by the jungle, but his face was full of joy beneath the sweat. “Look at this!” He was kneeling beside a piece of jungle floor – the only piece that was not completely strangled with vegetation. Litta-Po walked over to where he was squatting.

She looked at Nidyom as though he were mad. “I don't see no one.”

“Look!” he was pointing down at the ground. Litta-Po looked very closely. There were many different little stones laid up one against another. It was a road, like the roads that ran into the Naranantia, but all thrown up and usurped by the trees.

“Been a long time, now, since anyone walked down this,” she said.

Nidyom didn't seem to notice. He took out his knife and began to slice away at the fronds that choked this relic of civilization.

“Don't we need to go back and get people from the ship? We clear all this space, make it so that the children have a little place they can put their blankets down, and now you going to go walking down some old donkey-path looking for people who no one's ever seen? Probably this path's been made by demons. If there were people in this part of the world, someone would have known about them.”

“There is a road here. That means that there have been people. Go back to the ship with the others and tell them that they can come and set up camp. I'm going to go on ahead.”

Litta-Po went back and told the others to go back to ship and bring everyone down the river to the camp-site. It was not much of a camp-site, she thought, but all that chopped down greenery would make a good bed. She only hoped that the trees in this jungle had benevolent spirits. Thinking about that road, all choked up, and the people who no one had ever met, she didn't think so. For a long time, now, people had seen the lights glowing over this land. There were watchers here of unusual power. They lurked in the darkness, and they closed off roads, and they devoured the memory of a civilization. No. Litta-Po did not like the fact that the sea had chosen this place for them. She did not like the look of all the newly dead trees lying with their sap spilling into the soil. This was a place that didn't like people. Still, the ship was in no shape for going anywhere else. If they were going to be devoured, it was better than starving slow.

It didn't take her very long to catch up with the Narananti man. He didn't say anything to her when she joined him going down the broken road. They were silent together, working to cut a way down the path. It was hot even in the shade: a thick, sticky hot that made your clothes feel like an old fish skin draped across your shoulders.

Litta wished that she had never come here. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. When the ship of Narananti refugees had stopped on the shore near her village, looking for supplies, the old men of her tribe had said, “These are foolish soft-arms. They will need someone to teach them of the world. You go, and make sure that you keep the spirits of the wild from creeping into their bone. And keep them from carrying the spirit of the dragon-city into the wild.” This had seemed like sound counsel at the time. Now, Litta did not know how she was going to do anything to protect them.

The road stretched a long way before they came to the place where it crossed the river. There it ended in a high bridge built on pedestals of white stone which had been taken over by mildew. Once, it had risen like a titan astride the water, nearly twice Litta-Po's height. Now, it had all been thrown down, and the big, white blocks trailed green sea-weed hair into the flow of the stream. The river was not peaceful here. It was angry about the broken bridge. It gnashed at it with foaming lips. Nidyom climbed up onto the nearest of the toppled stones and began to pick his way across. It was not easy to walk: the stones were slippery, and in some places there were gaps that would have to be jumped. Litta handed the Narananti a stick so that he would be in less danger of falling in.

It was almost evening, and the jungle had opened up enough to let the eyes of the sky peer down over their heads. Litta kept a watch out to see if the lights would start to move over their heads. She realized that she should not have followed Nidyom down this path laid by demons. She should have stayed behind at the camp, and woven ghost-scarers to hang in the trees and protect the colonists.

Nidyom pushed aside a veil of leaves, then stopped, staring, with a sharply indrawn breath. Litta-Po crept up behind him and peered over his shoulder. There, draped in green, with little springs jumping over it like evil sprites, was a city built into the side of a ravine. The rock was steep and full of crevices where the snakes would go to sleep. It was covered with trees whose roots covered the mouths of doorways, and tore holes in long abandoned walls. Monstrous statues leered out from the shadows, crowned with mosses of purple and blue, their hideous eyes gaping from under veils of vines, their fattened tongues protruding from mouths filled with the weaver-spider nets.

Nidyom looked as though he had just discovered the promised land. Litta could see that whatever had happened here, it was a great evil. It still clung to the rocks. It clung to the stone in the center of the city, where an echo of blood that had long since washed away. Litta-Po knew that they should get away, but the spell of the city had worked its magic on Nidyom, and they would not be going unless she could break the enchantment.

“Wonderful!” he breathed. “What marvels!” He knelt beside a nest of broken pottery, picking up the detritus of dead men and studying it with the wild eyes of a scholar. “Look at these patterns. Look at this construction. Litta – this is not the home of savages. There was a civilization here.”

Litta-Po looked at the patterns. They were very intricate, but not beautiful, full of sharp angles that led the eye into a tangle of lines from which there was no emerging. “A civilization, that I can see. But people? What good is a city to anyone if it is not able to keep its people? If it devours them whole and leaves only stone idols?”

“Ruins,” Nidyom said sternly, “do not mean that a people has been devoured. Probably there is some reason that they had to leave.”

Litta shook her head. In the shadows, she saw something crouching. A human form, dark, and perfectly motionless.

She pulled aside a curtain of dripping moss that hung down over the crevice where the figure huddled. It was a woman, too life-like to have been carved by the hands that made the monsters, bent down to protect an infant clutched against her breast. Litta knew at once that this woman was real. What she did not know, was how a woman and child could be turned to stone.

Litta refused to spend the night in the city, but she could not convince Nidyom to come with her. He insisted that he was going to spend the night in one of the cavernous, empty tomb-houses where the people had been consumed many long-days before. He insisted that the woman crouching in the grotto had been killed in a volcanic eruption. He named the kind of rock that had embalmed her. He pointed to her wide open mouth, screaming as she rocked her baby. He described the great mountain that had spewed out fire like the blow-spout of a whale and said that the woman had been caught in its blowing and preserved. He said that she had died a long way away, and had been brought here, presumably as an object of worship. Nidyom did not know anything.

Litta went alone. It was dark, and there was nothing that she could bring to make a light. To ward off attack, she sang the protection song that she had learned as a girl. It was a strong song that stuck in the back of your throat and made you hoarse. You had to struggle against the pain in your gullet to make yourself keep singing. This was so that anything that might attack you would hear that your will was greater than theirs was. Especially if it was a ghost.

When she arrived at the place where the fallen stones bridged the river, it was almost too dark to see them, except as great, black hulks grinning toothily out of the water. Litta-Po could see that there was no way she was going to make it across before daylight dawned. She could hear creeping things in the forest behind her. A long howl, like a battle cry, rang from the trees, and a slithering army moved towards her in the dark. She sang louder, so that they would know that they did not frighten her. The song cut like a knife in her wind-pipe.

It was then that the lights began to fill the sky. They were strange lights, silver and green, tinged with golden yellow at their edges, with an eye of purple staring down from their midst. It was the eye of a demon larger than a mountain looking down at her from the starry heights. It was light enough to see by, but Litta was afraid. She did not want to take help from that monster in the sky. She did not want to go out into the open where it could see her.

The slithering increased behind her, and a sound like lips yawning. It was the beasts or the demon: one or the other was going to get her. Litta scrambled up onto the nearest of the rocks and began to pick her way across the river.

The light in the sky stretched, and the eye faded away in a splash of pink. Something had made it close its eye, just at the moment when it would have seen her. Litta thought of the old men of her village, casting their blessing-seeds out over the earth, and of the endless line of identity that stretched back amongst her people until the earliest days. She was an eddy in the current of that great stream, a branch of the tree that was her people. The sap still flowed from its source, way back at the beginning, and she was not severed from the blessings that were given far away. She pulled a couple of hairs out of her head and threw them into the river so that they would be carried home to remind her people of the part of themself that had come to this strange land. Then she finished crossing the river and headed towards the camp.

There were almost fifty families who had come from the boat. They were stretched out on the broken green, with their torn blankets, and their bundles of treasures brought with them from Naranantia. The children were mostly asleep, though some of them were awake and crying in fear of the strange lights. The men were exhausted: it had fallen to them to enlarge the camp enough to allow everyone to sleep there tonight. Many of the women remained awake.

Litta had no friends amongst these women. They were all Narananti – they had come here with their husbands, and many of them were talking about how they should not have come. Litta had heard them on the boat over, constantly complaining about how much better it had been at home, and how much work was going to need doing in a new land. They had come to prevent their families from being broken. They held this over their husbands' heads.

Litta could see already that there was not going to be anything different here from Naranantia. Even though she found Nidyom insufferable, she felt a little sorry for him and his dreams. He thought of himself as their leader. He was really the little pet bush-pig that they trailed ahead of them in the jungle so that if there was something lurking in ambush, he would die to warn them.

Litta-Po didn't go over to where the women were sitting around their fire, spinning plans for the city that they were going to build. She squatted down on a pile of thick leaves and started weaving together the dolls of tough grasses that she would hang in the trees to keep their children safe.

When she arrived back at the abandoned city the next morning, Litta-Po could see immediately that all was not well. Nidyom was sitting on a bench of broken marble with a darkness in his eyes as though a spirit had come and possessed him in the night and stolen away the nugget of his soul. She walked up to him very slowly, waving a little piece of grass in front of her so that if the spirit was still there, it would not be able to come near her.

“Litta-Po." His voice was as broken as the ruins he was sitting in. He stood and a fractured smile broke across his lips. “Come with me,” he said.

He led her up the side of the ravine, and down a road that had not grown over, as though the jungle was afraid to take possession of it. At the end of the road there was a pit, wide as a lake, full of bones. The skeletons had shed their flesh, and up through the rib-cages and the eyes of the skulls snaked long vines. Broken leaves of rust and brown draped like shawls over dust-white shoulders. The skeletons were of every age and size: even women with the bones of unborn children still bleaching in the hollow of their wombs.

“I think,” said Nidyom, “that there are over a thousand here. And there's another like it over the next hill.”

“This is a terrible war, you think?”

The Narananti shook his head. “Not war. No broken skulls. No shattered bones. No splinters where a blade had hit the rib-cage. These people did not die of violence.”

Not human violence, thought Litta. “What are you thinking they died of?”

Nidyom shook his head. “They didn't bother with separate burials. They didn't take the time to fill the graves in. You can see,” he said pointing to something gleaming deep within the piles of human remains, “their valuables thrown in underneath them. A treasure-trove, but it's never been robbed. Perhaps it was just their custom --”

“To leave the meat of their ancestors to rot in the sun? There are no such people.”

“And it would bring disease. No. I think, Litta, that something terrible happened here. I don't think anyone survived.”

It was the first time that Nidyom had shown a little intuition. He was right. Litta had known it yesterday, just looking at their homes. “It is because of the eye,” she said, “that burns in the night. It looked down on them, and it did not like what it was seeing. I do not know what it saw, or whether it was evil that burnt them up, or evil that they were doing. It would be a good thing to know, because it tells us whether or not we can survive in this place.”

“Probably a plague,” said Nidyom. “A terrible plague that kills completely, and can't be contained.”

“For a second,” said Litta, “there was sense in your bones. Now you are speaking like a babbler. This was no plague. It was evil. You know that as well as I.”

When they returned to the camp that afternoon, they found it in mourning. Three people had died in the night. Nobody knew why. They had shown no signs of sickness. They had not eaten the local fruits. It had not grown cold at night. But there, in the morning, they lay dead. Two men, one child. Nidyom turned pale and didn't say anything. Litta-Po checked her ghost-scarers. They no longer hung in the trees. She found several clumps of burnt grasses scattered nearby. “Did you go burning these?' she demanded of the women.

“Your Mik-Mar superstitions do not bother us,” they answered. “Now we need to go and mourn our dead.”

Litta looked at the burnt up dolls. The ghosts of that pit were still living here. They had burned the dolls to show her they weren't afraid of her magic.

She sat down in the corner of the camp. The others were weaving a basket for the dead out of the leaves that they had cut down the day before. The Narananti women made no sound in their grieving. They painted their faces with charcoal-paste, and kept their mouths and eyes very still and did not say anything. The men sat in a circle around the perimeter of the camp and kept their eyes fixed on the ground so that they would not look on the silent rites of death. Only the children made a sound: two small boys weeping for their father. The dead were carried out to the river and set on it. The mourners made little fans out of palm fronds and waved a silent good-bye. When the woven caskets had sunk, the Narananti threw the fans into the water. Then the families of the dead left the camp so that they could break their silence without anyone to see.

There were two more deaths the next night. When they were discovered in the morning, Nidyom did not wait until the grieving rites were over before he left. Litta-Po followed him down the road, back to the city below the pit of bones. When she arrived, he was kneeling before the grotto of the dead woman, hunched over his own knife, with fear filling his eyes.

“You don't be stupid,” she told him. “We don't need any other death to make this better.”

“You don't understand,” he said grimly. “I brought them to this place. I told them it was safe to get off the boat. It was at my insistence that we set sail from Naranantia. It was I who refused to stay on the islands because I was too proud to be a refugee in a colony of your people. I wanted to bear Naranantia with me. I wanted to make her anew, without the corruption in her heart. This was my dream. This is my failure.”

“Is this what the death-side confession of a Narananti sounds like? It is just what I would have thought from a civilization of cowards. You are so proud, you people of the wall. You think that the whole world is going to fall to pieces if you don't hold it tight in your hands. You told me you left Naranantia instead of taking the knife. You said you weren't going to kill yourself in this stupid gesture. Now what do you think to accomplish with this foolishness? Get up, and we're going to find out how to stop these people being dead.”

“A thousand bodies, Litta. A thousand in a single grave. They did not figure out how to stop the deaths.”

“And they don't have the Mik-Mar people to stand among them and call up the strength of all the time since the world began. Probably, just like you, they kneel down and cry themselves out in despair. Now get up. We've got a great magic to work here. You aren't Mik-Mar, but you could be if you put the wall out of your heart and turn into a man. Now come and be my help.”

Nidyom shook his head. He had not found a way to find his soul again. It was still stolen, hidden amongst the boxes of treasure at the bottom of the grave. He had looked too deeply, thought Litta, and not with enough hope. The knife went into his belly with a whimper. Litta did not paint her face black or weave him a coffin of silent leaves. She knelt over his body and sang a song of keening and pain – a song so deep in her gut that the Narananti must have heard it all the way back in the camp, and covered their faces for shame at hearing such grief.

There was not time to bury the body. She knew that it would begin to rot quickly in the heat. It was not fitting to leave him in this state. Yet it was essential that she begin her work immediately. He was a suicide. He had chosen this ignominious decay. Still, he had been Litta's only friend, and she did not like to leave it that way.

With the pain still clinging close to her bones, she went through the streets of the broken city, looking into the houses where termites ate away the remains of furnishings, and spiders the size of Litta's hand built massive webs across the ceilings. Somewhere, in all of this, there had to be a clue. It was the first thing necessary: to find out the truth. Only when the disease has been diagnosed does the singer know which song to sing to draw it out.

The houses were silent. Anything of value in them – anything that might have spoken of the people who had lived inside of them had been taken out.

It was only in the last of the houses, the one nearest to the graves, that she found something that might lead to knowledge. It was a stone door set in the furthest corner of the darkest room, blocked off by a pile of fur and tiny bones left behind by a nocturnal bird. Litta rubbed her fingers raw prying open the door. The little bones crunched like grain under a millstone. It opened on a passageway entirely consumed by darkness, with damp recesses that dully glinted back the tiny fragment of light that spilled in through the door.

Since it was impossible to see, Litta closed her eyes and edged forward. The ceiling was too low for walking; Litta crawled. Carapaces of starved-out beetles broke and shattered beneath her knees. Something tiny bit at her ankles in the dark: the needle-soft stinging of insects which might have been poisonous. A dizziness stirred in her veins.

At last the passage ended. A little light filtered in from above, but through a gruesome curtain. The gold and valuables that Nidyom had seen glinting underneath the bodies were spread out at the far end of a small chamber: the light came in on a slant through a forest of bones. In the center of the chamber there was a small box. Litta approached it slowly and pried it open. It was made of stone. Dust circled it like incense, and a scattering of blue-gold beetles, small and round as peas, trickled out like a stream of living jewels. Inside were human skeletons, too tiny ever to have been born, their rib-cages split open by the savage intrusion of a knife. Litta-Po shuddered and held one of the tiny, egg-shell skulls in her hands. In the pits where its eyes ought to have been, she could see the mothers laid out on the floor, the noxious brew forced past their lips, labor brought on too early, and the children, too small to survive, speared on the sacrificial blade. The dark god to whom this had been offered was carved into the wall before her. Litta shook to the center of her gut. It was an image that she recognized: the dragoness, patron of Naranantia. She lifted the box with its precious remains, and removed it from the sight of the idol's gilded eyes.

She stood in the stream at midnight, when the dragon's bright eye was opening over the world and seeking human souls to devour. In her hands she held the children who had never breathed. She had wrapped them each in a large, flat leaf, and tied each around with a thin braid of her hair so that when she set them to float on the river, and they flowed out to the ocean from which all life arose, their spirits would find shelter amongst the roots of Litta's people. As she set them afloat she turned towards the fateful eye and sang before it the terrible song of judgment which her people sang only when one had to be condemned to death. It was the song for cutting off a branch from the vine, the song of the surgeon when he was forced to take a limb. Litta sang it to the eye, and all the stars of heaven echoed her singing. The unnatural light trembled, smeared, closed, faded. The fiery eye extinguished its reflection in the river. The tiny leaf-made coffins swirled downstream in the current. Litta climbed up onto one of the slippery stones, and made her way back down the road to the camp.

There was no one else dead in the morning, nor in the morning after. Nidyom was the last to be mourned. Litta told the story to the Narananti women, but they did not believe her. They wreathed her sayings in silence, and did not repeat them in history to their children. The graves remained: no one knew why they were there. Already a Queen had been appointed from amongst the women. The plans of a city had been drawn out with care. Of the ruined city that had proceeded them they said, “These are good stones. Already cut. We will use them for our building.” They filled in the graves with soil, left the treasure undisturbed. The only thing retained was a stone woman, bending over, helpless, to protect her child, which was enshrined, for no reason that anyone could quite remember, in the center of the city that the Narananti colonists founded.