“Life is short, the Art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgement difficult.” - Hippocrates1
For eight months, no life-giving liquid had softened the hard earth. Each day, the great ruling light had blazed unflinching from the metallic dome of heaven and the heated air had moved swiftly with the dust of the earth. Each night the darkness had brought a wakeful chill that the lesser lights of heaven could not dispel, however near they hovered.
She was weary. The drying force of the pitiless light and gritty wind on her form sucked away strength from the ordinary and the healing tasks of each day. Nights of chilled sleep had not brought restoration. Some nights brought no sleep. At times, distant drums throbbed in rhythms of unknown speech, yet their message sounded celebratory. It was when high hoarse voices wove, in uncertain pitch, incessant, incomprehensible phrases that dread weighted the darkness. The most joyful sounds that broke the nights, making her laugh even in weariness, were the hideous, hilarious utterances of the varied creatures that dwelt among the humans.
But the last night had been quiet as if the earth and its surface dwellers had hushed to hear a renewed voice. The murmur of droplets on the shelter roof had not awoken her. When she went out into the daylight, the surface of the earth was pockmarked where drops of liquid had sunk into the dust. Tiny creatures with shells of red velvet crept out of the earth, heralds of the approaching end of this season of endurance.
It was the seventh day. She would go with a companion to visit the woman whose name had been shared with her as a welcoming gift. In honour, she dressed in her visiting costume made from a single length of bright, patterned textile. A plain rectangle of the textile, wrapped counterclockwise around her waist, became an ankle length skirt. She pulled on the tunic, fantastically cut and trimmed by a local textile artist. Then she wrapped a wide strip of the remaining textile around her head to protect her from the hot light.
The light was as unflinching as ever as she and her companion walked over the earth road. At least the softening liquid last night had tamed the dust. The air was still and the naked earth breathed heat. When they reached her namesake’s dwelling, the people of the household lead her and her companion across an expanse of roughened earth, toward a living shelter.
During the dry months when creatures and humans endured and small green plants withered and died, enormous living pumps drew life-giving liquid from deep within the earth. They drew it up many metres, through their dense branching frameworks into hundreds of thousands of small green factories. There, light, liquid, and air were combined to manufacture hundreds of confections filled with juicy pulp, the fruit of endurance. Rest was sweeter in the shelter of these great living plants.
They found her namesake at the edge of the living shelter, sitting on a woven carpet of dried small plants. Frail, thin, bent, clothed in frayed, faded textile, she might have been a living model for the dignified sculptures her people formed from the dark, dense material of the great living plants. The earth floor of the shelter was littered with spent factories and fallen confections. A few of her namesake’s youngest descendants shared the carpet, while others gathered the finest confections onto a spread textile.
No one knew the age of her namesake, whose birth was beyond the living memory of the humans of the place. It was said that she could remember hearing at night the roar of the great maned creatures that had vanished over seven decades ago. Few here had lived so long. Scant nutrients stunted growth and hard labour prematurely aged. The microscopic monsters of disease devoured weakened human bodies. Death hovered so near that a young human playing in daylight could be dead by nightfall. She had come to this place to help hold back the danger.
As her namesake greeted her with the long courteous liturgy of the language of the drums, she murmured the replies, stumbling over the unfamiliar rhythms. She and her companion removed their foot protection and joined her namesake on the carpet. They sat together, looking out over expanses of roughened earth towards other such living shelters. Her namesake had a container of ground nuts, raked out of the earth last season of growth, and was cracking open the basket weave shells on a flat stone. She accepted a few of the inner kernels with her right hand, uttering the triple beat of gratitude.
The green shadows of the plant factories cooled the moving air as the great light slowly sank toward the western edge of the land. They listened in silence to a voice speaking from a small soundbox made by humans who had mastered light to send sound and lightning to store power. No metallic cords bound this place to a web of power for such devices. Instead, unwieldy imitations of the green factories overhead renewed their power. She could not yet recognize all the vocal rhythms from the soundbox and sat in silence as her companion and her namesake listened.
A sudden series of heavy thuds shaking the ground behind them caused her namesake’s young descendants to scramble up and yell. She turned to see a burly four-legged creature with two large curved horns on its head ambling in their direction. The textile heaped with the confections of light, liquid, and air had attracted it. These creatures were docile in assisting humans to slice the earth into rows and to haul great burdens, but a careless turn of their heavy horned heads could impale a nearby human. The shrill cries and quick motions of the descendants baffled the creature and it moved away to a different part of the shelter.
The soundbox stopped. They sat in quiet for a little time. She heard clattering as the air stirred spent factories around the earth floor and single thuds as mature confections snapped the slender green threads suspending them from the living plants and plummeted to earth. Another series of heavy thuds made her turn around again. This four-legged creature had a grey-brown skin with a stiff line of darker coarse hair along the back of its neck and faint lines on its back and hindquarters. Its elongated head was topped by large, long ears that stretched upward.
The descendants warily stood between the long-eared creature and the textile with confections. As if in derision, the creature stretched its long neck forward, tilted its head to one side, and started to curl the lips of its toothy mouth. Resembling a human holding back a sneeze, it pulled back top and bottom lip until it exposed teeth and gums. Then the creature thrust forward its lower jaw and emitted a short series of high-pitched grating sounds, as if it had something stuck in its windpipe and was trying to breathe in, followed by a harsh outward groan in lower tone.
She smiled. She had often heard that hideous sound at night, but never witnessed the contortions necessary to make it. Those around her took no notice of the creature’s utterance. She remained silent, knowing too few rhythms to voice her amusement. The creature turned aside to graze on fallen factories and damaged confections. The light moved lower. She and her companion stood up to replace their foot protection. They murmured the shorter liturgy of farewell to her namesake and returned the way they had come.
As she returned to her shelter after nightfall, she paused under the darkened dome of heaven. Directly above her the night was still, but around the circle of the horizon, there were continual flashes of blue and orange light revealing towering forms of liquid vapour. The season of endurance had ended. The season of growth was beginning.
Hippocrates. Aphorisms. W.H.S. Jones. (2019). Athens: Aiora.