When Girly and I began to live together as man and woman I was awed by the plenty of her body and gracious accompanying spirit, so that all that happened in our exchanges, as much as I was fixed to that short moment by her body, enforced my permanent wonder at her. It was one of the rare times in my life when I considered life serene and beyond contest. And that seemed to be the way the days were set. I remember sunshine and then slanting rain on the lake with the catch of fish already in, and I remember chasing bounders with Girly, and her racing in a great flash of limbs to claim what was fallen. I believe that such events, whose full meaning I could not utter nor sing, would be somehow cut in the air and remain for all men and women to watch and thereby learn from.
Then Girly became distracted. I remember being confused, and then one dawn she told me, ‘There is a man following me. He’s a man related to me.’
This was a great difficulty. Blood laws intervened, though that did not always stop it happening.
‘But I think,’ she said, ‘he’s magicking me. I am so irritable now. He follows me, and lets me know his eyes are on me.’
I looked out from our hut at sundry times that day and saw the strict line of the dunes, and then, a distinctive head breaking the line. It was a cousin of Girly’s in a headband that marked him for the Parrot clan. A man close to middle years, a man with a marriage. Gone lightning-struck all at once. Stricken by enchantment and meaning to enchant his way to her. He was stalking her, visiting every site of her life, even where the women defecated. He tried to witness all her travels.
When I promised Girly I would fight him, she lost all her calm. There was no doubt she was frightened for me because the man, whose name I do not give, was well tried as a fighter, and a danger to take on, the leader of a hunting squad.
And that was the end of all my early contentment. It was not that Girly welcomed his fixed gaze or his sorcery, or was flattered by it. But I had a mean intention to pretend she did. It was then that she suggested we set out on our own, willing to travel together and find and hunt our food. He was a man of cares and his absence from the Lake would, we hoped, cause note, and women would ask his wife about it if he absented himself in our direction. He had the power to make his own mind about that, but he would need to see our departure in some way, by naked eye or vision.
Girly wanted me to go with her into the country which I believed was the country of her heart. She wanted me to accompany her to the Sunside of the world, a wooded plain that rose amidst flat hills made by the old rivers which enfolded the earth, and made occasional wide lakes favoured by waterbirds such as we had by our Lake, yet were shallow enough for us to wade across if we chose. Off there, a long way off, were believed to be the hardest and most dense stones. But hunting for them was not a purpose of ours.
The truth is that I resented taking this path not least because I believed it was the direction to the dead earth I had once occupied following my trial as a young man. Nevertheless, I let Girly lead. At every few steps I had an impulse to turn back and go to the Lake and try to kill this enchanted and enchanting older man. Better to be killed in an instant than lose Girly. She was my sky. But then with those same few steps I saw her care fall away, I saw her full youth begin to plump her features again, and she looked at me as if to say, ‘Here I am, your woman again, saved from alarm.’ So I sullenly believed I had to keep going. She has chosen to flee with me, I told myself. She has looked to me to provide her with the simple air of my own dedication, when I knew she was under persuasion to succumb to the seducer’s song, the song that lay where love and death met each other. She was content to be my woman and I was proud of that, and in that spirit we walked on into the Sunside country.
We travelled for three days in fine country. I saw no wasteland and, without telling Girly, I kept an eye on the country we traversed but saw no natural outline of earth broken by the crown of the man’s head. We made perfectly fine shelters from the branches of the writhe tree and within two days of continuous walking and singing – Girly was better informed on this country than me, as it happened – we reached a riverbank amongst all the shafts of deep-rooted river trees. It was a fine, broad river, the work of an ancestor giant of Girly’s who had gouged it with a digging stick to commence its life. One of Girly’s skills was throwing the nets, and she sat on the bank happily untangling the one she had brought, and took it down into the river till the water was at her thighs. She stood still then, holding the net like a child, a murmur of tune escaping her lips. Then, too fast for me to see it happen, she flung the net and soon we had strong-shouldered black and whisker fish, and biglips in there. The sleek sides of the fish when Girly brought them up from the water sang to me with a fresh lustre, as if I were seeing them for the first time. We cooked them wrapped in the wide branches of the sour tree that go so well with fish.
This was the place to stay for days on end. As long as the seducer did not know we were here and bring his sorcery and poison to the place! And we had not seen him, though I looked when Girly did not look for him, not wanting to meet or be reacquainted with evil. But I did look, and I saw nothing.
Each night we went to our skins in the shelter we had built on the bank. Then, one morning, I found something beyond the fire stones we had assembled the day before. It was a bunch of blue and yellow feathers – I do not know if they came from his head dress, but the message lay there: the woman I want is here, and I have been here to mark the ground. I hid the emblem, but there was trouble as soon as I said we should be moving on, for in Girly’s mind we had just discovered a place to stay for as long as the heart chose! I could not tell her the peril had resumed, yet I could not persuade her to move on unless I did. In fact, we had a normal shouting affair, very bitter. I waved the feathers in her face and accused her of giving encouragement to the man, and wanting to show our direction so she could be caught, as in some ways the feathers showed she had been. Where was the sense in all this? There was none. That was what quarrels were for. I believed her innocent of the latest that had happened, but I was angry that the man had found us and felt bound to give a sign, as if I would not deliver Girly up to him and – above all, I hoped – she would not give herself.
So Girly and I did move on, sullen and listless, expecting that he was trailing us. That night, when we lit the evening fire, I angrily erected a barrier of branches around us, upwind, so that our faces could not be observed, and we ate our evening food facing the barrier.
At last Girly put down her strip of small bounder loin and said with a sudden clear head, ‘We have to separate from each other. If we’re separate, he can’t track both of us down.’
I said of course that was true. ‘But he’ll only track you,’ I said.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I will track him. He will not bring sorcery into my camp. I’ll bring it into his.’
‘Or you will succumb, and run away with him.’
‘What do you want?’ asked Girly. ‘Do you want me to say I wish to be his woman? Would that make you happy? You’ve been asking me all day to say it so you can feel just in throwing stones at me. You want to kill me. Oh, you deny it, but ask yourself!’
I would of course have loved to deny it and even felt the urge to deny it with a blow and so prove it was the truth.
‘If we both track him, it will frighten him,’ said Girly. ‘Don’t you touch him or enter his camp. Leave it to me. I will poison his fire.’
It was a frequent enough female boast. Even wives threatened to change their men in various ways for the better and thus ‘poison their fire’. Yet she weighed the words more solemnly and as if in her hand, and then said, ‘Judge me when you see me by the Lake again. I will be there before you, and you’ll know. I can say now that all he’s done is bring misery to me, but when you see me by the Lake, it’s then you’ll believe me.’
When I woke the next morning she was already gone. Her footsteps could not be seen, only the sweep of the branch she’d so clearly carried behind; and then at a majestic tree, that ended. Beyond that, no further prints. When I saw that I knew I had misjudged her. She was indeed a serious woman, and somehow in this severe time had been given the power of flight. Now I wished she were there so I could take back all my callow, mannish-boyish threats. What was clear was that she must be left to pursue her own plan, since her plan was in earnest. For the whole day I skirted the earth to the Nightside so that I would not tangle up her path by intruding on it. Except for wanting her, I was contented enough on my own track. I fully believed that as once she had been his prey, now he could very well be hers. For she was a clever woman. As long as she did not suffer any damage from him.
On the next morning I started back on a straight line to the Lake, believing I would meet her there and that she would have achieved something. I wanted to tell her I put trust of the highest kind in her.
On the third morning, I came across the river and tall trees with grassland beyond, and I began to notice clumps of stone on the open ground which pointed me on a track to one of the flat-topped hills and, clearly visible as a black space, a cave in its flank. I did not doubt that the stones had been laid either by the man or by Girly, brought into small heaps by hand. I saw some tracks too, but whatever they meant I felt the necessity to follow. As I approached the cave in the side of that flat hill I saw a near-naked man lying on a fur by its door. I did not try to disguise my approach at all but went straight up. I told myself, it’s not him, this fellow. He looks too hapless. But before I could get close he scurried up and most shamefully fled. I waited and then watched him make a half-crippled return after some time. I drew closer. It was him, or else it was a brother of his. He looked up at me and said, ‘Beat me to death. I don’t care.’ And then he almost wept with pain and turned on all fours and made his way out of my sight again, and from the intervening rocks between us came the comic sound of thunderous farting. Somehow Girly had encountered him and reduced him to this, this mere pipe for shit. He returned to his skin, his lips looking blue, but vanished again almost instantly.
‘You’ll get over this,’ I told him. I half smiled. ‘Though it seems severe now.’
‘You are welcome to her,’ he said. ‘She is a poisonous woman. She will kill you when it suits her.’
‘She is a serious woman,’ I replied. ‘She is not to be played with.’ And most of the time since I have followed that same advice myself.
It was a joy to go on treading my way back towards the Lake.