In her younger days the woman who would become known as Old Mother had traipsed hither and yon, with never a home. She had come to pal with a gang of rover men, as most beings did at this time, since no other society was known or available to her.
In her ballooning the men shunned her and made her feel herself the outcast slave of them all. But one day a stranger arrived at their campsite. “Our time and being are at slip,” he said, “and we must be done with our old split-headed gods who spit nothing but torment and rancour. We must offer our faith to the god of the one head and go forth in the founding of nations.” Seated by their fire through the long evening, he endeavoured to set the rover men to thinking right on such issues.
It was at this point that the woman who would become known as Old Mother walked into the firelight, installing a cook-pot above the flames. The stranger teaching the religion of the one-headed god saw her swollen belly and knew then that fortune had steered him to a place of destiny. “Who has seeded this woman?” the man asked, and the men looked away from each other—in consternation at the naiveté of the question—inasmuch as they had as a community conspired in her taking.
“Are you members of the new order of humanity, then,” the theologian said, “or shall you continue in the pathways of the alien?” The rovers in the encampment voiced “yea” to the former, for there was much about time and being and their existence under the stars which was disagreeable, as their split-headed gods slaughtered their numbers indiscriminately. They were anxious for something better.
The woman who would become known as Old Mother stirred the pot and fed them, and the stranger studied anew her high belly and the faces of the men who had seeded her.
“Tear off these slithers of tree-bark,” he said to them, “and on each slither write your name’s symbol, them that can. Them that cannot, then whisper same to me, and I will write down that name. We will put all these names in my hat, and stir the slithers about, and if you trust me I will blindly pluck one from the pot. Whichever slip it is, that will be the woman’s name, and the name to be carried by the daughter or son born to her when she sojourns into the future to found our new nation of right and good thinking. “
But the rovers shied from putting their marks into the hat, and stomped and yelled as much as though their old gods of the split heads were again occupying their bodies. The “nations” idea was one foreign to their way of thinking, and how could such a fanciful configuration of beings be managed, and what was the time involved until such a whimsical condition might be realized? If their marks were to be in the hat as fathers of this brave initiative, then what was to be their personal liability if affairs did not go smoothly? Would the vengeful gods of the split heads return to smite or shackle them and drive them away into slavery?
“These are ancient questions unworthy of our release into modernity,” the theologian said. “Look ye for the positive function in your existential angst.”
The rover men then tried claiming some in their number had been with the woman more than the other and these parties should put their names into the hat by the twenty-fold. They argued on this matter endlessly, as the woman meanwhile swept the clearing for more wood and kept the fire going and bit her lips silent, as she had been compelled to do throughout her own long endurance of all matters pertaining to her time and being. It was a man’s world, here among the rovers or elsewhere; fate had yet to decree that she could be in swing with her true and destined orbit.
It was a dreadful cold night, the sky rank and heaving, and the shrubs and tree-limbs nearby their enclosure at glittery freeze.
Eventually one of the rover men agreed he would put his name fifteen times into the hat, since that was his notion of times spent with her, and the others should do likewise, each according to his private reckoning. So they agreed on this method. But they bickered interminably when it came to the particularities of these reckonings, some remembering the one event but denying the other and all confused by those nights when the woman was made to trek from one straw patch to the next, on and on through the night, and by those nights, too, when they were all too wickedly under the influence of fermented juices even to consider with whom she lay or what had been done with her.
The woman busied herself with her tasks, and her opinion on these matters was not germane to anyone’s time and being.
In the end the rover men agreed they would together enter forty slips of bark into the hat, plus the fifteen that had already been agreed upon. By this late hour in the proceedings they were all aswell with merriment and filled with self-importance, with food and drink in their gullets to the plenty; thus and so, it came to pass, at the religious fellow’s urging, that they consented each to put one gold piece into the hat, for the woman to take away with her that she might provide her offspring with the proper refinements in this new nation of the one god with the one head and not the direful many.
The theologian collected these coins and dropped the mark of their names into his hat. But as he was stirring the names about, one of the men stopped him and said the stranger’s mark should be in the hat as well, since he was a good fellow and regular to the bone, and one of them. The other rover men thought this a sound idea, and said furthermore they would make no call of the woman this evening themselves, for they were sick to their guts of her, and she could be his for the taking.
The theologian studied the woman a long time.
“Why have you been beating her?” he asked.
The men denied any whipping of her beyond the normal. They had done by her only what the flesh prescribed as their natural duty. They said she had stumbled upon them all gashed of skin, and that skin rusted, and her hair untamed, and her face swollen this very way he saw it. They reckoned it was how she had come from the harrowing, or how she had aged, or a result of what ill handling other rover gangs had perpetrated upon her, and none of it their doing beyond that which was ordinary and natural.
“How old are you?” the visitor asked the woman.
But he had to shake her by the shoulders and yank at her hair and pry open her mouth with a stick before she replied.
She did not know. And what did it avail her anyway to pursue such knowledge since each day and night of her life had been each day and night alike in its horror?
“Where is it you hail from?”
The fire crackled and the cinders flared and some while passed before she lifted a weary arm and poked it vaguely into the outer dark.
The religious man studied her features some seconds longer, ill at ease with her godless attitude and thinking her undeserving as one who would go now into unknown storms to found the new nation built upon the god of the one head and not the direful many.
He said, “Take up that bowl yonder, and go ye wash yourself.”
The rover men hooted and clapped their visitor about the shoulders, so aroused were they by his many strange notions, such as this one called washing.
The religious man spat on a blackened stick pulled from the fire and wrote the mark of his name down the once, and dropped his own slither of bark into the hat. He spun the names about, and pulled one out, reciting it aloud to the group—and this was thus the name the woman later to be known as Old Mother that evening took as her own, which would also, of course, become known as the name of the founded country under the god of the one head and not the direful many.
During the night, the theologian’s cold legs at last at rest between the woman’s own, she clutched the gold pieces in tight fists to her chest, and the slither of bark bearing the name tight in one fist as well. There were not but the seven gold pieces, though the men who had had their way with her in this camp were many more in number, which did not seem to her to be right.
She wondered which one of the rover gang bore this frightful name, and what that name signified for her future on this planet where time and being were alike as one in its horror.
“How does a mouth say this name?” she asked the visitor during the night, after he had awakened and had his rough way with her a second time.
The man uttered a word, then a stream of words, each perplexing to her ears—strange words such as fearful animals might speak when issuing warnings to each other through dark nights.
They were not sounds which conveyed anything to her, nor any her tongue could easily wrap around. They were not any of them a sound heard these loathsome months she’d been urchin-slave to this crew of motley rovers. She wondered it was not the religious man’s name, him whose eyes were lit with a passion for the ringed heavens but whose hands had been as coarse as a rover’s.
Most likely, she thought, these were names pumped up out of the very air, with no attachment to either time or being.
Afterwards, she saw him rooting in the dirt and among the rags of their clothing, doubtlessly in search of the seven gold coins. But in a while he tired of this, and tired of beating her, and returned to profound sleep.
They were an evil brew, these men, but at least they had done right by her in the end, giving her these legal names under invocation of the new theology.
In the morning, long before first light, the woman struck off, darting fearful glances back at the sordid camp to see if any would come chasing after her, to catch her hair and drag her back, as had been her ill luck so often in the past.
She pressed on through the frozen shadows.
She hoped both to the god of the one head and to the split-many that the chosen name would be a name to bring fortune’s good breath to the strange being unaccountably at roost inside her body.
Whatever else was to follow from that news was a matter beyond all conjecture.
Before quitting the encampment she had seen the religious man skip warily off into darkness. She had witnessed a new gang of bedraggled rover men creep in with stone and spear, and heard the gods of the split heads and the one-headed god at warfare, all howling without mercy.
In no way, to her mind, could a god of the single head defeat innumerable gods whose smoking bodies were affixed with the direful many.
Whether man or gods, someone would follow.
She took to water.
As daylight arrived, she saw in the sky a swooping eagle. Later, she saw the bird a second time, and in the evening, when she rested, she saw it yet again, looking down on her from a tree’s high bough.
Carry me along, dark flier was her peculiar thought.
Soon enough, her way strewn by the rubble of malignant gods of the one head and the many, she had reached new lands that in later ages of time and being would be affixed with a score of unpronounceable names. Just as she, by that ageless scoring, was already known as Old Mother. Her many children and their descendants had been swept hither and yon as though by hurricane, imparting their own names to this and the other unhewn country.
We were each of us by that hour at swim with romance and mystery.