By Kyle Coma-Thompson.
When Old Grandmother was a child, she was taken by her lala (mother) and kalka (father) to the edge place where the steppes turned to stone. Old Grandmother spoke of this: her bewilderment, her fear, her lala and kalka explaining that to be grown one day she would need to prove she could walk alone as a person. In the village place she had heard other children mention it. She had believed what they’d told her were merely stories. That the first morning of a child’s tenth year they would be brought to the edge place to learn how to walk again. “Learn how to walk again”—how they told it.
We are lucky, Old Grandmother says. No longer do any people honor such a tradition. Too many mothers were set to grief, too many children sent to walk beyond the limit where grass became troubled by stones. They went alone. Their parents and other elders stood shoulder to shoulder watching. The tradition was a cruel one, Old Grandmother tells us. Whether it was kleua-mi (a high distinction) she was one of the last to walk, walk and return, she still doesn’t know. She is glad none of us would be brought there. For that, forever grateful.
Why afraid? we ask her.
What about it left mothers so sorrowful?
All children were sent walking, she tells us, only most came back.
In what way? How so?
To tell of it, she would have to speak of her own morning.
Three dawns before her tenth birthday her lala had woken her. She heard her father calling from outside the yurt. With shaky hands her mother helped dress her. In the dark outside were many people gathered, most of Ttytye, her birth village. Horses were dressed and ready for mount; three wagons had been arranged for travel. A woman who appeared old from a distance approached looking on her with a mother’s face. Her kalka held her shoulders while the woman tied a band of cloth over her eyes. Darkness, blinded by cloth: hands she recognized, her kalka’s and lala’s, bound her arms and legs with leathers and rope, gently. Don’t cry, she’d been told. And because these were voices of people who’d birthed her, who’d raised her, she didn’t fight or flinch in terror.
By many hands she was lifted and carried, laid on softness, animal furs mounded in the back of a wagon. The wagon began to move and from all directions, nowhere she could see them, a whole village’s worth of people began singing.
The singing at first was loud then faded. The wagon drew her away from it, shrank the singing to the sound of her own breath.
In silence they rode for days. When she was thirsty someone brought a ladle of water to her lips; when hungry, a hand held for her jerky or a biscuit to be eaten. The wagon would pull to stop and she would be carried to her feet, tall grasses wispy against her calves. Among tall grasses she couldn’t see, she’d pass waste from her nethers. Light and dark she tracked by the rate at which crickets sang—slower, sparser by dark.
Blinded she kept calm by reference to her knowledge. Years she had wondered and asked others out of curiosity: where did they go, those envoys that left before dark? Always she heard from ones her age, slightly older or younger, never from children who’d passed into their tenth year and so had ceased to be children. The chosen had been stolen from their homes, bound and blinded. They had been transported across the flatlands to the border, the walking-off place. As a people for generations they had been doing so, and for generations their children had returned from the edge-lands with silence as parcel of their covenant. A requirement of honored aging: to keep mum about what had occurred.
Three days they travelled. Among her unseen company not a word was spoken.
On the third day the horses and wagons stopped. There was a rustling and talking and she overheard: here was the place, help the others.
In the dark among her fur-place she heard hammers and ropes pulling taut. She heard horses and voices somewhat familiar, her lala muttering to her kalka. She spoke up, asked the dark, Where? What? No answers came, but whole time she laid there she could feel someone watching.
Soon the hammers and ropes and horses and voices stopped. There was a quiet and from the quiet, the faint return of crickets. By intervals measured in hours or minutes, couldn’t tell, she slept, slept or woke. Morningtime she woke to a hollow, metallic clangor: a bell struck by a stick or so she guessed. Hands set upon her and lifted her from the wagon. On her feet she was stood and held while knots were loosened from her blindfold. Shock of soft blue early dawn: eyes blinking then coming to. Her lala, her kalka. Faces of both distant or solemn. Between them the woman, last person she had seen before the blindfold. The cloth taken away was in her hands. The woman was neither young nor old, of an age where aging seemingly didn’t matter. She lifted the cloth and with slow then sharp movements tied it about her eyes, hard tight knots behind the head. Blind she had been for three days and now this woman, this stranger to her, had chosen to take on the blindness.
This woman, children’s rumors had described. She was the See. The Guide, the Holy Spur.
Who was that? Old Grandmother in her youth had asked.
Some had spied her, mornings their elder roquwa (siblings) had been led from tents to be bound and blinded.
A tall woman, but only in spirit.
Actually neither short nor tall.
A shamaness who arrived by travel party through the dark of each child’s birthday week, having been called again to her purpose. A day’s ride away to the east the See lived in a village of her own. Men elected by custom attended to her protection. From every direction the steppe peoples came to visit her, to consult her about some fate or concern. She read people’s futures in the smoking bowels of goats, in the powders of dried and ground feces. She advised barren women on days when they might conceive. Hunters and warriors received her blessing before a campaign or sojourn. She carried the souls of many witches in her mouth, legend said. She heard nit-nits (ghosts) sing grass shanties to the moon, eves before a new autumn slaughter of livestock.
A virgin, rumors said of her. Unmarried.
Never ate nor slept.
A woman who had never herself once been a child.
Every parent I’d ever known, Old Grandmother tells us, had once been freshly born, had grown into some smaller version of their future, a young one. Each had shared this same past. Each had heard tales of the walking place. They grew older and noted the silence of yulti (returned children) on the matter. For each the story was the same. Days before their tenth birthday a woman had arrived at the behest of village elders. Each was stolen from loving company, by loving company, to a place where they might be made to stand, bindings untied, so this woman might take their blindfold, bind herself with it, assume their own portion of darkness. None who returned to the village after spoke of what had happened. None would dare tell, out of concern they might be banished. Now that the tradition is dead and with nothing to fear, Old Grandmother says, she can sit us down to tell us. Blindfolded, the See that day turned and faced away from her. Her lala and kalka each held her by one shoulder and led her past the woman. Beyond there was nothing but grass and stone, stone here and there spotted with reddish lichen.
This was the walking place, the edge-lands.
Lala’s hand on her left shoulder, kalka’s on her right, she followed the signal of their silence and waited. Something was being called upon by their standing there. Something was following the dictates of common preparation.
She had never seen a movement of land such as that.
All her years she’d known the ground to be even, constant. Never was there danger one might lose one’s balance, running or walking. Here ground lifted and lowered. It swelled and sank, just so. Stones jutted out and worried a shorn, ugly grass.
She would walk there, her lala told her.
She would take this, she said, holding out a whittled figure the size of a finger, to a place over those rocky swells where others had left many of its kind. The figure had arms and legs and head and tiny features of a face. It looked a crude version of her.
Her kalka wrapped it in a tear of rough dun-colored cloth, handed it to her.
Leave this where you find the others then come back, he told her. This much is important, so listen: no matter how much you may wish to, don’t run. Walk. Walk to the place, leave this there, come back but come back walking.
If you feel lost, listen.
Her kalka looked past her shoulder, direction of the See. It was then she noticed singing and drumming coming from behind her, from the encampment. To this day she couldn’t mention who had accompanied her, the elected of her departure party. She heard them singing, women and men: a language she didn’t know, melodies odd and jagged.
Follow our voices, he said. We won’t stop until you’re with us.
Her lala kissed her forehead, kalka gripped her shoulder. Then each sent her off on her first step with a push.
She was barefoot. The grass was sharp. High summer but early in the morning yet, so wet with dew.
Don’t turn, her father said, as she made to turn.
Go.
She wore a cloth smock, long about the legs. The wind was strong, pulled looseness of her dress every direction.
The stones scattered about weren’t buried so much as seemed to surface from a depth. Stepping on her first, she lifted a foot as if bitten. It was cold. Thereafter scanned the grass for more of its like, avoided them.
Have you ever walked a hill? Old Grandmother asks us.
We haven’t.
When ground rises, it’s called a hill. When it sinks, it’s called a valley. You’re young yet, you’ve not seen one of either. Imagine being first to see one while sent alone to walk one. To cross ground that lifts, that carries you down, it’s no soft encounter. Where will a hill take you, once it has lifted you from level? Where will a valley drag you, once it pulls you below?
Frightened she crossed the grassy stony place. In her hands a fetish wrapped in cloth, across the distance a lilt of singing and drums. She imagined her lala and kalka standing either side of the blindfolded priestess, singing loud as custom allowed. From the angle of sun she measured time as it passed—still morning yet. When it reached top of the sky it would mark noon. Once it crossed beyond the top and descended, afternoon would edge toward dusk, then it would be evening. She began ascent of a tall climb, a hill broad about its base but flat along its level. Last step bringing her to summit, sun almost directly above, warning her: was she halfway there? What would it mean to leave her cloth-figure hidden among rocks, having not found its kindred? Would they know? If she turned then and headed back before sundown, what way would they have of knowing?
The See, she thought. The See would be aware. Shame on her family and herself.
Atop the large hill there was only wind, wind and grass-sounds and something akin to hush. It was noon. Somewhere along the way the singing and drums had lost her.
On the other side of the hill unfurling from its slope was a flatness of land, glint of a stream carving a meander several miles out. Grass and more grass, stones and more stones. Quick scan showed her nothing besides, but a squint brought something else: a wall of sorts, a line on the wander. What was it she couldn’t tell. A wall, she decided. A kind of demarcation or boundary.
It took hours of careful walking to reach it. Thistles scattered along the slope.
The way down was a bother, hem of her walking shirt catching thorns every few steps. Daylight wasted in portions as she stopped to unknit the cloth. Eventually she gathered the cloth into a bunch about her waist to weave the snags barelegged. Light in her eyes, jags underfoot. Brittle rattles as breezes threshed the bushes. The path she cut had to be solved by careful selection of one step and another, no opportunity to hurry. When she finally cleared thorns and reached the bottom she paused before dropping her hem, to survey the wages of walking. Knees and ankles and calves speckled with pricks and scratches. Little blood daubs leeching through after the hem fell.
Before her stretched a field, grass and not much else. Beyond that, in the middle distance, a wrinkle of what appeared mounded stones.
First steps beyond the hill brought a swelling in her middle. Tight and hard and heavy—a concentration of innards she had not felt before. Dygdr (fear). This was dygdr, as others had long described. Telling of fatal tangles with accident or conflict, elders had spoken of the weight of life retracting from threat, how such weight was often felt and consciously, so one might be carried free of dangers. It was natural, always with a person, elders had explained. Each was born with a portion of dygdr in their belly and in keen moments it made itself known. Crossing ground beyond the largeness of a hill, she felt it, her first of such moments. Weighing her down, slowing her.
There was no wind nor breeze, she remembered.
There seemed a stillness about the place to welcome her.
She thought of other children who had walked there before. Who had descended the hill as she had, held a whittled figure as she had; who had felt fear gather in their bellies and carried it along. Some had been sent walking, she knew, and before sundown had not returned. Some had been left to wander and perish, lost among mazy hills and stones. Having failed to find their way back were abandoned, as old law required. Their mothers and fathers had been ordered to return to their village at day’s end, soon as sun left and earth darkened. She had seen the stricken faces of mothers after their return. She had watched the silence of grieving fathers. She had watched her own lala and kalka move to comfort them. Where had they gone? she would ask. Where was their son, their daughter? Don’t speak of it, they would tell her. Honor these wounds without words. The children there and not there: their absence vivid, wretched on their parents’ faces. To leave a child for dead; to uphold a custom that would ask such a thing. This See, she felt, was a terrible orphaner. Casting children into wilderness, abandoning any who didn’t find their way back by twilight.
Were they here? she wondered.
Dozens or hundreds, lost still but watching?
Children and parents, embarkment and abandonment, souls stranded and waiting to be taken home. She crossed the field, her shadow a slight lag behind her. It didn’t take long. A quiet string of paces. Having solved it without difficulty, she found herself at walking’s end standing before a wall.
Have you ever met one? Old Grandmother asks.
A wall?
We had not. We were children of open space, land in every direction.
Let me tell of it then.
It begins with one stone. One stone laid upon the ground. Take another, place it atop the first. Lay others alongside these, brother and sister stones to stack on top of them. Repeat. From the ground build a height and shape then follow its path either way for the remainder of one’s days. When one’s body fails and there’s death, bury oneself other side of the wall, bequeath the building of it to one’s children and their children’s children. There: such are the practices and demands of wall-building.
That afternoon, her tenth birthday, in the hinterlands she met her first and only wall and it was a strange confrontation. Toes touched old stone and felt a coolness. Coolness of lower stones, near ground and grass, warmth of the upper stones, hands laid upon them.
The stones were flat, stacked without mortar.
Many gaps among them where one, kneeling, might look through.
Often in these gaps were stuffed bits of cloth, keepsakes. Walk-gifts, tributes from others who’d been sent walking lifetimes and years before. Some brighter and so younger. Others scummy, ragged, aged by weather. Was one of these left by her kalka, her lala? All or none of them, no way of telling. Dotting a winding gray continuum either direction, fits of white and off-white, fizzles of cloth frayed and windblown.
White mostly, she noticed—why? The cloth she’d been gifted was rough and brown.
In hindsight a sign maybe the tradition was coming to an end, outworn.
She knelt, sought around for a cleft. Every few steps she noticed a figure had gotten loose and fallen to ground. These she picked off the grass, wedged them into the wall. It took a long while to find spots that were free to fill. To the south, or was it north, east, or was it west, an admixture of any or all between, she’d followed along the wall testing gaps with first her fingers then with the cloth-wrapping itself: no, too small, or no, too large, surely here too loose a fit so a wall-gift would drop at the slightest breeze. Much daylight was wasted finding the strongest fit for each and especially the one she carried. A gap she could look through with one eye and one only—what was needed. At last she found one. Before working her tribute into the wall, she unwrapped it, held it, turned it to observe the whittle-marks and carved details. Her double in miniature, it seemed, unblinking. She had half a mind to cast it over the wall but caught herself. No: if thrown, she’d have to climb and follow after, hunt through forbidden grass for it. And how did she know that—that the other side was forbidden? The land itself maybe, habit. Generations of such children, the See and her ceremony. Here walking had brought her and here a wall had grown from the earth to halt her. To climb it would violate the strictures of assigned duty. This she confirmed, standing there, figure in hand. Rewrapping the figure she cinched the cloth in two tight knots, hammered the parcel home with a flat palm.
There, she felt, stepping back.
Another birthday for the wall.
Now she could turn, find her way to her people before sundown.
•
Did we believe her?
Strange she would ask. This she’d never asked before.
That she was a girl once and that their people once brought children to the boundary-lands. That there were such things as boundary-lands. That there was such an officiant as a See. That parents accepted the call of tradition in such a manner: binding hands and feet and granting a foreigner, no matter her authority, rights to blinding, no matter how briefly, their child on transport to the ritual testing ground.
She could be scaring us, after all. As she was an old woman with death ahead of her and the power to instil fear in children.
Was this story more about the future than the past? More about the end of adulthood than about its beginning?
Swear, she said. Looking from face to face.
Swear we believe she’s a liar.
None of us were bold enough to break quiet. The dare itself was enough to convince us. To call Old Grandmother, mother to us all by parentage or clanship, a fabricator, a perverter of a people’s common past—she would strangely like that. Disbelief strengthens the far-fetched, she was often fond of telling.
No? She smiled, wrinkles coming alive across her face.
None? No takers?
Very well. To the rest of it then.
Some summer day several lifetimes ago (the old woman so long near death, it seemed, she’d extended her life, by contrast, many times over). Several lifetimes ago, she carried a wooden doll wrapped in raggy cloth to a stone wall, stuffed it into a gap and left it. She was alone among grass and sunlight but felt all about her the spirits of orphaned children. There was a creek beyond the wall, she was thirsty. She had been tempted to climb the wall, to run to where the creek was sounding, sip a few handfuls of water. She considered it then felt nerves in the considering. What harm in it? To judge the distance, had pulled herself to a height, standing on the wall—no eye on the water though the sounding of it louder. She could have died a girl that day, she is convinced, if she’d let herself drop and wander off. How many children before her had done the same? Spared. Saved that day, she said. Swear now again, if you like, you don’t believe. Swear before I relate: a line of birds I saw, came flying low, an arm’s reach from height of where she stood on the wall.
Never before had she seen such a thing, never since has she seen it. Smallish birds, swift or wren or sparrow, passing over land in a thin stream.
She hadn’t seen them traveling until they were on her. A few steps along the wall, she could stand beneath their line of flight, and did. Quiet except for wing-sounds and chatter. What would make a flock carry in such a way? Where had they come from, why arrive then, where going? She turned to watch them trickle off in the direction of hills behind her. An odd living rope that rose with the rise of the land and lowered once it had crested a swell. She thought to stand and watch them pass all as a piece. Miles long it seemed and calming to observe. Their shadow though. Their shadow and hers. The sun at a dangerous afternoon angle. Back before sundown, she remembered. No-one had told her, yet she knew. She leapt off the wall and walked at half-bird’s-speed, following the trail cast by their ongoing shadow on the ground.
That living trail, believe it.
Led her unimpeded through briars and thistles. Over one hill and another.
Heels caught not a single stone the way back.
This way, she said. You’re children, so maybe you doubt. The birds offered words of encouragement, of comfort. This way, they told me. I’m tired, I told them; let me stop a while, catch breath, rest. Not yet, they told me: your flock’s ahead, waiting. We’re holding them up but can’t keep them beyond dusk. Plenty of time to rest when you find them.
None among us had heard birds speak our language.
None dared challenge the old woman, serious as she was.
I am a bird, you too are birds, she could have said and we would have accepted her.
Not long after she heard voices, people singing and drums. And not long after she heard, she saw them: silhouettes of people standing on level ground, shadow-shapes of her mother and father and the old See standing between them. What did they see walking their way? What had they made of these birds flying from the edge-place, passing directly over them? Was it a sign? Was it preordained? When she arrived, her kalka and lala crouched and reached from where they stood, disallowed by tradition, she learned later, from running to greet her. Exhausted she walked free of tradition into their arms, mother and father weeping upon her shoulders. Between their heads she could see the last of the birds trailing off in the direction where they’d travel themselves the next three days.
Did you see? she’d ask other, younger children, once they returned to their village. A line of birds flying over the land in direction of home—surely they’d noticed.
No, they all said. Nothing of the like. Maybe they’d passed overhead while everyone was asleep, under dark?
A vision, she tells us.
Being Old Grandmother, she can make such claims. Being children, we’d be fools to doubt her.
What did they make of it, her parents? She asked them during the wagon ride home. Make of what? they said. Of birds making such a shape and low as they were, near the ground? What birds, what shape? they asked. She was blindfolded between them, her mother brushing her hair bare with her fingers, so she couldn’t see: did their faces tell the truth or were they playing? Their voices though. Since eyes were null, ears were sharper in discernment. No, they told. They believe what they say; in their version they only saw her walking, no birds accompanying. The birds were hers, she came to believe. Helpmates sent to guide her to safety and to calm her.
The See, old as she was, stayed a day after return to Ttytye. A feast was held in her honor. Meat and drink and dancing and lore-telling and celebration of this new child changed by walking. The old woman, not old by age but by role, by station, sat in a chair of wicker and smiled for the people without smiling. Perhaps she was happy as they to return with a child and not parents newly grieving. Perhaps it was nothing she wished for, even for herself: the cruelty required of her, to uphold a people through authority. Perhaps she did not ask to be See but was so because birthright demanded it, her mother having been See before her, and before that her mother’s mother.
Before retiring to her tent the old, non-old woman called for the girl through her relations. She would like a word, her lala told her, before ending the evening. The girl was frightened of the woman, this solemn figure who would have ordered her parents to leave, abandon her had she not come walking before the sun was gone. Her mother took her arm firmly, led her to the chair, the woman with firelight playing about her face, embers like savage insects stirring air. Her mother stood back to give them conference.
The woman lifted a hand, laid it on the girl’s forehead.
Uqi (Hello), she said. There you are.
The girl blinking said nothing.
What did you think of the gift? The gift I sent?
The girl’s brow furrowed.
Oh, you don’t know? Birds I sent out to find you—they brought you back well, didn’t they?
Girl’s eyes something different then.
You’re welcome, the See said, laughing with eyes but little else.
You may find they’ll make an appearance again, when needed. Never discount a bird alone; a flock soon follows.
Hand removed from the girl’s forehead, the See sent her off with a nod. The old woman worked to stand, attendants gathering her under arms. Old Grandmother watched the woman leave the light and people, duck to vanish into a tent. Next morning she left before dawn, gone before anyone might bother her again to thank her.
Soft is the world, Old Grandmother says. Because far as you know, world is hands and faces and bellies and warm places below and shoulders and feet. But hard is the world as well: you of all should know, being young. Look around you. Look at me.
Remember when I asked: do you believe? If you don’t, even a little, doesn’t that promise some bit of hardness in the future? If you do, isn’t there hardness there, in our past? My past, it’s yours as well. Take it, do with it what you will.
And the See? we ask.
We’re curious, we want to know: what became of her?
She was the last of her kind.
She was like me in that way. Time came for her and she had grace enough to go with it. Wherever they went, I imagine there’s a place for us all. Have I scared you now?
Oh, go on. Look around.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyle Coma-Thompson is the author of three collections of short stories: The Lucky Body, Night in the Sun, and most recently, written in collaboration with Tristan Foster, 926 Years. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he practices as a clinical mental health counselor.
